A Chronological History of Britain
Every episode of The British History Podcast that moves the story forward in a chronological way.
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“Under AEthelred nothing was done; or, more truly, throughout his whole reign he left undone those things which he ought to have done, and he did those things he ought not to have done.”
That is the damning conclusion of Edward Augustus Freeman, a Victorian historian, and epic beard grower.
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King Edgar is Dead… and in his place reigned his son, King Edward of England.
And you’d think that we’d be referring to him as King Edward the First. Or, if you wanted to fudge it a bit and give Edward the Elder some credit for forming the Kingdom of the Anglo Saxons… maybe King Edward II.
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King Edgar the Peaceable was buried at Glastonbury in 975.
But weirdly that isn’t the end of his story.
William of Malmesbury tells us that nearly a century later, in 1053, the Abbot Ailward re-opened the King’s tomb. Malmsbury doesn’t tell us WHY the monk opened the grave, so I suppose we can just assume Ailward was going through a goth phase.
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Human beings can’t really be summed up in a nickname. Usually we are more complicated than a word or two. And sometimes, the nickname just doesn’t reflect reality. If you take Edward the Elder, for example, the name probably conjures up an image of Gandalf. But Edward was only in his early 50’s when he died.
And you may have noticed that quite a few of these 10th century kings have nicknames that don’t seem to fit.
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You would think that someone named Edgar the Peaceable enjoyed a good reputation.
But the closer you look, the more things start to look…off.
And if you look closer than that, you start to get the sense that maybe things WERE off.
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Across the North Sea, in Scandinavia, a man named Harald Greycloak was struggling for dominance in the region. He wasn’t just any man, he was a son of Erik Bloodaxe and Gunnhilde. And his fight brought him into direct conflict with King Haakon.
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The King is dead, long live the King.
So … last episode was a bit of a shocker wasn’t it?
After it launched, I got an email from a listener (who hilariously, is the daughter of a Judge that once scared the hell out of me in Court)… small world. Understandably, she was confused that while we are lacking key details on major political events, battles, and just about everything going on in Scotland and Wales….we still manage to have this crazy story of a new King’s precocious sex life.
I think her exact phrase was “how did THAT story get recorded?”
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It begins in France.
The struggle for power between King Louis IV and Hugh the Great had been raging for quite some time…
When we last visited the continent, , Hugh the Great, King Otto of Germany, Duke William of Normandy, Count Herbert II, and various other supporting characters were allied against King Louis IV, the Archbishop of Rheims, and Count Arnulf of Flanders. In response, King AEthelstan tried to intervene by sending a fleet to support the embattled king… Suddenly King AEthelstan died, and rather than supporting the young French King, the English fleet instead opted to raid the French coast.
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You know the pieces on a chessboard? There’s the knight, and the queen, and the castle….and then there’s the bishop.
There’s a reason why a game that simulates medieval power strategy has a piece called the bishop. Bishops had power.
And it was a power that didn’t flow from the monarchy. And in britain, it wasn’t a power that necessarily had to be aligned with the monarchy either. We’re going to see this over and over again on the island – if you were trying to rule Britain, holy men were often a wildcard in your hand of ambitions. And the more powerful the holy man, the bigger the potential upset.
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The story of the last few episodes is a story about a lesson that humanity has had to re-learn again and again throughout history. When your society is ordered around a single figure it’s likely to descend into chaos the minute that figure goes away. And finding a new balance in the midst of sudden cascading failures is a difficult task that many peoples in history have failed to do.