Lady Godiva: The Tax Tale and Her Documented Wealth
Lady Godiva's famous ride first appears in writing in the thirteenth century, long after the eleventh-century noblewoman lived. The tale places her on horseback in Coventry, seeking relief from taxes imposed by her husband, Leofric, Earl of Mercia. Its earliest written appearance is in Roger of Wendover's Flores Historiarum. There is no mention of the ride in the two centuries after her death, although her generosity to churches receives several mentions.
Lady Godiva and Leofric were generous benefactors of religious houses. In 1043, he founded and endowed a Benedictine monastery at Coventry, on the site of a nunnery the Danes had ruined in 1016. Writing in the thirteenth century, Roger of Wendover credited her with persuading him to make that gift. In the 1050s, her name appeared alongside her husband's on a land grant to the monastery of St Mary, Worcester, and on the endowment of the minster at Stow St Mary, Lincolnshire. Other monasteries commemorated the couple as benefactors, including those at Leominster, Chester, Much Wenlock, and Evesham.
Their generosity also took the form of precious objects. She gave Coventry works in precious metal made by the goldsmith Mannig and left it a necklace valued at 100 marks of silver. Another necklace went to Evesham, where it was to hang around a figure of the Virgin Mary accompanying a life-size gold and silver rood the couple had donated. St Paul's Cathedral in London received a gold-fringed chasuble. Early Norman bishops carried the couple's donations to Normandy or melted them down for bullion.
Land provides another view of Lady Godiva's wealth. Her name appears in charters and the Domesday Book, with variations in spelling. After Leofric died in 1057, she survived into the period following the Norman Conquest of 1066; her death falls between that year and 1086. Domesday identifies her as one of the few Anglo-Saxons, and the only woman, who remained a major landholder shortly after the conquest. By the survey of 1086, she had died, and others held her former lands. The manor of Woolhope in Herefordshire, together with four others, had also been given to Hereford Cathedral by the benefactresses Wulviva and Godiva before the conquest.
A popular story says Lady Godiva repeatedly asked her husband to reduce the burdens on Coventry's people. He eventually made relief conditional on her riding naked through town. In the familiar version, she accepted, ordered everyone indoors with their windows shut, and rode covered only by her long hair. Yet the oldest form gives the scene a different audience: she passes through Coventry market while people are assembled, attended by two knights.
The tax itself changed in later versions. Richard Grafton's Chronicle of England, published in 1569, says Leofric had already freed Coventry's people from tolls except those on horses. In this telling, the ride wins relief specifically from the horse tax. Godiva also requires the officials to forbid spectators under a severe penalty and to have residents close their windows and remain inside. The ballad Leoffricus in the Percy Folio, dating to around 1650, follows Grafton's version: customs on horses are the burden, and town officers give the order to shut doors and windows.
Peeping Tom adds a further layer. His tale probably developed through local Coventry lore, and published tellings date from the eighteenth century or later. Paul de Rapin wrote in 1732 of a man whose decision to watch cost him his life, and of a statue showing a man looking through a window. Thomas Pennant, writing in 1782, called the watcher a tailor. The earliest document naming Peeping Tom dates to 11 June 1773, when Coventry authorized a new wig and fresh paint for his wooden effigy. Later versions have him struck blind or dead.
Lady Godiva's image eventually moved onto money itself. In 1792, she appeared on the reverse of a Coventry halfpenny Conder token, part of the privately minted token coinage used in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Artists gave the ride other forms: Coventry commissioned a painting by Adam van Noort in 1586, and the city's weaver Thomas Stevens sold a woven silk picture of the procession among his designs. John Collier's painting is dated around 1897. Thomas Hancock Nunn directed that it be offered to Coventry if Hampstead declined it; the painting hangs in the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum.