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Eleanor Parker: The Last Anglo-Saxons
01:03:38
We chat to Dr Eleanor Parker about the next generation of Anglo-Saxons whose lives took a different course thanks to 1066.
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- [00:00]
Commercial Narrator
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Commercial Narrator
I get so many headaches every month.
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Eleanor Parker
It could be chronic migraine 15 or
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Commercial Narrator
more headache days a month, each lasting
- [01:07]
Eleanor Parker
four hours or more.
- [01:08]
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Eleanor Parker
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Ali Hood
Welcome to Rex Factor. This week Eleanor Parker, the Last Anglo Saxons with your hosts Graham Duke and Ali Hood.
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Graham Duke
Hello hello and welcome to Rex Factor where we are reviewing all the nearly Monarchs of England and the United Kingdom from Ethelwold to Albert Victor, the people who could or should have become Monarch but for the intervention of fate.
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Ali Hood
It could be called Rex Factor.
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Graham Duke
Gutted well, I probably saved that maybe for the Harald Hardrada episode or.
- [02:48]
Ali Hood
Nice, nasty.
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Graham Duke
Now, we've just finished, of course, our first miniseries covering the Saxon and one Viking nearly monarchs. So we've got a couple of interviews. Have we finished a series miniseries? So, yeah, well, we. We haven't actually recorded Harold and Edgar yet, so we've actually got two more to do.
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Ali Hood
Right.
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Graham Duke
But when, by the time this episode comes out, we will have released.
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Ali Hood
I don't even think of them as Saxons. I mean, I know Harold isn't.
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Graham Duke
He's Viking.
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Ali Hood
Oh, harrowed hard rider rather than Harold. But by then it's like. It's a generational change. This is why, you know, why the Vikings never stood a chance because there was a wind of change and it's not.
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Graham Duke
It's not their time.
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Ali Hood
It's not their time. I mean, that could be the name of this series. It's not their time.
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Graham Duke
Well, so we have obviously just released those episodes on Harald Hardrada and Edgar the Etherling.
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Ali Hood
Weren't they good?
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Graham Duke
Weren't they great episodes? So we've got a couple of interviews lined up to reflect on the period. This is the second, those interviews, we haven't done any yet, but this is the second one. And in fact it will be the third interview that we've done because the first interview we did we released before we even released Aethelworld, but we haven't recorded that one yet either.
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Ali Hood
God, it's like working with Doc Brown.
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Graham Duke
So we are speaking today to Eleanor Parker about effectively sort of the last Anglo Saxons, last children of Anglo Saxon England, to quote subtitle of her book. So, you know, we often see the Saxon story stopping at Hastings, but as we saw Edgar the Etheling, he keeps on going, bless him.
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Ali Hood
He does. And I don't know how there's this
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Graham Duke
whole afterlife for these young Saxons who aren't at Hastings. They aren't wiped out in the conquest. And yet how do they accommodate themselves? How do they cope with the Norman conquest? What happens to them? What do they make of the tumultuous events?
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Ali Hood
Yeah, because if they play the cards right, you've actually. Could you stand a chance of surviving this? But one slip.
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Graham Duke
But equally, they don't know that this is it forever. The Viking conquest didn't last. Yeah, for very long. Maybe this one will pass over. So it's a whole generation that had to come to terms with it that we don't often look at. So that is what we are going to be speaking to Eleanor about today. So we are very happy to be joined on the podcast today by the historian Eleanor Parker. Eleanor, thanks so much for joining us.
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Eleanor Parker
Hello, nice to be here.
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Graham Duke
Could you just give listeners just a quick sort of introduction to yourself in terms of who you are and what you do?
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Eleanor Parker
Yes. So I'm a medievalist and I teach Medieval English Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford. But my interests kind of lie between literature and history, so that's kind of where I'm coming from.
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Graham Duke
Now, we're going to be talking to you today, particularly looking at your book, the Last Children of Anglo Saxon England. I think I first encountered you a blog that you wrote. I'm not sure. Are you still doing it now? Have you stopped?
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Eleanor Parker
Not so much, no. That was. Yeah. A Clerk of Oxford was my blog, but I don't do that very much more.
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Graham Duke
Yeah, I really enjoyed that. I got some fun little stories from the podcast, various different series back and things to annoy Ali about when I needed Dunstan information.
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Ali Hood
Yeah.
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Graham Duke
Good news is there's more Dunstan to come.
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Ali Hood
Excellent.
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Graham Duke
Yeah. So the reason we wanted to speak to you about the book and about that today is that we've just finished doing our mini series on nearly monarchs from the Anglo Saxon period. And I think I'm probably guilty of this as well, but I feel like a lot of people sort of imagine that we have the Battle of Hastings and then that's it. The Saxons are done. They're finished, and now it's the Normans. But actually, of course, there's this whole lot of people who are Saxons and are in England and are going to have to come to terms with what's happened. And they're not all just kind of ordinary people living their lives. They're quite important people that might have expected to have quite prominent roles to play that have to come to terms with it in some ways. So it feels almost like it's a nearly generation of Saxons. That's kind of why we wanted to talk to you about it today. What sort of drew you to this as a topic to write about?
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Eleanor Parker
Well, I think it was actually very much what you're saying about this sense that, you know, we all know the Norman conquest as this huge moment of change in English history, you know, kind of the end of one Anglo Saxon world and then the beginning of the Norman world. And, you know, things change really fast. But then, of course, if you think about it as an event that people were living through and experiencing, you know, things don't happen like that in real life, do they? Everything changes overnight and nothing's ever going to be the Same again. There were people who had to kind of live through that transition and come to terms with what it meant for them personally, for their families, you know, for their own hopes about their life and particularly the idea of the nearly generation. I mean, very much as you say, people who would have expected to be powerful in England if the Norman Conquest hadn't happened, you know, the members of prominent families who probably would have gone on to be king or earl or whatever, and then that didn't happen because of the Norman Conquest. I was really interested in that sense of, you know, their lives kind of suddenly changing and how they dealt with the consequences of that.
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Ali Hood
Some better than others, though. Who's that fellow I really like?
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Graham Duke
Edgar?
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Ali Hood
No, no. Yeah, the Etheling. Yeah, yeah, Edgar. Oh, it sounded odd, you saying his name without the ethling bit on the end. Y. What a life. He sort of made the most of it, though.
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Eleanor Parker
Yeah, he's really interesting. I mean, he's absolutely one where we stopped talking about him after, you know, the conquest and then, like, the Battle of Hastings and then, you know, the rebellions afterwards, and then people just like, okay, Edgar Atheling, his life just stopped at that point, but actually he lived on for decades afterwards. Yeah, interesting things.
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Ali Hood
Yeah. Just sort of able to check out of one storyline and go swimming in all the opportunity of the next. It's nice.
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Graham Duke
So how did you decide sort of who you're going to be focusing on? Because I sort of was thinking, reading the book, that almost any one of the chapters could have almost been like their own. Their own book, their own thing. So were you ever tempted to just sort of write about one person? Was it always going to be this kind of collective picture?
