1066 Quotes

“Historians like a quiet life, and usually they get it. For the most part, history moves at a deliberate pace, working its changes subtly and incrementally. Nations and their institutions harden into shape or crumble away like sediment carried by the flow of a sluggish river. English history in particular seems the work of a temperate community, seldom shaken by convulsions. But there are moments when history is unsubtle; when change arrives in a violent rush, decisive, bloody, traumatic; as a truck-load of trouble, wiping out everything that gives a culture its bearings - custom, language, law, loyalty. 1066 was one of those moments.”
― Simon Schama, A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World? 3500 BC-AD 1603

“He always behaved like one who has been deprived of love.”
― David Howarth

“It had all been a storm in a teacup.”
― David Howarth

“Stopped at the light behind license plate XNG 1066,
I think, as anyone would, of the Battle of Hastings
& what descendant of William or impassioned historian
is driving a battered Sentra through the new millennium
up Broad Street in Richmond, Virginia.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems