William the Conqueror and Henry IV of Germany Part 1 – why compare them?

 

William the Conqueror and Henry IV of Germany Part 1 – why compare them?

In this series of posts, I’m going to do something really quite exciting and unconventional. I’m going to compare William the Conqueror (1027 – 1087) and Henry IV of Germany (1050 – 1106). Why is this such a radical idea? After all, both of these eleventh century rulers were each other’s contemporaries, though William was of an older generation. Both rulers of course knew of each other, which wouldn’t be true if I was attempting a comparison between William the Conqueror and the Seljuk Turkish sultan Alp Arslan (d.1072) or between Henry IV of Germany and the Song Chinese emperor Yingzong (r.1067 – 1085).

Indeed, both had quite strong reputations in each other’s kingdoms, and chroniclers in each kingdom followed the other kingdom’s affairs with great interest. William of Poitiers, the Conqueror’s chief propagandist, claimed in 1075 that when William the Conqueror was planning his invasion of England, he sent embassies to the court of King Henry IV to secure his support as well as to the court of Pope Alexander II, though importantly not that of William’s notional liege lord King Philip of France. Its of course unlikely that the embassy happened, given that William of Poitiers, a highly articulate yet unreliable narrative historian, is our only source for it. But the fact that William of Poitiers would make the claim at all in a work intended to praise the Conqueror to high heaven, indicates just how esteemed Emperor Henry IV was in England and Normandy, as he was everywhere else in Western Christendom – the German king-emperor was the most important monarch of them all. Likewise, from the German side, Bruno of Magdeburg, writing in 1082, claimed that in 1074 when King Henry IV was facing a full-scale rebellion against his rule in the duchy of Saxony, he requested that William the Conqueror send military support. William then curtly replied that he had claimed his kingdom by violent conquest, and that if he left it alone for too long there would be rebellions. Bruno might have simply been relying on gossip, but it does show (and we know this from other German chroniclers too) that the Norman Conquest of England was much talked about in Germany – perhaps Henry IV wanted to the Normans to harry his own rebellious North.

Map of the German Empire in the eleventh century. By Holy Roman Empire 1000 map-fr.svg: Sémhurderivative work: OwenBlacker | Discussion - Holy Roman Empire 1000 map-fr.svg, originally based on HRR 10Jh.jpg (2005)., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16239633

Indeed, even if diplomacy was quite tenuous between England/ Normandy and the German Empire at this time, they would later be joined at the hip when William the Conqueror’s granddaughter, Matilda (1102 – 1167), married Henry IV’s son, Henry V (1086 – 1125). Some people easily look over this, but Matilda did not have the title of empress for nothing, and she wasn’t happy that for her second marriage she had to settle for a mere French count, Geoffrey of Anjou. Had Henry V lived for 20 more years, then the “Anarchy” would have taken a much more interesting turn with Swabian and Bavarian knights causing mayhem in the Home Counties and the Midlands. Perhaps we would have had German kings of England five and half centuries before we actually did, the Hundred Years’ War would have been completely avoided and Shakespeare would have written plays about kings called Otto and Conrad as well as, of course, Henry.

Perhaps most importantly of all, both rulers are remembered as highly significant in their respective countries. Their reigns are seen as turning points, indeed the pivotal moment, in English and German medieval history respectively – everything before them is inevitably seen in their shadow, and everything afterwards flows from them. What the Battle of Hastings in 1066 is to the English, Henry IV’s penance at Canossa in 1077 is to the Germans – they’re the dates that every schoolchild knows (or at least is supposed to know) and which you should never set your credit card PIN number to. If you ask the average educated English person to name five memorable medieval kings, William the Conqueror will almost certainly be one of them, and if you said the same to the average educated German, they’d probably name Henry IV. And the period they lived in was one of genuine cataclysmic change in both of their countries, which was driven by many of the same forces – the rise of knights, the proliferation of castles, a whole umbrella of economic and social changes and of course the growing power and authority of the papacy. So why have they normally been studied in isolation from each other?

You see, medieval political history has traditionally been written on national lines. English historians of medieval politics focus on England, German historians of medieval politics on Germany, French historians on France and so on. From the nineteenth century through to after WW2 this was very much the established way of doing things, though since the 1970s that has changed. Notably though, there are a lot more British and American historians of medieval Germany than there are German historians of medieval England. Nonetheless, this still means there’s traditionally been the presumption that Medieval English and medieval German history have very little to do with each other.

 Still, national traditions of scholarship leave a long shadow. As a result, until a few generations ago historical scholarship on Medieval English politics was shaped by the question that preoccupied the Victorians: why did a powerful and centralised national monarchy that gave birth to the common law, Parliament and ultimately Great Britain and the British Empire emerge. Meanwhile, German historians, like their predecessors in the Imperial and Weimar eras, still return to the opposite question: why did the German emperors increasingly lose control so that Germany ended up a loose confederation of squabbling principalities, suffered the tragedies of the Thirty Years’ War and Napoleonic occupation and was only unified in 1871 by the iron will of Bismarck. The Norman Conquest and the Penance of Canossa respectively have traditionally been identified as key turning points for both. 

What makes all of these traditional scholarly preoccupations important is that English historians have since the nineteenth century traditionally focused on the state, the law, bureaucracies, court cases and constitutional matters, and many still do. Since the 1950s and even more so since 1990, however, there has been a widespread interest among political historians of early and high medieval England in the social side of politics. There’s been a lot of work on lordship (personal power over people of lesser status), patronage networks, family relationships, aristocratic identity and stuff like that.

