King John at New Year

Where did King John see in the New Year?

1199 Normandy, precise location unknown, possibly Caen.

1200 Woodstock, Oxfordshire

1201 Montmorrillon, Poitou

1202 Lisieux, Nornandy.

1203 Brill, Buckinghamshire

1204 Clarendon, Wiltshire

1205 Clarendon, Wiltshire

1206 Unknown, probably Guildford, Surrey

1207 Winchester

1208 Winchester

1209 Guildford

1210 Unknown, possibly Nottingham

1211 Unknown

1212 Havering, Essex

1213 Waltham, Essex

1214 Temple Guiting, Gloucestershire

1215 Newark, Nottinghamshire

The Death of King Harold

Another year, another crackpot Battle of Hastings theory. Last year it was 'the battle was fought somewhere else'. This year it's 'King Harold survived the battle'. This one is, if anything, even more feeble and confused, so let's put it to bed as soon as possible.

Evidence for Harold's death:

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, D version (English, contemporary)
'King Harold was slain, and Leofwine, his brother, and Earl Gyrth, his brother, and many good men'.

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, E version (English, contemporary)
'Harold marched from the north, and fought against him [William] before all his host came up; and there he fell with his two brothers, Gyrth and Leofwine.'

William of Poitiers (Norman, contemporary)
'The king himself and his brothers and not a few of the nobles of the kingdom had perished'.

William of Jumieges (Norman, contemporary)
'Harold was slain, pierced with mortal wounds, during the first assault'

The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio (French, contemporary, before 1068)
'The first, cleaving his [Harold's] breast through the shield with his point, drenched the earth with a gushing torrent of blood; the second smote off his head below the protection of the helmet, and the third pierced his innards with his lance'

The Bayeux Tapestry (Anglo-Norman, contemporary, before 1082)
HERE KING HAROLD IS KILLED

Eadmer of Canterbury (English, 1090s)
'Harold fell in the thick of the fray'

Baudri of Bourgeuil (French, before 1102)
'A shaft pierces Harold with deadly doom'

Henry of Huntingdon (Anglo-Norman, 1120s)
'Meanwhile the whole shower sent by the archers fell around King Harold, and he himself sank to the ground, struck in the eye. A host of knights broke through and killed the wounded king.'

John of Worcester (Anglo-Norman, 1130s, and very pro-English)
'But afterwards, when very many had fallen on both sides, he [Harold] himself fell, alas, at dusk'

Simeon of Durham (Anglo-Norman, 1130s)
'In that battle he [Harold] fell with almost the whole English army'

And [NB], The Waltham Abbey Chronicle (Anglo-Norman, post 1177)
'The king.... was slain by his fierce foe'


'Evidence' that Harold survived:

The Vita Haroldi, a work of fantasy written at Waltham Abbey in the early thirteenth century, 150+ years after the event. (And available in print since 1885).

Eleanor of Castile arrives in England, 1255

On this day (or thereabouts) in 1255 Eleanor of Castile, the new wife of the future Edward I, arrived in England for the first time. The young couple had been married in Burgos, Spain, the previous November, when Edward was fifteen and Eleanor just twelve. The contemporary chronicler and monk of St Albans, Matthew Paris, saw it as yet more evidence that his country was going to the dogs...

'About the time of the feast of St Denis [9 October], when the king [Henry III] was returning from the north of England to London, in order to be present for the feast of St Edward, Eleanor, the sister of the king of Spain and wife of Edward, arrived in Dover in great pomp, and with such a numerous revenue that their arrival was looked upon with suspicion by all England, and fears were entertained that the country would be forcibly taken by possession of them.

 

The king thereupon gave orders that she should be received with the greatest honour and reverence at London as well as at other places; but especially London, where her arrival was celebrated by processions, illuminations, ringing of bells, songs and other special demonstrations of joy and festivity. On her approaching that city, therefore, the citizens went to meet her dressed in holiday clothes, and mounted on richly caparisoned horses.

 

And when the noble daughter-in-law of the king arrived at the place of abode assigned to her, she found it, like the dwelling of the bishop of Toledo, hung with palls of silk and tapestry, like a temple, and even the floor was covered with arras. This was done by the Spaniards, it being in accordance with the custom of their country; but this excessive pride excited the laughter and derision of the people. Serious and prudent persons, pondering over future events, were deeply grieved on a careful consideration of the pleasure manifested by the king at the presence of any foreigners. Indeed, the honours shown to the Spaniards, excited the wonder and astonishment of all, and no wonder. The English, therefore, lamented that they were held in less esteem than the people of any other nation by their own king, and with sorrow perceived that their irreparable ruin was imminent.'

On This Day 1265: The Battle of Evesham and the Death of Simon de Montfort

Simon de Montfort was one of a group of barons who confronted the incompetent King Henry III in 1258 and took over royal government. Their aim was reform but ultimately their good intentions foundered over political and personal divisions; like a lot of revolutions, it ended in civil war. Montfort was the most die-hard reformer, and had a number of personal grudges against Henry III, who was his brother-in-law. In May 1264 he defeated Henry's forces in battle at Lewes in Sussex, capturing both the king and his son, the future Edward I, after which he ruled England for over a year. But in May 1265 Edward escaped from captivity and led a well co-ordinated royalist fight-back, which soon had Montfort on the run. By the start of August Edward's forces had the earl and his small army of supporters cornered near Worcester. Montfort was waiting for reinforcements led by his namesake son, but Edward had just led a surprise attack on them at Kenilworth. Here's how I wrote up the end of the story in A Great and Terrible King:

But by this time Montfort had crossed the Severn. Having seized the opportunity presented by his enemies’ temporary absence, the earl was now camped on the river’s eastern shore. He was, in fact, only a few miles south of Worcester, but Edward, after his exhausting dash through the night, was unable to contemplate pushing himself of his forces any further. Both armies therefore spent an uneasy twenty-four hours resting in close proximity. During this time, Montfort heard the news from Kenilworth, and not all of it was bad. In spite of its losses, his son’s army was still intact. The hope of uniting their two forces therefore remained undimmed, and with this end in mind the earl began to move his army on the evening of 3 August. Marching under cover of darkness, he aimed to give his enemies the slip for a final time. At dawn the next day, which broke around 5am, his forces arrived in Evesham, and there they paused for breakfast.

Three hours later, their spirits suddenly soared: on the horizon were spotted the advancing banners of young Simon’s army. Their stealthy night-time manoeuvres, it seemed, had been a success. With these reinforcements, they would stand a fighting chance. But then, with equal suddenness, all hope evaporated. From the top of the tower of Evesham Abbey, the lookout called down to Montfort in despair. ‘We are all dead men, for it is not your son, as you believed’.

It was Edward. The royalist army had not been given the slip at all. On the contrary, they had silently shadowed their opponents throughout the night, all the while remaining undetected. Playing the advantage of surprise for all it was worth, they had advanced the last few miles under the banners captured at Kenilworth two days before. Now, at last, the lengthy game of cat-and-mouse of the past two months was over: Montfort was trapped. Evesham lies in a loop of the River Avon, closed in from every direction except the north, and it was here, at the top of the hill, that Edward and Gloucester lined up their army.

The old sorcerer had been out-generalled by both his former apprentices, and he knew it. ‘How skilfully they are advancing’, he exclaimed, before adding, with characteristic arrogance, ‘they learned that from me!’. His only possible escape route was the bridge at southern end of the town, but there was not nearly enough time to get a whole army across it. The earl and his cavalry might flee and leave the others to their fate, but the loss of prestige would spell the end of his career. In any case, flight was hardly Montfort’s style. Instead, he rallied his forces for a final time and marched northwards out of Evesham, up the hill, to face his foes. The sky darkened and a thunderstorm broke.

Montfort’s chances at Evesham were terrible. The element of surprise and the command of the high ground, both so useful to him at Lewes, had this time been seized by his enemies. Once again, the earl’s forces were outnumbered three to one. When the two sides engaged, the wide royalist frontline quickly absorbed and enveloped the smaller Montfortian force. Defeat was inevitable.

So too was death. Well before the first blow had been struck, Edward had let it be known that, on this occasion, the normal rules of chivalric warfare were to be suspended. No quarter was to be given, no surrender accepted. Consequently, as the royalists closed in, the killing began. Montfort’s young knights were dragged from their horses, stripped of their armour, and stabbed. At least thirty of them perished in this way, an orgy of blood-letting not seen for centuries. Montfort himself, meanwhile, had received the special honour of a dedicated death-squad – a dozen men, ‘the strongest and most intrepid in arms’, chosen by Edward and Gloucester on the eve of battle, whose sole task was to find the earl and kill him. Yet in the end it was Roger Mortimer, the pugnacious marcher lord with the personal grudge, who struck the killer blow, running Montfort through the neck with his lance. Others then fell on the earl’s lifeless body, hacking off his hands, feet and head. In a final piece of grotesque savagery, his genitals were cut off and placed in his mouth, and the severed head was dispatched to Mortimer’s wife as a grisly token of her husband’s triumph.

Amidst such brutal carnage, there were few survivors. One man dressed in Montfortian armour had a miraculous escape, but not before he had been wounded in the shoulder. ‘I am Henry of Winchester, your king!’, he cried. ‘Do not kill me!’. Roger Leybourne immediately intervened and saved the stricken monarch, but it was Edward himself who led his father away from the battlefield.

Meanwhile, all around them, the killing continued to rage. Those fleeing across the fields were cut down as they ran. In the town, too, the streets were thick with the slaughtered. Even those who sought sanctuary in the abbey church were not spared. ‘The choir, the walls, the cross, the statues and the altars were sprayed with the blood of the wounded and the dead’, wrote one horrified eye-witness. ‘From the bodies around the high altar, a stream of blood ran right down into the crypts’.

‘The murder of Evesham’, wrote another, ‘for battle it was none’.

