The King’s Body: Burial and Succession in Late Anglo-Saxon England by Nicole Marafioti (review)

Shortly after his accession to the English throne in 1040, the new king Harthacnut ordered the body of his predecessor and half-brother, Harold Harefoot, to be removed from its resting place at Westminster and thrown into a swamp. So much the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us; later sources add (on what authority is unclear) that Harold’s severed head was tossed into the Thames, whence it was retrieved by a fisherman’s net and reburied with due honour. It is Nicole Marafioti’s contention that this rather alarming example of fraternal disrespect can best be understood as part of a pattern of relationships between monarchs and the bodies of those who came before them in the later Anglo-Saxon period. Marafioti pursues a thorough, intricate, and carefully considered argument concerning the political imperatives that surrounded the display, disappearance, or denigration of royal corpses from the death of Alfred to the Norman Conquest (899–1066).

It is a well-known contention of Norman historiography that William the Conqueror cemented the perception of his legitimacy after 1066 by stressing his familial links to Edward the Confessor while casting Harold Godwinson as an illegitimate usurper. The management of bodies was a vital aspect of this strategy, with the high altar of Battle Abbey placed on the supposed spot of Harold’s battlefield demise, while William had himself crowned next to Edward’s tomb at Westminster. This sequence forms the endpoint of Marafioti’s study. She succeeds in showing just how closely the Conqueror’s tactics with regard to the remains of his predecessors built on the political and cultural preconceptions of the Anglo-Saxon period. Rather than representing a new departure, then, early Norman practices followed earlier precedents. For example, the Danish invader Cnut had also made careful decisions about the burial arrangements for his Saxon opponent Edmund Ironside fifty years previously. It was important for purposes of Cnut’s own legitimacy to afford Edmund an honourable burial, but by arranging for this to occur at Glastonbury, the Dane played his hand well. Several earlier Saxon kings had been interred there, thus marking it as a site of prestige and respect. Yet it also meant that Edmund’s remains were conveniently removed to a site far distant from the rising power centre of London, thus making it less likely that his tomb would become a focal point for disaffection with the new regime. Agency lay with the living, not the dead: whatever arrangements kings may have made for their own passing and memorialisation, it was their successors who were normally able to advance their causes by the placement and treatment of earlier kings’ mortal remains.

In some cases, royal fathers or brothers were memorialised in impressive shrines, such as Edward the Elder’s foundation of New Minster for Alfred at Winchester, which recalled but did not completely match the commemorative or cult-like status afforded to saintly figures. Yet respect was not always so evident. Harthacnut’s deliberate attempt to mark his half-brother’s corpse as a ‘deviant body’ (p. 155), thereby delegitimising his rule, appears to have backfired by casting doubt on the new king’s credibility. Marafioti argues that, in aggregate, these examples suggest an emerging respect for the office of kingship, no matter how ineffectual or unpopular the earlier incumbent may have been. In this sense, her discussion of medieval royal corpses inevitably calls to mind Ernst Kantorowicz’s landmark work, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, originally published in 1957. Marafioti’s echoing of that title can only be deliberate. Kantorowicz had stressed the dual nature of later medieval monarchy: the ‘body natural’ of the individual ruler died and decayed, even while his ‘body politic’ took its place as part of an ongoing spiritual community of rulership enhanced by the divine sanction inherent...