 On the German side of things, historians increasingly from the 1920s onwards and overwhelmingly so since the end of WW2, have generally ignored the study of medieval government and administration (the Verfassungsgeschichte that was much more fashionable in the Imperial period) in favour of a way of looking at medieval politics that focuses on the personal relationships between the king/ emperor and the political community – ties of lordship, patronage, family and friendship. A successful medieval king wasn’t one who issued laws that dictated how things were to be run across the country, taxed his subjects rigorously, punished criminals with harsh justice and generally worked to increase the power of the central government and the bureaucracy against the nobility and other vested local interests. Rather, as German medievalists have tended to see it, a successful medieval king was one who worked hard to get all the nobles on the same page as him and be on as friendly terms with them as possible, play by the time-honoured “rules of the game” (to use Gerd Althoff’s phrase) of kingship and generally act like the just and gracious lord of his people. Kings who succeeded in all this could then achieve lots of stuff by bring the nobility of the kingdom/ empire together in royal assemblies and armies. German historiography also stresses the importance of ritual and symbolic actions in how this consensus was built up between kings and aristocrats, such as displays of anger, the shedding of tears, kneeling or prostrating oneself to ask for forgiveness, bringing in holy relics to court gatherings or army musters, seating plans at assemblies and feasts and the like. And yet people talk about "gesture politics" like its a new thing!

What this means is that, in more than just a literal sense, English and German historians speak a very different language when it comes to discussing medieval politics. As a result, it seems like the two political systems of England and Germany in the middle ages were profoundly different and cannot be understood in each other’s terms, making any kind of meaningful comparison impossible. And on the surface of it, its easy to see this as just a natural state of affairs because the actual content they work on is very different. Lets turn to the two rulers we’re comparing. William the Conqueror was able to defeat and kill a rival contender for the throne, Harold Godwinson, in one decisive battle on 14 October 1066, and just over two months later he had seized control of the effective capital of England (London) and with it the machinery of government and was crowned king. Then over the next five years, he was able to completely subdue the whole country by force and replace the majority of its ruling class with foreigners loyal to him. By contrast, Henry IV faced betrayals, rebellions and civil war for almost all his reign and temporarily lost all authority over his kingdom when in 1076 the Pope released his subjects from their oaths of loyalty to him. This he could only regain if he approached the pope as a humble penitent begging for forgiveness. The sources are also hugely different. For example the most famous document from Norman England is of course the Domesday Book – a government survey of (almost) his entire kingdom that records land ownership, economic activities, wealth, tax assessment and the (adult male) population. Likewise there are lots of writs and charters and other administrative records surviving from Norman England. There are plenty of detailed narrative histories for the Anglo-Norman period - Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon - but they're counterbalanced by these administrative records. Meanwhile, Henry IV’s Germany is very different. While poor in administrative records it is rich in chronicles, many of them written by historians hostile to Henry IV like Bruno of Merseburg and Lamprecht of Hersfeld. These provide lots of "thick description" of rituals, assemblies and battles, but have little to say about the workings of government. Thus, in contrast to the Anglo-Norman case, they do so much more to colour how historians view the workings of politics in the period.

Thankfully, over the last fifty years, some historians, almost all of them English and most of them specialising in Continental European medieval history (though also including some intrepid and outgoing Anglo-Saxonists) have tried hard to bridge the scholarly great divide and challenge the insularity and historiographical navel-gazing of English and German medievalists alike. To give a short list of them (in chronological order) they include Karl Leyser, Timothy Reuter, Janet Nelson, Sarah Foot, Catherine Cubitt, Simon MacLean, Charles Insley and Levi Roach. There’s been a lot of work recently on the importance of just the kind of ritual and symbolic communication stuff that German medievalists like Gerd Althoff focus on, in relation to late Anglo-Saxon England, though Anglo-Normanists have been slower to follow up on this trend. Indeed its frankly bizarre that its taken so long for English medievalists to see the importance of demonstrative behaviour and symbolism in medieval kingship. After all one of the most famous episodes in English medieval history opens with a king throwing a tantrum and ends with the same king making a humble pilgrimage to Canterbury and being whipped bloody by monks to apologise to the archbishop whose death resulted from his anger. The whole saga of Henry II and Thomas Becket makes a great deal more sense if you have in mind Henry IV at Canossa in 1077, or from an even earlier time Emperor Otto III in 1000 making a pilgrimage to Gniezno to visit the tomb of the martyred Adalbert of Prague and greeting Duke Boleslaw the Brave of Poland in the humble garb of a penitent. And Anglo-Normanists have tried to look at the Norman Conquest in a more pan-European perspective as well, as exemplified by work from people like David Bates, Robert Bartlett, Stephen Baxter and (again) Levi Roach.

Canterbury 1174, when even the most old school historians finally realise that the politics of Norman and Angevin England weren't a ritual free-zone after all

But enough of the historiographical detour. In my view, William the Conqueror and Henry IV, while they mostly don’t match up, nonetheless make a really stimulating comparison for thinking about how eleventh century kingship worked (both through similarities and differences), the momentous changes going on all over Europe and how events almost a thousand years ago can still be so resonant and controversial today. In subsequent posts we’ll be exploring both rulers’ childhoods, how they presented themselves as rulers and faced challenges to their authority and how their reigns were shaped by broader forces of change.

Sources cited

Primary

William of Poitiers, The Gesta Guillelmi, edited and translated by Marjorie Chibnall, Clarendon Press, Oxford (1998)

Secondary

Gerd Althoff, Family, Friends and Followers: Political and Social Bonds in Early Medieval Europe, 500 – 1200, translated by Christopher Carroll, Cambridge University Press (2009)

Elisabeth Van Houts, ‘The Norman Conquest through European eyes’, English Historical Review 110 (1995)

Charles Insley, “‘Ottonians with pipe rolls?’ Political culture and performance in the kingdom of the English, c.900 – 1050’”, History 102 (2017)

Writing History in Medieval England (c.730 - 1509): an attempt at an introduction

This post was originally written a week ago for a British Medieval History Group on Facebook that has a chronological span of 800 - 1509. As a result, a lot of it goes later than I normally would on this blog and is also essentially anglocentric, which is normally something I try to avoid being.