The Battle of Falkirk

[On this day in 1298 the Battle of Falkirk was fought between Edward I and William Wallace]

 It was not, in fact, until the dawn of the next day that the king finally caught up with his quarry, whose spears were spotted on high ground close to the town of Falkirk. For the English this brought a welcome end to weeks of uncertainty, and an especially restless twenty-four hours. They had spent the previous night camped at nearby Linlithgow in fearful expectation of a Scottish ambush: every rider – including Edward himself – had slept on the ground next to his standing horse (‘with their shields as pillows,’ said Guisborough, ‘and their armour as bedclothes’). For one fraught moment, it had seemed that their foes were indeed upon them; a rumour that the king had been wounded had caused an abortive rush to arms. Edward, it turned out, had been hurt in the night, but by rather more prosaic means. His horse, carelessly kept by its groom, had trodden on him.

Now, in the clear light of day, it was apparent that the Scots had abandoned all thought of ambush; in the distance they could be seen arraying themselves ready for battle. To compensate for his inferior numbers, Wallace had adopted a defensive strategy. His army was drawn up on the side of a small hill, at the foot of which ran an insubstantial stream. His greatest asset, the massed pikemen of his infantry, were arranged in four great circular brigades, or ‘schiltroms’, as the Scots called them. With their bristling spears turned outwards, these giant hedgehogs would give the footsoldiers a fighting chance against a cavalry charge. Nestled between them for protection were the archers of Selkirk Forest, while the Scottish cavalry were stationed at the rear. Both these contingents, however, were tiny in comparison with their English counterparts.

The strength of Wallace’s formation is well attested by the reaction of his opponent. Edward, when advised of it, was inclined to be cautious: superiority in numbers only counted for so much. The last time he had charged uphill at a supposedly inferior foe, the result had been a disastrous defeat. That, of course, had been at Lewes, well over three decades earlier, and was, to be fair, his first taste of battle. But when one remembers that the king’s most recent battlefield experience was the almost equally distant engagement at Evesham, the reason for his caution becomes even more apparent. Edward was now in his sixtieth year; his hair, once blond, had turned to snowy white. In general terms he was in remarkably robust health, but on this particular morning, thanks to his night-time mishap, he was nursing two broken ribs. Having arrived at Falkirk, he proposed pitching camp, and allowing his tired and hungry troops to feed themselves and their horses. His commanders, however, would have none of it: hesitation, they argued, would leave them once again exposed to attack. The king in due course agreed. The order to advance was given, and the battle of Falkirk began.

At first, Wallace’s strategy seemed as if it might well work. The first line of the English cavalry, led by the earls of Norfolk, Hereford and Lincoln, thundered towards the Scots, but immediately ran into difficulty. The little stream they had dismissed as an insubstantial obstacle in fact fed a much larger area of boggy marsh, which halted their headlong charge and sent them veering to the left. The second line, commanded by the bishop of Durham, swerved right to avoid the same pitfall. It soon became apparent, however, that these initial diversions had done the Scots no favours. The marsh, while protecting them from a frontal assault, had merely forced their opponents to attack from the sides, and the Scots now found themselves caught in a pincer. Their schiltroms, as expected, were highly successful in deterring the English cavalry, but this simply meant that the cavalry concentrated on the softer target presented by the Scottish archers. Eventually the schiltroms stood alone, at which point the English infantry unleashed a hail of stones and arrows, which ultimately caused so many casualties among the spearmen that they broke ranks. Seeing that their enemies had lost their defensive advantage, the English cavalry rode back in, and the Scottish slaughter was complete.

The Scottish cavalry – that is, the Scottish nobility – had fled at the start of the battle. (‘Without a sword’s blow’, said Guisborough, derisively). This has given rise to the pernicious but persistent myth that they secretly despised Wallace as a common upstart, and were actually in league with Edward I. As we have already seen, nothing could be further from the truth. The nobles of Scotland had from the first defied the English king and were quite ready to resist him. What separated them from the unfortunate archers and infantry at Falkirk was not their commitment to the patriotic cause, but their ability to flee when they realized that defeat was inevitable. We should not be too quick to condemn as cowards men who faced such overwhelming odds: it was massive numbers and superior firepower, not treachery, that led to the English victory. Nor should we pretend that the behaviour of the Scottish cavalry in any way divided them from their general. Wallace too escaped from Falkirk – presumably on the back of a horse.

A Great and Terrible King, 311-14 

The Birth of Edward I

This story begins in the year 1239 with a girl called Eleanor. Eleanor lives in England, a peaceful and prosperous kingdom, much the same size then as it is now. Eleanor herself, however, is not English. She was bred and brought up in Provence, an independent county in the south of what is now modern France. The reason Eleanor is living in England in 1239 is because, three and a half years earlier, she was married to the king of England, Henry III. At the time of their wedding, Henry was twenty-eight. Eleanor was twelve.

Eleanor is now sixteen years old, or very nearly so, and reportedly a great beauty: graceful, charming and elegant. Henry is very much in love with her, and she with him, but she has yet to win the hearts of his subjects. In the thirteenth century, the English did not take to foreigners with the same easy readiness that they do today. We may take as our witness a monk of St Albans by the name of Matthew Paris, who, as well as being a thorough-going xenophobe, also happens to be one of the most gossipy, prolific and best-informed chroniclers of the entire Middle Ages. Brother Matthew and his contemporaries had observed the effects of Eleanor’s arrival and seen the thing they most feared: an influx of foreigners, surrounding their king, separating him from his ‘natural’ subjects and advising him – so the English believed – badly. Rather ridiculously, Paris tried to pin the blame for this on Eleanor. Foreigners were pulling the kingdom to pieces, he said, and Henry, ‘being under the influence of his wife’, was letting them.

It was also apparently held against Eleanor that, three years into her marriage, she had not produced any children. ‘It was feared the queen was barren,’ said Matthew Paris, with the sympathy of a professional celibate. Again, this was quite ridiculous, given Eleanor’s tender years. What is much more likely is that Henry III, a kind and considerate man, had been exercising a bit of self-restraint. Twelve was the minimum age at which the medieval Church would permit girls to marry, and Henry and Eleanor had probably had sex soon after their wedding, but this would have been for political reasons, to ensure that their union was valid and binding. Common sense and compassion suggested that twelve was too young for regular marital relations and to run the risk that Eleanor might become pregnant.

By the time Matthew Paris made this comment, however, Eleanor was fifteen, Henry was thirty-one, and they were definitely sleeping together. We know this because, on 9 September 1238, in the middle of the night, a knife-wielding madman broke into Henry’s bedchamber with the intention of killing the king. He failed because, as Matthew Paris himself tells us, Henry was not in his room at the time. Luckily, he was with the queen.

And now, a little over nine months on from that dramatic evening, the queen is about to confound her critics and silence the rumour-mongers. It is June 1239, just a few days short of Midsummer, and Eleanor is lodged in Henry’s palace at Westminster, by the side of the River Thames, on the site where the modern Houses of Parliament stand. And there, during the night of 17-18 June, in a room presumably lit by lanterns and candles, she gives birth to her first child. Her delivery is successful, the baby is healthy, and – best of all – it is a boy. In the most important aspect of her role as queen, Eleanor has triumphed. She has provided Henry, and England, with an heir to the throne.

There was immediate celebration in the palace of Westminster. At Henry’s command, the clerks of the royal chapel sang the triumphant anthem Christus Vincit, Christus Regnat, Christus Imperat (Christ conquers, Christ reigns, Christ rules), and messengers were sent speeding off in all directions to spread the good news. In nearby London, a walled city of some 50,000 souls, the citizens went wild, dancing through the streets with lanterns, drums and tambourines. Soon the royal messengers were returning, laden with costly gifts from the king’s greatest subjects. In some cases, Henry apparently felt that these presents were not costly enough, and sent their bearers back to get better ones. According to Matthew Paris, this provoked some wag at court to quip ‘God has given us this child, but the king is selling him to us!’

Game of Thrones, the Norman Conquest, Political Violence and Earl Waltheof

[Warning: contains spoilers]

So I finally got round to watching Game of Thrones. This was partly because my partner wanted to watch it and I wanted to sit on the same couch, and partly because almost all the other medievalists I know have been talking about it a lot over the past couple of years, leaving me feeling very much out of the loop. I quite enjoyed it. The dwarf is very good, isn't he? And the princess with the dragons: she definitely gets a huzzah.

Game of Thrones, in case you've just arrived by spaceship, is an fantasy-adventure type saga with a very medieval flavour. As lots of other commentators have pointed out, it contains, in its plots and characters, historical parallels with the real Middle Ages. People have pointed out similarities, for example, with England in the fifteenth century during the Wars of the Roses. York and Lancaster/Stark and Lannister - you don't have to concentrate too hard to spot that one.

Game of Thrones is also incredibly violent. People are forever being stabbed, mutilated, tortured, beheaded, shot, or otherwise maimed or killed. Very often people get their throats slit. In the dramatic climax of Season Three, the so-called 'Red Wedding', several main characters are dispatched in the most grisly way imaginable.

Well, you might say, that again is simply a reflection of the reality behind the fantasy: the Middle Ages were a bloody and violent era. That's why 'medieval' is frequently employed as a pejorative term. That's why if someone threatens to get medieval on your ass, you run.

Well, not entirely. Such levels of violence did exist during parts of the period we now call medieval. In England, they existed during the late Middle Ages (particularly the fifteenth century, during the Wars of the Roses), and in the centuries before 1066. But in the period I've studied for the past twenty years - the two and half centuries after 1066 - they did not.

The clue here, of course, is the famous date: 1066 was the year the Normans arrived, and the Normans, in spite of their generally negative reputation, did not go in for the kind of extreme political violence that was routinely used in England before the Conquest, and that re-emerged around the year 1300. The Normans were extremely bloody in their warfare - witness the Battle of Hastings and the Harrying of the North - but not in their politics.

