The Search for Lady Godiva

By Robert Hendry

Lady Godiva’s naked ride through Coventry as a protest against oppressive tax entered history! Did it really take place? Historian and Godiva descendant Robert Hendry offers compelling evidence from 1000 years ago that it did! Discover the social and religious background to this famous event and unravel the mystery of where she was laid to rest. 120,000 words + 100 illustrations, appendices.

We all know of Lady Godiva’s naked ride to spare the people of Coventry from taxes imposed by her husband, Leofric, Earl of Mercia. Did an Anglo-Saxon Countess who was married to one of the most powerful men in England really strip off her clothes and do as her husband demanded? How could he make such a bizarre demand? Was it true, or was it fantasy?

It may surprise you, but unlike the fictitious King Arthur and Robin Hood, Lady Godiva really did exist! She was born c1004 and died in 1067, and in her day was renowned for her piety and her beauty.

Revered for centuries for placing the good of the common folk before her own modesty, the last couple of hundred years have not been good for Godiva. She was reviled in Victorian times as shameless and as late as 1999, deranged Coventry councillors proposed to expunge her from the City’s image!

The modern controversy is not about her respectability, but whether the ride ever happened. Robert Hendry, the author of 26 historical titles, and descended from the legendary countess, uses research tools he has successfully employed on many occasions in a searching account of Godiva that explores many avenues that have been neglected by previous writers.

We examine the earliest accounts of the naked ride, as the author applies psychological profiling to Godiva and Leofric. If the legend is true, it survived in verbal form for the first 150 years. The author analyses how verbal tradition operated, and its potential accuracy.

He illustrates his point with a fantastic legend handed down in his family for over 300 years that “one of your ancestors wore armour”, a line that sounds like it escaped from a Walt Disney film rather than history! Sitting in a museum on a dull day in 2008, he turned up the 1683 will of a Civil War Era Major-general who bequeathed his bow and quiver, his arms and armor to his eldest son! The was the contemporary documentary evidence that the story was true!

We examine not one but two early Godiva legends, the possibility of distortion or manipulation of the story and Godiva’s remarkable legacy. Her celebrated ride was one minor episode in the life of a pious and compassionate woman. With her husband Leofric, her brother Thorold and her sister Wulviva, she poured her fortune into church building, yet her antecedents are obscure. After a painstaking search of property records to establish patterns, Robert suggests that Godiva was descended from another legendary Anglo-Saxon woman.

Of interest to genealogists and those with a love of family history will be an appendix tracing some of the Godiva lines into modern times. Tens of thousands, perhaps millions of people, if they did but know it, are descended from this remarkable woman whose granddaughter Edith was successively Queen of North Wales and then the last Anglo-Saxon Queen of England.

Although the Anglo-Saxon ‘sun’ set with the Conquest in 1066 and Godiva died not long after, her granddaughter’s descendants married into the new Norman elite, and every reigning British monarch from 1413 has been descended from Godiva, Countess of Mercia.

We visit Godiva’s resting place in the church she founded a thousand years ago in Evesham, but which was dynamited in 1870. A fragment of her church survived the explosion and may well be her burial place.

Read “The Search for Godiva”, and find out what a historian and descendant of Godiva suggests happened a thousand years ago.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Hendry
• Release date: Jul 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476194936

