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The reputation of Edward the Confessor, King of England from 1042-1066, along with his Saxon forebears, has often been eclipsed by the Norman Conquest of 1066. A long tradition dates the history of England as properly beginning only then, with William the Conqueror’s victory at the
Battle of Hastings.
At this moment, or so it was once said England ‘emerged[d] from the barbaric twilight into the full glamour and gl ory of the medieval noonday’ (David.C.Douglas, The Age of the Normans, 1929). In a similar vein, a well-known collection of poems on the Kings and
Queens of England by Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon (1932) assured a whole generation of schoolchildren that ‘William 1 was the first of our kings/not counting Ethelred, Egbert and things.’
It is hard to know quite what it is that provokes this feeling that the Anglo-Saxon past in somehow a quaint irrelevance and that it is only after 1066 that the ‘real’ history of England begins. The persistence of the idea in the first half of the twentieth century may in part be because the Anglo-Saxons were a Germanic people who had come to England from across the
North Sea sometime in the fifth century and in the demise of the Roman Empire had set up kingdoms. Seen from the perspective of World War 1 the Anglo-Saxons were therefore seen, as in the eyes of David Douglas quoted above, as somehow ‘barbaric’ and uncouth’ whereas the
Normans were perceived to be French ( even though they had only settled in Normandy in the early tenth century) and thus ‘civilised’ . In this view of history the Anglo-Saxons become no more than a rather dark and obscure people sandwiched between two great civilisations - the
Romans and the French. In more recent decades historians have done much to try to challenge this perspective; for
Edward’s sake I will try to give you some sense of this so that in this year we can see Edward for what he was: the king and head of the richest and most sophisticated state of Western Europe.
No other European country had a royal family of such antiquity as England’s; Edward could trace his ancestry back some 600 years; no other king had such an efficient system of coinage and taxation and no other country had a literature that included stories, poems and a history written down in a language everyone could understand and which is indeed the root of the language we still speak. In fact, if now we were to be catapulted back into Edward’s England although we would find much that was strange but we would also much that was perfectly familiar. The country for the most part was already organised into shires; villages were beginning to cluster around parish churches ; many towns such as Oxford had carefully laid out street plans that even the Oxford Transport Strategy hasn’t managed to obliterate - hence the crossroads at
Carfax leading to the Westgate, the Eastgate and Northgate. Islip, as we know from Domesday
Book, that great land survey of 1086, already had a milll that was in use right up till 1949. It seems likely that Edward’s father Ethelred had a hunting lodge in Islip (at that time it was politically correct for kings to hunt). Ethelred would have come to Oxford quite often for councils since Oxford was a convenient meeting place but it would have been more fun then as now to stay in Islip. Prattle woods up the road are all that is left of the medieval woodlands but in
Ethelred’s day these would have been quite extensive.
In Ethelred and even more in Edward’s day, there were many people with money to spend - and the desire to be seen spending it. This new prosperity may have had something to do with the better weather that was spreading across Europe and which in turn reduced the incidence of plague and helped agricultural productivity. Eating habits changed accordingly. Whereas not so long before most people killed and ate animals only when they were past their prime and therefore their usefulness we now find animals being reared exclusively as food. Beef and pork replaced mutton as the preferred meat and it became very fashionable to eat venison, pheasant,

3 partridge and geese - with I should add the occasional blackbird as a prized delicacy. Fish too - then as now - became a much more popular food - we have evidence from around the year 1000 for the eating of porpoises and for a well organised herring industry. At the same time it became very smart to spend more on clothes - silk, furs, gold and silk embroidered cloth all became quite the thing among anyone who wanted to be anyone - and as you might expect such people also began to spend money on their homes - bigger houses furnished with fine tapestries, and with the latest designs in kitchens and lavatories became the must-haves among the new rich.
To all this there was a downside. Not everyone was impressed by such conspicuous consumption. It encouraged greed (or so it was argued) and did not seem likely to please God.
