Theodulf of Orleans (c.755 - 821): Charlemagne's ferociously witty courtier and why medieval Latin poetry needs a lil' bit of love

 If you were asked to name three great medieval poets (European, 450 - 1500), who would you name? If  you're just a well-educated, well-read man/ woman/ non-binary person of culture, not a "fanatical medievalist" (as I have been called once by a certain expert on the legal and intellectual history of Norman England), you'll probably go for those who undoubtedly hold a much deserved place in the hall of fame of world literature - the likes of Chretien de Troyes (c.1135 - 1185), Wolfram von Eschenbach (1170 - 1220), Snorri Sturluson (1179 - 1241), Dante Alighieri (1265 - 1321), Giovanni Bocaccio (1313 - 1375), Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340 - 1400) and Sir Thomas Malory (1415 - 1471). Of course, here its worth noting that we don't actually know the identity of many of the most celebrated works of medieval literature - this is true of such famous epics as "Beowulf" (which could have been written any time between 604 and 1000), "The Song of Roland" (written sometime between 1040 and 1129), "The Poem of the Cid" (written sometime between 1140 and 1210), "The Nibelungenlied" (written c.1200) and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (written c.1400). If you're hardcore medieval literary scholar you might go for someone not well-known at all outside medievalist circles, like Aneirin (6th century), Caedmon (d.684), Giraut de Bornelh (1138 - 1215), Ulrich von Liechtenstein (1199 - 1275), Jean de Meun (1240 - 1305), Guido Cavalcanti (1255 - 1300), Richard Rolle (c.1300 - 1349) or James I of Scotland (1394 - 1437). Or, if you're a hardcore medieval literary scholar and your feminist conscience (if you have one, that is) is telling you that it ought not to be a sausage fest, and that the literary accomplishments of medieval women deserve better recognition, you might pick Marie de France (fl.1160 - 1215), Hadewijch (c.1200 - 1250), Mechtild of Magdeburg (1207 - 1294), Christine de Pizan (1360 - 1430), probably the most famous medieval woman writer with a valid (if somewhat disputed) claim to being the first feminist author in the western tradition, or Gwerful Mechain (fl.1460 - 1502). The latter is getting a lot of attention now as Gwerful's poems include an invective against domestic abusers, an ode to the vagina and other things that really speak volumes to the issues women still face in the twenty-first century. Now, hands up if you picked Theodulf of Orleans as one of your three. One of two things will happen. Either the room will just go deathly silent, or the Carolingianists (people like me, in other words) will be outed. 

Now you might have been noticing a theme in most of the names I've mentioned. You might have noticed that almost all of these authors are from the period 1150 - 1500, which is both symptom and cause of why that final third of the medieval millennium defines for most historically-aware people what medieval European civilisation was like - knights in shining armour, monumental stone castles, tournaments, trebuchets, soaring gothic cathedrals, monarchical popes proclaiming crusades and inquisitions, fat friars preaching compassion for the poor while enjoying the alms in food and drink they receive from the better off a bit too much,  university students getting into fights with each other over arid scholastic debates like problem of nominalism and universalism or with the townsfolk over being sold poor quality alcohol for rip-off prices, craft guilds having fancy processions and stifling competition/ keeping at bay the dangerous forces of unfettered capitalism (depending on who you ask), courtly love, ladies in fine gowns and funny pointy hats, deluxe manuscripts with gothic script (Microsoft word's Blackletter font) and colourful marginalia that very often look straight out of a Monty Python film (they had to get the inspiration somewhere, after all), revolting peasants, the list goes on. The previous 650 years, especially the period up to the year 1000, doesn't register so much when people think of the Middle Ages, for various reasons that I don't need to go into here, but will do elsewhere. 

For those of you who have some knowledge of the various names, including the less well-known ones, I've mentioned, you might have noticed another pattern. All of these authors wrote in the vernacular, which is itself closely linked to the previous pattern noted - with the exceptions of Wales, Ireland, Anglo-Saxon England and a few Old High German poems, there's barely any vernacular literature from most parts of Europe before the twelfth century, and in some places not until quite sometime later (Albanian doesn't even attain written form until the fifteenth century, being the last Indo-European language to do so). We focus on the vernacular literature of the Middle Ages because many of the works written in it are undoubtedly pioneering masterpieces in and of themselves which have resonated throughout the ages (Chretien de Troyes' Arthurian Romances, Dante's Divine Comedy and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are undoubtedly in that category), and in part out of a sense of patriotism and national pride. They represent the birth of English, French, German, Italian etc literature and in some cases signify even more than that. For example, since Italian Unification in the 1860s, Dante Alighieri has always been held as Italy's national poet in the singular and as a sort of prophet of Italian unification (indeed, the colours of the Italian flag - green, white and red, representing hope, faith and charity respectively - come from Beatrice's dress in the Paradiso). To the French, the Song of Roland and the Arthurian Romances of Chretien de Troyes demonstrate (like with the Abbey of Saint Denis and Gothic architecture) the leading role of France and the French in the development of medieval European civilisation, here specifically in the emergence of chivalry and courtly romance. Similarly, over here, Chaucer is seen as emblematic of a resurgent and self-confident English nation emerging phoenix-like from the Hundred Years War and the shaking off, at last, of the dominance of French language and culture since the Norman Conquest in 1066. 

Meanwhile the vast corpus of Medieval Latin poetry and prose fiction - Latin was of course used as a literary language all over Western Christendom throughout the Middle Ages and into what we call the Renaissance or the Early Modern Period (when it becomes what modern scholars call Neo-Latin) - neither holds a widespread reputation for containing works of great literature, and certainly doesn't inspire any kind of patriotic or nationalistic feeling. Instead, in so far as its really taken notice of by anyone at all outside of hardcore medievalist circles, its presumed to be conservative, elitist and mostly religious (which is a big turn off for most people) given Latin's status as the language of the Church in the Middle Ages. Unlike most medieval vernacular literature, which is available in nice helpful user-friendly Penguin classics editions, most medieval Latin literature remains untranslated and in editions not safe for distribution to students. And to many classicists, who do have the relevant linguistic training, medieval Latin literature is automatically presumed to be second rate at best. This is because its been the opinion, going back to at least the Renaissance, that Classical Latin (the high literary Latin of the period 75 BC - 200 AD) represents the perfection of the Latin language, which is then presumed to have declined in quality thereafter, and that the literature of that period is the only Latin literature that's actually good and worthy of a place on school and university classics curricula. For poetry the six Latin authors considered great and worthy of study are Catullus (84 BC - 54 BC), Virgil (70 - 19 BC), Horace (65 - 8 BC), Ovid (43 BC - 18 AD), Martial (40 - 104 AD) and Juvenal (late first to early second century AD).  The poets of the later Roman Empire like Ausonius (310 - 395), Prudentius (348 - 414), Paulinus of Nola (354 - 431), Claudian (370 - 404), Namatianus (5th century) and Sidonius Appolinaris (c.430 - 491) definitely don't make the cut - most classics graduates won't necessarily have even heard of them - and those of the Middle Ages even less so. Never mind that many medieval Latin poets (including Theodulf, as we'll soon see) had a very in-depth knowledge of the language, literary style and content of the Augustan poets (Virgil, Horace and Ovid). That only opens them to charges of imitation or being derivative - tiresome slurs so often levelled at medieval writers by modern scholars. Richard Ashdowne, an Oxford Classics professor and editor of the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, really has a good sense of the problem in his excellent short introductory article to the Latin poetry of Medieval Britain. And among medievalist literary scholars, they overwhelmingly gravitate towards the vernacular, if in part for economic reasons - they simply join English, French, German, Spanish, Italian etc departments and many universities offer chairs in Old English/ Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Old Norse, whereas professorships in Medieval Latin simply don't exist. There are, however, a good number of medievalists who have fought against the marginalisation medieval Latin literature. Probably the most famous is the German philologist Ernst Robert Curtius (1886 - 1956), whose "European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages" (1948) earned the praise of TS Elliot, of all people, and is definitely to be regarded as a classic - indeed, Curtius can be credited with single-handedly introducing the technical term topos to modern literary criticism.

At the same time, to be more sympathetic to classicists, it really depends on why you want to read the texts. If you want to read texts that are timeless literary masterpieces, which have spoken equally to every subsequent era in the history of Western literature and are full to the brim with eternal themes and values, then obviously you read Horace's "Odes", Virgil's "Aeneid" or Ovid's "Metamorphoses." Meanwhile, you shouldn't bother with Prudentius' "Battle of the Spirits", Angilbert's "Lament for Fontenoy" or Joseph of Exeter's "The Trojan War." As Mary Beard said in conversation with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook on my favourite podcast "there wasn't a day since 19 BC when Virgil's Aeneid wasn't being read somewhere" and that certainly can't be said of the latter three. And if what you want to write about, say, reading rape and sexual violence in Ovid's "Metamorphoses" as a woman in the age of #Metoo, then of course you can ignore the writings of the dead (implicitly white) male poets and scholars of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Victorian Age and beyond, though I must say that (proto) feminist readings of Ovid do go back to the Middle Ages, albeit a bit too late in the Middle Ages for me. 

