King Harold's Fleet - Another Major Problem

A quick update about Harold Godwineson allegedly sailing his army to the Battle of Hastings.

To recap: Professor Tom Licence of the University of East Anglia has argued that in mid-September 1066 Harold sent a fleet of ships from London to Yorkshire to combat a Norwegian invasion. After his victory against the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge, the king then used these ships to transport his troops back to London, enabling them to oppose the Norman invasion a fortnight later.

As I pointed out in a previous post, this argument depends upon the interpretation of a single word in the C version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Chronicle, our main source for events in England in 1066, tells us that, when Harold heard that the Norwegians had landed in Yorkshire, he ‘went northwards day and night as quickly as he could assemble his force.’ A few lines later it adds that on Sunday 24 September the king came ‘with all his force to Tadcaster and there arrayed his lið’.

‘Lið’ is the crucial word, because usually one would understand it to mean ‘fleet’. In this case, because of the context suggested by the rest of the text, we might more obviously translate it as ‘troops’ (as has been done in the past). Licence prefers the more literal reading, and contends that this lið must have been the same fleet that Harold had assembled earlier in the year and sent to London on 8 September.

The factor I had failed to take into account in my previous post was the location of the Norwegian fleet. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that the Norwegians sailed their ships ‘up the Ouse towards York’. A later source, however, says more specifically that they landed on the Ouse at a place called Riccall. The source, John of Worcester, wrote in the 1140s, but based his account on a lost version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

This is fairly crucial. As was pointed out to me by the historian Ste Lingard, it means that, if Harold really did send a fleet to Tadcaster, it would have had to sail past the Norwegian camp. Take a look at the map below, which I have borrowed and adapted from Richard Fletcher’s book Bloodfeud.

Even if the English fleet was somehow able to get past the Norwegian one, it beggars belief to suppose that they could have done so undetected. The Norwegian army had already taken themselves off to York in the days after their arrival, but they would not have left their 300 ships unguarded. Those men left to watch the ships would have noticed an English fleet sailing past their camp and proceeding further upriver to Tadcaster.

This causes serious problems for Licence’s argument, because the one thing that is abundantly clear from all the sources is that Harold took the Norwegians by surprise. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle explains, on Monday 25 September, the English king learned that his enemies had gone from York to Stamford Bridge and rapidly advanced against them. ‘Then Harold, king of the English, came against them unawares.’ (Ða com Harold Engla cyning heom ongean on unwaran.)

Harold’s victory at Stamford Bridge depended upon stealth. If he came to Tadcaster by land, as historians have long believed, he would have avoided the Norwegian camp at Riccall by several miles and remained undetected. By contrast, had he sailed a fleet up the River Ouse it would have alerted his enemies to his arrival, robbing him of the element of surprise.

Harold bringing his fleet to Tadcaster is the hinge on which Prof Licence’s arguments depend. Apart from the Chronicle’s use of the word lið at this point, there is no other evidence to support the notion that the king brought his fleet north from London, and plenty of reasons (discussed in the previous post) to suppose he did not. If the fleet did not come to Tadcaster, the hypothesis that the king transported his army back to London by ship also falls apart.

Did King Harold Really Sail to the Battle of Hastings?

Headline news in all the papers this weekend: historians have got 1066 all wrong! Previously they had thought that King Harold, who was famously defeated at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 by William the Conqueror, had marched his troops all the way from Yorkshire to Sussex in the days leading up to the battle. But new research by Tom Licence, a professor of history and literature at the University of East Anglia, has shown that the king in fact sailed south with his men. Clearly the history books will have to be rewritten.

A few journalists asked for my reaction and I declined to comment: I’ll wait, I said, until I’ve read the professor’s arguments in an academic paper rather than in a press release. But on further reflection I realized that this might involve waiting quite a long time. According to the press release, Licence is going to present his findings at a conference in the coming days, but it can take years for conference proceedings to make their way into print. I think we can reasonably suppose that the same arguments will feature in the professor’s forthcoming biography of King Harold, but that isn’t due until August, and this also seemed rather too long to wait to see the detail behind such sensational claims. By yesterday afternoon, however, my attention had been drawn to an article written by Licence himself for The Conversation, in which he discusses the evidence on which his theory rests.

As far as I can see, it amounts to a single word in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

But first, the background. In the spring of 1066 Harold Godwineson, crowned as England’s new king at the start of the year, assembled a massive military force to resist the anticipated invasion of William the Conqueror. It consisted of a land army, which he stationed at various points along the south coast, and a fleet of ships, which was based on the Isle of Wight, where the king himself waited throughout the summer.

This is all fairly indisputable stuff, because it is described in detail by the aforementioned Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, or Chronicles, a set of related accounts written very soon after the event by monks at different monasteries. Three variant versions exist for 1066, referred to by historians as C, D and E. The most detailed version, and the most important for our purposes, is version C.

On 8 September, the C Chronicle tells us, Harold was forced to stand down his massive military force:

‘When it was the feast of the Nativity of St Mary [8 September], the provisions of the people were gone, and nobody could stay there any longer. Then they were allowed to go home and the king rode inland, and the ships were brought up to London and many perished before they reached there.’

