DIVISION Of THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY PASADENA, CALIFORNIA 91125

WOMEN AND THE LEGITIMISATION OF SUCCESSION

AT THE NORMAN CONQUEST

..i.<,1\lUlE o� \\"" ,.<"'.:� Eleanor Searle �� � � � i".'.'...... 0 ::5 Q � ,,;,., � � � (I'� ....

328

SOCIAL SCIENCE WORKING PAPERJuly 1980 ABSTRACT

Marriage in the European military classes of the eleventh­ century entailed a transfer of property and the commencement of a new . family that had claims to inheritance. This being so, it is argued ,f l dJtu "'"'""' ' \ \ f.. •1 {; that the arrangement of women's marriages within vassal-groups would l 05\VUU /Ho.I•·"·' have been subject to the same 'public' scrutiny as was male ;-, .. . .i' .-� · inheritance. Evidence is presented that suggests that this was the Ca� • 11 I • I !'·• "·'m ' case, and that at the arrangement of a woman's marriage the ? inheritance of her family might be channeled through her to her I /; . i .-.C'DIJD �-. I husband, if he were preferable to lord and vassal-group to the males ' .. -"- ''",_f,,.,, L ' K R E ·- n.1�;V'J :_ L./ _.1\J M C E� - --"'- in the family. This model of marriage and inheritance is then applied . . · · L ... - • 3"""''" . e• k to the evidence of the Norman conquest of England. Two marriage­ ,,.. ..,, ,.�. l ,,,, ' - � ' ' . ·I .. ;/ · ' '""' \ \ patterns emerge. First, lesser lords and knights legitimised their -{cvtJ Q.· . �- -;.;· 'r==:::: t ...... ,._< \ occupatio n of Anglo-Saxon manors assigned them by their lords, through �-� (< . \, \ J' I . the means of marriage to Anglo-Saxon women, declared to be heiresses. � ' - I ' " , ' ··C' - � r .;" "'''' _, Secondly, among the magnates, legitimisation of membership in their . •" w / "' � ' ) N. L \ /'> E A I group remained the point, and pattern, of marriage. Norman magnates i .?' I ,r·�'''" � '"';• De • o>,,•[[ � <' )( -:'" c_v J_/. i who employed the first pat tern of legitimisation did not marry the \ ;:;!: f.-,,c! , E; Ti ' • . . �-.:.i· · ' " '· . €'>Cl"drr ;:r/ k \ I hrc>\�h•rv L 1:1 _,. !.. • daughters of the Anglo-Saxon magnates, but lived with them, in unions � J, S •L"'·,r., '- ' � , '' ' ' ' ) '- ,· /- ' ' ' '. 11 . acce pted by the natives, but not presented to their own group for --. .·0',. ">°" ! J ," , / ;" � · - _,; , C "d' >' " T , n-· .. J I ' ", » � -- '" _ ,: - :'" " t � --.U. •�/ approval. The few Anglo-Saxon magnates who survived were denied - D � •" '-"'"�� ' T /! --J ED U " , " � . / \.\ >. "m""' · "•-, '] j - marriage with Norman women, for, it is argued, such marriages would . " ' "'""/ •, \' ' ____ ' " " / - - "'. '-..-{ '\ (°" --"1 . '! ' have involved acceptance in the magnate-group of Normans. William the '" "" " I I _ � I'_, . , l / - ., -(, ' ,.,_.c c WG t;; "'' ' · >\ [' ' ( :. L . .:V ' - - · •• \ •O \ ' Conqueror attempted to secure such legitimisation for the English, but � - �� • I .. ---- - M[U · ' " c_r., A P ""' /); j', ) /• ,�""·o " d '' :: "-. ·, ' failed to convince his vassals. The interests of the king/duke and . r:J ,,. , r !, C ,, \ �, ' "... ) . «·, ' .c.'=·- /"'{ '' '� y- -� . ;,· · � / \ .,<· , . his great Norman vassals are thus shown to have been in opposition: \I • I .. j ,. c , .. : < ·------/ ". \ he appears to have wished the English earls to remain in possession, '' • , / , -.. . .. 1,, ,, "" , p while his vassals wished to dis place them. His acquiescence suggests P H .. ,.,,, '., l ----- ·'"""") that the power of a vassal-group over its lord -- the 'constitutional' l """• , �"'--5�-�� �-:;,_J , .... power to advise, consent and deny consent -- was highly developed at an earlier time than is usually assigned it. �_)·-- " """'" " " 2

marriage for his daughter , sister , neice orHcousin (cognatam) let him

speak to me ab out it . But I wi ll not take anything from him fo r this

permission , nor will I fo rbid him to give her , save if he should wish

WOMEN AND THE LEGITIMISATION OF SUCC ESSION to marry her to my enemy .' He then of course promises to arrang e the AT THE NORMAN CONQUEST 2 marriage of the orphaned he iress with the counsel of his barons .

Eleanor Searle I propose taking the statement very seriously too , as an

expression of good lordship -- and not just of good ro yal lordship. A

mal e wi th a claim to inherit could be contro lled directly, for he 'Did not Rou , my ancestor and founder of our people , along

with our ancestors , defeat the French king? •••no r could would one day present himself for acceptance as vassal and peer. A the French king hope for safety until he had humbly bestowed both daughter and the land called by you No rmandy .' woman , if she were ever to be declared an heiress , had to be

controlled at the moment of her marriage -- from the first to the last Wi lliam the Conqueror addressing his barons on the eve of the battle of Hastings: Huntingdon , 2 01 3 of them .

Now, the chronicles of the No rman conquest take marriage very Historians are faced not only with the search for new data ,

seriously. Indeed , once one begins to examine them , marriage is a but with the continual need to reexamine the assumptions they bring to

continuing theme of the Norman settlement in England . I wo uld argue the ir interpretation of data . This is peculiarly necessary for

that if we too take the ir theme seriously , we wil l see a modified medievalists . Men do not necessarily articulate the logic of their

picture of the politic s, perhaps even something new ab out the social choices , and we are in constant peril of attrib ut ing our own

chronology , and the means of reducing the violence, of that assumptions to men and women unlike us , and thus mis understanding the

settlement . The attempt to see whether they have anything to te ll us normal operation of their institutions .

should be made if only because men at the time took them seriously .

For several years now , I have been trying to look anew at some They were in the process of forming political.institutions out of the

problems in inheritance in feudal society through the light thrown on raw materials of family and war-b and loyalty . Marriage among them wa s

the institut ion by control ov er women's marriage.I Henry I's carefully arranged . It certa inly entail ed a transfer , with the bride,

coronation charter of 1100 takes the matter very serio us ly ; it is the of possessions and claims to inheritance. That being so , marriage

third capitulum , coming after control over the church and male within any vassal group was necessarily political , for it involved a

inheritance. 'If any baron or any of my men should wi sh to arrange a 3 4

shift in the resources by which the group maintained itself. It in terdependen t group wa s the only right a man,could possibly have to a involved an ac ceptance of the woman's husband as a legitimate holder share in the resources by which that group pro tected itse lf . A man of that resource and perhaps more importantly a legitima te claimant to did homage to his lord for hi s land , but no wi se lord wo uld take membership in the group should the men of the family die or prove homag e wi tho ut a decision of his court of vassals: their declaratio n themselves unwo rthy as heirs . If marriages are looked at in this way , that Xi s�·

I propose that it is inconceivable that they could have taken place Inheritance is recruitment , then . Security implied the witho ut a group ac ceptance , and this was no doubt particularly true of necessity of continuing to demonstrate the qualities that secured great marriages . No thing wa s more constantly anxio us than inheritance acceptance. Just as the rules of inheritance we re of necessity and recruitment , and marriage entailed both. Inheri tance in the flexible , so tenure could no t be unquestioned . It is important to seignorial wo rld of the eleventh-century could be neither automatic rememb er this lest we overestimate the seriousness of the fault tha t no r governed by rigid rules . From the lord's point of view this is might lead to dispossession . The fault of Mab el of Belleme's father , easy enough to see , for he could no t afford an in effective , hostile or Wil liam Talvas , was not tha t he wa s disloyal to hi s Norman lord and even unreliable vassal . But it is as true of the vas sal group . A peers . It wa s that he could no t control hi s disloyal son , Arnold . We lord's vassals -- the claimant's prospec tive peers -- had an anxio us do not know why his son Oliver was unacceptable as his heir -- but he in terest in the claimant's qualities . No vassal group could well wa s so . The sis ter , Mabel , wa s the heir , and Oliver wa s thereafter afford to have members who we re in themselves incapable, or unab le to maintained wi thin the family until old age when he became a monk . inspir e and hold the loyal ty of their own men . The unstable man , even Oliver ma y have been moved by the example of his merry uncle who had the unknown man , was un thinkab le as an heir , becaus e he wa s resigned the lord ship and part of its lands, and had preferred to be unthinkab le as a peer . We concentrate on the lord when we think of bishop of the lordship 's diocese. The cost of inheriting wa s no t low , the warrantor of a vassal's land . But , by the very logic of feudal and there must have been sons who preferred no t to pay so dearly. To power , he did not act alone . A unilateral decision by a lord wa s a the No rman duke and hi s magna tes , Mab el was perhaps the preferable dangerous matter for him because ultimately his group of vassals were heir because she could be married to the formidable and loyal Roger II the strength of his arm. The vassals relied upon one another as a of Mon tgomery . 4 The dis tribution of resources was a decision in which court where their advic e and assen t made them as well as their lord many needed to participate . the warrantors of one another's secure possession and of the peacef ul

succession of their children . Admittance to memb ership in such an In such a wo rld we canno t continue to imagine that men could 5 6

lay down rigid rules for the purpose of defining a unique heir , not marrying Breton girl s even even a mal e heir . But they could , and did , insistently defin e To have cleym tho row heritage, legitimate claimants , a 'pool' of heirs . Battles ov er succession Ne dowarye thorow mariage. 6 could , in this way , be limited. The castle of Roger de Mo rtemer of the 105 0s wa s taken from him -- not because he had betrayed hi s lord, Rights of inheritance can, this realizes , be channelled thro ugh women , but becaus e he had received into that castle his lord's enemy . But whether or not men exist in the 'pool' of heirs . If so , then we must Roger was left a powerful baron , quite powerful enough to make revise our notions , and look at the women of the Conque st for new trouble. He did not . And part of the reason must be that the castle evidence of continuity or discontinuity . was not given out again to just anyone . Wil liam de Warenne , who

succeeded Roger, was carefully called 'consanguin eus eius , tiro The group that conquered Eng land faced there the old problems

s legitimus ': of the acceptable pool of heirs . Neither Mabel's father , of legitimacy in wa ys that exacerbated their difficulty . The se are

brother nor uncle made trouble when the great Belleme lordship was problems faced not by Wil liam , but by his vassals, the group on whose

channelled through a female . We think of broilsome No rman lords -­ cohesion and mutual trust would depend the success of the conquest and

and so they were -- but in their broilsomeness and in security they their own enrichment . Let me identify what I take to be three maj or

sought , and even abided by , tenure decisions lent legitimacy by the aspects of the problem of legitimacy faced between 1066 and 1100.