However, if you're a cultural historian interested in the long-term development of Western literature, rather than a pure literary scholar, then you ignore Late Antiquity and the Latin Middle Ages at your peril, not least because Late Antiquity and the Latin Middle Ages were what kept the classical literary tradition alive and those particular poets I mentioned so popular for it all to be passed on to the men (and women) of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Victorians and then us. If you're writing a history of the reception of Virgil or Ovid you can't just say something brief and vague about monks copying and preserving stuff (implying that they didn't actually engage much with the texts), give a token glance at Dante and Chaucer and then go straight to Quattrocento Italy or sixteenth century Europe - just as you shouldn't write about the reception of Suetonius without mentioning Einhard's "Life of Charlemagne" (I don't want to be that snotty Carolingianist, but I wasn't exactly happy to see neither Einhard nor Charlemagne mentioned once in the index to Mary Beard's exciting new release "Twelve Caesars"). to say this, Anthony Kaldellis has argued along much the same lines for the role of Byzantium in the Greek literary canon - see his article "Byzantium for Classicists" in his brilliant yet polemical booklet of essays "Byzantium Unbound" (2019) pp 55 - 74. I wouldn't go as far as him, though, in claiming that Classicists (especially those specialising in ancient Greece) are "bad Byzantinists", nor would I call Classicists who specialise in ancient Rome "bad Carolingianists", but he's essentially right that classicists don't realise that every time they stare at a great shelf of Loeb classical text volumes, they're staring at two medieval libraries - with the green cover volumes being the Byzantine library and the red cover volumes being the Carolingian library.

But enough pointless, self-indulgent, barely relevant introductory ranting about something I have a vested interest in (I've translated all 436 lines of the "Carmen ad Robertum Regem" by Adalbero of Laon) - there's a new year's resolution for me - lets get on to Theodulf of Orleans, the star of the show here. 

Now, if you're not a Carolingianist or at least an early medievalist, you'll probably be wondering "who the *@#! is Theodulf of Orleans." Well, let me give you a little bit of background on him. Theodulf of Orleans was born sometime in the 750s, somewhere in the area around Zaragoza in Spain. Barely anything is known about his family background, though ethnically they would have been Visigoths. A couple of generations before Theodulf was born, the old Visigothic kingdom of Hispania (Spain) had been conquered by the Arab Umayyad Caliphate, which by c.720 stretched from modern day Portugal to Pakistan. The Visigothic kingdom fell very quickly (in less than a decade) and this kind of rapid, very total conquest has led to much debate among historians, - was the Visigothic kingdom a prodigiously centralised state that fell quickly after it became politically decapitated following the death of King Roderic at the battle of Guadalete in 711, or was it because of court factionalism and political divisions among an "overmighty" aristocracy. Such debates will certainly ring a bell to those familiar with the scholarship on the Norman Conquest of England, and 711 certainly is for Spain that great watershed moment that 1066 is seen as for England - indeed, in Spain and Portugal 711 is reckoned to be the beginning of the Middle Ages full stop, and the preceding Visigothic period is taught by classics and ancient history departments. The only part of Spain that was not conquered by the Muslims was the small mountainous region of Asturias in the far north, on the Atlantic coast. There's been a lot of debate among Spanish medievalists over whether it was in any way continuation of the Visigothic state, indeed to what extent the the Romans and Visigoths had ever set roots in Asturias or had even really controlled it politically except on paper. Some Marxist-leaning historians (Abilio Barbero and Pascual Vigil) have even suggested that the old Celtic tribal society that had existed there since the Iron Age had basically remained untouched by the Roman and Visigothic conquerors in Asturias, and that most of the kingdom's elites were actually some very ancient chiefs with deep roots in their communities. All of this has gotten really politicised. According to Chris Wickham, after the fall of the Franco regime in 1975, excavating a Roman villa in Asturias would often be decried as a right-wing political act (ironically, as Chris can easily confirm, most archaeologists in Southern Europe tend to be leftists).

 As for elsewhere in the peninsula, we can infer from the sources that at least half of the Visigothic nobility decided to make peace with their conquerors, being allowed to keep their local political power in return for tribute. For example, in the Treaty of Orihuela (dated to 5 April 713, or 4 Recheb 94 AH in the Islamic Hegira calendar), which we have preserved in three later texts - including the thirteenth century history of Ibn Adari and a fourteenth century biographical dictionary - General Theodemir agreed with Emir Abd al-Aziz Ibn Musa that he could keep control of seven cities in the Carthaginensis region and all of the Christians living in the territories he governed could continue to practice their faith under the Dar al-Islam (Muslim rule) if they paid one dinar and four jugfuls of wheat, barley, grape juice and vinegar and two of honey and oil if they free and half of that if they were slaves. Some nobles even converted to Islam - the Banu Qasi, a powerful dynasty of frontier emirs (marcher lords) in northeastern Spain first appearing in the sources in 788, claimed to be descended from Count Cassius, a Visigothic nobleman (though with a name like that he was likely of Hispano-Roman aristocratic origins) who had converted to Islam earlier in the century. Similarly, Umar ibn Hafsun (850 - 917), a rebel emir, claimed to be descended from a Visigothic nobleman called Count Marcellus (again, probably of Roman ancestry originally). Some historians are sceptical of these claims, given that they originate the tenth century history of Ibn al-Qutiyya (d.977), who himself claimed to be descended from Sara the Goth, a granddaughter of King Witiza (d.710) no less, who had travelled to Damascus and married Isa ibn Muzahim, a prominent courtier at the court of Caliph Hisham, and together they had returned to al-Andalus. His cousins, the Banu Hajjaj, also based in Seville, also claimed descent from Visigothic royalty. Because sceptical historians gonna be sceptical, they argue that all these tenth century Muwallads (people in al-Andalus claiming mixed Arab and Gothic ancestry) were just engaging in spurious antiquarianism to bridge the gap in the records for much of the eighth century make their genealogies more exciting. The other options available to Visigothic nobles during the Conquest were to resist Muslim rule, which except in Asturias didn't exactly work out, or to become refugees and flee north to the Frankish kingdom. 

Theodulf's parents, having hung around in Muslim Spain for the time being as Christians under Muslim protection, in the end decided to take the fourth option. Theodulf and his family went to live in Aquitaine, where he received his education, and he then enrolled at the monastery of Maguelonne as an adolescent in the 760s, which was in the territory of Count Aigulf of Maguelonne, a fellow Visigothic refugee in the service of the Carolingian king of the Franks, Pepin the Short, and the father of the great monastic reformer Benedict of Aniane (747 - 821). Theodulf became a very well-educated man - as we shall later see, his eloquence and knowledge of literary techniques were very good, and (as will be revealed in a future post) his knowledge of Virgil and Ovid was phenomenal. In 786, Theodulf made a trip to Rome, which inspired him to be committed to the cause of making literate education more widely available.  After his return, he wrote to many bishops and abbots, encouraging them to set up public schools. Theodulf would have no doubt been glowing inside, when, in 789, Charlemagne issued a royal edict called the General Admonition, where in clause 72 there is a line that says "and let schools be established in which boys may learn to read." This "Admonition" is one of the most memorable legacies of Charlemagne's kingship. Indeed, I've heard it said that French schoolchildren have traditionally remembered Charlemagne (whether they still do I cannot confirm) as "the guy who invented school."

Theodulf may have, in fact, been one of Charlemagne's advisers who helped suggest this edict. Yet putting such reforming legislation into practice required energetic men operating between the level of the court and that of the grassroots like Theodulf to pull it off. After Charlemagne appointed him bishop of Orleans in 798, Theodulf a significant part of his reformist efforst to the cause he'd always been passionate about - education. Chapter 20 of the episcopal statutes Theodulf issued for the priests of his diocese says:

Let the presbyters keep schools in the villages and hamlets, and if any of the faithful desires to entrust his small children to them to be taught their letters, let them not refuse to receive and teach them, but let them teach them with the greatest love, noticing what is written: "They, however, who shall be learned shall shine as the splendour of the firmament, and they who instruct many to righteousness shall shine as the stars forever and ever (Daniel 12:13)." When, therefore, they teach them, let them demand no fee for this instruction, nor take anything from them, except what the parents shall offer them freely through zeal for love."

(Source: "Theodulf of Orleans: Precepts for the priests of his diocese", edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton in "Carolingian Civilization: A Reader", University of Toronto Press, 2009, p 110).

