by Ed West
The Angles reverted to the old gods after Edwin’s death in battle, but were restored to the Church when Oswald came to power in Northumbria, later becoming the first English king to be canonized. Some rulers hedged their bets; Redwald, King of East Anglia, recognized as bretwalda after Ethelbert and a man self-confident enough to claim descent from the Caesars, had two shrines built next to each other, one for Christ and one for the old gods. Even Alfred the Great, living in the 9th century, claimed descent from both Woden and Noah. The religion spread across the seven kingdoms, and the Anglo-Saxons in turn converted the Saxons Overseas, as they called the Germans of the continent.
Most of what we know about this era was recorded by the Venerable Bede, a monk from Northumbria who was born in 672, orphaned as a child, and at the age of 12 sent to the monastery at Jarrow. Bede lived in the kingdom of Bernicia, and he almost certainly coined the term Northumbrian to describe the people of the north, to distinguish them from the Angles south of the Humber, but in The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, written in Latin sometime around 731, he was also the first to refer to the people of the seven kingdoms as the Anyclyn, or English. To the people of the north and west they were, and are, Sassanachs, Saxons.
The Seven Kingdoms
Just as the ruling houses of Westeros traced their lineage back to obscure and distant kings, in medieval England those of royal blood descended from the rulers of Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria, the ancient kingdoms of the Realm, which were eventually united before being conquered by William the Bastard.
Bede lived during what was later called the Northumbrian golden age. The showpiece of this flowering of culture was the Lindisfarne Gospels, a multi-coloured masterpiece (most books at the time only used three colours) laboriously written and illustrated in the Irish style by a monk called Eadfrith, and completed around 715. In time Northumbria was eclipsed by Mercia, literally ‘the boundary’, which had been founded by the most ferocious settlers on the frontier with the British. By the end of his reign in 796 its king, Offa, effectively ruled most of England from his court in Staffordshire, styling himself ‘king of the whole fatherland of the English’.
The Saxons were part of the German Sea, as they called the ocean around which the German peoples all lived. Beyond that world they knew little, only of travelers’ tales at the court of the kings, of voyages by the fjords of Norway up to the Arctic Circle and its midnight sun, and across to the land of the mysterious Finns and their shamans, and down the waterways where the Rus lived; and to the glories of Constantinople, like Rome a gilded, ancient city that filled the imagination.
Although English missionaries had made great efforts in spreading the faith in Frisia, by the banks of the great river Rhine, and in Saxony, further north in the original homeland of the Anglii the people still worshipped the old gods. These were facing hunger, and would export some 200,000 people between the 8th and 11th centuries.vi The seamen who terrorized neighbouring lands the English called Denes or heathens; since the 19th century we have known them through the Icelandic sagas as ‘raiders’, or Vikings. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles records the first of these pagani from 792 and the following year it noted that ‘dire portents appeared over Northumbria and sorely frightened the people’ – immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons, were seen flying in the air. That year the Danes raided the monastery at Lindisfarne in Northumbria. The Vikings returned in the 830s and in 865 King Ivan ‘the Boneless’ invaded with his great host; he captured the Northumbrian capital Eoforwic and established it as a permanent Danish kingdom. Unable to pronounce the name, they called it Jorvik, York.
By the late 860s all but one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had been conquered. Then in 871 the Vikings invaded Wessex. Within a few months its young king was hiding in the Somerset Levels, with only a small band, desperately fending off the invaders. His name was Alfred, grandson of bretwalda Egbert and from the line of Cerdic who had founded the kingdom in 519. The youngest of King Ethelwulf’s five sons, his reign began with the death of his last surviving brother, Ethelred, and soon afterwards the Vikings defeated his army in battle.
By the end of 877 his situation was desperate. On Twelfth Night, January 6, 878, the invaders beat the Saxons once again at Chippenham, and the last English king barely escaped with his life, fleeing with his army, or fyrd, to the Isle of Athelney in Somerset. During his darkest moments it was said that dead saints visited the king. Anonymously wandering through the woods, he came to a poor woman’s house and was allowed to sit by the fire if he would watch the bread (or cakes). Alfred, with his mind understandably on other matters, let the bread burn, and so the poor woman scolded him.
