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.

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.

Freedom and slavery in Anglo-Saxon England

 This is based on a facebook post I wrote for some medieval groups I'm on, where its often complained that there's very little discussion of peasants in contrast to the near constant posts about what kings, queens, dukes, earls and barons were up to/ were not up to. Early medieval slavery is something that's fascinated me since my first year as an undergraduate, not least given how it links to the legacy of the Roman world and its transformation (a recurring theme on this blog) and to the Feudal Revolution debate that I'm so fixated on, for which I will one day get round to doing a post on here for your benefit and mine.

Anglo-Saxon Slavery

Could these be Anglo-Saxon slaves at work in this early eleventh century manuscript?

There certainly was a lot of slavery in Anglo-Saxon England. It’s been estimated that, in the period 800 - 1066 , at least ten percent of the population of Anglo-Saxon England were slaves, though that figure may have been as high as 30%. If the latter estimate is correct, then that would mean that, proportionally speaking, there were almost as many slaves in Anglo-Saxon England as there were in Roman Italy from c.100 BC to 400 AD, according to Keith Hopkins’ estimates.

How did these slaves become slaves? Some would have been born into that condition – following ancient precedent, slavery was a hereditary condition and any child born to an enslaved parent/s was automatically a slave. Others were formerly free peasants who had been pushed below subsistence level by bad harvests or debt, and therefore needed to bargain away their freedom in order to receive the food and clothing needed for them and their families to survive from a slave master or mistress. For example, one wealthy Anglo-Saxon woman in her will gave freedom to:

“Ecceard the smith and Alfstan and his wife and all their children born and unborn, and Arcil and Cole and Ecgferth and Ealdhun’s daughter and all those people who had bowed their heads to her in return for food when times were bad.”

Others still were foreigners either captured in war or purchased at slave markets. Slave-raiding was a very standard part of warfare in the early medieval British Isles. This was a very ancient practice indeed, that can be seen in ancient Near Eastern texts and in the Bronze Age Mycenaean/ Archaic Greek societies described in Homer’s Iliad. At the same time as the Anglo-Saxons, it was very common in Viking age Scandinavia, along the eastern frontiers between the Frankish empire and the Slavic tribes and in the Islamic world, with the famous Moorish razzias. For example, when the people of Northumbria in 1065 rose up in revolt against the heavy-handed and unpopular administration of Earl Tostig, who had been imposed on them by Edward the Confessor, they, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, invaded the Mercian shires and

“They took many captives and carried them off north with them.”

Thirteen years earlier, Harold Godwinson, after he had gone into exile in Ireland after being deprived of his earldom in 1051, invaded the coast of Somerset with a force of Irish and Hiberno-Norse mercenaries and, according to the ASC

“Seized whatever he pleased, in cattle, captives and property.”

And in 1036, when Edward the Confessor and his brother Alfred tried unsuccessfully to invade England from Normandy to reclaim their throne from the Danish king Harald Harefoot, while Edward escaped, Alfred and his companions were not so lucky and, according to the ASC:

“Some of them were sold for money.”

Alfred himself, and some of his companions, were even less fortunate – they were horrifically mutilated and died shortly afterwards. It was not yet considered honourable to be merciful to captives in war, even if they were highborn – this was a pre-chivalric age. The typical choice for any defeated warrior in the early medieval period was simple – death or slavery.

Turning to slave markets, those were also widespread in Anglo-Saxon England. There were two primary slave-trading zones – the North Sea and the Irish Sea. William of Malmsbury (1080 – 1143), looking back on the mid-eleventh century from the 1120s, describes how Gytha Thorkelsdottir, the Danish noblewoman who was the wife of Earl Godwin of Wessex, would

“Buy parties of slaves in England and ship them back to Denmark, young girls especially, whose beauty and youth would enhance their price.”

Turning to the slave trade for West Britain and Ireland, in his “The Life of St Wulfstan”, William of Malmsbury also describes the slave market at Bristol, where merchants

“Would purchase people from all over England and sell them off to Ireland in the hope of profit; and put up for sale maidservants after toying with them in bed and making them pregnant. You would have groaned to see the files of the wretches of people roped together, young people of both sexes, whose youth and beauty would have aroused the pity of barbarians, being put up for sale every day.”

