Domesday Estates of the King and the Godwines: A Study in Late Saxon Politics

Abstract

The stability of Anglo-Saxon monarchy in generation before Hastings has been subject of long and continuing debate. Frank Barlow, in his important biography of Edward Confessor, saw reign as a period in which many threads were firmly tied together, and in which England attained more organic unity than it had possessed before.' Conversely, Eric John viewed Confessor's realm as suffering from what he termed fundamental structural problems.2 The Norman Conquest, he writes, was not a sudden bolt from blue . . . [but] climax of crisis that had been going on for generations. Only when that crisis is thoroughly understood, John declares, will historians be in position undertake a real enquiry into what difference Conquest actually made.3 Barlow and John, like other historians of late Saxon England, based their investigations chiefly on careful analysis of narrative sources works such as Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Florence of Worcester, Vita Edwardi Regis, and Gesta Guillelmi Ducis. The difficulties posed by paucity of narrative information, however, are enormous. Barlow, for example, laments that to write history of Edward and his reign we have scrape barrel with care: every scrap of information is precious.4 Eric John writes in same vein: the difficulties of subject stem from nature of evidence, of which there is usually quite lot, but never quite enough.5 The narrative sources make it clear that any debate concerning late Saxon political stability must inevitably center on relationship between