Harold (37 page)

This episode indicates Gunnhild’s continued status and importance despite the passage of nearly thirty years since King Harold’s death and the long campaign of villification directed against the latter. The Breton earls desired links with her, probably to legitimize their usurpation of her mother’s lands in the Midlands. The Norman kings attempted to keep her in seclusion for fear of her potential threat as an heiress, not merely of these lands, but of a kingdom. The head of the English Church behaved with the respect due to her nobility and royal lineage even when offended by her conduct.
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Two other relatives of King Harold remain to be considered, both of whom spent most of their lives in prison. Wulfnoth, his younger brother, had been taken hostage as a boy aged around fifteen, and imprisoned in Normandy. He was to suffer greatly, spending the rest of his life in prison. Harold had failed in his attempt to have him released in 1064, and although his release was ordered by a dying King William in 1087, he was instead taken to England by King William II
Rufus
and imprisoned in Winchester. The latter probably considered his own hold on the English throne too weak to permit Wulfnoth, brother of the last Anglo-Saxon king, to be released to provide a focus of dissent. Therefore, Wulfnoth languished in captivity, produced on occasion for inspection, until his death, an old man of fifty-eight, in 1094 at Winchester. The prior of the cathedral there, Godfrey of Cambrai, wrote a flattering but rather sad epitaph for him. He refers to him as ‘Earl’, reflecting the dignity of his lineage rather than his actual status:

King Harold’s son Ulf also ended up in Norman custody. It has been suggested that he was another son of Harold and Queen Alditha, perhaps a twin with young Harold, but this seems unlikely and there certainly exists no evidence for it. It is more likely that he was another son of Harold and Edith, and if this is the case he would have been a youth, aged somewhere between thirteen and nineteen in 1066. This makes it more feasible that he could have been captured separately from his brothers, perhaps during the chaotic period immediately after Hastings, and taken to Normandy. Whatever the case, he too languished in prison during William’s reign but was to prove more fortunate than his uncle Wulfnoth. When released in 1087, as part of the dying King William’s amnesty, he fell into the hands of Robert ‘Curthose’, who as Duke of Normandy and excluded from the English throne had no fears about Ulf’s claim. He not only released Ulf, but knighted him as well, after which he also departs from the pages of history.
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Thus in spite of the fall of King Harold and his brothers at Hastings, his remaining family, scattered and increasingly powerless as they were, remained a real and dangerous threat to William’s occupation of the English throne. This was particularly the case in the period 1067–8, when they threatened to develop a rival power base in south-west England. A fearful William dealt ruthlessly with this resistance and thereafter, the direct influence of the family gradually declined. However, although King William’s position in England was militarily secure by around 1070 and remained so in spite of further external threats, notably from the Danes in 1086, the legitimacy of his dynasty remained in a sense uncertain. Thus members of King Harold’s family, even those in close custody of one form or another, remained a real threat and possible focus of opposition not only to King William I but also to his son and successor, William II. This surely is testimony to the insecurity of the original Norman claim to the throne and perhaps also to its lack of foundation. Indeed, it was only really in 1100 when William’s younger son, Henry I, married Edith, daughter of St Margaret of Scotland, that the Norman hold on the throne gained wide acceptance among the English. She was a niece of
Atheling
Edgar of ‘the true royal line of England’, and brought with her the legitimacy bestowed by descent from King Alfred. This legitimacy in the end neither King Harold’s descendants nor his Norman conquerors could match.
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H
arold Godwineson was a remarkable man by any standards. He began his career with a number of important advantages. He was the second son of Earl Godwine of Wessex, the brother-in-law of King Edward of England, and Earl of East Anglia by the age of twenty-five. This early eminence had been secured for him as a direct result of his father’s assiduous career in royal service first to Cnut and then to Edward. Therefore, he had witnessed the rewards of such service and benefited directly from it and this made a strong impression on him.

This impression would be reinforced by the events of 1051–2, when his father, after a period of increasing tension and disputes, usually involving his eldest son, Swein, found himself in direct conflict with the king. The disastrous results of this conflict, although soon overturned, convinced Harold to avoid any such conflict in the future. When the deaths of his elder brother and his father placed Harold at the head of his family and in the earldom of Wessex, he sought to minimize any future tensions and to make himself indispensable to King Edward.

As Harold had anticipated, his loyal service to Edward brought immense rewards in its wake. Harold himself became the king’s lieutenant, and he and his family gained lands and position without equal. At the same time, Harold’s service produced benefits for the king through a long period of relative peace and stability at home and victory against his enemies abroad. In the years from 1053 to 1066, when Earl Harold and King Edward worked together, there were only three rebellions against the king’s peace, all of which were eventually resolved without open conflict and with Harold’s assistance. In a carefully planned and conducted campaign, Harold completely crushed Gruffydd, the most powerful and most dangerous Welsh prince of the period. These actions secured the peace of England and cemented Harold’s bond to the king. In 1065 he sacrificed his brother Tosti for the greater benefit of his family and of the kingdom, and thus avoided a bloody civil war. In contrast, his father, in similar circumstances, had supported Swein against the king and in doing so had almost brought about the ruin of the family in 1051.

In this way, Harold’s career in royal service proved immensely rewarding and might have continued so under ‘King Edgar’ had he not visited Normandy in 1064. This visit revealed to Harold the ruthless ambition and dangerous claims to the throne of England of William of Normandy, the knowledge of which transformed Harold’s intentions and brought him to consider for the first time the possibility of his own succession to the throne. Then, as King Edward’s health ebbed away in late 1065, he contemplated the dangers of the succession of the youthful, weak and inexperienced
Atheling
Edgar. This boy could not be expected to defend the kingdom effectively and Harold therefore decided to attempt to ascend the throne himself.

