Queens Consort (5 page)

The
Encomium Emmae
gives a fuller description of Emma’s presence at Bruges, which suggests something of the city Matilda knew as a child: ‘The latter town is inhabited by Flemish settlers and enjoys very great fame for the number of its merchants and for its affluence in all things upon which mankind places the greatest value. Here indeed [Emma] was … honourably received by Baldwin, the marquis [sic] of that same province and by his wife.’

Emma was active in Bruges, working to establish Harthacnut’s right to the throne. In 1039 he finally arrived, with a large fleet, to join her and they spent the winter as Count Baldwin’s guests. When Harold Harefoot conveniently died in the spring of 1040, Emma and Harthacnut returned triumphantly to England. For two years, she once again enjoyed power as Mater Regis (queen mother), until Harthacnut died after a drinking session at a wedding celebration in Lambeth in 1042. Emma had always championed him above her other sons, but now she was obliged to negotiate a relationship with Edward, who had joined his younger brother in dual kingship a year earlier, and now became sole ruler of England. According to
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, Edward had a low opinion of his mother’s wavering loyalties, and deprived her of most of her wealth. Emma died at Winchester in 1052, just after Matilda of Flanders became Duchess of Normandy.

Matilda was perhaps no more than a tiny child when Emma visited Bruges, and there is no evidence that the Queen of England saw her, though, given the length of Emma’s stay and the ‘honourable’ reception she received from Count Baldwin and Countess Adela, it is perfectly plausible that she was presented to their children. The triangular political relationships between Normandy, Flanders and England continued in the next decades, and Emma set a powerful example of what a politically astute and determined woman could achieve. She had effectively governed as regent in Wessex during Harthacnut’s absence in Denmark, she had obtained wealth and position as a patron, and though her life ended rather flatly, she did live to see two of her sons crowned king.

Very little is known of Matilda’s childhood in Flanders, but Queen Emma was not the only influential woman from whom she might have drawn an example. The last centuries of the first millennium witnessed an extraordinary concentration of women’s power as part of the emerging dominance of the Christian church. Royal abbesses were at the forefront of the new monastic movement, both as a trans-European phenomenon and in the country of which Matilda would eventually be queen, where
it is estimated that fifty religious houses appointed their first abbess from a royal family. Royal blood was an ‘essential prerequisite’ for sanctity.
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Bede’s eighth-century
Ecclesiastical History
observes the vital role played by Saxon women in the conversion of their male kin to Christianity enumerating royal missionaries such as Bertha, wife of the Kentish King Aethelred; her daughter Aethelburh, who married and converted King Edwin of Northumbria; Eanflaed, Edwin’s daughter, and Hilda, his great-niece. The foundation and patronage of abbeys was a potent symbol of royal authority, and far from being a retreat from the world, the religious life offered women an active role in dignifying the lineage of their houses. ‘The holiness of such women redounded to the honour of their male kin and the lineage they shared … a daughter or a sister in a convent was not a woman “disposed of”, but a woman put to work to add sanctity and legitimacy to newly, often nefariously acquired lordships.’
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A strong connection between the religious life and female scholarship was also current at the time. It was suggested to Matilda’s daughter, Adela of Blois, that learning was one way in which daughters could surpass their fathers, devoting their leisure to cultivating knowledge and a love of books. Early education was very much a domestic, maternal responsibility, and one that was taken seriously. Throughout the medieval period, an extensive clerical literature advises mothers on proper childcare and education and as early as Asser’s ninth-century
Life of King Alfred
, this was emphasised in Saxon England. The writer notes that ‘with shame be it spoken, by the unworthy neglect of his parents … [Alfred] remained illiterate even till he was twelve years old or more’. But Alfred’s mother, Osburgh, ‘a religious woman, noble by birth and by nature’, gave Alfred and his brother a book of Saxon poetry, saying, ‘Whichever of you shall the soonest learn this volume shall have it for his own.’ When Alfred succeeds, his mother ‘smiles with satisfaction’.

