The Fall Of Orthodox England

 

Vladimir Moss

 

 

It is true what I say: should the Christian faith weaken the kingship will
immediately totter.

 

Archbishop Wulfstan of York, The Institutes of Polity, 4 (1023).

 

 

CONTENTS

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION: ENGLAND, ROME,
CONSTANTINOPLE, NORMANDY

 

            On October 14, 1066, at Hastings in southern England, the last Orthodox king of England, Harold II, died in battle against Duke William of Normandy. William had been blessed to invade England by the Roman Pope Alexander in order to bring the English Church into full communion with the “reformed Papacy”; for since 1052 the English archbishop had been banned and denounced as schismatic by Rome. The result of the Norman Conquest was that the English Church and people were integrated into the heretical “Church” of Western, Papist Christendom, which had just, in 1054, fallen away from communion with the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, represented by the Eastern Patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. Thus ended the nearly five-hundred-year history of the Anglo-Saxon Orthodox Church, which was followed by the demise of the still older Celtic Orthodox Churches in Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

 

            This small book is an account of how this came to pass.

 

 

The Beginning of the End

 

            Now the English had been perhaps the most fervent “Romanists” of all the peoples of Western Europe. This devotion sprang from the fact that it was to Rome, and specifically to Pope St. Gregory the Great and his disciples, that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes owed their conversion to the Faith in the late sixth and early seventh centuries.[1] From that time English men and women of all classes and conditions poured across the Channel in a well-beaten path to the tombs of the Apostles in Rome[2], and a whole quarter of the city was called “Il Borgo Saxono” because of the large number of English pilgrims it accommodated.[3] English missionaries such as St. Boniface of Germany carried out their work as the legates of the Roman Popes. And the voluntary tax known as “Peter’s Pence” which the English offered to the Roman see was paid even in the difficult times of the Viking invasions, when it was the English themselves who were in need of alms.

 

            However, the “Romanity” to which the English were so devoted was not the Franco-Latin, Roman Catholicism of the later Middle Ages. Rather, it was the Greco-Roman Romanitas or Rwmeiosunh of Orthodox Catholicism. And the spiritual and political capital of Romanitas until the middle of the fifteenth century was not Old Rome in Italy, but the New Rome of Constantinople.[4] Thus when King Ethelbert of Kent was baptized by St. Augustine in 597, “he had entered,” as Fr. Andrew Phillips writes, “‘Romanitas’, Romanity, the universe of Roman Christendom, becoming one of those numerous kings who owed allegiance, albeit formal, to the Emperor in New Rome…”[5] Indeed, as late as the tenth century the cultural links between England and Constantinople remained strong, as we see, for example, in King Athelstan’s calling himself basileus and curagulus, titles ascribed to the Byzantine emperor.[6]

 

            We may tentatively point to the murder of King Edward the Martyr in 979 as the beginning of the end of Orthodox England. Only six years before, his father, King Edgar the Peaceable, had been anointed and crowned as head of the Anglo-Saxon “empire” in Bath Abbey, next to the still considerable remains of Imperial Rome. And in the same year he had been rowed on the River Dee at Chester by six or eight sub-kings, including five Welsh and Scottish rulers and one ruler of the Western Isles. But then the anti-monastic reaction of King Edward’s reign was followed by the murder of the Lord’s anointed. “No worse deed for the English was ever done that this,” said the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle[7]; and while it was said that there was “great rejoicing” at the coronation of St. Edward’s half-brother, Ethelred “the Unready”, St. Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury, sorrowfully prophesied great woes for the nation in the coming reign.[8]

 

            He was right; for not only were the English successively defeated by Danish pagan invaders and forced to pay ever larger sums in “Danegeld”, but the king himself, betrayed by his leading men and weighed down by his own personal failures, was forced to flee abroad in 1013. The next year he was recalled by the English leaders, both spiritual and lay, who declared that “no lord was dearer to them than their rightful lord, if only he would govern his kingdom more justly than he had done in the past.” [9] But the revival was illusory; further defeats followed, and in 1017, after the deaths both of King Ethelred and of his son Edmund Ironside, the Danish Canute was made king of all the English. Canute converted to the faith of his new Christian subjects; and the period of the Danish kings (1017-1042) created less of a disruption in the nation’s spiritual life than might have been expected. Nevertheless, it must have seemed that God’s mercy had at last returned to His people when, in 1043, the Old English dynasty of Alfred the Great was restored in the person of King Ethelred’s son Edward, known to later generations as “the Confessor”.

 

            It is with the life of King Edward that our narrative begins.

 

            However, in order to understand the world of King Edward it is necessary briefly to review cultural and ecclesiastical developments on the continent of Europe, which began to influence England precisely in his reign.

 

 

The Growth of Feudalism

 

            The most important of these developments was the growth of feudalism. Now feudalism is a common phenomenon in many lands in time of invasion or social breakdown; and historians have discerned variants of it also in East European states such as Byzantium and Muscovy. But the term was invented in the first place to describe the particular socio-political organisation of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages.

 

            Feudalism arose as a defensive reaction to the Viking invasions of the ninth century, and the breakdown in central authority and general insecurity which they caused. The breakdown was worst in West Francia, modern France, where royal authority almost disappeared. One result was serfdom: the lands which had belonged to the crown, the royal “fisc”, were given to local landowners, both ecclesiastical and lay, and the peasants who had cultivated the land, deprived of any protection from the crown, threw themselves on the mercy of the local landowners, bartering their labour and the labour of their children in return for protection. The second was feudalism proper: the freemen became vassals of lords, swearing to fight the lord’s battles in exchange for protection.

 

            A vassal was a knight – that is, he owned arms and a horse and was able to fight. Since this required money, he very likely owned land – either inherited, “allodial” land, or a “benefice” or “fief” granted temporarily, in the vassal’s lifetime only. A vassal might himself have vassals. Thus many of the king’s counts, or local officials, were at the same time both feudal lords and vassals of the king.

 

            Feudalism ate into the king’s power in two ways: first, the kings’ peasants hardly counted as his subjects any more since their real masters were now their landowners; and secondly, the king’s vassals tended to leave his service for that of the most powerful local feudal lord. Nor did the king always resist this process, but rather reinforced it, since he saw that the feudal lord was the only guarantee of law and order in the countryside. Thus in the capitulary of Meersen in 847 King Charles the Bald ordered all free men to choose a lord, and likewise forbade them to leave their lord without just reason – which effectively made the bond of vassalage permanent in all normal cases. Again, in a capitulary issued at Thionville, he gave official recognition to the vassal’s oath, which thereby replaced the oath of allegiance as the main glue holding society together. Finally, in the capitulary of Kiersy in 877, Charles sanctioned hereditary succession to counties and other fiefs, which meant that county administration became hereditary and passed out of the king’s control.[10]

 