Licence contends that scholars have misunderstood the Chronicle at this point, and assumed that Harold broke up his fleet. This is surprising, because the text of the Chronicle seems pretty unambiguous: the king allowed his army to disband, and sent his ships back to London. That is the way I wrote it up in my book on the Norman Conquest in 2012, and I had no sense that what I was saying was in any way revolutionary. Earlier scholars had said exactly the same. Prof David Douglas, for example, in his biography of William the Conqueror published in 1964, says ‘The Wessex militia was dismissed, and the king and his housecarls retired to London. The ships were also ordered to repair to the capital, and on the way thither many of them were lost.’ The nineteenth-century scholars that Licence cites may have erred in saying that the fleet was subsequently broken up, but it doesn’t seem to be an error that any sensible author has replicated in the past sixty years.

On arrival in London, says the Chronicle, Harold learned that northern England had been invaded from an unexpected direction. An army had landed in Yorkshire led by the king of Norway, Harold Hardrada [hereafter called Hardrada, to avoid confusion], aided by Harold Godwineson’s younger brother, Tostig. This prompted the English king to set out immediately for the north. ‘He went northwards day and night,’ says the Chronicle, ‘as quickly as he could assemble his force.’

The crucial question for our purposes is: how did Harold travel northwards? From the reports in some of the newspapers, you’d think that Licence was claiming the king had gone by ship. (e.g. The Guardian: ‘His interpretation? Harold simply sailed his armies to Yorkshire and back.’)

I’m not sure this is what Licence is claiming (or will claim when he delivers his paper). While the verb the Chronicle uses to describe Harold’s journey north is ambiguous [faran – equivalent to the German ‘fahren’ – to go, to travel], the rest of the sentence seems to imply the king was travelling hurriedly by land, rounding up new recruits as he did so.

There is also a cautious argument to be made from silence. When the Chronicle describes the movements of the other actors in 1066, it makes it amply clear when ships are involved. In the spring, for example, ‘Earl Tostig came from overseas into the Isle of Wight with as large a fleet as he could muster’. Harold, in response, ‘came to Sandwich and waited for his fleet there’. In September, Hardrada ‘came by surprise into the Tyne with a very large naval force’. After the Battle of Stamford Bridge, Hardrada’s son was allowed to ‘go home to Norway with all the ships’. Yet when it comes to Harold’s journey to Yorkshire in mid-September, there is no mention of ships at all – a fairly resounding silence. We might therefore more reasonably conclude that ‘went northwards’ meant he went by land.

Whether or not Licence thinks Harold personally went to Yorkshire by ship – again, we must wait for a more detailed exposition of his ideas – he clearly does believe that Harold sent his fleet north to combat the Norwegian threat. On what basis?

The only evidence to support this idea is a subsequent line in the Chronicle which says that, when the king reached Tadcaster [12 miles southwest of York] on Sunday 24 September, he assembled his ‘lið’ (þær his lið fylcade).

Now the Old English word lið, it is true, is usually taken to mean a naval force rather than a land army. Some scholars in the past argued that the mention of a lið at Tadcaster must be a reference to local ships. Others have assumed that the Chronicler simply used lið to mean ‘forces’.  The translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle published by Dorothy Whitelock in the 1950s, for example, rendered the phrase þær his lið fylcade as ‘there marshalled his troops’.

But Licence is certain that the Chronicle’s use of the word lið to describe Harold’s forces at Tadcaster indicates it was a naval force, and that furthermore ‘this was the same fleet that Harold had sent up from London’. He describes this in his Conversation article as ‘joining the dots’.

Let’s assume he is right, and that the king did indeed send his fleet from London up the east coast of England, into the River Humber, up the River Ouse, and then finally up the River Wharfe to Tadcaster. Does it follow that he is correct in assuming, as he says in his article, that it was used ‘to transport troops’?

In the first place, we might well ask: which troops? The Chronicle is pretty clear that on 8 September Harold had dismissed all his land levies and allowed them to go home.

Secondly, we might ask whether it would have been normal behaviour for a king to send infantry northwards by ship. In 934, for example, the mighty King Æthelstan mounted an invasion of Scotland. We know from the Chronicle that he sent a fleet to ravage Caithness, but it is clear that king himself marched the main part of his army northwards, because along the way he issued charters at Winchester, Nottingham and Chester-le-Street. When William the Conqueror attacked Scotland in 1072 he likewise sent a fleet to blockade the coast but marched his army northwards in person. Fleets were typically used in a supporting role to bring supplies to troops marching overland. When William Rufus advanced against the king of Scots in the autumn of 1091, his army was shadowed by a fleet of fifty ships that kept them supplied with grain. It was therefore a double disaster when these ships were wrecked off the Northumbrian coast, because as well as losing the sailors the army began to starve.

It is not impossible therefore, that Harold sent his fleet north in mid-September 1066, perhaps to serve in some similar logistical capacity. It is, however, a notion based on one word in the Chronicle – a word that could easily be interpreted in a different way, in a source that, on every other occasion that it describes the deployment of ships, does so in clear and unambiguous terms. If the fleet was sent north, it was highly unlikely that Harold went with it, based on the Chronicle’s failure to say so, and a comparison with the way other kings of England operated both before and after the Conquest.

