The Brad Bognor Show

Here's an interview I did about the Norman Conquest back in October.

Swein Forkbeard's 1000th Anniversary?

Lots of people tweeting and posting today that Swein Forkbeard was crowned king on Christmas Day 1013. E.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-25341754

But is it true? I couldn't recall having seen this date before, and it's not in my research notes for The Norman Conquest. Nor is Christmas Day 1013 mentioned in Swein's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

The only contemporary narrative source for Swein's reign is the E version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It says [my paraphrase] that in 1013 Swein landed at Sandwich in Kent 'before the month of August', went round East Anglia to the Humber, then up the Trent to Gainsborough, where the people of that region submitted. Later he went south to Oxford, where there were more submissions, and then east to London, where he besieged the English king Ethelred the Unready. Swein then went back north to his ships, 'and the whole nation accepted him as their undisputed king'.

Then London submitted... Then Swein demanded tribute and supplies for the winter... Then for a time Ethelred was with his fleet in London, and his wife Emma crossed the sea to Normandy.

'Then at Christmas the king [i.e. Ethelred] left the fleet for the Isle of Wight, and remained there for that festival, afterwards crossing the sea.'

In other words, Swein seems to have been accepted as king well before Christmas, and there's no mention of a coronation.

Anyone have any evidence to the contrary?

PS It's not in Adam of Bremen or John of Worcester, I've checked. My working hypothesis is that the belief Swein became king on Christmas day arises from a lazy misreading by some later historian of the section of the ASC discussed above.

Top Posts of 2013

In the past year I blogged forty-six times. These were the five most popular posts, in reverse order.

5. Earliest Description of a Traitor's Fate (517 views).

On 5 November - Guy Fawkes's night - Dan Snow asked his twitter followers if they knew any other good stories of punishment for regicide and treason. This was my response.

4. Killer Question: How Did Harold Die? (627 views)

Seemed appropriate on 14 October, the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings.

3. Queen Matilda was NOT a Dwarf (971 views)

Every so often I see a tweet that claims William the Conqueror's wife was only 4'2" tall. She wasn't - it's a modern myth.

4. Time Team: Battle of Hastings (2242 views)

On 1 December a Time Team Special claimed to have found a new site for the Battle of Hastings. I found the argument unconvincing.

5. A Letter to Terry Deary (20475 views)

The winner by a considerable margin. In February Terry Deary, author of the bestselling Horrible Histories, declared himself in favour of closing libraries, so I wrote him a short letter.

The Lady Edith

'And the Lady Edith passed away in Winchester seven days before Christmas. And the king [William the Conqueror] had her brought to Westminster with great honour, and laid her with King Edward, her lord.' Anglo-Saxon Chronicle E, 1075.

[On this day in 1075, Edith, the widowed queen of Edward the Confessor, died. Edith was the daughter of Earl Godwine (and the sister of Harold Godwineson). She had married Edward 30 years earlier, in January 1045. Their marriage was famously childless – had they had any children, there would have been no Norman Conquest...]

We know a reasonable amount about Edith because several decades later she commissioned one of the most important sources for her husband’s reign, a text known as the Life of King Edward. Unsurprisingly the anonymous author is fulsome in praise of his patron’s appearance, character and accomplishments. Edith, we are assured, was ‘inferior to none, superior to all . . . recommended by the distinction of her family and the ineffable beauty of her surpassing youth’. Educated by the nuns of Wilton in Wiltshire, she was also apparently quite the bluestocking, fluent in four languages, and so learned and talented that she was famous for her own poems, prose, needlework and painting. Dignified and reserved, serious and modest, affectionate, generous and honest: Edith was clearly ‘a wife worthy of so great a husband’. She and Edward were married at an unknown location on 23 January 1045.

But did Edward really have an alternative? Any assessment of his relationship with Godwine has to take into account the fundamental weakness of the king’s position at the start of his reign. Although he was fast approaching forty, he had not lived in England since his childhood; for a quarter of a century he had been living the life of an exile in Normandy. This meant that on his arrival in 1041 Edward had exceedingly few friends and allies – his only real confidants were the handful of Continental supporters who accompanied him from Normandy, many of whom were clerics. Godwine, by contrast, had been the principal force in English politics for almost all of the same twenty-five-year period. His lands and wealth, great as they were, could not quite rival those of the king; but in terms of lordship, the earl greatly outclassed Edward, with scores of followers in almost every shire in southern England, all ready to do his bidding. Events suggest that his will was all but irresistible. In 1040 he had supported Harthacnut, but the following year he had changed his mind and given his backing to Edward. What if he changed his mind again, and switched his support to another candidate – Magnus, for example, or perhaps Swein Estrithson? The reality was that, if Edward wanted to survive, he had little choice other than to do what Godwine suggested – and probably no say at all in choosing his own bride. As the author of the Life of King Edward explains with surprising candour, ‘Edward agreed all the more readily to contract this marriage because he knew that, with the advice and help of Godwine, he would have a firmer hold on his hereditary rights in England.

The corollary of this statement is pretty clear: had Edward refused, he would probably have found himself out of a job.

The suspicion, borne out by later events, is that Edward never forgave Godwine for Alfred’s murder, and merely went through the motions in marrying Edith. It is a suspicion reinforced by the fact that the match never produced any children. Later chroniclers insisted that this was because it was never consummated; most modern commentators, by contrast, ascribe it to sheer bad luck, and point to infertility as the more likely cause. Yet according to Edith’s own testimony (i.e. the Life of King Edward), the reason there were no children was because Edward had lived ‘a celibate life’; indeed, ‘he preserved with holy chastity the dignity of his consecration, and lived his whole life dedicated in true innocence’. This testimony deserves to be taken seriously; after all (as one modern historian has observed), had the reality been different, the Life would have been a laughing stock. More importantly, subsequent events do not support the idea that Edward was anxious to beget an heir. The reasonable conclusion remains that Edward agreed to marry Edith for purely political reasons and resisted her extensively chronicled charms.

The Norman Conquest, pp. 63-4.

The Bayeux Tapestry: Edith weeps at Edward's deathbed.

Llywelyn the Last

[As the year 1282 drew to a close, King Edward I of England was preparing a final assault that would complete his conquest of Wales, and remove its native prince, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd...]

Llywelyn and his allies could not afford to wait for this to happen. At present they were encircled but, with the respite granted by their recent victory, they might open up new fronts. Already in the second half of November there were fresh risings in South and West Wales, perhaps fomented by the presence of the prince himself in those areas. It was in the middle March, however, that Llywelyn was hoping for the greatest gains. There, on 26 November, Roger Mortimer, not only the king’s commander in the region but also the most powerful lord in his own right, had died of natural causes. (‘His long and praiseworthy services’, wrote Edward to Mortimer’s namesake son, ‘recur frequently and spontaneously to our memory’). The old warrior’s passing had led to immediate fears of an English collapse in central Wales: within weeks, the sheriff of Shropshire was reporting that Mortimer’s ‘fickle and haughty’ tenants were ‘on the point of leaving the king’s peace’. In Edward’s second set-back that autumn, Llywelyn saw his best opportunity. Leaving Dafydd in charge of Snowdonia, the prince took his army and struck out in the direction of Builth.

He arrived there on 11 December to find the might of the entire middle March ranged ready to meet him. Coincidence or conspiracy? There is circumstantial evidence to suggest that the Welsh leader had been lured into a trap devised by Mortimer’s sons, and perhaps by some of his own men too. Whatever the truth, it is clear enough what happened next. On the high ground to the west of Builth, at a place called Cilmeri, a substantial battle took place between the English and Welsh forces, and in the course of the fighting the prince of Wales fell. Most accounts agree that he somehow became separated from his men, and was killed unrecognized by his English assailant. It was only when the battle was over, and the bodies examined, that his corpse was identified.

‘Know, Sire’, wrote Roger Lestrange, captain of the English forces, to his royal master, ‘that Llywelyn ap Gruffudd is dead, his army broken, and the flower of his men killed’. Accompanying the letter as proof was the prince’s severed head. Edward had it sent on to Anglesey to cheer his other troops, and from there dispatched to London, where its arrival was greeted with a fanfare of trumpets and horns. Carried through the city’s streets on the end of a lance, it was finally placed on a iron spike above the Tower of London, and crowned with a mockery of ivy. The prophecy that a Welshmen would one day wear a crown in London was in this grisly way seen to have been fulfilled.

