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

by David Mitchell

History is a very contemporary thing – it’s ours to think about, manipulate, use to win arguments or to justify patriotism, nationalism or group self-loathing, according to taste. In contrast, the past is unknowable. It’s as complicated as the present. It’s an infinity of former nows all as unfathomable as this one. That’s why historians end up specializing in tiny bits of it.

For most of the period covered by this book, any claims or attempts by leaders to change or improve things are most persuasively labelled, to the people of the time, as restorations of some kind. Saying that something was totally new often played badly. The ultimate, most glorious restoration would be to the golden age of King Arthur.

It’s really strange. It means there was a complete cessation of one form of human occupation of that part of southern Britain and the start of a new one. The original Londoners died, or fled, to go and gradually become Welsh, and the newcomers looked at what they’d left behind – a city way beyond their technical abilities to construct – and thought, ‘We don’t want anything to do with that.’

Mellitus had been sent from Rome and wasn’t afraid of buildings, so he set up his church inside the city walls. By that time, a trading settlement or wic as they were called in Old English, had already built up, not inside the city walls (too scary!), but just to the west,

I don’t know where the idea of Vikings having horns on their helmets came from, but it’s a brilliant one. In every possible way, other than the literal truth, they totally had horns on their helmets. Horned helmets was absolutely their vibe and I feel we all have a right to that deeper artistic truth.

There’s a picture on the Alfred Jewel, in the middle of all the lovely gold work, that archaeologists think is supposed to be Jesus. Nobody knows what Jesus really looked like, but we can be pretty sure he didn’t look like that.

But he died soon after getting home, leaving a five-year-old son, Edgar, always referred to as ‘atheling’. That’s the Anglo-Saxon word basically meaning ‘royal prince who’s certainly a candidate for next king but isn’t anything as reassuring as a confirmed heir’. The fact that this status was sufficiently common to justify its own word is a key reason there was so much fighting.

It seems to me that Joan of Arc was the quirky personification of an inevitable historical process. It’s almost as if God or Fate or Chance – history’s great showrunner in the sky – felt the need to jazz up an otherwise predictable narrative. England had neither the united leadership nor the wealth nor the international clout to take over and hold on to France. It would have been not merely like a snake swallowing a basketball but like a fox trying to kill a hippopotamus. The English situation was bound to deteriorate but a young French peasant woman, wearing armour and having holy visions, leading a French army while the dauphin looked on with scepticism turning to amazement, is a much more interesting way for that to happen. If your awareness of history comes from a primarily English or British perspective, Joan of Arc is an awkward prospect. Her role in the story makes France right and England wrong. She is a rebuke to unworthy and unrealistic ambitions and only really enjoyable from a French perspective. ‘This is their bit,’ you have to say and let the French have fun. That wasn’t the view of the English at the time. The trouble with personifications of inevitable historical processes is that, unlike the processes themselves, they can be killed. So that’s what the English did to her,

There must have been amazing people, but we don’t hear about them because most of them couldn’t write. They left no mark. But the flowering of Elizabethan drama, and Shakespeare in particular, is a reminder that they existed. Amazing people existed but they did not seem to matter. That is probably the most far-reaching conclusion we can draw from centuries of violent kingship.

There are still tyrants in the world today and the strangeness of their power is something we must hold in mind. It’s extremely odd. That fact can get lost in our anger at the injustice of what they do. The anger dignifies them, it makes them important. But they’re not important, they’re random.

They’re a product of a flawed system, like litter or traffic jams. The people themselves are as inconsequential as the biographical specifics of a burglar who has been enabled to take all your stuff by lax security, poor law enforcement and a grim socio-economic environment. The rulers in this book inherited or acquired a lot of power. They did things that affected millions of people’s lives. But, if they hadn’t, someone else would have done. Unlike Shakespeare, they were not important. We had but mistook them all this while.