This Sceptred Isle: Trollheart's History of England

[Trollheart]

Edgar the Peaceful (943 - 975)

Now I’m not certain titles such as “the Good”, “the Peaceful” or “the Okay” are the sort of things you really want to hear in connection with kings. All right, I made that last one up, but Edgar was known as “the Peaceful” or “the Peaceable”. I mean, it’s not quite as impressive as “The Great” or “The Brave” or “The Wise” now is it? Not that there’s anything wrong with being peaceful, even for a king, and there are worse titles - we’ve got Charles the Simple, Ethelred the Unready, John Lackland and of course Ivan the Terrible - but it doesn’t bode well for expanding his kingdom does it? With predecessors such as Eadwig and Alfred the Great, Edgar the Peaceful just sounds like he’s kind of letting the family down a little. Is he? Let’s find out.

Perhaps it might be fair to say that, with Eadwig’s death removing all claim of the former king on the lands he held, Edgar, the new king, had no reason to wage war upon Wessex, as it automatically became his property when the power-sharing agreement was nullified on the death of Eadwig. So maybe he didn’t have to be a warlike king, and historians seem to agree that England pretty much solidified into the country it is today under his rule, whereas previously Eadwig had allowed parts of it to slip back into separate kingdoms (most notably, as already mentioned, Northumbria under the Vikings and then of course the part yielded to Edgar), so Edgar could be seen as the first king of a “united” England.

But while he may not have been a war-mongerer, there’s evidence to suggest Edgar was far from peaceful. When one of his ealdorman, Aethelwald, sent to suss out the beauty of Aelfthryth, whom Edgar was considering marrying, did the dirty on the king and married the girl himself, reporting her as not worthy of his affections, Edgar was not best pleased. At least, he was not best pleased when the deception came to his notice, and decided to head out and see the lassie for himself. Fearing the jig would be up, Aethelwald instructed his new wife to go against centuries of feminine instinct and make herself un-pretty, but Aelfthryth, knowing a better deal was on the table, unwilling to hoodwink the king and possibly fed up already with the ealdorman, ignored him and put on her best. King Edgar, on seeing her, said “that’ll do for me” and proceeded to battle his disobedient representative, killing him to teach him a lesson.

Having been an ally of Saint Dunstan during Eadwig’s time, it comes as no great surprise that on taking the throne Edgar invited the disgraced bishop back, awarding him with the Archbishopric of Canterbury. This union of Church and State as it were, compared to the fractious relationship that had existed between Dunstan and the previous king, gave Edgar the power to force through reforms and strengthen the hold of the Church over England, while also bolstering up his own power, now supported by that of the Church in the shape of Archbishop Dunstan. There were no sides to be chosen anymore, as both clergy and King were in concert, so there was little if any opposition to Edgar’s rule.

This was cemented by his Council at Chester in 973, when the King of Scotland, the King of Strathclyde (who had long fought against Eadwig’s incursions into his land) and several kings of Wales all came to pledge their homage to Edgar, perhaps giving him reason to claim being the first true king of Britain, not just England. To symbolise their submission to him, the six (or possibly eight) kings rowed Edgar personally in his royal barge down the river Dee. Edgar was also equated with Christ, this further binding him to and identifying and allying him with the Church (and, oddly, not pissing off the Pope, who was and is supposed to be after all God’s rep on Earth), making England once and for all, and forever a Christian nation.

Also oddly, Edgar’s coronation did not take place on his ascension to the throne but fourteen years later, seen not as the beginning but the culmination of his reign. Ironically, two years later he would be dead, having ruled for almost sixteen years. Unlike his predecessors however, Edgar had not been shy about putting himself about, and so there was a ready-made heir available when he popped his royal clogs.

Another Edward.

Edward the Martyr (962 - 978)

Okay, well if “The Peaceful” is the sort of title that as a king you would prefer to avoid, “The Martyr” is a whole lot worse. Poor Edward only lived to rule for three years, and as often happens when a strong (if “Peaceful”) king dies, disputes arose over who should succeed Edgar. It was widely believed (though not possible to prove beyond doubt) that Edward was a bastard, said to have been born to a nun whom his father abducted from Wilton Abbey, while his other son, Aethelred, raised the suspicions of Dunstan, as his mother had been already wed to Aethelwald before Edgar did him in. With no divorce proceedings - other than divorcing her husband from his life - the future saint ruminated on whether the marriage was therefore legal and legitimate.

In the end, both men would rule England, one as I say for a mere three years before meeting his end at the point of an assassin’s knife, the other for almost forty. Details of, and reasons for Edward’s murder vary, but there seems to be some basic agreement that it was perpetrated by men loyal to Aethelred, supported either tacitly or openly by his own wife the queen Aelfthryth, or possibly just because nobody really liked him. Under his rule, a lot of the land granted to Benedictine monasteries under his father’s reign were given back to nobles, while Dunstan appears to have shoved his hands into the pockets of his vestments (do vestments have pockets? Well if not, then into each other, very monklike) and done precisely nothing to stop this reversal of Edgar’s edicts.

It’s interesting to see how disliked Edward was, given that he later became known as “The Martyr”, as his body is said to have been buried “without honours”. Doesn’t exactly say they kicked him into an open grave and spat on him, but they certainly didn’t give him anything like a state funeral. Later though when they dug him up it seemed his body had not decomposed - and this was a year afterwards - so he was pronounced a saint and his remains reinterred in Shaftesbury Abbey. Soon afterwards a cult grew up around him, however I personally have problems with calling him a martyr. Isn’t that supposed to be someone who dies for their faith? Edward died because his rivals wanted rid, and that’s happened before without the unfortunate obstacle being canonised. I bet if you asked him if he wanted to die for God’s glory, Edward would have said “No thanks, I like living just fine.”

With the threat of his brother removed, the way was clear for Aethelred to take the throne. He is one of the few English kings from this period of history whom we can still remember today.

Aethelred (the Unready) (966 - 1016)

Let’s get one thing out of the way here from the start . Aethelred, known as “the Unready”, was not a man who was unprepared for battle or whatever. The word doesn’t refer to our one, though it has been changed into that meaning in recent times. His actual epithet was unraed, which means badly-advised. He was, however, one of the worst kings England had ever had, as well as, perhaps paradoxically, one of the longest-reigning up to that point. As we’ve noted above, Aethelred was one of the two sons of Edgar, and on the death of his father doubt and confusion had arisen over the parentage of both boys, and therefore their legitimacy to rule the kingdom. Aethelred’s brother, Edward, was chosen but again as we’ve seen this didn’t last long, as he slipped in the shower and ran right into a handy knife, or something. Anyway, on his death Aethelred took the throne.

The youngest to ascend at that time, the boy was at best twelve, possibly as young as nine years old when his brother was murdered, and so for several years the kingdom was administered by his mother Aelfthryth and Dunstan, as well as Aethelwold, Bishop of Worcester. During this time, and after it, the English court would be plagued by scandals and coups, and the ordinary man would suffer as never before, with taxes raised to all but unsustainable levels. The bad blood between those who had supported his brother and wished to avenge Edward’s murder would help to stymie the response of the English to, not a new, but a fresh and renewed threat, believed disposed of.

[Trollheart]

Return of the Vikings: Can’t Keep a Good Man Dane

Despite the absolute rout of the King of Dublin in Aethelstan’s time and the breaking of the power of the Danes soon afterwards by Eadred, the Vikings were not yet finished with England and they attacked again in 980, streaming over from Denmark, and though originally carrying out lightning raids on the coast only, and these spread out over almost a decade, with some years of respite in between, the lacklustre and uncoordinated response from England emboldened them. Aethelred tried to placate them by buying them off (“paying tribute”) but their blood was up and conquest was on their minds, and in 991 they sent a huge fleet to sack Ipswich, and in August came face to face with the English at Maldon in Essex. This was to be not only the first major defeat for the English but the nascent beginnings of the later Norman invasion of England, something that was to shape the country’s future forever.

With the soundest of defeats against the English under their belts, the Vikings - though demanding, and getting tribute - rampaged across the country, and you can’t help but call to mind the rather self-defeating invitation of the Saxons by the Britons two hundred years ago, sealing their own fate. The Vikings had not been invited, no, but the resistance of the English under Aethelred - who really could be accused of being actually unready, as it seemed he certainly had not been expecting this massive fleet to attack - was so weak that the Vikings were able to make it as far as London with impunity. England’s defence, such as it was, became more a desperate rearguard action, and there was really no chance the Danes, now supported by the French in Normandy, were ever going to be defeated.

The best the English could hope for was a truce, and this they got in 994, when King Olaf Tryggvason, suitably paid off, took much of his force to Norway and promised never to darken England’s doorstep again. He kept his word, but some of his men stayed on, as mercenaries loyal now to Aethelred, who thought he could control them. Big mistake! Three years after their prince had returned to the comforting icy wastes of Scandinavia, these soldiers of fortune seem to have fashioned their own fortune, and turned on Aethelred, deciding it was, say it with me, pillaging time!

And so in 997 the coastal attacks began again, until as the new millennium dawned, the Vikings decided to check out their new pals in Normandy, and Aethelred, as any king faced with such a sudden and unexpected respite in hostilities would do, gathered his forces, shored up his defences and… attacked Strathclyde. Um. The reason for this rather unreasonable attack is, according to historians, “lost in the history of the north”, but I would be willing to bet he was paying back some old scores, as Strathclyde had been one of the kingdoms to support Danelaw. He was caught rapid, as we say here, the next year though, as the Vikings returned, bored with eating frog’s legs and snails and hankering for some Yorkshire pud, or maybe Yorkshire puss(!) and back they came. I hope Aethelred and his court partied like it was 999, cos from 1001 onwards there wouldn’t be much cause for joy.

The Danegeld, already mentioned several times, would have been one of the main reasons taxes skyrocketed, as the Vikings demanded more and more tribute for not knocking in English heads (that much) or setting English cities on fire (well, maybe a small one here or there, but nothing serious), and Aethelred, with no real army to oppose them, had no choice but to cough up. Which meant making the people cough up. Which presumably left a less than glowing impression on the minds - and wallets - of his subjects. Eventually, he decided he’d had enough.

St. Brice’s Day Massacre

Herod would have been proud. Well, maybe not, but Al Capone would. When word came to Aethelred that the Danes were rising and would kill him and all his people, and take their land, he decided to get his retaliation in first, and ordered the massacre of all Danish men in England. This was on, appropriately enough, November 13 1002 (I don’t know if it was a Friday, but how cool if it was, eh? My phone’s calendar doesn’t go back to the eleventh century, cheap piece of crap) and is the first time I’ve read of an English king ordering what amounts to all but genocide. I mean, these people weren’t even prisoners of war. For all Aethelred knew, the accusations could have been what we would call today “fake news”, an attempt to stir up local hatred of those who belonged to the peoples who had attacked them, but who might not themselves have had anything to do with those attacks.

I find the king’s matter-of-fact recounting of what is on the face of it surely a savage and un-Christian act chilling, the more so because it was only related in reference to explaining why the funds were needed to rebuild the church.

“For it is fully agreed that to all dwelling in this country it will be well known that, since a decree was sent out by me with the counsel of my leading men and magnates, to the effect that all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination, and thus this decree was to be put into effect even as far as death, those Danes who dwelt in the afore-mentioned town, striving to escape death, entered this sanctuary of Christ, having broken by force the doors and bolts, and resolved to make refuge and defence for themselves therein against the people of the town and the suburbs; but when all the people in pursuit strove, forced by necessity, to drive them out, and could not, they set fire to the planks and burnt, as it seems, this church with its ornaments and its books. Afterwards, with God’s aid, it was renewed by me.”

Here the king is saying, without any sense of outrage or regret, the cheek of these guys! Instead of letting us exterminate (note the use of the word) them, they took refuge in a church! And because of that my people had to burn the church! The nerve! So now, like, we have to rebuild it so dig deep people!

It’s an act of pretty much wanton savagery on a par with the worst excesses of Cromwell in Ireland, or Lake later on in Ulster. Sure, Henry V would later execute French prisoners of war, and that was a reprehensible deed which has been more or less glossed over by English historians, but at least it has the very small saving grace of those men having been fighting the English, and being military prisoners. Yes, in fairness, the skeletons of 36 men excavated at the site in 2008 and analysed in 2012 does seem to support the fact that the Danish corpses were all warriors (and all men) so probably those mercenaries all right, but even so, once again English historians shrug and treat the whole incident with a kind of they-had-it-coming attitude. One even describes the incident as a “so-called massacre”. How there can be any doubt, when the king lays the entire case out in a fucking royal charter, you got me there son!

In the end, as nobody will be surprised to hear, this massacre of their people led not to pacification of England but further reprisal attacks, and the coming end of the House of Wessex.

I don’t quite understand how (unless the order was open to misinterpretation, or it happened accidentally as she was trying to shield her husband or lover) but the rumour was that Gunhilde, sister of Sweyn Forkbeard, the King of Denmark, was among the slain, and her brother did not take this well. I can just see Aethelred now: “Was I not fucking crystal clear here? Did I not say men? Is this woman a man?” And one of his disgruntled warriors muttering “She looked like a man”, whereupon the king might have turned sharply and demanded “What?” But the warrior who spoke had suddenly developed a deep interest in the tapestries on the wall, or something.

And so a proper Viking invasion of England kicked off in 1004, ploughing through East Anglia while Aethelred remained in the south, unable to engage the enemy while his court began to self-destruct under coups possibly instigated or at least supported by his second wife, Emma. There were some victories against the Vikings, but mostly they had everything their own way, and for the next five or so years England was under constant attack, the latest, an invasion launched in 1008 was only bought off in 1012. A year later Forkbeard attacked again.

Sweyn Forkbeard was the son of Harold Bluetooth (yes that one, from whom we get the word) and was to be reckoned one of the greatest ever Viking generals. His fleet hit English shores in 1013, this time with the intention not just of raiding and plundering, but to take the English throne. Sweyn was unstoppable, and by the end of the year England was his, and he was crowned its king, Aethelred fleeing into exile. His reign did not last long though, as he died a mere year later, leaving his son, Cnut the Great, to take his place. We’ll be hearing much more about him later. The English weren’t having this though, and invited Aethelred back, provided he fulfilled a lot of their wish list, including forgiving any bad stuff any of them may have said about or to, or done to him. Basically blackmailing a king, it would seem, but Aethelred shrugged and said sure, let ye bygones be ye bygones, swore to implement all the reforms they requested (demanded) and when he returned to battle Cnut few Vikings and hardly any Englishmen supported the son of Sweyn, who was quickly defeated and Aethelred reinstalled on the English throne. I’m not sure, but I think this might be the first (only?) time in English history when a king ruled, was deposed, went into exile and was then restored to the throne.

Though he beat Cnut, Aethelred walked into more trouble on his return, as his son, Edmund Ironside, established himself in the Danelaw and revolted against his father. Later, when Cnut (it’s so hard not to misspell that name!) returned both father and son allied against him, but in 1016 both were defeated and soon after Aethelred died, perhaps ironically, given his fractious rule of the country, on the day most revered by Englishmen, St. George’s Day, April 23. This left Cnut as king, initially sharing power with Edmund (though Aethelred’s son was only permitted to rule over Wessex until his death a little over a month later, whereupon Cnut became king of all England) the first not of the Wessex line, in fact the first non-Saxon king since Alfred the Great, discounting the very brief forty-odd-day reign of Sweyn Forkbeard. Cnut’s ascension meant power passed for the first time in almost a hundred and fifty years from the unbroken line of the House of Wessex, and though it would be temporarily restored with the rule of Edward the Confessor, he would be the last Wessex king to sit the English throne.

Although Sweyn Forkbeard had subjugated England and become its king, he ruled for a mere couple of months before his death, after which the throne reverted to an Englishman. But Cnut, as the first true Viking king of England, was to remain in power for nearly twenty years, a reign only bettered by Aethelred and the two original Wessex kings, Alfred the Great and Edward the Elder.

[Trollheart]

Edmund Ironside (990 - 1016)

An interesting fact about Edmund II’s rise to the throne would be reflected later in the ascension of one of the most notorious and divisive kings of England, Henry VIII. Like the Tudor monarch, Edmund was not the eldest son and so not actually in line for the throne, but his two brothers died. We might suspect foul play, but this does not seem to have been the case; indeed, Aethelstan, the eldest, left a sword in his will to Edmund, one that had belonged to the legendary King Offa of Mercia. The brothers did not follow their father into exile when Sweyn Forkbeard took the English throne, but with Aethelstan dying before Aethelred’s return, his other brothers also dead, there was only really Edmund whose aid his father could call upon. However Edmund, as we have seen above, decided instead to rebel, stealing the wife of one of the disgraced (and executed) brothers who had run the Danelaw, marrying her and setting himself up as king there.

He did however join his father in the later fight against Cnut, when his own borders were threatened, and Cnut was so impressed with him that a compromise was reached. On the death of Aethelred, the people of London elected Edmund king and he continued to fight against Cnut, hopelessly outnumbered. He won many battles though, and when he was defeated Cnut, probably fearing an English civil war, allowed him to rule in Wessex while he took the rest of England for his domain. As we’ve said though, this was not to last long, as he died in November 1016 and Cnut then became the first non-Wessex King of England.

The manner of Edmund’s death is disputed, but some accounts claim he died on the toilet, in a scene which surely must have inspired George R.R. Martin when he was writing the death scene for Tyrion Lannister. One account says Edmund was stabbed multiple times while taking a dump, another uses - wait for it - a crossbow as the weapon, but others shrug and think yes, he may have been murdered, probably was, but he might just as easily have fallen in battle. You’ve got to hope, don’t you, that the latter case is closer to the truth, as otherwise it’s a shitty way to die. Sorry.

Cnut the Great (d. 1035)

Also known as Canute, he was the first Viking king of England, and the first to rule Denmark and Norway as well. The son of Sweyn Forkbeard, his date of birth is unknown but may be around 980 - 990, even 1000. However the latter seems unlikely at best, as he conquered and was crowned king of England in 1016, which would make him, what, sixteen years old? I can’t really see the English accepting a “callow youth”, no matter his fighting prowess or their position, as their king, can you? At any rate, the real year will never be known as there are only hints for historians to guess at. He was said to be “exceptionally tall and strong, the handsomest of men”, and on the death of his father returned to Denmark to request of the king, Harald (who may have been Harald Bluetooth, though this would then have been his grandfather) a power-sharing deal, which the king refused. No wait: I see it was Harald II, Cnut’s brother. Right, well that makes more sense. A brother is more likely to tell a brother where he can shove it than a revered grandfather. Cnut instead set sail in 1016 for England, with a fleet that was to result in his defeating Aethelred and Edmund Ironside, and winning for himself the English throne.

As an aside, you have to love these epithets. We’ve had Alfred the Great, Edward the Martyr, Edgar the Peaceful and of course Aethelred the Unready - though most of these were affixed to the names of the various kings after their deaths, often long after - now we have the future King of Poland, Boleslaw the Brave (no not Coleslaw!). We also have Eric the Victorious and Gorm the Old, Harold Bluetooth of course and even Sigrid the, um, Haughty. No, not Naughty. Now that would have been interesting. Anyway, back to the story of Cnut.