This passage brings into focus two things. One being the brutality of the slave system in Anglo-Saxon England. The second being the range of different roles for slaves. Historians of slavery often usefully speak of the concept of “social death” – that upon becoming enslaved, a slave ceases to be recognised as a human being and a member of society with rights, and becomes something else i.e., the ancient Greek philosopher Plato famously described the slave as being a “tool with a voice.” Certainly, a degree of violent and inhumane treatment was built into the Anglo-Saxon slave system, like with all other slave systems. The punishments for transgressive behaviour could be very harsh, including being branded like cattle, blinded, castrated, stoned to death by other slaves (if male) or burned alive (if female). As alluded to earlier in that passage from William of Malmesbury, like in all patriarchal societies which also have systems of slavery, female slaves in Anglo-Saxon England were extremely vulnerable to sexual assault from slave merchants, masters and their agents, lacking as they did the protection mechanisms available to free women – the law and family honour. William of Malmsbury also suggests that there was a certain incentive to rape female slaves – getting them pregnant would mean churning out more slaves. However, in contrast to Classical Greece and Rome, free men showing their sexual dominance over their inferiors (women and slaves) was a much less integral part of Anglo-Saxon masculinity, and over time the force of Christian moral reform began to be felt, however slowly.

Yet there are some signs that “slavery as social death” was starting to weaken by the ninth century. By this point, almost all slaves would have been Christians and many, if not most, of them would have been the same ethnicity as their masters, unlike in the immediate post-Roman period (c.450 – c.680) when the majority of Anglo-Saxon slaves would have been conquered Romano-Britons/ proto-Welsh – these factors would have made it more difficult to make slaves seem other and not “people like us.” And so we do start to see slaves gaining some legal rights and recognition of their humanity. For example, the laws of King Alfred the Great (r.871 – 899) state:

“These days are to be given to all free men, but not to slaves and unfree labourers: twelve days at Christmas; and the day on which Christ overcame the devil (15 February); and the anniversary of St Gregory (12 March); and the seven days before Easter and the seven after; and one day at the feast of St Peter and St Paul (29 June); and in harvest-time the whole week before the feast of St Mary (15 August); and one day at the feast of All Saints (1 November). And the four Wednesdays in the four Ember weeks are to be given to all slaves, to sell to whomsoever they please anything of what anyone has given them in God’s name, or of what they can earn in any of their spare time.”

A folio of the Laws of King Alfred

While it is clear that slaves are not afforded the right to enjoy the same Christian holidays as the free, at the same time their agency as human beings is recognised in that the are allowed to engage in buying and selling objects at their own volition during Lent. And it is also hinted at that slaves could do certain additional tasks for rewards and wages, and were also the recipients of gifts given as pious acts of charity by the free, the latter recognising that slaves were human beings with souls and that treating them kindly would please God.

Slaves could be employed in all kinds of things. Given that this series is about peasants and agriculture, it is of course important to remember, as noted from the outset, that many slaves were employed as agricultural workers, but some were employed as domestic servants, artisans or even priests. And as hinted at from the allusions to the prettiness of the slave girls sold by Gytha, many female slaves may even have served primarily as entertainers and concubines to their masters, much like the harem women of the Islamic world.

Let’s finish our discussion Anglo-Saxon slavery with a quote from Abbot Aelfric of Eynsham (955 – 1010), a prodigiously learned man who produced translations of Latin works into Old English and wrote an Old English grammar textbook and glossary. Aelfric describes the life of the field slave as follows:

“I go out at daybreak, goading the oxen to the field, and I join them to the plough; there is not a winter so harsh that I dare not lurk at home for fear of my master.”

As you can see, there’s no sugar-coating of the slave’s condition in that description, however brief, and a measure of human sympathy.

