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Chapter 5

Confessor and Conquest

Edward the Confessor, Harold Godwinson

EDWARD WAS NOMINATED as king almost before the life was out of his predecessor. ‘Before [Harthacnut] was buried’, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports, ‘all the people chose Edward for king at London.’ Some historians have understood this to mean that Edward II was carried to the throne on a wave of patriotic sentiment for the House of Wessex. It is possible. On the other hand, the verdict of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle suggests, at best, modified rapture: ‘they received him as their king as was natural’.

I

By this time, Edward was already nearing forty. He had spent well over half his life as an exile in Normandy and was probably more French than English. Certainly, he seems to have been happier in Norman or French company. Both his coins, whose portrait type is the most realistic yet, and the Bayeux Tapestry show him with a long, rather lugubrious face, and moustache and beard. The beard began as a rather straggly imperial but became more luxuriant with age. In character, he seems to have had something of that other long-term exile, Charles II, about him. He was ordinarily rather lazy about affairs of state, but, when backed into a corner, he could be both cunning and decisive. And he, too, was determined never to go on his travels again.

The difference, of course, lay in their sexual appetites. Later, the fact that Edward was childless was misunderstood by his monkish admirers to mean that, though married for over two decades, he was voluntarily celibate. On this basis he was named ‘the Confessor’ and honoured as a saint.

But the real Edward was a man and a king of his time. And he did all the things an eleventh-century king had to do. He led his troops and his fleet. He loved hunting, and, when he relaxed of an evening, he liked to listen to the recital of bloodthirsty Norse sagas. Of course, like most English kings, he was pious and showy in his devotions – especially towards the end. But his childlessness, it seems clear, was the result, not of piety, but of mere bad luck – and perhaps of an impossible wife.

Edward’s coronation was delayed for the unusually long period of nine months. This allowed for careful preparation; it also enabled the coronation to be timed to coincide with Easter, the principal feast of the Church. ‘Early’ on Easter Day Edward was crowned at Winchester ‘with much pomp’. Archbishop Eadsige of Canterbury performed the ceremony and ‘before all the people well admonished [the king]’. The Church, clearly, wanted another Edgar: it remained to be seen whether they had got him.

Eight months later, Edward took what he probably saw as his first steps towards becoming his own man. Accompanied by Earls Godwin and Leofric, he rode from Gloucester to Winchester, ‘took his mother unawares’ and stripped her, once more, of her lands and treasures. The reason, the Anglo-Saxon chronicler heard, was that Edward resented the fact that Emma’s behaviour towards him had been lukewarm at best. ‘She was formerly very hard upon the king her son, and did less for him than he wished before he was king, and also since.’ Edward soon relented and made a partial restitution. But for Emma, the glory days were over. She was reduced from the regal state of mater regis to a mere royal widow. And, instead of dabbling in high politics, she seems to have retired to live out the last years of her life at her house in Winchester, where she died in 1052 and was buried next to Cnut.

But Edward soon exchanged one form of female domination for another. For, on 23 January 1045, he married Edith, Godwin’s cultivated, forceful daughter. Her two older brothers had already been made earls: Swein of a new earldom carved out from Wessex and Mercia along the Welsh border, and Harold of East Anglia. United, it seemed, the Godwin family could carry all before it. But there now occurred the first of a series of disastrous quarrels. It was provoked by Swein, who, although the eldest, was the black sheep of the family and seems to have seen himself more as a Danish freebooter than an English aristocrat. He first seduced an abbess and then murdered his cousin, Earl Beorn. Harold was outraged, but Edward, perhaps slyly, eventually pardoned Swein.

Was Edward already tiring of Godwin and his over-mighty family? If so, this would explain why Edward was also building up his own, French, party. His nephew, Ralph of Mantes, son of his sister Godgifu’s first marriage, was made earl of Hereford, which had formed part of Swein’s much larger earldom. And Robert, the former abbot of the great Norman abbey of Jumièges, was made bishop of London. Then, in October 1050, Eadsige of Canterbury, who had been incapacitated for much of the previous decade, died. There followed a disputed appointment. The monks at Canterbury elected a kinsman of Godwin’s. But Edward decided that Robert of Jumièges should have the archbishopric; overturned the election and sent Robert off to Rome to get his pallium (a narrow stole of white wool that marked the papal confirmation of the appointment of an archbishop) from the pope.

