Matilda: Queen of the Conqueror

In 1961 in excavations at the abbey of Ste Trinité in Caen the bones were recovered of a tiny woman, only four feet and two inches in height, which were identified as those of Matilda of Flanders. Her name may be unfamiliar, but that of her husband is not. He was William the Conqueror and she was the first queen of the new Norman dynasty in England.

While there have been many biographies of William I, this latest work by Tracy Borman is the first for Matilda. One does not have to get very far into the book to appreciate why this should be the case. The evidence that survives for the life of Matilda is skeletal and some essential components are missing altogether. Even her date of birth is not known with any certainty and no letters or personal documents exist. Medieval authors who do refer to her veer between the extremes of sycophancy and misogyny. Those writing in Normandy close to the time in which she lived praise excessively her beauty, intelligence, piety and generosity. Later medieval authors have the best stories but all too often they are there to denigrate and to illustrate what goes wrong when the natural order is overturned and women are allowed a public role. In several of these a very different Matilda emerges, one who is said to have taken a cruel revenge on those who had wronged her.

Matilda had indeed played an important public role in helping William control both Normandy and England after his victory at the battle of Hastings in 1066. This is clear from charters and other legal documents that show her acting as regent in his absence, sitting in judgement in the courts and using her wealth to endow religious communities or to construct those rituals which were deemed essential for the underpinning of royal power. That she sometimes acted controversially is apparent from a Lion-in-Winterish episode where she supported her eldest and favourite son Robert Curthose when he rose in rebellion against his father, who preferred his younger brothers, the future English kings William Rufus and Henry I. William was uncharacteristically forgiving of Matilda for this misdemeanour. Perhaps he really did adore her as some of the medieval authors claimed and as his unusual lack of known mistresses and illegitimate children may suggest.

Tracy Borman moves deftly between the difficult written sources, though it is sometimes surprising to find 19th-century works cited alongside the medieval. The different accounts are laid out and the more sensational are generally rejected, although she is unwilling to relinquish Wace’s unlikely romantic account of the young Matilda’s unsuccessful proposal of marriage to the Anglo-Saxon Brihtric, supposedly avenged by annexation of his estates after 1066. Much background research lies behind the book. There is an impressive bibliography of primary and secondary reading and full footnotes in which Borman pursues some of the more recalcitrant problems of interpretation, such as what exactly was the impediment that led a pope to forbid the marriage of William and Matilda and how many daughters did they have. The often scanty details of Matilda’s life are given more rounded form by viewing them in the context of the experiences of other elite Norman and Saxon women and of the material culture of the time. Some broader scene-setting chapters and generous helpings of supposition help the work conform to the length and range that is expected in a modern biography, making Matilda a useful addition to the current trend for accessible reclamations of the lives of medieval queens.

Barbara Yorke is Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Winchester.