Still, for the sake of argument, let’s say that Licence is right, and that Harold did send some ships north. What role did they play in the events that followed? Licence contends that, after the battle of Stamford Bridge, Harold used his fleet to sail his troops back south, rather than marching them south as is generally believed. There is no ambiguity about his argument here. His article for The Conversation begins ‘Is the biggest march in English history a myth? My research shows King Harold sailed down to the Battle of Hastings’.

Given the confidence of this statement, it may surprise readers to know that there is nothing in the way of evidence to support it. Sadly, the C version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle stops after the Battle of Stamford Bridge. In disappointment we turn to the shorter accounts in the D and E versions, which are anything but clear. The D version doesn’t mention Harold’s journey south at all – it says only that the king was told William had landed in Sussex and so assembled a large army and came to oppose him. The E Version is hardly any more helpful, saying simply ‘Harold came from the north’.

Any explanation as to how Harold returned from Yorkshire to London is, therefore, based entirely on assumption. So why does Licence think the king must have sailed his army south?

It boils down to simple maths. Harold won the Battle of Stamford Bridge on 25 September. Three days later, on 28 September, William the Conqueror and the Normans landed on the Sussex coast at Pevensey. From Pevensey to York is about 270 miles. Assuming Harold was still somewhere in the vicinity of York, and not already advancing southwards, we might suppose that he learned about the Norman landing three or four days later. News could travel fast in the Middle Ages, especially if it was urgent. If the messengers did not spare the horses, Harold could have known about the Norman invasion by 1 or 2 October.

The Battle of Hastings was fought on 14 October. If Harold set out immediately, that would have given him a maximum of about twelve days. But several chronicle accounts state that, before advancing to Hastings, the king spent some time in London – six days, according to the early twelfth-century chronicler Orderic Vitalis. If Orderic is correct, then Harold must have covered the 200 miles between York and London in just four or five days.

It would have been impossible to march infantry at a rate of 40 or 50 miles a day. The notion that Harold achieved this feat by ‘forced marches’ is an idea dreamed up by Victorian scholars and often repeated in more recent books on the Norman Conquest. Licence is therefore quite right to reject it.

He is not, however, as original as he suggests. In my book on the Conquest I made exactly this point – again, without feeling that I was saying anything particularly novel.

Where Prof Licence and I differ is in our opinion of how Harold managed to travel south so quickly. He thinks that the king must have sailed his army from Yorkshire to London, using the fleet which he believes had sailed to Yorkshire a fortnight earlier.

My contention is that we do not need to invoke this particular plot device, because it is highly unlikely that Harold still had an army by early October.

Having defeated the Norwegians on 25 September, the king had no need of an army. The dragon had been slain. Why would he keep several thousand men with him, all of whom needed to be fed and sheltered from one day to the next? No doubt we can imagine some sort of victory feast on the evening of 25 September but, since we are dealing only with assumptions, the most reasonable one is that Harold dismissed his infantry a day or so later, just as he had done on 8 September when he was unable to keep them together for lack of provisions. This is exactly what we see kings doing in later medieval centuries when we have day-to-day financial records. As soon as the campaign is over, the army is dismissed.

When Harold was informed about the Norman landing at the start of October, therefore, his conscript soldiers had probably already been dispersed several days earlier. The men who remained with him would have been his household troops, or housecarls – professional soldiers, with mail-shirts, expensive weapons – and horses. The simplest explanation for the how these men travelled to London in a matter of days is that they rode there. As the itineraries of later medieval kings show, it was perfectly possible for a mounted household to cover 30 or 40 miles a day, especially if the fate of a kingdom hung in the balance.

Once Harold arrived in London, he would have needed to call up more infantry from the southern counties. They would have taken time to arrive, but Harold, all the chroniclers agree, was too impatient to wait, and felt that a surprise attack on the Norman camp at Hastings was his best strategy. After all, a surprise attack on the Norwegian army at Stamford Bridge had just won him a great victory. On this occasion, however, he was outgeneralled. By sending scouts out into the countryside, William learned of the English king’s approach and set out from Hastings the next morning to confront him. The two armies met on a hill seven miles northwest of Hastings, known forever after as Battle.

 

Conclusions:

1. Prof Licence is quite right that Harold did not disband his fleet on 8 September and sent it to London. But it seems to me this is a common position amongst modern historians, if not Victorian ones.

2. He may be right in believing that Harold sent this fleet from London to Tadcaster, but his belief rests on a single word in the Chronicle, and other interpretations are possible. It is extremely unlikely, based on the Chronicle’s testimony, and a comparison with the behaviour of other kings, that Harold himself sailed to Yorkshire.

3. Licence is also correct to observe that Harold cannot have marched infantry from Yorkshire to Sussex in the short space of time between Stamford Bridge and Hastings. Again, however, this is by no means an original insight.

4. His belief that Harold must have sailed his army from Yorkshire to London is simply a theory, and not one that seems very compelling. Had the king pulled off such an audacious feat, transporting thousands of men by sea in a matter of days, it seems likely that at least one chronicler, Norman or English, would have mentioned it. The likelier and more mundane solution is that the army that beat the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge had already been disbanded, and Harold and his housecarls rode south in a rapid but otherwise unremarkable manner.