Edward can only have intended this as a deliberate challenge to Godwin. Not only was his kinsman slighted, but Canterbury lay at the heart of Godwin’s sphere of influence. Worse was to come. In the course of the summer, another of Edward’s extended French family, Count Eustace of Boulogne, came to visit the king. Eustace had married Edward’s sister, Godgifu, as her second husband, and had had children by her. Was the purpose of his visit, perhaps, to discuss the succession which the childlessness of Queen Edith left vacant? Eustace planned to return via Dover. The unpopularity of the French, already endemic in England, led him to expect trouble, and perhaps even to provoke it. He and his men donned armour and then tried forcibly to quarter themselves in the town. One householder resisted and a Frenchman was killed. A general melee resulted, leaving twenty English dead, and nineteen French, beside the wounded. Eustace complained personally to Edward, giving a slanted version of the story. Edward, happy probably to humiliate Godwin, took Eustace’s side and ordered Godwin, as earl of Wessex, to punish the town. But Godwin refused, ‘because he was loath to destroy his own people’.

Faced with Godwin’s direct challenge to royal authority, Edward convened the witan to meet at Gloucester on 8 September. Meanwhile, Godwin, who ‘took it much to heart that in his earldom such a thing should happen’, summoned his forces. So did Swein (back in the family fold when there was trouble). And so did Harold. The three met at their manor of Beverstone, fifteen miles south of Gloucester. Edward, taken by surprise at the size of Godwin’s army, hastily called on the forces of the rival earls, headed by Leofric.

Once again, civil war seemed inevitable. But, once again, it was avoided. Cooler heads pointed out the obvious:

It was very unwise that they should come together, for in the two armies was there almost all that was noblest in England. They therefore prevented this, that they might not leave the land at the mercy of our foes, whilst engaged in destructive conflict betwixt ourselves.

Matters were therefore postponed to give time for tempers to cool. Hostages were exchanged and the witan directed to reconvene in a fortnight in London. In the interim, the balance of forces shifted. The army of the royalist earls was constantly swollen with the arrival of recruits from the distant north. On the other hand, Godwin’s ‘army continually diminished’. By the time Godwin and his sons had taken up their positions in their London residence in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames, it was clear that the game was up. Stigand, Emma’s former confidant, who was now bishop of Winchester, was sent to deliver Edward’s ultimatum. Godwin, certain now that he would be condemned, refused to appear before the witan, and was immediately outlawed, together with his whole family. This then divided: Godwin, his wife and three of his sons fled to the family harbour at Bosham and thence to exile in Flanders. While Harold, with another brother, rode to Bristol, where a ship was ready prepared to take them to Ireland. Only their sister, Queen Edith, remained at the mercy of her family’s enemies, who were now headed by her own husband. In a grim echo of his treatment of his mother, Edward stripped his wife too of her lands and treasures, and packed her off to a nunnery.

When everything was over, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reflected on the mutability of fortune:

Wonderful would it have been thought by every man that was then in England, if any person had said before that it would end thus! For [Godwin] before was raised to such a height, that he ruled the king and all England; his sons were earls, and the king’s darlings; and his daughter wedded and united to the king.

Now all was lost.

It had not happened without planning, of course. Indeed, Edward, despite the apparently fortuitous course of events, seems to have prepared the ground for the coup with care. He even involved those outside the political elite by abolishing the hated heregeld, which won him instant popularity.

But the completeness of his success tempted Edward to overreach himself. The most obvious symptom was to invite his nephew William, duke of Normandy, to England. William arrived with ‘a great force of Frenchmen’ all of whom were entertained at court. We do not know what passed between uncle and nephew. But the suspicion must be that this was the moment when Edward formalized his nomination of William as his heir. According to Norman sources, Robert of Jumièges, on his way to Rome earlier in 1051, had paused in Normandy to convey the initial offer to William. Now, in Edward’s moment of triumph, the deed was done. William paid homage and Edward received him as heir. The royalist earls pledged their support, and a son and grandson of Godwin’s, who were already in Edward’s hands as hostages, were handed over to William to make sure that the exiled Godwins acquiesced.

What was Edward doing? In retrospect, it looks as though he was taking a decision of enormous strategic importance and deciding – no less – that the future of England should be Norman, not Anglo-Saxon.

But, at the time, it may have appeared very different. For the offer to William was not irrevocable. Edward might yet have children of his own, especially if he changed wives, as Archbishop Robert was encouraging him to do. And, even if he did not, he could always change his mind about his nominated heir. Edward, in other words, was using the great expectations of the succession to manage the politics of the reign. Godwin and his family were down but not out. William might prove a useful ally if it came to a showdown. Or he might indeed be the best long-term bet as an acceptable king of England.

