A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (49 page)

Some lucky beneficiaries certainly had reason to bless the memory of King Cnut. Further than that, to the nation at large, the legacy was scant and dubious. As with the Norman Conquest, just thirty years later, ‘the immediate effect was a vast dispersal of English wealth abroad.’ Whereas there was none of the wholesale destruction for which the Normans were to be responsible, ‘architectural reminiscences of the Danish conquest and rule are non-existent.’
¹⁶
The rivalries between the three great earldoms that, thanks to Cnut, became dominant in the nation’s affairs were to cause much trouble in the next reign and his ramshackle Nordic ‘empire’, bar a few trading concessions, brought little benefit to England.

Just one of the kingdoms of King Cnut the Great (in Danish, Knud den Store; in Norwegian, Knut den Mektige), the country seems to have bankrolled his Nordic empire. It was a measure of Cnut’s statecraft that he manipulated ‘Englalond’s’ fine governmental machine without the permanent dispossession of its governmental and aristocratic elite. He did replace Æthelred’s ealdormen and from 1018 to 1023, apart from Godwine and a small number of new English king’s thegns, he relied principally on Nordic earls and thegns in the upper reaches of his administration. But after 1023 he promoted more loyal English followers. On at least three occasions English troops followed his banner in wars in Scandinavia. In 1028 they helped him assert his overlordship in Norway with King St Olaf the Good or ‘the Stout’. There his English consort Ælfgifu and her son Swein ruled for a time but they were driven out by the
Norwegians in favour of the dead Olaf’s son, Magnus I, and were forced to flee to Denmark.

At home, the English saw war on only one occasion, when in 1027 Cnut made a foray into Scotland to enforce the submission of Malcolm, king of Scots. This same year he made his famous pilgrimage to Rome, reviving a tradition of earlier kings of Wessex, and was received by Pope John XIX. He also attended the coronation of Emperor Conrad II. Negotiations between the two monarchs would benefit English merchants with toll reductions and some years later Cnut’s daughter Gunnhild would marry Conrad’s son Henry (the Emperor Henry III), though Cnut never matched King Æthelstan’s continental dynastic networking. At his death he was followed in Denmark by Harthacnut, barely sixteen years old. The boy was promoted by his mother Emma to succeed Cnut in England but opposed by the Londoners who supported Harold, his son by Ælfgifu of Northampton. In 1037 Harold won general recognition.

Cnut’s marital status certainly left a few puzzles at his death. For Pauline Stafford, in her book
Queens, Concubines and Dowagers
(1983), it was a clear example of polygamy. Ælfgifu, his English wife, had borne him both Harold and Swein before his politically useful marriage to Emma/Ælfgifu of Normandy, his predecessor’s widow; recognized as full wife from the start. For Stafford the two women are to be considered ‘simultaneous wives’ though with different ‘spheres of influence’. The church seems to have made little protest over the arrangements during Cnut’s lifetime (given the benefactions it received that is, perhaps, not to be wondered at), though after his death the perspective may have shifted.

Disputed successions

Though half English by birth and ‘acknowledged as full king over all England’, Harold was apparently not popular. And his birth was an issue. Scandal, no doubt assisted by Emma, also claimed that he
was illegitimate, not just because he was not Cnut’s son by the Englishwoman, but because he was not her son at all: since Ælfgifu of Northampton was unable to have children, she had had the child of a serving maid smuggled into her bed. Such was the story detailed in the
Encomium.
The question of bastardy may have been a factor at the back of the mind of Archbishop Æthelnoth of Canterbury when, with a dramatic gesture, he refused to hand over the coronation regalia (crown, sceptre, anointing ampula, etc.) and forbade Harold or any bishop to remove them. Harold took the throne nonetheless – even though Harthacnut had been accepted as king by Godwine and Wessex. Æthelred’s sons by Emma, Edward and Alfred, were in Normandy.

In the last years of the Danish ascendancy in England, according to the Norman chronicler William of Jumièges, the Norman Duke Robert, nephew of Cnut’s queen Emma, came to look upon her sons by the long-dead Æthelred of England as his brothers. They had after all spent most of their lives among his people. It seems he even assembled an invasion fleet on their behalf, though it was scattered by gales in the Channel. As early as 1033, we find Norman charters that accord Edward the title of ‘king’ in England.

