Queen of the Conqueror: The Life of Matilda, Wife of William I (11 page)

Matilda’s obvious aptitude for the role of duchess quickly won her new husband’s admiration and respect. Within a comparatively short space of time, he had come to rely upon and trust her implicitly. Moreover, she had already fulfilled the major expectation of her as consort. Soon after marrying William, she had given birth to a son, who was named Robert after William’s father as well as Matilda’s grandfather, the king of France. Given that the former was known as “the Devil” and the latter as “the Pious,” the infant could not have had two more contrasting role models. The date of Robert’s birth—like that of most of his
siblings—is not recorded by contemporary sources, but is thought to have been around 1053.
¹²
The fact that there is such uncertainty over the arrival of the duke’s son and heir—an event that would usually have been heralded by all of the contemporary chroniclers—suggests that William and Matilda still felt constrained to downplay their union, given that it continued to be outlawed by the papacy. Ironically, although William had desperately wanted to erase his own bastardy by taking a bride of such impeccable pedigree as Matilda, in the eyes of the church their firstborn was illegitimate.

None of this mattered to Matilda. From the start, she doted on the boy. It was a devotion that would last a lifetime. Although William was no doubt pleased to have an heir, he was rather less enamored of Robert, and from the boy’s infancy he disdainfully referred to him as “Brevisocrea” (short-boot)—usually quoted by the chroniclers in its French form, “Curthose” (or “Courte-Heuse”)—on account of his short stature, which he may have inherited from his mother. This was the first obvious point of difference between Matilda and William. It may have seemed a simple matter, the result of an overly indulgent mother and an unduly harsh father, but it would have serious consequences. With Robert’s birth, the seeds of eventual discord between Matilda and her husband were sown.

For now, though, the picture was one of marital harmony—and extraordinary fecundity. During the next decade, Matilda was continually pregnant. Of particular significance from her husband’s perspective was the fact that she gave birth to two more sons—Richard around 1055 and William (known as “Rufus” for his red hair)
¹³
around 1060.

All of the chroniclers attest to the success of William and Matilda’s marriage in this regard. As Orderic Vitalis observed: “She bore her distinguished husband the offspring he desired, both sons and daughters.”
¹⁴
However, they are vague about the number, names, and dates of those offspring.
¹⁵
Jumièges simply writes that Matilda “bore him [William] sons and daughters, one of whom Robert afterward succeeded to his parents’ duchy, performing his father’s office.”
¹⁶

It says a great deal about the age that the chroniclers give far more prominence to William and Matilda’s sons than to their daughters. The
latter are so obscure that they are either not mentioned at all or the details are confused. Those chroniclers who do include them in their narratives disagree on the names, birth dates, and even the number of daughters.
¹⁷
Piecing together the available evidence, it seems most likely that the eldest was Adeliza (or Adelaide),
¹⁸
born around 1057, followed by Cecilia in 1058 or 1059. Orderic claims that there was another daughter, Agatha, although she is not mentioned by any other source, and the history that he ascribes to her suggests that she was in fact the same girl as Adeliza.
¹⁹

Between the birth of Robert around 1053 and that of William Rufus in 1060, the intermission between each of Matilda’s children was only one or two years. That such a diminutive woman should prove so fecund and so resilient to the many hard years of childbearing that she endured has been remarked upon with surprise by a number of historians.
²⁰
This is rather perplexing, given that fertility is not generally linked to height. We do not know if Matilda had any miscarriages, or if any of her children died in infancy, but the sheer number of children who survived into adulthood suggests that there cannot have been many such instances.
²¹
At a time when knowledge of obstetrics was rudimentary and riddled with superstition, and childbirth was fraught with danger for both mother and infant, this success rate defied all the odds.
²²
That Matilda herself apparently remained healthy throughout her childbearing years is also remarkable. Women of this period—even those from the upper classes—often suffered from chronic anemia owing to the lack of protein and iron in their diets, which meant that their life expectancy was shorter than that of men. Infant mortality was also high, with between 15 and 20 percent of children dying in the first year and 30 percent by the age of twenty.
²³

Matilda’s fertility did a great deal to protect and enhance her position. The prejudice against women was great, and she was by no means immune to criticism—as will be seen later—but by producing the necessary male heirs, she had fulfilled her most important duty as consort. If she had failed to give William a son, he could easily have repudiated her, just as Matilda’s maternal grandfather had done to his wife. Many other such cases could be cited. There was no equality in marriage. The
woman was the subservient partner, and if she failed to provide her husband with an heir, then all of the blame would be placed upon her. That a man should rid himself of such a wife was not just accepted by society; it was positively encouraged. The church even sanctioned annulments.

