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)

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.