elevation to the inheritance of one of a finite number of 'rightful' First there was the problem of allowing entrance to their group to men

heirs . It wa s as true in the Anglo-Scandinavian kingdom they were especially Englishmen -- who ac cepted their lord and were accepted

shortly to conquer. King Cnut's loyal Dane, Siward , married the by him -- for here their lord's interest differed from his vassals' .

daughter of the older Anglo-Saxon house that had been earls of This is related to the more obvio us legitimisation: the acceptability

Northumbria. In Earl Wa ltheof and his brother, their sons , true to the Eng lish of new lords. And this in turn is relate d to the third

legitimacy wa s achieved . The in-c oming of the foreigner wa s a moment problem , that of the dispossession of families from land . The

of great danger to such fragile polities . Even as late as the conquest was a brutal business , but total disinheritance in the

fourteenth-century the necessity of , and me ans of , legitimising such eleventh-century wa s more dangerous than we may imagine: indeed so

7 entrance was understood. In the legend of the 11,000 virgin s we read disruptive that it wa s avoid ed whenever possible. Finally, the

that Conan , conqueror of Brittany , caused their trag edy because he conquerors faced the problem of their own heirs . Fo r them , in large

wanted wi ves for his men , and wa s foolish enough to obj ect to their measure , England had been conquered . But every generation had 7 8

11 required much testing and some rejecting before trust could be the king. The greatest earl , because his family would be so great,

established. So it would be for the he irs of the conquerors. Let us had , in the way of marriage no more freedom than the littlest girl.

look at these problems of vassalage and legitimacy through what I This is dwelling long upon a marriage that never took place

propose as the trad itional means of their solution -- the control of and may never have been planned , but the earl iest versions of the

family -- and we shall see why marriages , achieved and failed , are supposed arrangements tell us clearly just how significant such

such an impo rtant theme in the tale of the Norman conquest. arrang ements were thought to be. Such a marriage enta iled the

acceptance by William as lord , of Haro ld as vassal , and would have

I NORMAN VAS SALS, ENGLISH KING been the visible sign that William had warranted Harold's possession

such it would have determined the line of inheritance , The theme of arranged and controlled marriage begins , of Wes sex. As

making it conceivable to channel the descent of Harold's possessions appropriately , in the negociations preceding the death of Edward the

into the ducal-regal family , and creating in Harold's descendents Confessor. Harold , earl of We ssex, had a wi fe , Ed ith Swanneck , no

serious claims upon the throne. Whether or not the sto ry has any less a wife and the mother of no less legitimate children because

8 truth in it , it wa s in keeping with William's own early conception of the ir un ion wa s 'more Danico•, But Haro ld had not yet married 'in

9 himself as English king, attempting to rule through Englishmen and matrimonio Christiano more' , in Robert of Torigny' s phrase. And so

English institutions , altered to fit his conception of lordship.12 he wa s free to entertain the proposal of such a marriage to Duke

10 agree One of the rocks on which that attempt foundered , I think our ev id ence William's daughter , as the early source s agree he did. They

will help to show. too that marriage involved a formal relation between the giver and the

, rece iver of the woman , that it wa s a channel of cla ims to property Th is attempt of William to be an Anglo-Norman king as Cnut had

and as such , necessarily subj ect to control. William of Malmesbury been an Anglo-Scand inavian one , was surely one of the reasons why the

puts in Harold's mo uth a version of marriage-formation that his Normans met virtually no widespread , organized resistance in the three

hearers wo uld have recognized as necessary for so great an earl. When or four years after Hastings. Perhaps another lies in the ag e of the

he breaks off the betrothal Harold denies that it could have been remaining Eng lish earl s and the Aethling. Waltheof of Northumbria had

: just as it wo uld be judged in effectual for a girl in binding on him l3 been too young to succeed ('adhuc parvulus') when his father died in

her parent s' custody to vow the disposal of her body in marriage the mid -lOSOs , and his claim to the earldom had been on that account

witho ut her parents' knowledge, he says , so would such a promise be passed over. He could have been little older than his mid-teens in ipline of pointless for him who lived sub virga regis , under the disc 9 10

1066 and wi thout ex perience as far as we know. The other earls Edwin Shrewsbury fo rt and burned the town, ev idently with imp unity , and in and Mo rcar we re also in their teens, and the Ae thl ing wa s but a boy. such circumstances the loyalty of even the easily ov erawed boroughs

All were unmarried . Only one was ever to be married . None wa s an was doubtful. Orderic's picture of Norman insecurity during the late alternative to Wi lliam as king . What the earls pa tently wan ted wa s to 1060s is vivid testimony to the superficiality of the 'conque st':

'ill-fortune', he wrote . 'held victors and vanqui shed alike in its be earls of the old style -� the king's men , but masters in the ir

16 earldoms. And , as is often remarked , so for a time , and wi th snare,• and some conquerors preferred to return to Normandy. qualificat ions , they remained . Mat ters were in suspension in the la te sixties . William fitzOsbern

had taken charge of the earldom of Hereford , for many years already The Normans had the ab ility to march through the North and the under Anglo-French governanc e -- under the son of the English princess West and even to keep a hold on garrisons , but the marches in the Goda and her husband Dreux of the Vexin . El sewhere in we stern Me rcia

1060s were hardly under Norman control . As Orderic says ,', ••in the there were isolated Norman garrisons , but there were no other No rman

marches of his kingdom , to the we st and north , the inhabitants • • • earls. Gherbod the Fleming had been given the city and district of

had only obeyed the English king in the time of King Edward and his Chester , but he had been unable to establish himsel f there for , 'he

predecessors when it suited their ends•,14 Sensitive as always to was continually molested by the English and We lsh alike .•1 7 Orderic ,

Mercian affairs, Orderic ha s left us a picture of Mercia's anx io us who knew much of the matter , tells us that Earl Edwin had been loyalty in these years to the young earls Edwin and Mo rcar , who had promised a daughter of King Wi lliam's as wife , and wa s wa iting fo r its taken themselves back to Mercia wi th their only sister , Al dgeva of fulfillment . He had no t been accepted into the ducal family, and this Chester . 'A progeny both fair and greatly to be praised ,' he calls wa s the sine gua non for great power under Wi lliam -- the sine gua non

them. 'The brothers were • both remarkably handsome , nobly for hold ing Mercia . There were , then , promi ses from the king , and

connec ted wi th kins folk who se power and influence were widespread , and perhaps hopes on the king 's part that he could really be the Anglo- we ll-loved by the people at large. Clerks and monks ceaselessly No rman king he cla imed to be.

offered prayers to God on their behalf; and throngs of poo r daily made

15 Wi th the crisis of 1069/70 in the North the game turned very supplication', The brothers had submitted to the new king , and

ostensibly Earl Edwin wa s now governing in the name of King William, nasty indeed , and must have hardened the opinion of William' s No rman

but the existence of a royal garrison at Shrewsbury was a vas sals about an Ang lo-Norman realm that wo uld include the Eng lish as

magna tes . precautionary measure of clear significance . Ro yal control was the In that year Earl Waltheof joined the invading Danes in the

Northumbrian resistance. Waltheo f was no doubt the most dangerous of long-term aim.. Even so , in the 1060s the men of Chester besieged the 1 2 11

legit imacy , and her children (supposing her brother and sister the three earls , his centers of support farther from No rman centers

remained unwed -- as of course they did) would be the direc t he irs of than wa s MercJla , and beyond him lay Lo thian , and beyond that the 2 1 the Anglo-Saxon kings. Waltheo f and the No rmans were thrown in to powerful king of Scots. Waltheof's settlement with Wi lliam after the

one ano ther's arms , and his marriage among them sealed the ir mutual Conqueror's northern vic tory is a measure of his impo rtance. He

acceptance. But while Waltheof lived it closed the No rth to their submi tted to William personally and wi thin mo nth s he had ac cepted

ambitions. Jud ith , the Conqueror's neice, together wi th the earldom of Hun tingdon

18 and No rthamp ton. As the Hyde chronicler preserves the tradition, No thing so formidable as Malcolm of Scotland lay beyond Me rcia

19 Jud ith was 'nomine pac is dota(e)•, His Hun tingdon estates were and western We ssex , and the permanence of the garrisons there must conferred upon Waltheo f as Judith's husband. They were her dowry; she have we akened English independence. No thing in the situation of the held them at the time of Domesday and through his and her daughter , sons of Earl Aelfgar made the No rman s necessary to them. The Norman s' esta tes and earldom passed in to the hands of men who sui ted the point of view ab out Edwin and Morcar mus t have been anything but

20 Normans. Through that marriage Waltheo f became the accepted vassal unan imo us. Duke William himself may well have been satisfied to rule

of the lord of the Normans and nephew of the ducal house. Through it in England as an English king wh ile gradually transforming tha t he became a peer and companion of the duke's vassals. It canno t have undisciplined poli ty into the manipulable No rman form in wh ich each been done wi thout the agreement of the No rman magna tes upon whom family's resources we re channeled in to the hands of men who no t only

Wi lliam rel ied. Un questionably there were advantages in accepting vowed loyalty to himsel f and to one another , but were required to

Waltheof among the ir number. It would attach a great and anc ient demonstrate tha t loyalty wi th unremitting zeal. That in the sixties

No rthern lineage to the in terests of Norman England rather than to William wa s still undecided on his course can be argued from the

Scotland. In 1070 no Norman could hope to control and govern in the evid ence that he was attempting to be a traditional king.

