Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers
I had a Kings & Queens of England / the UK as a child, I still have it somewhere, and even then I was aware that the bit before William the Conqueror was a bit sketchy – the claim that William was, what we might today term, the continuity candidate was thin (far from the only point on the chart when “continuity” has been achieved through change) but I didn’t give it too much thought.
I was too busy being fascinated by monasteries, focused on my Usborne cut and stick Cathedral and its associated town and castle, with a side interest in Vikings (mainly via their habit of raiding monasteries). I also spent a lot of time thinking about the “Celts”, the proto-Welsh, with Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Trilogy rage against the coming of the Saxon’s a key lens to that.
So, while I thought about what was before, and what was after, I really didn’t pay any attention to the Saxon period, and nor I think did anyone else really. But getting under the skin of Anglo-Saxon England, Anglo-Danish England has increasingly been a topic of interest.
And Eleanor Parker provides a useful contribution to that body of work. Taking the generation of England’s elite families who were born before 1066 but came of age either at that tipping point or after it opens up some key insights to the dynamics within the ruling class pre- and post-conquest.
I had grown up with knowledge of the Danelaw, and an idea that there was some kind of iron curtain between Saxon and Danish England (growing up in the 1980s we clearly projected contemporary Cold War realities a thousand years into the past). I knew Cnut told the tides to turn back, as a lesson to his court on the limitation of Kingly power, but I was never told he was King of all England. The level of intermarriage Eleanor reveals was new information for me.
The fact that the successful defence of the throne by Harold Godwineson looked, on paper, the most likely outcome should have put 1066 in the category of turning-points in History when History didn’t turn. The scattering and shattering of the Saxon ruling class is sometime quite surprising.
Some of this transitional generation became rebels, folk heroes, some exiles – as far a Kyiv also pointing to the interconnections that existed, most people might not have gone must further than the next hill but some were global travellers. But others, mostly women, married into the new Norman elite, politically motivated marriages, which provided legitimacy by giving the Norman rulers Saxon ancestors, and providing a level of legacy to those historical families.
The Normans were clearly having to work a careful balancing act, claiming legitimacy through association with the Saxons only so far as it avoided the Saxons being able to claim they, the Saxons, should in fact be in the seats of power.
Politics and power are complicated, and that is nothing new.
