Two Queens of England a Silver Jubilee Article
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TWO QUEENS OF ENGLAND A SILVER JUBILEE ARTICLE CYRIL HART M.A., M.B., D.LITT. Ampleforth Journal 82:2 (1977) 10-15, 54 NGLO-SAXON HISTORY, whatever its merits, can hardly be said to provide compulsive reading, and the reason is not far to seek. All too often, insufficient biographical details survive for even the Aleading actors on the stage to appear as much more than shadows. We know next to nothing of their physical make-up, their aspirations, their prejudices, or their emotions; and without such information we cannot bring them to life on the pages of our history books. Among English women of the tenth century, the two subjects of the present essay form perhaps the only notable exceptions to this rule. By piecing together scraps of evidence culled from a variety of sources, we can, perhaps, reconstruct their personalities and interests sufficiently to enable us to weigh up their impact on the contemporary scene. Both were queens of England; both, by medieval standards, long-lived (their joint life-span covers the whole of the century); and both, so it happens, were strong protagonists of the Benedictine reform movement, which was to sweep all England in the course of the century, with profound effect upon the spiritual, intellectual and material life of the country. Eadgifu, the first of our queens, was born at the turn of the ninth century. She was the daughter of Ealdorman Sigehelm of Kent, who perished fighting the Danes at the baffle of the Holme in 902, while Eadgifu was still a small child. She was put under the care of a powerful thegn named Byrhtsige Dyring, a relative of Sigehelm,. and we encounter her briefly with her guardian six years later, at a shire meeting at Aylesford, where some business was transacted concerning her late father’s Kentish estates. About the year 919, Eadgifu married King Edward the Elder, who was then twice her age. She was his third wife, and before his death some five years later she bore him a daughter, Eadburh who became a nun at Winchester, and two sons, Edmund and Eadred, both of whom were to succeed to the English crown. If Eadgifu exercised any great influence over her husband during the short spell of their married life, no record of it has come down to us. Nor do we have evidence that she was of much account during the early years of the reign of King Edward’s immediate successor Athelstan, who was his oldest son by his first marriage. Next in line were the sons of Edward’s second marriage: Elfweard, who survived his father by only fifteen days, and Eadric, who was drowned in 933. From this time onwards Eadgifu’s children, the aethelings Edmund and Eadred, became of increasing importance in affairs of state. Both were dominated by their mother, and with King Athelstan’s death and Edmund’s accession in the year 939 at the age of eighteen, the stage was set, with Eadgifu cast in the role of leading lady. Widowed at twenty-five or so, she never married again, being content to play out her part as the queen mother who was the power behind the throne. Some indication of her influence may be gained from the regularity of her appearance in the witness lists of the royal diplomas issued in the names of her two sons. She must have been constantly at court, and usually she signed next after the king, before all the other witnesses, including the archbishops and aethelings. She was the first queen to hold this place in English history, and she retained it even after her elder son’s marriage in 944; we have record of only one occasion when King Edmund’s wife witnesssed a royal charter, and then it was as concubina regis in twelfth place after the bishops, whereas her mother-in-law Eadgifu witnessed in her usual high position. The period of Eadgifu’s dominance covers the formative years of the revival of English monasticism. Already, well before Edmund’s accession, Bishops Elfheah of Winchester, Cenwald of Worcester, and Oda of Ramsbury had each independently made their monastic vows while visiting reformed houses on the Continent; though not cloistered, they were the first real monks within the English Church for over a century. Elfheah, whose tonsure gave him an appearance unique in England at that time, which earned him the nickname ‘the Bald’, was closely related to the royal line. In or about 936, on King Athelstan’s orders, he himself tonsured Dunstan and Ethelwold on the same day, at Winchester. Soon after Edmund came to the throne, Dunstan was installed as abbot of Glastonbury. Two years later, Oda was elevated to Canterbury, and in the next decade Ethelwold became the first abbot of the