Responsible for the palace coup at Aethelred’s court, Eadric Streona, ealdorman of Mercia, must have seen which side his bread was buttered and deserted the English cause, throwing in his lot (and forty of the latest ships) with that of Cnut. Thorkell the Tall, another previous ally of Aethelred, also came over to the new king’s side. This of course weakened the forces then being led by Edmund, as he and his father - who was soon to die - never seemed to be able to meet up together, sending force after force back without its expected reinforcements. Cnut set about subduing Northumbria, and then turned his attention towards London, wherein Edmund had been proclaimed king on the death of his father.

Unable to stand against the invader alone, and with his ex-allies deserting him in droves, Edmund made a run for Wessex, hoping his ancestral homeland would provide him the troops he needed to muster an army and take on Cnut. It did, and he returned to London, relieving it, but only temporarily, and for the next while each faction struggled to hold, or take, what would eventually become England’s capital. Eventually Cnut gave it up, hopping over to harry Essex instead, and with typical turncoat skills, and perhaps feeling that the wind of change was again blowing in Edmund’s direction, Eadric changed sides and offered his help to the English king. Cnut would deal with this treachery soon enough.

The decisive battle that would settle the matter of who ruled England took place at Assandun, in Essex, in October 1016, where Edmund’s forces met those of Cnut. Instrumental in his defeat (as perhaps had been his intention all along) was the withdrawal of the forces of Eadric Streona, who went back over to Cnut’s side. With all that turning of coat, the man must have been positively dizzy! After the battle, Cnut and Edmund divided England, the former taking all land south of the river Thames (including his stronghold, London) and everything north would be ruled by Cnut. As already related though, this was academic really, as Edmund died only a month later and Cnut then became king of all England.

If, six hundred years later, Oliver Cromwell would declare himself Lord Protector of England (or Britain) then Cnut did it first. Not the actual declaration - he had nothing against being a king, insisted on it in fact - but he became England’s defender against outside attack. Being monarch of most of Scandinavia he was easily able to forbid further raids by the Vikings on England, and so under his almost twenty-year rule England enjoyed an unparalleled period of peace and prosperity. As bad a king as Aethelred has been said to have been, and as ineffective, Cnut was one of the greatest kings England had had since Alfred. Not that that meant he didn’t take revenge on his enemies, of course. He was, after all, first and foremost, a Viking.

Heads literally rolled, with Aethelred’s remaining son, Eadwig Atheling, at first only exiled, later murdered on Cnut’s orders. Edmund’s two sons were exiled, while Cnut ensured the troublesome and unreliable Eadric Steona had no further opportunities for betrayal, having him executed, and I doubt anyone cried. The new king paid off his Viking army and sent them home, keeping a small standing force in England, just in case. In a somewhat Viking tradition, he married Aethelred’s widow, Emma, and had a son by her, Harthacnut, whom he declared to be his heir.

You have to hand it to Cnut. In addition to being the - now uncontested - King of England, he also secured his position as King of Scandinavia, taking on Sweden and Norway and beating both in 1026. You would think that, distracted by such a war, his return to England might have seen some rival taking advantage of his absence and making a play for the throne, but no. So untroubled and unrivalled was his reign that he was able to take a leisurely trip to Rome (the first Viking to do so with peaceful intentions?) to witness the installation of the new Holy Roman emperor. He took the opportunity to discuss certain things with the new emperor, as below:

… I spoke with the Emperor himself and the Lord Pope and the princes there about the needs of all people of my entire realm, both English and Danes, that a juster law and securer peace might be granted to them on the road to Rome and that they should not be straitened by so many barriers along the road, and harassed by unjust tolls; and the Emperor agreed and likewise King Robert who governs most of these same toll gates. And all the magnates confirmed by edict that my people, both merchants, and the others who travel to make their devotions, might go to Rome and return without being afflicted by barriers and toll collectors, in firm peace and secure in a just law.

And

… I, as I wish to be made known to you, returning by the same route that I took out, am going to Denmark to arrange peace and a firm treaty, in the counsel of all the Danes, with those races and people who would have deprived us of life and rule if they could, but they could not, God destroying their strength. May he preserve us by his bounteous compassion in rule and honour and henceforth scatter and bring to nothing the power and might of all our enemies! And finally, when peace has been arranged with our surrounding peoples and all our kingdom here in the east has been properly ordered and pacified, so that we have no war to fear on any side or the hostility of individuals, I intend to come to England as early this summer as I can to attend to the equipping of a fleet.

There’s a lot of stuff in Cnut’s reign about his attempts to secure Sweden, only ever styling himself as “king of some of the Swedes”, which sounds a little unimpressive until you add “all of Denmark, Norway and England” - that’s a sizeable chunk of real estate! But I don’t want to go too deeply into his Scandinavian adventures as this is the history of England, and while I had to detour through histories of England and Scotland in my Irish history journal, that was necessary in order to frame certain subjects. Here, in reference to England, these diversions don’t matter, so let’s just say Cnut was away from England a good deal and leave it at that.

Cnut’s relationship with the all-powerful Church was delicate at best. They knew him to be all but unseatable (if they wanted to unseat him) and he had been baptised, renouncing his Viking ways (though only in religion, and perhaps only in public) and he built churches and monasteries, but there was the small matter of his having two wives. I believe somewhere in the Bible it says that a man marrying his brother’s wife is a sin, and while Aethelred and Cnut were certainly not related, I wonder if the Church still frowned on the idea of marrying the wife, now widow, of the man you defeated, surely more a Viking tradition than a Christian one? That might be bad enough, but Cnut didn’t do the decent thing and divorce or even send his first wife to a convent, but kept both around, so that he had two wives. The Church would not have liked that at all.

But what could they do? Cnut was powerful, more powerful really than any king of England since Alfred the Great, and more importantly, well liked. He didn’t have any real enemies, at least, none left living, and there were no discernible divisions in his power base that could be exploited. Besides, though I can’t confirm this but will try later, it seems to me that Cnut was the first king of England to award land to the Church, something which would really get up the nose of Henry VIII a half-millennium later, when he testily snatched it back with a Trumpish “Mine!” on his snarling lips. Everyone loves land, especially that granted by royal charter, so maybe the bishops just shrugged and said “hell, he’s king. If he wants to have two wives, who are we to say no? Now, what about this new church?”

[Trollheart]

God Save the Queen!

While technically no woman ruled over the English until the ascent of Mary I in 1553, two claim the title in the Middle Ages, this being Judith of France, who really seems to have held the title more symbolically and on account of her husband, Aethelwulf and later his son Aethelbald, and only for a short period on both occasions. Then there was Aelfthryrh, who was anointed as queen but does not seem to have held any real power, married to Edgar. For my money though, although not actually recognised as an actual queen (none of the women before the twelfth century were, indeed as we say above, no female actually sat the throne alone until Mary I) the one who makes the best case is Emma of Normandy.

Not only did she become Queen of England through her marriage to Aethelred the Unready, she later retook the title on her marriage to Cnut the Great, but as his consort also was named Queen of Denmark and Queen of Norway. She was the first, so far as I can see, to actually engage in political machinations, making alliances and moving pieces on the board, and at some points can be considered almost the de facto ruler of England. Here’s her story.

Also known as Aelfgifu she was, you’ll no doubt be completely unsurprised to hear, French, a Norman noblewoman who was married to Aethelred in 1002 to both heal the rift between him and Richard II, Duke of Normandy, and save England from Viking attacks, most of which were by now being launched from there. On marrying Aethelred she was crowned Queen of England, though at the time it seems this was more just a formality, that her title was empty, depended entirely on her husband the king, and had no power attached to it. She did, however, receive land in Winchester, Devonshire, Rutland, Oxfordshire, Suffolk and Exeter. She had two sons by Aethelred: Edward the Confessor, who would go on to be one of the last kings of the House of Wessex, and Aelfred Atheling, who, well, wouldn’t.

When Aethelred died in 1016, his heir was not any of Emma’s sons but one from his previous marriage, Aethelstan. Angry at this snub to her sons, Emma began to try to gain support for her eldest son, Edward (later the Confessor) to be named successor, but even though the wily Eadric Streona - of whom more shortly - gave his support to her claim, she was overruled and Aethelstan was chosen. Nevertheless, she held London on the death of Aethelstan before marrying the victorious Cnut, and again being proclaimed Queen of England. Cnut, however, had no intention of allowing her sons, the sons of Aethelred, to aspire to the throne and so they were sent away to Normandy on her marriage. Emma later gave Cnut a son, Harthacnut, who became his heir.

In 1036 the two lads returned to England, ostensibly to pay a visit to mum, but in reality probably to try to take the throne. Alfred was captured by Godwin and delivered over to Harold’s men, who blinded him, wounds from which he quickly died later, while Edward, having had some success, returned to Normandy until it was safe to set foot on English soil again. When he did, and it was, he ruled jointly with Harthacnut, and as they were both sons of Cnut, Emma became the link between the two kings. In some ways, and to some historians and scholars, she is considered to have been all but a co-ruler of England. She even has part of an important eleventh-century work dedicated to her, the Encomium of Queen Emma, which no other woman from this time does.

There is a legend - almost certainly untrue or at least embellished in her favour - which speaks of her being accused of infidelity, and having to undergo one of the ordeals of fire spoken of much earlier in this chapter. According to the account she walked across hot ploughshares and “felt neither the naked iron nor the fire”, and so proved herself innocent. Right. Now, about that asteroid shaped like a dancing moose…

Nevertheless, though she never officially ruled in her own name, given a) her marriage to two of the most powerful kings of the time, b) the fact that two of her sons then went on to be kings in their own right, c) her “stewardship” of London and later much of England and d) her machinations at court, particularly with Godwin, I think there’s a pretty good case for seeing Emma of Normandy as the first, shall we say, unofficial Queen of England.

[Trollheart]

My Name is Earl: The Power Beside the Throne

Originally known as ealdorman, the title was given to a sort of provincial governor of a small town or hundred, with pretty limited powers, all of course very subservient to the king. With the arrival of the Vikings in the ninth century, their idea of erl, as a sort of sub-king, came more into use in England and the word was quickly adopted. With its adoption came its powers, as earls grew to be all but semi-princes, though having of course no royal prerogative that did not proceed from the monarch. Over the next centuries, earls would become some of the powerbrokers, and even to some extent kingmakers of England, and their support would be sought, bought and traded as they enriched themselves like sort of medieval godfathers. Three in particular were important during the time the House of Wessex held sway, and into the reign of the House of Denmark.

Eadric Streona (died 1017)

Although technically not an earl, as at this point ealdorman was still the title, Streona was the precursor to the sort of powerbroker figure earls would later become. Eadric married Edith or Eadgyth, a daughter of King Aethelred the Unready, but though this was a marriage of convenience, meant to ally him to the House of Wessex, Eadric would turn out to be the most double-dealing, traitorous, untrustworthy turncoat in the Middle Ages. He was loyal to nobody, supporting whomever he saw as best placed to advance his own prospects and play into his agenda, and he flip-flopped back and forth so much you might have considered he didn’t even have a spine.

His first action of note is reported in 1006, when he is said to have slain an Ealdorman the king didn’t much like, called Aelfhelm, using the old tried and trusted “hunting accident” idea, though he was careful not to dirty his own hands, paying someone to do his work for him, a local butcher. Soon after, Aelfhelm’s sons were blinded, and King Aethelred was indeed pleased. But Eadric jumped and crossed loyalty lines more than Prince crossed genres, so I’m going to be keeping a record of his various treacheries in this piece. So far, score one for the House of Wessex. It wouldn’t last.

Perhaps due to this favour to his king - or maybe he had carried out the murder on the understanding that he would be so rewarded - Eadric was given the title of Ealdorman of Mercia, even then a powerful position. Although he distinguished himself well in the position, fighting for his king against the Viking raiders, when it was clear that the day was lost and Sweyn Forkbeard was temporarily crowned King of England, Eadric decided it was a good time to leg it, and headed over to Normandy with Queen Emma. The king followed them a year later, in 1014. As we’ve seen though, he wasn’t in France a wet day before Forkbeard snuffed it and the English invited him back, and of course with him came Eadric.

In 1015 the treacherous Ealdorman killed two other thegns, Sigeferth and Morcar, possibly as a reprisal for their collaborating with the men of Forkbeard, and in that same year Eadric again sensed which way the wind was blowing and threw in his lot with the newly-arrived Cnut, who would take the kingdom shortly after, and on his death Eadric would pursue his son, Edmund, in the service of King Cnut.

House of Wessex one, House of Denmark One.

Never a man to waste an opportunity, when Eadric, facing Edmund’s forces in battle, noticed a man in his army who looked like him, he killed and beheaded him, holding up the head and shouting that he had killed Edmund, and his army might as well surrender. They did, this despite the fact that they were in fact winning the battle. When they saw what they believed to be the head of their leader, they lost all hope and ran.

They soon rallied though when they realised they had been fooled, and that their king was still alive, and finally defeated at the Battle of Otford, Eadric again changed sides, allying himself to Edmund. House of Wessex Two, House of Denmark One. When their forces met those of Cnut in 1016 though, Eadric helpfully withdrew his forces from the battle, leaving Edmund exposed. House of Wessex Two, House of Denmark Three. It’s been theorised that this was Eadric’s plan all along, to lull Edmund into a false sense of security and then betray him when his forces were needed the most. Whether or not Cnut was in on the plan, if there was a plan, nobody has commented.

Eadric then turned peacemaker and mediator, brokering the truce between Edmund and Cnut which divided England between the two kings, but which was not to last as Edmund died a year later, leaving Cnut in complete control of the kingdom. Despite his seeming defection, Cnut forgave Eadric and he was allowed to retain the ealdormanship of Mercia. Or did he forgive him? Cnut obviously knew the kind of man he was dealing with, someone who would sell out his own grandmother if he got him a position, lands or money, and he had an interesting and surprising Christmas present for Eadric. The man who had turned too many times was finally done in on December 25 1017, when Cnut, angered that he had been disloyal - both to him and to Edmund; the point didn’t seem to be to whom, but that his loyalty could not be trusted, and he was without honour (remember, Cnut was a Viking, a man who prized honour above most other traits) - ordered one of his men to “pay what he was owed”, and the axe literally fell.

Being away most of the time, Cnut realised he had to delegate some of his power, and therefore two men rose in his shadow who were pretty much in all but name co-rulers of England in the king’s absence. Unsurprisingly, they were each in control of one of the most important regions of England, the ancient sites of Anglo-Saxon powers, two areas which had once been warring kingdoms, and which to some extent kind of still were.

Godwin, Earl of Wessex (1001 - 1053)

Certainly an eleventh-century powerbroker, Godwin may have believed from an early age that he was destined for great things, as a fleet sent in pursuit of the man who may have been his father, Wulfnoth Cild, accused of crimes against Aethelred the Unready, foundered at sea. Left an estate by Aethelstan in 1014, Godwin would have been basically rich from his teens, though this estate had originally belonged to his family, so really all Aethelstan was doing here was restoring to Godwin what had been taken from him and was his by right. A mere six years later Godwin, now Earl of Wessex, was in Denmark with Cnut, where he made himself indispensable and also married the sister of the Danish earl Ulf, Gytha. In a sort of exchange-marriage, Ulf had married Godwin’s sister, Estrid.

Cnut’s death in 1035 did nothing to slow Godwin’s ambitious rise to power, in fact it expedited it, as he became the main deciding force as to who should succeed the king. Though he supported Harthacnut, he was in Denmark putting down a rebellion, so it was agreed that Harold Harefoot would rule as regent till he could return and claim his throne. You’ve read all this already of course. What do you mean, you just skimmed it? Bullet points? I’ll give you bullet points! What about hollow points, eh? Anyway, as you will (hopefully) also have read, Godwin thwarted the attempts of one of the sons of Aethelred, Aelfred Aetheling, to claim the throne in the name of his father, and turned him over to Harold’s men, who blinded him. He soon died. This of course made him popular with Harold. With no sign of Harthacnut on the horizon any time soon, Godwin decided the best thing to do was make Harold king, and so it came to pass.

Isn’t it odd how earls and nobles had such power back then, the power to literally choose the king? But that’s how it was. Until much later, when divine right of succession was established within the monarchy, there was no guarantee, no mechanism in place to arrange or accept the issue of a king as his successor. The witan, the king’s council, met and decided who they wanted to be the next king. You could say it was better that way, that then someone who may have had no idea how to be a king was not just thrown in at the deep end, but then again, it did mean that the most powerful people in the land chose the man they believed would best serve their interests, so that was hardly fair. The people? What had it to do with the people? They didn’t care who was king. They had enough to be going on with just trying to survive. Why should they care if a Dane or an Englishman sat on the throne? Wouldn’t affect their lives, and even if it did, there was nothing they could do to change it. Still isn’t, now that royal prerogative has been established.

Anyway, as we’ve already seen, Harold wasn’t to last long and Godwin then engineered the return of Harthacnut from Denmark to take his place. This didn’t last long either, and eventually Godwin had to choose a successor, which turned out to be Edward the Confessor, Aethelred’s son, bringing the whole dynasty of the House of Wessex full circle again. Godwin further strengthened his ties with the new king by having him marry his daughter, Edith, though Edward, swearing celibacy, would have no children Godwin or his heirs could control. Indeed, his time as powerbroker was running out. When he refused to punish the town of Dover when its people caused offence to the visiting Count of Boulogne, he basically said “Fuck this. I’m not killing English people for some filthy frog!” And realising that he took on the king himself with his defiance, he had no choice but to flee to Flanders (seems to have been the place to flee to, back then), exiled in 1051.

(No, not that one!)

He wasn’t prepared to leave it there though, and he and his fellow earls, who had also been exiled (the other two to Ireland) returned the next year at the head of an army, and Edward thought it prudent to let bygones be bygones. What did offence to a French noble Count for (sorry) anyway? Restored to his earldom, Godwin didn’t have long to enjoy his victory, as he died the next year, of some unspecified illness, but possibly a stroke, which may have left him speechless and without strength for four days before he finally passed away on April 15 1052.

His son Harold would go on to succeed Edward and be the last king of the House of Wessex, ruling for less than a year before dying at the Battle of Hastings as William the Conqueror led the Normans into a new era in English history.

Leofric, Earl of Mercia (died 1057)

Ah, if there’s one thing a man did not want history to remember him by it was that his wife was more famous than he, but Leofric of Mercia is really only taken notice of by history due to being the husband of the famous Lady Godiva, as related below. A contemporary of Godwin, he was earl of the other main territory, the kingdom of Mercia, but supported the claim of Harold Harefoot to the throne, in opposition to Godwin’s championing of the right of Harthacnut. He was therefore not best pleased when, on Harold’s death and Harthcnut’s accession, the new king, enraged at the killing of two of his tax collectors, sent Leofric and Godwin to sack the town of Worcester. This had been his ancestral home, so Leofric, though he obeyed, chafed at the order, and this might indeed have factored into his later decision to support Godwin’s disobedience to Edward the Confessor’s order to sack Dover.

