his goods by the counsel of the same Gemot, which doubtless
held him guilty of a share in the crimes of Emma. (Eng. Chron.
(Abingdon), 1043.) "That Stigand should have supported the
claims of Swegen is in itself not improbable. He had risen
wholly through the favour of Cnut, his wife, and his sons." (Free-
man, "Norm. Conq." ii. 65.) In the following year, however,
Stigand had made his peace with Godwine and Eadward, and was
again bishop of Elmham; (Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), i. 199), and three
years later, 1047, rose to the see of Winchester. His services
in securing Godwine's reconciliation made him primate in 1052,
and from this time till after the Conquest he stood at the head of
the English Church. He was not, however, satisfied with the
wealth of Canterbury; as he had promoted his brother, Æthelmær,
to Elmham when he went to Winchester, so on going to Canterbury
he retained his rich see of Winchester- 66
præterea multas abba-
tias." (Will. Malm. "Gesta Pontif." (Hamilton), p. 36.) Of the
"treasures of gold and silver" which he was said to have carried
off even to his prison (Angl. Sac. i. 250), Winchester preserved
a big silver cross with two images which were found in his treasury.
But though Stigand might sit at Canterbury, none held him
for archbishop. To the Abingdon chronicler in 1053, a year
after his elevation, he was still "Stigand bishop," though he
"held the bishopric at Canterbury." In the same year bishops
Leofwine of Lichfield and Wulfwig of Dorchester fared over sea
for consecration rather than ask for it from him. (Eng. Chron.
(Abingdon), 1053.) Robert, deposed by the Witan, fled to tell
his tale at Rome: and Leo IX. was not likely to hold the depo-
sition a valid one, nor seemingly did his successors Victor II.
and Stephen IX. For six years Stigand remained an archbishop
without a pallium, driven, as the story of his enemies ran, to use
the pallium of the Norman Robert whose place he had usurped.
At last in 1058 Stigand found means to get his pallium from the
anti-pope Benedict. Such a step however really increased his
difficulties. It enabled him, indeed, for the first and last time to
hallow bishops, Ethelric of Selsey and Siward of Rochester:
but it soon made matters worse. Benedict was driven from the
Papal see in 1059, and his successors, Nicolas II. and Alexander
II., with the deacon Hildebrand behind them, were only forced
into a position of hostility which was made the more irrecon-
cileable from the bitter strife in which the Papacy was then
The Norman
Conquest.
1053.
1071.
engaged with the Emperor. Nor was the answer given by EngThe Norman land to such a step on Stigand's part encouraging. So doubtful
Conquest.
10531071. Notes.
was his position still held to be, that in May 1060, a year after Benedict was driven out, Harold himself had Waltham hallowed by Archbishop Cynesige. The general drift of feeling too was shown in the journey of Walter the Lotharingian bishop of Hereford, and Gisa of Wells, to Rome itself in April 1061 for consecration from the very Pope, Nicolas, who had been defied by Stigand's act; and by Ealdred, the archbishop of York, also seeking his pallium at Rome in the same year, accompanied by two sons of Godwine, Tostig and Gyrth. In fact the very house of Godwine found itself unable to withstand the force of public feeling. The visit of Tostig and Gyrth to Pope Nicolas in 1061 pointed to a reconciliation with Nicolas; and as to the feeling of the king, Gisa himself tells us that it was Eadward that sent him to Rome and to Nicolas. ("Romam direxit, et a Nicolao Papa ordinatum . . . honorifice recepit." Hunter, "Eccl. Doc." p. 16.)
But a yet harder blow at Stigand's authority was to follow in the next year, dealt by the hands of Wulfstan. It is possible that the Papal legates who were sent to England in 1062 by the successor of Nicolas, Alexander II., brought a distinct and fresh sentence against Stigand. (Cf. the terms of Wulfstan's profession. Freeman, "Norm. Conq." ii. note cc.) They were received by the archbishop of York, who took them over England, and they were quartered at Worcester in charge of Prior Wulfstan. (Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), i. 220.) Their reception in the realm and in the Gemot at Worcester, and their influence in raising Wulfstan to the see of Worcester (which quite goes with his language about Stigand) secured England for the Papacy and made the archbishop's position untenable. Wulfstan's consecration indeed by Ealdred in September 1062 was the most public and decisive repudiation of Stigand that had been made. The words of his profession (only printed in Freeman, "Norm. Conq." ii. note cc.) are: "Quo tempore ego Wulstanus ad Wigorniensem Wicciorum urbem sum ordinatus episcopus, sanctam Dorobernensem ecclesiam cui omnes antecessores meos constat fuisse subjectos, Stigandus jampridem invaserat, metropolitanum ejusdem sedis vi et dolo expulerat, usumque pallii quod ei abstulit contempta apostolicæ sedis auctoritate temerare præsumpserat. Unde a Romanis Pontificibus Leone, Victore, Stephano, Nicolao,
Alexandro, vocatus, excommunicatus, damnatus est. Ipse tamen
ut cœpit, in sui cordis obstinatione permansit.
