Reading and Representing Transgression

Abstract

In the preceding chapter we observed that conflicting representations of Earl Godwin’s outlawry in 1051 mirrored conflicts over royal succession and political influence in the late Anglo-Saxon kingdom. A century and a half later, however, a very different sort of story was being told about the Earl of Wessex. In his De Nugis Curialium, the twelfth-century collector Walter Map includes a series of tales about Godwin, including two that portray the powerful lord of Wessex as a clever but unsympathetic man whose acquisitiveness was assuaged at the expense of the Church. First, desiring property that belonged to the nunnery at Berkeley by Severn, he sets his nephew to seduce the abbess and as many nuns as he can. When the young man has done so, Godwin accuses the abbess of corruption and receives the king’s permission to dissolve the foundation and take the property.¹ Later he acquires Bosham by playing a grammatical trick on the archbishop of Canterbury. While the historical Godwin was probably no great friend of the Church and competition for land between secular and ecclesiastical parties was common in the eleventh century, there is no other evidence for the earl’s duplicitous stratagems for expanding his property.² Nor do these stories told by Walter Map convey any coherent political interest in the Anglo-Saxon earl. He is often bold and courageous, frequently clever, and often just, but sometimes avaricious and self-interested.