Conquered

The Last Children of Anglo-Saxon England

Eleanor Parker

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350287068
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe médiévale

"Outstanding." - The Sunday Times
"Beautifully written." The Times
"Superbly adroit." The Spectator
"Excellent." BBC History Magazine The Battle of Hastings and its aftermath nearly wiped out the leading families of Anglo-Saxon England – so what happened to the children this conflict left behind? Conquered offers a fresh take on the Norman Conquest by exploring the lives of those children, who found themselves uprooted by the dramatic events of 1066. Among them were the children of Harold Godwineson and his brothers, survivors of a family shattered by violence who were led by their courageous grandmother Gytha to start again elsewhere. Then there were the last remaining heirs of the Anglo-Saxon royal line – Edgar Ætheling, Margaret, and Christina – who sought refuge in Scotland, where Margaret became a beloved queen and saint. Other survivors, such as Waltheof of Northumbria and Fenland hero Hereward, became legendary for rebelling against the Norman conquerors. And then there were some, like Eadmer of Canterbury, who chose to influence history by recording their own memories of the pre-conquest world. From sagas and saints' lives to chronicles and romances, Parker draws on a wide range of medieval sources to tell the stories of these young men and women and highlight the role they played in developing a new Anglo-Norman society. These tales – some reinterpreted and retold over the centuries, others carelessly forgotten over time – are ones of endurance, adaptation and vulnerability, and they all reveal a generation of young people who bravely navigated a changing world and shaped the country England was to become.

1

Hero of the English
Hereward

Hastings was only the first battle of the Norman Conquest. In the years after 1066, the Normans faced outbreaks of military opposition in different parts of the country: first at Exeter and in the west of England in 1067–8, then in 1069 in the north, where English rebels, assisted by forces sent by the kings of Denmark and Scotland, succeeded in capturing York from the Normans. The city was recaptured in the winter of 1069–70, and William punished the region for supporting the resistance by laying waste to the countryside – the notorious ‘Harrying of the North’.¹ In the spring of 1070, some of the rebels regathered with their Danish allies at the Isle of Ely, making their base there for some months, until the besieged Isle finally submitted to the Normans and the Danes returned to Denmark. Though there was a further uprising in 1075, the end of the siege of Ely was the point at which many of the rebels made peace with William.

At different times, the English leaders of these rebellions included young men from families who had been prominent before the conquest, including surviving members of the family of Harold Godwineson, Edgar Ætheling, the only remaining male representative of the Anglo-Saxon royal line, Edwin and Morcar, sons of the former earl of Mercia, and Waltheof, whose father had been earl of Northumbria. In later chapters we will look at the lives of some of these men and their sisters – young people born into wealth and power, whose fates were dramatically affected by the conquest. In this chapter, we begin with a man who in birth and influence was among the least significant of the rebels, but whose posthumous reputation outshone them all. This was Hereward, famous in medieval legend for leading a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the Normans in the Fens around Ely. The historical evidence for Hereward’s life is very scanty, and he is scarcely mentioned in the contemporary sources which document the rebellions of 1068–71. However, the legendary tradition that developed around his life story provides an important insight into one strand of English reaction to the Norman Conquest, not just in the immediate aftermath of 1066 but through the centuries that followed.

We will explore how Hereward was remembered in different medieval sources, especially a detailed account of his life known as the Gesta Herwardi (Deeds of Hereward), which was probably composed in the first half of the twelfth century.² This text tells how Hereward, exiled from England as a teenager for riotous behaviour, has a series of adventures around the British Isles and beyond in the 1060s. While he is absent he hears that England has been conquered, and he returns home to find himself displaced from his lands – no less an outlaw at home than he had been abroad. The rest of the narrative concerns his struggles against the new rulers in the area, set around the time of the siege of Ely, as he triumphs over Norman soldiers both through physical prowess and clever schemes of trickery and disguise. Much of this text is clearly fictional, and though it may be partly based on first-hand accounts of Hereward’s life, it also draws inspiration from Anglo-Norman romance and Anglo-Scandinavian tales of exiles and outlaws.