Robert Hendry

Hi there.My name is Robert Hendry, and over the past 30 years, I have 26 published Non-Fiction books in paper form. I recently decided I would like to branch out into the Fiction field, initially with a subject I have studied for a similar length of time, the Soviet Union.During that time I got to know a good deal about Soviet military hardware and operational doctrine, and after the break up of the USSR, it was interesting to actually see at first hand the stuff I had studied at a distance.Seeing a Termit Surface to surface missile fired for real beats any number of photos!The majority o COl War Era novels have a Western hero and Soviet baddies. In the 1980s, as the Brezhnev era ground to a stand, various factions view for power, and my novels have brought in a limited CIA or MI6 involvement, but the main action is between good guys and bad guys in the USSR.The First Novel to be relesed on Smashwords is "To Kill Our WOrthy Comrade", which covers a plot to assassinate the General Secretary at his dacha in the Crimea in 1981. The real 1991 plot took place at the replacement dacha just a few kilometres along the coast.The novel introduces the C-in-C of the Black Sea FLeet, Admiral Petrov who is drawn into the fight to defeat the plotters and a 19 year old girl communications rating, Lidiya. She is one of those girls who just seem to attract trouble, as you will discover in the Lidiya Petrova Series No 2 and No 3.I managed to get No 2, The Admiral's Woman on line, and if you felt that Lidiya had a pretty easy time in No 1, and landed on her feet, you will fidcover that things get a bit more hectic for the lovely Lidiya in "The Admiral's Woman".As you will have gathered I have these two very different publishing careers and I have thoroughly enjoyed both of them. As a historian, I have to rely on available sources, and imagination is not on. As a novelist, it is important to get facts right but after that the more imaginative and original the storyline the better.All the BestRObert H

Book preview

Introduction

Trinity Street in Coventry is a 1937 highway that cut through from Hales Street and Corporation Street to the north end of Broadgate, obliterating the Bull Ring and Great Butcher Row. It is a convenient starting point for anyone who is searching for Godiva. Coventrians might give a sigh of nostalgia for the circular brown and cream bus stop on the left and the Daimler double decker in the distance in this 1970s view. The flowerbeds provide the modern frontage to Holy Trinity Church.

*****

Much though I would like to, I cannot put a precise date on when Godiva walked or perhaps rode into my life. That I was quite small is certain, but living only twelve miles from Coventry, and with a ‘nanny’ who was a local girl, I could not have been very old. My impression is that it was around the same time as Snow White and Robin Hood made themselves known to me.

With the wonderful Disney cartoon, Snow White was assuredly my favourite, and like most little boys, and in common with the handsome Prince and all seven dwarfs, I fell hopelessly in love with her. It was very easy to see why ‘The Wicked Queen’ was jealous, as Snow White was smashing.

Although I would never have admitted it to anyone, as boys did not do soppy things like falling in love with girls, even if they were as special as Snow White, I adored her, and felt quite jealous of the Prince. He did absolutely nothing for his girl when she was in danger, leaving it to the dwarfs to bring the wicked queen to account, but won her hand by giving her a kiss on the last page of the book.

Robin Hood was outstanding, but in a totally different way. I admired him as a resolute, forthright hero, taking firm action against the naughty Normans who oppressed the land, and becoming a splendid role model in the process. Of the three characters, Godiva came third, and maybe not even third, for a host of new characters entered my life before I was five.

My mother was born in the Isle of Man in 1906 and was forty-two years old when I was born, having children being delayed by a family tragedy when she was younger, and then by an obnoxious man called Adolf Hitler. After one miscarriage in 1946/47, I arrived in 1948, but with such a late onset of motherhood, there were to be no siblings.

From an early age, my mother read to me when it was time to go to sleep. Enid Blyton was soon a favourite, but sometimes my mother would tell me stories that had been related to her about the Isle of Man in her childhood. Located in the centre of the Irish Sea, the Island developed a folklore all its own.

Soon I knew all about the Bugganes, the Phynnodderree, the Manx Fairies, (who were unlike their more vapid English cousins), and even the Taroo Ushtey. I heard the scary legend of the Moddey Dhoo or Mauthe Dhoo. Most folk tales are located in a ‘Never-Never’ land that we know we will not visit, so are suitably removed from us and from reality. The Mauthe Dhoo was different, as it was located in a real place where my mother’s ancestors had lived. It had far more impact and was terrifying.

Exciting though these stories were, they were folklore, and the stories I adored most of all were about real people. She would tell me of Sukie Corrin, who was not an ancestor but a distant relation. She would say that we were descended from a place called Milntown in the Isle of Man, that one branch of the family came from Galloway in southwest Scotland, and most improbable of all, that one of our ancestors had worn armour.

We bought a television when I was five years old to watch the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. On the great day, our lounge was filled with friends and neighbours and mum probably did not see that much of the event as she was the perfect hostess seeing that everyone had a regular refill of tea and biscuits.

