550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)

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And MLS, consumeraccesscess.org number 3030. At the end of France, there is a plain filled with woods and fruit trees.
In this narrow place, there lived a great number of very tough, strong people, the name of whom was Normans. Such were their numbers that in time as the population grew, the fields and orchards of Normandy proved insufficient to keep them all fed.
Therefore, the Normans scattered here and there throughout all the various parts of the world, making their way into numerous regions and countries, abandoning what little they had in order to obtain very much more. These people departed their homes, but they did not follow the custom of most people who go through the world, entering into the service of others.
Rather, like warriors of old, their aim was to make everybody subject to them and under their lordship. And so they took up arms and broke the bond of peace.
And whether as a mass of infantrymen or on horseback, they proved themselves great in deeds. So that was the terrifying opening to the history of the Normans, written, Tom, in the mid-11th century by a monk called Amartus.
And as you have pointed out in your notes, this is very reminiscent of the way that, you know, when the Greeks wrote about the intrusion on the world scene of the Romans or the Chinese about the coming of the Mongols, they would say, oh my God, there's this extraordinary new people who are absolutely formidable, very frightening, very brutal. They kill everybody.
They, you know. Where they come from.
Yeah, where they come from. And the Normans are greeted by writers beyond Normandy's borders with the same kind of awe and terror, aren't they? Yeah, kind of dread for reasons that Amartes spells out, because he says that the Normans are physically hardy, very tough, very strong.
So Amartes writes in Latin, but the version we have is translated into French. And he specifies that the Normans have a lust for seigneurie, so lordship, and that they have a particular aptitude for chivalry, so fighting on horseback, what will in due course come to be the attribute of a knight, chivalry.
But basically, they're going around on horses, kind of nicking other people's land and property. And also, of course, he's very impressed by their wanderlust, this sense that they're spilling out across the world, and that their goal is a kind of greatness that they're not prepared to serve other people and amartis is speaking from experience so he is a monk in monte cassino the great abbey in central italy which we last heard of in the podcast uh because boite the bear the polish bear yes bear.
We're serving with the Polish army there in the Second World War.

But it's a very venerable abbey reaching back

to the beginnings of Christianity in Italy.

And the fact that he is observing this from Italy

is a reminder to us in England,

we tend to think of the Norman conquest

as the Normans are going one way.

He has seen a great stream of Norman freebooters,

adventurers, rogues, mercenaries, whatever,

heading south into Italy and beyond.

and I'll see you next time. He has seen a great stream of Norman freebooters, adventurers, rogues, you know, mercenaries, whatever, heading south into Italy and beyond.
And actually, for me, one of the great fascinating stories of Normans is how they expand southwards and become a Mediterranean power. Well, because southern Italy in particular, I mean, if you're going out and you're looking for opportunities to set up your lordship, then you want a place where there are going to be rich pickings.
And Southern Italy is perfect for the Normans' purpose, because this is a place where all kinds of different empires are rubbing up against each other. So there's Latin Christendom, but there is also the Byzantine Empire.
So the Byzantines have territory there and there's Muslim powers in Sicily and kind of constant ambitions to push up northwards through Italy. So this is perfect for a bunch of kind of hardy horse riding mercenaries looking essentially to be paid and then to use that money to turn on the people who are paying them.
And the first Normans who get hired in southern Italy are actually pilgrims returning from Jerusalem. And they land on the heel of Italy in 1018 from Jerusalem.
And they get employed by rebels against Byzantine rule. So Italian speaking rebels.
And then four years later, they've switched sides and they're in the service of the Byzantine Empire. And then within a decade, these kind of Norman mercenaries, strong men are carving out their own fiefdoms.
And Amartes, from his vantage point in Monte Cassino, about halfway up Italy, you know, he's full of admiration, actually, for their kind of prowess, for their energy, for their chutzpah, really, in just taking their opportunities. But there are other monks at Monte Cassino who are slightly more jaundiced.
So the abbot of Monte Cassino is a guy called Desiderius, and he will actually go on to become Pope. And he views these Norman adventurers kind of as a wolf pack, that they've been driven southwards by hunger, and they are hungry for blood.
So he wrote, the Normans are avid for rapine and possess an insatiable appetite for seizing what belongs to others. It's not entirely wrong.
Not entirely wrong and a perspective that others as well as the Italians will come to get. And I suppose a question that the Italians might have pondered was why didn't impecunious Normans, if they're looking for lordships, why aren't they doing it nearer home? Why are they coming to Italy to do it? Okay, well, let me just pause you there.
So last time we heard about how Normandy was established. So that's under guy called rollo or rolf who so we're talking about northmen vikings effectively who have carved out and semi being granted this territory in northern france by charles the simple and that was in the early 10th century so rollo died probably about 9 30 but now we've moved on a bit in time so the last person that we met who was the kind of the leader of the normans was a guy called richard the second richard the good so he's the brother-in-law of two other characters that we met last time ethelred the unready and knute and he had kept normandy pretty settled stable um secure and he's of course the brother as well of emma of normandy who's got herself mixed up in all kinds of exciting dynastic shenanigans over in england which it would take another hour to explain yeah so richard ii in normandy things actually have been very ordered and secure under him right yeah so and the measure of this is that initially he'd begun life as the Count of Rouen,

but he's kind of promoted himself to become the Duke of Normandy.

