Gone Medieval - Lady Godiva

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

Did Lady Godiva ride naked through Coventry?Matt Lewis welcomes Annie Whitehead to delve into the legendary tale of Lady Godiva, uncovering the true historical figure behind the myth. They explore primary sources, the political landscape of 11th-century Mercia, and Godiva's significant role as a landholder and patron, as one of many independent and influential of Anglo-Saxon women.MORELegends of Robin HoodListen on AppleListen on SpotifyMurder in Anglo-Saxon England with Annie WhiteheadListen on AppleListen on SpotifyGone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Max Carrey, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here.

Find out who we really were. We've gone medieval. In the year of our Lord 1057, having founded this monastery by the advice of his wife, the noble Countess Godiva, Leifrich, at the prayer of a religious woman, placed monks therein, and so enriched them with lands, woods and ornaments that the there was not found in all England a monastery with such an abundance of gold and silver, gems and costly garments. The Countess Godiva, who was a great lover of God's mother, longing to free the town of Coventry from the oppression of a heavy toll, often with urgent prayers besought her husband

that from regard to Jesus Christ and his mother, he would free the town from that service, and from all other heavy burdens. And when the Earl sharply rebuked her for foolishly asking what was so much to his damage and always forbade her ever more to speak to him on the subject. And while she, on the other hand, with a woman's pertinacity, never ceased to exasperate her husband on the matter,

he at last made her this answer. Mount your horse and ride naked. before all the people through the market of the town from one end to the other, and on your return, you shall have your request. On which Godiva replied, but will you give me permission if I am willing to do it? I will, said he, whereupon the countess, beloved of God, loosed her hair and let down her tresses,

which covered the whole of her body like a veil, and then mounting her horse and attended by two knights. She rode through the marketplace without being seen except her fair legs. And having completed the journey, she returned with gladness to her astonished husband and obtained of him what she had asked. For Earl Leifrich freed the town of Coventry and its inhabitants from the aforesaid service and confirmed what he had done by charter. Lady Godiva is one of those names that many people know,

and perhaps you also know the story that you just heard, which the chronicler Roger of Wendover gave us. Godiva has become steeped in myth and mystery, and so Gone Medieval has set out to dispel the fake news and find the real Lady Godiva. Did she exist? Did she ride through Coventry naked? What else do we know about her? What can she tell us about the roles and the perceptions of Anglo-Saxon women?

Well, to help me dig deeper, I'm delighted to be joined by Annie Whitehead, author of Women of Power in Anglo-Saxon, England, and a friend of Gone Medieval. Welcome back to Gone Medieval, Annie. It's great to have you back again. It's lovely to be here, thanks for asking me back again. We're going to get into the weeds of a story that probably lots of people think they know might have heard, and we're going to try and get to the bottom of how true some of it may or may not be. And we're going to get to the most famous thing that people know about Lady Godiva in a little bit.

But first off, I wanted to try and establish whether we're even talking about a real person from history. Did Lady Godiva exist? She did, very much so. Brilliant. We've got an episode. We don't have to stop now. Yeah, in Old English, her name is, it's God Giffu, but it's pronounced God Yeva, which then in turn developed into Godiva. And, yeah, she was a real person.

She really existed mainly in the... 11th century, but she might just have been born in the 10th century. So yeah, real person, very wealthy woman as well, wealthy in her own right. But that's, of course, as you say, that's not what people generally know about her, of course. No. And before we get to that part of the story, how much do we know about her family? Is she born into the nobility? We don't actually know whether she was born into the nobility. It seems like she probably came from Northwest Mercier's, So she had land holdings in likes of Schwabshire, Staffordshire, Leicestershire, a bit of Warwickshire. It does look like she was a very, very wealthy woman in her own right.

So, yeah, we're going to guess that she was from a noble family. But she married into an extraordinarily famous, in retrospect, obviously not at the time, really, really wealthy, influential, powerful family, because she married the elderly known as the Earl of Mercia, Leifredch, And he was part of a family that was, I think, I'm right in saying, unique. Because although originally the office of Earl or Elderman wasn't technically hereditary, by this stage in the 11th century, it had become so. But his family was unusual in that four generations from that family were Earls of Mercia.

And nobody topped that, not even the Godwinsons. So a hugely influential, very, very powerful family. And she married into that. So, yeah, they were a kind of 11th century power couple, really. Yeah, medieval Midlands power couple. Sounds great. And presumably, you know, that, again, gives weight to the idea that she must have been, from some kind of noble family, to have been an acceptable bride for someone like Leifred.

