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

by David Mitchell

England was a word that gradually gained currency, like mansplain or staycation, and it was fully in use by the time William the Conqueror was king of it. I expect you’ve heard of him. Most people know that, in 1066, William the Conqueror (not at that point so named) won the Battle of Hastings and became king of England. When it comes to the likely readership of this book, that ‘most’ must rise to ‘all’. If there is anyone reading this book who didn’t already know that, I would love to hear from you because you are genuinely reading in a genre that was previously of no interest. You, if you exist, and I bet you don’t, are an absolute confounder of the algorithms. It would be like someone reading a biography of Elvis Presley who did not already know that he was a singer. What you are doing is probably more statistically remarkable than what William the Conqueror did.

I mean, you can speculate about why they came if you want to – if you really hate yourself and can’t stand a bit of mystery in your life. You can start thinking about their reasoning and ferreting around for the evidence. But I think it’s a bit of a shame – rather George Lucas of you. You’ve got some horned warriors in dragon ships emerging enigmatically from the mist – why ruin it with the prequel? Why start asking, ‘Ooh, what happened before this dramatic bit? What dry socio-economic causes can we root out?’ Need I say I am not a professional historian? I suspect that the view ‘It’s more fun to keep a bit of mystique about what’s actually going on’ is frowned upon in academic circles.

By early 878, things had deteriorated further. Wessex was almost entirely taken over by the Danes, and Alfred was reduced to hiding in the Somerset Levels – a harder place to hide than somewhere more undulating. I mean, anyone can hide in the Alps. The Danes must have been surveying the horizon for suspicious Alfred the Great-sized pieces of cover, like in that Monty Python sketch ‘How Not to Be Seen’.

There’s no justice. Alfred’s medium-sized achievements, thanks to his canny commissioning of a praise-packed biography, overshadow that of his more successful successors. Worse still, their fame is also dwarfed by that of the incompetent who came after them: King Aethelred, known as Aethelred the Unready. The nickname sums him up, though apparently ‘unready’ didn’t mean what it sounds like it means, but derives from the Old English word meaning ‘badly advised’, while the name Aethelred means ‘well advised’. It’s a joke – Well-Advised the Badly Advised – and a message to posterity about the limited impact of nominative determinism.

That’s what’s so chilling. There was financial interest involved, but a lot of Christians will have thought that excising all Jewish people from Christian society was what ought to be done. They won’t have felt guilty, they’ll have felt virtuous. People on their deathbeds, when contemplating their interview at the pearly gates, will have been thinking, ‘I’m a bit worried all the wanking will get mentioned, but at least I was consistently horrible to Jews so that should count in my favour.’ Their certainty that they were right is worth remembering because it means there’s probably stuff we’re certain is right that future ages will correctly judge to be monstrous. The fact that everybody is convinced of something is no guarantee that it isn’t evil horseshit.