North , but in Wal theof the Normans had an earl who could command

To his chief vassals the opportunity must have looked qui te loyalties there. He wa s al so the one Northumbrian now not likely to

different. Th ey were in a hurry; William wa s not. They had their own be won over to an alliance wi th Mal colm of Scotland , the protecto r of

vassal s to satisfy and their own flourishing families to provide for. Walt heo f's rival Gospatric , and of Edgar Ae thl ing. In 1069 Malcolm

If such a large par t of England we re to be closed to c onquest and himself had of course married the Ae thling's sister Margaret. Her

settlement permanently , would the dangerous game have been worth the claims to any , and if necessary , all , of England were suf ficiently

candle? I propose tha t by 1070-7 1 the Normans were safe enough in indisputable to clothe any conque st in the North wi th the mantle of 1 3 14

their hold upon We ssex, East Ang lia and the East Mid lands to would forever wait in vain , his position slowly eroding. From that contemplate the tho roughgoing conquest of Mercia , and tha t the No rman moment Edwin and Mo rcar had no more choice than Hereward. magna tes over ruled any temptation on their lord's part to ab sorb the How long it took to hunt the brothers down we canno t say . great English families into their tightly knit and exc lusive group . Their legend s and tha t of Hereward merge -- quite rightly, for they

The ma tter came to a head , if we ac cept the ex plana tion of are the same tale of the d espera tion of the to tally disinherited , the

2 3 Orderic and the hin ts of other chronic lers , over this question of Earl unac cepted . We do know that by 1071 Morcar had been captured. Some

Edwin 's marriage . months later Edwin wa s dead at the hands of mu rderers. Some eighty Edwin 's demand for a Norman marriage like

Wal theo f's would necessarily be the subj ec t of a council . The demand ye ar s later , in c.1155, the poet Geo ffroi Gaimar was requested by a

was rej ected by Wil liam' s councillors , strong enough by the end of the lady , the wi fe of an Ang lo-No rman knight, to tell the tale of the

dec ade to want Mercia . William accepted their autho rity . If this English and their noble ex ploits. It is of the highest in terest that

pat ter n be right then we can ob serve a side of the political genius of in the ye ars when clers lisants were concen trating on .!Q!!!!!!.S � for

the court, a knightly household was listening to the tale of England the Conqueror we are seldom aware of: he knew when to be persuaded

and when his trust in his vassals must be proved by allowing them to and of the resistance of Hereward:

take the lead . He wa s then wi lling to risk his life fighting for 'There we re many outlaws .

their advantage. From the moment when the No rmans denied a No rman One noble man wa s their lord, Who wa s named Hereward , woman to the English earl , the conquest bec ame their s more than their One of the best of the country . No rmans had disinherited him . Now all were gathered wi th him , duke's. Orderic says , • •••th e noble youths Edwin and Morcar , sons

Earl Mo rcar and his thegns • • •

of Earl Ael fgar , rebelled •••Fo r King Wi lliam , when Earl Edwin had Thus for several years he warred , made peace wi th him had gran ted him authority over his brother and Till a lady sent for him Tha t he should come to her , if he pleased ; almost a third of England , promising that he would give him his own Her fa ther wo uld give him his great estates If he took her for wife , and then daughter in marriage; but later , lis tening to the dishonest counsels Well could he war against the French. It wa s Ael ftrued who sent thus of his envio us and greedy Norman followers , he wi thheld the maiden To Hereward , whom she loved much. So many times she sent for him from the noble youth , who greatly desired her and had long wai ted for That Hereward made ready; He went to her wi th many folk .

her. At last his patience wore out and he and his brother were roused But, verily, he had a truce: to rebel lion .•22 Af ter a long wait for ac cept ance eit her a formal He wa s ab out to make pe ace wi th the king . Wit hin the month he was to pass decision of the Norman cour t had been made or Edwin realized tha t he The sea , to fight the men of Le Man s 1 5 16

25 Who had taken the king's castles. peace. He had even been there before: He had slain Gaut ier de! Bois , And Dan Gefrai de! Ma ine Wi thin a year Roger II of Montgomery had replaced Earl Edwin He had kept a we ek in prison . Now he thought to go in real peace, in Shropshire. One can see his me ans of bind ing his greatest Fo r gold and silver he had great plenty . administrator to himself and his sons there. He impo rted his neice When the Normans heard this , 24 They broke the king's peace , they set on him . Amieria for whomever held the shrievalty of Shropshire . She and the

At his meat they set on him • (And killed the Englishman .) office and its vast land-holdings went first to Wa rin the Bald , and

after his death to her second husband , Warin's successor from among In Gaimar 's legend are preserved the elements I have been 2 the Montgomery vassals to lady , land and office. 6 This is the emphasizing . Disinheritance breeds desperate resistance , but great marriage pa ttern of the magna tes and the ir upper vassals . Amieria and wealth in English hands could have been used against the invaders . Jud ith conveyed acceptance and the resources that go wi th acceptance. Women are endowed wi th property at marriage , and this can be an This class continued the practice of the ir group and recrui ted to occasion for the transferrance of the entire patrimony to the new the ir own vassal groups by the dowr ies they assigned the ir women , and couple . But the English war-leaders would have b een loyal to King in termingled the ir possessions by complicated assignments of dower and Wi lliam and wi shed to make peac e wi th him. It was the Norman vassals dowry. They married the ir sons to one ano ther's women , marrying as of the king who refused such an acceptance, and they resorted to much wi th No rman inheritance-right s and dowries in mind as English . murder to see tha t it fa iled . Th e memory of the rej ec ted marriage of Such marriages meant much to the cohesiveness and balance of property Edwin , c.1070-1 had , I think , pas sed wi th considerable accuracy into within the group . And since this wa s so , the marriage pursued in the the legend of Hereward the Wake . face of prohib ition wa s a cause for disse isin qui te as compelling as

Orderic makes this the moment of the push into Mercia: 'Af ter rece iving an enemy into one's castle.

King William had defeated the lead ing Mercian earls as I have rela ted Is this not why it wa s a 'bride-ale' that wa s so fa tal to -- Edwin being dead and Mo rcar languishing in prison -- he (Will iam) Roger , earl of Herefo rd and Ralph of Gael , earl of the Ea st Anglian s? divided up the chief provinces of England among his followers'. The Mo st accoun ts speak of rebellion, and some even of a plot to replace dis membermen t of Me rcia had begun . Th is is arguab ly the evil time of Wil liam, but in favour of whom no one seems to have imag ined . But let which Orderic recalled stories from his boyhood -- stories imbibed me conc entrate on Florence of Wo rcester and Lanfranc , and suggest that from his English kin of how the Normans suddenly turned rapacious and Florence gives us a hint that makes sense of wha t happened , and best attacked the English among st whom they had been living in relative 17 18

2 7 fit s the tone of Lanfranc's letters to Earl Roger and to the king . ind ucing the king to forgive them . William wa s at the moment in

If we take Florence of Wo rcester 's version seriously , the ' reb ellion' Normandy . Waltheo f went to the vic e-geran t Lanfranc , and having they undertook consisted of disob edience: the marriag e between Earl confessed that he had joined , but against his will , he received

Ralph and Earl Roger's sister had been forbidden , and yet they went penance; on the archbishop's advic e he went on to Wi lliam in Normandy, ahead . Here are the elements of his story , and to me they are vastly begged his fo rgiveness and gave himself up to the king 's mercy. In more plausib le than that a serio us reb ellion had been planned by two the meantime the earls withdrew to their forts and began to call up men who showed no trace of careful planning in their actions , and one their men . Archbishop Lanfranc now advised Roger to 'lie low'. But ,

of whom, on Lanfranc 's evid ence , was notab ly ineffective . No r do we as a precaution, lest Earl Roger should try to cross the Severn and

have the problem of understanding why Archbishop Lanfranc who knew join Ralph , Bishop Wulfstan of Wo rcester and Ailwin abbot of Evesham

ab out the plan before the fact should have treated it so lightly , wi th their men , called up the sheriff of Wo rcester , Walter de Lacy and

dismissing it as a 'stupid proposal' , and later advising earl Roger to a great multitude of folk and blocked his movements . Note that this

'lie low' lest the royal anger turn serio us . This is not the advice is a preventive measure -- no violence wa s offered on either side.

of a vic e-gerant faced with an attempt to overthrow a throne . It is Earl Roger made no attempt of which Florence wa s aware , to move . He

the advic e of an elder faced wi th the intransigeant whim of a young was taken wi thout a seige.

fool. Yet Lanfranc , as his letters testify , ultima tely received the In the east Ralph and his brid e were cut off from reaching king's decision against them, and after due legal process , both Cambridg e by Odo of Bayeux , Geof frey of Coutances and another large excommunicated the earls and with the lay justiciars declar ed them force . The couple made a dash to Norwich (where her father had 2 dis seissed . 8 supervised the building of the fort in 10 67), and Ralph , le aving hi s

In 1075, then , Earl Roger gave his sister to Earl Ralph wife and knights in charge, fled to Brittany. She soon followed , with

despite the prohibition of the king . The magnific ent wedding wa s held the king 's permission .

in Exning in Cambridgeshir e and attended by a great crowd of county 2 9 Is this a reb ellion, except in the sense of disobedience? notab les. Here they all made a great conjuratio against King William , When one looks at it , it evaporates, and becomes a marriage allianc e joined unwillingly by Earl Waltheof, the only other tenant-in-chie f carried out against the wi shes of a lord and vassal group. The men present . Now if the major parties were acting in direct contravention had tried to face it out and await forgiveness in their fortresses , of William's command , they were in deed all inv olved in something very but it wa s their peers who were implacable. Witho ut William present risky , and might well vow to stick together as the best way of 19 20

(and Lanfranc's le tters to him at this time emphasize that he is no t conquest. Alan the Red profited greatly at the expense of Earl Ralph: need ed ) the earls were quickly isolated and helpless . In the autumn East Anglian resourc es were thus devoted to securing his Linc olnshire the king returned and at the Christmas court the ma tter wa s dealt wi th foothold , and more importantly the fortress at Richmond , key to at a formal cour t proceeding , 'judicali sententia .' Earl Ralph wa s Swaledale and the road to Scotland , northern protec to r of the Vale of safe in Brittany , another English vassal had gone . Earl Roger wa s York . The season of Walt heof's use was past , and he , like Edwin , was imprisoned . On ly for Wa ltheof did it mean death . put to death .