And essentially by the end of his life, everyone else, including the King of France,

has basically said, yeah, okay, you know, you can rank as a Duke or in Latin a dux. So this is the root of Duce, the title that Mussolini takes up.
It's to be essentially a kind of military strongman as much as anything else. And in the context of France, there are five dukes as well as the Duke of Normandy.
So the Duke of Burgundy, the Duke of Aquitaine, of Gascony, and directly on Normandy's Western Frank, the Duke of Brittany. And to be a Duke in 11th century France is not the equivalent of being, say, an Earl in England.
Because we talked in the first episode about how over the course of the 10th and into the 11th century, the kings of England have massively consolidated and centralised their power over this kind of very

precociously united kingdom. But in France, the opposite process has been happening.
Royal power has kind of ebbed and bled away. And by this point, so early 11th century in France, the king exercises direct rule only over a tiny patchwork of territories centered on Paris and Orléans.
So to rule as the Duke of Normandy is to enjoy an autonomy, a kind of degree of independence that is beyond the wildest dreams of the Earl of East Anglia or the Earl of the earl of mercia and to give people a sense i mean it's far more than let's say i don't know being the governor of a u.s state or something because you're also an international player aren't you you can almost run your own foreign policy is that fair well so we talked at the end of the last episode about how richard's son robert who rules as duke for almost a, in 1035, he goes off on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And we were expressing surprise at this because Normandy potentially would be in an unstable situation were he to die.
But one of the reasons he's going is undoubtedly because he's very pious. He wants to go to Jerusalem for those reasons.
But also he wants to cut a dash. He wants to display his wealth, his power, his authority on the grandest of international stages, which if you're a Christian, is Constantinople, still the greatest city in the Christian world.
And so, he travels from Normandy to Constantinople and he cuts an absolutely amazing dash, the Byzantines are really dazzled.

And this is despite the fact that they've had some dealings with the Normans in the south of Italy.

So they trust them, but they are impressed.

And, you know, there are these reports that even his mules are shod with gold.

And it's said that his campfires are fuelled with the shells of pistachio nuts. And this is regarded even by the Byzantines as the height of high living.
And so they call him the Magnificent. Which from a Byzantine, paying tribute to a barbarian from the wild and frozen north, is not bad.
I mean, that is kind of measure of his standing. And yet Normandy itself is not remotely as rich and powerful as the eastern roman empire the byzantine empire because not least because normandy is embattled right it's um surrounded by predators and rivals yes because um because the king of france doesn't exercise a kind of controlling authority it means that all these various dukes and counts if they're to rule their territory and perhaps expand them, they have to be very militarily proficient and they can't afford a single slip because, as you say, there are predators lurking everywhere.
So in the case of the Norman dukes, these predators would include most obviously, I suppose, the King of France himself because Paris is upriver from Rouen and that's the great centre of French royal power., the King of France himself, because Paris is upriver from Rouen. And that's the great centre of French royal power.
And the King of France is therefore a kind of brooding, slightly ambivalent presence. The Dukes have always been kind of essentially loyal to the King of France, and the King of France has shown favour to them.
But the risk is that if they seem too powerful, then the King may turn against them. So that's an obvious risk.
And then on the western flank of Normandy, we've already mentioned the Dukes of Brittany and the Bretons are seen rather like the Romans used to see the ancient Britons as just complete barbarians. So a Norman writer describes them as an uncivilised and quick-tempered people lacking any manners and rather as the romans did talking about the britons goes on about how they like to drink milk well you know my views on that my sister-in-law went out with a man called paddy and he only drank milk we went with them to lisbon and he only drank milk and they don't the portuguese aren't really into drinking milk so it was a total washout and.
And I've always been bitter about it since then. I mean, I didn't drink milk.
The Normans do in the long run go and they go and besiege and take Lisbon, don't they? In the second crusade. So this is what happens if you just, if you, yeah, if you get involved with this milk drinking business, all kinds of horrors will follow.
Yeah. So the Bretons are a constant challenge, but the most dangerous adversaries of the Norman Dukes are the Counts of Anjou, who lie to the south, and Anjou is centred on the Loire.
And these are Counts, not Dukes, so you might think, well, they're slightly second division. Yeah.
And there's an additional reason why it might seem slightly puzzling that the Council of Anjou are such a menace because there is actually a buffer zone between Normandy and Anjou which is the county of Maine so Le Mans as in the motor racing yeah I mean obviously not in the 11th century but no that's all lying in the future I'm glad you've clarified that yeah I just make sure that's clear so this is a buffer zone but it is clear that the Counts of Anjou are in a way the most Norman rival that the Normans have. You could look at the Counts of Anjou and say, yeah, they have something of the predatory quality of the Dukes of Normandy, because like the Dukes of Normandy, they are relative upstarts.
They're very ambitious. They're exceedingly brutal.
And they're very cunning, very politically proficient. And the Count of Anjou, as Robert rides off on his pilgrimage, going off to Jerusalem, is a gnarled, terrifying, completely brutal warlord called Fulknera.
His nickname is The Black. Fulk the Black.
That's a great name. Fulknera the Black.
And he has been in power for essentially half a century. So he succeeded his father back in 987.
And over the course of the 50 years that he's been Count of Anjou, I mean, he again and again displays his capacity for violence and vengeance and perhaps the most notorious episode from his life. So in the year 1000 itself, the great citadel in Angers, which is essentially his capital, gets seized and held against him.
And what is shocking about this absolute stab in the back is that the person who has led the rebellion against him is Fulknera's own wife