            As a defensive system to preserve a minimum of order in a time of foreign invasion, feudalism undoubtedly had merits; but it was evidently much inferior not only to Byzantine-style autocracy, but also to the Carolingian system that preceded it. Moreover, as the threat of invasion passed, and feudalism spread from its homeland in Northern France throughout Western Europe in the eleventh century, its degrading and coarsening effect on general morality, and its potential, in certain circumstances, to create a more-than-local despotism, became more obvious. It was feudalism more than any other factor which contributed to the truth of the statement: “What characterizes medieval in contrast to modern society is its lack of individual freedom”.[11]

 

            Maurice Keen writes: “In effect, as a result of the confusion of the ninth and tenth centuries, government had ceased to have much to do with even a rudimentary state machine. It had become part of the patrimony of powerful men. What bound this society together was not a sense of obligation to a common weal, but the personal oaths of individual men to individual lords. The peace of society depended on how far these individuals were prepared to observe their promises, and here force was a moving factor. The system had grown out of the exigencies of a military situation, and bore plenty of marks of its origin. The true centre of a lord’s authority was his castle, behind whose walls or pallisades he could defy all comers: where too he held his court and judged his subjects. The most essential obligation of the vassal was his service in war: his estate was valued by the number of soldiers it could maintain. And if a man was injured in his right by a rival, or if his lord or his underling broke the sworn agreement between them, what king and count and vassal alike fell back on was the ancient right of the free man, the vendetta. He defied his rival in solemn language, and he made war upon him. The wars of feudal noblemen left little peace in many parts of Europe over the four centuries following the year 1000.”[12]

 

            According to Solonevich, feudalism could be defined as “the splintering of state sovereignty among a mass of small, but in principle sovereign owners of property”. Contrary to Marx, it had nothing to do with ‘productive relations’ and was far from being an advance on previous forms of social organisation. “It is sufficient to remember the huge cultural and unusually high level of Roman ‘production’. Feudal Europe, poor, dirty and illiterate, by no means represented ‘a more progressive form of productive relations’ – in spite of Hegel, it was sheer regression. Feudalism does not originate in productive relations. It originates in the thirst for power taken beyond all dependence on production and distribution. Feudalism is, so to speak, the democratisation of power [my italics – V.M.] – its transfer to all those who at the given moment in the given place have sufficient physical strength to defend their baronial rights – Faustrecht.. Feudalism sometimes presupposes a juridical basis of power, but never a moral one.

 

            “The feudal lord does not rule ‘in the name’ of the nation, the people, the peasants, or whoever else there might be. He rules only and exclusively in his own interests, which have been strengthened by such-and-such battles or parchments. For the feudal lord the monarch is not the bearer of definite moral ideals or even of the practical interests of the people or nation, but only ‘the first among equals’, who has had the luck to be stronger than the rest…

 

            “The thirst for power is, of course, a property common to all humanity, and therefore the tendency to the development of feudalism will be to a greater or lesser degree characteristic of all countries and all peoples of the world…. But if we discard trivialities, then we must say that Rome, for example, had no knowledge at all of feudal relations. There were landowners and there were senators, there were proconsuls and there were emperors, but there were no barons. The sovereign power ‘of the people and senate of Rome’, engraved on the Roman eagles, remained the single indivisible source of all power – even the power of the Roman emperors. The civil wars of Rome bore no relation to the feudal wars of medieval Europe. Nor did Ancient Greece with its purely capitalist relations know feudalism. Yes, Greece was split up into a series of sovereign states, but, though tiny, these were nevertheless states – monarchies and republics, in principle having equal rights in relation to each other and by no means in relations of feudal submission or co-submission.”[13]

 

            One of the worst aspects of feudalism was the fact that the Church, too, was bound up in the feudal nexus, with churchmen having lay lords higher than themselves and vassals lower than themselves.

 

            “One immediate result,” writes Papadakis, “was the unrestrained secularization of the western clergy. By the 900s most churchmen – both high and low – had lost nearly all their independence and sense of corporate identity, as their functions everywhere became identified with those belonging to lay vassals. Quite simply, as rulers came to regard all ecclesiastical organization under their effective control as a facet of the secular system, conventions governing one sphere were adjusted to fit the other. As a result, bishops and abbots were not exempt from the secular obligations and responsibilities attached to feudal tenure. As feudal dependents they, too, had to attend court, give advice and, when required, supply their lay superiors with military service…”[14]

 

            The control exercised by feudal lords over clerical appointments was symbolised by the ceremony of “lay investiture”, whereby the lord endowed the cleric with a ring, signifying the cleric’s entry into feudal tenure of a church or lands. Such a ceremony was distinct from ecclesiastical ordination. But in practice the power inherent in lay investiture determined who should be ordained (and for how much).

 

            “The hastily ordained and ‘invested’ clerk was often altogether unworthy (if not also incompetent and untrained) of the priestly calling. Church assemblies and individual churchmen, it is true, routinely complained. All the same, neither the power of laymen to appoint and invest clergy, nor the encroachment and spoliation of Church property, was ever discontinued. As a matter of fact, lay nominations to vacant sees became so frequent that they were no longer regarded a radical departure from canonical tradition. The abuse was recognized as a perfectly acceptable practice. In 921 the archbishop of Cologne was thus solemnly admonished by the pope himself for attempting to block a royal appointment at Liège. Pope John X’s letter informing the archbishop that no episcopal candidate was to be consecrated in any diocese without royal authorization still survives. As far as pope John was concerned, the right of the feudal power to interfere at the highest level in the internal affairs of the Church was ‘ancient usage’. Ecclesial autonomy, to say nothing of ecclesial political and economic freedom, was apparently of little consequence. Canon law evidently had long given way to the feudal system…”[15]

 

            The development of feudalism was aided by the pressure of the German land law system, which prevailed throughout the former Carolingian empire. The resust. continues Papadakis, “was the so-called Eigenkirchentum, or proprietary church system, an arrangement by which the parish with all its appurtenances became the private property of its founder. In terms of ecclesiastical power, according to one investigator, the main result of this ‘Germanization’ or ‘privatization’ was complete revolution. Its overall effect on Latin ecclesiastical organization at any rate was profound as well as extensive.

 

            “This becomes evident when traditional canon law is compared or contrasted with German land law. Plainly put, unlike the Church, early barbarian Europe did not understand the legal concept of corporate ecclesiastical ownership. The idea of an abiding corporation with legal rights simply did not exist in German customary law. Thus, the conviction that the Church could also simultaneously own land or real property, as a corporate personality or institution, was unknown. Rather, according to Germanic law, everything built on a plot of land, whether it was the local parish church or the monastery, was considered the exclusive ‘property’ of the landlord; the man who had built and endowed it was also its real owner. Control and rights of ownership of the foundation constructed on an estate, quite simply, continued to be in the hands of the proprietor. To be sure, the church could never actually be secularized. On the other hand, it could always be given, sold, traded, or exchanged if necessary. It was even possible to dispose of it as a sort of fief by leasing it to one’s relatives or liegemen. In sum, the treatment of parishes was identical to the holding of ordinary pieces of real property… It is worth adding that the resident priest of the Eigenkirche (usually an ill-trained serf from the lord’s own estate) was in practice appointed and dismissed by the proprietor. His status resembled a small quasi-feudal dependent. Almost invariably, if the incumbent was married or living in concubinage he was able to pass the parish on to his son or heir.