Although we now had TV, the tradition of bedtime stories continued and given the choice of Snow White, Robin Hood, the assorted Manx folklore tales or stories about real people such as Sukie, the real stories won. Poor Godiva, who seemed to be more legend than fact, was relegated to a very minor role in my life.

As I grew older the bedtime stories ceased, but by that time, I had heard them so many times that the details were indelibly fixed in my mind. Other interests ensued, but before my mother died at the age of 79, I had jotted down some of the details she gave me about our family, though I wish I had done a lot more.

By then I had qualified in Law and Accountancy but had decided I preferred historical research and writing to accountancy. My first book was published in 1976 and gave my mother great pleasure as she said she would have loved to write, had family circumstances when she was in her teens made that possible. Before she died that initial title had increased to seven hardback titles in print.

Books continued to appear, my fifteenth title appearing in 1999, which was an important year for me in another way. In 1998, I had met a charming Russian girl, Elena Aleksandrovna Plotkina, and we married in April 1999. Life took a definite turn for the better and we were thinking of starting a family when I achieved an unwelcome double within the space of 24 hours. I had a stroke and a heart attack in 2004!

I would not recommend this to anyone! With good medical care at the local hospital in Rugby, and devoted attention from Elena, I came through this trial relatively unscathed, for which I am eternally grateful.

During my convalescence, I decided that with almost twenty historical works in print or in the pipeline, it was high time that I knew more of my own family history. I had reasonable information upon a dozen names. A hurried search for old family papers took the list up to sixteen or seventeen names that first evening, which was splendid progress.

I set a target of going back at least four generations on every line, as my mother always told me.

‘Your mother’s mother’s mother is just as important as your father’s father’s father.’

Eight years later, that target has been comfortably surpassed and I have been able to trace every one of my ancestors for 200 years, and track several lines for a thousand years or more.

When many people struggle to get back even two hundred years, this may sound unlikely, but the explanation lies in the curious nature of society in the Isle of Man where both my parents had roots. From 1405, the Stanley family, later Earls of Derby, ruled the Island. Their Manx title was originally Kings of Mann, and later Lords of Mann. The title ‘Derby’ did not relate to the Midlands town, but to West Derby in Lancashire.

The Stanleys wanted dependable people to run their new possessions, as they felt that Manx born officials would favour their fellow countrymen at the expense of the Stanleys! The obvious answer was to use the younger sons of neighbouring Lancashire squires and landowners that were personally known to them. They would be dependable, but not on a par with the Stanleys, so were unlikely to become over-mighty servants.

Younger sons from the Tyldesley, Preston, Parr and Radcliffe families made their way to the Isle of Man, often from more than one generation. Although not on the same social level as their Stanley employers, they were well off. Their descendants rose to prominence, and in the absence of titled nobility on the Island, other than the Stanleys who were not resident in any case, filled the role that titled families customarily did in England.

The most notable instance of the prestige garnered by these families was that by 1727, the heir to the Tyldesley estates at ‘The Friary’ was regarded as a suitable match for the daughter of a younger son of the Bickerstaffe branch of the Stanley line. As heir to the Tyldesley estate he was well off, and with a respectable pedigree. She was descended from nobility, but as the daughter of a younger son, was not a major heiress in her own right.

At the time of writing, the President of Tynwald, which is the Manx Parliament, and is older than Westminster, the alleged ‘mother’ of parliaments, is the current occupant of ‘The Friary’, which was in the ownership of the Tyldesley family from the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536-1539 to the 1800s.

In most cases, marriages were within the circle of ‘official’ families grouped around ‘the Castle’ in Castletown where power rested. There was also marriage into well-established Manx families such as the Christians. They occupied the same site at Milntown for seven hundred, and Christian sons and daughters regularly married into the English squirearchy as well.

For over four hundred years, the Isle of Man was virtually a family business, owned by the Earls of Derby and later the Dukes of Atholl, and run on their behalf by around twenty families. As with titled families in England, marriage was a serious business and was frequently for dynastic reasons, or to create alliances. As in England where breeding could meet money, newly emerging families such as the mercantile Corrin family were accepted into the circle.