Meanwhile, Harold marched on Winchester where Emma had claimed control of the royal treasure hoping to hold the fort for her son, Harthacnut of Denmark. In fact, Harold, called ‘Harefoot’ was able to seize the greater part and assumed the rule. His cause was supported by Leofric, earl of Mercia and his wife Godiva, the Londoners, a group of Northern lords and his mother Ælfgifu of Northampton, who held great feasts to win friends and influence important people. But the party of her great opponent, Hathacnut, king of Denmark and Queen Emma’s favourite, was the man who would soon prove the most important in England, and whose faction the Godwine of Wessex led.

Neither Edward nor Alfred seems to have been considered. Some time in 1036 both arrived back in England, perhaps summoned by
a letter purporting to be from their mother at Winchester, perhaps attempting invasion. Norman sources tell us that Edward made a landing on Southampton Water but was forced to retire by the local levies while Alfred, crossing over from the region of Boulogne on the Channel coast, probably somewhat later, was intercepted by men of Godwine’s household who took him to King Harold; it was said he was blinded and died of his wounds. Some of his followers were blinded, others sold into slavery.

An assembly of great men at Oxford decided that England should be divided between Harold as king of Mercia and Northumbria, and Harthacnut as king of Wessex. A new coinage was struck in both names, but from the second year of the issue Harold’s name came to dominate, even appearing on coins struck at Winchester where Emma was still ensconced with Harthacnut’s supporters. In 1037 Harold drove them from the city and finally became king of all England. Edward had made good his return to Normandy while, two years into her second widowhood, his estranged mother was into her second exile, this time at Bruges with Count Baldwin of Flanders and his ‘royally born’ wife Adela. But Emma would soon return. Harthacnut lingered in Denmark until he came to terms with Magnus of Norway in 1039 and, with ten ships, sailed for Bruges. Following Harold’s death on 17 March 1040, Emma sailed from Flanders with Harthacnut. Their fleet was solemnly welcomed by Earl Godwine, who made him the present of a splendid warship manned by eighty elite warriors fitted out with valuable weapons and wearing gold armlets.

In his brief reign Harthacnut won a reputation for brutality. When men of Worcestershire killed two of his tax collectors, the king dispatched a force to ravage the county, kill the male inhabitants and burn down the city. Kings were permitted to take such punitive action: in the twelfth century, for example, Louis VII of France authorized action in Champagne in which hundreds of people died, murdered in the streets or burnt alive in the churches where they had
sought refuge. Harthacnut did not go to these lengths, but maybe his officers were excessive. The city was duly burnt and pillaged, large tracts of the shire plundered by the troopers, and if few men were slaughtered it was because most had fled in good time.

In the following year Harthacnut invited Edward back from Normandy. He himself was perhaps already ailing. At any rate, Edward took ‘some kind of oath as king’ and, according to the
Encomium
, belittled his own claims in favour of his half-brother. Harthacnut died of convulsions at a wedding feast on 8 June 1042. Edward, ‘the Confessor’ to be, now made a secure entry on the English scene. It was his turn to receive a warship from Godwine, the great courtier. Still more magnificent than Harthacnut’s, it carried 120 men, had a gold-embroidered purple sail and a ‘golden dragon at the prow . . . that belches fire with triple tongue’. (Was it what the Byzantines called a
siphonophore
, that is fitted with a Greek fire flame-thrower?) According to Godwine’s supporters, Edward owed his throne to the earl’s intervention with the English magnates. Edward, though, had long regarded himself as true king and had been named as such in charters issued in Normandy during his exile.

Briefly, after a lifetime in the corridors of power under Harthacnut and for a time under Edward, Queen Emma may have exercised real power. Named as
mater Regis
(‘king’s mother’) and invariably placed next after the king,
¹⁷
she features in many charter witness lists. In 1043 her son Edward moved against her. She was attacked without warning at Winchester by the earls Godwine, Leofric and Siward, and deprived of untold treasure in gold and silver. All her lands were taken into the king’s hands and he returned to her only enough for her needs. The reasons are unknown, though rumours were rife: she had refused reasonable request to yield the land; she had been hard on her son; she had been having an affair with Bishop Stigand, her spiritual adviser, who was deprived of his see at Elmham at this time. Years after her
death, a story was going the rounds in Canterbury that she had been offering to fund an invasion of England by Magnus of Norway.

