Women

As the rampant biting stallions of the Bayeux Tapestry most splendidly illustrate, this was a violently male society. Historians indeed are hard put to find any role for women within this environment save as heiresses or passive transmitters of cultural memory. The old legend that Duke William’s wife, Matilda, sat at home embroidering the Bayeux Tapestry whilst her men-folk went to war, is no longer credited. The Tapestry itself was probably designed within a monastic environment, St Augustine’s Abbey at Canterbury being the most favoured of the various suggested workshops, planned and in part executed by men rather than women. Even so, to ignore half of the human population merely because they make little impact or noise amidst the record of warfare and kingship would be a foolish dereliction of the historian’s duty. It was via a woman, Emma, the mother of Edward the Confessor, that the Norman claim to the English throne was first transmitted. It was from the circle of another woman, Edith the Confessor’s queen, that we obtain our most detailed record of the Confessor’s reign, the so-called ‘Vita Edwardi’. Women, such as William of Normandy’s daughter, Adela of Blois, played a crucial role in transmitting Norman propaganda to other parts of France, and it was via marriage to English heiresses that at least some of the Norman conquerors laid claim to their new English estates.

The greatest of these heiresses, Matilda, the wife of the Conqueror’s youngest son, the future King Henry I, was not only the great-great-granddaughter of King Aethelred but the daughter of a female saint, Queen Margaret of Scotland (d.1093). Such was the significance of Matilda’s marriage into the Norman ruling dynasty and the consequent merging of the blood of Norman and Saxon kings, that courtiers after 1100 are said to have referred to the King and Queen as Godric and Godgifu, precisely because they affected to behave like the low-born English. It was via the children of Henry and Matilda that the bloodlines of England and Normandy were truly united. Not a drop of English royal blood had flowed in the veins of William of Normandy or of King Henry I. By contrast, Henry I’s daughter and grandsons were the direct descendants not only of Rollo of Normandy but of Alfred, Aethelred and the English kings of yore. Even for those Norman lords who did not marry English heiresses, English women may have played a significant role. It was possibly via English wet nurses, recruited from the middling or lower levels of English-speaking society, that the English language itself was communicated to future generations of bilingual Norman lords.