Reconquering England for the English in Havelok the Dane

The Middle English Havelok the Dane (ca. 1295-1310), set in pre-Conquest England and rooted in Lincolnshire history, features an Anglo-Danish alliance through marriage between the heir to the throne of Denmark, Havelok, and the heir to the throne of England, Goldeboru.¹ The alliance comes amidst circumstances, paralleled in the two countries, of political usurpation and conquest. Both Havelok and Goldeboru lose their fathers (and kings) in early childhood, find themselves robbed of their royal positions, and are thrust into hardship despite the best efforts of their ailing fathers to provide for their future safety and well-being. Though Havelok is often considered a romance, in which such romantic unions typically play a central role, the marriage between the royal heirs departs from convention in that the union serves strictly political aims as it goes against both of their wishes, eliciting his feelings of awkwardness and her disgust. Their joint political destiny becomes manifest to both of them only after marriage when they realize that this union empowers them to reclaim their royal authority and take back their countries, which they do. Political readings of Havelok the Dane tend to situate the poem in the present, within the contemporary political affairs of the reign of Edward I (1272-1307), emphasizing the abuse of royal power in general.² While these readings rightly identify political corruption as a primary concern of the poem, they ignore many of the poem's most distinctive and specific political dynamics, notably the rather overt theme of conquest on two national fronts. I argue that the poet of Havelok the Dane looks to the past not the present, to the earlier period of the Norman Conquest, where a famous Anglo-Danish alliance, forged in the region of Lincolnshire, and recorded in Lincolnshire histories, promised to reconquer England and restore the Anglo-Saxon heir to the throne.

The Anglo-Danish alliance of 1069-71, like the poem Havelok the Dane, figures prominently in the political consciousness of Lincolnshire, where most of the events took place, and forms part of the story of a Lincolnshire man called Hereward, also known as Hereward "the Wake," who organized the most substantial and sustained resistance campaign against the Normans in the years immediately following the Conquest.³ Accounts of his activities in the late 1060s and early 1070s survive in upwards of ten different medieval sources, mostly from Lincolnshire, spanning the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, including L'Estoire des Engleis of Geffrei Gaimar (twelfth century), the Liber Eliensis (twelfth century), the Liber de Hyda (a compilation spanning 455 to 1023), the Historia Croylandensis (the "False Ingulph," a fourteenth-century compilation), Florence of Worcester (late eleventh to early twelfth century), Orderic Vitalis (late eleventh to early twelfth century), and the Annales Burgo-Spaldenses (a fourteenth-century compilation sometimes attributed to a certain John of Peterborough).⁴ Hereward's efforts for English freedom are most substantially treated in the thirteenth-century fictionalized biography the Gesta Herewardi, also originating in Lincolnshire.⁵ The source that holds greatest relevance for Havelok the Dane, however, is the twelfth-century Peterborough Chronicle of Hugh Candidus, which accounts for many of the most sweeping changes the English poet makes to the legend of Havelok.

The poet of Havelok the Dane essentially extends the story's original Lincolnshire setting to include the famous Anglo-Saxon political resistance efforts that centered in Lincolnshire following the Conquest. Specifically, the English poet references a particular historical episode in the career of Hereward, namely, his sacking of Peterborough Abbey in 1069 (1070 in some histories), allegedly to foil imminent Norman takeover, a deed that first brought Hereward to national prominence. This episode forms a subtext for Havelok the Dane in four important ways: (1) like Havelok, it features the wider backdrop of political conquest; (2) it accounts for the name changes introduced by the English poet for the heroine, the English heiress, as well as for her father, the king; (3) it helps to account for the poet's enhanced characterization of Havelok as a saintly figure; and (4) like Havelok, it...