Authors: Lisa Hilton
This changed, however, in 1086, when Edith and her younger sister Mary left for the abbey of Romsey to be educated under the supervision of their aunt Christina. Edith spent the next six or seven years ‘in fear of the rod of my Aunt’
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who treated her harshly, slapping and scolding her cruelly, and constantly made her feel as though she were in disgrace. Christina also stirred up a great deal of future trouble for her niece by forcing her to wear a heavy black veil. Edith reported that ‘That hood I did indeed wear in her presence, chafing and fearful … but as soon as I was able to escape out of her sight I tore it off and threw it in the dirt and trampled on it. This was my only way of venting my rage and the hatred of it that boiled up in me.’
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There is something delightful in this picture of the cross little princess stamping on the symbol of her stern aunt’s authority, but Edith had the self-discipline and intelligence to keep her rebelliousness sufficiently in check while she acquired an extremely good education. Before 1093, the girls moved to Wilton Abbey, gratefully leaving Aunt Christina behind to grow old at Romsey. Both convents were centres of women’s learning and literacy, where, according to William of Malmesbury, ‘letters were trained into the female heart’. At the turn of the twelfth century, Wilton accommodated between eighty and ninety women and had a distinguished association with the daughters of the old Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. Edward the Confessor’s queen, Edith, had retired there before her death in 1075, as a contemporary of the well-known ‘English poetess’ Muriel. Among the abbey’s treasured relics were a nail from the True Cross, a portion of
the Venerable Bede and the body of St Edith, which made it a popular destination for pilgrims. The house had been rebuilt in stone by the Confessor’s queen, and St Edith’s shrine boasted an impressive alb embroidered with gold thread, pearls and coloured stones. Anglo-Saxon needlework was highly prized, and in later life Edith continued to patronise the art with which she had grown up in the convent.
Edith’s education at Wilton was not confined to traditionally feminine activities. The convent’s rigorous intellectual tradition may be seen in the reading list prepared for Eve of Wilton, who went on to become a well-known anchoress, or holy recluse, in France. Eve began her training in 1065, aged seven, and when she left as a young woman was considered capable of reading St Augustine and Boethius, among many others, in Latin. Edith’s first language was English, but she perfected her French at Wilton, and she, too, learned some Latin. She read both the Old and New Testaments, the books of the Church fathers and some of the major Latin writers, familiarity with whom she was later to demonstrate in her letters. The house was a sort of cross-cultural finishing school where the daughters of conquered and conquerors met — Gunnhildr, the daughter of King Harold and his gloriously named mistress Eadgyth Swan-Neck, was also a pupil there, and the training Edith received was a good preparation for the new Anglo-Norman world in which she would be required to move.
By 1093, it seems, Edith’s parents considered her ready to enter this world, as they betrothed her to the Breton magnate Alan the Red, Count of Richmond. Before the marriage could take place, however, politics intervened. In the August of that year, Edith’s father, King Malcolm, was present at the dedication of Durham Cathedral, after which he was summoned to Gloucester by William Rufus to hold a council with him. ‘But then when he came to the King, he could be entitled to neither speech with our King nor to the covenants which were earlier promised him.’
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Affronted by such disrespectful treatment, Malcolm returned to Scotland, stopping to visit his daughter at Wilton on the way. William Rufus had been at the convent the same week and had seen Edith dressed as a nun. When her father arrived to find his daughter wearing the veil, he ripped it from her head, tore it into pieces and trampled it to the ground, declaring he would have her marry Count Alan rather than become a nun. He rode off to Scotland with her immediately, where they arrived to find Queen Margaret unwell. Still smarting at the English King’s behaviour, Malcolm then ‘gathered his army and travelled into England, raiding with greater folly than behoved him’.
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A party led by Robert Mowbray, Earl of Northumbria, surprised him, and both Malcolm and
his son and heir Edward were killed. When Queen Margaret heard the news, her illness worsened and, on 16 November, within three days of losing her husband and son, she, too, was dead.