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Eleanor Parker
I think I like the idea of a kind of group biography, partly because, you know, we don't have tons of information about most of these people. You know, their lives are kind of quite sparsely recorded, which is one of the interesting things about you, this sense that they fall into a historical gap. You know, they don't get kind of a lot of attention from medieval historians, so sometimes we have to sort of ferret out what happened to them from. From different sources. So I think in some ways it would have been quite hard to write a whole book about any one of these people. Maybe you could do it, but it would be quite hard, so. And then I also thought there was something interesting about kind of putting their stories alongside each other and thinking about which of them do get recorded by historians and which of them get ignored. You know, how you can kind of put Those parallel lives in contrast to each other. And sort of see, you know, what emerges from that comparison.
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Graham Duke
It also seemed like it's the story of these people, but also it's the story of the history as well. And like, who's recording what and why are they recording it and what their perspective is. And that was interesting. It's quite different perspectives. It's not, you might imagine, it's all, you know, sort of woe and lamenting about the lost Saxon age, but actually they're quite different nuances to how they approach it.
- [10:16]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, absolutely. That was kind of the other part of the story I was interested in as a kind of, you know, from my literary side of. I'm a literary historian really. And English literature and history writing was really changing in the years after the Conquests as well, because, you know, you get new. Obviously the Norman historians are writing their version of events, but you're also getting the emergence of new kind of ways of writing about history, like romance, you know, very kind of adventure focused way of telling stories about the past. And so we're getting different perspectives being recorded. And yeah, as you say, it's not all woe and lament, although there is a bit of that. There's also, you know, an interest in. In kind of, you know, how the people might respond to changing experiences, how they might even bring something positive out of it.
- [11:01]
Graham Duke
And I don't know if this is easier to sort of talk about within the individual stories or to take it as a whole, but sort of in terms of the language, like you're saying that sort of one of your areas of interest, like, how much is actually how much English. English history is there after 1066, or is it all Anglo, Norman or Norman or Scandinavian? Some of it. But you know, what English history is there?
- [11:23]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, that's a really good question because, you know, in one sense it could. It's. It's English history in that it's history about England, it's history about English people, but most of it's not being written in the English language. Definitely in the 12th century. When you're looking at 12th century historians, they tend to be in Latin or in French or. Yeah, you know, you're looking at kind of Scandinavian sources to try and fill in some of the gaps about what happened to these people. So the only, you know, the main source that continues to be written in the English language is one version of the Anglo Saxon chronicle. But that's obviously only giving us one kind of rather marginalized perspective. So, yeah, you know, the writing of English history becomes something that's being done in lots of other languages. And then, of course, other sorts of cultural perspectives obviously come along with that as well. So it's an interestingly kind of complicated picture, by contrast to the period before the Norman Conquest when, you know, pretty much, you know, there's still obviously writing in Latin in England, but there's a lot of history writing in the English language, and then that really fades away after the normal conquest.
- [12:21]
Graham Duke
It's fascinating because it's like so many things where the Normans sort of. It feels like the Saxons have written off as this sort of not exactly barbaric, but, yeah, less sophisticated, less advanced. Whereas actually we've seen from do the series about how actually the kingdom's really rich, it's really well governed, that's why you want to conquer it. Is there any sort of sense with that, with the literature as well, that actually it's being kind of unfairly ignored or dismissed? And actually it's a really a rich scene that just gets taken away because of the conquest?
- [12:51]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Anglo Saxon literature is incredibly rich and interesting and sophisticated. I mean, obviously people have heard of things like Beowulf, but there's a lot of old English poetry that's very rich and. And complex and interesting. And of course, the Normans didn't understand any of that, because they didn't mostly, you know, for a long time after the conquest, didn't learn the English language. So it was all very kind of alien to them. And although some kinds of writing in English do carry on, I mean, things like religious writing, for instance, has to be in the language of most of the people, and most of the people were still speaking English. So, you know, that tradition carries on into the 12th century, but things like the tradition of writing poetry just kind of dies out, and people, you know, something like Beowulf just sat on a shelf in a library right through the centuries after the normal conquest and had to be completely rediscovered because nobody was reading it, nobody knew how to read it after some point.
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Ali Hood
So how was that rediscovered? How was that? It was just how. And, yeah, at what point was that rediscovered?
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Eleanor Parker
So that starts to happen kind of in the 16th, 17th century, when scholars get interested in Anglo Saxon manuscripts and things like the remains of monastic libraries that have been dispersed at the reference information. You know, manuscripts start to be kind of circulating again and being studied, but people had to kind of learn the Anglo Saxon language again from scratch, you know, teach themselves Old English. And it took quite a long time before, I mean, our current state of knowledge of. Of Old English literature and language took ages to come to. To this position because, you know, we. The English language just changed so much between, say, 1100 and 1600. Kind of like almost an unrecognizable language.
- [14:28]
Ali Hood
Incredible. So, and. And that. That it was at that time it was all discovered, because that's when historians had the luxury to delve into this. These dusty cupboards and find this stuff.
- [14:41]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, yeah. There was kind of more interest in it as well, you know, a desire to kind of rediscover the earliest stages of England's history and that kind of thing. So.
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Graham Duke
Wow, you're saying how the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, it's sort of Peterboroughs, where it's.
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Eleanor Parker
That's right.
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Graham Duke
Continues. And that sort of use of us, like the first chapter in the book. And someone that you might imagine would have heard of as well. Hereward.
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Ali Hood
Oh, yeah.
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Graham Duke
Herod, the Wake, because that's all connected. So it's of the East Anglian, the Fenlands and all that sort of stuff. So for anyone who's not come across Herod before, and he definitely. Maybe there's not enough for a book, but he definitely could get a movie.
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Eleanor Parker
Yes.
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Graham Duke
Here.
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Eleanor Parker
Yeah. So Hereward is the one who. There is quite a lot of writing about him from the Middle Ages, but most of it's rather fictional. So, you know, these kind of stories and legends and. And romance about his adventures. Hereward is quite a shadowy figure in the historical sources and he has this big afterlife in legend. What we know about him from the history is that he was probably a minor landowner in Lincolnshire, kind of area around Peterborough and in the Fens. And he got involved in the rebellion against the Normans, which was kind of centred on ely in around 1070. And so he was kind of one of the figures involved in that rebellion. And then we don't what happened to him afterwards, in fact, but in legend, he kind of went on to have this, you know, career as a sort of Robin Hood kind of figure, an outlaw figure, hiding out in the Fens and, like, playing tricks on the Normans and, you know, kind of conducting this campaign of, like, guerrilla warfare against the Normans. So, as I said, a lot of that's kind of fictional, but it's. I'm sorry, I know, but it has attracted a lot of interest, you know, throughout. Like, there are lots of novels about hero with the Wake, for instance, because people have always kind of been fascinated by this rebel figure.
- [16:29]
Ali Hood
Why isn't there a film of that? That's brilliant.
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Eleanor Parker
Yeah.
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Graham Duke
It would Be he has all these ventures. Well, which I knew about the Saxon bear, I guess, just because of looking at, you know, the resistance to William and stuff. But he had all these, like. He goes around like, was it Ireland? And he goes off.
- [16:43]
Eleanor Parker
That's right, yeah.
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Graham Duke
As well. And that's before. It's quite poignant, actually, the fact that someone tells him. Oh, yeah, no, the Normans. Who.
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Eleanor Parker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Ali Hood
Just. I mean, but it's only more violent. But, you know, all these little adventures. Love it.