It must have been something that was politically advantageous to both sides. Yes, it does seem to look as if, although he was mainly in charge of the Western portion of the erstwhile kingdom, it's a good political marriage, isn't it? If she's got lands in the northeast and he's influential in the west, sorry, northwest, and he's in the south and east of the county, I suppose, then she's bringing lots into that marriage and essentially he's expanding his land holdings. And in this period, land is everything, land is power, land is wealth.

So the more you've got, the better off you are, literally. Yeah. And what kind of primary sources are we looking at when we're dealing with Godiva's life? What are the kind of the strengths and what are the limitations of the sources that we have that talk about her? Well, this is the problem. We don't have very much at all

in the way of actual proper primary sources because the main primary source that we rely on for this era is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and she's not mentioned in it because, and we'll get around to that, no spoilers, but she hasn't really done enough

to warrant a mention because they are just recording the big facts of the days of the years as they see it. We have a few charters that mention her name, but the majority of what we know about her really does come from slightly later sources that we maybe can still call them primary sources, but we're looking at people writing in the 12th, 13th century. Which is starting to ring little alarm bells. Exactly so, exactly so.

She is mentioned in Doomsday as a landholder in her own name. name in her own right. Doesn't necessarily mean that she was still alive at the time of Doomsday, but we do think that she was still alive after 1066. I think she died at a good old age and she is recorded in Doomsday named, you know, as one of the very few English women named in the Doomsday Survey as holding lands in their own right. So we've got that as well, but it's, yeah, it's not a great deal. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty incredible, isn't it? I was going to say, you know, is that an uncommon thing for a woman, and owner to be named in Doomsday. So if she's one of the very few, again, it points to her being

quite an important figure. It does. It does. And of course, one of the main things by this stage, she would have been known as being the grandmother of, who was technically the last English queen, because her granddaughter was Ilgith, who was Harold Godwinson's second and last wife. So there was this royal connection, which would have been known about then. Obviously, at the time when Godiva was a younger woman, nobody knew what was going to happen. But, yes, she was known posthumously as the grandmother of the last English queen. Wow. And I guess from the sounds of it, from the limited source material that we have, it makes it quite difficult to use any of that sort of real primary source material to get

anywhere near a personality for Godiva. If she's just cropping up as a name in charters and things, presumably we don't see much of her character. No. And I think this is a problem generally with this period, because, again, people aren't really interested in what people were like. We do have evidence about what her husband was like, incidentally. It seems that he was quite a staid, very religious person. There's a story about him that while all his men and his friends, his half-trups, his half-companions were carousing late into the night,

he took himself off somewhere quiet to pray and get an early night. That little snippet might be relevant to what we're. we're going to go on to talk about later. So he comes across as a very, don't rock the boat, just get on with the job, be very sensible, very stayed and steady kind of person. So was she like that too? They do both seem to have been very religious endowing a lot of religious communities and particularly Coventry, which was, you know, their foundation. So I'm guessing she probably, and again, this might inform what we're going to talk about in a wee while, probably just a very well-behaved, orderly, rich, conforming kind of member of the aristocracy.

We have to assume, but we'll talk some more in the moment, I'm sure, about that. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, I think, you know, we need to get there now, don't we? So what most people think they know about Lady Godiva is this idea that she took a naked ride through the city of Coventry. So I want to kind of pick our way through this story a little bit. So can you talk us through, if that hasn't emerged from the kind of the primary source material

that gives us charters and things like that, when and where does that story first make an appearance? So this comes from Roger of Wendover, who is a monk writing in, I can't remember his exact dates, 13th century. I mean, I can read you a little bit of it because he tells us that it was Leifference, who founded the monastery at Coventry, but on the advice of his wife. So there you go. This is the religious couple.

She's saying, I've got a great idea. And he said, yeah, let's do this. So he endowed the foundation with apparently so much land, woods and ornaments that, quote, there was not found in all England a monastery with such an abundance of gold and silver gems and costly garments. So this is quite the endowment. But we're told that Godiva was keen to free the town of Coventry from financial burden. And when she spoke to her husband about it, he told her, and this is a quote

from the story, mount your horse and ride naked before all the people through the market of the town from one end to the other, and on your return, you shall have your request. Whereupon she loosed her hair, let down her tresses, which covered the whole of her body like a veil, she rode through the marketplace without being seen except her fair legs, and having completed the journey, returned with gladness to her astonished husband, who then apparently committed all this to a charter and said, right, you know, the townspeople are free from the burden. So, you know, it sounds pretty true, doesn't it? The way it's written, we have no other source that corroborates this story at all. There are a lot of monk chroniclers writing during this period. None of them mentions this story.

