The story of the Kings and Queens of England is more surprising than you might
think; It’s a fine drama, a thousand years of tales of lust and betrayal, of heroism and
cruelty, of mysteries, murders, tragedies and triumphs;
2. But there is more than that: for example one of the most reliable chronicles describes
how a king of England proposed adopting Islam as the national religion;
3. This episode, the first of six includes that tale; It tells the story of the English crown
from 1066 to 1216 from one French invader William, to the next: Louis (another
surprise), a king of England who has pretty much disappeared from history;
4. It’s easier to say where the history of the English monarchy ends and when it
begins; It ended on the 14th of October 1066 here, but what became battle Abbey
on Senlac Hill near Hastings; We all know that this is where Harold was killed
and replaced by William the Conqueror and Harold was the last Englishman to
be crowned king; From then on the sovereign would always be from a foreign
family right down to Queen Elizabeth the second;
5. So a history of the Kings and Queens of England isn’t like the history of kings and
queens anywhere else in the world; What happened here on that October day, started a
completely new history, which is why it’s the one date in history that everybody
knows: 1066;
6. The story of that day was spelled out in a strip cartoon, the Bayeux Tapestry,
probably stitched for William’s brother, Odo; Here is our heroes first appearance
in the story; That’s William, Duke of Normandy , about 37 years old in 1064; He
is being told that Harold Godwinson, earl of Essex of the time, had been
shipwrecked on the French coast;
7. One of these guys is Godwinson, I think is the chap with the handlebar
moustache; He is about six years older than William and the most powerful man
in England after King Edward; These are both pretty hard men, survivors in a
very tough world.;
8. William spent his whole life fighting for survival and he was good at it; By the
time he was 20, he’d established complete control over Normandy; From then on
he was fighting to held on what he had; He got Harold to help him in one of those
battles, capturing Monsieur Michaelis and then apparently is the price of let him
go home had Harold swear to support him and becoming the next king of
England, which as the tapestry very clearly shows in not what happened;
9. When Old King Edward died, Harold as we all know, had himself crowned instead;
Actually to be a bit more precise, he had himself elected king; The crown of England
in those days was not inherited, but awarded;
10. In William’s view, this it all gone very badly wrong, so he set about putting it right;
11. The Norwegian Ruler, Harold Hadrada, took a similar view; There was an old
Norwegian claim to England which he decided to revive by launching an invasion of
his own; Their two fleets arrived within a few days of each other, one in the North of
England, one in the South; Both fleets were probably about the same size, about 500
ships;
12. King Harold rushed North and destroyed Hadrada’s army, only about 34 ships
made it back to Norway; Then he rushed South; This time of course he failed; We don’t know for sure that the man with the arrow in his eye is Harold but he
certainly died in the battle;
13. He and his axe-wielding spear carrying army of Danish and Anglo-Saxon noblemen
was simply swept away; In their place were the new rulers of England – Normans on
horseback and William was their master, master of the country he owned it;
14. He was not an elected king; When he went to London to be crowned on Christmas
day, the population thinking that was their duty now, tried to elect him; They claimed
him with loud shots; The Normans, not knowing what is going on thought this is some
kind of uprising;
15. They rushed out at Westminster Abbey and burnt London down, England had become
a new kind of kingdom, one which was owned, locked, and stocked by its king;
16. The story we were telling through this series, the story of a thousand years of English
history is the story of this alien conqueror and his successors to the throne; It’s the
story of how they changed England and change with it, eventually turning into puppet
rulers, symbols of power they cannot wield and how in that transformation they
survived through tides of revolution, republicanism; So that today while they are not
quietly only surviving Royals in Europe, they alone still lay claim to majesty; Now
how did that happen?
17. The story of Williams’ reign is really the story of a worrier lord taking all power into
his hands; He confiscate all of privately own land in the country; Its new occupiers
were tenants of the King, bound to him;
18. People of the North of England with their Viking capital at York were much bound to
Scandinavia than to Normandy; They refuse to submit; He punished them by
destroying all animals and all crops between York an Durham; According to the
Chronicles he celebrated Christmas of 1070 in the ruins of York;
19. The inhabitants were reduced to starvation, even cannibalism; 16 years later when all
the land in England was accounted for and valued in his doomsday survey, there were
places in Northumbria that were still utterly worthless;
20. The Church too was made Norman and old Anglo-Saxon ways crushed; At
Glastonbury archers were stationed inside the abbey and orders given that the old
chants should be replaced by new ones from France;
21. 21 months were shot and yet there were limits to his power; A few thousand
Normans, most of them not even understanding the language of their new
country couldn’t run the place; They needed the English to keep everything
working and William understood that perfectly well; His coronation made an
oath to uphold the laws of King Edward, to uphold good law and to renounce
bad; The old courts would continue to function and old traditions would
normally be respected; This oath would become fundamental to the coronation of
any king; The question though would be who got to wear the crown?