A few examples from pre-Conquest England. The reign of Æthelred the Unready (978-1016) saw several bloody purges. Æthelred succeeded to the throne as a child in 978 after the murder of his older half-brother, Edward the Martyr; in 1006 there was a bloody purge at his court orchestrated by his henchman, Eadric Streona, which saw several nobles slaughtered. ('Wulfgeat was deprived of all his property, and Wulfheah and Ufegeat were blinded, and Ealdorman Ælfhelm killed,' says that year's Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). And in 1015 Eadric was at it again: ‘he betrayed Sigeferth and Morcar, the chief thegns belonging to the Seven Boroughs: he enticed them into his chamber, and they were basely killed inside it’.

As you might expect, things failed to improve once England had been conquered by the Vikings in 1016. King Cnut began his reign with a similar round of executions (dispatching, among others, the treacherous Eadric). And the killing continued under his sons: during the reign of Harold Harefoot, Earl Godwine orchestrated the arrest, mutilation and murder of Alfred, brother of Edward the Confessor, and his companions, in 1036. It also continued unabated during the reign of the supposedly saintly Confessor himself. Tostig, son of Earl Godwine, killed his political enemies in Northumbria in 1063 having invited them to a conference. When the survivors came to complain to the king the following Christmas, they too were murdered, this time at the instigation of Tostig's sister, Edith, the Confessor's queen.

All this changed after 1066. 'No man dared slay another', said the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in its obituary of William the Conqueror in 1087, ‘no matter what evil the other might have done him.’ During William's reign, only one nobleman was executed - Waltheof, earl of Northumbria. Waltheof was implicated in a rebellion against the new king in 1075, and though he speedily confessed and turned himself in, he paid the price the following year, when he was beheaded on a hill just outside the walls of Winchester. Quite why William felt he had to make an example of Waltheof is unclear, but the fact remains he is the exception that proves the new rule. After his execution in 1076, no earl was executed in England until 1306, when Edward I commanded the death of the earl of Atholl. If you want to sum up this development in a sentence, you can say that the Normans, and William in particular, had introduced chivalry, in the sense of sparing and ransoming your enemies rather than lobbing their heads off.

Of course, sometimes the taboo was broken. King John (subject of the next book, btw) notoriously broke it by doing away with his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, and later the wife and son of William de Briouze. But look what happened to King John. After 1066, chivalry was a taboo you broke at your peril.

Waltheof, by the way, was executed on this day in 1076 - the anniversary of his killing, as much my recent Game of Thrones marathon, was the inspiration for this post. Inevitably a couple of people have already said (as they did at the time) 'poor Waltheof'. Waltheof certainly felt very sorry for himself, reportedly weeping and praying before he was led to the block, behaviour which later saw him raised to be a saint. During his lifetime, however, he was not particularly saintly. In the winter of 1073-74, a few months before the rebellion that ultimately cost him his life, Waltheof had settled an ancient blood feud with his rivals, the Karlssons, by sending his men to butcher them in the Yorkshire village of Settrington as they sat down to dinner - a scene which must have been very much like Game of Thrones' Red Wedding. Such behaviour had been par for the course in pre-Conquest England, an accepted part of the political process. But was no longer acceptable in the chivalrous era ushered in by William the Conqueror.

1066 words, so I'll stop.

Samuel Pepys at Rochester Castle

The celebrated diarist Samuel Pepys died on this day in 1703. Pepys, as his diary often makes plain, was an accomplished sexual predator. Here's an excerpt from his diary for 2 October 1665, when he paid a visit to Rochester Castle in Kent. Pertinent information: the great tower at Rochester Castle is the tallest of its type in Britain, rising 125ft tall.

 

I did there walk to visit the old Castle ruines... and there going up I did upon the stairs overtake three pretty maids or women, and took them up with me, and did besarlas muchas vezes et tocar leur mains [kiss their faces and touch their hands] and necks, to my great pleasure: but Lord, to see what a dreadful thing it is to look down praecipices, for it did fright me mightily, and hinder me from much pleasure which I would have made to myself in the company of these three if it had not been for that.’



The Battle of Lewes

(from A Great and Terrible King, pp. 60-63)

Siege and counter-siege, raid and counter-raid: such was the normal method of medieval warfare. Skilled commanders moved their troops like pieces on a chess board, taking individual castles and knights as part of a developing strategy. Attrition and retaliation were the name of the game; direct confrontation was to be avoided at all costs. However daring a general might be, he would almost never commit to battle, because of the enormous risk involved. In the noise and confusion of a battle, everything could be lost in a few short hours. As a consequence, they were rare events: in the spring of 1264, there had been no battle in England for almost half a century. Montfort, a renowned warrior well into his mid-fifties, had never fought in one.

And yet it was battle that Montfort now sought. In recent weeks his range of options had diminished rapidly. After his retreat to London they had never seemed so limited or so bleak. Dover Castle, his only other significant asset, was now threatened by the arrival in the South of the royal army; once it fell, Montfort would be trapped. In strategic terms it was almost checkmate, but the earl was not a man readily to concede defeat. On 6 May, like a cornered animal, he came out fighting, marching his forces out of London in search of his enemies.

Henry and Edward were in Sussex when they received news of Montfort’s warlike approach, and quickly moved to nearby Lewes, where both the town walls and the castle offered a strong defensive advantage. When their enemy drew up his forces a few miles to the north, however, it seemed they had been unduly cautious. Montfort’s army, as contemporary chroniclers attest, was a tiny; modern estimates suggest that his cavalry may have been outnumbered by their royalist counterparts by as many as three to one. Unsurprisingly, therefore, there was little mood for negotiation in the king’s camp. Henry III himself was apparently ready to talk, but his son was bullishly dismissive: the Montfortians could have peace, Edward assured them, if they presented themselves with halters round their necks, ready for hanging. Exchanges between the two camps concluded on 13 May with the exchange of formal letters of defiance. ‘From this time forth’, wrote Edward and the royalists, ‘we will do our utmost to inflict injury upon your persons and possessions.'

Montfort was eager to fight at once, hoping to hasten his enemies into handing him an advantage. Lewes nestles in a gap in the South Downs, and the road to the north runs through a narrow defile. If the royalists could be lured in this direction, Montfort’s inferior numbers would matter less. Henry and Edward, however, refused to be rushed. The surrounding hills, as much as the town and the castle, were their protection. They would engage the earl on their own terms in the morning, assuming he was still there. In the meantime they went to bed.

They woke at dawn to discover Montfort and his army staring down at them. During the night, the earl had used the woods to the west of Lewes and the enveloping darkness to march his men, undetected, to the top of the Downs. He now had command of the high ground, and his troops were already ranged ready for battle. Formed into three divisions, their frontline stretched over half a mile.

The royalists, after a swift council of war, drew up their army in a similar formation, with three divisions arrayed according to the immediate position of their commanders. Henry III, lodged in the priory to the south of Lewes, led the division on the left; Edward, quartered in the castle to the north of the town, the one on the right. A third division, led by Henry’s brother, Richard of Cornwall, formed in the middle. This deployment, arrived at seemingly by chance, would determine the outcome of the battle.

The cavalry, at the front of each contingent, were first to engage, thundering towards each other and meeting in a clash of wood and steel. It is hard to imagine either Henry or his brother leading such an assault, but Edward knew his moment had come. ‘He was not slow to attack in the strongest places, fearing the onslaught of none’, wrote one eye-witness (and a Montfortian one at that) immediately after the event. All those long hours in the saddle since boyhood, and the more recent practice on the tournament field, now stood Edward in good stead. He and his friends defeated the horsemen on Montfort’s left flank with their first charge, capturing them or putting them to flight. That left only the infantry to the rear, and they too had begun to flee from the oncoming swords and lances.

Edward, however, was not about to let these foot-soldiers escape unscathed. By chance, the contingent facing his own had been chiefly comprised of Londoners – the same rabble that had attacked and abused his mother the previous year. Edward was now in a position to exact bloody revenge. Exhilarated by his initial success, he and his knights rode after the fugitives, pursuing them to the north for several miles, slaughtering as they went.

It was a fatal error. By the time they regrouped and returned to Lewes – probably around mid-morning – all was lost. Edward’s departure had given Montfort the essential opening he needed, with disastrous consequences for the royalists. Richard of Cornwall had been captured having taken refuge in a windmill (a cause of much amusement for his captors). Henry III, badly beaten, had escaped back in the direction of the town, but he too was trapped: Montfort’s forces were closing in on Lewes from all directions. And now it was Edward’s turn to suffer defeat. At his approach, a force of Montfortians rode out and attacked him, putting many of his followers to flight. Edward himself evaded capture and began searching for his father. He found the king, together with the remnant of his army, holed up in the priory.

The Battle of Lewes was clearly over, and Simon de Montfort was indisputably the victor. Against all odds, his small force of inexperienced young knights – many of them ennobled only on the eve of the conflict – had triumphed over the superior might of the royal army. It was, as contemporaries were quick to conclude, nothing short of miraculous: proof that the earl’s cause was just, and a sure sign that he and his followers were favoured by God.

And yet outright victory remained elusive. Until Montfort had custody of the king and his son, he could not translate triumph on the battlefield into the political settlement that was his ultimate goal. Nor would getting hold of the pair be easy. To begin with, the royalists were far from being an entirely spent force. Henry had retreated into Lewes Priory with some of his contingent, and Edward still had his redoubtable Marcher friends by his side. It was enough, according to one chronicler, for Edward at least to consider making a sortie. Montfort almost certainly had the strength to take the priory by storm, but that posed an altogether more awkward problem. The Battle of Lewes would make a song worthy of remembrance; the Siege of Lewes Priory would not. Attacking a house of God would compromise the earl’s credibility as a holy warrior and undermine the righteousness of his cause. For similar reasons, there was no real question of executing royalist prisoners like Richard of Cornwall (although Montfort did apparently make the threat). Aristocrats could kill their non-noble inferiors with impunity, as the case of the unfortunate Londoners had shown, but they did not kill or mutilate each other, even in battle. Capture, imprisonment, ransom and release – these were the long established conventions of thirteenth-century warfare. It was almost two hundred years since the last English earl had been executed, and not even Montfort, ruthless as he was, would dare to break such a taboo.