William of Malmesbury was another, he was an incorrigible gossip. He has all the juicy stories that you can imagine, but not a word about this. He just talks about her being quite famous, but it doesn't suggest that there's anything sort of salacious about that fame. This is it. This is what the whole story is based on one 13th century chronicle. And it's amazing how this story has just blown up and blown up, you know, even in the days before social media.

Yeah, I mean, we've been through chroniclers like, you know, Audrey Pitalis, he was keen on reporting kind of almost everything in the universe. And we've got people like Walter Mapp, you know, is, again, terrible, terrible gossip and would report anything even remotely salacious. So it's striking how many people we can look at that haven't noted this story of Lady Godiva. So I guess, you know, the big drum roll moment, do you think it's true or not? I mean, it's probably no surprise that I don't think it's true. At all. No. And it's interesting that you mentioned Audrae Vitalis because he does talk about Godiva. He doesn't

mention the story. So he's obviously aware of her and of her existence and he doesn't say anything about this. I don't believe it's true. I have a few reasons for this. As I mentioned earlier, Leifrich comes across as very staid, very steady. He's very important. At the peak of his career, he's one of only three leading eldermen or earls who are advising the king. You can see him working with Godwin, Harold Godwinson's father. He's a very, very important man. I think given that by this stage of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, early on it's just one line. There's a particular thing happened in one year and that's all we get. You get into this period, the 1040s, the 1050s, the 1060s, there are pages and pages for one year. You've also got at roughly the same time, the fighting that went on when King Knieut died and his two ex-wives or his two widows were fighting for the rights of their sons to succeed. And it's Queen Emma and the Fever of Northampton. They are in an absolute propaganda war.

Lots has been written about them. I think if somebody almost as important did something like this, I'm absolutely convinced the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle would have mentioned it because it has an effect on Leifert's standing, I think. You know, it would have been scandalous. I mean, I get, you know, they say she went unseen by which Bodger Wendover means nobody saw her body apart from her pale legs. but even so this is not something that people were doing on a daily basis.

It's newsworthy. You know, it would be the headline, wouldn't it, in the red top papers? I just don't, I don't believe it. And Roger Wendon, like all of these later chroniclers, say that they are using older sources. They don't always name them, but they say they're using them. If you read something like that, you'd repeat it, wouldn't you? And the fact that nobody does, nobody else has got this story and it just doesn't have a slightest ring of truth about it

as far as I'm concerned, but I know a lot of people do disagree. Yeah, it definitely smells a bit funny, doesn't it? So do you have a sense of then why this story is told? Is Roger trying to get some point across or does he just think he's reporting old gossip? Is there some kind of moral tale behind what he's doing? Do we have any sense of why he records this story? Well, that's a really interesting question because he also has lots of gossip about other royal women.

Godiva wasn't royal, but she was important. He's the one that gives us a story that when Offer the great of Mercia had a rival king killed, it was actually all the fault of Offa's wife. And again, nobody else really says that. I tend to think that when you look at these later, these 12th, 13th, Century Chronicles, you find that the women, by and large, are getting a very, very bad press. They are being blamed for a lot. Edward de Marta's stepmother famously was accused of being involved in his murder, but only by

the later chronicles. And, I mean, you've said this yourself. The 12th century attitudes, church attitudes towards women change. You know, we've gone a long way from the early part of the Anglo-Saxon era where royal abbesses were founding abbees, they were in charge of huge monastic institutions, they were in charge of the monks as well as the nuns. But at the 12th century, there seems to be a shift in church attitudes and women are not tolerated quite as much. And we've got all these awful stories about them. But this isn't one of them. This isn't really her doing anything

wrong. This is almost her championing the poorer people. She's doing something really quite noble. And I can't really get to the bottom of why he would say this. And what point, as you ask, is he trying to get across? It's almost like he's decided that this one particular noble woman is worthy of a bit of praise when he's not that kind. That kind. about the other notable women of the era. It remains a little bit of a mystery and I can't understand exactly what he's trying to say with all this. Yeah, it's frustrating, isn't it?