and the reason that she's done this is that Fulknera has realized that she's been having an affair with someone else so I mean Cuckolding someone like Fulknera is very very foolish so he is not happy about this he sweeps into Angers he storms the citadel absolute carnage most Angers is laid to waste and his wife is captured and burnt at the stake. And that is a very public statement that, you know, do not cross him.
But also what Fulke represents and people like him represent is something bigger than just the sort of the dynastic soap opera of 10th century politics. He's not a blowhard.
He's not just a kind of wild barbarian. There is a, is it fair to call it a revolution? There is a massive transition in European military life underway at this point, of which the Normans will be the great beneficiaries and the embodiment.
And that transition comes about, of course, because, and here's what I think a crucial difference between France and England.land france is so divided and fragmented it's competitive it's militarily competitive and that breeds technological change absolutely so the 11th century in france particularly is a period of of such transformation that i think it is not an exaggeration to call it a revolution, Europe's first great revolution. And it affects

almost every aspect. So we will see it's religious, it's social, it's cultural, but it is also

military. So just focusing specifically on the military revolution that is happening in France

at this time, it is absolutely, as you say, a consequence of the breakdown of royal authority

in France. And back in the time of Charlemagne, it's a prerogative of the king to set up fortifications, to build battlements.
That's essentially his job. But by the time the Carolingian dynasty, the dynasty of Charlemagne, has gone extinct in France and has been replaced by the Capetian dynasty, the Capetians are struggling to hold on to their own territory.
And so their fortifications, rather than expressing their ability to control

the whole of France, are an index of the fact that they're losing control. And because they've

lost control, it means that in lands beyond their own heartlands, other figures, the dukes,

the counts, whoever, they are starting now to uh fortifications because the king is not in a position to stop them and if you think of france as kind of rotting wood these fortifications are like fungi like mushrooms sprouting up out of the wood and these are strange unsettling structures no one's ever seen anything quite like them before. And these are strange, unsettling structures.
No one's ever seen

anything quite like them before. And these are structures that in French will come to be called chateaux and in English, castles.
And the greatest castle builder of his generation is Faulknera. Carcels are the basis of his power and his expansionism.

And it reflects a very cold-eyed insight which is that you can use castles not just for defense but for attack right these are tools of dominance and oppression they're tools they're symbols of surveillance and control but they're also you know they're they're impregnable you put them on a on a hill or on a rocky outcrop or whatever it might be and there's no way that the pits people in the surrounding countryside can store or very difficult for them to storm it you control that territory now once you put down your castle yeah so i mean essentially you can plant it in enemy territory and you put it on on a crag or whatever a cliff. And if you can't find a crag or a cliff, then you can build a great mound of earth that comes to be called a mott.
But essentially you're seizing territory that previously had had no value at all. But now it enables you to be proactive because you can build a very rough castle out of wood.
It can be incredibly rudimentary. We're not talking great towns of stone or anything like that.
But because people are not used to the idea of fortifications suddenly sprouting up, it has an outsized effect on the ability of those who control these structures to then impose themselves and intimidate people who are all around them. And once you've done that, once you've used these kind of makeshift structures, these castles to grab an area of territory, and if you keep it, then of course, in time, you can, I don't know, rebuild them in stone or whatever.
And this is what Falknera has been doing. And so the result is that, you know, he's been in power for decades and decades and decades.
By the 10 1030s Anjou has come to be shielded all along its frontiers by kind of great donjons built on their crags built on their moths and they're essentially impregnable and it means therefore that Anjou itself is impregnable but because of course France is such a competitive arena Anjou's neighbors then have to follow suit don't they so that um by this point or certainly by the time robert goes off on his jaunt to the holy land normandy too has lots of castles so you have to because it's basically a arms race yeah but i guess the the question then is is there a kind of human dimension to this and and and this is a really interesting story of course because it's a military revolution that is also a social revolution. So it is creating an entire new class of people.
Because these castles, obviously, to be effective, they have to be held by warriors who are very well armed, probably who have armour, you know, chain mail. And they have to be mobile, because if you're using the castle as a base, then you need to be able to sweep across the surrounding territory and intimidate anyone there, which effectively means that you need horses.
And how are you going to pay for this? How are you going to pay for the horses, the armour, the swords, and whatever, the lances? The answer, obviously, is you're going to do it mafia style by extorting cash out of those who don't have horses and armor, which effectively means the local peasantry. And up until the 11th century in France, peasantry essentially had been scattered.
But now they get kind of herded like sheep or cattle into pens. And these pens are what come to be called villages.
So the emergence of the castle also sees the emergence of the village. And it's, I suppose, the kind of the classic image that people would have of the Middle Ages of, you know, a great castle and peasants and villages clustered around the castle.
This is where that kind of image is originating. And to contemporaries who are living through this, it's a completely shocking, unsettling, terrifying experience because suddenly you're getting these gangs of male clad thugs galloping through, you know, across territory where previously there hadn't been such figures to menace and intimidate.
And clerks and clerics and monks, they don't know what to call them. But gradually, the word that they start to use to describe these figures, these kind of heavies on their horses, because they're horses, they come to be called chevaliers, so people who ride a cheval, a horse.
And in English, these figures will come to be called knicksier so people who ride a cheval a horse and in english these figures will come to

