The Norman Conquest (21 page)

Yet the Tapestry appears to show a different scene. ‘Here Harold returns to England and comes to King Edward’, says the caption, blankly, but the picture below shows the earl advancing towards the king with his head visibly bowed and his arms outstretched – a posture that looks very much like an act of supplication or apology. Edward himself, moreover, is no longer the genial figure he seemed at the start, but larger, sterner, and raising his index finger as if to admonish.

‘Seems’;‘looks very much like’;‘appears’;‘as if. This is of course a speculative reading of a single scene, which some historians would argue is as ambiguous as any other.
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But Eadmer, who belonged to the same Canterbury tradition as the Tapestry’s designer, was in no doubt about the nature of Harold’s reception when he explained to the king what had happened. ‘Did I not tell you that I knew William,’ exclaims an exasperated Edward, ‘and that your going might bring untold calamity upon this kingdom?’
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8

Northern Uproar

H
arold had returned from Normandy by the summer of 1065 at the latest, for at that point the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle breaks its silence to inform us about his activities in south Wales. Before the start of August, we are told, the earl commissioned some building work at Portskewett, now a nondescript village on the Severn Estuary, a few miles south of Chepstow. His intention was apparently to invite Edward the Confessor there for a spot of hunting, to which end ‘he got together there many goods’. Was this an attempt, one wonders, to curry recently lost favour?

If so, it was unsuccessful, for Harold’s luck had not improved. On 24 August, when all the necessaries had been assembled and the building work was approaching completion, his new hunting lodge was attacked by the Welsh, still smarting from the earl’s invasion of their country two years earlier. Almost all the people working on site were killed and all the carefully stockpiled provisions were carried off. ‘We do not know’, says the D version of the Chronicle, ‘who first suggested this mischief’, not for the first time infuriating us by hinting that there was some wider conspiracy at work, but failing to divulge anything in the way of details. As it happens, we know that there was indeed an anti-Godwine conspiracy underway in the summer of 1065. Its target, however, was not Harold, but his younger brother, the earl of Northumbria.
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Eleventh-century Northumbria was a lot bigger than its modern namesake. A former Anglo-Saxon kingdom, it originally extended, as its appellation suggests, north from the River Humber, and as
such embraced all of Yorkshire and County Durham, as well as the region to the far north that now has exclusive ownership of the name. Once, in its glory days in the seventh century, Northumbria had extended even further still, to include the part of the Scottish lowlands known as Lothian, and as far west as the Irish Sea, to include all of modern Lancashire and Cumbria. During the tenth century, however, these outlying areas had been lost, or at least rendered highly debatable, thanks to the ambitions of rival rulers in Scotland and Strathclyde.

