Queen Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror, was NOT a dwarf

This is, quite simply, a modern myth. There is no evidence, contemporary or otherwise, to support it. It derives entirely from an excavation of Matilda’s tomb in Caen carried out in 1959, during which the scanty remains of her skeleton were measured. The French press at the time reported that she was only 127cm (4’2”) tall, and this arresting ‘fact’ soon found its way into the next generation of history books.

But it was not true. Twenty years or so later, the president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, Sir Jack Dewhurst, didn’t believe a word of it. Matilda, he pointed out, gave birth to at least nine healthy children, eight of whom grew to adulthood. The queen could not have done this had she been 4’2”. Dewhurst, who was writing a book a book about royal confinements, made enquiries with Professor Dastague (Institut d'Anthropologie, Caen) who had led the original dig, and was told that they had never claimed Matilda was so short. In fact they had concluded that she was 152cm (about 5’). As Dewhurst points out in his article, this height is far more compatible with Matilda’s successful multiple pregnancies.

But that doesn’t solve the problem beyond reasonable doubt. In the first place, the skeleton that the archaeologists examined in 1959 was far from complete; Matilda’s height was extrapolated from her femur and tibia. Second, and more problematic still, the excavation of 1959 was not the first time that the queen’s remains had been disturbed. The tomb had been destroyed during the Huguenot revolutions of the sixteenth century and its contents scattered. Whether or not the remains measured in 1959 actually belonged to Matilda thus depends on how diligent the nuns of La Trinite were when they returned to sweep up.

Incidentally, these same caveats apply to the bones of William the Conqueror himself, whose tomb in Caen was excavated at the same time. He is said to have been 173cm (5’8”) – this based on a single surviving femur, which might well have been his.

Conclusion: Matilda may have been 152cm, or 5’ tall – the evidence is far from compelling. But she certainly wasn’t 127cm (4’2”). That’s simply an error caused by bad reporting, and one which doesn’t even fit with the evidence of Matilda’s successful childbearing. It’s high time this pernicious myth was laid to rest.

J. Dewhurst, ‘A Historical Obstetric Enigma: How Tall was Matilda?", Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, 1 (1981), 271–2.

England's Earliest Georges

The cult of St George, which originated in the eastern Mediterranean in the fourth century, transferred to England in two phases. He was known to the Anglo-Saxons, but only in his original manifestation as an early Christian martyr. To judge from the minimal number of references to him, he was never very popular in this guise, and some authorities – Bede, for example – clearly considered him to be a dubious addition to the saintly canon. By the time of the Norman Conquest, however, George had been reinvented as a Byzantine soldier-saint, and his new-found military prowess made him irresistibly popular with the knights of western Christendom, many of whom went east themselves in the course of the First Crusade. Indeed, a quantum leap for George’s popularity in the West was his reported appearance in aid of the First Crusaders during their successful siege of Antioch in 1098; soon thereafter we find some of the earliest images of St George as a knight on tombs and church doorways in England.

When did he move from the margins to the mainstream? One thing is now certain – the shift had nothing to do with Richard the Lionheart. Until very recently, any book on the subject of St George would invariably assert that his first flush of popularity in England, if not his introduction to these shores, was due to the devotion of the famous crusader king. Richard, it was confidently reported, had beheld a vision of George during the siege of Acre, rebuilt a church in his honour at Lydda, and, most significantly, had adopted the saint’s emblem – the red cross on a white ground – as England’s arms. This tradition, however, was completely discredited fifteen years ago by Oliver de Laborderie, who showed Richard’s connection with St George to be entirely spurious, a legend invented for political purposes at the Tudor court and unquestioningly accepted and embellished thereafter. Contemporary sources for Richard’s reign mention neither visions nor church-building, and inform us that the king and his crusaders wore white crosses, not red ones. Apart from the incidental fact that he was married in a church dedicated to St George, Richard has no demonstrable connection with him at all.