be called knicks knights so we've got the castles we've got the village we've got the knight it's all kicking off but the paradox though right is that if you have your falconera or whoever who controls all this stuff this makes him you know much more powerful and the potential, therefore, for a very strong and

domineering state indeed. On the other hand, if they're not controlled, they could easily be tools for complete fragmentation.
You know, you could have independent castles and independent groups of knights and all this kind of thing. So if you have a weak king or a weak count or duke or whatever then then the potential for complete anarchy, an armed and violent anarchy, is surely greater than ever before.

Yeah, absolutely. And there is an illustration of this, of course, in southern Italy, because this is exactly the process that's been happening.
because there isn't a centralized power there because you have all these rival empires who

are competing for these mercenaries these norman knights on their on their horses with their their

mail and their armor and their spears um there is a massive opportunity for these mercenaries then to build castles there that's what they're doing that is how they seize their fiefdoms um you know you can grab a crag or whatever as falnera had been doing in Anjou and do it in southern Italy.

And you've got, you know, perfect base for practicing kind of terrorism, essentially, kind of the mafia law. And all you need really is a horse and armour and arms.
And the question is, of course, if that can happen in southern Italy, then why not in Normandy itself? If there is not a strong du duke then there will be no one to stop people back in the Norman homeland from doing exactly what they're doing in southern Italy all of which means that for Robert the Magnificent for all his magnificence going off on his pilgrimage is kind of risky and dare I say irresponsible I mean he is the the authority figure if he leaves why you know isn't there a danger that all the different mercenary bands as it were will set up their own private fiefdoms yeah it's the height of irresponsibility for reasons that we touched on at the end of the last episode but just to recap the succession in Normandy is rocky Robert does have a son, this boy, seven years old, called William. And in fact, before he left on pilgrimage, he had officially nominated this boy as his heir, and he had won the sanction for doing this of the King of France.
But, you know, this boy, to reiterate, is seven years old. And as we discussed in the previous episode, he is also illegitimate.

I mean, that's not a killer blow, but it doesn't help.

And so should anything happen to Robert on his pilgrimage, then the potential for disaster is absolutely enormous, as it would have been at any point in the dukedom's history.

But particularly now you have this military revolution with the potential, as you've been saying, for kind of breakdown and anarchy. But, you know, things seem to be going well.
Robert has dazzled Constantinople. And very satisfyingly, Faulknera has been on pilgrimage as well.
Faulknera is a great one for going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. I think he does it five times.
He's there and Robert massively puts him in the shade. So that's great for Robert.
Goes to Jerusalem, again, cuts a tremendous dash, sets off back home. And by late June 1035, he is approaching Constantinople.
But then before he can cross the Bosphorus, disaster. Oh, no.
He falls sick. He is taken to the city of Nicaea on the south of the Straits.
And there, at the beginning of July, Robert the Magnificent, Duke of Normandy, dies. We mentioned how Falknera is on pilgrimage and has been put in the shade by this guy who's his great rival.
I mean, there are rum that perhaps it's poison it's literally it's literally as if you've been on holiday with dan snow and i would never poison dan no he'd poison you no dan would never you would put him in the shade tom with your enormous download figures come on and my pistachios yeah exactly and my gold shot mules exactly i Exactly. I think a wonderful way to end this half would be for me to read from Millennium, my book on this very subject.
I mean, I can't read. I'm not reading that.
You can read it. Absolutely, you can read it.
The Count of Anjou, whose Princeton was separated from Normandy only by a single makeshift buffer, the unfortunate county of Maine, had long been angling to roll back Norman power.

Now, with Robert dead, such a goal appeared eminently achievable. William the new Duke

was only eight years old. Normandy had effectively been decapitated.

What an unbelievably thrilling cliffhanger.

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Welcome back to The Rest is History. And so at last, we come to one of the great monsters in all history, Duke William of Normandy, the man who shamed himself and his country by winning the battle of hastings and carrying out the norman conquest so we're in july 1035 and this blood-stained figure is at this point only eight years old he's william the bastard everyone calls him william the bastard because he's not legitimate and and basically, the odds are massively against it.

I mean, he probably won't live to the end of the year.

You see, I'm surprised you don't admire William.

Really?

Because I like a ruthless...

Yeah, I mean, ultimately a kindly man.

I mean, I think there is something of Cromwell

about William the Conqueror.

Do you?

Yeah.