 

From the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, hundreds of written histories were produced in England. Some of the authors of these histories are written by famous and prolific authors whose lives and careers we know a lot about, like the Venerable Bede (c.660 - 735), William of Malmesbury (c.1090 - 1143), Matthew Paris (c.1200 - 1259) and Thomas Walsingham (c.1370 - 1422), while others remain completely anonymous and we can know almost nothing about them - like the authors of the six versions (A, B, C, D, E and F) of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the various monastic and urban annalists of the later middle ages. When we imagine a medieval chronicler, we normally imagine a monk hunched over a desk in a candle-lit scriptorium deftly putting ink onto parchment with a quill-pen. Basically, something like this twelfth century illumination here ...

And yes, a large number of chroniclers were monks. But by no means all. Plenty of secular priests and cathedral canons wrote histories too, like Hugh the Chanter (d.1140), an archdeacon at York who wrote a history of the Church of York from 1066 to 1127, Henry of Huntingdon (1088 - 1157), an archdeacon at Huntingdon who wrote a history of the kings of England from the coming of the Anglo-Saxons c.449 to the accession of Henry II in 1154, the Yorkshire priest Peter Langtoft (d.1307) who chronicled the reign of Edward I and John Rous (1411 - 1492), a royal chaplain and canon of St Mary's Collegiate Church at Warwick who wrote a history of the kings of Britain from the legendary Brutus of Troy (a great-grandson of Aeneas) down to Richard III. In the post-1300 period, we also have a number of lay men who wrote chronicles, including knights like the grizzled northern warrior Sir Thomas Grey the Younger (1310 - 1369), ex-soldiers and diplomats like the Northumbrian chronicler John Hardyng (1378 - 1465), university educated clerks not in holy orders like the early humanist William Worcester (1415 - 1482) and merchants like the London draper Robert Fayban (d.1512). Nor were the writers of history necessarily male either - to give just one example, we have a twelfth century biography of Edward the Confessor written by a nun of Barking Abbey in Essex. And they wrote in a range of languages too. Latin was always in use for historical works throughout this period, being as it was the language of the educated. But, uniquely in the early medieval West (no other vernacular chronicles survive from pre-1100 Europe), the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles were written in Old English. And from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries many chronicles from Geoffrey Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis to Thomas Grey's Scalachronica were written in Anglo-Norman French, and from the thirteenth century Middle English was increasingly adopted as a language of respectable history writing.

(Above) The deluxe first folio of the Cotton Tiberius manuscript of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, dating from the early Ninth century, currently stored in the British library

(Below) The frontispiece of the third edition of Robert Fabyan's Chronicle, published in 1542, showcasing the technological transformation in the media of history writing that came at the end of this period in the form of the printed book 

Now we must bear two things in mind when dealing with this wealth of historical writing, both of which will be discussed in more detail below.

The first is that the priorities of medieval chroniclers are NOT the same as those of modern historians. They didn't necessarily aim for objective analysis of past events. Most of the time they approached their sources very differently to those trained in modern historical methods and critical approaches today, to the point that some inserted ancient myths and legends and contemporary gossip and rumour while apparently suspending any kind of scepticism. Many wrote consciously to fulfil the expectations of certain literary genres, like hagiography (biographies of saints), or in the models provided by the Bible, classical Roman authors or early Christian writers, often directly quoting them in places. Many also consciously wrote to entertain. And they didn't always see factual truth as the most important kind of truth their readers could get out of their histories - moral, spiritual and theological truths were often just as or even more important.

The second thing to bear in mind is that this does NOT make medieval chroniclers necessarily any more stupid, corrupt, credulous, partisan or polemical on average than anyone who wrote histories in more modern periods, or indeed does today. These men (and much more rarely women) who wrote narrative histories, annals and biographies in medieval England were intelligent, learned and sophisticated individuals, who were at the same time subject to the same human flaws and frailties as we are. Moreover, the way they saw and made sense of the world was very different to our post-scientific revolution, post-enlightenment worldview today - their worldview was deeply informed by Christianity and a sense that God and other supernatural forces were always intervening in earthly affairs, and by the authority of ancient texts.

Chronicles aren't our only way into the medieval past. Medieval England is remarkably blessed with written documents of all kinds. If we just stick to the sources for political history, from the seventh century we have law codes like the Laws of Aethelbert of Kent (c.616), the oldest document written in the English language, and the Laws of Ine of Wessex (c.694), as well as the canons of church councils like the synod of Whitby in 664 that was held to resolve the tensions between the Roman and Celtic churches. The archives of the various monasteries and cathedrals that popped up all over lowland Britain with the Christianisation of the Anglo-Saxons also take off from about the 680s. From the beginning of the eighth century, the letters of prominent individuals like the letter written in 704 by Bishop Waldhere of London to Archbishop Bertwald of Canterbury, the oldest letter written on parchment to survive as an original copy, which describes conflict between the king of Wessex and the two joint kings of Essex. From the ninth and tenth centuries, we get Latin diplomas issued at royal assemblies which have witness lists, enabling us to know who was present at these regular gatherings of the political community, who was in favour at the royal court and who wasn't. From the reign of Aethelred the Unready (r.978 - 1016) we have royal writs - terse written instructions in Old English that would be read publicly in the shire court to all the local landowners to notify them of the royal will, with the local bishop/ abbot and the sheriff each keeping a copy.