22. When William died bloated and exhausted at the ripe age of 60, his attendance
stripped his body and scattered; What mattered now was who would hold the land he
had conquered and how?; It all had been his and it was he who decided; On his death
bed in Normandy he handed out the spoils; He gave his eldest surviving son Robert,
his Duchy of Normandy, but it was the younger son the redhead William Rufus who
the conqueror should be acclaimed king of England; And the youngest, Henry was told
that he would have to be contempt with 5000 pounds; But Henry was his father’s son;
Content!? With 5000 pounds!? Was that likely?
23. The key to the plotting that followed was none of the brothers’ contempt; Henry
stir the brew of resentment that made Robert try to take the kingdom of England
from William and William try to take the Duchy of Normandy from Robert and
Henry was always changing sides, weakening them both; Eventually Robert,
tiring of the whole struggle decided it would be more satisfying to fight Saracens
than his brothers and went off on a crusade;
24. William was now secure and powerful and Henry changed his policy; He was now
William Rufus’s very best friend; The bishop of Lincoln later said that when Henry
praised anyone he was sure to be plotting that person’s destruction; It does seem as
though Henry concentrated on quietly stirring up discontent among churchmen and
barons in England, which was not hard as William Rufus needed their money and had
little to offer in return, except to give to somebody taken from others and besides,
William Rufus wasn’t that kind of chap; He didn’t marry, he had no children and as
one Chronicle puts it “All things that are loathsome to God and earnest to man were
customary in this land in this time and therefore he was loathsome to allay al his
people and abominable to God”;
25. Which is of course homophobic Chronical speak of being gay; On the 2nd of
August in 1100 both William and Henry were hunting separately in the New
Forest; It was the last day of William Rufus’s life;
26. No one knows who fired the arrow who ended the reign of William Rufus;
27. His companion tyro immediately fled and disappeared abroad;
28. William’s body was abandoned where it laid but the spot is still marked by the stone;
The next day local peasants took it in a car to Winchester;
29. Henry had arrived before them; Winchester was were the Royal treasure was kept; He
demanded the Treasury keys from the guards, they refused to hand them over, saying
that Robert his elder brother was right for them; Henry drew his sword and demand
that no one should stand between him and his father’ sceptre;
30. Resistance collapsed and when the peasants arrived with their cart, the Lords of
England were busy electing Henry as their king, the first elected ruler of England since
Harold Godwinson;
31. The bishop of Winchester refused to give the corpse of Christian burial; Out of
respect of royal status, William Rufus was nevertheless interred under the
Cathedral Tower and when that collapsed a few years later, everyone said “Told
you so!”
32. Henry’s coronation to Westminster was an attempt to ensure his authority to rule; He
was 32 years old, his father had won the country by force of arms and his barons
backed him for rich rewards, but why would anyone want a king now?
33. Alongside his sanctification by the church, he issued a charter promising that he would
not overtax the church or his tenants in chief and they must treat their tenants as he
treated them;
34. He claimed that the crown changed his nature; He was no longer an ordinary human
being; As the anointed king he held special divine granted powers: his touch was
supposed to cure Scrofula, swollen neck glands from Tuberculosis; This magic power
which became known as “Touching for the King’s Evil” was practiced by English
monarchs for the next 700 years as proof of that defying authority;
35. He also quite smartly understood that is a good idea to promote new people to
positions of power; Those who were alread on a make would support him;
36. By the time Robert was able to mount a challenge to Henry, it stood no chance; He
agree to recognize Henry as King of England in exchange for pension; Of course it
didn’t last, Henry ended up invading Normandy in 1106 and imprisoning his brother
for the rest of his life; This is his tomb in Gloucester Cathedral;
37. The question of who was entitled to succeed to the Crown was still when you came
down to it, a matter of brute force; But Henry’s victory had a profound symbolic
meaning, because it changed the status of the English Crown;
38. Under his father, England would have been a property ceased and owned by the Duke
of Normandy; Now Normandy was a property ceased and owned by the king of
England;
39. Henry was unnaturally cherry person; Just after his coronation he married Edith, the
daughter of an English woman under the king of Scotland and he was encourage
Normans he was promoting to marry English women;
y great barons didn’t need a king, but men