 

            “…The practice of buying and selling rural parishes as a profitable investment was in time also applied to bishoprics and cathedrals. Although such sales were not a general phenomenon, it remains true that in some areas such as the Midi region, bishoprics were habitually sold or bequeathed as Eigenkirche. This was presumably still the practice in 1067 when the bishopric of Carcassone was sold to the count of Barcelona by the viscount of Albi….

 

            “Everywhere the priest had really become essentially an estate servant. His private arrangement with the lord of the parish had in fact replaced the canonical bond uniting him to his bishop. It was this personalized local relationship that ultimately mattered, rather than the bishop’s potestas jurisdictionis. Throughout Europe, to put it another way, episcopal control enjoyed by all prelates was succeeded by a division of control among an unlimited number of owners. The diocese no longer actually functioned as a single administrative unit, but as a collection of private independent churches, in which the bishop’s pastoral and disciplinary powers were in practice relaxed or ignored altogether. Before long, given the moral and intellectual shortcomings of the priesthood, this diocesan centralization was to generate further serious pastoral and canonical problems. The confusion of authority and rights within the diocese just described was, in the main, also responsible for the ensuing simony and incontinence among the western clergy.

 

            “It was undoubtedly lay control of ecclesiastical structure that made possible the purchase or sale of virtually every clerical grade the general rule by the tenth century. Simony became in fact unavoidable once clerical offices began to be treated like secular appointments. If a secular vassal could be taxed on inheriting his fief, so could every clerical candidate on his elevation to office. Besides, the offices in question were profitable, and to grant them out without any remuneration would have been pointless if not unusual in the agrarian world of the Middle Ages. In the event, the bishop who had received his position by canonical election (without paying for it) had before long become a great rarity…”[16]

 

            Paradoxically, therefore, it was the “democratisation of power” inherent in the feudal system that gave the opportunity for the emergence of the “despotisation” of the papacy in the late eleventh century. But there were still some obstacles in the way of the triumph of despotism. Foremost among them were the Orthodox autocracies of England and Germany…

 

 

The German Feudal Monarchy

 

            Although East Francia, modern Germany, was as immersed in the feudal system as anywhere else in the West, it had preserved the institution of the monarchy more successfully than elsewhere (except England). For the kings were more than simply exceptionally powerful, perhaps the most powerful, feudal lords of Germany: they still retained about them the aura of the autocratic monarchy, the “balm” of anointed kings. And they used this charismatic authority to turn the feudal system to their advantage – and to the disadvantage of the papacy.

 

            Just as the English autocracy arose out of the successful struggle with the Danish Vikings, so the German autocracy arose out of the successful struggle with the Magyars. And just as King Alfred the Great’s victory at Ethandune in 878 laid the foundations for the All-English kingdom that encompassed the Danish invaders, so King Otto the Great’s victory at Lech in 955 laid the foundations for the German Salian monarchy, which, while not quite as extensive as the Carolingian empire at its height, lasted much longer.

 

            However, Germany proved more difficult to weld into a single whole than England. It was only after a series of civil wars that Otto won the submission of the duchies of Lotharingia, Swabia, Bavaria and Franconia in addition to his native Saxony. In order to secure these victories, he decided to remove the native ducal dynasties and distribute their lands to his relatives.

 

            But this still did not prevent rebellions, so he resorted to a bold and fateful experiment: government, not through secular officials, dukes or counts, but through bishops and abbots. Thus Otto put Lotharingia, as Davis writes, “in charge of his young brother Bruno, who was a cleric and Archbishop of Cologne. The combination of an archbishopric and a duchy did not seem in any way incongruous to him, for he did not consider that there was any essential division between ‘Church’ and ‘State’; they were merely different aspects of the same society.”[17] As he wrote to Bruno, “you have both priestly religion and royal strength”.[18] This failure to see any essential division between Church and State was, of course, a consequence of the feudal system and the Weltanschauung it inspired.

 

            The system of government through bishops had the advantage, from the king’s point of view, that he could appoint the bishops, who, since they could not marry, could not found hereditary dynasties that might challenge his power at a later date. Moreover, he founded imperial churches or abbeys with vast swathes of land to which he granted “immunity” from interference from the local dukes and counts. These abbots then became in effect then the local judges and tax-collectors, as well as spiritual fathers.

 

            Although the Ottonian system of government through bishops and abbots was clearly caesaropapist in essence, and greatly increased the power of the king, it was not opposed, as we have seen, by the papacy. However, it had the weakness from the king’s point of view that while the bishops and abbots could be appointed by him, they could be dismissed only by the Pope. Moreover, only the Pope could create new bishoprics or ecclesiastical provinces. In the case of conflict with a bishop, therefore, – and such a conflict took place between Otto and Archbishop Frederick of Mainz, the Primate of Germany – the king would need the help of the Pope in order to impose his will.

 

            Otto hoped that the Pope could be persuaded to grant more “stavropegial” grants to abbeys – that is, make more of them directly subject to the Pope and therefore “immune” from local episcopal control. “What he wanted,” writes Davis, “and eventually got, was papal exemptions for abbeys such as Hersfeld, Quedlinburg, and Gernrode, which were to be the perfect examples of the Ottonian System. Their ‘royal immunities’ would exclude the power of counts and dukes, and their papal exemptions that of bishops and archbishops. In them the abbot would preside over all things; and over the abbot would stand the king.”[19]

 

             Turning to Rome now: the first half of the tenth century was probably the period of the deepest degradation in the eternal city’s pre-schism history – the so-called “pornocracy” of Marozia, an evil woman who with her mother Theodora made, unmade, lived with and begat a series of popes. However, in 932 Marozia’s second son Alberic, marquis of Spoleto, imprisoned his mother, took over the government of Rome and gave it a short period of peace and relative respectability. But in 955 Alberic died and his son Octavian became Pope John XII at the age of sixteen.

 

            “Even for a pope of that period,” writes De Rosa, “he was so bad that the citizens were out for his blood. He had invented sins, they said, not known since the beginning of the world, including sleeping with his mother. He ran a harem in the Lateran Palace. He gambled with pilgrims’ offerings. He kept a stud of two thousand horses which he fed on almonds and figs steeped in wine. He rewarded the companions of his nights of love with golden chalices from St. Peter’s. He did nothing for the most profitable tourist trade of the day, namely, pilgrimages. Women in particular were warned not to enter St. John Lateran if they prized their honour; the pope was always on the prowl. In front of the high altar of the mother church of Christendom, he even toasted the Devil…”[20]

 

            Retribution was coming however. Berengar, king of Lombardy in northern Italy, advanced on Rome, and the pope in desperation appealed to Berengar’s feudal lord, Otto of Germany. This was Otto’s opportunity to seize that imperial crown which would give him complete dominance over his rivals. He marched into Italy, drove out Berengar and was crowned Emperor by John on February 2, 962. However, when Otto demanded that the inhabitants of the Papal states should swear an oath of allegiance to him, Otto, and not to the pope, thereby treating the Papal states as one of his dependencies, the Pope took fright, transferred his support to Berengar and called on both the Hungarians and the Byzantines to help drive Otto out of Italy. But Otto saw this as treachery on the part of the pope; he summoned a synod in Rome that deposed John, and placed Leo VIII in his place. Then he inserted a clause into his agreement with Leo whereby in future no pope was to be consecrated without taking an oath of loyalty to the Emperor.