The free peasantry in Anglo-Saxon England

The majority of the population in Anglo-Saxon England was, however, comprised of peasant families who owned landed property and were legally free – these people were known in Old English as ceorls. Being legally free didn’t just mean not being a slave. Free peasants had the right to have both disputes concerning their property and redress for crimes done towards them and their dependents brought before the public law courts of shire and hundred, supervised by the king’s officials (ealdormen, shire reeves, reeves, bishops and abbots). At these courts, juries that would include free peasants (ceorls) as well as thegns (the gentry of Anglo-Saxon England) would participate, giving the facts of the case and eventually reaching a verdict. Free peasants also had the right to bear arms, and concomitant to that were liable to be called up for military service in the fyrd – the royal armies of levied free men (thegns and ceorls) raised in the shires by the king’s officials (ealdormen and shire reeves). They could also, on occasion, have their grievances heard and addressed in the Witan – the royal assemblies kings held several times a year to take counsel, settle disputes and make government policies, which were attended mostly by bishops, abbots, lay magnates (earls and king’s thegns) and some ordinary thegns representing the shires. Thus they were fully participating members of the public sphere which, like in ancient Greece and Rome, was the central defining feature of their free status.

However, the ceorls were not as homogenous a class as they appear. Some ceorls were clearly doing better than others, for as Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d.1023) wrote in the laws of King Cnut, if a ceorl possessed five hides (a unit of tax assessment) of land, a proprietary church, a kitchen, a bell house and a burgh gate and an office in the King’s Hall, he could become a thegn. This indicates that some free peasants were, by the early eleventh century, getting so rich from the rapid economic growth that had been taking place since the Reconquest of the Danelaw and the onset of the medieval warm period in c.900, that they were building up what were in effect manorial estates and thus attaining thegnly (gentry) status through the backdoor.

The kitchen, proprietary church, bell house and burgh gate described by archbishop Wulfstan depicted in a modern illustration of an Anglo-Saxon thegnly residences - clearly some free peasants were getting incredibly wealthy if they could build such country residences and get considered for thegnly status under the law

At the other end there was a lot of downward mobility. In the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, a combination of oppressively high taxation through the geld (the only systematic land tax levied in Western Europe at that time), the costs of military service and the obligations to repair roads, bridges and fortresses that were imposed on the free peasantry meant that many ended up as slaves or entering into some form of dependency to lords. Meanwhile, the economic growth of the tenth and eleventh centuries was leading to the emergence of a much more developed manorial system in Wessex and Mercia, based on more extensive direct exploitation of the land by lords. By the mid-eleventh century, a complex rural pecking order seems to have been in place. A document called the “Rights and Ranks of People”, written in Old English sometime in the reign of Edward the Confessor and copied in Latin in the twelfth century. Between the thegn and the slave, this document specifies three types of free peasant instead of the traditional ceorl – (in descending order of status) the geneat, the cottar and the boor.

The obligations of the geneat (the original meaning of that word was courtier/ companion, but by the 11th century it just simply meant a free proprietor of some standing) were completely subject to regional variation, butc could include the following:

1. Pay rent in kind, in the form of a swine a year.
2. Perform carting services.
3. Perform reaping and mowing services for his lord.
4. “Keep up places from which deer may be shot”
5. Build and fence the lord’s house

For the cottar (a small-holding peasant owning five acres of land) the duties were as follows:

1. Perform labour services on the demesne every Monday, or for three days a week at harvest time.
2. He has to pay Peter’s pence (a tax of one penny paid by any freeholder with land above a certain value to the Holy See, abolished by Henry VIII in 1534) on Ascension Day and the tithe on Martinmas like the former two.
3. He can also be expected to do coastguard and work on the king’s deer-fence

Finally, the Boor's obligations were as follows:

1. On some estates he has to work on the lord’s demesne (land directly farmed by the lord for his benefit) for two days a week.
2. At Michaelmas he pays 10 pence in cash rent, and rents in kind at Martinmas (23 sesters of barley and 2 hens) and at Easter (a young sheep)
3. He must plough three acres as “boon work” (additional labour services performed at specific times of the year) and perform various other supplementary labour services where appropriate too.
4. Each boor must maintain one hunting dog and provide 6 loaves to the swineherd.
5. In return he gets two oxen, one cow, six sheep and seven acres of land as well as tools for his work and utensils for his house, though all this reverts to the lord after his death

I'm going to follow up with this post very soon with one on the Continental situation in the same period, for which there are many parallels, which will involve a close look at the ninth century Carolingian polyptychs - how exciting! There will also be a post about how slavery came to an end in both continental Western Europe and England - spoiler alert: the feudal revolution does feature and the Normans (contrary to how a lot of people like to see them, most of the time anyway) aren't the bad guys in this.