This character was immensely rewarding to write about for several reasons. Firstly, there is some information about her life and there are many preserved extant letters, which is unusual for female characters of the medieval period. Naturally, as a Queen she was of interest to the chroniclers, the monks and men of the church who would look to her for endowments and charitable works which they would then reward with praise and prayers.
But although Matilda was the daughter of a King (Malcolm of Scotland) and a Queen, (her mother Margaret, descended from Edward the Exile) it did not necessarily follow that Matilda herself would become a Queen. In fact it came about by a series of unexpected events –a name-change, a sudden death, a seizure of power, and a formal inquiry into her suitability to marry. All these events and outcomes were necessary before Matilda could secure her future by marrying Henry 1st and becoming Queen Matilda II.
Her life story contains just about every element a novelist could wish for. She is eminently fascinating in many ways, and yet, like medieval women generally, she remains an elusive figure, her inner life mysterious and unknown. However, in surviving documents and letters there are references to her as a child at two distinguished convents – first Romsey Abbey in Hampshire, then, later, at Wilton Abbey in Wiltshire, where she was under the protection of her Aunt Christina.
In The Remarkable Tale of the Bull and the Sheep, Matilda is known as Edith. She used this name as a child and young woman growing up at Wilton Abbey. ‘Edith’ was most probably her baptismal name and was also the name of the Saint who had a shrine at Wilton. For whatever reasons she later became known as Matilda, under which name she comes to prominence. Like all secular women of that time, her early life is sketchily recorded thus leaving huge gaps for the novelist to fill.
The Benedictine nunnery of Wilton is now completely gone, replaced by the famous Wilton House, home to the Earls of Pembroke. Nothing remains to suggest that Wilton Abbey was once renowned throughout Europe for its learning.
Noble and royal women were educated there: secular women, wards of the king. After the Conquest, women whose menfolk had been slaughtered sought sanctuary there.
Reading the sparse histories of Wilton, I had the strong impression that this was a dynamic and mysterious place, a place where refugee stories of suffering and hardship and stories of privilege are swirling side by side, a distinctive place of transformation, restoration, education or the discovery of the spiritual life.
Wilton roiled with extremes of experience: a place of dreams, desires but also fears and terrors. And it’s here young Edith comes to be raised in her early years. So I had the strong sense that what Edith became could be traced to Wilton.
I wanted to portray her as a spirited yet vulnerable child at Wilton and as a clever, informed and intelligent woman in later years. How she gets from one to the other is the story of Wilton – a place that doesn’t exist now and in a sense never existed, or always exists – which I can best describe as a place where the imagination is set free.
When I realised this, I saw that Wilton was my way into Edith’s character.
In the passage below, I am trying to portray the young Edith, as she appears to a sympathetic observer called Aefled, glimpsed in a moment of unselfconscious reverie. As a child at Wilton Abbey, under the stern influence of her aunt, Edith may have had few opportunities to simply sit and be herself (The Remarkable Tale of the Bull and the Sheep, p. 27).
“Towards evening on Friday, 11th of March, during Lent, Edith was sitting in the Priory house with a book of devotion in her hand, a psalter, richly illuminated. She was not reading, but tracing the swirls of red and gold with her fingertip, chasing their coils around the capital ‘I’ the first letter of Intende voci orationis…Attend to the voice of my prayer. By chance, Aefled came upon her and stood observing for a moment her unselfconscious absorption in the game. Over the last few days, she had become much drawn to Edith, seeing in her prospects the very same that confronted her own daughter. Marriage or the nunnery. Innocent, unworldly, subdued, Edith did not seem ready for either one of these. But, once out of her aunt’s company she opened up, began to unbend, smiled a little and even laughed. An unpractised laugh with shrill notes, hiding doubtful amusement.”
I wanted to make this early medieval girl believable without being modern, even though she had a modern longing – to be what she wished. Such an idea of self-fulfilment can only work in relation to specific circumstances of a character. Edith’s desire for power, to be a queen, is realistically within her scope, because she is the daughter of a king – King Malcolm of Scotland. But she still needs guts, spirit and resilience to get to the top.
