Truth, Saga
& Legend

Gytha was the daughter of a Danish chieftain, Thorgils (or Thorkel) Sprakaleg, and the sister of Jarl Ulf, who married Cnut’s sister Estrid and served as Cnut’s regent in Denmark. That made her Cnut’s kinswoman by marriage; Ulf’s son, Sweyn Estridsen — her nephew — would later be King Sweyn II of Denmark.

She married Godwin, the English thegn Cnut raised to be Earl of Wessex, shortly after his service with Cnut in Denmark in 1019–23 — around 1020 is the usual estimate. No source gives the year. Later pedigrees that make her father a grandson of Harald Bluetooth are generally treated as late inventions.

The album’s Daughter of the Danes opens on that marriage.

In September 1051 Godwin’s quarrel with Edward the Confessor ended in the family’s outlawry. Before the break, hostages were given to the king for Godwin’s good behaviour, among them his youngest son Wulfnoth, then a boy. The family fled — Godwin, Gytha, Sweyn, Tostig and Gyrth to Flanders; Harold and Leofwine to Dublin — and the hostages stayed behind.

Eadmer of Canterbury says the hostages were taken into Normandy, probably by the departing Archbishop Robert of Jumièges, and handed to Duke William. Wulfnoth stayed in Norman custody through 1066 and after. He was released in the general amnesty at the Conqueror’s death in 1087, put back under guard in England by William Rufus, and died a prisoner at Winchester in 1094.

He outlived every one of his brothers. In His Weight in Gold he is Wulfnoth in a Norman cell; in the album’s closer he is the sixth candle, left unlit because he is still alive.

Sweyn was the family’s disgrace. In 1046 he abducted the abbess of Leominster; in 1049 he killed his cousin Beorn and was declared a niðing, a man without honour. In 1051 he went from Flanders to Jerusalem barefoot to atone.

He died on the way home, in the autumn of 1052. The sources agree on the journey and disagree on the place: the Chronicle puts his death at Constantinople, John of Worcester in Lycia, and William of Malmesbury has him killed by Saracens. His death is dated to Michaelmas, 29 September 1052 — the same month his family forced its way back into England.

The Abingdon manuscript of the Chronicle records that at Winchester, on Easter Monday 1053, while Godwin sat with the king at the meal, he suddenly sank toward the footstool, deprived of speech and all his strength. He was carried into the king’s chamber and died on the Thursday, 15 April. He was buried in the Old Minster at Winchester — the church where Emma of Normandy had been buried beside Cnut thirteen months before.

Modern historians read it as a stroke. The more dramatic version, with the bread, came a century later and is marked as legend on this page. The album’s I Never Asked Him sings the Chronicle’s version, and lets Gytha say so.

Edward the Confessor died on 5 January 1066 and was buried the next day, the Feast of the Epiphany, in his newly consecrated abbey at Westminster. The Chronicle records that Harold was consecrated king the same day. John of Worcester names Westminster for the coronation; the Bayeux Tapestry shows Harold enthroned straight after Edward’s funeral.

So within a single day Gytha’s daughter Edith became a widowed queen and her son Harold became king. Harold struck coins at once: his silver pennies carry the word PAX across the reverse. He reigned for nine months and a week.

Tostig, Earl of Northumbria, had been driven out by a Northumbrian revolt in 1065, and Harold had sided with the rebels rather than his brother. In September 1066 Tostig came back with Harald Hardrada of Norway and a great fleet. They beat the northern earls at Fulford and took York.

Harold marched north and met them at Stamford Bridge on 25 September 1066. Hardrada and Tostig were both killed. Gytha lost a son to the army of another son. The parley before the battle — Harold offering his brother his earldom back — is a saga scene, and is listed separately below.

At Hastings on 14 October 1066, Harold II was killed with his brothers Gyrth, Earl of East Anglia, and Leofwine, Earl of Kent. The Chronicle names all three among the dead. The Bayeux Tapestry has a scene captioned for the deaths of Leofwine and Gyrth before the scene of Harold’s fall.

Counting Tostig three weeks earlier, Gytha lost four sons in under a month. His Weight in Gold opens on exactly that arithmetic: three of my sons in one afternoon, and the fourth one three weeks before.

This is the album’s centrepiece, and it rests on a single source. William of Poitiers, chaplain to the duke, writing within a decade of Hastings, says Harold’s mother offered the body’s weight in gold. William refused: he gave the body to William Malet to be buried by the shore, saying it would not be fitting for a man whose greed had left so many unburied to be buried as his mother wished.

Poitiers is contemporary, close to the duke and hostile to the Godwins, and he tells the story to show his master’s justice rather than his cruelty. That is reason to trust that the offer was made — he had no motive to invent a mother’s plea — and reason to hold the duke’s speech loosely. No English source mentions the offer at all.

The scale on screen in the video is the album’s image. The gold is Poitiers’. The refusal is the record.

After Hastings Gytha went west, to Exeter, which became the centre of resistance in the south-west. When William demanded the citizens’ oath they refused to swear or let him in, offering only the dues they had paid the old kings. He marched west in the winter of 1067–68. A delegation submitted and gave hostages, but when he reached the city the gates were shut and the walls manned. Orderic says he had one hostage blinded in front of the gate.

The Chronicle says the city held out for eighteen days and that William lost much of his army in the assaults; Orderic adds that the walls were undermined. The clergy came out with their books and relics, and William’s terms were lenient. Rougemont castle went up inside the walls afterwards.

That Gytha was inside is consistent across the sources; how far she led the defiance is not recorded. Orderic says she sent to other towns and to her nephew Sweyn of Denmark for help. The album’s Close the Gates of Exeter gives her the wall.