Theodulf of Orleans thus wanted instruction in reading and writing to be available to children of all social classes free of charge - rather, the reward that the teachers (who would all be priests) would receive would be the wisdom their students attained from becoming functionally literate. Theodulf's goals are are quite genuinely admirable, even if the ethos behind them (ensuring correct knowledge and practice of the Christian faith) may seem very distant to most of us living in twenty-first century Britain. And according to Rosamond McKitterick, we do have evidence to show that this episcopal statute was properly implemented and that similar projects were carried out by Theodulf's contemporaries elsewhere - the History of the Abbey of Saint Riquier, written in the eleventh century, recounts a liturgical procession held by Theodulf's contemporary, Angilbert of Saint-Riquier, which mentions boys of the lay school (presumably the type of elementary school in towns and villages mentioned by Theodulf) and of the abbey school participating. Theodulf also made a list of all the monastic schools (schools of the second type mentioned in the History of Saint-Riquier) in his diocese, which were open to "relatives of the clergy" though, as McKitterick suggests, this was not as socially-exclusive a category as one might think for a large cross-section of local society could claim to be "relatives of the clergy" (Rosamond McKitterick, "The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians, 751 - 987", Longman, 1983, p 146). 

As well as being a bishop and adviser to Charlemagne, Theodulf was also a missus dominicus - a type of itinerant provincial official (they would work in pairs, one a cleric, the other a layman) introduced by Charlemagne to supervise justice and local administration. This side of his career shall be explored in a subsequent post. As bishop, Theodulf built a splendid villa and oratory at Germigny-des-Pres, about a day's ride east of his episcopal seat at Orleans. It was designed by Odo of Metz, an Armenian by birth who was the architect of Charlemagne's famous palace at Aachen. Odo seems to have had knowledge of the first century Roman engineer Vitruvius' De Architectura, of which the earliest surviving manuscript copy dates to c.800 - yet another classical text that the Italian Renaissance did NOT rediscover. Construction begun after 806, not long after Odo had finished work on Aachen palace chapel. The villa itself, which unfortunately is no longer with us because it got destroyed by Viking raiders later in the ninth century, had elaborate fresco schemes of the Seven Liberal Arts (rhetoric, grammar, logic, mathematics, geometry, music and astronomy), the Four Seasons and the Mappa Mundi, and heated thermal baths. Yet the pagan Vikings for some reason decided that vandalising the oratory was too much even for them. Instead it would survive all the vicissitudes of the next millennium (the Hundred Years' War, the Wars of Religion, the French Revolution) only to get the treatment that would befall a lot of great French medieval monuments in the mid-nineteenth century - ignorant, overzealous and thoroughly botched "restoration." Indeed, much of the original interior decoration, including the furniture in white and coloured marble, the fabrics and the metalworks is lost forever thanks to the restoration work. But what does remain is very interesting. The internal structure of the building consists of many horseshoe arches, a prominent feature of Visigothic and Mozarabic (c.f. the famous eighth century Cordoba mosque/ cathedral) which is undoubtedly a nod to Theodulf's Spanish origins and the general plan may have been based on some exemplars from Spain, though potential Byzantine and Armenian influences have also been suggested - I get all this architectureal information from Kenneth J Conant, "Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture, 800 - 1200" (1959) pp 51 - 52. 

The oratory at Germigny des Pres, 806 (exterior)

The interior with the wonderful horseshoe arches

What's perhaps most notable about the oratory is that in its apse it contains one of only two (the other being the dome of Aachen palace chapel) surviving examples of early medieval (sixth to tenth century) mosaics from anywhere north of the Alps. The mosaic depicts two angels bringing down the Ark of the Covenant, something that rarely appears in early medieval art (what the significance of that might have been will be explored in another post), and below it is a Latin inscription in gold lettering, written by Theodulf himself, requesting that any visitors who gaze upon this mosaic pray for his soul.

Theodulf's Ark of the Covenant mosaic

After Charlemagne's death, Theodulf's career would take a turn for the worse. Emperor Louis the Pious, Charlemagne's son and successor, faced the threat of rebellion in 817 - 818 from his nephew, Bernard of Italy, who wanted to rule Lombardy as his own independent kingdom. Louis the Pious quickly defeated Bernard and had him blinded and sent to a monastery, with Bernard dying shortly afterwards (we don't know the gruesome details but Bernard likely didn't get the medical attention he urgently needed after being mutilated). In the wake of Bernard's conspiracy, Louis proceeded to purge the court of all courtiers  he suspected of disloyalty/ trying to obstruct his authority, and Theodulf's name was on the list. Theodulf was deposed from his bishopric and imprisoned in a monastery near Angers. Though he was released in 820, he would never reclaim his bishopric and died, most likely on his way to Orleans, in 821.

Theodulf therefore had multiple legacies, but where his talents shone most of all, and what concerns us most today, is in his literary legacy. Theodulf was a very accomplished poet and many of his poems survive for us today. Discussing all his poems would be too long for this post, and some will be discussed in future ones, so I thought I'd give you a selection of his short poems. They show him as a legendary wit, who could be ferociously provocative and deliver a scathing mockery of fellow courtiers to discredit them in the eyes of the Carolingian king-emperor and his court, but who could also be humorous in a much warmer and more light-hearted way. Above all, he reminds us that early medieval people were not the one dimensional figures we can sometimes be misled into thinking of them as.

Poem 1: About the Folly of Hypocrites and Fools who will not be swayed from their Depravity by Sound Exhortation

Neither wit nor wisdom corrects the hypocrite and the fool,

Teaching can not overcome the fool, nor wit the hypocrite,

It is worthless to apply learning to the fool's brain,

The more you teach him, the stupider he becomes.

Likewise, if anyone tries to wash a rough brick,

The more he washes, the dirtier he makes it.

How do fine words help, when there is no good will,

Why would one sow seeds among thorny weeds?

Why would one pour golden honey into a foul pond, 

Why would one mix olive oil with excrement?

What use is a lyre, if it is played by a long-eared ass,

Or a trumpet, if it be blown skilfully for a horned bull?

As much as the vision of the blind man improves with the rising sun,

So too does the intelligence of the fool after good advice.

Poetry can accomplish much, but not everything,

Though both profane and sacred literature say that it can.

It is said that Circe transformed the friends of Ulysses

into various wild beasts through her skilful songs.

While poetry can accomplish much, it can not heal mange,

Nor can its gentle murmur cure one of worms.

As poetry is of no help to one who has a hernia,

And while they are sung the whole exercise is useless,

So that work will be useless to you, you infamous hypocrite, 

If you attempt to slip in something good.

The wise king, [Christ], has said many things about this, 

And by way of example I shall set down one:

"Though a stupid man be crushed in a mortar like a grain

Of Wheat, his indolence will not leave him (Proverbs 27:22)."

Thus the words of our Lord; now let me set down what

The rural folk often say so wisely about this kind of thing:

"You cannot by practice or by punishment make an owl into a hawk

That will attack cranes with its talons."

Nor can a vulture take up your place, falcon,

Because it is slow, given to gluttony, and ponderous in flight.

The hypocrite does not desire to learn good things, but only bad,

Do you want to know why? He is [also] a fool.

Being worse than Judas, he wants to seem better than you, [Saint] Peter;

Fate covers over many evils with a false dress.

He thinks small things to be important, and many evil things to be nothing: 

While he wants to deceive others, the fool deceives himself.

(Source of translation: Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader (Second Edition), edited by Paul Edward Dutton, University of Toronto Press, 2009, pp 103 - 104)

Theodulf wrote this savage poem to discredit some anonymous courtier, presumably a fellow poet, at the court of Charlemagne, though his description of the hypocrite and fool could neatly fit Boris Johnson, whose first rate education has definitely not improved him intellectually or morally and who has, in deceiving others, verily deceived himself.

Poem Number Two: Wide Wibod

Perhaps big-boned Wibod, our hero, may hear this poem,

And shake his thick head three or four times,

And gazing fiercely try to frighten with a look and a mutter,

And overwhelm me with his threats, even though I am not there.

If, however, the king in all his majesty should summon him,

Wibod would go with faltering step and knocking knees.

And his huge gut would go before him and his chest:

He would resemble Vulcan in his feet, Jove in his voice.

(Source of Translation: Carolingian Civilisation, p 106)

Before you start thinking "we need another Theodulf do justice to lampooning our current sorry lot of politicians", lets maybe consider the poem's significance. There has been much discussion by medieval and early modern historians about the concept of honour. Today we often think of honour as a quiet sense that one's conduct is principled, virtuous, self-sacrificing and guileless, though we might also say "its an honour" after having been treated like a VIP/ been in the presence of a VIP. The medieval and renaissance definition of honour was both and neither. Richard Kaeuper, an expert on (mainly Anglo-French) chivalry in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, following the approach of the eminent social anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers (1919 - 2001) laid out in his classic field study of Andalusian peasants in the 1950s, argues that honour was a social attribute first and foremost - it was about having your desired place in the "pecking order" recognised and given the respect and admiration due, and needing to vigorously defend it, by violence if necessary, from any attempt to slight or besmirch it (Idem, "Medieval Chivalry", Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp 40 - 42). Mervyn James, a historian specialising in the aristocracy of Tudor and Stuart England, takes much the same approach in "English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485 - 1642" (reprinted in Idem, "Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England", Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp 308 - 415) takes much the same approach. Both recognise the nuances, complexities and tensions that have to be made to this model when handling the late medieval and early modern sources - did honour come primarily from lineage, rank and social background, or from virtue and meritorious deeds. Both also argue that it could indeed entail values and behaviours that we can admire - loyalty, honesty and courage even in the face of great adversity and risk of death, and a strong degree of self-consciousness and determination, perhaps even leading to self-criticism and improvement. But they also agree at heart with Pitt-Rivers that "the ultimate vindication of honour lies in physical violence" through the vendetta or the duel.