- [16:59]
Graham Duke
Well, obviously again, because you said the Robin Hood comparison and. Yeah, that's better if we get like, you know, you think Prince of Thieves, where he comes back from the Crusades, his father's been killed, his lands have been taken away and that's kind of heroic setup. He's not on the Crusade, but. Yeah, kind of doing the same thing.
- [17:14]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, yeah, exactly. He comes back to England after the conquest to find that, like, the Normans have stolen his lands and of feasting in his hall and they've murdered his brother and they kind of stuck his brother's head up on a pole and, you know, it's this really kind of traumatic homecoming. Yeah. And in fact, those Robin Hood type stories are actually. They do directly, you know, go back to the medieval stories about Harrowood. So there's, you know, Robin, who's more famous now, but he does like, one of his ancestors in story terms is Harold the way.
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Ali Hood
Wow.
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Graham Duke
And the. We mentioned coming into this with the Peterborough element and the. The regional element. So there's these sort of. These local. These East Anglian sources that seem to particularly celebrate him. So when we were saying at the start about the different perspectives and whether it's lamenting or whether it's looking forward and actually the different versions of his tales reflect those different approaches. So what are the different heroines, depending on what your take on the conquest is?
- [18:11]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, that's right. So one version is the one I've been talking about, this kind of. He's this great freedom fighter and anti Norman rebel and so on. But then actually what he really did, as far as we can tell, in that. That very sort of violent, tumultuous period just after the Conquest, was that he seems to have teamed up with the Danish fleet who were coming to get involved and take advantage of all this chaos in England. And he. One of the things he supposedly did was that he sacked Peterborough Cathedral and like stole a lot of its treasures and gave or sold them to the Danes and Peterborough never got them back again. So from the Peterborough point of view, he was a bit of a villain, really. They hadn't. They were not fans of Hereward, but at Ely, they saw him much in a much more positive light. So, yeah, it really depended who you are.
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Ali Hood
I went to school in Italy in one of the houses is called Hereward. And so I was familiar with this story, but that's presumably because there's rivalry with Peter. I didn't know that bit.
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Graham Duke
Another chance to get one over.
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Ali Hood
Yeah.
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Graham Duke
I also was really interested to read about the. The Fens, particularly in heroin story, because obviously we. The, you know, it was later drained and we know it's sort of. It's very different now to how it was before, but it was the fact that even like in the 12th century, it was a very different place to how it would have been. Was it like they built a bridge or causeway?
- [19:29]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, somewhere like Ely really was an island in this very watery, marshy kind of landscape. So it was quite hard to access, which is why it's a good place for the rebels to kind of hole up and, you know, have a sort of stand against the Normans. But, yeah, for the Normans to attack the island of Ely, they had to build this big causeway. And then, you know, there's all these stories about, like, the. Cause they're collapsing and they all fall into the marsh and, you know, it's kind of disaster for them, this kind of. These kinds of stories. So, yeah, it was a really very different landscape from what we would. We would know now. Much more sort of, you know, difficult to navigate if you didn't know the area. And Hereward does, you know, that's his big advantage. He can kind of hop around between these islands and, you know, and outsmart the Normans who don't know the territory, that kind of thing.
- [20:12]
Ali Hood
Yeah, that's lovely. It doesn't have the. Doesn't have the glamour if you can't get a horse in it. I bet that's why there's no film. Yeah, you sort of like a little muddy frog. Robin Hood.
- [20:23]
Graham Duke
Yeah. Yeah. You could do the Disney one. You've got the reeds, doesn't it?
- [20:27]
Ali Hood
Yes, you could if he were actually a frog. This really works.
- [20:30]
Botox Advertiser
Yes.
- [20:31]
Ali Hood
Let's workshop this out.
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Graham Duke
So you say he was involved or said to be involved in, you know, some of the rebellions and like, particularly the Danish element is. But presumably there's not really a connection. Is there a connection between him and Edgar or are these sort of. Of resistance that don't really actually ever meet?
- [20:50]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah. So it doesn't seem like Edgar was involved in the Ely revolt. So there were these kind of different stages where rebellion was kind of being focused in different parts of the country. And, you know, first of all, after the conquest, the first place where it kind of breaks out is like around Exeter in the southwest. And then you get York, and Edgar was definitely involved at York, but then the kind of the stage where they've all moved down to Ely, some of the rebels had moved from York to Ely, but it doesn't seem like Edgar was involved at that point. So we don't know that Edgar and Hero would ever had anything to do with each other.
- [21:23]
Graham Duke
Seem to shame. And it seems sort of in the slightly silly thing of being partisan about these events that were a thousand years ago. But like you say, you see, like you've got the Godwins in the Southwest, you've got stuff happening in York, you've got East Anglia saying, oh, why could they not just have, you know, coordinated, they could have kicked him out. Because it's amazing how much resistance there is to William. You think he's just able to pick them off one by one. But actually all of that had been directed in some way, or if you had a kind of a someone really at the center event. So it feels like Edgar was never quite able to be that person
- [22:00]
Ali Hood
now. Well, I mean, my mind might be for. I might be romanticizing this, but it's as if Oscar Wilde were to me, meet Bertie Wooster. They're around at the same time and one's fictional, but they're, you know, like it'd be so great if they did exist in the same world together, Edgar
- [22:16]
Eleanor Parker
and
- [22:19]
Graham Duke
we can but dream.
- [22:21]
Ali Hood
But.
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Graham Duke
Yeah, so sort of going on to Edgar then in a bit more detail, because it was out as well, which I'd sort of come across in the research. Like William of Malmsbury particularly seems to be really down on Edgar for no particular reason. And it was really interesting because your. Where you talk about him, it's actually sort of. It's not his chapter, it's his sister's chapter, St Margaret of Scotland. And that factual. Because actually, weirdly, that's what the chroniclers all do. It feels like Edgar is kind of deliberately sidelined. It's not just that we forget him, it's that everyone shifts. So why, even though Edgar's the last royal prince and all of that, why is he ignored and dismissed, but Margaret is the focal point?
- [23:02]
Eleanor Parker
Well, I think for at least part of it is a conscious decision to sideline him. And Kind of write him out of the story. I mean, if you think about something like the Bayer tapestry as, you know, the first Norman attempt to take control of all of the lead up to Hastings and to talk about Edward or to represent Edward the Confessor and his relationship with Harold and all that kind of stuff, where is Edgar Atheling on the pair tapestry? Just completely written out of the story. And I think from the Norman point of view, it was obviously in their interest to just pretend he didn't exist as much as possible because he had by birth a very strong claim to the throne. And from the Norman point of view it was much more beneficial to kind of focus on Harold because you could present Harold as a usurper and someone who just seized the throne because he was power hungry and all that kind of thing, you could blacken Harold's reputation and you couldn't do any of that with Edgar. He hadn't done anything wrong. You know, if there was any sense that Edward the Confessor had wanted Edgar to inherit from him, obviously the Norman, that would be in conflict with the Norman claim that, you know, William was Edward's chosen heir. So, you know, in the, certainly in those kind of first decades after the conquest, it, they just like prefer to pretend that Edgar doesn't exist, I think really. And then the kind of later consequence of that is that when 12th century historians come along, they then don't know very much about Edgar, they can't track his life. Or like William of Malmsbury, they kind of just conclude, oh, he probably wasn't, wasn't very clever or interesting, you know, otherwise he would have done something more or whatever. So I think he kind of initially is deliberately written out of the history and the only place where he is being kind of written about really is still within the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, where the chroniclers, the English chroniclers really do want to record what he's doing and where he's going and, you know, see him as still really important. But the Norman writers are not interested
- [24:43]
Graham Duke
and quite deliberately so, whereas Margaret is the one that gets. Ultimately, of course, that's where the line continues because she marries Malcolm of Scotland and then obviously comes back.
