Recordings & Info 59. Sir Aldingar
CONTENTS:
1) Alternative Titles
2) Traditional Ballad Index
3) Child Collection Index
ATTACHED PAGES: (see left hand column)
1) Roud number 3969; Sir Aldingar (11 Listings)
Alternative Titles
Sir Hugh le Blond
Traditional Ballad Index: Sir Aldingar [Child 59]
DESCRIPTION: Aldingar, spurned by the Queen, puts a (blind/drunk) leper in her bed and shows the king. She will be burned and the leper hanged. She finds a (child) champion who defeats Aldingar. He confesses. (The leper is made whole, becomes steward.)
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1765 (Percy)
KEYWORDS: royalty knight adultery trick disease reprieve
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (5 citations):
Child 59, "Sir Aldingar" (3 texts)
Percy/Wheatley II, pp. 54-67, "Sir Aldingar" (2 texts, one the original from the Percy folio and the other the retouched version in the _Reliques_)
Leach, pp. 185-196, "Sir Aldingar" (2 texts)
OBB 4, "Sir Aldingar" (1 text)
DT 59, SIRALDGR
Roud #3969
ALTERNATE TITLES:
Sir Hugh le Blond
NOTES: Child connects this ballad with the story of Gunhild, wife of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry III (reigned 1039-1056). A certain superficial similarity may be granted.
Gunhild (or Gunnhild, or Gunnhildr) was the daughter of King Canute (Cnut) and his more-official wife Emma of Normandy (see genealogy in O'Brien, p. viii). This made her the full sister of the future king Harthacanute (Hardacnut, etc. -- I'm going to stop with the alternate spellings now) and the half-sister of Swein and Harold I Harefoot, Canute's sons by his less official wife Aelgifu of Northampton. (Canute had married Aelgifu as his first wife, out of love or at least lust, then married Emma, the second wife and widow of the old king Ethelred II "the Unready" out of politics -- Canute was a conqueror, and marrying the old king's wife smoothed his way. But he did not set aside Aelgifu).
We do not know when Gunhild was born, but it obviously must have been after Canute assumed the throne of England in 1016. This would make her no more than ten in 1027 when she went to Rome with her father. She may well have been much younger. But she was probably betrothed there to Henry, son of the Emperor Conrad II. It was a logical match; Canute, as King of England, Denmark, and Norway (O'Brien, p. xvii) was one of the strongest kings in Europe. The marriage may have helped seal a bargain; the Emperor ceded the province of Schleswig to Denmark at that time (Linklater, p. 139)
But the marriage had not yet taken place when Canute died in 1035. This led to a real mess in England; the presumably-official heir, Harthacanute, had been governing Denmark for his father, and while he succeeded at once to the Danish throne, his absence allowed Harold Harefoot to take the English throne (O'Brien, p. xix). Suddenly Gunhild, as the half-sister of the king rather than his daughter, was worth less in the marriage market. But, somehow or other, the marriage went through (O'Brien, p. 169).
O'Brien, pp. 170-171, tells the rest: "According to William of Malmesbury, after a fairy-tale beginning Gunnhhild's marriage went horribly wrong. Although she was reputedly a dutiful wife, Gunnhild was accused of adultery. In William's story she was offered a chance to prove her innocence through man-to-man combat. Gunnhild herself was not expected to participate; the informant of her alleged infidelity would take on a representative to fight on her behalf. The accuser, William claims, was a man of gigantic proportions and against this daunting individual Gunnhild could find no one willing to defend her except a small pageboy, who was the keeper of a pet starling she had brought with her from England. However... the pageboy won and, triumphant, Gunnhild refused ever to sleep with her husband, Henry, again. William writes that she subsequently divorced him, become a nun, and lived 'to a leisurely old age...'"
She and Henry had stayed together long enough to have a daughter, Beatrice (Barlow, genealogical table I in endpapers), but the girl too ended up in the church (O'Brien, p. 171).
The marital alliance by then hardly mattered anyway. Harold I Harefoot had died in 1040. Harthecanute had followed him on the throne, but died in 1042. Canute's dynasty was extinct (except for poor Gunhild, whom everyone apparently ignored). The English witan gave the throne to Edward the Confessor, the son of the old English king Ethelred II. Edward was the son of Emma, so he was Gunhild's half-brother -- but Emma was by this time pretty much forgotten; the link meant very little.
The similarities between Gunnhild's story and the plot of this ballad are obvious, although we note that "Sir Aldingar" gives a motive for the accusation against the queen, while there seems to be none in the historical case.