II

But such subtleties passed most Englishmen by. To them, it simply looked as if Edward were handing over England to the French. The result was that the balance of opinion, especially in the south-east, now started to shift to the Godwins. Realizing this, the Godwins decided to try their luck in England once more. Harold and his father effected a rendezvous at Portland on the Dorset coast and then made for the Thames estuary. Hitherto, they had behaved like any other marauding army. But now they set themselves to win hearts and minds – and, above all, men. Thanks in large part to Godwin’s earlier protection of Dover, they succeeded. They were especially keen to recruit sailors and soon assembled a formidable fleet, which pledged its loyalty to Godwin’s cause: ‘then said they all that they would with him live or die’.

Godwin now felt strong enough to try the issue with Edward again. The king had taken his stand in London, with the royalist earls and the fleet. As the Godwins’ armada approached from the east, Godwin sent to Edward formally to demand restitution, on behalf of himself and his family: ‘that they might be each possessed of those things that which had unjustly taken from them’. Edward dismissed the appeal and Godwin’s forces clamoured for a fight. But Godwin instead decided to tighten the noose. On Monday, 14 September, his ships successfully shot London Bridge, taking advantage of the flood tide and hugging the south bank at Southwark, where Godwin’s own London burh was situated. Once past the bridge, Godwin’s ships joined up with his land forces, who were drawn up along the Strand. The Godwin fleet and army thus formed ‘an angle’, as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle puts it, and threatened to trap the king’s fleet against the bridge.

It was a situation that would recur in English history. In 1399, for example, Henry Bolingbroke, who had been disinherited of the dukedom of Lancaster by Richard II, returned in force to England. At first Henry announced, like Godwin, that he required only the restitution of what was rightfully his. But, as royalist resistance crumbled, Henry overthrew Richard II and usurped his throne – as had probably been his real intention all along.

A similar outcome seemed on the cards in 1052. But, once again, the instinctive quest for balance in the Anglo-Saxon polity came into play:

They were most of them loath to fight with their own kinsmen – for there was little else of any great importance but Englishmen on either side; and they were also unwilling that this land should be more exposed to outlandish people, because they destroyed each other.

These were the same arguments as in 1051. But they had the opposite effect this time and it was the royalist forces that backed off. Negotiations began, with Bishop Stigand acting once more as intermediary. Meanwhile, Archbishop Robert, who had done so much to provoke the crisis, realized that the game was up and, with his fellow French bishop, Ulf of Dorchester, cut his way out of the City and fled for France ‘on board a crazy ship’.

On the 15th the final scene was played out before the witan, which met in the king’s palace at Westminster. Godwin protested his innocence of all the charges laid against him and exculpated himself before ‘his lord King Edward and before all the nation’. Edward, though unwillingly, professed to believe him and gave him the kiss of peace. Godwin and his sons were then restored to their earldoms while his daughter, Edith, resumed her place as queen. It was now the turn of Edward’s fallen French followers to be outlawed. The charges were that they had ‘chiefly made the discord between Earl Godwin and the king’, and, more generally, that they had ‘instituted bad laws, and judged unrighteous judgements, and brought bad counsels into this land’. An exception, however, was made in favour of household servants, whom the king was permitted to keep on the proviso that they were ‘true to him and all his people’.

Again, these self-same words and phrases echo through the succeeding centuries. In the thirteenth century Henry III was required to divest himself of his French favourites in 1234 and of his Poitevin relations in 1258; while in the seventeenth century the Civil War was ushered in with the charge against Charles I’s minister, the earl of Strafford, that he had put discord between king and people. Even in the language of opposition, it would seem, the foundations of English politics were laid in Anglo-Saxon England.

Once the great crisis of 1051–2 was over, Edward II’s reign takes on a very different character. The interesting times, apparently, were finished. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which had given a breathless, blow-by-blow account of each political drama and its resolution, turns into a bare narrative of events. And there seem to have been rather few of those.

What had happened? And what was Edward’s own role in the change? Some historians see him as a broken man. Forced against his better judgement into a reconciliation with a man and a family he detested, he went into a sort of internal exile. He abandoned the affairs of the ungrateful kingdom of England for the kingdom of Heaven and devoted himself, more and more, to his great new monastic foundation of Westminster Abbey.

