CHAPTER 2

MATILDA OF SCOTLAND

‘Enduring with complacency’

Edith of Scotland was a true Anglo-Saxon princess. Her mother, Margaret, was the daughter of Edward ‘the Exile’, son of Edmund Ironside, and his wife Agatha. Edith’s grandparents had left their Hungarian refuge for Edward the Confessor’s court in 1057, and though Agatha had been widowed shortly afterwards, she remained in England with her children, Edgar, Margaret and Christina, through the events of 1066. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle implies that they were present for the coronation of Matilda of Flanders at Pentecost in 1068, as it was not until the summer that the family departed the uncertain atmosphere of Westminster for the protection of King Malcolm of Scotland. Malcolm persuaded Margaret to become his wife. She resisted at first, declaring she preferred to remain a virgin, the better to serve God, but eventually overcame her reluctance and, in spite of sacrificing her virginity and producing eight children, still achieved sainthood after her death. Edith, the fifth child and her first daughter, was born in 1080. Queen Matilda of Flanders and her son Robert Curthose were her godparents. Like William of Normandy, Edith supposedly asserted her regal ambition early: during her baptism she grabbed at Queen Matilda’s veil and tried to pull it towards her own head, a gesture which, with hindsight, was naturally considered to have been an omen.

Edith’s childhood can be glimpsed through the Life of St Margaret of Scotland, a biography of her mother which she commissioned as queen. Evidently Margaret was an extremely pious woman, but she and her siblings were also sophisticated, bilingual and educated, and she had a great influence on the somewhat rustic Scottish court. Margaret loved books and studied the Bible diligently, and though her husband was illiterate, there is a touching image in the Life of St Margaret of King Malcolm holding his wife’s book as she reads. He surprised her with gifts of rich bindings for her books, and while she ‘delighted more in good works than the possession of riches’¹ she was mindful of the show of magnificence required by her station. She encouraged foreign merchants to visit Scotland with previously unheard-of luxury goods, decorated the royal halls with hangings and rich gold and silver plate and smartened up both the appearance and the manners of the King and his retinue, forbidding his men to go plundering when they rode out with her husband.

The picture of Margaret as a mother is sketchy, but unusually intimate for a royal woman of the time, suggesting that her daughter contributed her own recollections to the memoir. Margaret admonished her children and had her steward beat them if necessary, but as a result they reputedly had very good manners, and were brought to their mother ‘very often’ for religious instruction in simple language that they could understand. The Life also shows Queen Margaret sitting the children of the poor on her knee and feeding them mashed-up food. Edith’s tremendous regard for her mother creates a strong image of a warm and happy early childhood.

This changed, however, in 1086, when Edith and her younger sister Mary left for the abbey of Romsey to be educated under the supervision of their Aunt Christina. Edith spent the next six or seven years ‘in fear of the rod ofmy Aunt’² who treated her harshly, slapping and scolding her cruelly, and constantly made her feel as though she were in disgrace. Christina also stirred up a great deal of future trouble for her niece by forcing her to wear a heavy black veil. Edith reported that ‘That hood I did indeed wear in her presence, chafing and fearful . . . but as soon as I was able to escape out of her sight I tore it off and threw it in the dirt and trampled on it. This was my only way of venting my rage and the hatred of it that boiled up in me.’³

There is something delightful in this picture of the cross little princess stamping on the symbol of her stern aunt’s authority, but Edith had the self-discipline and intelligence to keep her rebelliousness sufficiently in check while she acquired an extremely good education. Before 1093, the girls moved to Wilton Abbey, gratefully leaving Aunt Christina behind to grow old at Romsey. Both convents were centres of women’s learning and literacy, where, according to William of Malmesbury, ‘letters were trained into the female heart’. At the turn of the twelfth century, Wilton accommodated between eighty and ninety women and had a distinguished association with the daughters of the old Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. Edward the Confessor’s queen, Edith, had retired there before her death in 1075, as a contemporary of the well-known ‘English poetess’ Muriel. Among the abbey’s treasured relics were a nail from the True Cross, a portion of the Venerable Bede and the body of St Edith, which made it a popular destination for pilgrims. The house had been rebuilt in stone by the Confessor’s queen, and St Edith’s shrine boasted an impressive alb embroidered with gold thread, pearls and coloured stones. Anglo-Saxon needlework was highly prized, and in later life Edith continued to patronise the art with which she had grown up in the convent.

Edith’s education at Wilton was not confined to traditionally feminine activities. The convent’s rigorous intellectual tradition may be seen in the reading list prepared for Eve of Wilton, who went on to become a well-known anchoress, or holy recluse, in France. Eve began her training in 1065, aged seven, and when she left as a young woman was considered capable of reading St Augustine and Boethius, among many others, in Latin. Edith’s first language was English, but she perfected her French at Wilton, and she, too, learned some Latin. She read both the Old and New Testaments, the books of the Church fathers and some of the major Latin writers, familiarity with whom she was later to demonstrate in her letters. The house was a sort of cross-cultural finishing school where the daughters of conquered and conquerors met - Gunnhildr, the daughter of King Harold and his gloriously named mistress Eadgyth Swan-Neck, was also a pupil there, and the training Edith received was a good preparation for the new Anglo-Norman world in which she would be required to move.