 

            Although Otto was crowned in Rome, he did not call himself “Emperor of the Romans”, but preferred simply “emperor”. This probably because he did not wish to enter into a competition with the Byzantine emperor. Thus although, as Davis writes, “Otto’s emissary Liudprand of Cremona.. told the emperor at Constantinople that Otto was the true Roman emperor,.. Liudprand also revealed a hostility to what was Roman and a pride in what was German that he probably shared with other personages at Otto’s court. According to his report of his embassy to Constantinople in c. 969, he and his people were insulted by Nicephorus Phocas with these rude words, ‘You are not Romans, but Lombards.’ Liudprand then said he replied as follows:

 

            “‘History tells us that Romulus, from whom the Romans got their name, was a fratricide born in adultery. He made a place of refuge for himself and received into it insolvent debtors, runaway slaves, murderers and men who deserved death for their crimes. This was the sort of crowd whom he enrolled as citizens and gave the name of Romans. From this nobility are descended those men whom you style ‘rulers of the world’. But we Lombards, Saxons, Franks, Lotharingians, Bavarians, Swabians and Burgundians so despise these fellows that when we are angry with an enemy we can find nothing more insulting to say than ‘You Roman!’ For us in the word Roman is comprehended every form of lowness, timidity, avarice, luxury, falsehood and vice.”[21]

 

            In spite of these words, which must have reflected Otto’s own opinion, Otto seems to have impressed the Byzantines sufficiently to obtain their recognition of his imperial title (which, as we have seen, did not contain the word “Roman”), and to persuade them to send Princess Theopano to be the bride of his son, Otto II. The marriage was celebrated in Rome in 972. Theophano then introduced another Byzantine, John Philagathos, as godfather of her son, Otto III. He later became head of the royal finances and finally – Pope (or antipope) John XV.

 

            This led to a sharp increase in Byzantine influence in the western empire,[22] and the temporary eclipse of the new papist theory of Church-State relations. Thus in an ivory bas-relief Christ is shown crowning Otto II and Theophano – an authentically Byzantine tenth-century motif. “The image,” as Jean-Paul Allard writes, “was more eloquent than any theological treatise. It illustrated a principle that the papacy and the Roman Church have never accepted, but which was taken for granted in Byzantium and is still held in Orthodoxy today: Christ and Christ alone crowns the sovereigns; power comes only from God, without the intercession of an institutional representative of the Church, be he patriarch or pope. The anointing and crowning of the sovereign do not create the legitimacy of his power; but have as their sole aim the manifestation of [this legitimacy] in the eyes of the people.”[23]

 

            In 991 Princess Theophano died and the young Otto III became Emperor under the regency of his grandmother Adelaide. He “dreamed of reuniting the two empires [of East and West] into one one day, so as to restore universal peace – a new imperial peace comparable to that of Augustus, a Roman Empire which would embrace once more the orbis terrarum before the end of the world that was announced for the year 1000.”[24] To signify that the Renovatio Imperii Romani had truly begun, he moved his court from Aachen to Rome, and began negotiations with the Byzantine Emperor for the hand of a daughter or niece of the basileus that would enable him to unite the two empires in a peaceful, matrimonial way. And, imitating the Byzantine concept of a family of kings under the Emperor, he handed out crowns to King Stephen of Hungary and the Polish Duke Boleslav.

 

            The plan for union with Byzantium was foiled; but Byzantine influence began to spread outwards from the court into the episcopate. Thus Gerbert of Aurillac, who became the first French pope in 999, took the name of Sylvester II, thereby reviving memories of the symphonic relationship between St. Constantine and Pope Sylvester I.[25] Moreover, he revived the Carolingian theory of the Renovatio Imperii Romani. But he stressed that this renovation, while it embraced both Empire and Church, must be led by the Emperor, to whom he had written, already before he became Pope: “You are Caesar, emperor of the Romans and Augustus. You are of the highest birth among the Greeks. You surpass the Greeks in empire, you rule the Romans by hereditary right, and you surpass them both in mind and eloquence.”[26]

 

            Moreover, it was Sylvester who, in 1001, inspired Otto to issue an act demonstrating that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery.[27] In this assertion he was correct, even if he was wrong in his dating of the forgery to the middle of the tenth century.[28]

 

            Again, as long as the German autocracy was strong, there could be no question of the Pope being deemed to be above the judgement of his fellow-bishops, as we see in a remark by the future Pope Sylvester II in 997: “The judgement of God is higher than that of Rome… When Pope Marcellinus offered incense to Jupiter [in 303], did all the other bishops have to do likewise? If the bishop of Rome himself sins against his brother or refuses to heed the repeated warnings of the Church, he, the bishop of Rome himself, must according to the commandments of God be treated as a pagan and a publican; for the greater the dignity, the greater the fall. If he declares us unworthy of his communion because none of us will join him against the Gospel, he will not be able to separate us from the communion of Christ.”[29]

 

            Thus by the year 1000 there was little trace of papism in the west: it was the Byzantine ideal of “symphonic” Church-State relations (albeit with a certain caesaropapist bias) that had triumphed in the west’s most powerful monarchy.

 

            However, Otto III died in 1002 and Pope Sylvester in 1003; after which the “symphony” between Church and State at the highest level of western society began to break up. Like a spinning top that, as it begins to slow down, at the same time begins to lurch more and more sharply from one side to the other, so the balance of power shifted first to the Emperor and then to the Pope. In the first half of the eleventh century, it was the German Emperors who held the upper hand, as the Papacy descended into one of its periodic bouts of decadence. “Suddenly,” as Papadakis puts it, “the papacy was turned into a sort of imperial Eigenkirche or vicarage of the German crown. The pope was to be the instrument and even the pawn of the Germans, as opposed to the Romans.”[30]

 

            At the same time the heresy of the Filioque reared its head again. In 1009 Pope Sergius IV reintroduced it into the Roman Symbol of Faith[31], upon which the Great Church of Constantinople promptly removed his name from the diptychs. In 1014, the heretical innovation was recited again, at the coronation of Emperor Henry II. Some date the beginning of the Great Schism to this period, although it was another forty years before the formal lack of communion between East and West was cemented by the anathemas of 1054.[32]

 

            In 1046 Emperor Henry III acted decisively to stop the chaos into which the Roman papacy had descended, as rival families of Roman aristocrats, the Crescentii and Tusculum counts, each tried to place their candidate on the throne of St. Peter. At the Council of Sutri Henry forced the resignation of Pope Gregory VI and the deposition of Popes Sylvester III and Benedict IX. Then he proceeded to nominate four German Popes in succession: Clement II, Damasus II, Leo IX and Victor II. However, in 1056 Henry died while his son was still a child; and it was at this point that German caesaropapism began to fall. It was struck down by one of the greatest “spiritual” despots in history, Pope Gregory VII, better known as Hildebrand…

 

 

The Papal Reform Movement

 

            One of the Emperor Henry’s appointees, Pope Leo IX, had been bishop of Toul in Lorraine, an area that had come under the influence of a network of monasteries under the leadership of the great Burgundian abbey of Cluny, founded by Duke William the Pious of Aquitaine in 910. The Cluniac monasteries were not Eigenkirchen, but “stavropegial” foundations independent of the control of any feudal lord. As such, they had assumed the leadership of a powerful reform movement directed against the corruptions introduced into the Church by the feudal system, and had had considerable success in this respect.[33] They stressed papal authority, clerical celibacy and ecclesiastical centralisation.

