Queen Emma of Normandy Part 2

History generally remembers Emma of Normandy as the wife of King Cnut and the mother of the last Anglo-Saxon King of England, Edward the Confessor. However, Emma’s life, as with most Queens, was so much more than the wife and mother of Kings. Join Johanna Strong as she interviews Steven Bishop about Emma’s amazing life and discover how Winchester became Emma’s final resting place.

Transcript

Intro Welcome to Hampshire HistBites. Join us as we delve into the past and go on a journey to discover some of the county's best and occasionally unknown history. We'll be speaking to experts as well as enthusiasts asking them to reveal some of our hidden heritage as well as share with you a few fascinating untold stories.

Johanna It's always interesting to see this development of queens when you get these political marriages that sometimes go really well and sometimes go really badly. And I think it's so special that Emma's is one where it starts as a life-saving method, but then further develops her into this. Powerful political woman that she doesn't really get to have in the first marriage. And so, I guess what's rolling that around in my head is, how does she use that newfound consort power during her second marriage? Does that political match turn into kind of at least a mutual respect between the two? 

Stephen There are two ways where we can find out the answer to this. One is we go back to witnesses and charter lists again - I was reading a very good book by a historian called Pauline Stafford, who's written a book about Queen Emma and Queen Edith, who becomes Edward the Confessor's wife - so it's a book about two queens during this period. And she claims that Emma is unusual for the time period of English queen consorts, that she appears very high up on these charter lists, and she's not referred to as the mother of Ætheling so mother of future kings. 

She is referred to as the wife of a king in her own right, which to our modern ears doesn't sound amazing, but actually at the time, she is very much seen. As an equal in that regard, in terms of that political match. Politically, that's higher up the ladder for a queen consort of this time. Cnut uses her also, like I said, for this smoothing over of political tensions between Danish elite there in England and some of the English nobility who may have their noses put out of joint.

He sends Emma to move the relics of an archbishop who had been slain by Danes earlier in the ten hundreds. If he does it as a Danish king, moving the relics of an English archbishop who was slain by Danes might not go down so well. But Emma is seen powerfully as this English queen who has the authority to do that on behalf of the king. And it looks good for publicity as well. 

And then with the second way that we see Emma's role during Cnut's marriage is how she remembers it herself. So, she has a biography basically written for her during her lifetime called the Encomium Emmae Reginae, probably pronounced it incorrectly so sorry for some of you Latin linguists out there. 

She has it written after Cnut's death about her life and the way that she writes about her marriage to Cnut, her time as queen under Cnut and the legitimacy of her own children under Cnut, in comparison to the claims of his other son with Ælfgifu of Northampton. She writes very positively about her marriage.

Now there's an element that she sort of has to, to strengthen her claim for her children, but at the same time she writes very positively and glowingly about her marriage to Cnut. So those are the two ways that we can see Emma's own agency during her time as Queen. 

Johanna I'm just in awe, the more I learn about Emma the more it's just incredible that history and our historical narrative has not latched onto her even more, because she is just such a powerful woman who just kind of looks at what needs to be done and goes, okay, well, here we go. Buckle up. It's going to be a ride.

I've had the privilege of getting a sneak peek at one of the upcoming Team Queens blog posts about Emma. If I'm misquoting this, that's on me, not on the person who has written it. Emma, when she signed charters, her name came second only to Cnut. And I think that's just incredible, that not only is she signing charters, but she is above everyone else except the king. We need a feature length film about her. That's what I'm going to advocate for.

Stephen 100% agree. 

Johanna And so, of course, this is Hampshire HistBites. So, what is her connection to Hampshire and especially to Winchester? 

Stephen Historically, Winchester plays a really massive role in the history of pre conquest England as being the seat of the kings of Wessex. So, Winchester is a natural hub for Cnut and Emma to gravitate towards and it actually becomes increasingly important as her life goes on, and this links quite nicely to Cnut's passing because in 1035 Cnut dies and there is this massive power struggle, who will become king after Cnut because he's got a son with  Ælfgifu of Northampton, Harold known as Harold Harefoot, who's still alive. He's got two sons with Emma of which Edward the Confessor, as we now know him, would be sort of the prime candidate. So that's another line. And then we've also got Æthelred the Unready’s children from previous relationships through Edmund Ironside's line. So, Edmund's died, but he's got children who were exiled to Hungary during Cnut's reign. He actually wanted them killed in Sweden but the Swedish king just passed them on to Hungary and they lived. 