By 1093, it seems, Edith’s parents considered her ready to enter this world, as they betrothed her to the Breton magnate Alan the Red, Count of Richmond. Before the marriage could take place, however, politics intervened. In the August of that year, Edith’s father, King Malcolm, was present at the dedication of Durham Cathedral, after which he was summoned to Gloucester by William Rufus to hold a council with him. ‘But then when he came to the King, he could be entitled to neither speech with our King nor to the covenants which were earlier promised him.’⁴ Affronted by such disrespectful treatment, Malcolm returned to Scotland, stopping to visit his daughter at Wilton on the way. William Rufus had been at the convent the same week and had seen Edith dressed as a nun. When her father arrived to find his daughter wearing the veil, he ripped it from her head, tore it into pieces and trampled it to the ground, declaring he would have her marry Count Alan rather than become a nun. He rode off to Scotland with her immediately, where they arrived to find Queen Margaret unwell. Still smarting at the English King’s behaviour, Malcolm then ‘gathered his army and travelled into England, raiding with greater folly than behoved him’.⁵ A party led by Robert Mowbray, Earl of Northumbria, surprised him, and both Malcolm and his son and heir Edward were killed. When Queen Margaret heard the news, her illness worsened and, on 16 November, within three days of losing her husband and son, she, too, was dead.

Edith was now an orphan and, it appears, a runaway. Her husband-to-be, Alan the Red, had also visited Wilton that turbulent summer, and it is not known whether he saw Edith there. It is quite possible she had already left, as, perhaps to console himself, he ran off with King Harold’s daughter Gunnhildr. Anselm, the archbishop of Canterbury, now stepped in to take charge of this scandalous situation. Gunnhildr had confessed to him that she had decided to become a nun, and the archbishop wrote to her threatening her with damnation if she did not go back to Wilton. Although Alan the Red died before he and Gunnhildr could make it to the altar, she was obviously determined that the religious life was not for her, since she married his brother, Alan the Black, instead. Edith, meanwhile, perhaps inspired by Gunnhildr’s obstinacy, also refused to return to the convent. Although she had been seen in the veil on several occasions, she always maintained that she had never intended to profess herself a nun. When Anselm instructed Osmund, bishop of Salisbury, to see that this ‘prodigal daughter of the King of Scots whom the devil made to cast off the veil’⁶ was retrieved for the Lord, she defied him.

Edith did not return to Wilton, and between 1093 and 1100 she disappears from the chronicles. After her father’s death, the Scottish crown was claimed by his brother, Donald, whose son Duncan seized the throne before being murdered by Donald’s supporters. In 1096, Edith’s uncle, Edgar Aetheling, led an army against Donald and succeeded in placing her brother Edgar on the throne as Edgar I. Edith’s whereabouts during these dangerous times are unknown. It has been suggested that she may have spent time at the court of the English King, William Rufus, who had perhaps considered her as a possible wife during her time at Wilton. And when she re-emerges, it is no longer as the prodigal princess but indeed as a royal bride, and with a new, Norman-friendly name: Matilda. Her husband-to-be, however, was not Rufus, but his younger brother Henry.

The division of the Conqueror’s inheritance had left Henry in an ambiguous position. He received a large sum of money and an interest in the lands of his mother, Queen Matilda, but no marriage had been arranged for him and he had no clear political role. He supported his elder brother William who, though not the Conqueror’s first-born son, had been his choice to succeed him as king, in his ambition to reunite the Anglo-Norman realm, an aim William went some way towards achieving when Robert Curthose departed from Normandy on the first crusade in 1095. Robert and William had already recognised each other as heir if either should die without a son, and now William took the opportunity to govern Normandy in Robert’s absence in exchange for a large loan to support his expedition. Henry had been periodically in conflict with William, but at the time of the Normandy agreement they had made peace, and he appears as a member of William’s household, leading a squadron of knights in one of the endless Norman border skirmishes. Despite the apparent accord between the brothers, more than one commentator has claimed that Henry planned to murder his brother, and that, in the summer of 1100, he grabbed his chance.

What is not in doubt is that William Rufus was killed in a hunting accident in the New Forest on 2 August, and that by the next day, Henry had persuaded the officials of the King’s castle at Winchester to give up both the castle and the royal treasure it contained, then ridden hard for London, where he was crowned king at Westminster by the bishop of London and issued a ‘Charter of Liberties’ which promised just government. One of Henry’s first acts as king was to send for Archbishop Anselm, who was in exile. Another was to propose to the princess of Scotland.

Perhaps it is Henry’s very decisiveness that has subsequently cast suspicion on his conduct. His swift response to the crisis of William’s death preserved the throne for the Norman dynasty without conflict, and it is tempting for historians to argue that this speedy reaction must have been part of a calculated coup. Yet fatal hunting accidents were commonplace - Henry and William’s own brother Richard had died this way, as had one of Robert Curthose’s illegitimate sons - and none of Henry’s contemporaries suggested that there had been anything untoward in William’s death. At the time the only controversy was the new King’s proposed marriage.