Both sides, therefore, recognized that a negotiated surrender by the royalists was the only way forward: terms were agreed that evening. Montfort’s superior position is evident from the fact that, on most points, he got his way. The restoration of the Provisions of Oxford had been the earl’s cry to arms, so it was no surprise that the reforms were now resurrected in their entirety. Henry III was once again obliged to accept the tutelage of a council that would ruled on his behalf. Montfort’s only concession on this matter was a promise to review the arrangement at a later date, but such promises he could easily contrive to ignore. On another front, however, the earl was forced to make a major concession that betrays the limits of his bargaining power. In return for the surrender of the king and his son, Montfort agreed to let the Marchers go free. This was a serious gamble, for these were dangerous men, whose number included not only Edward’s bellicose friends Roger Clifford and Roger Leybourne, but also Roger Mortimer, the man who had recently become Montfort’s hated rival. Accordingly, the earl imposed all manner of conditions and oaths on them, and sought further to guarantee their good behaviour by retaining two high-ranking hostages. Henry of Almain, the eldest son of Richard of Cornwall, was one. Edward was the other.

The Birth of Edward II at Caernarfon

On this day in 1284 Edward II was born at Caernarfon in north-west Wales. The previous year Wales had been conquered by his father, Edward I. The story goes that the king asked the Welsh whether they would like a new prince born in Wales who spoke no English. The Welsh, thinking that this must mean they were going to get one of their own to rule over them, as before the conquest, readily agreed. Edward then presented the crowd with his new-born namesake - who, of course, couldn't speak at all. In some versions of the story, Edward presents the baby by raising him up on a shield.

 

(from the Ladybird Kings and Queens of England)

 

 

Any truth in the story? Well, more than you might at first think. The bit about Edward junior not speaking English sounds like the kind of laboured joke that someone thought of after the event - it first occurs in a late-sixteenth-century history of Wales.

 

But, at the same time, there is no doubt that Edward II's birth at Caernarfon was deliberate, contrived by his father for political purposes.

 

The king had returned to Wales from England in the spring of 1284, taking with him his queen, Eleanor of Castile. For all that they were pretty much inseparable as a couple, Eleanor, well into what was probably her sixteenth pregnancy, might well have preferred to remain in England in some comfortable castle like Windsor. Instead, she accompanied her husband back into Wales, recently a war-zone, to the building site that was Caernarfon Castle. Edward II was born in well-appointed wooden chambers that had been built especially for the purpose.

 

Although he did not invest him as prince of Wales until 1301, Edward I clearly intended that his son would play some future role in Wales from the moment of his arrival. Caernarfon was a place associated with imperial rule in Welsh legend. It was reputedly the burial place of the Roman emperor, Magnus Maximus. In 1283, the year before his son's birth, the king had 'discovered' the body of the emperor in Caernarfon and ceremoniously reburied him. The castle he built there, with its polygonal towers and banded masonry, seems to evoke the walls of Constantinople.

 

Of course, what nobody could know before his arrival in 1284 was whether Edward II would turn out to be a boy. In 1282 Eleanor had given birth to her previous child at Rhuddlan, then the most important new English castle in Wales. In this instance it had turned out to be a girl, who was named Eleanor.

St George

It's worth saying every year: the introduction into England of the cult of George had nothing to do with Richard the Lionheart. Find out who was really responsible by reading my vintage History Today article.

Edward I exhumes King Arthur

At Easter 1278, King Edward I took his court to Somerset, and the abbey at Glastonbury, to visit the tomb of King Arthur.

The tomb of King Arthur at Glastonbury, regrettably destroyed in the seventeenth century, was obviously a fake. ‘Obviously’ because, as all sane historians will nowadays readily attest (whatever the assertions of lamentable Hollywood films to the contrary), Arthur himself never existed. Beyond any reasonable doubt, the legendary ‘king’ began life as an elemental figure or demi-god – a sort of low-grade Thor or Wodin. What is also unquestionably clear, however, is that his otherworldly origins were in no way apparent to Edward I and his contemporaries. To them, Arthur was a historical personage as real as Richard the Lionheart, William the Conqueror or Edward the Confessor.

Diligent and painstaking modern scholarship reveals to us what thirteenth-century folk could not possibly know: that Arthur was not historic, but had been ‘historicized’. That is to say, a number of earlier medieval writers, at different times and for different reasons, had taken the legendary or god-like figure and written about him as if he had been a real person. In the early ninth century, for example, an author known to posterity as ‘Nennius’ wrote Arthur into his account of the struggle between Britain’s original inhabitants, the Ancient Britons, and the Anglo-Saxon invaders who eventually displaced them. The deity was thereby demoted into a warrior who successfully battled for the Britons around the year 500AD.

This Arthur was shadowy and obscure, brief and boring; had his development ended there and then he would have undoubtedly remained a little-known and seldom-mentioned curiosity. But Arthur underwent a subsequent re-imagining, one which transformed him out of all proportion. In the 1130s, a mischievous Oxford scholar called Geoffrey of Monmouth sat down and perpetrated what stands to be regarded as the most brilliant and audacious literary hoax of the Middle Ages, if not of all time. The History of the Kings of Britain, as his book has come to be known, was in reality nothing of the sort. It was a work of fiction, laced with just enough snippets from more sober and bona-fide chronicles to convince the credulous. And into his long, tall tale of imaginary kings in a distant imaginary past, Geoffrey inserted Arthur – King Arthur, as he now became – the greatest of all Britons, onetime ruler of the whole world.

Not everyone was taken in by such nonsense. ‘It is quite clear’, wrote the infinitely more responsible William of Newburgh, some fifty years later and with palpable irritation, ‘that everything this man wrote about Arthur and his successors, and indeed his predecessors…was made up!’. By this stage, however, it was far too late: Geoffrey’s book had become a runaway success, a medieval best-seller. Even today, some 215 manuscript copies of the History still survive, putting it way ahead of its nearest rivals, and second only to the Bible. And as for Arthur – the part of the book that everyone liked best – he rapidly spawned an entire industry. Tales of his exploits were taken up by other writers and poets, especially Continental ones, and made taller still. Soon Arthur acquired a castle called Camelot, a host of knightly companions, and a Round Table.

It was only a matter of time before he acquired a tomb. When the church at Glastonbury Abbey burned down in 1184, it quickly dawned on the monks there that a sure-fire way to increase the number of paying visitors was a spot of creative marketing involving everyone’s favourite king. Accordingly, they dug around in the churchyard and unearthed a pair of skeletons which, they claimed, were those of Arthur and his queen, Guinevere. To the monks’ credit, their forgery was first-rate: the excavations were carried out in secret, and the bones were discovered under an inscribed lead cross that confirmed, with convenient explicitness, the identities of their former owners. As with other famous hoaxes (Piltdown Man, the Hitler Diaries, Geoffrey of Monmouth) even the very clever and sceptical were taken in. Gerald of Wales, a man who considered himself nothing less than a genius, saw both the bones and the cross and was convinced of their authenticity. Other writers followed suit, and Glastonbury’s claim to be Arthur’s final resting place was rapidly accepted as a matter of fact. By the early thirteenth century, it was proof positive that the fabulous king about whom Geoffrey of Monmouth had written had once really existed.

Thus, by Edward’s day, Arthur-mania knew no bounds, and evidence of enthusiasm for the king was abundantly apparent. Richard of Cornwall, for instance, soon after gaining his earldom, spent considerable sums building the remote castle at Tintagel, a place which offered neither strategic nor domestic benefits but which was, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the location where Arthur had been conceived. Eleanor of Provence, it is touching to note, was taken to Glastonbury soon after her arrival in England, by a new husband evidently anxious to please a twelve-year-old queen who (as other evidence shows) loved all things Arthurian. By this time, moreover, one did not even have to be a great reader like Eleanor to join in the fun. Even those knights who were insufficiently in touch with their feminine sides to endure interminably long tales of courtly love were still able to fill their leisure time with Arthur-themed entertainment. It is in the middle decades of the thirteenth century that we first begin to hear of special tournaments called ‘Round Tables’, where the emphasis was on jousting, pageantry and prizes. Edward’s good friend Roger Mortimer would organize just such a tournament at Kenilworth Castle in 1279 in order to celebrate the end of his military career.

In Gascony and Germany, Italy and Sicily, France, Scotland and even in the Holy Land: everyone everywhere loved Arthur and told tales about him. In England, however, the famous king, fantastic though he was, did present something of a problem. Geoffrey of Monmouth, sticking to his earlier sources (like Nennius) had located his superhero at the turn of the fifth and sixth centuries. Arthur was not merely a British king, but a British king who had fought against the Anglo-Saxons – that is, the founding fathers of the kingdom of England. The English, in other words, were the bad guys in the Arthur story; the invaders who had ultimately defeated the Britons and driven them into the northern and western extremities of their island. Arthur, the most excellent king that had ever been, might be admired by the English, but he did not belong to them in any meaningful sense. On the contrary, he belonged to the descendants of the Britons – the Welsh.

The fact that Arthur was Welsh, though galling, was not his biggest problem as far as English audiences were concerned. A more disturbing difficulty was that he was apparently due for a come-back. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the king was merely wounded in his last battle with the Saxons; nothing was said about his death. Arthur, Geoffrey maintained, had been taken to the mysterious island of Avalon, in order that he might recover from his injuries. And when he did, so the story went, he would return and lead the Britons to victory once more. For fairly obvious reasons, the Welsh were very fond of this idea.

The English, for reasons that are equally obvious, preferred the version of the story that ended in Glastonbury. Not only did the tomb there prove that Arthur had really lived, and was therefore apt to be emulated; it also proved that he was really dead, and would not be coming back to cause any trouble. One of the few people who seems to have been in on the original fraud at Glastonbury was Edward’s great-grandfather, Henry II, who had problems of his own with the Welsh. It was reportedly his suggestion – and one imagines him tapping his nose and winking as he made it – that had set the monks digging in the first place. If, however, it was indeed Henry’s aim to discomfort his Celtic neighbours by this discovery, his propaganda missed its mark. The English might have been predisposed to accept that Arthur was dead and buried, but the Welsh simple refused to believe it. ‘In
their stupidity’, scoffed Gerald of Wales, ‘[they] maintain that he is still alive’.

