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

by David Mitchell

Monarchy is what England has instead of a sense of identity.

What do we stand for really? Freedom and democracy? Tradition and hierarchy? Bad food and sarcasm? Traffic and disappointment?

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.

That’s putting it politely. Gandalf is fictional. King Arthur is a lie.

People found it much easier to believe in a rose-tinted view of the past than a utopian future.

In Britain, a king called Vortigern (but note that ‘vortigern’ means ‘king’ in Brittonic, the ancient Britons’ language, so I worry someone might have got confused, but maybe there really was this King King) was beset by raids from the Picts, who came from what is now Scotland, and from the Scots from what is now Ireland. I know that sounds wilfully confusing but there’s nothing I can do about it.

There’s no need to remember any of that – there’s a high chance it’s bullshit. And the rest, after a few more centuries of mists of time, is history at last.

the Dark Ages. Academic consensus has turned against that term in recent years because that’s what academics are like. Their favourite thing is saying that previous academics have got it wrong,

Is assuming that things improve the best way of ensuring they will? I doubt it. A healthy fear of societal cataclysm may be a good technique for avoiding it.

the trappings of religion felt a bit embarrassing and weird, like properly putting on a French accent when saying things in French.

Gradually, by the same method used by drug gangs to divide up LA, a system of government emerged.

Aethelberht ignored his wife’s funny ways until they were explained to him by a man from Rome and suddenly he was into them.

The prevailing ethos of any surrounding society is almost always that you’re not supposed to kill people without a good reason, or at least some sort of reason. But the arseholes are clever, so they come up with reasons. To deeply religious societies, religious differences sound like a very convincing reason for killing people. But that doesn’t mean the killing wouldn’t have been happening anyway.

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.

So, is religion a good or a bad thing? Perhaps the answer is no.

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.’ They built hovels somewhere else instead and left London empty. I reckon that is weird. These are people who definitely wouldn’t have taken the Covid vaccine.

‘Well, if you’re going to eat bats, what do you expect?’ attitude. ‘Not this!’ is the answer to that. ‘I expected a delicious bat meal, not a global pandemic. I maybe had half an eye on food poisoning – perhaps that would have served me right. This is fucking insane.’

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.

it was the will of God that they should have conquered Britannia, even if it was a God they didn’t believe in at the time they did the conquering.

It’s not that the raiders were necessarily better at fighting, it’s that raiding was easier than repelling raiders.

history isn’t actually a proper story. It’s more like a soap opera. It never fucking ends. So it has to get cyclical.

so many ‘elfs’, ‘alfs’, ‘edgs’, ‘adgs’ and ‘ethels’ that we’re forced to conclude that the Anglo-Saxons found making those noises a lot easier than people do now.

On accession, Edward was challenged for the throne by his cousin Aethelwold (a great name for an artisanal cheese),

The towering sexism of many ages, and of many subsequent ages which have spearheaded the analysis of those earlier ages, has left the specifics of all the brilliant or shitty things women were doing largely unrecorded. You’d think that all they were doing was marrying kings, which the overwhelming majority were not.

I’m acknowledging this because I’m aware of the irony that, while I’m writing about an age in which almost all women (and men) were illiterate, in the current era of mass literacy, it is much more likely that any given book is being read by a woman than by a man. Men read less than women and instead commit more violent crime and listen to more audiobooks. These aren’t necessarily the same men, I should add.

There’s something infantile about these post-Dark Age rulers’ relationship with Rome. They seem to have only the sketchiest idea of what the Roman Empire actually was, but a strong sense that it was enormous and official and that the route to looking like you’re allowed to be in charge of stuff was via affecting to be extremely Roman.

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.

In fact, the monk who drew it shows few signs of having ever laid eyes on a human being of any sort

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

Taking advantage of a sudden death was a viable career path for much of the olden days. If you’re looking for promotion nowadays, hoping your immediate superior will snuff it just isn’t enough.

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

I don’t want to become someone who will blithely carry on when a king’s name is as close to the word cunt as Cnut’s is. If I get to the point where that amusement is lost on me – the fact that a big important serious king is very very nearly called King Cunt, King Cunt the Great or the Great Big Cunt – then I think an important part of me will have died.

It seems Cnut was an effective king, despite his inability to influence lunar gravity.

It seems like a weird notion – the religious equivalent of tax avoidance. Those rich guys must have thought that, like with the Inland Revenue, it was possible to game the system – that omniscient God wouldn’t notice that the millions of prayers saying how lovely Duke Charles the Rapist was were all coming from monks living in buildings he paid for. They must have thought God was an idiot, a very powerful idiot.

If your experience of government is exclusively medieval kingship, why would you expect the celestial realm to be a meritocracy?

If it was love, it was tough love. Very tough. I’m thinking specifically of an occasion where someone was blinded. If that’s being cruel to be kind, the resulting kindness is going to have to be amazing.

The royals of the eleventh century would look in awe at the efficiency and cleanliness with which leaders of the modern age would theoretically be able to blind their relatives, and find it hard to believe how seldom they take advantage of that facility.

Same question for Fox News and Trump in 2016.

Oh, David, no.

the man who actually ended up being the next king was Earl Godwin’s son Harold, often called Harold Godwinson for reasons you can probably grasp.

This is projection on my part but I’m not a professional historian so I don’t have to pretend I haven’t picked a side.

Edward had to send his Normans home, including Robert of Jumièges, who was replaced as archbishop of Canterbury by an Anglo-Saxon prelate called Stigand. Genuinely. That’s what everyone says he was called. To me, it sounds like a name someone has hastily invented while trying to conceal extreme drunkenness from a police officer. The last ‘d’ in particular reeks of falsehood and lager burp.

Don’t be the first to jump in the pool. Or the last. These are important things to remember if you’re a medieval baron.

They chucked him out of York and killed all his officials and then – and this is the really embarrassing part – they called for the brother of the Earl of Mercia to be their new earl. They asked to change service provider! Who ever does that? It’s such a hassle. You start your life with Vodaphone and British Gas and HSBC and you’re stuck with it unless you’re a pervert who gets off on filling in forms.

I’m imposing anachronistic values. Some would say that’s unfair of me. I reckon I’ve got the right to enjoy 1066 in whatever way I like.

Harold Godwinson died, possibly as a result of having taken an arrow to the eye – though possibly more boringly than that, some historians have felt constrained to point out. ‘Dear oh dear, you appear to have accidentally captured someone’s imagination! Put it down immediately and return to your research on crop yields.’

History must be full of occasions where someone had a reasonable case for raising an army and invading somewhere and didn’t, through either fear or laziness. Those people don’t get the credit they deserve for the positive consequences of their indolence.

We can blame medieval chroniclers’ rather rhetorical attitude to numbers. They’re altogether too keen to say ‘a squillion soldiers’ to keep the reader’s attention. Before you cut those poor olde-worlde idiots with their childish drawings too much slack, it’s worth bearing in mind that they could count. It’s not fucking calculus – someone just needed to tot up the numbers. It would have been nice if they’d bothered.

as with most medieval art, it looks like it’s based on pictures sent in by a nine-year-old

If you get away with it, God was on your side.

For a mortal species, to focus on what happened last is a pretty downbeat way of looking at things. In the end, we die. But that’s not necessarily the main thing about us.