Both Williams had been kings of England but, thanks to his Yorkshire birth, Henry was an English king. A marriage to a descendant of the ancient Wessex line would not so much legitimise the Norman claim as augment the perception of a continuity of rights being fostered by the Norman chroniclers. The nine-month reign of ‘Earl’ Harold, to which rank he had been demoted, was being presented as an aberration, a brief usurping of the crown, with William of Normandy signifying a return to the ‘true’ line of English royalty through his claim as Edward the Confessor’s designated heir. In terms of Norman propaganda, a marriage between Henry and Edith should have been understood as the union of two members of the same house, not as the representative of a conquered dynasty bestowing her royal bloodline on the conqueror, which was, of course, what it was. Whatever the official line, Henry was aware that Edith’s blood would transmit powerful rights to an heir and enhance his popularity with his English subjects. The Norman magnates, having ‘adopted’ Edward the Confessor as their forebear, could hardly object without undermining their own presence. Edith’s Scottish connections increased the chances of a truce on the perennially troublesome northern border, which would release funds and men for service in Normandy and the Welsh marches.

The political motivations for the match were sound enough, but the chronicler William of Malmesbury kindly suggests that Henry was actually in love with Edith. If Edith had indeed spent time at William Rufus’s court, it is possible that Henry could have met her there. It is also suggested that Henry’s education included a period at Salisbury, as a pupil of Bishop Osmund, who was charged with retrieving the runaway princess, and that Edith might have attracted his attention at this time. William of Malmesbury is understated about Edith’s looks -her beauty was ‘not entirely to be despised’ - but Henry loved her so much that ‘he barely considered her marriage portion’. The objection to the match was Edith’s purported commitment to become a nun.

Edith’s self-confessed rejection of the hated veil forced upon her by her Aunt Christina makes it clear that, however pious she might have been, she was determined to take up a place in the royal world to which she was born. But the evidence of witnesses who had seen her wearing the veil counted against her. It was Edith herself who took the initiative of arranging a meeting with the newly returned Archbishop Anselm. Disgusted by the idea that a genuine religious vow might be broken, he declared he ‘would not be induced by any pleading to take from God his bride and join her to any earthly husband’.⁷ The two met at Salisbury and, after hearing Edith’s own account, Anselm agreed to call an ecclesiastical council to decide the matter, and representatives were sent from Canterbury and Salisbury to make enquiries. A significant factor in the council’s decision was the ruling by the previous archbishop, Lanfranc, that Anglo-Saxon women who had taken refuge in convents at the time of the Norman Conquest were not to be held as sworn nuns when they emerged from hiding. The council concluded that ‘under the circumstances of the matter, the girl could not rightly be bound by any decision to prevent her from being free to dispose of her person in whatever way she legally wished’.⁸

On 11 November 1100, the Anglo-Saxon princess became a Norman queen. When exactly Edith became Matilda is uncertain, but the adoption of her godmother’s name signalled her intention to break with the past and reinforce her closeness to her new marital family. She and Henry were married by Anselm on the steps of Westminster Abbey. Before he performed the ceremony, the archbishop recounted the story of the religious controversy and invited any objections. According to Eadmer, ‘The crowd cried out in one voice that the affair had been rightly decided and that there was no ground on which anyone . . . could possibly raise any scandal.’

From a contemporary perspective, fertility was perceived as a sign that a marriage was blessed by God, and in February 1102, Matilda (having earlier suffered a miscarriage) gave birth to a daughter, also named Matilda, at the royal manor of Sutton Courtenay. A son, William, was born before the end of September the next year. A prophecy made on William of Normandy’s deathbed made the birth of the prince especially joyous to the new royal family. Archbishop Anselm recorded that in 1066 England had been about to be delivered to its enemies as a punishment for the sinfulness of its people (an interpretation shared by The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). The realm would only be secure when ‘a green tree shall be cut through the middle and the part cut off being carried the space of three acres, shall without any assistance become united again with its stem, burst out with flowers and stretch forth its fruit, as before, from the sap again uniting’. The green tree represented the royal house of England, the three acres Harold, William and William Rufus, and the reunification was the marriage of Henry and Matilda, its fruit the new baby boy. The prophecy recalls the stark image of the hoary grey apple tree on the battlefield of Hastings, the reminder of so much death being transformed into an emblem of new and promising life.

In twelfth-century England, ownership of land was of paramount importance in the acquisition of wealth and prestige. The records of lands held by Matilda of Scotland permit much greater insight into the customs that would be established for English queens than do those of Matilda of Flanders. Surprisingly, in that she was the sister of a reigning king and the daughter of another, William of Malmesbury suggests that Matilda brought little or no dowry to Henry, though since she did possess some lordship rights in the north, this may have been exaggerated to emphasise Henry’s disinterest in the financial element of their marriage. Matilda’s dower estates were principally granted from those lands held by Queen Edith, Edward the Confessor’s widow. Though it has been argued that there was no consistent pattern of grants to Anglo-Saxon queens, there was a perceived tradition that certain properties were the prerogative of the queen, and the fact that Henry chose to grant such properties to Matilda suggests he wished to incorporate her into that tradition.

Matilda’s ability to control and manage her estates set a vital precedent for queenly power. One such estate was the abbey of Waltham, which was worth £100. The abbey remained part of the queen’s holdings well into the century - both Matilda and Eleanor of Aquitaine drew servants from among its canons, while Isabelle of Angoulême and Eleanor of Castile made use of its revenues. Matilda of Scotland was personally involved in the abbey’s dealings; indeed, the charter by which Henry granted the property to her mentions the ‘queen’s court’ held there. Charters and land exchanges were conducted in Matilda’s name and between 1108 and 1115 she gave permission for the canons to hold a fair. Another property that became associated with English queens was the convent of Barking, which was granted to Matilda of Boulogne in the next reign and provided Eleanor of Provence with five months’ worth of revenues during her widowhood. Matilda of Scotland received rents and tithes from Barking, improved the nearby roads and made the house responsible for the upkeep of a bridge she had constructed, assigning the revenues of her nearby manor of West Ham to pay for its maintenance.