Because you could see that he could easily turn this into a story of a salacious story of, you know, an incorrigible woman who is riding through the streets naked to the shock and disgust of everybody, except that, as you say, it's almost like a charitable act in the story, isn't it? She's getting things for other people by being forced to do this. So it kind of doesn't fit with the attitudes and the roles for women more generally in those sources,

does it? Where, as I've said before, the church attitudes are changing, this idea that women are all daughters of Eve and, you know, the font of original sin. Godiva is being given this weird story in which she's taking all of her clothes off, which could feel like it's going to move into something salacious and sexual, but it just doesn't. it moves into what is in effect a charitable act. It's odd. It is.

It is very, very strange. There may be some kind of sort of folklore route to the story. There's a tradition of women riding naked on horses that might be peculiar to this particular area. It's not a million miles away. In fact, it's considerably less than that. From Banbury and Oxfordshire where we've got, you know, the lady riding on the white horse and all that, There's a suggestion that it might go right back to the idea of the god Teel, after he on the Tuesday is named, and this idea that he rode horses. But I can't find much information about that.

And it doesn't seem to be something that's sort of carried through. So we have this sort of possible ancient folklore sort of myth attached to it. And then just this one story. Again, if that were the root of it, why don't we have more of these types of stories? That's the puzzling thing for me. I mean, the person who comes out of this worst of all is poor old Lafreych, you know, who's coming across as a sort of scrooge, who's taxing the people. He may have been like that, but no more so than any other noble, I'm sure,

because, you know, that's what they did, wasn't it? It was tough being a peasant in any age of history. And there doesn't seem to be any particular reason why Laerfricht would be singled out, you know, as being the baddie of the story. So, yeah, it's an enduring mystery. It's very odd. Yeah, because you almost end up in a situation in which it becomes a tale about being careful what you demand of people.

Leia Frickshire is behaving quite badly, maybe. And it's like, oh yeah, I'll stop this if you ride naked. through the streets and his wife goes and does this, which would presumably have been, you know, embarrassing for him to have his wife ride naked through the streets of Coventry. And maybe it's more to do with, oh, unfortunately, maybe more to do with the man than it is to do with the woman and kind of be careful what you ask for or wish for or demand or whatever else because you just might get it. Yes, yeah.

Well, I mean, there definitely is an element of that in the story, isn't there? But it's just remarkable how it's grown. And then, of course, it does, you know, the morality. elements do come into it later because obviously we've got associated with Godiva the story of Peeping Tom and this is much later this is 18th century but you know peeping Tom was was one who did actually sit and watch her and that's that's a morality tale isn't it because I think it goes blind doesn't they as a result so that but this is 18th century this is much later and it's a different moral code in a way it's a different set of sensibility

but the story grows and it grows and then for years, I think it's been reinstated recently. There's, you know, the annual parade and somebody riding as Godiva through the streets of Coventry. So it's a myth that's endured and people love it. But when you actually drill down, it isn't actually even that much of a story. It's that, you know, we don't have much detail about it.

We don't really know the wise and the wherefores. It's just Roger O'Wendover giving us this tale. And even he doesn't comment on it, doesn't say what his thoughts are, just tells us what he thinks or wants us to believe happened. It's, yeah, it's so unusual. And peeping Tom is an interesting addition because he comes so much later. And yet it's almost that in this story, the man is still the bad guy. You know, there's still no criticism of Godiva for what she's doing.

She's trying to cover herself up as she's riding naked. he's the bad guy because he's kind of trying to be a lech and trying to get a look when he shouldn't and he pays the price for that. So again, it revolves around the idea that the woman is not doing anything particularly wrong. It's the man who's at fault there again with peeping Tom. Yeah, she comes across as very pure, very virginal,

and you're right, you know, he's the sinner for casting his eyes. You know, nobody's suggesting that, you know, if she hadn't done it in the first place, then he wouldn't have been, you know, wouldn't have been there watching. But it's a remarkable story and why. You know, it's an odd thing to say, isn't it? You know, it's a weird kind of domestic argument.

You know, husband, I don't like the fact that you're taxing all our poor people. Okay, well, just ride naked through the streets. I mean, that's, it's very bizarre. It really is. Right, well, I mean, having sort of put that to bed and said that we probably don't think it's very true, other people can argue with us if they like. I'd like to try and get back to a bit more about the real Godiva then. Let's talk about what we do know about her

and what she might have actually done. So we've mentioned that she's married to the elderman, the Earl of Mercia. So I wonder if you give us a sense of where Mercia is politically at the time that Godiva is around. How important is Mercia? Oh, hugely, hugely. So it's, as I mentioned earlier, it used to be a kingdom. By this stage, you've really got four separate parts of what had become

