The death of Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon King at the Battle of Hastings, Bayeux Tapestry 1067 (Image: Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Young and beautiful Gytha Godwinson was the envy of England when her father Harold seized the country’s crown in early 1066. But triumph turned to terror when treachery tore apart her family and the last Anglo-Saxon king of England was killed at the Battle of Hastings.
The death of her father signalled not only the end of an era and a new beginning for Britain, but a seismic change in the direction of Gytha’s life.
The flame-haired princess, subject of my new novel, was the eldest daughter of Harold II Godwinson, who had also been King Edward the Confessor’s right-hand-man, and his consort Edith the Fair.
After her father was hacked down following his reputed wound in the eye by an arrow – a disputed death immortalised in one of the most famous scenes in the Bayeux Tapestry – Gytha chose to exile herself to Denmark with two of her brothers.
There they found sanctuary with their first cousin once-removed, who happened to be King, and Gytha found the love that would create a new empire.
While her brothers were welcomed to lofty positions at court, Gytha fell in love with the Grand Prince of Kiev, Vladimir II Monomakt. Gytha’s role in his rule is not documented by historians, but an insight into their marriage appears to emerge in a book of instructions Vladimir II wrote for their sons in the 12th century: “Love your wives, but grant them no power over you.”
This may have been written with telling hindsight on the part of the East Slavic monarch for, according to Russian historian Vladimir Medinsky, Gytha was a significant influence on her husband’s PR operation. “[His] English wife wasn’t wasted,” he wrote with a touch of irony.
She may have witnessed the demise of one cursed kingdom but she was instrumental in the emergence of a new empire.
Her marriage was destined to see Gytha becoming an ancestress to two great regal dynasties through her son, Mstislav the Great, who had 12 children: she was an antecedent of both King Edward III of England – and therefore all later British monarchs – as well as of the first Tsar of Russia, Ivan the Terrible.
Stained glass representation of King Harold’s daughter, Gytha Godwinson (Image: Weglinde/Wikimedia Commons)
Her family seemed cursed but, even as she suffered loss, betrayal and humiliation, Gytha was determined to regain what was rightfully hers. And she survived the walk through the furnace that was the Norman Conquest to go so much further… My book aside, the story of 1066 is having a bit of a purple patch.
A blockbuster new historical drama arriving next year on BBC1 will star James Norton as King Harold, Earl of Wessex, Eddie Marsan as Edward the Confessor and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as William, Duke of Normandy. Written by Michael Robert Johnson (Sherlock Holmes), it will explore one of the most turbulent periods in England’s history.
I was inspired to write my own re-telling of 1066, The Last Princess, with Gytha as a captivating new heroine – the first in a trilogy – after research by my Swedish father-in-law. Recently retired, he began to fill his time with genealogy.
A couple of weeks, six sheets of paper and 33 generations later, he proudly presented my sons with their ancestress: Gytha.
Family politics and political families are an endlessly fascinating topic, but what if you throw a crown, a country, severe sibling rivalry, the end of both the Viking and the Anglo-Saxon era, and a princess whose bloodline survives until today into the equation?
It was this potent blend that proved intoxicating when I first “discovered” Gytha Godwinson. Godwinson certainly doesn’t sound like a regal name and indeed, the Godwinsons were a feral pack of a family.
They were also utter upstarts, who owed everything to their women.
Gytha’s grandfather Godwin laid the foundation for the family’s rise in the dying days of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, when he married a kinswoman of Canute the Great, the sole ruler of the North Sea Empire of England, Norway, and Denmark.
How did he seduce her? He might have been silver-tongued and had sex-appeal; but above all he was prepared to do what others weren’t. Godwin did what he had to in order to survive and rise in his cut-throat age where allegiances shifted like quicksand and coats turned in the slightest breeze.
When Godwin’s young liege Prince Alfred – Edward the Confessor’s baby brother – returned to English shores after a long exile in Normandy, Godwin lit a huge pyre on the beach to lure his ship ashore. But Alfred did not get to see much of the English coast. Godwin, who unbeknown to Alfred had switched sides, first blinded and maimed him with a red-hot iron rod, and then clubbed him to death.
Happy Valley star James Norton will play King Harold in a forthcoming BBC 1066 drama (Image: PA)
To a Godwinson, an unbreakable vow is a mere string of words: betrayal runs generations deep in their House of Dragons.
Their heraldic beast is a winged, two-legged wyvern, which also adorns the book’s cover, albeit as a cross-stitch embroidery motif: Women in the high Middle Ages used embroidery as an outlet for their emotions – their choice of motif, of colour, even of thread could be small-scale rebellions.
Godwin’s wife – Gytha’s grandmother – had her women weave and embroider, as she not only gave Harold half a dozen children but cemented thefamily fortune when she proved herself to be a consummate slaver.
Her slaves were sourced in Ireland and included prisoners of war, orphaned children and indebted peasants, whom she sold on to the Danes.
In the language of Gytha Godwinson’s time, a slave was known as a “thrall” – the root of our word “enthralled”.
The Godwinson’s riches were tainted by brutality and blood.
But it was the “Danelaw” wedding – a simple hand-fastening – of their eldest surviving son Harold to England’s wealthiest maiden Edith Swanneck which truly changed the family’s fortunes.
Her dowry of 250 “hides” (manors and estates) gave him the simple soldiers, whose fortunes rose and fell with the family, as well as the rental income on the property.
The ultimate twist came when Harold’s sister, King Edward the Confessor’s Queen, bore England no son and heir, as the saintly King – an albino obsessed with hunting – locked her up in a nunnery for most of her life. Harold Godwinson was determined to give England one King, one law and one coin. This is where my novel The Last Princess begins.
Last Princess author Ellen Alpsten (Image: Andreas Stirnberg)
In her brilliant book, Queen Emma and The Vikings, the author Harriet O’Brien lists female roles as “cupbearer, peace-weaver and memory-keeper”.
At first, Gytha – Harold’s elder daughter – is not so different from other high-born women in the High Middle Ages.
Her choice between monastery and marriage is clear when we join the family for Modranicht – an ancient Anglo-Saxon name for Christmas Eve – in December 1065 in the candle-lit, fir-scented glory of the great hall at the Godwinsons’ home, Bosham Manor, which was depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry and survives to this day.
If Harold’s aim of strengthening England was wise, his means were hard to digest. For the true cause for 1066 – and the end of the Anglo-Saxon era – was a searing sibling rivalry.
Ellen Alpsten’s new book takes a fictional look at Gytha Godwinson (Image: Ellen Alpsten)
The Last Princess may seem like a Greek tragedy of Anglo-Saxon making, where doom and gloom reign. But instead Gytha decides to write world history. War, the great destroyer, is often also a harbinger of progress. It allows Gytha a third choice, which presents itself soon after her witnessing the defeat at Hastings: Exile.
Although exile severs a person from all they know, the confidence with which Gytha chose it was remarkable. She survived the slaughter-stained year of 1066 and shed all shackles of her society for good, and from the ashes of her father’s kingdom, she helped make a new empire arise…
The Last Princess by Ellen Alpsten can be ordered in print or as an e-book via https://books2read.com/u/3yXDeV