For the present, however, the Normans inEngland were not strong enough permanently to assume the direction of the commonwealth, and in 1052 Godwine and his sons made a triumphant return. The old earl had no difficulty in recruiting a powerful force in Flanders, and Harold in Danish Ireland found numbers of adventurers only too eager to follow the fortunes of a leader who could promise excitement and booty. In the middle of 1052, Harold, acting no doubt in concert with his father, set sail from Ireland with nine ships, landed on the coast of Somerset at Porlock, and there proceeded to slay and harry in true Viking fashion, passing on round the Land’s End and so along the Channel. In the meantime Godwine with his Flemish pirates had reached the Isle of Wight and plundered it until the inhabitants were driven to pay whatever ransom the earl might demand. Off the Isle of Wight Harold joined forces with his father, and the earls sailed on past Pevensey and Hastings and along the Kentish shore, drawing many volunteers from the friendly ports at which they called, while their crews indulged in sporadic devastation elsewhere. Without serious opposition the exiles entered the Thames, and sailed up the river as far as London Bridge; Godwine disembarked at Southwark and the feeling of the city declared itself unmistakably on his side. The archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of Dorchester made a hurried escape from the town and rode for their lives to the Essexcoast, where they crossed to Normandy. The king, powerless to protect his friends in the moment of the reaction, had no option but to restore Godwine and his family to all their honours and offices, and he was forced to declare outlaw “all Frenchmen who had raised disorder and proclaimed bad law and had plotted evil against the land.” He was, however, even allowed to retain about his person such Normans as Godwine’s party chose to consider loyal to the king and his people; and indeed it does not appear that the triumph of the nationalists in 1052 was followed by any considerable exodus of foreign settlers from the country.
Godwine had thus secured an unequivocal victory, but he and his friends proceeded to make a false move, the result of which was to throw the whole influence of the church on to the side of the Norman invader in 1066. The flight of the archbishop of Canterbury had left the metropolitan see at the mercy of Godwine’s party, and it was immediately given to Stigand, bishop of Winchester, the leading ecclesiastical partisan of the earl of Wessex. The act was a gross violation of law and decency, for the exiled archbishop had been deposed by no clerical tribunal, and Stigand did not improve his position by continuing to hold the see of Winchester in plurality with that of Canterbury. The Curia refused to recognise him as metropolitan, and in 1058 Stigand aggravated his guilt by accepting thepallium, the badge of the archiepiscopal rank, from an antipope, thereby in effect giving defiance to that section of the church which represented its highest ideals, and was destined to exercise most influence in the coming years. Before long Stigand’s political associates perceived the mistake that had been made, and for the next fifteen years the province of Canterbury was, in matters of spiritual jurisdiction, left without a head. Between 1058 and 1066 Stigand never consecrated a bishop, and at ecclesiastical ceremonies of especial importance his place was taken by the primate of York. To all strict churchmen the nominal head of the church in England was a schismatic, disowned by his own suffragans and banned by the Holy See; and it would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this fact in preparing the public opinion of Europe to support the enterprise of William of Normandy in 1066.
Godwine survived his restoration for little more than a year, and on his death in 1053 his earldom of Wessex passed to Harold as his eldest surviving son. For thirteen years it is probable that Harold was the real head of the English government. Until the very close of this period the internal history of England is almost barren of recorded events, and its significance lies in the steady aggrandisement of the family of which Harold was now the head. By the beginning of 1065 the wealthiest and most warlike parts of the country were divided into earldoms held bymembers of the house of Godwine. Wessex, Harold kept under his own rule, with the addition of the shires of Gloucester and Hereford; Leofwine, his youngest brother, governed a province comprising Essex, Hertford, Middlesex, Kent, Surrey, and Sussex; Gyrth, a third brother, held East Anglia; to which was added the midland shire of Oxford.[28]Even Northumbria had been secured by an earl of the family, for Tostig, the only one of Godwine’s sons for whom King Edward seems to have felt personal affection, had received the government of that lawless land upon the death of its native earl, Siward, in 1055. Less obvious, but equally suggestive of the general trend of Harold’s policy, is the enormous amount of land of which he held direct possession at the Confessor’s death. There was scarcely a shire in which a certain number of estates were not held by the earl of Wessex in 1066; andDomesday Book, in recording the fact of his ownership, will often also record that it had been acquired by force or injustice. Harold, like his father, was quite unscrupulous in the advancement of his interests, and his greed for land and revenue is one of the few traits in his character of which we can be certain. Of his brothers, Gyrth and Leofwine are very imperfectly known to us, although in the Norman traditions of the twelfth century the former is represented as the realhero of the campaign of Hastings on the English side. But Tostig, the earl of Northumbria, was a man of stronger character, and the circumstances of his fall from power demand a brief account in this place.
