In another attempt to bolster her husband’s public image, Matilda returned to England in the spring of 1072 and joined in the celebrations for Easter at the royal court in Winchester. An ecclesiastical council was held there in April—an indication that the royal couple were using it as a base from which to conduct government business. By Whitsun, Matilda had moved to Windsor, which suggests that she was keen to maintain a high profile. However, her tour came to an abrupt end a short while later, when the situation in England again appeared volatile due to a threatened invasion from the Scottish king. She therefore returned to Normandy and was once more appointed coregent with her son Robert—although it was again clear that she held the reins of power.

It did not take William long to neutralize the Scottish threat, using his accustomed strategy of meeting aggression with aggression in order to bring his enemy to terms. He and Malcolm agreed to a truce in the autumn of 1072. “At last, for a while, the storm of wars and rebellions dying out, he [William] now powerfully holds the reins of the entire English monarchy and even more prosperously reigns in glory.”¹ Jumièges may have been overstating the case, but the situation in England did appear more settled. After 1072, the frequency of William’s journeys home increased dramatically. From that time until his death, he spent around 130 of 170 months in Normandy, which effectively made him an absentee ruler in England.² Although there were genuine calls upon his attention in Normandy, such as the revolt of Maine, it was clear that he had a strong preference for his native land.

But though William was often absent from England during the 1070s, it remained vital that he and Matilda continue to reinforce their authority there. One of the most powerful expressions of this authority was the court, and Matilda in particular was keen to ensure that they made the most of their increasingly infrequent visits by living in as magnificent a style as possible. Thus her apparently domestic duties as superintendent of feasts, pageants, and the other great gatherings of court were in fact loaded with significance and vital authority.

Nowhere was the magnificence of William and Matilda’s court more blatant than at the great “crown-wearings” that were held at regular intervals throughout their reign.³ Although there are some references to Edward the Confessor wearing his crown at certain court festivals, the crown-wearings as a distinct court gathering seem to have been a Norman invention, and they soon became integral to William and Matilda’s exercise of majesty. There is no record of the order of ceremony that was followed at these occasions, but they probably involved an appearance by the royal couple in front of their ordinary subjects as they processed from the palace to the church. They usually took place at Winchester at Easter, Windsor or Westminster at Whitsun, and Gloucester at Christmas.⁴Again, full of pomp and ceremony, they were designed to emphasize William and Matilda’s legitimacy as king and queen of England.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle hints at a sense of the scale and grandeur of the crown-wearings. “All the great men of England were assembled about him: archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, thanes, and knights.”⁵ Many of these men would bring a host of attendants of their own, thus swelling the numbers further. There would also often be foreign envoys and visitors, who would be accorded a lavish reception so that they might report back on the splendor of the English king and his court. The witness lists of the charters that were granted during these occasions give a sense of both the number and quality of the attendees. For example, at the crown-wearing held in Winchester at Easter 1069, a charter for the abbey of St.-Denis was signed by William, Matilda, one of their sons, William’s two half-brothers, his right-hand man, William fitzOsbern, and a plethora of archbishops, bishops, and other high-ranking churchmen.⁶

In such charters, Matilda is almost always styled “Regina,” and occasionally she is given the more elaborate title of regina Anglorum et comitissa Normannorum et Cenomannorum (queen of England and countess of Normandy and Maine).⁷ Her illustrious ancestry is also reinforced in the numerous bequests made by the great nobles of England, which refer to prayers and gifts for the souls of the whole royal family.⁸ Matilda’s inclusion in such bequests, along with that of her sons, suggests that only as head of his dynasty was William viewed as the rightful king: on his own, without Matilda’s validating presence, he was little more than a bastard usurper. Combining the pageantry and splendor of the crown-wearings with the practical business of granting titles and estates gave out a clear message: the court was the center of power, patronage, and favor, a symbol of the entire kingdom.