After the Norman conquest we of course have the Domesday Book - arguably one of the most remarkable administrative documents produced anywhere in the medieval world; not even the bureaucracies of the Roman Empire (Byzantium), Fatimid Egypt or Song China, which were arguably light years ahead of anything that existed in Norman England, produced anything remotely comparable to it that survives to this day. We also get the beginning of systematic record keeping of royal revenues with the pipe roll of 1128 - 1130 in the reign of Henry I. Moving forward into the Angevin period (1154 - 1272), we see all of the main departments of state at Westminster like the Chancery, the Exchequer, the Treasury, the Privy Seal, the courts of King's Bench and Common Pleas etc take shape and with them new archives i.e. in the reign of King John, the Chancery starts producing the Charter Rolls series from 1199, the Patent Rolls from 1201 and the Close Rolls from 1204,.. Under Edward I (r.1272 - 1307), with the crystallisation of the Westminster Parliament as an institution, we start to get statute legislation and petitions to parliament, as well as the remarkable Hundred Rolls enquiry into local government in 1279 and so many other kinds of documentary sources.

By the fifteenth century, when we enter the age of what could quite genuinely be called mass politics the range of sources becomes mind-boggling. We have records of parliamentary and municipal elections. We have political sermons like those the English crown had issued in churches and court rooms to encourage support for the Hundred Years' War. Pamphlets like the Libelle of Englysche Polyce of c.1436 (a xenophobic, early mercantilist tract that called for an end to the French wars in favour waging a naval war with the Flemish and the German Hanseatic League for control of Channel and North Sea shipping) start to appear on the scene. As do manifestoes like those issued by Richard duke of York and Warwick the Kingmaker in the wars of the Roses to stir up popular support for their causes. And to get a nice grassroots view of it all, we have voluminous collections of letters by gentry families, the most famous of all being the Paston letters, that provide us with remarkable insight into the dynamics of local politics in Norfolk (as well as other aspects of life in the period) from the 1440s to the 1480s, and what the events of the Wars of the Roses actually meant for relatively ordinary people in the shires.

It is thus possible to work primarily or exclusively with documentary sources, and English medieval historians, especially those working after c.1200, when the volume of archival material increases exponentially, have traditionally been inclined to do that and discount narrative sources as highly unreliable and of little interest to the serious historian. This approach is misguided for two reasons. The first is that narrative sources provide us with a chronological and narrative framework to help us make sense of events. Obviously, that cannot be taken on its own and we need to corroborate each narrative source with the other available narrative sources, as well as with the documentary record, to be certain about what really happened when and how. But its infinitely better than having to piece together events from the documentary record, which is what specialists on the Visigothic kingdom of Spain in the seventh century, northern Spain and Italy in the period 900 - 1050 or indeed England in the period between Bede and Alfred the Great essentially have to do due to lack of contemporary narrative sources, or to have not much at all by way of either like specialists on England and Wales before c.600 or the Pictish kingdom/s in Scotland before c.850 are faced with.

But more importantly, chronicles are sources of unparalleled richness on the mentalities of the age – irrespective of whether they get right what actually happened, they tell us so much about how literate, historically-minded individuals thought and felt about how the world they live in came to be and what was currently going on in it. They also provide a well of information for beliefs, attitudes, values and prejudices held by people more generally at the time. Its precisely because of this, that historians like Matthew Paris still attract so much interest. As any resident thirteenth century specialist can confirm for you, Matthew Paris is a fascinating man of contradictions. At once he is a highly learned man who knew a great deal of what there was to know about the history of the British Isles from earliest times, and of contemporary events going on in places as far apart as Norway, Sicily, the Holy Land, Eastern Europe and the Eurasian Steppe, and was often very transparent about his sources. At the same time, he was a deeply prejudiced man, with a deep-seated hatred for King Henry III, the queen-mother Isabella of Angouleme and her relatives, the queen-consort Eleanor of Provence and her relatives, the Papacy, foreigners, the Knights Templar and Hospitaller and the friars, and those prejudices led him to misrepresent his information, pass off his own personal views as public opinion and possibly even forge some of the original documents he copied and inserted into his chronicle. Nonetheless, the fact he was so up-front about his prejudices suggests that he expected at least some of his intended audience to share them, and indeed many of the events of the reign of Henry III seem to bear that out – the xenophobia towards foreigners at court oozing from the pages of Matthew Paris was a significant motor for stirring up support for the baronial reform movement of 1258. Similarly, his account of the Mongols engaging in cannibalism during their invasion of Poland and Hungary in 1241 – 1242 reflects both how much of a psychological shock the invasion was to thirteenth century Christian Europeans, to the point that such lurid and exaggerated accounts of the atrocities committed by the Mongol army (mass slaughter, rape and displacement of Polish and Hungarian civilians did indeed take place) could emerge from second and third hand testimony. But it also shows the influence of Classical texts on medieval thinking. Ancient Greek and Roman authors like Herodotus and Pliny the Younger had claimed that to the northeast of Scythia lived the anthropophagi, a tribe of man-eaters who wore the scalps of their dead enemies and drank from their skulls. Similarly, the first century AD Jewish historian Flavius Josephus had claimed that Alexander the Great had built a brass wall around the extreme north-eastern region of the world to keep out the flesh-eating monstrous children of the Biblical giants Gog and Magog, who would be set loose with the coming of the Apocalypse. Such ancient stereotypes about the peoples that lived in the regions beyond the known world would have doubtlessly influenced Matthew Paris and other medieval authors writing about the Mongols, who would have genuinely seemed at once exotic and terrifying to them. Thus, in an age in which historians, including those who work on the Middle Ages, are becoming increasingly interested in global history, Matthew Paris remains relevant and valuable as ever.

 

(Above) A drawing in the author's own hand of Matthew Paris kneeling as a supplicant before the enthroned Virgin Mary: a medieval selfie?