Now you might be thinking - do these discussions of late medieval and early modern masculinity and aristocratic culture really matter to the Carolingianist? The answer is that Carolingianists are very divided on this question. Some think that such touchy notions of personal honour (and the culture of violent self-help that came with it) were already rife in eighth and ninth century Francia, its just that our sources, which are much fewer in number than for the twelfth to seventeenth centuries anyway, are in some kind of conspiracy of silence about it, either because of their genres, audiences, political and moral agendas or a combination thereof. They'll also argue that there's evidence of it from earlier sources. The ninth book of the Histories of Bishop Gregory of Tours (535 - 594) describes a sixth century Frankish aristocrat, Chramnesind, who goes to a feast at the house of his former enemy Sichar, who has murdered one of Chramnesind's relatives, and after Sichar drunkenly boasts at the feast about doing this, Chramnesind evocatively says "if I avenge not the death of my kinsman, I deserve to lose the name of man, and to be called a weak woman" and so proceeds to put the candles out before slicing into Sichar's head with his dagger. The Salic law, issued at the beginning of the sixth century, prescribes financial compensation for insults, which many take to mean that if compensation was not paid to the victim it would be in their rights to retaliate with violence. And then of course, if you want to play that venerable yet dubious game, there's the authority of Tacitus and his description of the ancient Germans to fall back on. Historians who take this view are also likely to take a very pessimistic view of the Carolingian monarchy and its ability to control violence and rein in the power of (in their view) a largely independent Frankish aristocracy, so that even a ruler like Charlemagne had to tread carefully. 

Others would argue that Carolingian society had moved on from the norms of first century AD Germania and even sixth century Merovingian Gaul, and that the culture of touchy personal honour and violent self-help epitomised in later medieval and renaissance chivalry is not part of an unbroken line of continuity reaching back to the heroic ethos of the ancient Germans, but fundamentally a product of post-Carolingian (tenth and eleventh century) developments. They would also argue that the Carolingian aristocracy primarily derived its power from government office and royal service, and that strong kings like Pepin the Short (r.751 - 768), Charlemagne (r.768 - 814) and  Louis the Pious (r.814 - 840) could make, break, reward and punish individual aristocrats through their vastly superior powers of patronage and coercion without much difficulty. 

Its the latter position which I take, and the Wide Wibod poem would appear to support it. While Theodulf speaks of Wibod, a prominent aristocrat and count, getting enraged and threatening him to the point that he might "overwhelm me", it doesn't appear to be the case that he's actually afraid of getting beaten up by Wibod or his retinue. Its also apparent from the poem that Wibod is a royal servant who humbly obliges to his royal master's wishes without question, knowing that to incur his displeasure is bad for his position by being proud and insolent. Above all, the poem implicitly presupposes a culture in which its socially acceptable not to use violence against those who insult you. Rachel Stone, an expert on Carolingian court culture and masculinity, has argued along similar lines regarding Carolingian court poetry, and more broadly, using a range of different evidence, that touchy aristocratic honour and honour based violence was largely absent, or at least successfully reined in, under Charlemagne and his immediate successors and that Charlemagne was able to build new hierarchies at court based on competitive merit and good Christian behaviour. 

Poem 3: About a stolen horse

Often cleverness supplies what strength cannot,
And often he who lacks power makes up for it with skill.
Listen to how a soldier using his brains recovered a horse,
Which was stolen in a military camp.
Sad over the loss of the horse, he yelled at the crossroads:
"Whoever has my horse should return it immediately.
Or I will be forced, because of this, to do
What my father once did while he was in Rome."
This statement frightened everyone, and the thief, being afraid
Of what would happen to him and the people, let the horse go.
When the owner regained his horse, he was extremely happy;
Those who had been afraid before, now congratulated him.
Then they asked him what he would have done if the horse had not been returned,
Or rather what his father had once done in Rome.
He answered, "My poor father tied the bridle and saddle
Together with his own neck and so weighed down by things, off he walked.
With nothing now to prod, he [still] wore spurs on his heels.
Thus once a rider, my father returned a walker.
You may believe me. I would have sadly done the same,
Had my horse not been returned to me [at once]."

(Source of translation: Carolingian Civilisation, pp 104 - 105)

All I can really say about this one is that Theodulf's wisdom and comedic genius shines through this triumph of simplicity Anyone who thinks Medieval Latin poetry is boring, trite, derivative or all about arcane and aetherial religious stuff should have their perceptions well and truly altered by this. In order to not like this, you'd have to be well and truly prejudiced against medieval culture for no good reason other than that its, well, from the Middle Ages and therefore must be second rate to anything the ancient or the early modern world produced - kind of like how the great German romantic Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe on his Italian tour of 1786 spent ten minutes in the great Gothic cathedral at Assisi, decorated by the frescoes of the legendary Trecento master Giotto di Bondone himself, yet spent hours staring at a church that incorporated the front of the old temple of Hercules (spoiler alert: the next post will be all about Hercules and the Carolingians).

Poem 4: Sign above a bar

May he who once changed water into the benefit of wine,
And he who made the likeness of water into wine.
Bless our cups with his kind touch,
And may he let us have a delightful day. 

(Source of translation: Carolingian Civilisation, p 105)

This short witty poem, which plays around somewhat with metaphysical concepts in the first two lines, is absolutely golden. As someone who does bartending, I wish we could have this poem put up above the bar - rather than the highly misleading "Apothecary" sign that makes everyone think, wrongly, that our pub was once a Victorian medicine shop.

Edward the Confessor's foreign policy

 Happy new year everyone. I hope you've had a good 2021, in spite of the constantly evolving plague situation, and that much happiness and success awaits you in 2022, which will hopefully be less chaotic but we'll have to wait and see. I have to say that last year was a year in which I accomplished a lot - I got a Merit on my Master's Degree, I got my first regular paid job, I did a presentation on late Carolingian assembly politics in Richer of Rheims (an aspect of my Master's thesis) to the Cambridge graduate medieval seminar, I secured a PGCE place at Roehampton University to train as a secondary school history teacher and, of course, I accomplished what I'd been meaning to do for a very long time in starting a history blog. What 2022 shall bring for me, only time can tell. If the international situation permits it, I hope to go travelling in Europe in May and June for a big late Roman and early medieval tour (Rheims, Trier, Aachen, Cologne, Ravenna and Milan are all on the itinerary). I'm incredibly excited about it, and you can reasonably expect that many interesting blogposts (with lots of pretty pictures) will be generated from it in due course. 

I've been planning many exciting blogposts for this new year. The first of these, the one you are presently reading is the one on Edward the Confessor - the 956th anniversary of his death (5 January 1066) having been just a couple of days ago (I'm ever so timely, am I!). I'm not going to give a comprehensive treatment of his life and reign here. That would take far too long for a simple blogpost, and at any rate, if that's what you wanted, you'd be best advised to read Frank Barlow's excellent biography of the king in the Yale Monarchs series, or to the abbreviated version in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography which I shall be citing a lot here. Nor will I be telling the familiar, well-trodden story of the prelude to the Norman Conquest - that gets so much attention in UK historical media anyway, and I've already touched on that a bit here.

I don't this image needs much explanation

What I'm going to talk about today is about a specific aspect of Edward the Confessor's reign - his foreign policy. It is very well-known that Edward the Confessor had close connections to the Continent - his mother was Emma of Normandy, after all, and he spent more than a third of his life in exile there. Anyone who has studied this period in English history in depth will also know that his court had a very cosmopolitan feel to it. Edward the Confessor made a Norman monk, Robert of Jumieges, archbishop of Canterbury in 1044, appointed more than half a dozen foreigners to other vacant bishoprics and abbacies across the country, had a non-English cleric called Regenbald as his chancellor and made his French nephew, Ralph of Mantes, the earl of Hereford in 1047 (we'll come back to him later). And one of Edward the Confessor's greatest, most well-remembered achievements (to this day), was building Westminster Abbey (completed 28 December 1065) in the new Romanesque style that had been pioneered in the previous half century in France, northern Italy and western Germany - the "white mantle of churches" that the Burgundian chronicler Raoul Glaber had written about roughly thirty years before. But Edward the Confessor's connections to Normandy and his cosmopolitan court aside, its the  domestic side of his reign that gets the most attention. 

