The Historical Godiva

by

Octavia Randolph

This piece is adapted from the Afterword to my novella Ride, a retelling of the story of Lady Godiva, which may be read at http://www.octavia.net  

Ride is my attempt to re-frame her act in light of the realities of 11th century Anglo-Saxon law and social and religious custom. It is also my tribute to the efforts of women everywhere who seek peace over their own personal comfort. 

GODIVA is the latinised form of the Old English name Godgyfu or Godgifu (literally, "God's gift" or "good gift"). Godgyfu was an 11th century Anglo-Saxon aristocrat whose life spanned one of the most tumultuous periods in early English history. Despite her illustrious husband, renowned piety, and religious benefactions, without the tantalising legend of her ride she would likely be completely forgotten. 

What is known of Godgyfu is found in the chronicles of various religious foundations, mentions of her or her husband in charters, and the post-Conquest compilation known as the Domesday Book. The first positive record of her is in 1035, when she was already married to Leofric, Earl of Mercia. In my novella I place her from Newark in Nottinghamshire, as her estate of single greatest value was there, but this is conjecture on my part. Likewise, I have made her thirty-eight years old in 1042; her actual birth date is unknown. Similarly, the date of her ride through Coventry cannot be known; I have placed it the year before the dedication of the Priory she and Leofric built there. Here I must also acknowledge that despite records dating to the late 12th century concerning her ride, there are some modern scholars who doubt that it ever took place. I am persuaded that it did. 

To return to fact: Like other Anglo-Saxon women of her class, Godgyfu owned property in her own right, both given to her by her parents and acquired through other means—gifts from her husband, inheritance from relatives, and purchases and exchanges from individuals and religious foundations. The modest farming village of Coventry was one of them. Domesday lists it, twenty years after her death, as having sixty-nine families. 

It is not known why Godgyfu and Leofric turned their attention to Coventry. As early as 1024 Bishop Æthelnoth (later to be Archbishop of Canterbury) gave to Leofric a priceless relic, the arm of St. Augustine of Hippo, which had been purchased by the bishop in Rome and which he apparently indicated was intended for Coventry. The Benedictine Priory of St. Mary, St. Osburgh, and All Saints was dedicated by Archbishop of Canterbury Eadsige in 1043, on property owned by Godgyfu. Within was a shrine to St. Osburgh which held her head encased in copper and gold. St. Augustine's arm took its place in a special shrine, and they gave also to the new Priory many ornaments of gold, silver and precious stones, so that it was famed for its richness. Leofric further endowed the Priory with estates in Warwickshire, Gloucestershire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, and Worcestershire. 

Leofric was a man of considerable talent and statesmanship; no man could survive forty years as Earl without these qualities. Elevated to Earl (a title and position new to the English, replacing and expanding the Anglo-Saxon ealdorman) in 1017 by the Dane Cnut, he survived and thrived through Cnut's reign. Then followed that of Harold Harefoot (1035-1040), in whose selection as successor to Cnut Leofric was instrumental. Hardacnut, Cnut's other son, reigned next (1040-1042), and then began Edward the Confessor's rule (1042-1066). 

Unsurprisingly for his age, Leofric could alternate between great rapacity and great piety, his depredations and subsequent generous benefactions upon Worcester being a case in point. Near the end of his life he experienced four religious visions which were carefully recorded by the monks at Worcester and published after his death in 1057. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 1057 noted "...In this same year, on 30 October, Earl Leofric passed away. He was very wise in all matters, both religious and secular, that benefited all this nation. He was buried at Coventry, and his son Ælfgar succeeded to his authority..." (G.N. Garmonsway translation). 

Following his death, Godgyfu made additional gifts to the religious foundation at Worcester to aid in the repose of Leofric's soul, and for the benefit of her own. These gifts included altar frontals, wall hangings, bench covers, candlesticks, and a Bible, and joined a long list of items and estates the two had granted to Worcester in the years prior to Leofric's death. 

Leofric and Godgyfu had one known child, the above-mentioned Ælfgar, who died in 1062. His daughter Ealdgyth was wed briefly first to a Welsh king and following his death, to Harold Godwineson, killed by William of Normandy's men on the field at Hastings. Thus for nine months Godgyfu was grandmother to the queen of England. 

Godgyfu died in 1067, the year following Hastings. At her death she was one of the four or five richest women in England, with estates valued at £160. Her lands were then forfeit to new king William. 

Godgyfu was buried next to her husband in the Priory church in Coventry they had created. According to chronicler William of Malmesbury, her dying act was characteristically pious: as a final gift to the Priory, she ordered hung about the neck of a statue of the Virgin Mary her personal rosary of precious stones. 