Medieval historians wrote histories for a range of purposes. Some really did write them for nakedly propagandistic purposes, like William of Poitiers’ adulatory panegyric to William the Conqueror, the “Gesta Guillelmi” (c.1077). Here, the author also takes an opportunity to show off his learning by writing it in an extremely ornate and classicising Latin, frequently embedding quotations and paraphrases from ancient Roman authors like the first century BC historian Sallust in the text and finishing off with a lengthy comparison between the Hastings campaign and Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain in 55 BC as recounted in the “Commentaries on the Gallic War” written by Caesar himself. William of Poitiers is an extreme example, and was not widely read in his own day – no medieval manuscript copy of his work survives, only an incomplete early seventeenth century printed version by the French antiquarian Andre Duchesne. Yet some much more reputable historians also engaged in a certain degree of partisan polemic. For example, the Venerable Bede did much to emphasise the singular importance of the Roman Church in the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons at the expense of the Celtic Church, which had played no small part in converting his own Northumbria.

 

Others wrote for more constructive, yet nonetheless present-centred concerns. Besides trying to promote Roman Christianity over Celtic Christianity, Bede was also trying to help construct a collective identity for the West Germanic peoples that had settled in lowland Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries and been Christianised in the seventh century – he was, after all, the first to write about the Gens Anglorum (English people), whom he portrays as having a special relationship with God and the Papacy. Most famously of all, is the line Bede attributes to Pope Gregory the Great (r.590 – 604) when he saw some fair-haired slave boys in the market at Rome and was told they were from the land of the Angles, to which he replied non Angli sed Angeli (not Angles but Angels). The three great historians of the post-conquest generation, Orderic Vitalis (1075 – 1142), William of Malmsbury and Henry of Huntingdon, all of whom were of mixed English and Norman parentage, wrote their histories both to understand why the Norman Conquest, which they saw as highly traumatic and transformative, had happened. They saw the root cause of the Norman Conquest as being divine retribution for the poor organisation of the English church, lack of discipline for its clergy and the loose morals and effeteness of the English people following cataclysm of the renewed Viking invasions of 991 – 1016, which undid all the good reformist work done by King Edgar the Peaceful and Archbishop Dunstan of Canterbury. At the same time, they wanted to preserve the memory of the great achievements of the Anglo-Saxon past, not just to ward off sceptical Normans who doubted the validity of Anglo-Saxon saints’ cults, but also to satiate the interests of many members of the twelfth century Anglo-Norman elite who were actually interested in the history of the kingdom their fathers and grandfathers had conquered. For example, Henry of Huntingdon’s patron was Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, and Geoffrey Gaimar wrote his French verse translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Estoire des Engleis, for Constance FitzGilbert, a lady from an Anglo-Norman gentry family in Lincolnshire. Sir Thomas Gray said he began writing his history while in prison in Edinburgh in 1355 because he wanted to be of aid to those who

 

“would take delight in, or who wishes to know, how the island of Great Britain (formerly Albion, the land of giants, now England) was originally inhabited – and by what race, and of their origin, and the procession of the line of kings there has been, and their conversion.”

 

Thus, many medieval chroniclers were genuinely trying to make sense of the past and meet the demands of audiences, clerical and lay, who wanted to know more about it.

 

Medieval chroniclers were also serious about their research. For example, when writing about the history of the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, William of Malmsbury, Henry of Huntingdon and John of Worcester all used Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the two narrative sources still most widely used today, and were capable of carefully and critically contrasting where the two accounts corroborated and where they differed. For example, Henry of Huntingdon noted that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provided a very different account of what happened after the death of King Cenwalh in 672 to that provided by Bede. And William of Malmsbury noted that Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gave very different lengths for the reign of Aethelbert of Kent. Indeed, some medieval chroniclers strove to provide the equivalent of modern reference works. For example, John of Worcester set out genealogies of the royal families of all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and by scouring seventh and eighth century hagiographies was able to determine the names of the wives of the early Anglo-Saxon kings, before arranging them out in diagrammatic family trees like we’re familiar with today. He also provided short histories of each kingdom, lists of the shires and bishoprics of his own day that were within the boundaries of these kingdoms and provides a summary account of the histories of each shire and diocese – his work was basically the prototype of the Handbook of British Chronology.

In the early thirteenth century, Thomas of Marlborough, abbot of Evesham, wrote a history of his abbey as part of an ongoing dispute over lands, rights and jurisdiction between his abbey and the bishop of Worcester, one that even made it to the papal curia in Rome, in which he did extensive documentary research in the archives of Evesham to prove that his abbey lawfully possessed the lands and rights that it claimed, some of them going back as far as its foundation at the beginning of the eighth century by St Egcwine, bishop of Worcester. 

In the fourteenth century, Sir Thomas Gray was able to use a range of sources for writing his Scalachronica. For the earliest bits he used the Bible, Virgil’s Aeneid and the Roman de Brut by Wace. For the history of the ancient Britons he used Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. For the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms up to 735, he used Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. For the period 735 to 1066 he used Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, which itself was based on the meticulous research done by John of Worcester, William of Malmsbury and Henry of Huntingdon. For the period 1066 – 1272 he used John of Tynemouth’s Historia Aurea. And for the reigns of the three Edwards, he used the memories of his father, who had fought for Edward I and Edward II in Scotland, and his own memories, combined with the stories he’d heard from other soldiers on campaign, from which he got to know about events going on in places as far apart as Lithuania and Spain. He also used Scottish chronicles that he was able to access in prison, which were unavailable in England, to write about Scotland’s history prior to 1286. While some of his choices of sources were questionable, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, many were in fact very judicious and show that he was making best use of all material available to him – like Bede, Ranulf Higden and John Tynemouth, as well as the invaluable first-hand accounts of the English campaigns in Scotland and France from his father and his own experiences. 

More than a century later after Grey, the London merchant John Fabyan made use of a range of different sources including Bede, William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, Ranulf Higden and the Brut Chronicle (the most popular historical work in late medieval England, existing in many different versions, all going from the legendary Brutus of Troy to the present day), but also the civic records of the city of London and his own eyewitness testmonies to certain events, including the arrival of the first Native Americans (three men from Newfoundland) in England in 1502.