Moreover, England’s riches attracted looters, notably Vikings from across the seas. Throughout much of the reign of Edward’s father, King Ethelred, Viking raiders continually battered the country; at first they were content to exact tribute and to sail away but after a while their tactics changed. Conquest became their aim and their achievement. In 1016, the year Ethelred died a
Viking King Cnut succeeded him on the throne of England. Edward himself would have been too young to take much part in the fighting - though there is a tradition that on one occasion he joined forces with his brother Edmund to resist Cnut, but whatever the truth here there can be no doubt that Edward’s boyhood would have been scarred by a deep sense of doom. Listen to this sermon written by Wulfstan archbishop of York in about 1014:
Beloved men, know what the truth is: this world is in haste, and it approaches the end, and therefore it is ever worse and worse within the world.....nothing has prospered for a long time now either within or without but there is devastation and burning and bloodshed in every region........the plundering of robbers has injured us very severely, and excessive tax has oppressed us greatly .......we have kept neither the laws of God nor of men as we should....therefore there are great disloyalties towards God and towards the world ...and there are also those here within the land who are traitors to their lord in many various ways. And of all the treachery in the world to the lord the greatest is that a man should betray his lord’s soul; and it is also a very great betrayal of one’slord that a man would treacherously kill him or drive his lord living from the land. And both have happened in this land: Edward was betrayed and afterwards killed and afterwards he was burnt....
( Note here that he Edward referred to here was St Edward , also known as Edward the Martyr, a victim of political intrigue after whom Edward was perhaps named -he was his half-uncle - and incidentally the reason why Edward became known as ‘the Confessor’ rather than St Edward.
‘Confessor’ was a technical term often used for someone who was a saint but not a martyr.)
Let us return to Archbishop Wulfstan:
‘it is no wonder that things go wrong with us...this nation has become very sinful...and far and wide such very evil habits have arisen that men are more shamed for their good than for their misdeeds....Inn God’s name( concludes Wulfstan) listen, let us do what is necessary for us: defend ourselves as best we can, unless we all perish together.
Fine rhetoric that if the young Edward heard it would well have seemed too prophetic by far. ... within a few years of this sermon King Ethelred,
Edward’s father was dead and England had as its king the Viking conqueror Cnut, a king who secured his position not only by victory on the battlefield but also by a number of ruthless political assassinations. Edward himself together with his younger brother Alfred took refuge as exiles in Normandy. His mother Emma had herself married Cnut , thereby giving some legitimacy to Cnut’s reign but effectively abandoning both
Edward and Alfred. Cnut too already had a son ( Harold Harefoot) by his mistress but Emma

4 struck a bargain with him: Harold Harefoot, Edward and Alfred were all to be excluded from any claims they might have to the English throne in favour of any son born to Emma and Cnut; soon such a son was indeed born and named Harthacnut. We know Edward felt his mother’s betrayal very keenly; many years later after he had become king one of the first things he did was to ride to her house and to confiscate her property because ‘ she had done less for him than he wished, both before his accession and afterwards.’ (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, D: 1043).
So - you may well be wondering, how then was it that Edward ever became king? What happened to that cuckoo of a figure Harthacnut ? At this point let’s cut a long story short: in 1035
Cnut died - Harthacnut was out of the country; there was general uncertainty as to who will be king -
Edward and Alfred returned, possibly at Emma’s invitation, Alfred was captured and blinded and died of his wounds whereupon Edward retreated back to Normandy leaving the field clear for Harold Harefoot who in 1037 was elected king. But within just three years Harold had died, to be succeeded by Harthacnut who had finally arrived on the scene and who unceremoniously dug up Harold and threw his body into the Thames.
Harthacnut seems all the same to have felt uneasy about his position - or maybe it was just the local nobility of England who felt enough was enough and it was time to give Edward his due.
We know very little about what Edward did during his years in exile but there is some evidence that h is claim to the English throne was never quite forgotten and that he known as ‘the king in exile’. Whatever the truth here it seems that Harthacnut felt his own position would be strengthened if he could associate his rule with Edward’s and in 1041, presumably with
Harthacnut’s agreement and perhaps at his invitation, Edward returned to England and was accepted as co-ruler. Just one year later Harthacnut died - he dropped dead at a wedding feast - it’s presumed he had a heart attack and Edward at last, in his mid 50s, became full king of
England.
Edward, as king of England, was, let us remember, in some ways a stranger - for 25 years, thus for most of his life he had lived abroad. If he was to be a successful king he had now to find allies at home - the man who was least slow in coming forward in his support was Earl
Godwine, chief advisor to Cnut but a man with a very doubtful reputation as far as Edward was concerned since it is likely he had been implicated inthe death of Edward’s brother Alfred. At
Edward’s coronation Godwine is described as having given the most lavish present of all; the author of The Life of King Edward the Confessor even bursts into poetry to describe it - it’s a
‘loaded ship, its slender lines raked up in double prow.../ A golden lion crowns rhe stern. A winged/and golden dragon at the prow affrights the sea.... ‘. This is on the one hand a magnificent present, and possibly it was intended as a peace offering; yet it seems to have about it more than a hint of menace equipped as i t is with ‘six score fearsome warriors’.