Now, as regards Edward's domestic rule, there's a lot of debate amongst historians to who was really in charge of the kingdom's internal affairs and what was the balance of power between the king and his aristocracy (above all, Earl Godwin and his family). The view among most scholars up until very recently was that Edward the Confessor's effective control over the kingdom internally was massively circumscribed by an "overmighty" nobility, which really amounted to the three magnate houses - the Godwinsons, the Leofricsons and the Siwardsons - that had risen to prominence under Cnut and his sons and had effectively monopolised appointments to almost all of the six or seven provincial earldoms. Robin Fleming argued in a seminal and very influential work "Kings and Lords in Conquest England" (1991), with a wealth of statistics backing her arguments, that the wealth and landed resources of the Godwin family, and to an even extent that of the three main magnate families combined, outstripped that of the king. Barlow himself in his ODNB article largely concurs with Fleming's view, and thus he sees Edward the Confessor as being in quite a compromised position when it came to controlling the kingdom's political elite and internal affairs.

Recently, this view of the balance of political power between king and aristocracy has been challenged by Stephen Baxter, one of the foremost experts on late Anglo-Saxon government and the Domesday Book at the moment (I was fortunate enough to attend a few of his seminars at Oxford back in 2019, which feels like a very long time ago), who in his article "1066 and Government" (2018), and in his academic output more generally, has made the case that Edward was actually by far the wealthiest landowner in the kingdom both in terms of the extent and real value of his estates. He was also able to draw on revenues from food rents, judicial fines and the land tax (geld) which the earls could not. And above all, as Baxter argues quite succintly, most of the lands the earls "owned" were, like with counts in the ninth century Carolingian Empire, were actually temporary, revocable grants attached to their office, not to their family property, and so it was more than possible to break the power of earls by confiscating their offices and the lands that went with it, as Edward himself actually showed time and again (see "1066 and Government", pp 138 - 140).  Still there's plenty of room for debate about the nature of pre-Conquest English royal power and government - these scholarly debates never settle, do they!/

But, what all historians can agree on is that Edward the Confessor was in control of the kingdom's external affairs, which is what concerns us here. We'll explore Edward's policies to both England's neighbours in Great Britain and on mainland Europe, though Normandy will be deliberately left out (it gets enough attention elsewhere).

Wales and Scotland 

In the Abingdon and Worcester versions (Manuscripts C and D) of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, an obituary poem for King Edward is provided in the annals for 1065. The first verse goes:

Here King Edward, lord of the English, 
sent a righteous soul to Christ.
a holy spirit into God's keeping.
Here in the world he lived for a while
in kingly splendour, skilful in counsel;
24-and-a-half
in number of years, a noble ruler,
distributed riches. Aethelred's son
ruler of heroes, greatly distinguished,
ruled Welsh and Scots and Britons too,
Angles and Saxons, combatant champions.
Cold sea waves thus encircle
all youthful men that loyally
obeyed Edward, princely king.

The poem thus portrays Edward as having been, in effect, the imperial overlord of all Great Britain, as some of his tenth century predecessors undoubtedly had been (more about that when I finally get round to doing my Athelstan post I've been meaning to do ever since he won the World Cup of Monarchs in November, I promise you!). But what was the real substance behind it?

At the beginning of Edward the Confessor's reign in 1042, it would seem that this wasn't the case at all. The kingdom of the Scots (also known as Alba) was completely independent, as were the three Welsh kingdoms of Deheubarth, Gwynedd and Powys. Cumbria and Westmorland were in a bit of a power vacuum, following the collapse of the Welsh-speaking kingdom of Strathclyde sometime after the battle of Carham in 1018, but the kings of Scots were slowly extending their power into the region. 

The first we hear of Anglo-Welsh relations in Edward the Confessor's reign is in 1046, when the Worcester manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports that Sweyn Godwinson (d.1052), earl of southwestern Mercia (Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire), made an alliance with Gruffydd ap Llewellyn (1010 - 1063), the king of Gwynedd and Powys, and together they invaded Deheubarth. Whether he did this on Edward's instruction, or out of his own initiative and the leeway given to him as a provincial governor (as that's basically what an Anglo-Saxon earl was) on a frontier region, we can't really know though the latter seems likely. Sweyn would disgrace himself later that year by kidnapping and raping the Abbess of Leominster, resulting in him being stripped of his earldom and exiled from the kingdom. Gruffydd ap Llewellyn's alliance with the English would prove to be a short-term arrangement for mutual convenience when he teamed up with some Irish Vikings from Dublin to raid England on 29 July 1049. Other than that, not much seems to have gone on for the first decade of Edward the Confessor's reign.

Things escalated when in 1053, Edward managed to get Rhys ap Rhydderch, the king of Deheubarth, assassinated, after Rhys had raided Westbury-on-Severn in Gloucestershire and slaughtered the garrison there a few months earlier. This created a power vacuum in South Wales, which Gruffydd ap Llewellyn was quick to exploit, and by 1055 Gruffydd had established himself as high king.

Now that Wales was politically unified under a charismatic leader, more border warfare was to ensue. In 1055, Edward the Confessor convened the Witan (royal assembly of all the prominent landowners in the realm) and by their collective judgement, Earl Aelfgar of East Anglia was dismissed from his earldom and outlawed. Our sources are in disagreement as to why this happened. Manuscript E (written at Canterbury) of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that Earl Aelfgar was exiled for being a "traitor." Manuscript D (Worcester) says he was exiled "almost without any fault" and Manuscript C (Abingdon) says that he was exiled "without any fault." What explains the dissonant accounts seems to be, as Stephen Baxter has argued in his article "MSC of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the politics of mid-eleventh century England", English Historical Review Volume CCXXII (2007), pp 1189 - 1127, that Manuscript E, which was written in Kent (part of Godwin's earldom), was written by a chronicler supportive of Earl Godwin and his family. Meanwhile, the other two manuscripts were written in southern Mercia by chroniclers who were more critical of the House of Godwin and their influence and more sympathetic to the house of Leofric (which Aelfgar was from), the difference between C and D being that the latter has a more court-centred outlook, reflecting the patronage of the leading courtier Bishop Ealdred of Worcester (future archbishop of York) in its production, whereas C is more provincial in its perspective. Thus D sort of sides with the royal court and the political community at large in the position they took, but sort of gives some sympathy to Aelfgar, whereas C is firmly opposed to it all. But anyway, Earl Aelfgar was indeed made an outlaw and he wasn't going to sit back and take it. Instead, he managed to enlist the support of King Gruffydd of Wales and the Irish Vikings in Dublin, the former providing him with an army and the latter with a fleet, and together they invaded England. Aelfgar and Gruffydd managed to defeat a royal army, led by the Confessor's nephew, Earl Ralph the Timid without a pitched battle, and the Welsh then pursued them and massacred them. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Manuscript C says the royal army fled "because they were on horse", and John of Worcester elaborated on that passage in the early twelfth century by saying that Earl Ralph ordered the English to fight on horseback "contrary to their custom", but Earl Ralph and his retinue of French knights got demoralised and started to flee, at which point the English fled too. Gruffydd and Aelfgar then proceeded to sack Hereford, badly damaging the brand new cathedral there. Another royal army, commanded by Harold Godwinson, assembled at Gloucester, and Harold had a defensive dyke built around the town. Earl Aelfgar decided to open negotiations and an agreement was made at Harold's manor of Holme Lacy in Herefordshire, whereby Earl Aelfgar was restored to his office as earl and his personal estates came back into his possession. 

In 1056, Hereford got a new bishop, Leofgar, a former chaplain of Harold Godwinson. Manuscripts C and D, with their Mercian focus, discuss his character, whereas Manuscript E gives him no attention whatsoever. Both C and D are highly disapproving of his character, regarding him as too worldly and secular. They describe how "he wore his moustaches during his priesthood until he was bishop" - this went against the Canon law of the Church, which prescribed that priests be clean-shaven and tonsured. More ambiguous in relation to canon law (and a highly common practice, at any rate) was when Bishop Leofgar, presumably acting on the king's orders:

Abandoned his chrism and cross, his spiritual weapons, after his ordination as bishop, and took up his spear and sword and went thus to the campaign against Gruffydd, the Welsh king, and they killed him there, and his priests with him, and the sheriff Aelfnoth and many good men with them; and the others fled away.

Manuscript C of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but interestingly not D, then recounts how what followed this inglorious defeat of the English army was that:

Earl Leofric [of Mercia] and Earl Harold [of Wessex] and Bishop Ealdred arrived and made reconciliation between them there, so that Gruffydd swore oaths that he would be a loyal and undeceiving under-king to King Edward.

This would seem to imply that Gruffydd, after receiving this embassy, most likely sent by King Edward himself, agreed to become a kind of English client-king. Gruffydd then married Ealdgyth, the daughter of Earl Aelfgar (who had succeeded his father, Leofric, as earl of Mercia), the following year and from what the Anglo-Saxon chronicle tells us, the Welsh border was generally peaceful after that. 

