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

had to be exercised, castles built, estates and towns and riches won. No surprise, then, that England, where the great men still fought on foot, and defended their wooden halls with little more than ditches, and were not organised for ceaseless warfare, should have served to beckon the restless and hungry duke. To most Englishmen, accustomed as they were to look for danger from across the northern seas, the notion that the upstart Normans might represent a genuine menace to their ancient and wealthy kingdom had appeared a fanciful one-but not to Harold. He, at any rate, had taken pains to analyse William at close quarters. He had made sure to observe in the field how the duke’s castles were built, and the aggressive use to which they could be put, and the ominous potential of the Norman cavalry. Indeed, he had even ridden with William on a raid into Brittany – and performed so heroically during the course of the expedition that he had been rewarded for his feats with a gift of armour from the duke himself.

This startling feat of espionage had been achieved only a couple of years before the fateful testing time of 1066. Quite what it was that had brought Harold to Normandy in the first place would later be much debated. The Normans would insist that he had been sent by Edward to promise William the succession; the English that he had travelled there of his own volition in order to negotiate a marriage alliance or perhaps the release of a hostage. It is not impossible that both claims were true. Altogether more certain, however, is that Harold, after a calamitous initial journey to Normandy - one that had featured both a shipwreck and a spell in the dungeon of a local princeling -- had ended up as William’s guest. Though this might have been awkward for him, Harold was not his father’s son for nothing: and so it was, smoothly and with a fine show of Godwin opportunism, that he had set himself to a close study of the man whom he would long since have fingered as his likeliest rival for the English throne. Carefully veiling his own ambitions, he had encouraged William to spill out everything. Sure enough, the duke had openly acknowledged to his charming and attentive guest how he did indeed intend to press his right to England, by virtue of his relationship to his long-dead great- aunt, the Lady Emma, and by sundry blessings that he claimed to have received from King Edward. Harold, more than content to play his rival for a fool, had duly sworn to support and advance William’s cause. His reward had been yet further gifts, and a ship back home to England. ‘Watchful mockery’ indeed.

No wonder, then, in the early weeks of 1066, that William should have responded to the news of Harold’s accession with icy and bitter rage: he felt the fury of a man who had been cheated as well as robbed. Particularly shocking to him was the memory of how his guest, pledging his support, had done so with a gesture of awful and public solemnity, his hand laid on a relic box, a deed of fateful boldness: for what was an oath if not a challenge flung directly at God?

‘But alas’ — as those who knew the new king had long appreciated — ‘he was a man always too quick to give his word’. It was all very well for Harold to claim that his oath of loyalty to William had been extorted from him under duress, and that he had been crowned entirely by right, according to the wishes and customs of the English people. Such details did not serve to absolve him, for there existed laws more awesome and binding than those of any mortal kingdom. William, at any rate, understood this well enough. Indeed, he had always capitalised powerfully upon it. He was a man, after all, who had turned the Peace of God so thoroughly to his own advantage, and imposed it with such an iron fist, that other princedoms, in comparison with Normandy, could appear to the Normans themselves mere bear pits, ‘rife with unbridled wickedness’. No surprise, then, that the duke, in his determination to secure his right to England, should have moved quickly to explore what else God might be able to do for him. He was acutely sensitive, in a way his wily but light- hearted rival was not, to the changing spirit of the times--a spirit that set a premium on the universal over the local. Certainly, he had no doubts that the laws of England could be made to seem as nothing when compared with the awful majesty of the one supreme law: that of God Almighty Himself. William, whose stern religiosity had always been combined with a talent for spotting trends, was a ruler surpassingly well fitted to appreciate the new enthusiasms that were animating the highest reaches of the Church - and what they might mean for himself. One of his bishops had sat alongside Leo IX at the Council of Reims. One of his abbots had been a school friend of Alexander II, the reigning Pope. The mighty tide of reform, which far from subsiding with Leo’s death had continued to swell and surge and advance, could hardly help, then, in the great crisis of 1066, but be a matter of surpassing interest to William.

Nor, in turn, could William fail to arouse a matching enthusiasm among reforming circles in Rome. In the summer of 1066, even as Harald Hardrada was preparing to unfurl Land-Waster, a very different banner was being readied for the Duke of Normandy. ‘The standard of St Peter the Apostle’ bore no moving ravens on it, nor any other hint of magic, and yet there could be no doubting its awesome and supernatural potency – for it had been blessed in person by none other than the Holy Father himself. A