Edward the confessor's return to England in 1041 *.

Tandem revocato Eadwardo, Adelredi regis filio, mediante Alwino Wintoniensi episcopo et Godwino comite, convocatis apud Hursteshevet totius Angliae baronibus, ita demum in regem suscipiendus auditur, si eis Cnudi leges et filiorum eius inconvulsa stabilitate suo tempore mansuras iuramenti satisfactione sanciret.

'Argumentum' to Quadripartitus, ch. 9

At length, Edward, son of King AEthelred, was recalled, through the intervention of Bishop AElfwine of Winchester and Earl Godwin; the thegns of all England gathered together at Horstead, and there it was heard that he would be received as king only if he guarantee to them upon oath that the laws of Cnut and his sons should continue in his time with unshaken firmness.

Richard Sharpe's translation of 'Argumentum', ch. 9 (1)

THE sources for the history of eleventh-century England are not so plentiful that we can afford to neglect any fragments that lie to hand. The passage cited above is one such fragment, found in the second of the three prefaces to the post-Conquest Latin translation of Anglo-Saxon legal materials known as Quadripartitus. It tells of the return to England of Edward the atheling, later Edward the Confessor, from the exile in Normandy to which Cnut's conquest of his native country in 1016 had consigned him; of the responsibility of the Bishop of Winchester and of Earl Godwin for his recall; of an assembly at a place called Hursteshevet and of the demand made there that Edward should swear to maintain the laws of Cnut as a condition of his acceptance as future king. Since we are told in the work's next sentence that Edward was 'promoted with such fortunate auspices', we can assume that he took the oath and that he did so at Hursteshevet. The year is 1041.

If this story is true it adds considerably to our scanty knowledge of the events immediately prior to Edward's accession following Harthacnut's death in 1042 and has wider implications for our view of the pre-Conquest polity. Yet although Quadripartitus and its prefaces were first edited by Liebermann in 1892, this particular section has been almost wholly ignored by subsequent scholars. The list of expositors is a short one. The passage's importance was glancingly recognized by York Powell in his contemporary review of Liebermann's work. (2) The place Hursteshevet appears, with no comment but 'unidentified' and' ?1041', in Professor Simon Keynes's list of tenth- and eleventh-century meeting places of the king's councillors. (3) The excerpt is mentioned in a footnote to Mr Patrick Wormald's discussion of Quadripartitus's place of origin, and more generally (if allusively and dismissively) in his great work on the making of English law. (4) Professor Richard Sharpe has translated it, in the form given above and with a brief gloss, in his full translation of the prefaces to Quadripartitus. (5) In total these comments, all that are traceable since 1892, amount to some 250 words. To the major authorities on the period and the king, from Sir Frank Stenton to Professor Barlow and Professor Stafford, the episode appears to have been unknown.

Their oversight is understandable. The preface to a legal compilation dating from Henry I's reign is not the most obvious place to search for information on Edward the Confessor, particularly when the author's Latin is barely penetrable and sometimes entirely obscure. Until Sharpe's brave and public-spirited translation, only the few specialists interested in Quadripartitus were likely to have come across the passage, and they were not by and large those most interested in pre-Conquest politics. Even had it been registered, there would perhaps have been seemingly good reasons for not making too much of it. In the 'Argumentum' which preceded Quadripartitus and from which our passage comes, the author--whom in deference to Wormald's convention we will call 'Q' (6)--wrote to make a case. His 'Argumentum' was indeed an argument and his purpose was ideological: to show that Old English law, which had reached its summation and conclusion in Cnut's great code of 1120 x 21, and had been transmitted forward as King Edward's law, had been happily restored and supplemented in Q's own day by King Henry I. 'Not only has [King Henry] given us back the law of King Edward, which we received with every delight of rejoicing, but strengthened as it was by the improvements introduced by his blessed father, he has improved it with his own laws in everything that belongs to God and life and truth.' (7)