While the English rejoiced, Wales despaired. ‘See you not that the world is ending?’ asked one Welsh poet. ‘Ah, God, that the sea would cover the land!'

A Great and Terrible King, pp. 185-6

Time Team: Battle of Hastings

Gosh, where to start with tonight's Time Team about the Battle of Hastings? (If you missed it, you can watch it here. I'm in it for a few minutes at the beginning and at the end).

We were repeatedly told  – and it’s true – that no archaeological evidence has been found for the Battle of Hastings. ‘From an archaeological point of view’, says presenter Tony Robinson [at about 4mins10secs], ‘it’s as if the fighting never took place at all.’

But that’s also true for almost every other medieval battle. Consider, for example, the Battle of Falkirk, fought between Edward I and William Wallace in 1298. We know, from surviving English payrolls, that Edward I mustered some 28,000 men for this decisive engagement. It was one of the biggest battles ever fought on British soil. But we don’t know precisely where it was fought – not so much as an arrowhead has been unearthed.

In the case of Hastings, we are invited to consider two principal locations: Battle Abbey, which has been the accepted site for the past nine centuries, and Caldbec Hill, proposed by John Grehan in 2012.

So what’s the evidence for Caldbec Hill?

Answer: there isn’t any. John Grehan, interviewed in the programme, simply notes that contemporary accounts of the battle mention that the ground was steep, and observes that Caldbec is a steeper hill than the one on which the abbey stands. He also contends that Caldbec is where Harold mustered his men. On what basis?

Cut to Dr Laura Ashe of Oxford, examining the D version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1066 – a good, contemporary source, written in Old English, for the events of that year. It says that Harold ‘gathered together a great host, and came to oppose him [William] at the grey apple tree’.

Notice it doesn’t say ‘came to oppose him at Caldbec Hill’. The notion that ‘the grey apple tree’ stood on top of Caldbec Hill was an idea first put forward by a local Sussex historian in the 1960s. It is, of course, an unprovable assumption. Who can say where a tree stood in 1066?

Nevertheless, the assumption hardens into fact as the programme progresses. ‘Most historians think that Harold’s weary army assembled at a place called Caldbec Hill’ says Tony Robinson [about 5.15]. I’d dispute that. I don’t think that, for starters. Nor does Ken Lawson, who wrote a great big comprehensive book about Hastings in 2002. ‘The assumption of some writers that Caldbec Hill was Harold’s rendezvous point does not have much to recommend it.’ (Lawson, Battle of Hastings, p. 202. Note his use of the word ‘assumption’).

So what of the claim for the traditional site at Battle Abbey? According to Tony Robinson at the top of the programme [about 1.10], it rests on ‘legend’. A few minutes later [4.00], ‘Legend says the Normans built the high altar exactly where Harold died.’

Back to Laura Ashe, who is looking at the Chronicle of Battle Abbey with Tony in the British Library. Tony correctly says that it was written ‘more than 100 years after Hastings’. Laura points out the line that says that the abbey’s altar was precisely where King Harold fell, but goes on to say that, alas, the chronicle is ‘not trustworthy’.

Now, it’s true that the Chronicle of Battle Abbey is in places demonstrably unreliable. It is on this basis that John Grehan, in his book, rules its testimony out of court.

Which would be fair enough – if the Chronicle of Battle Abbey were our only witness.

But it isn’t. Far from it: at least half-a-dozen earlier sources say exactly the same thing. Take, for example, John of Worcester, an English monk who wrote in the period 1124x1140. The Conqueror’s abbey, he says, was ‘founded and erected on the site of his battle in England. The church’s altar was placed where the body of Harold (slain for the love of his country) was found.’

Similarly, William of Malmesbury, half-English, half-Norman, one of the most important of all medieval historians, writing in the 1120s: ‘It is called Battle Abbey because the principal church is to be seen on the very spot where, according to tradition, among the piled heaps of corpses Harold was found.’

But we don’t have to stop there. We also have the testimony of the E version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – a supremely well-informed source, demonstrably written before 1100. Writing his obituary of William the Conqueror for 1087, its anonymous author says he will ‘write of him as we have known him, as we ourselves have seen him, and at one time dwelt at his court’. A few lines later he says:

‘On the very spot [On ðam ilcan steode] where God granted him the conquest of England he caused a great abbey to be built.’

To emphasize: that’s a contemporary witness – an English witness – from the time of William the Conqueror himself.

So the claim that Battle Abbey was built to mark the site of the battle is not ‘legend has it’, nor is it a claim that rests only on a late and unreliable source (i.e. the Chronicle of Battle Abbey). It’s a very strong, continuous historical tradition – one which stretches right back to the time of William the Conqueror.

There is also, of course, the evidence of the Abbey itself. As English Heritage’s Roy Porter pointed out in the programme, by looking at the dormitory building, ridiculously located on the side of a hill, it is a bonkers place to build an abbey. Unless William the Conqueror insisted that’s where he wanted it, exactly as the monks of Battle Abbey would later claim he did.

None of the historical evidence for the battle’s location, of course, was unpacked or even mentioned in the Time Team programme. According to Tony Robinson, ‘only archaeology can prove where it took place.’ [c. 18.00].

But, unsurprisingly – as with most medieval battles – archaeology fails to come up with anything. So the programme settles for a topographical survey, which shows where the high ground is, and where the low ground is. Time Team regulars Stewart Ainsworth and Alex Langlands look at the results and decide (one hesitates to use the word ‘speculate’) that the epicentre of the battle must have been some 600 feet to the east of the Abbey. Hilariously, especially for headline writers, the site is now occupied by a mini-roundabout! A former British Army commander is wheeled out to say that it looks like a good position to him. And, after all, an axe head, which may well have been a weapon, and certainly dates before 1600, was found near this site - according to local legend.

By this stage, I confess, I’m thinking (a bit unfairly) of that awesome David Mitchell line: ‘Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uninformed, ad hoc reckon’.

Perhaps one day they will build some new houses in Battle, or knock down some old ones, and discover a grave-pit with several hundred bodies, datable to the mid eleventh century. This happened at Lewes in the early nineteenth century, and is good grounds for locating – roughly – the site of the famous battle that took place there in 1264.

Until that happens, I’ll stick with testimony of the man who lived at the court of William the Conqueror.

(Incidentally, there was an attempt to locate the battlefield at Falkirk in 2002 – by flying Uri Geller over it in a helicopter. But due to bad weather, the helicopter couldn’t take off. I’m not making this up. http://www.scotsman.com/news/scotland/top-stories/rain-blinds-psychic-to-falkirk-battle-site-1-626179)

A Surfeit of Lampreys

On this day in 1135 King Henry I died at the ripe old age of 66 (good innings for a medieval monarch). The youngest son of William the Conqueror, Henry had succeeded his elder brother William Rufus in 1100. A contemporary chronicler, Henry of Huntingdon, describes how the king met his end:

‘He had been hunting, and when he came back to Saint-Denis in the Forest of Lyons [Lyons-la-Foret, Normandy], he ate the flesh of lampreys, which always made him ill, though he always loved them. When a doctor forbade him to eat the dish, the king did not take this salutary advice. As it is said, ‘We always strive for what is forbidden and long for what is refused.’ So this meal brought on a most destructive humour, and violently stimulated similar symptoms, producing a deadly chill in his aged body, and a sudden and extreme convulsion. Against this, nature reacted by stirring up an acute fever to dissolve the inflammation with very heavy sweating. But when all power of resistance failed, the great king departed on the first day of December [1135], when he had reigned for thirty-five years and three months.

Henry of Huntingdon, The History of the English People, 1000-1154 (OUP, 2002), p. 64.

The trouble is they taste too good.

 

Eleanor of Castile

Eleanor of Castile is one of the most interesting English queens of the Middle Ages, not so much for the events of her life, which are difficult to recover, but because of the magnificent series of monuments that were built to celebrate her memory – the so-called Eleanor Crosses.

