Lady Godiva and the Legend that Replaced Her

Nearly everyone knows the legend of Lady Godiva - the noble Saxon woman who rode naked through the streets of Coventry to win tax relief for its suffering citizens.  Far fewer know the woman beneath the legend: a major landowner in her own right, a prolific patron of the Church, and the only woman in Norman England to retain significant estates after the Conquest.  In this episode, Sophie separates the history from the myth - and finds that the real Godiva is considerably more impressive than the horse she (probably) never rode.  Her choice of modern comparison - another quietly formidable Englishwoman whose actual achievements have been similarly overshadowed by a more colorful popular image - is both unexpected and entirely persuasive.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Music by Gregor Quendel from Pixabay 

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2599997/episodes/18768959

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Lady Godiva and the legend that replaced her, a podcast by Sophie Manners. Hello and welcome back. I'm Sophie Manners, Professor of European History at Queen's College, Cambridge, author of biographies of women whose actual lives were more interesting than the stories told about them, wearer of a scarf that my college porter described this morning as a bit much for a Tuesday, to which I responded that some of the most consequential events in history happened on Tuesdays, and that the scarf was therefore entirely appropriate, and that I was going to make a podcast about it. He did not appear convinced, he is not easily convinced, we have a relationship. Today we are going to the eleventh century, we are going to the Anglo Saxon Midlands, specifically to Coventry, which is a city in the English West Midlands, with a very fine medieval heritage, that it has spent the better part of 900 years being slightly overshadowed by a story that may not have happened. We are going to talk about a woman who was, in her own right, one of the most significant female landowners in pre-Norman England, whose generosity to the church was documented and genuine and extensive, who survived the Norman conquest as essentially the only woman in the country still holding major landholdings, which is an achievement of extraordinary political and administrative significance, and whose actual biography has been so comprehensively buried under one specific legend, that most people who have heard her name have never thought about what she actually was or did. She is also, I should acknowledge at the outset, someone whose most famous image involves riding a horse without her clothes on. I am going to address this. I am going to address it with the combination of historical rigour and what I hope is a light enough touch that the episode does not become either a Victorian moral lecture or an extended undergraduate seminar on the historiography of female nudity in medieval legend formation. Both of those things exist in abundance. We do not need more of them. We need the actual woman. Her name was Godgifu. History calls her Godiva. I call her one of the more interesting people in this series, and I mean that sincerely, and not only because the story is unusual. Let us begin with what we actually know, which is considerably more than most people who have heard her name appreciate, and considerably less than the legend implies. Godiva, or Godgefu, in Old English meaning God's gift, was a late Anglo Saxon noblewoman who is relatively well documented as the wife of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and a patron of various churches and monasteries. She was not a minor figure in the background of her husband's career. She was a woman of independent wealth and independent landholding, in a society that permitted Anglo Saxon women property rights, that would not be available again in England for several centuries after the Norman conquest replaced Anglo Saxon law with Norman custom. She owned estates across Warwickshire and Leicestershire. She owned Coventry, not in the modern sense of a business owning a premises, but in the specific medieval sense of being the lord of the manor, the person responsible for the land, the tenants, the governance, the agricultural and commercial life of the settlement. She was, by any reasonable assessment, powerful. Not powerful in the way that queens regnant are powerful. She held no crown, no royal title, no position in the formal hierarchy of kingship, but powerful in the way that very wealthy, very well connected women in Anglo Saxon England could be powerful through the ownership of land, the patronage of the church, and the management of a domestic and economic sphere that was, in the eleventh century, considerably less separated from political power than we now tend to assume. Her husband, Leofric, Earl of Mercia, was one of the three most powerful men in England during the reign of Edward the Confessor, alongside Sywider of Northumbria and Godwin of Wessex, the father of the Harold who would be killed at Hastings in ten sixty six. Leofric controlled an earldom that stretched roughly from London to Manchester, encompassing the entire English Midlands. He was a man of considerable political sophistication who had navigated the reigns of Knut, Harold Harefoot, Harthicnut, and Edward the Confessor, without losing his head, or his earldom, which in early eleventh century England was not a trivial accomplishment. He and Godiva were, by all contemporary accounts, a matched pair in their munificence. They gave together, they built together, they endowed together. She and her husband were among the most munificent of the several large Anglo Saxon donors of the last decades before the Norman conquest. They gave to Coventry, to Leominster, to Chester, to Muchwenlock, to Evesham. They funded gold work by Manig, the most celebrated goldsmith