APPENDIX. (continued 6)

766

NOTE OO. p. 531. The Ætheling Eadgar.

I do not know that there is any distinct evidence to fix the age of Eadgar. I have not come across any distinct statement either as to the date of his birth or as to the date of his parents’ marriage. His father died in 1057; so he must have been nine years old at least in 1066, and of course he may have been much older. We have seen several passages (see pp. 526, 527) where he is spoken of as a boy (“puer”) and as being too young to reign. On the other hand he was able (see Chron. Wig. in anno) to exercise a certain will of his own with regard to the marriage of his sister Margaret in 1067. He was alive, but old, at some time between 1106 and 1125, when William of Malmesbury wrote his third book. See Mr. Hardy’s note, iii. 251, and Ellis, i. 409. The former date is forty-nine, the latter sixty-eight, years after Eadgar’s coming to England. We have therefore no certain data at all; but, on the whole, it seems most likely that, though young, he was not a mere child, at the time of his election in October. It was probably not so much mere lack of years, as his incapacity, his foreign birth, his lack of the technical position of a King’s son, which shut him out in January, especially when put into competition with the overwhelming merits of Harold. In October he had no competitor better than Eadwine. Perhaps those who spoke of him as a mere child were deceived by the ambiguous description, “Eadgar cild,” which is given to him in the Chronicles, and by which he was probably known.

Hardyng (see above, p. 608) makes Harold invest Eadgar with an Earldom. Lappenberg (532; Thorpe, ii. 274) gives him the Earldom of Oxford. No authority is quoted, and the statement can hardly be reconciled with the known position of Gyrth (see vol. ii. p. 561). Indeed the evidence is against Eadgar’s holding any Earldom. All the undoubted Earls are scrupulously called Earls in the Chronicles; Eadgar is always either “cild” or “Æðeling.”

Our reckoning as to Eadgar’s age is further perplexed by the appearance of a person described as “Edgar Adeling” so late as 1158 and 1167. See Mag. Rot. Pip. Northumberland, in Hodgson’s History of Northumberland, part iii. vol. iii. pp. 3, 11. This 767entry gives us a choice of three difficulties, any one of which is somewhat alarming. Either the person so called is Eadgar himself, in which case, like Harold and Gyrth in the legend, he must have lived to the age of 110 at the very least. Or it is a son of Eadgar; but we hear nothing of any wife, mistress, or children of his; and a lawful son of Eadgar would, like Eadgar himself, have stood awkwardly in the way of Henry the Second’s claim to represent the Old-English royal house. Failing these two unlikely alternatives, we have one equally unlikely, that some person not of royal descent was spoken of as “Adeling.”

NOTE PP. p. 544. The Submission at Berkhampstead.

For once I venture to set aside the authority of the Chronicles. I do not think that Eadwine and Morkere could have been at Berkhampstead. Their presence there is asserted by the Worcester Chronicle and also by Florence, but it is hard to see how it can be reconciled with Florence’s own account of their movements just before (see p. 531). They are not mentioned by William of Poitiers, who makes them submit to William at Barking after his coronation (147, 148). The Archdeacon is capable of any disregard of chronology, but he is not likely to have cut the Berkhampstead submission into two or to have imagined a submission at Barking which did not take place. A submission of Eadwine and Morkere after the coronation falls in much better with the rest of the story than a submission before. And it is less violent to suppose that their names have got into the Chronicle in a wrong place—a process which the likeness of the names Barking and Berkhampstead would make specially easy—than to suppose that the story in William of Poitiers is an invention without a motive.

Had Stigand a share in the submission of Berkhampstead? William of Poitiers specially introduces him; indeed he is the only person whom he mentions by name (141); but he brings him to Wallingford; “Adveniens eodem [Wallingford] Stigandus, Pontifex Metropolitanus, manibus ei sese dedit, fidem sacramento confirmavit, abrogans Athelinum, quem leviter elegerat.” But the whole story is a model of geographical confusion; Berkhampstead is not 768mentioned; the request of the English that William will accept the Crown, the debate on the question, and the speech of Hamon of Thouars, are all placed “statim ut Lundonia conspectui patebat.” I have ventured to transfer all these events to Berkhampstead, where it is plain from Florence and the Worcester Chronicle that the chief act of submission took place. But the presence or absence of Stigand is a knotty point. He is not mentioned in the Chronicle, nor in the fuller list in Florence, which seems to be specially meant as a complete list of the Bishops present. On the other hand, he is the only person named by William of Poitiers, and it is certain that he must have submitted before the coronation. Is it possible that, when submission was unavoidable, he was the first to submit, and that he met William at Wallingford before the others met him at Berkhampstead? The two English writers leave Wallingford out altogether, but William must have crossed the Thames somewhere, and there seems no reason to reject William of Poitiers’ statement that he crossed it at Wallingford.

Sir Henry Ellis (ii. 267) quotes a story which is said to be in William of Poitiers, but which I cannot find there, how one Wigod of Wallingford received and entertained William at Wallingford, till Stigand and others came there to make their submission. Of this I can say nothing, but Wigod of Wallingford is a real man, occurring in Domesday (62, 150) and elsewhere. “Wigod Minster” signs a doubtful charter in Cod. Dipl. iv. 189, and “Wigodus Regis pincerna” signs the Waltham charter (iv. 159). In the writ (Cod. Dipl. iv. 215) addressed to Bishop Wulfsige and Earl Gyrth and the Thegns of Oxfordshire, dating therefore between 1058 and 1066, the King also greets “mínne léfne may Mygod on Walingeforde,” and gives him instructions which show that he was high in the royal confidence. We should surely read “Wygod.” The kinsfolk of Eadward are endless. Do “mage” and “consanguineous” really mean no more than “well-beloved Cousin” when addressed by a modern Sovereign to a modern Earl?

END OF VOLUME THE THIRD.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.

Used numbers for footnotes, placing them all at the end of the last chapter.