Eleanor died on 28 November 1290 at Harby in Nottinghamshire. From there her body was carried first to nearby Lincoln, and then south to Westminster. This journey took twelve days, and, at each place that her cortege rested for the night, an elaborate stone memorial, originally surmounted by a devotional cross, was later erected. Remarkably, three of these monuments survive, at Geddington and Hardingstone (both in Northamptonshire) and at Waltham (Hertfordshire). The one that stands outside Charing Cross station is a modern replica. Eleanor was also commemorated with three separate tombs – one in Lincoln Cathedral for her viscera, another in Blackfriars, London, for her heart, and a third for her body in Westminster Abbey. Only the last survives, but it too is a work of striking sophistication, surmounted by a gilt-bronze effigy that shows the queen with her hair worn down and her eyes wide open.

The instigator of this unparalleled display was Eleanor’s husband, King Edward I (1239-1307). Edward was arguably England’s greatest medieval monarch – not only, as his tomb at Westminster proclaims, ‘the Hammer of the Scots’, but also the conqueror of Wales, a reformer, a legislator and a builder of mighty castles. It is no surprise that the king who held the biggest parliaments and led the largest armies of the English Middle Ages should also be responsible for what has been called ‘the most magnificent funerary display ever accorded an English monarch’.

Eleanor and Edward had married 36 years earlier, in 1254, when he was 15 and she was not quite 13 years old, and since that time they had been virtually inseparable. Edward, in addition to visiting every corner of Britain, had also travelled to France, Spain, Italy, Sicily, North Africa and the Holy Land, and in each case Eleanor had travelled with him. Another testament to their closeness is the fact that Eleanor bore Edward at least 15 (possibly 16) children, and (unusually) there is no credible evidence of infidelity on either part.

Because they were so rarely apart, and because he was such a masterful monarch, her personality is rather obscure (medieval queens who opposed their husbands tended to attract more comment). From Eleanor’s financial accounts we can see that she enjoyed the typical aristocratic pastimes of her age – romance literature, chess and hunting. More unusual was her taste for exotic fruits and water gardens, doubtless acquired during her youth in Spain and not entirely forgotten.
What little contemporary comment we do have about Eleanor is far from positive. ‘A Spaniard by birth’, wrote the annalist at Dunstable Priory, ‘she acquired many fine manors’. He was referring to Eleanor’s practice of snapping up property from those who found themselves financially embarrassed. The queen arguably needed more land to support her status, but the way she and her ministers went about obtaining it were both ruthless and underhand. Moreover, Eleanor often targeted manors whose owners were indebted to Jewish moneylenders (Leeds Castle in Kent was acquired in this way) which, in a profoundly anti-Semitic age, served to compound her notoriety. ‘There is public outcry and gossip about this in every part of England,‘ wrote the archbishop of Canterbury in 1286.

Thus at the time of her death Eleanor was deeply unpopular across the country, and hence the need on Edward’s part to repair the damage. The purpose of the crosses was to encourage those who saw them to pray for Eleanor’s soul. To this end they were a great success. As the memory of the real Eleanor faded, later generations looked at the crosses and assumed that she must have been an outstandingly good queen. From the sixteenth century this idea was bolstered by an unreliable, romantic legend that Eleanor, during her stay in the Holy Land, had selflessly sucked the poison from a wound that Edward had suffered at the hands of Muslim assassin. In the nineteenth century Eleanor was written up as an example of the Victorian ideal – pious, faithful, modest and devoted. Only the more painstaking researches of the recent years have exposed the darker and less becoming side of her character.

Yet for all her apparent faults, we can say one thing in Eleanor’s favour, which is that her husband clearly adored her. Despite the doubts of some historians, we can be confident that the primary cause of the crosses was profound grief of the king at the lost of his most constant companion. A few weeks after her death, Edward wrote a letter to the abbot of Cluny in France, requesting prayers for the wife ‘whom in life we dearly cherished, and whom in death we cannot cease to love’.

 

 

The following information was kindly sent to me by Sara Cockerill, who is writing a biography of Eleanor:

 

Edward’s arrangements for Eleanor’s commemoration were very touching indeed.  He endowed chantries at (inter alia) Harby and also at her pet project of Leeds Castle; and for a year after her death he made a special distribution of alms every Tuesday (28 November 1290 was a Tuesday) to as many as might approach him. Meanwhile Westminster Abbey had to hold a special service with nine lessons every Monday and a special mass with tolling of bells and a distribution of alms to 140 poor men every Tuesday. Eleanor’s tomb was to be surrounded by thirty large candles at all times.  All were to be lit on great feasts, and two were to be kept burning at all times. The commemorations on the anniversary (involving 100 twelve pound candles which could burn throughout the vigil plus a procession with forty nine candles to mark her age) were so intensive that the clergy involved were reportedly left physically exhausted by the effort.  Nor was Edward running any risks about the Abbey getting it right – the letter patent expressly stipulates that it had to be read out in full in chapter once a year to ensure proper observance of all its requirements, and the abbot, prior and convent had to bind all their goods to performance of their obligations.



 

The Feast of St Edmund, 1296

In 1296 Edward I was at war with France, trying to recover his duchy of Gascony, which the French king Philip IV had snatched two years earlier. The English expedition was led by Edward's brother, Edmund of Lancater. It was not going well...

'The second force sent to the duchy had fared no better than the first. By the autumn of 1295, when Edward had twisted enough aristocratic arms to elicit the necessary enthusiasm, the main expedition was already a year behind schedule – and even then it had not left on time. Edmund of Lancaster, the king’s appointed captain, had fallen ill, and had not recovered until after Christmas. It was not until January 1296 that the much-delayed fleet had finally set sail. Once arrived in Gascony, their luck had not improved. The French, having been left unmolested for so long, were found to be well entrenched. English attempts to retake Bordeaux, and even the smaller towns along the Garonne, came to nothing. Eventually, as his money had started to run out, Lancaster had been forced to abandon his efforts and had retired to Bayonne. There he had once again fallen sick, and died on 5 June. Henry de Lacy, the ultra-loyal earl of Lincoln, had taken command of the demoralized English forces.

News of his brother’s death had reached Edward while he was still in Scotland, just days after he had received John Balliol’s resignation. Orders had been sent out immediately for masses to be said for Edmund’s soul. The king spoke of his devastation, and enjoined his churchmen to pray for ‘our dearest and only brother, who was always devoted and faithful to us, and to the affairs of our realm, and in whom valour and many gifts of grace shone forth’. It was almost certainly with Edmund’s eternal salvation in mind that Edward had summoned his next English parliament to meet, not around the feast of St Edward (13 October), as was usual, but one month later, around the feast of St Edmund (20 November). For the same reason, the venue was not to be Westminster, but Bury St Edmunds, where his brother’s saintly namesake was interred. The local chronicler confirms that, when the king arrived in the town in November, he and his great men solemnly kept St Edmund’s feast.'

A Great and Terrible King, pp. 291-2

Always read the label

My ebook, Kings and Castles, is a collection of essays and articles. It is described on Amazon as a 'collection of essays and articles'. If you don't realize this before you invest your £1.99 (or $3.32), you may be disappointed:

'I give it a "3" rating because it obviously wasn't written as a consecutive book but rather is a compilation of related articles.'

'Unfortunately this book is just a collection of magazine articles put into a book... I read about a dozen pages and then gave up when I realised what it was comprised of. In all honesty it's a bit of a cheat as a book (and shouldn't even be called one) and I wouldn't have bought it if I'd known...'

'Morris starts off clearly writing a book that is about castles, but finishes with a book which is all about the life and times of Edward I. Any student writing a paper knows that the conclusion of a work must bear some reason to its opening or thesis. Unfortunately, this is not the case in Kings and Castles. Overall the book is well researched and educational, but misses its mark by staying to far off from its purported subject matter. I deducted three stars.. one for redundant over-repetition of information, and two for titular misinformation.'

Cnut and the Waves

On this day in 1035 King Cnut died. Here's what I wrote about him in The Norman Conquest:

Whatever Cnut died of, it wasn’t old age. Contemporaries were agreed that he had been very young at the time of his conquest of England in 1016, which has led modern historians to place his date of birth at some point in the last decade of the first millennium. Thus when the king died in the autumn of 1035, he was probably around forty years old (a thirteenth-century Scandinavian source says he was thirty-seven). According to William of Jumièges, he had been seriously ill for some time, and this statement finds some support in a charter that Cnut gave to the monks of Sherborne Abbey in Dorset in 1035, asking for their daily prayers to help him gain the heavenly kingdom. It was at Shaftesbury, just fifteen miles from Sherborne, that the king had died on 12 November.