The cult of the Virgin, which was to play such a resonant part in contemporary conceptions of medieval queenship, also connected royalty, sanctity and learning. An engraving from ninth-century Mercia shows the Queen of Heaven holding a book, connecting three dynamics which were to be central to Matilda’s own conduct and the manner in which she raised her children. The northern, pagan concept of the queen as wise and judicious counsellor to her husband was absorbed, in Christian education, into St Paul’s edict in I Corinthians on the duty of wives to influence their ‘unbelieving husbands’ — an obligation adopted by Matilda’s Saxon predecessors with evident success, there was a new tension between the dynamic, evangelising role of the queen as a source and symbol of
sacred power and the injunction, also found in St Paul, that Christian wives should be meek, passive and silent. Later stipulations on the education of women suggest that Matilda would also have been exposed to this new conception of her wifely role. In the influential manual
The Book of the Knight of the Tower
, Geoffrey de la Tour-Landry suggested that women’s learning should be limited ‘to the virtuous things of scripture, wherefore they may better see and know their salvation’. The fifteenth-century commentator Bartholomew Granville
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stressed the importance of deportment to the well-bred woman’s character. Her carriage should be erect, but her eyes modestly cast down; she should be ‘mannerly in clothing, sober in moving, wary in speaking, chaste in looking, honest in bearing, sad in going, shamefast among the people’. Writers from the end of the period such as Giles of Rome and Christine de Pisan concurred that spinning, sewing and embroidery were ideal activities to keep girls from idle and potentially sinful imaginings.

Extrapolating from these two slightly variant traditions, it is not possible to do more than give a sense of the intellectual atmosphere in which Matilda of Flanders was raised, though evidence of her character and activities can be stretched to support the theory that she was successful in creating a role combining both active pious queenship and suitably modest personal conduct. Literacy in Latin had been a notable feature of the Flemish court, and since Matilda’s daughters could certainly read the language, it seems likely that she too had some knowledge of it, which in turn suggests that her own mother had favoured a ‘royal’ education. Writing, however, was extremely uncommon among laywomen, and it is probable that Matilda, like her daughter-in-law, used a clerk for her letters. What other practical skills she acquired is not known, though the thirteenth-century French romance
Silence
suggests that appropriate accomplishments for girls of her class were music, particularly the harp and viol, and embroidery. Matilda’s daughter-in-law, Matilda of Scotland, was to be a patron and promoter of the skills of English needlewomen, and while the nineteenth-century writer Agnes Strickland’s assertion that the Bayeux Tapestry was made by Matilda of Flanders and her ladies has been proved false, Matilda did leave some fine work in her will, and her husband certainly patronised one Leofgeat of Wiltshire, who is recorded as making gold embroidery for the King’s use. Saxon needlework is one example of the cultural validation that was as essential to the Norman project of conquest as military might, in that the Anglo-Saxon past was reclaimed and absorbed into a new tradition.

However profound were the wider implications of such activities, there
was much more to Matilda’s life than sitting around sewing. Aristocratic women were the principal managers of their family’s households and estates, particularly in a time when their men were often absent for long periods on campaign. Their effectiveness in applying themselves to a role that might be seen as the equivalent of running ‘a major business enterprise’
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is borne out by the frequency with which they were named as executrixes in widowhood. Whatever the precise details of Matilda of Flanders’ early training, it seems to have equipped her well for life as a ruling duchess and a successful, fully engaged consort.

Matilda appears as William’s consort in a charter to Holy Trinity in Rouen in 1053. By then, the marriage had directed an important change in William’s policy and family attitudes. As a minor, he had relied on the older generation for support, particularly his uncles, Mauger, archbishop of Rouen, and William of Arques. As William grew more confident and emotionally involved with Matilda, he began to redefine his family more intimately, in terms of his own growing children. In a pattern that would become a familiar problem to English princes, he also began to favour his own contemporaries over his senior relations. By 1052, both uncles were in open opposition to William and in 1053, William of Arques staged a revolt. Matilda was now faced with an experience common among aristocratic brides: a conflict between her husband and her natal family. William’s relationship with Matilda’s uncle, King Henry of France, had been an important motivation for their marriage, but this aspect of the alliance had turned sour when Henry reconciled with William’s archenemy Geoffrey, Count of Anjou. Normandy was now isolated between hostile Angevin and French territory, and Henry was keen to profit from dissent within the duchy. In response to his uncle’s opposition, William besieged the fortress of Arques, and Henry led a relief force to the rebels. William succeeded in forcing Henry to retreat, and William of Arques went into exile in Boulogne, where he died. Archbishop Mauger was obliged to retire after a Church council at Lisieux in 1054, and withdrew to Guernsey, but William’s difficulties with Henry continued.

