The Godwins

The Rise and Fall of a Noble Dynasty

Frank Barlow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317868095
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica

The family of Earl Godwin of Wessex stands among the most famous in English history, whose most famous son was King Harold.

Frank Barlow charts the family through to Harold – the last Anglo-Saxon king – and finally the crowning of William the Conqueror during the Norman Conquest. Set against the backdrop of Viking raids and ultimately the Norman Conquest of 1066, Frank Barlow unravels the gripping history of a feuding family that nevertheless determined the course and fortunes of all the English.

chapter 1

The Family’s Origins and Godwin’s Early Years

Since Godwin’s daughter, Queen Edith, was the fruit of the union of two noble families, one English, one Danish, it might be expected that the tract she commissioned to eulogise her family, Vita Ædwardi Regis, would pay considerable attention to her forebears. In the prefatory poem, indeed, the Muse bids the author write in praise of Edith and her husband the king and tell how her father Godwin, ‘esteemed for his respect and loyalty (fidei pietate cluentem)’ founded four comital lines in England.¹ These are probably those of Harold, Tostig, Gyrth and Leofwine, for the disreputable eldest son, Swegen, is not mentioned in Vita. And, remarkably in this context, Godwin’s own ancestors, like those of his wife, are completely ignored. Chapter i.1 begins abruptly with the Danish conqueror Cnut (who had established his position in England in 1016), choosing Godwin from among the English nobles as his favourite, taking him with him to put down a rebellion in Denmark (?1019), giving him his sister as wife, appointing him an ealdorman, and making him the power behind the throne.² But we have to wait for the third poem for Godwin to be described as ‘blessed in his ancestral stock and fortunate in his dutiful offspring’.³ And then, although we hear much of the children, we are told nothing of the ancestral stock. There is massive evasion here. Not only is Godwin’s background totally ignored, but also his wife is probably incorrectly identified. Gytha was more likely the daughter of Thurgils Sprakaleg and sister of the Danish jarl Ulf who married Estrith, Cnut’s sister.⁴ Moreover, although she was still alive in 1066, she is not named in Vita and rarely mentioned. The reasons for these silences, all the more remarkable since Edith clearly loved and revered her father, are discussed below.⁵

The encomiast’s view of Godwin’s background may, however, be encoded in a poem he provides on the earl’s triumphant return from exile in 1052.⁶ He likens Godwin’s relations with King Edward to David’s with King Saul as told in the Bible (I Samuel xvi–xxxi). David, the son of Jesse and the fourteenth generation from Abraham, became the first king of the Judaean dynasty in Israel and a direct ancestor of Jesus Christ (Matthew i. 1–17). But, although of distinguished lineage and with a successful, if chequered, career and illustrious descendants, David started life as a poor lad, a youngest son and a shepherd, who made his career first by his skill as a harpist and then as a soldier against the Philistines. Since, however, the encomiast’s main point is that Godwin spared Edward’s life when it was in his power to kill, just as David spared Saul’s because of his reverence for the Lord’s anointed, other concordances cannot be taken for granted.

There is good evidence that Godwin’s father was named Wulfnoth (Cild),⁷ a name Godwin gave to one, perhaps the youngest, of his sons; and there is a ‘confused and doubtful’ later tradition that Ælfwig (Ælfwy), abbot of New Minster, Winchester (1063–6), who was killed in the battle of Hastings, was Godwin’s brother.⁸ There also seems to have been a sister, Æthelflaed.⁹ The Victorian historian E.A. Freeman was a great admirer of Godwin and, when writing and revising his massive History of the Norman Conquest in the 1870s, was much interested in his ancestry. But he was doubtful which of two possible Wulfnoths his father was. Yet the Godwins’ massive estates in Sussex, as shown in Domesday Book (1086) — the family held over 1,200 hides, about one third of the shire — are indisputable evidence that Wulfnoth was the South Saxon thegn.¹⁰ And it was left to Alfred Anscombe in 1913 and Lundie W. Barlow in 1955, by treating Wulfnoth as the son of Æthelmaer, ealdorman of the western provinces, and tracing the descent of some estates, especially Compton in Westbourne Hundred in Sussex, to take the pedigree back through seven generations to Æthelwulf, the king of the West Saxons who died in 858 and was a descendant of the sixth-century Cerdic, the founder of the dynasty.¹¹ This pedigree, even if mistaken, is of the right type. The Anglo-Saxon kings mostly married into the English nobility, and much of the aristocracy was inter-related. A rival medieval view, that Godwin was of low birth, an upstart, although it would explain the obscurity of his background, seems inherently unlikely.¹²

The main difficulty with the pedigree created by Anscombe and Barlow is that seven generations with almost all the family names beginning with Æthel/Alf (noble) mutate suddenly to Wulfnoth and Godwin. Barlow suggested that if Compton was inherited by Wulfnoth through his mother, royal descent was through her. But there were some exceptions in the nomenclature with younger children, and fashions could change. Also it is likely that there were some drastic disturbances in the family’s fortunes during the reign of Æthelred II, ‘the Unready’, when viking raids made deep inroads into the kingdom, Danish kings aimed at conquest and for a short time succeeded, and disloyalty to Æthelred was rife.

