It was almost as though Edward – and Harold – were secure enough once the crisis of 1051–2 was over to allow the luxury of dissent. We can see this strength in the silver penny issued shortly after. The image of the king on the coin is a sharply characterized, realistic portrait – the first such on an English coin. It is also remarkable for its weight of royal symbolism: not only is the king shown with a sceptre but his crown is doubly imperial. The upper portion of the crown is crossed with two arches, like the closed crown of the German Holy Roman Emperor; the lower jewelled circlet, however, is modelled on the diadem of the basileus, the Byzantine emperor, and features the same cataseistae, or pendants. The St Stephen Crown of Hungary, where Edward the Exile took refuge from Cnut, is of similar appearance and it may perhaps be conjectured that Edward introduced his Hungarian hosts both to the form of the crown and to the formulary of the English coronation, which was also adopted in Hungary.
Should the king be properly known as Edward the Emperor rather than Edward the Confessor?
For the second half of Edward’s reign was a period of remarkable prosperity and stability. The continuing struggle for control of Cnut’s Scandinavian empire between the rulers of Denmark and Norway meant that they were too busy fighting each other to think seriously of invading England. This meant in turn that the geld, or land tax, which continued to be levied despite Edward’s ostentatious abolition of the heregeld itself, flowed directly into the king’s coffers.
A rudimentary treasury was set up at Winchester to administer the funds. It began as a chest under the royal bed in the charge of one or more of the king’s bedchamber servants or ‘chamberlains’. The chest figures in one of the legends that gathered around Edward as a proto-saint. A thief entered the royal bedchamber; made sure, as he thought, that the king was sound asleep and stole from the chest. He did the same a second night. But, as he came back a third time, he was startled when Edward, who had silently observed his earlier depredations, warned him to be gone as Hugolin the chamberlain was about to enter.
This Hugolin was a real person and, as senior bur-thegn or chamberlain, had charge not only of the royal treasures but of important documents as well. But was the under-the-bed chest also real? Modern historians have been sceptical. They have calculated the size of the chest needed to hold the annual yield of the geld, and then observed, dismissively, ‘some box, some bed’! But they may be being too clever by half. For hands-on royal management of the finances remained a feature of English government to the end of the Middle Ages and beyond. Henry VII counted and chested his own money with his treasurer of the chamber; while under Henry VIII the wealth of the monasteries was decanted into a cash hoard that was kept behind the royal bedchamber in Whitehall and administered by Sir Anthony Denny as chief gentleman of the Privy Chamber. Denny’s other duties included the custody of valuables and documents, the control of access and the wiping of the royal bottom.
Where modern historians are right, of course, is that this ‘primitive’ system of cash hoarding, whether in the eleventh or in the sixteenth century, was underpinned by an elaborate and formalized system of revenue raising. Receipts, in the form of notched sticks or tallies, were issued, and written records, including tax assessments, were kept. And, in sharp contrast with later practice, they were kept in English.
At the same time, the royal writing office developed rapidly too. It was run by the king’s priest Regenbald, who probably came from Lotharingia (Lorraine). He used the title of either regis sigillarius (‘keeper of the king’s seal’) or regis cancellarius (‘king’s chancellor’). The seal, of which he was keeper, was a metal matrix, or mould, which was used to make a wax impression. The image of the seal, which showed the king enthroned in majesty, with crown, sword and sceptre, was modelled on the seal of the Holy Roman Emperors. But, uniquely, the English seal was double-sided and hung from the document on a tag rather than being impressed on its surface. This meant that even when the document was folded and tied up, the seal could still be left hanging outside, proud and visible.
The visibility of the king’s image was important because the document, to which the seal was most frequently attached, was a peremptory royal letter of instruction. Known as a writ, it ordered a royal official that something should be done forthwith: that a case be heard in his court; that a tax be remitted; that a burh be punished for its misdemeanours. All this implied a highly sophisticated form of government: the person addressed was a royal official, not a feudal magnate; and the courts which would hear the case, in the shire and hundred, were royal also. But, though they were royal, they were not bureaucratic. Instead, they relied for their operations on the cooperation of the local community of free men. And a surprisingly high proportion was involved: on one Herefordshire estate, for example, it has been calculated that one free man in twenty was engaged in administration at one level or another.
Another mark of the stability of these years was the deliberate reconstitution of the royal family. As we have seen, after Cnut’s triumph the children of his supplanted Anglo-Saxon rival, Edmund Ironside, had been packed off to Germany and thence to Hungary. Cnut’s intention was that they should be murdered (at a safe distance from English eyes). Instead, they were received as honoured guests. The younger, Edmund, died in Hungary. But the elder, Edward the Exile, married the Princess Agatha and had ‘a fair offspring’. In 1054, the princely Bishop Ealdred of Worcester, who was an intrepid traveller, went ‘on the king’s errand’ to the imperial court. His mission was to persuade Edward and his family to return with him to England. The then state of relations between the Empire and Hungary frustrated Ealdred’s mission. But the message got through and Edward, Agatha and their children arrived in England in 1057. Edward himself died almost immediately, to the grief of the Anglo-Saxon chronicler. But his wife and children remained in England and his young son, Edgar the Æthling, was brought up by Edward as his own.
The most striking change, however, and the surest sign of recovery, was that England regained her tenth-century hegemony within Britain. In 1054, Earl Siward of Northumbria defeated Macbeth, the usurping king of Scots; killed many of the Scots nobility and seized immense booty. These events, imaginatively dramatized by Shakespeare, paved the way for the restoration of Malcolm III, son of Macbeth’s predecessor, Duncan, in 1057. Two years later, in 1059, Malcolm visited the English court, escorted by Earl Tostig. It was the first such visit by a Scottish king since Kenneth I had come to Edgar’s court eighty years previously, also to swear a form of fealty.
Likewise reminiscent of Edgar’s reign was the fate of Wales. Harold tried to bring Gruffudd ap Llwelyn to heel in 1056 by negotiation from a position of strength. Gruffudd, recognizing that he was temporarily outmatched, ‘swore oaths that he would be a firm and faithful viceroy to King Edward’. But, as soon as he dared, he was back to his old tricks. Finally, in 1063, Harold and his brother Tostig launched a two-pronged attack on Gruffudd: Harold by sea and Tostig by land. Their success provoked an internal rising against Gruffudd, who ‘was … slain on 5 August by his own men’. His severed head was surrendered to Harold, who sent it as a trophy to Edward, together with the gilded figurehead and prow of Gruffudd’s ship.
It is a remarkable achievement. Edward’s coronation seems to have been intended to usher in a new ‘age of Edgar’. An observer of Britain in 1063 would probably think that it had succeeded.
But he would have judged too soon.
III
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle contains no entry at all for 1064. But this is the year, almost certainly, of Harold’s ill-fated visit to William of Normandy. There are contemporary descriptions of the visit only in the Norman sources and even they disagree about details. But the broad outlines, as they are presented in the Bayeux Tapestry, seem reasonably clear. Harold took leave of Edward and rode to Bosham, hunting and hawking along the way. He prayed at Bosham Church and ate and drank in the hall before embarking