Given his Viking ancestry, and the bloodshed that had accompanied his conquest, Cnut’s anxiety to enter heaven rather than Valhalla may strike some as surprising. But in fact the Danish royal house had been converted two generations earlier, and Cnut himself had been baptized as a child (his baptismal name was Lambert). Indeed, the point of the famous story about the king and the waves, as originally told*, was not to illustrate his stupidity, but rather to prove what a good Christian he had been. ‘Let all the world know’, says a damp Cnut, having conspicuously failed to stop the tide from rising, ‘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 sea obey eternal laws.'

Cnut had in fact been famous for such acts of ostentatious piety. Having conquered England and dispatched his opponents in the traditional Viking manner, the king had sought to convince his remaining subjects that his rule was legitimate, and this meant, above all, demonstrating that it was approved by God. In 1027, for example, Cnut had gone on pilgrimage to Rome. He had also attempted to salve the wounds inflicted in the course of the Danish takeover – for example, by having the bones of Ælfhelm, the murdered archbishop of Canterbury, moved from St Paul’s Cathedral in London to a new shrine at Canterbury; by causing a church to be built on the site of the battlefield where his opponent, Edmund Ironside, had been defeated; and by visiting Edmund’s tomb at Glastonbury, where he honoured the late king’s memory by presenting a cloak embroidered with pictures of peacocks. The giving of such valuable objects was also typical, and helped Cnut secure a good reputation at home and abroad. ‘When we saw the present you sent us,’ wrote the bishop of Chartres, responding to the king’s gift of some beautifully decorated books, ‘we were amazed at your knowledge as well as your faith . . . you, whom we had heard to be a pagan prince, we now know to be not only a Christian, but also a most generous donor to God’s servants.’

There was nothing incongruous, therefore, when Cnut was eventually laid to rest in Winchester, in the cathedral known as the Old Minster, alongside the bones of St Swithin and several earlier kings of England and Wessex.

* The earliest version of this story to come down to us was written a century later, by the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon (who is on occasion quite inventive):

'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 sea obey eternal laws'.

Henry of Huntingdon, The History of the English People, 1000-1154, ed. D. Greenway (OUP, 2002), pp. 17-18.



Framlingham Castle and the Bigods

If you want to imagine yourself in the guise of a medieval warrior – and, let’s face it, who doesn’t – there are few better places to visit than Framlingham Castle in Suffolk. Approach as if to attack, and you are confronted with one of the most impressive and impregnable-looking fortresses in England: a mighty ring of stone walls, thirteen metres high, surrounded by a broad, deep ditch. Twelve surviving towers stand taller still, and are amply supplied with arrow-loops. Make no mistake about it: this is a fantastically tough old building, designed in expectation of trouble.

To say that this is a veritable and venerable fortress, however, is to tell only a small part of its story. Inside those giant walls, the only structure that stands today is a seventeenth-century poorhouse. Now home to the local museum, it’s a building well worth visiting in its own right, with a harrowing history that recently reduced the normally flinty Jeremy Paxman to tears. Medievalists, meanwhile, lament the fact that it was ever built at all, for its stones were salvaged from the castle’s original interior. As a result, the casual observer now has a highly distorted view of Framlingham; one which reinforces the traditional misapprehension that castles were all about fighting, battlements and boiling oil. The reality was, of course, very different.

Framlingham was established by the Bigods, a family who came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066 and quickly established themselves as the most powerful barons in East Anglia – a position officially acknowledged in the middle of the twelfth century when they were invested as earls of Norfolk. A cursory glance at the history of these men suggest that they liked nothing better than a scrap with England’s kings. Earl Hugh Bigod (d. 1177), for instance, unsuccessfully challenged Henry II, with the result that the original Framlingham Castle, a conventional earth-and-timber structure, was torn down by royal command in 1174. The present castle was built by Hugh’s son and successor, Roger (d. 1221), to proclaim that the Bigods were back in business – and ready to challenge King John, who laid siege to the castle in 1216. But in actual fact, the Bigods, like most medieval magnates, almost always worked in partnership with the Crown. Framlingham was hardly ever used as a fortress (even the so-called ‘siege’ of 1216 lasted less than 48 hours). It was, on the contrary, a place where power was expressed in a very different way – through benign local lordship, conspicuous consumption and luxurious living.

Ironically, a fantastic snapshot of ordinary, everyday life at Framlingham has been preserved because of the desperate, extraordinary decision taken by the last of the Bigod line. In 1297, at the end of a long but fairly unremarkable career, Earl Roger IV led a movement of popular resistance against the indomitable Edward I, whose government was widely deemed to have become unjust and oppressive. Although he met with considerable success, the earl was bankrupted by this stand, and so ended up having to cut a deal with the king. In return for an annuity for the rest of his life, Roger agreed to make Edward his heir. Accordingly, when the earl died a few years later, his vast estate in England, Wales and Ireland – Framlingham Castle included – passed to the Crown. And so too did all his estate accounts, some 650 neatly written rolls of parchment, which survive to this day in the National Archives at Kew. It is these documents which permit a unique glimpse into the earl’s private affairs, and a window through which we can look at life inside Framlingham Castle.

Roger himself was only occasionally in residence. Medieval magnates, like modern rock stars, were forever on tour. Nevertheless, in the earl’s absence, the castle did not stand idle. It was from here that his officials oversaw the workings of the entire Bigod administration in East Anglia, and it was to here that money generated on other manors was sent to be kept in the treasury. Framlingham was also an agricultural centre in its own right: the account rolls reveal all manner of produce being farmed, ranging from the expected (dairy, poultry, sheep and cattle) to the surprising (regular wages and robes were given to the earl’s vintner for tending his vineyards). Periodically there were visits from members of the earl’s own household: his knights came to hunt venison or to track falcons in the adjacent park; his accountants to check every bushel and barrel, even as they themselves consumed large quantities of fancy foodstuffs.

When the earl himself was due to arrive, the administration went into overdrive. Roger typically travelled with around fifty people in tow, and the castle had to be brought rapidly up to speed to cater for this entourage. Produce and provender poured in from the outlying manors. Deer were driven from the park, beer was brewed and bread baked. At Easter 1286 it was even necessary to bring in extra crockery from Tattingstone, some twenty miles away. Equally as important, the buildings in the castle had to be cleaned, repaired and, where necessary, rebuilt. The full extent of the castle’s vanished interior stands revealed in the rolls. We read of service buildings, such as the saucery, larder and kitchen, and accommodation, including the chambers of the earl, his steward, his knights and his servants.

The most important building of all was the castle’s hall. It was here that the earl and his household were wined, dined and entertained. Originally located on the eastern side of the courtyard, the hall was moved to face west when the castle was rebuilt around the year 1200, and this move reflects a corresponding shift in the Bigods’ domestic priorities. To the west of the castle, the ground falls away until it reaches a great lake or mere. This itself was a man-made feature, a piece of medieval landscaping. Of course, it could have helped to defend the castle, but its primary purpose was to provide dramatic effect. From afar, the castle’s appearance is greatly enhanced by its own reflection. From within, the views to the west are spectacular, which explains the relocation of the hall. The mere also provides the backdrop to the so-called Lower Court, a levelled area directly below the hall, almost certainly created as a private enclosure for the earl and his family. Whether in the hall or the garden, the Bigods and their guests could watch the sun setting across the water as they dined and relaxed.

Such was the normal life at Framlingham during its thirteenth-century heyday. It was not a place that the Bigods used to confront their kings, but rather to welcome them. In 1256 Roger’s predecessor threw open his doors to Henry III, and Roger himself played host to Edward I in 1277 (sadly, a year for which no accounts exist). The earl died a peaceful death at Framlingham in 1306 and, under the terms of his agreement with Edward, his dynasty drew to an close. It seems only fitting, on the seven-hundredth anniversary of the family’s eclipse, that we remember their main castle as it really was. Mount the walls at Framlingham and exercise your imagination, but bear in mind that the sight of an advancing army would have been almost as surprising for the Bigods as it would be for us today. Picture instead a ‘landscape of lordship’: men fishing in the mere and felling trees, knights hunting in the park; carpenters and masons, glaziers and gardeners, all seeking to beautify the castle and its surroundings; carts creaking across the drawbridge, laden with building materials, fine foods and bags of money. A peaceful panorama, but a busy one, animated by the news that the earl was riding towards Framlingham, eagerly anticipating the comforts and pleasures to be had within.