From my research into the Isle of Man between 1200 and 1800, it became clear that if you were descended from one of the inner circle, you would probably be descended from most of these families. I was able to trace Stephenson, Tyldesley, Stanley, Radcliffe, Preston, Parr, Norris, Wattleworth, Corlett, Christian, Casement and Garrett ancestry.

Because of their prominent role in official life, it was easier to trace these families in the Manx ‘goldfish’ bowl than was the case in the ocean of English country life, and the Stanleys, Stevensons, Tyldesleys, Radcliffes and Christians all had connections with the pre-1500 English squirearchy.

Whilst the majority of people in medieval society were born, lived and died without leaving any recorded trace, the landed families were a different matter and their pedigree has been worked over by countless historians and genealogists for the past three hundred years.

The first possible link to Godiva was through the Radcliffe family of Knockaloe in the Isle of Man, but I quickly realised that however disappointing it might be, this was tenuous. Historians and genealogists have argued for years about Lucia, Countess of Chester and whether she was descended from Godiva or her brother Thorold. Lady Katherine Keats-Rohan solved the problem in a superbly researched paper in favour of Thorold.

The first firm link emerged through the Stanley family, Earls of Derby, and in this case, there were at least two separate connections between Godiva and the Stanleys. As I was researching this book, I realised that through the marriage of Deemster (Judge) William Christian of Milntown to Mabel Curwen around 1576, there was a further connection to Godiva by way of the Curwen, Fairfax, Percy, Neville and Mortimer families.

This offered the curious coincidence that the Christians, who were the most powerful Manx family for hundreds of years, and dominated the alliance that finally broke the autocratic powers of the Stanley Lords of Mann in 1704 shared Godiva as a common ancestor with their Stanley lords.

The result of all this research was that Godiva entered my life once again, but in a much more intimate way than when I had been a child. She was family! The girl who could be called the patron saint of streakers was what my wife would call, Nasha. This wonderful Russian word means Ours, and denotes a sense of family belonging.

In genealogical research, it is a thrill when a ‘new’ ancestor emerges from the mists of antiquity, and there is a feeling of gratitude if you know when they were born, got married, what family they had, and when they died.

Those are the bare bones of research, but after a while a family history that is confined to dates becomes as exciting as reading the telephone directory. If you can flesh out the story and even add clothes, although that is not perhaps the right phrase for the Countess of Mercia, it is far more interesting.

I had been extraordinarily lucky in finding leads that did permit word portraits of quite a number of people back to the 1600s, and in the process had proved the legends about Sukie, Milntown, Galloway and the armour, but Godiva was a well-known historical personage, so it should be easy enough to find out about her.

The first thing I discovered was that Godiva was controversial. In some accounts she was a courageous woman who sacrificed her modesty to save others from an oppressive tax burden that her grasping husband was demanding. I found a Victorian account that expressed outrage at the Godiva celebrations in Coventry and implied that Godiva was a shameless hussy who was best forgotten.

That I could understand, as the Victorians felt that table legs were best kept covered, whilst women’s’ skirts reached down to below their ankles. If a music hall entertainer who wore a short skirt was considered fast, that word would not even begin to describe Godiva, who discarded not merely her skirt, but every other stitch of clothing in public.

By the latter part of the twentieth century, attitudes were more relaxed, but Godiva remained controversial. The new dispute was not whether the lady was fast or not, but whether the ride ever took place. The battle lines were not the slut or saint campaigns of Victorian times but a Did She/Didn’t She battle that seemed every bit as heated as the old conflict.

I had been vaguely aware of this, but it was only when Godiva became, Nasha – Ours that I decided I wanted to know more. After studying twenty or thirty different accounts, I had read a great deal more about my ancestor but felt I knew her a lot less well than when I was five years old.

The situation reminded me of a joke that if you asked a hundred economists about a specific problem, you would have a hundred and one mutually incompatible answers. It seemed as if Godiva possessed the same remarkable properties!

