Battle of Hastings, The Read online

  And all these misfortunes, he adds, befell the English through lack of good counsel, in that tribute was not paid in time, but only after the Danes had done as much harm as they could; ‘and when peace had been made and tribute paid, they went wherever they would and raped and slew our wretched people’. The whole country suffered from a collective loss of morale; Sweyn was accepted as King of England in 1013, and at Christmas King Æthelred followed his wife and his two sons by her into exile in Normandy. He was to return to England and his throne for a brief period after the death of Sweyn in February 1014, on condition that he would rule better than he had done before (an interestingly early constitutional agreement between people and king), and died in London in 1016, leaving his eldest surviving son by his first marriage, King Edmund Ironside, to defend England against Sweyn’s son Cnut. This he did effectively, winning four outright victories before he was betrayed at the battle of Assandun later in the same year. The struggle between Edmund and Cnut ended in a peace treaty and the division of the kingdom between them; but the suspicious death (almost certainly murder) of Edmund in November 1016 left the whole of England in Cnut’s hands.

  It has been said that Cnut fought as the son of Sweyn Forkbeard, but ruled as the brother of Edmund Ironside. The chronicler William of Malmesbury reports him as praying at the latter’s tomb at Glastonbury. In one charter of 1018, he includes the words ‘when I, King Cnut, succeeded to the kingdom after King Edmund’. Whatever his feelings for his former enemy, fraternal or otherwise, they did not prevent him from sending the two infant sons of Edmund Ironside out of the country, delivering them to the King of Sweden with, according to some accounts, a request that they should be killed. This the Swedish king apparently felt unable to do but passed the children on to hosts elsewhere. At some stage during their wanderings, one of them died, but the survivor, Edward the Athelingiii, eventually reached the court of Hungary where he grew to manhood, prospered and married. Nor did Cnut hesitate to eliminate the remaining sons of Æthelred by his first marriage. In the meantime, he established his rule over England, and sought to make it more acceptable by sending for Emma, the Norman widow of King Æthelred, and marrying her. Since she was presumably still living in Normandy at this time (though she may have returned with Æthelred in 1014), it seems likely that her remarriage took place with the approval of her brother, the Duke of Normandy. By her, Cnut had one son, Harthacnut, and a daughter; by an earlier, probably handfast marriageiv to an Englishwoman, Ælfgifu of Northampton (with whom he must have continued his relationship since she later appears in the records as co-regent in Norway), he already had two sons, Sweyn and Harold Harefoot, a situation that made future contention almost inevitable. In the short term, he was probably seeking to forestall any Norman attempt at the restoration of one of Emma’s exiled sons by Æthelred by diverting the Duke of Normandy’s attention from his nephews by Æthelred to his nephew by Cnut. In the meantime, he took over the administration of England very much as he inherited it from his predecessors: he recognized its ancient laws, honoured its Church and gave peace to a much-harassed people, largely through the fact that he was able to protect them from the Danish raids that in the recent past had played so large a part in disturbing it. During the years that he ruled England, despite the bloodbath with which he began his reign, he achieved a greater degree of assimilation to and acceptance by the English than the later conqueror was to do. His brother, King Harald of Denmark, had died in 1018 or 1019, leaving Cnut to succeed to the Danish and, later, the Norwegian thrones in addition to the English. His dominions have been dubbed ‘the Empire of the North’; the degree of his acceptance and security in England is best indicated by his ability to leave it to be governed by regents while he secured his position in Denmark and Norway.