 

            Leo IX now introduced the principles of the Cluniac movement into the government of the Church at the highest level – but with results, in the reign of his successor, Gregory VII (Hildebrand), that went far beyond the original purposes of the movement, and which were finally to tear the whole of the West away from New Rome and the Byzantine commonwealth of nations… “From the outset,” writes Papadakis, “the new pope was determined to make the papacy an instrument of spiritual and moral rejuvenation both in Rome itself and throughout Europe. To this end Pope Leo journeyed to central and south Italy, but also to France and Germany, crossing the Alps three times. Nearly four and a half years of his five year pontificate were in fact spent on trips outside Rome. The numerous regional reforming synods held during these lengthy sojourns often had as their target the traffic in ecclesiastical offices and unchaste clergy. Their object above all was to rid the Church of these abused by restoring canonical discipline. The need to reassert both the validity and binding power of canon law for all clergy was repeatedly emphasized. In addition to the decrees against simony and sexual laxity promulgated by these local synods, however, simoniacal and concubinary clergy were examined and, when required, suspended, deposed and, even excommunicated. The object, in short, was to punish the offenders as well. Even if the synods were not always successful, no one was in doubt that Leo IX and his team of like-minded assistants were serious. The immediate impact of this flurry of activity was often extraordinary…

 

            “Overall, the progress of the new papal program was not all smooth sailing. Widespread protest, often accompanied by violent protest, was to continue for decades. Yet, all in all, by the end of the century the popular defenders of simony, of clerical marriage, and of the evils of the proprietary church had by and large vanished. The champions of reform at any rate proved more unyielding than their often more numerous adversaries. This was particularly evident in the skilful drive of the reformers to make celibacy an absolute prerequisite to ordination. This part of the Gregorian platform was reinforced by the monastic ideal, since many of the reformers were actually monks and had already embraced a continent life. Some, like the ascetic Peter Damian, cardinal-bishop of Ostia, were even eager to treat the problem as heresy and not as a matter of discipline. But the reformers were perhaps also uncompromising on this issue because they were convinced that compulsory clerical continence could advance the process of de-laicization – another more general item of their platform. A monasticized priesthood, quite simply, was viewed by reformers everywhere as a crucial corrective to clerical involvement in the world. If successful, the strategy, it was hoped, would provide the clergy with that sense of solidarity and corporate identity needed to distinguish them from the laity. In all essential respects, as one scholar has put it, the reforming initiatives of the popes were ‘an attempt by men trained in the monastic discipline to remodel Church and society according to monastic ideals… to train churchmen to rethink themselves as a distinct ‘order’ with a life-style totally different from that of laymen.’ Behind the campaign for celibacy, in sum, aside from the moral and canonical issues involved, was the desire to set all churchmen apart from and above the laity; the need to create a spiritual elite by the separation of the priest from the ordinary layman was an urgent priority. Doubtless, in the end, the Gregorian priesthood did achieve a certain libertas and even a sense of community, but only at the expense of a sharp opposition between itself and the rest of society.

 

            “By contrast, in the Christian East, as in primitive Christianity, a wholly celibate priesthood never became the norm…”[34]

 

            As so often in history, one important historical process going in one direction masks the presence of another going in precisely the opposite direction. The process of ecclesiastical reformation initiated by Pope Leo IX in 1049, which aimed at the liberation of the Church from secular control, was – generally speaking, and with the exception of the element of clerical celibacy – a laudable and necessary programme. But the increasing distance it placed between the clergy and the laity was fraught with danger. In particular, it threatened to undermine the traditional place in Christian society of the anointed kings, who occupied a kind of intermediate position between the clergy and the laity. And in the hands of two ambitious clerics who entered the service of the papacy at about this time, Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida and Archdeacon Hildebrand (the future Pope Gregory VII), it threatened simply to replace the caesaropapist variety of feudalism with a papocaesarist variety –that is, the subjection of the clergy to lay lords with the subjection of the laity, and even the kings, to clerical lords – or rather, to just one clerical lord, the Pope.

 

            The problem was that by the middle of the eleventh century Church and State were so deeply entangled with each other that nobody, on either side of the controversy, could conceive of a return to the traditional system of the symphony of powers, which allowed for the relative independence of both powers within a single Christian society. Thus the Church wished to be liberated from “lay investiture”; but she did not want to be deprived of the lands, vassals and, therefore, political power, which came with investiture. Indeed, the last act in the life of Pope Leo IX himself was his marching into battle at the head of a papal army in 1053 in order to secure his feudal domains in Benevento, which had been granted to him by his kinsman, Emperor Henry III.

 

            Contemporary western society was shocked by that; for, worldly and entangled in secular affairs as bishops had become, it was still felt that war was not an activity suited to a churchman. But that shock was as nothing to the trauma caused in the 1070s and 1080s by Hildebrand’s creative interpretation of the basic feudal relationship: all Christians, he said, were “the soldiers of Christ” and “the vassals of St. Peter”, i.e. of the Pope, and the Pope had the right to call on all the laity to break their feudal oaths and take up arms against their lords, in obedience to himself, their ultimate feudal suzerain, who would repay them, not with lands or physical security, but with the absolution of sins and everlasting life! Thus freedom from lay control, on the one hand, but control over the laity, and greater secular power, on the other: that was the programme – both contradictory and hypocritical – of the “reformed” papacy

 

            But before undertaking this assault on the West, the papacy needed to secure its rear in the East. This was achieved by picking a quarrel with the Eastern Church[35] and sending Cardinal Humbert to Constantinople to anathematize it in 1054. Pope Leo IX was actually dead when the exchange of anathemas took place, but that he was a truly papist pope is proved by his words: “If anywhere in the universe any people proudly disagrees with the Roman Church, it can no longer be called or considered to be a Church – it is already an assemblage of heretics, a conventicle of schismatics, a synagogue of Satan”.[36] To which Patriarch Michael of Constantinople replied: “O you who are Orthodox, flee the fellowship of those who have accepted the heretical Latins and who regard them as the first Christians in the Catholic and Holy Church of God!” For, as he said a little later, “the Pope is a heretic.”[37]

 

            In this proud exaltation of the opinion of one local Church, the Roman  – or rather, of one man in one local Church – above the Universal Church lies the whole tragedy of the further development of Western civilisation…

 

            The now definitely secular character of the papacy was demonstrated at the inauguration of Pope Nicholas II, at whose inauguration a quasi-royal coronation was introduced as part of the rite. Then, in 1059, he decreed that the Popes should be elected by the cardinal-bishops alone, without the participation of the people. “The role of the Roman clergy and people,” writes Canning, “was reduced to one of mere assent to the choice. The historical participation of the emperor was by-passed with the formula ‘saving the honour and reverence due to our beloved son Henry [IV] who is for the present regarded as king and who, it is hoped, is going to be emperor with God’s grace, inasmuch as we have now conceded this to him and to his successors who shall personally obtain this right from the apostolic see’.”[38]

 

            Sixty years before, Otto III had bombastically claimed that he had “ordained and created” the Pope.[39] Now the wheel had come round full circle: the emperors were emperors only by virtue of receiving this right from the Pope.

