Dan Snow (5:01)
God save the King. No black white unity until they disperse some black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. 1066. It was a year in which history seemed to move at a gallop. There weren't glacial changes and subtle shifts. This was a year that saw no less than three men ruling as kings of England. There were three great battles and other skirmishes as well. There were at least three pretenders to the English throne slugging it out on English soil. And it's a year that's come to just represent gigantic change. A moment of discontinuity. It is rightly remembered as one of the most Famous years of British history. First, let's have the context. And now I say this in most of our explainers, which is a bit sad and a bit worrying, but this was an era in which violence was the norm, in which might was right, and in which war was common, particularly wars around succession. Nature abhorred a vacant throne. The British and Irish Isles, the North Atlantic archipelago, you call it what you will, was a patchwork of competing groups in that period. There were kingdoms and statelets and tribal areas almost right across the isles from Donegal to Kent. You got England itself, a relatively big unit taking up much of the southern part of Britain. It had been united really for only a couple of generations, since the conquests of Athelstan, or arguably his little brother, Edmund. I'm not prepared to die on the hill of who was the first English king? It could have been Aethelstan, could have been Edmund, could have been Edgar the Peaceful. Let's not get into it right now, okay? That's another podcast. But it was one of them. And that was only around 150 years or so before 1066. To the north of England, you've got Alba, roughly we would call it Scotland. And in the 11th century, that is busy conquering a British kingdom, you might say more accurately a Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde. There's a whole other story there that's a part of Western Britain not yet conquered by the English speaking Anglo Saxons or other Germanic settlers from the continent. You've got Orkney, Shetland, the Hebrides Islands like Mull, Aran, Skye. You've got Kintyre, where my mum's family are from. They're Viking, effectively, they're ruled by Norsemen. And Ireland and Wales. Where do we even start? They were a tapestry, a mosaic of competing principalities, kingdoms and all that meant that there was competition, there was rivalry, there was violence in pursuit of wealth and power, violence was celebrated. It was seen as the natural order of things. Now, this feels disturbingly similar to my introductions for the first and Second World War explainers, and I think we might be hitting on a problem, folks. We've got a problem with violence in our species. But anyway, around succession, in particular, the passing of the crown, from one to another, there was always the potential for violence, for conflict. It was a terrible point of danger. And I'm really struck by how rarely stable successions were carried out in this period, how infrequent it was that a dynastic line could be set up not just in England, but in Normandy as well, across the Channel. Power was focused on, it was exercised by a single individual, a king, a ruler. There weren't really capital cities in this period. There wasn't really a bureaucratic state like we get based in Whitehall today or Washington D.C. because the kingdom was the center of the kingdom was really where the king laid his head that night. Continuity of government depended on the heartbeat of the king. And the minute that heartbeat stopped, well, there was no telling what would happen. Internally, there was division or competition between warlords or his sons, but externally there might be invasion. There was almost certainly going to be violence around that moment of succession and therefore nearly every generation of ruler had to establish themselves. It's almost like the hereditary blood claim in this period. It was necessary, but it wasn't sufficient to take over from the previous generation. It was a violent business, ruling in the early Middle Ages. I mean, let's check this out. Let's look at a case study. The kingdom of England. You've got King Edmund of England killed in 946. His son Eadwig was a wrongen. The country is partitioned between him and his brother Edgar. They got rid of Eadwig. Edgar ruled pretty successfully. But Edgar's son Edward was killed by an opposing faction within the Anglo Saxon kingdom in 978. If that doesn't smack of an unstable succession, I don't know what does. And if we're being honest, that's where the rot set in. Because guess who came to the throne after that? Aethelred the Unready. Edward, his half brother had been murdered. As I said, a great schism therefore, within the English state. The Vikings sensed that they returned. This was terrible timing. And there followed a great onslaught of Norsemen at