Edward’s relationship with Godwine and his numerous children was to colour - or rather to cloud
- the whole of Edward’s reign. We of course know how it will all end - for it is Godwine’s secondbor n son Harold who on Edward’s death in 1066 becomes king. How this became possible is one of the strangest and most inexplicable stories of medieval England, but we must try now to note some of the landmarks.
The first coup for the Godwine family was the marriage of Earl Godwine’s daughter, Edith to
Edward in 1045. The natural expectation must have been that Edith would give birth to children - in this way the ancient bloodline of English kings would have been preserved and at the same

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Godwine ambition would have been satisfied. Much later when moves were afoot to have
Edward proclaimed a saint the story caught on that he and Edith had in fact enjoyed a chaste marriage - giving up sex in the middle ages wasn’t always a sign of holiness but it certainly helped but there really is no contemporary evidence to support this view and much to suggest otherwise. Just six years after the marriage Godwine and Edward had an almighty row -
Godwine together with his sons Harold and Swein, was banished from the kingdom and Edith was sent off to a convent.
This is the one occasion during the whole of Edward’s reign when
Edward took unequivocal action against the Godwines. Had he been able to maintain this stance there is every reason to think he would have chosen a new bride and possibly fathered a new family? It’s an extraordinary testimony to the power of the Godwine family that this is not what happens. Quite the contrary. A year after the banishment the Godwines return and in a dramatic encounter on the river Thames they brazened it out. The account in the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle is worth quoting in full:
‘..Godwin kept moving on London with his troops until he came to Southwark and there waited for a while until the tide came up, using the opportunity, as he had done earlier, to come to an arrangement with the citizens that they would fall in with his wishes in almost everything. When he had arranged his course of action, then the tide came up and they immediately raised their anchors and held on their way through the bridge near the south bank; and his supporters on land came down and arrayed themselves along the strand. Then they veered round with the ships towards the north bank as if they were going to surround the king’s ships. The king also had great land levies on his side in addition to his shipmen, but it was hateful to almost all of them to have to fight against men of their own race, for there were few men else of any consequence, except Englishmen on either side; and besides they were unwilling to increase the danger of leaving this land wide open to the invasion of foreigners, were each side to destroy the other. It was decided that wise men should act as intermediaries and arrange a truce between each side; and Godwine landed with Harold and as many of their troops as they considered sufficient, and a meeting was then held; and Godwine’s earldom was restored to him without reservation, as fully and as completely as ever he possessed it, and to his sons likewise all they had possessed; and the council ratified complete friendship between them, and made a promise of good laws for the whole nation..’ (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, C,1052).
This is a memorable passage, not simply because it demonstrates the power of the Godwine family and the limits of the ki ng’s; but because of the reluctance of each side to fight - ‘it was hateful to all most all to fight against men of their own race....and beside they were unwilling to increase the danger of leaving this land wide open to the invasion of foreigners were each side to destroy the other...’
In 1066 of course, this is precisely what did happen - foreigners in the shape of William the
Conqueror invaded and conquered - and Englishmen lamented.
So how did this happen? The Norman version, famously suggested by the Bayeux Tapestry is that Edward offered William the throne, even that Harold was sent to Normandy to put this to
William and that Harold himself swore an oath to William promising to give him every support.
But this is of course simply the Norman story....we may complain about spin today - but don’t imagine it’s anything new; the Normans of 1066 were experts at it. But there is a serious flaw in their argument for according to English rules of succession even had Edward wanted to offer
William the throne this was not something, constitutionally, that he could have done. English kingship was elective; only a small group at any one time were eligible - usually the previous

6 king’s sons - but succession was not automatic and however much influence the king might bring to bear it was still, emphatically, not in his gift. The chief men of the country had to meet, to discuss and agree; only then came election and coronation. Now what this means is that if
Edward could not have designated William as his successor - nor by the same logic could he have chosen Harold - and there is no evidence that he did. It’s clear both from the Bayeux
Tapestry and from the account given in Edward’s Life that Harold was indeed at the bedside of the king as he lay dying in
January 1066 but the king’s words are nicely ambiguous: he did not say to Harold ‘ you will be the next king’; his reported words were very different - he simply commended his wife and his kingdom to Harold’s protection. On Edward’s subsequent death,
Harold with remarkable speed had himself crowned but we do not need to imagine that this was either in accordance with or in contravention of Edward’s wishes: the simple fact is that in 1066 there was no one else in England who had the same degree of power as Harold and no one who would have dared to challenge him. In 1066, the wealth of the Godwine family was very close to the king’s.