But the king then won a series of battles, starting with Edington in May 878, driving the Danes out of Wessex and making a peace with their king, Guthrum, whereby the Danes would keep the east of the country and recognize Alfred’s rule in Wessex. Guthrum also agreed to baptism, with Alfred as godfather; to Guthrum’s way of thinking Alfred’s victory was proof that this Christian God might be strong.vii
Alfred built a series of burhs or forts, no more than 40 miles apart, and these boroughs became the first towns since the Romans left, among them Exeter, Oxford, Worcester and Warwick. As well as opening and re-founding schools, and forcing aldermen (local councillors) to learn to read, Alfred also laid down the first national legal system, and also established the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, which provide a great deal of the history of the period. And he achieved all this despite being struck down with a mysterious stomach disease on his wedding day, and being in agony for much of his life. He also re-founded London on the old Roman settlement – Anglo-Saxon Ludenwic, built in 600 a couple of miles west, now became known as the old city, or Aldwych.viii In 886, in the newly rebuilt city, Alfred was declared king of all the Anglo-Saxons not under Danish rule. He was, in the eyes of the people, rex Anglorum – King of the English.
Alfred died in 899, and although his brother Ethelred’s living sons had a greater claim, he ensured his own son Edward ‘the Elder’ became king after him, recognised as fader and hlaford (father and lord) of all the island. The term lord, used by kings until Richard II, came from Loafward literally ‘loaf giver’, and this relationship was at the heart of Anglo-Saxon and later medieval society; men had certain duties towards their lords, whether it was working on the land or the taking up of arms, in return for which they received protection and food.
Edward was crowned at a location close to the borders of Mercia, Kent and Essex called Kings-Town-upon-Thames, on the same spot where his father and grandfather had been anointed, and where his son’s coronation is still immortalised on a stone. That son, Athelstan, was the product of Edward’s liaison with a shepherd’s daughter, a ‘noble concubine of his father’s youth’, and despite being illegitimate, he succeeded in 924. The crowning achievement of Athelstan's rule came in 937 when he won a spectacular victory at Brunanburh. An Anglo-Saxon poem about the battle stated that at the end of the day five young kings lay dead: ‘Stretched lifeless by the sword, and with them seven of Olaf’s earls and a countless host of seamen of Scots.’
Although Athelstan united England, becoming in effect its first king, a feature of medieval kingship was that of constant struggle for power by families, and within them. He was succeeded by his brother Edmund ‘the deed-doer’, whose line would continue until the time of Ethelred the Unready, who at the turn of the millennium faced the return of the Danes, now Christian but still as violent as ever. The Vikings – Danes and Norwegians – had most heavily settled on the rocky islands off the north and west of Britain, especially Orkney and Shetland, the Hebrides and the Isle of Man, and they maintained a raiding culture. (Like Westeros’s Iron Islanders, they also sometimes kept a second wife, a ‘handfast’ of lower status, often non-Scandinavian.)
This time a Viking king, Canute, took the crown and ruled for 20 years before it eventually passed to Edward the Confessor, Ethelred’s son by his Norman wife Emma. He spent his
reign in conflict with Godwin, Earl of Wessex, and his six vicious sons, a division that would trigger the invasion of Emma’s great-nephew Duke William against the ‘usurper’ Harold Godwinson.
Edward hated Godwin, who had began life as a pirate before rising up through violence and cunning, and had murdered the king’s brother Alfred. He had no choice but to recognise his power, and agreed to marry Godwin’s daughter Edith, although their marriage remained childless, and possibly chaste. The king’s relations with the Godwins reached crisis point in 1051 when Eustace of Boulogne, the husband of Edward’s sister and a major ally, made a diplomatic visit to England, and ended up stabbing a Dover innkeeper to death and starting a brawl that left 20 people dead. Edward ordered that Dover be harried, but Godwin, as the Earl of Wessex and therefore the immediate overlord, refused. Edward exiled the entire family; but Godwin had enough powerful allies for the ruling council, the Witan, to force the king to back down.
