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January 21 - January 31, 2025
You may be thinking that there’s more about James Bond in this chapter than you expected.
Just a tad. I'm not upset about it, though.
Some historians say this was an act of genocide, others that it was merely the sort of brutal thing that went on back then. I don’t reckon those conclusions are mutually exclusive.
I think that’s my conclusion about the Norman Conquest: it was a moderately major change and, in general for people at the time, it would have been nicer if it hadn’t happened. I feel the same way when they make you upgrade your operating system.
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.
William II died in 1100 as a result of a hunting accident in the New Forest. Some say it was no accident. But some say it was an accident. I reckon it’s too late to dust for prints.
As William the Conqueror nervously waited on the French coast for a favourable wind to invade England, one suspects that he considered the drowning of a king, or a duke as he then was, to be eminently possible if you put God in a bad mood.
stealing the crown isn’t just like stealing an object – say a crown – something that can then be returned to its rightful owner. It’s like stealing a sandwich and then eating it.
William the Conqueror fathered his sons in reverse order of regal competence. If this isn’t enough to make me endorse porphyrogeniture, it’s still a massive rubdown for primogeniture.
I should warn you that, as a name, Matilda was very much the Aelfgifu of the twelfth century.
I’m not risking any spoilers when I say that one person or another called Matilda was queen of England most of the time from 1066 until the middle of the following century.
Apparently it’s a simplistic label. I’m sure it is, but that’s pretty much the deal with names. I’d say ‘Brian’ is a simplistic label for the guy who came to fix our washing machine, but it’s still his name.
You can see that things have gone a bit crazy when it’s easier to build two new castles than gain access to one.
If he wanted to be chivalrous to Matilda, he shouldn’t have stolen the throne from her. It was an eccentric moment to suddenly give a shit about her feelings.
They were both as bad as each other! The fact that they didn’t know it should only be added to their failings.
In an environment where brothers fight wars against each other, where sons try and overthrow fathers, I’ve never quite understood why there was any expectation that you could rely on your in-laws.
Henry’s empire was like lots of plates spinning on poles all over western Europe – he had to keep going round them to keep them going round. This was a preferable situation to Stephen’s reign – which in the same analogy was the constant sound of breaking china, then the groan of Stephen bending down, then the smell of inexpertly applied glue
‘If I don’t have horses with monkeys riding them, the King of France won’t take me seriously!’ He sounds like the twelfth-century equivalent of a rap star.
Personally, I don’t want to be in charge of much. It’s an admin hassle and it makes things your fault. I’d much rather carp from the sidelines.
Many politicians seem to want to hold high office but for most of the things that actually happen, which inevitably go a bit wrong and piss people off, to be someone else’s responsibility.
Becket wasn’t even an ordained priest. So, on 2 June he was ordained a priest and on the 3rd he was consecrated as archbishop of Canterbury. A meteoric ecclesiastical rise that continued apace because (spoiler alert) ten years later he was canonized a saint. By now, he must be an archangel at least – that’s if he isn’t the current God.
What was hereditary was the state of affairs in which they had all spent insufficient time mastering the art of getting over themselves.
It was a brutal and messy time, but this action was as abominable to them as it would be to us. More so, possibly. They minded murder less back then, but thought being a priest was a bigger deal. So maybe it balanced out.
He died, alone and betrayed, in Chinon Castle in Touraine. Then again, if he’d wanted his wife to be with him, he shouldn’t have put her in prison.
Arthur probably died by John’s order and there’s a real chance it was an order he gave to his own hands.
Dying was by far the most astute and successful thing King John did in his entire reign.
It’s one of the many historical examples of the weird way antisemitism waxes and wanes for no clear reason, with little warning and with cataclysmic consequences for Jewish people. It’s why those who nowadays accuse Jews of hysterical sensitivity to the slightest undercurrent of antisemitism need a fucking history lesson.
Being tall and trying to take over Scotland seem to me less unusual attributes for an English king than a fondness for parliaments.
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.
He was using parliament to wage war on nuance.
it was a sufficiently two-dimensional concept for Edward to master.
This all makes the famous seventeenth-century event, which is simply called the English Civil War, seem rather presumptuously named. How come that historical titular web address hadn’t already been taken? English civil wars, it seems to me, are what mainly happened in English history.