Entwhistle goes beyond even Child, ringing in William of Malmsbury's statement that a poem about this event circulated in England in his time (twelfth century):
"William of Malmesbury states definitively that a poem about Canute's daughter Gunhild, falsely accused before her husband the Emperor Henry III [emperor 1039-1057] and unexpectedly delivered, was 'nostris adhuc in triviis cantitata" (c. 1140). Brompton (c. 1350) names her accuser and defender, Roddyngar and Mimicon; Mathhew of Westminster gives us Mimecan. There is no doubt that these references are to a poem of traditional nature and content identical with the ballad of Sir Aldingar" (quoted by Chambers, p. 154).
Entwhistle might also have mentioned the account of Matthew Paris, who says that accounts of the wedding feast were still circulating in his time, another three quarters of a century after William of Malmesbury (Keen, p. 34).
About this Chambers is scathing: "But surely there could be no more gratuitous hypothesis than an assumption that a poem which, like Sir Aldingar, comes to us from the Percy MS. of about 1650 can be identical in style with one known to William of Malmesbury in the twelfth century." This is especially so since the English language changed dramatically between the reign of Canute and the time of the Percy manuscript -- the writer of the folio simply would not have understood the Old English poem. Chambers grants that there may be similar legends as the source.
I am not absolutely convinced even of this, although I grant the possibility. Accusations of unchastity against wives are not rare -- witness the fact that the Bible prescribes a trial by ordeal for women accused of hidden adultery (Numbers 5:11-31) -- almost the only instance in the Bible of guilt being assigned without actual evidence. Julius Caesar divorced one of his wives on mere suspicion of adultery. There are dozens of adultery ballads. The number of Scandinavian analogs to this piece cited by Child proves that there is no necessary dependence -- there are too many possible sources for something like this, including even the King Arthur legend.
The use of a champion is historical -- and sometimes required by law. In the Angevin period (well after Canture's time, but well before the Percy Folio was written) it was even rather normal in certain types of cases: "Trials in cases of right was theoretically by battle. The demandant could not fight his own battle, unlike in criminal cases: he had to be represented by someone supposedly a witness to the basis of his claim. The defendant could have a champion; professional champions were disapproved of in the twelfth century but were common in the thirteenth" (Mortimer, p. 58). Thus the idea represented in this song could fit the era of William of Malmsbury -- or be rather later.
Nor are boy-champions unusual; we see a sort of twisted parallel in "The Boy and the Mantle" [Child 29]. But the whole business is so obscure that not even Gunnhild's mother Emma, in her self-justifying book, mentions the poor girl (O'Brien, p. 124).
If there is a historical connection, it has been heavily distorted, because the king and queen in "Sir Aldingar" are Henry and Eleanor (either Henry II or England and Eleanor of Acquitaine, or Henry III and Eleanor of Provence). And, as Chambers points out on p. 157, William of Malmesbury was dead before even Henry II took the throne. One suspects the tale was attracted to Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine because of the accusations (probably false) that Eleanor was unfaithful. (For this, see the notes to "Queen Eleanor's Confession" [Child 156]).
Nor was Gunhild's story well-known in England. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the primary source for English history in this period never mentions Emperor Henry III by that name, although there are a few references to "the Emperor" in this period, and two manuscripts of the Chronicle mention his death in 1057, using his other name "Cona" (Swanton, pp. 186-187). Gunhild daughter of Cnut is not mentioned at all in the Chronicle (at least based on the index in Swanton and some online searches). There is a brief mention of Gunnhild the niece of Cnut, daughter of an unnamed sister of that King by Wytgeorn king of the Wends (Barlow, genealogical table II in endpapers); Swanton, p. 157 note 15, says that her uncle sent her into exile because he feared her husband was conspiring against him; Barlow, p. 57, while agreeing that she was exiled, more logically dates this to the reign of Edward the Confessor in 1044 (since Edward the Confessor would fear a revival of Cnut's lineage).
Conclusion: While this story might possibly have its roots in the tale of Gunnhild and Henry III, there are plenty of other sources from which such a tale might be assembled. - RBW
Bibliography
Barlow: Frank Barlow, Edward the Confessor (one of the English Monarchs series), University of California Press, 1970.
Chambers: E. K. Chambers, English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1945, 1947
Keen: Maurice Keen, The Outlaws of Medieval Legend, Dorset, 1961, 1977, 1987
Linklater: Eric Linklater, Conquest of England, Doubleday, 1966
Mortimer: Richard Mortimer, Angevin England 1154-1258, Blackwell, 1994
O'Brien: Harriet O'Brien, Queen Emma and the Vikings, Bloomsbury, 2005
Swanton: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, translated and edited by Michael Swanton, 1996 (I use the 1998 Routledge edition)
Child Collection Index- Child Ballad 059: Sir Aldingar
Child no. --Artist --Title --Album --Year --Length --Have
059 Brian Peters Sir Aldingar Songs of Trial and Triumph 2008 7:33 Yes
059 Chris Foster Sir Aldingar Outsiders 2008 No
059 Kornog Sir Aldingar Ar Seizh Avel (On Seven Winds) 1985 4:56 Yes