Edward’s Westminster Palace and the adjacent Abbey are represented in the Bayeux Tapestry – and archaeological evidence and contemporary descriptions confirm the broad accuracy of its representation. The Abbey, with a ground plan in the form of a Latin cross, was modelled on the great Norman foundations. One outstanding example is the abbey of Jumièges, which had been founded a decade before in a self-consciously Roman style of grandeur by its then abbot, Robert, Edward’s notorious archbishop of Canterbury.

Westminster, however, would outdo all its Norman rivals. Despite the French inspiration, two of the master masons were English, while a third was probably German. Under their direction, work started probably in the late 1050s and proceeded rapidly. It began at the east end, which was the nearest point to the riverside palace which Edward had built a little earlier. The choir was made up of two double bays. Each bay consisted of a pair of semicircular arches resting on plain, round columns, while the bays were divided from each other by massive piers. The crossings, where the choir met the transepts and nave, was surmounted by a lantern, in which four corner staircase turrets clustered around the massive central square tower. The nave, also made up of double bays, was half as long again as Jumièges and probably even higher. At the west end, which the Tapestry shows as work in progress, were two more square towers.

The result was by far the largest and most magnificent church in England and one of the noblest in northern Europe. But why, in the first place, should Edward have bothered to rebuild the poverty-stricken Abbey and nominate it as his burial place? The site, on Thorney Island, was surrounded by barely drained marshland, and all Edward’s dynastic connections pointed to Winchester. Contemporaries explained the king’s choice by his devotion to St Peter, the Abbey’s patron saint. This is no doubt true as far as it goes. But it was the Abbey’s proximity to London which counted for most. London had always been the commercial capital. But the events of the eleventh century show it usurping the role of the political capital as well: it had been the last place to hold out against Cnut and it was the scene of the decisive encounters between Edward and the Godwins in 1051–2.

Edward’s decision to site his abbey on Thorney Island both reflects this historical development and hastened it. And it means that, to all Edward’s other achievements, we should add this: he is the founder of Westminster as the royal and political capital of England.

Edward’s enthusiasm for Westminster is real enough. But it does not quite explain his apparent withdrawal and reconciliation with Godwin. Rather, Edward, the great survivor, decided that, if he could not get rid of the Godwins, then he would have to live with them. And, as he was no ascetic, he resolved to live with them as comfortably as possible.

Things were helped by the swift removal of Godwin himself from the political scene. For the tensions of 1051–2 seem to have been too much for the earl’s constitution. Within a few days of his triumphant vindication at the Westminster witan, he was taken unwell and went back home. Six months later Godwin, with his sons Harold and Tostig, was celebrating Easter with the king at Winchester. On Easter Monday, 12 April 1053, as he was sitting with Edward at table, he had a stroke: ‘he suddenly sank beneath [the table] against the foot-rail, deprived of speech and of all his strength’. He was carried into the king’s bedchamber and was expected to recover. Instead, he remained speechless and helpless, and, after lingering for three days, died on the 15th. He was buried in the Old Minster, close to his first patron, Cnut.

Godwin’s death drew the worst of the venom from Edward’s feud with his family. For the king’s inveterate dislike of the earl for his part in his brother Alfred’s death in 1036 was personal; it did not extend to his sons. On the contrary, Edward’s relations with them were correct and, in the fullness of time, even became warm.

This was especially true of Harold, who, following his brother Swein’s death on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which he had undertaken to atone for his sins, was now the head of the family. He succeeded to his father’s earldom of Wessex and soon to his role as nutricius or protector of the realm as the king’s right-hand man. His other brothers did not have to wait long for their share: Tostig became earl of Northumbria in 1055, Gyrth of East Anglia in 1057 and Leofwin of a newly created earldom of the south-eastern counties bordering the Thames estuary in the same year.

This left the one non-Godwin earldom of Mercia surrounded. Earl Leofric himself, old and perhaps schooled to patience by his wife Godgifu (Godiva), remained impassive. But his son and heir, Ælfgar, kicked against the pricks. He was twice outlawed. And twice he responded by allying himself with the aggressive and successful Welsh king Gruffudd ap Llwelyn and attacking England. Yet twice, too, Ælfgar was pardoned. He was allowed to succeed to Mercia; died in his bed and was in turn succeeded by his young son.