Although great occasions such as crown-wearings swelled the ranks of those paying attendance upon the royal couple, even on ordinary days their court would have been filled with hundreds of noblemen, ecclesiastics, military men, and visitors. Many of these formed part of William and Matilda’s permanent staff. It was considered essential to royal dignity that a large body of servants be maintained. “A worldly king has many thegns and stewards,” observed the tenth-century writer Aelfric. “He cannot be glorious unless he has the dignity which befits him and many serving men who wait on him in obedience.”⁹

The personnel of the royal household reflected the military and administrative function of the court. It was more sophisticated than the ducal household back in Normandy, and had a long-established structure and officials. The king and queen had their own chapel, which held services, housed the royal relics, and fulfilled some of the couple’s secretarial needs. Their household also contained the royal treasure, which was largely the responsibility of the chamberlain. In theory, this traveled with the court wherever it went, but by the eleventh century, the palace at Winchester served as almost a permanent treasury. The contemporary records also include references to an array of domestics—from cooks and washerwomen to grooms, carpenters, smiths, falconers, swineherds, dog handlers, clerks, and jesters.

Evidence from Domesday Book suggests that the queen had a household of her own that mirrored the structure and functions of the larger one. It could exist either as a separate entity or as part of the overall household. The officials referred to in Domesday Book are for the most part the same as those in the main royal household, with the exception of the queen’s personal attendants. They include a chaplain, chamberlain, butler, cooks, goldsmiths, hunters, stewards, and geld collectors.¹⁰ Matilda’s own household included a host of male and female servants to meet her every need. Many of them were drawn from high-ranking families in each country, as was customary. It is difficult to ascertain the precise number of men and women who served Matilda, but it is likely to have been in the region of seventy to eighty. This includes both those who served her at court and those who held land for her or worked on her estates. Although little is known of her household in Normandy, this was probably considerably smaller, particularly as the bulk of her landed estates were in England.

The servants of Matilda who are listed in Domesday Book include Humphrey the chamberlain, who was evidently one of the queen’s most loyal attendants, because he received a great deal of land in recognition of his royal service. There is also Albold the cook, who held lands in Mapledurham, Hampshire, which had formerly been held by his mistress. It is possible that she bequeathed these to him prior to her death. A reeve named Goscelin farmed some of Matilda’s manors in Devon and held land from her in Halberton, near Tiverton. Wulfweard White is listed as another official, and Bernard, the bishop of St. Davids, was her chaplain.¹¹

Matilda’s presence seemed to have a civilizing influence upon court life when she was in England. As in Normandy, she welcomed men of letters to court, adding to its luster. They included the celebrated poet Godfrey of Winchester. The queen made such an impression upon him when they met that he was inspired to write about her in his epic work, Epigrammata Historica.¹²

There was a marked deterioration in standards during Matilda’s long sojourns in Normandy. The twelfth-century chronicle of the life of Lanfranc recounts that at one of his crown-wearings, William was seated on his throne, magnificently dressed in gold and jewels, with Lanfranc seated beside him. Upon seeing the king, a jester cried out in mock adulation: “Behold, I see God! Behold, I see God!” William was on the point of laughing at this joke, but the shocked Lanfranc ordered that the man be flogged. William agreed, but if his archbishop had not intervened, he would no doubt have been happy to indulge his jester’s blasphemy.¹³ It is hard to imagine this incident happening if Matilda, who was widely renowned for her piety, had been present.

There is no doubt that the queen was becoming increasingly and unprecedentedly powerful. In part, this was due to the fact that court life in the eleventh century was intimate, and there was little or no differentiation between public and private spheres of life. As king, William’s court—the curia regis—in a sense differed little from the curia ducis that had surrounded him as duke. The business it considered was identical to that of the ducal court in Normandy, for it was largely concerned with confirmations of land or privilege, and it played a judicial function in the settling of claim disputes. Both were dominated by members of his family—notably his wife and sons—as well as by a select group comprising the chief magnates and churchmen of his realm. And as most of the latter were drawn from Norman families, there was a strong continuity between the two courts. Crucially, the curia regis was always held at a royal residence.