of the era. They gave relics, vestments, jewelled altarpieces. The list of their gifts is, in the surviving records, extensive and impressive. At Coventry in particular, Godiva and her husband donated so many jewels, gold, and holy relics that the very walls seemed too narrow for all this treasure. This is the historical Godiva before the legend, a wealthy, pious, politically connected noblewoman of the Anglo Saxon aristocracy, managing her own estates, co funding major ecclesiastical projects, living through a period of extraordinary political instability with apparent success. Then Leofric died in 1057. And here things become genuinely remarkable, because what Godiva did after her husband's death is, from the historian's perspective, the most interesting part of her biography and the part that the legend most completely erases. After Leofric's death in 1057, his widow lived on until her mid-fifties and died sometime between the Norman conquest of 1066 and 1086. She is mentioned in the Domesday Book as one of the few Anglo Saxons and the only woman to remain a major landholder shortly after the conquest. I want that sentence to land properly. The only woman in ten eighty six, twenty years after William the Conqueror had arrived at Hastings and spent two decades systematically dismantling Anglo Saxon land tenure, redistributing the estates of the conquered English aristocracy to his Norman followers, and replacing a legal system that had permitted women to own property with a Norman feudal system that was considerably less generous about this. After all of that, Godiva was still there, still holding land. The Domesday Book, the Great Survey of English Landholding Commissioned by William, which recorded who owned what, and was the most comprehensive administrative exercise in English history up to that point, lists her. She is the only woman of her class who survived the conquest with her landholdings intact. This is not luck. This is not accident, this is the achievement of a woman who understood the political landscape she was navigating, who howed the resources and the connections and the administrative intelligence to manage the transition from Anglo Saxon to Norman England in a way that allowed her to retain what was hers. We do not know exactly how she did it. The records are not that specific. But the fact that she did it when virtually every other Anglo Saxon landholder of comparable status, male or female, lost their estates to Norman redistribution is a historical fact of considerable significance. And then she died, sometime between ten sixty six and ten eighty six, and the legend began to take over. The legend, as most people know it, goes like this Leofric imposed oppressive taxes on the people of Coventry. Godiva begged him repeatedly to reduce them. He refused, and finally told her he would only grant her request if she rode naked through the streets of Coventry. She did. The townsfolk, having been ordered to stay indoors and shutter their windows, averted their eyes except for one man, later named Thomas, a tailor, who peeked and was struck blind. The taxes were lifted. It is an extraordinarily compelling story. It has all the elements that make story survive the sympathetic protagonist, the stubborn antagonist, the dramatic act of sacrifice, the divine punishment of the voyeur, the triumphant outcome. It is a story that speaks across nine centuries to something real about the relationship between power, gender, vulnerability, and the willingness to sacrifice personal dignity for a public good. It is also, by the evidence, largely invented. The first known written account of Lady Gediva's naked ride appears in the Chronicle of Roger of Wendover, a monk at St. Alban's Abbey. In it he presents the basic narrative that we're familiar with today Gediva's pleas for tax relief, Leofric's condition, and her subsequent ride that prompted him to abolish the onerous tax. However, the monk's account was written sometime between twelve fifteen and twelve thirty five, around one hundred and fifty years after Lady Godiva's death. One hundred and fifty years the gap between her death and the first written account of the ride. In the two centuries immediately following her life, the chronicles mention her generous donations to the church in considerable detail. They do not mention the ride. This silence is historically significant. A noblewoman of Godiva's rank riding naked through a medieval town would have been, by any reasonable assessment, the most remarkable thing that happened in Coventry in the eleventh century. The fact that no one who was alive during or near her lifetime thought to write it down suggests with considerable force that it did not happen. There are also several specific problems with the legend the historians have noted. One important part of the Godiva legend is that she is supposed to be protesting her husband's imposition of heavy taxes. Yet remember that Godiva was herself a landowner in her own right, and at least one historian has claimed that Godiva, not Leofric, was the only person who could impose a tax on the people of Coventry. The concept of female authority and right to hold property was commonplace in Saxon society, but would have been a foreign concept to early Norman chroniclers who would assume that only Leofric had authority to levy taxes. This is the most historically interesting point, and the one that I find most illuminating about the entire legend if Godiva owned Coventry, which she did in the direct and specific sense that Anglo Saxon landholding implies, then she was the person with the authority to adjust taxation on Coventry's residence. The legend requires her to petition her husband for tax relief she could arguably have granted herself. The Norman chroniclers who first wrote the story would not have found this obvious because Norman law did not permit it. They wrote within a legal