The Lady Godiva legend has captured the imagination over the centuries. Clive Upton looks at the truth.

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Godgifu was an Anglo-Saxon landowner and the wife of an earl in 11th-century Coventry.

As such she was unusual – in being a woman – but far from unique.

Saxon law was remarkably even-­handed in its treatment of men and women, and the property a woman brought to a marriage remained hers. Like her near contemporary, Wulfruna of Wolverhampton, Godgifu chose to bestow much of this income upon the Church, and Coventry’s first cathedral (of three) was endowed by her and her husband.

As such Godgifu would probably have remained a footnote in Anglo-Saxon ­history. But one event transformed her reputation, translated her name into the more user-friendly Godiva, and made her probably the most famous Saxon of them all. Even my students, who no longer hear at school the tale of King Alfred and the cakes, have heard of Godiva’s naked ride through Coventry.

Yet all of the contemporary evidence, and for more than a century after Godiva’s death in 1067, present the woman in conventional, if pious, terms. She is, more than anything, the wife of Earl Leofric of Mercia, and therefore no more than a bit-player in 11th-century history. If William of Malmesbury, the more than chatty 12th-century chronicler, had the merest inkling of a tale involving nudity, he would certainly have set it down.

The anecdote we most associate with Godiva first turns up in the mid-13th century, 200 years after her death, in the chronicles of St Albans monastery. In the version written down by Matthew Paris, Godiva wished to challenge what Paris calls “an oppressive and shameful servitude”, exacted by her husband.

Matthew Paris was against all forms of taxation, which is what he means by “servitude”. Exasperated by his wife’s endless pleas, Leofric off-handedly challenges her to ride naked through the Coventry market-place, “when all the people are gathered”. Only then would he grant Coventry freedom from the tax.

Godiva takes Leofric at his word, but “releasing the braids of her hair, veiled the whole of her body, except for her brilliant white legs.” And once she had completed the task, “unseen by anyone” she returned to Leofric who granted the town exemption. The story is so fully formed and full of detail and dialogue that it must have been passed down to the St Albans’ monks by others, either orally or in some earlier lost chronicle.

But there are plenty of reasons why this story does not ring true of Anglo-Saxon England. For one thing, as ­Coventry’s landowner, Godiva already had the right to exempt her people from taxation herself. For another, there were no such tolls in 11th-century England anyway. The only possible tax this might have applied to was directly levied by the king, and Godiva would have had to take her entreaties to him.

What is also odd about the tale is that Godiva rides “unseen by anyone”. Was this magic, did Godiva’s hair hide her face as well, or were the people of Coventry so used to women riding bare-back through the market that they never ­noticed? On all this the chronicle remains tight-lipped. There were rough edges in this story which still needed ironing out. This was duly performed by a Warwickshire antiquarian in the 16th century called Richard Grafton. Grafton had access to a (lost) chronicle compiled by one Geoffrey, prior of Coventry cathedral in the 1220s, and he copied out some material from it.

In Grafton’s version, Godiva went to the magistrates of the town, and on her behalf they ordered all shutters and windows to be closed. And so “her honesty was saved” and the only people who saw her were her husband, those riding with him and Godiva’s gentlewomen.

This then explains how the good lady is “unseen by anyone”, without having to resort to a magic cloak. No one seems to have been bothered by the blackening of Leofric’s reputation. The earl who was well-loved and wise in Saxon times had, as the legend grew, become a cruel and oppressive landlord, willing even to sacrifice his wife’s modesty.

We are left with one element (and one character) in the story, who has become almost as important as Godiva herself. Where did Peeping Tom come from? He is certainly not present in any of the medieval versions.

The man who defies the edict of the Coventry magistrates and peeps out from his window is first attached to the tale in the 16th century. Although a ­voyeur does not feature in any written accounts before the 1700s, a wooden effigy of him (which still survives) was already around in Coventry in the 1500s.

The statue was even dressed in costume and paraded, and before that may have been pushed out of a window during re-enactments of Godiva’s ride. Such manhandling might explain the effigy’s lack of arms: they may have broken off.

Some sources call him a tailor (there were plenty of those in Coventry), and say that he was either struck blind or killed as a divine punishment. So the story added another miracle after all. Giving the tailor a name – Peeping Tom – comes later still, but once christened Tom enters the English dictionary, too, as the archetype of all voyeurs and spies.

I suppose the point of Tom being there was as a moral warning. This was something the story had lacked.

By the 17th century, then, 400 years or so after the story had first been written down, Lady Godiva and her act of defiance (and an equal and opposite act of disobedience by Peeping Tom) was complete, and continues to this day. It has become far more the symbol of the city of Coventry than any phoenix or elephants with castles on their back.

Like the character in any folk-tale, the Saxon Godgifu has been re-invented to suit other purposes in other ages. What people believe is often just as important – perhaps more so – than what actually happened.