The kingdom of Northumbria, like all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms except Wessex, had been brought to an end by the arrival of the Vikings. In the last third of the ninth century the Danes had conquered and colonized a large area of what is now northern and eastern England – a region referred to in later centuries as ‘the Danelaw’. Yorkshire was extensively colonized by the invaders, and York itself became their capital. The former kings of Northumbria, meanwhile, continued to rule its northern rump – the far less productive territory north of the River Tees – from their ancient seat at Bamburgh, a rocky fastness surrounded by sea.
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The Viking kingdom of York did not last very long, falling in the middle of the tenth century to the all-conquering kings of Wessex, but the effects of the Danish invasion continued to be felt for generations beyond. Because of Viking settlement, Yorkshire was ethnically and culturally very different from the other parts of the newly forged kingdom of England. Its inhabitants, for example, persisted in using a Scandinavian counting system for their money, and commissioned tombs and memorial crosses of an unmistakably Nordic design. More significant still, they spoke a language that was barely intelligible to their southern neighbours, littered with Scandinavian loan words. In Yorkshire place names we commonly encounter the distinctive Danish ‘-by’ (Grimsby, Kirkby). Elsewhere in England shires were divided into subdivisions called hundreds, and hundreds into hides; Yorkshire was divided into ridings, wapentakes and carucates. Even today, the major streets in York are designated by the Danish word ‘gate’ (Coppergate, Swinegate).
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As a result the north of England was politically divided. The Anglo-Danish magnates of Yorkshire naturally resented being ruled by their conquerors from Wessex. The members of the former royal dynasty based at Bamburgh, by contrast, although now reduced to
the status of earls, were quite happy with the new situation. The exchange of a Viking ruler in nearby York for an extremely distant overlord in southern England meant that they were essentially left to look after their own affairs beyond the Tees, and more often than not appointed to govern Yorkshire as well. They were less happy (and their neighbours in Yorkshire correspondingly well pleased) when the Vikings returned to conquer England in 1016. After Cnut’s takeover Yorkshire received its own Scandinavian earls, first Erik, then Siward, who became bitter enemies with the house of Bamburgh. Siward eventually ended the conflict in 1041 by arranging the murder of his northern rival and extending his authority across the whole of Northumbria.
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Such was the situation in northern England at the time of Siward’s death in 1055. Divided culturally and politically, it was at the same time largely left to its own devices, for the good reason that it was a long way away and hard to reach. Thanks to the wide Humber Estuary and the bogs and swamps of Yorkshire and Cheshire, only a few roads linked the north to the south, and none of them were good: the 200-mile journey from London to York usually took a fortnight or more, assuming the roads were passable and that no robbers were encountered en route; by far the quickest and safest way to reach York from southern England was by ship. For this reason Northumbria was only subject to the lightest of royal supervision. The king of England had very little land in Yorkshire; coins were minted in York bearing his face and name, but he himself was never seen there. Beyond the Tees, meanwhile, there was no permanent royal presence at all: no royal estates, no mints, no
burhs
, no shires. For most people in southern England, including the king, the north was a faraway country, where they did things differently, about which they knew and understood very little.
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This was one of the reasons that the appointment of Tostig Godwineson as Siward’s successor had come as such a shock. As we have seen, Tostig’s promotion in the spring of 1055 had caused a bitter rift in England south of the Humber, apparently provoking a showdown between the Godwine family and their rivals in Mercia. But within Northumbria itself his advancement must have caused equal if not greater consternation. In the century since the region had been absorbed into the kingdom of England, its earls had been
either members of the house of Bamburgh or else Danes appointed by King Cnut. Only once, around the turn of the millennium, had the pattern been broken, when the earldom of York had gone to a Mercian named Ælfhelm, and his rule had not been a success. Yet in 1055 the Northumbrians were presented with Tostig, a twenty-something son of the late earl of Wessex, whose name was the only Danish thing about him. By birth, upbringing and political experience, Tostig was a southerner, and it showed.
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Complaints about Tostig’s rule all date from a decade after his appointment, but evidently applied to the entirety of his period in office. According to the C version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the principal charge against him in Northumbria was that ‘he robbed God first’. This is somewhat surprising and perhaps unfair (the C Chronicle, composed in Mercia, is a hostile source). The pro-Godwine
Life of King Edward