It was almost as though Edward – and Harold – were secure enough once the crisis of 1051–2 was over to allow the luxury of dissent. We can see this strength in the silver penny issued shortly after. The image of the king on the coin is a sharply characterized, realistic portrait – the first such on an English coin. It is also remarkable for its weight of royal symbolism: not only is the king shown with a sceptre but his crown is doubly imperial. The upper portion of the crown is crossed with two arches, like the closed crown of the German Holy Roman Emperor; the lower jewelled circlet, however, is modelled on the diadem of the basileus, the Byzantine emperor, and features the same cataseistae, or pendants. The St Stephen Crown of Hungary, where Edward the Exile took refuge from Cnut, is of similar appearance and it may perhaps be conjectured that Edward introduced his Hungarian hosts both to the form of the crown and to the formulary of the English coronation, which was also adopted in Hungary.

Should the king be properly known as Edward the Emperor rather than Edward the Confessor?

For the second half of Edward’s reign was a period of remarkable prosperity and stability. The continuing struggle for control of Cnut’s Scandinavian empire between the rulers of Denmark and Norway meant that they were too busy fighting each other to think seriously of invading England. This meant in turn that the geld, or land tax, which continued to be levied despite Edward’s ostentatious abolition of the heregeld itself, flowed directly into the king’s coffers.

A rudimentary treasury was set up at Winchester to administer the funds. It began as a chest under the royal bed in the charge of one or more of the king’s bedchamber servants or ‘chamberlains’. The chest figures in one of the legends that gathered around Edward as a proto-saint. A thief entered the royal bedchamber; made sure, as he thought, that the king was sound asleep and stole from the chest. He did the same a second night. But, as he came back a third time, he was startled when Edward, who had silently observed his earlier depredations, warned him to be gone as Hugolin the chamberlain was about to enter.

This Hugolin was a real person and, as senior bur-thegn or chamberlain, had charge not only of the royal treasures but of important documents as well. But was the under-the-bed chest also real? Modern historians have been sceptical. They have calculated the size of the chest needed to hold the annual yield of the geld, and then observed, dismissively, ‘some box, some bed’! But they may be being too clever by half. For hands-on royal management of the finances remained a feature of English government to the end of the Middle Ages and beyond. Henry VII counted and chested his own money with his treasurer of the chamber; while under Henry VIII the wealth of the monasteries was decanted into a cash hoard that was kept behind the royal bedchamber in Whitehall and administered by Sir Anthony Denny as chief gentleman of the Privy Chamber. Denny’s other duties included the custody of valuables and documents, the control of access and the wiping of the royal bottom.

Where modern historians are right, of course, is that this ‘primitive’ system of cash hoarding, whether in the eleventh or in the sixteenth century, was underpinned by an elaborate and formalized system of revenue raising. Receipts, in the form of notched sticks or tallies, were issued, and written records, including tax assessments, were kept. And, in sharp contrast with later practice, they were kept in English.

At the same time, the royal writing office developed rapidly too. It was run by the king’s priest Regenbald, who probably came from Lotharingia (Lorraine). He used the title of either regis sigillarius (‘keeper of the king’s seal’) or regis cancellarius (‘king’s chancellor’). The seal, of which he was keeper, was a metal matrix, or mould, which was used to make a wax impression. The image of the seal, which showed the king enthroned in majesty, with crown, sword and sceptre, was modelled on the seal of the Holy Roman Emperors. But, uniquely, the English seal was double-sided and hung from the document on a tag rather than being impressed on its surface. This meant that even when the document was folded and tied up, the seal could still be left hanging outside, proud and visible.

The visibility of the king’s image was important because the document, to which the seal was most frequently attached, was a peremptory royal letter of instruction. Known as a writ, it ordered a royal official that something should be done forthwith: that a case be heard in his court; that a tax be remitted; that a burh be punished for its misdemeanours. All this implied a highly sophisticated form of government: the person addressed was a royal official, not a feudal magnate; and the courts which would hear the case, in the shire and hundred, were royal also. But, though they were royal, they were not bureaucratic. Instead, they relied for their operations on the cooperation of the local community of free men. And a surprisingly high proportion was involved: on one Herefordshire estate, for example, it has been calculated that one free man in twenty was engaged in administration at one level or another.