Matilda was also the owner of substantial property in London. Henry’s grants to her in the capital may also have had a political motive, since some Londoners had not forgotten their allegiance to Matilda’s uncle Edgar Aetheling at the time of the Conquest and remained emotionally loyal to the Wessex line. As a representative of that line, Matilda would be better able to retain their support, and her management of her London possessions was astute in this respect. A charter of donation to Westminster Abbey explicitly states that the gift was made ‘at the prayer of Queen Matilda’, a site near Aldgate was made available in 1107-8 for a new house for the Augustinian canons, and sixty shillings per year from dock revenues were diverted to build a hospital for lepers at St Giles. These docks acquired the name of Queenshithe, which remains today. Later queens followed Matilda’s example by using their rights to the toll on disembarked goods to fund charitable projects. Adeliza of Louvain endowed Reading Abbey with one hundred shillings per year from her Queenshithe revenues, while Matilda of Boulogne contributed from them to her hospital foundation St Katherine by the Tower.

Leprosy was a particular focus for Matilda’s compassion. She was the benefactress of a ‘leprosarium’ at Chichester and possibly the patron of the hospital of St James at Westminster (textual sources attribute the foundation to Henry II, but archaeological evidence dates the building earlier than his reign), while her leper hospital at St Giles was still caring for fourteen sufferers at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539. Matilda’s parents had publicly washed the feet of several hundred paupers as part of their Lenten devotions, and Matilda followed in their footsteps in her own humble ministrations to lepers. Her brother David described a scene in her apartments at Westminster:

The place was full of lepers and there was the Queen standing in the middle of them. And taking off a linen cloth she had wrapped around her waist, she put it into a water basin and began to wash and dry their feet and kiss them most devotedly while she was bathing them and drying them with her hands. And I said to her ‘My lady! What are you doing? Surely if the King knew about this he would never deign to kiss you with his lips after you had been polluted by the putrefied feet of lepers!’ Then she, under a smile, said ‘Who does not know that the feet of the Eternal King are to be preferred over the lips of a King who is going to die? Surely for that reason I called you, dearest brother, so that you might learn such works from my example.’⁹

There is something a little too didactic about this anecdote for it to be entirely authentic, perhaps, but it tells us something about both Matilda’s reputation among her contemporaries and their expectations of their queen. It illustrates the connection between piety and that other important element of queenship, the role of intercessor or ‘peace-weaver’, the Christian duties of compassion and charity mingling with the role of mediator with the earthly representative of God’s power, the king. Matilda showed that it was possible for a queen to combine a public demonstration of religious devotion with an effective political function.

Matilda played a significant part in the development of the Anglo-Norman Church, which was undergoing a period of problematic evolution in relation to the papacy that was to become known as the Gregorian or investiture controversy. While it centred on the issue of ecclesiastical investiture, it had far broader implications for the relative roles of spiritual and temporal powers in England and throughout Europe. The eleventh century had seen many attempts to clarify and consolidate canon law, of which the sacrament of secular marriage that influenced the subsequent reputation of William the Conqueror was one. Other disputes concerned clerical marriage and the sin of simony, or the sale of Church offices. As early as 1059, the papal see had decided that secular leaders had no right to determine the election of popes, since the Church was founded on the authority of God alone. Traditionally, rulers had had the power to invest prelates, and to receive homage from them for their temporal powers, that is, the lands and revenues they controlled. Henry I’s involvement in this controversy was further complicated by the variance between Norman and English practices. Archbishop Anselm had gone into exile to avoid conflict with William Rufus and, although Henry had recalled him on his accession, Anselm, who had attended the Council of Rome in 1099, felt morally unable to condone the prevailing conventions of investiture in England and Normandy. In 1102, a compromise was reached whereby Henry was able to appoint bishops so long as Anselm himself was not required to consecrate them, but this soon broke down. Matilda’s own chancellor, Reinhelm, gave back his ring and staff of office rather than accept what he saw as uncanonical consecration, while William Giffard, a candidate for the see of Winchester, refused to allow the ceremony to proceed. In spring 1103 Anselm felt obliged to leave once more for Rome to seek papal advice.

During the two and a half years of Anselm’s absence, Matilda corresponded with him. Her letters are the earliest in existence known to have been written by an English queen. Though they are not in her own hand - a clerk wrote them on her behalf - they display ‘a scholarship rare among laymen and quite exceptional amongst laywomen’.¹⁰ Her efforts to mediate between the archbishop, her husband, and the Pope, Paschal II, required not only a sophisticated understanding of the theological questions at issue and their political repercussions, but also a great deal of diplomatic discretion. Matilda signalled her support for Anselm just before his departure for Rome, when she witnessed a charter at Rochester which she signed ‘Matildis reginae et filiae Anselmi archiepiscopi’,but she was also aware that she could not afford to alienate Henry. The King had claimed the revenues of Canterbury for himself when Anselm left, on the grounds that the see was vacant, but Matilda was able to get him to set aside a personal allowance for the archbishop. However, when Henry extracted further sums of money from the clergy a few years later and they begged the Queen to intervene, she wept and insisted she could do nothing. She knew that success meant concessions, that she could not afford to overplay her hand without losing her influence over Henry.