Godwin died suddenly at a feast, possibly from choking to death on bread, or perhaps a stroke, and with the childless king growing old and sick Godwin's son Harold effectively became heir apparent, though without Edward’s public blessing. But the Godwins were themselves torn apart by feuds. Godwin’s third son, Tostig, had been made Earl of Northumbria following the death of Earl Seward in 1055, who the previous year had defeated and killed the Scottish usurper Macbeth at the Battle of the Seven Sleepers. Northumbria was an alien place to southern men, there were few passable roads between north and south, and the region was far more heavily Danish, especially the country around York. Tostig, despite his Danish name and Danish mother, was considered too southern by most of the magnates but the violence he displayed in maintaining the law, to both the guilty and innocent, also unnerved many.
In October 1065 this led to an uprising in the north, led by two brothers from the old ruling house, Edwin and Morcar, who reached as far as the Thames and threatened civil war. Harold acted as mediator, most likely agreeing to exile Tostig and making the brothers Earls of Northumbria and Mercia, and marrying their sister. This would give him a greater claim to the throne, which the brothers of the north would support.
The final days of 1065 were marked by terrible storms. The noblemen of England came from all around the country to feast together at Westminster Abbey, which Edward had built, but it was clear that the king was gravely ill. Two monks by his bedside warned that England was cursed by God and would suffer evil spirits for a year and a day; the king died on twelfth night, and Harold assumed the throne.
Across the narrow sea William the Bastard, ferocious leader of the Duchy of Normandy, was soon assembling a fleet to conquer the Realm. The Normans were scared of crossing this dangerous stretch of ocean, and the king called a council, where with sheer force of will and the promise of riches, he proclaimed that he would become King of England. It was a fantastically bold move. But the Normans were the pre-eminent warriors of the region, the ferocity of their Viking ancestors reduced not one bit by the French tongue and Roman religion Instead their capacity for conquest was increased by a fervent faith and superior tactics. For these warlike people their entire way of life was geared towards fighting: they cut their hair short in the Roman fashion, and bred a special warhorse from Arab stallions.
William was the illegitimate son of Duke Robert and a low-born woman whose father may have been an embalmer of corpses. Although a bastard, William was accepted as Robert’s heir, but when his son was only seven the duke headed to the Holy Land. There he died, leaving William to grow up in a feud-ridden court where several attempts were made on his life, most of them by family members. Odo the Fat killed his first protector, Count Gilbert, and then his tutor Turold. Later, Osbern, head of the royal household, was stabbed to death by William of Montgomery in young William’s bedchamber. Montgomery was himself later stabbed to death.
By the time that Edward the Confessor passed away William was nearly 40, thick set, and battle-hardened by years of conflict with Normandy’s neighbours Maine, Flanders and France. He claimed the throne through his relation to the Confessor, and said that Edward had named him successor and that Harold had sworn an oath to him, although few believed him; and the one with the strongest claim was Ethelred’s great-grandson Edgar Atheling, but he was just a boy.
Meanwhile a fourth king vied for the throne, the Norwegian Harold Haadraada, ‘hard-ruler’. The 6’4” Thunderbolt of the North, as he was also known, was famed for showing no mercy to his enemies. One of his party tricks was to break a siege by attaching burning wood to the wings of birds, which would then fly back to their nests within the city.ix Haadraada had travelled far in his career; as a youth he had followed the Viking trail down the rivers of Russia to the holy city of Constantinople, capital of the eastern Roman Empire, where the north men were employed in the emperor’s Vangerian guard as mercenaries. This second Rome was a place of outstanding riches and sophistication at the very edge of the continent. It was here that Greek Fire was developed, the inspiration for the Battle of King’s Landing; it was first used by the Byzantine Greeks during the Arab Siege of Constantinople in 674, when a navy under the second caliph Yazid I was scorched. It was formed from a mysterious substance still unknown today, which caused water to burn.x
Haadraada had been persuaded to invade by none other than Tostig, with whom he set sail from Norway towards the Shetlands and down the coast of eastern Scotland. The armada consisted of 300 ships and the invading army met a pitiful English force led by Edwin and Morcar, and after the battle they walked over English heads lying in a river ‘like stepping stones’. The brothers, however, escaped, and Harold’s army marched north in record time and met the invaders at nearby Stamford Bridge, killing both the Norwegian king and Tostig. Harold, magnanimously, allowed the surviving Scandinavians to go home, the pitiful band filling only 20 or so ships, and a visitor to the area in the 1120s recalled that there was still a mountain of bones visible on the battle site.