He's a man of austere piety

and given to brutal invasions of his neighbours. I think we said recently that I and this series, there's nothing I like more than law and order.
And he's very much a law and order man. Well, as we will see, because the news comes back to Normandy that he is now the Duke and he is really staring down the barrel.
So, as we said, he's called by his enemies, particularly Anjou, William the Bastard. And I guess you could say he's a bastard in every sense of the word.
Very good. So it is said that his mother was the daughter of a man who had prepared the dead for burial.
Or an alternative story is he was a tanner or perhaps he was both. But either way, you know, he is working with the dead.
So he is seen as being a man polluted by rottenness and filth. And this is a very damaging charge because it implies that William, although of noble descent on his father's side, on his mother's side, is shot through with baseness.
And the thinking is that Robert, by taking to bed the daughter of a corpse handler, has, as you would say, Dominic, bred a monster. Right.
Yeah. And that this young Duke, if he is allowed to grow to adulthood, he will be fated to serve as the shroud winder, not of dead but of entire kingdoms i mean the people who say that are not wrong well maybe but to be honest the normans themselves don't really care about um williams parentage partly because actually um his grandfather wasn't an undertaker or or a tanner he was actually an official in the duke court right so this was all kind kind of malevolent anti-norman propaganda right and also it's because i think that they remain sufficiently viking that they're they're not too worried about uh the issue of wives and concubines and things like that they're like the rolling stones they don't care about petty morals well it is observed by the the monk rudolph graber who is a brilliant um source for this whole period um it has always been their custom for as long as they've been settled in france to take as their princes the offspring of concubines so i guess you could kind of maybe say that the running states i don't know yeah i think you probably could and people may remember that there was this kind of similar issue with canute wasn't there there? And he had two wives or was one a concubine or anything.

Although it is interesting that times are definitely changing. So views on marriage are also part of this great revolutionary process that is kind of picking up speed at this time.
And the Normans are really actually kind of starting to buy into this. The fact that William's father had gone on pilgrimage is kind of evidence of that.
They are very, very pious christians and increasingly anxious not to seem on the wrong sides of this kind of great moral revolution and and this combines with a sense that the best way to for a noble family to pass on its patrimony is not to have a divided inheritance. So you remember when we talked about the Franks, you were expressing surprise that the Frankish kings and emperors kept dividing up their patrimony between their sons and thinking, well, why haven't they sussed out? This is a bad thing to do.
This is again is the period where they are starting to work that out. So the royal dynasty, the Capetian dynasty has worked this and it seems that robert the duke of normandy who's just died he had worked it out as well so after he has fathered william he doesn't take a wife and it's probable the reason he does this is he doesn't want to have a divided inheritance he doesn't want anyone to doubt that william is there well no one does doubt although william is only eight years old so inevitably the early years of his inverted commas reign are going to be very bloody and contested i mean whatever he does and you know how many eight-year-olds are prepared to take the reins of this warrior state sure but i think if there'd been you know two other brothers okay maybe from a legitimate source, then that would have been a real source of instability.
But you're right. I mean, he's in a terrible position.
And a contemporary chronicler notes as a sign how, forgetful of their loyalties, many Normans set about piling up mounds of earth and then constructing fortified strongholds on them for themselves. So these are the castles being used of anarchy basically the motts the mounds of earth and the baileys that the towers that are put on top of them and essentially rival warlords within a dukedom building castles is a terrible sign it's a sign of state breakdown yeah and the fact that these warlords have their castles means that they can launch raiding parties on their rivals so you get this craze throughout the early years of william's dukedom for abducting uh foes so there's a notorious case where one is abducted from his own wedding feast carried off blinded castrated you know that's not a good start to a wedding.
So people are literally neutering the opposition. And anarchy is spreading across Normandy.
And it's absolutely terrible time and will always be remembered as the worst time that Normandy ever endured. And what about William? I mean, he's only eight.
What's he doing in all this? He's presumably not going around castrating people. No, and he's not without support.
So he does have, you know, he has the backing of the powerful men in his own family, the church hierarchy in Normandy. They stay loyal to him and he has the support of the King of France.
And that, again, is not insignificant. But it's not enough to prevent his childhood from being constantly shadowed by violence.
So two of his guardians are hacked down in quick succession. His own tutor is murdered.
And there's one particularly notorious occasion where he's in a room and his steward is also in the room asleep. And people barge in and they cut the throat of the steward and the blood spills out.
The young Duke is asleep and he wakes up and finds. Oh, my God.
No, he thinks he's wet himself, perhaps, or something. Oh, no.
It's like the horse's head and the godfather. Yeah.
I mean, so terrible. But, of course, the point of that story is they killed the steward, but they've left William alone.
People are not after William himself. They're exploiting the fact that he is not in a position to reign in this anarchy.
But they're not targeting him for elimination. And I suppose you could say that the process of living through these horrors, I mean, it's stealing him, isn't it? Yeah, it's a good, you know, we should think about this a little bit more carefully with our own royal family.
There may be a similar Spartan education. I thought with your enthusiasm for public schools that you might say that this could be a way to breed a hardy new elite.
Exactly. Send them off and murder people.
This is what Prince Philip did with the king, Senator Gordonstone. But there is actually, I said Spartan, but I mean, you said it in your notes.
Thereartan about um norman's education so so somebody like william he is being trained from really from birth for war for cruelty for violence i mean that is these are the duties of a norman of a norman man yes and indeed women so aristocratic girls are being raised in this environment where, you know, it's all sweat and iron and horses and hawking. So like a British public school for girls, actually.
Pretty. Yeah, pretty much.
Horses, cruelty. So arms and horses and the exercises of hunting and hawking, such are the delights of a Norman.
Yeah. And these are, of course, the patterns of the upper classes that will seize power in britain yeah and to a large extent still own most of the land to this day so yes this is where it all begins and william himself again like a spartan is raised as part of a wolf pack so he's surrounded by kinsmen by high friends, and these are called nuri.
So people who are young boys, young men who are nourished at the side of the Duke. And so they grow up thinking of themselves as William's brothers in arms.
And this is a pack of carnivores being trained to despoil. And what are they learning?