Did it change Edward? Well, as I keep saying, people don’t change, so no. But obviously a bit yes. I hope you’re pleased with the level of historical nuance you’re getting: no, but a bit yes. That’ll see anyone through A-Level.
Up to now, Queen Isabella had been amazingly tolerant of Edward’s dickish behaviour. But she hated Hugh Despenser the Younger and felt humiliated within her own marriage. Quite how badly he must have behaved, considering what she had previously gone along with in the days of Gaveston, we can only guess.
Some important, serious people, who had forged successful careers in Hollywood, sat in a room and tried to work out which was better out of the song ‘The Age of Not Believing’ and the theme from Shaft. They were willing to give that a go. They didn’t insist that neither is better and that the notion that such works of art can be reduced to the quantifiable level of the 100-metre sprint is so contemptuous of the noble endeavours of composing music and writing scripts and directing and acting that it’s completely counterproductive to the whole aim of the Oscars ceremony. You might as well ask
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He was a usurper of royal power – people like that don’t retire. They’re either still running the show or they’re dead.
We love taking credit for things but, where no credit is available, we’ll settle for blame rather than entertaining the horrendously humbling notion that something, anything at all, might have nothing to do with us.
haven’t heard of it, it sounds plausible. ‘I’d revolt if I were a medieval peasant,’ we say to ourselves with the self-confidence of people unafraid to complain about slow service in a Pizza Express.
The whole ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear’ approach to private information is predicated on state power being held in honest and ethical hands.
Richard doesn’t seem to have been that into poetry, though Gower’s 33,000-line Confessio Amantis says in its prologue that Richard commissioned it. Doesn’t say he read it, mind you. But I can’t talk. I haven’t read a single syllable of any of those writers’ work and certainly won’t until I’ve watched the box set of The Sopranos that has been gathering dust in my possession for a decade and a half.
condemning Richard’s most senior ministers to death – this included de Vere and de la Pole, but they had fled to France so escaped execution. This might have been exciting if they hadn’t both died quite soon thanks to medieval Europe’s narratively insensitive mortality rate.
All this lefty mud-slinging is a huge help to the right. In the same way, the English were hugely helped by the conflict between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs.
John’s skull was kept by some monks in Dijon for reasons vaguely connected to Catholics being weird,
I’ve often thought that, when a great club wins everything, it should be closed down. Its players and resources could split among other teams. Having achieved its destiny, its greatest triumph, it should be allowed to ascend to sporting heaven rather than continue to scratch around on earth in the hope, at best, of repeating its triumph, but never of bettering it.
readeption. It is the special word just for the time when Henry VI started being king again for a bit, nine and a half years after he’d been deposed. For most people, this was a depressing development.
Feeling a sense of deja vu right now, AMERICA.
Most importantly, it’s depressing for you and me, because we felt we were getting somewhere, didn’t we? Henry had been a terrible king, and there’d been disastrous consequences, and pressure had built up until finally he’d been overthrown. It was dramatic and nasty but, like a violent bout of vomiting after hours and hours of feeling horrendously ill, it was for the best.
The lamentable problem that you can’t believe everything you’re told is not solved by merely believing the polar opposite. We can’t know for sure who killed the princes in the Tower – or if they were murdered at all – but the circumstantial evidence against Richard is far greater than that against Henry Tudor or any Tudor sympathizers.
It would be brilliant if it were true, of course – if this notorious king turned out to have been the victim of a centuries-long libel and was in fact a sort of statesman-cum-pussycat. But then it would be brilliant if unicorns or dragons or King Arthur turned out to exist.
It’s nice to take an active interest in history – I’ve already admitted to supporting Harold of Hastings as if he were a football team. But we don’t and can’t really know these people. The only meaningful respect we can pay them is to acknowledge that unknowability. The truth is lost under centuries of propaganda and then centuries of contrarian rejection of it.
Anne was more aspirational than Mary and wouldn’t have sex with him unless they were married – a technique known at the time as ‘doing an Elizabeth Woodville’.
But no English king, however irascible and self-confident, had ever done the full ‘Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me’ to quote from Rage Against the Machine’s 1992 protest hit ‘Killing in the Name’, which, if you ask me, would be a much more appropriate piece of music to be associated with Henry VIII than ‘Greensleeves’, though neither track reached England until after his death.
