by Ed West
Copyright © 2017 by Ed West
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Rain Saukas
Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1986-6
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1991-0
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 Red Sky at Night
Chapter 2 Ethelred the Unready
Chapter 3 In Bed with the Normans
Chapter 4 King Canute and the Waves
Chapter 5 Lady Godiva
Chapter 6 Edward, Patron Saint of Divorcees
Chapter 7 ‘A Savage, Barbarous and Horrible Race of Inhuman Disposition’
Chapter 8 The Last Viking
Chapter 9 The Battle of Hastings
Chapter 10 The Norman Yoke
Chapter 11 William’s Children All Kill Each Other
Chapter 12 Nineteen Long Winters When Christ and His Angels Slept
Chapter 13 We Shall Never Surrender
Bibliography
Endnotes
Introduction
In April 1066 an elderly, eccentric monk called Elmer noticed a shooting star in the sky from his Abbey of Malmesbury in Wiltshire. Seeing it as a bad omen, Elmer is supposed to have muttered: ‘You’ve come, you source of tears to many mothers. It is long since I saw you; but as I see you now you are much more terrible, for I see you brandishing the downfall of my country.’
Few people reached old age in the eleventh century, but Elmer was one of them, and as a boy in September 989 he had seen the same ‘hairy-tailed star’ in the sky. Soon afterwards the Vikings had returned to England after almost a century, and so the comet’s arrival now was not entirely welcome. Three months before the star reappeared King Edward had died, having first shouted wild and rather unhelpful prophecies about the country’s destruction. During his long reign the slightly weird monarch had promised the throne to a number of very violent men, and the country was now in a state of deep foreboding even for the standards of the time.
The heavenly body, identified six centuries later by astronomer Edmund Halley, was indeed a bad omen, for 1066 would turn out to be a terrible year for England, with two invasions, three battles, and thousands of deaths. In the most famous of these clashes two armies of between seven and eight thousand men faced each other outside Hastings on October 14.
Elmer was lucky to have seen Halley’s Comet a second time. Fifty years earlier the monk was so inspired by the Greek legend of Icarus that he built wings from willow trees and parchment, and proceeded to launch himself from the abbey’s sixty-foot-high bell tower in a rather optimistic early attempt at manned flight. But even the fact that he broke both his legs and never walked again didn’t dampen his cheery demeanour and enthusiasm (in fairness he did stay airborne for two hundred yards before crashing, or so he claimed).
Edward’s successor King Harold II had a hell of a year since being proclaimed king in January. By the time of Hastings he had just spent a month marching an army two hundred miles up to the north of England, where his men had seen off another invasion from the flamboyant Viking maniac Harald Hardraada, before marching back again. Now he faced Duke William of Normandy, the humorless, hard-faced ruler of the most militaristic people in the known world, descendents of Vikings who had settled in France a century and a half before.
Few battles in history have had such catastrophic consequences for the losers, for as historian Elizabeth van Houts put it: ‘No other event in western European history of the central Middle Ages can be compared for its shocking effects: the carnage on the battlefield, the loss of life and the consequent political upheaval.’
By the end of William the Conqueror’s reign twenty-one years later, only two major English landowners were still in possession of their homes, one Englishman held a senior position in the Church, and just 5 percent of land was still owned by natives, while an entire class of five thousand thegns, England’s aristocrats, had been killed, driven abroad or forced into serfdom or something similarly awful. In the worst instance of Norman violence over one hundred thousand people were killed in Yorkshire, an event known as the ‘Harrying of the North’ which left whole regions deserted for a century afterwards.
One-third of the entire country was set aside for royal forests, with large numbers of natives evicted from their homes that then became Norman pleasure gardens. Countless houses were demolished to make way for castles to enforce Norman authority, and the natives were collectively punished if any Norman was found dead in their neighborhood (while a Norman who killed an Englishman would go unpunished). The English language itself, which perhaps had the richest body of literature in western Europe at the time, would be suppressed for three centuries, by which time it would reemerge heavily influenced by the conquerors. Today, between a quarter and half of all words in the dictionary come from French, including almost everything to do with the law, government and war.
It’s easy to cast the Normans as preeminent medieval bad guys, callous imperialists who oppressed everyone, stole their land, and forced them into serfdom. And on top of invading England, and later Wales and Ireland, they also had more conservative views about women and religion, and their approach to interfaith issues in the Middle East would not be entirely fashionable today. Indeed the word ‘bigot’ was originally a Parisian insult for Normans, and came from their habit of using the Germanic oath ‘bei Gott’ or ‘by God’.1 They are also blamed for introducing the idea of feudalism, whereby most people were tied to the land and had to work for their master half the year in exchange for a penny or some dung.
In England, Norman ancestry has become synonymous with elitism, so that French-sounding names suggest privilege, while Anglo-Saxon ones appear humble. In the most popular British book and film series of recent years, the heroes have the very Anglo-Saxon sounding surnames Potter and Weasley, while the baddies go by the Normanesque Voldemort and Malfoy.2 It’s shorthand for humility versus entitlement.