It was, therefore, more than just idle curiosity or exaggerated devotion that brought Edward I to Glastonbury in the spring of 1278. The king, like his mother and his wife, owned Arthurian romances and appears to have been well versed in their contents; but, as has been rightly observed, there is nothing to show that his enthusiasm in this regard was anything other than ordinary. So far as we can tell, Edward’s trip to Glastonbury in 1278 was his first and only visit, and it was not a secular pilgrimage of the kind that had drawn his parents there forty years earlier. Edward came not to praise Arthur, but to bury him. Again.

Two days after Easter, which the court celebrated at the abbey, the king ordered Arthur’s tomb to be opened. ‘There, in two caskets’, said a local chronicler, ‘were found the bones of the said king, of wondrous size, and those of Guinevere, of marvellous beauty’. The next day, Edward had these remains removed to the abbey’s treasury, there to be kept while a new and better tomb was constructed. From a description in the sixteenth-century, the eventual outcome was a box of black marble with a lion at each end, and an effigy of Arthur at its foot.

What took place at Glastonbury was a piece of political theatre every bit as pointed and significant as Llywelyn’s homage the previous Christmas, or the prince’s marriage the following October. As on these occasions, every effort was taken to ensure that the event was momentous and memorable. The disinterment of the bodies, we are told, took place at twilight, no doubt deliberately to heighten its dramatic effect. The following morning, the court was treated to an equally arresting spectacle when Edward personally wrapped Arthur’s bones in silk, while Eleanor of Castile similarly prepared the remains of Guinevere for reburial. There may even have been, in addition to these macabre solemnities, some kind of celebratory jamboree. Immediately prior to its arrival at Glastonbury, the court had gone out of its way to stop at Eleanor’s manor of Queen Camel, which stands close by the giant Iron Age hill-fort at South Cadbury. Since Cadbury had already been identified by this date as Camelot (presumably because of its proximity to Camel, as well as to Glastonbury), it seems very likely that the two visits were connected, and that there might have been a chivalric prelude to the exhumation.

Such efforts, coming as they did within a few months of Edward’s humbling of Llywelyn, and at a time when the king was engaged in a general drive to redefine the relationship between England and Wales, can hardly be interpreted as anything other than a exercise in propaganda directed squarely at the Welsh. The attempt to deal decisively with Arthur shows in the attention to detail: having wrapped the skeletons and returned them to their caskets, Edward and Eleanor affixed their seals, so as to certify that the contents were indeed authentic. More telling still is the intention to ensure that the evidence was left on permanent display: the skulls of ‘Arthur’ and ‘Guinevere’ were not reinterred, but placed outside the tomb, ‘on account of popular devotion’. Edward, it would seem, was determined to prove to his turbulent neighbours, once and for all, that Arthur would not be coming back to save them.

A Great and Terrible King, pp. 162-6

King John's treasure found in The Wash

No, not really. It's 1 April. But at least they won't have to move the Custom House in King's Lynn.

The Siege of Berwick 1296

On this day in 1296 Edward I captured and sacked the town of Berwick on Tweed. It was the first major military action of the long-drawn-out wars of Scottish Independence. (The Scots had attacked Carlisle a few days earlier, but without success).

Edward's action at Berwick became notorious because, once his army had entered the town they put many of its citizens to the sword. Contemporary English chroniclers maintain that only the men were killed; later Scottish writers wrote of the indiscriminate slaughter of men, women and children. There is no doubt that a lot of people died, though probably not quite as many as suggested by the chroniclers, whose estimates varied wildly between 7,500 and 15,000. Generally when medieval chroniclers reach for figures like this, they simply mean 'a large number'. For comparative purposes, London at this time had a population of about 80,000 people.

The accounts get more lurid as time wears on. One story that gets repeated all the time is how the slaughter went on for two days, and Edward was only moved to call a halt when he witnessed a pregnant woman being killed. But this story was not written down until the early fifteenth century, by which time the English and Scots had been fighting for well over a hundred years. It's exactly the kind of horror story you'd expect to find after such a long and bitter conflict.

What gets left unsaid in much of the commentary about the attack on Berwick in 1296 is that Edward's decision to sack the town - while it seems abhorrent to us (note italics) - was entirely conventional behaviour for a military commander at the time. In the Middle Ages, cities and castles that offered to surrender expected terms, including life and limb, and in almost every instance received them. Cities and castles that chose to hold out, and offer only defiance, left themselves open to exactly the kind of brutal treatment that Edward visited on the Scots at Berwick. It was appalling, but wholly unexceptional. One of the best people to read on the ethics of medieval warfare is Matthew Strickland, a professor at the University of Glasgow, who wrote a very good article on Edward's conduct during his war with Scotland. (You can read a bit of it here.)

Anyway, based on what contemporaries wrote, and the comments of Strickland, here's how I wrote up the siege of Berwick in A Great and Terrible King (pp. 287-8):

Edward arrived in Newcastle on 1 March 1296 to meet the giant English army he had summoned. The Scots, who had been ordered to present themselves on the same date, unsurprisingly failed to appear. The king therefore marched his host along the Northumbrian coast and drew it up at Wark, a castle on the River Tweed, where the English lord had decided to join the Scots on account of his love for a Scottish lady – a nice reminder, at this critical moment, that the Tweed was a political boundary between the two countries, not a cultural one. Edward’s arrival at the border coincided with the start of Holy Week, and so, with proper respect for Christian piety, the English army sat and waited. During this time, the Scots made an attack on nearby Carham, and on Easter Monday they tried, unsuccessfully, to take Carlisle. When the festivities at Wark were over, therefore, the English king had all the justification he needed for his invasion. As the end of March approached, he crossed the Tweed and led his army in the direction of Berwick.

Berwick was one of the three towns whose surrender Edward had demanded by proxy the previous year, and that demand was now repeated in person. The citizens again rejected it, throwing back insults, taunts and gibes at the king, and even – according to one English chronicler – baring their buttocks at him. Such bravado was quite surprising, given the size of the English army, and the fact that Berwick’s defences at this time amounted to no more than an insubstantial wooden palisade. The assault that followed, however, seems to have caught both sides unprepared. The king had drawn his forces up in front of the town, and was engaged in the pre-battle ritual of creating new knights – a display perhaps intended to persuade the Scots to reconsider their position. But to the English navy lurking offshore, this military activity looked like a cry to arms, and they duly began their attack. When the sailors in turn got into difficulty and several ships were set on fire, Edward was obliged to sound a general advance. His troops rapidly breached Berwick’s flimsy defences and poured into the town, putting many of its stupefied citizens to the sword.

The king has often been criticized for his behaviour at Berwick, and stands accused of having ordered the indiscriminate massacre of the townspeople. In fact, Edward’s tactics and the killing that took place – however reprehensible they may seem to modern sensibilities – were entirely in keeping with the conventions of medieval warfare. A town or city that refused to surrender left itself liable to be sacked in just this way. That Edward was operating squarely within the usual chivalric norms at Berwick is emphasized by his treatment of the two-hundred-strong garrison who holed themselves up in the town’s castle. To these men, the king offered generous terms of surrender: safety of life and limb, the right to retain their lands and possessions, and even the right to go free, provided they swore never again to bear arms against him. It was a most magnanimous package, which the garrison wisely chose to accept.

Harold Harefoot

On this day in 1040 Harold Harefoot, king of England since 1035, died in Oxford. By any reckoning he has one of the best names of any English monarch. How did he come by it, and what did it mean?

'His cognomen "Harefoot" referred to his speed, and the skill of his huntsmanship', says Wikipedia, citing a book from 1899 called Essentials of Language and Grammar by the august-sounding Albert Le Roy Bartlett. Bartlett does indeed say that Harold was called Harefoot because he could run as fast as a hare, but he was not the first to do so. The celebrated eighteenth-century historian David Hume said exactly the same and, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, so too did other writers as far back as the late Middle Ages. Small wonder, then, that Harold's hare-like agility is today reported pretty much everywhere, online and in print, as a matter of established fact.

But sadly for those who like to imagine their medieval kings haring around at such velocity, it is a fact that is almost certainly made-up. No contemporary source accords Harold his arresting nickname. Indeed, eleventh-century sources tell us next to nothing about Harold, who is one of the most faceless kings ever to have ruled England. His nickname first occurs over a hundred years after his death, in a history of Ely Abbey, where it is written as 'Harefah' or 'Harefoh'. The likeliest explanation is that the monk who wrote it simply confused Harold with his Norwegian namesake, Harold Fairhair.

So Harold was probably no more frisky than any other English monarch. But his colourful cognomen does illustrate the tenacious power of myth, and the desire of historians throughout the ages to add substance to the ghosts of the distant past.

The Last Days of Edward I

Here's an unpublished article I wrote some years ago about Edward I's stay at Lanercost Priory during the last few months of his life. It's lately been included with fourteen other essays in my ebook, Kings and Castles. (I really can't emphasize enough that this book is a collection of essays and articles.)

By the start of 1306, Edward I had lived longer, travelled further, and achieved more than any previous king of England. At 66 years old, he had visited not only every corner of Britain but also France, Belgium, Italy, Sicily, Spain, Sardinia, Cyprus, North Africa and the Holy Land. And, in the eyes of his contemporaries, he had performed the most praiseworthy deeds. He had fought against the infidels on crusade; he had, as one chronicler put it, ‘expelled the faithless multitude of Jews from England’, and he had – also to the great rejoicing of his English subjects – conquered Wales.

The great chain of castles that the king constructed to cement his victory over the Welsh are his most enduring architectural legacy. Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech and Beaumaris, to name just the four most famous, are collectively recognized today as a World Heritage Site, and are a must-see for anyone even marginally interested in the medieval past. They are not, however, the focus of this present story, which is devoted to the last few months of Edward’s life, and a ruined monastic church in Cumbria, now in the care of English Heritage.