From my ebook of collected essays, Kings and Castles.

BBC History Magazine Interview

Here's a short film of me chatting about the Norman Conquest at the recent BBC History Magazine weekend in Malmesbury.

Earliest Description of a Traitor's Fate

On 9 September 1238, King Henry III was staying at his palace of Woodstock in Oxfordshire when there was an attempt on his life. (Our informant is the contemporary chronicler, Matthew Paris). An unnamed man intruded himself into the king’s presence and demanded to be given the realm. Henry, believing the man to be mad, called off his attendants, who had already begun the business of administering a right royal roughing-up. Later that night, however, the intruder came back. Through an unsecured window he crept into the king’s bedchamber and, brandishing a knife, rushed at the royal bed. But the bed, it turned out, was empty. Luckily – or, as Matthew Paris said, ‘by God’s providence’ – Henry was in the queen’s bedroom at the time.

Having made an attempt on the life of the king, the man was guilty of treason, for which the punishment was a horrible death:

'The king ordered him, as guilty of attempting to murder the king's majesty, to be torn limb from limb by horses at Coventry, a terrible example, and lamentable sight to all who dared to plot such crimes. In the first place, he was dragged asunder, then beheaded, and his body divided into three parts; each part was then dragged through one of the principal cities of England, and was afterwards hung on a gibbet used for robbers'. (taken from Matthew Paris's English History, ed. J. A. Giles, 1889, vol. 1, 139)

Treason, of course, came to be viewed in much more flexible terms by Henry's son, Edward I, with the result that similar excruciating punishment was meted out to, amongst others, Dafydd ap Gruffudd, Rhys ap Maredudd, Sir Thomas Turbeville, Sir Simon Fraser and – lest we forget – Sir William Wallace.

Here's another interesting thing. The incident described by Paris proves that, by 9 September 1238, Henry, who was just three weeks short of his 31st birthday, was clearly sleeping with his queen, who was no more than fifteen. Nine months and eight days later, on 17 June 1239, Edward I was born.

Movember

In 1055 the Welsh invaded Hereford and burnt it to the ground. A short time later, in February 1056, the bishop of Hereford, Athelstan, died. In his place, to counter the Welsh threat, a more pugnacious priest was installed. The D verison of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle explains:

'Leofgar, who was Earl Harold's chaplain, was appointed to succeed him: he kept his moustaches long during his priesthood until he became a bishop. He forsook his chrism and his cross and his spiritual weapons, seized his spear and his sword, and thus armed joined the levies against Gruffudd, the Welsh King: and there he was slain with his priests who were with him, together with Ælfnoth the sheriff and many other good men.'

(I put this in the Norman Conquest, but it was cut.)

Hastings: The Aftermath

The night after Hastings was almost as terrible as the day itself. William of Poitiers paints a vivid picture of the English fleeing from the battlefield, ‘some on horses they had seized, some on foot; some along roads, others through untrodden wastes’. These, he makes clear, were the fortunate ones, the lucky unscathed or the lightly wounded. More pitiful is his description of those who wanted to flee but could not: the men lying helpless in their own blood, the maimed who hauled themselves a short distance only to collapse in the woods, where their corpses blocked the escape of others. The Normans pursued them, says Poitiers, slashing at their backs, galloping over their bodies, ‘putting the last touches to the victory’. Yet even the victors died in large numbers that night, their pursuit turning to disaster when they rushed headlong into an unseen obstacle. ‘High grass concealed an ancient rampart’, explains Orderic Vitalis, ‘and as the Normans, fully armed on their horses, rode up against it, they fell, one on top of the other, thus crushing each other to death.’ The chronicler of Battle Abbey records that this pit was afterwards known locally as the Malfosse.

Thus when the sun came up the next morning it revealed an appalling scene. ‘Far and wide the earth was covered with the flower of the English nobility and youth, drenched in blood’, says Poitiers, noting that among them lay Harold’s two brothers, Leofwine and Gyrth, whose bodies were said to have been found close to the king’s own. Beyond this, however, Poitiers gives us a fairly sanitized account. He says little, for instance, of Norman casualties, which must have been considerable. (The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle speaks of ‘great slaughter on both sides’.) Similarly, we hear nothing about the routine medieval practice whereby the dead were deprived of their valuables, yet we know from other sources that this had been happening even before the end of the battle. (The Bayeux Tapestry, for example, shows in its margins men being stripped of their expensive mail shirts.) Most interestingly, we see Poitiers implicitly contesting a statement made by the author of the Carmen, who says that while William buried his own dead, he left the bodies of the English ‘to be eaten by worms and wolves, by birds and dogs’. Nothing too surprising there, you might think, considering the labour that burying thousands of Englishmen would entail, but Poitiers was determined to depict his master in the best possible moral light, however much it contradicted military common sense. Leaving the dead unburied, we are told, ‘seemed cruel’ to the Conqueror, who accordingly allowed any who wished to recover their relatives’ remains to do so.

But not the remains of Harold. As Poitiers and several other sources make plain, the king’s corpse was in a very bad state, stripped of all its valuables, and so hacked about the face that it could be recognized only by ‘certain marks’. According to the twelfth-century tradition at Waltham Abbey, the task of confirming his identity required the presence of Harold’s sometime partner, Edith Swan-Neck, ‘for she had been admitted to a greater intimacy of his person’. In contemporary accounts, by contrast, it is the king’s mother, Gytha, who appears amid the carnage to plead for the return of her son’s body. Despite allegedly offering its weight in gold (a detail provided by the Carmen and kept by Poitiers), her request was refused, William angrily replying that it would be inappropriate for Harold to be interred while countless others lay unburied on his account. This directly contradicts the later tradition that the king was buried at Waltham, and both Poitiers and the Carmen state that his remains were buried on the summit of a nearby cliff, under a mocking inscription which suggested that he could in this way still guard the seashore. It is not impossible that Harold was removed to Waltham at some later date; but had he been granted a Christian burial in 1066, we can be sure that William of Poitiers in particular would have let us know about it.

The Norman Conquest, pp. 189-90

Killer Question: How Did Harold Die?

(an extract from my book, The Norman Conquest).

What ultimately decided the battle, everyone agrees, was the death of King Harold. Day was already turning to night, says the Carmen, when the report ‘Harold is dead’ flew throughout the battlefield, causing the English to lose heart. Poitiers concurs: knowing that their king was dead, ‘the English army realized there was no hope of resisting the Normans any longer’. William of Jumièges, in his brief account of the battle, tells us that ‘when the English learned that their king had met his death, they greatly feared for their own lives, and turned at nightfall to seek refuge in flight’. The Bayeux Tapestry puts it in typically telegraphic terms: ‘Here Harold was killed, and the English turned in flight.

But how did Harold die? The established story, as everyone knows, is that the king was felled by an arrow that hit him in the eye. The Tapestry famously shows him gripping a shaft that has lodged in his face, and this depiction is seemingly backed up by several chroniclers. ‘A shaft pierces Harold with deadly doom’, wrote Baudri of Bourgeuil; ‘his brain was pierced by an arrow’, says William of Malmesbury. ‘The whole shower sent by the archers fell around King Harold’, says Henry of Huntingdon, ‘and he himself sank to the ground, struck in the eye.’

 

But there are problems. The Tapestry, as is well known, is debatable, principally for two reasons. First, there is debate over which figure is actually Harold. Is he the upright figure grasping the arrow (whose head, after all, interrupts the word ‘Harold’ in the caption); or is he the falling figure immediately to the right, being hacked down by a horseman, under the words ‘interfectus est’ (‘was killed’)? Some critics solve the riddle by saying that Harold is represented by both these figures, and that the Bayeux Tapestry artist does this kind of thing on numerous other occasions; others have demurred that, if this is really the case, Harold manages the neat trick of losing his shield and acquiring an axe in the act of dying.

Even if, however, we accept that the first figure represents Harold, there is controversy over the arrow itself. The Tapestry was heavily restored in the mid-nineteenth century, and the death of Harold is one of the areas where the restorers may have taken considerable liberties. Some experts contend, from an analysis of the embroidery and an examination of the earliest drawings of the Tapestry in its (apparently) unrestored state, that the first figure is actually holding not an arrow but a spear, ready to hurl at his attackers.

