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

by David Mitchell

Simply because the monarchy has never been removed, except for a brief experiment in the middle of the seventeenth century, we’ve never been forced to work out what else we might be other than a kingdom. What do we stand for really? Freedom and democracy? Tradition and hierarchy? Bad food and sarcasm? Traffic and disappointment? Ships and factories? Rain and jokes? We’ve never agreed on anything and the royal family have long since stopped taking the lead.

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.

Sharing a religion only seemed to divide them further and there were persistent differences over how to calculate the date of Easter despite the extreme disinclination of people on both sides to send one another festive eggs. (My strong advice is not to worry about the specifics of this difference because it is complicated and unimportant. Basically, the Celtic church calculated the date of Easter Sunday on an eighty-four-year cycle, while the Roman church that the Anglo-Saxons had largely adopted did it on a nineteen-year cycle. If that information is not enough to put you off further enquiry, then I think you should seriously consider putting this book down and developing a drug habit.)

And, frankly, even if some bat-eating was contributory, I don’t buy all that wise-after-the-event admonition. The whole ‘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.’ Now I’m talking as if I was the guy who ate the bat. Which I’m not. I am relatively confident I have never eaten bat, though I’ve had a fair few frozen lasagnes so it’s hard to be totally sure.

The thought that disasters are your fault is comforting, on some level. It gives you the illusion of control when, in truth, something horrible came out of the blue and ruined your life.

When I was ten the history teacher informed us that we were going on a school trip ‘to see the Alfred Jewel’. This announcement, which would have confused me as an adult, was taken by the whole class in our world-weary strides. We were used to baffling stuff. Having to absorb weird thing after weird thing after weird thing is what being at school largely consists of. Whatever the empathy-drive in history teaching, no adult, however great a teacher – not even Robin-Williams-in-Dead-Poets-Society himself – can quite get their heads round the extent to which small children don’t have the first idea what’s going on.

though nobody seemed to be able to draw a face that looked realistic at any point between the Romans leaving and the Tudors.

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. It’s skilfully crafted in enamel under quartz, but the image itself is like something I might have done while drunkenly playing online Pictionary on my phone.

Also I’m bitterly aware that this is the first mention of a woman in this narrative, apart from a brief one for Queen Bertha of Kent and an adjectival contribution from Queen Victoria. And actually I think my daughter got a nod, but that’s really just nepotism as her impact on early medieval English history is tiny.

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. It’s not very nice and it’s likely to lead to disappointment. You have to get proactive and start sending out CVs. People don’t die as much as they used to. That’s not quite true. People still die at exactly the same rate as they always have: once per person. It’s not how it feels, though, because people used to die younger, on average, and more randomly. It jazzed things up, introduced an element of doubt, like the presence of all those hungry lower-league teams in the FA Cup.

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.

It is a lamentable fact that the care system fails many of the children entrusted to it. A family environment needs to be exceptionally terrible – murderously, malevolently endangering – before a child isn’t better off there than in care. It’s a sad failure of the state and calls into question the extreme fastidiousness of the adoption process. Good luck adopting if you smoke, but the outcomes for children brought up in the households of smokers are far better than for those whose childhoods are spent in care. But the adoption system is not held accountable for the failings of the care system, only for the shortcomings of any parents they allow to adopt. It’s the same principle as not allowing someone to get into your lifeboat because it has insufficient fire extinguishers.

Jane Seymour was Henry’s ideal wife: she didn’t argue, she gave birth to a boy and then she promptly died without his having to kill her. What a catch.

Further Reading At this point, I’d probably recommend a thriller, really. Or a whodunnit. Maybe even a graphic novel. You know, for a bit of variety. You must feel up to your ears in history. But that’s not the form in these sections. They tend to work more like Amazon algorithms: ‘Seeing as you just bought gardening gloves, perhaps you’d be interested in these gardening gloves?’