the end of the 10th century and into the 11th century. And Aethelred just wasn't up to it. He was chased off the throne. England was conquered by Sweyn Forkbeard, the king of Denmark and Norway, and after even more fighting, was conquered again by son Canute. Anyway, you get the picture. This was not a time when the automatic transition from father to son was as assured as it was in other periods. Nearly every succession was contested and few were more famously contested than the one in 1066. Because in 1066 there wasn't even a son to take the throne. It was open season. It began in the depths of winter. King Edward the Confessor, the old king, he'd reigned for 24 years. He'd come to the throne as a result of a compromise hammered out between the Danish conquerors of England and the indigenous elite. He was Aethelred the Unready's son, but he'd sworn to respect the laws and the changes that had taken place under Danish rule. So he was a compromised candidate. He re established a kind of equilibrium that papered over the fissures within England. And one of those fissures was sort of embodied by one of King Edward's worst enemies, Godwin, Earl of Wessex. He was an Anglo Saxon, but he'd switched sides to become a key figure in the Danish administration of England. And now he sought to maintain his power after Edward the Confessor came to the throne and he'd forced Edward to marry his daughter Edith. Now, Edward the Confessor had not produced any children with Edith. Arguably, they'd never had sex with each other. He possibly abstained as a final act of defiance against his hated father in law, as they had no kids and so England had a succession problem. Edward the Confessor breathed his last on the 5th of January 1066. The next 12 months makes game of Thrones look like a game of pat a cake. The question on everyone's lips is who is going to rule England? There was a blood relative, but he was a child. And nothing spells trouble for the kingdom like putting a child on the throne. Now, that child in question is 13 years old. He's called Edgar the Etheling. He really is the last candidate from the line of Alfred, the last of this royal line of England, the royal line of Wessex. Edward Confessor had been his great uncle, so he's got the blood in his veins, but he's young and England was a rich country that needed a warrior to defend it. So went the thinking of Harold Godwinson, the local strongman. Harold was the son of Godwin from his Danish wife. So he got Harold Godwinson, the classic English leader with a Danish mother. When Earl Godwin had died in 1053, Harold inherited from him the Eldom of Wessex and the mantle as the most powerful aristocrat in the kingdom. By the mid-1060s, the Godwins had practically taken over. Three Godwin brothers in particular controlled the great earldoms of England. Between them, there were some other Godwin brothers who had been exiled or were just troublemakers and wound up dead. But these three main brothers have an earldom each and they've got a huge gang of supporters and friends they've put into positions of power. They are the top of a huge pyramid of patronage. They run the show. The Archbishop of Canterbury is a supporter. The Archbishop of York is a Godwinson man, the newly widowed Queen. Don't forget Edward the Confessor's wife. She is Harold's sister. So when Harold claims that Edward the Confessor, just before his death, had awoken from his coma and had anointed Harold as a successor, well, there's not many people high up in the kingdom who are going to disagree with that. So you've got Harold, he's the homegrown choice for the crown of England. But there were other claimants. There was one in particular claimant who I think, deep down, Edward the Confessor certainly probably had preferred. And I think Edward the Confessor probably had promised him the throne. I say probably because, look, disclaimer alert, folks. We have got very, very fragmentary evidence for all of this. So this is a story, there are other interpretations. We cannot be certain about this, but it is perfectly possible that Edward the Confessor had promised the throne to someone else. And that's because in 1051, Edward had had a particularly bad falling out with his father in law, Godwin, and his brothers in law. He'd sort of found his backbone. Briefly, he'd managed to expel the Godwin family and he'd put his Godwin wife in immediately into a nunnery. And at around that time, critically, he had invited Duke William of Normandy to come to England. The evidence for this is pretty solid. It's mentioned in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, for example. No one denies this happened. Now, who are these Normans? Norman comes from the root word Norsemen, north men. So the first Normans are basically Vikings, much feared Scandinavians who invade, who raid, who ended up settling in northern France in the late 9th century, the early 10th centuries. And they gradually