King and Conqueror: Not Even Wrong

I watched the first episode of King and Conqueror. It took all my reserves of staying power to make it to the end.

I won’t comment on the quality of the drama. I’m sure plenty of people will find it sufficiently entertaining to sit through all eight hours. But as history, it’s absolute nonsense. Not only it is not ‘a true story’ – it is not even an approximation of a true story. Real characters and events have been thrown together with zero consideration for historical truth to produce a piece of fiction. To criticize it for being historically inaccurate would be as pointless as levelling the same accusation at Game of Thrones. From a historian’s point of view it is, to borrow a phrase from the scientists, not even wrong.

This would be much less irksome if King and Conqueror wasn’t being sold to the public on the basis of its supposed accuracy. But here’s James Norton, who plays Harold Godwineson, in a recent promotional interview:

"I remember being constantly surprised reading scripts and saying 'is this real? This seems completely mad,' and invariably, he [writer Michael Robert Johnson] would be like, 'no, that is exactly what happened.'

Except it isn’t. Not by a long chalk. Not by a country mile. By every conceivable measure, this is almost exactly what didn’t happen. Of course, the people who produce this kind of thing will always protest when confronted with this sort of criticism, and say ‘oh, we had to take one or two liberties – it’s not a lecture, professor!’

But King and Conqueror is all liberties. Apart from the names of the main characters – and some of these have been changed – there’s nothing here that is even vaguely correct. This is a Frankenstein’s monster, assembled from various mangled bits and pieces unearthed from bona fide histories, and stitched together to produce something that anyone remotely familiar with the truth would find unrecognizable.

 

An Old Interview about Edward I

Clearing up my hard-drive, I discovered an interview that I did for Waterstone's back in 2008 for the promotion of A Great and Terrible King. As far I as remember it was never used, and is certainly not available any more, so I've decided to post it here.

What inspired you to undertake a biography of Edward I?

I have studied the Middle Ages since I was an undergraduate, and the thirteenth century – i.e. Edward’s century – was the focus for my postgraduate studies. During these years I was particularly inspired by the teaching and writing of Rees Davies, a historian who had pioneered the notion that the period could only be understood by examining the British Isles as a whole, rather than simply the national histories of England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. Because of his aggressive policy towards the Welsh and Scots, Edward I provided a great way of examining the momentous changes that occurred in Britain during the Middle Ages. It’s no exaggeration to say that his is an epic story, but in recent years no one had told it as such.

What were your most valuable primary sources? Did you uncover any new evidence during your research?

Well, in this period it’s either chronicles or government records. But both are far more voluminous than most non-medievalists can imagine. My most valuable resource has been the National Archives in Kew, which is a short cycle from where I live in London. The Archives are home to thousands of original parchment rolls generated by Edward’s government (fortunately, the most important ones are also in print). Because of the quantities involved, it’s very rare (though not impossible – see below) to make new discoveries based on a single new find. Most of my innovations have arisen from the simple expedient of putting this great mass of evidence in the correct chronological order. I have, for example, proposed a new date for the giant Round Table, made by Edward, that now hangs in Winchester Great Hall.

Is it possible to describe Edward as the ‘greatest’ of English medieval kings?

It is, but then ‘greatness’ is a pretty subjective measure, isn’t it? When the BBC, for example, asked the British people to put its greatest sons and daughters in rank order in 2002, the actor Michael Crawford did better than Queen Victoria, and the Enoch Powell – generally regarded as an odious racist – achieved a very respectable 55th place. Edward’s contemporaries certainly wrote about him as the greatest king that had ever been, outshining all of his predecessors. But their praise was predicated on certain royal actions that we would now regard with horror, such as the expulsion of the Jews in 1290. That said, there are certain empirical measures that are hard to contradict: the biggest armies raised in England during the Middle Ages; the largest taxes, the largest parliaments, and the most legislation. Slice him however you like, Edward was in most respects superlative.

What was his most remarkable achievement?

Bearing in mind the above comments – i.e. I’m not saying it was a good thing – the conquest of Wales. The sheer size of the resources that Edward was able to mobilize, and the single-minded determination with which he set about the task – both were remarkable. And, of course, the castles that he built to cement his victory.

When did Edward first become known as ‘Longshanks’? Was it a contemporary sobriquet?

The first references come at the end of his reign, in chronicles and songs. I’ve seen two. So yes it was contemporary, but it’s impossible to say how widely it was used. Edward was massively tall – his corpse, exhumed in 1774, measured 6 foot 2 inches, and that was presumably after some shrinkage – so it clearly struck people as his defining characteristic. In later centuries he was sometimes called Edward the Long.

To what extent was Edward responsible for the unprecedented slaughter of rebellious nobility at the Battle of Evesham? Is there any evidence to suggest that he ordered his men to ‘murder’ Simon de Montfort on the battlefield?

The answers are ‘entirely’ and ‘yes’. Evesham had long been recognized as an unusually bloody encounter – in this era, the nobility spared and ransomed each other, and killing was strictly taboo. One contemporary writer, aghast at the amount of blood spilt, described it as ‘the murder of Evesham’. Edward’s personal role in instigating the slaughter only became clear about ten years ago, when a new account of the battle was discovered on the reverse of a roll in the College of Arms. Evidently written by a well-informed eye-witness, this amazing find added the fact that, before the two sides engaged, Edward hand-picked a death squad to hunt down Montfort and kill him.

