This publication used to be called Flint & Fable, but now it’s called Horse Guard, and it’s heading in a new direction.

Britain: The Story of an Island for Young Readers – the serialised narrative history that follows Churchill’s account of the British Isles, written for children, continues exactly as before. Twenty articles are already published and more are coming, and this will not change until the series is complete.

What has changed is that Horse Guard is becoming broader. Alongside The Story of an Island, there will be new content.

What are the Horse Guard Heritage Workbooks?

The Heritage Workbooks are free printable PDFs, with each one covering a single subject – a person, an invention, a place, a craft, a folktale, or a tradition – each one comes with everything you need to turn it into a lesson, teaching aid, and keepsake.

Inside each workbook you will find:

• A brief introductory story.

• Key facts

• Comprehension questions and discussion questions

• Further reading, and places you can actually visit

• A page or two of cut-outs: photographs, diagrams, portraits, and maps

The workbooks are meant to be cut up.

Print the pages, read the story together, work through the questions, and then get the scissors out. The entire workbook is intended to be taken apart and cut up.

Some children may want to create a neat notebook with everything squared off and labelled. Others will build something closer to a junk journal – layered, overlapping, stuffed with torn paper, string, stamps, tickets, pressed leaves and whatever else they’ve collected. There is no right or wrong way of approaching it. The point is that the child chooses what to keep and how to arrange it, and in doing so they learn, and over time, the notebook becomes their own book of British heritage that they have made themselves.

A word on who it’s for.

The content leans towards what interests boys. This isn’t accidental. Boys are falling behind in reading and attainment, and there appears to be very little out there that grabs their interest. But nothing in the workbooks is exclusively for boys. Girls will find plenty to interest them as well, and the workbooks are being created for families to use together, across a range of ages.

The first workbook is attached below. It tells the story of Frank Whittle, the mechanic’s son from Coventry who invented the jet engine. Many British children have never heard of him.

Heritage Workbook 001 The Jet Engine

3.24MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

More will follow. They’re FREE, and if you find them useful, please subscribe.

Best wishes Vincent Shaw

The quay at Melcombe.

Melcombe was a small port in the county of Dorset, on the south coast of England. It was situated on the eastern side of a narrow harbour mouth, and across the water sat its rival, Weymouth. The population of the two towns hated one another, but today the two are one town and nobody remembers the quarrel. In 1348 they were separate places with separate quays.

Ships came from Bordeaux in France and from the Channel Islands and from other English ports, and almost every week, so when two ships came alongside before Midsummer, nobody thought anything of it. One of them had sailed from Bristol. The other had come from Gascony, the English-held wine country in the south-west of France, and crucially one of the sailors aboard was unwell.

That was not unusual. Men often stepped off a ship after weeks at sea with bad water and bad food inside them, and they might be sick for a day or two and then be fine.

A Franciscan friar at King’s Lynn, writing his chronicle some years afterwards, set the story down. Two ships had come in, and a sailor had carried something infectious with him from Gascony. And the men of Melcombe, he wrote, were the first in England to become ill, and those first Melcombe men died within three days.

That is the story as it has been told for six hundred years, and there is a plaque on the quay at Weymouth today that commemorates it. But the friar was writing years afterwards, and he was not the only man writing about this strange sickness that had appeared in England. Other chroniclers said the sickness came ashore first at Southampton, or Bristol, and they gave the date as July, or August, or as late as the end of September. One modern historian has been through every royal and manorial account that survives and found that not one of them mentions pestilence anywhere in England before October.

Nobody was keeping a record at the time, because nobody knew yet that there was anything yet to record. What everyone agrees on is that in the second half of 1348 plague came to England and it arrived on a ship.

It was not called the Black Death then. That name was invented in Scandinavia two centuries later and only became common in English in the eighteen hundreds. To the people who lived through it, it was the pestilence.

To understand what had come ashore, you have to go a very long way to the east of England, and back ten years.

In the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains, in what is now Kyrgyzstan, there was a trading settlement in the Chu valley, on one of the great roads that carried silk and silver west towards the Black Sea. In the years 1338 and 1339 its people began to die in numbers far beyond anything normal, and their graves were cut and their headstones carved in the Syriac script they used. One of those stones can still be read. It says that this is the tomb of Sanmaq, and that he died of pestilence.

For six hundred years nobody could prove what had killed Sanmaq. Historians argued about it, and most of them said the sickness must have begun in China. Then in 2022, a team of historians and geneticists took ancient DNA from the teeth of seven people buried in those graveyards, and found the plague bacterium in three of them. Its name is Yersinia pestis. The strain they recovered turned out to be the direct ancestor of the plague that swept the world in the years that followed.

The disease lives naturally in wild rodents, and in the Tian Shan the rodents that carry it are marmots, fat grass-eating creatures that whistle at each other across the high slopes. Something in those years pushed it out of the marmot burrows and into people. Once it was in people, it travelled the way people travelled, which by then meant everywhere.