  What the extensive areas he controlled mainly did for England was to reopen to it the routes for trade and external contact, especially in the Baltic, from which it had been largely cut off during the troubles of Æthelred’s reign. In this his personal choices and priorities made a substantial contribution to the peace and prosperity of England. Whatever his ability as a warrior (he is said to have declined Edmund Ironside’s challenge to personal combat on the grounds that he was much the smaller), his diplomatic skills were clearly of a high order, and he welcomed the possibilities of interaction with the rulers of Europe. Sir Frank Stenton summarizes Cnut’s achievements:

  His own conception of his place among sovereigns was expressed to all the world in 1027, when he travelled to Rome in order to attend the coronation of Conrad, the Holy Roman Emperor. In part, his journey was a work of devotion. Rome, to him, was the city of the apostles Peter and Paul, and its bishop was the teacher of kings. Early in his own reign he had received a letter from Pope Benedict VIII, exhorting him to suppress injustice, and to use his strength in the service of peace. In the churches which he visited on the way to Rome he appeared as a penitent. But he was also a statesman, and there is no doubt that he regarded the coronation of an emperor as an appropriate moment for a gesture of respect towards the formidable power which threatened his Jutish frontier. It was also an opportunity for negotiations on behalf of traders and pilgrims from northern lands who had long been aggrieved by the heavy tolls levied at innumerable points on the road to Rome. Before the company dispersed he had secured valuable concessions from the emperor himself, the king of Burgundy, and the other princes through whose territory the great road ran. From the pope he obtained a relaxation of the immoderate charges hitherto imposed on English bishops visiting Rome for their pallia.v

  The possibility that he may have aimed to model his rule on that of Alfred suggests itself. Alfred also made pilgrimages to Rome, Alfred also seized the opportunity while he was there to negotiate better terms and conditions for English pilgrims, Alfred also conducted international diplomacy on a scale of which few of his predecessors except Offa of Mercia were capable; and Alfred married his daughter into a European royal family, as Cnut was also later to do.

  One minor innovation in particular was to establish itself in England. Cnut, as a king who had come to his throne by conquest rather than by rightful succession or election, perhaps understandably surrounded himself with a bodyguard of formidably efficient professional fighting men who became known as housecarls. Such a force may have been an innovation in England but in Denmark one had probably existed for some time. Cnut’s grandfather, Harold Bluetooth, is said to have established a colony of such men at Jómsborg, at the mouth of the Oder. This was no casual Viking settlement but a body of men bound together by loyalty to the king and to each other and by a code of behaviour designed to promote the wellbeing and honour of the company. Several of the Danish housecarls had appeared in England during Æthelred’s reign and played an active part in affairs during his successor’s. Cnut’s English bodyguard may have been constructed on the same lines as the Jómsborg Vikings (though there is no reference to such a body in his code of laws) and it gradually came to form the core of the English army, paid for by the Danegeld, more properly known as the heregeld or army tax; in many cases individual housecarls were rewarded with land, and the distinction between them and other of the king’s thegns and landowners became imperceptible. The chief duty of the royal housecarls was to guard the king and to provide the first defence of the country in time of war. As time went on, the great lords of Anglo-Saxon England would have employed their own housecarls who would go to war with them; they became the eleventh-century equivalent of the comitatus, the body of retainers described by Tacitus in his Germania, who served their lord in war and defended him to the death. The army that fought at Hastings would have included both royal housecarls and those of the chief landowners who were present at the battle.

  The strongest recommendation of Cnut’s reign, as has been remarked, is that his contemporaries found so little to say about it. His comparatively early death in 1035 left the kingdom to the chaos of a disputed inheritance. Neither he nor any of his sons appears to have been physicall
y robust. It is an ironic reflection that, if Cnut had been as healthy and lived as long as Edward the Confessor (there cannot have been more than a few years between them in age), there would never have been a Norman Conquest. It is probable that Cnut had intended his son by Emma to succeed him; but Harthacnut’s absence in Denmark at the time of his father’s death left the way open for his half-brother, Harold Harefoot (Sweyn had predeceased his father), to fill the vacancy, first theoretically as regent until Harthacnut could return, but later as King Harold I. His tenure of the throne was brief; but it included one event that was to produce reverberations as late as 1066.