 

 

The Rise of the Normans

 

            Four months later, the new Pope made a hardly less momentous decision: he entered into alliance at Melfi with the Normans of South Italy, the same nation whom the last Orthodox Pope, Leo IX, had died fighting, and whom he had cursed on his deathbed. The alliance was momentous because up to this moment the Popes had always turned for protection to the Christian Roman Emperor, whether of East Rome or of the “Holy Roman Empire” of the West. Indeed, the Pope had insisted on crowning the “Holy Roman Emperor” precisely because he was the papacy’s official guardian. For it was unheard of that the Church of Rome should recognise as her official guardian any other power than the Roman Emperor, from whom, according to the forged Donation of Constantine, she had herself received her quasi-imperial dignity and power. But just as, in the middle of the eighth century, the Papacy had rejected the Byzantines in favour of the Franks, so now – after Cardinal Humbert had cut the last remaining links with Byzantium by “anathematising” the Orthodox Church in 1054[40] – it rejected the Germans in favour of the Normans, a recently formed nation of Viking origin but French speech and culture.

 

            Now the Normans had recently seized a large swathe of land belonging to the Lombards and Byzantines in Southern Italy. The Pope legitimised this robbery in exchange for the Norman leaders Richard of Capua and Robert Guiscard becoming his feudal vassals and swearing to support the Papacy. In addition, Robert Guiscard specifically promised: “If you or your successors die before me, I will help to enforce the dominant wishes of the Cardinals and of the Roman clergy and laity in order that a pope may be chosen and established to the honour of St. Peter.”[41]

 

            Guiscard was as good as his word. “Every stage in the Norman progress entailed from the first a practical extension of papal power in the countries which were being subjected to the Normans.”[42] “Thus after 1059 the Norman conquests were made progressively to subserve the restoration of the Latin rite and the extension of papal jurisdiction in southern Italy”[43] – at the expense both of the Byzantines and of the German Emperor, Henry IV, who was at that time still a child and therefore unable to react to the assault on his position.

 

            Even before this, the Papacy had begun to forge close bonds with the Normans in their homeland in Northern France, whence the papal assault on that other fortress of old-style Orthodox Autocracy, England, would soon be launched. Thus in 1055, the year after Duke William of Normandy seized effective control of his duchy by defeating a coalition led by his lord, King Henry I of France, the old-fashioned (that is, Orthodox) Archbishop Mauger was deposed to make way for the more forward-looking Maurilius. He introduced “a new and extraneous element”[44] – that is, an element more in keeping with the ideals of the heretical, “reformed papacy” – into the Norman Church.

 

            Then, in 1059, papal sanction for the marriage between Duke William and Matilda of Flanders, which had been withheld by Leo IX, was finally obtained, opening the way for full co-operation between the Normans and the Pope. Finally, William supported the candidacy of Alexander II to the throne as against that of Honorius II, who was supported by the German Empress Agnes.[45] The Pope now owed a debt of gratitude to the Normans which they were soon to call in…

 

            By the 1060s, then, there were only two powers in the West that stood in the way of the complete triumph of the crude, militaristic ethos of feudalism: the Orthodox autocracies of England and Germany. By the end of the century both powers had been brought low – England by military conquest and its transformation into a single feudal fief at the hands of the Normans, and Germany by cunning dialectic and the fear of excommunication by the Pope.

 

 

The English Orthodox Autocracy

 

            The Germanic peoples had great reverence for their kings, whose sacred, priestly character was conferred upon them by the three elements of hereditary descent, election and consecration.[46] According to Germanic, no less than Byzantine, ideas, the king owed his authority, not to the priesthood of the Church, but to God. Thus Canning writes: “In the barbarian kingdoms God was understood to be the ultimate source of royal authority. This notion, which was widely prevalent in the sixth century, became focused into the formula that such a ruler was ‘king by the grace of God’ (rex Dei gratia) – that he ruled by God’s favour… The earliest known use of this formula itself in the west apparently dates from the reign of the Lombard king, Agilulf (590-616); [St.] Isidore of Seville also applied it to the Visigothic king, Svinthila (621-31); by the end of the seventh century the Anglo-Saxon kings were employing it or similar titles; and in the second half of the eighth century it became part of Charlemagne’s royal title. The idea of kingship by divine favour was, however, older than the formula itself and can be discerned as early as the reign of the Vandal king, Huniric (d. 484). In the east the idea that the emperor ruled by God’s grace had been prevalent from the fifth century, but appears not to have been the source of the western concept.”[47]

 

            With the coming of Christianity, writes Chaney, there was “a separation of royal functions, the sacrificial-priestly role of the Germanic tribal monarch going to the Church hierarchy and that of sacral protector remaining with the king. This separation of power manifested itself not in the obliteration of the religious nature of kingship but in the establishment of a sphere of action by and for the ecclesia apart… from that of the regnum.”[48]

 

            The religious nature of Anglo-Saxon kingship was manifested in the fact that the king was still seen as the “warden of the holy temple”, as northern poetry called him[49]. Crimes against the Church or her servants were seen as crimes against the king, and were duly punished by him. It was seen as his duty to look after the Church and enforce her laws with secular penalties. “For a Christian king is Christ’s deputy among Christian people”, as King Ethelred’s code of laws (1014) put it. Both he and the archbishop were “the Lord’s Anointed” – the archbishop so that he might minister the sacraments of salvation, and the king so that, as Bede wrote in his commentary on Acts, “he might by conquering all our enemies bring us to the immortal Kingdom”. The king was sometimes compared to God the Father and the bishop – to Christ (in fact, the bishop is often called “Christ” in Anglo-Saxon legislation). He was the shepherd and father of his people and would have to answer for their well-being at the Last Judgement. Regicide was the greatest of crimes; for, as Abbot Aelfric wrote in a Palm Sunday sermon, “no man may make himself a king, for the people have the option to choose him for king who is agreeable to them; but after that he has been hallowed as king, he has power over the people, and they may not shake his yoke from their necks.” And so, as Archbishop Wulfstan of York wrote in his Institutes of Christian Polity, “through what shall peace and support come to God’s servants and to God’s poor, save through Christ, and through a Christian king.”[50]

