Category: The Dark Ages

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Earl AElfgar was having a rough time. The clergy and local lords of East Anglia had never really warmed up to him since his appointment to the post in 1053. Their loyalty to Harold went so deep that we can still see evidence of their loyalty to the House of Godwin in surviving records.

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If I could interview one figure from this period, I think it would be Queen Edith.

That woman had a WEIRD life. She was married off to a King. Then she watched that King try to destroy her family…As thanks she got stuffed into a nunnery by said King… then got to watch as her family utterly spanked the King in a pirate fuelled civil war. Was finally pulled out of the nunnery only to get dropped right back where she started. In the King’s bedchamber.

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Godwin was dead, and now Harold Godwinson found himself leading the family. Befitting this new role, he was due to inherit the wealthy and politically potent Earldom of Wessex. His father’s Earldom. And according to the Vita Edwardi, the Kingdom rejoiced at Harold’s impending promotion.

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When you come at the King, you best not miss… and now the Godwins had the King of France and the Holy Roman Emperor acting as their surrogates while they were constructing no less than two invasion fleets just off of two separate English coasts … which means Edward probably realized he had went at the real King and missed.

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“O happy earl, in bairns and forebears blessed
Siring four guarantors of England’s peace.
First, Edith, gem-link on the kingdom’s brest,
All virtues’ friend, fit daughter for the earl,
Her sire, and also her spouse, the king;
By her advice peace wraps the kingdom round
And Keeps mankind from breaking pacts of peace.
Thus from your single fount, O Paradise,
You part in secret water for all lands,
Four ample streams to stir the earth’s recess
And nourish the estate of men and beasts.
Themselves they loudly praise, born from one womb,
Issue of various kind, unlike in birth,
In flesh and voice, place, space, and time and motion.
The one part mounts the skies, to heaven twined,
And tends to its race’s hope in tree-top nest.
The other, gulping monster, seeks the depths,
Attacks its root and mouths the parent trunk,
And holds, until, as doomed, the breath of life
Creates a creature from a lifeless dam;
And losing grip, pursues again its prey.
O happy world, if each would keep its course
And water its own lands, with pacts observed,
As the celestial order has ordained!
The shining lilies will delight the fields,
The caper gild the plain with golden curls,
The spring adorn the meads with privet’s gleam,
The giant oaks, with gloomy eyes, survey
The lands laid out, the kingdoms overcome.
When bees in swarms across the honeyed hills
And meadows feed, you, ant, your labour done,
Secure in your own homes, will nothing fear.
But if malignant envy break this pact
By revolution, O what ruin comes!
The wretched world again old Chaos keeps;
High cypresses with roots torn out will plunge,
The lofty pines crash down with broken tops,
Tall cedar, branches drooping round, will fall
With all those riches cherished at its heart.
Thus Madness on ungrateful lands will help
The bounty looted in the hostile towns.”

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Swegn Godwinson was exiled….again. Only this time it was for life.

As that judgment came down, the Godwins must have realized they had been maneuvered into blind dependence on the King’s mercy.

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The summer of 1051 must have felt like some sort of nightmare.

A French aristocrat rode into Dover, picked a fight and then slaughtered the townsfolk. And that man’s cousin, the King of England, told the townsfolk’s lord (Earl Godwin of Wessex) to go back and finish the job…by butchering his own people on behalf of that French aristocrat.