The plague reached the Crimea in 1346, when Caffa, a Genoese trading town was under siege. There is a famous story, that the besieging army caught the plague and flung their own dead over the walls with siege engines. The story may or may not be true, as it was told by an Italian lawyer who was not there. What is certain is that the Genoese ships sailed home, that plague came ashore at Messina in Sicily in October 1347, and that by the following summer it had gone through Italy, southern France and Spain and was killing people in Bordeaux and Paris.

England knew the plague was coming. That is easy to forget, because we imagine that the pestilence arrived like weather – out of nowhere. News of the plague arrived via merchants and pilgrims returning from Rome. The King’s envoys at Avignon wrote to the Pope in May 1348 that the English embassy would come at Michaelmas unless the epidemic prevented it.

By high summer the bishops were writing to each other in real fear. On the twenty-eighth of July, William Zouche, Archbishop of York, told his officials that nobody could still be ignorant of what was coming, and ordered processions and prayers twice a week in every church in his diocese. Three weeks later Ralph of Shrewsbury, Bishop of Bath and Wells, warned his clergy that a catastrophic pestilence had reached a neighbouring kingdom, and that unless they prayed without ceasing, it would reach England.

That was all they could do. There was no way to close a coastline that had a hundred harbours and lived by trade, so all they could do was pray and go on with their lives. Meanwhile, King Edward III knew what the pestilence could do. It had already killed his daughter.

Princess Joan was fourteen, King Edward and Philippa’s second daughter, and she had left England in the spring to be married to Pedro, heir to Castile. She travelled with four ships, a hundred men-at-arms, and a wedding wardrobe designed to impress the Spanish court, along with plate, saddles, tapestries, and a gown of cloth of gold. When her fleet reached Bordeaux they were warned not to land, because the plague was in the town. They landed anyway.

Within a fortnight her people began to die. The knight commanding her escort died on the twentieth of August. Princess Joan was moved out to a village in the countryside for cleaner air, but the plague followed her there, and she died on the second of September, having never met the boy she was going to marry. Her body was never brought home.

King Edward wrote to her intended father-in-law in October. It is a strange letter, because you can see a father and a king fighting each other inside the same sentences. He calls Death a destroyer who takes young and old alike and levels rich and poor together. He says no fellow human being should be surprised that he was desolated by grief, since he is human too. Yet this was also the king who had stood outside Calais just over a year earlier, deciding whether to hang six burghers.

So what was bubonic plague?

It is a bacterium that travels in the bite of a flea. Fleas live on rats, and rats lived in every barn and ship and thatched roof in Europe, but fleas live very comfortably on people too, and in their clothing and bedding. The old picture of a black rat scuttling down a mooring rope off an infected ship is probably too simple. The pestilence moved faster than rats move, and it kept moving through communities across the winter. In all likelihood the infection passed from person to person in a household via the fleas and lice that everyone carried on their own bodies.

The flea bite raised a lump. Within a day or two the glands in the groin, the armpit or the neck swelled into a hard and agonising swelling the size of an egg. That swelling was called a bubo, and it is where the word bubonic comes from. Then came fever, thirst, black and purple blotches under the skin where the small blood vessels had burst, and, near the end, a wandering of the mind that the chroniclers called madness. It took three days, sometimes fewer. A man could be well at breakfast and dead before the same time the next day.

There was a second form, worse. If the infection reached the lungs, the sufferer coughed blood and could pass the sickness straight to anyone close enough to breathe it in. That form of plague killed almost everyone who caught it. How much of the mortality it accounts for is still argued over, and over the winter of 1348 into 1349, England was devastated.

What did people think was happening?

The medical faculty at Paris investigated and reported that a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the sign of Aquarius three years earlier had corrupted the air, and that the corruption was now moving about the world in the air. If bad air was the cause, then smells were the defence. People carried herbs and posies, burned juniper and rosemary indoors, lit fires in the street. And since it was widely observed that the men who cleaned the latrines never seemed to catch it, some took the opposite view and stood over the cesspits on purpose, breathing deeply. Doctors advised against baths, which opened the pores and let the badness in.

None of it worked, though the herbs at least made a sickroom easier to sit in.

In any event, most people believed that the bad air had been sent by God.

This sounds odd, given modern medical understanding, but the men and women of 1348 lived inside a world that made sense as everything was due to the will of God. All this suffering had a purpose, God’s purpose. Then the pestilence came, and it took the wicked and the good, the old and the newborn, the drunkard in the ditch and the nun in the infirmary, and it took the priest who came to hear the confession of the dying and the gravedigger who buried them both. If a merciful God ruled the world, then why was he inflicting such suffering, and that question tore through Europe.

In Kilkenny, a Franciscan friar named John Clyn kept writing his annals while his brothers died around him, eight of them in a single day in March. At the end of his entry for the year he wrote that he was leaving parchment behind, in case anyone should still be alive to carry the work on. Another hand added a note underneath, later, recording that the man who wrote this had died. Nobody filled in the parchment.