- [24:55]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, exactly. So and then from 1100, when Henry I marries Margaret's daughter and has kind of united himself through the female descendants of the Anglo Saxon royal line, then you can kind of, you know, present her life as a form of continuity, as something that can be, you know, joined up to the Norman kings and give them this link to the pre conquest dynasty. And obviously also because she comes to be seen as a saint. There's a lot of writing about her, which is kind of interpreting her life as kind of like God's plan for England and for Scotland that, you know, she could kind of do good work as a kind of Christian saint in Scotland as well. So there's a lot of, like, you know, kind of reinterpreting the story of her life from that point of view. And you can't do that with Edgar's story. It's just too awkward and it doesn't kind of fit in.
- [25:43]
Graham Duke
There's no happy ending, but also tragic ending either. It just sort of carries on.
- [25:49]
Ali Hood
Brilliant. He manages to complete Norman England, which is a tough landscape.
- [25:58]
Graham Duke
Yeah, I found that fascinating, that the idea of Margaret, like you said, as providence. The idea that these writers struggling to understand how something so cataclysmic could happen. And like, well, it's okay because, look, we've got Margaret and then she has these children and it's come back. So it's all fine. It's all fine. Margaret makes sense of this otherwise horror.
- [26:19]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, exactly. And you just see this sense. I mean, again, this is mostly coming from the Anglo Saxon chronicle of they just. They can't understand why the Battle of Hastings happened. Like, why did God allow this to happen? Well, it must have been because we were sinful, because we deserved it, and yet maybe somehow good is going to come out of it. So they're trying to make sense of something that's just very traumatic and seems to make no sense, kind of logical sense. They're trying to kind of find some way to understand it.
- [26:44]
Graham Duke
Because actually we hadn't done the Nearly Monarch series because we let our sort of people on Patreon, our Privy Councillors vote, and it beat by one vote, the alternative, which was Scottish consorts.
- [26:54]
Eleanor Parker
Okay.
- [26:55]
Graham Duke
So we could have, at this stage in our podcast, have been doing an episode on Margaret rather than Edgar. So we're always going to do. Do one of them. So I think people are going to get a little bit of chance to talk about her. And I was also interested the fact that you wrote. How is it turgo or turgot, how would you say?
- [27:10]
Eleanor Parker
I usually say turgot, but yeah,
- [27:16]
Ali Hood
he
- [27:16]
Graham Duke
kind of deliberately writes out the Saxon bit. Like, when he writes this great hagiography, you'd expect that's where we get all of this information in. Yet he kind of pushes the Saxon bit.
- [27:27]
Eleanor Parker
It's quite frustrating, really, because that would have been such a good. Because he knew her, you know, he would have been such a Good source to tell us more about. Like her mother, for instance. We don't know hardly anything about Edgar and Margaret's mother and that would have. But anyway, yeah, because he's kind of trying to. To reinterpret the story in a way that's suitable for Margaret's daughter, who's now kind of aligned herself with the Norman kings and is, you know, sort of obviously got a political interest in not talking too much about the Saxon side of things and really focusing on the connections to the Norman line.
- [27:58]
Graham Duke
It's frustrating. What do you think, Wordsworth? You think, well, that's must be what it was good for Henry about marrying.
- [28:04]
Eleanor Parker
Exactly.
- [28:05]
Graham Duke
She had that Saxon line. But it's like, yes, we understand you're important, but we don't really want to talk about any of the specifics of it. I was also just interested in which I think whenever I mention her on the podcast, it always feels like it's in quite a negative light. So I like the fact there was a bit of an alternative spin on the other sister that gets forgotten about the three of them, Christina. Because the only anecdote where she ever really seems to have any role in history is where her niece, Edith Matilda is with her at the abbey. And there's the question over whether Edith is really a nun or not a nun. And she says, oh, well, it was my wicked aunt shouting at me and forcing me to wear this thing. But I think you were right about how actually maybe she's got a more protective role.
- [28:47]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, yeah, I think. I mean, you can absolutely read that story. You know, it's kind of being told to cast. Deliberately to cast Christina as this person who's. She's trying to make Edith a nun, and she doesn't want to be a nun because she's obviously wants to be free to marry, you know, Henry, I. So it's kind of. There's an agenda towards presenting her in a bad light. And I think you can absolutely also read the story as being she's trying to protect her very young niece against these predatory men who are quite keen to, you know, they're focusing on her as a target for marriage because of her ancestry. So Christina might well have felt very protective and sort of seen, you know, the. The kind of making her dress as a nun or something is about saying she's kind of off limits, you know, unavailable. Yeah, yeah,
- [29:31]
Ali Hood
yeah. What is. So that's a really human perspective to have. Whereas I think it's previously it all been, oh, she must have been well up for this, you Know, it's very male dominated history, isn't it?
- [29:44]
Eleanor Parker
Well, and you just think, I mean, we don't really know anything about Christina so we can't kind of say too much about it. But you know, she had witnessed Margaret be, you know, being married off to, to King Malcolm, whether or not she wanted to. So she obviously and you know, experienced a lot of disruption in her own life and seen, you know, what happens when people get kind of forced into marriages or into positions against their will. And you know, I think if she was angry, I feel like I couldn't blame her, to be honest.
- [30:12]
Graham Duke
And you also, there was the potential that she might have been. So one of the other subjects in the book, Waltheof, who's sort of the last Saxon earl, that she might potentially have been involved in preserving sort of some of his life story.
- [30:26]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, there's some sense that he seems to have been remembered at Romsey and Christina was at Romsey. So it's just an interesting possible connection.
- [30:34]
Graham Duke
I love all those just little pieces of information where it makes a bit more sense when you map people out and where they are. The other thing, I suppose Margaret, I guess is she's quite representative because the way we obviously she's a saint, she becomes the Queen of Scots. It's kind of this very elevated position. But like you say, actually there's a point at which she's following a path that lots of Saxon women would have been, which was seek safety in a nunnery. So is that the fate of a lot of the sort of, of high born Saxon girls or young women that is that their only option really?
- [31:06]
Eleanor Parker
That does does seem to have been the case. Unless they could leave England, as some of them did. It does seem like, you know, taking refuge in a nunnery was a kind of a means of finding protection because they did, you know, there was a reason why new Norman landowners might try and kind of marry the daughter of the previous landowner or something as a way of legitimising their claim to the land. And some of them did do that. So if you didn't want to, you know, be targeted for marriage in that way, then a nunnery was maybe your safest option.
- [31:33]
Graham Duke
That's the case for Gunnhild. Is that Howard's daughter? That is also. And she's actually with Edith, although it's separate.
- [31:43]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, no, at Wilton Abbey. Yeah. So with her Aunt Edith and. Yeah, so she was there, she was at Wilton for quite some time after the conquest and presumably she was kind of left behind when the rest of her family Went off to Flanders and Denmark and so. But at some point she ended up leaving the nunnery and living with Alan Rufus. So, you know, she also ended up in one of those kinds of relationships where, you know, a new landowner is kind of maybe seeking out a remnant of a Saxon family. But we. The details are really murky on that one, so we don't absolutely know what happened.
