The Piety of Earl Godwine

Summary

Who knows how a king behaved a thousand years ago? There is only recollection, and stories.

(Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)

Modern scholarship has not looked kindly on Earl Godwine. Allen Brown called him ‘a parvenu who by some means won the favour of Cnut’, adding that ‘unscrupulous aggrandisement’ was his chief characteristic, while Donald Matthew presented his whole family as ‘ambitious upstarts’ among their warring peers. Similar judgements appear in Robin Fleming's description of Godwine and his kin as ‘a family of highly competent and slightly unscrupulous earls’ whose machinations fatally weakened the English kingdom, and in Eric John's even more vituperative judgement: ‘a cancer upon the body politic that had to be cut out’. At best, modern historians tend to agree with Walter Map's assessment of Earl Godwine: ‘I do not say he was a good man, but a mighty, and an unscrupulous one’. Frank Barlow, for instance, concluded that, though he ‘was not religious, [and] may not always have been scrupulous, he must have had great talent; and we cannot doubt that his virtues outweighed his vices’. Equally lukewarm is Emma Mason's assessment of Godwine as ‘an able administrator who achieved his objectives through his ability to create a consensus in those around him’, a facility she attributes to a ‘suave and paternalistic manner’. It seems that modern commentators, in reacting against the excessive adulation heaped upon Earl Godwine by Edward Augustus Freeman, have replaced an eleventh-century Gladstone with an eleventh-century Lord Mandelson.