1066 - Andrew Bridgeford [111]
And of Harold Harefoot he wrote this: 'Harold claimed to be the son of King Canute by Ælfgifu of Northampton, but that is quite untrue, for some say that he was the son of a certain sutor [a "cobbler" or "workman"], but that Ælfgifu acted in the same way as she had done with Swein. But because the matter is open to doubt, we have been unable to make a firm statement of the parentage of either.'12
Swein, then, is supposed to have been the son of a fornicating priest; Harefoot the offspring of a cobbler or other workman. It was only in 1980 that the American historian J. Bard McNulty drew full attention to the relevance of these stories to the Bayeux Tapestry, arguing that the Ælfgyva in the tapestry was Ælfgifu of Northampton.13
It was not alleged, it is true, that Ælfgifu of Northampton had actually had an affair with a priest. Rather it was said that, desperate to produce a child for Canute, she had connived with a fornicating priest so as to smuggle his child by an unknown mistress into her bedchamber and to pass him (Swein) off as a son of her relations with Canute. It appears, however, that the face-touching gesture did not necessarily imply sexual intercourse between the persons shown; it could merely imply connivance in a plot in which sex played an important part.14 The case for Ælfgifu of Northampton as the tapestry's eponymous lady appears to be becoming strong. Certainly the coincidence of the name and the hint of sexual scandal involving some priestly interest are suggestive. Some sort of workman was alleged to be the father of Harold Harefoot, and the depiction of a workman in the preceding lower compartment in the tapestry is again intriguing. It may not be irrelevant either that the rumour about Harefoot is specifically found in the E version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was being written at the time at St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury, where the tapestry's artist appears from art historical evidence to have been connected. Moreover, the rumour about Harefoot is also found in the Encomium Emmae Reginae, a work written by a monk from St-Omer, which survives in a single manuscript copy that is itself first heard of in the possession of St Augustine's Abbey in the later Middle Ages, but which may well have belonged to St Augustine's from the mid-eleventh century.15
What we lack at this juncture is a plausible reason why this fifty-year-old scandal should have been referred to, seemingly in quite another context, in the Bayeux Tapestry. There is no obvious solution to this difficult question. To attempt an answer we must trace the subsequent course of events, as the jealous rivalry between Emma and Ælfgifu of Northampton grew yet more bitter in emotion and tragic in its consequences.
If Canute ever heard any of the rumours concerning Swein and Harold Harefoot, there is no evidence that he believed them. His continuing attachment to Ælfgifu of Northampton and the two boys is evident from the positions he sought to give them within his empire. The death of Canute's brother in 1018/19 meant that Denmark fell under Canute's control and it seems that in the early 1020s he appointed the young Swein as his lieutenant in the Wendish region of Denmark. Because of the lad's youth - he cannot have been more than about ten years old - the ambitious Ælfgifu of Northampton accompanied her son to Denmark as his regent and protector. Herself of Anglo-Danish