We also get a certain degree of research into archaeology and material culture. For example, in his history of English bishops, William of Malmsbury accounts for the early history of Carlisle by studying its Roman ruins, including a hall with its roof and walls still completely intact in his own day. And in the late fifteenth century, in his geneaological roll for Richard III and his queen, Anne Neville, John Rous extensively studied funerary monuments and other contemporary artworks so that their pre-1200 ancestors would be depicted in chainmail and spangenhelms/ Norman nasal helmets, her fourteenth century ancestors in partial plate and bascinets, Anne's father Richard Neville "the Kingmaker" in full articulated Gothic plate etc.

Semi legendary ancestors of the earls of Warwick in the Rous Roll

Edward the Confessor and William the Conqueror in the Rous Roll

Guy de Beauchamp (1272 - 1315), earl of Warwick depicted over the slain corpse of Piers Gaveston in the Rous Roll - the transition from mail to plate armour is nicely depicted here, even if some of the bits of armour that Rous depicts (like the visored bascinet) came in later than he thought

The Earls of Warwick 1315 - 1439 showcasing the development of plate armour

The Warwick the Kingmaker himself in the Rous Roll

And finally, medieval chroniclers were able to spot pseudohistory where they saw it. William of Newburgh (d.1202), might not have always been so sceptical and scientific in his approach to history – he did provide accounts of ghosts, vampires and green children while suspending disbelief – but he outed Geoffrey of Monmouth as a fraud, pointing out that if Arthur really had conquered Gaul and Rome, as Geoffrey of Monmouth had claimed, why is he not mentioned in Continental Latin sources from that period? More than two centuries later, fifteenth century monks also noted that King Arthur could not have been fighting with Emperor Lucius at the time of Mordred’s betrayal, because no other sources mention a Roman emperor called Lucius in the late fifth century.

 

To sum up, history writing in the Middle Ages was not like history writing today, but it was much more sophisticated, motivated by a genuine desire to get to grips with the past and, dare I say, modern than we give it credit for.

1016 and all that

 

On this day of course took place, 955 years ago, the battle of Hastings. The story gets told and retold every year. Walter Carruthers Sellars and Robert Julian Yeatman in the revealingly named "1066 and all that" (1930), their famous satire of how history was taught in British schools in the early twentieth century and how adults remembered it, claimed that, along with Julius Caesar's invasion of Britain in 55 BC, it was one of two truly memorable dates in English history. Indeed, at this very moment the vast majority of English secondary school students in year 7 (11 - 12 year olds) will either still be studying, or will have recently finished, the Norman Conquest in their Key Stage 3 National Curriculum history classes. The choice of 1066 as being the place to begin the secondary school history curriculum is very intentional - while one can argue that it was far from being the great "year zero" of English history, the Norman Conquest is an inherently dramatic story. So memorable a date is it, that banks explicitly advise customers against choosing 1066 as their PIN number. I'm not going to join in with the flood of posts about how William won the battle of Hastings, or what the implications of his victory were for England. Instead, I'm going to look back a good fifty years earlier to another very important (but less memorable) date in English history - 1016. And to a king for whom it could be said that all the events leading up to the Norman Conquest took place in the shadow of - Cnut or Canute, as he's sometimes referred to.

An image of Cnut from the New Minster Liber Vitae, produced in his lifetime (c.1031)

King Cnut (r.1016 - 1035) is probably one of the five pre-conquest English kings that most people know anything about - the others being Offa (r.757 - 796), Alfred (r.871 - 899), Aethelred the Unready (r.978 - 1016) and Edward the Confessor (r.1042 - 1066). Perhaps what he's most famous for, however, is an apocryphal tale first recorded by the twelfth century historian Henry of Huntingdon (d.1157), in which Cnut sits by the seashore and commands the incoming tide not to wet his feet and robes, yet predictably it does. Henry of Huntingdon himself interpreted the story as showing that Cnut was a wise and pious man, trying to rebuke the flatteries of his courtiers by demonstrating that his power was nothing compared to that of God. However, the story has often been spun differently to tell the exact opposite message, and has often been brought up as an analogy for any modern political leader who appears too arrogant or quixotic.

Cnut rebukes his courtiers by Adolphe-Marie-Alphonse de Neuville (1904)

Like with most early medieval rulers, we know almost nothing about Cnut's childhood and adolescence. Even his date of birth is very uncertain - he could have been born in any year between 980 and 1000, though most modern historians opt for c.990. We know his father was King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark (d.1014), who was responsible for the renewed wave of Viking invasions on England from 1002 and who had managed to briefly become king of England from 1013 - 1014 after starving the citizens of London into surrendering and electing him king, facilitated by widespread dissatisfaction among the governing elite of Anglo-Saxon England with Aethelred's rule. Its not entirely certain who Cnut's mother was, though she seems most likely to have been a Polish princess. The most contemporary sources, the Chronicon of Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg (d.1017) and the Encomium Emmae Reginae claim that she was Swietoslawa, a daughter of Duke Mieszko I of Poland, though Snorri Sturlusson, writing in the early thirteenth century, claims she was a certain Gunhild, a daughter of Duke/ King Boleslaw the Brave of Poland. And to further complicate things, Adam of Bremen, whose "The Deeds of the Bishops of Hamburg-Bremen" (completed in 1076) is one of the most important sources for the early history of Scandinavia and the first European source to mention the Americas, claimed that she was actually the widow of the King of Sweden. This kind of uncertainty about very basic information is one of the many joys of early medieval history. Its precisely the reason why you won't be seeing a popular biography of Cnut on your bookshelves anytime soon, and why some historians doubt whether early medieval rulers in general are biographable at all (c.f. Sarah Hamilton, ‘Early Medieval Rulers and their Modern Biographers’, Early Medieval Europe, 2003, p 248).