Is there any sense in all this , even beyond the very good sense of main taining tight disciplin e? I think there may be. In II NORMAN VA SSALS , ENGLISH LADIES another context Freeman , who for all his limitations wa s often shrewd , There wa s a second pat tern of marriage tha t make s sense , not commented , 'In the northern part of England (William) wa s constrained as a rec ogni tion of legitima te memb ership of a vassal group , but as for a season to leave the successors of Leof ric and Siward in rec ognition of legitimate successio n to lands being held: legitimate possession of the vast governmen ts held by their predecessors . But no t only in the eyes of No rman lord and peers , but as a claim to hold (where the No rmans could ac t effec tively) there wa s no longer to be an in something less than constant fear. This second pa ttern was not the Earl of the We st Saxons or an Earl of the East Saxons , wielding the usual magna te one , for their claims were secured by memb ership in vast terri tory which had been held by the Earls of the Ho uses of their family/vassal group that spread ac ro ss the channel . It was the 3 0 Godwin and Leofric• . It makes reasonable the downfall of Edwin , but pattern of tho se who would hold only in Engl and , and who could no t though Freeman did not have it in mind , it accounts for the downfall hope to hold fo rever as occupying troops in a land of Herewards and too of tho se who presumed to make this private marriage alliance. For Edrics . 'Castlemen' they were for a time , as the Anglo-Saxon kenning Ralph of Gael wa s earl of the East Angles , though no t as great as his for them tells us , but they had no t risked their lives to huddle Anglo-Saxon predecesso r certainly . Half-Breton, half-English , he had forever in castles . And they could no t -- le t us admit it -- murder no old ties of blood or loyalty wi th William' s vassals . The marriage the whole of the English thegns . 'Manormen' we see them by 1087, and wi th the king 's cousin Emma could create both . It could raise up a as is so often remarked , they appe ar as the heirs of their Anglo-Saxon lineage wi th claims to succession in No rmandy and in both the western antecessores , holding so often exac tly the same estates , however 3 1 and eastern marches of England. A latter-day line of Godwinssons -­ inc onveniently tho se estates might straggle ac ross counties . Scant like them allied by blood to the traditional and new rulers both. I though the evidence is , if we look at tha t evid ence accepting tha t think one can al so date from 1075 the ripeness of the North fo r real 21 22

Lucy , the English he iress of Bol ingb roke , Linc olnshire , who carried marriage wa s a moment of inheritance qui te as impor tant as any

admission into a fief , and tha t marriage wa s one of few ways of her estates and her anc estors' earldom/shrieval ty to her Norman

legitima tely effecting a property-trans fer , we shall see that it tells husbands, Ivo Ta illebois (d . ca. 1094) , Rog er fitzGerold , and Ranulf

34 a consistent story. And , I would argue , some ev idence makes very much le Me schin earl of Chester .

better sense in this pa t tern than looked at from our la ter perspective Lucy's father , William Malet , had fought among the Conqueror's

of a mal e-dominated lineage. When Sir Frank Stenton wrote ab out closest compan ions at Hastings , and wa s of an important Norman family .

'English Families and the Norman Conquest' , he briefly ment ioned the Ye t he wa s 'partim Normannus et Anglus , compater Heraldi'.35 His widow likelihood tha t some Normans married Eng lishwomen , but the offspr ing wa s still alive in 1087, a Domesday tenant, hold ing most of her land

of such unions did not , to him , constitute an unb roken lineage . Th us from her son , Rob ert Malet , lord of Eye . It is unusual , to say the he confined himself to the evidence for male continua tion , that is, of least , for the mot her of a tenan t-in-chief to be on e of his sub­ admission of Englishmen into various Norman vassal groups . This he enfeoffments . She is one of the few great female landholders in considered as the touchstone of the continuat ion of Eng lish famil ies Dome sday , and so much of the lands listed as hers are associa ted wi th among the pos t -Conquest gentry . the great Suffolk English lord , Edric of Laxfield , that the conj ecture

A significant fact about the few Englishmen of importance is not implausible that she had been Edric's he iress. Ne arly al l of

al lowed fiefs is that they seem to have left he iresses only . Th us her land is identifiable as having been he ld by Ed ric or by men

Col swe in of Lincoln left an heiress, married to Rob ert de la Haye , a comm ended to Edric in King Edward's time . Her only lands not

Norman . Turchil of Arden did leave a son , but that son did not spec ifically stated to have been held by Ed ric are a group of holdings

inhe rit -- his lands went to the Earl of Warwick, under whom the entered separa tely because they were the obj ec t of a dispute between

Ardens continued in possession as V'issals -- a family tradition indeed the lady and the bishop of Bayeux . We cannot certainly identify

record ed tha t the Norman earl had married the daughter of the Eng lish Robert Malet's mot her , and the Countess Lucy's grandmot her , as the

32 English heiress, daughter of Edric , but we can say certainly that if family . If so , it is the precise circumstance of Oliver de Belleme ,

she had been, Dome sday would describe her holdings precisely as it his sister Mab el and Rog er II de Montgomery. We know too that Robert

d'Oill�, castellan of Ox ford , married the daughter of Wigot of does , and tha t in the us ual cour se of things we would not expect any

3 6 Wallingford and 'inherited' her father's lands, and Geoffrey de la more specific identifica tion . It would have been no unlikely

Querche married Al fgeofu, he iress of Leofwine , thegn of arrangement between the two great East Anglian landholders and

associa tes in county administrat ion that the one shou ld have married Warwickshire.33 We can, even at a higher level , know of the Countess 2 3 24

the other's daughter. It would ex plain too why the lady , wi th her redis tributed and families were mingled in fact without violence. children , was not only in Eng land in 1069, but in the dangerous town One Englishman had a spec ial claim to Norman atten tion , and of York in her husband's company. Nor would it be surprising that by his case is sufficien tly documen ted to provide an in structive example 1087 when Normans had replaced the English as tenants-in-chief, the of the peaceful satisfaction of English claims through marriage. He English families' holdings were the responsibility of the Ang lo-Norman is Harold , son of the pre-conquest Earl Ralph of Hereford. His mo t her branches of one family. If Edric had had a son he wo uld be almost in had the Ang lo-Danish name, Gytha. Hi s grandmother had been Goda , principle impossible to identify: he would very likely not have been Edward the Confes sor's full sister. He was in fact as direc tly an trusted by a Norman peer-group and would therefo re be barred from 'heir ' of the Old Eng lish kings as wa s Edgar Ae thling , and he was being a tenan t-in-chief. Domesday Book does not supply us with family therefore particularly dangerous. His fa t her , Earl Ralph is so often identifications , so if he continued as his sister's tenant , he might thought of as a 'Norman favourite' of Edward the Confessor, that we be generously provided for , but we might never know. are apt to forget that he was half-English , was mar ried to an Anglo­

The problem of the continuation of English famil ie s after the Dane , and had g iven his son the name of the greatest of the

Conques t is not so much one of ev idence that No rman fighters, Godwinssons. In the circumstances , this Harold was fortuna te to

partic ularly at the lower level s, married Englishwomen , as in survive. He did no t of course inherit. But he wa s eventually allowed

realising that inheritance through the female would have been an to marry the daughter of Alured of Marlborough , the Domesday holder of

ac ceptable arrangemen t to men of that time -- tha t they felt Ewias , and to become Alured 's gener et heres , to use Oderic's term in

37 differently ab out family constitution than we assume they must have. a different context. His name has been attached to the site of the

Yet the pa ttern is so common that we mus t be wi llful no t to see it. fortres s since -- Ewias Harold. He called his own son Rober t. He wa s

From the marriage that channeled the Norman Count Rudolf's great one of the tenant s in a wild corner of the honour of Boulogne , the

landholdings through his daughter to the ducal steward Osbern in the huge hono ur associated wi th the marriage of his grandmother and

early eleventh-century , wh ile his two sons were pensioned off with Eustace of Boulogne. Harold , sole living descenden t of this princess,

bishoprics, to the great Berkeley marriage in the 1150s whereby one and one of only two males of the lineage of Athelred to surv ive , was

baron wa s disposses sed in favour of anot her , but in such a way that content to live as a 'No rman' vassal hold ing of a No rman in-law. By

the sons and daughters of the two were married and mingled the blood 'content' I mean tha t he had been sa tis fied to the extent tha t he did

not rebel , and that , I take it , was the point. Men had different and land s of Berkeley of Berkeley and Berkeley of Durs ley , there is a

continuing pattern by wh ich the polity was streng thened , resources thresholds of contentment , but here we see a significant one -- for a 25 26

man of high birth and no poltroon. It took a brave man with a cool His plans for the church and for his boys' welfare were nerve to hold Ewias Harold. His acceptance tells us much about his inextricably linked. For the eldest, the English-named Orderic, it assessment of reasonable options. provided a handsome dowry of thirty silver marks for his reception

into a Norman monastery. Orderic tells us that between the ages of At a much lower level, we can turn to the example of Orderic five and eleven he was placed in the charge of 'a noble priest called Vitalis' own family to see the expectations for his children that a Siward', in Shrewsbury from whom he learned his letters. He was then man might even himself arrange as the best settlement he might make sent, 'as if I had been a rejected stepson' to St. Evroul in Normandy. for them. Orderic was a child of the conquest of Mercia. The story An English boy -- so English that he claims to have known no French.40 is worth pausing over, for it is really our only account of the While his English son was studying with Siward, Odelarius persuaded enfeoffment of a humble man.38 In the time of King Edward, one his lord the earl to found an abbey and to give the whole suburb Siward, son of Aethelgar, whom Orderic calls a kinsman of the king outside the east gate of the town to it. He proposed that he himself (and we may wonder how he knew this)39 erected a wooden chapel on his give the church he had begun, his house and all its furnishings for land at the east gate of Shrewsbury, where the Meole joins the river the abbey site, with fifteen pounds immediately, and whatever Severn. In the 1070s, after the removal of the young Mercian earls, continuing help he could give. He would vow himself and his five­ Roger II de Montgomery conquered this part of Mercia and ruled it as year-old, Benedict, as monks. All of his possessions were to go earl of Shrewsbury. In the new earl's household was a clerk, ultimately to the proposed abbey. Half was to go immediately and 'the Odelarius, about age forty then, and like many a household retainer, a ot her half shall be given to my son Evrard to hold under the lordship man who waited till early middle age for his reward of a settlement. of the monks'. One son, then was left to carry on the land's service. His reward came in the transfer of Siward's church-land to himself, Naturally enough the father's lord was an active participant in the Siward being given in compensation ·a life-grant of his own manor of arrangements for the disposal of the family resources for the benefit Cheney Longville, the very expedient of settlement of which I have of his vassal's children. As for the boys' mother, whom her been talking. Odelarius was also given, or allowed to marry, an historian-son never mentions, one may wonder why a forty-year-old English wife. He had a house on the river bank, and presently three unmarried clerk required a wife the moment he was installed upon sons, Orderic, born in early 1075, Evirard and Benedict. Eventually Siward's land.41 His disposition of his boys shows no great hopes of he began to replace Siward's wooden chapel with a stone church founding a long-lasting lineage. What did she confer as wife? dedicated to St. Peter in fulfillment of a vow taken at Rome after the Orderic depicts his father as reminding Earl Roger of the utility of boys were born. 27 28

castles when one holds without being a legitimate heir of ancestors in Send them home, Lanfranc is saying, and it will be closely examined the land. Perhaps then, his English wife (Siward's daughter or after a short time whether they might wish to make their lives among sister, it may have been and Orderic then, of a noble English line) Norman men or to return to the cloister. A sub-set of these endowed Odelarius with the quiet security of legitimacy of which he Englishwomen might choose to leave without investigation -- those who was so aware, and in Evrard we see the heir of his mother and the had fled not out of love of God but out of fear of the French. If we continuity of an English family on its land. It is precisely then the put the letter in the mid-1070s, then the land was growing peaceful, sort of family for whom Gaimar wrote a generation later and in French: because as Orderic bi tterly says, 'foreigners grew wealthy with the a minor knightly family that wished to hear, and was moved by, the spoils of England, whilst her own sons were either shamefully slain or legend and the tragedy of its English forbears. driven as exiles to wander hopelessly through foreign lands•.44

Despite sub-enfeoffment many were made exiles -- Simeon of Durham,

perhaps one himself, speaks movingly of them.45 But their sisters III NORMAN VA SSALS, ENGL ISH NUN S were wanted at home.

