The Norman Conquest (22 page)

But this was only half the story. Not long afterwards, in 1061, Tostig and Judith, accompanied by other members of their family and a number of English bishops, piously departed on a pilgrimage to Rome, thereby presenting Malcolm with what proved to be an irresistible open goal. That same year, says the twelfth-century chronicler Simeon of Durham, the Scottish king ‘furiously ravaged the earldom of his sworn brother, Earl Tostig’. So thorough was the devastation that the Scots did not even deign to spare the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, the cradle of Christianity in northern England.

It was probably also at this moment that Malcolm invaded
Cumbria. Of all the debatable territories in the volatile north of England, none had been more frequently contested than this famously mountainous region on the north-west coast. Originally a British kingdom (its name derives from the same root as Cymru, the Celtic word for Wales), Cumbria had been absorbed into the English kingdom of Northumbria in the course of the seventh century, but lost around AD 900 to another British kingdom, Strathclyde, whose kings nominally ruled there for the next 120 years. During this time, however, Cumbria was invaded and settled by Norwegian Vikings operating out of Ireland, and then repeatedly conquered, ceded, harried and reconquered in a struggle for overlordship between the kings of England and Scotland. Latterly the region had been overrun by the Scots in 1018, an invasion which finally ended the rule of the kings of Strathclyde, but subsequently recovered for England during the rule of Earl Siward. Although the evidence is circumstantial, it seems fairly certain that Malcolm used the opportunity of Tostig’s absence in 1061 to reverse the situation once again, and that Cumbria was reclaimed by the Scots.

The loss of Cumbria, not to mention the sacking of Lindisfarne and the devastation of the rest of his earldom, clearly demanded some sort of military response on Tostig’s part. As far as we can tell, however, there was still no sign of the ‘martial courage and military campaigns’ ascribed to the earl by the
Life of King Edward
. On his return from Rome, Tostig appears to have accepted Malcolm’s invasion as a fait accompli, for once again he sought out the Scottish king and offered to make peace. Cumbria, it seems, was going to remain a part of Scotland.
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But not everyone was as willing to let bygones be bygones. Among those likely to have been infuriated by Tostig’s failure to defend his predecessor’s conquests was Gospatric, a scion of the house of Bamburgh. Had the historical dice rolled differently, Gospatric, not Tostig, would have been earl of Northumbria. In ancient times, as we have noted, his ancestors had ruled the region as kings, and as recently as fifty years ago his father, Uhtred, had governed the whole province as earl. As we have also noted, however, the house of Bamburgh had lost out badly after the coming of Cnut. Earl Uhtred had been murdered in 1016 on Cnut’s orders and the southern half of his earldom awarded to a Danish newcomer. Twenty-five years later, Gospatric’s brother, Earl Eadwulf, was similarly betrayed and murdered
at the behest of Earl Siward, who had subsequently taken over the remainder of the earldom. Gospatric, therefore, had ample excuse for feeling bitter about the way events had unfolded, but Siward had been smart enough to try to assuage such resentments. Soon after his taking over the house of Bamburgh’s territory he had married Ælfflaed, a granddaughter of Earl Uhtred, thereby linking the fortunes of the defeated dynasty with his own. Around the same time, he had granted Gospatric a subordinate role in the running of the earldom by making him responsible for the government of Cumbria.
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Thus, while Tostig may have viewed the Scottish recovery of Cumbria with equanimity, for Gospatric it meant the loss of his consolation prize. We cannot say for certain that this was the cause of the subsequent bad blood between the two men – the earl was unpopular on so many other scores – but it certainly seems the likeliest one. We can see that fighting broke out between them soon afterwards, because in 1063 or 1064 Tostig is known to have invited two men, both members of Gospatric’s affinity, to his hall at York for a peace conference – or so they thought. What the earl had actually arranged was an ambush of the kind practised by his Danish predecessors, and the two men were treacherously murdered. Their deaths probably prompted Gospatric to complain directly to the king, for at Christmas 1064 he was present at Edward’s court. It was, however, his last appearance, for he had failed to take into account the loyalty of the Godwine family. On the fourth night of Christmas, Gospatric was himself assassinated on the orders of Tostig’s sister, Queen Edith.