Like many medieval romances, the Gesta Herwardi is a coming-of-age story, about a young person finding their place in the world. It is the story of a teenager becoming alienated from, then reconciled to, his family and home; of an untried warrior proving his strength for the first time; of a young man’s experience of falling in love. We do not actually know how old Hereward was at the time of the conquest, and he may have been somewhat older than the young men who fought beside him, whose stories we will look at later. But his youth is important in the Gesta, which sets out to tell how, in the turmoil of the post-conquest years, a wild and rebellious teenager became one of England’s greatest heroes.

The people of the Fenland

To explore the legendary tradition which grew up around Hereward, we have to travel first into the Fenland, the region in eastern England which provides the setting for Hereward’s adventures with the Normans. In the Middle Ages, this large expanse of low-lying land extended across southern Lincolnshire, eastern Norfolk and what is now Cambridgeshire. The environment of the Fens was changed forever by drainage schemes in the seventeenth century, so it can be difficult for a modern audience to picture quite how unusual and distinctive this landscape was in the medieval period, and how powerfully its environment shaped the imagination and identity of the people who lived there.³ The romance of Hereward’s story has been, from the beginning, closely linked with the specific landscape which the outlaw was imagined to inhabit: a world of reeds and rivers, wetlands, fens, and water-meadows, interspersed with islands of higher ground.

On several of those islands were communities of monks, and it is from these abbeys that our best evidence for Hereward’s legend survives. In the Middle Ages the abbeys of Ely, Peterborough, Crowland and Ramsey formed a network of influential communities, important not only as powerful spiritual centres and prominent local landowners but also as guardians of the Fenland’s history and heritage. These monasteries had a great deal in common with each other, yet proudly maintained the independence of their individual identities and traditions; at times they were fierce rivals, at other times allies in the face of greater external threats. They were often in close communication with each other and with the world beyond, while at the same time extolling the glorious isolatio n of their Fenland setting. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they were all centres of literature, engaged in producing chronicles, saints’ lives and other kinds of texts in Latin and (unusually, at this date) in English.

These works of local and institutional history record and reflect on each abbey’s own story, placing it within the context of national events, and they often include some discussion of the monks’ relationship to the distinctive character of their environment.⁴ The wealth and influence of these monasteries derived in part from their skilful management of the natural resources which surrounded them, and their chroniclers make much of the great richness and fertility of the Fenland world. A twelfth-century chronicler from Ely begins the Liber Eliensis with a panegyric to the Fens, especially his own island:

Ely, which we begin by declaring undoubtedly worthy of renown, is the largest of the islands of the Fens. It is magnificent in its wealth and its towns; equally praiseworthy for its woods, vineyards and waters; exceedingly rich in all fruit, livestock-breeding and crops. We call it in English ‘Elge’, that is, it has taken its name ‘from the abundance of eels which are caught in these same Fens’, as Bede, the most eloquent of Englishmen, tells us.⁵

The allusion to Bede establishes the great antiquity of the abbey, which traced its history to its foundation by St Æthelthryth in the seventh century, and for this author the wealth of Ely, even the abundance of its eels, is a sign of divine favour in the situation of this holy island. The Ely author might have liked to think his island especially blessed, but similarly rapturous descriptions of the Fenland’s fertility can be found in the chronicles of Ramsey and Peterborough.⁶ At Crowland, tradition kept alive the uncanny environment in which that abbey’s chief saint, Guthlac, had made his hermitage in the eighth century: in the hagiography of Guthlac, the Fens are full of devils and the saint’s retreat at Crowland is imagined as the sole spot of light and fertile land in a dangerous wilderness.⁷