In any palace, the Great Hall or “common room” was where the king and his court ate, slept, and governed. This meant that the queen was constantly at his side. Therefore, even though a consort’s role was in theory limited to her family and domestic arrangements, in practice this gave her a great deal of influence in what we would today consider the public or political arena. As one recent commentator has observed: “The nature of personal rule ensures that she who has the king’s ear may help direct the course of events.”¹⁴ Such power was never openly acknowledged, however, and a wise queen would be discreet in employing it—as Matilda herself proved to be.

However, by the early 1070s, Matilda had carved out a more dynamic and visible role for herself in the public affairs of her English kingdom than any of the queen consorts who had gone before her. The constant to-ing and fro-ing between England and Normandy, as well as the considerable travel that she undertook within each domain, might be expected to have taken its toll on the queen, who was by now in her early forties and the mother of at least nine children. But there is no record of her ever failing in her duties on account of sickness, and she seemed to endure the rigors of her position with remarkable fortitude.

The queen was particularly active in the sphere of justice. There are frequent references in Domesday Book to her hearing English legal cases during William’s absences, especially those involving disputes over property. The crowds that gathered to support their kinsmen or friends in such disputes were huge, and their numbers were swelled even more by royal officials, sheriffs, underlings, churchmen, jurors, and witnesses. To wield authority over such a gathering would have tested the mettle of the most formidable king or magnate, let alone a mere woman. But Matilda proved more than equal to the task, for she presided over these assemblies time and again, often acting as sole adjudicator. This is one of the clearest testaments to her personal presence and authority, as well as to the respect that her English subjects felt toward her.

One of the most notorious cases involved the abbey of Abingdon, then part of Berkshire but now in the county of Oxfordshire. Like so many others, although it centered on a dispute over property, at its heart lay the ongoing feud between native Englishmen and their Norman oppressors. The case was brought by a royal official named Alfsi who had sought out Matilda at Windsor and complained to her of the violent treatment that he had suffered. Although what it represented was of a very serious nature, the case does have an element of farce about it. Alfsi, who was by all accounts an arrogant and overbearing official, had harassed the local population surrounding the abbey by plundering their woodland and using their oxen to transport lead for the king’s use. This so enraged the abbot that he beat the man with a stick, threw the lead to the ground, and returned the oxen to their owners. When Alfsi came back a second time, the abbot once more seized the load that he was carrying and obviously made as if to beat him again, for the terrified man fled on horseback. So desperate was he to escape the furious prelate that he waded across a river, “wet up to his neck,” rather than cross the nearby bridge and risk encountering him.

In seeking out Matilda, the royal official was no doubt confident of winning his case, for she had shown no scruple in plundering the abbey herself shortly after her arrival in England, demanding a selection of its finest treasures. But the wily abbot acted swiftly by offering a sum of money to atone for his violent behavior, and Matilda subsequently ordered that there should be no further exploitation of land or goods, either by Alfsi or any other royal official.¹⁵ From a localized squabble, the case was thus transformed into one of enormous national significance. It also proved the apparent lack of Norman bias that Matilda displayed in her role as royal justiciar.

The only women with similar legal authority to Matilda’s were to be found on the Continent, in the persons of Beatrice of Lorraine and Matilda of Tuscany, both of whom wielded considerable influence in the judicial sphere. But this had never been the case in England. Neither of Matilda’s direct predecessors, Queen Emma or Queen Edith, had had any involvement in the administration of justice. Indeed, both women had found themselves on the receiving end of the law. Edith had been suspected of being involved in the murder of Gospatric, a Northumbrian noble and a rival claimant to the throne. Both she and Emma had also been accused of adultery and had been forced to prove their innocence—in Emma’s case perhaps even by ordeal.¹⁶ Matilda had therefore transformed the role of queen consort in England from that of victim of the law to master of it. In doing so, she provided a powerful role model for her successors and descendants—none more so than her daughter Adela, as her later career would prove.