As far as can be determined, the earliest interest in St George in royal and aristocratic circles in England was expressed two generations after Richard’s death, in the middle decades of the thirteenth century. In 1245, for example, King Henry III paid a certain Henry the Versemaker for writing an account of George’s life, and a decade later he ordered an image of the saint to be installed over the entrance to the hall at Winchester Castle. Similarly, at some point before his death in 1251, Paulin Piper, one of the king’s closest courtiers, composed some lines of poetry (now sadly lost) in George’s honour, while in 1251 itself, William de Cantilupe, a baron with strong court connections, decided to call his firstborn son George – the earliest person mentioned in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to bear that name after the saint himself.

Possibly this early English interest in St George had something to do with crusading – it is interesting to note that each of the above men – Henry III, Piper and Cantilupe – had taken the cross. At the same time, none of them actually went on crusade; their interest in George equally likely to have been stirred by the growing enthusiasm that his cult was attracting elsewhere in Europe. In England itself that enthusiasm remained muted. These are the only two references to connect Henry III with George in a 56 year reign, compared with the thousands that link the king to his favourite saint, Edward the Confessor, in whose honour he rebuilt Westminster Abbey. Likewise, young George de Cantilupe may have been the first of that name, but for a long time he was also the last. Of the 1550 entries in the Dictionary of National Biography for the thirteenth century, he is the only George.

If there was significant interest in St George at Henry’s court, it is less likely to have been driven by the king, whose model was the peaceable and pious Confessor, than by the more martial and mettlesome members of his family circle. Henry’s queen, for instance, Eleanor of Provence, was an avid reader of romance literature and an enthusiastic devotee of the cult of chivalry. A romance work written for her after Henry’s death contains only a passing reference to St George, but its very terseness shows that by this date (1270s) the saint had become a byword for knightly prowess.

More likely still to have been an advocate for St George was Henry’s son, the Lord Edward, later to reign as the formidable Edward I. Henry may have had no need for a military role model, but that was not true of Edward and his contemporaries, who hungered for glory on the tournament field, and who yearned to go on crusade. For these young men George would have been an ideal patron, and it is therefore probably significant that, when Henry’s reign collapsed into civil war, they rode into battle against Simon de Montfort wearing red crosses on a white ground – the earliest recorded use of the saint’s device in England, although not identified as such in the sources.

Unequivocal evidence of Edward’s identification with St George, and the biggest advance for his standing in England before the founding of the Garter, came in the course of the English conquest of Wales. In both his campaigns against the Welsh (1276-76 and 1282-83) Edward led armies that marched behind St George’s banner, and his infantry were issued with St George’s cross armbands, now explicitly described as such in royal financial accounts. The association of George with the conquest was further underlined on the king’s return to England in 1285, when he gave thanks for his victory by presenting four gold figures at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral: St Edward and St John, the favourites of his father, were now joined by St George and his horse.

Full article available in Kings and Castles

Birth of a future king, 1239

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!’. Paris himself, striking a more serious tone, thought that Henry’s ingratitude had ‘deeply clouded his magnificence’, and the episode, while not very significant, does provide something of a character note for the king. Henry, as other contemporaries observed, was a vir simplex: charitably, a ‘straightforward’ chap; more obviously, a simpleton. Consequently, he tended to act in inept ways such as this. Even when Fortune handed him a silk purse, Henry could generally be relied upon to make a pig’s ear out of it.

A much more important indicator of the king’s personality is provided by the name he chose for his new-born son. Henry, although king of England, was ancestrally and culturally French. He and his family were direct descendants of William the Conqueror, the Norman duke who had snatched England’s throne some 170 years earlier. Similarly, his leading subjects were all directly descended from the Conqueror’s Norman companions. When they talked to each other, they spoke French (or at least a slightly Anglicized, Norman version of it), and, when they came to christen their children, they gave them French names. William (Guillaume), for example, was still a popular name, for obvious reasons. So too was Richard (Ricard), because it evoked the memory of Henry’s world-famous uncle, Richard the Lionheart. And Henry (Henri) itself was perfectly respectable and commonplace. Henry III might have been rather limited in his abilities, but his two namesake predecessors had both been fearsome and successful warrior kings, worthy of commemoration and emulation.

All these options, however, Henry rejected. He had no desire to father conquerors, or for that matter crusaders. Thanks to his own father, the notorious King John, he had grown up surrounded by uncertainty and conflict. John had died in the midst of a self-inflicted civil war, bequeathing to his son a kingdom scarred and divided. What Henry craved above all for himself and his subjects was peace, harmony and stability. And it was a reflection of this ambition that he decided to call his son Edward.

