by Ed West
9. Harald achieved a more lasting fame when Scandinavian cell phone engineers came up with a new device that would be able to make cross border communication easier, and decided to name it after a king who had united Norway and Denmark.
10. O’Brien.
11. In Bernard Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom the protagonist, the Northumbrian Uhtred, is supposed to be an ancestor of the real Uhtred.
12. He didn’t made a huge impact on the country, and as king of England Sweyn’s only act was levying a tax in the area under his control which was returned after he died.
13. His name in Danish was Cnut, literally ‘knot’, but this sounds too pretentious and rude in English. In fact his real baptismal name was Lambert.
14. This is one theory at least. Many dispute it.
15. While Bishop of London Wulfstan once warned: ‘Woe then to him who has earned for himself the torments of Hell. There there is everlasting fire roiling painfully, and there there is everlasting filth. There there is groaning and moaning and always constant wailing. There there is every kind of misery, and the press of every kind of devil. Woe to him who dwells in torment: better it were for him that he were never born, than that he become thus.’
Chapter 4
1. Although it sort of survives in the name of the Wizengamot, the council of wizards led by Dumbledore in the Harry Potter books.
2. Queen Emma’s autobiography merely says ‘God intervened’ and took away Edmund, who was to be the last fully English king for some time.
3. Curiously Edmund is the subject of a play believed by some to have been Shakespeare’s first, Edmond Ironside (The English King) although most experts now ruefully accept it wasn’t.
4. There is still a St Clement Danes in the City of London, which features in the nursery rhyme Orange and Lemons.
5. East Anglia went to Thorkell the Tall, Mercia went to Eadric and Northumbria to his old friend Eric. Canute kept Wessex, the most important part and from where any native resistance was likely to come from.
6. Oliver, Neil.
7. A lot of historians don’t like the term but it’s useful and the quality and quantity of historical record hugely increases from the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
8. The relationship between church and state was also established after the Holy Roman Emperor and the pope met at an alpine pass and formally settled on the division and later this would be important in developing into the idea of secularism, that is that the church does not set secular laws and vice versa.
9. Most rules vastly exaggerated the extent of their power in their titles, with King Edgar calling himself ‘Autocrat of All Albion and its Environs’. However in Rome Canute with typical Scandinavian modesty describes himself as ‘King of all England and Denmark and the Norwegians and of some of the Swedes’. Not of all Sweden, just some of them.
Chapter 5
1. Barlow, Frank.
2. The ‘warming pan myth’, that the baby was snuck in during a fake ‘birth’ in a warming pan, is a recurring historical theme, most famously used against the son of the Catholic James II, whose birth in 1688 triggered a revolt by Protestant lords. A modern version is the legend that Barack Obama was actually born in Kenya and therefore an illegitimate ruler.
3. One theory at any rate. From Godwins.
4. Barlow.
5. Sweyn died soon after arriving in Denmark but on the plus side got a small cameo role in Macbeth.
6. Although some historians say she may have just been ‘symbolically’ naked, without jewellery. If this was the case, it was either a mistranslation, or the most wildly exaggerated story in history.
7. The procession fell into decline in the midnineteenth century because sexually repressed Victorians were fighting to get to the front to see the specially chosen local woman in tight clothes, and killjoys turned against it. It sadly disappeared in the twentieth century, although there have been attempts to revive it.
Chapter 6
1. Samuel Johnson, who created the first dictionary in the eighteenth century, received it from Queen Anne as a boy.
2. McLynn, Frank.
3. Sources are divided about whether it was consensual or rape. Also about whether she was actually related. At any rate it horrified everyone.
4. This ancient custom was called ‘carrying the wolf’s head’ in Anglo-Saxon England; in other words the person could be hunted down like a wolf.
5. Barlow.
6. In 1066 Ralph’s son Harold was too young to be a threat and was still around during the Domesday Book, listed as a landowner in the Midlands.
7. Many of the Normans then went up to Scotland, where King Mac Bethad mac Findlaich used them to cause trouble on the English border.
8. It was Eustace’s men who accompanied Prince Alfred during his ill-fated trip to England and he may have feared a similar ambush, thus the hostile approach which proved self-fulfilling.