Also, as every novelist will tell you, in order to come fully alive a character needs a weak spot. It was not difficult to find one for Edith. A terror. A terror brought about simply by being raised at Wilton, among the nuns. I thought of all the Catholic writers who talk about their minds being subject to ill-understood fears by the convent nuns of their educational institutions. For me this was the nub and kernel of Edith’s character, a particular terror would give coherence to her experience and give her something to surmount, overcome, test herself against. Between the nuns, who had renounced the world, and Aunt Christina who was, we guess from the evidence, strict and domineering, the child Edith had plenty of put-downs to navigate. Kept in dreadful ignorance of her own body and its functions, constantly told that the world was dangerous, that the only worthwhile life was spiritual, dutiful and prayerful, Edith would surely have had plenty to fear in her early years.
I wanted to portray her as a spirited yet vulnerable child at Wilton and later as a clever, intelligent, mature woman. How she gets from one to the other is the story of Wilton – a place that doesn’t exist now and in a sense never existed or perhaps always exists, which I can best describe as a place where the imagination is set free.
When I realised this, I saw that Wilton was my way into Edith’s character.
Edith feigns illness to get attention from her friends Agnes and Aefled who have been urgently summoned to Wilton. On arrival they enter her chamber (The Remarkable Tale of the Bull and Sheep, p. 63):
“Preparing themselves for the very worst scene imaginable, a child’s deathbed agony, Aefled and Agnes followed Christina to her chamber. It was not the cell of a nun but a plush, well decorated, airy room. They found Edith stretched in a comfortable bed draped with a brocade bedcover richly embroidered with the arms of Scotland. It was a reminder that this was the bed of no ordinary child but one around which national destinies were to be played out. Edith lay still, eyes closed, breathing shallowly, looking rather more in a peaceful sleep than tormented by pain or fever.
‘Edith, dear, the ladies Agnes and Aefled have come, just as you asked.’ Christina’s whisper caused the eyelids to flutter and the cold blue eyes to open in response, but she made no other movement.
‘She has been like this for days. Hardly eats, speaks little.’
Aefled took her hand and touched her forehead. Both were cool.
‘She seems clear of fever at least. How did this illness begin?’
‘With her bleeding,’ said Christina. ‘She complained of pains when her bleeding began.’
‘She is young to bleed,’ said Agnes. ‘We might not have expected it for years.’
‘I was fifteen and thought it was early,’ said Aefled. ‘She is indeed young for the monthly burden.’
‘She came to me in a terrible state, saying she was struck by the flux and would die. I explained what was happening but she did not seem to accept it. Poor Edith, it is the terrible mark of women’s fate, the seal of sin, the curse of sex.’
If this is the sort of explanation Christina has been giving, thought Aefled, it is no wonder the child has taken to her bed in terror.
‘Is this where you sleep, Christina?’ asked Aefled seeing a second bed in the room.
‘Yes, I stay with her night and day.’
Aefled and Agnes exchanged a glance of concern, suspecting that the cause of this malady lay in the tensions between aunt and niece. A heavy load of religious guilt on one side and a profound ignorance of the body’s functioning on the other, had driven them into a destructive emotional conflict.”
Aunt Christina made Edith’s childhood something of a trial, especially when Edith became of matrimonial interest to the king, William Rufus, against whom Christina had taken a personal dislike. In the summer of 1093 the king, who had recovered from a serious illness earlier in the year, travelled to Wilton Abbey with a view to meeting Edith and making a decision in regard to marriage. According to the sources, the visit was a fiasco. The king was kept from speaking to Edith and only allowed to view her in the cloister as she crossed it in the company of her aunt. Apparently, Edith was not even told that the king was present. Of course the exact circumstances of the incident are not known. They were not even fully known at the time. Was Edith wearing the veil? Was she already in the early stages of becoming a nun? Was she actually marriageable?
In The Remarkable Tale of the Bull and the Sheep, I imagine the scene as follows (p. 86):
“And so it was arranged that the king, after saying his prayers in the abbey church, would walk out into the cloister garth, as if to view the roses which grew in great fragrant bowers in the central garden. Christina would bring Edith into the cloister but no introduction would be made, no encounter would be permitted, no word would be exchanged.