Another mark of the stability of these years was the deliberate reconstitution of the royal family. As we have seen, after Cnut’s triumph the children of his supplanted Anglo-Saxon rival, Edmund Ironside, had been packed off to Germany and thence to Hungary. Cnut’s intention was that they should be murdered (at a safe distance from English eyes). Instead, they were received as honoured guests. The younger, Edmund, died in Hungary. But the elder, Edward the Exile, married the Princess Agatha and had ‘a fair offspring’. In 1054, the princely Bishop Ealdred of Worcester, who was an intrepid traveller, went ‘on the king’s errand’ to the imperial court. His mission was to persuade Edward and his family to return with him to England. The then state of relations between the Empire and Hungary frustrated Ealdred’s mission. But the message got through and Edward, Agatha and their children arrived in England in 1057. Edward himself died almost immediately, to the grief of the Anglo-Saxon chronicler. But his wife and children remained in England and his young son, Edgar the Æthling, was brought up by Edward as his own.

The most striking change, however, and the surest sign of recovery, was that England regained her tenth-century hegemony within Britain. In 1054, Earl Siward of Northumbria defeated Macbeth, the usurping king of Scots; killed many of the Scots nobility and seized immense booty. These events, imaginatively dramatized by Shakespeare, paved the way for the restoration of Malcolm III, son of Macbeth’s predecessor, Duncan, in 1057. Two years later, in 1059, Malcolm visited the English court, escorted by Earl Tostig. It was the first such visit by a Scottish king since Kenneth I had come to Edgar’s court eighty years previously, also to swear a form of fealty.

Likewise reminiscent of Edgar’s reign was the fate of Wales. Harold tried to bring Gruffudd ap Llwelyn to heel in 1056 by negotiation from a position of strength. Gruffudd, recognizing that he was temporarily outmatched, ‘swore oaths that he would be a firm and faithful viceroy to King Edward’. But, as soon as he dared, he was back to his old tricks. Finally, in 1063, Harold and his brother Tostig launched a two-pronged attack on Gruffudd: Harold by sea and Tostig by land. Their success provoked an internal rising against Gruffudd, who ‘was … slain on 5 August by his own men’. His severed head was surrendered to Harold, who sent it as a trophy to Edward, together with the gilded figurehead and prow of Gruffudd’s ship.

It is a remarkable achievement. Edward’s coronation seems to have been intended to usher in a new ‘age of Edgar’. An observer of Britain in 1063 would probably think that it had succeeded.

But he would have judged too soon.

III

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle contains no entry at all for 1064. But this is the year, almost certainly, of Harold’s ill-fated visit to William of Normandy. There are contemporary descriptions of the visit only in the Norman sources and even they disagree about details. But the broad outlines, as they are presented in the Bayeux Tapestry, seem reasonably clear. Harold took leave of Edward and rode to Bosham, hunting and hawking along the way. He prayed at Bosham Church and ate and drank in the hall before embarking in a single ship with his hawk still on his wrist and his hound under his arm. Was he on a royal mission to renew Edward’s offer of the crown to William, as the Norman sources claim? Or was it a pleasure trip that went wrong, as some later English sources argue? At all events he was driven ashore in the hostile territories of Count Guy of Ponthieu. Thence he was rescued by William; accompanied the duke on a campaign against the refractory Bretons, in which he performed wonders of strength and bravery, and finally swore a great oath to support William’s claim to the throne at Bayeux (or Rouen or Bonville-sur-Touques or Bur-le-Roi, depending on which version is to be believed). He then returned to England to an apparently grim reception from Edward, who pointed an admonitory finger at him.

What to make of all this? That the visit to Normandy took place and that Harold swore an oath we can accept. But it is impossible to believe that Harold acted voluntarily. However he got to Normandy, he was in the duke’s power. As was his younger brother, Wulfnoth. Harold therefore swore under duress and would have discounted his oath accordingly.

Moreover, he soon had more pressing things to worry about.

For, at the beginning of October 1065, Northumbria rose in revolt against Earl Tostig, Harold’s brother. Partly, it was a question of style. Tostig was a stranger to the area; he had tried to impose southern customs and he maintained, the northern men felt, unnaturally friendly relations with King Malcolm III of Scotland. But there were also more serious and specific charges: that he had perverted the law to kill his enemies; had robbed churches and had taxed disproportionately. The revolt was no hole-in-the-corner affair. Instead, the Northumbrian thegns (nobles) acted collectively and decisively. They killed Tostig’s retainers, seized his arsenal at York and confiscated his treasury. Having thus emasculated Tostig’s local power, they then chose as their earl Morkere, the younger brother of Earl Edwin of Mercia. Under the nominal command of their new earl, the rebels marched south, gathering the strength of three more counties of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire on the way, till they came to Northampton. There Earl Edwin joined them with the Mercian levies.