- [32:20]
Graham Duke
And I was interested. Again, I found it really interesting because you've got, like you said, actually it's the benefit of having all these different stories in one book that you kind of draw the parallels or the differences between them in a way you might not if you did them separately. But having Edgar the Etheling, having the Godwins or the Godwinsons or the Godwinsons and Waltheof, I found a really interesting thinking with Edgar there because, like, so Waltheof is the last Saxon earl and he's the only one that actually gets executed.
- [32:51]
Ali Hood
They only execute one Saxon earl, the Normans, well, after they've.
- [32:55]
Graham Duke
I mean, they kill quite a few at Hastings, obviously, but that's their game.
- [32:58]
Ali Hood
But once they sort of draw a line in the bloody mud and say, that's all right, yeah, wow, that's very un Norman, isn't it? I thought.
- [33:09]
Graham Duke
Well, yeah, that's the thing I found interesting thinking about comparing them. So, like, Wolof gets to be Earl, he gets to marry, and you think, oh, this all right, poor Edgar, he doesn't get a wife, he doesn't get a title, he's, you know, he's itinerant boy trying to find someone to help help him fulfill his destiny. But yet Wolfie off ends up getting his head cut off. And it feels a bit harsh and unfair. Whereas Edgar, despite being kind of the legitimate claimant, just keeps on rebelling, getting forgiven, carrying on. So I found it really weird comparing the two. I felt like Wall street gets all these benefits early on, but then head chopped off, whereas Edgar, they don't. I don't know what I'm thinking. Why. Why were they so harsh in the intervals? Or why didn't they do that to Edgar as opposed to.
- [33:52]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, I think this is really interesting comparison because I guess, you know, the point at which that decision was being made is immediately after the collapse of the 1069 rebellion, when, you know, you've got these kind of William's confronted with these still very young Anglo Saxon men of kind of noble descent and like, what's he going to do with them? It would be a really inflammatory thing to just execute them at that. Point. But you could imagine he was quite wary of the fact that they might continue to rebel. And I guess his intention with Waltheof was you. Waltheof was the son of a former Earl of Northumbria. He was descended on his mother's side from ancient earls of Northumbria. So he had really kind of deep roots in the north of England that William was trying to kind of get control of. And Northumbria was always a rather challenging place for southern kings to rule. So, you know, William perhaps saw the potential of wealthy off as someone, okay, I can use this guy to help me get control of the north of England and, you know, kind of bind him to loyalty with William by arranging the marriage and all that kind of thing. And if Waf had stayed loyal, he probably would have, you know, lived a very prosperous life as Earl of Northumbria. But he, you know, got involved in this second rebellion, and then he, you know, gets his head, and then it's kind of like he's pushed William's patience too far, or William realizes he can't use him the way that he wanted to. Whereas Edgar never gets given, you know, an earldom or anything like that. He's kind of kept down, I think, you know, and William doesn't. I mean, William. William could have been much harsher to him. He could have executed him. He could have kept him in prison his whole life. You know, the Normans were perfectly happy to. I mean, like, one of Harold Godwinson's younger brothers spent his entire life basically in Norman captivity. But so Edgar was kind of left free to roam around, but he wasn't allowed to build up any kind of power base in England that could be the basis for later rebellion. So I think William was quite strategic in the way that he was handling these people.
- [35:42]
Graham Duke
Is it damning of Edgar that William never executed him? Like, implied that he was like, it's this guy. He's never gonna. He's never actually gonna do anything that we need to worry about, is he? At some point, maybe no one thinks that he can be, because otherwise he'd be dead.
- [36:00]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah. Yeah. I think maybe at some point he, you know, William was kind of happy to say, actually, you know, Saxon rebellion has. Has weakened to the point that I don't need to worry so much about Edgar anymore. But then also, you can think, well, if he had had him executed, you sort of created a martyr then, haven't you? Because he was so young, and, yes, he'd rebelled against the Normans in 1069, but that's not exactly enough to deserve being summarily executed at the age of, I don't know, less than 20 or whatever he still was. And then you're killing off the last heir of the Anglo Saxon royal line. It's a pretty drastic thing to do. And I think in terms of. You could imagine that it might have created a lot of even more bad feeling on the English if he, you know, treated Edgar in that really harsh way.
- [36:49]
Ali Hood
It's got all the makings of a film. It's all the opportunity, isn't it, to paint in the color, in the blanks.
- [36:56]
Graham Duke
It's interesting because we think of obviously, William being such a harsh ruler to the English and obviously particularly in the north, with how he responds. And yet I can't imagine Canute would have let Edgar just wander around rebelling against him every few years. I think he would have been straight for the chop if Knut had been there. And yet Knut's the slightly more cuddly Levi.
- [37:16]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, absolutely. I think when you compare it to Canute, Knut would have not hesitated to, you know, get. Dispose of Edgar in one way or another.
- [37:22]
Ali Hood
Yeah, or any. Any king for the next 800 years. It's just very odd. It makes me think that he had something on. On William, like a USB stick tucked
- [37:34]
Graham Duke
down his tunic or. William is just misunderstood.
- [37:38]
Ali Hood
They look at his nickname for goodness.
- [37:42]
Graham Duke
So Wolf's the off. And we haven't said too much about him, actually. I mean, the circumstances of it, because actually it was controversial, even though he's not exactly. Some become a martyr. But it did feel like everyone thought it was a bit harsh, like he was sort of almost secondhand rebellion, wasn't. It was almost that he didn't tell William about a rebellion that he didn't exactly.
- [38:01]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, yeah, that's right. It was a. And the rebellion, it was like, you know, it's known as the Revolt of the Elves. But the other two earls, who were not Anglo Saxon earls, they were kind of. William's appointees were much more the leaders of the revolt. And Waltheof was kind of like just. He just knew about it and he didn't sort of tell William. So. Yeah, I think clearly people, some people at the time saw it as an overreaction, as too harsh. And indeed, you know, did in fact almost treat Waltheof as a martyr, you know, in Crowland, they treated him as a saint and a martyr, which is where he was buried. So. So you can kind of see, even at the time, there were quite sharply divergent opinions on whether Wellfield kind of had it coming or whether William was being too harsh with him.
- [38:43]
Graham Duke
So just a quick message to say that Rex Factor are going to be doing a live show at the Ludlow assembly rooms on Friday 21st August at 7 o' clock pm. We're going to be looking at the four main contenders for the throne in 1066. Harold Godwinson, William the Conqueror, Harald Hardrada and Edgar the Athlete. And we're going to ask the audience who comes to the show to decide who should have become the king. We've had lots of fun, we've been to Ludlow in previous years and we've really loved getting the chance to meet Rex Factor fans in person. So if you are able to, then please do come along to join us on Friday 21st of August at the Ludlow Assembly Rooms. You can get tickets directly from the Ludlow Assembly Rooms website or we will have a link to it on our website, rexfactorpodcast.com hopefully, hopefully we'll get to see you there. I was also thinking with another chapter in here, whether we should have been doing any of these as nearly monarchs. And it's another one where I just completely just don't think of them after Hastings, but the Godwin family. And it's interesting the way that they just kind of immediately fall off a cliff of kind of interest or people looking at them, you think, well, actually, because Harold has. He has sons, doesn't he? Like, are they adult sons or at least teenage sons?