Lanercost Priory lies on the Anglo-Scottish Border, close to Hadrian’s Wall, which might seem a foolhardy place for anyone to have planted a religious community. Most people assume that during the Middle Ages England and Scotland existed in a state of perpetual hostility. But, in fact, for a century and more after Lanercost was founded in 1169, the two kingdoms had been getting on famously. English merchants and monks had emigrated to Scotland, helping to found new towns and monasteries; the aristocracies of the two realms had intermarried, and so too had their royal families: Edward I’s aunt, Joan, and his sister, Margaret, were both married to consecutive kings of Scots. The line of the Border on which Lanercost lies was fixed by treaty in 1237. Far from being a hostile frontier, this was a place where two cultures met and merged on peaceful terms and for mutual profit.

But all this changed in the 1280s, when a series of tragic deaths wiped out the Scottish royal family, leaving the Scottish throne with no obvious heir. Edward I was invited to help decide between the various claimants, but used the opportunity to browbeat the Scots into accepting him as their superior lord. Having found in favour of one candidate (John Balliol), he forced him to perform a humiliating act of homage, and repeatedly required him to appear in Westminster. Eventually the new Scottish king and his subjects decided that they would stand for no more, and sought to reclaim their lost independence. For the first time in over eighty years, the two countries went to war.

Naturally, this was bad news for those living at Lanercost. Within days of the war’s outbreak in 1296, the priory had been raided by the Scots – ‘dastardly thieves’, as the local chronicler described them – and the following year it was attacked again, this time by none other than William Wallace (‘that bloody man’, said the same chronicler). In general, however, this was a war in which the English had the best of the fighting. In 1304, after eight years of devastating English invasions, the Scots surrendered. The following year Wallace was captured and sent to London to be executed. Edward erected a new government in Scotland, to be overseen by an English governor. Scotland was declared to be a kingdom no longer, and was to have no new king.

Which brings us back to the start of 1306. Just when Edward thought his life’s work was complete, news came out of the north of a new Scottish rebellion, led by Robert Bruce, who resurrected his country’s claim to independence by having himself crowned king. Inevitably this meant the resumption of war, and within weeks a new English army was advancing into Scotland. But Edward I was not there to lead it. News of Bruce’s revolt coincided with (and thus possibly triggered) a sharp decline in his health. When the English king eventually set out northwards that summer, he had to be carried on a litter. His intended destination was Carlisle, but after three agonizing months he was forced to stop just twelve miles short of the city – at Lanercost Priory.

Religious houses were accustomed to receiving the kings of England from time to time as they toured their domains. Such stays, however, were always kept short, for the royal household was a monstrous and all-devouring beast. Edward arrived at Lanercost on 29 September 1306 with almost 200 people in tow – mostly grooms, cooks, carters, clerks and huntsmen – and that was just the core of his entourage. He would have been attended in addition by military men coming and going from the field, and also by the merchants, beggars and prostitutes that his household invariably drew in its wake. Lanercost had been once again been invaded by an army, albeit a friendly one.

But it was quite clear that, on this occasion, the army was going nowhere. Edward’s condition meant that he could not be moved, so his household proceeded to ensconce itself in the priory for the long haul. Soon teams of carpenters, plumbers and glaziers were arriving to build new chambers for the king, the queen and their manifold servants. Surviving household rolls reveal the considerable extent of the work. The priory precinct may appear peaceful and empty today; but in the winter of 1306 it must have resembled nothing less than a small town, crammed with new timber buildings and innumerable tents.

Edward’s household rolls also reveal something of his existence that winter. He travelled with vast quantities of gold and silver plate, including a pair of table knives with crystal handles. Food was obtained in huge quantities: scores of oxen and pigs, and cartloads of almonds, rice, sugar and bread. The other great expense was medicine: the king’s doctors ordered a cornucopia of spices, herbs and oils in their effort to prolong his life. Edward also had the benefit of the chests of holy relics with which he habitually travelled – a hoard that included a fragment of Christ’s cross appropriated from Wales, a piece of St Andrew’s cross taken from the Scots, as well as a saint’s tooth ‘effective against lightning and thunder’.

In the spring of 1307, Edward finally left Lanercost, but he never recovered his health. Soon after reaching Carlisle he fell sick again, and the rumour arose that he was already dead. In a grand gesture of defiance, the king gave up his litter, mounted his war-horse and led his army out of the city towards Scotland. Ten days later he died at Burgh by Sands on the Cumbrian coast, having advanced barely six miles.

Lanercost never recovered either. In 1292 its estates had been valued at a healthy £200 a year, but at the time of the Dissolution in 1536 that figure had shrunk to just £85. This decline in prosperity was due in part to the long centuries of hatred that Edward I had engendered by his attempt to conquer Scotland. But the decisive turning point in the priory’s fortunes had come in the winter of 1306­–7, when for five months its resources had been decimated by the magnificent court of a dying English king.

The Vikings in 1014

The Vikings are getting lots of positive press in England at the moment. But 1000 years ago the English regarded them with rather less enthusiasm. Here's an excerpt from the famous sermon by Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester, delivered in 1014:

'Things have not prospered now for a long time neither at home nor abroad, but there has been destruction and hate in every district time and again, and the English have been entirely defeated for a long time now, and very truly disheartened through the anger of God. And pirates [i.e. Vikings] are so strong through the consent of God, that often in battle one drives away ten, and two often drive away twenty, sometimes fewer and sometimes more, entirely on account of our sins. And often ten or twelve, each after the other, insult the thane's woman disgracefully, and sometimes his daughter or close kinswomen, while he looks on, he that considered himself brave and strong and good enough before that happened. And often a slave binds very fast the thane who previously was his lord and makes him into a slave through God's anger. Alas the misery and alas the public shame that the English now have, entirely through God's anger. Often two sailors [i.e. Vikings], or three for a while, drive the droves of Christian men from sea to sea - out through this nation, huddled together, as a public shame for us all, if we could seriously and properly know any shame. But all the insult that we often suffer, we repay by honouring those who insult us. We pay them continually and they humiliate us daily; they ravage and they burn, plunder and rob and carry to the ship; and lo! what else is there in all these happenings except God's anger clear and evident over this nation?'

The Headlines in 1204 (according to the Dunstable Annalist)

In the year 1204 the king confirmed a gift to us of his houses and garden at Dunstable.
In the same year a vicarage was assigned to Pulloxhill church on the authority of William, bishop of Lincoln.
Also Godfrey, bishop of Winchester, died.
And Suffredus, bishop of Chichester.
And Eleanor the king's mother.
And Normandy was lost.

Just a bunch of stuff some guy made up

The History of the Kings of Britain was written in the 1130s by a mischievous Welsh monk called Geoffrey of Monmouth. It is an elaborate literary hoax – a sustained work of fiction, laced with just enough snippets of more sober chronicles to convince the credulous. Geoffrey, for example, explains in his first chapter that Britain was named after its first settler, Brutus, a Trojan who arrived following the fall of Troy, and fought against the giants he found in Cornwall. He also tells us that that London was founded by Lud, Carlisle by King Leil, Colchester by Old King Cole: you get the idea. The part of the book that everyone loved was Geoffrey's tall tales about King Arthur, which at a stroke transformed an obscure Celtic legend into the most popular figure in medieval European literature.

Not everyone was taken in. ‘It is quite clear’, wrote William of Newburgh, half a century later, ‘that everything this man wrote about Arthur and his successors, and indeed his predecessors... was made up!’. But Geoffrey’s book became a runaway success, a medieval best-seller. Even today, some 215 manuscript copies of the History still survive, putting it second only to the Bible.

Geoffrey would undoubtedly by cheered, as I was, to read the reviews of his book, good and bad, on Amazon.com. Here are the edited highlights (with original spelling, punctuation etc):

'Definately plausible, whatever the critics may say. Well written and quite readable, for all history buffs, this one is a must.'

 

'Too tedious and detailed for me. It read like a doctorate thesis. One star rating should have been one moon.'

 

'This is a very interesting book about the Kings of Britain, more detail on their lives than in history books I have read before. If your interest lies in this area, as mine does, I believe you would enjoy this book too.'

 

'The major flaw in the content is that the history is totally fictitious. If you want to learn the history of the kings of Britain, choose another book. Unless, that is, you believe that King Arthur ruled from Paris (as one example).'

 

'Excellent historical background for all you folks who like the middle ages and are interested in the succession of the English throne.'

 

'Surprise and delight rolled over me every time I closed this book. I wish it was a standard read for all students in our nation.'

 

'I don't know why I got this book. Seems like I had heard about it being a classic. It's mostly just a bunch of stuff some guy made up a long time ago.'

 

'The history is an example of a reference book to keep on hand. It is not an easy read straight through if one wants to remember any of the important kings and few will remember the very early kings of England. Some are obviously of more significance than others.'

'The Kings of Britain is well written and well received. It gives me insight to the dimention of the UK.'

'I had to read this for a class. It tells you the history of Britain, from the first kings, to Arthur and so on. I just read the Arthur part, because the class was about King Arthur.'

 

'It's a book for learning and reference == not to enjoy the same as a novel. There is so much information in it, you have to read it over and over, but the information is as good as it gets.'

 

'This is an excellant history book but was rather dull to read. The research disclosed efficient and enthusiastic diligence and awed many readers with the disclosure of the relevant details. I do my own research into written history products and can reveal this book is not widely read.'

 

'I give this book 5 stars as I think it covered all I was looking for if you are interested in English history.'

 

'This book is essential reading for those interested in the early origins of British royalty and the associated political traditions.'

 

'Don't waste even the $0.99 this book costs. It only covers that period prior to the Roman invasion up to a bit after it. If you want to learn about the monarchs of Britain in later centuries, go elsewhere. I was very disappointed.'

Remembering Charlemagne

Today is the 1200th anniversary of the death of Charlemagne, the celebrated Frankish emperor who stamped his authority over most of Europe. Cleverly, when he was short of manpower, he would sometimes use armies made of rocks, trees and birds:

 

Sadly, Charlemagne is not recorded as ever having said anything even vaguely like this. (See a well-informed discussion here).

