Book Review: The Norman Conquest

The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon EnglandBy Marc MorrisPegasus Books, 2014 When it comes to the subject of the Norman Conquest, to the well-worn worn saga of William of Normandy leading his troops across the Channel to wrest control of England from the newly-crowned King Harold Godwinson and thereby earn the name Conqueror, a pitch-black smog of superfluity hangs over the whole historical landscape.As Marc Morris notes in his new book The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England, the story has been told and re-told many hundreds, if not thousands, of times over the centuries. And we don’t exactly lack for modern attempts. The Bayeux Tapestry (which our author nerdily points out is actually an embroidery) has been the subject of at least ten popular histories in the last ten years alone. All the major participants of the year’s events – from Harold to Viking invader Harald Hardrada (who struck the kingdom from the north virtually on the same day as William’s invasion), poor old dead King Edward the Confessor, and of course William himself – have all had full-length biographies. D. A. Carpenter’s 2003 book The Struggle for Mastery: 1066-1284 contains a comprehensively authoritative account of these events, as does Peter Rex’s 1066, David Howarth’s 1066, and Frank McLynn’s 1066. Hell, 2009 alone saw R. Hushcroft’s The Norman Conquest: A New Introduction, H. M. Thomas’s The Norman Conquest: England After William the Conqueror, and G. Garrett’s The Norman Conquest: A Very Short Introduction.This isn’t an embarrassment of riches – it’s just plain embarrassing. Any dedicated reader of popular scholarly history (that increasingly rare production in an age of Green: The History of a Pretty Color, or Getting It Up: A History of the Erection) would be justified in calling for a stony moratorium.Instead, we get this thickly-researched new book by Morris, who can’t possibly justify his choice of subject but is game enough in assaying it just the same. If you only read ten books in 2014 called The Norman Conquest, this should definitely be one of them - maybe even the first.As can be speedily inferred from those thousands of retellings, the original story is one of the all-time thrillers of the historical record. England’s weird, powerful king Edward the Confessor is growing old and has no natural heirs. Both his over-mighty subject the swinish Harold Godwinson and his swinish Continental kinsman William of Normandy consider themselves next in line, but Harold has the advantage of proximity. There’s even a deathbed pronouncement: the indissoluble question of what, if anything, Edward said on in his final hours, but as Morris puts it:

Only a handful of people – those present by his bedside – could have actually refuted the suggestion that Edward, in his last hours, had nominated Harold. So far as we can tell, none of them did so.

But Morris has already admitted (in a fairly brave note in his Introduction) that he’s not that big a fan of the English or the Normans, and although he can’t find any documentary evidence to dismiss Harold’s claim, he squints with refreshingly judgemental acerbity at Harold’s subsequent actions:

What does damn Harold, however, is the unseemly haste with which the [coronation] ceremony was arranged. The new king was crowned the day after the Confessor’s death, and on the same day as the old king’s funeral. No previous king of England had demonstrated such a desperate hurry to have himself consecrated … Harold’s rush to have himself crowned within hours of his predecessor’s death was therefore quite unprecedented, and suggests that he was trying to buttress what was by any reckoning a dubious claim with an instant consecration. It is the most obviously suspect act in the drama.

The move outraged William, who first sent emissaries to Harold urging him to relinquish his claim to the throne (a curious historical side-note: this tactic has never, in fact, worked) and then applied to Pope Alexander II for papal sanction to invade Engand (the Pope was something of a reformer who hated Norman ecclesiastical abuses almost as much as he hated Harold personally, so he gave William both his blessing and a pretty banner to take into battle). William also applied to his own Norman barons, many of whom, as Morris helpfully reminds us, weren’t at all certain the thing could be done.He won them over, of course, and the invasion was launched – and a little later immortalized in the famous Bayeux Embroidery, the single most remarkable historical document of the pre-photographic age. It’s a long visual manifestation of the fact that history is written by the winners, and Morris is at his most charming when he’s simply conveying how exciting he finds looking at the thing, at the busy populations on both sides:

And there they are: the Normans! Hurling themselves fearlessly into battle, looting the homes of their enemies, building castles, burning castles, feasting, fighting, arguing, killing, and conquering, clad in mail shirts, carrying kite-shaped shields. They brandish swords, but more often spears, and wear distinctive pointed helmets with fixed, flat nasals.And there, too, are their opponents, the English. Similarly brave and warlike, they are at the same time visibly different. Sporting longer hair and even longer moustaches, they also ride horses but not into battle, where instead they stand to fight, wielding fearsome long-handled axes.

Analyzing the Bayeux Tea Cosy is only the most dramatic of the various source-work siftings any conscientious history of 1066 must undertake. The strongest point of Morris’s book is its engagement with those sources – including his investigation of the most iconic visual moment of the Norman Conquest: the death of King Harold in battle by means of a thick wooden arrow through his eye. It’s an arresting scene on the visual evidence alone – and Morris makes a strong case that is never happened.The arrow-in-the-eye is attested to by half the Conquest’s sources – Baudri of Bourgeuil, William of Malmesbury, and Henry of Huntingdon, but the other half, William of Jumieges, William of Poitiers, and some versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, make no mention of it, and Morris finds this suspicious, especially in the case of William of Poitiers, a grizzled ex-fighting man who served as William the Conqueror’s personal chaplain and confessor and who, throughout most of his Gesta Giullelmi, indulges in what Morris accurately refers to as “cloying obsequiousness” that must be taken with “a large grain of salt.”An alternate version of what happened at Hastings has always existed, a version in which William, on the verge of victory, sees Harold fighting ferociously and surrounds him with a large group of hand-picked Normans – who proceed to hack the king to pieces. Historians have traditionally dismissed this account by noting that if it really happened, surely faithful retainers like William of Poitiers would have trumpeted it from one end of Christendom to the other. Morris begs to differ, and it’s at times like this, when he’s closely and carefully interrogating the same sources we’ve had in front of us all along, that he excels:

This argument, however, assumes that everyone in Christendom would have regarded the premeditated butchery of a crowned king as acceptable behaviour, which was not necessarily the case. The Carmen [de Hastingne, another early source] insists that Harold’s killers acted ‘in accordance with the rules of war,’ a statement which by itself suggests that others may have felt those rules had been broken. One person who may have thought as much was William of Poitiers … when it comes to Harold’s gory end … he offers no denial and no alternative scenario: he simply lapses into silence.

“With most writers,” Morris grants, “their silence on a particular point would be poor foundation on which to build an argument” … but if this most partisan of all William writers neither denies nor praises the butchery of King Harold, that might be taken as strong evidence that the butchery really happened. It’s good muscular reasoning, and it the most winning attribute of this book.It could come with candy bars and Bach oratorios and it still wouldn’t be winning enough to validate the appearance of yet another history of 1066. By way of counter-example, William’s fourth son, Henry (the second of his sons to rule England after him), was king for thirty years and has had in the last 100 years exactly one popular scholarly biography. No need for a moratorium there.