became frankified, they became more French, they intermingled with the local population, they adopted Christianity, they swapped their ships for horses and castles. But importantly, they don't seem to have lost that warlike nature that the Vikings are famous for. And they carved out an area which became known as Normandy. It was a duchy of Normandy. And they do adapt quite well to Frankish customs, by the way. They have also got the best series of names in the history of the world. So let me just run through those. Rollo's successor was called William Longsword. And then we get his son, Richard the Fearless. His son was Richard the Good. He was father of Robert the Magnificent, who was the dad of William one day to be William the Conqueror. So it's not a family you want to mess with. Now, Edward the Confessor had been exiled as a child. He'd grown up in Normandy. His mother was Norman and he was a big fan of the place. He'd been happy there. And it seems that Edward may have promised the throne to William of Normandy. When William came to England to visit, he'd grown up with William, he liked him, they were cousins. But Harold Godwinson cares not for the old celibate king's wishes. He's dead, the throne is vacant and he's the man on the spot. He's on hand. And he had himself crowned within days of Edward the Confessor dying, possibly on the same day that Edward the Confessor was buried in Westminster Abbey. When news reached Normandy, William, Duke of Normandy, went absolutely bonkers. The Normans subsequently claimed that Harold had once visited Normandy. It's unclear why. And when he visited Normandy, he sworn an oath to uphold William's claim to the throne. He'd sworn on holy relics, bits of old bone associated with saints. Now, that's a big deal because it makes him an oath breaker in the eyes of the Normans, which in the 11th century is really, really bad. So William of Normandy is able to message the Pope. The Pope legitimizes the invasion. He says it's a holy crusade against this oath breaker that legitimized Duke William's claim to the English throne. And that meant that anyone who died for his cause on the battlefield would get fast tracked into heaven. So the invasion is divinely sanctioned, and that's useful. It's good to have God on your side, Sir William, he's got the papal backing. He sends word out across Western Europe, particularly to neighboring parts in northern France and the Low Countries. He says he's going to invade and he asks for mercenaries, he asks for volunteers. The wealth of England was famous. William makes it clear that there were going to be rewards for anyone who joined him under this papal banner, this papal flag, they're going to defeat the oath breaking Harold and he was going to take back the crown of England that was justly his. In England, Harold's well aware that all this is coming. He knew he's going to have to fight William and he gathers an army. It's called a great army. In fact, they spend the summer in the south of England and hanging about in and around the Solent, which is the closest part of England to Normandy. And he waits for William. And the year 1066 is made even more dramatic by the fact that there was a conveniently timed arrival of Halley's Comet, which blazed through the skies above England and gave those of a superstitious bent a rather Nervous feeling. Did it portend the death of kings? Well, this time around, yes, it very much did. So while William is assembling volunteers from as far away actually as Sicily in southern Italy for his invasion force, Harold is calling out his own English army. We call it the Third, the militia if you like, of England. What you've got with the English army is the elite corps are the so called housecarls. These are full time professional troops. They're some of the most highly trained, effective warriors in Europe at the time. You can imagine royal bodyguards in full mail armor, wielding swords and double handed battle axes. But he's also got a huge pool of part time soldiers as well. They're called the fyrd and they make up the bulk of the army. Each earldom into which the kingdom was divided was then subdivided into shires and each shire had to produce this levy of men. The Third, a small group of farms, perhaps a hamlet, would have to produce one fighting man with the right equipment and enough supplies to spend two months of the year at war in the service of the King. And so Harold gathers this force together, but the problem is by the end of the summer that term of service has run out. They've been sitting around, they've done their months of service and the harvest has to be collected, food supplies have run out and the Anglo Saxon Chronicle just tells us that that army had to disband and lo and behold, just four or five days later, we don't know if it was luck, the timing, it was great intelligence, we're not sure. The Norman fleet set sail from Dives in Normandy, but William