England by then. So you've got Northumbry, obviously in the north, you've got Wessex in the south and east, East Anglia, obviously in the east, and then Mercia in the Midlands. And it's not as big as it was earlier on. I mean, at its height under King Offer in the 8th century, it's sort of covered everything from the River Humber down, including London. But it's much reduced now. It's the borderlands with Wales, which is also important politically. And Leifrich sort of inherited the earldom from his father. So he's already second generation. And really, I think, when Knewit became king, he kept Wessex for himself. So for a long while, there wasn't an Earl of Wessex. So you've got these three leading earls and the king, of whom Leifrich was one. And

they're really, I mean, you can have more than one right-hand man, I suppose. They really are the king's right-hand men and they are controlling these vast areas of land. They've got men underneath. They're the top rank and then there are lower-ranking nobles underneath administering the shires and what have you for them. But hugely politically important, whenever any major decisions are taken, you know, the king is there obviously, but so are leading earls. So they can be very influential. They can be very partisan. They can be very self-serving. Leifredge doesn't seem to have been. He just seems to have quietly got on with things. His son, Alfgar, got into a lot of disputes with the earls of the other side of the country,

which by and large all Godwins. And they caused him to be banished twice. And he, allied with Wales to get his power base back, which is why it's so important that it was on the borderlands because he had somewhere else to go, somewhere else to ask for help. And that alliance was sealed when Elfgar's daughter, Eljith, I've mentioned before, before she was married to Harold Godwinson, she was married to Griffith, who was King of Wales. So you've got this massive powerhouse in the West versus the Godwins in the South. and east. But Leifrich does seem to have steered a much more steady, gentle course. He's not ruffling any feathers politically, he's just getting on with the job. But this family is so

powerful, so important. And as I say, his son, Alfgar was a little bit more disputatious and a bit more confrontational. But Leifrich, let's say, pretty, pretty, just your average middle of the road, leading nobleman. So we're still in a situation then maybe where, although England, is now a single kingdom, you can sometimes see those tensions between what used to be the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms are sort of still pushing against each other and rubbing up against each other, even if Leifrich isn't particularly participating in that. Oh, yeah, I think so. And again, you know, if you're, and we see this so many times in history, don't we, it might not be

the patriarch. It's the sons, the grandsons who may be jostling for a bit more power or they can see the way the wind is blowing, you know, that this situation might change, so they need to sort of make a grab while they can. And this certainly happened with Leifrich's sons and even more so, I suppose, with his grandsons who were Edwin and Morkar, who famously got sort of, you know, tangled up in 1066 and all that. But, yeah, I think it was hugely important. By this stage, the people who were in charge of the earldoms, the Urswire kingdoms,

were not necessarily from that area. but I think in Leifrich's case he probably was and so they really you know that where they were governing was also their home whereas over on the other side of the country the Godwins were just being awarded land left right and centre at one point Alfgar was actually he had responsibilities over in East Anglia but he was kind of sort of squeezed out and isolated by the Godwins all around him and he didn't inherit something that he thought he was going to get because it was given to a godwin. So there's a lot of, you know, these are two really mighty families locking horns. But, yeah, Leifrich, I think probably just probably quite old when he died. And I don't know whether he just wasn't dynamic enough to see what was happening with these upstart godwins, you know.

and may genuinely not have cared terribly much. I think he was just happy doing his own thing, but immensely powerful and deeply religious. It does look like they end down an awful lot of religious organisations, institutions, as I said. But that's nothing unusual, because we've got to remember at this period in time, everybody is very religious, you know. Even if they're doing it slightly cynically, you know, the more you give to the monastic institutions, the more you give to the church, the more guaranteed you are a place in heaven.

But that in itself shows a sign of very, very strong belief, you know, that there is heaven, there is hell, and there's only one place that I want to end up. So, you know, even that cynicism is rooted in deep religious belief. And we shouldn't ever forget that these people were hugely religious, even if they perhaps used it for their own self-serving means sometimes. Yeah, yeah. Are there specific religious houses that we know Godiva is tied to? Obviously the story that everybody sort of knows about connects to Coventry,

but are there specific religious places that she's endowing that we can see in the charters? There are. I can't remember them off the top of my head, I'm afraid, But Coventry is the main one. When you look at all the different sources, for example, as I said, Roger Wendover said that it was Leifrich who endowed Coventry, but it was Godibert's idea. Other sources say that it was a joint enterprise. It's possible, in fact, I think it's probable.