By now the Normans had landed in Sussex, along with mercenaries - sellswords, as they are called in Martin’s world - from across the continent, and plundered the land. Harold could have stayed in London and let the Normans run out of food, but he was tempted out, for as lord he could not stand by while the people of Sussex, the heartland of the Godwinson family, were plundered. By the evening of October 13th the two armies were camped near Hastings, and the English, despite their tiredness, had the advantage of higher ground. Their army also included 3,000 of the elite housecarls, each carrying an enormous two-handed axe that could chop a horse in half. At 9am, 7,000 Englishmen went into battle against 7,000 invaders, the English shouting ‘Ut!’ (out) and the enemy ‘Dex Aie’ (with God’s help). The fighting went on for most of the day.
The Normans charged and charged, but there was deadlock. Then the Bretons on their left side began a retreat and, thinking that the enemy were in tatters, the English were fooled into chasing them. Their formation collapsed and the higher ground was lost, and Harold’s brothers Gyrth and Leofwine were killed. The English now on the retreat, William ordered four knights to go after the king; they hacked him to death, and it was left to Harold’s mistress, Edith Swan-Neck, to identify him by a part ‘known only to her’. After the battle, the Normans went from town to town until on Christmas Day London surrendered, supposedly after a traitor let the invaders through the Lud Gate, where the old gods had been worshipped a millennium before.
On Christmas Day 1066, William was crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey, the celebration ending with his men firing on the crowd, before setting fire to the surrounding buildings. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle lamented: ‘They built castles far and wide throughout the land, oppressing the unhappy people, and things went ever from bad to worse.’
The Conquest
A central theme running through Game of Thrones is the warrior code known as chivalry, which in England reached its high point in the reign of Edward III in the 14th century. It had been brought to England with the Normans, differing
from other medieval warrior codes in that it prohibited the killing or mistreatment of aristocratic prisoners, who in Anglo-Saxon times would have expected to be killed.xi (Chivalry also encompassed ideas about the treatment of women, although most of what we imagine by chivalry towards women today is a later romantic idea from the far gentler Victorian era.) The invasion also brought a new elite, the barons, and with baronial power came rivalries and jealousies that would dominate the next four centuries.
William ‘The Conqueror’ spent the 20 years following his invasion fighting rebels and rivals. In 1087 he attacked Mantes, in the rival duchy of Maine, besieged it and set it on fire. During the siege his horse fell and William’s fat stomach was ripped open and became infected, and he spent five weeks in agony. As he lay dying he parcelled out territories to his sons and noblemen, but all his nearby possessions were ransacked and everyone went back to their lands to prepare for anarchy. William had grown so obese that at his funeral the pallbearers collapsed under the weight of the coffin, and his body fell onto the church floor, causing everyone to flee.
The Conqueror had three surviving sons, and had fallen out with his eldest, Robert, whom he called ‘Stubby legs’; in 1079 Robert had managed to personally wound his father in battle. Yet the king left him Normandy, middle son William inherited England and the youngest, Henry, got just £5,000. So much did he mistrust his father that Henry sat counting it in front of him until he was satisfied it was all there, before riding off.
Nicknamed Rufus because of his red hair and alcohol-soaked ruddy face, William II alienated the clergy, and because monks wrote most history, he generally received a bad press, becoming the subject of many allegations, among them that he indulged in devil-worshipping and homosexual orgies. His conflict with his brother was resolved when in 1090, Pope Urban II called for a Crusade to win back the Holy Land for Christendom, and Robert volunteered, mortgaging Normandy to pay for it. Rufus died in a mysterious hunting accident in the New Forest in 1100, with his brother Henry only a mile way, conveniently close enough to reach Winchester within an hour to claim the crown. Hunting was a dangerous sport and accidents were quite frequent – the Conqueror’s second son Richard had been killed in 1081 in the same forest. - but the circumstances of the king’s death were extremely fortunate for the youngest brother. Robert was still on his way back from the Holy Land, having won the crusade and picked up a beautiful (and, more importantly, rich) wife on the way back.