All seemed set for another civil war: between north and south and between Godwins and the rest. But, once again, a way out was found, with Harold performing the crucial role of peacemaker. He had gone to Northampton as the king’s representative at the meeting of the witan convened there, and had returned thence to put the rebels’ demands to Edward. No doubt on Harold’s advice, Edward accepted them at a second meeting of the witan on 28 October at Oxford; replaced Tostig with Morkere as earl of Northumbria and confirmed the Laws of Cnut, which embodied the separate legal status of the Danelaw.

Harold had played the statesman. He had put his country before his family and saved England from civil war. But there was a price: the Godwins were now irretrievably split and Harold’s dispossessed brother Tostig had become his deadliest enemy. After the Oxford meeting, Tostig fled with his family to Flanders, where he spent the winter contacting allies and plotting his revenge.

Edward by this time was about sixty. It was old for the time but his health was excellent. When, for instance, he received the news of the Northumbrian revolt he was hunting with Tostig in Wiltshire. But the political storm of the autumn, which came from a blue sky, affected him badly. He celebrated Christmas Day with the usual pomp. But on the 26th he took to his bed and was too ill even to attend the consecration of his new abbey at Westminster on the 28th.

Over the next few days, his condition worsened and he alternated between fitful sleep and delirium. As he shook with a particularly violent seizure his terrified attendants roused him and all his old lucidity seemed to return. He had had a prophetic dream, he explained. God’s curse was on England for her sins, and her troubles would cease only when the trunk of a green tree, which had been cut in half, reunited of itself and bore leaf again.

Was he really prophesying the fate of England and the House of Wessex? Or was it only, as the ever secularly minded Archbishop Stigand whispered to Harold, that he ‘was broken with age and disease and knew not what he said’?

As well as the archbishop and Earl Harold, the group gathered in the royal bedchamber included Robert fitzWimarch, the king’s kinsman and staller or master of the horse, and Queen Edith herself, ‘who was sitting on the floor warming his feet in her lap’. Edward, now fully himself, first spoke to Edith, beseeching God to be gracious to her: ‘for certainly she has served me devotedly, and has always stood close by my side like a beloved daughter’. Then he turned to Harold and said, ‘I commend this woman and all the kingdom to your protection’. The words do not quite amount to a bequest of the crown, but they were the next best thing. That Edward had nominated Harold as his heir was also stated as sober fact by The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; it was even admitted by the Norman sources – though, in view of the earlier undertakings of both Edward and Harold, they denied the validity of the bequest.

Edward’s final request was that his death should not be concealed, so that all his subjects could pray for his soul. He had his wish. He died on 5 January and was buried in his new abbey on the 6th.

On that same day, the Feast of the Epiphany, and in the same place, Harold was crowned king of the English. It was a peaceful, unchallenged succession and, as the ceremony took place so quickly, it must have been both anticipated and prepared for. Harold’s other moves display a similar confidence and good sense. He married Ealdgyth, sister of Earls Morkere and Edwin, as his queen. And he went on a progress to the north. He was back in London from York by Easter, which fell on 16 April.

But, a week later, on 24 April, Halley’s comet appeared in the skies and remained there till 8 June. It was universally taken as a portent of disaster. In the Bayeux Tapestry a group of men marvel at the flaming comet in the sky; it is labelled ISTI MIRANT STELLA, ‘these men marvel at the star’. A messenger is shown bringing the news to Harold, whose evident anxieties are reflected in the ghostly fleet of empty ships which appear beneath him, in the margin.

IV

But the disaster seemed long in coming. Tostig made the first moves, raiding from the Isle of Wight to Sandwich and thence to Lincolnshire. He fled from Sandwich with the approach of Harold, who had assembled ‘so large a force, naval and military, as no king collected before in this land’. And he was driven out of Lincolnshire by the brother earls, Edwin and Morkere. He then took refuge with his bosom friend, Malcolm III, in Scotland.

With Tostig out of the way, Harold was able to put his forces to the use for which he had raised them and guard the south coast against William: ‘for it was credibly reported that Duke William from Normandy, King Edward’s cousin, would come hither’. Harold stationed himself on the Isle of Wight, which enabled him to shadow perfectly the fleet that William was building, directly opposite, at the mouth of the River Dives. But then, about 8 September, shortage of provisions forced Harold to stand his forces down. It was a blow. But not, apparently, a bad one as the usual campaigning season was almost over.