As a historical researcher and writer, I had been used to applying a variety of techniques in my chosen field, which was railways, tramways, buses and shipping. In these fields, many writers concentrate on the hardware, i.e. engines, tramcars, buses or ships, and people play a minor role.

Interesting though the hardware is, individual human beings shape history and decide what happens. The first book I wrote where people really mattered was a history of the Manx Northern Railway that was published in 1980, and over thirty years later is still the definitive work on the subject.

One of my books, Mann at Sea looked at the close association between the Isle of Man, often spelled with a double n and shipping. One episode featured a battle within the Isle of Man Steam Packet Co Ltd shortly after the end of the Great War, in which one faction wished to keep the company in being. The other faction wanted to sell up and make a fast buck, regardless of the harm it would do to the Island.

It was a classic good guy/bad guy duel. On the one side were those who cared for the community they lived in. Ranged against them were those who were keen to line their own pockets. A near verbatim report of the battle existed, but many of the protagonists had been friends of my mother’s family, and as a teenager she had known them, and had told me their personal quirks and foibles. As I read the proceedings of the meeting, their responses often mirrored the word portraits she had painted of them.

People make history, and what they do is determined by how they think and by their characters. By trawling every source I could, I was able to build up a portrait of the people who took part in this crucial debate. Although no crime was involved I was applying the same kind of logic that the Behavioural Science Unit of the FRI pioneered in the 1960s.

Psychological profiling, as it is known, requires every shred of evidence to be assessed to build up a picture of the subject’s habits, employment, marital status, mental condition and personality. I was not dealing with criminals, but trying to assess how the subject’s character affected their actions.

In most scientific fields, anyone should be able to repeat the same experiment anywhere with an identical result. In psychology, scientific methods are used, but the result is not repeatable, as no two people are identical, so the same experiment will yield different results. This is an anathema to most scientists. As a result a heated but sterile debate exists within the scientific world as to whether psychology is a science or not.

Few historians are happy examining the psychology of their subjects, as it cannot be an ‘exact’ science, and academia tends to apply the same disdain to psychology as some scientists do. The FBI and the police, who live in the real world and face real problems, are more discerning, seeing psychology as a useful tool in their battle to seek the truth. They also know it must be used with care as it is a pointer rather than ‘smoking gun’ evidence.

Historians prefer to stick to documentary evidence, but in the 1970s, I found out how fragile the documentary record could be. I was researching the history of the Manx Northern Railway, and read contemporary newspapers, proceedings in the Manx parliament, annual reports and so on. I was able to read the company minute books, and even had access to 20,000 letters written by the company’s most outstanding manager.

I found that history is not two-faced, but three-faced. There is what appears in the newspapers, so is public knowledge. There is what is discussed in official meetings at board level, and if that record is open to a historian, the picture it gives can be very different to the public face. This is commonly known, but what of the third face?

The 20,000 letters I read gave the private thoughts and agenda of the decision makers, and that often differed from what appeared in the official papers. It is rare that a historian has access to all three faces of history, and I relished the opportunity I had been given. I also had the good fortune to be put in touch with the son of the man whose letters I had read. John Cameron had died in 1921, more than quarter of a century before I was born.

When I sent a copy of the manuscript to his son who was then in his eighties, he wrote back to me to say that I had written of his father as if we had been lifelong friends, and that it was a stunning likeness to the man he knew so long ago. Those remarks mean more to me than any review I have ever received, for it suggests that I had got it right, but the credit belonged not to me, but to the letters I had studied so avidly, and to their writer.

With the shipping battle and the Manx Northern Railway I had been describing events concerning people who had died before I was born but about which it was then still possible to gain first hand accounts, and to read what they had written and done. With Godiva it was more of a problem, as her alleged ride took place around 1040, or almost a thousand years ago.

Early writers took the published accounts of Godiva’s ride and added their own embellishments, but did little or no research, and more recent popular accounts followed the same path. Most accounts of Godiva that have been penned since 1600 bear little relationship to the earliest known records, and are valueless.