informs us that the earl was a notably pious individual, whose generosity to the Church was encouraged by his equally devout wife, Judith (a daughter of the count of Flanders, whom Tostig had married in 1051 during his family’s Flemish exile), and this testimony is supported by later sources written at Durham Cathedral, which remember the earl and his countess as munificent benefactors. Just possibly the accusation of ‘robbing God’ is Tostig being tarred by association, for one of his first acts as earl had been to help replace Æthelric, the unpopular bishop of Durham, with his even more unpopular brother, Æthelwine. Both men, like Tostig, were southerners, and later remembered for having despoiled Durham and other northern churches in order to enrich their alma mater at Peterborough.
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If the Church did suffer directly at the hands of Tostig, it was more likely as a result of his tax policy, which was perceived to be disproportionately harsh. According to John of Worcester, another complaint against the earl in 1065 was that he had raised a ‘huge tribute’. Exactly how excessive the earl’s demands had been is impossible to say, but most likely the problem was one of differing expectations. Historically the north had paid very little tax at all: later records show that land was assessed at only one-sixth of the rate customarily applied in the south. This may have been in deference to the northerners’ tradition of independence, or in recognition of the region’s lower population and less productive economy. Perhaps Tostig had some grand scheme to improve revenues and bring the
earldom into line with southern norms; more likely he simply tried to increase the tax yield to meet his own needs, and his expediency was seen as a nefarious attempt to introduce into the north the more onerous type of government to which the south had long been subject. Either way, Tostig’s attempts to raise taxes above their traditional low levels plainly made him extremely unpopular.
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The same was true of his policy on law and order. Northumbria, says the
Life of King Edward
, was a notoriously lawless region, where even parties of twenty or thirty men could scarcely travel without being either killed or robbed; Tostig’s sole intention, being ‘a son and lover of divine justice’, was to reduce this terrible lawlessness, to which end he killed and mutilated the robbers. The C Chronicle, conversely, says that Tostig simply killed and disinherited ‘all those who were less powerful than himself’. Again, we might suspect that the truth lay somewhere in the middle, were it not for the fact that the author of the
Life
, rather less loyally, chose to report rather than refute such allegations. ‘Not a few charged that glorious earl with being too cruel; and he was accused of punishing disturbers more for the desire of their confiscated property than for love of justice.’ Elsewhere the same author ruefully remarks that Tostig was ‘occasionally a little too enthusiastic in attacking evil’.
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Tostig, then, was unpopular because of what his friends chose charitably to regard as the overzealous execution of two of his principal duties, namely raising revenue and doing justice. By contrast, no contemporary complaint has come down to us about his discharge of a third and even more fundamental responsibility, namely the defence of his earldom from external attack. Indeed, the
Life of King Edward
, in a section that heaps praise on both Tostig and Harold, declared that just as Harold had beaten back the king’s enemies in the south (i.e. the Welsh), so too his brother had scared them off in the north. The absence of contradiction here is surprising, in the first place because the
Life’s
statement was patently untrue, and, secondly, because Tostig’s failure to defend his earldom led directly to the crisis that eventually engulfed him.
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Since the turn of the millennium, being earl of Northumbria had meant having to contend with the expansionist ambitions of the kings of Scotland. In the first half of the eleventh century the Scots had invaded northern England on three separate occasions, and on
the last of these in 1040 they had laid siege to Durham. As we have already seen, Tostig’s predecessor, Earl Siward, had dealt robustly with this problem, invading Scotland in 1054 and deposing its king, Macbeth. In his place the earl had installed Malcolm, son of the late King Duncan, the man whom Macbeth had famously murdered in order to ascend to the throne. Malcolm had apparently grown up as an exile at the court of Edward the Confessor, who seems to have backed Siward’s scheme to reinstate him. The thinking, no doubt, was that a Scottish king who owed his position to the force of English arms would be less likely to pursue a policy of aggression against Northumbria.
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If that was the theory, it held good for only a short while. In the opening years of his reign Malcolm was preoccupied with his ongoing struggle against Macbeth (who, contrary to theatrical tradition, did not die after Dunsinane, but three years later, after the Battle of Lumphanan). But with Macbeth dead, and his stepson Lulach also killed in 1058, Malcolm reverted to type and, in the best tradition of his predecessors, began launching raids into northern England. The
Life of King Edward
explains that the new Scottish king was testing the even newer Earl Tostig, whose ability he held cheaply. But, the same source continues, the earl was too clever, and wore down his opponent ‘as much by cunning schemes as by martial courage and military campaigns’. This was true, up to a point: in 1059, Tostig, aided by the bishops of Durham and York, somehow persuaded Malcolm to return to England for a personal interview with Edward the Confessor, who may have ventured across the Humber expressly for the purpose. A peace was agreed, hostages were exchanged and, as was the northern custom on such occasions, Malcolm and Tostig became ‘sworn brothers’.
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