They are learning the skills that are very, very demanding for this new way of war. So you have to learn how to handle a lance properly, to sit in a saddle and use a lance.
I mean, this is a new skill, a new requirement, takes a lot of training. And, you you know it takes years to perfect but william and his nuri his comrades you know this is what they're learning and of course they're also trained in all the cutting edge military technology of which castle building is the most obvious and it's all about attack about spoliation about conquest so i mean that reminds me a little bit of alexander the great and his companions being raised with their famously long macedonian spears and you know the arts of conquest and all of that kind of thing however there is a different dimension to this because as you point out in your notes william is also being raised to be extremely pious not to let's say, almost fanatical in his attachment to the faith and his belief that he is the embodiment of a kind of new kind of Christian faith, I guess.
That again, I think there's a kind of slight parallel there with Cromwell. Okay.
He's able to commit what seem to be atrocities, but do so in the absolute conviction that he is fulfilling God's will. And there is a kind of new type of militancy to this faith for reasons that we maybe come to later in this series.
But William absolutely is raised in the kind of the fervor, in the spirit flame of this sense. And he sees absolutely no contradiction between his vocation as a warrior and his duty to give his subjects peace because it's only as a warlord that he can stamp his authority on the Normans.
If all the Normans are predators, then he has to establish himself as the top predator, as the apex predator. And even the Normans themselves can recognise that it would probably be best for the dukedom if William is able to essentially slap down anyone who would think to rival him.
So there's an English chronicler writing after the Norman conquest in an abbey in Normandy who writes about the Normans, rather as you would about dogs, I think. For discipline the Normans with justice and firmness, and they will prove themselves men of great valour who press invincibly to the fore in arduous undertakings and proving their strength fight resolutely to overcome all enemies.
But without such rule, they tear each other to pieces and destroy themselves for they hanker after rebellion, cherish sedition and are ready for any treachery. And I think William undoubtedly thinks this.
and it steals him in his determination not to tolerate any rival and the older he gets the readier he is to kind of impose this authority on his his his war-torn dukedom for the benefit obviously of people who don't want to live in anarchy and be abducted on their wedding day and castrated. Yeah.
Now, let's move to two people who are witnesses to all this, who see all this happening. They are not Norman born.
They are exiles at Williams Court. And these are people that we mentioned last week who are the heirs to the Anglo-Saxon bloodlineline that had ruled england for so long the the heirs of kurdick the so-called mythical founder of this bloodline and these are the half brothers of edmund ironside they are called alfred and edward they are the sons of ethelred the unready.
And they have been in Normandy since 1016.

So they were there for 20 years before William even succeeded,

hanging around at the court.

What's been going on with them?

They've been hanging out in Normandy because they don't want Canute to murder them,

essentially, despite the fact that their mother, Emma, is now married to Canute.

But she's kind of washed her hands of them. She doesn't care about them.
She essentially sees them as losers. She doesn't need to worry about them.
And I think this isn't really surprising because Emma, I mean, she is a baggage. She is very hard-nosed.
She's very calculating. And essentially, she's interested in upholding her power yeah and she can see that there's no prospect of edward or alfred succeeding to a throne that has now been seized by the a danish monarchy and therefore the son that she is backing is her son by canute a guy called half a canute that is the person that she needs to succeed her husband now there is a complication because of course she has a deadly rival who is this other wife concubine whatever you want to call her yeah alf gifu from the midlands canute's first wife who canute has set up in denmark and who likewise has given canute a son um harold who will call harold hair, even though that nickname doesn't emerge until the 12th century.
Even so, Emma has kind of advantages over Alf Gifu. She is Canute's principal wife.
She's the Queen of England. She's been anointed as such.
And because of this, most of the power breakers in England, so the earls and so on, they accept that Harthacnut is the legitimate heir, that he is the guy who properly should succeed Canute. Although, if I can jump in at this point, is there not a slight regional dimension to this, in that Emma and Harthacnut tend to have the support of the big landowners or the big men in Wessex, but you mentioned Elf Gifu.
She's from the Midlands. And the Mercians are more likely to back her and her son, Harold Harefoot.
Yes. But I still think that had Harthacnut been on the scene when Canute dies, then probably most of the Witan, most of the earls in England would have accepted Harthacnut as king.
The problem is, however, it doesn't turn out like that. We're a few months on from the death of Robert the Magnificent in Nicaea.
It's the autumn of 1035, Canute dies, and the timing is an absolute disaster for Emma. Because as you say, Harthacnut is in Denmark, and Harold Harefoot is in England.
So he is the guy on the scene. And what makes it even worse, Emma sends kind of frantic messages to her son saying, you know, come here, come and get the throne.
But he can't because he's having to deal with a revolt in Norway. I mean, it's kind of interesting because it's almost like he's running an election.
He has to wine and dine all the various members of the Witan to try and persuade them that he should succeed as king of england and that half can it should be binned and emma is likewise frantically campaigning for half a canoe to succeed so she um she spreads rumors that harold was actually a changing that he was the son of a servant woman um therefore not remotely legitimate not the son of canoe at And when this doesn't work, she barricades herself in Winchester, which is the place where the coronation would happen, to try and stop Harold from kind of sneaking in and having himself crowned there. But then Elf Gifu turns up on the scene.
She sailed from Denmark. So bizarrely, she's in Denmark with her rival, with Harthikinit.
It's all mixed up. But Elfgifu is very proactive, hates Emma,