The French King made another attempt on Normandy in 1054, sending a divided army to the north and south of the River Seine. William faced Henry in the south, sending his cousin Robert of Eu to confront the northern column. Robert achieved a spectacular victory at Mortemer and once again Henry was repelled, but he continued plotting with Geoffrey of Anjou and in 1057 Normandy was attacked yet again. The French and Angevin forces invaded from the south and pressed towards the Channel, laying waste to the countryside en route. William met them at the estuary
of the River Dives at Varaville, where a high tide split the enemy forces. Their battalions cut in half, Henry and Geoffrey could only stand helplessly on the bank and watch as William massacred their army. Both Henry and Geoffrey died in 1060, by which point William had already begun a long campaign to secure Maine as a border province.

Such a compression of military events might give the impression that William and his peers spent most of their time hacking at one another on the battlefield, but this would be to misunderstand the nature of medieval warfare and to neglect the significant cultural and economic development of Normandy in the 1050s. Despite the near-permanent military commitments of the duke, he was not engaging in pitched battles on a regular basis. Europeans were notoriously cautious in war, as a twelfth-century Arab commentator noted,
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and it was prudence as much as bravery that won campaigns. So when diplomacy failed, siege warfare — taming the enemy by hunger and isolation, or strategies such as taking important hostages — was tried. Outright armed combat was avoided as far as possible: it was only as a last resort that a commander would risk his men’s lives in large numbers or, worse, that of his prince.

So while the Normandy Matilda knew was certainly dominated by her husband’s armed struggles to control his aristocracy and expand and secure his borders, it was able concurrently to develop peacefully and profitably. A distinct ‘Norman’, as opposed to Scandinavian or French, identity was becoming clearly established. The towns of Rouen, Bayeux and Caen were expanding — a Jewish community of artisans and merchants was founded in Caen around 1060 — and the duchy was profiting from the wine-growing regions to the south as tuns were shipped down the Seine to supply Britain and the north. There was also something of a religious revival. Normandy had been Christian as far back as the fifth century, but owing to the Viking incursions, by the first decades of the tenth, there were no monasteries remaining. William’s grandfather, Duke Richard, restored the monastery of St Michel in 965, and by the eleventh century, Benedictine abbeys were flourishing at Préaux, Lyre, Corneilles, Conches and St Georges-de-Boscherville, in addition to William and Matilda’s own foundations at Caen. St Stephen and Holy Trinity were created in response to the papal recognition of William and Matilda’s marriage in 1059. The papal edict was revoked on condition that William and Matilda each performed a penance of building and endowing a monastic house ‘where monks and nuns should zealously pray for their salvation’.
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Matilda’s foundation, Holy Trinity, was functioning under its first abbess (appropriately named Matilda), by the end of the year, with a choir of
nuns to sing the daily offices. The abbey was finally consecrated in 1066.

That year is, of course, the one that everyone knows: 1066, the year of Hastings, the year that English history really ‘began’. Throughout the first fifteen years of Matilda’s marriage, the manoeuvrings and manipulations that led to the battle of Hastings were fitting gradually into place. Edward the Confessor, the English King, had married Edith, the daughter of the powerful Earl Godwin, in 1045, but by 1051 the marriage was still childless. Having spent much of his life in Normandy, the King’s loyalties to the duchy were strong, and he began to build up a faction of Norman retainers at the English court, possibly as a check on Godwin’s influence. Nevertheless, in September 1051, Godwin was confident enough to openly defy Edward and events came to a head. The Godwin family was outlawed, Godwin himself fled to Flanders, continuing the tradition of the province as a refuge for disaffected English ambition, and Edward repudiated his wife, leaving the English throne without even the possibility of a successor.