That Matilda and William produced such a large family bolstered their dynastic ambitions, and the names they chose for their children were loaded with significance. In the medieval period, female ancestry was just as important as male, and if the wife’s family was more distinguished than her husband’s (as was the case with William and Matilda), it was usual to give at least equal prominence to the traditional names of her kin. The sons were named for both sides in more or less equal measure. Robert, Richard, and William were all popular names within the duke’s family, but the former could also be found among Matilda’s forebears. It is interesting that none of the boys was given the name of Matilda’s father, Baldwin. This may indicate that while Duke William was keen to publicize his connections with the French royal family, he did not wish to be seen as a vassal of the Flemish counts. The names of the daughters also reflected William and Matilda’s ancestry. Cecilia was the name Matilda’s cousin, King Philip I of France, had given to one of his daughters. Adeliza, meanwhile, may have commemorated either her father’s half-sister or his aunt.
²⁴

The medieval world defined childhood rather differently from our understanding of it. Isidore, the seventh-century archbishop of Seville, gave it a precise duration as part of his “six ages of man,” which appeared in his popular encyclopaedia,
Etymologiae
. He claimed that infancy—or
infantia
—was from birth until the age of seven, childhood from eight to fourteen, and adolescence from then until twenty-eight years of age.
²⁵
His theory appears to have had an influence upon the education of children, which followed similar stages.

The role of the mother during the first seven years of her child’s life was seen as vital, both for the physical care and nurturing that she gave and for the intellectual stimulation that she provided. Children up to this age were considered to lack moral reasoning, which made such close attention
by their mothers indispensable. Matilda seems to have been a paragon of this model. One observer even compared her to a woman in the Bible whose assiduity was legendary: “As a mother, she resembled Martha in her solicitous care.”
²⁶
In contrast to later periods, royal and noble children were not immediately farmed out to nursemaids or governesses in separate households of their own. The evidence suggests that all of Matilda’s children were raised at court under her direction, at least initially. Certainly her eldest, Robert, remained by her side during his early years.

It is unlikely that Matilda would have breast-fed her children, because this was known to hinder conception. Instead, they would have received their milk from wet nurses—women usually drawn from the noble classes who were breast-feeding babies of their own. But in all other respects, Matilda was an active and committed mother to her many offspring. She had the support of her own mother and her mother-in-law for some of this time, for the records show that Adela and Herleva spent time at the ducal court. The charters suggest that both women knew their first grandchild, Robert, particularly well.
²⁷

Not surprisingly, as far as the upbringing of his children was concerned, William focused all of his energies on his sons. This was entirely commensurate with the traditions of the day: as a general rule, boys were the responsibility of fathers, and daughters of their mothers. But Matilda must have had some say in her sons’ upbringing, because Malmesbury observes that both she and William took “the greatest care” with their education.
²⁸
In the royal household, their three sons were raised alongside those of other Norman aristocrats, sent there by their ambitious parents.
²⁹
They included Matilda’s godson and kinsman Simon of Crépy, the future count of Amiens, Valois, and the Vexin.
³⁰
Her influence on his early education seems to have been profound, because it was mentioned many years later by his biographer.
³¹

Despite Matilda’s influence, all of the boys who were educated at William and Matilda’s court would have experienced a very masculine environment in which military prowess and boisterous behavior were encouraged. They would have been taught to ride and hunt from their infancy and would have begun serious military training at the age of twelve. Of the two careers that were open to young men—the military
or the church—it was the former that William encouraged more. They were not mutually exclusive, however, as William’s half-brother Odo would prove.

It was not an entirely military upbringing, however. Medieval tradition dictated that the children of noble households should be given a literary education, and this would have been taken very seriously by William and Matilda. Both boys and girls were taught the “liberal arts,” which included reading, rudimentary Latin, and possibly also writing, though the latter was sometimes neglected and it was common for children to be taught simply to recite poems, psalms, and prayers. It certainly seems that Matilda taught her children to recite nursery rhymes, the Lord’s Prayer, and other devotional exercises, and also instructed them in Norman French and perhaps a little Flemish. She was no doubt keen for them to absorb the social and cultural traditions of both sides of their heritage. Young men were also instructed in moral principles and the art of chivalry. According to Malmesbury, William Rufus (who was something of a favorite with his father) spent a great deal of time in “knightly exercises … competing with his elders in courtesy, with his contemporaries in courtly duties.”
³²

Most noble sons would have been educated in political theory, and this was certainly true for the ducal family. William was keen to involve his sons in political affairs, and the records show that from the time that they were babes in arms, they were regularly witnessing charters—Robert in particular.
³³
They were also often in their father’s company, no doubt in order that they might learn from his example. But mothers were also expected to advise their offspring on matters of policy, so it is likely that Matilda, whose own upbringing had given her an exceptional grounding in international politics, embraced this task with alacrity.
³⁴

Marriage was not high up on William’s agenda for his boys. His eldest son, Robert, was the subject of a short-lived betrothal when he was about eight or nine years old. Perhaps this experience, which involved a great deal of trouble on William’s part, was enough to dissuade him from attempting it with his other sons, or perhaps he did not wish them to have any distractions from what he saw as the far more worthwhile pursuit of military excellence. Either way, there is no evidence of any
further attempts to use his sons to forge political alliances. Indeed, neither he nor Matilda seemed concerned with securing the longevity of their dynasty by encouraging their sons to marry and produce heirs at the earliest opportunity. It is interesting to note that none of the boys would marry during their mother’s lifetime; William Rufus in fact never married, which was almost certainly due to the fact that he was homosexual. The case would be very different with William and Matilda’s daughters, whose value lay in their potential to strengthen Normandy’s position through advantageous marriages.
³⁵