What happened was that Leifrich, it's the charters in his name. There are a couple of spurious charters as well that were clearly forgeries. you know, this happened a lot. Abbey's just making things up to claim, you know, to establish ownership, even if it wasn't true. But I think probably what happened with Coventry and probably elsewhere is that it was Leifich's grant, but it was Godiva's lands.

So these were her own lands in Coventry. And I think that's why she's so heavily associated with Coventry. As I said, there were other foundations. There's just one of those things. completely slipped my mind. As soon as we start chatting, I will remember them, of course. Of course. And do we see her operating on her own in those charters as well, or is it generally with or through her husband? I think it's through her husband. It's very, very rare. It's not unheard of for women to issue charters in their own name, but I could be wrong. There'll be

somebody out there will correct me, I'm sure. But I think all the charters were issued jointly. Yeah. And if it's possible that Godiva was still alive at the time of the Norman conquest in 1066, do we know what impact it has on Mercia and on Godiva? Well, I mean, it already had started to have an impact because by the time the Godwins was sort of in control, what was happening was that key places, Herriford, for example, people were being sort of parachuted in. And some of those were Normans, you know, because by the time of Edward's confessor, we've got Normans in the English court. And there was Michael Ralph. He was Norman in origin. He was sort of operating within Mercia. So there's already this huge tension. By this time,

I imagine that Godiva, if she was still alive, she's going to be quite elderly. She's got adult grandchildren for a start. She's probably watching with a sense of despair. I get the impression that this family was very strong together and very sort of partisan. As I say, they weren't just governing somewhere they'd been appointed to. This was their home. and I think they fought very keeny to protect it and I think she must have just been staggered at what was happening

because everything did fall apart very, very quickly. Alfgar died. Incidentally, one of the reasons that we think she might still have been alive in 1066 is because some of the lands, some of her lands, I should say, that should have passed to her son, actually passed directly to her grandsons. So the suggestion is that she outlived Al Fgar, who died in, I think, 1062, 1063.

So it's perfectly possible. The date we usually settle with for her death is 1067. So she would just have seen it. In which case, she saw everything unravel because her granddaughter, Eljith, had been married to Griffith of Wales, who was then killed probably by his own men or by the Welsh, but they then sent his head to Harold Godwinson. Elges was then married to Harold Godwinson, and I mean, we're not told how she felt about that,

but probably not that great. Harold Godwinson needed the Mercians on side, and this gives you an idea of how powerful they were, because Edwin and Morkar, we think, were only teenagers in 1066, were very, very young. But suddenly their father, Alvgar, who was very, very strong, very belliger, He'd been banished twice. He came back both times with Welsh and I think at one point Irish troops.

He's gone. Mercia is now in the hands of a teenage boy. So he's no real threat to Harold Godwinson. And yet, you know, both the brothers, one's Earl of Northumbria, one's Earl of Mercia, they can rally an awful lot of troops between them. So Harold then arranges this political marriage to marry their sister, Iljith. 1066 didn't go well for any of them, as we all know. Edwin and Morkar did survive, but not for long. Morkar ended up fighting alongside Hara with the Wake. There's another interesting detail about Godiva. There are some legends that suggest that she was Hera with the Wake's mother, but Morkar, imprisoned for a long time fighting with Herald the Wake. Edwin, having pledged allegiance to William, because

you know, made sense to, then sort of renounced that oath of homage and was fighting, you know, in the resistance, but was then also killed by his own men, whether it was sort of turned in for a reward is possible. So Godiva would have seen a lot of that happening and it would have been a terrible turnaround from when she started, you know, this young power couple herself and Leia of which presiding over a largely peaceful period and then suddenly to see it all unravel and to see the effect that it had on her grandchildren must have been particularly poignant

and very upsetting for her, I'd have thought. Yeah, yeah, you can imagine. I mean, she's lived through a fair bit of, you know, relatively peaceful, I guess, but a lot of change in the 11th century too. She's seen a lot of kings come and go, and you can imagine if she was around in 1066, on the ground it must have felt very different

to anything that had happened before. Yes, yeah. I mean, she was, you know, if we're assuming, and I think it's safe to assume that she was still alive until 1067, and she's kept her lands. And we did talk about this earlier how few English women are mentioned in Dune's Day,

but the thing is that it was incredibly rare. Very few of these women did keep their lands. and the ones who are named are really important people. So Iljith, her granddaughter, in theory, kept her lands, although we're not sure what happened to her, but ownership of the land wasn't transferred. And Queen Edith, Harold Govinson's sister, so the widow of Edward the Confessor, also kept her lands.

