England and Byzantium on the Eve of the Norman Conquest (the Reign of Edward the Confessor)

Summary

At this same conference, in 1978, John Godfrey said in his paper on Anglo-Saxon refugees to Byzantium that ‘towards the close of the pre-Conquest period there is evidence that some departments of English life were influenced by Byzantiurn'.' This most intriguing remark, given without further references, has prompted me to searcll for evidence in the two leading articles on relations between Engtand and Byzantium in the tenth and eleventh centuries: R. S. Lopez, ‘Leproblème des relations anglo-byzantines du septième au dixième siècle' and A. A. Vasiliev, ‘The opening Stages of the Anglo-Saxon Immigration to Byzantium in the Eleventh Century'. Neither article proved to be very revealing. Lopez’ article, as was to be expected, does not deal with king Edward's reign. Vasiliev starts his study after the crucial year 1066; we will see that his hypotflesis about the beginning of this migration may be wrong. The year 1066 was also the starting-point for V. Laurent in a more recent article.

It is worth investigating the period preceding the Norman invasion, that is the reign of king Edward the Confessor (1042/3-1066), to see if traditions we assumed to have started after duke William's coming to the British Isles, may not belong to an earlier period.

In this article I will try to review indications of contact between the Byzantine empire and Anglo-Saxon England during king Edward's reign. Some of these indications were neglected by earlier scholars, some did not receive sufficient attention. The reader, however, will be offered more questions than answers, more suggestions than conclusions. f hope that historians, art historians, archaeologists and other people interested may be stimulated to keep an eye open for anything that may contribute to a better understanding of the relations between East and West in the period mentioned.

So far only R.M. Dawkins, D. M. Nicol and Constance Head have explicitly referred to connections with the East during the reign of Edward. Dawkins seems to take for granted that relations between the Greek and Anglo-Saxon courts existed:

From a curious story told by William of Malmesbury we know that earlier than this, even before the Conquest, there were connections between England and Constantinople. King Edward the Confessor, we are told, had a prophetic dream about the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, in which he had seen them turn from their right on to their left sides, and so to remain for seventy-four years.