Anselm confirmed his awareness of that influence when he wrote: ‘Counsel these things, intimate these things publicly and privately to our Lord the King and repeat them often.’¹¹ The perceived intimacy of husband and wife was one of the most powerful (and occasionally feared) elements of queenly power, and Matilda declared herself ready to make use of it. She encouraged Anselm: ‘Farther, frequent, though secret consultation promises the return of the father to his daughter . . . of the pastor to his flock.’ She claimed that she was ‘skilfully investigating’ Henry’s heart and had discovered that ‘his mind is better disposed towards you than many men think; and I favouring it, and suggesting wherever I can, he will become yet more courteous and reconciled towards you’. Matilda appeared confident of her power to persuade her husband. ‘As to what he permits now to be done, in reference to your return, he will permit more and better to be done in future, when, according to time and opportunity, you shall request it.’

Henry’s understanding of the investiture issue was that it represented a diminishing of the royal prerogative, and he was reluctant to give way. In 1104, the Pope threatened to excommunicate him. Matilda had written to Paschal, describing the ‘lugubrious mourning’ and ‘opprobrious grief’ the realm of England was suffering from the lack of its ‘dearest father’, Anselm, and pleading in high-flown classical rhetoric for the archbishop’s return. Now, as excommunication was mooted, Anselm urged Matilda to ‘beg, plead and chide’ Henry to change his position. A compromise was eventually agreed in which Henry gave up his powers to invest prelates but retained the right to receive homage for ‘temporalities’, a concession in ecclesiastical terms, but one in which the secular powers of the crown were arguably augmented.

Matilda’s involvement in the investiture controversy demonstrates a degree of confidence between King and Queen that is reinforced by the political responsibilities Henry assigned to her. The first six years of his reign were dominated by his ambition to retain control of Normandy. In 1101, he had made peace with his brother Robert in the treaty of Alton, but in 1105 he began the conquest of the duchy in earnest. After the battle of Tinchebrai in 1106, where Robert was taken prisoner, Normandy was his. It has been estimated that Henry spent 60 per cent of his time in Normandy,¹²and Matilda, the designated head of his curia, or council, frequently acted as regent of England during his absence. That a woman should fulfil such a role was not perceived as odd by contemporaries: ‘The sources reveal the Queen intimately and actively involved in the public affairs of the kingdom, and none of the writers of these sources exhibit any surprise or dismay that this should be the case.’¹³

Charter evidence is particularly important in ascertaining Matilda’s status. Her earliest public attestation took place in 1101, at the same time as Henry granted her the abbey of Waltham. Matilda pardoned the canons of Waltham the sum they had previously paid to the see of Durham for work on the cathedral there. In the sixty-five charters she witnessed during the first eighteen years of Henry’s reign, her name is placed above that of the bishops, second only in status to the King himself (the only exception being a charter to the Conqueror’s foundation of St Stephen’s Caen, where Matilda appears after two kings, Henry and her brother Edgar King of Scots). Many charters feature clauses concluding with the words ‘per reginae Matildis’, which has been interpreted as an indication that the Queen supervised the document between the council and the clerks’ office to ensure that its contents accorded with what had been decided.¹⁴ Matilda also issued at least thirty-three charters of her own, and a smaller group ‘clearly shows the Queen acting with what amounts to vice-regal authority’, sending out writs in her own name. The second-ever mention of the English exchequer, in the Abingdon Chronicle, describes a sitting of the exchequer court at Winchester in 1111, presided over by Matilda while Henry was in Normandy. As in the case of Matilda of Flanders, the cross-Channel division of property in the Anglo-Norman realm made shared rule both necessary and natural, and Matilda of Scotland’s career represents a high point in the opportunities for medieval women to exercise public power.

Cultural patronage was a vital element of such powers, and one of Matilda’s first demonstrations of this was the commissioning of the Life of her mother, St Margaret of Scotland, which may have had a didactic as well as a hagiographic purpose, serving as a ‘mirror’ (in the sense of model or guide) of the virtues of the perfect princess for the young queen to emulate. Matilda certainly succeeded in imitating Margaret in her piety and her desire to regulate the Church, but she seems to have been less successful at reconciling her own inclinations towards simplicity and humility with the grandeur that was both expected of her and indeed obligatory as a manifestation of royal authority. In a pre-literate, highly visual culture, opulence and magnificence were essential badges of power, and as such were considered necessary virtues. St Margaret herself had recognised this in her attempts to spruce up the Scottish court, and Matilda may have been aware of the example of her erstwhile namesake, St Edith of Wilton, a holy Kentish princess who dressed splendidly even as a nun. When St Aethelwold reprimanded her for her worldliness, Edith replied that spiritual purity could sit just as well under silks as rags and continued to show off her beautiful gowns. Matilda, though, was ‘possibly somewhat uninspired in matters of style’.¹⁵ In fact, her Norman courtiers thought her rather a bore.