Where Cnut really comes to the fore of the historical record is when he led his invasion of England in 1016. At that time, his brother, Harald II, ruled as King of Denmark. Aethelred the Unready had been invited back to rule as King of England in 1014, after reaching a constitutional settlement with the Witan – the regular assembly of the bishops, abbots, ealdormen (half-way between the post-conquest earl and sheriff), kings thegns (quasi-baronial figures) and thegns (the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of knights or gentry) of the kingdom, which already operated on a doctrine of virtual representation (by Aethelred’s reign it was claiming to speak for the English people and sometimes relayed the concerns of free peasants about the oppressive behaviour of royal officials onto the king) - that placed limits on his power and required him to reform the state apparatus, which was becoming quite expensive and burdensome, and hold his officials to account for their oppressive behaviour. John R Maddicott in “The Origins of the English Parliament, 924 – 1327” (2013) describes it as the first constitutional settlement between crown and subjects in English history, and indeed Cnut and Edward the Confessor would have to make similar agreements in 1018/ 1020 and 1041, setting some important precedents for political thought and practice in centuries to come (see Maddicott, pp 35 – 41). Cnut invaded England in April 1016. King/ Duke Boleslaw the Brave of Poland sent contingents of warriors to assist him, pretty clear evidence that Cnut’s mother was a Polish princess – whether Boleslaw was Cnut’s cousin or his uncle is, however, uncertain. Aethelred died and a very interesting situation arose. While Aethelred’s chief counsellors and the citizens and garrison of London elected Edmund Ironside, Aethelred’s eldest surviving son, to be the new king, a much larger body of representatives from the Witan, including bishops, abbots, ealdormen and thegns, assembled at Southampton and swore to renounce Aethelred’s descendants and elect Cnut as their king provided he promised to be a faithful lord to them. Cnut and Edmund Ironside then fought each other to a stalemate at Assandun before coming to an agreement – Edmund would rule Wessex and Kent (everything south of the Thames) and Cnut would rule Mercia, East Anglia and Northumbria (everything north of the Thames). Edmund died later that year on 30 November 1016, leaving Cnut as sole ruler of England.

Cnut soon proved himself to be an astute and effective ruler. After he had paid off his army and fleet, he decided to keep the Geld – the land tax (the first of its kind since the disappearance of the ancient Roman land tax in the West in the sixth and seventh centuries AD) introduced in the reign of Aethelred, funnily enough for the purpose of paying off the Danes. He used the Geld to fund a permanent standing fleet and to pay for permanent standing contingents of troops, the huscarls and the lithsmen. As the historian James Campbell has argued while calling these contingents a standing army may be straining a point, to deny them the functions of a standing army would be to miss a point as they were paid annually, included men of varied status and served as a mobile field force, as garrisons, as the nucleus of a larger army supplemented by levied free men and as tax collectors (see James Campbell, the Anglo-Saxon State, pp 201 – 206). In effect, Cnut created a kind of embryonic fiscal military state not unlike that of the Great Elector Friedrich Wilhelm I of Brandenburg-Prussia (r.1640 – 1688) many centuries later. In 1020 Cnut, following in the tradition of Anglo-Saxon kings going back to the seventh century, issued a royal law code written in Old English (Anglo-Saxon administrative documents were mostly written in the vernacular, rather than Latin) that as well as containing new laws also provided authoritative compilations of earlier law codes. the laws of King Ine of Wessex (688 – 726), King Alfred the Great and King Edgar the Peaceful (r.959 – 975), thus signally his respect for his Anglo-Saxon predecessors and for his subjects’ native traditions of law and government. Cnut also created a substantially reconstituted and remodelled England’s governing class. Much of the West Saxon nobility had been decimated in the renewed Viking invasions from 991 to 1016, and many other figures would soon fall following Cnut’s rise to power, including the treacherous royal counsellor Eadric Streona (a possible inspiration for Wormtongue in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings). Cnut replaced the various ealdormanries with a smaller number of provincial earldoms and appointed trusted subordinates to be in charge of them as earls – an earldom was essentially a provincial governorship, it was not yet the hereditary noble title it would later become. Some of his appointees were native Anglo-Saxons/ Englishmen from lesser thegnly (gentry) backgrounds – for example, Godwin was appointed Earl of Wessex and Kent and Leofric was appointed Earl of Mercia. But he also appointed a number of Scandinavians – firstly Thorkell the Tall then Osgod Clapa served as earls of East Anglia and Siward (who features in Shakespeare’s Macbeth) as Earl of Northumbria. Whether or not this meant that he created a loyal and efficient service aristocracy or a bunch of overmighty subjects has been much debated by historians since the late nineteenth century. All in all, through a mixture of effective statecraft and strategic use of royal patronage supplemented by political communication that signalled continuity with his predecessors, Cnut managed to consolidate a firm hold over England. A clear sign of how much political stability and internal and external peace England enjoyed under Cnut was that he was able to go on a pilgrimage to Rome in 1027. There, he nabbed a chance to attend the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor, Conrad II (d.1037), the first emperor of the Salian dynasty (c.1024 – 1125), at St Peter’s, making him the first (and last) English king to attend an imperial coronation.