The curious letter about Englishwomen written by Archbishop Whatever the motivations of the men and women involved, Lanfranc belongs, I would suggest, to the mid or late 1070s, and must Lanfranc was dealing with a general problem. Some twenty years later, be seen in the context of the legitimisation of the Norman in 1093/4, his successor Archbishop Anselm had the problem still to settlement.42 Lanfranc had been asked: which Englishwomen in deal with, in two specific, and I would argue, clear cases: those of nunneries are to remain as nuns and which are to be sent home? The the great ladies Edith and Gunnilda. Their cases can be reconstructed answer was that nuns who had made profession or who had been offered and we can be sure that we are either seeing strange passions shaking as oblates were to remain such. Those women who fell in neither heretofore solid and middle-aged barons, or women with the category were to be sent away ad presens until their wishes about legitimising effect of heiresses. Both cases involve the desire of living as nuns might be minutely investigated. Now why should this the Norman king and that the ladies remain in their convents, or at category of women concern the king and his justiciars? Many girls least not marry a particular magnate. From this inversion of the were brought up and educated in nunneries or boarded there and left policy of the seventies we can most cogently argue both the freely.43 Many widows retired to them. Why send them away? I would legitimising effect of marriage to an English woman and the relative suggest that they concerned Lanfranc and his fellow-governor because unimportance of the ladies earlier released. A kightly class would be they were wanted at home as peace-weavers and channels of inheritance. th us quietly settled upon the land and in county government. But for 30 29

ac knowledge that when King Edward gave me h.i s great-neice Margaret in ladies of the lineages of Edith and Gunnilda , careful consideration at marriage he gave me the county of Lothian. King Wi lliam later the highest levels was necessar y, lest their proper ty rights create an confirmed what his predecessor had given me , 4 9 overmighty member of the magnate-group.

St. Margaret 's dowry , then , was Malcolm's justification of In 1068 Malcolm of Scotland had given refuge to many nobles of claims in the North. Her daughter's dowry was as expandab le and as the North and to the English royal children , Margaret , Christina and significant. This is the reason that the dispute over this daughter's Edgar. He had subse quen tly married the young Margaret.4 6 Two mar riage in 1093 was so bitter. Her case is the subjec t of the fir st reasons for the marriage can be adduced , and both must have been in O of the let ters of Archbishop Anselm concerning runaway nuns . S It is Malcolm 's mind. The fir st is the establish ment of a claim to the addres sed to the bishop of Salisb ury , asking him to use hi s authority throne of England itself and through it , the second, more realistic to compel Malcolm 's daughter to return to the ab bey of Wil ton where aim of a Northumbria detached from Norman England. As Professor she had laid aside her religious veil and returned to the world. Barrow has written , 'Just as Malcolm's first marriage to the Norwegian Anselm has , he says , delayed his condemnation of her sin for fear tha t Ingibjorg had denoted a Scandinavian alliance (probab ly direc ted it had been prompted or condoned by the king. But , he writes , he has against Moray) , so his mar riage to Margaret stood for an alliance with spoken with the king and found to hi s satisfac tion that such was not the legitimist royal house of England, and, had Scots strategy the case -- the king wished Malcolm's daugh ter in a nunnery. Let us comprised aught save repeated pillage , might have been a means of put the whole story of Malcolm and his daugh ter in to the context I rallying the men of English as well as Scot tish Northumbria against propose and we shall see that there is nothing so ob scure in the fin al the Norman usurpers•.47 St. Margaret's dow ry could be as large and break between William II and Malcolm , nor in the circumstance that a vague or as specific as suited Malcolm. At its most specific , it twelve-year-old girl should have been the center of the quarrel. provided a legi tima te claim to Lothian , annexed years earlier. In

1072 Malcolm became William 's man. But for what? Like St. The girl Edith (later of course , Queen Matilda) was in England

Margaret's dowry , Malcolm's vassal holding could expand or con tract at in the summer of 1093 at Wilton where she was awai ting the husband for

51 will and in this case we have evidence tha t Malcolm equated the two whom her fa ther intended her. Malcolm had come to the king at

when it was convenient. In 10 91 he met William II on or near the Glouces ter to continue the se ttlement they had begun in Lot hian two

year s earlier. As par t of that se ttlemen t Malcolm intended a marriage Lo thian border to begin the process of neg oc ia ting areas o f recognized

4 in fluence in the uncertain North. 8 In his revealing ac coun t of between his daugh ter and Alan the Red , lord of Richmond . Now Alan was

Mal colm's claims , Orderic put s these words in Malcolm's mouth: 'I 3 1 32

more to a Scots king than the greatest baron of Yor ksh ire and one of whose fam ily planning was subject to his fellows' agreement. He was the greatest in Lincolnshire and Ea st Anglia . His greater attrac tion wi lling to ab ide by the judgement of a joint court made up of magnates perhaps was that his terri tory lay immedia tely to the south of the of each realm and convened on the borders. The two kings par ted (if disturb ing ly effective Robert de Mowbray , earl of No rthumb erland . one may call a non-meeting tha t) in great enmity and Malcolm went

Mowbray's arrival upon the Tyne in ca. 1080 had brough t for the first north , where Mowbray of course was left to deal with him. By November

5 time since the Conquest a force that neither Malcolm nor the Mal colm had been ki lled, either ambushed or raiding. 3 But he had previou sly unmanageable North umbrians could di slodge . His presence first gone to Wil ton for his daugh ter , had torn the ve il from her there promised a check to Scots' ac tivities south of Lothian and at head , as she later testified, telling her that he had in tended her as the same time to Count Alan's ac tivities north of the honour of a w.ife for Count Alan rather than for a community of nuns , and taken

Richmond . A marriage that would give Alan claims to Lothian and her away . Anselm's letter of February, 10 94 did not get her bac k.

Malcolm a grandson in Richmond wou ld suit them both very well indeed. Seen so , Edith's 'place in al l this' is anything but In the game of 'go' it is called a 'pincer movement' , and the ph rase 'obsc ure' , as it has been called. And it shows the sagacity -- not to graphically describes the geography of Mowbray's si tuation. If say the sheer cheek -- of Prince Henry that on the quiet he of fered Wi lliam II contemplated for a moment sanc tioning it , he must have been Mal colm that he himself would marry this 'maid of Lothian'. William quickly recalled to his duties as a lord by his vassals , led by wi shed her bac k and veiled; only after he had heard this did Anselm Mowbray . write hi s direc tive . The king indeed is the likeliest source of

In August of 1093 , I would argue , William ac ted much as had Anselm's information , to judge from the memory of Herman of Tournai ,

his father in 1070 and yielded to hi s vassals . When Malc olm arr ived who heard , and later rec ounted, Anselm's story that Ru fus had thought

54 at Gloucester the king refused even to talk to Malcolm except in his himself sa tisfied by having seen a ve il on the princess' head . A

own court ac cording to the judgement of his own barons and of them girl wi th such a potential was best kept behind stout walls.

only.52 I t was an ac t of flambouyant good lordship. Wil liam was At the same time another woman best kept incarcerated was wil ling to be guided by his barons , to the point of of fending the taken from Wi lton: Gu nnilda , daughter of Harold Godwinsson . At the Scots king -- which he certainly did -- and one of his most effec tive angry breakup of the Gloucester court, King Malcolm and Count Alan had vas sals , Alan , though the latter might seem somewha t expendable in

ridden off, angry men both, and , as it happened , men doomed to die view of his brother's presence as a possible replacement . Malcolm wi thin months . As if they rode together -- as well they migh t -- King however would have none of being treated as merely another vassal 33 34

Malcolm sna tched his daugh ter from Wilton , wh ile his chosen son-in-law res ult' , he wri tes , 'was a strange and passiona te romance •• rode off wi th Gunnilda from the sa me nunnery . In her case Anselm knew Stranger st ill tha t his brother and heir sh ould be smitten by the sa me she had willi.ngly worn the ve il , for he himself had once talked to passion : 'Why these important barons , in the face of ecclesiastical

SS her. The fac ts as we know them are few. Count Alan abducted censure and as an al ternative to the important pol itical alliance

Gunnilda wi th in a day or so of the breakdown of negociations at proposed by King Malcolm, should have preferred the daugh ter of Harold

Gloucester, as I have sa id. Short ly , and wi thout having married her , is a qu estion we sh all never answer. , , the secret of her powe r died

S7 he was dead. But Gunnilda did no t return to Wilton. Instead Count wi th her.·

Alan's brother Alan Niger 'succeeded not only to his estates but to The strange and passionate romance of the grizzled veteran of his ma trimon:lal plans' , in Southern's phrase . S 6 Anselm wro te her then Hastings evapora tes looked at as I propose . Nor is the affa ir an a bitterly ph ysical letter, horrible to read , attempting to disgust enigma . Instead it joins the other evidence in making sense of the her with the world and man's embrace . What happened to her eventually many pos t-Conquest unions of which cont emporaries were so conscious . we do not know , but she left no legitimate children , and ano ther of Reading Orderic , Florence of Worcester and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle the Breton family succeeded to the lands of his brothers . as I propose , it was not Count Alan who broke off the marriage , but

The facts of the story , few as they are , are clear enough , but Rufus' insistence that it be considered by his magnates assembled.

the interpre tation must be part of the pa ttern the historian believes Malcolm , we are told , left in a fury . He had been insulted and his

he sees. Le t me contrast two -- one tha t does not see property and interests disregarded . Was Count Alan's si tuation any different? Was

succession cla ims inhering strongly in women , and another , the one I there a second-best for this long-unmarried Bre ton , who knew be tter

am putting forward , that assumes that such attributes in the ir wom en than to go ahead wi th the marriage on his own?

were rarely out of the minds of cont emporaries .