The First English Parliament?

Some people will inevitably be claiming that today is a red-letter day for democracy – the occasion when Simon de Montfort summoned 'the first English parliament'. Which would be great, were it in any way true.

The famous earl of Leicester did summon a parliament, and it did begin on 20 January 1265. Beyond that, it's pretty much all myth.

The trouble is that the parliament of 1265 was in no way the first such assembly. The kings of England had been in the habit of consulting their subjects en masse since well before the Norman Conquest, and the term 'parliament' had been used to describe such meetings for at least a generation before 1265 – the earliest use of the term in an official government document occurs in 1236.

But weren't these earlier meetings just barons and bishops? Surely it was Simon de Montfort who struck a blow for democracy in 1265 by introducing representation, summoning knights from the shires and burgesses from the towns?

Well, yes, Montfort did do that in 1265. But, again, this had been going on for years. Knights had been attending parliament for decades – the earliest evidence that they did so as elected representatives occurs in 1254. There is also evidence to suggest that townsmen had been present in parliament before 1265. Montfort was doing nothing new in 1265 by summoning either group.

It can be argued that in earlier parliaments representatives had been summoned simply to gain their assent to taxation, whereas Montfort sought their opinion on political issues too. But since we don't know much about what went on in these early parliaments, that seems to be an argument from silence.

Moreover, it's hard to sustain the idea that Montfort was extending the role of these men because he was a prototype social democrat. The earl was in charge of government because he had seized power the previous year by defeating his brother-in-law, King Henry III, in battle. Without any hereditary claim to authority, Montfort was anxious to show that support for his regime was broadly based. Men in search of legitimacy – King Harold in 1066, King Stephen in 1135 – always claim to have the popular vote.

You don't have to take my word for it. Here's John Maddicott (my old doctoral supervisor, and author of the definitive biography of Simon de Montfort), writing in his most recent book, The Origins of the English Parliament, 924-1327 (p. 234):

'Simon de Montfort's summoning of the knights to parliament in June 1264 and of knights and burgesses to parliament in January 1265 is often thought to have marked the beginnings of local representation or even, and more vulgarly, the foundation of parliament by Montfort himself: a popular myth which it is astonishingly difficult to dispel.'

Today is the 749th anniversary of Montfort's parliament. Will next year's 750th anniversary celebrations dispel the myth or sustain it?

PS You can read the text of a 2012 lecture by John Maddicott on Montfort, the Battle of Lewes and Parliament here.

The Storms and Floods of 1250

In his chronicle for October 1250, Matthew Paris, monk of St Albans, wrote the following:

Daily in the first week of the waxing moon the air began to be much disturbed by dense mist and violent winds. The winds began to tear off the branches and the leaves which were then withering on the trees and carry them a great distance through the air. And what was more damaging, the rough sea, rising above its usual level, and the tide flowing twice in succession without any ebb, made such a horrible roaring noise that it resounded in places remote from it, to the amazement of the hearers, even old ones. No one living now could remember seeing this before. In the darkness of the night the sea seemed to burn as if set on fire, and waves joined with waves as if in battle, so that the dexterity of the sailors could not come to the aid of their doomed ships. Even large and strongly-built vessels foundered and sank. And if we remain silent concerning others, at one single port, namely Hartburn [Northumbria], besides small and medium-sized boats, three fine ones were swallowed by rough seas. At an eastern port called Winchelsea [Sussex], apart from sheds for salt-making, fisherman's buildings, bridges and mills, more than three hundred houses and several churches were destroyed in that place by the violent rise of the sea. Holland in England and Holland overseas, with Flanders and other low-lying places, suffered irreparable damage. Rivers flowing into the sea were forced back and overflowed, so that meadows, mills, and the neighbouring houses were destroyed, and the corn not yet stored in the barns was swept away from the flooded fields.

The Illustrated Chronicles of Matthew Paris, ed. and trans. R. Vaughan (1993), p. 187.

The Coronation of King Harold

How and why did Harold Godwineson come to succeed Edward the Confessor? What of the candidacy of Edgar Ætheling, son of Edward the Exile, whose claim by birth was manifestly superior? Had Harold long intended to wear his brother-in-law’s crown, or did he accept it only at the last minute, in deference to the king’s dying wishes? Was his accession a legitimate act or a usurpation? Was he spurred by ambition or rather a sense of duty? As ever, this pivotal moment in the history of the Norman Conquest raises many questions for which there can be no definitive answers.

Part of the difficulty, of course, is that in eleventh-century England there was no hard-and-fast set of rules governing the succession. At the start of the century the trend may have been in the direction of a hereditary principle, but that particular apple cart had been upset by the return of the Vikings, who had characteristically re-emphasized the importance of violence and opportunism. Cnut’s grip on England, observed William of Poitiers, ‘owed only to conquest by his father and himself and nothing else’.

So what else was there? In the succession debate that followed Cnut’s death we can discern three key factors. First, although there was no strict line of precedence, a close blood link with the previous king was still highly desirable – hence the unsubtle attempt to smear Harold Harefoot by suggesting that he was not really a son of Cnut at all but a low-born changeling. Second, it was also evidently considered beneficial for a prospective king to have been in some way designated as such by his predecessor. Thus the Encomium Emmae Reginae insists that Cnut had given Harthacnut everything under his control ‘while he was still living’, and maintains that Harthacnut had in turn invited Edward the Confessor to come to England in 1041 in order to hold the kingdom with him.

The most important factor, however, in deciding who should be king was clearly election – not in the wide sense in which we use the term today, but in the sense of obtaining the approval of the majority of the kingdom’s leading men. Harold Harefoot had plainly succeeded in 1035 because he was backed by just such a majority; Harthacnut, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes clear, had accepted the crown in 1040 at the invitation of a body of magnates. And Edward the Confessor, although he could claim descent from the ancient royal line and perhaps designation by his predecessor as well, ultimately owed his throne to the collective will of the English aristocracy, and in particular Earl Godwine.

How, then, did Godwine’s eldest surviving son manage to obtain the throne in January 1066? Clearly, in hereditary terms Harold’s case was extremely weak. The earl was related to Edward the Confessor, but only by virtue of his sister’s marriage. His claim therefore had to rest heavily on nomination by his predecessor and election by the magnates – which, according to some sources, is precisely what happened. ‘Earl Harold’, says the E version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘succeeded to the kingdom of England just as the king had granted it to him, and also men chose him for it.’ Similarly, John of Worcester, writing several decades later, says that Harold, ‘whom the king had chosen before his demise as successor to the kingdom, was elected by all the principal men of England to the dignity of the kingship’.

But both John of Worcester and the E Chronicle are written with a strong pro-Godwine bias; other sources are not nearly so sure about the legitimacy of Harold’s elevation. Was he, for instance, really nominated by his predecessor? As it happens we have a very full account of the Confessor’s last hours in the Life of King Edward. The old king, we are told, had been in bed for days, slipping in and out of consciousness and rarely saying anything intelligible. Of the small number of people who were with him, the author of the Life names just four: ‘the queen, who was sitting on the floor warming his feet in her lap; her brother, Earl Harold; Robert, the steward of the palace, and Archbishop Stigand’.

We can picture this scene more fully because it appears on the Bayeux Tapestry (which, moving seamlessly from Harold’s return from Normandy, resumes its story at this point). Having shown us the Confessor’s corpse being carried for burial in Westminster Abbey, it returns, as if in flashback, to the king’s deathbed. The scene is so similar to that described in the Life that one source (probably the Tapestry) must have been inspired by the other. We see Edward, lying in bed, surrounded by four figures. A servant (perhaps Robert the Steward) props him up, while a weeping woman (presumably Queen Edith) sits at his feet. On the far side of the bed stands a tonsured cleric, whom we take to be Archbishop Stigand, while on the near side a fourth figure, who must be Harold, kneels and touches the king’s outstretched hand with his own. ‘Here King Edward, in bed, speaks to his faithful servants’, says the caption.

As usual the Tapestry gives us no idea what is actually being said, but the Life of King Edward purports to give us the Confessor’s last words. ‘May God be gracious to this my wife’, he says to Edith, ‘for the zealous solicitude of her service. For certainly she has served me devotedly, and has always stood by my side like a beloved daughter.’ Edward then turns to address Harold (‘stretching out his hand’, says the Life, just as depicted on the Tapestry): ‘I commend this woman and all the kingdom to your protection’, he continues. ‘Serve and honour her with faithful obedience as your lady and sister, which she is, and do not despoil her, as long as she lives, of any due honour got from me.’

The heavy emphasis on Edith’s welfare is hardly surprising, given that the Life was written at her behest. What is surprising is how casually the subject of the kingdom is introduced. Edward seems to mention it in passing, almost as an afterthought. As a result, his words fall a long way short of providing a clear and unambiguous designation of his successor. Indeed, all the king says is that he commends the kingdom to Harold’s protection, which sounds rather more like the words one would use to nominate a regent. Of course, we don’t have to believe that these were actually Edward’s last words, any more than we have to accept the testimony of the pro-Godwine sources that insist Harold did receive his predecessor’s blessing. The Life of King Edward was completed after the Norman Conquest, and as such suffers from hindsight. Had there been an unambiguous bequest to Harold, the author and his patron, living in a post-Conquest world, may have diplomatically decided to downplay it. Nonetheless, when all allowances have been made, it remains striking that our best-informed source for the Confessor’s death is so reticent on the crucial subject of who he wanted to succeed him.