So, we've got different lines of potential kings that could come and rise in Cnut's place. And geographical proximity rules the day. Harold Harefoot, Cnut's son with Ælfgifu of Northampton, he is in England at the time. The rest are not. We've got Edward and Alfred in Normandy. We've got Harthacnut who's gone over to Scandinavia to rule and look after his father's kingdoms there. And then we've got, like I said, the line of Edmund Ironside there over in Hungary. Emma wants to champion half a Cnut, her son with Cnut, which would be the most logical as well to just continue that line of Cnut.

When you read something like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, they really only tend to chronicle bad things. So, a year where a lot of things have happened and are bad, not only for England, but for Christianity, you'll get reams and reams. So, you might get a year that will be full up two or three pages. Cnut's reign of 20 years almost, fills about two pages in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle depending on what size edition that you buy. And it's like, wow, 20 years condensed into two pages. And that just indicates to you that nothing much happens, it's quite a peaceful reign. So, for Emma it's natural that she would champion her son with Cnut rather than her other two children with Æthelred at this time. But half of Cnut for whatever reason is really slow to come to England.

And Harold Hareford, Cnut's son with Ælfgifu of Northampton, he becomes king of England roughly in 1035. He's gonna share the kingdom with Hardicanute. Didn't really ever come, come to England properly. So, in 1037 Harold Harefoot's king Harold the first, he is King of England. His mother is Ælfgifu of Northampton and she's not going to want Emma knocking around.

So, at various times during this period, Emma spends some time in Winchester in sort of this kind of protective bubble and then she eventually flees to Bruges to be safe on on the continent. So, Winchester becomes a place of refuge for Emma. Eventually Harthacnut, her son with Cnut, does become king after Harold Harefoot dies in 1040.

But then Harthacnut dies two years later. So, we've got a couple of English kings from the line of Cnut dying relatively early. Some historians have supposed there may have been a genetic default or disease or something like that that have caused quite young men to die quite early in Cnut's line.

For Emma, 1042, Harthacnut died, she can now look to her other children from her marriage with Æthelred to invite Edward the Confessor over to England to become King of England. What's really interesting in this time is King Edward very quickly deprives Emma of much of her land, of much of her possessions and sends her to Winchester to basically serve out the rest of her days there.

That's probably the second thing that's really remarkable - Emma marries a Danish king that's invaded England and ousted her husband from the throne, and then now we've got her son Edward, ousting his mother from any kind of power that she had and just forcing her to live quite a quiet life in Winchester.

So that's her second link to Winchester and presumably that's why her bones still lay there and that's sort of very exciting. You'll know more about that Jo than me 'cause you've had the privilege to see that and I still haven't made it to Winchester Cathedral. 

I suppose there are two reasons for forcing her to live a quiet life in Winchester and they're both quite understandable. There is one reason that says Edward may have been bitter towards Emma because, since marrying Cnut, Emma had kept Edward and Alfred, her sons with Æthelred, in Normandy. She'd gone on to marry a new king and ever since then they're stuck in Normandy, she's in England living the life of an English queen having children with Cnut and then when the time comes that Cnut dies, she's championing their half-brother over themselves.

So, there may have been some bitterness between Edward and Emma and that would be understandable. They haven't really properly seen their mum for 20 years and she only sort of played a really active role in their upbringing when they were in sort of the first 10 years of their life. After that, they're brought up in the court of Normandy and that will lead to big problems for the English line, but we'll get on to that a little bit later.

The second reason may just be simply, like many men may do, not don't have to be a king, can just be a man starting out in life. Maybe he felt, you know what, I want to move out of my mum's shadow. She's been Queen of England since 1002, she's powerful like we were saying Jo, she probably holds still a huge degree of influence and Edward wants to be king in his own right. And maybe just cutting his mum down to size a little bit, just reminding her that I am the king, you're not going to have that huge influence over me. If anyone's watched 'The Last Kingdom', it could be a little bit of like, you know, when Edward the Elder becomes king after Alfred dies and you've got Ealhswith there, the very overbearing mother, and you as a viewer, you're thinking you're only his mum, you need to sort of pipe down and let him be king. It could have been Edward just thinking, you know, well, I need to just use my mother's influence here. 