Religion was another sphere in which Matilda was actively involved. In April or May 1072, she and her husband cast judgment upon the primacy of the church of York—an issue that struck at the heart of the English church—and they were the only members of the laity present. The case had first been heard during the Easter celebrations at Winchester, and the royal couple, together with numerous other dignitaries, had convened in the royal chapel within the castle.¹⁷ After hearing the case, William and Matilda decreed that the church of York should be subject to the archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc, along with the bishoprics of Worcester, Dorchester, and Lichfield—the only ones not to have submitted to the prelate’s authority thus far. Lanfranc’s supremacy over the entire religious community of England was therefore confirmed.¹⁸

Besides the vexatious issue of York, Matilda was at the center of other important religious debates of the time in England. For example, she played a part in settling a dispute between the powerful churchmen Bishop Osbern of Exeter and Bishop Giso of Wells, persuading Osbern to return a contested church to his rival.¹⁹ She also independently directed a change in management of the important bishopric of Wells in Somerset, which had formerly been the concern of Queen Edith, informing “the sheriff and all the men of Somerset” that at her request the church of Wedmore was to be transferred to Bishop Giso of Wells.²⁰ Moreover, in assemblies at the cathedrals of Wells, Exeter and Bury St. Edmunds, and the London church of St.-Martin-le-Grand, she would have been the only lay person present, apart from William, and certainly the only woman.²¹

According to Eadmer, as archbishop of Canterbury Lanfranc “always took great pains both to make the King a faithful servant of God and to renew religion and right living among all classes throughout the whole Kingdom.”²² Both Matilda and her husband were of course actively supportive of this campaign in England and Normandy. The two abbeys that they had founded at Caen—La Trinité and St.-Étienne—had set a new standard for ecclesiastical life across the duchy, and between 1072 and 1076, Lanfranc organized a series of reforming councils to impose the same rules upon the English church as existed in Normandy. These included the outlawing of clerical marriage and simony (the sale of church offices), the latter practice being “detestable” to him, according to Orderic Vitalis.²³ The backing that William gave to these councils was not entirely due to a genuine religious fervor, however, for they were obviously another potentially useful means of forcing the recalcitrant English to adopt Norman ways.

During the early 1070s, Matilda continued to make increasingly generous bequests to the English church, fulfilling the pious and charitable role expected of medieval queens. She was described as “munificent and liberal of her gifts” and “indefatigable at alleviating distress in every shape.” It was said that she “frequently relieved the poor with bounteous alms.” Her epitaph later claimed that such generosity had “left her in need,” but this is unlikely to be true, given the enormous resources at her disposal—and her natural instinct for self-preservation.²⁴

Considering this celebrated munificence toward the church, it is perhaps not surprising that Matilda could count some of the most influential ecclesiastics of the day among her acquaintance. Besides Archbishop Lanfranc, they included his protégé Gundulph, a monk from St.-Étienne who came to England after the Conquest and was appointed bishop of Rochester. Gundulph claimed to enjoy a close friendship with Matilda, which had no doubt been forged during his time at her husband’s abbey.²⁵

Thanks to William’s generosity, Matilda owned a considerable amount of land in England, the administration of which formed a constant demand upon her time. She was assisted in this by her viceregal council.²⁶ The wealth that she had amassed after the Norman Conquest also enabled her to play an active role in patronage. She was particularly generous toward the scores of her countrymen who had come to England in the wake of the Conquest, and she encouraged the artisans among them to teach their trades to the English people. She patronized Flemish architects, sculptors, and painters from her native land, and she promoted poets and chroniclers.²⁷ The influence of her countrymen was also felt in the religious and political life of England. The tyrannical abbot of Glastonbury, Thurstan of Caen, forced his monks to abandon their English chants and learn “an alien and novel chant from Flemings and Normans.”²⁸ By the early twelfth century, the number of Flemish people in England was so high that they were considered a burden to the state, and Matilda’s son Henry was forced to gather them all together “as though into some great midden” and banish them to Wales.²⁹