Count Alan held four hundred manors in England. Nowhere was

Professor Southern, assuming tha t eleventh-century baronial he more indepe ndent and powe rful than in the ' magnitude and sol idity'

of marriage was of such relatively small importance tha t it could be both his grea t honour in the north of Yorksh ire . But his power extended

throug freely contracted and romantically motivated, infers from Alan's h the eastern part of the old Danelaw: in Lincolnshire ,

SB abduct ion of Gunnilda that the union wi th Edith foundered because Cambridge , Norfolk, Suffolk , Essex. Gunnilda's name is of the

Danel 'Count Alan Ru fus saw a young woman whom he liked better' . He reminds aw, and her mother Edith Swanneck had been one of the great

us that Alan was a tough , practical warrior in his mid-fifties . 'The Danelaw powers . Many lands had been under her soke and many men 35 36

Edith Swanneck had been a wife more Danice, but fo r commended to her . royal women . They were dealing with different classes and with a Dane that meant no lowly position. Nor did it denote a woman of low different needs . Fo r mino r Norman fighters, being actually settled birth . Only the daughter of a great war-leader's lineage could have upon English estates -- isolated from one another, we must remember commanded so many and held so much . When we realize this we can see it was a source of safety to marry Englishwomen connec ted wi th those something of Gunnilda's utility to Alan and to his heir after him . estates and quickly to produce Angl o-Norman boys and girls who

She was the Swanneck's heiress and heiress to whatever legitimacy understood the new Norman bond of vassalage . remained of the old Danish war-lineage . And the Breton honour of But this could scarcely be a desirable pa ttern amo ng the Ri chmond (like Lacy of Pontefract) was unusual in the continuance of magnates . Their strength as a group lay in such mutual trust as they pre-Conquest Anglo-Danish men on their old estatea .59 Second-best the could generate . Men without preexistant loyalties were not welcome unio n undoubted ly was to the chance for Lothian, but not so far behind among them . Safety for such men was in part ensured by marrying one it perhaps, especially to an angry man . I do not think that the another's women . Aggrandizement of a lineage in England and in sec ret of Gunnilda' s power died with her . Normandy made such marriages imperative . And how better to ensure

Gunnilda's fate provides us with evidence that at least makes one's children's acceptance than to ensure that they were a coherent picture . There was no marriage mo re Normannico and grandchildren or cousins of those judging them? Self-interest therefore no children with claims to inherit and to be seated beside dictated endogamy ; group interests dictated its control . When William their father's peers. Nor need there necessarily be . The woman II finally himself ousted Mowbray, he did not offend the family of the

herself passing the cup in the new lord's hall was important as a Eagle, whose daughter Mowbray had recently married, by ousting her as

bridge to the old fo rm of lordship, and the children could be provided well. The group closed ranks, petitioned an understanding pope for a

for. Thus a bizarre tale of strange and ruinous passions, full of the divo rce for her and married her to the successo r of her ruined and

most unlikely coincidence and quite out of character for the acto rs is imprisoned husband . She had married Northumbria, and to Northumbria

trans formed into reasonable, if unromantic, baronial 'politics'. It she was intended to remain married .

requires merely a slight shift in our perceptions of the significance It might seem fitting to conclude with the great marriage of to these men of their own and one another's marriages . And we can see 1100 between the Princess Edith and the new king Henry I as the that there may have been more than an attitude towards canon law in ult imate in legitimising succession to Eng land and claims to Lo thian , Lanfranc 's decision that Englishwomen should be sent out of nunneries which it is . 60 Edgar Aethling's inheritance went through his sister . tho ugh they had worn the veil and Anselm's opposite opinion concerning 37 38

It is even more enlightening to look at Henry's sexual politics long evidence is so tantalizing I cannot forbear to end with it . In 10 66, before his marriage, and to conclude with another non-marriage. A earl s Edwin and Morcar , upon hearing of Ha�old 's death , rode more unmarriageable young man than Prince Henry can scarcely be straightway to London for their sister Aldgitha (or Edgiva as Orderic imagined. Having cheated him out of his inheritance , his elder cal ls her or Aldgeva) and carried her back to Chester.64 We ll they brot hers were hardly likely to make his fortune for him by a marriage. might , if the picture I have been sketching is near the truth. Edgiva

Yet the shrewd Henry was not to be done out of children whose tho ugh probably not so different from her young brothers in age , was marriages could be useful supposing better days were on the way . by now twice a widow. The only daughter of the great earl of Mercia

Wi l liam of Malmesbury was not being quite a fool when he recorded that had gone first to Gruffydd of Gwynedd and then to Harold Godwinsson ,

Henry copulated only to get children, 'effundans naturam ut dominus, so powerf ul were the successio n claims that inhered in her. Her non obtemperans libidini ut famulus •.61 Wh en Rufus died Henry already brothers could hardly have feared for her safety in 10 66, but they had a quiverf ul of potential barons , earls, heiresses and queens for surely knew that Cnut had channeled the inheritance of North umbria his nobility and neighbours -- and loyal supporters for their through a girl whom he had married to his man , and they surely knew legitimate siblings. 6 2 And not a one carrying dangerous claims to the that the precondition of French right s in the honour of Boulogne and crown. I would maintain therefore that, while individua ls were of the earldom of Hereford had been marriage with the princess Goda. inconvenienced by the ch urch's growing definitio n of marriage as It was her brot hers , not Edgiva , who were safe when they got her monogamous, the seignorial world in fact wel comed and encouraged within Chester's wal ls.

clerical aid in reducing the 'pool' of legitimate claimants , and This is the last time we hear of Edgiva, in Chester , in 1066. thereby reducing the dangers and violence of succession-disputes.63 In ca. 107 1, after her brothers had been removed , the Conqueror's The baronage soon went beyond the Ch urch in England , and denied young relative , Hugh of Avranches, arrived in Chester , invested with legitimacy even to 'mantle children' whom the Church accepted. They one of the new earldoms being carved out of Mercia. The earl of were not converted to a new morality of marriage. They were making Chester is surely one of the most colourful figures of his time, and use of a new control over inheritance. one of the most able. Under his strenuous rule his county was kept

One final no n-marriage may be explicable in this way , and in under his control and the Norman conquest of North Wales begun. He

any case deserves at least a shadowy place beside the more certain was a close friend of no less a man than Anselm. Orderic who

unions of Alan and Gunnilda, Henry and Nest, Henry and Isabel de preserves what may be a Montgomery ambivalence about Earl Hugh,

Beaumont. It is anything but a certainty, and yet the circumstantial records the magnificence of his court and his own flamboyance , telling 39 40

us tha t he had many children by concubines, but that they al l perished The blood of the great Anglo-Saxon families migh t flow into the royal

65 miserably . He married at last, in his mid-forties after twenty houses of England and Scotland . But it was best diverted from the years ruling in Ches ter . His only legitima te son and heir was born in upper level s of the baronage .

1096 . It was leaving the mat ter late . I have tried, in this paper to do no more than propose a new

But despi te Orderic's opinion in one place, he tells us in way of look ing at evidence we all know of, and to convince you only another tha t in fac t Earl Hugh did have a son, whom he sent as an tha t it produces at least a consistent picture, and one that has the obla te to a No:rman monas tery, and who later was uns uccessfully merit of not underestimat ing the long-term difficulties of eleventh­

66 cen tury conquest and colonisation . Marriage and the control of appoin ted abbot of Bury St Edmunds , Hugh had a daughter as well .

She was married to Geof frey Ridel, Henry I's jus ticiar, and she was inher itance are, in this reading of the evidence, the very hear t of given a magnif:lcent dowry from the Mercian palatinate . Whoever she the solution to the conquerors' problems . The pa ttern of marriage at was , she was not the child of a 'dishonourable' union . Her name was the knigh tly level was necessarily to marry Englishwomen, to become

Geva . the lords of their male in-laws, and to produce children who were

legi timate heirs of English grandfathers and legi timate claimants to The lady Geva lived until at least 1142. She founded Canwell the fiefs of Norman fathers . At the magnate-level the pa ttern was 67 Priory in Staf fordshire, and her dowry founded the fort unes not only quite different, for marriage 'Christiano more' within that exclusive of the Ridels but of the Bassets . For her daughter Maud in the 1120s group involved Normandy as well as England. Control over one married the Crown's servant Richard Bas se t, at the ins tance of the new another's marriages was for them a powerful control ov er one another's earl Ranulf le Meschin . 68 Geva was King Henry's cousin and the wealth and power . Looking back, as we do, through statal daugh ter of a grea t earl. However magni ficently endowed, her marriage preconceptions, we can forget that the ov ermighty subject was quite as outside the baronage to an administrator of no bir th was a dangerous to his neigbours as to his king . Looked at in this way, the disparagement . Her propertied wealth paradoxically emphasizes it . It decision-making pow ers of the vassal-group of the eleventh-century is hardly likely that we shall ever know the identity of her mother . assumes rather more importance than is generally given it . Much of But if Aldgeva of Mercia sa t in Earl Hugh's hall, as Gunnilda in Earl William I's poli tical success looks to be in knowing when to yield to Alan Niger's, some of the sec ret of his effectivenes s in his dangerous his vassals' insistence that they, as well as he and the church, Marcher palatinate may be explained , and we can understand why he left define the legi timacy of as pirants' to their women's hands and marriage so late -- and why his daughter should have been disparaged . property. 42 4 1

FOOTNOTES 5. Orderic iv , 88 .

Th is Working Paper is an expanded version of my contribution 6. The Story of England, Robert Manning of Brunne , ed. F. J. Furnivall

to the Th ird Annual Ba ttle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies , RS 1887, i, 230.

to be published in the 1980 Proceedings of that conference. It 1. Hereward is no t the only example of the dangers in complete is a draft of chapter of a book on Marriage and Women's Property disinheri tance. Earl ier , Earl Aelfgar fled to Wales and from there in Medieval England. kept the Mercian marches in a state of disruption after his

dispossession. ASC � 1055. In Normandy Arnold of Echauffour for three

years 'carried out a furious war of vengence for the injustice

of his banishment' until he was removed by a sudden illness thought

to have been poison. Orderic ii , 12 . Another feature common I. E· Searle, 'Seigneurial Control of Women's Marriage: the Antecedents 4

to these men's si tuation is that each had a safe base from which to and Function of Merchet in England', Pas t and Present, no. 82.

operate. (1979), 3-43 .