The glamour and sophistication associated with royal courts naturally led to their condemnation by moralists as places of licentious behaviour. Margaret of Scotland had been aware of their potential for scandal and kept it in check: ‘None of her women were ever morally degraded by familiarity with men and none ever by the wantonness of levity.’¹⁶ The showiness and self-indulgence of the Anglo-Saxon court, it was implied, constituted one of the ‘sins’ for which the English had paid at the Conquest. William of Malmesbury draws an unflattering comparison between the clean-shaven, ‘delicate’ and economical Normans and the ‘fantastically appointed English’, who adorned themselves with masses of gold jewellery, drank to excess and sported tattoos. Forty years later, though, the contrast was less apparent: long hair was in, absurdly pointed shoes were fashionable for men and women’s gowns required extravagant amounts of fabric, their sleeves trailing on the ground. Elegant ladies painted their faces and bound their breasts to achieve a slimmer figure. In the midst of this finery the Queen seemed dowdy. Marbod of Rennes ventured tactfully: ‘You, o Queen, because you are, fear to seem, beautiful,’ but the outfit Matilda wears on her seal had been out of style for a generation before she was crowned. (The dress shown on the seal is probably a copy of one belonging to Matilda of Flanders, and it is similar, too, to a gown in which Henry’s sister Cecily, the abbess at Caen, is depicted elsewhere.)

The atmosphere at Henry and Matilda’s court was very different from the racy environment of the unmarried Rufus’s reign, and William of Malmesbury suggests that Matilda was blamed for the change. Although Malmesbury’s 1066 portrait sneers at the English for their extravagant appearance and behaviour, it was Matilda’s Englishness that was now perceived as dull. At their traditional crown-wearing at Westminster a few weeks after their wedding, Henry and Matilda were nicknamed Godiva and Godric, two unambiguously English names that would have had old-fashioned and stuffy connotations. The fact that Matilda’s first language was English may have been a positive advantage to Henry, whose own grasp of the tongue is uncertain, but French was the language of social status, of the elite, and the very fact that Matilda spoke English at all provided the snobbish with a reason to look down on her.

The difficulty of reconciling piety and the sophisticated behaviour expected of a courtier had formed part of the background to Matilda’s education at Wilton. ‘Courtly love’, the term used to describe the elegant, mildly licentious literature that had such tremendous cultural influence in Europe from the twelfth century onwards, is particularly associated with the legend of a later English queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, but long before Eleanor supposedly presided over her ‘courts of love’, the ideas, if not the form of the literature were being discussed in the Anglo-Norman kingdom. There are as many definitions of what precisely its ethos was as there are scholars to debate it, but in essence the genre is concerned with the idealisation of a married mistress by the poet, who worships his beloved and performs all manner of elaborate deeds in an attempt to win the merest mark (sometimes considerably more) of regard. The tradition later melds with the cult of chivalry and knightly honour, producing a romantic dreamworld of valiant knights and beautiful ladies that maintains a vague but potent grip on modern-day perceptions of medieval life. Muriel, the poetess who was particularly honoured by her burial next to the relics of the Venerable Bede at Wilton, was described in a pre-1095 poem addressed to her by Baudri de Bourgueil as a beautiful young noblewoman who eschewed marriage and wealth to devote herself to virginity in the convent. A monk poet, Serlo, wrote to Muriel praising her choice and explaining the conundrum that a lady in ‘society’ could not be both elegant and virtuous since, in a world where marriages of convenience ruled, a woman who did not take a lover would be looked down on as ill-bred or provincial. This was precisely the dilemma ritualised by the troubadour poets. Given the veneration of Muriel’s memory at Wilton, it is likely that Matilda encountered this conundrum during her training there. Much to the disappointment of the court, Matilda inclined to virtue, but the connection with Wilton and Muriel strengthens the association of Matilda with a prototype of the courtly lady who was to become such a significant cultural entity in the following centuries.

Her contemporaries may have considered her a failure in the glamour stakes, but Matilda’s intellectual legacy is satisfactorily enduring. One of her passions was architecture, and if her taste in clothes was conservatively ‘English’, the buildings she loved were uncompromisingly Norman in their awe-inspiring grandeur of scale. She has links with the abbey at Waltham, rebuilt by architects whose style was influenced by the designers of Durham Cathedral, Abingdon Abbey, Selby Abbey, Merton Priory and the church at St Albans, all either Norman foundations or rebuilt in the Norman style after the Conquest. Neither her Augustinian foundation of Holy Trinity Aldgate, of which the Queen’s confessor, Norman, was the first prior, nor her leper hospital survives, but contemporary accounts note their fashionable style and size. While ‘it is unquestionably true that Matilda shared the Norman passion for erecting large buildings’,¹⁷ she also took an interest in projects of a more domestic scale, building the first arched bridge in England, over the River Lea at Stratford-le-Bow, where previously there had been only a dangerous ford. The bridge was endowed with land and a mill to keep it in repair and was still in use in the nineteenth century. At Queenhithe, Matilda added a bathhouse with piped-in water, along with a set of public lavatories - appealingly pragmatic, if not exactly the sort of undertaking normally associated with courtly ladies.