But if Harold had wealth and influence the one thing he did not have - any more than William the
Conqueror - was royal blood. And yet in 1066 there was a claimant who had, and who remarkably was overlooked. This was Edgar, grandson of Edmund Ironside, great-grandson of
King Ethelred. Edgar had been born abroad but he had returned, we think at Edward’s invitation in 1057 together with his father. His father died that same year; thereafter the young Edgar was strangely ignored by Edward; certainly he was not set up in any kind of position from which he could ever have challenged Harold. And why ? Only one conclusion is possible - in 1052
Edward had failed to break the power of the Godwine family; thereafter the Godwines in the shape of Harold were unstoppable, prepared to bide their time but not to allow the emergence of any other rival.
What does all this say about Edward and his kingship? Was he a weak king, impotent in the face of the ambitions of a rich and unscrupulous family? Well - yes - but that is not the end of the story and it won’t do as a final verdict. To begin with, it is worth recalling Edward’s traumatic early years - his father’s kingdom overrun by Vikings; his mother married to the victor; he and his brother abandoned; his brother murdered.
Edward’s desire for peace is both understandable, and let us remember, in sympathy with those of his nobility who in the years when he tried to break the Godwines, did not want to precipitate a civil war. The peace Edward gave England was no mean achievement.
But there is more to Edward’s reign than this; the most remarkable thing about Edward is his posthumous reputation and for this he himself deserves at least some of the credit - for he pointed the way in which he himself hoped he would be remembered - and it is here that we should turn to Edward and Westminster.
When Edward became king Westminster housed a small community of monks. At the time of his death the Abbey had been entirely rebuilt into the finest, most lavish and most adventurous building across the country. It would be nice to think that some of the stone came from Islip - that certainly is the later tradition - you can find it recorded in Robert Graves Goodbye to All That where he writes about his time in World’s End- I quote ‘The Abbey Stone came from a quarry on the hillside close to the river; our cottage stood on the old slipway down which the stone-barges were launched.’ Be that as it may Edward’s Westminster, both the Abbey and the Palace - also
Edward’s creation - gave English kingship a new home and created a centre for an ideology of kingship that despite many a hitch was to prove remarkably enduring, and which - at a stretch - you could say Islip both contributed to through Edward but which it also helped to kill off; this was at the Battle of Islip B ridge when we ferried Cromwell and his men across the river and so

7 hastened the execution of Charles 1 in 1649. At issue in 1649 as it was in Edward’s reign was this: what was the nature of royal power. How different was a king from everyone else in his kingdom? What happened when a king was crowned? Did the ceremony of his anointing make him in some way special? Did it mean that in a very particular way God was with him and would work through him?
It will come as no surprise to know that very often the kings who were the most anxious to stress their closeness to God were those who in other respects lacked power. Edward is a classic example. We can see this both through the image portrayed of him by his building at
W estminster and from the biography a contemporary wrote. Here Edward, lived in this world ‘like an angel’ , singled out by God to be king of England even before he was born; Edward had had no children because he and Edith had taken a vow of chastity; he ‘gladly and devoutly’ attended church every day - and - most remarkably of all he was accredited with the power of healing disease, including the tubercular complaint scrofula known as the ‘King’s evil’, which Edward seemingly cured by his miraculous touch.