For a time it must have seemed that Tostig’s decapitation strategy had worked: in the immediate wake of Gospatric’s death the north seemed calm enough. But throughout the following year a far larger and more co-ordinated response to the earl’s misrule was steadily gathering momentum. Had he been present in Northumbria Tostig might have read the signs. In March, for example, when the clerks of Durham staged a public protest by digging up and displaying the bones of King Oswine, a seventh-century Northumbria ruler who had died at the hands of his treacherous relatives. But such unsubtle propaganda seems to have passed Tostig by. The earl was frequently absent from his earldom, preferring to leave its day-to-day management to his deputies. Hence it was they rather than he who bore the immediate brunt of the northerners’ fury.
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On Monday 3 October 1065, a group of thegns loyal to Gospatric entered York with a force of 200 armed men. John of Worcester, our best informed source, explicitly links their action to the treacherous betrayal of their master and his men. They seem to have taken the city by surprise, for on that Monday only two of Tostig’s Danish housecarls are said to have died, hauled back and executed as they tried to escape. But the following day there was evidently a more hard-fought struggle with the rest of the earl’s retainers, more than 200 of whom perished as a result. The rebels went on to smash open Tostig’s treasury in York, seizing all his weapons, gold and silver.
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It was the beginning of a massive rebellion. The thegns from beyond the Tees, it is clear, had managed to defeat Tostig’s sizeable retinue because they had been joined by the men of York – a remarkable testament to the earl’s unpopularity, that the two traditionally hostile halves of his earldom should come together in order to oppose him. The rising was also clearly well co-ordinated and directed personally against Tostig. The
Life of King Edward
speaks of the slaughter of the earl’s adherents wherever they could be found, not just in York but also on the streets of Lincoln, as well as on roads and rivers and in woods. ‘Whosoever could be identified as having been at some time a member of Tostig’s household was dragged to the torments of death without trial.’
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The rebels’ plan, it transpired, was to replace Tostig with a young man named Morcar, the second son of the late Earl Ælfgar, formerly the Godwine family’s most hostile opponent. According to the
Life
, Morcar and his older brother, Eadwine, had inherited all their father’s ill will, particularly towards Tostig. It may be that for a time Tostig and Harold had contrived to keep Eadwine out of his paternal inheritance, for he does not appear in the record as earl of Mercia until the spring of 1065, some three years after his father’s death. The speed with which the two Mercian brothers fell in with the rebels suggests that they had long been privy to the conspiracy. Morcar immediately accepted the proffered role as the rebels’ leader and marched them south, raising the shires of Lincoln, Derby and Nottingham as he went. Meanwhile Eadwine assembled his men in Mercia, where he was also joined by his father’s erstwhile allies, the Welsh. Everyone who had suffered as a result of the relentless rise of the Godwine family was uniting to try to end their monopoly.
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Tostig was at his brother-in-law’s court when news of the revolt broke. Edward was in Wiltshire at the time, apparently for the rededication of the church at Wilton Abbey, childhood home of Queen Edith, who had funded its reconstruction. Since this was an important occasion, taking place in the heart of his own earldom of Wessex, we may assume with some confidence that Harold was also present. It was certainly Harold who was sent north to meet the rebels in order to negotiate.
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By the time the earl reached them, Eadwine and Morcar had united their forces in the town of Northampton. From Mercia, Wales and the whole of northern England, their army had ‘gathered together in an immense body,’ according to the
Life of King Edward
, ‘like a whirlwind or a tempest’. Harold delivered the king’s message, which was essentially that the rebels should desist, and that any injustices they could prove would in due course be corrected. This, unsurprisingly, failed to pacify his audience, who replied that Edward should dismiss Tostig, not merely from Northumbria but from the realm as a whole, or else he too would be regarded as their enemy. Such was the counter-offer that Harold conveyed back to the king in Wiltshire.