From Dorset the pestilence spread along the coast and inland, following the roads and the rivers and the carters and the pack-ponies. Bristol was struck hard and early. Henry Knighton, a canon at the abbey in Leicester who wrote a long chronicle of these years, said that at Bristol almost the entire population died, and that most of the sick died within three days.

The plague reached London in the autumn of 1348. Robert of Avesbury, a clerk at Lambeth and the most reliable eyewitness the city has, dates the first visible signs to All Saints’ Day on the first of November. London then held perhaps sixty thousand people inside its walls and suburbs, and it had no more idea of what to do than Melcombe had. Between February and May of 1349 the epidemic was at its worst. Then the plague spread north and west, into the Midlands, into Wales, into the north country, into Ireland and Scotland, and by 1350 there was hardly a parish that had been spared.

The Scots, according to canon Knighton, watched England suffering and thought their moment had come. They gathered an army in Selkirk Forest, laughing about the foul death of the English, and while they were mustering, the pestilence came into the camp. The camp broke and the Scots ran for home, carrying the infection into Lowland Scotland. However canon Henry Knighton was English, and it is exactly the story an English chronicler would enjoy telling, so his account should be read accordingly.

Historians who have counted parish records and manor rolls and lists of tenants now think England had roughly five million people before the pestilence and something over two and a half million after it. On some manors the losses were lower. On others, in Hampshire and Wiltshire and Oxfordshire, two-thirds of the tenants were gone. It would be three hundred years before the country held as many people as it had held in the spring of 1348.

Numbers on that scale stop meaning very much. So look instead at just one letter.

In January 1349, Ralph of Shrewsbury, the same bishop who had written the warning in August, sat down at the manor house at Wiveliscombe, where he had gone to sit out the crisis, and wrote to every priest in his diocese. His parishes, he told them, were being left with no parson and no priest to care for anybody, and no replacements could be found. Some of the priests would not go near the sick, for fear of infection, and the result was that people were dying without confession, which to a fourteenth-century Christian meant dying alone and unprepared before God.

So the bishop, a careful and conservative man and a doctor of canon law, wrote something that would have been unthinkable eighteen months earlier. If no priest could be got, the dying should confess to any layman. And if no man was to be had, then to a woman.

The Church took a terrible blow. Across the English dioceses something close to half the parish clergy had died, which is not surprising, since their work was to sit at the bedsides of the dying. John Stratford, the Archbishop of Canterbury, died at his Sussex manor at Mayfield in August 1348, before the pestilence even reached Kent, but of what, nobody knows. The man chosen to replace him, John Ufford, caught the plague and died in May 1349 before he could even be consecrated. The man chosen to replace him, Thomas Bradwardine, a mathematician born in Chichester and one of the finest minds in Europe, was consecrated at the papal court in Avignon in July, came home, and was dead of plague before the end of August. Three archbishops in twelve months.

In London, the situation was getting desperate. They were running out of room to bury the dead.

The churchyards were full, so Ralph Stratford, the Bishop of London and kinsman of the dead archbishop, bought land at East Smithfield outside the walls, near the Tower, and a second graveyard was opened by Walter Manny, a soldier and a friend of the King. Over the centuries since, it has always been assumed that the dead were simply dumped into great pits, but in the 1980s, archaeologists excavated the East Smithfield ground, and found something else. There were mass trenches, and in places the dead lay five deep. They had not been thrown in. They had been laid out in rows, side by side, each one placed.

In one of those graves lay a woman with a hundred and eighty-one coins still in the purse at her waist. Nobody had taken them. It is very rare to find coins in a medieval burial, and the likeliest reason they were there is that nobody was willing to undress her. She went into the ground with everything she had.

Elsewhere in Europe, fear turned outward. Through the winter of 1348 and the spring of 1349 the story spread along the Rhine that the Jews had poisoned the wells, and Jewish communities in Strasbourg, Basel, Mainz and dozens of other towns were murdered by their neighbours in numbers running into thousands. Pope Clement VI had already issued a bull that July forbidding it, and issued another, and pointed out that Jews were dying of the pestilence exactly like everybody else. He was ignored. In England the same horror did not happen, for a bleak reason. Fifty-eight years earlier King Edward I had expelled the Jews from the country altogether, so there was nobody left to accuse.

What England did see, briefly, was the flagellants. Around Michaelmas in 1349 a company of penitents crossed from Flanders, Zeeland and Holland, and appeared in London, stripped to the waist, wearing caps marked front and back with a red cross, walking in single file and beating their bare backs with knotted three-tailed scourges, all of them chanting. They believed that if they punished themselves hard enough God might be satisfied and lift the pestilence. Londoners came out and watched, but did not join in, and after a while the penitents went home. It was the only time the flagellant movement ever reached England.

The plague loosened its grip on England through the winter of 1349, though it came back in 1361, and again in 1369, and kept coming back for three hundred years.

What it left behind was quiet.

Henry Knighton wrote about the fields. Sheep and cattle wandered through standing crops with nobody to drive them out. In one pasture, he said, more than five thousand sheep died and lay rotting, and no beast and no bird would touch them. Harvests stood ripe and were not cut, because there was nobody to cut them, and a reaper who had once worked for a few pence a day could now name his price and get it.