 

Early Twelfth Century depiction of Emperor Conrad II

Cnut also expanded his power to other realms, creating what some historians have called a “North Sea Empire.” In 1018, after his brother Harald II’s death, he became King of Denmark, and began to win some influence and possibly overlordship over the Norse colonies in Ireland – the coins of the Norse kings of Dublin from 1017 to 1025 bear Cnut’s quatrefoil legend rather than the traditional legend of the Norse kings of Dublin. Later in 1027, after Cnut’s pilgrimage to Rome, King Malcolm II of Scots (the grandfather of the King Duncan who features in Macbeth – quite a few Shakespeare characters finding their way into this, aren’t they) would pay homage to Cnut and accept him as his overlord – this would lead the Burgundian monk Raoul Glaber, writing in the 1030s, to claim that Cnut had some kind of imperial overlordship over all the British Isles. King Cnut would then exploit an internal political crisis in Norway to take control there when the Norwegian nobles and peasants, who were disatissfied by the rule of King Olaf Haraldsson, invited him to become their king in 1028, and in 1029 Olaf was exiled to the Viking principalities in Russia. Cnut also managed to, besides his pilgrimage and attendance of Conrad II’s coronation, deepen ties with Germany with Germany and the Empire and secure Danish control of Schleswig-Holstein by marrying his daughter Gunhild to Conrad’s son, Henry (the future Emperor Henry III).

Coin of Olaf Haraldsson

When Cnut died, he left two sons to succeed him. The first was Harald Harefoot, the son of a concubine or a common law wife (a wife not married in a church ceremony with ecclesiastical sanction but still recognised as a wife under Danish law). There was still very little stigma around illegitimacy in Western Europe in this period (that would only really come into place in the twelfth century), not least among recently Christianised peoples like the Danes, so there was no obstacle to Harald Harefoot becoming king. The other was Harthacnut, the son of Cnut’s wife Emma of Normandy (984 – 1052), the widow of Aethelred the Unready and mother of Edward the Confessor.  Harthacnut succeeded Cnut in Denmark and Harald Harefoot in England. Harald was opposed by much of the political community in England, but Earl Godwin was able to sway the Witan in favour of Harald’s candidacy – maybe he really was an overmighty subject. Harald Harefoot died in 1040, and was succeeded by Harathacnut. The following year, Harthacnut invited his half-brother Edward the Confessor, who had spent almost all his life living in exile in Normandy with his maternal cousins (the dukes of Normandy), to return to England in 1041, no doubt at the persuasion of his mother. He was also designated as his successor, with the Witan making it conditional that Edward agree to uphold the laws of King Cnut and govern the kingdom justly. A year later Harthacnut died, as recounted by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle after experiencing a seizure whilst drinking, or perhaps he might have been poisoned. Thus it was thanks to Cnut’s choice of marriages that Edward the Confessor was able to come to the throne in 1042 at all, and that, well, set the stage for everything to come.

Emma of Normandy (a key player in it all) as depicted in the Encomium which she herself commissioned the writing of

As was stated earlier, Cnut was responsible for the rise of Earl Godwine, and under the new regime, headed by a 40 year-old who had spent most of his life in France, Earl Godwin managed to use his political leverage, which as we have already seen was very great, to win more power for his family. He managed to get Edward to marry his daughter, Edith, and by 1046 four out of seven earldoms were in the hands of Godwin and his sons Sweyn and Harold. Godwin was also married to Gytha, a Danish noblewoman and a relative of Cnut’s. Gytha’s nephew, Sweyn Estridsson, managed to become King of Denmark in 1047 after having defeated Magnus the Good, the son of the exiled King Olaf of Norway who had seized control of Denmark and Norway in the power vacuum following Harthacnut’s death. Sweyn II tried to take control of Norway after Magnus’ death but was prevented from doing so by a charismatic old-school Viking adventurer, Harald Hardrada, who the political community in Norway chose instead to be their king. Indeed, before his invasion of England in September 1066, leading up to the battle of Stamford Bridge, Harald Hardrada would try to take Denmark off Sweyn on multiple occasions.

Edward and much of the political community in England would come to resent the overbearing influence of Godwin and his family and in the late 1040s they did much to discredit themselves. Edith, for whatever reason, failed to produce Edward a son. Sweyn Godwinson abducted (and possibly raped) the abbes of Leominster in 1046, had his earldom promptly confiscated and was sent into exile, before being invited back, murdering his cousin Bjorn and being sent into exile again in 1049 – he died in Constantinople in 1052, on his way back from the Holy Land. And Earl Godwin did much to discredit himself when the Witan vetoed his attempts in 1047 for the English navy to be sent to help his nephew Sweyn II against Magnus because, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle “it seemed unwise to everybody.” These events would create tensions that would almost ferment a civil war and result in the entire Godwine family being exiled from England in 1051. Later in 1051, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Edward would invite his cousin Duke William the Bastard of Normandy to visit England, and may have temporarily designated him as his successor (which William may have then interpreted as binding), thus setting the stage for 1066. Of course, the Godwin family would bounce back and in January 1066 no one could doubt that Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex and Kent, was the most powerful magnate in England, hence why, whether by the prudent decision-making of the Witan or by a carefully planned coup, he was able to succeed Edward the Confessor as king of England.

Thus, without Cnut, none of the three contenders in the great struggle of 1066 – Harold Godwinson, William of Normandy and Harald Hardrada – would have been in the position to claim the throne of England, indeed Harold Godwinson wouldn’t have even existed given that Cnut was responsible for bringing his parents together. Indeed its very odd that William the Conqueror gets singled out for his Scandinavian connections because his great-great-great grandfather, Rollo (d.930), was a Viking, while Harold Godwinson was literally half-Danish. William the Conqueror may have been a direct descendant of Rollo, but he was also the 8x great-grandson of Charlemagne, and its pretty clear both from William’s own personality and style of rule and from what mid-eleventh century Norman government, society and culture was like that the Frankish heritage mattered a great deal more than the Viking one. But lets not get too sidetracked from our general conclusion, that the events of Cnut’s reign were fundamental in setting the stage for the Norman Conquest, and that the events of 1066 were basically the three most formidable warlords in Northwest Europe fighting over the debris of Cnut’s legacy.