How deep was Edward’s commitment to the crusading cause? Was it the militaristic equivalent of his father’s devotion to the cult of Edward the Confessor?

Well, he actually went on crusade, which is more than any other English king did, with the obvious exception of his great uncle, Richard the Lionheart. You don’t save up for years on end, sacrificing all other concerns and ignoring pleas to remain at home, then trek from one end of Europe to the other, risking your life with numerous sea voyages, and suffering manifold privations, unless you’re pretty committed. What hasn’t really been stressed enough in the past, however, is the extent to which Edward continued to be committed to the crusade for the rest of his reign. He firmly intended to go again, at the head of a much greater host, and spent most of the 1280s making preparations to do so. The only reason these plans collapsed was the unexpected outbreak of a war with France in 1294. As for the second part of the question, Edward’s devotion to the crusade was far less odd than his father’s devotion to the Confessor – recovering Jerusalem was the highest ideal of his age. His father’s attachment to a long-dead Anglo-Saxon saint was by contrast quite quirky.

Was Edward’s queen, Eleanor of Castile, as politically active as his mother, Eleanor of Provence?

No. Eleanor of Provence is a fascinating character, and the subject of a wonderful recent biography. She acquired a political role, and hence attracted more contemporary comment, because of Henry III’s weakness, which allowed factions to develop within his own family. Edward, on the other hand, was one of the most masterful kings England has ever known, and there were no similar divisions at his court. Hence his wife (and, for that matter, his younger brother) are less easy to characterize, because they supported him at all times, and their personalities were overshadowed by his.

Who would you consider to be Edward’s most formidable military opponent?

It’s either Baybars, the Egyptian sultan whom Edward faced when he was in the Holy Land, or Philip IV, king of France, with whom Edward went to war in 1294. Both were considerably more powerful.

Why did Edward embark upon such a monumental campaign of castle-building in Wales? Would you agree that it was the ‘most coordinated and impressive…in medieval history’?

Edward considered that he had solved the problem of Wales in 1277. When, therefore, the Welsh subsequently rebelled in 1282, he determined on outright conquest. The new castles at Caernarfon, Conwy and Harlech were necessary to hold the newly conquered territory. They were certainly the most impressive chain of fortresses erected in Britain in the Middle Ages, and probably in Europe too, though no doubt someone will tell me otherwise. Whether they were unnecessarily large is a moot point. They did the job as intended, in that the Welsh never recovered their independence. And although the cost was considerable, totalling about £100,000, that was not much less than the cost of a war, which the castles ensured would not have to be repeated.

What would you describe as Edward’s most serious lapse of judgment? Did he ever face the real threat of a rebellion in England?

His most serious lapse of judgement did not concern England at all, but Scotland. Edward’s mistake was to assume that he could treat Scotland like Wales. When his plans for a marriage alliance with the Scots collapsed in 1290, Edward browbeat the Scots into admitting his superior lordship, ignoring their claims to be an independent kingdom. The trouble this ultimately caused him – viz. ceaseless war from 1294 – almost led to a tax revolt in England. In the summer of 1297, the king’s opponents were holding armed assemblies, and the earl of Hereford’s men were going about saying he was against the king’s peace.

If you had to give one reason for Edward’s failure to conquer Scotland, what would it be?

Regnal solidarity. There were, of course, myriad reasons why Scotland proved too much for Edward: it was bigger than Wales, more distant from England, and the king himself was becoming older. But the bottom line is that, whereas Wales was politically divided, Scotland had a strong sense of itself as a united kingdom. Scottish nationalism was given a massive boost by Edward’s attempt at conquest, but it also had a long history of existence before that time.

Which of Edward’s castles do you admire the most?

Caernarfon is the grandest but can sometimes leave me rather cold – there’s little sense of Edward’s personality there, because it was never finished. Conwy, for that reason, is probably my personal favourite of the Welsh castles. Finished in just four years, and with the king’s chambers still intact, it imparts, to my mind, a strong sense of the man behind it.

If you had to recommend two other books on Edward that everyone should read, what would it be?

I’m going to cheat, because I have to mention the two previous biographies by Prestwich and Powicke. But for more recent writing that deals with interesting aspects of Edward’s reign, I’d say Expulsion by Richard Huscroft, and The First English Empire by Rees Davies.

What are you working on at the moment?

Rediscovering the bits of my brain that haven’t been completely conquered by Edward I.

Imperial Overstretch? King Æthelstan and the Conquest of the North

The terrible attack on their community by ‘heathen men’ in 793 must have long haunted the monks of Lindisfarne, and left them feeling vulnerable and unsettled. At some point in the first half of the ninth century, with viking activity increasing everywhere, they abandoned the island that St Aidan had selected for them two centuries earlier and moved to the mainland, bringing with them the bones of their most celebrated and powerful predecessor, St Cuthbert. For a time they resided on the banks of the Tweed at Norham, but in the mid-870s, as Northumbria was being carved up by Scandinavian warlords, they set off again, apparently wandering from place to place for seven years. Eventually, around 883, they settled at Chester-le-Street, an old Roman fort about sixty miles to the south, situated on the River Wear. They were still there half a century later, when they were visited by King Æthelstan.