Her one appearance in the English record is a single sentence of the D manuscript of the Chronicle: Gytha, Harold’s mother, went out to Flat Holm, and the wives of many good men with her, and stayed there some while, and went from there over sea to Saint-Omer.

Flat Holm is a small bare island in the Bristol Channel. Harold’s sons were gathering ships in Ireland and raided the west in 1068 and 1069; waiting there for them makes sense, though the Chronicle does not say why she waited. Saint-Omer is where, a generation earlier, a monk of Saint-Bertin had written Emma of Normandy’s book. Gytha’s death is not recorded. John of Worcester has her retire to Flanders in 1067, a year earlier than the siege; the dating of these entries is not secure.

Gunhild, Gytha’s unmarried daughter, left England with her mother — probably in 1068 or 1069 — and went first to Saint-Omer, where her memorial says she stayed a few years, then to Bruges. She visited Denmark, returned to Bruges, and died there on 24 August 1087. She was buried in the church of St Donatian, to which she gave relics and a psalter glossed in Old English.

A lead plaque buried with her records her life and exile. It is the family’s only surviving account of the exile in something like its own words, and it is a daughter’s, not a mother’s.

The saga says that at Roskilde at Christmas 1026, after a quarrel over a game of chess the night before, Cnut sent a housecarl to kill Jarl Ulf in Holy Trinity church — the predecessor of Roskilde Cathedral. Ulf’s widow, Cnut’s own sister Estrid, is said to have given the church lands in compensation.

That Ulf died around then and fell out with Cnut after the battle of Helgeå is broadly accepted. The church, the chess game and the housecarl are Snorri’s, two centuries later, and have the shape of a told story. The album’s Daughter of the Danes keeps the killing off screen — a door, a candle — and lets Gytha hear of it at an English feast.

In Snorri’s telling, before the battle twenty English horsemen ride up to the Norwegian line and one of them offers Tostig a third of the kingdom if he will change sides. Asked what Hardrada would get, the rider answers: seven feet of English ground, or as much more as he is taller than other men. Tostig refuses, and only afterwards does Hardrada learn the rider was Harold himself.

It is one of the most famous scenes of 1066 and it is literature — the anonymous king, the perfect line, the reveal. No English source has it. The album’s One Son Killed the Other stages the offer as the mother imagines it, and never quotes it as fact.

Orderic says that while she was in Exeter Gytha sought help from other towns and from her nephew Sweyn II of Denmark — Ulf’s son. In late summer 1069 a large Danish fleet under Sweyn’s brother Asbjørn and his sons entered the Humber, joined the English rebels and took York. William later bought them off with silver and leave to forage the coast, and they sailed home.

The fleet is certain. That it sailed because Gytha asked is not: Sweyn had his own claim to England, and no source connects his fleet to her letter. The album’s My Brother’s Son Sent Ships sings the connection as her hope, and this page marks it as inference.

William of Poitiers says the body was buried by the shore. The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio goes further: the duke had Harold buried on the summit of a cliff, with an epitaph in mockery — that by the duke’s command he lies there as a king, so that he might still be guardian of the shore and sea.

The Carmen’s authorship and date are among the hard problems of 1066. If it is Guy of Amiens writing within a year or two, it is a near-contemporary witness; if it is a twelfth-century school exercise, it is not. Either way it is a Norman joke at a dead king’s expense. The album’s outro to His Weight in Gold takes the epitaph and turns it into his mother’s blessing.

The story goes that at the king’s table Godwin was accused, again, of the death of Edward’s brother Alfred in 1036, took a piece of bread and swore it would choke him if he were guilty — and it did. It is the version told by Aelred of Rievaulx and other twelfth-century writers, a century after the event, and it reads as Norman-era moralising against the Godwin house.

The Chronicle written at the time says only that he sank toward the footstool, lost his speech, and died three days later. I Never Asked Him opens on the legend and has Gytha reject it: I was there. It was bread. The question of Alfred, which the record never settles, is the one she never asked.

The canons of Waltham, Harold’s own foundation, told it this way a century after the battle: two of their brethren went to the field to recover the king, could not recognise him among the dead, and fetched Edith, called Swan-neck, his long-time partner, who knew him by secret marks on his body. The body was then carried to Waltham.

It is a moving story, and its purpose was the abbey’s claim to the king. No eleventh-century source has it, and the Norman writers have the body buried by the shore. Edith Swan-neck herself is real — Harold’s partner in the Danish fashion, more danico, and the mother of several of his children — but the scene on the field is the Waltham tradition’s. The album’s She Knew Him by the Marks stages it as legend, and has Gytha send for her.

Waltham Abbey shows a stone marking where Harold is said to lie, at the east end of the vanished choir. The claim goes back to the abbey’s own twelfth-century chronicle; William of Malmesbury also knew of it. Against it stand the Norman sources, which put him in a grave by the sea, and a separate local tradition at Bosham, where a coffin found under the chancel arch in 1954 has been argued over since.

No grave of Harold has been identified. The album does not choose: Gytha’s song is about not being given one.

Everything Gytha says on this album is the album’s. She left no words. Specific inventions: the scale and the gold ring-brooch on screen in His Weight in Gold; her presence on the field in She Knew Him by the Marks; the messenger at the Christmas feast in Daughter of the Danes; her walking Exeter’s wall; the candles, one for each son, and the sixth left dark; and the three words she speaks across the album.

Where the album stages a saga or Norman scene — the offer at Stamford Bridge, the epitaph, Edith on the field — it stages it as the story told about her family, and this page says so. It never puts a fact in the record that the record does not have.