Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens

by David Mitchell

To Lynn and Churchill, England’s existence was inextricably linked to the continuity of its institutions.

The fact is that, when millions of people are involved, any sense of a nation united in its values can only be portrayed by repressing the feelings and views of many.

What’s the point of showing bland respect for all the ages? ‘Oh, they’re all lovely, all the ages – let’s not be rude by labelling one of them “dark”.

The Romans established reliable public order, a feat not achieved again in Britain for well over a thousand years. This

Some people managed it, though. King Ceolwulf of Northumbria, for example, and his favourite historian, the Venerable Bede.

The Romans had been Christian by the end. Originally they’d been polytheistic and inclined to use Christians as lion food, but in 313 the Emperor Constantine put a stop to all that and declared he was a Christian himself.

took. Rather poignantly, the modern English word ‘lord’ derives from the Old English hlaford meaning ‘bread-giver’.

My point is that I don’t think religions are themselves to blame for all the violence in the name of religion, though it has to be said that the religions also totally failed to stop it.

Christianity and the right to rule were welded together.

It was another part of the transmogrification of the office of king from top thug into something supposedly sacred and noble.

The thought that disasters are your fault is comforting, on some level. It gives you the illusion of control when, in truth, something horrible came out of the blue and ruined your life.

The Vikings were a thing that just happened.

843, at the Treaty of Verdun, Charlemagne’s grandsons agreed to split his vast empire into East Francia – which evolved into a state that, broadly speaking, was the precursor of Germany – and West Francia, which later started to be referred to as France.

West Francia were having their own issues with Vikings, or Northmen. One of them, Rollo, had invaded and occupied the area around Rouen and, in 885, had nearly taken Paris.

Since it was now ruled by these Northmen, or Normans, the region became known as Normandy.

This period, the early to mid-tenth century, is when the kingdom of England started.

bit of that. He had the brilliant idea of announcing he was the Roman emperor – or as the office was later referred to with garish hyperbole ‘Holy Roman Emperor!’

Charlemagne twigged that a key part of becoming an emperor was saying you were one.

The House of Wessex claimed to be restoring something, a pre-existing England, which didn’t pre-exist, and a pre-existing Romanness, which their regime was absolutely nothing like and had no connection with at all.

Maybe that’s true. Maybe England was always going to gravitate towards the French axis and out of the Scandinavian one.

However balanced Harold’s and William’s respective positions before the battle, it was decisive. Anglo-Saxon England was on its knees.

Ownership of England was passed to new people.

England was conquered in 1066 and that’s it. That’s the line: everything’s been the same since.

It was replaced by Latin and Norman French and all but disappeared as a written language.

Royalty and aristocracy in England continued to use a different language from the vast majority of the people for centuries.

The north was different and William knew it.

and decided to ‘waste’ the north. His troops went around slaughtering people and burning villages, crops and crop stores.

Some say that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. I find that an awkward principle because, in my view, allowing good men to do nothing is the purpose of civilization.

But they felt that, as anointed kings, they possessed their own measure of ineffable ecclesiastical power: they were holy too.

The coronation of Henry’s son, known thereafter as Henry the young king, turned out to be a mistake.

But Henry the young king reckoned it meant he was a king already.

The young king’s irksome instinct to rule from the moment he was crowned is recontextualized by the fact that he didn’t have long.

The problem for Richard’s legacy is that the badge is deeply, inextricably linked to the notion of England.

Some say that the three lions on Richard’s shield represent not merely England, but Normandy, Aquitaine and England, Richard’s main three dominions.

He was the scion of a major French noble house who were such big shots they had their own rainy north European kingdom as a sort of country retreat. They

For Richard, it was a splendid source of funds to pay for his main priority: raising a big army to take part in the Third Crusade.

Richard’s key attribute was being extraordinarily good at fighting. And, by fighting, I mean large-scale fighting.

The crusades were a series of chaotic and vicious attempts by western European Christians to wrest the control of what is now Israel, Palestine and bits of Lebanon and Syria from Muslims –

Various popes initiated them, incensed as they then were (in both senses of the word) by the existence and geographical spread of Islam.

The Franks, as western Europeans were often collectively known, were a backward civilization compared to the Islamic states from which they tried to conquer the Holy Land.

and Constantinople itself – the new Rome and centre of the Byzantine Empire – fell to the Turks in 1453.

So poor was the management he provided that it famously spurred the English aristocracy into unionizing. That’s what led to Magna Carta.

There should be some sort of thing – the law, the constitution, the customs of the realm – that existed separately from the person of the king and the surprisingly malleable tenets of Christianity. This

Nevertheless, at the point when Henry III acceded to the throne, the Plantagenet situation was bleak.

If you were wondering when parliament was going to get invented, it’s now. Thanks

lost most of his North American possessions to a rebellion based on the idea of ‘No taxation without representation’. That whole principle originated in the era we’re talking about now, when cash-strapped medieval kings, with territorial ambitions beyond their means, realized that they’d have to consult their prominent subjects, and give guarantees of reasonable government,

The key mover and shaker in all this was a man called Simon de Montfort,

that Edward liked parliaments, but because he wanted things to be properly organized and he needed money to go and conquer places.

But, for him, they weren’t about compromise, they were about enforcing ordered government, about making things official. He

As a result, hugely greater financial resources became available to him. He was extending governmental scope, and