The year was 934, and Æthelstan was leading an army from Wessex through Northumbria in order to fight the Scots. He decided to pause at Chester-le-Street to venerate the remains of St Cuthbert, and to shower the monks with gifts. These were described in a charter issued by the king at the time of his visit and copied into a history of the community composed a century or so later. They included many items of richly embroidered fabric: ecclesiastical vestments, altar coverings, curtains, tapestries, and ‘a royal headdress woven with gold’. There were also numerous other treasures worked from or decorated with both gold and silver: cups, candlesticks, armlets, bells, drinking horns, and a cross ‘finished with gold and ivory’. Æthelstan in addition gave the monks an extensive royal estate on the south bank of the Wear, and also several books: three ornate sets of gospels, a missal, and ‘a life of St Cuthbert written in verse and prose’.

Remarkably, some parts of this generous donation have survived. Six decades after the king’s visit, and more than a century after their arrival at Chester-le-Street, the monks decided to move again, and relocated seven miles further south, establishing a new church in a loop of the Wear which became Durham Cathedral. The shrine that was constructed in the cathedral for Cuthbert’s body after the Norman Conquest was destroyed during the Reformation, but his coffin was secreted in a wall space and survived. When it was rediscovered and opened in 1827, it was found to contain not only the saint’s complete skeleton, but fragments of the elaborately carved wooden casket in which he had originally been buried, his gold pectoral cross (colour picture 7), and a gospel book written not long after his death. It also contained some scraps of the embroidered items donated by Æthelstan in 934 – probably the stole and the maniple mentioned in the king’s charter (colour picture 19). All these items are now on display in the cathedral’s treasury.

No less miraculously, one of the books donated by Æthelstan is still with us. Many items from the cathedral’s library were dispersed during the sixteenth century, including the Lindisfarne Gospels, which ultimately ended up in the British Library. In the case of Æthelstan’s books, we do not know what happened to the missal, and two of the three gospel books are also unaccounted for. The third survived until the eighteenth century, but perished in the fire of 1731 that also consumed Asser’s Life of Alfred and singed the pages of Beowulf. But the volume donated by the king that contained a life of St Cuthbert is still in existence, having found its way to Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. It is a copy of the two lives of Cuthbert written by Bede, and has at the beginning a full-page picture of the saint being presented with the book by Æthelstan himself (colour picture 18). It is the earliest manuscript image of an English king.

This image, and the royal visit that inspired it, tell us several important things about Æthelstan. In the first place, he was notably pious. ‘The most pious King Æthelstan’ is how he was described on the first page of the gospel book that was destroyed by fire in 1731. The scale of his donation indicates that he was also abundantly rich: a ruler who could afford to reward his favourite subjects with almost embarrassing quantities of precious artefacts, as well as land and money. And, as his pronounced wealth implies, he was extremely powerful – arguably the most powerful of all the English kings before the Norman Conquest. Æthelstan was in Northumbria in 934 not as a foreign visitor but as its self-appointed ruler, having forcibly annexed the formerly independent kingdom seven years earlier. The army he was leading against the Scots was composed of men drawn from every region in southern Britain – not only English warriors from Wessex and Mercia, but also Danes who had settled in the eastern parts of the island, and Britons from the west. As the ruler of all these regions, Æthelstan has good claim to be considered the first king of England (although the word ‘England’ had yet to be invented) and even grander titles were touted at his court, where he was sometimes styled ‘king of all Britain’.

According to the same chronicle that preserved his charter, before Æthelstan continued on his expedition against the Scots, he gave instructions that ‘if anything sinister should befall him’, his body was to be returned to Chester-le-Street for burial near St Cuthbert, who would be able to present him before God on the Day of Judgement. As it turned out, this precaution proved unnecessary: the king’s campaign was a success, and he returned south to reign for a further five years. When he eventually died in 939, he was buried in Malmesbury, an ancient monastery in Wessex, founded in the late seventh century. The abbey church, now the parish church, still contains a tomb chest built for his remains in the late Middle Ages, topped with a life-sized effigy of its sometime royal occupant. But Æthelstan was less fortunate in death than Cuthbert, and during the Reformation his remains were destroyed. All we have now is a description of his body, written in the early twelfth century by William of Malmesbury, one of the greatest English historians. William was a monk at Malmesbury and had evidently seen inside the king’s tomb. He describes Æthelstan as being slim, ‘not beyond what is becoming in stature’, and having blond hair, ‘beautifully mingled with gold threads’.

It is thanks to William that we know more about Æthelstan than most other tenth-century English kings, whose lives are on the whole very poorly chronicled. Writing his Deeds of the Kings of the English, William interrupts his section on Æthelstan to explain how he had recently discovered ‘a certain obviously ancient volume’ that contained an earlier account of the king’s career, and goes on to incorporate some of this new material into his own narrative. Doubts have been raised in recent years about the authenticity of this information, chiefly because the sections that William appears to present as verbatim quotes can be shown on stylistic grounds to have been composed in his own day, rather than at some point in the more distant past. But this apparent obstacle is not insuperable, since William himself tells us that the original text in his ‘ancient volume’ was written in such a florid, bombastic style that he felt compelled to rewrite it using simpler and more comprehensible language. In addition, some of the information William reproduces from his lost source is so mundane in its detail that it seems unlikely to have been whimsically invented. Most modern historians are therefore prepared to admit this material as evidence, though perhaps with the caveat that it might not be wholly reliable.

