Fate or Accident

There is a natural tendency when writing about the past to assume an inevitability or internal logic to past events, that what was had to be. Attempts to challenge such comfortable assumptions generally take the form of ‘counterfactuals’, or ‘what ifs?’, of which, for England after 1066, two questions pose themselves ahead of all others: what might have happened had Harold won the Battle of Hastings, and what would have been the outcome had Normandy and England remained divided realms despite William the Conqueror? The first of these questions invites images of a long-haired line of Harold’s descendents, buoyed up by victory at Hastings, but surely, in the longer term, brought low either by foreign invaders (the King of Norway, the King of Denmark, the Count of Boulogne, or any others of those who, even before 1066, had expressed an interest in acquiring the wealth of England), or by civil war provoked by the Godwins’ own hubristic hoarding of wealth. Ireland might provide an apt comparison here. Theoretically united by the late eleventh century under a race of native high kings, one of whom is reputed to have fought alongside Tostig at Stamford Bridge, Ireland was in practice divided between the various claimants to high kingship, which led, sooner rather than later, to foreign intervention and, a century after Hastings, to a full-scale English invasion. The destinies of Scotland and Wales, as we shall see, followed a similar pattern. The eleventh and twelfth centuries, indeed, can be regarded in general as a period during which European and above all French traditions of lordship were extended across the North Sea world, not just through the Norman conquest of England, but through the conversion of Iceland to Christianity, the Danish conquest of Norway, and the forced incorporation of the Baltic regions of Prussia, Lithuania and Sweden into European affairs.

The Godwinsons were not entirely exterminated by the Norman victory in 1066. Though Harold, Leofwine and Gyrth, sons of Earl Godwin, were all killed at Hastings, three weeks after the death of their brother Tostig at Stamford Bridge, Harold left a mother, at least two women claiming to be his widow and several children by both of these marriages. In 1068, his mother fled to Flatholme in the Bristol Channel and thence into exile at the court of her nephew, Svein of Denmark. Harold’s sons by his first marriage attempted armed landings from Ireland in 1068 and 1069. A son by his second marriage, also named Harold, was as late as 1098 engaged in attacks by the Norse King Magnus ‘Barefoot’ Olafson against the Norman settlers of Anglesey. Meanwhile, Harold’s daughter Gytha had been married to Vladimir Monomakh, prince of Kiev, becoming sister-in-law to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, kinswoman to the emperors of Byzantium, and the begetter of several dynasties of princes and princesses across Russia. There is some suggestion that Harold, via Gytha and her Russian offspring, was the ancestor not only of the future queen Isabella of England, wife of King Edward II, but of the composer Modest Mussorgsky and the aristocratic Russian anarchist, Peter Kropotkin. Another of Harold’s daughters, lover of Count Alan Rufus of Brittany, gave birth to a daughter who married into the Norman family of Aincourt and thus produced a minor line of Nottinghamshire gentry, more than happy, within forty years of Hastings, to commemorate their English royal ancestry.

At much the same time that the Aincourts were raising a funeral monument to Harold’s granddaughter, Harold himself reappeared in England, or so it was alleged. Far from dying at Hastings, being interred on the seashore at the high tide mark or carried off for royal burial at his foundation of Waltham in Essex, he had recovered from his wounds and, after a period of continental wandering, returned to live as a hermit outside Dover, eventually moving to Chester where he died in 1176 or 1177, presumably aged about 170, his identity confided to only a close circle of initiates. As late as 1332, a Welsh chronicler reported that the body of Harold, dressed in golden spurs and crown, had been found at Chester, still incorrupt and smelling as sweetly as the day on which it was buried: a clear sign that Harold was now amongst God’s saints. Such reports fit into a common pattern of survival myth that can be traced from the legends of King Arthur, to ideas of the survival of members of the Russian imperial family after 1917, of Adolf Hitler after 1945, or even of Elvis Presley restored, beyond the grave, to perfect voice and waistline. Ultimately, such legends derive from the love of a good story and to some extent from religious impulses, specifically from the idea of Christ the risen king, triumphing over death. What is most interesting about the survival myth of King Harold is that it should have been confined to Chester and a very narrow audience: those disconcerted by the new style of kingship pioneered after the 1150s by Henry II. If in Wales Harold was remembered as a saint, in England he was commemorated, not as a threat to William I and his heirs, but chiefly as a mighty warrior against the Welsh. Many inscribed stones had been raised by him on the Welsh Marches, so it was alleged, still visible when Gerald of Wales toured the region in the 1180s, stating that ‘Here Harold defeated the Welsh’. To this extent, both the Welsh and English began to take comfort from Harold’s memory. Harold himself, meanwhile, had become an irrelevance. Rather than threaten the foundations of Norman or Plantagenet kingship, he and his family had been fully subsumed within English myth.

Far more intriguing from a counterfactual perspective is the question of what would have happened had William of Normandy died soon after 1066, leaving England and Normandy once again to go their own separate ways. Here, no doubt, much the same would have happened as in the reign of King Cnut: a brief period of North Sea imperialism, the promotion of various foreigners to land and power in England, but thereafter the rapid collapse of this empire and a restoration of the status quo. It is here that the truly momentous nature of the changes in English society after 1066 come into focus. There seems little doubt that, to begin with, William’s intention was to govern England from Normandy, rather as Cnut had ruled from Denmark, treating England as an imperial fiefdom subject to foreign control. William had already shown a willingness in Maine, where he had extended his authority, to work in harmony with the local aristocracy who retained their lands and wealth, albeit under a new Norman administration. Like Julius Caesar before him (and we should remember here that there were many at William’s court who had read Caesar’s Gallic Wars), William used the English earls as local ‘feodati’ to control English tribal loyalties. Meanwhile, he retained a number of the old king’s officials, most notably the chancellor, Regenbald, who now issued writs and charters in the name of King William just as he had previously issued them for King Edward and King Harold, composed both in Latin and in the English vernacular. At Christmas 1066, William was crowned in the old English style albeit, like Harold, in Westminster rather than at Winchester, the traditional coronation church of the West Saxons. It is symptomatic of William’s later difficulties that the Norman soldiers standing guard outside the coronation misinterpreted the shouts of acclamation raised by the English assembly within, assuming that the crowd was baying for his blood. A massacre of the English by the Normans was only narrowly averted.