Edward was a deeply unfashionable name in 1239 – no king or nobleman had been lumbered with it since the Norman Conquest, because it belonged to the side that had lost. Edward was an Old English name, and it sounded as odd and outlandish to Norman ears after 1066 as other Old English names – Egbert, Æthelred, Egfrith – still sound to us today. To call a boy such a name after the Conquest was to invite ridicule; he was bound to be mocked by the Williams, Richards and Henrys who were his peers.

But Henry III had good reason for foisting this unfashionable name on his firstborn son. After his father’s death, his mother had abandoned him – Isabella of Angoulême left England for her homeland in France, remarried and never returned. Effectively orphaned from the age of nine, the young king had found substitute father figures among the elderly men who had helped him govern his kingdom. But these men too, Henry ultimately decided, had failed him and, by 1234, he found himself alone once more. It was at this point, though, that the king discovered a new mentor, a man who would never, ever let him down – largely because he had already been dead for the best part of two centuries.

Henry’s new patron was Edward the Confessor, the penultimate king of Anglo-Saxon England. Like Henry himself, Edward had not been a very successful ruler: his death in January 1066 sparked the succession crisis that led to the Norman Conquest nine months later. Posthumously, however, Edward had acquired a reputation as a man of great goodness – so much so that, a century after his death, he had been officially recognized as a saint. Thereafter his reign had acquired the retrospective glow of a golden age: men spoke with great reverence about his good and just laws (even though, in reality, he never made any). Of course, the fact that Edward was not a great warrior had made him an unlikely exemplar for the conquering dynasty of kings who came after him. But to a man like Henry III, who was entirely lacking in military skill, the Confessor seemed the perfect role model. There were, moreover, other similarities between their two lives which must have struck Henry as highly significant. Edward had lost his father and been abandoned by his mother at a young age; he had grown up with war and wished to cultivate peace; he had been misled by treacherous ministers. Above all, Edward, like Henry, was famed for his piety. Edward was the king who established the royal palace at Westminster, in order to be near the great abbey (minster) which he spent the last years of his life rebuilding. In due course he was buried in the abbey church, and his tomb there became a pilgrim shrine. It was the greatest testament to Henry III’s love and reverence for the Confessor that, from 1245, he would spend vast sums rebuilding the abbey for a second time, replacing the old Romanesque church with the massive Gothic building that stands today.

 

It was no surprise to anyone, therefore, that Henry should chose to call his son Edward in honour of his idol. Nor, probably, was it a coincidence that the boy happened to be born in Westminster. Henry spent plenty of time in his palace there, partly to be near the abbey, and partly because Westminster was a centre for some branches of royal government. But the king had lots of other palaces and castles all over England, and to govern his realm properly he was obliged to travel around them. It seems very likely that Henry had deliberately arranged it so that he and Eleanor were in Westminster as the end of her term approached, in order that they would be in the closest possible proximity to the Confessor’s shrine. Being born in Westminster also meant that Edward could be baptized there. A few days after his birth, the new baby became the first king of England to be christened in the abbey, surrounded by a great crowd of bishops, noblemen and ladies. No less than twelve of them became his godparents. Henry was evidently determined from the first that his son would have all the affection and guidance in childhood that he himself had lacked.

A Great and Terrible King, pp. 2-5

History Live!

This Saturday I'll be speaking about the Norman Conquest at the English Heritage History Live! Festival at Kelmarsh Hall, Northamptonshire.

Interview for Sittingbourne FM

Another recent radio interview on the Norman Conquest.

Historical Association Talk

The talk on the Norman Conquest I gave to the Historical Association last month is now available as a podcast.

The Coronation of William the Conqueror, 1066

By the time William himself reached London some days later, the situation there must have been incredibly tense. The city, as we have noted, had been swelled by the survivors of Hastings. They, and the relatives of the thousands who had fallen, can hardly have looked upon the arrival of the Normans with anything other than abhorrence. According to William of Jumièges, the advance guard that the Conqueror had sent ahead ‘found many rebels determined to offer every possible resistance. Fighting followed immediately and thus London was plunged into mourning for the loss of her sons and citizens’. Jumièges may not be the most reliable witness here, but the resistance he describes is implicitly acknowledged by the better-informed William of Poitiers, who tells us that the advance guard had been ordered to build a fortress in the city, ‘as a defence against the inconstancy of the numerous and hostile inhabitants’.