The Legend 

Over the centuries the story of Godgyfu's ride has enjoyed a life of its own. The oldest surviving account of it, dating from perhaps 1175, that of Roger of Wendover (d. 1236). It presents the story much as it has come down to us today, of a compassionate but powerless Godiva who is dared by a cruel and imperious husband to ride naked through the streets of a bustling city as the price he exacts for tax relief to its citizens. 

Later chroniclers embellished and expanded upon the legend; Richard Grafton (d.1572) M.P. for Coventry, imagines the lady in question living in a place very similar to that of his own time, with "Magistrates and rulers" weighing in on her decision to ride. The voyeur Peeping Tom did not make an appearance in the tale until the 17th century, from the account of Humphrey Wanley (1672-1726), although no mention is made of the price paid by the curious peeper. 

It was left to Alfred Lord Tennyson, in 1842, to codify the tale into the form in which it became known around the world. His poem Godiva presents Leofric as a great hulking Mr Rochester of a man, grim, snarling and with "a heart as rough as Esau's hand". After daring Godiva to ride, she goes forth "clothed on with chastity", whereupon she is spied by "one low churl, compact of thankless earth...but his eyes, before they had their will/Were shrivell'd into darkness in his head/And dropt before him." Nonetheless, Godiva "...gain'd/Her bower; whence reissuing, robed and crown'd/To meet her lord, she took the tax away/And built herself an everlasting name."  

All of these accounts ignore important facts, and are fraught with inconsistency and illogic. Coventry at the time of the ride is depicted not as a small village but as teeming metropolis (recall that twenty years after Godgyfu's death it had less than seventy families). There is no corroborating evidence to suggest that Leofric warranted the reputation of a husband who would order his virtuous wife to parade naked through town in an attempt to humiliate her at worst, or at best to prove the sincerity of her compassionate leanings. On the contrary, the long record of the joint benefactions of Godgyfu and Leofric indicate that theirs was a marriage of more or less equal tastes and aims. Divorce was far from uncommon amongst Anglo-Saxon aristocracy; if Godgyfu had found herself in an untenable marital situation the union could have been speedily dissolved, with her retaining all the property she had brought into the marriage, and custody of any minor children. Since only women mention household property in their wills, it is very likely that they alone were considered to own, and have the right to dispose of, furnishings acquired during the marriage. Thus separation from a husband who exhibited sadistic behaviour could be accomplished without undue economic hardship upon the departing wife. 

But by far the most vital fact ignored in these retellings is that Godgyfu possessed the village of Coventry outright. She need not ask Leofric or anyone else to suspend or repeal any tax or toll upon it, as she controlled the collection of these herself. The sole exception was the heregeld, an onerous levy instituted by Cnut to pay for the king's personal body-guard. Until revoked by Edward the Confessor in 1051, it was a national tax, required of all. Godgyfu would not have been able to suspend it - but she certainly could have paid it from her own purse. 

The reason for this persistent misrepresentation is simple, but profound in its implications to the unfolding of the tale. Because Anglo-Saxon woman—indeed all women in England—had by the time of even the earliest extant retelling lost the extensive property (and other personal and legal) rights they had enjoyed prior to the disaster of 1066, chroniclers wrote from the perspective of Norman law and mores. As the tale became sentimentalized and ever-more erotically charged, the victimization of Godgyfu became paramount—she must become a virtuous victim, compelled by an unfeeling husband to perform (in the chronicler's eyes) a humiliating act, in a Coventry subjected, as was she, to his utter domination. There is no room in these later recountings for a woman of independence and intelligence, acting out of deep-seated devotion, and inspired by well-remembered (and in some instances, still enacted) pre-Christian agricultural rituals and Biblical acts of religious dedication and contrition. 

Despite—or because of—the perverting of the tale, it grew. But however obscured, its underpinnings remain sound. As Joan C. Lancaster, former City Historian of the City of Coventry, states in her definitive study, Godiva of Coventry, the legend was predicated on a     

"genuine local tradition known to the Coventry people in the 12th century...It was based on memory of her piety and her share in atoning for her husband's sins, and also the removal of the heregeld when she was ruling over them."  

It is this Godgyfu I choose to celebrate and honour.

 

Selected Bibliography 

Godiva of Coventry, Joan C. Lancaster, Coventry Corporation, 1967

Lady Godiva: Images of a Legend in Art & Society, Ronald Aquilla Clarke and Patrick A.E. Day,   City of Coventry, 1982 (pamphlet)

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, G. N. Garmonsway, trans., J.M. Dent & Sons, 1975

Domesday Book, Thomas Hinde, editor, Coombe Books, 1996

The Beginnings of English Society, Dorothy Whitelock, Penguin, 1974 

In addition Prof. Daniel Donoghue of Harvard University graciously allowed me to review several chapters of his manuscript, which has since been published as Lady Godiva: A Literary History of the Legend, Blackwell, 2002 

Copyright © 1998, 2006 Octavia Randolph