 

            Nor was the king’s authority confined to the purely secular sphere. Thus “in England,” writes Barlow, “just as the king referred to his earls and thegns, so he addressed his archbishops, bishops and abbots. The prelates were his men, his servants; their churches and estates were in his gift and under his protection and control. He could even grant the rank of bishops without the office or benefice. It was he who decided under what rule his monasteries should live, what saints should be recognized, what festivals observed.”[51]

 

             And yet the relationship between Church and State in England was one of “symphony” in the Byzantine sense, not of caesaropapism; for the kings, as well as being in general exceptionally pious, did nothing without consulting their bishops and other members of the witan or assembly – who were not afraid to disagree with the king, or remind him of his obligations.[52]

 

            Thus, as Barlow goes on, “a true theocratic government was created, yet one, despite the common charge of confusion [between spiritual and political functions] against the Anglo-Saxon Church, remarkably free of confusion in theory. The duality of the two spheres was emphatically proclaimed. There were God’s rights and the king’s rights, Christ’s laws and the laws of the world. There was an independent ecclesiastical jurisdiction under the control of the bishop, but there was also the helping hand of the secular power which the church had invoked and which it could use at its discretion.”[53]

 

            The weakness of the English consisted in the fact that in their whole history there was not a single instance of struggle with Rome over doctrinal (as opposed to canonical or administrative) matters, nor any appeal by the English Church to the Eastern Churches against the Pope; so that there were no clear indications as to how a struggle between the King and the Pope, or the local Church and the Pope, would end…[54]

 

 

Aims of the Present Work

 

            It is neither the aim of the present writer, nor would it be within his competence, to give a detailed political, military or social history of the period. With regard to most of the major issues disputed by historians, he has simply adopted, without detailed argument, what seems to him to be the most plausible version of events. Thus with regard to King Edward’s alleged bequest of his kingdom to William of Normandy, he has adopted the position taken by Ian Walker[55]; while with regard to the Pope’s involvement in the invasion, he has followed David Douglas[56], Frank Barlow[57], David Howarth[58] and Frank McLynn[59].

 

            The main aim of the present work is twofold: first, to provide a spiritual (as opposed to a political or social) history of the decline and fall of Orthodox England, and secondly, to collect material relevant to the hoped-for future glorification of the great spiritual heroes of the period – notably King Edward the Confessor and Martyr-King Harold – in the Orthodox Church. The writer feels that such an undertaking is especially timely now that the relics of Martyr-King Harold have been discovered and identified through the invaluable research carried out by John Pollock.[60] It is this spiritual and hagiographical nature of the present work that explains why the writer has made much more extensive use of the hagiographical materials available from the period than most modern researchers into the period, with their bias against anything that smacks of the miraculous.[61]

 

Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ our God,
have mercy on us!

 

 

March 18/31, 2000.

St. Edward the Martyr, King of England.

 

 

I. SAINT EDWARD THE CONFESSOR (1043-1066)

 

 

Early Years

 

            The holy King Edward was born near the beginning of the eleventh century. His father was the English King Ethelred, and his mother – the Norman princess Emma. When Queen Emma was pregnant with him, “all of the men of the country,” as his earliest, anonymous biographer records, “took an oath that if a man child should come forth as the fruit of her labours, they would await in him their lord and king who would rule over the whole race of the English.”[62]

 

            In spite of this promise, Edward’s claim to the throne was laid aside in favour of those of Ethelred’s six sons by an earlier marriage – in particular, Edmund Ironside, who became king in 1015 and was killed in the same year, and the Danish King Canute’s sons by Elgiva of Northampton (Harold I) and Queen Emma (Hardacanute). It must therefore have seemed a great miracle to his contemporaries that Edward should finally, when already in middle age, have succeeded to the throne of his fathers, reigning in peace for another twenty-four years. It must have seemed, moreover, that God was taking pity on His people again after the heavy chastisement of the Danish yoke (1016-1042); for, as the anonymous biographer writes, “just as a father, after chastising his children, is a peace with them again, shows himself a soothing comforter, so God’s loving kindness, sparing the English after the heavy weight of his rebuke, showed them a flower preserved from the root of their ancient kings, and both gave them the strength and fired their minds to seek this flower for the kingdom as well as for their salvation.”[63]

 

            When Edward was still in his cradle, he was brought to the monastery of Ely by his parents, “and was offered,” according to the monastery’s chronicler, “above the holy altar… Moreover, as the elders of the church who were present and saw it used to tell, he was brought up there in the monastery with the boys for a long time, learning the psalms and hymns of the Lord with them.”[64]

 

            Some have doubted whether an English king could have been dedicated his son to a life of monastic chastity in this way. But he was not regarded as the immediate heir: in the charters of the latter period of Ethelred’s reign, his name is added at the bottom of the list of princes.[65] Moreover, so close were the links between the English royal family and the monasteries that both Kings Edgar and Edward the Martyr were brought up by monks, while the daughters of Kings Alfred and Edward the Elder, and the sister of Edward the Martyr, were dedicated as nuns. It is therefore not impossible that the future King Edward was brought up by monks, at least until the royal family was forced to flee to Normandy in 1013. And his later virginal life, even in marriage, is certainly not inconsistent with a vow made by his parents when he was only a child.

 

            The fruits of the boy’s pious upbringing were soon evident. On February 2, 1014, King Swein of Denmark was miraculously killed by St. Edmund while he was ravaging East Anglia.[66] This event was made known by revelation to Prince Edward, although he was only a boy of twelve at the time.[67]

 

            But when Edward had this revelation, his father King Ethelred and the whole of the royal family were in exile in Normandy, expelled by their subjects, who had been exasperated by his failed policies against the Danes, and especially by the fruitless payment of ever larger amounts of tax, the Danegeld. Archbishop Wulfstan of York saw in this and other betrayals the root cause of the people’s failure to repel the pagan Danes: “For there are here in the land great disloyalties towards God and towards the state, and there are also many here in the country who are betrayers of their lords in various ways. And the greatest betrayal in the world of one’s lord is that a man betray his lord’s soul; and it is also a very great betrayal of one’s lord in the world, that a man should plot against his lord’s life or, living, drive him from the land; and both have happened in this country. They plotted against Edward [the Martyr] and then killed him… Many are forsworn and greatly perjured, and pledges are broken over and again; and it is evident in this nation that the wrath of God violently oppresses us…”[68]

 

            The English repented and recalled their king from exile. However, on April 23, 1016, he died “after a life of much hardship and many difficulties. Then, after his death, all the councillors of England chose Edmund [Ironside, his eldest son by his first wife] as king, and he defended his kingdom valiantly during his lifetime.”[69]

 

            The seven short months of Edmund’s reign are among the most dramatic in English history, matched only by the nine months of Harold Godwinson’s in 1066. The pattern of events, moreover, was very similar to that later drama: great extremes of heroism and treachery, culminating in the crucifixion of a conquered country. Thus immediately after the witan proclaimed Edmund king in London, the bishops and chief men of Wessex assembled and unanimously elected Canute, the son of King Swein, as king. Meeting him at Southampton, writes Florence of Worcester, “they repudiated and renounced in his presence all the race of Ethelred, and concluded peace with him, swearing loyalty to him, and he also swore to them that he would be a loyal lord to them in affairs of Church and state.”[70]

