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From: Gordon Fisher< >
Subject: Re: Earl Godwine--correction
Date: 18 Feb 1998 09:17:58 -0800


At 08:39 AM 2/18/98 -0800, David Greene wrote:
>A couple gremlins appeared in my posting about Early Godwine. (Mea
>maxima....) The following is a corrected version, which I have also
>clarified slightly:
>
>I haven't seen--perhaps through inattention--a posted discussion on the
>ancestry of Earl Godwine of Wessex, father of King Harold, the last Saxon
>king of England. (A descendant of Harold was Isabella of France, wife of
>Edward II, and many lines of descent can be traced.) I am not an expert
>on pre-Conquest English genealogy, but I will summarize bibliographically
>what has been theorized on this question and ask for the latest scholarly
>consensus.
>
>In 1913, Alfred Anscombe in _Transactions of the Royal Historical
>Society_, 3rd ser, vol. 7, suggested that Godwine was a descendant of
>King Aethelred I through Aethelweard the historian, who d. ca. 1002. His
>evidence was the descent of land from Aethelweard to Godwine or to
>Godwine's children. Anscombe, however, was not able to fill in the two
>intervening generations between Aethelweard and Godwine. The missing
>generations were provided by Lundie W. Barlow in an article in NEHGR in
>1957 (111:30-38), also based on land descent; Moriarty accepted Barlow's
>conclusions. The arguments were strengthened by David Kelley in a major
>article on Aethelred I's descendants in the Charles Evans Festschrift.
>
>Bierbrier, however, reviewed the Evans Festchrift in the Genealogists'
>Magazine and said that Kelley (and by implication Anscombe, Barlow, and
>Moriarty) were wrong and that Godwine was a "new man" who had received
>his lands en bloc from Cnut. Bierbrier cited several recent studies on
>Cnut and Godwine which reach this conclusion, although so far as I can
>tell, they provide no contemporary evidence for the source of Godwine's
>land.
>
>It is certain that Godwine or his children possessed a number of manors
>that had been in the possession of Aethelweard and his ancestors. If
>Godwine received the land through inheritance, he was a descendant of the
>royal house of Wessex. But if he received it through Danish expropriation
>of the Saxon possessors of the land, it provides no evidence for
>Godwine's ancestry.
>
>One slight piece of evidence that would support the latter interpretation
>is that post-Conquest chroniclers stress Godwine's obscure origin.
>
>Comments?
>
>DAVID GREENE
>
>
>

A small comment, or rather note:

"The son of Wulfnoth, probably a Sussex thegn, Godwin rose to power through
the favour of King Cnut."
--- *The Life of King Edward who rests at Westminster*, attributed to a
monk of Saint-Bertin, 2nd edn, ed & tr & with introduction & notes by Frank
Barlow, Oxford (Clarendon), 1992. Footnote, p 6

Gordon Fisher

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