Edith was now an orphan and, it appears, a runaway. Her husband-to-be, Alan the Red, had also visited Wilton that turbulent summer, and it is not known whether he saw Edith there. It is quite possible she had already left, as, perhaps to console himself, he ran off with King Harold’s daughter Gunnhildr. Anselm, the archbishop of Canterbury, now stepped in to take charge of this scandalous situation. Gunnhildr had confessed to him that she had decided to become a nun, and the Archbishop wrote to her threatening her with damnation if she did not go back to Wilton. Although Alan the Red died before he and Gunnhildr could make it to the altar, she was obviously determined that the religious life was not for her, since she married his brother, Alan the Black, instead. Edith, meanwhile, perhaps inspired by Gunnhildr’s obstinacy, also refused to return to the convent. Although she had been seen in the veil on several occasions, she always maintained that she had never intended to profess herself a nun. When Anselm instructed Osmund, bishop of Salisbury, to see that this ‘prodigal daughter of the King of Scots whom the devil made to cast off the veil’
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was retrieved for the Lord, she defied him.
Edith did not return to Wilton, and between 1093 and 1100 she disappears from the chronicles. After her father’s death, the Scottish crown was claimed by his brother, Donald, whose son Duncan seized the throne before being murdered by Donald’s supporters. In 1096, Edith’s uncle, Edgar Aetheling, led an army against Donald and succeeded in placing her brother Edgar on the throne as Edgar I. Edith’s whereabouts during these dangerous times are unknown. It has been suggested that she may have spent time at the court of the English King, William Rufus, who had perhaps considered her as a possible wife during her time at Wilton. And when she re-emerges, it is no longer as the prodigal princess but indeed as a royal bride, and with a new, Norman-friendly name: Matilda. Her husband-to-be, however, was not Rufus, but his younger brother Henry.
The division of the Conqueror’s inheritance had left Henry in an ambiguous position. He received a large sum of money and an interest in the lands of his mother, Queen Matilda, but no marriage had been arranged for him and he had no clear political role. He supported his elder brother William who, though not the Conqueror’s first-born son, had been his choice to succeed him as king, in his ambition to reunite the
Anglo-Norman realm, an aim William went some way towards achieving when Robert Curthose departed from Normandy on the first crusade in 1095. Robert and William had already recognised each other as heir if either should die without a son, and now William took the opportunity to govern Normandy in Robert’s absence in exchange for a large loan to support his expedition. Henry had been periodically in conflict with William, but at the time of the Normandy agreement they had made peace, and he appears as a member of William’s household, leading a squadron of knights in one of the endless Norman border skirmishes. Despite the apparent accord between the brothers, more than one commentator has claimed that Henry planned to murder his brother, and that, in the summer of 1100, he grabbed his chance.
What is not in doubt is that William Rufus was killed in a hunting accident in the New Forest on
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August, and that by the next day, Henry had persuaded the officials of the King’s castle at Winchester to give up both the castle and the royal treasure it contained, then ridden hard for London, where he was crowned king at Westminster by the bishop of London and issued a ‘Charter of Liberties’ which promised just government. One of Henry’s first acts as king was to send for Archbishop Anselm, who was in exile. Another was to propose to the princess of Scotland.
Perhaps it is Henry’s very decisiveness that has subsequently cast suspicion on his conduct. His swift response to the crisis of William’s death preserved the throne for the Norman dynasty without conflict, and it is tempting for historians to argue that this speedy reaction must have been part of a calculated coup. Yet fatal hunting accidents were commonplace — Henry and William’s own brother Richard had died this way, as had one of Robert Curthose’s illegitimate sons — and none of Henry’s contemporaries suggested that there had been anything untoward in William’s death. At the time the only controversy was the new King’s proposed marriage.
Both Williams had been kings of England but, thanks to his Yorkshire birth, Henry was an English king. A marriage to a descendant of the ancient Wessex line would not so much legitimise the Norman claim as augment the perception of a continuity of rights being fostered by the Norman chroniclers. The nine-month reign of ‘Earl’ Harold, to which rank he had been demoted, was being presented as an aberration, a brief usurping of the crown, with William of Normandy signifying a return to the ‘true’ line of English royalty through his claim as Edward the Confessor’s designated heir. In terms of Norman propaganda, a marriage between Henry and Edith should have been understood as the union of
two members of the same house, not as the representative of a conquered dynasty bestowing her royal bloodline on the conqueror, which was, of course, what it was. Whatever the official line, Henry was aware that Edith’s blood would transmit powerful rights to an heir and enhance his popularity with his English subjects. The Norman magnates, having ‘adopted’ Edward the Confessor as their forebear, could hardly object without undermining their own presence. Edith’s Scottish connections increased the chances of a truce on the perennially troublesome northern border, which would release funds and men for service in Normandy and the Welsh marches.
