Weakness of English Monarchy in 1066

¶ … Conquest

At the time of the Norman Conquest, monarchy in England was an inherently unstable institution. Howarth's account of the throne in the years leading up to 1066 paints a picture of a curious institution: without fixed laws of succession, and with no more fixed governmental assembly than the witana gemot, the English Crown at this point in time seems more like a chieftancy for a society in transition. I hope to show that three aspects of the monarchy in 1066 -- its lack of succession law, its closeness to the aristocracy, and its political nature -- made England a candidate for conquest.

The lack of succession law is perhaps the most astonishing thing Howarth reveals about the English monarchy before the Battle of Hastings. As Edward the Confessor lay on his deathbed, Howarth tells us, "under the unwritten constitution, it was the duty of the assembly, in the name of the people, not only to advise the King in his lifetime, but to choose his successor when he died. It was not the custom yet, as it was in later ages, for the crown to pass to an heir by formal rules of succession…The choice was a matter of for discussion and if possible unanimous agreement." (Howarth 29). Howarth acknowledges that some basic rules would be observed as this process went on: the new king was selected on the basis of character, royal lineage, Englishness, and with due respect toward the old king's choice of heir. But nevertheless this process indicates something fundamentally odd about Anglo-Saxon kingship. As Frankforter notes, "medieval kings not only had to work at keeping the masses of their subjects in line, they had simultaneously to struggle to maintain authority over the men through whom they governed. The nobles who served in a king's government often preferred him to be weak. The less power he had, the more they could appropriate for themselves." (Frankforter 257-8). In some sense, however, the religious nature of medieval kingship -- with the king being formally anointed by a bishop or archbishop in the coronation ceremony -- made this sort of succession seem less odd than it does to us now. After all, the Pope is a sort of monarch, but is chosen by ballot. The difference is that the Pope is sworn to celibacy, and thus never produces heirs. However the marriages of medieval English kings seem to have been dynastic insofar as they intended to shore up internal regional alliances, and not necessarily to produce heirs. Edward the Confessor of course had no children -- and William the Conqueror was the great-nephew of Edward's mother Emma (who had been married to two different English kings, Ethelred and Canute). Moreover Edward had spent such a considerable portion of his life in Normandy, it seems likely that the more continental notion of inheritance (deriving from Salic Law perhaps) was already on the minds of the Normans when it was clear that Edward would die without producing an heir.

However the difficulty that a king faced in terms of his subject aristocracy is even more evident when we consider the ambiguous role that had been played by Godwin in the period before the Norman Conquest. Howarth notes that Godwin's "genius was for power -- winning, keeping, using and increasing it" (Howarth 32). But of course the difficulty here was "with his mysteriously humble birth he could not hope to be chosern king himself" (Howarth 36). As a result, the flimsy sense of royal succession combined with the relative power of aristocrats compared to the monarch, to create a situation in which Godwin essentially was behaving like a cuckoo, placing his own eggs and chicklets in the royal nest: "For Godwin, the choice of Edward as king had special advantages…he was a bachelor. So it seemed quite possible that every earl of England might be a Godwin, the queen might be a Godwin, the next king of England Godwin's grandson, and he himself the co-founder of a dynasty. Within three years of Edward's accession, Godwin was well on the way to achieving this unique position" (Howarth 36). In this case, it is no wonder that the Norman propaganda quoted by Howarth makes Godwin out to be such a sinister and wicked figure -- it was after all Godwin's son Harold who succeeded Edward. If one way or another the dynastic imperative was going to assert itself in the throne of England, then in some sense William the Conqueror must have thought he had a plausible claim in this situation (as indeed the length of his dynasty demonstrates that he did).

But a final incident that might very well show why the Anglo-Saxon monarchy might be ultimately weaker than the invading Norman French involves Harold's own coronation. Without a fixed parliamentary system, and with the reliance on the witana gemot as the ad hoc representative political body, England was ultimately a series of disconnected geographic regions -- and based on the location of the witana gemot, it was possible that representation could be affected as well: as Howarth phrases it, "districts near the meeting place were bound to be better represented than districts far away" (Howarth 57). It is worth recalling that England centuries before the Norman conquest had contained multiple kingdoms -- not just Scotland and Wales which persisted as separate thrones into the period of the Conquest, but also smaller kingdoms which had been ultimately annexed (like Mercia) -- and was also largely polyglot, with separate Celtic languages like Cornish and Manx persisting alongside the imported Germanic of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. As Frankforter notes, "the Anglo-Saxons who occupied [England] in the fifth century may have divided into seven kingdoms" but "the Viking invasions of the eighth and ninth centuries obliterated all but one of these" (Frankforter 255). As a result, kingship was of necessity about unifying or at least placating the often-unruly subordinate populations. At the time of Harold's accession to the throne, the populations of the two large earldoms of the north of England announced to their earls -- who had been present -- that, regarding Harold's coronation, "they would not accept the decision unless formally asked" (Howarth 57-8). Howarth then notes that Harold "rode at once to York…It was no warlike expedition, not even a display of strength….A gemot of the earldoms was summoned in York…It was happily convinced, acclaimed Harold king and swore its oaths of fealty." (Howarth 58). For Howarth the lesson of the new king's trip to Yorkshire is that "Harold was England's choice; and when it came to the test a few months later, the English fought for him without a single traitor." (Howarth 58). Yet we must ask if Howarth's analysis is not perhaps too limited and optimistic. If the Norman French had received word that the first act by the successor of Edward the Confessor was to travel to York and persuade the population that he was legitimate, then it sounds like the kingship itself is weak. Harold may have had the support of all of England when the Normans invaded; but to get that support, he arguably had to make himself look more week in the eyes of an outside (Norman) observer.