But, just when he seemed safe, events started to run hard against Harold. For the stand-off in Scandinavia, which had given England three decades’ respite from the Vikings, now started to resolve itself. In 1062, King Harold Hardrada of Norway defeated King Swein of Denmark at the battle of Nissa, and two years later they made peace. Either was now free to take advantage of Edward’s death and attack England as the self-proclaimed heir of Cnut.

Harold Hardrada took the initiative. Though just over fifty, he was a formidable warrior of the old Viking type. He was bloodthirsty, and, in his own saga, gloried in his deeds:

Now I have caused the deaths

Of thirteen of my enemies.

I kill without compunction

And remember all my killings.

Harold, he determined, should be his fourteenth victim. He set sail for England with a huge armada of 300 ships; landed at the Tyne and linked up with Tostig, who swore fealty to him. Then they sailed up the Ouse towards the old Viking city of York. En route, they were intercepted by Earls Edwin and Morkere. Both sides suffered heavy losses when they met on 20 September. But Hardrada and Tostig were left in possession of the field and entered York.

Harold, who meantime had force-marched his troops from London, arrived at Tadcaster on the 24th. There he heard that Hardrada and Tostig had already moved a few miles north-east of York to Stamford Bridge, to receive hostages and the submission of the countryside. Instead, Harold took them unawares in a headlong assault in which Hardrada and Tostig were both killed. As the invaders turned to flee, a lone Norseman held the bridge and prevented the English pursuit. But an Englishman somehow got under the bridge and ‘pierced him terribly inward under the coat of mail’. The pursuit now became a massacre, which was halted only by Harold himself. Barely 25 of the 300 ships which Hardrada had brought were left to sail home.

It was the most total, complete victory that the English had ever won over the Vikings. But there was no time for celebration as, immediately after Stamford Bridge, the wind turned and William was able to set sail. He landed unopposed at Pevensey on 28 September and occupied the old Roman fort of Anderida. Then he moved a few miles north-east to the more strategically important site of Hastings, where he erected a wood-stockade castle.

What would Harold do? To fight two major battles within days of each other was unheard of. But that was what Harold resolved on. After returning from the north, he spent about a week in London, gathering more men and resting such crack troops as he had brought down from the north. Then, before his preparations were fully complete, he force-marched south towards Hastings. His intention seems to have been to repeat the success of Stamford Bridge and take William unawares. Instead, William got news of his approach on 13 October and the two sides took up battle stations the following day: Harold on top of the hill where Battle Abbey now stands; William on Telham Hill. The English fought on foot, forming a shield wall as at Maldon, which they defended with battleaxes and throwing spears. The Normans attacked with mounted and armoured knights and foot archers. As they clashed the Normans cried Dieux aide (‘God help us!’), while the English chanted Ut, ut! (‘Out, out!’)

The two sides were evenly matched and the balance, insofar as the different, contradictory accounts can be disentangled, swung this way and that. Harold’s brothers, Earls Leofwin and Gyrth, were cut off and killed. But then a large detachment of Normans were worsted and threatened to flee. They were rallied by William’s half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, waving his baton (baculus). More confusion was caused by a rumour that William was down, and he raised his helmet to identify himself. This seems to have been the turning point. Perhaps the English had broken ranks to pursue the apparently fleeing French. Perhaps the steady rain of arrows was beginning to tell. At any rate, first Harold’s bodyguard was slaughtered; then the king himself was killed, disabled apparently by an arrow in the eye and then cut down with a sword-blow to the thigh. With the death of the king, the English fled and William was master of the field – and, as it turned out, of England.

The result was the death of one world and the birth of a new. Anglo-Saxon England had been a nation-state, in which rulers and ruled spoke the same language. This now ceased and, for the next four centuries, England was administered in Latin and governed in French. Anglo-Saxon, instead, became the patois of the poor and dispossessed. On the site of his victory William founded Battle Abbey. It was built on the hill where the English formed their shield-wall phalanx and the high altar is said to mark the spot where Harold fell. The size of the abbey also tells its own story: like the Normans themselves, it dominates the landscape and crushes the nearby settlement. Even its name is foreign and French: Bataille.

But what of the ideas and institutions of the Anglo-Saxon state, with its notions of consensual politics, of participatory government and a monarchy that, as 1014 had shown, was in some sense responsible to the people? How would these fare under new rulers with a new language and new values? Would they vanish? Or would they transmute and survive?