The Normans sound like cartoon Hollywood upper-class English villains, blamed for creating long-standing class divisions, and to an extent this is true. To take one example, when Gerald Grosvenor, the multibillionaire 6th Duke of Westminster, was asked by a journalist what advice he’d give to a young entrepreneur hoping to become rich, he suggested ‘make sure they have an ancestor who was a very good friend of William the Conqueror.’3 Indeed the duke’s forebear Hugh Lupus, ‘le gros veneur’ or chief huntsman, had been granted lands by William in the county of Cheshire in order to keep the Welsh under control. In the 1170s, his descendent Robert le Grosvenor had been given the manor of Budworth in the county, which is still home to the Grosvenor seat, the Eaton Estate. When, in 2016, the duke died, he left £8 billion ($10 billion) to his son.4
But, of course, the Normans weren’t all bad. There were huge class divisions in Eng
lish society in 1066, and feudalism was already in place;5 the Godwin family, of whom Harold was head, were absurdly wealthy, possibly richer than his grasping successor. And, as well as building many beautiful cathedrals and castles, the Normans abolished slavery, maintained and improved Anglo-Saxon England’s system of government, while their customs were in many ways more civilized. They tended to ransom their aristocratic opponents, while the English just killed them, which is partly why by 1066 the country had been worn down by several decades of feuding and murder.
And it all began when the last comet visited, and with the doings of an evil stepmother.
CHAPTER ONE
Red Sky at Night
Read any national history from this period, whether it’s Ireland, Italy, Spain or even Egypt, and you’ll find the Normans turning up at some point. And England made an awfully tempting target. By the mid-eleventh century, the country was one of the most prosperous in western Europe, with wool from the Cotswolds and East Anglia exported across the continent and a system of minting coins and collecting taxes that was way ahead of its rivals.
This was all quite impressive since only five hundred years earlier their ancestors had been illiterate raiders noted largely for the cruel deprivations they carried out on prisoners. The tribes known as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes had crossed the North Sea from Germany and Denmark to Britain in the fifth century after the Romans left, conquering the south and east of the island. Converting to Christianity in the seventh century, the ‘Garmans’ (as natives called them) had gathered into a number of kingdoms that slowly absorbed each other until by the ninth century there were just four—Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex. However, at this point new barbarians from Scandinavia arrived, known to us as the Vikings (‘raiders’), and in the 860s their armies overran three of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms until in 871 just Wessex remained, ruled by a young, inexperienced and very neurotic king called Alfred. Against the odds, he fought off the invaders, and fifty years later his grandson Athelstan had conquered all of what is now England, roughly on its modern borders.1
England had become a rich and sophisticated state under the House of Wessex, culminating with the relative golden age of Alfred’s great-grandson Edgar the Peaceful (959–975), who established full authority over the island’s various warlords, despite being less than five feet tall. With peace came a huge growth in trade and learning, most of it done through the Church and its monasteries. The Angles and Saxons, despite being terrifying pagan barbarians to the Britons they conquered, had very quickly become devoted to Rome; partly, it has to be said, because they were so far away they didn’t have to encounter the squalid reality of the place.
And so England in 1066 had law courts, counties, a tax system, and a very rich body of literature. Its people were in many ways more civilized than the Normans, who according to one contemporary ‘found English prisoners well-dressed, long-haired and beautiful, much given to combing their locks–unlike the Normans’ own shaven and crop-headed style.’2 The English were ‘a people greater, richer and older’ than the Normans, according to Orderic Vitalis, a mixed Norman-English writer of the time.
The language, what we call Old English, had flourished in the century previously so that before the conquest some one thousand ‘writers and copyists in English have been identified’,3 and, along with Irish, it was ‘the most developed of Europe’s vernaculars’, with a literature far in advance of French.’4 Much of this was owed to Alfred, who, as well as beating the Vikings, encouraged everyone to learn to read and also set up the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a series of books recording (the mostly depressing) events of the period written in five different locations.
King Alfred had built the first English cities since the Romans left, creating a system of ‘burhs’ that were fortresses where people could hide when the Vikings turned up, and these soon grew into towns. In the tenth century, London had property magnates for the first time—the Abbess of Barking, with twenty-eight apartments in the city, was the biggest. With peace, overseas trade increased, and England was connected to the global economy revolving around Pavia, northern Italy, through which goods from as far away as modern day Indonesia turned up in England.6 A tourist trade sprang up in religious centres, centred around novelties such as Saint Swithun’s relics in Winchester, although ‘pilgrims’ were often just merchants pretending to be on religious missions to avoid customs duties. Almost every big town in the country claimed to have some saint’s remains, which could be very lucrative, and many were rather dubious; five different holy houses claimed to possess the head of Saint Oswald, so presumably at least four of them were wrong.