9. The Chronicle only refer in passing to ‘the old lady’ dying, which must have pleased her no end.
10. Barlow.
11. McLynn.
12. For example, it is still the law in some border towns to kill any Welshman after dark, largely because the medieval laws have never been officially repealed, but they have been superseded by other laws, and legal experts are fairly confident you wouldn’t get away with it today.
13. The northern part of Northumbria, in the modern counties of Durham and Northumberland, remained more English and was still controlled by the old ruling house of Northumbria.
14. Perhaps Tostig was put in charge of the army, Harold of the treasury, and this lead to their rivalry.
Chapter 7
1. However the Europeans did change the pieces: the queen was originally a vizier, a sort of prime minister, while the bishop used to be an elephant.
2. Quoted in Bartlett, Robert, The Making of Europe.
3. Bartlett.
4. Tombs.
5. Howarth.
6. Robert tried to persuade the girl’s father to let him sleep with her without any promise of marriage and without her permission, but was rebuffed. However he charmed her and they had a night of passion.
7. Although some historians doubt it. According to Howarth, Herleve’s father Fulbert was perhaps a burgess, that is a city person of some status, and her brothers appear on charters, which suggest they were fairly high ranking.
8. McLynn.
9. Another story has William and Matilda having a domestic row at which point he dragged her through Caen by her hair, and this display of manliness impressed her so much she agreed he was right.
10. It’s a testimony to the importance of Norman women that the number of daughters a couple had was only vaguely recorded. William and Matilda had five or six; he may have had daughters called Agatha and Adeliza or this may have been the same person. The chroniclers may as well have just written ‘some daughters or whatever’.
11. On the other hand some historians say it’s a myth and she was actually five feet tall, which was only a couple of inches below the average.
12. Borman, Tracy.
13. It’s probably not true that local lords also claimed the right to sleep with their peasants’ wives—the droit de seigneur—as this was only referenced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when people often made up or exaggerated how ghastly the medieval period was. It was in fact then that the term ‘medieval’ was invented as an insult. There’s no need to exaggerate how awful the medieval world was—for most people it was horrific enough.
14. In one incident in 1014 a knight is recorded as taking it off to avoid detection after a battle was lost.
15. Quoted in The Battle of Hastings, Bradbury, Jim.
16. Only three of these are definite murders; two of them were strangled and one starved to death. Of the other four, two were allegedly poisoned, one strangled and one smothered.
17. William of Malmesbury.
18. At the council held to investigate the Norman bishops Ivo was asked ‘What
did you do, you perfidious man? you should be condemned by the law for daring to consign your mother to the flames’.
19. This is a fairly dubious story, to be fair. But Harold is certainly known to have had a sense of humour.
Chapter 8
1. Schama, Simon.
2. McLynn.
3. Bradbury.
4. The town had been founded in 965 by Norseman Thorgls ‘Skarthi’, the hairlipped, and is probably most famous for the fair that inspired the song of the name. The lyrics date back to the nineteenth century but it may be medieval in origin.
5. Howarth.
6. A recent example is the television series Vikings.
7. http://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/the-battle-of-stamford-bridge.html.
8. This is the higher of the two estimates by historians of the time, the other being five hundred. The human tendency to exaggerate being what it is, it’s always safer to go for the lower figure.
Chapter 9
1. Morris, Marc.
2. A pinch of salt should be added here: stories about invaders falling and landing on the shore are quite perennial. The same thing was said about Julius Caesar and later Edward III in the 100 Years War.
3. It’s believed that the route of the Norman army can be traced from the 1086 Domesday Book and the parts of Sussex listed as ‘wasta’, or empty land.
4. William of Malmesbury.
5. Or perhaps it was ten or eleven a.m. Only three actual accounts of the battle exist.
6. At the time it was reported as his ‘leg’, although the knight in question certainly wouldn’t have been punished for such an attack.
7. William Malet is the only Norman whose successors today can definitely trace their descent in the male line directly to someone who actually fought at Hastings. This used to be a prestigious thing to claim in England, and there were often bitter arguments about pedigree.
8. https://familysearch.org/wiki/en/England_Pre-Norman_Conquest_Surnames_(National_Institute)
9. A church in Sussex, where Canute’s daughter is believed to be buried, may also hold his remains, although the Church of England has to date refused to allow an exhumation, which are only carried out in exceptional circumstances.