- [39:53]
Eleanor Parker
Teenagers at least. Yeah, yeah.
- [39:56]
Graham Duke
And they rebel, you think, well, they're almost nearly monarchs in a way, aren't they? They would probably have assumed that they would one day be each other to become King of England. So what does that, does that tell us something about Harold or is it again, just the desire to completely play down the Godwins as a legitimate family? Like, how do they just get forgotten about so quickly?
- [40:17]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, that's a really interesting one because as you say, I mean, one of the interesting what ifs about the conquest is if Harold had managed to be king for more than, you know, nine months, if he'd stayed king for a significant point of time, who would he have intended as his heir? Surely he would have wanted his oldest son to succeed him and not Edgar Atheling, who would have, you know, so at that point there might well have been some interesting conflict anyway. But yeah, so you've got these, you know, these sons of Harald, and partly they are again, kind of written out of history a bit, you know, they're not the Norman chroniclers kind of don't really want to acknowledge that Harold was ever a legitimate king. So to be interested in his children or to imagine that they were in any sense royal children is obviously in opposition to that. But the other part of it is that they kind of, you know, disappear off the English scene pretty quickly after the conquest. So unlike Waltheof and Edgar, they don't stick around in England. They rebel in the late 1060s and then head off to ultimately to Denmark where their mother family were and where they were connected to Sveinastris and the King of Denmark. So, you know, they kind of almost seem to have like turned their backs on England and that means that they're not. Their fates aren't really recorded in English sources. And we have to look to, particularly to Scandinavian sources to know what happened to them. And in fact, we don't know what happened to Harold's sons. Not the old. His oldest sons anyway. That's a bit of a mystery. So, yeah, I think it's those two things. It's the, you know, Norman historians not wanting to write about them, but also this sense that they have had just kind of given up on trying to, you know, preserve their family in England really.
- [41:50]
Graham Duke
It's just bizarre when you think of Harold so dominant and the family so dominant for this period before the conquest and then just suddenly off they go. It's just a really strange. You just couldn't imagine, obviously, I suppose, any of it. But you think in 1065, the idea that that family would just almost just disappear from England, just be bizarre. But then like you say, actually it's an interesting light, I think, in the book, how the identities of the people there at the time, and actually they're not all just Anglo Saxon and there is a strong Anglo Danish or Anglo Scandinavian population. I guess maybe you've got like, with Wolf off, you said he's got this strong roots in the north. Edgar is the Saxon royal, but actually he's come off from Hungary. Maybe they do have this sense that they have part Scandinavian in their outlook as well. And it's not as simple as English history.
- [42:40]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah. And maybe that made it easier for them to kind of turn their back on England in a way because obviously on the. On Godwin's side of the family, they were English, but they weren't really from a particularly distinguished family. The family had kind of come out of nowhere as a result of Canute's conquest because, you know, Geether, Godwin's wife was. Was a close relative of Canute So they'd sort of shot to power in the, you know, 1020s and then they were out of power again by the late 1060s. It's, you know, it all happened quite fast. But, you know, they were maybe in that sense more divided in their loyalties rather, compared to Edgar. I mean. Yes. You know, his mother, we don't quite know where she came from, but Hungary or somewhere like that. But obviously his. In terms of his ancestry, it went way back into the. You know, he's looking back to people like Alfred the Great and stuff. So, you know, that sense of a tie to England must have been quite a lot stronger for him than for the Goblins. And I think. Or that the children have got the Godwinsons.
- [43:28]
Graham Duke
And I guess that's part of the problem with the sort of post 1066, the different groups that could have resisted William, but they're just not. They're not on the same page. You can't imagine Edgar and the Godwins teaming up.
- [43:39]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah.
- [43:39]
Graham Duke
Can't imagine them lining up behind this sort of child, Edgar as his figurehead.
- [43:45]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah. Maybe they saw him as a rival as well, you know.
- [43:48]
Graham Duke
Yeah. I also had never quite really put together because it's impressive that Harold's mother is still. Still alive at this point and still quite an active player. And I just never put together the fact that from her perspective in 1066, in a few weeks, she lose. Is it four of the brothers that.
- [44:06]
Ali Hood
Oh, God.
- [44:07]
Graham Duke
You have Stamford Bridge and Hastings. Just. What a horrific thing. Just as an individual.
- [44:12]
Eleanor Parker
Absolutely.
- [44:12]
Graham Duke
Perspective.
- [44:13]
Botox Advertiser
Yeah.
- [44:14]
Eleanor Parker
Within just a few weeks, you know, Tosti and at Stamford Bridge and then the three.
- [44:18]
Commercial Narrator
Hastings.
- [44:20]
Graham Duke
Shocking. But then, like you said, there's this other one. Who is it? Wulf Noth, who, like you said, he's. He's imprisoned by the Normans. But that's even before Hastings, that they've got hold of him. So how does he. How has he found himself a Norman prisoner before there's even been a Norman Conquest?
- [44:38]
Eleanor Parker
So they're kind of. That goes back to the conflict between Edward the Confessor and the Godwin family, because they had that very contentious, fractious relationship. And, you know, at that point where Edward and the Godwins really fell out and then had to, you know, the Godwins kind of forced their way back into England and they had to make peace. There was a point at which they gave hostages to Edward and it seems that at that point, I mean, it is a little bit uncertain, but I think it's at that point that they were kind of that Wulfnoth and also one of Godwin's grandsons. So maybe a son of his oldest son Svein get kind of in Norman captivity and they sort of just never come out again. Or Elif Wulfnoth never comes out again.
- [45:20]
Graham Duke
He's just really unlucky. The fact that like that should have just been a temporary thing and then the man that's imprisoned him ends up overthrowing his brother who wasn't meant to be king either. And it's like it's really not worked out well.
- [45:30]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [45:35]
Graham Duke
And also that we have a continuation of their lives. I mean it's unfortunate there's a lot of Githas in the family, aren't there? But one of them is almost like a Margaret figure in that she becomes a queen. And so what sort of, what's her story and where does that continue?
- [45:52]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, so she's kind of the one that we do know more about. I mean we know interestingly just more what happened to Harald's daughters than we do to his sons because we know about Gunild in Wilton and then her sister Geetha and Githa left England when. So after the rebellion in the southwest failed, the older Gytha, Harold's mother and a number of other English women and their families kind of left England and as I said, they ended up in the Danish court. And Svein Estrassen, so this is Geether's nephew, kind of, you know, we don't know what happened with the Harold's sons at that point, but he arranged, Svein Estrassen arranged for the daughter Githa to marry the future Grand Prince of Kiev. So into the kind of, you know, Scandinavian courts have a strong connection to the Rus, you know, the people in what's now kind of Russia, Ukraine, that sort of area. And so she, you know, got married off into that region and you know, her husband went on to become a powerful man and they had children and she lived on for quite some time. So you know, she maintained royal status and her descendants then married back into other European royal families in subsequent decades and you know, the years after. So, you know, she's the one who in one sense kind of carries on the legacy of Harold when all of his other children have sort of faded into history.
- [47:15]
Graham Duke
And it's fascinating how loves with Margaret as well, like you said, how so often women have written out of history and yet with the conquest it's the women's lives a lot of the time because of their marrying and continue the line that they're the ones that actually we do know about and a lot of the men sort of disappear. Isn't interesting how the conquest has that weird shift.
