Battle of Hastings, The (10 page)

Many of the ideas relating to family were remarkably modern. The position of women in society might well have been envied by their descendants in the post-conquest period
and much later; it is clearly stated in the law-codes that ‘no woman or maiden shall ever be forced to marry one whom she dislikes, nor be sold for money’. She had legal rights to
shares in the property of the household and to the care of the children if there were a divorce or separation and, if widowed, a second marriage was, in theory at least, entirely at her own
discretion. Indeed, according to the first Kentish laws, divorce was extremely easy in Anglo-Saxon society; a woman who wished to leave her marriage with her children was entitled to half the goods
of the household. Her freedom to own and dispose of land was remarkable, compared with the post-conquest period when the property of a woman became the property of her husband the moment she
married. It has been suggested that Harold’s mistress or handfasted wife, Edith,
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may have been the woman named in the Domesday Book
as Edith the Fair or Edith the Rich, in which case she clearly came of good family and held extensive lands in her own right throughout East Anglia and Buckinghamshire. The Domesday Book also
records the situation of a woman in Yorkshire called Asa who held her land

Not until the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act in 1882 were women to enjoy such financial independence again.
Moreover, a woman did not
have to be of noble birth to enjoy such rights: the Domesday Book records the grant to Ælfgyth the maid of two hides of land in Buckinghamshire

Gold embroidery work was, of course, one of the most highly prized and rewarded skills of the time and one for which the English were particularly renowned.

As for the upbringing of children, the ideas expressed in one of the gnomic poems (essentially collections of sententious utterances) were positively advanced even by twentieth-century
standards:

The history of education in Anglo-Saxon England divides into five periods: the conversion period, when missionaries from both Rome and Ireland brought learning and books with
them; the first high period of the Church, when Alcuin, an English missionary at the court of Charlemagne, recalled regretfully the richness of the library of York Minster that he had left behind
and of which Alfred was thinking when he remembered the churches filled with treasures and books; the first Danish invasions, in which so many of those books and treasures were plundered or
destroyed; the beginning of the revival of learning under Alfred, and the gradual building up again of libraries and teachers during the peaceful times of Athelstan and Edgar;
and then the second wave of Viking invasions under Æthelred, less destructive than the first but bad enough. At least Cnut was a devout Christian and his father Sweyn Forkbeard nominally one
– Æthelred never had to answer the unanswerable question his forefather Alfred was faced with: how can you trust the oaths of pagans to whom nothing is sacred, not even their own
gods?

The first and most important educational necessity throughout these centuries was to train recruits for the priesthood and the cloister. That the various minster schools succeeded in this is
indicated by the number of English missionaries who went to convert the heathen on the Continent, such as St Boniface, or were sent for to take education and civilization to foreign schools, as
Alcuin was recruited by Charlemagne. These men were accustomed to send back to England for books unavailable to them where they were working; English book production was clearly of a high standard.
Boniface wrote to ask the Abbess Eadburh to copy St Peter’s epistles for him in gold. This would presumably be for ceremonial occasions, but more workaday books were in demand also. Dorothy
Whitelock listed the writings that were then available in England:

And the English monastics were not just reading these books, they were writing new works for themselves. Bede’s and Aldhelm’s works were produced at this period.

It is impossible to know how far learning reached the lay population in the eighth and ninth centuries. There may have been, probably were, noblemen and women who were literate and could read
Latin as well as English. Many of the most famous founders of monasteries, such as Benedict Biscop, the founder of Bede’s monastery of Jarrow/Monkwearmouth, and a noted buyer of books, must
have come into this category; many, like him, must have entered monasteries or taken holy orders later in life. If there had been no tradition at all of lay education, Alfred would hardly have
lamented in his letter on the state of learning in England (?890s) that there were now few people north or south of the Humber who could even read English or translate a letter from Latin into
English, or make use of the books that remained. It is not entirely clear from his letter whether he is thinking of clerics or laypeople or both. He may have been
thinking
primarily of priests or monks; but if he had been thinking only of the clergy, his programme of translations into English of the books that were most necessary for
all
men to know would look
rather strange. He would never have supposed that it would have been sufficient for a priest or a monk to know only these particular books and only in English. Their needs would have been far more
extensive. His programme of translation, as well as his own words, ‘all men’, imply a determination to reach the laity. Asser, one of the scholars whom Alfred recruited to make his
court a centre of learning, speaks in his life of Alfred of the king’s children being educated

We may well suspect that Asser is laying it on a little lavishly here, but even allowing for exaggeration, his specific mention of other noble children and some of lesser birth
makes it fairly clear that, in theory at least, Alfred’s conception of education was not limited to the Church and that the origins of comprehensive education may be found in England nearly
two hundred years before the conquest.