Whether there's this sense that William stopped short, of taking lands away from these women. I don't know. I mean, he doesn't come across, you know, in my view, as somebody's particularly chivalrous. But the fact that Godiva was still a landlady in her own right would have given her a bit of a safety net, of course. Clearly, she's left alone. She's left unmolested. She's far too old, I imagine, by this stage, to worry about being forcibly married to the next Norman lord, which obviously did happen to a lot of the widows of 1066. So, yeah, she's probably, you know, retiring quietly.

I mean, I have this picture of her just sort of sitting as an old woman just alone with all these memories of what life used to be like and how drastically it changed. And of course, it did for everybody living in England. But she has seen so much and seen so many kings come and go. And, you know, to see her family destroyed, a lot of it sort of almost. deliberately, you know, the way her son was banished twice both times on trumped up charges. You know, this was just politically motivated. And, you know, although she is a very, very powerful, wealthy woman, she's powerless to stop that sort of thing going on because women were influential,

but not really politically, unless you were actually a queen. Not that much political agency, really, unfortunately. When you were talking then, I couldn't help wondering whether actually William was being the opposite of Chevalric and thinking, you know what, if I leave these lands in the hands of older widowed women, they're far less likely to raise an army than the man I might give the lands to if I take them off them. So it's almost easier to just leave it there and think, you know, they won't pose a problem for me, whereas if I take those lands off them and have to grant them to somebody else, that person might cause me a problem.

Well, that's a very interesting point. Yeah, they're no threat, that's for sure. You know, the likes of Godiva, she's not going to suddenly raise a rebellious army. I suppose the only thing is that she could give sanctuary to her rebellious grandsons, but they've really disappeared off the seed. I say Morcair was imprisoned. I think he was taken to Normandy for a while. Herod, the wake obviously disappears. There is absolutely no truth in this idea that Herod was Godiva's son. This is, it comes from a a 15th century genealogy and it was commissioned by the Wake family and it's thought that it was just a likely way of bolstering their credentials really. The minor nobility, the Wake family by this stage. So, you know, any forebears they can find that were really important would have helped. But there's no other evidence, you know. And when we're looking at things that don't appear until the 15th century, you've got to be dubious. You know, there's no supporting evidence that Herriwood was, I mean, he was Pally with with more car because they were fighting together, but there's no suggestion from the earlier

sources that they were, well, they wouldn't even mean brothers, would they, that have been uncle and nephew, something like that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'd be dubious of them being connected to Harrywood at all themselves, although he gets remembered as Harry Wood, the way, slightly obsessed with Harry Wood, absolutely love his story, so, yeah, so it's great to be able to crop him up in this story, too. I wonder if we could think about as we come to the end, what Godiva's life can tell us about the role of Anglo-Saxon aristocratic women,

you know, should we think about her exercise of power and her position of authority as an exemplar of the period of senior aristocratic women? Or is she something of an outlier? Is she unusual? No, I don't think she's unusual. I think what's probably a bit special about her is that she had so much. land in her own right and there were very few women who did so possibly comparable was the lady that everybody remembers Azidus Swanneck, that wasn't actually her name. Her name was Adyva,

which is a completely different name, although it sounds similar. She also had extensive lands in her own right. And I suppose this is the thing that perhaps would surprise anyone who doesn't know that much about the period is that Anglo-Saxon women were allowed. to hold land in their own right. In their own name, they were allowed to bequeath it to whomsoever they wished. When they married, you know, all their goods and chattels did not transfer to their husbands. So they kept whatever they took into the marriage. And if they separated divorce, they could take it out with them as well. You know, their, her lands were hers. And Leifredch had very little say over what she did with those lands. You know, if she decided she wanted to sell them,

he can't stop her. You know, the idea that the wife and all her worldly goods become property of the husband, this is not Anglo-Saxon, this is later, this is something that the Normans introduced, you know, it's a completely different culture. Anglo-Saxon women had a lot more say than their Norman and later medieval counterparts. It's not to say that they had, but, amounts of freedom, but comparatively they did. And in that Godiva, I think is a really, really good example of that. They did have a lot of dealings with the church and, you know, the monastic establishments. More so in the earlier part, as I said, you know, royal abbesses were the ones who were founding the very early, the first monasteries. This was all royal women who were doing that, not the men.

So they played an important part in sort of, you know, establishing the Christian church, really, in England. But yes, Godiva, I think, is a classic example of how much Anglo-Saxon women didn't have to shut up. You know, they didn't necessarily have an awful lot of political influence, but they also didn't have to just stay at home and do their embroidery. You know, they were landlords in their own right, which gives you a certain amount of financial freedom. They were allowed to get divorced. You know, they could end marriages. They got to keep the children.