  During Cnut’s relatively peaceful reign, his stepsons Edward and Alfred, Emma’s children by Æthelred, had grown up in Normandy. We know little of their life there. They do not seem, for example, ever to have been granted land or honours in Normandy when they reached adulthood, though their sister was respectably married to the Count of the Vexin. On the occasions when they appear as charter witnesses there, their names generally occur rather insultingly low in the order of precedence. In 1033 William’s father, Duke Robert, assembled a fleet for the purpose, it was said, of assisting the young athelings to regain their inheritance. The fleet lay for some time at Jersey and then sailed for Mont St Michel to attack Brittany instead. It was hardly a convincing gesture of support. On the other hand, they do appear to have been recognized as the rightful heirs of their father, despite their mother’s subsequent marriage to his conqueror and the birth of another son. Emma herself appears to have remembered them only intermittently, at least in public, her main ambitions being centred on her son Harthacnut, a fact that aroused the lasting resentment of her eldest son Edward. In 1036 the younger brother, Alfred the Atheling, returned to England, to visit his mother at Winchester. According to the anonymous author of the life of Emma, he was lured over by a forged letter from Harold Harefoot, written in Emma’s name, asking that one of her sons come to her immediately to discuss how the throne might be regained.vi Whether this story is true or not, it is unlikely that he was coming simply to make a social call. On the other hand, he does not seem to have arrived in any kind of strength. According to the life of Emma, he brought only a few men. He was intercepted by Godwin, Earl of Wessex and handed over by him to King Harold Harefoot who had Alfred’s men murdered or mutilated and the Atheling himself blinded so savagely that he died of his wounds at Ely.

  Blinding was not at that time a very unusual punishment (after 1066 it was, for example, the penalty for poaching one of the royal deer). Like other forms of mutilation common at the time (and promoted by the Church in England as a more merciful fate than death), it was designed to render the victim harmless. None the less in this instance it created consternation. (It may be noted that it is unlikely that so common an act of Dark Age violence would have aroused such surprise or revulsion in other countries; that it did so in England indicates the extent to which a less savage and more law-abiding society had prevailed there.) Harold Harefoot’s motives are perfectly clear; the Atheling posed an obvious threat to his power. Godwin’s motives are less clear. He had voted for Harthacnut’s succession and against Harold after Cnut’s death, and this may have appeared a way to reinstate himself in the king’s good graces. In later years, when he came to trial for his part in the crime, he maintained that in surrendering Alfred to Harold’s men, he was acting under the king’s orders and had not known that the Atheling’s mutilation was intended. Whatever the facts of the case, it shocked the inhabitants of England, most of whom had probably virtually forgotten the Atheling’s existence during the peaceful days of Cnut’s reign. Never was a bloodier deed done in this land since the Danes came, declared the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which recorded the death of ‘the guiltless Atheling’ in a burst of poetry. Whatever Godwin’s motives, his part in the crime permanently stained his name and soured his relations with Alfred’s brother Edward when the latter eventually succeeded to the throne. Not the least of the Norman accusations against Godwin’s son Harold in future years would be the fact that his father had betrayed a prince of the royal house of Wessex who was kin to their duke and was under Norman protection.

  If Godwin had hoped to propitiate Harold Harefoot by his betrayal of the Atheling, he might have saved himself the trouble. Within four years Harold was dead, succeeded by his half-brother, Harthacnut, who had been Godwin’s candidate for the throne all along. Harthacnut lasted a bare two years on the throne before dropping dead at a bridal feast, but during his short reign he invited his half-brother, the Atheling Edward, by now the only surviving son of Æthelred, to return to England and (it is assumed) to succeed him. Thus, after a gap of twenty-four years, the direct heir of the royal house of Wessex returned to the English throne.