It was now that Harold’s long period of royal service proved really indispensable. He was by now so widely recognized as a royal deputy that many had no difficulty in accepting his rise to the throne. The great men whose support was essential to this process were either Harold’s relations or his allies. Others who were not so convinced, Harold won over, using his remarkable powers of persuasion. The extent of his own lands and authority as Earl of Wessex meant that he would be completely familiar and at ease with governing England.

In his occupation of the throne, Harold was a usurper because he had put aside the rights of
Atheling
Edgar, but this action appears to have met with little opposition from the English in stark contrast to William’s later rule. Indeed, Harold proved a very capable king despite the difficult circumstances he faced as a result of foreign invasions and his own lack of legitimacy. He was successful in government and victorious in war. Undaunted by two major foreign invasions in the space of one month, he completely defeated the great warrior Harald
Hardradi
of Norway, and was within an ace of defeating William of Normandy before his death on 14 October 1066 at Hastings.

Harold’s career had been an astonishing success, but ultimately it ended in failure. If he had won at Hastings it seems likely that he would have been remembered as one of England’s most successful kings. Instead, he was consigned to the footnotes of history as a supporting player in William of Normandy’s triumph. With these antipodes of success and failure – how can we judge Harold?

In contemporary terms, Harold had been judged by God. The disastrous result of the battle of Hastings and his own death therein proved beyond doubt to his contemporaries that God had found him wanting. This fate must have been visited on Harold as a punishment for his sins. The search for the sin which brought about this dreadful divine retribution led naturally to the breach of his holy oath to William. Clearly, Harold had brought this destruction on himself by his failure to keep his oath once he had sworn it. This was the story which would be repeated in later medieval sources.

In modern terms, the position is less clear but the causes of Harold’s fall have usually been sought in two main areas. Firstly, Harold usurped the throne in opposition to William, King Edward’s chosen successor, and he was therefore unable to hold it against the true heir and the appeal of his natural right. Secondly, Harold was beaten at Hastings by a better man leading a better army.

In 1066 the true heir to the kingdom of England was in fact
Atheling
Edgar and none of the three contenders of 1066 had any legitimate claim. Harold succeeded to the throne because he had a power base and wide support in England and because he was able to convince the leading men to promote him in preference to Edgar. Harald of Norway launched an invasion in order to seize the throne by force, as had Swein and Cnut before him, but with less success against Harold. William had no true claim, no support and no power in England. Instead, he, like Harald of Norway, launched an aggressive war in order to claim the crown after failing to coerce Harold into helping him. These three men contended for a prize which should have been Edgar’s.

Harold defeated his Norwegian namesake at Stamford Bridge then fought William for the crown at Hastings in a long and bloody battle. It was neither a walkover won by the use of cavalry against infantry nor a triumph of superior Norman training or tactics. A one-sided conflict like that would have been over much earlier in the day. It was in fact a tough battle between two very evenly matched armies, both led by excellent commanders. To suggest otherwise would not only reduce Harold’s status but lessen William’s achievement in staging his invasion, which was in fact immense. In these circumstances, it was naturally a long and hard battle and in the end only the element of chance could finally resolve it.

It was this element of chance which ultimately sealed Harold’s fate and turned his success into failure. In 1064 Harold took the oath to William to ensure his own freedom and he later broke it. In 1065 he helped to ensure the exile of Tosti and a year later brought about his death in battle. In 1066 he ascended to the English throne, putting aside Edgar, the rightful heir. He then chose to defend his new kingdom against Harald and William in battle. All of these actions and decisions have been considered with hindsight as causes of Harold’s downfall but all were, I would argue, the correct decisions for him to make at the time.

The truth is that Harold was an extraordinary man who was faced with an extraordinary crisis in autumn 1066. He faced this unprecedented crisis undaunted, and came within inches of surmounting it. In the end, he was simply overwhelmed by events and found that his luck deserted him at the very last. William’s victory over Harold was indeed a tremendous feat but it was one in which luck played a significant part.

The remarkable nature of Harold’s achievement is confirmed by the inability of his family after his death to play a major role in influencing subsequent events. They always represented a danger to his successors, but it was one which they were unable to realise without Harold’s personal abilities.

A
ethelric the monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, who played a significant role in the events leading up to the great crisis of 1051–2, is a mysterious figure. He is only mentioned in one source, the
Vita Eadwardi
, but because this is a Godwine family tract and he is stated to be related to Godwine, its facts may perhaps be trusted. In this source, the exact nature of his relationship to Godwine is not made clear but it seems not to have been very close. He was perhaps a cousin rather than a nephew or grandson, for example. He had been a monk at Christ Church since childhood, but was nevertheless a good administrator, wise in the ways of the world. In an attempt to preserve control of their archbishopric, the other monks elected him to the office, probably as the most suitable candidate among them. In spite of the support of Aethelric’s relative Earl Godwine, the scheme failed in the face of opposition from King Edward, who had his own candidate in mind. Thereafter, Aethelric disappears from the sources as suddenly as he had appeared. He has been assumed to be an unknown monk who made only this one brief appearance on the stage of history.
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However, there exists the possibility that this Aethelric is, in fact, the same as the Aethelric, also a monk of Christ Church, who was appointed Bishop of Sussex by King Edward in 1057, and who was consecrated to that see by Archbishop Stigand in 1058. The name of the two men is the same, although it is written ‘Aelric’, the usual Continental variant of Aethelric, by the Flemish author of the
Vita Eadwardi
. In this context, it should be noted that the Continental scribes of Domesday Book also record the Bishop of Sussex himself as ‘Alric’. However, the name is a common one, and not sufficient to prove the identity of the two even given their common status as Christ Church monks. There does exist other evidence, though, which points strongly towards this.
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