10. Battle Abbey was only bought by the British government in 1976 with funds raised by American citizens, Britain being a basket case at the time; something perhaps worth mentioning when you’re asked for the entrance fee.
11. Bridgeford, Andrew.
12. Bridgeford.
13. In a similar way the owners of Stonehenge used to hire out small axes so that visitors could chip bits off as mementos.
Chapter 10
1. Stanton.
2. Tombs, Robert.
3. Tombs.
4. Surrey Folk Tales by Janet Dowling.
5. The word wasn’t coined until 1776, first appearing in Adam Smith’s capitalist bible The Wealth of Nations.
6. Having said that, if you wanted to hunt well you needed a fair bit of cash anyway. A hawk cost as much as £5, an enormous amount, and a female peregrine, the most prized bird of all, far more. Many hunting birds were provided with privileged lives, living on luxurious perches in their master’s room.
7. Borman.
8. Borman.
9. It did not become known as this for another century. In fact there were two books, the Big Domesday and Little Domesday, because East Anglia was a bit late in getting it sorted.
10. As Robert Tombs wrote, it showed England was a ‘rich and developed agricultural country, with its forests already reduced to twentieth-century levels … and as much land under the plough as in 1900, using 650,000 oxen’.
11. In fact income tax was introduced in England as a temporary measure for the war with revolutionary France, and it’s safe to say the threat from Napoleon is no longer a national security priority.
12. The Normans are also seen as being behind priestly celibacy, although this was just the way the world was going; in 1076 the Catholic Church banned priests from marrying, the main practical reason being to stop the Church being dominated by nepotism and family corruption. The Normans just happened to turn up as this party was ending.
13. Morris.
14. Morris.
15. Ackroyd.
16. Tombs.
17. Tombs.
18. Tombs.
Chapter 11
1. Higham and Ryan.
2. Poole, A.L.
3. This is according to a dubious account by Orderic. Maybe William felt no guilt whatsoever.
4. http://www.marcmorris.org.uk/2013/09/the-death-of-william-conqueror-9_9.html
5. Barlow.
6. William of Malmesbury.
7. Anselm was also one of the greatest philosophers of the medieval Church, and the first to come up with the ontological argument for God, one that is deeply influential in philosophy and which is too complicated to get into here (i.e. I don’t understand it).
8. Poole.
9. Bridgeford.
10. Poole.
11. Borman.
12. The spot where Rufus fell in the New Forest is today marked by the Rufus Stone, although this was only put up in the seventeenth century and it seems the authorities just picked a random place.
Chapter 12
1. Poole.
2. Most took the surname FitzRoy, Norman for ‘son of a king’. Charles II is the only serious rival, with something like seventeen.
3. Queen Matilda was a great patron of learning, and of William of Malmesbury especially; Malmesbury, who had written all those critical things about the English, was actually half-Norman, half-English (like many writers this period) and was the first man since Bede to write a history of England, or at least a serious one that didn’t depend on wizards and magic swords for explanations.
4. Poole, A.L.
5. Morris, Marc King John.
6. Castor, Helen.
7. Castor.
8. Asbridge, Thomas.
9. Matilda’s father-in-law Fulk left immediately after the wedding to go to the Holy Land to try to worm his way into the affections of the heiress to the kingdom of Jerusalem. Unfortunately the rumor that she was having an affair with another crusader led to a civil war, until Fulk was eventually killed by falling from a horse.
10. For Game of Thrones fans, George RR Martin based King Joffrey’s demise on this event, the ‘Anarchy’ being one inspiration for the War of the Five Kings.
Chapter 13
1. Ackroyd, Peter.
2. Ackroyd.
3. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/apr/13/artsandhumanities.highereducation1.
4. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8424904/People-with-Norman-names-wealthier-than-other-Britons.html.
5. Stanton, Sir Frank.
6. http://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/05/medieval-new-england-black-sea.html.
7. According to historian Ian Mortimer between 80 and 95 percent of ethnically English people are descended from Edward III, and most likely closer to 100 percent. Tens of millions of Americans would also be.
8. Crystal, David.
9. Crystal.
10. Crystal.
11. Among the French words that entered in thirteenth century were treasure, letter, cup, tribute, serve, marble, grace, abbey, nunnery and attire.
12. Bridgeford.
13. Richard de Lucy, chief justiciar of England in the twelfth century..
14. Denzinger and Lacey.