England in the Eleventh Century

Abstract

Twelfth-century historians differed as to which of the Old English kings was most worthy of admiration. For William of Malmesbury, it was Edgar, ‘the honour and delight of Englishmen’, who experienced ‘no treachery from his own people and no destruction from foreigners’, and in the chronicles of whose reign ‘scarcely a year is passed over … without his doing his country some notable and necessary service and without his founding some new monastery’. Eadmer of Canterbury agreed, describing Edgar as ‘that most glorious king … a devoted servant of God, [who] when foreign invaders surged in on every side fought them, conquered them and kept them at bay’. For Henry of Huntingdon, it was Cnut who held the palm; ‘before him there had never been in England a king of such great authority … lord of all Denmark, of all England, of all Norway and also of Scotland’. The Ramsey Chronicler was of the same mind: Cnut was ‘inferior to none of his royal predecessors in virtue or strength of arms’. Edgar and Cnut were significant choices for twelfth-century writers. The former had kept invaders at bay, as Edward the Confessor and Harold II had not, and the latter stood, in implicit contrast to William I, for the ideal conqueror king, a foreigner who nevertheless preserved the fabric of the English Church and kingdom. Now this kingdom had fallen, and ‘all had been reduced to servitude and lamentation, and it was even disgraceful to be called English’. To contemporaries, the reason was clear: ‘such things happen because of the people's sins, in that they will not love God and righteousness’. Later writers have required more specific causes, and have been more accustomed to apportion blame than praise. Some have seen ‘a certain built-in obsolescence’ in the Old English kingdom itself, with its ‘many weaknesses, in military organisation, in uncertain frontiers, in racial divisions and political instability, in the absence of a unified law and custom, and, not least, in the absence also of the feudal bond’. Others have concentrated on politics rather than institutions.