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From: David Greene< >
Subject: Earl Godwine--correction
Date: 18 Feb 1998 08:39:12 -0800
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
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