Serious academic writers had quite rightly sliced through the detritus of centuries, but having got back to the earliest account, they have thrown those out as well. It is a case of throwing away the bathwater, the baby and the bathtub. In effect they say that unless the evidence is beyond all doubt, and not even the ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ of criminal law, that baby, bathtub and all must be consigned to oblivion.

What seems to have happened is that as a gap of almost two hundred years exists between Godiva’s ride and the first written account, most historians have decided that it is professionally unwise to accept a story that many of them see as tawdry. History should be about serious things, not about a woman who may or may not have ridden around naked on a horse. The result has been a plethora of accounts saying the legend is probably fictitious.

I am tempted to say that the Fabrication Theory over Godiva’s ride has become a modern equivalent of the Phlogiston Theory that emerged in physics in 1667. Phlogiston was a substance without colour, odour, taste or mass that was contained in all combustible substances and given off during burning. It had no basis in reality and no serious evidence could be advanced in its defence, but for more than a century it was a central tenet of science, and anyone challenging it was held up to ridicule.

In Godiva research, it is nowadays fashionable in academic circles to say the ride never happened, and that anyone who differs is peddling fantasy. As no one likes to expose himself or herself to ridicule from their professional peer group, it would take a bold academic to say it did take place.

All of the fabrication theories face an underlying problem, as it is necessary to explain why an enduring legend arose over something that never happened! The old saying that there is no smoke without fire has changed in this instance to all smoke but no fire.

A series of ingenious theories have been advanced over the last hundred years ‘to prove’ why Godiva’s ride must be fiction. Proving that something did not happen is inevitably harder than proving it did happen, but as I reviewed the fiction theories, one thing was clear.

However weak the case is for the Godiva ride is, and there are problems with it, the case for the ‘no ride’ theories is much weaker. A written account that existed within two hundred years is dismissed as the work of a careless and gullible monk, yet other statements from the same source are accepted as fact. A second independent account is similarly dismissed.

We are told the story must have been garbled accidentally or deliberately, but no one seems to have made any effort to consider if this is likely or even feasible. The questions any investigator must ask are, WHAT, WHY, WHEN and WHO. I have not seen a single ‘no ride’ account that made a serious attempt to ask those questions, let alone answer them.

The standard of proof that is demanded from those who say the ride took place is high, and that is perfectly reasonable. No proof and no serious research are needed to advance the fabrication theories.

I say theories, as there are several of them. Indeed, I am reminded of the apocryphal story of the son of an eminent barrister who was accused by his headmaster of breaking a window. He replied, ‘In the first place, no proof has been adduced that there is a wall. In the second place there is no window. In the third place it isn’t broken. In the fourth place, I didn’t break it. In the fifth place it was an unavoidable accident.’

The defences are mutually incompatible, but reflect a truism in law that all the defendant needs to do is to win on one count and the charge must be dismissed. It also shows where the burden of proof lies, which is with the other side. In Godiva research the fabrication theories need no evidence to support them, whilst the ride theory needs ‘smoking gun’ evidence. This is not sound academic practice and does not produce good history.

I have written more than twenty-five books on historical subjects and what, why, when and who were repeatedly thrown at me by my father who would challenge any assertion I made that was not adequately researched. In researching for one of our books we found that a date that had been accepted for decades was out by almost thirty years.

The originator of that date was a leading historian who had repeatedly crucified other writers for being out by a single day. Before my father was satisfied, I had to find five separate independent sources, and proving one date took a whole page of text, but no one has ever challenged those findings.

The work of a historian is often similar to that of a cop trying to work out who did the deed, to a health professional trying to identify the ailment, or an intelligence officer trying to detect a spy. I found that out from a most unlikely source. My mother trained as a civilian nurse before the war, and in 1939, as a regular army officer’s wife, was in Egypt with her husband.

A few weeks before war broke out, and much to her displeasure, she found she had volunteered to work for the Director of Military Intelligence to Middle East Forces in Cairo. Her transition from nursing to counter intelligence work was because of a German refugee from Hitler, who was staying at the boarding house where my parents were also staying due to some quirk in army regulations about married quarters.

