Weakness of English Monarchy in 1066 Essay

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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.

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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….....

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