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Back in Wiltshire, Edward had summoned a council to his manor of Britford, a few miles east of Wilton, close to where the city of Salisbury now stands. When the meeting assembled there were ugly scenes. It was at this moment that many magnates charged Tostig with having ruled his earldom with excessive cruelty, effectively blaming him for having brought the crisis upon himself. It was, however, the demands that Harold brought back from Northampton that caused the greatest acrimony, for at this point Tostig accused his brother of being in league with the rebels; indeed, of having provoked the rebellion in the first place. The author of the
Life of King Edward
, who reports Tostig’s accusation, personally professes not to believe it, and assures us that Harold cleared himself of the charge by swearing his innocence. At the same time, the same writer also slyly reminds us that an oath from Harold was not really worth very much (this seemingly an allusion to the earl’s visit to Normandy).
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Despite this innuendo, it seems most unlikely that the earl was behind the plot to bring down his brother. If Harold had entertained such an idea, there were surely safer ways to go about it than provoking the kind of unpredictable storm that was now raging.
Since his departure from Northampton the rebels had begun harrying the countryside around the town, knowing that much of it belonged to Tostig. Not only did they kill people, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and put houses and barns full of corn to the torch, they also seized thousands of head of cattle and hundreds of human captives, all of which they subsequently led back to the north. They then advanced further south to Oxford, where the line of the River Thames marked the boundary between Mercia and Wessex, leaving no doubt that England was on the very brink of civil war.
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The more reasonable conclusion is that Harold, in his capacity as a negotiator, did all he could to try to appease the rebels and to save his brother. Such was the belief of John of Worcester, who insists that the earl had acted as a negotiator at Tostig’s own request. What Harold was evidently not prepared to do was fight the rebels for his brother’s restoration. According to the
Life of King Edward
, when the negotiations proved fruitless, the king ordered a royal army to crush the uprising. But no army was forthcoming. The
Life
blames the difficulty of raising troops on the winter weather that was already setting in, as well as a general reluctance to engage in a civil war. Yet the king and his court were in Harold’s earldom, and in the end it must have been Harold’s own refusal to commit his men to a suicidal struggle that condemned Tostig to his fate. It was Harold who on 27 October conveyed to the rebels in Oxford the king’s acceptance of their demands, recognized Morcar as Northumbria’s new earl and restored to the Northumbrians what the Chronicle calls ‘the Laws of Cnut’ – shorthand for the rights they had enjoyed in the good old days, before the novelties and taxes introduced by Tostig. Meanwhile, much to the grief of his mother and his sister, the queen, Tostig himself prepared to go into exile; on 1 November, the earl and his family, along with many of his loyal thegns, crossed the Channel to Flanders, where they were once again welcomed by his wife’s father, Count Baldwin.
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The distress of the Godwine women, however, was as nothing compared to the grief of the king. As in 1052, when his demands for military action had similarly fallen on deaf ears, Edward’s powerlessness had filled him with rage. ‘He protested to God with deep sorrow’, says the
Life
, ‘that he was deprived of the due obedience of his men in repressing the presumption of the unrighteous; and he called down God’s vengeance upon them.’ Such was the king’s
mental anguish, the same source continues, that he fell sick as a result, and his sickness grew worse from day to day. It must have been clear to everyone that he would not live much longer, and so a dedication ceremony for his magnificent new church at Westminster was arranged to coincide with Christmas. The building work was almost complete, says the
Life
, with only the porch remaining unfinished, but new houses had to be hurriedly erected to accommodate the crowds of people that came to attend the festivities. On Christmas Day Edward apparently did his best to disguise his illness, sitting serenely at table but having no appetite for any of the fancy food that was served. Alas, on 28 December, the day scheduled for the new abbey’s dedication, he was too unwell to attend, but at his insistence the service went ahead as planned with Edith acting as his proxy. Eight days later, attended by the queen and a few other intimates of his household, the old king died.
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