1066 - Andrew Bridgeford [109]
According to a curious story that was circulating in the fourteenth century, the widowed Emma, Canute's former queen and mother of Edward the Confessor by her earlier marriage, was accused in 1043 or 1050 (the accounts differ) of a liaison of particularly scandalous proportions.9 In short, she was supposed to have been on much more friendly terms than she ought to have been with one of England's foremost ecclesiastics, Ælfwine of Winchester. At first King Edward believed the stories, but protesting her innocence, and that of the bishop, Emma successfully endured a trial by ordeal by walking unscathed across nine red-hot ploughshares (the horizontal cutting blade of the plough). A penitent Edward begged forgiveness; but he was nonetheless beaten with a rod (so the fourteenth-century story goes) by both his mother and Bishop Ælfwine. Could it be that the tapestry's Ælfgyva scene is an allusion to this late-reported scandal involving Emma and the Bishop of Winchester?
The story is found in no contemporary source. It has every appearance of being purely legendary. Its relationship with known events is confused and no modern historian takes it seriously.10 It also differs in key respects from what we see in the tapestry. For one thing, the alleged affair was with a bishop. If the Ælfgyva scene concerned Emma and an episcopal lover, the Tapestry would surely have called the tonsured character a bishop, 'UNUS EPISCOPUS', not simply a cleric, 'UNUS CLERICUS'. For another, according to the story, Emma was widely believed to have proved her innocence by enduring hot iron: in other words by the miraculous intervention of God; and to the medieval mind that was the highest and most indisputable indication of the purest innocence. That the scandal was raised again in the 1070s by the artist of the Bayeux Tapestry, if indeed it was ever raised at all, seems pretty inconceivable. It is also hard to find a reason why Emma should be called out as a subject of special interest at this point in the Bayeux Tapestry. We must therefore turn to the story of scandal that involved her rival and namesake Ælfgifu of Northampton, Canute's mistress. To do so it is necessary to enter the turbulent world that threw these two forceful woman into bitter rivalry.11
At the tail-end of the tenth century successive waves of Danish attack and pillage had brought the country almost to its knees. King Æthelred was proving himself an ineffectual ruler, helpless to resist the Vikings. His attempts to buy them off only encouraged them to return; and in the north and east they had long settled in large numbers. It was into this violent world that Ælfgifu of Northampton was born. Her family were important landholders in Northamptonshire, coming from English or Anglo-Danish stock. In these dark and lawless days suspicion and treason were rife and violence was never far away. In 1006 Ælfgifu's father, Ælthelm, was tricked and murdered while hunting and around the same time her brothers Ufegeat and Wulfheah were blinded, apparently on King Æthelred's orders. The situation for the native dynasty worsened until at last it became untenable. In 1013 Swein Fork-Beard, the King of Denmark, invaded at the head of his own army and within a year he had conquered the whole of England. Æthelred and most of his family were forced to flee to exile in Normandy, the land of his wife Emma. Swein's sudden death on 3 February 1014 provided only a temporary respite from the Danish