Largely thanks to King Alfred’s literacy drive, as well as modern forensics, we know quite a lot about life in urban tenth-century England—and it was mostly grim. We know that hygiene was not of the highest standard, and that only monasteries had neccessariums, or toilets. We also know that the people suffered from parasites, the most sinister being the mawworm, a twelve-inch-long monster that sometimes popped out of the corner of people’s eyes, Alien-style. The Anglo-Saxons almost never washed, and remarked upon how strange it was that their Viking neighbours would comb their hair and bathe themselves (with soap made from conkers) before their Saturday night activities; it improved their chances with the ladies, observed one monk.
The weather must have made all of this even more unpleasant. England was far hotter in the tenth and eleventh centuries than it is now, with London enjoying the same climate as central France does today. There were almost forty vineyards in the south of Britain, spread as far north as Suffolk, not considered by wine buffs today as great grape country.
As for food, we know something of what the early English ate from a Latin vocabulary by Elfric, archbishop of Canterbury at the turn of the millennium, which discusses the roles played by the baker, ploughman, fisherman and shepherd. Elfric’s Colloquy consists of a series of discussions between monastic master and young pupils designed to improve their conversational Latin, but it is also an insight into teaching methods and jobs.7 It suggests that although the Anglo-Saxons kept pigs, goats and deer, they ate them rarely, as meat was expensive. Fish was more popular, although herring was also very costly. People mainly ate carrots, leeks, garlic, fennel and kale; kale was so popular that February was called sproutkele in Old English before the introduction of the Roman calendar.8 In fact, the calendar was different to the one we have today in many ways. While January 1 was merely the day of Our Lord’s circumcision, New Year’s Day was on March 25, or Lady Day, a feast in honour of the Virgin Mary and her immaculate conception (nine months before Christmas). It is now called Mothering Sunday in Britain, or Mother’s Day.9 This calendar lasted until the seventeenth century, and may be the origin for the European custom of April Fool’s Day, whereby people following the old system were laughed at.
Some ancient superstitions and bits of folklore survive from this era: ‘If the sky reddens at nights, it foretells a clear day; if in the morning, it means bad weather,’ goes the wisdom first written down by Bede in the eighth century; or ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight’, as people still say in England. Other bits of wisdom did not last so well, including one claiming that thunder on Wednesdays ‘presages the death of idle and scandalous prostitutes’; you don’t often hear people say that these days. Among the few other things a visitor to the tenth century might find familiar are noughts and crosses—the only game of the period that we still play.10
If you wanted to look after yourself, you could read the ninth century Bald’s Leechbook, the first English medical guide, although it’s not quite as medieval as it sounds, laeceboc meaning medicine book, rather than referring to leeches. Among the cures recommended was cutting the eyelid open to calm a swelling, treating a spider bite with crushed black snails and lower back pain with ‘smoke of goat’s hair’. It also suggests one might lash oneself with a whip made out of dolphin to cure insanity (at what point does someone doing this think ‘my mental health is def
initely improving’?) Alternatively, chicken soup was used as an ailment for sickness, and a thick, porridgey beer was drunk as much for its cleanliness (although most people did have access to clean water, at least outside of cities) as for its alcohol content, which was low by today’s standards; still, a few pints would certainly dull reality. The Leechbook also deals with headaches, baldness, virility or lack of it, and ‘talkative women and evil spirits’, declaring: ‘If a man be over-virile, boil water agrimony in Welsh ale; he is to drink it at night, fasting. If a man be insufficiently virile, boil the same herb in milk.’
There is lots of standard medieval gibberish: ‘If a man’s hair fall out, make him a salve; take great hellebore and viper’s bugloss, and the lower part of burdock, and gentian … If hair fall out, boil the polypody fern, and foment the head with that very hot.’
It also suggests: ‘Against a woman’s chatter: eat a radish at night, while fasting; that day the chatter cannot harm you.’ And, ‘make this a salve against the race of elves, goblins and those women with whom the Devil copulates; take the female hop-plant, wormwood, betony, lupin, vervain, henbane, dittander, viper’s bugloss, bilberry palants, cropleek, garlic, madder grains, corn cockle, fennel.’
Among the other folk remedies suggested at the time was drinking wolf’s milk for problems in pregnancy and childbirth, or alternatively trying a dried and pounded hare’s heart. For an epidemic of plague, take a ‘hand of hammerwort’ and some eggshell of clean honey and add some more herbs. Meanwhile, hearing troubles could be dealt with by pouring ‘juice of green earthgall or juice of wormwood’ into the ears. As for bladder problems, get some ‘dwarf dwolse’ and pound it, and then down it with two draughts of wine. You’ll at least forget about your problems. For baldness, ‘collect the juices of the wort called nasturtium’ and rub a bit in.
We may laugh, but this was not especially irrational: before the scientific method and modern medicine in the late nineteenth century, most active medical treatment was more likely to kill you than make you better, so you could do worse than eating some herbs and hoping for the best. Anyone who actually thought himself knowledgeable about medicine was probably a menace and would just try making a hole in your head to see what happened.