framework that made male authority the assumption, and in writing her into a position of supplication before her husband, they may have reversed a historical reality in which she was the authority first of all, the figure of Leofric. In the story he occupies the role of a cruel, unrelenting ruler willing to humiliate his wife to prove a point. However, this directly goes against what we know of the Earl. Leofric was shrewd in his political judgments, and his marriage seems to have been a successful and honourable union. There are no accounts at all that question his dignity as a ruler, or indicate in any way that he was cruel or overbearing. A man of Leofric's political sophistication, who had successfully navigated four reigns of English kingship, would not casually humiliate the wife who co managed his estates and co funded his most important religious projects. The legends Leofric is a Norman chronicler's invention, not the historical figure. A more plausible rationale for the legend includes one based on the custom at the time, for penitents to make a public procession in their shift, a sleeveless white garment similar to a slip today, and one which was certainly considered underwear in Godiva's time. If this were the case, Godiva might have actually travelled through town as a penitent in her shift, likely unshod and stripped of her jewellery, which was the trademark of her upper class rank. To a Norman chronicler, writing two centuries later, a noble woman walking through town stripped of jewellery, and in her shift, publicly visible without the ornamental armour of her class, would have translated in the retelling into a naked ride. The symbolic public self humiliation of a high status woman, stripped of the visual markers of her rank, became the literal nakedness of the legend. And Peeping Tom, in case you are wondering. The first reference to the Peeping Tom character comes in an account by R. Grafton's 1569 Chronicle, more than five hundred years after Godiva's death, added by a Protestant printer with an evident interest in adding a morality tale to the legend. The Tom who peaks and is punished is not medieval. He is Elizabethan. He is the sixteenth century adding its own anxieties about looking and being seen to a story that was already several centuries old. What is left when you remove the naked ride? The penitential interpretation, the Norman reframing, and the Elizabethan addition. A wealthy, pious, administratively capable Anglo Saxon noblewoman, who co managed a significant earldom, who survived her husband's death and the greatest political upheaval in English history, who owned Coventry and probably ran it, who endowed churches and monasteries across the Midlands, and who was the only woman in Norman England to retain major landholdings after the conquest. That is what is left. And that, I would submit, is a more interesting person than the naked rider of legend, precisely because it requires us to think about her as a political and administrative figure, rather than as a body making a gesture. The legend replaced her with an image, the image replaced the person. The person was more capable than the image, and less legible, and therefore less useful to the subsequent centuries that needed women to be symbols rather than agents. This is not an unusual story. I have told versions of it in several previous episodes of this series. It is, in some respects, the story this entire series has been telling in different registers and different centuries and different parts of the world. A woman of genuine capability and genuine historical significance is reduced by the mythology that forms around her to the single aspect of her biography that the subsequent tradition finds most emotionally or symbolically useful. For Cleopatra it was the seductress. For Mary Queen of Scots it was the tragic martyr. For Joan of Arc it was the divinely inspired innocent, for Godiver it is the naked rider. And in each case the reduction is not random, it is specific, and the specificity tells you something about what the reducing tradition needed from the woman it was reducing. What did the Norman and post Norman tradition need from Godiva? It needed a story about a woman sacrificing her bodily dignity for her people at the command of a man who held authority over her in a gesture that was entirely passive and entirely personal. There is no political agency in the naked ride, no administrative action, no legal or economic mechanism. She does not change the tax code. She makes an embarrassing gesture, and her husband, moved by it, changes the tax code for her. The story removes her agency and replaces it with vulnerability. This was much more comfortable for a post Norman England that did not want to think too carefully about the property rights of Anglo Saxon women, because acknowledging those rights would raise awkward questions about who had taken those rights away and why. The silence of the Domesday Book about her role is in some ways the loudest thing about her. She is there, holding land, present in the record, but the record that survives is a Norman record, and it tells you what she held, not how she held it, not the intelligence and the political agility with which she navigated the transition, not the specific quality of capability that made her the only woman who managed it. The legend remembered her as a naked woman on a horse. The Domesday Book remembered her as a name attached to holdings, but neither quite manage the person. Now the T's picture a woman of independent wealth and independent position or Operating in a world in which the formal structures of power were overwhelmingly occupied by men, who understood that the levers available to her were different from the levers available to the men around her, and who deployed the levers available to her with consistent practical effectiveness. Someone for whom the management of estates, of