But it does cause a stir. It's recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It's quite public. It's quite a shock. There are rumours that perhaps she'd had an affair with a bishop down in Winchester and that could have been the cause for it, but historians have come on the side that that's most likely just sort of stuff that's developed in further legend. And there’s probably more reasonable explanations for it. But it results in Emma spending the rest of her days in Winchester. 

Johanna So, she probably has worse memories of Winchester than kind of the memories that Winchester has of her because now she is such a big part of Winchester's story. And for those who are in or near Winchester or Stephen, when you get there eventually one day, be sure to stop - this is going to sound strange, but bear with me. Be sure to stop at Ask Italian on the High Street, because it is in, I'm probably going to pronounce this wrong, God Begot House which was once owned by Emma, was gifted to her by Æthelred. Was not, spoiler alert, an Italian restaurant at the time, but it is kind of one of the properties associated with her in Winchester. And then, as Stephen pointed out, her bones are still in the city. So, she came and I guess never left. She was buried at the cathedral so just down the road from what was once her home, now Ask Italian, and they've done some forensic analysis of the bones in the mortuary chests there and they're fairly confident that they are Emma's. Of course you can never be sure, but she is buried there with Harthacnut I believe. So, the whole family is up there. So that's one thing to check out if you're ever in or near Winchester Cathedral as well.  

Stephen That's a great excuse to have an Italian as well.

Johanna Yes, yes, we are not sponsored to say that but I would recommend. So, we've also touched on how society in 2022 looks at Emma and so how is she portrayed in television or films? How do we see her today versus maybe how history remembers her? 

Stephen But it's a great question. I've been looking at sort of more contemporary sources and when we say contemporary, we've got the Anglo-Saxon chronicle that is contemporary. We've got charters and Witness This which are contemporary, but we then also look to subsequent chroniclers of history and a lot of these come post Norman conquest looking back on, on the history of England. Like Geoffrey of Monmouth, we've got Henry of Huntingdon. Reading Henry of Huntingdon last night actually, and he's born to one Norman parent and one English parent, so he's sort of got that Anglo Norman perspective on history. And he calls Emma the Jewel of the Normans, the wife of kings and the mother of kings.

So, history has remembered her quite favourably. You asked me this at a time, Jo, which is quite positive for Emma because we've got this spinoff show from Vikings called Vikings Valhalla and Emma of Normandy plays a very prominent role in it. And when I saw that she was going to become a character in it, I was like whoop! And then when I watched it and she was like one of the central characters in it, I was even more excited. So, for Emma's memory I think that's a really positive thing. She definitely hasn't been remembered enough in recent English history and she suffers from two things there, in my opinion. One - the whole pre-conquest period suffers from historical amnesia in this country, in my opinion. You only have to look at the education system and we were talking about GCSE curriculums and so on and so forth before we recorded on air, Jo, but the Anglo-Saxon period is sort of known in England and there's some controversy around that phrase in North America. There's still very much referred to as that here, I have some problems with it for different reasons and if you watch my history and goals talk, you'll see why I prefer to call it the Anglo Scandinavian period but, for lack of a better term Anglo Saxon period is studied in primary schools here. When you get to secondary school year seven, which begins at the age of 11, they follow the Key Stage Three national curriculum and that basically states that history should be taught from 1066 through to the modern day. So, from Year 7 they start, usually chronologically is the easiest way to teach, and we finish near to the modern day as possible in Year 9. It also does state that a period before 1066 of British history can be taught, but this could be any period and it's usually quite short.

But you also have another subject, Classics or Latin. Now not everybody takes that in England, it's not offered everywhere, but if you're at school it does offer that you get the Roman history of Britain taught in Classics. So, you've got sort of Julius Caesar trying to invade England all the way up until the fall of Rome in the AD 400s. So, you get that taught under Classics at Key Stage 3. You get 1066 onwards, the next thousand years of history taught at Key Stage 3, where there is this vacuum of, British history from AD 500 to 1066 typically known as the Anglo-Saxon period; prefer to call it the pre conquest period or the first half of the Anglo Saxon and the rest Anglo Scandinavian just because of the makeup at that time, but lost to the historical abyss you know. And I saw this actually when I went to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, I went to the gift shop and they had this great little gift where it was fridge magnets of every English monarch. Ends with Elizabeth II. Did it begin with King Æthelstan? No, it does not. It begins with King William but Æthelstan is widely regarded in historical circles as the first king of all England.