sets out in less than ideal conditions. And that fleet, so carefully prepared for months and months, is blown not to England, but it's blown eastwards along the coast of northern France. Now I always thought as a child this was ridiculous. I mean, how hard can it be to get across the Channel? I mean it's a 12, it's a 14 hour sail with a decent wind behind you. I now know, let me tell you, that the weather in the Channel can be absolutely appalling. And that's in the summer, waiting for the right window to get a fleet of sail powered. Ships safely across can take weeks and weeks on end, particularly quite primitive ships which are packed with horses and troops and supplies. Actually, William ends up not in England, but at a town called St. Valerie. And he spends the next two weeks there looking at the weathercock on the top of St. Valerie Church, praying every day for the winter change and for the rain to stop. He even goes to the extraordinary extent of exhuming the body of St. Valerie himself, parading it around the Norman camp and getting everyone to pray for decent wind. Remember that a thousand years ago, the person who decides battles. At the end of the day, the person who decides the fate of a campaign, the wind direction is God. And William believes to the depths of his soul that if God isn't on his side, this isn't going to work. Finally, on the 27th, 28th of September, the wind does change direction and William begins crossing the English Channel. God must have answered his prayers this time, because he gets decent weather and it gives him a little window to nip across. But we're going to come back to that in a second, because while William has been waiting for the weather and exhuming corpses, all hell has been breaking loose in England. Let's cross the Channel. Harold, remember, had disbanded his army. He'd hoped that the threat might be over for the year and his men can go and help with the harvest. He got back to London and suddenly there he is, hit with a thunderbolt. Harold discovers that England has been invaded, but not in the south, by William of Normandy, at the other end of his kingdom in the north. And to make matters worse, at the head of the invading army, one of the greatest warriors of the Middle Ages, a giant veteran Viking called Harald Hardrada. And by his side, he has a very useful advisor. He has King Harold of England's troublesome brother, Tostig Godwinson. The family drama has just intensified. Throughout the 1050s and early 1060s, Harold and his brother Tostig had collaborated very well. They'd won victories in Wales together and Tostig had been made Earl of Northumbria. But Tostig had eventually fallen out with Harald, because during a rebellion against Tostig's rule in Northumbria, Harold had refused to back him and Tostig had been forced into exile. And from that point, the brothers were enemies. And it's not entirely clear what happens with Tostig, because we only know the story from later legends, from stories written down hundreds of years later, but it seems like he goes around the courts of northern France and certainly those of Scandinavia, looking for military support. Tostig may have had his eye on the crown himself, or. Or he just wanted to get back at his brother and restore his power base, the north of England. He's up for revenge. And Harold Hardrada is the man who he ends up persuading to have a punt at. Invading England, Sir Harold has been betrayed in the most brutal and personal way imaginable by his brother. It's all getting a bit godfather here, folks. But before we see how Harald responds to this, let's just pause and talk about Harald Hardrada, because he is a figure that I have been obsessed with for years. Harald Hardrada, well, the Hardrada bit roughly translates as hard ruler, severe, resolute. You get the sense he's a gigantic super Viking. He was an adventurer from his earliest days. He'd been chased into exile, he'd headed east along the arteries of the Viking world, deep into Europe and even Asia. He turns up with the Kievan Rus. The Rus are the people that give their names eventually to the Russians. These are Vikings, these are Scandinavians pushing down the great rivers of Russia and Ukraine. He meets Yaroslav the Wise. And old Yaroslav must have been wise because at one look at Harald Hardrada and gave him command of his forces. And then Harald Hardrada fought everyone really on behalf of Yaroslav the Wise. He fought the Poles, he fought the Step Nomads, he fought the Byzantines, he fought the Estonians. And there is one Harald Hardrada doesn't fight actually in this period. And then he heads even further south through those rivers and he signs up to fight with the Byzantines in their elite, so called Varangian Guard. Now, the Varangian Guard sounds like something out the Game of Thrones, but it's actually much cooler than that because it actually existed. It is a kind of Praetorian guard, I suppose you might