relationships, of church patronage, of political alliance constituted the substance of a career that left few dramatic traces in the historical record, but whose effects were real and durable. Picture someone who survived a catastrophic transition, the kind of transition that destroyed the positions of almost everyone around her, through a combination of resources, connections, and the specific kind of quiet practical intelligence that is harder to document than military victory or political proclamation, but no less consequential. Someone who was still standing when the dust settled, still holding what she had held, still exercising the authority that the new order had taken from everyone else of her class and her gender. Picture someone whose public reputation rests almost entirely on a specific, dramatic, extensively mythologized story, a story that has been retold and elaborated and embellished across centuries, to the point where the actual person beneath the story is very nearly invisible. Someone whose name is famous for one thing, and whose actual significance lies in everything else. Picture someone who was, in the quiet substance of her actual career, more interested in the practical management of land, of resources, of institutional relationships, than in public performance or political drama. Someone whose form of power was administrative rather than theatrical, and who understood, perhaps more clearly than her more celebrated contemporaries, that durable power is built through accumulated practical action rather than through grand gestures. Picture someone who was, despite all of this, remembered primarily as a symbol, a symbol deployed by subsequent generations for their own purposes, with indifferent attention to the actual person the symbol was supposed to represent. Who is this? It is Bess of Hardwick, Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury, known to history as Bess of Hardwick, from her birthplace in Derbyshire, was born around 1527, five centuries after Godiva, in a small manor house in the Derbyshire countryside, to a minor gentry family of no particular distinction. She died in 1608 in the extraordinary palace she had built for herself at Hardwick Hall as one of the wealthiest women in England, and arguably the most successful female social climber in the history of a country that has produced a great many of them. In between she married four times, widowed four times, acquired estates with each marriage, managed them with exceptional competence, survived the political typhoon of Tudor and early Jacobean England, and built literally in stone in the form of two extraordinary houses at Hardwick, a monument to female accomplishment that is still standing. Her four husbands were in ascending order of wealth and social rank, Robert Barlow, a minor Derbyshire gentleman, who married her when she was about fourteen, and he was terminally ill, and who died within a year, leaving her a modest jointure. Sir William Cavendish, a former official in the dissolution, who had accumulated considerable wealth, and who, under Bess's management, founded what would become the Cavendish family, and the Dukedom of Devonshire, a dynasty that is still extant, still at Chatsworth, still one of the significant names in English aristocratic life, Sir William St. Lowe, captain of the Queen's Guard, who adored her and left her his entire estate to the fury of his family. And finally, George Talbot, sixth Earl of Shrewsbury, one of the greatest noblemen in England, whose wife she became in fifteen sixty eight, and whose household she managed for twenty five years while simultaneously, and this is the biographical detail that makes her particularly relevant to this episode, serving as the keeper and principal custodian of Mary Queen of Scots, whom we have discussed in a previous episode. The Shrewsbury marriage eventually collapsed acrimoniously, under the combined pressure of the financial drain of housing Mary Queen of Scots, the political suspicions that attended that housing, and the specific interpersonal incompatibility of two people who were each accustomed to being the most capable person in any room they entered. The breakdown was loud, expensive, and publicly documented, and it did not especially damage Bess, who had been managing her estates and building her houses throughout. She outlived Shrewsbury. She outlived three of her four husbands and several of their heirs. She built Hardwick Hall, which is, if you have not seen it, one of the most extraordinary Elizabethan buildings in England, with more glass than wall, and the initials ES for Elizabeth Shrewsbury in stone on every parapet, because Bess of Hardwick was a woman who believed in leaving visible evidence of her presence. The parallels with Godiva are structural and precise. First, the independent wealth in a world designed to manage wealth through men. Godiva held land in her own name under Anglo Saxon law. Bess accumulated land and capital through four strategic marriages, managing each husband's estate during his lifetime, with a competence that consistently exceeded what anyone expected of a woman of her era, and retaining the assets from each marriage at widowhood. Both women operated within the specific legal and social frameworks available to them to achieve a degree of independent financial power that was, in their respective eras, exceptional for women. Second, the survival of catastrophic transition. Godiva survived the Norman conquest as the only woman landholder of significant standing in Norman England. Bess survived the entire Tudor succession crisis, the reigns of Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, each of which involved significant political realignments that destroyed the positions of people with much stronger institutional power than best possessed, and then the transition to James I, during which her building program