And some places never came back at all. At Tusmore in Oxfordshire every one of the tenants died. Years afterwards the landowner, Roger de Cottisford, petitioned the King, and a royal enquiry set it down. Before the pestilence Tusmore had been fully inhabited, since the death of those men it had been empty, it remained empty, and it was expected to remain empty in future. He was given leave to enclose the ground and make a park of it. There is a lake there now, and a house, but no village.

That flat little phrase, before the pestilence, began to turn up everywhere. It became a legal date. Because here is what the men who governed England noticed, once the epidemic passed. There was as much land as there had ever been, and as many sheep and as many mills and as much wool, but there were only half as many people to work it all.

A man who owned nothing but his own labour was suddenly worth something. Ploughmen asked for more and got it. Servants walked off manors where their families had worked for two hundred years and hired themselves out down the road for double. Landlords who had spent their lives being obeyed found themselves haggling with their own peasants.

So in June 1349, with the dead still being buried, the King and his Council issued the Ordinance of Labourers, and in 1351 Parliament turned it into the Statute of Labourers. Every able-bodied man and woman under sixty who held no land must work for anyone who asked. No one might refuse work. No one might leave a master for a better offer. And wages were fixed by law at what they had been before the pestilence.

It was an attempt to hold the world still with a piece of parchment. It did not work, and it was never going to, but it was enforced hard enough to be hated, and it was remembered. The men who came up the road to London in the summer of 1381, thirty-two years later, with a list of things they wanted from a boy king, were the sons and grandsons of the people who had done the burying in 1349.

If you go to the town of Weymouth today you will find a seafront, a long pale beach, gulls, chips, and the harbour full of little boats. On Custom House Quay, where the wool used to be loaded, there is a plaque on the wall. It records, in a few lines that most people walk straight past on their way to the ferry, that the Black Death came into England here in 1348.

And in London, east of the Tower, under the ground where the Royal Mint used to stand, the woman with the purse is still lying in her row, with the others laid out beside her.

Behind a church, on a Sunday afternoon, a man picked up a bow that was taller than he was and went off to practise. The bow was a longbow.

It was made from a single piece of yew, and it was extremely powerful. The arrows it fired were a yard long, and tipped with a slim iron point, and made for one purpose only – to go through armour.

To bend this incredibly powerful bow the archer did not pull with his arm. He laid his whole body into it, pushing with the left hand and hauling with the right, and the effort came up through his back and his shoulders. The men who did this could do it time and time again, perhaps ten times in a minute and for as long as their arrows lasted.

How did these men become strong enough to draw those bows? The law said that a free man of a certain amount of property must keep a bow and arrows in his house, and be ready to bring and use them when the king called, which meant he had to know how to shoot, and be strong enough to do so. So archery practice became a Sunday afternoon pastime. In villages all over England, in fields behind churchyards and wherever else there was room, generation after generation of ordinary men grew crooked shoulders and thickened arm bones and became incredibly strong and expert in the use of the longbow.

This was England in the 1330s. A country that had spent fifty years fighting in the mountains of Wales and the hills of Scotland, whilst in France, the finest heavy cavalry and mounted knights in Europe had ruled every battlefield they had ridden onto for three hundred years, and who regarded foot soldiers as the lowest sort of soldier, but they had never yet encountered the English longbow.

Yet what the English archers could do was not a secret. News of them had crossed the water to France again and again, but it made no difference because the men who ran France were knights, and a knight thought that battles were decided by the charge.

The king who would prove otherwise was a complete surprise. His father, King Edward the Second, had been a disaster: beaten by the Scots at Bannockburn, ruled by his favourites, despised by his barons, and finally pushed off the throne by his own wife. Queen Isabella came back from France with an army and a lover, a Marcher lord named Roger Mortimer, and between them they took the crown and gave it to her fourteen year old son. In September 1327 the old king died in Berkeley Castle. He was almost certainly murdered, but nothing has ever proved.

For three years Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer ruled England in the boy’s name. However, Scotland was a problem. They could not beat the Scots, so they paid them instead, recognising Robert Bruce as king north of the Tweed in a treaty people were calling shameful before the ink was dry. Effectively they gave Scotland away.

In October 1330 the young King Edward took his kingdom back. Nottingham Castle sits on rock, and under the rock there is a passage that comes up inside. A small band of men went up it in the dark and took Roger Mortimer in his room, and he was hanged in November.

King Edward the Third was seventeen, and what he wanted was everything his grandfather had wanted. King Edward the First had hammered at Scotland for a decade, and his grandson picked that hammer back up to continue.

He did it carefully, and at first through somebody else. Robert Bruce had died in 1329 leaving a son of five, and the Scots who had lost when Bruce won had been living in England ever since, calling themselves the disinherited and asking anybody who would listen for their lands back. They were listened to by Edward Balliol.