Initially though he fought against Godwin in the name of Edward, who led an army against him at Gloucester in 1051. Leofric convinced the king not to join battle, as too many of the nobility would be lost and it would damage the kingdom, so Edward instead exiled Godwin, which suited Leofric perfectly, making him basically the second most powerful man in England. His own son Aelfgar however damaged that power by bringing a combined force of Irish and Welsh against the king at Hereford; nevertheless this revolt was settled amicably and on Leofric’s death in 1057 his son rose to the earldom.

As we’ll see below in the story of Lady Godiva, Leofric was a man who brutally oppressed his people, levying harsh taxes on the people of Coventry, and could not have been a popular lord. The fact that his wife could not appeal to his mercy says a lot about him too. As usual, historians argue and bicker over how true all of this Godiva stuff is, and as usual we’ll let them, as we have better things to do.

[Trollheart]

There is Nothing Like a Dane, Nothing in the World: Important Vikings in England

Although they came to England as raiders, the effect and influence the men from the North had upon the country is undeniable, and even led to one - alright, two then - of them becoming king of the newly formed land. Here I want to look briefly into the main Viking figures who impacted upon English politics and history from the tenth century to the eleventh.

Olaf (sometimes Anlaf) Guthfrithson

The third Viking King of Dublin, following the expulsion of his people in 902 by the Irish, Olaf first appeared in 933 hassling the people of Ulster, and fought a campaign against them, then turning south, battling the King of Limerick and taking the throne of Dublin for himself. Secure in his power in Ireland, he then headed across the Irish Sea to take on the English in 937. At this point Aethelstan was the king, and Olaf set his sights on Northumbria, which had always been fiercely independent and which was close enough to the defiant Scots to provide him with allies against the English. Besides, he believed he was only taking back what was his, as his father, Gofraid ua Imair, had been king of Northumbria before Aethelstan had taken it from him. Time for some revenge then, Viking-style!

The allied forces of Olaf and Constantine II of Scotland met those of Athelstan and his son Edmund at the Battle of Brunanburh, where the Vikings were defeated and Olaf hopped back across the sea to lick his wounds. But with the death of Aethelstan two years later he was back, and this time he took Northumbria, setting himself up as king. He fought the new English king, Edmund, and the result was a compromise whereby the area known as the Danelaw was established. Olaf died in 941, but his brother succeeded him as King of Northumbria.

Thorkell the Tall

Leader of one of the major invasions of the first decade of the eleventh century, Thorkell had a sandwich - sorry; landed at Sandwich in Kent in 1009, but the people of Kent bought him off and he tried his luck with London. The Londoners didn’t have to bribe him though as their city was too well defended and he gave up, turning towards Canterbury in 1011, and besieging the town for three weeks. It fell finally due to the treachery of a man whose life the Archbishop, Aelfheah, had saved, which was pretty ironic as Thorkell captured the Archbishop and later had him murdered. Thanks a lot, dude! Mind you, it seems Aelfheah may have to some extent brought this fate down on himself, being a constant thorn in the Vikings’ side as he continued to try to convert them with the annoying zeal of a Jehovah’s Witness who just won’t go away even when you shut the door in their face, and eventually, after seven months during which the Archbishop refused to be ransomed, the Vikings had had enough. During a drunken feast (did any Viking know any other sort?) they started throwing meat-bones at him, and then finished him off with an axe.

The killing of the Archbishop had been against the will and orders of Thorkell, which just goes to show I guess that drunk Vikings listen to nobody when their blood is up, and as a result he defected and went to work for Aethelred as a mercenary, taking forty-five ships with him. Though he and his men fought against the invasion of Sweyn Forkbeard in 1013, and escorted Aethelred into exile, Cnut allowed him to fight for him later, and in 1016 the king even made him Jarl, or earl of East Anglia. Although he fell out of favour with Cnut and was banished to Denmark in 1023, it was here that he was given charge of the king’s son, Harthacnut, and the earldom of Denmark, though this quickly passed to Ulf. Nothing further is known about Thorkell after 1023.

Sweyn Forkbeard

The first true Viking king of England, even if he only reigned for just over a month and a half, Sweyn was of course father to the man who would become one of the eleventh century’s most famous and successful monarchs, Cnut the Great. But his relationship with his own father had not been that great, revolting against his father Harald Bluetooth and taking his throne, having driven him into exile, where he died soon after. Supplanted himself by the incredibly-named Eric the Victorious of Sweden, and himself exiled to Scotland, Sweyn plotted revenge against the English after the slaughter of Danes following the St. Brice’s Day Massacre in 1002, and invaded no less than four times, including one headed by Thorkell the Tall. In 1013 Sweyn was victorious, Aethelred Aethel-fled (sorry) to Flanders and Sweyn became the first Viking - indeed, the first non-Saxon - to sit the English throne.

Unfortunately he hadn’t long to relish his triumph, as he died only forty-one days later. His son Cnut would succeed him, but not before Aethelred returned and both he and his son Edmund Ironside would rule England.

Ivar the Boneless

Anyone familiar with the series Vikings will know of Ivar, and while there is evidence for him actually being lame, or having no legs, or weak bones (osteoporosis maybe) there is also belief that the epithet could refer to his being impotent, or even that it was mistranslated and should be more along the lines of the Hated. As with all events so far back in history and with few accounts supporting the facts, many contradictory or at best taking a guess, we’ll never be sure. But what is accepted is that Ivar seems to have fathered (in a historical sense) the great dynasty that would one day lead to Cnut the Great sitting for twenty years on the throne of England.

Despite his infirmity, if he had one, Ivar is generally agreed to have been an intelligent and cunning man. When he led the Great Heathen Army against England in 865, but was unable to beat King Aella of Northumbria, he promised to live peacefully if the king would give him enough land to live on. He then tricked Aella into giving him far more than the king had expected (the details of which are probably mostly folklore-related) and settled in York or London. But whether this was a ruse or peaceful farming just did not suit Ivar, he was on the march again the next year, and this time took Northumbria and executed Aella. Alarmed at the success of the Great Heathen Army, the kings of Mercia and West Saxon (later Wessex) joined forces to oppose them, and pushed them back to York, where they remained for the winter.

869 saw Ivar lead his army out of York and into East Anglia, where he and his brothers executed the English king Edmund, to be forever after known as the Martyr. The death of Ivar himself, including its cause, is uncertain, noted by various sources as being 870 or 873, and possibly due to some “unnamed disease”, which might possibly hark back to the believed manner of his father Ragnar Lothbrok’s death, understood by many to have been a form of bowel disease. An interesting legend says that when he was dying, Ivar commanded that he should be buried in a place “open to attack” and that he would guard England even after death. Not quite sure why, as he had fought the English, but however. According to the legend, this prophecy came true until William the Conqueror had his burial mound excavated, saw the body had not decayed and had it burned, whereafter his invasion of England was successful, and he became the first in a line of Norman kings.

Siward, Earl of Northumbria

Possibly the cousin of Earl Ulf of Denmark, Siward’s ancestry is very vague though most historians do at least place him as coming from Scandinavia, most likely Denmark. He was one of the three earls who carried out Cnut’s commands during his reign - basically, his enforcers - but survived to serve both Cnut’s successors, and even Edward the Confessor for a short time. Legend has it that Odin himself chose him to rise in English politics, but the All-Father could not be contacted for comment at the time of writing. Legends or at least possibly apocryphal stories abound in the career of Siward, who was said to have procured the earldom of Huntington by the rather drastic but simple precedent of killing the current holder of the title after he caused him offence. In fact, he cut off the earl’s head and laid it at Cnut’s feet in his throne room, to show that the position was vacant, and Cnut agreed to give him the earldom. I’m sure he always knew Siward would get ahead. Sorry.

Around 1041, with the killing and “betrayal” of Eadulf, Earl of Bamburgh, and having already been granted Cumberland, Northumberland and Westmoreland by the king, Siward became the Earl of Northumbria, one of the first to hold the title. That same year he helped put down riots in Worcester, as already mentioned, and when Edward the Confessor came to the throne he was one of his greatest supporters, taking part in the excursion to Queen Emma at Winchester where she was divested of most of her treasures by an angry Edward. He fought against Godwin in 1051 along with Leofric and, um, Ralph the Timid (I kid you not!) whereafter the Earl of Wessex was exiled.

Three years later he made his name by taking on Macbeth of Scotland, the previous king, Duncan I, having attacked Northumbria in 1040. Failing to subdue the kingdom, he was deposed a year later by Macbeth, and Siward sent his son Ozzy sorry Osbjorn against him, resulting in the death of his sprog. Siward then rode himself in revenge to Scotland In 1046, where he defeated Macbeth, placing another - who may have been Malcolm III - on the throne. On his departure though, Macbeth seized his crown back.

Like it seems so many English people, Siward’s death was to be a messy and ignominious one, certainly not one fitting a soldier, much less an earl. Like Ragnar and Edmund, he died from dysentery, though a saga seems to insist he commanded that he would not die “the death of a cow” and ensured his armour was put on him and that his sword and shield were in his hands. Makes no difference whether he did or not though, as he still crapped himself to death. Urgh.

[Trollheart]

Britannia Does Not Rule the Waves: Cnut and the Sea

Cnut died in 1035, having reigned, as I mentioned at the beginning, longer almost than any English king up to this. But before we write his obituary, I know you’ve all been waiting for me to address the legend, story or parable so linked with him, though usually under the name Canute.

And here it is.

The story goes that Cnut, in an attempt to explain the limits of his powers, and that he, as all men, was helpless against nature and God, showed his courtiers that even he could not command the sea not to advance. The story is recounted in Henry Huntington’s twelfth century account:

When he was at the height of his ascendancy, he ordered his chair to be placed on the sea-shore as the tide was coming in. Then he said to the rising tide, “You are subject to me, as the land on which I am sitting is mine, and no one has resisted my overlordship with impunity. I command you, therefore, not to rise on to my land, nor to presume to wet the clothing or limbs of your master.” But the sea came up as usual, and disrespectfully drenched the king’s feet and shins. So jumping back, the king cried, “Let all the world know that the power of kings is empty and worthless, and there is no king worthy of the name save Him by whose will heaven, earth and the sea obey eternal laws.”

Over time, this has been taken, erroneously (including, until I read this, by me) as a demonstration of the arrogance of the man, his faith in his own power and his belief that he was, as Monty Burns’ high-priced lawyers once pointed out, not as other men. But it makes more sense that it was a sort of parable to show his subjects that even a king had to bow to the majesty of God’s creation. After all, Cnut was, from what I’ve read, neither a vain nor a stupid man, and he certainly was not ignorant. Having no real need to prove his powers, it makes no sense that he should attempt this demonstration unless he was trying to teach a lesson, as it seems he was. There is no real agreement though as to whether this event took place, or whether it was either embellished, misreported or simply made up later.

Despite his promises, on his death Cnut’s son Harthacnut was not accepted by the English as his successor, mostly due to his spending most of his time ruling over Denmark, and his mother, Queen Emma, had to flee to safety in Flanders (well, hidely-ho, neighborino!) under pressure from Cnut’s other son, by his other wife, Harold Harefoot, who became the next king of England in 1037, having been regent for two years.

We’ll certainly come back to him, and pick up the story of the last of the Wessex kings, but right now let’s digress a little.

Death and Taxes

If there was one thing a king loved to do, or may not have loved to do but needed to, it was levy taxes. Whether this was to prosecute a war, for the upkeep of the armed forces, to help build or rebuild churches and abbeys, or to pay off debts, the king or queen was always the nation’s principle taxman. And people had to pay. Or riot. Usually they paid, as rioting was so tiresome, with the ever-present danger of imprisonment or death, and the pretty good chance that the protest would avail nothing anyway, except perhaps harsher taxes. What kind of taxes were there in Anglo-Saxon England? Well, there were certainly a few.

The first was not even called a tax, and comes from the time of King Aethelbert of Kent in the closing decades of the sixth century, wherein the king proclaimed that all fines from court cases were to be given to him. Then there was food render or food rent, in which a stipulated amount of foodstuffs was to be presented to the king by each hundred, or small village, but only if the king or his representatives visited. If not, then that hundred was exempt from food rent for the next year. What this meant, in effect, was that when and if the king turned up at any particular hundred, he could be assured of a good feed. It’s likely that the food part of the food rent was consumed by the king and his men during their visit, so really not what you’d call quite a tax, more like a catering-on-demand for the king, available wherever he chose to visit.

Possibly one of the first proper forms of taxation though was the Danegeld, which has been spoken of before. Basically this was a tax collected so that the marauding Vikings could be placated and bribed to fuck off and leave England alone, so to an extent it was a justifiable tax. Nevertheless, some might say it was the responsibility of the king and his nobles to make sure the enemy was bought off, and that the burden should not fall on the common man - perhaps some who said that might regret it as they looked up at the slavering Dane wielding a broadaxe over their shoulder and looming down on them, and think “I wish I had paid the bloody Danegeld!”

It’s a curious thing to me that fighting and battles could be decided not just by strength of arms, but by who was willing to pay for peace. I suppose it makes sense: money has always talked, and the Vikings after all were first and foremost raiders, and raiders want plunder. If they can be handed that rather than have to take it by force, sure why not? But what’s quite interesting is that this practice seems to have insinuated itself into the English consciousness and the English way of doing things, as more and more kingdoms at war with each other would buy each other off rather than fight to the death, or to a standstill. I guess the Viking ways really did take hold. I doubt Odin would have approved though.

It was probably Alfred the Great who really took taxation to a new level, when he had built the system of burhs, or fortified towns and forts, referred to earlier in this chapter. In order to maintain these and keep them in a state of readiness, he imposed new taxes on his people, so many in fact that they all had to be recorded in a large volume which was called the Burghal Hidage, maybe the world’s, certainly England’s first tariff of taxes. Edgar later ensured that all coinage was updated periodically, and the dies used were taxed too.

There was also another type of Danegeld called heregeld, which was paid directly to the king for the upkeep and payment of a standing army. Like most taxes, this was extremely unpopular, except I assume in times of war, when people were glad they had the soldiers there to protect them. As Anglo-Saxon England was replaced by Norman England in the middle of the eleventh century, the system of taxation would rise exponentially, as the now-conquered country would be subject to new and cruel taxes and levies forced upon it by its new masters.

The Naked Truth - Lady Godiva: Fact, Fantasy or Fiction?

Just about everyone knows the story of the famous, semi-legendary figure of Lady Godiva, who is said to have ridden naked through the streets of Coventry, and that’s about all we know about it. It certainly is all I knew about it, but as she lived in the time of Cnut - and as her ride is tied in with the idea of taxation - I thought it might be an idea to do a little research and see how true, if at all, this story is. After all, just because she was a real person doesn’t mean she actually did what she’s said to have done, does it? So let’s have a shufty at the legend, and the reality, and see what lies behind (sorry) the legend of what could be termed almost the first streaker in history.

Lady Godiva was the wife of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, with Eadric Stronea one of the two most powerful men under Cnut at the time. Her name may have been Godgifu or Godgyfu, though no Christian or forename seems to have survived. It seems she was a religious and indeed a generous woman, persuading her husband to donate to the Church with projects such as the endowment of a Benedictine abbey in Coventry and the granting of land in Worcester and Lincolnshire. She is one of the only female landowners to have retained her property after the Norman invasion, but when her death is placed between 1066 and 1086, that might not be such a big deal as it seems.

There are no dates for the legendary story, and it was first related three hundred years after her death, in the thirteenth century. Basically nobody believes it, but who knows? Anyway, the idea behind her ride is that she, seeing the suffering the people of Coventry were undergoing as her husband Leofric crushed them with tax after tax, and unable to appeal to him to be merciful and ease the burden, finally received from him a (we assume) laughing ultimatum. He would lift the taxes if she would agree to ride naked through the streets. To - presumably - his great surprise and possibly excitement, she agreed, on certain conditions, quite reasonable ones.

The streets must be deserted. Nobody could come out of their house or look from their windows or doors. There was, essentially, to be no witness, no peeping. This condition was strictly observed, but (according to the legend, and really to nobody’s surprise reading this) one man could not contain his curiosity or excitement and did look. He was - so the story goes - a tailor and for his disobedience and debauchery he was blinded, either by God or more likely by Leofric or the townsfolk, the latter probably just jealous they hadn’t had the balls to defy the lady. Interestingly, this legend is even less likely to be true, even if Godiva’s one is, as “Peeping Tom”, as he became known, an epithet now attached to any voyeur, is only mentioned from about the seventeenth century, four hundred years after the original story is first reported, so therefore must be a clever little embellishment. It might be there to try to give the story an air of authenticity. Who, after all, would believe that no man would look, risk the consequences? That there is one who is said to have done so makes this seem more plausible as a story, I think.

The tellings vary on how naked Lady Godiva was. The popular belief is that she was entirely naked, clothed only in her long flowing hair. This seems to me unlikely for several reasons. We have no record of the weather (always assuming this actually took place) and it may have been windy. If so, then her hair is unlikely to have stayed in place for the ride, which would have caused her to expose at least part of her more intimate charms. Also, the motion of the horse, even at a slow walk, must surely have disturbed any attempt to keep her hair in position. Finally, there’s the comfort angle. Leaving out the hair, riding a horse has never been a comfortable proposition, and riding in the buff would surely have been very painful. Is it likely Lady Godiva was ready to risk bruises and maybe welts on her thighs and buttocks just to prove a point? Was she really ready to suffer pain, in addition to humiliation, for her husband, on behalf of her people?

It seems to be more accepted that she wore some sort of close-fitting slip or shift, this mode of dress being linked with penitents at that time, and if she was basically representing a sort of submission to her husband in order to get what she wanted for the folk of Coventry, then that style might be more appropriate. In any event, trying to mount a horse naked (we must assume she got up on the horse herself, as everyone else had been commanded to remain indoors) would be difficult, painful and potentially dangerous. There are certain people who believe “Peeping Tom” may have been her groom, though I reckon that unlikely, but even if so, was she going to let a lowly groom touch her naked body as he helped her up?

There are many supposed symbolisations historians ascribe to Lady Godiva’s ride, but though I don’t personally believe it happened (wouldn’t it have turned up in stories earlier than the thirteenth century if it had, especially given that she was a noblewoman?) I see it more as the affirmation of the gentleness of women as opposed to the cruelty and brutality of men, the idea that the harsh male nature can be softened by the tempering touch of a kind and caring woman. Of course, it can also be seen as the ultimate power man has over woman (or vice versa), as Godiva gave Leofric what he wanted, and in that sense possibly linked right back to Herod and Salome in the Bible.

Though it is, as I say, likely just bollocks.

Not that, of course, she had those.

[Trollheart]

What’s in a Name, Ae?

Just want to digress momentarily here to look at what I believe is an interesting development in England, and in particular in its monarchs. Up until the arrival of Cnut (discounting our forty-day friend Sweyn) the names of all of England’s kings have begun with A or E, sometimes both, as in Aethelstan and Aethelred. Cnut’s reign seems to dispense with that, forsaking the Saxon convention of naming boys and replacing it with that of his people. So his sons are called Svein, Harold and Harthacnut. I can’t say for certain, but I wonder if this is around the first time the name Harold is heard, or used, in England? Harold of course begets, in a way, Henry (Henrys were often called Harry) a name which would go on to dominate English history in the centuries to come. Harold, or Harald, is very much a Scandinavian name, and Cnut was surely responsible for making it a popular one in England later. I don’t see or hear of any mention of any Harold or Henry or Harry prior to this, and soon afterwards the usage of A and E together in names fades out, mostly due, admittedly, to the events of 1066 and the forced decline of the Anglo-Saxon ways, including the supplanting of their language, so do we have Cnut and his successors to thank for the sudden appearance of what would in time become such a regal name?