continued uninterrupted. Both women displayed a quality of political durability under conditions that eliminated their contemporaries. Third, the church and the building program. Godiva's most documented historical activity before the legend was her patronage of monasteries and churches. Bess's most documented activity before and during her legend was her building programme, old Hardwick Hall, then Chatsworth, substantially remodelled, then the extraordinary new Hardwick Hall, begun in fifteen ninety, which is the building that bears her initials on every turret, and which is now in the care of the National Trust, and may be visited, and which I strongly recommend if you are ever in Derbyshire. Both women invested in physical structures that bore their names, and that outlasted them. Both treated building as an act of identity and legacy. Fourth, the administration overperformance. Godiva's historical significance lies in estate management, church patronage, and the quiet navigation of one of the most disruptive political transitions in English history. Bess's significance lies in estate management, strategic marriage, building, and the development of what would become several of England's greatest aristocratic families. Neither woman's power was primarily political in the formal sense. Both exercised it through the management of resources, relationships, and physical property. Fifth, the legend that replaced them. Godiva's actual biography has been replaced in popular memory by the Naked Ride. Bess of Hardwick is slightly better served by history. There are excellent biographies, her buildings survive, her correspondence is extensive and has been studied, but even she is more likely to be remembered as a colourful figure of Elizabethan social climbing than as one of the most capable financial and administrative operators of the sixteenth century. Both women have been, in the popular memory, made more vivid and less serious than their actual careers warrant. Where do the parallels strain? Bess of Hardwick's career is documented in extraordinary detail. Her letters survive, her accounts survive, her building contracts survive, her feuds survive in legal records, her relationship with Mary Queen of Scots is documentar from multiple perspectives. Godiver's biography is thin to the point of near invisibility outside the Domesday book entry and the records of her religious endowments. The evidentiary richness is categorically different. Bess was also, by the evidence of her correspondence and the opinions of those who dealt with her, a woman of sometimes formidable personal abrasiveness. Her feud with Shrewsbury generated a remarkable archive of mutual accusation that does not spare either party. Godiva's personal character is essentially unknown. The gentleness the legend ascribes to her may or may not reflect something real. We simply cannot know. The verdict Godiva and I say this with the specific acknowledgement that Bess of Hardwick is in several respects the more historically legible and more fully documented figure, and that her career is, in the detail of its execution, more precisely impressive. But Godiva is the more compelling figure precisely because she is the more enigmatic one. Because the gap between what the legend made of her and what she actually was is so large, so instructive, and so specifically revealing, of how the tradition has preferred to see powerful women. Because the achievement that the historical record most clearly documents, surviving the Norman Conquest as the only female major landholder in England is, when you think about it carefully, one of the most extraordinary administrative and political achievements available in the entire eleventh century, and it has been almost entirely overlooked in favour of a story about a horse. I find this combination, the genuine achievement and the specific nature of its erasure, one of the most historically interesting biographical situations in the series. More interesting, finally, than the legend itself. Which may be the most appropriate thing I can say about Godgifu of Coventry that she is more interesting than the story that replaced her. She is always ultimately more interesting than the story that replaced her. This is, I have come to think, the most reliable mark of a person worth studying. I grew up in Kingston upon Thames, where the local historical figures are moderately distinguished, but not especially prone to naked rides or Norman survivalism. Godiva is not my ancestor, unlike Thomas Manners, and not my neighbour in the historical record, unlike Cromwell. She is simply a woman who owned land and managed it, and endowed churches and survived a conquest, and whose name became famous for something she almost certainly did not do, while what she actually did was forgotten. That is a biographical injustice of the most ordinary and most tenacious kind, and this episode has been, in its modest way, my attempt to address it. Godgifu, born probably somewhere in the English Midlands, sometime in the early eleventh century, died probably in Coventry, sometime between ten sixty six and ten eighty six, Countess of Mercia, Lady of Coventry, co founder of the Benedictine Monastery of St. Mary's, major landholder before and after the Norman Conquest, the only woman in Norman England to retain significant estates after ten sixty six. Remembered primarily for riding naked on a horse, was not, in all probability, riding naked on a horse, more interesting than the horse, always emphatically more interesting than the horse. I'm Sophie Manners. Thank you for being here. If you are ever in Coventry, the city has a very fine statue of Godiva on horseback in Broadgate, which is at least an honest monument to the legend, since the legend is what the city has. And if you are ever in Derbyshire, go to Hardwick Hall. The initials are still on the parapets. Bess meant them to last. They have.