There can be no doubt that Æthelred was an incompetent ruler. His punning nickname, Æthelred Unraed (noble counsel: no counsel) points to his foolishness; and there was much complaint of the absence of good justice and sound government. It is true that he faced enormous difficulties. But the successes of some of his predecessors, such as Alfred, and of his own son Edmund Ironside at the end of the reign, show what a wise and resolute king could achieve. The way in which Æthelred had succeeded to the throne (after the murder of his elder stepbrother, Edward ‘the Martyr’) and then his erratic conduct of affairs destroyed confidence in his leadership and eventually led to treason. Moreover, by marrying in 1002 Emma, the daughter of Richard I count of Normandy and the grand-daughter of a viking adventurer, and by recruiting viking forces, such as Thorkell Havi and his 45 ships in 1012 and Olaf Haroldsson, the future king of Norway and saint, in 1014, Æthelred helped to blur English ethnic loyalties and make it easier for English nobles to desert him for successful Scandinavian invaders.

In 1005–6 a palace revolution seems to have occurred. Several influential noblemen, including Ealdorman Æthelmaer, Wulfnoth’s supposed father, disappear from the royal court and the ascent of the Mercian Eadric Streona (the Acquisitor) and his family begins.¹³ Eadric became notorious for his greed for lands, for his treachery, and for his involvement in murders. He also presided over a period of almost farcical disasters. In 1008 Æthelred ordered a fleet to be built; and the next year some 300 ships were assembled at Sandwich in Kent, ‘the most famous of all English ports’,¹⁴ in order to intercept a threatened viking invasion. At this time Brihtric, a brother of Eadric Streona, denounced Wulfnoth Cild of the South Saxons, probably Æthelmaer’s son and Godwin’s father, to the king, accusing him of some unspecified crime. Whereupon Wulfnoth rebelled, seduced twenty ships, presumably his or his father’s contribution to the fleet, and ravaged the south coast. Brihtric then took eighty ships against him, intending his capture or death. But a tempest drove them ashore, where Wulfnoth burnt them. This diversion or destruction of a third of the English fleet caused such disarray that the king and his leading men left Sandwich while the remaining ships were transferred to London. As a result, in August viking forces were able to land unopposed in Kent. In 1013 Æthelmaer also defected: with ‘all the western thegns’ he surrendered to King Swegen at Bath and gave hostages.¹⁵

All that we know for certain about Wulfnoth and Æthelmaer’s subsequent careers is that the former was dead by 25 June 1014 when the atheling Athelstan, King Æthelred’s eldest son, made his will and died, and that Æthelmaer died soon after.¹⁶ We should note, however, the fate of the hostages Æthelmaer had given in 1013. These, after King Swegen’s death on 3 February 1014 and Æthelred’s temporary recovery of the throne, were mutilated by Swegen’s son, Cnut — he had their hands, noses and ears cut off — and put ashore before he left England for Denmark.¹⁷ It is just possible, although perhaps unlikely, especially in view of Godwin’s adherence to Cnut two years later, that Wulfnoth was one of the unfortunate hostages. We are on firmer ground in thinking that Æthelred had punished Wulfnoth in 1009 and his father in 1013 for their defections by confiscation of property. In any case the family was in dire trouble. In 1014, however, a helping hand was offered when the atheling Athelstan in his will, which his reinstated father ratified, restored to Godwin, Wulfnoth’s son, the land at Compton (Sussex) which his father had owned.¹⁸ The bequest shows that in 1014 Godwin was in Athelstan’s good books and maybe an adherent of the atheling’s warrior brother, Edmund Ironside.

The date of Godwin’s birth can only be conjectured. As he died in 1053 and is unlikely to have lived long after sixty, he was probably born not far before 993. And as he was certainly adult in 1018–19 a much later date is precluded. If Godwin was indeed born about 993 in Sussex, he probably spent his youth on the fringe of the areas most heavily disturbed by viking raids. These had started again with Olaf Trygvason’s attack on Kent in 991, taken a more serious turn with the invasion of Danish armies under the brothers Thorkell the Tall and Heming in 1009–12,¹⁹ and become overwhelming when Swegen Forkbeard, king of Denmark, invaded in 1013 and forced the English royal family to take refuge in Normandy.²⁰ The invaders from Denmark or Normandy found entry easier through Kent or up Southampton Water than through Sussex, enclosed as it was by the Downs and the forest of Andredsweald. But the shire was ravaged in at least 994, 998 and 1009.²¹ It would also have had to contribute to the large sums of money which local communities and the royal government raised in order to buy the invaders off, as well as bear the cost of King Æthelred’s several attempts to create a defensive navy. They were hard times for all.

Until 1013 the main purpose of the raids was to collect provisions and loot; and what the vikings could not carry away they burnt or destroyed. The damage was, of course, patchy. Even armies to be numbered in thousands, while cutting a swathe through the countryside and occasionally sacking a town or borough, left even larger areas untouched. Nevertheless the kingdom as a whole was greatly disturbed. For the contemporary, or near contemporary, chronicler, a monk of Abingdon Abbey in Berkshire, it was a story of English ineptitude and cowardice, of royal irresolution and aristocratic treachery, with even the rare heroics ending in disaster and with no English military successes before Edmund Ironside’s unsustained victories in the spring of 1016. For Wulfstan the Homilist it was a time of shame. Even more disgraceful, he thought, than the ignominy inflicted by the heathen on the Christians, by the pirates and the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Author’s Preface
• List of Genealogies
• List of Plates
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Sources
• chapter one: The Family’s origins and Godwin’s Early Years
• chapter two: Godwin Under the Danish Kings, 1016–1042
• chapter three: Godwin in Power, 1042–1051
• chapter four: Godwin’s Children, 1053–1062
• chapter five: The Lull Before the Storms, 1062–1065
• chapter six: Harold’s Triumph, 1065–1066
• chapter seven: The Collapse of the Dynasty, 1066
• chapter eight: The Diaspora, 1066–1098
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index