The Lady Godiva Legend

The story of Lady Godiva is one of the most familiar in the English-speaking world. A noblewoman of eleventh-century Coventry, distressed by the heavy taxation of her husband Earl Leofric, prayed that he would lift the burden from the people. He answered that he would do so when she had ridden naked through the streets of the town. She did so, and the people of Coventry, by previous arrangement, stayed indoors and shuttered their windows. Only one man, Tom the tailor, looked out, and he was struck blind — or so the legend says. The historical figure behind the legend, however, was a real Anglo-Saxon noblewoman, and the long passage from the historical to the legendary is one of the great examples of the folkloric amplification of a real person.

This article is part of the wider survey of the Legendary Women of folk tradition and of the larger survey of Folk Heroes and Legendary Figures. It follows the legend from the historical Godgifu of the eleventh century through the chronicles of Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris, the visual tradition of the Renaissance and the Victorians, and the modern uses of the legend in marketing and political rhetoric, and it connects to the wider currents of the Celtic tradition of the divine horse, the Medieval European Hero tradition, and the European Folklore of the medieval west.

The Historical Godgifu

The historical Godgifu (in Old English, “God’s gift”) was a noblewoman of the mid-eleventh century, the wife of Leofric, the Earl of Mercia, one of the most powerful men in Anglo-Saxon England. She is recorded in the Liber Vitae of the monastery of Ely as a great benefactress, and she and Leofric are remembered as the founders of a number of religious houses, including the Benedictine monastery of Coventry and the great cathedral priory of Stow in Lincolnshire. The historical Godgifu lived, by the usual estimate, from c. 1040 to c. 1080, surviving her husband by some ten years.

The First Version of the Legend

The earliest version of the legend is in the Chronica of Roger of Wendover, the monk of St Albans, written in the first half of the thirteenth century. Roger tells the story of Godgifu, who was distressed by the heavy taxation of the people of Coventry, and who pleaded with her husband to lift the burden. Leofric, weary of her pleading, said that he would do so when she had ridden naked through the town. Godgifu, with great faith, did so, and Leofric, moved by her devotion, kept his word and freed the people of Coventry from the tax.

The legend in Roger’s version is, importantly, not yet the legend of the Peeping Tom. It is a story of piety and self-sacrifice, in which the noblewoman humbles herself for the sake of the people, closer to the legend of the Christian saint who undergoes trials for the faith. The legend was further embellished by Matthew Paris, the great thirteenth-century chronicler of St Albans, who repeated Roger’s account in his Chronica Majora and added a number of details: the horse on which Godgifu rode, the long hair that covered her body, the chain of flowers she wore. Matthew’s version became the standard medieval version.

The Peeping Tom of Coventry

The figure of Peeping Tom does not appear in the medieval sources. He is first recorded in the early seventeenth century, and his story is a later embellishment. In the seventeenth-century version, Tom the tailor was one of the townspeople who had agreed to stay indoors during Godiva’s ride. He could not resist the temptation to look, and he was struck blind — or, in some versions, struck dead — for his presumption. The Peeping Tom story is a typical example of the way folk legend grows: a figure that does not exist in the earliest sources is added in later versions, in response to a felt need in the tradition for a cautionary figure. The Peeping Tom of Coventry is the figure of the male gaze, punished for his presumption, and his appearance in the tradition is a sign of the moral seriousness of the medieval legend.

The Tennyson Poem and the Visual Tradition

The legend was given a famous nineteenth-century treatment in Tennyson’s poem “Godiva” of 1840, in which Godiva is a figure of high moral seriousness, a meditation on the duty of the powerful to the powerless. The Victorian era was the great age of the Godiva image. The painter John Collier produced a celebrated Lady Godiva in 1897, and William Holman Hunt, Edmund Blair Leighton, and Frank Dicksee all produced important Godiva paintings. The image of the unclad noblewoman on horseback, with long flowing hair covering her body, became a fixture of the Victorian visual imagination. The image was also popular in advertising and marketing, and it was used in many campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to advertise soaps, hair products, and luxury goods.

The Modern Uses of the Legend

The Lady Godiva legend has been used, in the modern period, in a great many ways. The marketing tradition has used the name of Godiva for chocolates, lingerie, and other luxury goods. The political rhetoric of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used Godiva as a symbol of the people against the tyrant. The legend has also been the subject of a great deal of modern scholarship, in which the historical Godgifu has been separated from the legendary Lady Godiva, and the long process of amplification has been traced.

The Celtic and European Context

The Lady Godiva legend belongs to a wider pattern of European folk tradition, and the comparison of Godiva with the other legendary women of the European tradition is a small study in itself. The comparison of the Godiva legend with the Celtic tradition of the divine horse is particularly interesting: the medieval Celtic world remembered a number of horse-goddesses — Epona, Rhiannon, the Macha of the Irish tradition, the Boudicca of the British tradition — and the figure of the noblewoman on horseback is one of the great images of medieval European folklore. The connection of the Godiva legend to this older tradition is part of the wider world of the Celtic Folklore section.

The Godiva legend also belongs to the wider pattern of the Medieval European Hero tradition. The figure of Godiva, like the figure of Joan of Arc, like the figure of Robin Hood, like the figure of King Arthur, is the figure of a real person whose memory was preserved in the folk tradition and who came, in the long passage of the centuries, to mean far more than the historical person ever could.

Sources and Further Reading

Blanton, Dana C. The Original Rider of the Horse Blanket: Lady Godiva. 1998.
Donato, Anthony. Lady Godiva. The Warburg Institute, 1983.
Child, Francis James, ed. English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 5 vols. Houghton Mifflin, 1882–98.
Mercia, Hugh. Godiva and Coventry. 1976.