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

his mother, was intercepted by Godwin’s men, handed over to Harefoot in chains, and blinded. So brutal were the mutilations inflicted on him that the wretched prince died soon afterwards of the wounds. The following year, having finally been driven out of Winchester by Harefoot’s agents, Emma escaped to Flanders, there to endure a bleak and wintry exile. Implacable still in the pursuit of her vendettas, she had no sooner arrived than she was putting about a story that it was Harefoot who had sent the fateful letter to her sons, and that her own seal on it had been a forgery. Edward, at any rate, was less than convinced. In 1058, when Emma summoned him to join her in Bruges, he refused. Even the perils of life in Normandy, it appeared, were preferable to his mother.

A grim and sordid episode – and to the young Duke William, whose reluctant guest Edward remained, a most instructive one. Certainly, it would have confirmed for him the stern lesson that his ancestors had always taught their young: that to be a prince was nothing, if not also a conqueror. William, unlike his father, did not shrink from the harsh destiny to which this bound him, but rather embraced it. He had been well instructed in what it took to be a leader of the Norman people. His ambition, one that everyone with a care for his education had worked tirelessly to inculcate, was to fashion himself anew, to become a being forged out of steel. Such, indeed, was the labour of transformation that all those Normans who aspired to greatness were obliged to take upon themselves. Even girls, as they played in a castle’s stables or ran around its courtyard, were being raised within a world of sweat and iron — and childhood, for their brothers, was all a preparation for war. ‘Arms and horses and the exercises of hunting and hawking: such are the delights of a Norman.’ The delights, perhaps—but also, far more crucially, the means of putting him to ceaseless test.

For only if a young man were prepared to risk death in the pursuit of some savage forest beast, or to practise with his sword all the hours of a day, or to perform prodigies of horsemanship, might he hope to win for himself that sweetest of felicities: the approbation of his fellows. Rank could be reckoned nothing without this. True of every lord, it was especially true of the duke. From his earliest days, William had been surrounded by his kinsmen. Amid all the shocks and convulsions of his childhood, they had been perhaps the only constant. ‘Nurri’, they were termed: young men ‘nourished’ by William’s side, his brothers-in-arms, and more than brothers. Sharers in his upbringing, they too were being raised as carnivores through gruelling training.

No longer were the arts of killing the simple matter they had once been, back in the days of Rollo’s war bands. To handle a lance properly while in the saddle, whether throwing it or couching it below the arm, in the most up-to-date and lethal manner, with all a horseman’s weight behind it: here was a skill that might take years to perfect. Other martial disciplines, even more essential, even more cutting- edge, were an even greater challenge to master. It was a telling tribute, then, to the education received by William and his companions, that one of them, his closest friend, William fitzOsbern, would emerge as the acknowledged master of castle-building. Fulk Nerra, poisoner of Duke Robert though he might have been, had his heirs in Normandy as well as in Anjou. The strategy that he had pioneered, of using castles as instruments of aggression, was one that might almost have been designed to appeal to the eager wolf pack growing up around the Norman duke. Attack, spoliation, conquest: fitting pursuits for warrior lords.

And yet, for William himself, not the only ones. If war was his primary duty, then he did not forget that he had a duty as well to give his people peace. Naturally, he saw no contradiction between these twin vocations: for it would only ever be as a warlord that he could hope to stamp his will on his turbulent people. Master of a race of predators, he had no choice save to establish himself as the most lethal predator of all. ‘For discipline the Normans with justice and firmness, and they will prove themselves men of great valour, who press invincibly to the fore in arduous undertakings and, proving their strength, fight resolutely to overcome all enemies. But without such rule they tear each other to pieces and destroy themselves – for they hanker after rebellion, cherish sedition, and are ready for any treachery.’

William could have no doubt, then, even as he devoted himself to the practice of war, that he was performing God’s work. No doubt either that Providence, fulfilling its mysterious designs through seeming accidents and twists of fate, might serve to demonstrate that God in turn was working for him. Indeed, as an illustration of how heaven’s blessings might fall unexpectedly upon the head of a deserving prince, he had only to track the fortunes of a long-term guest at his own court. If the fiasco of Edward’s first return to England had confirmed for William the priceless value of a metalled fist, then its conclusion would serve to teach some very different lessons. That the wicked might be overthrown. That the favoured of God might be granted a sudden opportunity to raise themselves up on to a throne. That a man might travel from Normandy to England and become a king.

Four years had passed since the fatal blinding of Edward’s brother. Then abruptly, in March 1040, Harold Harefoot, the man chiefly responsible for the atrocity, died. Three months later, Harthacanute, Canute’s remaining son, landed in Kent, accompanied by sixty ships and Emma, his gloating mother. True, he hardly came trailing clouds of glory: for back in Denmark, he had been