Anyway, on with the show.

Harold I (Harold Harefoot) (died 1040)

Though the throne of England would see many bastards sit upon it, we might be able to point to Harold I, known as Harefoot for his supposed skill in running (hare meant fleet or fast) as the first, if you will, true bastard. Of course it’s never easy to prove these things, but the accepted story of his birth seems to be this. Queen Aefligu, unable to have a son by Cnut, came up with the rather odd strategy of adopting the children of strangers and passing them off as her own, presenting them to Cnut as his sons. The belief is that Harold was the son of a cobbler, Aelfgifu’s other “son”, his “brother” Svein, the son of a priest. Some historians dispute these claims, but then, what historian worth his or her salt doesn’t dispute historical claims when a chance presents itself? If she was barren though, it does make a certain amount of sense, and given that men back then had no real interest in their sons after the actual birth (and none at all in their usually unwanted daughters) until they were ready to be trained as their heir, it’s not such a stretch. I mean, it’s not as if he would have demanded to have been at the birth, after all, and money talks, loudly, at court.

Whatever the case, the late Cnut’s promise that he would put no other of his children above Emma’s son Harthacnut proved unenforceable, as he had to deal with the Danes, and was so long putting down a revolt in his father’s other kingdom that the English shrugged and said “fuck it, the kid will do.” Now, though there’s no date for Harold’s birth, it seems to be assumed that he was, at this time, too young to be king, and so was made regent. He didn’t have an easy time of it though, as the Archbishop of Canterbury, perhaps mindful of the rumours about Harold’s birth and therefore his illegitimacy, refused to perform the coronation, an absolute necessity to ensure the validity of the king’s claim. Disgruntled, stymied, Harold renounced Christianity in protest and spent a lot of time hunting, no doubt envisioning the face of the pompous Archbishop in every stag or boar he took down.

But as ever, political pressure and the support of powerful nobles - along with a generous helping, no doubt, of bribery - secured Harold’s position, and he was elected (sorry again but it keeps coming up) king in the North, that is, king of all territories north of the Thames, while Queen Emma ostensibly held all the land south of the river in the name of her son. Eventually though pressure told, and the Earl of Godwin, one of the main supporters of Emma, switched sides, leaving her exposed, and unable to resist Harold’s claim, and he was proclaimed King of England.

As we’ve seen though, with her son still too young to be actual king, and more or less serving as regent, Aelfgifu really held the power until he came of age. Emma, also a queen, had held the lands south of the Thames, yes, and in that sense ruled by proxy for Harthacnut, but she was squeezed out and had to leg it to Flanders as her support collapsed (hate that: should have worn a wonderbra!) so never got to rule, even in her son’s name, all of England, unlike her hated rival, her late husband’s other wife.

Before that though, while her son could not leave Denmark to come claim his rightful throne, two of her other sons did. Aelfred Aetheling and the future king, Edward the Confessor, both sons of the late Aethelred. Their armies proved unequal to the task, however, when they landed in 1036, and Aelfred was captured by the Earl of Godwin, blinded and later died. The Earl would have cause to regret this later, when his brother ascended the throne. Edward, later the Confessor, did win some battles but rightly saw he had not enough support to challenge the son of Cnut for the kingship, and hopped back over to Normandy to bide his time and gather his forces. A year later, Harold was proclaimed unopposed king, and Emma got the hell out of Dodge.

Perhaps a little precipitously, as Harold only lasted four years on the throne, and indeed four years further on the Earth, as he died of some unspecified disease in 1040. Nevertheless, those who were exiled at that time seldom cooled their heels and relaxed into retirement, taking up knitting or bingo, and Emma plotted from Brugges to have her son returned to England and crowned king. She didn’t have long to wait.

Whether at the urging of his mother (almost certainly part of the reason anyway) or horror at the death of his half-brother at the hands of Godwin, or just because he saw it as his right as Cnut’s only legitimate son, Harthacnut landed in Kent exactly three months to the day after Harold breathed his last, and though he had a large fleet he encountered no opposition, the likelihood being that England had been gearing up for his coronation anyway since Harold was sick and soon to die. Crowned almost as soon as he arrived, Harthacnut set about avenging Aelfred Aethling’s treacherous death, ordering the body of Harold to be dug up, beheaded and thrown into a marsh, though it was later transferred to the waters of the Thames, where it was later retrieved by Danish fishermen and eventually found its way to Winchester.

The reign of the son of Cnut was nothing like that of his famous father. Though short, it saw taxes rise to unprecedented levels as Harthacnut ruled like an autocrat, as he had in Denmark, and set about expanding the English fleet. Bad harvests added to the poor people’s woes, and when the behaviour of heartless tax-gatherers (was there ever any other kind?) pushed them to the limit they rioted, leading the English into conflict with their own king for the first time in centuries, as Harthacnut reacted to a riot in Worcester by having his men burn the town to the ground. Add to this the charge against him as an “oath-breaker” and the people would not be sorry to see the back of him. Oaths were of course seen as sacred in England (and more so in Scandinavia) so when Harthacnut went back on his word, having promised safe passage to one of the earls of Northumbria, who had offended him but been forgiven and had the other earl murder him and take his lands, it really was the last straw.

They needn’t have worried though, as Harthacnut was not long for this world. Having recalled his brother Edward the Confessor back from exile, he fell into bad health and during a wedding feast in 1042 died while proposing a toast to the bride. Now, this might be seen as bad luck and not the greatest way to start your married life, to have the man - indeed, the king himself - toast you and then end up brown bread a moment later, and there are various theories floating around, as you might expect, that he was poisoned, most likely by Edward. But while he may have been known as the Confessor, Aelfred Aethling’s brother was keeping this one, if he was involved, between him and God, and never said, as was once written, a mumbling word, but quite possibly (though not likely) headed off to try out the throne for size. He’d want to ensure it was comfortable, as his reign, the last major Saxon one, would be a long one.

I prefer to think though that Harthacnut just died a man’s death, drinking himself literally to death at a wedding. I mean, let’s be honest: as deaths go, this isn’t a bad way to check out is it? And at least he didn’t have to worry about the hangover the next morning! It’s certainly said that he drank a lot, so it could just literally have been, as has been suggested, a stroke brought on by excessive alcohol consumption. As a Viking, I’m sure daddy would have been proud. I’m also sure the cheers could be heard all over England when the news broke. His reign had lasted just short of two years, his death coming nine days before what would have been the second anniversary of his ascension.

Edward the Confessor (c. 1003 - 1066)

Although they had no idea of course at the time, the weight of history was pressing down on the line of Saxon kings, and on England, like a remorseless juggernaut, and soon events would transpire which would shake English history to its very foundations, re-order the way the people lived, worked, built and fought, and perhaps kick off the lasting enmity between England and France. After 1066, nothing in England would ever be the same. It would be as if a great flood had washed away the last five hundred years of its heritage and replaced it with something entirely new, and alien. While England had been invaded before - twice - no invasion would ever have the epoch-changing effect the arrival of the Normans would have on the country.

But before then, there were two more kings to rule the land, one of whose reign was short, one who ruled for over two decades. We’ve already seen how, not long for this world, Harthacnut had invited Edward the Confessor back from exile to England, and on his death soon after, and with the support of the Earl of Godwin, Edward was crowned King of England. Possibly, even probably due to her favouring Harthacnut over him when the son of Cnut was king, Edward was not well disposed towards Emma, and she did not figure in his reign, dying ten years later much poorer and not at all regarded or welcome at court. Edward may also have reviled her for climbing into bed with her husband’s rival soon after Aethelred had died, feeling betrayed and since she did nothing to prevent or fight against his exile under Harthacnut.

Despite the support of Godwin though, Edward found himself in a rather precarious position as king. The ancient loyalty to, and power of the House of Wessex was so weakened it was almost non-existent, Danish rule having supplanted Saxon now for over a quarter of a century, and none of the earls, save one, were loyal to his House. Indeed, his own ascension to the throne was in doubt, as Magnus Olafsson, King of Denmark and Norway, claimed he had been promised both the throne of Denmark and that of England by Cnut III, otherwise known as Harthacnut, when he had ruled Denmark. He therefore asserted his claim to the English throne, and told Edward to expect an invasion. Edward, however, pointed out that the English people would never accept Magnus, reminding the Dane that he, Edward, was the son of Aethelred, rightful king of England and last of the royal Wessex line before the arrival of Cnut, that his mother was Queen Emma (whose name and reputation he didn’t seem above using to validate his own claim, even if he had no time for her personally and treated her shabbily) and that no matter what army he raised, no matter what invasion he mounted, even were he to attempt to take the throne, he would face resistance. In short, he was told by Edward, “you can never be called king in England, and you will never be granted any allegiance there before you put an end to my life.” Magnus is reported to have said “Fair doos, you got me there son” and left it at that.

Godwin, a central figure in eleventh century politics, who you may remember changed sides more often than Bowie changed his look, set about causing more trouble when he rode against the new king in a dispute over the ordered punishment of some of the men of Edward’s brother-in-law, and losing the fight he had to flee into exile. In some ways then, Edward the Confessor had worked his vengeance on Godwin for the murder of his brother Aelfred (even though technically Aelfred had only been blinded; he had died of his wounds - having red-hot pokers pushed into your eyes will do that), despite his having needed the support of the earl originally in order to confirm his claim to the Crown. Ah, politics, eh?

And of course, that was the end of Godwin, right?

Was it fuck!

Back he came a few years later at the head of an army, and fearing civil war, Edward had to sue for peace, the two shaking hands that were surely as ice-cold as those of a White Walker. Godwin finally did the decent thing and died in 1053, and nobody as relieved I’m sure as the king to see the back of him at last. However Godwin had not been shy about putting it about, and so he had sons. And those sons set about consolidating their power, gaining earldoms here and there, until, with the death of various nobles around the country, England was in all but name under the control of the Godwin family. At this point, around 1057, having successfully kicked the arses of both the Scottish and the Welsh, including defeating the king of Scotland made legendary five hundred years later by Shakespeare, Macbeth, and seeing the growing power of the Godwins, it seems Edward gave up the kinging lark and decided to concentrate on hunting instead, leaving the sons of Godwin to run the country.

[Trollheart]

Crumbling support and a lack of respect for him as king led to Edward suffering from a series of strokes in 1065 which led to his death, bringing to a close the longest single rule of an English king since Cnut, and the last before the Norman invasion. The final king to rule would do so for a mere two years before being defeated at some battle you’ve probably never heard of.

One of the major building projects begun during Edward’s reign, and very much still standing and active today, is the Norman cathedral known as the Collegiate Church of St. Peter, or more commonly Westminster Abbey. A story goes that a local fisherman saw a vision of St. Peter on the Thames at the site where it now stands, and its building commenced in 1042, a Benedictine abbey having stood previously on the site but been destroyed. Most people consider maybe booking themselves a plot or at least checking out places they might wish to be buried, but when you’re a king no “six paces of the vilest earth will suffice”, and so Edward wanted to rebuild what was then called St. Peter’s Abbey as a place to house his mortal remains.

It is the first building in England constructed in the Romanesque style, and therefore the first Norman building raised on English soil. Indeed, after Edward had been buried there the first recorded coronation of a King of England would be the first Norman king, William the Conqueror, less than a year after Edward’s passing. It was in fact only completed a mere few days before Edward’s death, and is now one of the most important and significant buildings in Great Britain.

As for who was going to take over from Edward. He confessed, he wasn’t sure, and his dithering and indecision may have given the Normans the chance they were waiting for. Having professed celibacy, Edward had no children of his own, certainly no son and therefore no heir, so there were several claimants. First up was Edward Aetheling, known, perhaps dismissively, as Edward the Exile, the son of Edmund Ironside who had been banished from England by Cnut, along with his brother, Edmund, and sent to the Swedish court. The orders from Cnut were to do the two children in, but, Snow White-like, the Swedish king had been a mate of Aethelred and so declined to kill them, sending them instead to Hungary (presumably without enlightening the then King of England). When Edward the Confessor found out in 1056 that Edward Atheling was still alive he invited him back to England, intending him to be his heir. This would allow the ancient House of Wessex to reclaim its lineage and push back against the Danish established House of Denmark.

It was not to be.

Edward the Exile arrived in England and promptly became Edward the Expired. No details are given of his death, but he was only on English shores a matter of days when he died. Given that his presence threatened the claim of the Godwins, you would imagine they had something to do with it, but I can’t find out anywhere whether he died of natural causes, an accident, or was murdered. Either way, the end result was that the last of the bloodline of the Saxon kings died with him, or rather with Edward a few years later.

Then there was William I, Duke of Normandy and later to be known as William the Conqueror, whom it is believed had visited Edward when Godwin was in exile and secured from him a promise to be his successor. However in the end the Confessor went with this guy.

Harold Godwinson (1022 - 1066)

After briefly coming out of a coma from which he would never again rise, admittedly. But still, for whatever reason, it was the son of the Earl of Godwin whom Edward marked as his successor. In the event, Harold’s would be perhaps the shortest reign of an Anglo-Saxon king - and the last - as he would sit on the throne for a mere 282 days, only sixty days longer than Edmund Ironside, but still leaving poor old Sweyn Forkbeard with the wooden spoon for his 41 days. Still, Sweyn was not of the House of Wessex, so this certainly makes Harold’s reign the second-shortest of the Saxon line. Harold’s being picked out by Edward as the go-to guy is depicted in the famous Bayeux Tapesty, though really the king is only pointing to him, and could, for all we know, be saying “anyone but this guy!” They wouldn’t have had time to clarify what he meant, as he never again regained consciousness, dying on January 5 1066, a year which, had he known (or cared) was to be a momentous one in English history.

There is plenty of argument about the validity of this, but on the Norman side it was said that Harold, having been shipwrecked on his way to France, was taken prisoner by a French count (no I said count!)but released by William, then Duke of Normandy, and that afterwards he had promised the English throne to William, presumably at the behest of Edward. Back then though, kings didn’t decide who would be the next in line (despite the story about Edward’s deathbed selection of Harold) and so neither Harold nor even Edward is believed to have had the authority to make such a promise, if indeed he ever did.

Be that as it may, William was pissed. He had waited for Edward to push off this mortal coil, and now that he was gone, he would be damned if he’d let some little snotnose take the throne that was not rightfully his. So he did what all claimants do when their claim is spurned, and prepared to invade England.

The next great chapter of English history was about to be written, and as ever, it would be written in blood.

[Trollheart]

Part Two: The Fallen Crown: New World Rising
“No-one would have believed, in the sixth decade of the eleventh century, that English affairs were being watched from the shores of France. Few men even considered the possibility of an attack by the Vikings. And yet, across the English Channel, military minds immeasurably superior to theirs watched that island with envious eyes, and slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against them.”

(With apologies to H.G. Wells and Jeff Wayne)

Chapter IV: Under the French Heel, Part One
Ruled Britannia: The Third, and Final, Conquest of Britain

If there is one date, or at least one year every school kid in Britain knows, it’s 1066. That was, of course, the year of the famous Battle of Hastings, in which not only English but European life changed forever. The Crown of Wessex, as already detailed the last time we stepped into the history of England, had fallen, and though for a short time others such as the House of Godwin and the House of Denmark carried on, there was about to be a seismic event which would change English politics, policy and the lives of every Englishman and Englishwoman, and in the process both give rise to an enduring hero of legend, and more practically, change the shape of Europe, and even further afield, leaving its mark on the western world for all time. In some ways, you could say that though the Vikings failed to conquer Britain in the eighth and ninth centuries, they did eventually manage it, and more completely than they could ever have hoped to do. By then, though, they had settled in France and become known by another name: the Normans.

The future Kings of England, who would rule unopposed in pretty much an unbroken line for another six hundred years, traced their claim to the throne back to a - mostly disputed, never proven - promise that William, Duke of Normandy, would be made king on the death of Edward, an assurance supposedly given by Harold Godwinson, who then tried the throne out for size and thought “You know, this ain’t bad. Fuck that William. May I may be shot through the eye with an arrow before any damned frog sits on this throne!” Right. Anyway, you’ve read about that in the previous chapter, haven’t you? But before we get to that broken (if ever made) promise and what it meant for England, and wider Europe, just who the damned hell were these Normans? Oh, glad you asked.

Pirates to Princes: The Rise of the Normans

As everyone knows, and as I’ve already told you, the Normans were the descendants of those jolly old folk, everyone’s favourite raiders, five stars in Rape and Pillage Monthly and beloved of shipwrights, the Vikings. Having somewhat failed to hammer down the English like their poster boy, Thor, god of thunder, the Vikings had, in the early tenth century, decided to seek easier pickings to the east. Not very far east, just a hop over the English Channel where they said “Bonjour! Vous est morte!” or something and began harrying the French. They could not have really been expecting an easy conquest, and Vikings generally went where they thought they could pick a decent fight. True, if they could just slaughter and carry off treasure, then that was sehr gut, or something, and Lindisfarne and other monasteries along the coast of England provided them with little to no resistance. But Vikings were at heart warriors, and there’s nothing really brave or particularly honourable about slaying men who wore dresses and shrieked like girls from the barest flesh wound, a simple cut deep into the shoulder and through bone, the kind of thing no self-respecting Viking would allow him to stop raping, pillaging and plundering to take care of. Doctor? What’s that?

In France, they got the fight they had been craving. Many of them, in fact. Although they folded like umbrellas a millennium later when Hitler’s wehrmacht rolled over Europe, at this time there were few fighting machines like the French one, and one thing they loved to do was defend their towns and cities, especially the jewel of la belle france. So when heavily-armed Vikings came sailing up the Seine, they shouted “Non!” and gave them what for. So much so, in fact, that really, the Vikings never managed to conquer France, and had to end up settling there with the permission of the French king. And most of that was probably down to these two.

Odo (857 - 898)

You’ve got to love the French. They had three kings, all succeeding one another, all called Charles, so rather than give them numerals, as later became the trend, they identified them by their, ah, characteristics. So we had Charles the Bald being succeeded by Charles the Simple and then Charles the Fat. Oh, and there was also Hugh the Abbot, who was, well, an abbot. Of course he was. Was there a Charles the Costello? No of course there wasn’t; don’t be silly. Okay, he was never king, just regent. Oh, and Odo’s father was Robert the Strong. And for you Star Trek fans, no, he wasn’t called Odo the Shapeshifter. Wrong journal. Originally the Count of Paris, he was crowned king after the Siege of the capital, in which he drove back the Viking invaders.