Yet, at the same time, Edward knew how dangerous this ruler of a unified Wales had been in the past, and so was determined to eliminate him once and for all. Once the one-time rebel Earl Aelfgar had died, and Edward had placated his son Edwin by giving him the office of earl of Mercia that had been held by his father and grandfather before him, he decided that war with Wales was on the cards and hostilities resumed in 1063. Manuscript E gives a very terse, brief account of the war, but D goes into a lot more detail (C has no annals for 1057 - 1064):

In this year Earl Harold went after midwinter from Gloucester [on instructions from King Edward, who was holding his court there] to Rhuddlan, which was Gruffydd's, and burnt down the manor, and his ships and all the equipment which belonged to them, and brought him to flight. And then towards the Rogation Days [26 - 28 of May] Harold went with ships to Bristol, round Wales, and that people made peace and gave hostages; and Tostig went against them with a land-army, and overran that land. But here in this same year, at harvest, at fifth August, King Gruffydd was killed by his own men, because of the struggle he was waging with Earl Harold. He was king over all the Welsh race, and his head was brought to Earl Harold, and Harold brought it to the king - and his ship's figurehead and the embellishment with it. And the King Edward entrusted that land to his [Gruffydd's] two brothers, Bleddyn and Rhiwallon; and they swore oaths and gave hostages to the king and to the earl that they would be undeceiving to him in all things, and everywhere ready [to serve] him on water and on land, and likewise to pay from that land what was formerly done before to the other king.

Thanks to a feat of strategic genius on the part of the Godwinson brothers, King Gruffydd had been defeated and killed without it coming to so much as a single pitched battle, the unified Welsh kingdom that Gruffydd had briefly managed to create was broken up again and the two brothers of Llewellyn had agreed to become full-blown tribute-paying client-kings to Edward the Confessor, thus reviving the quasi-imperial overlordship over Wales that Edward's tenth century predecessors from Athelstan to Edgar had had. No English king would win such an all-out, crushing victory campaigning in Wales until Edward I (for whom Edward the Confessor was his namesake) more than 200 years later, and even then in a much longer, more drawn out campaign. By the end of 1063, Edward had achieved all he could have set out to do with Wales - he had neutralised all threats from across the border, ended Welsh political unity and brought back English overlordship over Wales.

The sources are largely silent about Anglo-Scottish relations until the middle of Edward the Confessor's reign. At the time of Edward the Confessor's accession in 1042, Scotland was ruled by none other than ...

Yes, this guy was a real historical figure, and he lived in the eleventh century

Macbeth. Yes him. But the historical Macbeth doesn't seem to be the bloodstained tyrant plagued by his conscience and insecure about his legitimacy that William Shakespeare portrayed him as in his 1604 eponymous play. Nor does he seem to have encountered any witches or ghosts in his fifty-something years of life. Scotland in Macbeth's day was essentially a tribal federation - the king of Scots was essentially a high-king ruling over various mormaers (sub-kings), each of whom ruled a specific territory. Macbeth was the Mormaer of Moray (see the map of Scotland c.1040 below).

Now, the thing is, even by early medieval standards, our sources for Scottish history pre-1100 are very few and fragmentary indeed - no continuous chronicle of Scotland's medieval history survives prior to John of Fordun, writing in the 1360s. Thus there's a great deal of uncertainty about Macbeth's genealogy. We know his father was Finlay mac Ruadri. But before then we're much less certain, though Dauvit Broun in his article on Macbeth in the ODNB argues we have good reason to think that he was either the grandson or nephew of King Malcolm II of Scots (d.1034). Macbeth was married to Gruoch (the real life Lady Macbeth), who was probably the granddaughter of King Kenneth II (d.995). Now, Scotland in this period was not yet a hereditary monarchy. Instead, royal succession was governed by an ancient Gaelic system (also used in Ireland) of royal inheritance known as tanistry, whereby the king's successor would be elected from amongst his collateral relatives by the clan chieftains and other senior nobles. So Macbeth, as a collateral member of the royal house himself married to another collateral member of the royal house, actually had a decent claim to the throne. Indeed, and also demonstrative of how powerful and dominant the mormaers of Moray were within the kingdom of Scots/ Alba, Macbeth's father Finlay was mistaken by contemporary Irish annalists for the king of Scots himself. Perhaps it was natural that Macbeth came into conflict with King Duncan I of Scots (the King Duncan of Shakespeare's play). But rather than dishonourably stabbing him to death in his bedchamber - "is this a dagger I see before me? Let me clutch it" - Macbeth killed Duncan in pitched battle on 14 August 1040, and shortly afterwards was acclaimed king of Scots. 

As I said before, the sources are very scanty, so we know very little about what went on in Macbeth's reign. From what we can gather, his position was initially insecure - in 1045, King Duncan's father, Crinan, hereditary abbot of Dunkeld, rose up in rebellion to install his 14 year old grandson Malcolm Canmore (the Malcolm of Shakespeare's play) on the throne, but Macbeth defeated and killed him in battle. But by 1050, he seems to have managed to consolidate his rule and the kingdom seems to have been fairly secure and politically stable. It was in that year that he, like Cnut 23 years earlier, went on a pilgrimage to Rome, "scattering coins like seed" according to a contemporary account, and for an early medieval ruler, living as they did in an age before modern communications, to be able to travel more than 1,500 miles away from the kingdom without their noble subjects opportunistically rising up in rebellion or foreign kings deciding to invade really is no small political achievement. It also indicates that Macbeth had at least some kind of royal administration, however rudimentary, that could govern the kingdom and hold it altogether in his absence. And like Edward the Confessor, Macbeth seems to have had quite a cosmopolitan court - in 1052, two Norman knights entered his service.

When Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane ...

But this was not to last. Once Malcolm Canmore reached maturity, Edward the Confessor saw a window of opportunity to extend his influence into Scottish affairs. In 1054, Earl Siward of Northumbria (who does feature in Shakespeare's Macbeth) was sent north with an army and the royal fleet, Macbeth was defeated in battle at Dunsinane Hill on 27 July and put to flight, and Malcolm Canmore was installed as King Malcolm III of Scots. Macbeth was killed by Malcolm (not by Macduff) in 1057, and Macbeth's stepson Lulach was slain in 1058. Malcolm III did indeed attend Edward the Confessor's Christmas court at Gloucester in 1059, but, as Frank Barlow points out, on the whole he was not the subservient vassal that the obituary poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle would seem to imply - indeed, he began to devise plans to annex all the Northumbrian territories down to the River Tees - the modern day boundary between County Durham and North Yorkshire. So while Edward the Confessor had some success in throwing his weight around in Scotland's internal dynastic affairs, he didn't exactly achieve the imperial overlordship he managed in the end with Wales. Nor did he manage to guarantee that the kingdom's northern borders, which at this point were still very ill-defined and fluid, were secure from future Scottish incursions.

Denmark and Norway

If we cast our minds back to my Cnut post, we'll be reminded that England, Denmark and Norway were all part of a North Sea Empire, that then began to unravel after Cnut's death in 1035. Norway had been the first to break away, coming under the control of King Magnus the Good, the son of St Olaf (d.1028), the king of Norway whom Cnut had defeated and exiled. Meanwhile, Denmark, after Cnut's line became extinct in 1042, Sweyn Estridsson claimed the throne. Sweyn was the son of Ulf Thorgilsson, a Danish jarl (earl) who had acted acted as regent of Denmark in Cnut's absence. Ulf had a sister called Gytha Thorkelsdottir (997 - 1069), who was married to none other than Earl Godwin of Wessex. Sweyn's mother was Estrid, a daughter of King Sweyn I Forkbeard of Denmark. So Sweyn was a nephew of Earl Godwin on his father's side and of King Cnut on his mother's side. However, Magnus the Good promptly invaded Denmark in 1042 and seized the throne, sending Sweyn into exile.

Coin of Magnus the Good, minted between 1042 and 1047 at Lund in Denmark, based on a prototype of King Cnut's depicting the crowned king on the obverse side and a cross on the reverse

King Sweyn and King Edward seem to have gotten on well from the start - the Life of King Edward who rests at Westimster written in 1068 by a monk of the abbey of Saint Bertin in Flanders on the request of Edith, Edward's widowed queen, says that a "king of the Danes", attended Edward the Confessor's coronation in 1043, and that king being referred to is most likely to have been Sweyn in exile, although it could have been Magnus.

Magnus the Good wanted to restore the North Sea Empire of Cnut for himself. That ambition would not be complete without conquering England. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's annals for 1043 recount this unexpected turn of events happening:

The King was so counselled that he - and Earl Leofric and Earl Godwine and Earl Siward and their band - rode from Gloucester to Winchester on the Lady [Emma] by surprise, and robbed her of all the treasures which she owned, which were untold, because earlier she was very hard on the king her son, in that she did less for him than he wanted before he became king, and also afterwards; and they let her stay there inside afterwards.