The most famous anecdote that William of Malmesbury relates from his ancient book sits on the cusp of plausible history and convenient legend. As a child, we are told, Æthelstan was good-looking and graceful, and these qualities endeared him to his grandfather, King Alfred, who publicly acknowledged the boy’s suitability as a future ruler by investing him at a young age. Æthelstan, who could have been no more than six, was given a scarlet cloak, a jewelled belt, and a Saxon sword with a golden scabbard. Since his accession, which eventually happened twenty-five years after Alfred’s death, proved to be a very contentious affair, stories of him having been pre-approved by his illustrious grandfather might rightly be viewed with suspicion. But the tale draws some support from a poem dedicated to Æthelstan as a child that expresses similar sentiments, and from the fact that Alfred himself, at a comparable age, had been blessed and invested by the pope in a similar ceremony. Perhaps, then, the old king had indeed publicly bestowed honours on his grandson as his own reign drew to a close. The pity was he had not done more to quell the family feud among the generation immediately below him, which erupted in the days after his death.

The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, pp. 247-51.

The Last Days of King John

King John died on this day in 1216. Here's my account of his final days, taken from my recent book. 

[For context: John was at this point engaged in a desperate war against his own barons, and their ally, Louis, the son of the king of France, who had invaded England earlier in the year.]

Precisely what John's next move would have been is uncertain. The rebels who had been pursuing him had given up the chase after his flight from Cambridge and gone to join Louis, who was still besieging Dover. Although the king was heading south, he appears to have been planning a northern campaign. On 9 October he left Lincolnshire and went to King's Lynn in Norfolk, then one of the most prosperous ports in England, to arrange for supplies to be sent to several of his northern castles.

At that point, however, John fell ill. Ralph of Coggeshall claims it was dysentery, and assumed it was caused by an excessive intake of food and drink; Roger of Wendover famously but unreliably describes a dish of peaches and new cider. More likely a body racked by exhaustion was to blame: for the previous four weeks the forty-nine-old king had been travelling at a relentless pace, often riding more than thirty miles in the space of a single day.

Two days after arriving at King's Lynn, despite his illness, he set out again, heading back in the direction of Lincolnshire. Still in a hurry, he decided to save time by taking a short-cut across the great tidal estuary of the Wash, at the point where the River Wellstream merged with the sea. Disaster struck when parts of his baggage train, both men and packhorses, were sucked down into the treacherous sands. According to Coggeshall, the king lost all the precious items of his chapel, including his collection of holy relics. He may even have lost his crown and other regalia, since they do not figure in later royal inventories.

Wracked with grief on account of this loss, John struggled to Swineshead Priory in Lincolnshire, then after two more days pushed on to the bishop of Lincoln's castle at Sleaford. There he was met by messengers from Dover with even worse news. Louis had undermined and partially collapsed the castle's main entrance. Hubert de Burgh and his men had prevented the French army storming the breach, but they could not hold out for much longer. A truce had been agreed to allow the defenders to seek the king's help, or else his permission to surrender.

This news, says Coggeshall, caused John such distress that it brought on the return of his illness. An attempt to alleviate his condition by bleeding him seems to have made no difference, and on 15 October he wrote to the pope, describing how he was suffering from 'a grave and incurable infirmity'. The pope in question was not the formidable Innocent III, whose pontificate had done so much to shape the king's reign. Innocent had died on 16 July, to be replaced by Honorius III. John now addressed the new pontiff 'on bended knee', and committed his kingdom to the Church's protection, without which he could see no hope of saving the succession for his heirs.

Having composed this letter, the king continued with his desperate journey. Too ill to ride, he was carried in a litter from Sleaford a further twenty miles west to Newark, another castle confiscated from the bishop of Lincoln. It was probably there that he dictated his last will and testament, the original copy of which still survives. John began by assigning the administration of his affairs to thirteen of his faithful servants, including William Marshal, Ranulf of Chester, Peter des Roches and the papal legate, Guala. These men were to make amends to the Church for the damages and injuries he had inflicted, and to arrange for aid to be sent to the Holy Land. They were to help his sons obtain and defend their inheritance, and to ensure that his other faithful servants were rewarded. Lastly, they were to distribute money to religious houses and to the poor for the salvation of the his soul.

Had the imminent prospect of death and the danger to his soul brought any repentance? Eight days earlier, after the first onset of his illness at King's Lynn, John had given permission to Margaret, wife of Walter de Lacy, to found a religious house in Herefordshire in memory of her father, William de Briouze, her mother Matilda and her brother William.

On the night of 18 October, a great gale howled through the town of Newark, with such intensity that the citizens feared that their houses would be destroyed. The abbot of Croxton must have been grateful to be safe within the walls of the castle. He had been summoned to the king's bedside because of his medical expertise, but by this point his patient was beyond saving. Instead he heard the dying man's confession, and administered the last rites.

