It seems that St. Edward spent most of his time in Normandy until around the 1040s when he went back to England if I am remembering correctly. I am visiting England again in December and want to know if I could visit anywhere of significance to St. Edward, including a place of residence. Thanks!
Researchers regard English Kingship at least down to the reign of King John was essentially as itinerant - without the single fixed capital, as I briefly summarized before in: Did the King visit different parts of Medieval England regularly? Was his face instantly recognisable by most peasants?. That is so say, not only the king and his household, but also some more officials, courtiers and servant (hundreds in total in the 12th century) traveled around one place to another generally in the royal land (estate), with occasional (though generally regular) stops in the important power center like London for the important political events.
To give an example, the scribe of ASC: Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (of MS E) offers the location of a sudden death of Edward's half-brother, Harthacnut in 1042, as the royal manor at Lambeth by River Thames:
"Here [in this year] King Harthacnut passed away in Lambeth on 8 June; and he was king over all England for two years, all but 10 days; and he is buried in the Old Minster in Winchester with King Cnut, his father. And before he was buried, all the people chose Edward as king in London-may he hold it as long as God grants him! (ASE (MS E), a. 1041 [1042]. English translation is taken from [Swanton trans. 2000: 163])".
According to another manuscript of ASC (Manuscript C), Edward had also apparently accompanied with King Harchacnut for a while at the traveling royal court:
"And soon in that year [1041] came from beyond the sea Edward his [Harthacnut's] brother on the mother's side - King Æthelred's son, who had been driven from his country many years earlier, and yet was sworn in as king; and then he dwelled thus in his brother's court as long as he lived (ASE (MS C), a. 1041. English translation is taken from [Swanton trans. 2000: 162])".
"Central" governance of Late Anglo-Saxon rulers, including Edward the Confessor himself, also generally fall into this pattern.
Then, how to track and to reconstruct the itinerary of individual rulers in the High Middle Ages? Chroniclers usually mention only the date and place of important events, so we have to rely on other types of evidence, but the royal documents (charters and writs) issued in King Edward's name (AFAIK 167 are apparently extant in the standard electronic database called E-Sawyer usually does specify neither the exact date nor the place of issuing the document. So, we don't have any conclusive clue on where he or the royal household stayed except for important events for most of his reign.
Open Domesday (E-Database of Domesday Book in 1086) also lists 791 landed property [royal demesne] of Edward the Confessor in 1066 (prior to the Norman Conquest), and they apparently largely confined within southern England, especially in the old kingdom of Wessex: https://opendomesday.org/name/king-edward/
So, Edward was probably traveling around these scattered royal lands from one to another, mainly in southern England. This is the "core area" of Edward's direct political wealth as well as influence, but researchers tend to make a note that even in southern England Edward's power in this regard was probably not so absolute - since landholding of the family member of the Godwins roughly overlapped with those of Edward and controlled the third of the total land of the kingdom according to one estimation (Huscroft 2005: 24f.).
Nevertheless, at least one political center played a crucial role in late Anglo-Saxon England, including the reign of Edward: Winchester - it was where Edward was crowned at Easter of 1043 (ASC (CDE), a. 1043), but it was also the royal mausoleum of his direct predecessors as well as the power base of his potential political rival, his mother Emma and Godwin. The author of Edward's standard biography, Frank Barlow, compares Winchester as "the true heart of the kingdom" (Barlow 1970: 62).
One of the first deeds of Edward in the first years of his reign was to confiscate his mother's treasure at Winchester, as the scribe of ASC (D) records:
"After that year [1043], 14 days before St. Andrew's Day [the middle of November], the king was so counselled that he - and Earl Leofric and earl Godwine and Earl Siward and their band - rode from Gloucester to Winchester, on the Lady [Emma] by surprise, and robbed her of all the treasures which she owned, which were untold, because earlier she was very hard on the king her son, in that she did less for him than he wanter before he became king, and also afterwards; and they let her stay there inside afterwards (ASC (D), a. 1043. [Swanton trans. 2000: 163])."
Late Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman Winchester has also been well excavated and researched by archaeologists, and last year [2021] they has just published the collection of essays on its significance in the period from 800 to 1200, though I haven't checked it yet: Lavelle, Ryan, Simon Roffey & Katherine Weikert (eds.), Early Medieval Winchester: Communities, Authority and Power in an Urban Space, c.800-c.1200, Oxford: Oxbow, 2021.
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