say. It's an elite body of troops around the emperor. They're drawn often from north and northwest Europe, so there's lots of Anglo Saxons in there. There's Franks, there's Northmen in their ranks. It was thought they might be kind of the political and national and regional loyalties and competitions within the Byzantine Empire and they'd be able to quell dissent, put down rebellions without shedding a tear. And that's exactly what they did. And predictably enough, they then also played a role in the court intrigue, in palace politics, until it seems that they actually got to the point of installing candidates on the throne of the Byzantine Empire itself. King Harald Hardrada, on behalf of that Byzantine Emperor, he fought the Arabs. We think he went as far as Iraq and Syria. He went to Italy. He became known as the Bulgar Burner in Bulgaria because of his devastating campaigns there. He may have taken part in one particular palace coup where he blinded an emperor and put another candidate on the throne. All of which meant he became Fabulously wealthy, amazingly and somewhat predictably, he decided he wanted to go home. So he headed north. He arrived back at the court of Yaroslav the Wise and immediately attacked the Byzantine army straight away, because, of course, by then he knew everything about them. And he kept journeying north through Kiev. He married a princess, and with all of his wealth, he headed home to claim the throne of Norway. Because, see, deep down, all he wanted was to go home, was to return to his native Norway and become king. And unsurprisingly, given what I've just told you, he got exactly what he wanted. He arrived back in Norway and took the throne as king. He defeated the Danes several times in battle. His dream was unifying Denmark and Norway. He helped to forge certainly modern Norway. He explored the Arctic. I mean, the guy is completely extraordinary. One historian has a great quote about him, which I thought was one of the most euphemistic things I've ever read in my life. The historian wrote, his personal morality appears not to have matched the Christian ideal. Yeah, do you think? Anyway, this is the guy who has just crunched his keel into the gravel shores of Yorkshire. It's not great. He lands his ship called Serpent. Naturally, he unfurls his standard, known as the Land Waster. And he got down to business. He seems to have had about 300 longships, perhaps 12, perhaps 15,000 men. We can't be sure. Tostig has got some troops with him, but what Tostig really brings is intelligence and local connections, much more than raw manpower. Tostig and Hardrada sail up the River Ouse towards City of York. And if I've said it on this podcast one time, I've said it a thousand times. Rivers, folks, rivers. Until the invention of the steam engine, that is how people transported armies and goods and things around Europe. Anyways, they go up the river towards York, and then they fought a remarkable battle on September 20th just outside York. It's called the Battle of Fulford, and it's against the northern earls, the men who had actually replaced Tostig earls Edwin and Morcar. It's a bit of a complicated battle. What seems to have happened is the Norwegians used a path along the riverbank to outflank the English, and there was a slaughter. York surrendered to the Norsemen a few hours later, and it was then arranged that hostages would be brought to the Norwegian army at a place called Stamford Bridge, which is around 10 miles east of York, as a token of loyalty and submission. So Harold Hardrada has effectively conquered the north of England. He returns to his ships and he made his plans to gather up those hostages at Stamford Bridge a few days later. And that is when King Harold of England makes one of the boldest moves in English history. You listen to Dan Snow's history hit there's more coming. Hi folks, this episode of Dan Snows history. It's brought to you by Opera Air, the first browser with mindfulness at its core. From the makers of the Opera browser, Opera Air is lightweight, lightning fast and secure with a minimalist design and built in privacy tools like ad blocking and tracker prevention. But what really makes it different is its mindfulness first approach. With Opera Air you can set gentle reminders to take mindful breaks, stretch, which I need to do now, or breathe so you can stay refreshed instead of burned out. Plus the built in ad blocker helps you block out distractions and stay on task if you need to get into the zone. Opera Air comes with curated soundscapes, ambient sounds, lo fi beats, even binaural tones that support focus, creativity or relaxation while you browse. Opera Air isn't just a browser, it's a healthier way to be online. So experience a more focused, balanced and stress free web Download now at opera.com air only. Boost mobile Boost Mobile will give you a free year of service. Free year when you buy a new 5G phone. New 5G phone?