My parents were married, but Army Regulations said they were not entitled to married quarters! The refugee, apart from fleeing for his life from Hitler, had medical problems, but what he ate did not make sense for his ailment. My mother was a trained dietician, and reported her worries to the DMI, assuming the so-called refugee would be immediately arrested.

Her first lesson in counter-intelligence was that the game was not played in that way. She found she had ‘volunteered’ to keep the suspect under surveillance, and before the duel was over, there had been a stand off in which he attempted to knife her, whilst she had a tureen of boiling soup. As she pointed out to him, he might get her, but he would get the soup in his face first. He believed her, which was wise, and backed off!

Apart from being scathing about the Abwehr, who ought to have hired a German nurse if they were using a medical cover story, she said that the man’s character did not match his cover story. This was the other reason her suspicions were aroused. She was employing dietary evidence, and what would later be called psychological profiling.

The refugee’s documents were impeccable and a counter intelligence officer going by them alone would have been deceived. I learned from that episode that it is not wise to confine yourself to documents alone, although these are the core of most historical research.

Lt-Colonel Oreste Pinto (1889-1961) in his book ‘Spycatcher’ makes exactly the same point, as personal characteristics, clothing, physical factors and the investigator’s wider background knowledge all play a role.

Few academic historians seem comfortable with building up a picture of the character’s background and behaviour, but as I have said this is a key tool used by every police force in the world in trying to create a manageable list of suspects.

It cannot be an exact science, as people can act wildly out of character, but it has helped solve many horrific crimes. Possibly because of The Case of the Spy who ate the Wrong Food, I was conditioned to look outside the envelope, just as my mother had done in 1939.

Had anyone applied character profiling to Godiva or her husband Leofric, Earl of Mercia? So far as I could see, no one had attempted to do so. Instead, a series of bland assumptions have been made, which went as follows.

An event such as this would have attracted a contemporary written record. No such record has been found, ergo the ride could not have taken place. That is sloppy thinking for several reasons. To cite just one, a record might have been made, but many more recent documents that must have existed no longer exist.

Serious historians state that verbal tradition is drivel after a couple of generations, so is not worthy of consideration by anyone. ‘Nakedness’ did not mean a lack of clothes as one might assume, but a lack of jewellery or finery. Lastly, it is suggested that there was a vested interest in an historic naked ride to attract visitors to Coventry eight hundred years ago, so a naked ride was invented, and Godiva just happened to be the lucky girl to have her name attached to it.

Each of these arguments has merit, and they may even be true, but the caution that is applied to Godiva’s nakedness must also be applied to the arguments that are advanced against it. I have tried to apply the same historical research techniques I have found to work in other fields to an event that may have taken place close on a thousand years ago.

I do not say that I know what happened, and anyone who suggests they do have the definite answer is either a fool or a knave. Unless incontrovertible fresh evidence comes to light, sometimes called smoking gun evidence, certainty is impossible. The best smoking gun evidence would be a written account from someone who was there. A letter from Godiva herself would be ideal.

‘Dear Mum, as you know Leofric was an absolute pig, so I went for a ride through the town naked this morning. It all went well. Love and kisses, Godiva.’

If I were to see such a letter I would have grave doubts for dozens of reasons, and although scrolls have turned up in the Dead Sea region that are hundreds of years older than the Godiva story, the likelihood of authentic contemporary evidence turning up is negligible.

We cannot know if a young woman mounted her horse in Coventry almost a thousand years ago and rode naked in public to save the poor of Coventry from starvation. It is a matter of opinion. An informed opinion can only be derived from the evidence, but we should seek evidence from as many sources as we can. That is the purpose of this book.

In historical research there can be hitherto overlooked evidence that has come to light but there is no such thing as ‘new’ evidence. The evidence has been there all along, but may have been lost or ignored. In this book, you will find a lot that is familiar, but I have re-examined the way we assess the evidence and ranged wider than is usual.

In doing so, I have opened myself to the challenge that I have added padding to support a case that is weak. I reject this argument. Thousands of accounts have been written about the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, some confining themselves to Hitler and the Nazi party. The more useful surveys have examined pre-existing attitudes to the Jews, Germanic nationalism and the desire for expansion in the East at the expense of the ‘sub-human’ Slav races.