Even if the Tapestry artist did intend to depict an arrow, can we be sure that he was depicting what really happened? On many occasions we can see that the Tapestry includes images which are not truly original, but which have been copied and adapted from other illustrated manuscripts that the artist had to hand, and it looks very much like this process was at work in Harold’s death scene. Immediately before the king dies, we see a Norman soldier about to decapitate an unarmed Englishman. This otherwise inexplicable image seems to have been lifted more or less unaltered from an illustrated version of an Old Testament story, namely the fate of King Zedekiah and his sons, one of whom is shown being beheaded in exactly this manner. This artist may have lighted on this particular image because of the resonance of the story – Zedekiah and his family were punished because he had broken his oath of fealty to his overlord, and Zedekiah’s own punishment was blinding. It could well be, therefore, that the arrow in Harold’s eye is simply a piece of artistic licence based on nothing more than an allusion to this particular Bible story, and that blinding was felt to be a fitting end for a king who was similarly foresworn.

Lastly, we have to consider the fact that the Tapestry is our only contemporary source to suggest that Harold was hit in the face by an arrow. True, a similar report is carried by an Italian chronicler, Amatus of Montecassino, writing about 1080, but his account is compromised by the fact that the Latin original is lost – it survives only in a fourteenth-century French translation, heavily interpolated in places, and hence of negligible worth. These two questionable sources apart, the story that Harold was felled by an arrow occurs in later works (Baudri of Bourgeuil, William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon are all twelfth century). Contemporary accounts, by contrast – the Carmen, William of Poitiers, William of Jumièges and the various versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – make no mention of it. In the case of the last two, this omission is not very remarkable, given the brevity of their accounts; in the case of William of Poitiers and the Carmen it is altogether more striking. Poitiers offers us the longest and most detailed account of the battle, yet makes no mention of the manner in which Harold died. Possibly this was because he did not know. Alternatively, it may have been because he knew full well, having read the Carmen’s version, and did not care to endorse it.

For the Carmen – our earliest source for the battle – offers an entirely different account of how Harold met his end. According to the Carmen, the battle was almost won – the French were already seeking spoils of war – when William caught sight of Harold on top of the hill, hacking down his foes. The duke called together a cohort of men, including Count Eustace of Boulogne, Hugh of Ponthieu and a certain ‘Gilfard’ (‘known by his father’s surname’), and set out to kill the king. In this they were successful, and the Carmen gives a graphic description of the injuries each inflicted on Harold, who was pierced with a lance, beheaded with a sword and disembowelled with a spear. His thigh, we are told (possibly a euphemism for his genitalia) was hacked off and carried away some distance.

Historians have always had huge problems with this story, and still tend to reject it outright. One of the foremost experts of the last century, Professor R. Allen Brown, found it impossible to believe that William had been personally involved in Harold’s death; not because the duke was uninvolved in the fighting, for everyone accepts that fact. Rather, his objection was that, had William really been involved so directly in Harold’s death, ‘the feat of arms would have been bruited abroad in every court and chanson in Latin Christendom and beyond’.

This argument, however, assumes that everyone in Christendom would have regarded the premeditated butchery of a crowned king as acceptable behaviour, which was not necessarily the case. The Carmen insists that Harold’s killers acted ‘in accordance with the rules of war’, a statement which by itself suggests that others may have felt that these rules had been broken. One person who may have thought as much was William of Poitiers. In general he is not afraid to contest points of detail with the Carmen and offer his own version of what happened. When it comes to Harold’s gory end, however, he offers no denial and no alternative scenario: he simply lapses into silence. With most writers, their silence on a particular point would be a poor foundation on which to build an argument. But with a writer as erudite as William of Poitiers, we can reasonably read more into it. Poitiers wanted to present the duke as measured, merciful and just in all his dealings, and in particular in his pursuit of England’s throne. He did not want to show his hero, whose mission had been sanctioned by the pope, hacking his opponent into pieces. The suspicion that Poitiers tried to suppress the Carmen’s version of Harold’s death is reinforced by his similar failure to include the episode involving Taillefer the juggler. Perhaps he thought it unreliable; more likely he considered it shameful – a piece of bloodthirsty barbarism that cast the Normans in a bad light. More pertinent still is the fact we have caught Poitiers at this kind of suppressio veri once before, in his account of the taking of the town of Alençon. His source, William of Jumièges, tells us that the duke mutilated the town’s defenders by lobbing off their hands and feet, but Poitiers omits all mention of this from his own account. In the case of Harold’s death, therefore, the silence of William of Poitiers, far from undermining our faith in the Carmen’s version, could instead be considered to strengthen its credibility. That credibility is also enhanced by the fact that the poem’s author, Guy of Amiens, had close connections with the men he tells us were William’s accomplices.

Of course, we cannot say for certain how Harold died. Our sources, as ever, are contradictory, and each of them can be regarded as in some way compromised (because they are based on biblical or classical motifs; because they are inherently biased; because they are better regarded as imaginative works of art rather than sober reportage). We know that at various points in the battle the Normans showered the English with arrows and crossbow bolts, so it is not unlikely that Harold was hit, perhaps fatally, perhaps in the eye. At the same time, we cannot lightly disregard the Carmen (as historians have usually done) when it tells us that Harold died in a very different way, deliberately cut down by his enemies. Apart from anything else, a deliberate killing accords well with William’s assumed war-aim. He had risked everything to get an army to England and to bring Harold to battle. After a long day’s fighting, with the autumn light starting to fade, it would have been quite possible for the English king to withdraw, enabling him to fight another day. William could not take that risk; for him it was imperative that his opponent should die before the day was out. Given this fact, it would not be at all surprising if the duke, in the closing stages of the conflict, decided to risk all and lead just the kind of death squad that the Carmen describes. By the same token, with the deed accomplished, it would be equally unsurprising if the Normans in general, like William of Poitiers in particular, sought to keep these details quiet. An anonymous arrow in the eye accorded better with the idea that, in the final analysis, Harold’s death had been down to the judgement of God.

 

The Norman Conquest, pp. 183-8 

The Battle of Stamford Bridge, 25 September 1066

Having been favourably received in York and won the support of its citizens, the Norwegians withdrew to their ships at Riccall. Before they set out to conquer the south, however, it had been agreed that there would be another meeting, at which hostages from the rest of Yorkshire would be handed over. For reasons that remain obscure, the location selected for this meeting was neither Riccall nor York, but a small settlement eight miles to the east of the city, a crossing of the River Derwent known as Stamford Bridge. Hardrada and Tostig were waiting there on 25 September in expectation of a final round of submissions before they advanced to subdue the rest of the kingdom.

What they encountered in the event was Harold Godwineson at the head of a new royal army. The English king had advanced northwards and reassembled his host far more quickly than his opponents had anticipated. After leaving London around the middle of the month, he had arrived in the Yorkshire town of Tadcaster on 24 September, having covered the intervening 200 miles in little more than a week. According to the Chronicle, he had expected to find Tostig and Hardrada holding York against him and had drawn up his forces against an attack from that direction. But the following morning he discovered that his brother and the Norwegian king had left for their appointment at Stamford Bridge, evidently quite oblivious to his approach. It was an opportunity not to be missed. Harold marched his men straight through York and out towards the crossing on the Derwent, a distance of some eighteen miles. The day must already have been well advanced by the time the English king fell upon his unsuspecting enemies.

The accounts of the Battle of Stamford Bridge are not much better than those for the encounter at Fulford five days before. Snorri is once again on fine (i.e. unreliable) form, giving an account of the preliminaries entirely at odds with that of the Chronicle, including an improbable interview between the two King Harolds before the onset of hostilities (notably for its oft-quoted line that Hardrada would be granted only ‘seven feet of ground’). One element of Snorri’s account which does merit attention, however, is his claim that the Norwegians had gone to Stamford Bridge wearing their helmets and carrying their weapons, but without their mail shirts because the weather was warm and sunny. Special pleading, you might think, but the story is corroborated by a contemporary chronicler called Marianus Scotus. The C version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle contributes a few more details, confirming that the English king caught his enemies ‘unawares’, describing the fighting as ‘fierce’ and adding that it lasted until late in the day. It concludes with a story, added in the twelfth century and repeated by several other writers, of how the English were for some time prevented from crossing the bridge over the Derwent by a single Norwegian warrior, apparently wearing a mail shirt, until at length an inspired Englishman sneaked under the bridge and speared the Viking in the one place where such armour offers no protection. This was supposedly the turning point of the battle: Harold and his forces surged over the undefended bridge and the rest of the Norwegian army were slaughtered. Both Hardrada and Tostig were among the fallen.