wants her boy to succeed.

So she does come sailing over

and she's very good at campaigning.

She wines and dines

all the various earls and jarls

and people,

all the members of the Witan,

urging them to choose Harold as king.

And because, as you said,

there are people in England,

particularly in Mercia,

who instinctively do want to back Elf Gifu's relatives being among them.

She's very well connected in Mercia.

And essentially the kind of the momentum is all with Harold.

And so he marches on Winchester where Emma has barricaded herself.

Emma realizes it's all up for her.

She runs away, leaves Winchester.

And Harold seizes what the Anglo-Saxon chronicle describes as all king knute's best valuables essentially the coronation regalia so he's he's he's got what he needs now to be crowned if we stop the story there emma and hartha knute are on one side and they look like they've lost and on the other side elf gifu and her son harold hairfoot looks like this bloke hairfoot even though it's not his name he's going to be king and he's got it all going on for him so now emma's going to be out in the cold and she does something that i think is absolutely bonkers at this point she drops her candidate her son and says well it wasn't really about him in the first place actually it's more about me so now she digs out the two losers from normandy and says what about the it throws them into the mix i know she's she's such a entertainingly horrible and ruthless character because of course it's incredibly risky for these two lads to come over to to england they haven't been to in England for 20 years, but they haven't seen her for 20 years either. I mean, they have no relationship with her whatsoever, but she's like, right, you two now.
I actually am going to start sending you Christmas cards. Yeah, it's absolutely mad, but they do come in answer to their mother's request.
I guess they kind of feel, well, maybe there's an opening here for us to come back. So the first to arrive is the eldest Edward and he lands at Southampton.
But I mean, the welcoming committee is not all it might be. He has a look at it and he thinks, Oh God, I'm out of here.
And he sails back to Normandy. And then shortly after that, Alfred makes his own crossing and he lands, immediately gets captured and him and all his followers are treated very, very brutally.
So we're told that his followers are stalled into slavery, cruelly murdered, laid down with chains, blinded, mutilated and scalped. And Alfred himself is taken to Ely in the middle of East Anglia, kind of on an island surrounded by the Fens.
And there he is blinded and he dies soon afterwards of his wounds and mummy doesn't care well mummy does care because now you know that attempt's failed so she she runs away to flanders and of course everyone is saying she's behaved terribly i mean this is monstrous behavior and so she starts kind of again spinning frantically and saying, actually, it wasn't me who sent the letters to Edward and Alfred. It was Harold Harefoot who did it.
There's no truth in that. That's just a lie.
No, because it was her seal on it. And she's saying, oh, he faked my seal.
He hacked my account. Right.
That's terrible. Yeah.
And in 1038, when Emma summons Edward to go and join her in Flanders, he says, no way. I've had enough.
Well, you wouldn't. I mean, that's not a mother you want to be reunited with, frankly.
But here's the thing, right? So this has been a mad story so far. All these people called Harefoot and Harthikin and whatnot, and just ridiculous twists.
But now there is another insane twist to this story, which, you know, if you were the Game of Thrones script writer,

you'd say, come on, this is a bit much.

So Harold Harefoot basically has won.

He's king.

The years go by.

He is 25 years old.

He could live for another 40 years.

You know, a lot of English listeners to this podcast

may be thinking, I've actually never heard of this bloke, Harold Harefoot.