The Siege of Paris (885 - 886)

It should probably be understood that at this time the Kingdom of Francia was not France, but was in fact the territory of the Franks, and encompassed what would become France, also Germany and part of Italy. Most, in fact, so far as I can see, of Western Europe, with the exception of Spain and Portugal. In 843 West Francia became a separate kingdom, which would evolve in time into France, and Paris was its capital city. In 845 the Vikings reached Paris for the first time, and attacked it, eventually sacking the city. How they carried a whole city away in sacks is something historians still debate to this day, but the French (we’ll just call them that for handiness’ sake, all right? I know they were the West Francians or Franks or whatever, but this is easier) decided that the Seine was too easy a conduit for those big longships to sail up and menace their beloved capital, so Odo’s father, Robert the Strong, started having bridges built across the river, thus impeding Viking progress up the Seine and also making of them something of a target.

When Robert fell in battle in 866, his son Odo was made Count of Paris, and when Charles the Bald died in 877 he was succeeded by the other Charles, the fat one, who had barely had time to get comfortable on the throne before those annoying Vikings were back, shouting and halloooing and attacking up the river again. This time though, they meant business, and they weren’t going to be driven away by a few poxy bridges. Some say they had 700 ships, but those who hadn’t drunk too much wine thought it more like 300, still a big fleet and sure to put the willies up any Frenchman seeing them sailing up the Seine, shouting and hallooing and, you know.

As Count of Paris, Odo undertook the city’s defence, and though outnumbered (even 300 ships would have carried about 15,000 men, and he had barely 200 at his command) he managed to drive them back. The Vikings had by now settled on a form of protection racket, where they arrived in a town or city and promised not to burn it to the ground and kill every living soul if they were paid off. It was called tribute back then, but it’s the same principle as “ooops! Now look what you made me do!” that helped gangs to terrorise shop-keepers in the next few centuries. Anyway, Odo told them where they could stick their requests for a payoff, and possibly after enquiring whether he had anything to do with the All-Father, his name being so similar and all, and if so, could he put in a good word with Odin to aid them in their quest to burn Paris to the ground, the Vikings withdrew and set up a siege.

They mined the river (how did they work if they were on it? Oh right: they had camped on the other side of it. Still, they’d have to go out on it if they wanted to renew their attack. Seems a little self-destructive, possibly literally so). Hold on just one wench-chasing, axe-wielding, tankard-emptying minute son! How did they mine? This was the 9th century! What kind of explosives were available in the 9th century? I’ll tell you what kind: none. But the account just says they mined the river, so who am I to question? Though I do. Get no answer to my question however. Bloody typical. Anyway, they used siege engines, catapults and sneering sarcasm probably, but nothing would induce the French to surrender. The city was probably unable to support a bribe, not when they had a king called Charles the Fat, and also knew what happened to those who gave in to the Vikings. So they fought on. The Vikings used battering rams and fire, but the French had a secret weapon: a cross! Yes, the Bishop of Paris planted a crucifix in the outer defences and called on all Christian men to resist the heathen invader. That’d show ‘em!

The siege continued on into Christmas and the New Year, the Vikings trying everything to gain access, including shoring up the shallow part of the river with dead bodies (kind of lends new meaning to “close the wall up with our English dead”, doesn’t it?) but to no avail. They even had a shot at sending burning ships - the dreaded “fireships” - against the wooden bridge, but the damn things sank before they reached the structure, thanks Olaf the Lazy Shipwright! Odin, however, must have been bored, because he took an interest and sent rain that swelled the river and wrecked the bridge. Down it came and in came the Vikings. Go for it, lads! And they did. Seeing their plight was now somewhat up a certain creek without a certain instrument, Odo sent men to Charles, looking for reinforcements. They arrived, but after marching from Germany were too shagged to do any fighting, and sat down for a breather, no doubt to the massed mocking laughter of men who had wrestled ice giants in legend and drank the ocean possibly.

However, they weren’t laughing by April, when one of the leaders declared “Fuck this lads, I’m bollocksed with all this sieging. Vikings weren’t meant to siege. In and out, hit ‘em fast and hard, fuck off back home, that’s for me. Hell with this. Who wants their city anyway? Only full of pox-ridden whores, mimes and snooty Frenchmen. I don’t really fancy eating frog’s legs for the rest of my life, do you?” And with that, he was gone. But it wasn’t all roses for the French either. As it tends to do when food runs low and sanitation is at best basic, disease began to break out in the city and the poor old bishop snuffed it. Odo decided to head to Old Fatso’s palace, asking for more help. Charles’ attendants looked on with horror as the big fat bastard agreed, envisioning the block and tackle and sheer disregard for physics it was going to take to get the king on his horse (his horse would not have been too pleased either) but somehow they managed it and off they went. They attacked and fought their way into the city, turned and mounted its defence.

Realising, as fresh armies arrived in the summer, that there was no way they were getting into Paris without wearing a tie and being on the guest list, the remaining Viking leader, Rollo, of whom we will hear more presently, gave up and, allowed by the king to head up the Seine to attack Burgundy - a handy way of putting down a pesky revolt that had erupted there - he eventually paid him off, (Odo possibly thinking “what the fuck did you do that for? I could have paid him and saved all those lives but I didn’t, and now you just fork over the cash? Just wait till I’m king you fat…”) but either way, the important thing was that the almost year-long siege was over. And more importantly, Paris had not fallen.

As part of the story of how Odo then became king, it’s amusing to chronicle what happened to Charles the Fat. After he paid off the Vikings he was persona non grata (or possibly persona gras, sorry) in the capital, and fell out of favour. When he tried to have his bastard son Bernard made the legitimate heir to the throne in 885, the bishops, to a man, said oh no you fucking don’t pal. No fat bastard - excuse our French - will sit on the throne of France while we have breath in our bodies. Unfortunately for them, their boss, Pope Hadrian III, declared that he would recognise the kid, and as long as he had breath in his body nobody would dare to defy him. Then suddenly he had no breath in his body, as, on the way to sort out the bishops and proclaim Bernard the Bastard as the new king, he sort of died (doesn’t say whether this was of natural causes, an accident or whether some disgruntled bishop slipped deadly nightshade into his wine or something) and put a real crimp in Charles’ plans. Would it be unfair and unkind to mention he was on the way to Worms, but before he got there ended up as future food for worms? It would? Tough. You should know me by now, and if you still don’t then just get used to it: this is how I roll.

[Trollheart]

Another who supported the legitimisation of Bernard was a Benedictine monk called Notker the Stammerer, but nobody paid him any attention, as you could never tell what he was saying. In fact (drum roll) you could say that they did Not ker about his views! Ba-tish! Yeah, well anyway, Charles continued to try to circumvent the fact that he had no actual legitimate children by attempting to cook the books, inserting the word proles (offspring) into the charters, but nobody was fooled. Specially as he did it in blue biro possibly. He then chummed up to Hadrian’s successor, Pope Stephen V, but though he agreed to meet him the new pope pulled out at the last minute, possibly claiming he was washing his cassock or something. Charles then plumped for adoption, making Louis of Provence his heir for some reason, but Pope Stephen wagged his finger and said no way pal, not blessing that line of succession!

All this bumbling and fumbling around, trying desperately to get someone to carry on your dynasty, from a man who had never been a great king anyway (well, great in the sense of being fat, but it’s widely reported most if not all of his crowns fell to him without any real effort, and he never waged any proper war or got his nose bloodied like any self-respecting monarch) people began to look elsewhere for an heir. Odo headed down to his palace in 887, and may have been confirmed heir there. Either way, there was trouble a-plenty at Chez Charles, as he first accused his wife of infidelity. Having proven her innocence through trial by fire, she quite rightly told him where he could stick it and sodded off to a nunnery. Then he pounced on his hated enemy, Liutward his archchancellor, first minister and also bishop of Vercelli, with whom he had accused his - now proven innocent and convent-bound - wife of having an affair. Nobody liked him, so it was not any hardship to kick his ass out of court. Which he did. Probably with relish. He then replaced him with Liutbert, which really makes me think it was just the archchancellor wearing a funny wig. I mean, come on!

Proof that he was either desperate or losing it, or both, surfaces when you realise that Louis II, Louis of Provence, whom he wished now to make his heir, was, well, blind, as evidenced by that quaint French custom of naming someone after their main trait, so he was called Louis the Blind. Blind drunk? No, just blind. I wonder what they would have called me? Trollheart the Arsehole, probably. Anyway I digress. Adding to old Fat Boy’s woes, one of his nephews decided he fancied the throne and went to war against him. History doesn’t record what happened, but it probably involved a lot of huffing and puffing on Charles’ part, a sort of “hold on till I get my breath, would you, there’s a good lad” and stuff like that. In the end, to nobody’s surprise, and probably not even his own, he was deposed, and that was that.

His fall wrecked the Frankish empire, as claimants and challengers to this and that throne popped up all over the place, and the empire disintegrated into separate kingdoms and countries, one of which became West Francia and later France. Which brings us back to our mate Odo.

Elected as the new king of that new country, he went about tearing the Vikings a new one, but as ever, heavy rests the head or something, and yet another Charles wanted to be king. Simple. Yeah. Charles the Simple. Doesn’t sound like the kind of guy you want sitting on the throne, does it? I don’t know if his title meant simple in the way of the brain, or that he was an uncomplicated man. Tell you what: let’s find out, shall we? Well he was also called Charles the Straightforward, so I think we’re looking more at a sort of direct, Meerkat Market sort of simple than the drooling, idiotic smile variety. Charles is however important, so we will come back to him very shortly. Meanwhile, Odo was crowned in 888 and would rule for ten years, though as I say his reign would be marred by his struggle against Charles.

In fact, I can’t see that he had that great a time after saving Paris. He ended up looking for the support of the king of East Francia, Arnulf, but he must have insulted his wife or his wine or something (Frenchman, more likely the wine) as Arnulf instead threw his lot in with Charles, and Odo was forced to concede territory on the Seine to him. He had battled Arnulf for three years, and on the fourth he died, in 898. That left the throne Charles’ for the taking. And he took.

Charles III, Charles the Simple (879 - 929)

We’ve already spoken a little about him above, but here are some more funny facts. He was preceded by - wait for this - Louis the Child, who wasn’t a child. Though he was when he ascended the throne - probably with a bit of a bump-up from someone; he was only six, and died at eighteen. What a bummer. What did he die of? He died of a Tuesday. No, seriously, let’s see. Died of terminal depression, it says here. Wow. If an eighteen-year old king can die of depression, how many of his subjects must have kicked the bucket? Anyway enough about him, as he’s really not important except for me to point a finger and laugh at. Back to Charles the Simple. His dad was another stammerer, Louis the Stammerer - was he king? Yes. Yes he was, and by all accounts, though not a man to make waves or any impact of any sort, you kind of can’t argue with the words of Herman Munster, sorry Sebastian Munster that “he was a sweet and simple man, a lover of peace, justice and religion.”

Oh for the love of - another child! This time Charles the Child, whom Louis succeeded as King of Aquitaine. He also died at age 18, though not from depression, unless you count being depressed by having been hit in the head by a sword while fooling around in mock combat with your own men! The incident left him a little doolally, and he passed away in 866. But as for Charles the Simple, well, he was destined to make his mark on history. Hey, at least he had a mother with a decent name - Adelaide of Paris, because, you know, she was from Paris. In the year 911 (shut up) Paris was again besieged, and again by Rollo, who had come back to finish the job. After Charles had kicked his arse he decided to negotiate with Rollo, and granted him all the land between the river Epte and the sea, and the Duchy of Brittany, naming it all as the new Duchy of, you guessed it, Normandy. Anyone singing “Pass the Dutchie” can leave right now, I’m serious. We don’t need your kind here. Where was I? Oh yeah. In return for this grant, Rollo and all his men were to swear fealty to France, and he himself was to be baptised as a Christian and take Charles’ daughter Gisela as his wife.

It was quite clever of Charles to grant Rollo and the Vikings-soon-to-be-Normans the Duchy of Brittany (yeah, you can go too. You! The one singing “Hit Me Baby One More Time”! Out!), as this was at the time an independent kingdom he had been trying without success to conquer. Now all he had to do was sit back and let his new Viking/Norman allies conquer it for him. Well, for them, but it amounted to the same thing. That year, 911, is also the one in which our friend Louis the Child comes, briefly, back into the picture. With his death, the East Francians elected him king, as they didn’t fancy Conrad I. Well, this is not quite true. Bloody fragmented kingdoms within fragmented kingdoms! Right. Lotharingia was part of East Francia, and they were the ones who elected Charles their king, but essentially saw him as king of all East Francia. This didn’t bother Conrad too much, not because he didn’t care but because he was too busy fighting off claims to his throne, and not only from Charles, but within his own kingdom. So in one way - probably a very wrong way - you could make a very tentative case for Charles the Simple, being technically but not really king of both East and West Francia as being the first actual king of all of France. But you’d be wrong. Also it didn’t last. After Conrad kicked it, it looks like Saxons or some form of Germans anyway took East Francia, and it then either became Germany or was subsumed into it.

Despite six tries, our Charles just couldn’t muster up a son - daughter, daughter, daughter, daughter, daughter… hold on, hold on! Could it be? Is it poss - nah. Another daughter - so like kings everywhere at that time he blamed it on his wife and dumped her to marry another woman, this time the daughter of an English king. English gels knew how to do it right, and out popped an heir, first time of asking. Jolly good show! This boy would go on to rule as Louis IV, but I don’t think he was one of the Bourbon dynasty kings, the likes of Louis the Sun King XIV and zut alors! Where’s me head Louis XVII, and since I’m not writing the history of France (yet!) I don’t really care.

A sad end really for Charles. His own brother Robert marched against him, with the backing of the nobles who had really got pissed off at him for doling out land that was theirs by right, and though Robert was killed in the ensuing battle, Charles was captured and died in prison in 921. Not a very fitting way to end your reign, even if it was a simple one.

But one thing Charles would always be remembered for was for the basic creation of the Norman state, which would go on to cause such misery and hardship in England (and, by extension, Ireland, Scotland and Wales) but which would also fundamentally change Europe and most of the western world.

[Trollheart]

Rollo (c. 835/87- - 928/933)

All right, let’s just get this out of the way, for those of you who have seen Vikings and think “Oh yeah, that’s Ragnar’s brother!” He wasn’t. At least, so far as history can ascertain (and you can see from the dates of his birth and death that there’s not even agreement on those), Ragnar may or may not have lived (I think I went into this earlier, pretty sure I did) but if he did, he wasn’t around at the same time Rollo was. Rollo can be definitely traced to a proper historical figure though, and so we have a lot more certainty about him than we do about Ragnar. Some facts about him that Vikings got right are that he was a giant of a man, nicknamed “The Walker”, as it was said he was too big for any horse to carry, that he did attack Paris (as we’ve seen above) and was the father of the Norman dynasties. He also contributed to the history of England in a way which will link us back to 1066, if you’ll just bear with me.

But to understand the Normans, and why they so easily defeated the English at Hastings, as I said, we have to know more about them, and it starts with Rollo. We’ve already seen a pencil sketch of him; we know he was a Viking lord who changed tactics from harrying the English to harrying the French (no doubt to a great big “huzzah!” from the English, one they would live to very much retract and regret) and that he besieged Paris. Unable to take it he came to a compromise with Charles the Fat and settled in the area of France (well, West Francia as it was known at the time) which came to be known as Normandy. But they’re only the barest bones, so let’s put the flesh on this skeleton.

Although he is definitely believed to have come from Scandinavia (duh, historians!) nobody can say for sure if it was Norway or Denmark where he was born. He was referred to as “Rollo the Dane”, but then, Dane was a general catch-all label for all Vikings that Europeans used, regardless of their country of birth (which they were unlikely to have known anyway; it’s not like they would ask, as they fended off a blow from a huge axe with a shield, “By the way, where was it you said you came from again?”) so that’s no proof of anything. There does seem to be evidence to suggest he was chased, harried out of or exiled from Scandinavia though, and the first time contemporary history picks him up is attacking Paris in that siege. There are other accounts, but you know historians: two or three corroborating sources at least please, or we’re not interested.

So whatever he did before arriving on the shores of France is mostly unknown, and kind of unimportant anyway, as it is really from the time he became a Norman - the first, you could say - that we’re interested in him. So what happened after Charles said to him “That bit there, down to there, that bit, that, you might have to fight for that bit, they don’t like me and I haven’t been able to subdue them but I’m sure you could. Oh, and that bit too. But not that one. That’s mine.”? We know Rollo was baptised and became a Christian, and that he then took the daughter of the king for his wife. Before this, there is an account of him carrying off the daughter of the Count of Rennes (well, what self-respecting Viking - still a Viking at this point, 876 - wouldn’t carry off a beautiful woman? Went with the territory) and marrying her, she giving him a son, but our friendly historians believe this may be what they term “quasi-bollocks”, meaning it might or might not be true, depending on how many rounds you’re prepared to buy.

Stories, too, of his friendship with an English king, originally identified as Alstem, later seemingly confirmed as Athelstan, (look, just don’t start, all right? The things that show got wrong…) the Danish leader Guthrun whom Alfred the Great baptised and then renamed. Again, this could be true or just “qb”, and again it really doesn’t matter, because dial the emergency services or stand outside Ground Zero: 911 is the year we’re most interested in, as this becomes Year Zero for the creation of the Norman State.

Once the lands had been granted to him, Rollo (now baptised as Robert, but it doesn’t seem like he’s ever referred to as anything other than Rollo) decided it was time to put manners on the other Vikings in France and show them who was boss. When Charles the Simple was kicked off the throne though, Rollo thought his deal was over, and so it was hell for leather across West Francia as he pushed the borders of his new realm outwards. Eventually the new king sued for peace, giving Rollo more land. Because of their close connection with the native French, Rollo’s descendants clove to the Catholic tradition, one of many reasons why England would become, for almost four hundred years, a Catholic country.

Rollo died, cause unknown, sometime between 923 and 928. His great-great-grandson was called William, and this is where we return, as it were, by a circuitous route, to the end of English rule and the coming of the Normans to England in 1066.

But of course, it wouldn’t be like me to just go for Hastings now would it? Of course not. First we need to talk about himself.

William I, aka William the Conqueror (1028 - 1087)

The man who would change English politics and start a dynasty that would last centuries lost his father early, when the Duke of Normandy, Robert I (also known humbly as Robert the Magnificent) died on the way back from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1035. Before departing, Robert had declared William his heir, and extracted from all his nobles a promise to uphold his claim, therefore WIlliam became Duke on the death of his father at the tender age of seven years. There’s no such thing, so far as I know, as a regent for a duke, so though he was far too young to rule, William had to take on the job. He did however have allies, in Archbishop Robert, his great-uncle, and the king himself, Henry I. Things took a turn for the worse though when Robert died in 1037, and the duchy descended into anarchy.

William fell under the protection of various guardians, including Alan of Brittany and Gilbert of Brionne, and others, all summarily slain as the young duke’s enemies tried to get to him. He eventually had to seek the protection of the king, but when grown he returned with him in 1047 and retook Normandy, defeating his enemies. He spent five years hunting them down and consolidating his power, but then that power became just a little too consolidated for the king’s liking, and, fearing the power the young duke was building up in Normandy, Henry teamed up with his enemies against William. William proved himself an able commander and a charismatic leader, resulting in some of his former enemies joining him against Henry (turnabout is, after all, fair play) and his battle finally came to an end when both the king and his main ally Geoffrey of Anjou died in 1060.