It was, said the D Chronicle, ‘a very stubborn battle’. When the remaining Norwegians tried to flee back to their ships at Riccall, the English attacked them as they ran. Some drowned, says the Chronicle, some burnt to death, and others died in various different ways, so that in the end there were very few survivors. The author of the Life of King Edward, weeping for the death of Tostig, wrote of rivers of blood: the ‘Ouse with corpses choked’, and the Humber that had ‘dyed the ocean waves for miles around with Viking gore’. Only those who made it back to Riccall – the D Chronicle names Hardrada’s son, Olaf, among them – were given any quarter, their lives spared in exchange for a sworn promise never to return. Above all, the scale of the Norwegian defeat is indicated by the Chronicle’s comment that it took just twenty-four ships to take the survivors home.

After the battle, the bodies of thousands of Englishmen and Norwegians were left in the field where they had fallen; more than half a century later, Orderic Vitalis wrote that travellers could still recognize the site on account of the great mountain of dead men’s bones. But the body of Tostig Godwineson was recovered from the general carnage and carried to York for an honourable burial; William of Malmesbury, who had a fondness for such human details, reports that it was recognized on account of a wart between the shoulder blades (the implication being that all the earl’s other distinguishing features had been too badly maimed). His older brother, it is as good as certain, also returned to York in the aftermath of his victory. Apart from anything else, he would have wanted to have a serious conversation with its citizens about the alacrity they had shown in supporting his Norwegian namesake. Quite possibly, therefore, Harold Godwineson was present at Tostig’s funeral, whipped by the wind that continued to blow from the north.

Two days after the battle, however, the wind changed direction.

The Norman Conquest, pp. 163-5

11 September 1297 - The Battle of Stirling Bridge

Few men living in the summer of 1297 were genuinely enthusiastic about the prospect of fighting in Flanders alongside Edward I, but John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, was a clear exception. All his life – and this year he would be sixty-six – the earl had been a staunch supporter of the Crown and the king’s close friend.

On this occasion, however, Warenne’s anxiety to serve had less to do with his loyalism, and more to do with avoiding the responsibility that had been foisted upon him the previous year. In 1296, true to form, he had marched with Edward against the Scots, and had led the English in their decisive victory at Dunbar. But the earl’s reward for this feat had been his appointment as Scotland’s new royal governor, and it was a role he clearly did not relish: within a few months he was actively offering the job to others. The king may have been well pleased to have ‘rid himself of a turd’, but his old friend was correspondingly dismayed to find himself charged with its custody. Warenne, in fact, behaved entirely as one might expect in such circumstances, and stayed as far away as possible, saying that the task was bad for his health. According to Walter of Guisborough, the earl found the Scottish weather so unbearably awful that he spent most of his time in the North of England.

Inevitably, the absence of the governor had a deleterious effect on Scotland’s new English government, which by 1297 was already struggling to cope with a host of additional problems. Imposed on the country against the will of its people, the regime was in any circumstances likely to have proved unpopular and been perceived as oppressive. As it was, thanks to the stream of emergency demands emanating from England, the administration was from the first a genuinely extortionate affair. The Scots, like the other peoples of Edward I’s empire, were expected to supply the money and materials that would enable their overlord to prosecute his war against France. When, in May 1297, they were asked to supply the manpower as well, it proved to be the last straw: at that point unrest and resistance in Scotland boiled over into outright revolt. Trouble started in the West, at Lanark, where the English sheriff was killed.

Behind this revolt, it seemed, lurked the usual suspects. One of the prime movers, for example, was Robert Wishart, the bulldog bishop of Glasgow, who six years earlier had stood up to Edward I at Norham. Also involved were several high-ranking members of the Scottish nobility, not all of whom had been captured or imprisoned during the English invasion the previous year. A surprising newcomer to their rebel ranks was the young earl of Carrick, Robert Bruce. Grandson of the late competitor for the throne, son of the disappointed collaborator of 1296, this third Robert might have been expected to toe the family line and aid the English. But instead he broke with ancestral tradition and threw his weight behind the patriotic cause. ‘I must join my own people’,he reportedly told his father’s knightly tenants, ‘and the nation in which I was born’.

Alas for the Scots, however, their aristocratic and ecclesiastical leaders once again proved stronger in their patriotism than they did in arms. Towards the end of June an English army crossed the Border from Cumbria, and within days the rebels were forced to surrender. On 7 July Wishart, Bruce and their allies submitted to terms at Irvine on Scotland’s western seaboard. To the young English commanders who had obtained this easy victory, it seemed that was the end of the matter. They rode east to the government’s base at Berwick, from where a letter was dispatched to the king a fortnight later. ‘Sire,’ it read, ‘your enemies are dispersed and dismayed’.

The author of this now-anonymous announcement was evidently not the new regime’s treasurer, Hugh Cressingham. Unlike the military men fresh in from the field, or his boss, John de Warenne, who continued to linger in England, Cressingham worked in Berwick at the centre of the web. He could perceive the whole picture and, as he explained in his own letters to Edward, it was deeply alarming. ‘By far the greater part of your counties in Scotland still have no keepers,’ he said, ‘because of death, sieges or imprisonment’. There were other rebels massing in the North, beyond the River Forth, and also in the South, in the Forest of Selkirk. Cressingham himself had wanted to march against them immediately – indeed, he had personally raised an army for this purpose – but had been outvoted. The consensus at Berwick was that they should wait for Warenne to arrive. ‘And so,’ the treasurer lamented as he drew to a close,‘matters have gone to sleep’.

While the English slumbered, the Scots were indeed being roused. Those in the North were led by Andrew Murray, the son and heir of a prominent local lord. Captured the previous year at Dunbar, he had escaped during the winter and raised rebellion in the spring. By August a number of northern towns and castles were already in his hands.

Meanwhile, in the South, leadership had been assumed by a certain William Wallace. Unlike Murray, Wallace was a virtual nobody – nothing at all is heard of him before this juncture, bar a possible reference in a court roll of 1296 which mentions‘William le Waleys, a thief’. When, the following year, he bursts unheralded into the picture, he is described by English chroniclers as ‘a bloody man’, ‘a chief of brigands’, ‘a vagrant and a fugitive’. Most likely he was a younger son of Alan Wallace, a minor landowner in Ayrshire; such origins would account for the fact that his earliest activities were concentrated in western Scotland. The death of the sheriff of Lanark in May 1297 had been his handiwork, and thereafter he appears to have based himself in Selkirk Forest with his growing band of followers. ‘The common folk of the land followed him as their leader and ruler,’ wrote Walter of Guisborough, ‘the retainers of great lords adhered to him’. By August 1297, Wallace had his popular army had moved into northern Scotland, where they linked arms with Murray’s forces.

By this point, finally, John de Warenne had arrived in Berwick, and been convinced by a no doubt frantic Cressingham of the urgent need for military action. There was yet more delay while they waited for those Scots who had surrendered at Irvine to complete their submissions (a process which was deliberately drawn out by the likes of Wishart and Bruce). But at last, probably as the end of August approached, the English army and its reluctant captain set out to crush the Scottish rebels.

To do so they had to enter northern Scotland, and that meant crossing the River Forth –a feat easier said than done. The Forth rises in the west, near Loch Lomond, and flows east to meet the sea, and thus effectively cuts the country in half. Moreover, for much of its eastern length it forms a broad tidal estuary, or firth, which could not be crossed except by boat. In fact, in the thirteenth century, the Forth was referred to as ‘the Scottish Sea’, and on contemporary maps, northern Scotland was designated as Scotia ultra Marina – Scotland beyond the Sea.

Warenne therefore marched his army towards the first place that the Forth could be bridged, which at that time was the royal burgh at Stirling. As the principal gateway between northern and southern Scotland, Stirling had a unique strategic importance (indeed, on one thirteenth-century map, the town’s bridge is shown as the only link between the two halves of the country). It was also a brilliantly defended gateway: half a mile from the bridge, on the river’s southern shore, stood Stirling Castle. Nothing survives of the original medieval fortress, but it was almost certainly built of stone, and (like its latter-day replacement) rendered all but impregnable from its situation atop a great outcrop of volcanic rock.