In August 1332 he landed in Fife with fifteen hundred men and marched on Perth, and the Scottish army that came to meet him was ten times that size. Its commander, the Earl of Mar, had been made Regent nine days earlier and was so certain of winning that he set no proper watch, and in the night the English crossed the river below him unopposed. In the morning the Scots army meet the English at Dupplin Moor. The English archers shot into them from both flanks, and the army could not go forward and could not get out or go back. Mar was killed and Balliol was crowned at Scone in September. However, before the year was out, he was surprised at Annan and chased back over the border.

In 1333 King Edward III came north himself to besiege Berwick, the Scots came down to relieve it, and the two armies met at Halidon Hill.

Bannockburn, nineteen years earlier, had been a disaster for the English. The Scots had stood in their schiltrons, tight blocks of men with long spears, hedgehogs of iron that no horse would go near, and the English had thrown cavalry at them until there was nothing left to throw. At Halidon the schiltrons formed up again and came on across boggy ground and up a slope, but this time the archers were placed where they could shoot into them, and they did. The blocks fell apart before they ever reached the English line.

In Scotland it was noticed. In France it was filed away as something that had happened a long way off, to people who did not matter.

Then King Edward pressed too hard, as he often did, and made Balliol hand over the eight counties of south-eastern Scotland, which finished Balliol in the eyes of every Scot alive and sent the followers of Bruce across the sea to ask France for help. France gave it. That, more than any claim to any throne, is what turned England and France against each other.

Although there was already a claim to the French throne. The King of France had died in 1328 without a son, and King Edward’s mother was a French king’s daughter, so he could argue a thin case that the crown could be allowed to pass through a woman, and he would raise the case when it was useful and drop it when it wasn’t.

A claim a king picks up and puts down a claim is not the reason he goes to war. The real reason was wool. English wool was the best in Europe and it went across the Channel to the weaving towns of Flanders, which depended on it for their living. But the lords who ruled those towns looked to France, and it was the lords Edward meant to hurt. In 1336 he stopped the wool. All of it.

He hurt the towns instead. Looms stood still, weavers had no work and no bread, and the townspeople rose against their lords. Within two years a merchant of Ghent named Jacob van Artevelde was governing much of Flanders in all but name, and the Flemish, thrown into a fight with France and surrounded by enemies, looked across the water for a friend. England was delighted to be asked.

So when King Edward asked Parliament for money he did not have to argue. The wool merchants wanted the war because their trade depended on it, and the knights of the shires wanted it because there was profit and ransom in it. Parliament said yes.

In May 1337 King Philip declared King Edward’s lands in Gascony forfeit, that autumn King Edward renounced his homage, and the war began. No treaty ever ended it. English kings went on calling themselves kings of France, on paper, until the first day of 1801.

King Philip’s answer was the sea. Stop the English crossing and there would be no war on French soil. He gathered every ship in France, hired galleys from Genoa, and in Normandy men began talking cheerfully about doing to England what William the Conqueror had done. The fleets met in June 1340 in the crowded harbour of Sluys. Sea fighting then was land fighting on unsteady ground: ships lashed together, grappled and boarded, nine hours of it, watched from the shore by Flemish townsmen who made sure that any Frenchman who swam for it did not get far. Jean Froissart, the chronicler who wrote down more of this war than anyone, said battles at sea are worse than battles on land because there is nowhere to run.

The French admirals had been told they would lose their heads if the English got across. They fought well and were beaten anyway, and the Channel belonged to England.

What followed was a lesson in the difference between winning a battle and winning a war. King Edward landed, joined his allies, and besieged the walled city of Tournai. He could not get in. The city held, and while it held, everything behind him came apart. The great tax he had raised on wool brought in a fraction of what he had promised his allies, and men who are not paid stop being allies. King Philip brought his army up in September, looked at the situation, and refused to fight, because he could see that King Edward’s coalition was falling to pieces without any help from him.

Unexpectedly, the fighting stopped with a family visit. King Edward’s mother-in-law, Jeanne of Valois, was King Philip’s sister, and she was a nun. She came out of her convent, went to her brother and then to her son-in-law in his tent, and asked them both to stop. On the twenty-fifth of September 1340 they signed a truce and everybody went home. The first invasion of France had achieved nothing at all.

It took six years before King Edward could try again, and the six years went on finding the money, which came, as English money did, out of sheep. Every sack of wool that left the country was taxed on its way through the port. Kinng Edward revived a system called the Staple to control it, in which a favoured group of merchants held the sole right to export through one town of his choosing. He taxed what passed through and they lent him money in return for being favoured, which Parliament disliked intensely, because a king with his own income is a king who does not need to ask.

However, in the spring of 1346 a French army came down into Gascony and laid siege to the town of Aiguillon, and the English commander there was writing home for help. Parliament agreed to the raising of money for the men. But the army that gathered was something new: not a feudal levy, the old system where lords owed the king so many days of service by the men on their land. This was a paid force of chosen men. Twenty-four hundred cavalry, thousands of archers, and a body of other foot soldiers boarded ships to cross the Channel, and on the twelfth of July 1346 the army came ashore, unopposed, at St Vaast on the Normandy coast.

