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

by David Mitchell

In an A-Level history essay, I was taught, there should always be at least one paragraph on the church.

Without the wifi of the empire, the app hadn’t been getting the updates.

The Welsh for Wales basically means ‘us’ and the English for it means ‘them’.

It was discovered in Somerset in 1693 by people who didn’t even realize they were living in the past themselves.

We can understand more clearly that history isn’t actually a proper story. It’s more like a soap opera. It never fucking ends.

In fact, the term ‘emperor’ started as a euphemism. Rome, having become a republic, loathed the notion of kings. ‘Emperor’ derived from imperator, which means a ‘military commander’ – they weren’t horrible kings, just trusty commanders, in the same way that Stalin was just a nice reliable general secretary rather than anything showy or threatening like a president or tsar.

Imagining this scene of a pope in ninth-century Rome, a feeble and impoverished city lurking on the outskirts of the ruins of its namesake empire’s mega-capital, handing out shiny bits of old Roman clobber to random visiting children, is both poignant and hilarious.

In fact, the monk who drew it shows few signs of having ever laid eyes on a human being of any sort – though the facial expression he gives Aethelred might have inspired cartoonists of later centuries who were trying to capture the essence of someone who’s just been viciously bonked on the head.

(Forkbeard is Old Danish for Fuckface) (no it isn’t).

People still die at exactly the same rate as they always have: once per person.

The institution that is the UK today was ‘established 1066’. On Christmas Day. It all began with people having to work on a bank holiday. How apt.

James Bond not dying is the premise of a Bond film. It’s the premise of the whole franchise. What you are supposed to watch and enjoy is the exciting manner in which he does not die.

By the time William was lying in a priory with a suppurating wound and nothing left on his to-do list except divide up his lands, die and explode,

You’re going to be hearing a lot about these crusades over the next few hundred years (I hope I’m not over-estimating your pace of reading)

porphyrogeniture.

I should warn you that, as a name, Matilda was very much the Aelfgifu of the twelfth century.

Geoffrey was nicknamed ‘Plantagenet’ because he had the habit of wearing a yellow sprig of broom blossom, or planta genista, in his hat, and that name has been given by historians to the English royal house that descended from him.

The main obstacle to this working was Eustace, Stephen’s son, but he was so furious that the deal was even being considered that in August he conveniently died, apparently ‘in a fit of madness’.

The wording is unclear, and it would have been in Norman French, so it certainly wasn’t the famous phrase ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’ It was something more along the lines of ‘What sort of a bunch of saps have I surrounded myself with that they let me get treated like shit by this fucking oik?’

King Edward I loved parliaments. That’s surprising because they were quite new and in general are seen as a constraint on royal power. I’d say it was the most remarkable thing about him, which makes it strange that his two main nicknames are ‘Longshanks’ and ‘Hammer of the Scots’. Being tall and trying to take over Scotland seem to me less unusual attributes for an English king than a fondness for parliaments.

Gaunt had then left the country in high dudgeon to go and try to become king of Castile.

What this fabricated backstory meant, they said, was that England and Henry, unlike other kings and kingdoms, were not subject to any external European jurisdiction. The idea that someone on the continent could overrule any aspect of English governance would not be stood for. Sound familiar?

Edward first, because he was a boy, and then the girls starting with Mary and followed by Elizabeth. And that is exactly what happened: they all reigned one after another and died childless. The Tudor line, which Henry had wreaked so much havoc trying to secure, was doomed anyway.

God, who we now definitely know was never a Catholic despite going along with a millennium and a half of popes and saintly images and everyone claiming to be solemnly eating bits of his son.

King Eric XIV of Sweden (wow – fourteen Erics! The Louis-loving French were only on twelve at this point).

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.