So I think this is something that sounds really remarkably modern compared with what we think we might know about the medieval period. So, so, yeah, for that reason alone, I think, you know, we should talk about Godyver an awful lot more, but maybe not so much on the horseback. I mean, it sounds like she's a really good example of just how much things changed with the Norman conquest. You know, the before and after, the snapshot that we can have of the authority, the Anglo-Saxon women and the, I don't want to say independence, but, you know, that kind of sense of slightly more independence that they were able to enjoy, you know, that is sort of swept away in the wake of 1066 and there is this real change in society. So Godiva gives us a really good snapshot of before, and we've got quite a lot of snapshots of. after, but we probably don't think about before very much. Yeah, absolutely. I agree. And

they were, I mean, there's a famous 10th century will of a noble woman who gives us an idea that a, her bequest is stuffed full of books, so she could obviously read, you know, literacy is a thing, these women were literate. And it seems like a lot of them, when they got to widowhood, rather than just, you know, off you go to a convent, sort of established, like religious settlements but in their own houses so other women would come and live with them and they're living a sort of quasi-religious life just quietly getting on with things you know there were laws in place that said you cannot force a widow to remarry if she doesn't want to so they would just take themselves off to their estates and live very quietly not that going to a convent or an abbey was a bad

life it wasn't but you know there wasn't this same idea that all of their life had to be dictated by a man, you know, that they were nothing if they didn't have a husband. So not true, prior to 1066, less so after 1066, sadly. Yeah, I mean, it's been fascinating because I think we sort of ripped away a bit of a carpet from underneath people saying that probably she didn't do this naked ride through Coventry. But in many ways, the truth about her is far more interesting than that. You know, that's a kind of a little bit of a novelty that we're not even sure what it might have meant if it did happen. But here is a woman who can really demonstrate for us the structure of the society in which she lived and the ways in which she was able to operate within that and the patronage that she's able to dispense

and the way that she's able to control land. I mean, it's one of those where the truth is far more interesting than the fiction. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, if we say, okay, she did it, actually, I can see her doing it. You know, I don't think she'd have any qualms, but I think she probably wouldn't have gone about it in the same way. I think if she disagreed with the taxes that Leifrich was levying, I think she'd have just told him so. And from what we can gather from his personality and his character, he might have just, you know, rather than saying, oh, you know, I'll listen to you if you'll get on a horse naked. I think he probably just would have listened to her anyway. So it's a really, as you say, an outlandish way of. of demonstrating that actually she did have a lot of say in the affairs of, you know,

the local system and the, you know, what was going on in terms of the local administration. And I don't think she would have been afraid to tell him if she disagreed with him. Yeah, although, again, I'm thinking as well, even if it is true, if we say that she might have undertaken this ride through Coventry naked, even if that is true, it's still from what we've been talking about, it's still far from the most interesting thing about her anyway. Yes, yeah, because that story, in and of itself, just kind of set her up as, you know, we were searching for meaning in it. You know, it's some kind of allegory. It's there to demonstrate something. And that kind of isolates her and makes her all about that and diminishes the person that she really was and the power that she really had and that of her family as well. So, yeah, to sort of shine a light on that is to put everything else.

that she did in shadow really. Maybe that's what Roger was doing. Terrible medieval chroniclers, yeah. Annie, this has been absolutely fascinating. It sounds like we definitely need to remember Lady Godiva today, but we need to not focus on that story of her riding through Coventry. We need to focus about what she can tell us about Anglo-Saxon society and what we can find out about the ways in which she

and perhaps other contemporaries were able to operate in Anglo-Saxon society because that, it seems to me, is a far better legacy for us to focus on and something that can tell us far more than whether she did or didn't ride a horse naked through the streets. I totally agree, yeah. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Annie. It's been absolutely fascinating, as always. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.

I hope you found this episode interesting. So what do you think? Did Lady Godiva ride through the streets of Coventry naked in 1057, or is it a myth? And does it matter either way? I'm not sure it's what we should be focusing on anyway. You can find Annie's books which include women of power in Anglo-Saxon England, Mercia, Rise and Fall of a Kingdom, and Murder in Anglo-Saxon England, justice, weargill and revenge, wherever you get your books.

You can also find Annie's previous visits to God Medieval to talk about the Kingdom of Mercia and about murder in Anglo-Saxon England in our back catalogue if you'd like to immerse yourself further in early medieval English history. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval.

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