Whether King Edward ever seriously meant to take Paris is argued about to this day, and there is a good case that he had chosen Normandy in advance precisely because it would force King Philip to come out and fight him somewhere in the north. What is certain is that he went east and he went fast. Caen fell in July, with the army burning its way through the Norman countryside until it was close enough for people on the walls of Paris to see the smoke rising up from the villages.

And then the whole strength of France came upon King Edward. An army perhaps three times the size of Edward’s, every knight in the kingdom, gathering north of the city. King Philip sent a message inviting the King of England to choose which bank of the river he would like to be destroyed on.

King Edward turned and ran for the coast. Sixty miles in four days, with the French army marching on a line beside him, and keeping between him and the crossings.

Ahead lay the river Somme. It is a name that would become well known again, but for different reasons, and in 1916. In 1346 the river ran out to the sea through wide marshes, crossable only at bridges and causeways, and every bridge and causeway was broken or held by the French. Four times the English tried to cross and four times they were turned back. Part of the French army reached Amiens behind them. Now there was the river in front, the sea on the left, and the French army closing in on the right.

And then the English were saved by a prisoner. Somewhere in the countryside the English army had picked up a Frenchman who knew the coast, and he told them, in exchange for his freedom, about a ford near the river’s mouth called Blanchetaque: a long shallow crossing over hard sand that could be used for a few hours at low tide, but at no other time.

The next day the English army was on the move before dawn and they reached the ford at sunrise, but the tide was in, and they had to wait for the tide to go out.

When the water finally dropped, King Edward ordered his men to cross. On the opposite side, three and a half thousand Frenchmen held the far bank, and the knights of Picardy came out to meet the English in the shallows in chain mail, which is a terrible thing to be wearing when you fall over in water. Also, from the French side, Genoese crossbowmen shot into the English column as it tried to cross, holding it up. But then on the English bank, the archers, armed with longbows, came into range and shot the crossbowmen off the bank. French horsemen came down into the water to drive the archers back, and English knights waded up through their own men to meet them, and for a while the fighting was in the river itself, in a foot of water and moving sand, with more English crossing behind all the time. Then the French broke and ran for Abbeville, and by the time King Philip arrived the tide was in again and the English army were across.

Up to the ford, King Edward had been running, but once he was on the far bank he stopped running. He regrouped and rested and fed his army. Then the English army marched through the forest of Crécy and assembled on a slope, waiting for King Philip and the French army to come to them.

The next morning, on Saturday the twenty-sixth of August 1346, King Edward drew up about eleven thousand men on the open downland outside the village of Crécy. He ensured that the wood was behind them, so that if the battle went badly there was somewhere for them to make a last stand. The English king then rode along the line on a small horse with a white stick in his hand, and wearing crimson and gold over his armour, and he asked his men to look after his honour. Then he told them all to sit down, eat and rest so they would be fresh for when the French arrived.

Then the French army arrived, but it was tired.

King Philip had begun the day by sending out four knights to see what the English were doing. When they came back and told him the English had stopped running and meant to fight, he gave the order to halt, close up the army, and attack in the morning.

But nobody obeyed the order. The roads from Abbeville were thick with men who had been chasing King Edward and his army for weeks and they were not going to be told to wait another night in case he slipped away again. Those at the back pushed the ones in front, and the ones in front could not stop, and the whole enormous army poured up to within sight of the English lines and stood there in the late afternoon, tired, unfed and in disarray.

At the head of the French were the Genoese crossbowmen. The crossbow is a fine weapon. It punches harder than a longbow, it can be aimed by a man with little training, but it is slow, because after every shot the string must be hauled back with a hook or a windlass. Crossbowmen normally sheltered behind a pavise, a tall shield propped on the ground whilst they reloaded, but the shields were somewhere in the baggage train, miles back down the road.

Not unreasonably, the Genoese said that they had marched all day under the weight of their weapons and were tired and in no state to fight, but the Count of Alençon, the French king’s brother, who had made the journey on a horse, said something cutting about hiring scoundrels who fall away the moment there is work to be done, and sent them forward.

As they threaded through the horsemen the sky went dark and a short heavy rainstorm came over, soaking the crossbow strings, which, now wet, stretched. The English archers, so the story goes, had taken their strings off and put them under their hats to keep them dry. When the storm cleared, the sun, now low in the sky, was at the backs of the English and in the faces of the French and Genoese crossbowmen.

The crossbowmen shouted, advanced, shouted again, advanced again, and then shot. Their bolts fell short.

The English lines, however, didn’t make a sound. On the army’s flanks six to seven thousand archers took one step forward, drew their longbows and let fly a storm of arrows. They did not fall short.

In minutes thousands of Genoese crossbowmen were killed, and the survivors turned and ran back into the ranks of French cavalry waiting behind them. King Philip, watching his own front line dissolve, shouted at his knights to kill the scoundrels who were blocking the road.

