Godiva, Lady

   The wife of Earl Leofric of Mercia, and a devout and generous patron of churches and abbeys, she was Lady of Coventry in her own right. She died in 1067 and about a 100 years after her death, Roger of Wendover, a monk of St Alban's, told how this 'saintly countess . . . beloved of God', inspired by the Trinity and the Blessed Virgin, begged her husband to free Coventry from tax, until, angry at her persistence, he told her that if she rode naked across the crowded market-place, he would grant her request. She agreed, but let her hair hang loose, so that 'her whole body was veiled except her fair white legs'. Her husband 'counted this a miracle', and lifted the tax. Later versions, beginning in the 16th century, switch the emphasis from holiness to cleverness; Godiva, it was now said, asked the magistrates to make everyone stay indoors with closed windows as she rode by, which they did, so 'her husband's imagination [was] utterly disappointed'. By 1659, a new character had been added to the legend: Peeping Tom, struck blind for trying to see the naked Godiva.

   Historians are agreed that Godiva and Leof-ric were real people, who may well have remitted some unpopular tax, but the tale shows influence both from saints' legends (pious wife contrasted with cruel husband, modesty miraculously protected), and from folklore motifs. There are several other English local traditions in which some grant or privilege is said to have been won for the community by a great lady's willingness to undergo a humiliating ordeal: to walk barefoot, or ride naked, or crawl on hands and knees round a piece of land which she wishes her husband to donate to charity, for example at *Tichborne (Hampshire) and *St Briavels (Gloucestershire). These may of course be imitations of the Godiva tale, being recorded far later; however, the motif of a clever woman who fulfils seemingly impossible or intolerable conditions by a trick is old and international. So too is the punishment of curiosity by blinding.

   During the Middle Ages Coventry held an annual eight-day fair in Corpus Christi week, which included miracle plays and a procession; after the Reformation, this was replaced by a civic pageant at Midsummer, which was suppressed during the Commonwealth but lavishly revived in the reign of Charles II. From 1678, there are records of a 'Lady Godiva' appearing in the pageant; at first the role was taken by a boy, but from 1765 there was a real woman (fully dressed) on a white horse. Meanwhile, a life-size wooden figure of a man in Tudor armour, the original function of which is unknown, had become famous as 'Peeping Tom'; it was carried in the annual procession, and between whiles displayed in various houses and hotels. It is currently in the Cathedral Lane Shopping Centre. The rowdi-ness and ribald humour of the occasion drew Victorian disapproval, but parades continued intermittently until the 1960s, and were revived in 1996.

   The story of Lady Godiva and Peeping Tom is a great favourite, not merely in Coventry but as a part of English popular culture, the combination of virtue, sexual titillation, and earthy humour having proved irresistible.

   ■ Joan Lancaster, Godiva of Coventry (Coventry, 1967); Hilda R. E. Davidson, Folklore 80 (1969), 107-21; Palmer, 1976: 134-9.