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

the earldom of Wessex. ‘Two great brothers of a cloud-born land, the kingdom’s sacred oaks,’ they were hailed by one enthusiast. ‘With joined strength and like agreement they guard the bounds of England.’

All in all, then, for Harald Hardrada, it might have been thought, this was a most unpromising state of affairs. But was it? Firmly rooted though both the Godwinsons might appear, the truth was that one of them, after a decade in power, was coming to be battered by increasingly stormy crosswinds. Northumbria, Tostig’s earldom, remained what it had always been: a realm much given to violence. In the savagery of the landscape, and in its remoteness from the kingdom’s West Saxon heartlands, there was held up a fitting mirror to the inveterate factionalism of the locals. Even the women, on occasion, would think nothing of sticking the heads of captured Scotsmen on poles. Hardly the place, in short, to look with much favour on a southern earl. Tostig, a man renowned for his courage and cunning, but also possessed of an often fiery temper, had tended to respond to hints of restiveness with all the forcefulness he could muster. As a result, he had ended up widely hated. By 1065, the Northumbrian lords had had enough. Raising an army, they marched first on York and then on Wessex itself. Edward, despite initial attempts to stand firm, had found himself powerless to resist their demands: that Tostig be deposed from his earldom and replaced with the Northumbrians’ own nomination, a young lord by the name of Morcar. Even Harold, recognising that his brother’s cause was doomed, had shrunk from making the kingdom bleed in Tostig’s defence. A statesmanlike call, no doubt – but one that had left Tostig himself with a burning, indeed almost frenzied, sense of grievance. That November, as the humiliated earl left England for exile in Flanders, he did so breathing vengeance on his brother.

And casting about for any foreign warlord who might be persuaded to assist him. The time for such treason was ripe. Edward, as Tostig well knew, had recently suffered a number of strokes, and by Christmas he was rumoured to be mortally ill. The moment of its king’s death was always a fateful one for any kingdom – but for England, that New Year, it promised to be especially so. For Edward had no son, nor even a daughter, to succeed him. Later ages would attribute this withering of his line to a godly vow of chastity, or else to his hatred of the Godwins — but neither explanation appears a likely one. Edward, in his own way, it seems, had grown close to Edith, and dependent upon her for advice – whether in matters of dress, or interior decoration, or the very gravest affairs of state. Perhaps, then, as many of the English were coming to fear, the otherwise inexplicable barrenness of their king’s marriage was a punishment imposed upon them for their sins. Edward, with shallow subtlety, had always exploited his childlessness for his own ends, promising the throne to rival candidates as and whenever he had required their assistance. Now, however, it seemed, with no obvious heir to the throne, there would have to be a reckoning. No wonder, then, as the New Year came and went, and reports from the royal sickbed steadily worsened, that the English looked forward to 1066 with a sense of mounting anxiety.

And all the while, beyond the northern seas, the King of Norway was biding his time. Soon enough fateful tidings were being brought to him from London. Edward was dead; and sat upon his throne, consecrated and crowned with indecent speed, or so it was reported, was no man of royal blood, but Harold Godwinson. Affront and opportunity: Harald Hardrada took the news as both. Dusting down the claim to England that he had inherited long back from his nephew, he duly began to plan for war. The precise object of his task force, however, he still kept close to his chest; for he intended that his hammer blow, when it fell, should come out of the blue. How gratifying it was, then, that emissaries from Tostig should have arrived at his court in the very midst of his preparations, proposing what he had already settled upon. How gratifying as well that even in the skies all things seemed to be moving in his favour: for in the spring there appeared above the lands of the North a mysterious star with a blazing tail. Well might men in England have been filled with dread at the sight, and reported seeing phantom ships out at sea: for there existed no more infallible portent of a looming crisis than a comet. By the late summer, when Harald’s forces were ready at last to embark, the omens had grown even more pointed. One warrior, a member of the king’s own bodyguard, dreamed that he saw an ogress holding a knife and a trough of blood; another that he saw a hag riding on a wolf, and that the wolf had a corpse in its mouth.

Admittedly, there were some among Harald’s followers who read these sanguinary visions as a foreboding, not of their lord’s victory, but rather of his doom: for the old carnivore was fifty, and long in the tooth. Not for Harald himself, however, any pessimistic notions that he might be venturing on an adventure too far – still less that the very era of the sea kings might be slipping him by. Naturally, as befitted the brother of a martyr, he had made sure to pray at Olaf s shrine before departing, and to obtain some keepsakes by giving the saintly hair and nails a trim; but his most potent treasure, as he set sail for England, was one that any of his pagan ancestors would have hailed. ‘Land-Waster’, it was called: ‘a banner that was said to bring victory to whomever it preceded into battle’.’’ Canute had owned one very similar,