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

of loyalty to an eight-year-old could be taken for granted -- nor was it. The years of William’s minority would long be remembered in Normandy as a time of violence and cruelty exceptional even by the standards of what had gone before. Rival warlords, with no one to leash them in, found themselves free to indulge all their most razor- clawed instincts. Nothing more brutally illustrated what might be at stake than the fashion, one bred of increasingly savage and incessant feuding, for abducting rivals, even from wedding feasts, and subjecting them to horrific mutilations. Blindings were particularly popular; castrations too. As well they might have been: for those who aimed to found a flourishing dynasty naturally had to look to neuter the competition. Meanwhile, ‘forgetful of their loyalties, many Normans set about piling up mounds of earth, and then constructing fortified strongholds on them for themselves’.

As it had done in the southern princedoms, so now in Normandy, a sudden rash of castles served as the surest symptom of a spreading anarchy. ‘Plots began to be hatched, and rebellions, and all the duchy was ablaze with fire.’” As for William himself, he was soon inured to the spectacle of slaughter: two of his guardians were hacked down in quick succession; his tutor as well; and a steward, on one particularly alarming occasion, murdered in the very room in which the young duke lay asleep. Yet even as blood from the victim’s slit throat spilled across the flagstones, William could feel relief as well as horror: for he at least had been spared. The feuding that resulted in the assassination of so many appointed to his household never had him as its object. Violence-shadowed the years of his childhood certainly were; but throughout them all he retained his hold on the title that had been bequeathed to him, and him alone, by his father: the Duke of Normandy.

To see how much more perilous things might have been for him had Robert fathered a brood of heirs with different women, and left behind a tangled succession, William had only to look across the Channel. There, with a determination that marked her out as a true member of the Norman ducal clan, Queen Emma was engaged in a frantic power struggle of her own. Like Normandy, England had recently been thrown into a state of crisis: for in the autumn of 1035, at around the same time that the news had reached Emma of her nephew’s death in Nicaea, the man who had previously guaranteed her rank for her, her second husband, the great Canute, was being laid within his own coffin. Solemnly, before their marriage, he had sworn an oath that he would ‘never set up the son of any other woman to rule after him’; but no sooner had he breathed his last than Harold, Aelfgifu’s younger son, was moving in on the English throne. Not for nothing, it seemed, was the young prince nicknamed ‘Harefoot’ – and Emma, certainly, had found herself left behind in the dust. Her own son by Canute, Harthacanute, was absent in Scandinavia; nor, despite her increasingly frantic summons, was he willing to abandon his inheritance there, for the Norwegians were in revolt, and with such success that their new king, Magnus, had begun to menace Denmark itself.

By 1036, Harefoot’s grip on England was tightening. Emma, having first barricaded herself inside Winchester in an effort to keep Wessex at least secure for her son, then tried spreading rumours that the usurper was not Canute’s son at all, but a bastard who had been smuggled into the hated Aelfgifu’s bed. Next, after that tactic had failed to draw blood, she dispatched an urgent appeal for assistance to Edward and Alfred, her two sons by Ethelred – which was, if anything, an even more shameless throw. Emma had seen neither of them for twenty years. Throughout the whole of Canute’s reign, they had been living as exiles in Normandy — quite forgotten and unlamented, so it had always seemed, by their hard-nosed mother, the queen.

And not by her alone. Edward might have been crown prince of the House of Cerdic – but there was little enthusiasm among the kingdom’s power brokers for the restoration of its native dynasty to the throne. Much had changed since the time of Ethelred. Canute had made sure to promote a new breed of earl to the rule of England. Such men owed nothing to the Cerdicingas. Indeed, the highest flying of them all, an English lord of previously obscure family by the name of Godwin, had good reasons for bearing a personal grudge against Ethelred’s line: for back in the darkest days of the Viking assaults on England, he had witnessed his father unjustly accused of treason by the old king, and driven into exile. A salutary demonstration, no doubt, of the need always to keep on the right side of the powerful—and Godwin himself, in his own relations with royalty, certainly always made sure to swim with the tide. Smooth, prudent and opportunistic, he had duly succeeded in keeping afloat even amid the tempest-rack of the Danish subjugation of England – and to such effect that he had ended up with an earldom, and Canute’s own sister-in-law, Gytha, as a wife. By the time Emma dispatched her summons to Normandy, begging her two sons to come and join her, Godwin held the rank of the Earl of Wessex, no less. Many of the lands that had once belonged to Ethelred were now his. The ships that patrolled the Channel, the troops that guarded the south coast – most were his as well. And Emma’s two sons, landing in England, duly ran straight into Godwin’s men.

Who gave them a thoroughly bruising reception. Edward, greeted in his ancestral homeland as though he were nothing more blue- blooded than a common pirate, was soon scarpering back to Normandy, his tail between his legs. Alfred, crossing southern England in a frantic attempt to reach