  It is difficult, on the limited evidence available, to assess the character of King Edward fairly. In part, this is due to the atmosphere of piety spread retrospectively over his life by the appellation – which he acquired only after his death – of St Edward the Confessor. What is definitively known of him suggests that his later sainthood may have been no more deserved than the title of ‘the Martyr’ was merited by his uncle Edward, assassinated in 978 for the benefit of his father Æthelred. The only thing we know of his personality is that he seems to have had a tendency to fly into ungovernable rages. The main characteristic that can be deduced from his policies is a determination never to leave England again. The situation in England to which he returned, though clearly preferable to his former position of impoverished hanger-on at the ducal court in Normandy, cannot have been without difficulty, and it is much to his credit that he negotiated it so successfully that he contrived (though clearly no warrior-king, like his half-brother Edmund Ironside) to die peacefully in his bed after a relatively prosperous reign of twenty-four years. His biography, the Vita Ædwardi Regis, commissioned by his wife, portrays him as an old man, majestic, white-haired and white-bearded, all his thoughts fixed on the next world. He is probably more realistically described by his twentieth-century biographer:

  If there is one trait that runs through the whole and can usefully be stressed at the beginning, it is Edward’s ability to survive. Despite an inclination to rashness and inflexibility, he was blessed with a saving caution. And there is a general characteristic which must be held in mind. Edward was never a roi fainéant or a puppet ruler. Although he was neither a wise statesman nor a convincing soldier, he was both belligerent and worldly-wise. He caused most of his enemies to disappear and outlived almost all who had disputed his authority. He was rex piissimus, a fortunate king, blessed by Heaven.vii

  Since, however, it was during his reign that the faultlines that were to lead to Hastings became perceptible, we must make some effort to understand him.

  He was born in or around 1005, and can therefore have been a child of no more than seven or eight when his mother took him to her native Normandy as an exile. He seems to have made a brief reappearance in England when his father Æthelred was restored to his throne in 1014. Apart from one or two rather half-hearted skirmishes around the coast, he saw no more of England until his return as heir-presumptive to Harthacnut in 1041. Since he was educated from childhood at the Norman court, we may assume that he was bred to arms as no other form of education for a king’s son would have been contemplated there. Whatever his belligerent impulses, he seems never to have put such an education into practical use. There is no credible evidence of his appearance on any battlefield. According to the Scandinavian Flateyjarbók, he fought beside his brother Edmund in 1016 and nearly killed Cnut, but this is a very late fourteenth-century source and cannot be regarded as reliable. Since he could only have been eleven or twelve at the time, this story seems particularly unlikely. Cnut may not have been a great warrior, making up in guile what he lacked in physical prowess, but he cannot have been as feeble as that. Of the personalities who then dominated England he knew nothing. It is improbable that he even spoke much English. If he did, it would certainly have been as a foreigner. In th
e first few years after his return, he must have had much to learn. One of the things he must have learned very quickly was that, though he enjoyed a substantial reservoir of goodwill in the country as a whole as the last representative of the line of Alfred, in practice he held the throne only through the continuing support of the dominant nobles of the kingdom, and in particular three of them: Siward, Earl of Northumbria; Leofric, Earl of Mercia; and Godwin, Earl of Wessex. All three had originally been appointed by Cnut; all enjoyed considerable power in their own domains. The prospect of asserting his authority over them might well have daunted more forceful men than Edward.

  His first conspicuous action, almost as soon as he was crowned, was with the support of all three and revealed much both about Edward’s own character and the reserves of resentment he felt he had to pay off. In company with the three great earls, he rode without warning to Winchester where his mother, Emma, was living, stripped her of all that she owned, ‘untold riches in silver and gold’, and abandoned her there with a bare subsistence. The reason given for this in one version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is that in past days she had been very hard towards him, and had done less for him than he had wished before he was king. A more practical reason may have been that she had control of the royal treasury, which was normally kept in Winchester, the old capital of the kingdom. She may have been holding it on behalf of her son Harthacnut, and using it to interfere in matters of state (one version of the Chronicle states that she was holding it ‘against him’). The fact that he was accompanied on his raid by the three most powerful men in the land indicates that there was more than a private grudge here, but a private grudge there must undoubtedly have been, and the fact that it, rather than a perfectly legitimate public reason, is officially recorded in the Chronicle suggests that it must have been widely known. Whatever lay behind his actions, it signalled Emma’s retirement from public life. Her death is recorded in 1051.