The coronation itself took place on Christmas Day. Given the situation in London, there can have been little appetite for the kind of processions through the streets that we know preceded later ceremonies. If the Carmen can be believed (and, sadly, most of its account of this episode has to be rejected), William may have taken up residence in Edward the Confessor’s palace at Westminster in the days immediately prior to the ceremony. We know that the ceremony took place in Confessor’s new church at Westminster Abbey, and we also know that the audience included both English and Normans. Since there can only have been space inside for a few hundred people, the majority of London’s citizens must have remained at home, and the bulk of the Norman army camped elsewhere (perhaps in the new castle in city’s south-eastern corner). A number of armed and mounted Normans, however, were stationed outside the abbey as a precaution against ambush.

As for the ceremony itself, we know enough to see that it followed a conventional form. Historians continue to debate which order of service was followed, but all agree that, despite the novelty of regarding it as the king-making moment, William’s coronation adhered to longstanding English traditions. Anthems in praise of the king were sung, just as they had been in the Confessor’s day, and the service was conducted by an English archbishop. As at the start of the year, this was Ealdred, archbishop of York, rather than Stigand, the pariah archbishop of Canterbury. In describing the ceremony, English sources, for obvious reasons, emphasized the first part, wherein the new king swore the traditional oath to govern his subjects well, according to the best practice of his predecessors. As John of Worcester explains, William promised to defend the Church and its rulers; to govern the whole people justly; and to establish and maintain the law, totally forbidding ‘rapine and unjust judgements’.

The English in the audience must have been particular keen to hear the last part, in light of recent events. William of Poitiers gives the impression that the days between the submissions at Berkhamsted and the coronation had been peaceful ones: had the Conqueror wished, we are told, he could have spent all his time in hunting and falconry. The D Chronicle, by contrast, tells a different story. Having noted William’s promise at Berkhamsted to be a gracious lord, it adds bitterly that ‘nevertheless, in the meantime, they harried everywhere they came’. As the English had feared, the Normans had continued to behave during these weeks as if they were still at war. Now, at last, as their new king swore his oath, they could hope the ravaging would cease.

But evidently someone had forgotten to explain the significance of this moment to those Normans who were standing guard outside. As William of Poitiers explains, the next part of the service involved asking the audience whether or not they would accept the rule of the new king – a question which had to be put twice, first in English by Ealdred, and again in French by the Norman bishop of Coutances. Naturally everyone answered in the affirmative, shouting out in their respective tongues, but, unfortunately, says Poitiers, the guards outside the church thought that this loud clamour was some sort of last-minute English treachery, and responded by setting fire to the nearby houses.

As modern historians have observed, this is William of Poitiers at his most unconvincing: if the guards had really thought there was trouble in the church, surely they would have rushed inside? What we seem to have is a clumsy attempt to excuse yet more burning and pillaging, even as the coronation service was in progress. At the same time, the fact that Poitiers felt compelled to mention this incident at all suggests it must have been serious, and that suspicion is confirmed by the later but fuller account provided by Orderic Vitalis. As the fire spread rapidly, says Orderic, ‘the crowd who had been rejoicing in the church took fright, and throngs of men and women of every rank and condition rushed outside in frantic haste’. Some, we are told, went to fight the flames, while others went to join in the looting. Meanwhile, in the abbey, only the bishops and a few monks and clergy remained to complete the coronation service. Archbishop Ealdred, as was customary, anointed William with holy oil, placed the crown upon his head, and seated him on the royal throne. The churchmen were reportedly terrified, and one can well believe it: at the very moment they had called upon God to bless their new king and grant him a peaceful rule, the scene outside was mayhem. By the end of the ceremony, we are told, even the Conqueror himself was trembling from head to foot. It was, as Orderic observes, an inauspicious beginning.

 

The Norman Conquest, pp. 198-200.