Nor is the Life alone in using such guarded language. The E version of the Chronicle may insist that Edward ‘granted’ the kingdom to Harold, but the C and D versions say simply that the king ‘entrusted’ it to him – a significant verbal weakening which again suggests that Harold may have been empowered to take care of the kingdom only as a temporary measure. The Bayeux Tapestry might seem to offer something a little stronger, for immediately after Edward’s death it shows Harold being handed the crown by two figures, one of whom points back to the deathbed scene, as if to indicate that the one event had legitimized the other. But, once again, the Tapestry is carefully ambiguous. Harold’s supporters could interpret this scene as being the moment when the crown was bequeathed to him; his detractors, on the other hand, might see only the moment where Harold claimed the bequest had been made. Similarly, it is often argued in Harold’s favour that the Norman chronicler William of Poitiers – a very hostile source – refers to Edward’s deathbed bequest several times and, while he challenges its legitimacy, he makes no attempt to deny that it happened. This, however, proves nothing. Only a handful of people – those present by his bedside – could have actually refuted the suggestion that Edward, in his last hours, had nominated Harold. So far as we can tell, none of them did so. All we can say is, in the case of Queen Edith, she chose to describe it in a very non-committal way, and that such vagueness is also apparent in a number of other contemporary sources. Many people, it seems, harboured serious doubts about Harold’s version of events.

What of Harold’s election? Was he, as the E Chronicle and John of Worcester maintain, chosen to be king by the English magnates, or did he, as William of Poitiers alleges, seize the throne ‘with the connivance of a few wicked men’? Certainly Harold was in a good position to put his case to a wide audience because, as we’ve seen, Edward the Confessor had died just a few days after Christmas and the dedication of Westminster Abbey, the combination of which events would have ensured there was a crowd of magnates at court. This is confirmed, more or less, by a pair of charters in favour of the abbey, given on the day of the dedication (28 December 1065) which show that during his last days Edward was indeed surrounded by the most important men in his kingdom. On the spiritual side we see no fewer than ten bishops, including both archbishops, as well as eight abbots. On the secular side, we see five earls: Harold, his brothers Gyrth and Leofwine, and also the brothers Eadwine and Morcar.

The presence of Eadwine and Morcar – and the glaring absence of Earl Tostig – reminds us immediately of the recent rebellion. Just eight weeks earlier, the two brothers had assumed the leadership of the largest uprising in living memory, and successfully brought about Tostig’s downfall, despite the fact that he was supposedly the second most powerful man in England. Morcar was now the new earl of Northumbria, which meant that he and Eadwine (lately recognized as earl of Mercia) between them controlled almost half the kingdom. Clearly, for Harold’s bid for the throne to have been the success that it was, it must have been essential to have secured their support. Harold, of course, had led the negotiations with the rebels in October, and ultimately accepted that Morcar should replace Tostig. Were any other deals, one wonders, struck at the same moment?

Certainly a deal was struck at some point, because by early 1066 Harold was married to Eadwine’s and Morcar’s sister, Ealdgyth. This was very obviously a political match; apart from anything else, Harold already had a long-term partner, after the Danish fashion, named Edith Swan-Neck. Irritatingly, we do not know when his wedding to Ealdgyth took place, so we cannot date the alliance it embodies. She had previously been the wife of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, the Welsh king killed in August 1063, so in theory her marriage to Harold could have occurred at any point after her first husband’s death. It is most unlikely, however, to have occurred before the rebellion of October 1065: whatever Tostig’s assertions to the contrary, it is impossible to believe that Harold had prior knowledge of the rebels’ plans, and far more plausible that the revolt itself obliged him to reach an accommodation with his brother’s opponents. The question therefore becomes whether the deal was done before or after the Confessor’s death. Given that the king’s declining health must have been evident to everyone in the final weeks of 1065, a deal during those weeks would seem the likeliest scenario. Presumably, though, it was agreed in secret. Harold could hardly have married Eadwine’s and Morcar’s sister without revealing his intentions regarding the throne – especially if, as later chroniclers contend, he had earlier agreed to marry a daughter of the duke of Normandy.

For how long had Harold harboured such intentions? Certainly the idea of becoming king had occurred to him well before his alleged designation by the dying Confessor. That much is clear from the Life of King Edward, the original purpose of which was plainly to justify some sort of Godwine takeover once the Confessor was gone. What form this would have taken is uncertain: the author divides his praise fairly evenly between Harold, Tostig and his patron, Queen Edith. But since that plan, and the Life’s original purpose, was wrecked by the northern rebellion, we can safely date Harold’s ambition for power earlier than October 1065. Some historians have suggested that it was spurred by his trip to Normandy, which revealed the undiminished hopes of Duke William. Yet if anything this episode pushes the seeds of the earl’s ambition further back in time, for all our sources agree that at least part of his reason for going to Normandy was to affect the liberation of his brother and nephew – men whom William had long held hostage as a guarantee of his right to one day rule England. Harold’s desire to put his kinsmen beyond harm’s reach arguably indicates that his thoughts were already tending in the same direction.

How Harold might have realized his ambition had the northern rebellion not happened, or been unsuccessful, is anybody’s guess. But it is far from certain that, had Tostig remained in power as earl of Northumbria at the time of Edward’s death, he would have stood in the way of his brother’s accession. The rivalry between Tostig and Harold was a consequence of the October rising, not a cause of it. Indeed, if we look back at their careers before that point, all we can see is co-operation – Tostig’s support of Harold’s conquest of Wales being the most obvious case in point. Part of the reason for the Godwine family’s success had always been their ability to stick together in both triumph and adversity. Based on past behaviour, it is more reasonable to suppose that Tostig, had he not been banished, would have supported rather than opposed his older brother’s bid for the throne.

The real obstacle to Harold’s ambition was neither Tostig nor William but Edgar Ætheling. The son of Edward the Exile, great-nephew of Edward the Confessor, Edgar was directly descended from the ancient dynasty that had ruled Wessex, and later England, since the beginning; the blood of Alfred and Athelstan, not to mention the celebrated tenth-century King Edgar, flowed in his veins. This fact, combined with the considerable efforts that had been required to secure his return from Hungary, must have led many to expect that the ætheling would in due course succeed his great-uncle. After all, his title, accorded to him in contemporary sources, indicates that he was considered worthy of ascending the throne. Moreover, according to one Continental chronicler with close connections to the English court, Harold himself had sworn to the Confessor that, when the time came, he would uphold Edgar’s cause. Whether this was true or not, the mere existence of this legitimate heir was singularly awkward for Harold. The saving grace was that in the autumn of 1065 Edgar was little more than a child, apparently no more than thirteen years old, and – owing to the Confessor’s political weakness – with no power base of his own. All Harold needed was enough of the other English magnates to agree that Edgar’s rights should be set aside, which is what he must have obtained from Eadwine and Morcar. The incentive for them, of course, was Harold’s marriage to their sister. As queen, Ealdgyth would produce children who would unite the fortunes of the two formerly rival houses, and a new royal dynasty would arise to take the place of the old.

No single fact points to a conspiracy of this kind more obviously than the circumstances of Harold’s coronation, which took place on 6 January 1066, probably in Westminster Abbey. The Bayeux Tapestry shows the new king crowned and enthroned, holding his rod and sceptre, flanked on one side by two men who hand him a ceremonial sword, and on the other by the solitary figure of Archbishop Stigand. The inclusion of the excommunicate archbishop of Canterbury is almost certainly an underhand piece of Norman propaganda: it is far more likely that Harold’s consecration was performed by Ealdred, the archbishop of York, as John of Worcester later insisted was the case. What does damn Harold, however, is the unseemly haste with which the ceremony was arranged. The new king was crowned the day after the Confessor’s death, and on the same day as the old king’s funeral. No previous king of England had demonstrated such a desperate hurry to have himself consecrated, for the good reason that in England the coronation had never been regarded as a constitutive part of the king-making process. Normally many months would pass between the crucial process of election and a new ruler’s formal investment. Edward the Confessor, as we have seen, had come to the throne by popular consent in the summer of 1042, but was not crowned until Easter the following year. Harold’s rush to have himself crowned within hours of his predecessor’s death was therefore quite unprecedented, and suggests that he was trying to buttress what was by any reckoning a highly dubious claim with an instant consecration. It is the most obviously suspect act in the drama.

The last weeks of 1065, then, probably ran as follows. The king is clearly dying, and the greatest earl in the kingdom determines he will succeed him, having perhaps nurtured the hope of doing so for several years. He strikes a deal with his rivals in exchange for their support. The king dies, inevitably behind closed doors, and surrounded by only a handful of intimates, including the earl himself, his sister the queen and a partisan archbishop of Canterbury; afterwards it is given out that the old king, in his dying moments, nominated the earl as his successor. Before anyone can object – indeed, so fast that the dead king is barely in his grave – the new king is crowned, and is therefore deemed to be God’s anointed.

Not everyone was convinced. Clearly many people were surprised by Harold’s succession, not least because it required a far more legitimate candidate – Edgar Ætheling – be set aside. Half a century later, the historian William of Malmesbury wrote that Harold had seized the throne, having first exacted an oath of loyalty from the chief nobles. Malmesbury was hardly a hostile witness: in the same paragraph he praises Harold as a man of prudence and fortitude, and notes the English claim that the earl was granted the throne by Edward the Confessor. ‘But I think’, he adds, ‘that this claim rests more on goodwill than judgement, for it makes [the Confessor] pass on his inheritance to a man of whose influence he had always been suspicious.’ More telling still is an account written in the 1090s for Baldwin, abbot of Bury St Edmunds, which described Harold’s hasty coronation as sacrilegious, and accused the earl of taking the throne ‘with cunning force’. Since Baldwin had formerly been Edward the Confessor’s physician, and was therefore very likely present at his death, this testimony ought to be accorded considerable weight. It is also possible that there was opposition in the north of England at the unexpected enthronement of the earl of Wessex. We know that soon after his coronation Harold travelled to York, a destination far beyond the usual ambit of English kings. Perhaps the occasion was his marriage to Ealdgyth, planned secretly in advance and now publicly celebrated. Alternatively, Harold may have had to go there in order to quell opposition to his rule. William of Malmesbury says as much, and has it that the people of Northumbria initially refused to accept Harold as their king. Unfortunately, elements of his story suggest that he may have confused these events with the northern rebellion of the previous year. Nevertheless, the likeliest reason for Harold’s trip to York was some sort of unrest. As the C version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ruefully observed, there was little quiet in England while Harold wore the crown.

 

The Norman Conquest, pp. 132-41