The impressive variety of English charters in which Matilda was involved—from founding a market at Tewkesbury to rewarding loyal subjects with estates—attests to her versatility in business matters.³⁰ As well as granting land and money, she could also appoint officials to manage her estates and local interests. Word of her preeminence soon spread beyond her kingdom. The contemporary biographer of her kinsman, Count Simon of Crépy, referred to her as “The queen of the English, Matilda, wealthy and powerful.”³¹Little wonder that she attracted petitioners in her own right, not just because she was the king’s consort. This gave her a position of considerable influence and authority at the English court. While she was seen as more diplomatic and benevolent than her fearsome husband, her power and influence earned her a reputation as a formidable woman. One unnamed Englishwoman offered her estate in Surrey to the queen in return for her protection.

It seems undeniable, then, that Matilda had become something of a powerful royal in her own right. Not only did she have the king’s ear and the crucial role of managing all royal spectacles, but she was now firmly installed at the heart of legal and religious matters and had established her own enormous independent wealth. Her influence was such that her name became extremely popular among the royalty and aristocracy of France and England, who were keen to flatter her by naming their daughters after her. However, this emerging authority was the cause of some unease among contemporary commentators. Any royal female authority beyond that derived only from being mother of the heirs and mistress of the household was viewed with suspicion by the chroniclers, who were quick to accuse women of witchcraft, scheming, and even murder. Malmesbury’s account of Queen Emma’s reign is typically scornful. Although he admitted that she was a formidable queen, he was highly critical of the wealth that she accumulated and claimed that she wasted all of it on jewels.³²

A similar undertone is evident in the accounts that would emerge of Matilda’s own reign, both as duchess of Normandy and queen of England. For every account that praised her benevolence to the church or her dignity of bearing, there was another depicting her as a defiant traitor or an insatiable adulterer who was dragged through the streets naked as a punishment for her sin. The only way that her husband’s misogynistic biographer, Poitiers, could reconcile himself to the degree of power that Matilda had attained was to describe her as a “woman of masculine wisdom.”³³

Most chroniclers also felt uneasy about the conflict at the center of a queen’s role; that on the one hand she must be pious and chaste, but on the other she must be a “fruitful mother.”³⁴ The Virgin Mary was the ultimate symbol of motherhood and purity, and the chroniclers believed that royal wives should aspire to her example. Little matter that immaculate conception was difficult to come by in most royal marriages. Indeed, if a queen showed any hint of sexuality, she was immediately condemned as a wicked seductress. The same was not true of kings, who were expected to take mistresses and would suffer no diminution of their prestige as a result. It is an indication of the general prejudice against women that only they, not their husbands, could be accused of adultery. Equally, if a marriage was barren, it was the wife, not the husband, who was to blame.³⁵

Nevertheless, from the mid-eleventh century onward, there were the beginnings of a profound change in the perception of women in society. Ladies of high birth became more conspicuous in the contemporary records as owners of titles and estates. Female royals and noble ladies also emerged as prominent patrons of literature. This literature itself sparked a new tradition of courtly love that placed women at center stage as the belles dames sans merci who could bestow or withhold favor as their will dictated. The idealized view of womanhood and maternity was inspired by the cult of the Virgin, as well as by developments in theology that placed much greater emphasis upon the sacred nature of marriage.

The new respect for women that this literature implied harked back to an earlier time. The famous eighth-century Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf presents a very positive image of queenship—and of womankind in general. There are more female characters inBeowulf than in any other Old English poem. Among them are five queens, all of whom display what the author considers to be typically feminine virtues of pacifism, diplomacy, hospitality, and wisdom. The male characters are imprudent and boorish by comparison, embroiled in incessant wars and military affairs. Despite the various battles that are waged in the story, it is the women, more than the men, who assume heroic status.³⁶

If Matilda read this famous poem, she might well have reflected upon the parallels with her own position. As duchess of Normandy, she had already proved that she had an abundance of the feminine virtues described in Beowulf, while her husband conformed to the warfaring stereotype of its male characters. The contrast between their characters would become even more marked as their reign in England progressed.