 

            Undeterred by this treachery to the ancient royal dynasty that had served England so well, King Edmund raised no less than five armies against the Danes, and was finally killed, on November 30, not by a Dane, but by the ubiquitous traitor of his father’s reign. He was buried beside his grandfather, King Edgar the Peaceable, at Glastonbury. And so the whole of England passed into the hands of Canute the Dane…

 

            The young Prince Edward, lover of monasticism though he was, had shown great valour as a warrior in this period. Thus we read in a Scandinavian source that, during a battle for London between the English and the Danes, “Thorkel the Tall had taken the one part of the town; many of his host had fallen there. Then Earl Thorkel the Tall went to King Canute to win the other part of the town, and as luck would have it, just saved his life, for Edward, King Ethelred’s son, struck at that time a blow which men have held in memory in after days. Thorkel thrust Canute off his horse, but Edward smote asunder the saddle and the horse’s back. After that, however, the brothers had to take to flight, and Canute exulted in his victory, and thanked King Olaf for his help.”[71]

 

            Canute was to become an exemplary defender of the Church; but at the beginning of his reign he acted like the inveterate pagan that he still was, inflicting the last and largest ever Danegeld tax on the nation, while disposing of all his possible political opponents. Thus Prince Edwy, St. Edward’s half-brother, was killed, while his brothers Edward and Edmund were sent “to the king of the Swedes to be killed.”[72] The Swedish king, however, was a Christian, baptised by the English missionary bishop St. Sigfrid. So he would not acquiesce in Canute’s demand, in spite of the treaty he had with him. Instead, “he sent them to the king of the Hungarians, Solomon by name, to be preserved and brought up there…”[73]

 

 

Years in Exile

 

            To avoid the same fate, St. Edward and his brother Alfred were forced to return to Normandy.

 

            Soon the princes had another shock. In July, 1017 King Canute married Emma, King Ethelred’s widow. To her sons in exile in Normandy it must have come as a shock that their mother should marry the conqueror of their country and the murderer of their brothers, while letting them languish alone in exile. This may explain, at least in part, the difficult relations King Edward had with his mother at the beginning of his reign.

 

            Now on the death of King Canute, the throne of England passed to his son by Elgiva of Northampton, Harold, while Denmark was ruled by his son by Queen Emma, Hardacanute. Initially, Emma hoped that her son Hardacanute would become king; and, supported by the powerful Earl Godwin of Wessex, she even had coins struck in Hardacanute’s name at her base in Winchester, while the coins in currency north of the Thames bore Harold’s name. However, when it became clear that he was not going to come to England from Denmark, she turned to her sons in Normandy. She wrote to them to leave Normandy and join her at Winchester.[74]

 

            Now Edward, as David Raraty says, “never regarded either Harthacnut or Harold as legitimate rulers, but had himself begun to use the royal style in Normandy, on Mont-St-Michel and Fécamp charters as early as the reign of Duke Robert.”[75] So he had no hesitation in responding to his mother’s call. However, he was forced to return after a battle in the Southampton area.

 

            Then came his brother Alfred. The murder of Prince Alfred – probably by Emma’s former ally Earl Godwin at King Harold’s instigation – was, as we have seen, one of the excuses William of Normandy used for the invasion of 1066. The Abingdon manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (c. 1050) records: “Godwin prevented him [Alfred], and placed him in captivity, dispersing his followers besides, killing some in various ways. Some were sold for money, some cruelly murdered, some put in chains, some blinded, some mutilated and some scalped. No more horrible deed was done in this land after the Danes came and made peace with us.”[76] And in another chronicle we read that in 1040 Godwin admitted to the murder, but swore to King Hardacanute and all the chief men of the land “that it was not by his counsel or his will that his brother was blinded, but that his lord King Harold had ordered him to do what he did.”[77]

 

            Prince Alfred actually died from his wounds in the monastery of Ely, that great fortress of Anglo-Saxon Orthodoxy. The body was buried with great honour in the southern porch of the west end of the church, where “wondrously beautiful visions of lights often occur”, wrote the monastery chronicle. And there were “many miracles…, as people report who even declare most repeatedly that they have seen them.”[78]

 

            The years which followed Prince Alfred’s murder, until his brother Edward ascended the throne, were among the most wretched in English Orthodox history. The Danish rule, which had been tolerable under Canute, now became an oppressive yoke. In 1038 Archbishop Athelnoth “the Good” died, followed, seven days later, by Bishop Athelric of Selsey: “for he had besought God that he should not live long in this world after the death of his most beloved father, Athelnoth.”[79] In the next two years these losses were compounded by the deaths of Bishops Alfric of Elmham, Beorhtheah of Worcester, Beorhtmaer of Lichfield and Edmund of Durham, who were succeeded by men of much lower spiritual stature. Thus to York came Alfric Puttoc, or the Hawk, who was angry when, in 1038, the vacant see of Worcester was not also given to him, as it had been, by an exceptional measure, to two of his predecessors. Instead the king gave it to a favourite of Godwin’s, Lifing of Crediton, who now held three sees simultaneously. Nor was this the only case of sees held in plurality or through simony. Elmham was given to a king’s chaplain, Stigand (later archbishop of Canterbury). “But he was afterwards ejected, and Grimcetel was elected for gold, and held then two dioceses.”[80]

 

            However, as the spiritual atmosphere darkened, a revelation was given to one of the last of the holy bishops – Brihtwald of Ramsbury. He was once weeping over the plight of the people, “and asked,” records King Edward’s anonymous biographer, “that God’s mercy should look favourably upon them. At that time he passed the watches of his weeping in the monastery of Glastonbury, and weary after so many tears the man of God fell asleep. When lo! In the Holy of Holies he saw the blessed Peter, the first of the Apostles, consecrate the image of a seemly man as king, mark out for him a life of chastity, and set the years of his reign by a fixed reckoning of his life. And when the king even at this juncture asked him of the generations to come who would reign in the kingdom, Peter answered, ‘The kingdom of the English is of God; and after you he has already provided a king according to His will.’”[81]

 

            The “seemly man” marked out for a life of chastity was King Edward. And the prophecy began to be fulfilled when King Harold’s successor Hardacanute died suddenly while drinking at a marriage feast in 1042. Supported by the most powerful man in the realm, Earl Godwin, Prince Edward was recalled from exile.

 

 

Edward the King

 

            And so Edward was consecrated king of England in London at Pascha, 1043. “Great was the joy that the English had,” writes an early French chronicler. “For the Danes had held them cheap, and often humiliated them. If a hundred of them met a single Dane, it would go badly for them if they did not bow to him. And if they met upon a bridge, they waited; it went badly for them if they moved before the Dane had passed. As they passed, they made obeisance, and whoever failed to do this was shamefully beaten if