restored monastery at Abingdon. There can be little doubt that Queen Eadgifu played a major part in securing these appointments; she tried to persuade Dunstan to accept a bishopric, and her influence over King Eadred concerning the refoundation of Abingdon is well recorded, both in the earliest Life of Ethelwold and in the Abbey’s Chronicle. All seemed set for a great expansion of monasticism, staffed by monks trained in the seminaries of Glastonbury and Abingdon, when the movement received a severe set-back. Eadgifu’s second son Eadred who had succeeded the throne after the murder of his brother Edmund in 946, never enjoyed robust health, and he was still a bachelor when he died towards the end of 955, at the early age of thirty-one. The two aethelings Eadwig and Edgar, sons of King Edmund, had been brought to court and began to wituess royal diplomas towards the end of Eadred’s reign. Eadwig succeeded to the Kingdom of England, being separately chosen by the West Saxons and the Mercians. A youth of fifteen, he was well thought of by the common people, being named 'All-Fair' because of his beauty, but he began his reign inauspiciously by a major confrontation with the monastic party because of his licentious behaviour during his coronation banquet. Abbot Dunstan and Queen Eadgifu disapproved of Eadwig’s fascination for a noblewoman named Ethelgifu, and for her daughter Elf gifu, whom subsequently he married. Later the area of disagreement widened, and led to events which were to shake the foundations of the Old English monarchy. Within a few months of his accession, Eadwig brought about a radical upheaval in the composition of his court, details of which have been preserved for us in the changes of the witness lists of his royal charters. Undoubtedly his first (but not his sole) objective was to break the growing power of the small but influential group of highiy placed persons, both lay and ecclesiastical, who were dedicated to the cause of the Benedictine revival of English monasticism. Having banished Dunstan to the Continent, and packed off from his court Dunstan’s supporters such as his relative Cynesige, bishop of Lichfield, he turned his attention to his grandmother Eadgiiu, who was deprived of the possession of all her extensive estates. It seems probable that she retired to Canterbury, the home of her kith and kin. The most powerful lay figure in the monastic movement was Athelstan ‘Half King’, who up to the time of Eadwig’s succession was virtually the regent, with direct personal control of most of England north of the Thames, including Mercia and East Anglia. Eadwig set about a skilful and sustained attack on the Half King’s position, and by the late summer of 956 he was forced to resign his ealdordom; he accepted the tonsure at Glastonbury. But Eadwig had to pay a heavy price for his victory. He had alienated the support of the whole of England north of the Thames, which transferred its allegiance a year later to his brother Edgar, then a boy of fourteen, who broke away from Eadwig’s court and set himself up as King of Mercia, East Anglia, and Northumbria. The Thames became the dividing line between the two kingdoms. In particular Berkshire, including the newly- founded abbey of Abingdon under its abbot Ethelwold, remained under King Eadwig’s control. Eadwig sought to restore his tottering power in Wessex by packing his council with new men, whose loyalty he had purchased by large-scale handouts of the West Saxon royal demesne, including lands confiscated from Queen Eadgifu, and possibly from other members of the monastic party. Later however, he found it expedient to effect some sort of rapprochement by augmenting the endowment of Abingdon, and by yielding to pressure from Archbishop Oda to put away his wife Elfgifu on grounds of consanguinity. A remarkable feature of this period is the way in which the two brothers Eadwig and Edgar each ruled their respective share of England, without coming to blows. With one king aged only seventeen and the other but fourteen, it must have seemed very questionable at the time, how long stability could be maintained before either internal or external stresses brought the truce to an end. In the event the matter was never put to the test, for on 10th October 959 King Eadwig died, very conveniently, at Frome. He was buried at Winchester’s New Minster, and his brother Edgar succeeded to the whole kingdom. The period that ensued has been described as the Golden Age of English monasticism. Dunstan, who had been recalled from exile by Edgar when he was still only king of the Mercians, was appointed to Canterbury, Ethelwold to Winchester, and Archbishop Oda’s nephew Oswald to Worcester.