In 1049 William had married Matilda of Flanders, cementing his alliance with Germany, though His Holiness Pope Leo IX, for some reason, refused to allow the marriage. He went ahead anyway, sort of taking a future page from one of his successors, Henry VIII, though he stopped short of creating his own Church.

Eve of the, um, Battle

It’s always struck me as odd that a simple duke should decide to invade England. Was this not the prerogative of the king? Was it not kings who invaded and tried to take crowns from other kings? I suppose it’s quite possible that if you look through history there have been some instances of other nobles invading foreign countries, but I would have thought that would have been a prelude to their king coming over and sitting on the throne? Did the French king give his blessing to, or even permission for, such a huge and potentially world-changing action? Who was even king at this time? Let’s see. Hmm. Philip I is shown as being “king of the Franks” but there’s no reference to his being involved in William’s campaign. I suppose it’s possible he had other things to worry about. William probably didn’t feel he owed him any real fealty anyway, as Normandy was essentially all but a separate state, and powerful, so maybe Philip just let him go his own way. I’ll try to research that a bit further later, because I find it strange. Would, for instance, say maybe Cnut or Alfred the Great allowed one of their dukes or barons to boogie over to France and try to take the crown? Sounds unlikely.

Then again, perhaps given the story that William had been promised the English crown, his boss thought maybe it gave him that right. Perhaps Philip was too busy fighting (or, considering his suffix, “the amorous”, engaged in other activities) and just said “Sure if he promised ye the crown, you go and take it like a good man there, and leave me alone.” Why he should have suddenly gained a Dublin accent we will never know. But there is no mention of him, whether he approved, disapproved or was totally oblivious to the ambitions of the Duke of Normandy, and it does appear, on the surface anyway, that he just left him to it.

Winding our way across the Channel and back to Merry Old England, it will possibly be remembered that we left the country in a state very much other than merry, as King Harold Godwinson was somewhat less than secure on the English throne, having in total three claimants to the Crown, one of which was his own half-brother. Four, in fact, if you include Edward Atheling, though he was only fourteen at the time. Tostig, the other brother, had been exiled, and we’ll have a shufty at him in a moment. The third claimant, as already discussed in the previous chapter, was the king of Norway, Harold Bastard Hard, I mean Harold Hardrada. He had made an agreement with his uncle, King Magnus, that should Harthacnut die without an heir, then his son would take the crown, but should Magnus do the same, then his heir would be next in line for the throne.

It’s been almost a year, and I’m getting a little confused, so let’s recap on all these people and sort things out before we go any further.

First, Harthacnut: as everyone knows (and if you didn’t know, then you would from his name) he was the son of Cnut, one of the wisest and longest-reigning kings of England, and the first ever Viking one. Harthacnut succeeded to the throne on the death of his half-brother Harold Harefoot, who had come to power after the great Cnut had passed away, he being his son by Aelfgifu, and Harthcnut being busy with trying to establish control in Norway. When Harold died, Harthacnut returned and took the throne, but only lasted seven years, dying, it appears, of terminal alcohol poisoning at a wedding.

Next up was Edward the Confessor, and he died childless, having decided to take a vow of chastity, which kind of threw the succession into chaos. They really needn’t have worried, as William was on his way to sort out all their problems for them and take away forever the burden of ruling England. But anyway it was his brother, son of the late great Earl Godwin, and last of the Anglo-Saxon kings, did he but know it, Harold II, known as Harold Godwinson, who became his heir. Harold had to fight off an attempt by his namesake with different spelling, King Harald of Norway, then, having kicked his arse, may have thought, this French William will be a piece of cake. Shoot out my eye if - oh wait: I’ve done that one, haven’t I?

So for whatever reason he was allowed, ignored or just went anyway, William decided the time was ripe to cash in on that “IOU 1 crowne of ye Englishe” and headed west, with a rather large army. His wife may have complained about not wanting to live in such a miserable rainy country, but history records his reply as “I’ll give you miserable, you moaning old…” (the rest of the manuscript has sadly been lost to the ravages of time) and Hastings-bound he came.

[Trollheart]

Back to Harald we go. No, the other one. When he came over from Norway to kick the son of the Earl of Godwin (Godwinson, get it?) off the just-vacant English throne, he brought with him another enemy of the then-king, but paradoxically also a claimant, so not quite sure how that worked. Tostig has already been mentioned, Harold’s brother whom he exiled from England, but who believed he jolly well had just as much a right to the crown as his sibling, dash it all, and decided to support the Norwegian king, perhaps in the hope he might be granted a duchy or a baronetcy or some damn title with a lot of land anyway. Okay, let’s unpack this.

Tostig had come with his army to take the throne but had been driven off by his brother, and instead decided to head north, where there were always arses to kick. Unfortunately, these arses kicked back, so to speak, and Tostig was harried by the Earls of Mercia and Northumbria, and he lost most of his men. He decided to go to Scotland and lick his wounds, and maybe see if he couldn’t scare up some support there. The Scots were always on for a fight, after all, and there was little they hated more than the English. Of course, he was English too, so there was that. As it went, King Harald, the Norwegian one, was cooling his heels on the south coast, looking at his watch and wondering where the hell this WIlliam character was, said to meet him on the south coast 1066, and here it was and no sign of him. It was then that his men came to him and said “Look Your Majesty, we’d love to stay and die horribly in your service, get mutilated and maimed for life all to get you this throne your heart seems set on, but the thing is, we’re militia, see, and, well, we have these crops that need to be harvested.” So off they went to return to a much safer life as farmers (unless you happened to get in the way of the local lord, who might just that morning have arisen with an insatiable desire to mow down farmers, the things these lords get up to, I don’t know) and Harald was kind of left armyless.

So he moseyed on up north, which seemed to be the in-place to go, where he met a rather despondent Tostig. “How many men you got?” he asked him possibly over a few pints of good dark ale (or, being the north, possibly grey ale, and also possibly not good). “Not much,” belched Harald maybe. “A mere 300 ships, no more than 15,000 men.” Tostig may have grinned and the two may even have clinked glasses, who knows? “That’ll do for me,” it’s possible Tostig may have said, having perhaps spent too long among northerners, and so they banded together and went to kick the king out of the royal palace. As for William, well, Harald may have thought philosophically, he may turn up, he may not, but this guy has an army here and now, and I’ll be buggered if I’m spending another season pulling my dick in this cold climate waiting for him.

At York, at the end of September, Tostig was able to have his revenge on the two earls, whom he and his new ally sent running like girls maybe as they roundly defeated them at the Battle of Fulford. Had they waited for Harold Godwinson, who had texted ahead saying there was heavy traffic on the A40 maybe, they might have triumphed, but as ever in English politics (and not just English of course) nobody trusted anybody else, and the two earls thought maybe Harold would set Tostig up as Earl of Northumbria. The other earl, Edwin of Mercia, may have shrugged that that would suck, but what had it to do with him, and may have been answered by the reminder that there was also a Norwegian bastard involved, who might fancy Edwin’s earldom. So stung into action, the two decided fuck Harold, we can take these two pussies.

They were wrong.

So when Harold did finally huff and puff his way up the motorway he found his allies nothing more than a rapidly-receding cloud of dust, with Harald and Tostig there going “Now, about this throne.” They met at Stamford Bridge, and in true Chelsea home style, there was a massacre. 2-0 to the English king as he not only defeated Tostig and Harald, but killed them both. The exertion, however, left his forces depleted, and all he could probably think was that this would be the worst time for, say, an attack to come from across the sea.

He had barely a month to wait.

Of course, I’m sure we all understand well enough that it wasn’t as if William texted Harold - “You, me, Hastings. Be there.” In fact, neither probably had any idea where the decisive battle would be, and like any king (or in this case, duke, but soon to be king) landing on foreign shores he was invading, William had a lot of raiding and harrying and possibly raping to do as well before he got to grips with his enemy. His power had obviously grown by now, and I don’t know whether you could call him the de facto king of France, but he was certainly able to muster men from Flanders, Brittany and other parts of France to fight for him, and though as ever historians disagree over the size of his force, it’s generally accepted to have been somewhere between the 7,000 and 10,000 mark. Hard to be sure, as contemporary historians and present ones never get on: if they see each other at your local, watch out and hold onto your pint. Naturally, those on William’s side would have been exaggerating to make him look more of a threat than he was, but it’s never possible to be sure. So we stick with this range.

Doesn’t seem that huge really. King Harald only brought about 15,000, and his army was considered large. Well, as they say, it’s often not how big it is but where you stick it, and William stuck it to the English. Let’s not forget Harold’s men were also shagged out after the Battle of Stamford Bridge, and a fresh army with a duke eyeing his crown was really the last thing he needed right now. Right now though, was exactly when William came, and he landed in England only a few days after the battle, Harold’s army limping home and looking forward to putting their feet up with a cuppa and a copy of Soldier Times or whatever. Sussex was where he made his invasion, setting up a wooden castle (huh?) at Hastings and using it as a base for attack. Since this was Harold’s stomping ground, the idea was to lure him there by wrecking everything around, levelling his relative’s castles and basically causing shit all through the neighbourhood till the king came to ask them nicely to keep it down if they wouldn’t mind, there were people trying to sleep, and Mildred at number ten had a newborn that just would not fucking stop crying.

But when he got the e-vite that was it, and it would be rude not to respond, so off he went to Hastings. He set up defensive camp on Saulac Hill, hoping to surprise William, but the duke’s scouts were out and about and had probably recognised Harold due to the crown on his head or something. Anyway, they legged it back to tell their master the English ruler was on the way, and William rode out to meet them. It was October 14 1066, the day everything changed for England. In a stunning piece of irony, those little quirks history is wont to throw up from time to time, the place where the battle actually took place was called, um, Battle. It still is, and I assumed it had been renamed for the famous confrontation, but it seems it has always had that name. So in effect, it wasn’t really the Battle of Hastings, but then, the Battle of Battle 1066 would just be silly, wouldn’t it?

Anyway the battle lasted pretty much all day, and as you know, I don’t do all this battlefield historians shite; not interested in who made a pincer movement or who cut off who from their forces, who took this flag or that ridge or any of that bollocks. But I’ll see what I can pick out from the details, see if there is anything I should be writing and telling you about. Okay, I see there was a rumour started that William had been killed, and the army began to panic and retreat, the English pushing forward until the man himself appeared, shouting rather unnecessarily that he was alive, and led the counter-offensive as the English wet themselves and fled. Incredible as it may seem to us, but perhaps a totally English thing (and observed by the French too) the two armies appear to have broken for afternoon tea, taking a rest and getting their strength back. Bah! Wouldn’t have happened at El Alamein, I can tell you that!

Nevertheless, once Harold went down that was that. Again with the differing accounts, but whether it’s the truth or just the accepted one, the later Bayeux Tapestry has the famous drawing of the king being shot in the eye by an arrow and thus being killed. That may not be the case, but it’s passed down into legend and popular history, and who am I to dispute it? Although some of his men rallied around the king’s corpse and fought to the end, as in most battles, once the leader is slain the army is out of here, and so they were. William had won the day, and the last English king had bit the dust. A lot of long-winded explanations and theories over how and why William triumphed, but they seem to be mostly centred on the English attacking when they should have been defending (Newcastle United anyone?), being fooled by the feigned retreats the Normans pulled off during the battle, only to be led into an attack, and their lack of cavalry, which would always remain one of the Normans’ biggest advantages.

A decisive and stirring victory it may have been, and indeed the beginning of the end for English rule, but if William thought the country was going to fold like a pack of cards and meekly accept a frog as their new sovereign, well, he was about to find out he was in error.

Edgar Atheling (1052 - 1125 or possibly later)

We’ve heard of him before. He was the son of Edgar the Exile who, once his exile was over, returned to England only to earn a new name: Edgar the Dead. With so many powerful claims to the throne on the death of Edward the Confessor, and he being so young, still in his teens, at the time, Edgar Atheling was not really considered a runner, and Harold Godwinson was crowned instead. When Harold fell, and William began his march towards London in order to take the crown that was possibly rightfully his but never mind if it wasn’t, he had won it by right of combat, the English elected Edgar as king. He never ruled though. In Southwark he fought with the English for control of London Bridge, unable to gain access to the city, he expected to encounter only token resistance at the bridge, but one of the leaders of the defenders, a man called Ansgar (or Esegar), the sheriff of Middlesex, had been with Harold at Hastings, and had returned to Southwark to organise its defence.

William, somewhat nonplussed to see such a force arrayed against him - even the townsfolk were armed and joined the effort - offered Ansgar the sheriffship under his rule if he would submit to him, but Ansgar told him where to stick it and they attacked. You have to give it to this guy: he was so badly wounded he had to be carried around in a litter, and had been offered pretty generous terms by the victorious duke, soon to be his king. If he recognised him not only would he be allowed retain his lands, but he could also have a seat on the council. Now, you can’t say fairer than that, can you? But England doesn’t like invaders, especially ones who rub out their kings, and so there was no compromise.

It’s possible those two earls, he of Mercia and the other of Northumbria, were there defending the town too, and though William’s cavalry broke through, they faced such stiff opposition that they could not hold the bridge, so they set it ablaze, and Southwark was virtually razed to the ground. London continued to put up stiff resistance until the clergy, convinced by William that they should concede, swore their fealty and he was allowed enter the city. He was crowned the first Norman king of England on Christmas Day.

His first few years, however, were far from easy or peaceful. England had been battered into submission, with the only real alternative to William - now known forever more as “the Conqueror” - being the weak and ineffectual and inexperienced Edgar Atheling, and really nobody wanted to rally behind him. When William returned to Normandy in March though, the English took their chance and revolted here there and everywhere, leaving his half-brother Odo, (so far as I’m aware. no relation to he of the defence of Paris the previous century) and his partner, William Fitzosbern with rebellions to put down, which they did. William was back at the end of the year and took a hand in suppressing the revolts himself, the great strength of his policy being what would become a feature of Norman conquest, not only in England and Ireland but everywhere: he built castles and installed garrisons there, so that there was no chance of rebels getting too uppity again. If they did, there was a ready-made force there to take care of them.

But then there were rebellions and there were rebellions, and one definitely demanded his own personal attention.

The Harrying of the North: No Mercy from the Normans

In late 1069 the north rose. To almost paraphrase and parallel Game of Thrones, winter was coming and the north had united behind Edgar. I don’t know if they proclaimed him “King in the North” or anything - most likely not; they’d have wanted him to have been recognised and acknowledged as king of all England - but they rallied and stood against William, still more or less at this point seen as an invader. England - and Ireland - would of course have cause to hate and revile the word Norman over the next few hundred years, even more than it had hated the word French. What became known as “the harrying of the north” was only the beginning.

[Trollheart]

Up to now, I’ve held the view of the English that they were the sworn enemies of France, but Wikipedia tells me this rivalry didn’t really develop between the two countries until much later, culiminating in fact in the Hundred Years War (1337 - 1453), one of the major battles of which was of course that of Agincourt, where Henry V booted French bottom and neutralised most of their nobles. Returning to choruses of “Hoorah!” for the most unlikely victory since Reading kicked Manchester United out of the FA Cup, he was adored by his subjects, but the French never forgot and so began the hatred between both. Maybe.

Look, that might account for the official, sanctioned establishment of the “auld enemy”, but I have to believe that the ordinary folk started hating the French a lot sooner, like once William got confortable on their throne and started issuing edicts and levying taxes left, right and centre, and sending helpful bands of soldiers out with burning torches to ensure those who didn’t pay the taxes paid in other ways, or just when he was bored.

Since there was no actual English king now to raise any objections, you could probably say with some degree of truthfulness that England was more or less a French possession now, an occupied territory, though that occupation would be one of the longest in history, lasting over half a millennium. So no state reaction, sure, but as anyone who has watched any version of the adventures of Robin Hood (of whom we will speak much more later) can tell you, the poor English common man fucking hated the French, and it has to be from here that any sort of enmity grew for those “frog-eating, slimy, snail-bothering sons of degenerate Vikings” (the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, just prior to being burned by William possibly). After all, if your country is invaded, conquered and then ruled by people who treat you as slaves and work and tax you into oblivion, how can you not hate them? Have you ever been to Ireland?

I suppose at this point it might be helpful to explain what “the north” comprised at the time. Borders and boundaries would be redrawn during William’s reign, but at the time of his accession to the throne the north was Yorkshire, Durham, Northumberland, Lancashire, Cumberland and Westmorland (see map above). Many of these places, you may remember, had been part of Danelaw, and occupied by Vikings in the time of Alfred and Aethelred and so on, and they had little taste to bend the knee to a French king. They possibly saw their Norman cousins as Vikings who had submitted themselves to France, and were no longer worthy of the warrior race. Or maybe they just didn’t like William, who knows? Either way, they weren’t having it.

One of the main points of contention was the earldom of Northumbria. This area had been a trouble spot since the days of Danelaw, often allying against the king, and by this time it had changed hands three times since the days of Tostig (remember him?). The first had been when a supporter of his, with the unlikely name of Copsi (sounds like a character from Beatrix Potter!) took over, swearing fealty to William, having fought Harold with Harald, as it were, on the side of Tostig at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. But the north was against William, and within weeks of being made the new earl Cosplay sorry Pepsi sorry Copsi was killed, replaced by Osulf, who was in turn murdered and the earldom then bought by his cousin, Cospatrick. Who promptly offered his allegiance to Edgar. And so here we were.

William, having had quite enough of these Anglo-fucking-Saxons and their treachery and treason (there’s always an excuse for it) rode to Northumbria and Edgar and Cospatrick and assorted allies all scattered, making a beeline for Scotland, where the king, Malcolm II, always happy to stick it to an English monarch, especially a new one finding his feet, said “Come on in, all o’ ye! Sure ye’ll find braw shelter at mah hearth, ye ken!” or something. William then solved the problem of the Earldom of Northumbria by conferring it on someone he could trust, a Norman. Job done.

Or not quite. Secure now in his new position, Robert de Comines rode into Durham and swiftly adn brutally learned that the one thing the north did not like was a fucking Frenchman trying to lord it over them. So that was the end of him, and the beginning of a resurgence of the revolt. The rebels then burned York castle, which really ticked William off and he rode back, snarling “That fucking castle cost me a lot to build, you English bastards!” And someone may have whispered in his ear so that he added, shrugging “Oh. Right. Yeah. And you killed my newly-appointed earl, too!”

As it often does, rebellion spread, so other towns rose in support of Edgar, who turned to a Viking, Sweyn II, a nephew of Cnut the Great, who was probably none too pleased to see what a pig’s breakfast this William head was making of his uncle’s ex-kingdom, and sent a large fleet against him. They retook York, but when William came again to make them give it back, they quipped “Didn’t want your stupid castle anyway!” and ran back across the border to Scotland. Possibly seeing what a useless wimp this Edgar Atheling was, Sweyn headed back down the coast, William bought him off in the time-honoured fashion and he buggered off back to Denmark with all his ships. You could probably hear the sound as William clapped his gloved gauntlets together and eyed the north.

“Right!” said he, probably. “Now let’s sort this fucking place out once and for all!”

And so he did.

