In a little over forty years this country will be celebrating the one thousand year anniversary of the Norman Conquest, widely claimed as the most memorable date in English history.
The events of 1066 initiated a new age and marked the passing of an old order. In hindsight they can be seen as a founding moment of nationhood, and for many people today 1066 marks the date when English history began. Change occurred, not all at once, but over the next few centuries after the conquest. Lasting changes in societies require processes over time. And so, as the decades passed and the English people, language, culture and heritage intertwined with the newly planted Norman versions, the distinctive age of Anglo-Norman history was established. It is a story told many times in many ways by scholars, historians and the occasional novelist.
But this book proposes a different approach: to tell the history of the period through representative lives of twelve individuals who both embodied and transcended their age. Deaths, Disasters and Destinies focuses on the period extending from a generation before 1066 to the end of reign of Henry I (1135). These decades contain some outstanding but little known figures whose stories are important in the shaping of England after the Conquest.
This under-examined period saw some of the swiftest and most radical changes to land ownership and private wealth ever to be seen in England, the beginnings of an aristocratic class that would last until this century, and the rudiments of law and law courts and the language of law that has not even yet quite disappeared. This rich and crucial sedimentary period of our history deserves the attention of continually inventive, dramatic and faithful reinterpretation. Often what is missing from the records of this period is the character, the personality, the inner life of people. This book fills that need. Many of these characters knew one another. Each has a unique story, but each is a player in the stories of others. Through the interconnections of their lives we can begin to have a glimpse into the lived experience of these historical figures.
Why I wrote yet another history book
The book came about when I realised that after researching my four novels set in the Anglo-Norman period I had amassed a huge amount of historical and archival material. I was struck by how many fascinating personalities I had encountered in chronicles, letters and other documents and yet how little-known they were, except probably by historians. I felt strongly that these figures deserved to be better known by a wider audience of non-specialists because their stories were exciting, astonishing, tragic and very human. In this way I could create a collection of historical true stories and at the same time give an account of Anglo-Norman history through the portrayal of twelve interlinked lives. I wanted to create a focused but spacious history book, sharp on facts where known and fully researched but not afraid to embrace history in the spirit of the old chroniclers. I wanted to create the kind of history book that historians wouldn’t reject and readers of novels would enjoy. Well, that was the ambition anyway.
I was also struck by the thought that our modern sense of history with its established areas of knowledge, rules for research, evaluation and analysis etc. is very different from the medieval sense of history. But common ground can be found in the basic human need to tell stories. A need that reaches to the dimmest parts of human memory and comes back brightly in the form of myths, legends and fables; a need that has been answered in every age in innumerable ways and is never exhausted. We are fascinated by our own lives and the lives of others, wherever and whenever they lived. That, I hope, is what will make this collection of historical true stories interesting to anyone who just loves a good story.
True stories from history?
Deaths Disasters and Destinies: Anglo-Norman History in Twelve Lives claims to tell true stories from history.
But what is meant by ‘true’? This is a philosophical challenge.
When writing about a time period which had very imperfect processes for recording and collecting data, it is quite daunting to claim ‘truth’ about any particular fact. It’s even difficult to know what is ‘true’ in our own times. ‘Fake news’ is a particularly obfuscating phenomenon in an age which ironically has a multitude of ways to record events – even as they are happening: in film, by audio, by image, algorithmic data collection, and so on, we still cannot necessarily agree on the ‘truth’ of an event or a claim, even about an incident that may have happened yesterday. Can we agree about the present any more than the past?
But let’s not get bogged down with philosophy at the beginning of what is really a wonderful journey into early medieval English history.
In Deaths, Disasters and Destinies you will find stories that are as entertaining as fables, that are grounded in historical truth, that have been thoroughly researched, covering the period from 1066 to the end of the reign of Henry 1st (1135). They contain the portraits of some outstanding but little-known figures whose lives are important to the shaping of post-Conquest England, enabling a better understanding of the past that shaped us and still shapes us today.