More conventionally, Matilda was a keen patron of music and literature, the former being among her main enthusiasms, according to William of Malmesbury. The musician William LeHarpur was given tax relief on lands granted to him by the King, and the Norman minstrel Rahere, who had performed for William Rufus, continued to work under Henry. Henry himself has preserved an historical reputation for learning, his nickname, Beauclerc, attesting to his literacy, but ‘it has long been recognised that the epithet . . . is something of an exaggeration, and that the credit for court sponsored literary and artistic activity in the first quarter of the twelfth century belongs to Henry’s wives rather than the King himself¹⁸

The context of Matilda’s own literary interests is that of the ‘Twelfth-century renaissance’, ‘the first age since classical antiquity when the intellectual emerges as a driving force’.¹⁹ As with the later, best-known Renaissance, there is a good deal of dispute about when this new intellectual current began to flow, of what exactly it consisted and the degree to which contemporaries were aware that they were part of it, but essentially, as the cohesive concept of ‘Christendom’ emerged after the Gregorian reforms, both Church scholars and the secular elite had a ‘lively awareness of doing something new, of being new men’.²⁰ The authority of the Church fathers was being challenged by a modern sensibility to the possibilities of analysing rationally the natural world and man’s place in it as the link between the created universe and the divine power. Christian humanism was beginning to take form. This exciting intellectual energy manifested itself in systematised administrative and canon law, a rapidly expanding interest in books and libraries, developments in vernacular literature such as the courtly romance, a sense of historical writing as a discrete genre (this particularly strongly in the new Anglo-Norman kingdom with the works of Malmesbury, Orderic Vitalis and Geoffrey of Monmouth), the development of the famous ‘schools’ at Laon, Chartres and Paris and increasing opportunities for exposure to Jewish, Arabic and Greek science after the reconquest of Toledo from the Moors in 1085. Man’s relationship with Christ was also reconfigured, with the Saviour considered for his human as well as divine qualities, and hence a greater emphasis was placed on His suffering and sacrifice. Such radical ideas often led to accusations of heresy, but the figure of Christ as Redeemer contributed to the development of the cult of Marianism, which became a particularly dominant motif in the representation and understanding of English queenship. Anselm was one of the innovative churchmen who popularised such thinking and Matilda was also close to his pupil, Gundulph of Rochester. Gundulph revered Mary Magdalene and promoted Marianism, celebrating the Feast of the Immaculate Conception before it was universally recognised. The celebration of the women in Christ’s life highlighted a gentler, more compassionate Christianity, but Marianism also elevated the simple village girl of the New Testament to a Queen of Heaven, frequently depicted in the glorious raiments of her earthly counterparts.

While patronage and religion were closely linked, the world of international scholarship was closed to women. Latin was the official language of scholarship as well as of government and the Church, and though Matilda and her sister-in-law Adela of Blois did have some knowledge of Latin, the everyday language of the ruling class was French. So the area in which noblewomen were best able to participate in the new sensibility was that of vernacular culture. Matilda commissioned a French translation of a Latin poem, ‘The Voyage of St Brendan’, which has been described as a ‘Celtic version of the classical odyssey poem’²¹ and is the earliest surviving example of literary Anglo-Norman. ‘St Brendan’ was performed in a cycle of three episodes at the Easter court of 1107-8. Matilda’s desire to celebrate the memory of her mother’s achievements is reflected in the eight poems written for the Queen which mention Margaret, demonstrating that contemporary writers were alert to Matilda’s interests and how best to attract her attention. Matilda was the first patron of Philippe de Thaon, who went on to work for her successors Adeliza of Louvain and Eleanor of Aquitaine, but her most famous literary association, in addition to the Life of St Margaret, is with William of Malmesbury, who wrote The Deeds of the Kings of England at her request.

Malmesbury, however, leaves a curiously unflattering depiction of the cultural ambitions of his patroness, suggesting that her desire for intellectual distinction - and the recognition that embracing new artistic developments would add to her reputation, and thus that of England - resulted in harsh management of her estates:

Her generosity becoming universally known, crowds of scholars, equally famed for verse and singing, came over, and happy was he who could soothe the Queen’s ears with his song. Nor on these only did she lavish money, but on all sorts of men, especially foreigners, that through their presents they might proclaim her dignity abroad . . . Thus it was justly observed that the Queen wanted to reward as many foreigners as possible, while others were kept in suspense, sometimes with effectual but more often with empty promises. So it arose that she fell into the error of prodigal givers; bringing many claims to her tenantry, exposing them to injuries and taking away their property, but since she became known as a liberal benefactress, she scarcely regarded their outrage.²²

This is a long way from the benign image of ‘Good Queen Maud’ which pertained after Matilda’s death. Matilda was reprimanded by Anselm for her punitive taxation of her lands, which did not exempt Church properties, and her promotion of ‘foreigners’ also attracted criticism among Norman churchmen. Yet promotion of the arts was a means of remaining directly involved in the liturgy, placing as it did the tangible evidence of a patron’s generosity within the Church itself. Matilda’s presentation of a pair of bells to Chartres, or the ornate candlesticks, ‘trees of brass fashioned with wondrous skill, glittering with jewels as much as with candlelight’²³ she gave to Le Mans, engaged her in a triple cycle of patronage between the artisans she encouraged, whose productions were the marks of her favour, the churchmen who sought that favour and the capacity of the latter to spiritualise the physical objects bestowed on them in acknowledgement of the Queen’s regard. Writing to Adela of Blois, Bishop Baudri of Dol requested an elegant cope (complete with fringe), as his return for publicising her literary discernment. In a letter to Matilda, Hildebart of Lavardin, bishop of Le Mans, declared that in offering Christ those jewelled candlesticks she was associating herself with the women who witnessed the crucifixion and brought precious spices to His tomb.