The people would remember it forever as the Harrying of the North. Historians would call it genocide. Even later, more sympathetic writers of Norman descent would opine that it was cruel and merciless, but that William had no choice. Basically, it was a slaughter. The Viking blood that pulsed in his Norman veins was up now, and William had had just about enough of these English. He set to ensuring they would learn their place, would stay there, and would never rise again. Nobody was spared: towns, villages, households; men, women, children, animals, possibly even furry toys - all fell to the sword, the arrow and the fire. The North was set ablaze from border to border, the fires possibly reflected in the eyes of the king and his men as they went about their business like demons from Hell. Well, they wouldn’t be demons from anywhere else, would they, but you know what I mean.

An Anglo-Norman chronicler wrote in 1116 of the fury of the king, and how savage - and indeed, unjust - his reprisals were: “The King stopped at nothing to hunt his enemies. He cut down many people and destroyed homes and land. Nowhere else had he shown such cruelty. This made a real change. To his shame, William made no effort to control his fury, punishing the innocent with the guilty. He ordered that crops and herds, tools and food be burned to ashes. More than 100,000 people perished of starvation. I have often praised William in this book, but I can say nothing good about this brutal slaughter. God will punish him.”

It may not really have been the best policy. If you’re trying to establish your rule on a foreign land, trying to (presumably) create alliances and win allies, torching half of the country is probably not the way to go. Then again, it was only the north. This would, however, instil forever in that half of the country a hatred, resentment and resistance to William’s rule which would come back to haunt him. English kings had raided and gone on the rampage before, but not, it would seem, in such an indiscriminate and murderous way. Villages were torched, crops destroyed, livestock killed, the whole land laid waste. In the ensuing and inevitable famine, it was said, with some support, that people turned to cannibalism in order to survive. I don’t believe this had happened in England before this, so there’s a mark of shame William was never able to remove from his reign.

[Trollheart]

Band of Brothers: Harold’s Progeny Rise

Although he had been crowned King of England, the West Country remained loyal to Harold, where his mother Gytha had set up her powerbase while her three grandsons Godwin, Magnus and Edmund sailed to Ireland to muster an army. With the ex-queen mother and three potential heirs to the throne in residence, Exeter became a beacon of resistance, and supporters of Harold flocked there. William could not allow such a challenge to his authority to remain, and so as soon as he was in a position to, he rode for Exeter to force the queen’s submission. Ooe-er! Sounds kinky! (Shut it, you!) He arrived with a large force and besieged the castle (nothing a Norman liked better than a good siege) which held out for eighteen days before surrendering.

Though he suffered heavy losses as the town was determined to resist him, William finally managed to breach the walls by the use of mines, said to be the first time this technique was ever used in England. Gytha, seeing the game was up, had had it away on her toes in a boat, fed up of waiting for her worthless son’s nippers to come to her rescue, and William took the city, perhaps surprisingly sparing all its defenders and citizens. Maybe he’d worked out all his aggression putting down the northerners. He then did something which again became de rigueur for Normans, and built a castle at Exeter, ensuring it would remain loyal to him. Gytha ended up on the Island of Flat Holm, waited, waited and waited some more, than said fuck this and headed back to Flanders, from where she vanishes from history.

Meanwhile, the three sons of the defeated and dead King Harold Godwinson had fled after Hastings to Ireland, where they petitioned the king, Diarmait Mac Máel na mBó for assistance. The Irish, always ready to strike a blow against their neighbours to the east, agreed and sent a small fleet to engage William’s forces. William had by now left Devon, but his men engaged the brothers and put up stiff resistance, sending them yelping back across the Irish Sea, possibly one brother short. The king grumped “You feckin’ lads back already? Did yiz get that Norman bastard? Yiz didn’t? Holy Jaysus! Do I have to do everythin’ meself here? Look, here, take these men and boats and for the love of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, will yiz get the job done this time, or don’t bother comin’ back! I tell yiz, it won’t be Ireland of the thousand welcomes for you hoors if yiz come back defeated again. Now get up that yard!” Or words, vaguely, to that effect.

Back the brothers went in June 1069. Still no William (he was oop north) but Brian of Brittany, his second cousin, met them in battle and the superior Norman forces, with those all-important cavalry units, kicked their arses and sent them home. It’s reported that the Irish king decided to get very drunk that night, and wasn’t seen for several days. The remaining brothers followed their mother out of history, and that was the end of any challenge by the line of Godwinson to the rule of William the Conqueror.

But what about our man Edgar the Halfling, sorry Atheling, still hiding out under Malcolm’s kilt? Well, not much really. He literally did hide in Scotland until William decided it was time Malcolm bent the knee, and in 1072 part of the deal was that Edgar should be kicked out of Scotland, and indeed out of Britain. He went, where it seems all deposed/exiled/on the run kings, queens, nobles and persons of dubious birth went: Flanders. Eventually he decided to give up and accept William as his sovereign, so he doesn’t really feature much more in the story of the Norman conquest of England.

But the Welsh do.

The Dragon Awakes, Look You! Eadric’s Wild and Possibly Savage Revolt: A Prelude

You have to feel cautious engaging anyone with “the Wild” as their suffix, and Eadric was a wealthy owner of land in Shropshire and Herefordshire, said to be (though unconfirmed) a brother of that jolly ealdorman, Eadric Streona. Fiercely resistant to William’s rule, he nevertheless realised that he needed allies, and turned to the west, where he joined forces with the Welsh princes Bledden and Rhiwallon ap Cynfyn, princes of Powys and Gwynedd. Around the time William was counting out gold pieces of whatever into Sweyn II’s eager hand to enable him to fuck off home and leave Edgar high-tailing it back to Scotland, Eadric and his Welsh allies attacked Shrewsbury Castle, while others of their forces took on the newly-built one at Exeter. Neither were successful, both pushed back and the Anglo-Saxons beginning perhaps to learn the value of a good stone castle at your back, so much more so if it was a Norman one.

However, as it was necessary to take a left-turn in the History of Ireland to look into that of Scotland, as I research more I feel that the same is important here, so that we can better understand the relationship, not only between Wales and England, but between the Welsh themselves. Like any nation of the time, their country was never really at peace, rival kings and princes fighting among each other for control of this or that territory, and while there was, to my knowledge, no actual war of Welsh independence, the land of the Valleys has always been one of the most fiercely independent of the United Kingdom. Okay, we all have - Ireland and Scotland too, but I’m not very familiar with the actual history of Wales, so before I go too much further and start talking about princes and alliances and grievances and wars, it would probably be helpful to know who and what I’m talking about.

This, then, is obviously not intended to be a history of Wales, but a quick retelling of how the Welsh got to where and how they are. Considering that they are so deep, as it were, in English territory, how did they stay virtually independent, even up to today? Scotland you can understand: it’s way up there in the cold, frozen north, and it has highlands and crags to defend itself, plus the weather is awful in general and even as you come down closer to the south, the people from the likes of Sunderland and Newcastle are more closely aligned with Scotland, in some ways, than they are with England. They did, after all, bear the brunt of invasions from England when kings rode north to try to conquer Scotland, and there have been certainly instances of the Scots and the men from the north banding together against a marauding king. This king, almost invariably, would have been an English one, but the English in the north were not prepared to smooth his way.

Add to this the fact that, as mentioned above earlier, places like Northumbria had a tradition of being settled by Vikings (Saxons) and had been covered under Danelaw from about the eighth century. They had fought against kings of Wessex and Mercia, and held their own land as long as they could. There was no real loyalty in the north to the king, who traditionally ruled from, and in, the south, as today. London might as well have been a million miles away from places like Newcastle, and the north did not really regard the English king as theirs. Mind you, they weren’t about to submit to the Scottish one either, but in general, unless forced to, as we saw in the War for Scottish Independence, the Scots didn’t tend to bother too much about crossing the border into the south, so it’s now as if Northumbria was being constantly menaced by Scottish armies.

All of this, then, makes it easy to see how Scotland, for a time at least, was able to maintain its own independence, even if seen by the king as being part of his dominions. In some ways, it probably just wasn’t seen as worth going all that way to try to bring them to submission. Let them stay up there in the cold and think they were independent; when the time came, the king could march on them, but for now, the toasty throne room of London was much more attractive. Not so though with Wales. Wales essentially takes up most of the lower west half of Britain, and is more like a part of it than is Scotland. So how was it that the Welsh avoided being invaded and subjugated for so long?

[Trollheart]

Land of my Fathers: A (Very) Short History of Wales

Leaving aside the 300-year occupation by Rome, the first major battle to involve Wales was the Battle of Chester, in 616 AD (there are sources who give other dates, but fuck them: I’m sticking with this one. Who cares anyway? Bloody historians!) when the invading Angles and Saxons under Aethelfrith, one of the kings of half of Northumbria (as detailed previously) - he was the one who had all those priests killed, as they were praying for victory - faced the “wild” Welsh. Chester being close to the Welsh border, it was a force of men from Powys, Rhôs and possibly Mercia too which met Aethelfrith and whose leaders were killed in the battle. Wales was broken into two main kingdoms, Powys and Gwynedd, but the first man to rule over the entire country was Rhodri Mawr in the 9th century. Of course, this then became the period in which the Viking raids on Britain began, and the Welsh were no exception to the depredations of the Danes.

Wales was, like Ireland, overwhelmingly Christian, some of this being due perhaps to the influx of Irish settlers who arrived around the fourth century, and like Ireland (and indeed England, before the ascension of Henry VIII) there were monasteries and abbeys dotted across the country, and monks, abbots and friars administering to the spiritual needs of the people. Over time, parts of what were Wales and the northern kingdoms were taken and absorbed into both Scotland and England, leaving Wales more or less as it is today. Although Rhodri Mawr ruled over Wales, the first man to do so effectively came a century after him, but would die before William even set sail for England and his new realm.

Gruffydd ap Llywelyn (c. 1010 - 1063)

Originally king of Gwynedd in 1039 on the death of the previous ruler, Iago, supposedly his grandfather, he killed the brother of the Earl of Mercia and then attacked Dyffed, where he defeated Hywel ab Edwin (no relation, I don’t think) who had Irish support. Gruffydd drove them out but they returned again two years later, in 1044. Again Gruffydd routed the new Irish army and this time ended Hywel’s threat by the simple expedient of ending his life. He then linked up with Aelfgar, a disgruntled son of the Earl of Mercia who had a bone to pick with Harold, and together they attacked Hereford. Look, when the leader of the defenders is called Ralph the Timid, you’re not exactly going to be expecting a hard time, are you?

And they didn’t, leaving the town ablaze as they left. Soon after, Aelfgar got the earldom of East Anglia and was as happy as a pig in shit, so this time Gruffydd attacked Hereford on his own. Maybe he thought it hadn’t been burned enough so he wanted to finish the job. Taking territory after territory and kingdom after kingdom, he seemed unstoppable, and in 1057 was recognised as King of Wales. It should be made clear that he had to swear fealty to Edward the Confessor, as did the King of Scotland, and rule as a kind of “under-king”, so that he had Edward’s blessing, meaning peace with England. As long, of course, as Edward felt like maintaining that peace.

He is recorded as being the only true King of Wales, and he reigned for seven years. Whether he was a brutal ruler or a just one I don’t know, but the fact is that there was peace in his reign, enforced or not who can tell. In 1062 Harold rode against him, sent by the then-king, Edward the Confessor, and put him to flight. The next spring Tostig joined up with Harold and together they encircled Gruffydd’s position, cutting him off and then literally cutting him off as they took his head to the king. In fact, it was Gruffydd’s own men, desperate for peace with England, who agreed to kill him and send his head on to the king. Wales was again divided into the three traditional kingdoms, Harold reached an agreement with two Welsh kings and they were set up each to rule one of the kingdoms. Not sure who ruled over the third.

From around 1070 to 1081 Wales was again at war, as king fought king and territory changed hands, and internal strife tore the country apart, but by and large the new Norman monarchy left them to it, other things on William’s mind. I suppose the prevailing wisdom was that as long as the Welsh were fighting amongst themselves they were never going to be united, and therefore no threat of attack from Wales existed. However in 1081 William decided that Wales was becoming just a little too united for his tastes: Gruffudd ap Cynan had managed to regain control of Gwynedd, and had an army of Irish mercenaries at his side. That didn’t look good, and the old adage held true that when an under-king gets less under than you want him to be, time to teach him his place.

So William sent the Earl of Chester, Hugh D’Avranches, to parley with him but it was a trap and he was captured at Rug (you could say he had the rug pulled out from under him, ho ho) and nicked his lands. He then tried to install bishops and priests loyal to the Normans in place of the traditional native Welsh ones, but this did not go well, leading to the bishop having to carry a sword and go around with a bodyguard when he went out. Shades of The Simpsons: “Bishop carries less than fifty dollars” huh? In the end, Gruffudd escaped from Chester and returned to lead a revolt in 1094, but we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves, so that’s where we’ll leave the history of Wales for now.

I wonder if it was a mistake for William to keep shuttling back and forth between France and England? In his absence something always seemed to happen, and it must have been hard to keep control when you’re constantly moving between the two countries. But then he had holdings a-plenty in Normandy which he had to watch over, and England in general wasn’t exactly being welcoming to him, so maybe he preferred being back in the homeland whenever he could. His method of land control amounted to a feudal system, as practised by the Normans, where the king basically held all the land and distributed it to those he saw fit to receive it, and took it from those he did not. This resulted in many English lords losing their lands and castles for having stood against him, and also the often forced marriage of English women to Norman lords, in order that the property would remain in, or pass into, Norman hands. As usual, the king retained control by the usage of castles, more and more built throughout England as William consolidated his power.

However, somewhat in comparison, in a strange way, to the Ascendancy landlords in Ireland in the nineteenth century, William spent very little time in England, preferring to administer his new kingdom through intermediaries. This had several consequences, the first of which was of course the rise to unprecedented power of lower lords, who were left to look after areas of England, though still directly under the control of the absentee king. The next was the all but elimination of the English aristocracy, as Normans became the dominant power in England and Englishmen, all now seen as “Saxons”, were relegated to a second class status, again somewhat like Catholics in Ireland some hundreds of years later. Englishmen could no longer hold posts in the Church, or if they had lifetime appointments, were replaced on their death (and who is to say, with not a shred of evidence but you know, that some of these troublesome natives were not assisted out of this world early?) by Normans.

Another consequence was the “fuck this I’m out of here” syndrome, or to put it more mildly and politely, the exodus of English to other countries not controlled by the Norman king: Scotland, Ireland and even Scandinavia - well, not surprising, considering how many Vikings still remained in England - as well as the Byzantine Empire, which was crying out for good mercenaries, and where a seasoned English soldier or commander could make good money. Back home, even the language was changing, as the Norman overlords forced the use of their Anglo-Norman tongue, and Old English - the dominant language before Hastings - began to undergo the same fate as Gaelic would in Ireland with the later arrival of the English, technically the Normans really. Administrative documents were now written in Latin, not English, and the Forest Laws were enacted, designating certain areas of England as belonging to the king, royal forests wherein no commoner may tread or hunt. This would of course in a few hundred years give rise to the legend of the one man who dared not only hunt in the forest, but live there and strike from it as his base to harry the occupying Normans.

(Did he exist, or was he just a myth, put about to bolster Saxon courage and provide a figure of resistance? Was he based on a real-life figure? I don’t know, and we’ll examine the legend of Robin Hood when we get to the era in which he supposedly lived. One thing I do know pretty much for sure, and that is that he was not a fox.)

It might seem odd that all of these changes came about not due to a mass immigration of Normans to England, but a relatively small number. It’s estimated that the population of Normans at the time of William the Conqueror only amounted to about 8,000 - that’s about a thousandth of the population of London alone today, and less than half of its population at the time. In all of England. So it’s not like the Normans outnumbered the English. Far from it; they were very much the minority. But then, once you’re in power and have all the major institutions, including the army of course, under your control then it kind of really doesn’t matter how inferior your numbers are.

While there were definitely advantages to the Norman conquest (not if you were there at the time, and English, of course), such as the abolition in short order (well, two hundred years, but lightning fast in terms of history) of slavery, this in a way didn’t matter for England, as almost all of the peasant or serf working class English were relegated ot the position of all but slaves. They had few rights, taxes of increasing cruelty were levied on them to pay for foreign wars, and they had no representation in the country. Not as if anyone could have voted or anything in the time of the House of Wessex, but at least you could expect that the king would, generally, have your best interests at heart. Not so under the Normans. It would probably be fair to say that English Saxons were looked upon by the new occupier ruling class as about as favourably as Jews were in Germany in the 1930s, or blacks in the Deep South in the nineteenth century, or the tenant farmers in Ireland by the Ascendancy landlords. In other words, in the eyes of the Normans, they had no rights, and this would continue for centuries until, eventually, as always happens, the invaders were not defeated by force but by inevitable circumstances.

As they began to intermarry with Saxon women, Norman men would acclimatise to the English ways, and the two peoples would more or less mingle to become one, as had happened to the Vikings in Ireland and indeed in France, where the Normans had become about as French as you could be. Now they would, slowly and not without bitter contest and bloodshed over the next few hundred years, almost against their will be turned from French into Englishmen, and England would be ruled by a sort of hybrid of both for the foreseeable future.

But to the native English, for a very long time, the Normans would be French, the enemy who came across the sea and killed their king, and then set about changing their land till it was virtually unrecognisable, a brutal, occupying force that frequently burned villages and towns, either in reprisal for rebellions or just because they were bored, and the Saxon scum had to be taught their place, and kept there. The huge, frowning Norman castles which would rise all over England, and remain there to this day, would be, and are, a lasting reminder of the huge and all-but world-changing effect these people would have on England, Ireland, Europe and further afield.

The time of the Normans had begun.

[Trollheart]

The Wild and Possibly Savage Revolt of Eadric the Wild, Part One

So that brings us back to that wild fella again, and how he rose against William’s reign. We touched on his revolt, barely, before I realised we needed to have a short history lesson on Wales, then I kind of pushed him to one side, but I’m sure one thing old Eadric did not appreciate back then was being pushed to one side, so let’s look into how he fought against the new King of Britain. In fact, who the hell was he? Well, for a start, he was no Welshman, though it looks to have been him who was first to have organised Welsh resistance - even if this just meant mobilising them to his own ends - against William.

As the new king and his occupying force would soon set about the eradication of the Old English/Saxon naming tradition of placing E after A, Eadric (also known as Edric) was a proud Saxon magnate, and has indeed been said to have been a nephew of the infamous Eadric Streona, bane of King Cnut, of whom we have heard previously. As usual with the Middle Ages and before, reliable intel is next to impossible to come by, and things like lineage - unless you were famous and powerful, like a king - hard to prove. It may be that the relationship was other than that of being a nephew to Eadric Streona (Eadric the Wild’s own father, Aeflic, may not have been Eadric Streona’s brother but his nephew, which would then make Eadric the WIld his, um, something. Grandson? Not sure. Doesn’t matter) but there was definitely a familial connection there.