In other words, Edward had just orchestrated a coup against his own mother, the twice-queen of England, twice-widowed Emma of Normandy. Why did he do this? The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle deliberately leaves it vague. However, the Translation of St Mildred, written in the 1090s by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, a Flemish monk living in Norman England who was a prolific writer of Anglo-Saxon saints' lives, alleges that Emma had promised all her (clearly very extensive) treasure to King Magnus of Norway if he were to invade England. Simon Keynes in his ODNB article on Emma and Cat Jarman in an article for BBC history magazine, however, argue that a more likely explanation is that Edward wanted to assert his independence from his mother and prevent her from having an active political role, which she undoubtedly had under her second husband Cnut and Edward's half-brother Harthacnut. Emma then lived out the remaining decade of her life in relative obscurity at Winchester, where she and Cnut had built the new cathedral. 

The invasion threat from Magnus of Norway, however, was undoubtedly there. In 1045, Edward took the royal fleet down to Sandwich in Kent, and, according to Manuscript D of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and assembled "so great a raiding army that no one had ever seen a greater raiding-ship army in this land" in anticipation of Magnus' invasion. 

What Edward the Confessor feared was coming his way in 1045

In the end, the invasion did not materialise, as Magnus had to divert his attention to fighting off Sweyn Estridsson's attempts to take Denmark off him, which were receiving support from Magnus' own uncle, Harald Hardrada, who was making a bid for the Norwegian throne. In 1047, Sweyn II would request naval assistance from Edward the Confessor  - England's taxpayer-funded, standing fleet that had developed under the West Saxon and Anglo-Danish kings was highly desirable and the second most powerful man in the kingdom, Earl Godwin, was Sweyn's uncle - to help him in his war against King Magnus, but King Edward and the Witan refused, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, on the grounds that "it seemed unwise to everybody." King Magnus would die later that year, the kingdom of Denmark going to Sweyn II and the kingdom of Norway going to Harald Hardrada. Harald Hardrada saw Denmark as rightfully his, and he and Sweyn fought a long war for control of it between 1050 and 1064, which ended in Harald giving up his claims to Denmark in return for Sweyn's recognition of him as king of Norway. Edward the Confessor chose to stay out of it, and in 1051 abolished the Heregeld (army tax) that had been levied continuously to finance the royal armies since 1012, a decision that was undoubtedly popular with the political community, for in the words of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle "that tax oppressed the whole English nation for as long a period [39 years] as it is here written above; it always came before other taxes that were variously paid, and oppressed men in manifold ways." Thus Edward's foreign policy towards Scandinavia from 1047 on was eminently sensible. By not taking a side in the wars between Sweyn Estridsson and the kings of Norway over the Danish throne he ensured that neither could be a threat to England's security, and he avoided getting into costly wars that would make him unpopular with the political community and the people at large from the tax burden it would inevitably impose on them. 

Coin of Sweyn Estridsson, minted at Lund sometime between 1047 and 1076. The obverse depicts Sweyn (left) receiving a staff from an angel (right) - a motif borrowed from Byzantine coinage.

France, Flanders and the German Empire

As I said before, Edward the Confessor had many connections to mainland Europe. So its hardly surprising that he pursued close relations with the most immediate powers on the other side of the English Channel and on the southern shore of the North Sea. According to the The Life of King Edward, all the rulers of "Gaul" welcomed his accession in 1042 with congratulatory embassies, with King Henry III of Germany (and Burgundy and Italy) and King Henry I of France being explicitly mentioned. In fact, Henry III was Edward's brother-in-law - Edward's half-sister Gunhilda, the daughter of Cnut and Emma of Normandy, was the queen-consort of Germany. Henry I of France is erroneously referred to by the author of the Life of King Edward as being "another kinsman" of the Confessor.  

Emperor Henry III, holding the imperial insignia, attends the consecration of Stavelot abbey church on 5 June 1040, as depicted in a mid-eleventh century miniature

Edward does not seem to have had many active dealings with Henry I after that. While Henry I did have plenty of standing in the international community - in 1051, he would marry Anna of Kiev, the daughter of Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise of the Rus - his position within the kingdom was extremely weak. Henry I's father, king  King Robert the Pious (r.996 - 1031), had had a disastrous reign in which he spent 15 years fighting to assert royal authority in the the duchy of Burgundy, went through two divorces before contracting a highly unpopular marriage to Constance of Arles, experienced scares about heresy and ended on a sour note with the king fighting a civil war against two of his sons. This, combined with deeper shifts in the nature of political power in France (more about that another time), meant that Henry I decided that it was best for the monarchy to withdraw into the Ile de France - the area around Paris. The map below shows in light blue the extent of the area that Henry I had any real power over, and even there it was starting to get a little shaky as the barons and petty seigneurs of the Ile de France went gung ho with castle-building. Still, what was left of his royal authority meant he could at least appoint bishops to the powerful ecclesiastical lordships in purple on the map, which could guarantee a degree of loyalty and service from them. But with the great dukes and counts of the realm - who by now really were territorial princes in every sense of the word - he was almost a foreign power. And yet some historians still talk about Edward the Confessor being beset upon by an "overmighty" nobility - to Henry I of France, his situation would have seemed enviable. As a result, Edward the Confessor's foreign policy towards France would mainly focus on negotiating with the territorial princes closest to England - namely, the dukes of Normandy and counts of Flanders. 

Apologies for the map being in French - it really was the best I could find

While we might say that the middle decades of the eleventh century were the ultimate low point for French royal power and authority in the Middle Ages, the opposite was true of the French kingdom's eastern neighbour. The decade in which Edward the Confessor came to the throne of England, the 1040s, was arguably the high-watermark for the kings of Germany/ the kings of the Romans (as they were officially called)/ the western emperors. These king-emperors ruled over two kingdoms, Germany and Italy, and under Conrad II, the first king-emperor of the Salian dynasty and the father of Henry III, they had absorbed the kingdom of Burgundy (depicted in both the map above and the one below, highlighted in yellow there) into their empire in 1032 following the extinction of its dynasty of kings. To the east, the realms of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary were satellite states, and to a certain extent Denmark to the north was as well. Within the German kingdom, all the duchies except Saxony were held either by the king-emperor himself, by members of his immediate family or by his loyal appointees. And through the imperial church system, the emperor could nominate all the bishops in the empire and invest them with the ring and staff - the symbols of their office. He was also advocate of many of the monastic houses in Germany, meaning that he stood for them in legal disputes. Thus, the bishops and many of the abbots essentially held their lands from him, and could always be expected to furnish large numbers of troops for him on military campaigns, both from their own personal retinues and free tenants and from the knights the emperor had billeted on their lands. Bishops could also be assigned to govern counties when they fell vacant, and could be given royal lands, mints and castles to administer by the emperor. The German king-emperors may not have ruled in depth like the kings of England - they had no powers of national taxation, and the business of justice and keeping the peace in the localities was largely left to the dukes, counts and bishops and to local communities - but they were undoubtedly the most powerful rulers in the whole of Western and Central Europe at this time. And ideologically, they could claim to be the protectors of Christendom, responsible for both the bodies and souls within it, and to be the heirs of Otto the Great, Charlemagne and, ultimately, of the ancient Roman emperors. 

