The Norman Conquest

Well, just how seriously should we take history based on a piece of needlework? About as seriously as Doomsday, it turns out, if the needlework is the Bayeux Tapestry and the event is the conquest of England.

On tap today is The Norman Conquest by Marc Morris. You may recall the author’s name, he wrote The Anglo-Saxons, which we have considered elsewhere on this site. The Norman Conquest picks up the story much where Morris’s last volume left off, with the end of the Anglo-Saxon period and the invasion of the Normans. Which is to say, the invasion of the French.

Another day, another invasion…but what gives this one frisson is that it was a three-way, and unless I misread my Oolong, one of the guys was gay.

Since it was England getting invaded, you would expect the king of England to be a major player, and you would be right. King Edward the Confessor was the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, a line that had been interrupted in 1016, when King Cnut of Denmark defeated Edward the Confessor’s father, King Æthelred (pronounced “Ethyl-red”) the Unready. Cnut was no push-over: he not only killed Æthelred, he also took out all six of Æthelred’s elder sons, leaving Edward suddenly and unexpectedly the Anglo-Saxon heir apparent, albeit one with very dim prospects of inheriting anything. However, when Cnut died in 1035 the Anglo-Saxons rose and after a couple of intermediate rulers, installed Edward and his lovely wife Edith on the throne.

Edward and Edith were childless, a fact we shall return to.

The other player you would expect is the invader, Duke William of Normandy. Normandy is today a part of France, but in the time was considerably more autonomous. Continental duchies of the day were nearly independent, although their dukes were infeudated (swore allegiance and service to, received protection from) the king of France. Nobody expected William to inherit his office any more than they expected Edward: William was the bastard offspring of a second son. However, his dad murdered his uncle, making William’s dad, Robert, the new duke of Normandy. Robert apparently felt bad about offing his brother and went off on pilgrimage to the Holy Land as penance. It was a dangerous trip in the day, so Robert left his only (if bastard) son William in the care of regents to run Normandy in his absence. An arrangement that became permanent when Robert died on the return trip, leaving William the new duke.

Also, as it turns out, a duke with an aunt on the throne of England. Normandy was populated by a bunch of Danes who had been run out of England in the tenth century, who settled in northern France and had assimilated big-time. Edward the Confessor’s father, Æthelred, had married the duke of Normandy’s sister in a bid to form an Anglo-Norman alliance against the Danes. Which as we’ve seen didn’t work, but it did leave William with his aunt Emma queen of England, and it made the English heir apparent, Edward the Confessor, his cousin. Emma was actually queen twice over, since after Cnut killed off her husband Æthelred and all his sons by a prior marriage, Emma married Cnut. (His people say that as victor, Cnut just sent for her; her people claim he made Emma all these fancy promises to woo her. Depending on how Emma felt about the first wife, maybe she just figured she owed him one.)

Enter our third man in the three-way power struggle, Edward’s brother-in-law, Harold Godwinson.

Harold was the son of a man whose origins are so obscure we only know him by one name, Godwin. He, his daughter Edith (Edward’s wife and queen), and his son Harold (hence “Harold Godwinson”) were parvenues of the worst order: Godwin was an Anglo-Saxon who somehow entered the court of King Cnut, and his rise was meteoric. By 1018 Cnut had elevated him to earl of Wessex…which is to say, only one rank down from the king. Earl Godwin, as he was now styled, used his position to bully others and consolidate further power to himself. When the political tide turned at Cnut’s death, Godwin proved highly adaptable and threw back in with the Anglo-Saxons. He even married off his daughter, Edith, to Edward with the full intent of placing his own grandson on the throne. At Godwin’s death, Harold, his son, sought to step into Dear Old Dad’s place…he, too, was powerful and wanted the throne, first for his family and then as it happened for himself.

Relations between Edward and his in-laws were fraught at best. In 1051, Earl Godwin was implicated in the death of Edward’s brother. It was at that point that Edward named his cousin William as his heir to the English throne, and he also exiled Godwin and sent the fair Edith to a nunnery. (At least he didn’t have her executed, a real option in the day, and perhaps a real temptation at the time.) Enough with those awful Godwins, at least William was offspring of Edward’s own grandparents.

Unhappily for Edward, Godwin staged a comeback several months later and Edith was reinstalled on the throne. Much fuss and many battles ensued…Edward died in January of 1066…Harold claimed that on his deathbed Edward had named him as the heir, a claim that regrettably only the Godwins were around to hear. So it was Harold who led the famous Battle of Hastings in October 1066, and lost it and the country to William. And thereby to the French.

Morris is an admirable and conservative scholar, conservative in that he does not speculate. He reports what the sources tell us, notes their known biases, and highlights their differences. Somehow he manages to keep a comparative reading of sources, a description of military action, and a cohesive political narrative going all at once. Plus, he makes the whole thing readable, which in itself takes some doing. And unexpectedly, Morris takes a somewhat dim view of William, who would normally be the hero of the piece. Although the book is even-handed and maintains its academic detachment, the author’s heart is clearly with the Anglo-Saxons.

One of the things our author does not speculate about is Edward the Confessor’s sexuality. Maddening. In both The Anglo-Saxons and again here in The Norman Conquest, Morris tells us that not only were Edward and Edith childless, Edith was forever complaining that Edward wouldn’t do anything with her in bed. Morris considers all sorts of reasons, save one. He never even considers the idea that Edward was likely gay, his preferred explanation being that Edward was somehow sterile. We will never know, of course, but Edward was fully aware of the stakes involved in succession. If Edith wasn’t his type, even a bastard birth would have sufficed: as we’ve seen, William himself was a bastard, and he led the invasion with the backing of the French king and the blessing of the pope. But Edward seems not to have given it a go with any other women, and none came forward to claim her kid was the king’s offspring. As to Edward’s religiosity, he was religious but so were all the rulers of the day…William, having conquered, went on to a wholesale reform of the Church in England on the grounds that English clerics had gone soft on the faith. (Which from all accounts they had.) Edith made up the whole “he was so religious that he wouldn’t put out” thing in a bio she commissioned, the Life of King Edward, which despite its title started out as a legitimization of the Godwins, but after Edward’s death was recast as a paean to the Normans…and an extended argument that none of what happened was Edith’s fault.

Being gay is a long way from disqualifying for a monarch. We’ve seen elsewhere that King Æthelstan, whom I also believe to be gay, drove the Danes out of England in the tenth century, produced no children, and still managed an orderly transition at his death. Edward the Confessor’s marital failures may have been sterility or homosexuality, or both; his dynastic failures were the absence of a biological heir, and a disorderly succession.

If you think such matters are only medieval history, look again. The present queen of England is the nation’s longest-serving monarch, and while the Curmudgeon wishes her all the best, logically we know her reign is nearing its end. Yet for a woman of advanced years the Queen has done a surprising amount of press lately...she is quite literally working herself into the grave. We see it as a matriarch trying to wrap up loose ends and make nice on her family. Which is exactly how the woman intends for us to see it. In reality she is doing the hardest work of her life, ensuring that the coming succession will not only be smooth, it will be inevitable.

That’s the bitch about being a monarch: they save your toughest job for the last hour of your shift.

(Editor’s note: This article was written and originally published before the death of Queen Elizabeth II of England on September 8, 2022. Requiescat in pace Elizabeth Windsor, you saw it through to the end.)