Lady Godiva rode a horse in the nude because of taxes

Lady Godiva rode a horse in the nude because of taxes

What you may have been told 

When the people of medieval Coventry were upset about their high taxes, Godiva, the wife of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, asked him to reduce them. He told her that he would if she would ride through the town naked. To everybody's surprise, she called his bluff. Out of respect, everybody looked away as she rode past, except one cheeky chap called Tom, later known as Peeping Tom.

Luckily, most of her body was covered by her long hair. The earl kept his word and lowered the taxes. How nice.

The debunking

A story always becomes a bit suspicious when there are no contemporary records - after all, if something this incredible happens you'd expect someone to make a note of it at the time. In medieval times, not that many people could read or write, but towns, nobles and the local clergy often kept records in one way or another, and several chroniclers were busy collecting all sorts of stories and news. But we have nothing about Lady Godiva being a nudist.

There really was a Leofric, who really had a wife called Godiva or Godgifu, which means God's gift), and they were in charge of Coventry in the eleventh century AD. Chroniclers write about how they ruled: how kind, generous and respectable she was; how they made donations to the church but ... no naked horse ride. For over a century since it supposedly happened, there's not a trace of the event anywhere. Then, in the thirteenth century, chroniclers of the abbey of St Albans wrote down the whole naked horse-ride story and it understandably became very popular.

Perhaps there were earlier records that later vanished - it happens - but we need to stick with what we can prove. On top of that, there's also just too much about the story that doesn't quite add up.

Coventry at the time wasn't much of a town. In fact, it was barely even a village - the Domesday Book records so villagers, 12 smallholders and 7 slaves living there in 1086 and it belonged to Godiva. It was her possession, so raising taxes was her privilege, not her husband's. You may think that, as a woman, she would be subservient to her husband and so, although legally the owner, she wouldn't have much real power. But that was not necessarily the case back then; medieval women rulers often had power and influence of their own.

Godiva was rich and powerful even before her marriage. She owned land given to her directly from the king, so the idea of her having to appeal to her husband, humble herself, even beg him on behalf of the villagers, fits in the era when the myth first appeared but not the time when it supposedly happened. This small village was hers, and so were any taxes.

The size of Coventry then also doesn't quite fit the image later depicted of a crowded city with streets and marketplaces.

This is much more like Coventry a century later. So the audience for any nudey ride would have been fairly small, and made of up Lady Godiva's own peasants. What is also interesting is that the tax most likely related to ownership of horses, and most of the inhabitants of Coventry back then wouldn't have owned a horse so the number of people helped by her sacrifice would have been even smaller. Medieval chroniclers often had the unpleasant habit of using their imagination and adding fun little details to what they were writing about. Come to think of it, that's an urge some historians to this day can't resist.

If you look at all the later descriptions you'll find more and more details being added or changed. Some even include the dialogue between Godiva and her husband. It is extremely unlikely that someone was close enough to overhear them, noted down their exchange, kept it safe for a century or so and then quoted it to the cleric so he could write it down.

And if you were wondering about Peeping Tom, the only person in Coventry to take a peek at the naked lady, and who was struck with blindness or paid for it with his life, there's no mention of him anywhere till the seventeenth century.

There are similarities with other stories that some of our medieval clerics probably knew about, and pagan fables and ceremonies sometimes involved naked women on horses. Add to that local folklore, rumours, gossip and the unreliability of the oral tradition and very little is left that we can rely on. It wouldn't be the first time several different stories got mixed up and combined into a new one.

Who knows, it may have started with Lady Godiva riding into the village telling people she was going to lower their taxes, but she forgot to wear a cloak and didn't cover her hair, and people started talking about how she was so eager to give them the good news that she didn't even get dressed properly ...

Or maybe she did penance for something completely different, riding through the village wearing just her chemise, an under-dress, which would have been quite something back then. So even if someone had written down that she rode through the village undressed', we'd still not know what they exactly meant.