There is no such direct testimony of the state of general literacy as Alfred provides in his letter from the reigns of his immediate
successors, but there is little doubt
that many could and did read. Professor James Campbell comments:

In addition to these legally useful documents, the religious texts available to the Anglo-Saxon layman in English would have included the Gospels, the psalms, the Hexateuch, the
creed, the confessional formulae, homilies and the lives of the saints. Ælfric’s translation into English of the Old Testament was commissioned by a nobleman. Perhaps he wanted to have
it read to him in his own tongue; but possibly he wanted to be able to read it himself.
It is worth remembering that, from the earliest period, the various codes of laws had
all been written in English, implying an ability in those who were not Latinists to read them. After a papal council at Rheims in 1050, King Edward ordered that a record of what had been said and
done there should be written in English and a copy kept in the king’s treasury. This would not be necessary for the clergy and could therefore only have been designed for the convenience of
laymen. There is a tradition that King Harold owned books – not just religious books, which any pious man might have, but books on hawking – which has caused his biographer to hazard
the cautious guess that he may have been literate. It would be more surprising if he had not been. He had been virtually running the highly sophisticated Anglo-Saxon state of which Professor
Campbell speaks for years before he was crowned; a state in which, since at least the days of Alfred, one of the primary instruments of government was the royal writ, which recipients were expected
to be able to read. His sister, the queen, had received an excellent education at the abbey of Wilton, where there was a school for aristocratic young ladies, and one may assume that her younger
sister, Gunnhild, who later took the veil, had been similarly educated; it would be strange if less trouble had been taken over the education of the boys of the family. We know from the anonymous
author of the
Vita Ædwardi
that Godwin took care to have his sons trained in all the accomplishments that would make them useful to their king. Indeed, Frank Barlow has pointed out
that, of all the English kings after Cnut, Harold was the only one who received a political education suitable for the office.
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There is no
evidence either way for Duke William’s literacy. One of his biographers asserts categorically that he was not and that all his sons were similarly illiterate.
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The Norman court, he points out, was not a centre of culture. Orderic
Vitalis writes of his having witnessed a charter by making a cross.
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Indeed, the point has been made by David Bates that, ‘for almost the first century of its existence, the government of the Norman rulers was
illiterate’
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– a circumstance that considerably complicates the writing of its history during that period. After Hastings, the new
regime was to be much distressed to discover the extent to which English was used for the everyday affairs of church and state; the Normans made haste to substitute Latin, which their own clerks
were able to understand.

Alongside the literacy or otherwise of the laity in England was something that is much more easily estimated: their affection for the old Germanic heroic poems and lays. This was one of the most
lasting gifts that they brought from their continental homelands and it endured right up to the conquest. Of all the countries of Europe at that time, England was far ahead in having a flourishing
vernacular literature, much of which is unfortunately lost, though enough has survived to give us a feeling for its quality. Before 1066, there was little to challenge it, apart from the Celtic
literature of Ireland and Wales and the French
chansons de geste,
the stories of heroic deeds, of which there were probably once many, though few, and those mostly considerably later, have
survived. The
Chanson de Roland
is the most important early example to survive and cannot much pre-date the conquest in its present form. There had certainly been vernacular poetry on heroic
subjects in Germany, but it was mainly oral; only scraps and shards of this have survived in written form, such as the tantalizingly short piece of the heroic poem
Hildebrand.
The great age
of the Icelandic sagas came well after the conquest.

England, on the other hand, had the distinction of having poems not just of heroic deeds but also of a more reflective nature, asking the questions that good poetry has always asked about the
unfathomable mystery of existence. It is miraculous that we have as much of it as we do: the odds must always have been heavily against its survival. In its original form,
when the Anglo-Saxons first came to England, it must have been a purely oral tradition that they brought with them. When a more literate age arrived with the conversion, it was highly unlikely that
the monks, then the only literate people, would have given priority to committing the pagan songs of pagan gods and heroes to paper. (Though it is a mistake to exaggerate the prudishness of the
cloister; Professor Campbell has pointed out that a tenth-century transcription of Ovid’s
Ars Amatoria,
the part concerned with the techniques of seduction, may well be in the hand of
St Dunstan.) But the songs did somehow survive, indeed they must have flourished, and even in monasteries they must have had a following, or Alcuin would not have asked the Abbot of Lindisfarne his
indignant question,
Quid enim Hinieldus cum Christo?
, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Christ?’ Ingeld, prince of the Heathobards, makes a brief appearance in
Beowulf
, the only
surviving Anglo-Saxon epic, in one of its many digressions through old Germanic legend. Freawaru, daughter of Hrothgar, the King of the Danes, is given to him in marriage to heal the breach between
his people and hers. But, prophesies Beowulf, the peace offering will surely turn sour, when the Heathobards see the daughter of their enemy at the feast, and indeed the blood feud breaks out again
even more strongly with Ingeld torn between love for his bride and his duty of revenge and loyalty to his people. The fact that he could be referred to so allusively, both in
Beowulf
and in
Alcuin’s letter, implies the existence at some time of many well-known songs or poems about Ingeld and the Danish/Heathobard feud, so that the hearers or readers of
Beowulf
would
quickly pick up the allusion.