All four of these Fenland abbeys have a role to play in the development of the Hereward legend, and many of his adventures take place on their islands and across the spaces in between. In the stories about Hereward, the Fens’ strange and unearthly world of waters, reeds and rivers is a character in its own right. It is a landscape Hereward and his men know intimately, and their enemies do not: Hereward is familiar with the hidden paths and rivers of the Fens, and uses them to elude pursuit or travel unseen by those who are trying to track him down. He is familiar, too, with the people who inhabit this world, the fishermen and tradesmen who ply their wares by boat between its islands; when need demands, he can play the part of a fisherman or a seller of pots, or hide himself under a cargo of reeds in a flat-bottomed marshland punt. Part of his tactical advantage in eluding the invaders comes from this useful local knowledge, but it is not merely a strategic benefit. For a Fenland audience, his power as a hero comes from the fact that he is a part of this world, a product of it, and prepared to act as its defender. There is a striking moment in the Gesta Herwardi when a Norman soldier, approaching a group of men who are (though he does not know it) the outlaw and his followers, cries out in angry contempt not only against Hereward but against the Fenland itself:

Are you from the company of that rascal Hereward, who has ruined so many by trickery and drawn so many to him to help in his wicked deeds? If you agree to reveal the villain’s whereabouts now to our lord the earl, you’ll deserve to get rewards and honours! For truly that hostile band of enemies may force us in the end to live in this hateful swamp, and to pursue them helplessly through muddy marsh, surging waters and sharp reeds.⁸

Hatred for Hereward and contempt for the Fenland landscape seem to go together, and when Hereward reveals his identity to his enemy and shoots him with a near-fatal blow, his action avenges the insult to his marshes as well as to himself.

Just as the Hereward story was shaped by this environment, so the legend of this local hero helped to reinforce the idea of the Fenland as a defined region with its own particular history and identity. The opening description of the Fens in the Liber Eliensis, quoted earlier, is partly indebted to a passage in the Gesta Herwardi in which the wealth of Ely’s natural resources is credited with helping Hereward and his allies resist the Norman siege of the Isle. Significantly, the Liber Eliensis later returns to descriptions of the Fenland landscape when it tells the story of Hereward’s defence of the Isle; the arrival of a Norman army is presented as an attempt to conquer Ely’s island independence, forcibly bridging the waters which divide it from the outside world. At Peterborough, meanwhile, it is in an account of Hereward’s rebellion that we find one of the earliest instances of the word ‘Fenland’ being used to refer to this region: when Hereward joins forces with a fleet from Denmark at Ely, a Peterborough chronicler records that ‘þet englisce folc of eall þa feonlandes comen to heom’ (‘the English people from all the Fenlands came to them’) in support.⁹ At this time the feonland did not correspond precisely with any contemporary political boundaries, but there is a clear sense here that it is an area in its own right. We will see this again as we examine the development of the Hereward legend: in this story of English rebellion and resistance, local and regional identities intersect with national ones in important ways (Figure 2).

Figure 2 A surviving area of the Fens near Ely. © Author’s own.

The earliest sources: ‘Hereward and his gang’

The firm historical evidence for Hereward’s life is extremely limited.¹⁰ In the earliest sources, he comes into view for a brief period in 1070–1, taking part in resistance to the Normans at Peterborough and Ely, but most details of his life before and after this remain obscure, and many of the statements made by later writers about his family and deeds are open to question. It is probable that his origins were in Lincolnshire, close to the region where he was active in 1070–1: a man named Hereward appears in Domesday Book as a minor landowner in southern Lincolnshire, holding lands as a tenant of the abbeys of Peterborough and Crowland.¹¹ These landholdings all lie fairly close together in a small area around Bourne and Stamford, on the south-west edges of Lincolnshire. In Domesday Book there are references to the fact that this Hereward ‘fled the country’, which indicates we are dealing with the same figure as the outlaw of later legend.

In the romance tradition, Hereward’s ancestral lands are said to be at Bourne, and though Domesday Book does not provide any contemporary evidence which would support this link, the general area seems right. The Gesta Herwardi names Hereward’s father as Leofric of Bourne and his mother as Aedina, a Latinized form of an English name such as Eadgifu, but nothing more is known of them. Later medieval historians attempted to link Hereward to more distinguished ancestors, including Leofric, earl of Mercia, and his wife Godgifu (‘Lady Godiva’), but such claims are implausible. These supposed family connections will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter; although inaccurate, they tell us something interesting about the people later writers wanted Hereward to be related to.¹²

The first evidence for Hereward’s activiti...