Tostig’s appointment in 1055 had been an experiment and a rash one. From the overthrow of the Northumbrian kingdom by Edred, down to the last year of Harthacnut, a dynasty of native earls had presided over the north. The succession in the southern half of the earldom, between Tees and Humber, had been broken in the reign of Cnut, but the ancient family continued to rule in Bernicia until in 1041 Ealdwulf II., the last earl of the house, was murdered by Siward the Danish ruler of Yorkshire. Siward thereupon reunited the two halves of the Northumbrian earldom, gaining in local eyes some title to the government by his marriage with Aelflaed, the niece of his victim Eadwulf; and for fourteen years his ruthless severity kept his province in comparative quiet. In Tostig, Siward’s successor, the Northumbrians for the first time were expected to obey a south-country stranger, and hence there was no qualification to the hatred which Tostig caused by his imitation of his predecessor’s methods of government. As a personal favourite of the king, Tostig was absent from his province for long spaces of time, and it is not easy to understand why the Northumbrians submitted for ten years to the spasmodic tyrannyof a stranger. But at last, in 1064, Tostig entrapped and murdered two leading thegns of the north, named Gamel the son of Orm, and Ulf; and at Christmas time in the same year Gospatric, the last male descendant of the ancient earls of Bernicia, was slain at the king’s court in Tostig’s interest.[29]For nine months there was ominous peace in Northumbria, and then, very unexpectedly, in October, 1065, a great revolt burst out. Two hundred thegns marched to York, held a meeting in which we may possibly recognise a Northumbriangemot, deposed Tostig, and offered the earldom to Morcar, brother of Edwin the reigning earl of Mercia, and grandson of Leofric. These events were followed by a general massacre of Tostig’s adherents in York, and then the rebel army, with Morcar, the new earl, at its head, rolled southwards to force a confirmation of its revolutionary acts from the king.
At the moment of the outbreak Tostig was absent in Hampshire, hunting with King Edward. Events had now passed quite beyond his control; Morcar had been joined by his brother Earl Edwin with the fyrd of Mercia, and a contingent of Welshmen, and the combined force had reached Northampton, their line of advance being marked with wholesale ravages which can be traced very clearly in the pages of the NorthamptonshireDomesday.[30]At Northampton the rebels were met by Harold bearing a message from the king to the effect that, if they were to disperse, their charges against Tostig should be heard and decided in lawful manner. They returned a blank refusal to accept Tostig again as their earl, swept on down the Cherwell Valley, and next appear in occupation of Oxford. In the meantime Edward had called a council at Bretford near Salisbury, at which there was a long and angry debate, and Harold was roundly accused of stirring up the present rising for his own advantage. The earl cleared himself of the charge with an oath, and the discussion turned to the measures to be adopted to restore order. Edward himself was for putting down the revolt by force; but his counsellors urged the difficulty of conducting a campaign in winter, and the king was seized with a sudden illness which left the immediate control of affairs in the hands of Harold. Accordingly Harold paid a second visit to the rebels’ camp, this time at Oxford, and formally granted their demands. Tostig was outlawed, Morcar was recognised as earl of Northumbria, and Waltheof, the son of Siward, who might consider himself aggrieved by this alienation of his father’s earldom, was portioned off with the midland shires of Northampton, Huntington, Bedford, and Cambridge. Tostig himself, to the king’s great regret, took ship for Flanders, and spent the winter at St. Omer.
The above course of events is clear, and attested by good contemporary authority, but there is evidently much beneath the surface which is not explained to us. The revolt must clearly have been planned and organised some time before its actual outbreak, but who was really responsible for it? It would be natural enough to lay the blame on Edwin and Morcar, and on any showing they can hardly be acquitted, but it is at least doubtful whether the causes of the rising do not lie deeper. It is hard to avoid suspicion that the men who accused Harold in the council at Bretford may have had knowledge of the facts behind their accusation. It is quite certain that Harold was forming plans for his own succession to the throne upon Edward’s death—would those plans be furthered by the substitution of Morcar for Tostig as earl of Northumbria? From this point we are in the region of conjecture, but our authorities give us certain hints which are significant. It was certain that the last wishes of the king would be a most powerful factor in determining the choice of his successor; Tostig was Edward’s favourite, Harold might well feel anxious about the manner in which the old king would use his influence when the end came. Then, too, there is evidence that Harold about this time was trying to conciliate the great Mercian family; and the suspicion is raised that Edwin’s acquiescence in Harold’s schemes in 1066 was not unconnected with Morcar’s elevationin 1065. Lastly, Harold’s action in granting the demands of the rebels, the moment that Edward’s illness had given him a free hand, is itself suggestive of some collusion with the authors of the rising. If Harold’s policy had been strictly honourable his conduct should hardly have given rise to doubts like these; and if on the evidence before us we may hesitate to condemn him outright, we may at least acknowledge that his contemporary accusers deserved a respectful hearing.
More important and less conjectural than the nature of Harold’s conduct is the picture given by these events of the conditions of England in 1065. All the symptoms of political disorganisation on which we have already commented—the independence of the great earls, the importance of the executive, the fatuity of the royal counsellors, the personal weakness of the king—are illustrated by the narrative of Tostig’s expulsion. For just another year the Old English state was to stand trembling to its fall, and then the final test of political stability would be applied and a conquering race would slowly rebuild the social fabric which it had overthrown.
Penny of Edward the Confessor
Penny of Edward the Confessor
Penny of Edward the Confessor