That means we miss Æthelstan, we miss Cnut, we miss Edward the Confessor, so Emma suffers from a wider historical amnesia, I would argue, in this country of this time period as a whole. I think it's going to hopefully get better because of shows like Vikings and The Last Kingdom. This period, which has been historically called the Dark Ages which has got negative connotations, has actually become a bit sexier for lack of a better term. You know, these shows they have made it a little bit more appealing for people to watch and hopefully that's going to have a knock-on effect. And Vikings Valhalla, hopefully that'll have a knock-on effect for Emma. 

Then the second reason Emma suffers is because she's a woman. Now you could probably speak more eloquently about this, Jo, because of your work on Mary I and your involvement with Team Queens and other analysis of Queen consorts in history and how they've been forgotten. I feel that in England we remember fairly well, queens who are Queens are outright, so Elizabeth I and Mary I, and Queen Victoria to an extent, and Elizabeth II obviously got a lot of popularity at this current time. But Queen Consorts, typically outside of Henry VIII, people will be scratching their heads unfortunately. So, Emma suffers secondly because she's a woman and not a queen in her own right. But hopefully people are going to sit back, stand up and say ‘hang on a minute, she was queen twice and she was a mother of two kings. This is a hugely significant woman’. And I would like her to be remembered as sort of this embodiment of this intersection where there is English influence, Scandinavian influence and then increasingly Norman influence which starts with Emma, goes tenfold with Edward the Confessor and his court, and then obviously William's invasion. She's sort of this perfect embodiment of the sort of Anglo-Norman-Scandinavian tensions or political issues of this time, in one person she embodies that. So, I would like her to be remembered as that. 

You could also remember her in a negative light depending on how you view the Norman Conquest. You could view her sending away of her children Edward and Alfred to Normandy, and their upbringing in the Norman court, as a direct cause of the Norman Conquest. So, when Edward the Confessor becomes king, he marries a woman called Edith of Wessex, Harold Godwinson's sister, but they don't have children together so when Edward the Confessor dies there is this political vacuum again, who will become King of England? And this is a bit of pre-conquest history, that very last few months people do learn in this, in this country, and Harold Godwinson becomes King but William the Conqueror (Duke William of Normandy) believes he has a strong claim because of what Edward had promised him earlier in his life and that's because they grew up at court together. They spent a lot of time in Normandy together and I suppose the flip side you could see that if Emma hadn't had Edward in Normandy for so long, William would've probably never thought he would've had that strong claim to the English throne. Whether that promising of the throne did or didn't happen, that intense period of time, that length of time that William spent with Edward in some way, whether it was explicit or implicit, gave William the notion that he had a right to the English throne. 

Now, as we've discussed, did Emma have much of a choice? Did, was she able to bring back Edward and Alfred to court once she'd married Cnut? You know, Cnut didn't have them killed but he probably didn't want them hanging around the English court either. So having them alive in Normandy and him married to their mother was probably the best that Emma was going to get out of that situation. But there is another way to remember Emma. I'd like her to be remembered as this woman who was powerful, queen twice, mother of two kings and embodies these, political, geographical tensions of this time period.

Johanna I think that's a perfect way to end on this incredible woman. Thank you, Stephen, so much for coming on and for having this chat with me. And for everyone who has been listening, are we going to hear any future talks from you about Emma or not about Emma?

Stephen So not about Emma unless I get invited elsewhere. But yes, I will be given more talks, so as I alluded to, I give, Jo and I, we give lots of talks for history and doors don't, don't we, and we are very, active, with that organization. Just key in History Indoors on YouTube and you can watch our over 250 videos by numerous historians, including Jo and myself and many other topics. 

Johanna Absolutely. Also, I will plug, Stephen has talked previously a short video on Macbeth. So, there's all sorts of things to get stuck into rabbit holes in. So, thank you so much Stephen for joining us and thank you everyone for listening.

Outro We hope you enjoyed listening to today's episode. If you would like to find out a little bit more about what we've been talking about, then please visit the website www.winchesterheritageopendays.org. Click on Hampshire HistBites and there you'll find today's show notes as well as some links to more information. Thank you.