Cures do not in themselves make a saint and we need now to ask how it was that Edward’s reputation survived the traumas of 1066 and how it was that his Abbey of Westminster came to become the royal cult centre that has survived to this day. The answer lies in the perceived needs both of the monks of Westminster and of the royal house. The Normans of 1066 were not regarded as a particularly nice people and their claims to England were in many circles seen as tenuous. Hastings had been a bloody victory, won against an anointed king. Even at this late stage there were Anglo-Saxons who tried t o revive the claims of Edward’s nephew, Edgar. They failed, but a sense of the importance of his bloodline remained and in 1100 when William the
Conqueror’s youngest son Henry became king he recognised this and chose as his queen
Matilda, one of Edgar’s nieces. The marriage was interpreted as the fulfillment of a strange prophecy of Edward the Confessor’s uttered as he lay dying to the effect that England would enjoy no peace until the top part of a green tree, felled and carried off ‘ the space of three furlongs from the stock, shall again be joined to its trunk , by itself and without the hand of man or any sort of stake and begin once more to push leaves and bear fruit from the old love of its uniting sap...’ (The Life of King Edward the Confessor, p.76). English traditions in King Henry’s reign were still being remembered and they mattered. In his coronation charter Henry promised to respect the Laws of King Edward, evidently now a touchstone of good government. In 1102
Edward’s tomb was opened and it was found that his body had not decayed, in other words it was what was known as ‘an incorrupt body’, not something that was essential for a saint but helpful all the same. New stories of marvelous happenings associated with Edward circulated - how it was St Peter himself who had told him to restore Westminster; how he had once cured a cripple by giving him a piggyback from the palace to the abbey; how he gave a ring to a beggar who turned out to be none other than John the Evangelist and how the ring was returned to him. And finally in 1161 Pope Innocent II declared that Edward was indeed a saint and as such worthy of veneration. His tomb was re-opened and we have this time a vivid description of the gold cloth in which Edward’s body had ben wrapped, his purple shoes and his white beard. A new coffin was prepared and situated now for all to see. The ceremony took place on October
13 - a date Islip will commemorate this October.
This might seem a fitting place to end - but in a very real sense I have only just reached the beginning of Edward’s cult and the story of how, gradually, he became England’s patron saint saint until toppled by St George. Norman claims to legitimacy depended upon perpetuating the notion that William the Conqueror was Edward’s chosen heir. Harold could be, and indeed was,

8 written out of the historical record but not Edward and it was how England had been ‘tempore regis Edwardi’ , in the time of King Edward, that was recorded in Domesday book alongside the new information belonging to the year of its compilation. And although for many decades after the conquest kings were not buried in Westminster Henry I’s Queen - Matilda - Edgar’s niece - was, and, notably, all kings were crowned there. Westminster had become the font of English kingship. The first post-Conquest king to choose Westminster also as his burial place was Henry
III, king from 1216-
1272. (Significantly, by the time of Henry’s accession Kings of England had lost all their Norman possessions). Henry lavishly rebuilt Westminster and poured attention on
Edward. At his coronation he used Edward’s regalia; he and his queen took communion from a chalice that had belonged to Edward; his throne was decorated with a painting of Edward, even the walls of his bedc hamber had on them paintings of Edward’s miracles. And in as far as he could every October 13 he went to the Abbey. In 1269 at his instigation Edward was moved to new and yet more splendid tomb. An expanded Life of Edward, dedicated to the Queen took the court by storm and was required reading in all the best circles - and it was now that Edward became again a kingly name - Henry III was succeeded by no less than three Edwards; the king with whom I will end - Richard II was the son of the fourth consecutive royal Edward - more usually known as the Black Prince.
Richard II’s own devotion to Edward finds its most memorable expression in the Wilton Diptych.
In this painting the young Richard is depicted kneeling before the Virgin and Child, accompanied by a choir of angels. Behind him stand three figures - Edmund, king of East Anglia martyred in the tenth century by Vikings, Edward the Confessor and John the Baptist. Between his finger and thumb Edward holds a ring, recalling the legend of his gift of a ring to a beggar who turned out to be John the Evangelist. Less frequently represented is the exterior of the right wing where
Richard’s arms are impaled, in other words put side by side with Edward’s cross with its three splayed points and five martlets. But Edward in the Diptych has become more than a English saint - he plays the part along with Richard and Edmund of one of the three kings present at the nativity of Christ. Edward has thus come to symbolise the holiness of all kings - and although
Richard himself came to a sticky end Edward’s reputation as a righteous king lingered on - you can find it for example in Shakespeare’s Macbeth where ‘the most pious Edward’ gives shelter and aid to the refugees from Macbeth’s court. Edward is portrayed here as a wonder-working
King, curer of the sick and the recipient of God’s grace and it is with Shakespeare’s words as
Edward’s epitaph that I would like to end. Malcolm is explaining to MacDuff Edward’s powers:
How he solicits heaven
Himself best knows; but strangely visited people
All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye
The mere despair of surgery, he cures
Hanging a golden stamp about their necks
Put on with holy prayers; and tis spoken
To the succeeding royalty he leaves
The healing benediction. With this strange virtue
He hath a heavenly gift of prophecy
And sundry blessings hang about his throne
That speak him full of grace.
(Act IV, Sc.III).