Lady Godiva

A little history:

                        Coventry was the town where Lady Godiva lived in the 11^th century.

Lady Godiva was a Lady, wife of Leofric, the Earl of Mercia. Earl Leofric was an all-powerful lord who ruled England under the Danish King Canute.

Lady Godiva was a rich landowner in her own right and her most valuable property was Coventry.

Lord Leofric did not care about the peasant of Coventry, he was always collecting taxes, and he wanted more tax money all the time.

Lady Godiva did not agree with her husband ruthlessness, and avarice, and she was always fighting with him about the amount of taxes that he was charging the people of Coventry.                                                                        

One day during one of those fights, Lord Leofric told his wife that the day she rides naked through the town on market day, would be the day he would stop taxing the peasants. Of course, he never thought that she would even consider doing something so outrageous.                   

Lady Godiva was  very determined on stopping all this taxation, so she went into town and told the peasants what she was going to do and asked for everybody to stay inside and don’t go out to the market or any other place and to close all the shutters on the windows and to no look out.

Everybody in town loved Lady Godiva, so they all agree; besides, if she rode naked and her husband kept her word, it meant no more taxes for them, so of course they agree to stay inside and not to look.

Next Market Day in Coventry, she rode naked, cover only by her long golden hair, which was so long that covered all her body, you could only see her face, arms and legs.

Leofric could not believe it, not just that his demure and proper wife actually rode through town, but that nobody saw her? He thought it was a miracle that nobody was in town, so at that moment, he stopped taxing the people of Coventry and he became a Christian person and a very nice and considered landlord.

            Their house and the cathedral they built was demolish during the War World II, as it was most of Coventry. Now a day there is a statue of Lady Godiva in what use to be the town square, but now behind the statue there is a mall, ei: no more town square.

There is a very nice movie with Maureen O’Hara as Lady Godiva.