Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

in Normandy. Once, under Richard II, uppity lords would have found themselves compelled to wear saddles on their backs and crawl before the duke for mercy-but Robert, unlike his father, had lacked the will to rein them in. The pressure on him always to fight, to expand and to succeed had grown a wearisome one; so that by the time he finally opted to shrug it aside altogether, and depart for Jerusalem, his duchy appeared on the verge of disintegration, stained as it was with bloodletting, and riven by gangsterism.

And then he died – and Normandy was left in a more perilous condition still. So perilous, indeed, that there were some who suspected poison, and a plot to destabilise the duchy for good. With good reason, perhaps – for there was certainly a most plausible mastermind to hand. Track record, motive and opportunity: Fulk Nerra, Robert’s companion out on the eastern pilgrimage trail, combined them all. The Count of Anjou, whose princedom was- separated from Normandy only by a single hoof-gashed buffer, the unfortunate county of Maine, had long been angling to roll back Norman power. Now, with Robert dead, such a goal appeared eminently achievable. Normandy had effectively been decapitated.

The new duke was a boy of only eight years old, a bastard of Robert’s by the name of William. In Anjou, predictably enough, much was made of his parentage. William’s mother, his enemies alleged, was the daughter of a man whose loathsome duty it had been to prepare corpses for burial: a wretch irredeemably polluted by filth and rottenness and death. The charge was certainly a damaging one – for it served directly to cast aspersions upon the new duke’s fitness to rule. The science of heredity was a serious matter, after all. As the ancients had long since proved, both sperm and menstrual blood were suffused with the essence of an individual’s soul – and since, as everyone knew, it was their commingling that served to form an embryo, it implied that baseness as well as nobility might be implanted within a womb, there to flow within a foetus’s veins. Robert, by slaking his lusts upon a corpse-handler’s daughter, had most likely bred a monster. The vileness of the grandfather, so William’s enemies charged, could hardly help but manifest itself within the grandson. The young duke, if only permitted to grow to adulthood, appeared fated to serve as the shroud-winder, not of the dead, but of very kingdoms.

Or would have been, perhaps, had the slanders been remotely true. In fact, far from practising a low-bred and abhorrent trade, William’s grandfather had been an official in the ducal court. Not a warrior, to be sure – but then bastardy, among the Normans, had never been reckoned a fatal taint. Indeed, often they had seemed positively to approve of it: ‘for it has always been their custom, for as long as they have been settled in France, to take as their princes the offspring of concubines’. The resigned shrugs with which outsiders tended to note this was hardly surprising, perhaps. Things might well have been worse. The marital habits of the Northmen had long been a matter of scandal. In Sweden, for instance, a barbarous land so remote that it lay even beyond the limits of the North Way, it was reported that men might have up to three or four wives at a time — ‘and princes an unlimited number’. But then the Swedes were unregenerate pagans. In lands where the Northmen had become Christians, princes were generally content to satisfy themselves with two. So it was, for instance, that even the ostentatiously pious Canute, when he married Emma, Ethelred’s Norman widow, and restored her to her former status as Queen of the English, had opted not to dwell on the awkward fact that he was already married. Aelfgifu, an Englishwoman who had been with him since the very earliest days of his arrival in England, had already given him two sons: a reserve of heirs that Canute had not the slightest intention of squandering. Indeed, in 1030, he packed one of them off, along with Aelfgifu herself, to govern the Norwegians, who had recently been brought to submit to his rule. Although his own bishops might fulminate sternly against bigamy, the practice brought Canute too many advantages for him to contemplate abandoning it. In Normandy too, it had often proved a godsend. One wife from the Frankish world, and one from the Norman: such had long been the preference of the dukes. In the marriage bed as elsewhere, they liked to face both ways.

Except that even in Normandy the times were gradually changing. For there too, as the decades of the new millennium slipped by, the fathering of children on numerous wives was coming to seem an increasingly unacceptable habit, the practice of sinister peoples ‘ignorant of divine law and chaste morals’: the Saracens, for instance, or – most barbarous of all – the Bretons. Such an attitude shift reflected, in part, the sheer smouldering weight of the Church’s disapproval: its insistence that marriage was properly an exclusive partnership of equals. Perhaps even more significant, however, was the nobility’s own vague but dawning realisation that it was not plunder which represented the surest guarantee of establishing a family’s greatness, but the transmission, Capetian-style, of an undivided patrimony. That being so, the right of a lord’s heir to succeed to his father’s lands had to be established beyond all possible doubt. William might have been illegitimate —and yet it was significant that he was also an only son. Duke Robert had very consciously refrained from taking a wife. Only once he had summoned the lords of Normandy to his court, and formally presented William to them as his successor, had he ventured to leave for the Holy Land. No one had been left in any doubt as to who his heir was to be.

Not that, in a society as loot-hungry as that of the Normans, an oath