Lady Godiva’s Conventry

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It’s easy enough to lose yourself in Coventry. This Midlands industrial city, just east of Birmingham, enjoys a happy jumble of modern and medieval. Brick and cobble lanes, narrowed by the overhang of half-timbered buildings, twist past ancient churches and lush gardens, only to open suddenly to the monumental plainness of modernist architecture. Walk anywhere in Coventry’s lively central district for the same juxtaposition: a row of medieval shops opens suddenly from a modern mall, an ancient guildhall faces a metal-clad university building, a ruined 14th-century abbey abuts a huge modern cathedral. Here the 20th and the 12th centuries mix like oil and water, close neighbours who never seem to blend.

It’s also easy to lose yourself in a more literal sense. Coventry is the result of the finest principles of urban planning of the 1950s, applied with a thoroughness made possible only by a strong central authority and lots of German bomb damage. A circular expressway rings its central district with curves so gentle and steady that it is almost impossible to tell what direction you are heading. Get off at any exit, and you find yourself wandering down a local street that meanders past car parks to a dead-end at the service entrances of the downtown shops. To a first time visitor it seems like a cockamamie way to design a city, but it is all very rational. Parking surrounds a central core of businesses and offices, while the circular expressway offers ready access to the peripheral parking. A local can drive easily to the nearest car park, then stroll leisurely past a wide variety of downtown shops. Of course, such rationality is little comfort to a lost tourist. The best method for a first visit is to park at random, then walk to the Tourist Information Centre (follow the signs), where you can get a map that will show how much closer you could have parked if you had known where you were.

Coventry is associated with Lady Godiva, and for good reason–Lady Godiva was one of its founders and earliest rulers. Earl Leofric of Mercia and his wife, the Countess Godgifu (Godiva), founded a Benedictine priory on a hill overlooking the River Sowe, and the town of Coventry grew up around it. The priory probably ran a market that would have formed the nucleus of the growing town. Such a market would bring fees and taxes to the priory and the Earl while flooding the district with goods and money. Godiva may well have ruled the settlement between Leofric’s death in 1057 and her own in 1066.

Certainly, taxation would be an important early issue, and Countess Godiva might have been an advocate for the priory and its market. However, it seems unlikely that she would have ridden naked through the streets of Coventry to reduce taxes. For one thing, she would have had to ride naked through the farm lane of Coventry, as the settlement had only 50 working men as late as 1086. The legend of Godiva’s ride is probably a folk memory of a Queen of the May pageant–perhaps a particularly bawdy one. Godiva processions, complete with naked maiden, were held from earliest times well into the 20th century, and prudish attempts to clothe the maiden were met with riots. At any rate, the legend of Godiva’s ride is first mentioned nearly two centuries after the fact, by Roger of Wendover, whose work ‘contains many fantastic and distorted stories,’ according to the Columbia Encyclopedia. The legend of Peeping Tom is even later. It derives from a wooden statue of St. George that was salvaged from the dissolved abbey in 1539 and stuck in a window over the market place as a joke. (’Who is that?’ ‘Why that’s Tom. He’s peeping at Godiva.’) Peeping Tom may be a legend but the statue still exists, on display downtown at the Cathedral Lanes Shopping Centre, still peeping at the city’s famous statue of Lady Godiva.

The Coventry we know today took form in the Medieval period, between 1100 and 1500, as a great wool centre and cloth manufacturer. By 1100, Coventry’s Benedictine priory hosted a cathedral, one of the largest in Britain. The next three centuries brought a building boom still very much in evidence in Coventry’s central district. The Parish Church of St. Michael, so magnificent it would be made a cathedral in 1918, reached its final form in 1346. Across from St. Michael’s the magnificent St. Mary’s Hall, erected by the merchant guild of St. Mary in 1342, stands as a monument to the power of the medieval wool merchants. Now a city building and open to the public, St. Mary’s is organized around a Great Hall with a 14th-century timber roof and a tapestry dating from about 1500.

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Tags: British Heritage, Religion, Social History, Women's History

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