Although most people imagine that Hitler invented the Nazi creed, in reality, every aspect of Nazism predated Adolf Hitler. He was a first class plagiarist, taking other people’s ideas and projecting them as his own.

General Friedrich Adolf Julius von Bernhardi (1849-1930) wrote a book, Germany and the Next War, before the Great War of 1914-1918, but it set out the rationale for the next-but-one war! Hitler’s contempt for peace, his master-race theories, the ‘law of struggle’, Germany’s biological right to land, or lebensraum, at the expense of the inferior Slav races, and pan-Germanic extremism were all there.

Von Bernhardi expounded so much of the Nazi creed with relentless clarity that I find it hard to believe that Hitler had not absorbed the malignant theories of this influential and high-ranking cavalryman who was a member of the famed Great General Staff.

The first German officer to ride through the Arc de Triomphe during the German Victory parade in Paris at the end of the French War of 1870-71, von Bernhardi commanded the Bernhardi Corps and later the Bernhardi Army Group on the Eastern Front during the Great War. He was awarded the coveted Pour le Merite, popularly known as ‘The Blue Max’, Germany’s highest military decoration in 1916.

Bernhardi’s words, which were a brutal definition of German intent in which the young Hitler had played no part, were ignored in England before 1914, just as Hitler’s identical comments in Mein Kampf were in the 1930s.

In reality, Hitler’s contributions to Nazism were brilliant PR, relentless determination and a magnetic personality to peddle the loathsome creed he acquired and then made his own. In a different age, he might have been a crusading bishop, or a brilliant marketing manager for toothpaste, cars or soup.

The best historians have taken into account the social and economic problems of the time in exploring why a creed that was as detestable as Nazism appealed to a nation that had as much to be proud of as Germany. What happened between 1919 and 1945 did not occur in a vacuum, but in a complex society riven by many problems. Hitler and his evil creed flourished not merely because of Hitler, but because of the wider world it evolved in.

We should not assume it was a one off, as it was a product of many things, and not just one evil man. We tend to play this down as it is more reassuring to think that Nazism was the warped product of one evil mind. If we believe that, we can be confident that it will not happen again. This is lazy and dishonest, for history shows us other men who were just as successful in the evil they did, most notably Stalin and Mao.

Historians can be uneasy when faced with such thoughts. Hitler was so evil that it is more comfortable to place the entire blame on him than to dilute the blame by admitting to pre-existing Nazi-like thoughts and socio-economic factors. Few of us would wish to give Hitler the slightest alibi, so we shunt our eyes to Friedrich Adolf von Bernhardi.

Similar factors apply with Godiva, as the story takes history into the realms of shaky evidence, morality, public nudity, voyeurism and candaulism, the latter being a desire by a man to have his wife seen naked by others. Rather than venture into such potentially muddy waters, many academics are more comfortable with the ‘no ride’ theory.

A couple of points remain to be made. A fatuous convention arose many years ago in publishing in which an author sought to make his ‘work’ as impersonal as possible. He did not use the dreaded ‘I’ word, and if he wished to relate a personal opinion or experience, he wrote ‘the author believes’ etc. In some of my earliest books, I followed this approach, but referring to myself as ‘the author’ is pompous and meaningless. The reader is intelligent enough to work out that ‘the author hopes’ means ‘I hope’, so I have discarded that quaint nonsense.

Many authors try to avoid a personal element in their books. I have outlined the personal experiences that have led me to look at the evidence across the board. The tale of the Nazi spy previously related is to show that a first class counter intelligence officer would have accepted the documentary evidence but it needed a dietician to spot the wrong eating habits. Documents are important, but eggs were more important in this case!

In Appendix III, I have covered the descent from Godiva to satisfy anyone’s curiosity. Am I biased? As I have gradually got to ‘know’ Godiva, I have developed a deep respect for this remarkable lady, so I am biased. Have I allowed that to warp my judgment? Hand-on-heart, I can say I believe I have not permitted affection to rule