The political motivations for the match were sound enough, but the chronicler William of Malmesbury kindly suggests that Henry was actually in love with Edith. If Edith had indeed spent time at William Rufus’s court, it is possible that Henry could have met her there. It is also suggested that Henry’s education included a period at Salisbury, as a pupil of Bishop Osmond, who was charged with retrieving the runaway princess, and that Edith might have attracted his attention at this time. William of Malmesbury is understated about Edith’s looks — her beauty was ‘not entirely to be despised’ — but Henry loved her so much that ‘he barely considered her marriage portion’. The objection to the match was Edith’s purported commitment to become a nun.
Edith’s self-confessed rejection of the hated veil forced upon her by her Aunt Christina makes it clear that, however pious she might have been, she was determined to take up a place in the royal world to which she was born. But the evidence of witnesses who had seen her wearing the veil counted against her. It was Edith herself who took the initiative of arranging a meeting with the newly returned Archbishop Anselm. Disgusted by the idea that a genuine religious vow might be broken, he declared he ‘would not be induced by any pleading to take from God his bride and join her to any earthly husband’.
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The two met at Salisbury and, after hearing Edith’s own account, Anselm agreed to call an ecclesiastical council to decide the matter, and representatives were sent from Canterbury and Salisbury to make enquiries. A significant factor in the council’s decision was the ruling by the previous archbishop, Lanfranc, that Anglo-Saxon women who had taken refuge in convents at the time of the Norman Conquest were not to be held as sworn nuns when they emerged from hiding. The council concluded that ‘under the circumstances of the matter, the girl could not rightly be bound by any decision to prevent her from being free to dispose of her person in whatever way she legally wished’.
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On 11 November 1100, the Anglo-Saxon princess became a Norman queen. When exactly Edith became Matilda is uncertain, but the adoption of her godmother’s name signalled her intention to break with the past and reinforce her closeness to her new marital family. She and Henry were married by Anselm on the steps of Westminster Abbey. Before he performed the ceremony, the archbishop recounted the story of the religious controversy and invited any objections. According to Eadmer, ‘The crowd cried out in one voice that the affair had been rightly decided and that there was no ground on which anyone … could possibly raise any scandal.’
From a contemporary perspective, fertility was perceived as a sign that a marriage was blessed by God, and in February 1102, Matilda (having earlier suffered a miscarriage) gave birth to a daughter, also named Matilda, at the royal manor of Sutton Courtenay. A son, William, was born before the end of September the next year. A prophecy made on William of Normandy’s deathbed made the birth of the prince especially joyous to the new royal family. Archbishop Anselm recorded that in 1066 England had been about to be delivered to its enemies as a punishment for the sinfulness of its people (an interpretation shared by
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle)
. The realm would only be secure when ‘a green tree shall be cut through the middle and the part cut off being carried the space of three acres, shall without any assistance become united again with its stem, burst out with flowers and stretch forth its fruit, as before, from the sap again uniting’. The green tree represented the royal house of England, the three acres Harold, William and William Rufus, and the reunification was the marriage of Henry and Matilda, its fruit the new baby boy. The prophecy recalls the stark image of the hoary grey apple tree on the battlefield of Hastings, the reminder of so much death being transformed into an emblem of new and promising life.
In twelfth-century England, ownership of land was of paramount importance in the acquisition of wealth and prestige. The records of lands held by Matilda of Scotland permit much greater insight into the customs that would be established for English queens than do those of Matilda of Flanders. Surprisingly, in that she was the sister of a reigning king and the daughter of another, William of Malmesbury suggests that Matilda brought little or no dowry to Henry, though since she did possess some lordship rights in the north, this may have been exaggerated to emphasise Henry’s disinterest in the financial element of their marriage. Matilda’s dower estates were principally granted from those lands held by Queen Edith,
Edward the Confessor’s widow. Though it has been argued that there was no consistent pattern of grants to Anglo-Saxon queens, there was a perceived tradition that certain properties were the prerogative of the queen, and the fact that Henry chose to grant such properties to Matilda suggests he wished to incorporate her into that tradition.