So the flower of French chivalry rode down its own crossbowmen with swords, and in doing so came inside the deadly range of the English archers, and so another storm of arrows fell on them.

After that it stopped being a battle. Squadron after squadron of men came up into the arrow storm. Horses screamed and reared with arrows in them, men in mail going down under the flailing hooves, and behind them more men riding forward into the same place because they could not see and would not stop. Welsh and Cornish foot soldiers slipped out between the ranks of archers with long knives and went among the fallen, killing earls and barons and knights on the ground. King Edward was furious about it afterwards. A live nobleman was worth a fortune in ransom and a dead one was worth nothing, and as far as he was concerned, a great deal of money was thrown away in the mud that evening.

Among the dead was the King of Bohemia, who was blind. He had come to fight for King Philip, and when he understood how the day was going he asked his knights to tie their bridles to his so that he could strike one blow with his own hand. They did it. The next morning the bodies were found still tied together.

The French charges went on after dark, men groping forward through the night to strike their blow, and being killed for it, because the English were in no mood to take prisoners whatever their king wanted. When the fighting finally stopped, King Philip of France had sixty knights left around him, an arrow wound, and a dead horse. One of his commanders took his bridle and led him off the field by force, on the sound principle that a live king can fight another day. King Philip reached Amiens the next morning with five barons.

The next day, Sunday, there was a fog. King Edward sent out a strong force to see what was in front of him, and he found the rest of the French army, the columns still marching up from Rouen and Beauvais who had not heard that there had been a battle. They were destroyed piecemeal in the mist. Froissart was told that more foot soldiers from the French towns died that Sunday morning than in the whole of Saturday’s fighting.

Then the English army marched north, through Montreuil and Étaples and Boulogne and the forest of Hardelot, and on the fourth of September they arrived in Calais.

Calais was a nest of privateers. It was the port that had fitted out the raiders who had preyed on English shipping and burned English coastal towns, and King Edward had wanted it for years, but it was also a walled town with the sea on one side and marsh on the others, held by a garrison under an experienced soldier called Jean de Vienne, who had no intention of opening the town gates.

The English longbowmen had decimated an army in an afternoon, but they could not knock a hole in a stone wall. King Edward tried the walls more than once, from the land and from the sea, and failed, so the army sat down outside and waited for the people inside to run out of food. That would take eleven months.

In the meantime they built a town of their own and called it Villeneuve-la-Hardie. Timber houses laid out in streets, with market halls, so that an army could live through a winter in the mud. They dragged up bombards, the early cannon, which were loud, but otherwise ineffective. They also drove lines of piles into the sea bed so that French supply boats could not creep out along the coast under the cover of darkness.

And the army stayed. Through the autumn, through the winter, through the spring, through the following summer. In that time, the English soldiers wanted to go home, and they came close to mutiny, but they held.

The Scots had promised France that they would help, and in October 1346, with King Edward stuck outside Calais, King David the Second of Scotland brought an army over the border, but the English had expected it. He was met and beaten at Neville’s Cross, just outside Durham, and taken prisoner, and spent the next eleven years in England until an enormous ransom was raised for him.

Meanwhile inside Calais, food was running out, and Jean de Vienne put out the people who could not fight and could not stop eating: the old, the sick, the women, the children, about seventeen hundred of them, driven out of the gates into the open ground between the walls and the English lines. King Edward would not let them through. They had what they could carry and then they had nothing, and they began to die where they sat, in sight of both armies. Then he changed his mind and let them pass, and they were fed and sent on their way.

Months later it happened again, but this time those people stayed under the walls until they were dead.

By the summer of 1347 the people still inside had eaten the horses and the dogs and the rats. Jean de Vienne wrote to his king to say so, and to say that when those were gone there would be nothing left to eat but each other. The letter got out through the English lines and to King Philip, and in July King Philip finally came with an army, and camped within sight of the town, but he did not attack. He thought about what to do for a few days, and let it be known that he preferred to be careful. Then he took his army away again.

The men on the walls of Calais watched their king leave and that was the end. On the third of August they opened the gates.

King Edward, after eleven months in a hut in the mud, was in no mood to be generous. He said he would spare the town if six of its leading citizens came out to him bareheaded and barefoot in their shirts with ropes round their necks, carrying the town keys. They were to be executed as he pleased.

Six of them came. The chronicle names the first as Eustache de Saint-Pierre.

King Edward ordered them beheaded. His own commanders argued with him and told him plainly that history would remember it, but he would not be moved. Then, Froissart the chronicler says, Queen Philippa, who had followed him to the war and was expecting a child, went down on her knees in front of the whole company and begged for their lives. He gave them to her. Whether the two of them had arranged the scene beforehand is a question that has been asked for six hundred years, and most historians now think they probably had. It is also possible that a man who had been cold and angry for eleven months needed a way to stop being angry without losing face, and his wife knew it.

The burghers lived. The rest of the town did not do so well. Almost the whole French population was turned out and Calais was resettled with English families, a wool port and a garrison town on French soil, and it stayed in English hands for two hundred and eleven years.