Taken from King John: Treachery, Tyranny and the Road to Magna Carta, pp. 282-4

Castle Acre and the Warennes

Castle Acre, a wonderful little village in Norfolk, offers the most amazing three-for-one deal. A really splendid Norman fortress, so impressive in scale that it could command attention all by itself. A gorgeous priory, the best preserved example of its kind in England. And, as if these two were not enough, there’s also a medieval town there too, still discernible from the layout of its streets, its earth ramparts and a well-preserved stone gate. As the new interpretative displays and audio tour of the priory explain, it’s one of the best locations in Britain for seeing how the forces of violence, religion and commerce combined in the Middle Ages to shape the landscape that we see today.

We owe this concentration of quality sites to a family by the name of Warenne, so called because they originally hailed from a town called Varenne in Normandy. Like so many men of those parts, the Warennes backed the winning horse in 1066. ‘My ancestors came with William the Bastard and conquered their lands with the sword’, said one of the their number some two centuries later, brandishing an ancient, rusty blade to prove his point. It was a exclamation born of frustration with the interference of royal government, but such conflict with the Crown was exceptionally rare. The story of the Warennes is, in fact, proof positive that the way to get ahead in medieval England was to swing a strong right arm in the service of the king.

The founder of the family’s fortune, and therefore putative owner of the rusty sword, was William de Warenne. One of the Conqueror’s closest companions, he was at the front of the queue when the spoils were being dished out. Extensive lands in Sussex were given to him when he was barely off the boat, and he set about organizing them around the town and castle of Lewes. Other prizes soon followed. By the time Domesday Book was compiled in 1086 William was the fourth richest individual after the king himself, and owned estates in more than a dozen English counties. The overwhelming bulk of them were concentrated in East Anglia, and centred on what would become known as Castle Acre.

Castles were, of course, one of the most striking innovations that the Normans introduced to the English countryside, and the earliest examples tended to be built to a common-or-garden design. A great mound of earth raised the lord’s residence high above its surroundings, and a larger, lower enclosure accommodated his household and their horses. Such castles, as every schoolgirl knows, we now call ‘motte-and-baileys’.

At first glance, the structure created by William de Warenne at Castle Acre would seem to be a prime example of this type. Initial appearances, however, can be deceptive. Archaeological investigation has revealed that, whilst the bailey probably dates to William’s time, there was originally no motte at all. William had instead settled for a much shallower, lightly defended enclosure, in the middle of which he built a rather luxurious stone house (the foundations of which can still be seen). It was only his later descendants, living through the uncertainty of a civil war, who decided that a large mound of earth would be a good idea after all. Castle Acre, therefore, presents a uniquely peculiar case, a motte-and-bailey without a motte. Curiously, and by contrast, William’s other castle at Lewes has not one motte but two. One cannot help wondering if part of his intention was to frustrate castle historians of the future.

Unconventional he may have been when it came to building castles, but in all other respects William was a textbook Norman Conqueror, a warrior who carved out an empire for himself and ran it with ruthless efficiency. Such men wanted not only glory but profit – hence, in part, the need for a town at Castle Acre. They also needed to atone for a lifetime of maiming and killing. In the 1080s William set off on pilgrimage to Rome, but in the event got no further than Burgundy and the great abbey of Cluny. Suitably inspired, he returned to England and founded two priories of his own, one at Lewes, the other at Acre. As the earlier of the two, Lewes had the greater claim on the Warenne’s loyalties. When William died in 1088 – killed, appropriately, by an arrow-wound sustained during a siege – he was buried there, as were all his later descendants. But Lewes Priory suffered severely in later centuries, not least from having a railway driven through its precinct. Castle Acre Priory, by contrast, is a wonderfully well-preserved ruin, located in as serene a setting as could be imagined. Visit on a fine day, and you’ll almost wish they were still looking for new monks.

Shortly before his death, William de Warenne was created earl of Surrey – a rare distinction, and a final confirmation of his highly successful career. It was a success replicated by his descendants who, over the next three centuries, emulated his model of dynamic lordship and service to the Crown to maintain their place at the top of society. But in the fourteenth century, the story came to an abrupt end. John de Warenne, seventh earl of Surrey, was by no means incompetent either as a soldier or as a politician, but his personal life was a disaster. His marriage, forced on him by Edward I, was doomed from the start: he was not quite twenty, his new wife not quite ten. But, since she was the king’s granddaughter, the match proved hard to dissolve, and successive popes refused to grant a divorce. The earl’s case was not helped by his notorious way with the ladies: he had at least two mistresses, and later confessed to having had an affair with his wife’s aunt, a decidedly loose-living nun. Earl John ended his days living with a certain Isabella Holland, referred to in his will as ‘my companion’. Through these various liaisons he had at least six children, but none by his wife. Thus, when he died in 1347, his vast estate passed by law to his legitimate but distant relatives. Castle Acre, where generations of his family had kept company with kings, fell quickly into ruin. And so passed the Warennes, one of the greatest dynasties in medieval England, their fortune won with the sword, but lost through lust and love.

This article is published in Kings and Castles