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

Christendom. Even in regions where borders and loyalties were infinitely more confused, and confusing, than in England, men had long been in the habit of identifying themselves with a ‘natio’ — a nation. ‘People joined together by a single descent, custom, language and law,’ one abbot, writing in the Rhineland a whole century before the Millennium, had defined the word.

True, there were certain ‘nations’, the Normans pre-eminent among them, whose beginnings were so recent that their mongrel character could never hope to be smoothed over — but this was a problem only for parvenus. Generally, among the more venerable peoples of Christendom, it was taken for granted that all those who shared a common homeland necessarily shared a common ancestry too; indeed, that they had been united by blood even back in the most primordial of times, when they too, like the pagans who were rumoured still to haunt the steppelands beyond the frontiers of the Rus, had been wanderers, without any roots at all. A convenient notion: for since no one could actually be certain what had happened in such an obscure and distant age, the field had been left free for the learned to rustle up any number of glamorous ancestors for themselves. Frankish genealogists, for instance, had traced the pedigree of their people back to the ancient Trojans; the Saxons, not to be outdone, had claimed to be the offspring of the soldiers of Alexander the Great. Most ingenious of all, perhaps, were the Scots, who bragged, with a formidable disregard for plausibility, that they were originally from Egypt, descendants of the same Pharaoh’s daughter who had discovered Moses in the bulrushes – and whose name, so they cheerfully insisted, in a manner designed to clinch their argument, had been Princess Scota.

Far-fetched such stories might have been – and yet they were no less potent for that. Indeed, the myths that peoples told about themselves, and the sense that they had of themselves as distinctive nations, tended to be much more deeply rooted than the monarchies that ruled them. Not that this, for an upstart dynasty, was necessarily a disadvantage. Back in 936, for instance, when Otto I succeeded to his father’s throne, he had been able to do so not merely by right of inheritance, but ‘as the choice of all the Franks and Saxons’. For Harold Godwinsson, in 1066, the benefits of posing as the people’s prince were even more self-evident. Lacking as he did so much as a drop of royal blood, his surest claim to legitimacy lay in the fact that his peers, and perhaps even the dying Edward himself, had all given him the nod. Nor, despite the mildly embarrassing detail that both his name and mother were Danish, could there be any doubt as to why he had been considered worthy to rule as the supreme representative of the English. Harold had been — as even his bitterest enemies acknowledged—’the most distinguished of Edward’s subjects in honour, wealth and power’. No one was better qualified to guard his countrymen against foreign invaders. ‘Our king’ he was duly hailed in the wake of his slaughter of Hardrada’s army. Harold, at Stamford Bridge, had successfully defended both ‘folc and foldan’.

Yet even as he cleaned his sword of Norwegian blood, the circumstances that had brought him to the throne continued to menace his prospects. Back in 1063, in the wake of a hard-won victory over the Welsh, Harold had been presented with the head of his murdered enemy: a baneful and portentous trophy. Three years on, and his ability to claim the scalps of his adversaries had come to rank as the only certain measure of his fitness to rule. Not even with Hardrada safely fertilising the soil of Northumbria could he afford to relax. Other predators, other invaders, still cast their shadows. All that summer of 1066, Harold had been standing guard on the Channel – and now, with his warriors force-marched up the length of England, he was grimly aware that he had left his southern flank unprotected. Wearily, then, with the crows still flocking and clamouring above the fields of Stamford Bridge, he set about retracing his steps. He could have no doubts as to the urgency of his mission. Long before becoming king, Harold had made it a point ‘to study the character, policy and strength of the princes of France’ – and of one in particular. Grant so much as the sniff of an opening, he had to reckon, and the Duke of Normandy would take it.

For certainly, by 1066, there could be no doubting that William ranked as a truly deadly foe. His apprenticeship was long since over. Seasoned in all the arts of war and lordship, and with a reputation fit to intimidate even the princes of Flanders and Anjou, even the King of France himself, his prime had turned out a fearsome one. So too had that of his duchy. Quite as greedy for land and spoils as any Viking sea king, the great lords of Normandy, men who had grown up by their duke’s side and shared all his ambitions, had emerged as an elite of warriors superior, in both their discipline and training, to any in Christendom. For a decade and a half William and his lieutenants had been probing southwards, engaging in a uniquely lethal and innovative style of combat, pitting themselves against those most proficient castle-builders, the castellans of Anjou. The buffer zone of Maine, which back in the early 1050s had passed almost entirely into Angevin hands, had been systematically broken to William’s will. Patience had been blended with daring; attrition with escapades; months spent ravaging vineyards with sudden midnight surgical strikes. ‘Terror had been sown across the land.’ Nor, even with Maine securely in his grasp, had William been content to rest in his saddle. Campaigning had become a way of life for him, and for all those who followed his standard. Horses still