Emma died on 6 March 1052 in Winchester, about seventy years old. King Edward arranged for his mother to be interred next to her Danish warrior husband Cnut in the church of St Swithun, the Old Minster. She was the first queen to be buried there. She was also the first queen since Alfred the Great’s Æthelswih to be buried with her husband. Nunneries were the normal place of retirement for widowed queens, and the normal place of their burial. Emma/Ælfgifu’s death was still commemorated in the later eleventh century and the house where she had lived was still identified as hers in the twelfth.

Hard woman, hard world

Emma of Normandy’s life reads like a feminist metaphor for a woman’s frustration in politics. The
Encomium Emmae reginae
(‘In Praise of Queen Emma’), written about 1041 and which she almost certainly commissioned and may well in part have dictated, reads as the anonymous CV of a great talent woefully underused. A frontispiece, not a common feature of books at this time, depicts the queen in royal regalia seated upon a throne, an early example of a secular figure seated in majesty, with the kneeling author at her feet presenting the volume into her hands. Behind him stand her two royal sons, the half-brothers Edward, son of Æthelred, and Harthacnut, son of Cnut. The kneeling author is presumably of no interest to anyone, except perhaps himself, but the trio of royals represent the tense up-to-the minute story of English politics in the pages that follow, told very much from Emma’s viewpoint. The information on the English scene is no doubt provided by her and so we may assume that the narrative reveals how the people it deals with were viewed by her and her party.

Her antecedents, she boasts, lie with a victorious people that wrested the province of Normandy in Gaul (echoes of imperial Rome) from the Franks and their prince. Rich in wealth and lineage, beautiful and wise, the most outstanding woman of her day, she is now a famous queen. As if to validate her vaunted wisdom, the
Encomium
opens with a general survey of Denmark before her birth to explain the decision by Swein, father of Cnut, to invade England in 1013. More than a praise text, though it was that, the book urges the claims of Harthacnut, her son by Cnut, as the next king of England. Emma was no mere wife or bedfellow but a fit companion for a warrior monarch in the true Viking mode:
¹⁸
a woman familiar with war at sea as well as on land; a lady as at home with the warrior band as in the mead hall; above all, a worthy ‘consort in his
imperium
’.

For fourteen years she was the wife of Æthelred, king of England. The fact is suppressed by the
Encomium
and the sons of that marriage, Edward (later ‘the Confessor’) and Alfred, barely mentioned. The
Encomium
was meant to influence the future, through a version of the past that met the questions of the present. It was aimed at her sons, and more widely at the great men of the English. It was a political work, from a political woman in the thick of politics
¹⁹
– but politics in a man’s world. When the son she had backed for the crown died and the son she had dispraised (some said wished dead) succeeded, retirement from the scene was all that was left.

For England the legacy was more serious. In 1038 that favourite son had struck a deal with Magnus of Norway that if either died childless the other would succeed to his kingdom. In 1042 Harthacnut died – and was succeeded by Edward. Preoccupied by threats to his crown, Magnus was never able to follow up his claim. In 1066 his son and heir Harald Hardrada invaded England and helped ensure that King Harold II was in battle at Stamford Bridge, 250 miles away from the beaches of Pevensey Bay, when William of Normandy was preparing to disembark his invasion force there. No doubt Emma of Normandy would have approved.

12

EDWARD THE CONFESSOR, THE CONQUEST AND THE AFTERMATH

Edward was crowned king at Winchester on Easter Day, 3 April 1043. He had been exercising the powers of the kingship for ten months since the death of Harthacnut in June 1042 and may have been joint king since 1041. A contemporary saw a man in his late thirties, tall above the average and to be feared in his rage. He was passionately addicted to hunting with dogs – English hounds were renowned throughout Europe – and had inherited an impetuous streak from his father. He was half Norman by birth and spoke Norman-French as fluently as, if not more so than, English. His entourage comprised Bretons as well as Normans and the Lotharingian Herman, whom he appointed bishop of Sherborne. His most influential councillor, Earl Godwine of Wessex (according to Robert Fleming ‘a parvenu’
¹
), had been raised to power by Cnut the Dane. The earl’s Danish wife, Gytha, far more distinguished than her husband, had been the great king’s sister-in-law and Edith (i.e. Eadgyth) his half-Danish daughter, was shortly to become Queen of England. The family had connections with Ireland (possibly trading in slaves to that country) and Queen Edith would prove a fluent Irish-speaker, as well as mistress of various other languages. There was nothing about the vigorous and cosmopolitan court of this Edward of Wessex and England, third of his
name since Alfred the Great, to suggest the milksop image history sometimes associates him with as ‘Edward the Confessor’.