2. Select Charters , ed. w. Stubbs , 9th edition, revised by H. w. c. Davis 8. In this Edith resembles Cnut's wife Aelfgifu of Northampton. There

Ox ford 1966, 118. is no hint that her son was illegi timate , and she ruled legi timately

for Cnut in Norway. 3. Professo r Milsom, commenting on Glanvill ix, 4 , puts the mat ter

9. Robert of Torigny, in Chronicles Stephen , Henry II and clearly : it requ ires say ing that relief is no t due from any husband •••

Richard but the first , because the lord's consent , Glanvill assumes , is I, ed. R. Howlett, RS 188 9, iv , 19.

necessary for all her marriages and his consent will en tail paymen t IO. In his interpolations in William of Jumieges , ed. J, Marx , Rauen 1914 ,

unless it is spec ifically denied. s. F. c. Milsom, The Legal Framework 191: 'Adelisam filiam suam cum medietate Anglici regni se

of English Feudalism , Cambridge 1976. 104. daturum eidem spopondit'. The Anglo-Saxon Ch ronicle knows no th ing

, but Orderic speaks of it. Orderic 4 , For a su ccinc t analysis of Order ic Vi talis' evidence concerning ab out the suppo sed marriage

ii, 13 6; and see William of Po itiers for the story, � the Belleme inheri tance , see The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic

Guillelmi du cis Normannorum et regis Anglorum , ed. Foreville , Vitalis , ed . M. Chibnall , ii , Ox ford 1 969, Appendix I, 362-5 . R. 43 44

Paris 1952, 230. De Gestis Regum, 297-8. Huntingdon , 196-7. 15. Orderic ii, 216.

11. William of Malmesbury , 298. And for Harold speaking as king, see 16. Orderic ii , 220. �. 8: 'Si de filia sua quam debui in uxor em , ut assevit ,

ducere agit , super regnum Angliae mulierem extraneam inconsultis 17 . Orderic ii, 260.

princibus me nee debere nee sine grande injuria posse adducere 18. Orderic ii, 262 and 263 , n. 8. Waltheof may have had claims to

novent.' The king is thus under the discipline of his magnates Huntingdon and Northampton before 10 66, but as Dr. Chibnall

in the mat ter of his marriage. comments, 'whatever earlier rights he may have had in Huntingdon,

Waltheof se ems to have been granted or regranted the county after

12. R. Allen Brown, The Normans and the Norman Conguest, New York 1968, his rebellion, at the time of his marriage.' Judith was the daughter

20 6-7: 'That in the beginning king William had intended to establish of William' s sister Adelaide. Waltheof' s claims to Northumbria seem

a genuine Anglo-Norman state is proved by his patronage of and patience seem not to have been admitted until 1072. His cousin Gospatrick

with the aethling Edgar , earls Edwin and Morcar, Waltheof and Copsi also had claims to the huge district , and was in possession of the

and those other members of the pre-Conquest nobility of England who stronghold of Bamburgh after the defeat of the Nor thumbrians and

submitted to him and made their peace after Hastings, as by his Danes in 10 69. Gospatrick's ties with Malcolm of Scotland were

main tenance in their positions of English sheriffs and other officials. close and this may have decided Waltheof to throw his lot in with

Ye t also (William had the obligation) to meet the claims of those who the Normans .

had supported his invasion on the promise of rich rewards •

This , I think , puts William' s intentions and dilemma shrewdly and 19. Liber Monas terii de Hyda, ed. E. Edwards, RS 1866, 294-5 .

clearly. For the latest treatment of William' s not wholly unsympathetic 20. Maud , daugh ter of Waltheof and Judith married first , Simon of St. reception by the English thegns, see Eric John, 'Edward the Confessor Li z , by whom he had two sons , Simon and Waltheof , Her second and the Norman Succession', EHR cclxxi (1979), 24 1-67. hus band was David I, King of Scots. At Simon 's death , this second 13. Huntingdon, 196. husband became ear l of Huntingdon, and al though Stephen recognized

the claims of Simon II, the earldom pas sed at his death back to the 14. Orderic ii , 21 0. Orderic 's pi cture of the dangers in England royal lin e of Scotland. The Eng lish -named Waltheof , grandson of in the 1060s is strong evidence of the incomp lete character of Earl Waltheof , was excluded from a claim to inherit. He was given conquest. 45 46

as a monk-oblate . His career wa s made in Northumbria, where he was a decade or slightly later we may attribute the settlement of

brilliant abbot of Melrose and a powerful figure in the governance Mo ntgomery at Shrewsbury, Beaumont at Warwick, Clare at Pemb roke ,

of the area in wh ich his family's prestige and power lay . DNB , .!!.!!!.• Av ranches at Ches ter , Count Alan at Richmond , Fitz Hamo in

Gloucester . 21. Indeed the claims of these children were emphasized by the ir names ,

for the first four princes were named after the Ang lo-Saxon kings 26. J, Ta it, in VCH Salop i, 296 . backwards in order , Edward , Edgar , Edmund and Ethelred . One of their

27. Worcester , 9-1 8 (.!.!.!. • 1074 ), De Gestis Regum ii two sisters was Edith. , 313. Symeonis

Monachi Opera , ed. T. Arnold, R S, London 1882-5, ii, 205, and cf .

22. Orderic ii , 214-6 . Orderic places this in 1068. It may have Orderic ii, 3 10-16.

happened this early , or Orderic may be conflating the early resistanc e

28. For Lanfranc 's letters to Roger , earl of Hereford , to the king and to wi th the final rej ec tion that meant life or death to Edwin , and tha t

Bishop Walcher , see M. Gib son and H. Clover , The Letters of Lanfranc , wi thout delay. He was hunted down and killed probably in 1070/1.

Oxford 1980 , 118-26. See n. 29. Domesday Book has evidence to Brown , Norman Conquest, 197, n. 285. ASC 'D ', .!.!.!.• Th e mix ing

bear our Lanfranc 's description of the formality of the procedure . of da tes with the pattern of events is perfectly possible. See

It speaks of land tha t Earl Ra lph forfeited 'postea derationis est Dr . Chibnall's no te , Orderic ii, 256.

Lanfrancus iussu regis in episcopatum rovensem.' Q!!. i, 3 81. See also

23. Orderic ii, 256: 'For King William, ill-advisedly relying on evil Orderic ii, 316 for the secular legal procedure.

counsellors , brought great harm to his reputation by treacherously

29. Orderic ii, 310, thought that the mot ive wa s to replace William wi th surround ing the noble Earl Morcar in the Isle of Ely , and bese iging

themselves , manifestly an impossibility . Other chroniclers a man who had made peace wi th him and was neither doing no r expecting

conj ectured merely that they had conspired with Wa ltheof to dethrone harm' .

the king . Huntingdon , 206. The Peterborough Chronicle, ed . Cecily

24. Geoffroi Gaimar , Lestoire des Engles , ed . c. T. Martin , RS , 1888-9 ; Clark , 2nd ed , Ox ford 1970, 5. ASC, .!.!.!.• 1075. Lanfranc 's letters ,

11. 5591 ff and see Orderic , 256-8. the only contemporary documents , speak of a 'stulto proposito ' ab out

wh ich he was fully cognizant before the event , and aga inst wh ich he 25. Orderic ii , 256-8 , 260. Ag ain , Orderic put s this ca . 1068, but charter

stro.ng ly advised Earl Roger . He sub sequently warned the earl to ' lie ev idence does no t bear him out . The ev idence of the division to wh ich

low' ('ut quiescas') lest he incur even greater royal anger . To the he refers indicates that it wa s of the early seventies . To this 47 48

king Lanfranc speaks of the earls as 'periuri ,' and 'traditori ,' and o f who also made the ir peace and were allowed to continue hold ing under

Ralph of Gael's Bretons even as 'spurcicia' . But no thing in the their Norman in-law. Such men are almost invisible in our records .

archbishop's letters has any hint of an attempt to overthrow the king , But the ir position wa s no t necessarily humiliating ; it may have been

and it is impossible that he could know of such a danger and wr ite to acceptable to be represented to the Normans , with their dif ferent

its perpetrato r calling it merely 'stupid .' customs of service , by a No rman . See Stenton , 'English Families ,' for

a reference to an English holder continuing 'at rent heavily and

30. E.A. Freeman , The Norman Conquest, 2nd ed . Ox ford 1870, iv , 70 . wr etchedly ,' cited in Domesday . The very sympathy of the commissioners

might suggest that such exploitation wa s disapproved .

31. See Q!Q ix, 572, n. b, and De Gestis Regum, 313, Huntingdon , 206. In

the event , Earl Ralph's second son Ralph wa s allowed the Norman 34. Lucy died in 1138. After Roger's death , their son, William de Roumare ,

inheritance in 1119, and it passed , wi th his daughter Amiee , to Robert became earl of Lincoln. The barony passed in the late twelfth-century

earl of Leicester at their marriage. GEC vii , 529-30. Th ey eventually to Lucy's he irs by her third husband , Ranulph le Me schin , earl of

received the county of Hereford from Ste phen . In this way , Emma 's Chester . GEC vii , Ap pendix J. 743-6 . I.J. Sanders, English Baronies ,

line rather than that of her bro ther , became the he irs of their father Oxford , 1 9 60, 18, n. 1. Lucy's father was prob ably the sheriff Tho rold

William fit z Osbern . Her brother , Earl Roger , had a son , Reginald and her mother wa s certainly Beatrice, daughter of William Malet .

fitz Count , who has given an heiress of the Ballon family . J. H. Bea trice's dowry of Alkborough in Linc olnshire descended to Lucy .

Ro und , Studies in Peerage and Family History, London 1901, 201 ff .