- [47:38]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, yeah. And because then it's often their descendants, you know, like as you talked about, Waltheof's daughter, and it's the same with Margaret's daughter. It's their descendants who are kind of then recording the history of the family and the history of their ancestry. And so they give us the best sources often, you know, through those marriages and the offspring.
- [47:55]
Graham Duke
Remember, really like that. When we did our previous series, we did the English Consort. So when we did Edith Matilda and how sort of her role in getting these histories written, I think. I don't know. For some reason you always sort of. Because. Maybe because of the episodic nature of doing a biographical podcast, but you always sort of see them in isolation. And I'd always like it when you see this sense that actually they do know where they come from. They want to preserve this. They do obviously have this sense of it beyond simply this chaotic moment that they're living in that they are watching, wanting to preserve a history as well as their own lives.
- [48:27]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah.
- [48:29]
Graham Duke
Now, Ali is a big fan, by which I mean not a big fan of a chap called Dunstan. He obviously we did the English monarchs in our first series, the English Consorts in the third, Scottish monarchs in the second, and he never failed to appear in a series. You paid an awful lot in the first series. So Ali got rather fed up with him.
- [48:53]
Ali Hood
Persistent bad smell.
- [48:55]
Graham Duke
Exactly. The fun sponge, so you nicknamed him. And so I was obviously delighted when the final chapter on Edna. It seems that actually Dunstan very important to some of the surviving English historians. So who is Edmer and why is Dunstan so important to you?
- [49:14]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, so Edmer is a kind of the bit of the odd one out in the book. He's not from a powerful family, he's not a rebel, he's not a, you know, survivor of someone powerful before the conquest. But he is a very important figure because he was a historian. So he wrote about English history. He was a monk at Christchurch Canterbury, and he was born just before the conquest and he kind of lived through the aftermath. And then in later life he wrote a lot about pre conquest English history, including Saint Dunstan, who was one of his heroes, you know, one of Canterbury's major saints at that point. And in the process of writing about that, Edmer provides some really important information about kind of the aftermath of the conquest and how that was experienced more, you know, not at the level that we've been talking about so far, that kind of elite level of society, but kind of, you know, in a monastery like Canterbury. Christchurch Canterbury, for instance. Yeah. So stories about Dunstan and like how his ghost was supposed to be kind of intervening in disputes in the monastery in around 1066, 1067. This is a very fraught time time. A part of Edmer's contribution to the story of the aftermath of the conquest.
- [50:22]
Graham Duke
We were mentioning Dunstan in the recording we were doing just before now and you were saying Ali had got this view of him as almost this sort of really strict sort of head mastery type figure.
- [50:30]
Ali Hood
Yeah.
- [50:31]
Graham Duke
And he sort of is in that role in some Edmund's things but he's a little bit more generous. He sort of. Is it slightly more protective outlook for Medmus. There's an alternative side to like.
- [50:43]
Ali Hood
No, I mean it's, it's. Yet here we are still talking about Dunstan, this the problem.
- [50:51]
Graham Duke
But also it seemed like. Because like Margaret go back to Margaret of Scotland how when she names her children, the sons, initially she's going back in that line and it goes back to Edgar and then she goes off and goes for completely different names after that. So is, is there this sort of sense that like Edgar and Dunstan, like that is the definitive point of Anglo Saxon history that they kind of all look back to when they have the rose tinted glasses and they are lamenting is that the moment they're looking back to is when everything was right with the world.
- [51:24]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, yeah. There's this specific kind of tradition of writing about pre conquest history which is very much a monastic one because Edgar and Dunstan were you know, supporters of monastic reform in the, you know, the late 10th century. It was a great time of founding of new monasteries and flourishing of monastic life and all of that kind of thing. So when it's immediately followed by Ethelred the Unready and all of the disruption and chaos of the Viking invasions and then of course all of the disruption of the 11th century kind of later writers look back to the 9 70s and Edgar's time as this sort of golden age when the king was so supportive of the English church and you know, everything was kind of flourishing and beautiful, you know, before everything kind of descended into chaos. So yeah, they do very much look back to that point and kind of see that, you know, as far as they see it, everything's been in decline since that, since that time.
- [52:17]
Graham Duke
So Edmund. So it's interesting because he's sort of the least famous one there. But if we were to go back to like pre podcast Graham, he'd have been the only one I'd really heard of, particularly because. Yeah, because I did at a level, I did a moderate university as well, did philosophy and ethics.
- [52:37]
Eleanor Parker
Okay.
- [52:38]
Graham Duke
And Anselm was on there. So. And he's got this very close relationship with Anselm and he writes Anselm's life. So I'd heard of Edmond just because I knew about Anselm. And again, it was weird when we came to do Rex Factor and Anselm being an actual historical person rather than someone that had a theory about the existence of God. But yes, it's quite interesting getting to see actually the. The man behind this obscure bit of a level history for me. But he's also talking about how like he. He is a Saxon, like you said, he's English, he's not highborn, but he is actually a Saxon there who's a Saxon historian. And he does have this perspective of a world he sort of remembers, but he has this close relationship with one of the most important people in the Anglo Norman world. So is he someone that's commemorating the Saxon world or is he more someone that's building the Anglo Norman vision?
- [53:32]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, it's really interesting because he is very much this kind of transitional figure. He thinks of himself as English. You know, he can just about remember the world before the Conquest. But he was quite young. He was only about like six or something at the time of the Battle of Hastings. So it's really very much just a distant memory, but one he's very attached to. And yet in his adult life, he does have this really close relationship with Anselm. He also really respects Lanfranc, and both of them have only come to Canterbury because, you know, as a direct result of the Norman conquest. So he's living in this Anglo Norman world and it's kind of shaping his entire outlook. And you know, what he's remembered for, as you say, you know, the places people might encounter him outside stories of the Conquest, is as a biographer of St. Anselm and then also as a historian, you know, who wrote quite an important history of what he calls history of recent times, but, you know, particularly around the times around the Norman Conquest. So he became an influential figure in the writing of history. You know, 12th century writer, writers kind of refer back to him and so on. So he is very much like an important figure in the culture of the Anglo Norman world. And yet he has these roots in just. Just about. In the pre Conquest world that he's very Sort of strongly attached to.
- [54:44]
Graham Duke
It's pointing, I think you said, how it's kind of later on in his life that he's really doing the. The Saxon history bit. It's almost like he sort of gets to the end and starts to reflect.
- [54:54]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah.
- [54:54]
Graham Duke
On those things at the start of his life.
- [54:56]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, he's kind of looking back, you know, once he's an old man, on his earliest childhood memories. And the cathedral at Canterbury burned down very close to the time of the Norman conquest. And that was obviously his home and the place that he was, you know, very emotionally attached to. And so those two things are kind of connected in his mind. The destruction of Canterbury Cathedral and the conquest, these two kind of connected disasters for him. And in the. Like in the 1120s. So, you know, decades after the conquest, he's writing about these things and kind of piecing together his earliest memories. So it's an interesting way of kind of getting closer to the experience of someone who did live through these tumultuous years. Someone who wasn't a political player, even though, you know, he was important as a writer, but was. Was kind of aware of things, was witnessing things and reflecting on them and what it meant for. For him and for England.