I think there's a case for saying he's kind of the most obscure king who's ever ruled England. People know nothing about him.
I've never heard of him. I know nothing about him.
I don't believe this man was ever king of England. And the reason for that is the sources are so kind of fragmentary and vague, but also unbelievable twist.
He drops dead out of nowhere for for no good reason yet another character in this story who drops dead out of from nowhere yeah so he's gone and this is obviously brilliant news for uh half canute and for emma so three months after the death of harold hairfoot half canute lands in kent and who should be with him but his very very self-satisfied mother who's absolutely delighted right so harthacnut to get to england has had to agree quite stiff terms with the king of norway so he abandons his his claim to norway for good and there is a story which is i mean if it's true is potentially very significant for future developments that he had agreed with the Norwegian king, a guy called Magnus, that whichever of the two die first, if they die without an heir, then the other one will inherit the kingdom. Let's just sow that seed.
If later on there's another king of Norway hanging around and there's's an english succession crisis he might dig this out and say whoa i'm actually entitled yeah i'm in i'm the king of england now so um so how does harth canute do he's terrible so i think his reign sounds brilliant it's very liz truss like isn't it yes yeah so there's this lettuce this lettuce sitting in Winchester. So the first thing Half Canoe does is he shows himself a good sport by digging up the corpse of his half-brother, Harold Harefoot, dragging it through a sewer, and then dumping it all shit-stained in the Thames.
Oh, God. He then imposes massive tax rises

and crashes the economy.

That's only a demi-truss.

That's more a kind of Rachel Reeves.

That's a Rachel Reeves,

but then a truss effect.

So the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,

and I'm slightly paraphrasing here,

writes,

all who had enthusiastically welcomed

his coming to power

now decided he was useless.

Oh, no.

And it may be because he's losing support.

It may be because he's already ill by this point. may be because emma is still on maneuvers that he he invites his half brother edward over from normandy to join him and edward this time does come i mean maybe he is ill because in june 1042 so he has ruled only for a couple of years, he's drinking at a wedding feast.
In Lambeth, I read. In Lambeth.
In Lambeth, yes. When suddenly, as the English Axan Chronicle puts it, he fell to the earth with an awful convulsion and those who were close by took hold of him and he spoke no word afterwards, but passed away.
This is why you could never really make a drama of this because people would say i've invested so much in these two characters this feud between hairfoot and harthacanute that i assume will dominate the rest of the series and then no they're both dropped dead for no no no obvious reason but meanwhile in in norway uh king magnus kind of offstage character but as you've been saying this is his chance well this is his chance um you know this is chance to claim the throne but the english don't want him and that means that the only plausible possible candidate is emma's other son edward the son of athelred who is a descendant of Alfred the Great and ultimately Kurdic. And so unbelievably, the Kurdic ingas have been restored.
The line of Ethered the Unready had the last laugh. Absolutely.
So Easter 1043, Edward is crowned king. And people may be wondering, you know, Emma must be exultant about this.
this she's she's triumphed yeah not a bit of it edward's grudge against his mother is still going strong so he confiscates all her treasure and banishes her from court um and unbelievably she then starts plotting with magnus the king of norway to overthrow her own son and it's just absolutely deranged behavior that doesn't work out so she just basically then what what happens to her she just gets she just kind of withers away in obscurity so she dies in 1052 she's buried in Winchester alongside Canute and half the Canute and Edward is now king so while all this has been going on in England William has been of age. And in 1047, he's 19 years old.
He faces down a great rebellion and he rides out to battle for the first time and he secures a very bloody victory. And riding back from this great victory, he rams home the implications of his triumph by dismantling a large number of illegally raised castles.
And as he enters his 20s, it is clear to everyone that the anarchy in Normandy is over, that strong rule has been reestablished, that William is going to be a duke to respect and to fear. And meanwhile, William himself, watching what's been going on in England, he must have been pondering the lessons of Edward's unexpected accession to the English throne.
And he must have reflected, well, this teaches that usurpers can be toppled if they have God's favor at their back that those who are favored by god can claim thrones and that a man can travel from normandy to england and become a king but that's all very unlikely right because this guy edward who's finally become king he's hale and hearty he could have sons and if that were to happen you know there would be no opening whatsoever there'd be no vacancy no there'd be no vacancy but also just suppose that edward doesn't have sons and so there is a vacancy it presupposes that there wouldn't be people in norway or indeed in england itself who might not have thoughts that perhaps they should become king in England itself I wonder who you could be thinking about there Tom well we will find out in our next episode when we turn to one of the glittering stars of English history the last English king hero to all who him, the story of Harold Godwinson.

Now, if you want to hear that episode right now, and why wouldn't you?

You can, if you're a member of the Rest is History Club.

And if you're not already a member, then just go to therestishistory.com and sign up.

But we will be back next time with the next thrilling chapter in this epic saga.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
So here's a clip from our series on the troubles. This is the strangest thing about this story is that Northern Ireland is so small.
And listen, there are other, I mean, you could tell a similar story about Sarajevo or any number of other types of places where there's been a conflict, Rwanda, and then the conflict ends and everybody still kind of lives in the same community and you see these people. But, you know, there's an instance, even as adults, where Helen McConville was with her own family in McDonald's and sees one of the people who abducted her mother.
There's a moment that I describe in the book where Michael McConville actually gets into the back of a black taxi in Belfast as an adult. And he sees in the mirror in the front of the taxi, he realizes that the man driving him is one of the people who decades

earlier abducted his mother. And the strangest, most eerie aspect of this is he doesn't say

anything. And he doesn't even know if that guy recognizes him.
And they drive in silence,

and then he just pays the guy's money and leaves.