The kingdom of Germany/ the Western Empire in the period 1042 - 1066

Even so, as this is the eleventh century we're dealing with after all, life wasn't all sunshine and roses for the king-emperors, and indeed cracks were already starting to appear in the mighty edifice of the western empire. A key problem area was Lotharingia - the western frontier region that encompassed the modern-day Netherlands, Luxembourg, half of Belgium, the regions of Alsace and Lorraine in eastern France and parts of western Germany. As you may recall from my post on the treaty of Verdun, once upon a time Lotharingia had been its own kingdom. Since 939, the aristocracy of Lotharingia had decided firmly that they wanted to be part of the German kingdom. The Ottonian dynasty had divided it up into two separate duchies in 960s, Upper and Lower Lotharingia (depicted on the map), so that no magnate house could grow too powerful there. Lotharingia was, however, vulnerable to external threats. The last Carolingian kings of France had tried to reconquer it on various occasions in the tenth century, with limited success. And as royal power declined in France, the French territorial princes on Lotharingia's borders became a nuisance. Indeed, Emperor Conrad II had had to bring upper and lower Lotharingia together again to face the threat posed by Count Odo II of Blois-Champagne (his territories are shown in yellow in the map of France). After Odo had failed against Conrad in his bid for the Burgundian crown in 1032, Conrad decided to put Duke Gothelo of Lower Lotharingia (967 - 1044) in charge of Upper Lotharingia as well, reunifying the two duchies as a super-duchy, in 1033, anticipating that there would be an invasion from Odo, who really was looking to expand his territories at every conceivable opportunity. In 1037, when Emperor Conrad II was on the other side of the Alps sorting out Italian affairs, Odo decided to make a land grab on the Empire's western borders, but was defeated in battle by the forces of Duke Gothelo of Lotharingia at the battle of Bar-le-Duc and killed while attempting to retreat. However, when Duke Gothelo died in 1044, Conrad's successor, Henry III, appointed Gothelo's son, Godfrey the Bearded (997 - 1069), to the duchy of Upper Lotharingia, but denied him the duchy of Lower Lotharingia as he feared that a single super-duchy gave the duke too much power. Instead, he proposed that Godfrey's younger brother, Gothelo II, get the Duchy of Lower Lotharingia. Henry III also refused to give Godfrey the county of Verdun, which he saw as his rightful inheritance. Godfrey thus rebelled against his king and went about devastating Lower Lorraine, but he was defeated in battle, deposed as duke and imprisoned in the royal castle of Gibichenstein. In 1045, Godfrey was set free and the rebellion recommenced again. This time, Count Baldwin V of Flanders (d.1067), that other French territorial prince bordering on Lotharingia, whose predecessors had tried to nibble at it whenever the opportunity arose, decided to join forces with Godfrey. With the help of his allies, Godfrey managed to sack Verdun and destroy its cathedral. On 11 November 1048 at Thuin, Godfrey fell upon his replacement as Duke of Upper Lotharingia, Adalbert, and killed him in battle. King Henry III, now Emperor Henry III (he had received his imperial coronation at Rome in 1046), immediately responded by nominating the young Gerard of Chatenoy as duke in a royal assembly at Worms, but he really was losing control of the situation in Lotharingia at this point. He needed some kind of external help.

A seventeenth century image of Godfrey the Bearded in gloriously anachronistic attire (ancient Roman muscle cuirass mixed with sixteenth century plate armour - I love it)

And this is where Edward the Confessor comes in. Edward had his own interests in the Low Countries. As Frank Barlow points out in his ODNB article, he wanted to put pressure on the counts of Flanders because they allowed their territory to be used as a forward base for old-school Viking raiders to attack southern and eastern England - as late as 1048, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a band of Viking raiders had devastated the Isle of Wight and had attempted to do the same to the Isle of Thanet in Kent but were beaten back by the locals - and as a safe haven for English political exiles. For this, he could count on his two brothers-in-law, Count Eustace of Boulogne and Emperor Henry III. When the latter was coming into difficulty from none other than Baldwin of Flanders, acting in cahoots with Godfrey the Bearded, Emperor Henry III called on Edward the Confessor and King Sweyn to provide naval assistance. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in its annals for 1049, reports:

In this year the emperor [Henry III] gathered a countless army against Baldwin of Bruges [Count Baldwin V of Flanders], because he had broken down the palace at Nijmegen, and also caused him many other offences. The army which he had gathered was countless: there was the pope himself [Leo IX, a German by birth] and the patriarch and numerous other famous men from every nation. He also sent to King Edward, and asked him for support with ships so that he would not allow his [Baldwin's] escape by water. And then he [Edward] went to Sandwich, and there lay with a great raiding ship-army until the emperor had all that he wanted from Baldwin.

Baldwin of Flanders, facing a pincer movement from the Germans, the Danes and the English, and Godfrey the Bearded, whose campaigns in the Moselle region were being met with stiff resistance from Duke Gerard of Upper Lorraine, decided it was best for them give up at this point. Godfrey was not given back his duchy, but reconciled with the emperor anyway and agreed to help fund the rebuilding of the cathedral at Verdun. And Edward seems to have achieved one of his objectives - from 1050, Flanders stopped being a forward base for Viking raiders. The peace didn't last - Godfrey the Bearded rebelled against Henry III again in 1052 after Henry arrested and imprisoned his new wife, Beatrice of Bar, and Baldwin came to his assistance. Edward the Confessor did not get involved in any of it. Indeed in 1050, Edward the Confessor held a Witan in mid-Lent and, at the behest of the political community, agreed to disband nine out of the fourteen ships that made up England's standing navy and put the other five on a one year contract. This precipitated the abolition of the Heregeld (army tax) in 1051 we mentioned earlier, which drastically reduced England's capacity to get involved in overseas affairs. When in 1051 the entire House of Godwine was exiled from the kingdom, they took refuge in Flanders. Without his standing navy, England was not able to put any pressure on Count Baldwin V, who, along with Henry I of France, began to clamour for the Godwine family to be allowed to return. In the end, in 1052 the Godwine family made a forceful return with the help of foreign mercenaries, Flemish and Irish, and King Edward, not being able to countenance civil war, decided to reconcile with them and restore Godwin and Harold to the earldoms. So getting rid of the standing navy and the crown's ability to pay for a professional army (the Heregeld) was maybe not the best of idea in terms of England's ability to throw its weight around overseas. But at the same time, it was undoubtedly popular with the political community and enabled the kingdom to economically prosper with the king's subjects not being excessively burdened by direct taxation.

And good relations with the German king-emperors continued to be maintained. For the year 1054, Manuscript D of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports:

Bishop Ealdred [of Worcester] went across the sea to Cologne with a message from the king, and was there received with great honour by the emperor [Henry III]; and he lived there well-nigh a year, and both the bishop in Cologne [Hermann] and the emperor entertained him; and he allowed Bishop Leofwine [of Lichfield] to consecrate the minster at Evesham on 10 October.

What the purpose of the visit was, the Chronicle does not specify, but then for the year 1057 it reports:

Here in this year came the aetheling Edward, King Edmund's son, here to the land, and soon afterwards departed; and his body is buried in St Paul's minster in London.

John of Worcester, writing in the early twelfth century, said the Bishop Ealdred had been sent to the imperial court to petition Emperor Henry III to send messengers to Hungary to negotiate the return of Edward the exile, King Edward's nephew. Edward's marriage to Edith, the daughter of Earl Godwin, was childless - whether that was because, out of great piety, wanted to follow the Christian ideal of a chaste marriage, or for biological reasons, we'll never know for sure - and he needed a successor. Edward may or may not have promised to designate Duke William of Normandy as his successor when he visited England in 1051 following the banishment of the Godwine family, but our only sources for that are post-1066 propaganda, and there would have been more important matters to attend to - William's marriage to Matilda of Flanders, the daughter of Count Baldwin V, had drawn the ire of Emperor Henry III and Pope Leo IX, and Edward might have been trying to get William to put pressure on his father-in-law not to actively assist Earl Godwin and his family in trying to make their comeback, and also not to assist him should Flanders and the Empire go to war again. At any rate, if Edward did make a promise to William, it certainly wasn't a binding one. 

Meanwhile, if we cast our minds back to my Cnut post, Edward had an elder, half-brother called Edmund Ironside, who had briefly reigned as king in 1016. After Cnut's conquest of England, Edmund Ironside's son, Edward went to live in Germany and Hungary. He married a woman called Agatha, whose ethnicity is disputed - some think she was a German noblewoman, whereas others, noting the Greek name (suggesting close ties with the Eastern Roman Empire), think she was Hungarian or Russian. Edward the exile was the ideal candidate for Edward to designate as his successor - as his nephew and the son of a previous king, he was an aetheling (prince) of the royal house of Wessex who was likely to be accepted by the Witan when it came to the designated successor being elected as king. And sure enough, thanks to warm relations between England and the German Empire, Edward's return from Hungary to England was made possible. It was only thanks to a cruel stroke of fate that Edward the Confessor outlived his nephew. Edward the exile left two daughters, Margaret and Christina, and a six-year-old son, Edgar. As a result, when Edward the Confessor died in 1066, the now 15-year-old Edgar wasn't even considered for election, with the Witan promptly electing a much better established, much more politically and militarily experienced candidate who also happened to be in the right place at the right time, Harold Godwinson.

I don't think this image needs explaining either

Conclusion

The anonymous Flemish author of The Life of King Edward wrote of the late king's reign "a golden age shone for his English race, as after David's wars came Solomon and peace." And in fairness, I think he was right to draw such a comparison between Edward the Confessor and the Biblical king of Israel. Despite some difficulties here and there, King Edward had managed to bring Wales under English overlordship, pacify Scotland and introduce some measure of English influence there, keep England secure from all its external enemies, avoid costly entanglements overseas, maintain good relations with his most powerful neighbour (the German king-emperor) and allow his kingdom to prosper from peace and foreign trade. Above all, Edward's foreign policy testifies to his wisdom and skill as a ruler, and that Anglo-Saxon England was far from being an insular backwater as some historians used to presume. But its also worth noting from this Biblical allusion a certain kind of hindsight on the part of the Flemish monk (he was writing in 1068 after all) and prescience for what was still yet to come, as just like with the kingdom of Israel following the death of Solomon, political division, foreign invasion and war would befall England shortly after Edward the Confessor's death, all thanks to that one thing for which his foreign policy, though well crafted, ultimately didn't bear fruit - the succession.