- [55:48]
Graham Duke
I didn't realize that about Canterbury. That was the fire so soon afterwards. That was a powerful symbolism that the Church, the center of the kingdom, burns down the year after the kingdom falls.
- [56:00]
Ali Hood
Yeah. God.
- [56:05]
Graham Duke
Now, Edmer also interested me because he's, like you said, the fact that he's kicking around in the 1120s. And so is Edgar as well, isn't he? Because Edgar's still alive in the countryside, going around at this point. So they're sort of like the. The end of this last generation of Anglo Saxon children. So, I mean, and obviously this is, you know, the next generation. But for those who are around in the 1120s and old, do we have any sense that. I don't know if this is possible to track, but whether there's this continued into the next generation sense of the lament and the loss, or do they just have to grow up and if they're born within the conquest, is that just a world that they just don't see? It's been written out and it's been taken away, or is there this long lingering sense of. I think it's all that the Norman yoke is the trope in the historical yoke. But is there something there that we know about in real life or is that something that we impose on.
- [57:09]
Eleanor Parker
Well, I think that's where the stories about here would become interesting because they sort of start to be recorded sort of around the same time in the 1120s and, and then on into the 12th century. And we do see this kind of romanticization of the Anglo Saxon past. And you know, that later idea of the Norman yoke kind of draws on a lot of that medieval, you know, idealization of the pre conquest world as something that was, you know, there was more liberty and more freedom. And then the Normans come in and impose this incredibly harsh system. So I think there's even, you know, as the, the, the realities of Anglo Saxon history kind of recede out of living memory, people are still very interested in writing about that period, but obviously they're kind of reinterpreting it from their own perspective. And as you get further into the 12th century, the populations become more and more mixed together. You know, there's intermarriage and people start to, you know, have like one Norman parent, one English parent and is, you know, a typical story of the next generation. And so obviously they have a different attitude to, to English history, but they're still very interested in the pre conquest past. And there is for quite some time, you know, still this sense that, you know, like if you were. There were stories from the 12th century about, you know, like somewhat of people of English birth who feel kind of aggrieved because if you don't learn French or you can't learn French, you can never get on in the world. You know, the expectation is that you adopt Norman customs and you learn to speak French because if you're English you're kind of always at a disadvantage. So that sense of a kind of, you know, political grievance does continue for quite some time after the normal congress, even after this first generation have passed away.
- [58:42]
Graham Duke
Well, thanks so much for talking to us about all of that. It's really fascinating, really interesting to get that sort of perspective of kind of the what comes after which I think we always really lose. Before I ask if there's anything else that, you know, we haven't covered, I've realized just the last couple of minutes I haven't asked what the lovely big document.
- [59:05]
Eleanor Parker
Well, you see, I've got Harold Goblinson here and small Harold, this is, this actually came from, from the cafe at Canterbury Cathedral when they, they were selling off their decorations and so they made this big poster thing of a document which is an agreement between the monks of Christchurch and William just after the conquest. So it's like they're kind of post conquest to nice.
- [59:28]
Graham Duke
Oh, perfect backdrop.
- [59:30]
Eleanor Parker
Yes.
- [59:30]
Graham Duke
That's the how we couldn't quite see he wasn't quite in focus.
- [59:32]
Ali Hood
I thought that was a seal.
- [59:34]
Eleanor Parker
That was his. Little Harold.
- [59:35]
Graham Duke
Oh yeah.
- [59:38]
Ali Hood
Getting something out of his eye.
- [59:39]
Graham Duke
Yeah, lovely. Well, so, I mean is there anything that like we haven't covered today on the topic that you think is sort of a thing you'd like to leave people with or people should take away or.
- [59:51]
Eleanor Parker
I don't think so. I think we've had a good comprehensive discussion.
- [59:55]
Ali Hood
Lovely.
- [59:55]
Graham Duke
Well, thanks so much for joining us. If anyone wants to find out more about your access, any of your other works and things, where should they go to find out more?
- [60:05]
Eleanor Parker
Good question. I'm just generally around on the Internet. Yeah. I think, I mean I've written a couple of other books about, well, the Vikings in England and also the. The Seasonal Cycle in Anglo Saxon England. So if people are interested in those topics they could look me up.
- [60:23]
Graham Duke
Although it's not updated anymore. The Clerk of Oxford blog spot's got loads and loads and loads of stuff on it. So people haven't had a look at that and they're interested in this period then that's definitely worth.
- [60:31]
Eleanor Parker
Yeah, lots about Dunstan if that's what people want to hear.
- [60:36]
Graham Duke
Brilliant.
- [60:36]
Ali Hood
Well, thanks Elena, thanks so much.
- [60:38]
Eleanor Parker
Thank you. Thanks.
- [60:39]
Ali Hood
Yeah,
- [60:43]
Graham Duke
so that was Eleanor Parker on the Last Children of Anglo Saxon England. England and plenty of Dunstan.
- [60:49]
Ali Hood
There was enough. Yeah, there was enough, wasn't there? I think we can agree that there was enough, Dunstan.
- [60:54]
Graham Duke
If you'd like to get in touch you can find us on our various social media and email, all of which you'll find the links to on our website rexfactorpodcast.com and if you'd like to support the podcast, leave, review and subscribe on whatever podcast provider you use and sign up for loads of bonus content@patreon.com RexFactor where you can. An ad free version of this podcast as well as over 450 bonus episodes.
- [61:17]
Ali Hood
That's the hard sell. You know, this is this one free.
- [61:21]
Graham Duke
This one's free.
- [61:22]
Ali Hood
See that? All that content free. Imagine what you get if you pay for it.
- [61:29]
Graham Duke
Yeah, imagine if I was actually trying for this. Actually imagine what I'd be like.
- [61:33]
Ali Hood
Yeah, the premium content.
- [61:36]
Graham Duke
So that's them all. So, so that is all from us today. Hopefully you enjoyed that interview with Eleanor. Our next episode will be a right to Reply episode where we respond to all of your messages if you pay. No, no, that's for everybody. I'm not mentioning the ones that aren't the next episode for everybody because that seem.
- [61:53]
Ali Hood
Oh, behind the secret paywall, we're keeping it. Okay.
- [61:58]
Graham Duke
I thought people might like to know what the next thing they will see in their feed is. Restricted access.
- [62:04]
Ali Hood
Does it say that?
- [62:05]
Graham Duke
Don't think so. Well, I mean, it might actually. I think on Spotify now, it might show you bonus episodes that you can't get. To encourage you to realize that there are episodes.
- [62:14]
Ali Hood
I mean, from a commercial point of
- [62:15]
Eleanor Parker
view,
- [62:17]
Ali Hood
we have ways. No, I'm full member of. We have ways. There's another one, like look inside the cockpit or something like that. And they definitely have on Patreon a like a thing.
- [62:31]
Graham Duke
It annoys me, but I can see how it benefits.
- [62:33]
Ali Hood
Yeah.
- [62:33]
Graham Duke
Yeah. Well, the next episode in the normal feed of Rex Factor will be the Right to Reply episode for the Saxon Nearly Monarch. So all the messages we've been getting during the series, we'll be responding to those. And then after that, we'll be moving on to the Norman Nearly Monarchs.
- [62:50]
Ali Hood
Yeah, we're rattling through.
- [62:51]
Graham Duke
Indeed. See you next time, Sam.