35. The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio of Guy bishop of Amiens , eds . 32 . F. M. Stenton , 'English Families and the Norman Conquest ,' THRS Catherine Morton and Hope Munt z, Ox ford 1972, 38. ser . 4, xxvi (1944) , 1-1 7, esp . 6. Anthony Wagner , English

Genealogy , Oxford 1960, 47. 36. Th e Malet genealogy is so ob scure that we canno t be certain who the

mother of Robert and wife of William really was . See c.w. Hollister , 33. Charters of the Honour of Mowb ray, ed . Diana E. Greenway , xx and n.4. 'Henry I and Rob ert Malet ,', .Y!.!12!: 4 (197 3), 115-22. Fo r her lands Wigot had a son killed fighting for William against Robert in listed separa tely as in dispute between herself and the bishop of No rmandy . �. D, ..!!.!.!!.• 1079. The reference enables us to see one Bayeux , see DB ii, 450. Fo r lands she held of the queen's fee and Englishman reconciled to the No rmans and with sister married to a a now from her son , DB ii, 310b. Her other land s are scattered , eg . No rman . It serves to remind us that he may have had brothers or sons 49 50

DB ii, 304b , 320. There is some further but slight reason to think From Robert's earlier losses , there looks to have been continuing

that Edric wa s Robert Malet 's antecessor in a closer sense than the pressure to part this Anglo-Norman family from its English inheritance .

usual 'predecessor' of Domesday terminology , for lands that Rob er t

had never held could be described as having once been held by 37. J. H. Ro und , Feudal Eng land , London 1895, 324, and his Studies in

Edric and then William Ma let , or by Edric , 'Robert Malet's Peerage and Family History, London 1901, 156, 165. Alured 's daughter

anteceasor'. DB ii, 148b, 260a, 332, 332b , 344, 346b, 376. Th e had been married first to Thurstin the Fleming , who died between

problem of the Ang lo-No rman family is peculiarly complex. The half­ 1075 and 1086 . DB i, 183b . Fo r 'gener et heres ' , see Orderic vi, 390 .

English Will1.am and his possibly more than hal f-Engl ish son wer e and for his notion that the ho pes of alliances through marriage

unswervingly loyal to Duke William. William fought beside the duke centered upon the children of the marriage, see Orderic vi , 122, 128-30.

at Hastings and tried to hold York in 1069, to which city he had 38. The following is taken from Orderic iii, 7, 142-50. significantly enough . taken his wife and children . Tha t he met his

death fighting for the Normans can be inferred from the numerous 39. For the probl ems in the identification of Siward , son of Ae thelgar ,

references in Domesday Book to the time when he 'wen t into the marsh' , see Orderic ii, 194, n . 4.

presumab ly during the fighting against Hereward . Eg . DB ii, 133b. 40. Al though the claim is hardly comprehensib le, it is clear , and mus t refer Robert Malet wa s actively loyal at the dispossession of Ralph of Gael to French . Orderic had studied Latin for five years wi th Siwa rd in 1074 /5 . �· 1, 82 and Letters of Lanfranc, 126. In spite of (Orderic iii , 6, 146 and n. 3; ) vi , 552. It is quite possible tha t this he no t only failed to profit from Earl Ralph 's fall , but he he went to live with his tutor and they talked in English and La tin. actually lost lands to the Normans who did profit, particularly William Even so, they lived in Shrewsbury which housed a Norman garrison of Warenne 1md Roger Bigod , and to Count Alan the Red . In 1086 he no and Orderic records wo rd s his father said to him on parting , Orderic longer held the shrieval ty that he had once held in Suffolk, and he vi , 552. Hi s identification wi th the Eng l ish however , is so strong attested no charters of William II. As Hollister points out , he held that his later memory about his knowledge of lang uages was , 'Decennis important office under Henry I and wa s a frequent attestor of Henry's

itaque Britannicum mare transfretaui , exul in Normanniam ueni • char ters . But when he died , .£!!.• 1106, his he ir was no t allowed to Linguam ut Ioseph in Aegipto quam non noueram audiui ', Orderic vi , inherit in England . ASC !!..!.!!.• 1110, merely says he wa s deprived of his 554, lands ; Huntingdon 237, t hought that this William, Rob ert's he ir , had

somehow 'inj ured the king' , but knew no evidence of such an inj ury. 41. Orderic was evidently told by his father to forget his family ; he wa s 52 51

to be 'liber ab omni parent um cura et affectu laetifero . , • • ' 44. Orderic ii, 266.

Orderic iii, 146, and his falure to set down clearly his Eng lish 45. Simeon of Durham, 202-3 . ancestry and his mother's name may be a considerably complicated ac t

of discipline . 46. Margaret wa s probably still a child . He r own first child wa s born

42. Letters of Lanfranc , 166. It will be evident tha t I incline to Dr . in 1073 /4 and she had a numerous family .

Clover's choice of Bishop Geoffrey rather than Bishop Gundulph , as

recipient , for I think that Lanfranc 's end ing , 'Et ho c est consilium 47. G. w. Barrow, Feudal Britain, London 1965, 129.

regis et nostrum' point s to the problem as being one for a royal

justice rather than a bishop. Eadmer supposes it to have resulted 48. Whether on the Twe ed or the Forth is no t certain. Orderic places it

from a counc il held soon after the first disturbances of the conquest . on the Forth . Orderic iv , 268. The ASC and Florence of Wo rcester say

Eadmer , 129-30. Orderic , without mentioning the letter , puts the mo re vaguely that Malcolm came in to Lothian . ASC, �· 1091, Wo rcester ,

story wi th the events of the 1070s. Orderic ii, 268. ii , 28. As Dr . Ch ibnall points out , the armies may have met at the

Twe ed , Orderic iv , 268, n. 2. 43 . The sisters of Robert of Grandmesnil , abbot of s. Ev roul are an

example. They occupied ('morabantur' ) a chapel of s. Evroul , and the 49. Orderic iv , 270.

monks thought ('credebantur') in taking up residence tha t they had SO. Ep . 177, s. Anse lmi opera omnia, ed . F. s. Schmitt , Ed inb urgh 1946-61.

taken the veil. But after their brother's flight to Sicily and the The incident has been an alysed by R. w. Southern , St. Anselm and

news of his good fortune there, they left and followed him, one to his Biographer , Cambridge 1963, 183 -5 .

marry Roger I Guiscard , count of Sic ily . Orderic ii, 102-4. Two well- 51. Whether she had earlier been at Ramsey in the charge of her aunt born ladies wo uld hardly have attempted to make the ir way to Sicily Ch ristina , a nun there , is unclear . Ac cord ing to Eadmer , Ed ith alone . It seems clear that Robert sent for them, and the marriage

herself said that she wa s raised by her aunt . He also says she wa s ind icates that he used them (wi th dowries no doubt, out of the brought up at Wilton . She may well have been taken to Wi lton to possessions of his new ab bey s. Eufemia) to strengthen alliances wi th await her father , who was negociating the settlement wi th Rufus . other No rman adven turers in Sicily . It is the magnate marriage- Eadmer , 1 2 1-6. See E . A. Freeman , William Rufus ii , n. EE, 598 ff. pat tern , as wi th Roger earl of Hereford and his sister Emma , and

Roger of Montgomery and Amieria . See ab ove . 52. Wo rcester ii, 30-1 . 53 54

59. w. E. Wightman , The Lacy Fami ly in England and Normandy 1066-1194, 5 3. See E. A . Freeman , Wi lliam Rufus ii, Note CC, 592-6 for a review of Oxford , 1966, 40-2.

the sources .

60. And wa s hard ly necessary for protecting Henry's rear while he dealt 54. Fo r Henry's later claim ab out his promise , and Anselm's story, see with his No rman baronage . Cf . Sout hern , St. Anselm, 188. Tha t had 'De Restaurat ione s. Martini Tornacensis ,' �. �. xiv 281. been already accomplished by keeping the young king of Scots and his The story of Rufus seeing Edith, from the same source, is a peculiar brothers at the English court , wh ich both Ruf us and Henry did. one but Anselm' s own source was the abbess of Wilton. Ruf us rode

to the nunnery with a frightening retinue of knights, and demanded 61. De Gestis Regum ii , 4 88. It is interesting to no te tha t while both

entrance . The abbess, fearing for Edith's safety quickly got a ve il Ruf us and Henry succoured the royal Scots children , Ruf us kept them

on the child and while Ru fus wa s pretending an interest in the unmarried , wh ile Henry married them into his family/baronage . David

cloister garden , he wa s allowed to glimpse her in the company of the married Matilda , daughter of Earl Waltheof and Judith , and received

other young nuns . Immed iately he saw her so dressed he left . As far their lands , to the exclusion of her son by Simon of St . Li z;

as Henry is concerned , he was at least wi th his brothers during the Al exander married Sybil, one of Henry's own illegitima te daughters ;

negociations of 1091 and could have talked to Ma lcolm then . We do Mary ma rried Eustace of Boulogne , attaching the Hono ur of Boulogne

not know whether he wa s at Gloucester in 1093. �· i, no . 3 18. once again to the royal house .

55. Fo r a summary of the events , see Southern St. Anselm, 185-93. Anselm's 62. GEC xi Ap p. D. Henry's bro ther , Duke Robert Curthose , can be found

letters to Gunnilda are epp . 168 and 169. employing a daughter in precisely the same way: 'To prepare a barrier

of defense against so many enemies (he ) gave his daughter by a conc ub ine

56. Southern, St. Anselm, 188. Th is brother , Alan the Black, died in 1098. in marriage to Helias son of Lambert of s. Saens , wi th Ar ques , Bures

and all the neighbouring country for her marriage portion, to enable 57. Sout hern , §t . Anselm 185, 188. him to resist the enemy and defend the province of Caux' . Orderic iv ,

58. W. Fa rrer , VCH Yorks . ii , 156. �· i, 27 is a 'pseudo-charter' from 182. It is the use to which Ab bot Rob ert of Grandmesnil put his

the Register of the Honour of Richmo nd , conferring all of Earl Edwin 's sister . See ab ove , n. 41.

Yo rkshire holdings on Alan , and this is borne out of Domesday Book . 63 . Cf . Georges Duby, Me dieval Marriage , transl. E . Fo rster , Baltimore , Q.!! ii, 309-13. 197 8, 18-22. 55

6 4. Wo rcester, 634 and Simeon ii, 181, following him .

65. Orderic ii , 260-2 , iii 216.

66. Orderic iii, 236-8 . The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, ed . H. E .

Butler , Edinburgh 1962, xix.

67. Monasticon Anglicanum, ed . w. Dugdale, iv , 104.

68. !!&• ii, no . 1389. It is a complicated marriage arrangemen t involving

the custody of the lands of Maud 's father and the wa rdship of her

brother . In the event , her brother did no t inherit and the entire

Ridel inheritance went via Maud to her sons , Ra lph Basset , who became

lord of Dry Drayton , Staffs ., part of Maud's lands (see Mon . Angl . iv

104), Geoffrey who took the name Ridel and became lord of Great We ldon

No rthants. Red Book of the Exchequer , ed . H. Hall, RS 1896, i, 329

ff, William, who became lord of Sapcote , Leics.