This was agreed and, soon after noon, the king walked into the blazing garth where the sun struck down like a blinding sword. Clusters of roses, by turns dozing in the perfumed breeze then startled awake by the buzz of bees, nodded at him in the bright sun as if to say ‘we know what you’ve come for.’ He heard footsteps and looked around. Coming into the cloister from the west side was a tiny nun, led by the hand of a stern-looking woman. They were both wearing habits and were veiled. Eyes ahead, looking neither left nor right, they stepped along the arcade, past the entrance to the chapter house and entered the church by the southern door.”
The disappointment is not great since William Rufus was never in earnest, I believe. He never married and his sexual life remains something of a mystery. Nevertheless, this episode would have serious repercussions for Edith many years later when she is grown to adulthood and becomes the object of further matrimonial interest. In 1100 King William Rufus dies suddenly. His brother, Henry 1st, immediately grabs the throne and within three days gets himself crowned king in Westminster. Henry’s next step is to marry and who could be a better candidate than the daughter of a king and the descendant of the ancient English line, Edith. At some point Edith’s name is changed to Matilda, perhaps for the purpose of marriage, as being more ‘Norman’ or perhaps to honour the king’s renowned mother, wife to the Conqueror. But there is a problem. Men of the church discover that Matilda, as the child Edith, has a dubious past. Wasn’t she a nun at Wilton? Hasn’t she reneged on her vows? A huge fuss is made and the Archbishop of Canterbury has to step in. There is no help for it. There must be an inquiry. The king’s marriage, and thus the legitimacy of his offspring, must be above suspicion. So we come to what must have been a dreadful experience for Edith/Matilda. Still young, still quietly ambitious and within the reach of power, she finds herself at the centre of a court of inquiry led by the foremost prelate of the kingdom. She knows that her shy and private childhood is going to be subjected to scrutiny and a report made to the king. The verdict will determine her future.
The inquiry is dramatised in After the Arrow (p. 59):
“Matilda looked pale. She had not slept much the night before, being both anxious and in the grip of her monthly pains. Since the age of thirteen, when it had begun, her monthly bleeding had been the cause of severe discomfort. Aefled was fully aware of the situation and had tried many different remedies in an effort to allay the pain which sometimes grew so wretched that Matilda was forced to bed. But nothing seemed to work. She wondered if she ought to mention Matilda’s case to Faricius. But then, what would a male physician know about such things, especially a monk? It seemed that Matilda would always be plagued by monthly indispositions, until, of course, she got pregnant. But the pale, slender young woman entering the great chamber at Lambeth to appear before the foremost churchmen of the day must not betray any outward sign that she was in fact in pain and bleeding. There must be no hint of sexuality hovering about the nubile young woman. The very thing that made her marriageable and desirable must be ignored. Innocent dependence, humility, subservience were required at this unique and specially convened council where Matilda’s female childhood was to be subjected to the judgement of elderly men. It was perhaps the greatest ordeal she had faced.”
The outcome of the inquiry is favourable. That Matilda was married to Henry on Saint Martin’s Day, Sunday November 11th, in a ceremony in Westminster Abbey conducted by Archbishop Anselm, is a matter of record. Interestingly, there is also a record of an intriguing little scene which takes place at the door of Westminster Cathedral as the bride and groom are entering. I wanted to dramatise that moment because I thought it gave insight into the characters of Matilda and Anselm. A rare glimpse of sensitivities and formalities that very often go unrecorded (After the Arrow, p. 54):
“While the lovers were entering at the great west door, surrounded by the nobility and their hangers-on along with a crowd of officials and London post-holders, Anselm came up to them and spoke in a fatherly way to Matilda, in the grip of conscience for having put her through the Lambeth ordeal a few weeks before. Would she like him to reiterate the finding of the inquiry and, here and now, extirpate any seeds of possible future discontent? Matilda gave earnest consent and so Anselm got himself lifted up onto the raised dais at one side of the portal and called for silence. ‘On divine authority,’ he warned them, ‘I declare that there is no impediment to this marriage. There is no ground except malice upon which any scandal can be raised. Anyone who, at any time, contests the legality and divine authority of this marriage shall be deemed traitorous and deserving of the wrath of God.’
No-one made a murmur. Satisfied that he had pleased Matilda on her wedding day, and therefore won the good opinion of Henry, Anselm climbed down and led the procession into the nave.”
Matilda and Henry go on to have many years together and two legitimate children: Maud/Matilda and William Aetheling.
Follow their stories in The Remarkable Tale of the Bull and the Sheep and After the Arrow.