Such opportunities for patronage were especially attractive to women at a time when overt political action was a receding possibility. If the ascendance of the formalised, Latinised and thus masculinised administrative kingship for which the reign of Henry I is noted was in part responsible for this diminution in political potential for noblewomen in general, it served to emphasise the significance of a particular woman, the Queen, in her traditional role as intercessor. As new structures of government made direct, informal approaches to the King more difficult, the intimacy of his relationship with his wife made her a target for those who wished their petitions to be heard. Once again, Matilda was able to link this form of patronage with her support for the Church, as with Henry’s charter for Westminster, which states that his donation is made ‘at the prayer of Queen Matilda’, or in the case of the nuns at Malling, who received the right to a weekly market ‘for the love of and at the request of my wife Queen Matilda’.

Henry may have loved his wife, but he was certainly not faithful to her. He was a walking baby boom, producing over two dozen extramarital children. Matilda appears to have accepted this with equanimity, ‘enduring with complacency, when the King was elsewhere employed’, as Malmesbury discreetly put it, and it may have been that it suited her pious leanings to stop having sexual relations with her husband after she had done her duty of providing him with children - Malmesbury adds that she ‘ceased either to have offspring or desire them’. After Henry’s visit to Normandy in 1104, Matilda spent much of her time at Westminster, where eight of her twenty-two charters whose place of issue is identifiable were drawn up. Henry apparently conducted his goings-on at Wooodstock, a town there is no evidence she ever visited, which suggests a certain care for her dignity. It seems that they achieved an arrangement that was satisfactory to them both, and if Henry was sexually estranged from his wife, he continued to involve her in government. Nor did her ‘retirement’ at Westminster mean that Matilda had ceased to be publicly active. The lively, scholarly atmosphere of her London court has been noted, and when Henry departed once more for Normandy in 1106, he left the realm under her regency. Matilda herself crossed to Normandy that year, issuing a charter at Lillebonne and witnessing another at Rouen, and she may have enjoyed a private concert by Adelard of Bath, who played the cithera for her.

In 1109, Matilda participated in the Whitsun court described by Henry of Huntingdon as the most magnificent of the reign, where the contracts for the marriage of Henry and Matilda’s daughter were drawn up. In 1110, eight-year-old Princess Matilda left for Germany, to be educated at the court of her betrothed, Henry V of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor. It was a momentous marriage, validating the importance of England’s new ruling dynasty and giving young Matilda the title of Empress by which she was known for much of her life. A letter to Queen Matilda from the Emperor attests to how her influence with her husband ensured the matter went smoothly: ‘We have from experience come to know of your zeal in all those things that we ask from your lord.’

Henry was abroad again the next year, when Matilda presided at the exchequer court and was also present at St Peter’s, Gloucester to witness a gift of lands to the house. In 1114 the Queen took her son William to visit the new foundation of Merton Priory. There is very little evidence of Matilda’s day-to-day involvement with her children, though it is possible that young Matilda was raised in her mother’s household, but the visit to Merton gives a sense of Matilda trying to inculcate piety in her son with the same sweetness and understanding of children’s nature that her own mother had displayed. She hoped that the happy memory of the visit, of playing with her at Merton, would encourage William to regard the house favourably when he became king. Matilda also succeeded in persuading Henry to agree to the marriage of her brother David to the King’s ward, Matilda of Senlis. David became King of Scotland in 1124 and was to play an important role in the life of his niece the Empress, but at the time his prospects of succeeding to the crown seemed slight, and the marriage meant he could take the title of Earl of Huntingdon in right of his wife. The wedding was celebrated before Christmas 1113, while the King was in England. Matilda was regent again in 1114-15 and 1116—18. The latter period shows her involving her son William in her activities, obviously in preparation for his own succession. Together they issued three writs on the business of a ship belonging to the abbot of St Augustine’s, Canterbury.

Matilda may have fallen ill in 1114, as her correspondent the bishop of Le Mans wrote to her asking after her condition and enclosing a prayer to St John the Evangelist for her recovery. She did recover, as her activities in the following four years demonstrate, but her family had a sad reputation for dying young. Matilda’s last act as regent of England was made in Oxford, for the protection of a chapter of hermit monks, and on I May 1118 she died at Westminster. The Church had questioned her right to marry, and now there was a quarrel over the right to bury her. The monks of Trinity Aldgate claimed it, and when Henry returned from Normandy they lodged a complaint, via the canons of St Paul’s, against the monks of Westminster, who had taken the body. Henry confirmed all Matilda’s donations to Trinity and compensated the order with a gift of relics from the Byzantine emperor, and Matilda was laid to rest at Westminster. The King gave money to maintain a perpetual light by her tomb, which was still being paid in the reign of Matilda’s great-great grandson Henry III, while her brother David organised an annual memorial Mass.

Despite the controversy over her marriage and the criticism she had attracted in the management of her lands, Matilda died a beloved queen. Soon after her death reports of miraculous signs occurring at her tomb began to circulate, and a cult to her quickly grew up at Westminster. Over the next decade her grave attracted as many papal indulgences for pilgrims to Westminster on St Peter’s Day as did that of Edward the Confessor. Her official epitaph was inscribed on her tomb during the reign of her grandson Henry II, but the Hyde chronicler summed up the popular mood: ‘From the time England first became subject to kings, out of all the queens none was found to be comparable to her, and none will be found in time to come, whose memory will be praised and name will be blessed throughout the ages.’²⁴