May 31, 1020, is the supposed date for the supposed ride of the supposed Lady Godiva. Actually, I didn’t need to put “supposedly” in front of her name. There really was a Lady Godiva. She appears in the Domesday Book. She was the wife of the Earl of Mercia. We know she and her husband donated a lot to the Church and even founded a monastery in Coventry where they lived. According to the legend, Lady Godiva was upset with her husband’s high taxation of the citizens of Coventry. After she had nagged him several times unsuccessfully, he told her he would lower the taxes if she rode nude through town. She took him up on the deal. But she ordered the townspeople to stay indoors and not look. She proceeded to ride on a horse with her long hair strategically placed for modesty. A man named Thomas couldn’t resist peeking and was the original “Peeping Tom”. He went blind because of his act.
How much of the legend is true? Besides the fact that she did exist, probably nothing. The story first appeared about a hundred years after her death in a book by a monk named Roger of Wendover. Roger had a reputation for tall tales. Later, the Peeping Tom part of the story was added because why not? The legend caught on because of the titillating (look it up in a dictionary) nature of the story. Artists could paint her. “Hey, I’m just painting the story.” And some poets were inspired. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, wrote a poem about her in 1842. Here’s an excerpt:
Then she rode forth, clothed on with chastity:
The deep air listen’d round her as she rode,
And all the low wind hardly breathed for fear.
The little wide-mouth’d heads upon the spout
Had cunning eyes to see: the barking cur
Made her cheek flame; her palfrey’s foot-fall shot
Light horrors thro’ her pulses; the blind walls
Were full of chinks and holes; and overhead
Fantastic gables, crowding, stared: but she
Not less thro’ all bore up, till, last, she saw
The white-flower’d elder-thicket from the field,
Gleam thro’ the Gothic archway in the wall.
https://www.history.com/news/who-was-lady-godiva
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Godiva
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