5 - Edward, the Godwines and the End of Anglo-Saxon England

Summary

edward and edith

On Easter day (3 April) 1043 Edward the Confessor was crowned king at Winchester, becoming the last of the Cerdicing dynasty to hold the throne of England. The choice of Winchester was no doubt deliberate. The city had developed first as a capital under Alfred and Edward the Elder, and it had remained the dowager queen Emma's seat of power; it was thus the perfect venue for Edward to proclaim his place within the dynasty and his reestablishment of the true Cerdicing bloodline after the reigns of the foreigners Cnut, Harold I and Harthacnut. It was not long after the coronation, however, that Edward began to build up his own royal complex at Westminster in London as part of a larger effort to establish a new court and a new independence.

Edward's desire to establish both his dynastic rights and a certain degree of political independence is also reflected in the iconography of his coinage. In the early years of Edward's reign the designs of his coins emphasised his ties to the old regime, and a sense of continuity between rulers, but towards the middle of his reign the designs were altered to project a new type of image – albeit one with roots in the past. On his earliest issues (1042–53) the crowned bust, by now a standard feature of Anglo-Saxon coins, faces left, just as it had on the coinage of Harthacnut and earlier kings, and the distribution of the letters PACX in the four quadrants of the cross on the reverse of the very earliest issue, the Pacx pennies of 1042–44, has plausibly been interpreted as a reference back to the Crux coinage of his father Æthelred II, on which the inscription was arranged in similar fashion. The inscription, with its message of peace might also have been intended to express a wish for a return to the quieter days before the Danish conquest of 1016, as well as an end to current political rivalries. In 1053 Edward introduced a new type of coin, the Pointed Helmet, on which he appeared bearded and helmeted, facing right and holding a fleur-de-lis.