When the earl arrived at Stirling in early September, he discovered that Wallace and Murray were waiting for him on the opposite side of the Forth. By all accounts the Scots were greatly outnumbered, and thus the English commanders naturally assumed that, as at Irvine, their enemies would wish to negotiate. On this occasion, however, the negotiators were turned away with a celebrated rebuke.‘Go back and tell your people that we have not come for the benefit of peace,’said Wallace, ‘but are ready to fight, to avenge ourselves, and to free our kingdom’.

According to Walter of Guisborough, who preserved these attributed words, this was invitation enough for the more hot-headed in the English camp. But wiser heads, the chronicler added, had surveyed the surrounding terrain and foreseen the danger. The bridge, their only way forward, was also their major obstacle, for it was only wide enough for men to cross in two-by-two formation. In addition, there was not much room to manoeuvre once they reached the other side. At Stirling the Forth meanders in large, lazy loops, and consequently the northern end of the bridge connects not to an open plain but to a narrow tongue of land. ‘There was no better place in the kingdom of Scotland’, Guisborough was later told,‘to put the English into the hands of the Scots – the many into the hands of the few’.

Nevertheless, in the final council of war, the voices of caution were overruled. Cressingham, conscious of the enormous daily cost of fielding the army, argued for an immediate advance. Warenne, once woken from a long lie-in, agreed, and the order was duly given. It was late in the morning of 11 September 1297, and events that day unfolded with all the inevitability that had been predicted. The English began to cross the bridge and array themselves on the northern shore, but were attacked while their host was only half-formed. The Scots rushed towards the river, seized the bridgehead, and so divided their enemies. Those English who had already crossed – Cressingham was among their number –were surrounded and killed. Those stranded on the southern shore – who included Warenne – could only watch the slaughter as it happened. Eventually the earl came to his senses, ordered the bridge to be destroyed, and rode hard in the direction of England. From Stirling to Berwick it is nearly a hundred miles. The old man, says Guisborough, did not rest until he reached the Border.

A Great and Terrible King, 301-5.

The Death of William the Conqueror, 9 September 1087

Although we cannot say for certain how tall he was or what he looked like, it is hard to think of William the Conqueror as anything other than a formidable figure. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes him as ‘a man of great wisdom and power, surpassing in honour and strength all those who had gone before him, and stern beyond measure to those who opposed his will’. Another contemporary source suggests that his voice was harsh, and William of Malmesbury tells us that he used it to good effect, employing colourful oaths ‘so that the mere roar of his open mouth might somehow strike terror into the minds of his audience’.

After his return to Normandy in 1086, however, it appears that such theatrics were not having the desired effect. William was by this stage in his late fifties, which made him old by contemporary standards. He was also, according to Orderic Vitalis, extremely fat – a condition not uncommon among medieval aristocrats later in life, as the exercise of hunting failed to counteract the quantities of venison consumed. Moreover, William’s military reputation on the Continent had been nothing to brag about in recent years, following his defeats at Dol and Gerberoy. The king may have rushed home to defend his duchy from attack, but in the event his physical presence proved to be no deterrent.

Trouble began in the Vexin, a region on Normandy’s eastern border which had served as a buffer with France until Philip I had fortuitously acquired it ten years earlier. At some point in 1087, presumably on the French king’s instructions, his garrison in the town of Mantes went on the offensive and made repeated raids into Normandy. According to Orderic, whose account looks to be very well informed, they overran the diocese of Evreux, harrying the countryside, driving off cattle and seizing prisoners. They grew bold in their arrogance, he says, and taunted the Normans.

And, if we believe William of Malmesbury, the cruellest taunt of all came from the lips of King Philip. ‘The king of England lies in Rouen,’ he allegedly joked, ‘keeping his bed like a woman who’s just had a baby.’ William, the chronicler explains, had been confined to his capital for some time, on account of his stomach, for which he had taken a drug. Generally historians have understood this remark to refer simply to the Conqueror’s obesity, but the mention of confinement, bed rest and medicine make it sound as if the king was physically ailing. It may have been knowledge of this, above all, that had caused his enemies to start snapping at his heels.

But Philip’s insult, says Malmesbury, eventually reached William’s own ears, and stirred him into action. ‘When I go to Mass after my lying in,’ he swore, ‘I will offer a hundred thousand candles on his behalf.’ This was a grim joke on the part of either the king or the chronicler, for towards the end of July 1087 William assembled an army and invaded the Vexin, setting fire to the fields, vineyards and orchards as he went. His principal target was Mantes, the town from which the recent French raids had been launched, and this too was put to the torch. The castle was burnt down, as were countless houses and churches. A great many people perished in the consuming flames, says Orderic, and notoriously (for several other chroniclers mention it) at least one of them was a religious recluse.

Inevitably, therefore, some monastic writers saw what subsequently happened to the Conqueror as divine retribution. ‘A cruel deed he had done’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘but a crueller fate befell him. How crueller? He fell sick and suffered terribly.’ According to William of Malmesbury, some people said that the king was injured when his horse jumped a ditch, driving the front of its saddle into his overhanging stomach, but Malmesbury himself follows Orderic in stating that William succumbed to heat exhaustion caused by the flames and the warm summer weather. Quite possibly, since he appears to have been suffering since before the campaign’s outset, William was simply beset by the return of his earlier illness. Whatever the cause, suddenly in great pain, he sounded the retreat and retired to Rouen.

Back in the capital, it soon became clear that the Conqueror was dying, and all his doctors could do was try to minimize his discomfort. Orderic provides a long but gripping account of the king’s final days, which he claims to have carefully investigated and truthfully described. Rouen, he says, was a crowded and noisy city, and so at his own command William was carried beyond its walls to the church of St Gervase which stood on a hill to the west. There he lingered for the rest of the summer, suffering terrible agonies but retaining the power of speech. ‘I was brought up in arms from childhood’, he groaned, ‘and am deeply stained with all the blood I have shed.’ These are, of course, Orderic’s words rather than William’s, but both statements are incontestably true. The king accordingly spent many hours confessing his sins to the bishops, abbots and monks who stood by his bedside, endeavouring to wash clean his soul. For the same reason he also commanded that his treasure be distributed among the poor and divided up among various churches, specifying precise sums for each, and paying particular attention to rebuilding the ones he had recently burnt down in Mantes. Finally he attempted to please God by ordering the release of all the prisoners in his custody – a list which included Earl Morcar and Earl Roger, Siward Barn, and even King Harold’s brother, Wulfnoth, handed over as a hostage as long ago as 1051 and held captive ever since. The only exception to this general amnesty was Odo of Bayeux, whom William insisted was still too great a threat to be at liberty. But after incessant pleading by his other half-brother, Robert of Mortain, as well as various other Norman magnates, the king eventually relented, and Odo was also set free.

During these last days the king also made known his wishes about the succession. Among the throng of magnates and priests by his bedside were his two younger sons, William Rufus and Henry. Robert Curthose chose to stay away, remaining at the court of the king of France. Yet despite this final slight and his own forebodings about the future, the Conqueror in the end felt compelled to recognize his eldest son as his heir. As the king allegedly explained to those present, Robert had been invested with Normandy in 1066 and had received the homage of its barons; such bonds could not be undone.

But this was true only of Normandy – England was not part of the inheritance, but an acquisition obtained by conquest. And because it had been won with so much blood, William declared that he dared not transmit it to anyone. ‘I name no man as my heir to the kingdom of England,’ he concluded, ‘but entrust it to God alone.’ Again, these are Orderic’s words, but their content draws strong support from the fact that the king is known to have bequeathed the royal regalia he used in Normandy – his crown, rod, sceptre, chalice and candlesticks– not to any of his sons, but to his abbey of St Stephen’s in Caen. He did, however, express a personal hope that William Rufus would succeed him as king of England, if that turned out to be God’s will.

At last, on Thursday 9 September, the end came. Having slept peacefully through the previous night, William woke as the sun was rising over Rouen to the sound of a great bell tolling in the distance. On asking what time it was, he was informed that the hour of prime (6 a.m.) was being rung in the cathedral of St Mary. The king then raised his eyes and hands towards heaven, commended himself to Mary, and died.