Per idem tempus
jussa eorum Pontificum in Anglicam terram delata sunt pro-
hibentium ne quis ei episcopalem reverentiam exhiberet, aut ad
eum ordinandus accederet. Quo tempore Anglorum præsules,
alii Romam, nonnulli Franciam sacrandi petebant; quidam vero
ad vicinos coepiscopos accedebant. Ego autem Alredum Ebora-
censis ecclesiæ antistitem adii; professionem tamen de canonicâ
obedientiâ usque ad præsentem diem facere distuli." The "perjuriis
et homicidiis inquinatus" in Orderic's description of Stigand's de-
position (Ord. Vit. (Duchesne) 516 B) may mean the bloodshed, &c.,
at the Gemot of 1052, but the "perjuriis" must go with the
"dolo" of Wulfstan. None would have him. He did not consecrate
Westminster. Harold in later days chose Ealdred to hallow him
as king. Stigand indeed stood with Harold beside the bed of the
dying Eadward; but it was only to hear himself denounced as
Eadward predicted the coming woe. "Cognoscebant enim per
sacri ordinis personas Christiani cultus religionem maxime
violatam, hocque frequentius declamasse tum per legatos et
epistolas suas Romanum Papam, tum in frequentibus monitis
ipsum regem et reginam: sed divitiis et mundanâ gloriâ irrecu-
perabiliter quidam diabolo allecti, vitæ adeo neglexerant disci-
plinam ut non horrerent jam tunc imminentem incidere in Dei
iram." Vita Edw. (Luard), 431-432. "Cunctisque stupentibus et
terrore agente tacentibus, ipse archiepiscopus qui debuerat vel
primus pavere, vel verbum consilii dare, infatuato corde submur-
murat in aurem ducis, senio confectum et morbo, quid diceret
nescire." Vita Edw. (Luard), 431. The "divitiis" above points
to the ground which common rumour assigned for Stigand's
obstinacy.
His presence with the earl at the king's bedside only shows that Harold was still driven to cling to him, though he, with all England, held him to possess no spiritual power.
CHAP. XI.
The Norman
Conquest.
1053
The Norman Conquest. 10531071.
(I have reprinted from an article written by Mr. Green in the SATURDAY REVIEW for August 22, 1868, the following passages, which deal with the character of Harold, and, in the scarcity of materials, furnish some commentary on the text.-A. S. G.)
"The death of Godwine in the very hour of his triumph bequeathed the direction of English affairs to his son, Earl Harold. It is the special merit of Mr. Freeman's elaborate researches into the later history of Eadward's reign that they bring home to us the fact that the man, who in common narratives starts into rule for a single year by his seizure of the crown, had in reality been the ruler of England for twelve years before. The coronation of Harold was, as he fairly puts it, the natural climax of the life of one who at twenty-four years old "was invested with the rule of one of the great divisions of England; who seven years later became the virtual ruler of the kingdom; who at last, twenty-one years from his first elevation, received, alone among English kings, the crown of England as the free gift of her people." The obvious lesson of all this is that Harold can no longer be judged from the single stand-point of Senlac. The year of his great close is simply the last of an administration which extended over thirteen years; and it is the general tenour of that administration, rather than of any isolated events in it, that must really give us the measure of Harold. He came to power, it must be remembered, unfettered by many of the obstacles that had beset his father. The revolution which had restored his house had freed him from the internal rivalry of a foreign party at the court. The defeat of Macbeth and the elevation of a nominee of England to the Scottish throne removed all danger from the north. If any fears of a Danish reaction still lingered, they must have been removed by the death of Osgod Clapa. Siward and Leofric, the two formidable counterpoises to the power of his house, passed away in the first years of his rule. Godwine had carried with him to his grave a thousand party resentments, gathered along a tortuous
course of political intrigue. The one great moral obstacle that
stood between England and his family had died with Swein.
None of the jealousy which Eadward displayed towards the
supremacy of his first minister seems to have displayed itself
towards his second. For twelve years he was the undisputed
governor of the realm. And this political supremacy was backed
by high personal qualities. . . . The character of the Earl,
however, remains singularly obscure. The very nature of his
administration itself, during the greater part of it, is dark and
mysterious. The three last years of it, indeed, are memorable
enough-the years of the Welsh campaign, the expulsion of
Tostig, the accession to the Crown; but the ten that precede
them defy even the industry of Mr. Freeman.
... With the
exception of his doubtful voyage through France, it is notable
that throughout the rule of Harold England is without any
foreign relations whatever; for the embassy to the Imperial
Court in 1054 had a simply domestic purpose, and the nomina-
tion of a few Lotharingian bishops does not affect the really
insular nature of his policy. Nor is this absence of outer rela-
tions compensated by any internal activity. Mr. Freeman marks,
indeed, the predominance of ecclesiastical administration as the
characteristic of this earlier period of Harold's rule; but when
we look closer into the mass of details, there is simply no
ecclesiastical administration whatever, no conspicuous synod, no
great Church reform-nothing, in a word, but the appointment
of a few prelates in the place of others, the attempted introduc-
tion of the rule of Chrodegang, and, so far as Harold himself is
concerned, the foundation of a single religious house. . . . In
his civil administration, as in his foreign and ecclesiastical, it is
difficult to grasp any new or large conception in the mind of
Harold, such as those which lift his Norman rival into greatness.
Take him at his best, there is little more than a sort of moral
conservatism, without a trace of genius or originality, or even
any attempt at high statesmanship. Take him at his worst, and
we can hardly fail to see a certain cunning and subtlety of
temper that often co-exists with mediocrity of intellectual gifts.
In the internal government of the realm he simply follows out
his father's policy, while avoiding his father's excesses. For
one great political scandal he is solely responsible. It may not
have been with a deliberate purpose of neutralizing the great
The Norman
Conquest.
1053-
1071.
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