A marshy landing place on the Thames opposite Westminster, where Harthacnut collapsed and died at a wedding feast on 8 June 1042, and where the archbishops of Canterbury built their London seat.
Lambeth is the stretch of the south bank of the Thames directly opposite Westminster. Before the embankments it was low, wet ground — marsh and foreshore with a landing place, which is what the name records: it appears as Lambehitha in 1062, a hythe or landing place associated with lambs, and reaches its modern form by 1255. Domesday records it as Lanchei.
Two things happened here that matter to the archive. In 1042 the last Danish king of England died at a wedding feast in the settlement, and from the end of the twelfth century the archbishops of Canterbury made it their London residence.
Until the eighteenth century Lambeth was rural and thinly peopled, and it could be reached from the north bank only by ferry or ford — there was no bridge until 1750, and the horseferry that crossed to Westminster gave its name to the street that still runs down to the river there.
That combination of proximity and separation is the whole of Lambeth’s medieval significance. It was across the water from the seat of English government, near enough for a magnate’s hall to be a convenient place to hold a feast and for an archbishop to attend court, and far enough to be outside the city and its jurisdictions. The church of St Mary-at-Lambeth, recorded as early as 1062, stood beside the landing place; the manor and the church together made the nucleus.
On 8 June 1042 Lambeth was the setting for the wedding of Tovi the Proud — a staller, one of the great household officers under Cnut the Great — to Gytha, daughter of the thegn Osgod Clapa. King Harthacnut was among the guests.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes what happened with a directness that has kept the scene alive for a thousand years: he "died as he stood at his drink, and he suddenly fell to the earth with an awful convulsion; and those who were close by took hold of him, and he spoke no word afterwards." He was about twenty-three or twenty-four. He was carried to Winchester and buried in the Old Minster beside his father Cnut, whose bones — with those of other kings of Wessex and England — were moved into the present cathedral after the Old Minster was demolished in 1093 and now lie in the mortuary chests around the choir.
The groom is worth a note of his own: Tovi is the man credited with bringing the great black crucifix found at his Somerset manor of Montacute to his estate at Waltham in Essex, where he rebuilt the church to house it. That cross became the Holy Cross of Waltham, a major pilgrimage object, and the battle cry of Harold Godwinson’s household.
Harthacnut left no son, and with him the Danish line in England ended. Edward the Confessor, his half-brother, succeeded to the English throne, and Magnus of Norway inherited Denmark and pressed a claim to England on the strength of an agreement he had made with Harthacnut — an unresolved claim that the Norwegian kings did not forget, and which Harald Hardrada revived a quarter of a century later.
The convulsion at a wedding party in Lambeth therefore sits at the head of the chain that runs to 1066. A king dying suddenly without an heir, in a country that had been ruled by Danes for a generation, left three separate lines with arguable claims to the same crown.
The manor of Lambeth was in the hands of the archbishops of Canterbury from at least 1190, and in 1197 Archbishop Hubert Walter established a residence there — the beginning of Lambeth Palace, which has been the London seat of the archbishops ever since.
The choice was deliberate. An archbishop needed to be at the king’s elbow at Westminster without being lodged inside the royal palace or the city, and the south bank gave him a great house, a river frontage and his own jurisdiction. Church and crown negotiated across that stretch of water for the rest of the Middle Ages, which is why so many medieval agreements carry the name of a Thames-side manor.