Eadric’s lands (we’re done with Eadric Streona now, thank Christ, and every reference to Eadric means the Wild; we’re just dealing with him now) - and presumably, those of his father, were in Hereford and Shropshire, both counties close to the Welsh border, which explains why he was able to enlist the help of his cousins to the west. While many English (Saxon) lords and nobles bent the knee to their new king, our Eadric was not one of them, and while he may - or may not - have been the first to say no, he did rebel a mere year after Hastings, so he must have been at the front of the queue. You can see, of course, why he - and any other lord or noble - would not take kindly to William the Conqueror. He was, after all, a conqueror of England and that meant rewarding the men who had helped him achieve his conquest and won for him the crown of England, or indeed Britain. How he rewarded them was of course with land, land that had previously belonged to the now-defeated English, the Saxons. And Eadric the Wild, no doubt so named for a reason, weren’t having none of that, no sir.

His raids were doomed to failure, and to understand this we have to comprehend the biggest and most immovable innovation the Normans brought to England (and later Ireland). Up until the time of their arrival, the word “castle” was not even known in Britain. We may remember back to the days of Alfred the Great, less than a century prior, when the legendary first real King of England instigated the system of burhs, standing fortifications which were always manned. Even though these were, for want of another word, forts, they were not castles, not really even buildings. At best, they were constructed upon the remains of either Roman forts (which were not castles either, more walled encampments with perhaps a guard tower, slightly similar, perhaps, to prisons today) or even older Bronze Age hillforts. The idea of a huge, walled, stone edifice, with a standing army, drawbridge, moat, gates, turrets, arrow slits and indeed an entire mini-ecosystem running it, was utterly alien to the English. They literally had no word for it. The Normans, of course, did: they called them castles.

“Fuck me, boys! We are NOT attacking that! Hey! Who are you calling a coward ya bastard? I’ll show ye!”

So first of all, to have to deal with the sudden emergence and proliferation of such massive strongholds was bad enough, but to consider attacking them must have seemed all but tantamount to suicide. Not forgetting, of course, the Norman mounted army, the cavalry, another new innovation, a further culture shock to the infantry-minded Saxons. It’s not at all surprising, then, to read that Eadric’s attempts to take Hereford Castle (built on the lands which used to be his, and his father’s) was entirely unsuccessful, and though, as mentioned, he had help from the two princes of Wales (sorry) Bleddyn and Rhiwallon ap Cynfyn, he was forced to take shelter in Wales as the three considered their next move. It wouldn’t quite be true to say the Normans’ laughter followed them across the border, for although they had little to no chance of taking the castle, they did take a lot of men with them, as John of Worcester, writing in the 12th century, noted that “they [the Normans at Hereford Castle] lost many of their knights and soldiers.”

The first word there is impressive. You could imagine Eadric and his Welsh allies taking down infantry, but, being of course not mounted themselves, the idea that they were able to kill knights, men on horses, Norman cavalrymen, must mean that they were fiercer opponents than the defenders of the castle had expected. Nevertheless, they may have struck some blows but they were never getting into that stone fortress and back off to Wales they went, to plan and plot. This, of course, it should be noted and understood, all took place at a time when the newly-crowned (as such) King William was living it up and basking in the adulation of his Norman fans back in good old France.

Two years went by, and by the time they were ready to strike again Eadric and the Welsh princes found themselves far from the only ones rebelling against the new king, as other lords and nobles rose in anger and wrath at the treatment meted out to them by the Conqueror. 1069 saw the three allies attack and this time besiege Shrewsbury Castle, though again they failed to take it. To console themselves they burned the town, so as far as they were concerned I’m sure that was something. At this time, William, however, was back in da house, as it were, and while he was at that moment putting paid to a rebellion by the Earl of Morcar up in ever-troublesome Northumbria, when news reached him of the burning of Shrewsbury and the attack on the castle there, he hot-footed it back south and met them in battle at Stafford. It should be also noted that this time Eadric, Rhiwallon and Bleddyn had further support, this time for Chesire, again very close to their home country.

It made no difference.

Whether we can judge him for being a coward, a shrewd man who knew ye game was up, or just someone who was beating a tactical retreat, Eadric legged it before William’s army arrived from the north, and so was not there to see the defeat of his two allies. This must have given him pause though, and finally accepting the inevitable (and perhaps allowing it to be said, though it probably wasn’t, that Eadric the Wild had been tamed) he submitted to William, thereafter even assisting him in putting down another rebellion later, in 1072, to the disgust of the other lords, who surely thought him a traitor.

Ah, but did they?

[Trollheart]

The Wild and Possibly Savage Revolt of Eadric the Wild, Part Two

If there’s one thing any people love, and the English as much as we Irish, it’s a good folk tale, and if that can involve a local hero - real or imagined - so much the better. Jessica Brain, a native of Kent who is a freelance writer specialising in local history, has a fascinating article which shows, or purports to show, how sometimes a traitor can be turned into a hero by the creation of a legend around them. Perhaps in a case of national (or local) refusal to accept that the great rebel had turned against England, several fanciful legends sprung up about not only Eadric but his wife Godda, some surely echoing those that were told about one of England’s greatest kings who may never have lived, the semi-mythical King Arthur.

To explain the turning of their hero, the story was put about that Eadric and his wife had been taken prisoner by their own people, who were shocked and outraged at Eadric’s betrayal of them. The stories - getting more fanciful as they were added to - went on to say that the two had been imprisoned in lead mines in Shropshire, and that a curse had been placed upon them, forcing them to stay there for eternity. Should England be threatened, they would have to rise and ride forth to defend the country they had betrayed, after which they would be forced to return to their eternal incarceration. Their vigil - and imprisonment - would not come to an end until the Norman oppressors were driven out of England, and Anglo-Saxon ways returned.

Stories like these, of course, take on a life of their own, and so-called “sightings” have been made of the ghostly traitor and his wife, in 1814 during the Crimean War, and just before the two World Wars. Witnesses (surely unreliable/drunk) swear they saw the two riding side by side, leading an army of men across the Shropshire hills. But that’s not all. Perhaps striking some parallels with tales of those doomed to roam this plane forever after death due to whatever they have or haven’t done in life, such as the Flying Dutchman or the Headless Horseman, Eadric became involved with something known as “the wild hunt”, which claims that legendary heroes (see how quickly, in relative terms, a traitor becomes a hero?) ride out in times of need, leading a hunt - sometimes even across the sky - in search of lost or doomed souls to capture and take back with them.

Again linking the Wild One back to King Arthur’s legend, the tale of “the fish and the sword” holds that a great fish is in possession of Eadric’s sword, and that if it is ever caught, the fish will simply cut itself free using the sword. Quite how a piscean that does not possess arms is supposed to use a sword is not explained, but you know storytellers and their legends. Oh, and the King Arthur bit? If the true heir of Eadric is ever to catch the fish, the sword will present itself to him. Presumably not, as George R.R. Martin noted, with the pointy end first. Yeah, all sounds a little fishy to me. Sorry.

Eadric’s wife is not just there as a sidekick either, or no. They have a legend about her too. As perhaps you might expect, she’s rumoured to have been a fairy princess who takes human form, and agrees to marry Eadric as long as he is good to her. One day, his temper breaks and from that moment she transforms back into a fairy and fucks off back to wherever fairies come from, leaving him to bemoan his temper and consider taking anger management classes. Feckin’ women, eh? Can’t say a cross word to them but they turn on the waterworks, turn into a fairy and leave you in a pool of your own tears. How many times has that happened to me?

In reality, we know that Eadric helped his new master to attack that old enemy hold-out, Scotland, and then accompanied him to France where he fought with him at Maine (no, not the state, dummy!) and seems to have, rather ironically, ended his days in his home county. After opposing Ranulph de Mortimer in Herefordshire and being defeated, he was (it’s said) imprisoned in Wigmore Castle, where he died, date unknown.

[Trollheart]

Papal Bull? The Pope Sets the Seal on William’s Right to Rule

As has already been pointed out, at this time England was staunchly Catholic, mostly because there was nothing else. If you were a Christian, you were a Catholic. The two were interchangeable and indistinguishable. When various popes called for crusades against the infidel or the heathen, it was not against Protestants that they fumed and raged (though later, of course, they would) and for at least the next half a millennium, Catholic = Christian and Christian = Catholic. The only other religions were Judaism, Islam and others seen as “heretical” by the Church. So while there may possibly have been the odd group in medieval England who worshipped pagan gods and remembered the druids, it’s probably fair to say that the bulk of the native population were Christian/Catholic. As were the French, and would remain so, one of the biggest Catholic powers along with Spain even as England turned to the wickedness of their own form of Lutheranism.

One good way, then, to have your monarchy legitimised was to have the head of the Christian Church give it his seal, and this happened in 1070, when the pope sent three of his legates (quick! Legate! Sorry) to England - I suppose he didn’t fancy travelling there himself for some Norman duke who now found himself king of England - who all dotted the holy “I”’s and crossed the ecclesiastical “T”s to make his reign official in the eyes of the Church, and really, those were the only eyes to be seen as official in. Once His Holiness had given William the nod, he was the rightful ruler of England, and everyone had better toe the line, or they might just find themselves suddenly no longer on the guest list when they arrived at the Pearly Gates! Not that this stopped resistance to William’s rule, of course, but it must have made some of the would-be rebels examine their hearts and wonder if material possessions in this life were, after all, important enough to sacrifice their immortal souls for?

Not that, mind you, I’m saying anyone who rose against their new sovereign would be automatically excommunicated; I’m sure the pope had much better things to do, and while he would certainly, as it were, notarise the documents for William to say he was the One True King, it’s highly doubtful he would have started condemning people to Hell if they rebelled against the Conqueror. After all, God needs all the souls he can get, right? And who knew: somewhere down the line, Rome might find itself ideologically or even militarily opposed to England and its new king, or his successor, and then, as ever, traitors would become heroes and terrorists patriots and so on. Therefore I’m assuming (though I don’t know, but it makes sense) that His Holiness kept his nose out of William’s affairs, had his legates stamp the certificates and recalled them to the sunnier climes of Italy, leaving England to fend for itself.

When we get to the legend, or otherwise, of Robin Hood it will be interesting to see if he or his men, or the people he fought for, ever appealed to or even mentioned or thought of the pope. I kind of feel they may have been (certainly were, in the series Robin of Sherwood) more disposed towards the friendlier, local and far more pagan gods, especially those of the forests, and may have considered the pope an enemy for having basically set his seal on the legitimacy of the king who oppressed them and now occupied their land. But as I say, that’s all in the future. Right now it’s sufficient to say that William had the backing, such as it was, of Rome, and could certainly consider, and prove himself to be the rightful King of England.

But let’s just take a moment here to consider: why did he do it? Was he worried that England - not, remember, at this time, anything like a European, never mind world power - might turn against Rome if he refused to legitimise William’s claim? Or did he see in the new king a man who would spread Catholicism (Christianity) further and wider than had the kings of the House of Wessex? I suppose it can be remembered that a mere four hundred years ago,the people of England, these very Saxons who were now being ground under William’s heel, had been not averse to the idea of “ping-pong belief”, which is to say, if they converted and then things didn’t go their way, they had no issue checking out what other gods had to offer. So at that time, around the seventh century, Christianity was in perhaps not quite as precarious a position as it had been in, say, Nero’s time, but could not in all fairness be really said to have been established as the most popular or even state religion (not that there was, till much later, any state to speak of). So perhaps His Holiness didn’t quite think Christianity had the stranglehold on England that it should have, and hoped this new guy would send his men into the various villages and perhaps forests and explain to the people in no uncertain terms that worshipping false gods came with certain terms and conditions, mostly that you might no longer be able to use all your limbs, as you would be deprived of them, and that that lovely thatch your roof is made of burns so easily. Why not take the easy way and just submit to God yes? Oh but we’re going to burn your hovel down anyway. Why? We’re Normans, son! Got to burn something.

There was, of course, a negative side to this papal seal of approval, and it had to do with the English (Saxon) bishops, most of whom began to search furiously for their nearest dole office as they were summarily defrocked, and Norman lads put in their place. Well, it made sense, didn’t it? Not much point in enforcing your own (and the pope’s) form of Christianity if you leave the old guard there to implement those laws. Like all kings and queens, William knew the most important thing was to place in positions of power men he trusted, and he didn’t trust a Saxon as far as he could throw him into a burning village, so out they went and in came his people. The pope, of course, either smiled on or ignored this ecclesiastical cabinet reshuffle - France was a God-fearing Catholic country, whereas England? Well, England was still getting there. Too many damned pagan deities and wood sprites and what have you roaming the English countryside, infesting the forests and hanging out by the banks of rivers, waiting to catch unsuspecting innocent maidens and tempt them away from the worship of God possibly. Best to be rid of them all, and the frogs were the guys to do that. How they did it, how many they killed or made homeless was not his problem.

Was William that bothered about spreading the faith, converting the heathen? Nah, probably not. I imagine he couldn’t give a pair of toasted stag’s antlers what the Saxons believed in, but positions in the Church carried with them great power and wealth (and lands) and he had no intention of leaving these in the hands of his now-vanquished enemy. Not only that, he had to reward his people for having fought for him, and while being awarded lands and castles was all very well, people like them also wanted the titles, and this suited William. After all, remember that pretty much all of these Saxon clergy had been appointed by, well, Saxon kings. They would have been the remnants of, and reminders of the “old days”, the days when the House of Wessex was in control of England (and later, very briefly, Godwin and not quite so briefly Denmark) and such memories were to be stamped out, ground into the English dust, which was now Norman dust, and if anyone had a problem with that, do please come up to the castle and check out our state-of-the-art dungeons. You’ll never want to leave. Nor will you be able to.

A final reason, of course, for the deposing of the Saxon clerics would have been to practise upon them the final insult: take away their representation to God. While, probably, all English Christians still professed loyalty to Rome, the pope was a very long way away, and so the bishops and archbishops and deacons and abbots were the ones into whose trust was put the responsibility for the care of their immortal souls. Now, that was to be taken from them, and perhaps like the Irish a few centuries later, forced to convert to Anglicanism or face imprisonment or execution, and forbidden to practise their own religion, the Saxons, while still allowed to be Christians, had now to be Norman Christians. Which is to say, of course, that they could only take mass in Norman churches, celebrated by Norman priests and bishops, those masses held in Latin, not the more familiar Old English they were used to. In this way, I imagine, mass became less a participatory event and more a kind of pointless ritual, as most English could not understand Latin, nor did they wish to. Alfred the Great had seen to the former two hundred years prior, and as for the latter, well, reading Latin was tantamount to acknowledging the invader’s right to be in England, almost like collaboration. So, like we Irish refused to speak English, the Saxons refused to learn Latin, and the Normans? They didn’t give a curse; didn’t want these nasty heathen Saxons sullying their lovely language with their uncouth tongues anyway. Sure, they didn’t have to understand what the priest said, and being low and (in Norman eyes surely) unintelligent as they were, they probably wouldn’t have been able to.

[Trollheart]

Danes to the Left of Me, Frenchies to the Right, Here I am…

Unfortunately for WIlliam, the pope’s approval meant nothing to men to whom the pope himself meant nothing. Yep, the Vikings were again eyeing England and, perhaps seeing the new king as a weak point, or having intelligence of the rebellions breaking out across his new kingdom, they decided they wanted some of that action, and began putting orders in to Sven the Shipwright, all specially weather-proofed against the rainy English climate. If the fact that William, a Norman, was a distant cousin registered in their minds, it would have mattered little if at all. We’ve already seen that Vikings had a loyalty to little else but their pocket, and if the opportunity arose to attack their neighbour, well sure wasn’t that what neighbours were for? So a guy who had Viking ancestry in his family did nothing to dissuade them, and on they came. They weren’t the only ones who took advantage of William’s difficulties, but let’s deal with them first.

In 1069 King Sweyn, in association with Edgar the Aethling, brought a large fleet from Norway to fight William. Sweyn’s uncle was someone called Cnut, you may have heard me mention him in passing. Now, in a strange case of coincidence, it seems that Sweyn had a similar story to tell about a claim to the English throne as did William. Though no evidence existed to back his tale up (about as much as legitimised William’s own claim) he said that he had visited England during his uncle’s reign and that the throne of England had been promised to him on the death of Edward the Confessor who, as you should recall, died without a sprog to his name, triggering the last-ever succession crisis prior to the Norman invasion. Though William secured a promise of neutrality from Denmark before he made his move on England, rumours abound that Sweyn sent troops to help Harold Godwinson retain the crown that was resting, rather shakily, upon his head.

When Harold fell at the Battle of Hastings and William became the new King of England, the first of a long line of Norman kings, Sweyn was none too happy about it, but unable to show the Conqueror exactly how unhappy, as he had troubles of his own to deal with. His kingship of Denmark was being contested, and for the moment England would have to wait. However now that things had settled down back home, and with the urging of the Saxons, who were also less than pleased to being ruled by a bunch of frogs (and possibly remembered how an all but English Golden Age had flourished under Cnut), he began making plans to invade England. He knew he had an ally in the aforementioned Edgar the Aethling, whom the Saxon lords would see as the true king of England, In 1069 good old reliable Northumbria exploded in revolt, and Sweyn’s assistance was again requested. Wary of the power of the Danes, William sent one of his abbots to Denmark to ask Sweyn not to bother, it was just a few hundred rebels, easily cleaned up, and his trip would be for nothing. Sweyn, of course, knew a whitewash job when he heard it, and anyway, he had all these shiny new longships just sitting, rather like Otis Redding, on the dock of the bay, doing nothing, and as we all know, raiding ships that aren’t raiding aren’t making money.

So he launched his fleet and headed back towards his uncle’s second-favourite country to rule, and Edgar began rubbing his hands and making plans to redecorate the throne room maybe. In totally atypical Viking fashion, however, Sweyn did not travel with his fleet, possibly due to his bad back or needing to catch up on his box set of Game of Thrones, who knows? But he sent his sons Harald and Cnut, and his own brother Asbjørn. They came up against stiff resistance from the Normans, and had to flee from no less than four intended landing spots, one of which, Ipswich, they did land at but were chased back to their boats by irate Ipswich fans, or possibly Norman soldiers, or both, till finally they came ashore at the Humber, where an exasperated Edgar would have looked at his watch had they been invented and grumped “What the fuck kept you? Don’t you know how cold it is standing around here on the shores of this bloody river in winter?”

Notwithstanding the king-in-waiting’s possible complaints, the Danes and the Saxons marched on York, all the county of Yorkshire rising in revolt, which led to the attack by William’s forces on the north and the subsequent harrying of it, as already noted. Whether shocked by the ferocity of the Norman attack (unlikely; he was, after all, a Viking) or realising that his allies had been so depleted that he now had little chance of victory, Sweyn, who had by now joined his fleet, stuck out his hand and accepted the gold William offered him to bugger off back across the sea, and buggered off back across the sea.

But not right away.

It may have come as something of a shock to the people of England as Sweyn’s troops arrived in their counties and began ravaging the countryside. They surely must have thought the Dane had come to help free them, and place Edgar (or some suitable substitute) on the throne of England, but in fact Sweyn had secured, in addition to a large payout, permission from William to sack the eastern coast, in order to feed his rather ravenous army. After all, what did William care if they killed Saxons? Less enemies to rebel, less Englishmen to keep control of, and this would also, he must have thought rather cunningly, sow distrust between the Saxons and the Danes, making it unlikely they would band together against him in the future. In that, however, he was to be proved wrong.