Then, in the summer of 1348 a ship arrived on the Dorset coast carrying something that no wall and no bowman could stop. The plague.

The fire had been burning in the church since first light, and a man stood beside it and watched the iron get hotter and hotter. The man had eaten nothing for three days. He had heard mass that morning, and sworn before God that he had not done it. Then the priest sprinkled holy water over the coals and asked God to make the truth plain.

A man had been found dead on the road below the village that spring, and the dead man’s brother had stood up in the county court and named the man for it, but there was no proof either way. So the question of guilt had been given to God.

When the iron glowed red hot, it would be put into the man’s bare hand, and he would carry it three paces across the flagstones and set it down. Then his terribly burned hand would be bound at once and the linen sealed. Nobody would touch it for three days, and on the third day, the priest would break the seal, unwind the bandage and look at the wound. If the burn was clean and beginning to heal, God had spoken for the man and he was innocent. If the wound was swollen and weeping, God had spoken against him, and he would hang for murder.

The ordeal was called the judgement of God, and for centuries it was how a serious accusation ended in England when there was no convincing evidence either one way or another, and it was one man’s word against another. There were other forms of the ordeal. A man could be lowered on the end of a rope into a pool of blessed water, and if he sank the water had accepted him and he was innocent. But if he floated, it had rejected him and he was guilty. And there was trial by battle, which the Normans brought over, in which two men fought until one of them could not stand, on the belief that God would strengthen the honest man and weaken the guilty.

None of this left much room for arguing about law, or proof, or justice, but then a king offered people something else.

King Henry the Second, the red-haired, restless Frenchman who spent thirty-five years putting England back in order, had built a system of royal courts and sent his judges into the countryside to hold them. But how to get people to use them. He could not simply order men to bring their quarrels to him, because the great lords had held courts of their own for generations and their right to do so was ancient and untouchable. So he did not order. He advertised.

The advertisement was the jury.

Henry did not invent the jury. It began as a tool of government rather than of justice. A king could call local men together and put them on oath to tell the truth about anything that touched his own interests, which is how William the Conqueror found out what England was worth when he ordered the Domesday survey. Twelve men from a neighbourhood could say who held which field, and be made to swear to it.

What King Henry offered was this. A man who came to the king’s court in a quarrel over land need not physically fight for it. He could have twelve men of the neighbourhood swear an oath and declare who had the better right. The lawyer who wrote the first book of English law called it a royal boon, a gift from the crown, and said it spared men from a sudden and early death, because the outcome of combat depended on the strength of two men where the new procedure asked the oaths of twelve and was more likely to reveal the truth.

But nobody wanted those twelve to be strangers. They were chosen because they knew the area and the people who lived there. Those men were more likely to have heard any argument or to know more of the history behind a dispute. Those twelve men were both witnesses and judges. The juror we have today who knows nothing about a case until it is proved in court would not arrive for centuries.

And only the king could grant permission to form a jury. King Henry made sure of that. He would not give it to a lord’s court, only to his own court, so every man who wanted the better kind of justice had to come to him for it.

The ordeal itself he left alone. A man presented by his neighbours for murder still went to the water, a man accused by name still carried the glowing hot iron, and that did not change in Henry’s lifetime or his sons’.

Importantly, to get your case heard in one of his royal courts you needed a writ.

A writ was a small strip of parchment, written out by one of the king’s clerks and sealed with wax, and it carried a precise set of words. There was one set of words for a man who claimed he had been put out of his land, another for a debt, another for an inheritance. The words were fixed and unchangeable. If your dispute or problem did not fit the wording of any writ that existed, you had no case at all, and if you bought the wrong writ you lost, however much you were in the right.

In the years around 1190 there were fewer than forty writs, but by the reign of Henry’s great-grandson, King Edward the First, Edward Longshanks, there were several hundred writs, and every new one took another quarrel out of the lords’ courts and into the king’s.

So a justice mechanism had been built, and it gave England better justice than anything the country had known before. But it was the crown’s machinery. It ran on the king’s writs, in the king’s courts, under the king’s judges, and it passed down with the crown from one man to the next. No part of it could be turned against the man at the top. A bad king could be resisted, or endured, or rebelled against, but he could not be taken to law, because the law was his.

That was the flaw, and nobody had found a way round it. What happened next was that England stumbled into one by accident.

It was the Church that ended it, not a king. In 1215, at a great council in Rome, the Pope forbade any priest to bless the iron or the water, and without a priest the ceremony was only a burn and a ducking, which settled nothing.

That was the year the barons cornered King John at Runnymede and made him seal the Great Charter. Within weeks he had persuaded the Pope to cancel it, and the barons, who had run out of patience with him entirely, offered the crown of England to Louis, son of the King of France. Louis came, and brought an army, and by the autumn of the following year he held London and the Cinque Ports and half the country was against its own king.

That was where matters stood in October 1216, when John died of dysentery at Newark, worn out and still fighting. Much of the royal baggage, and by tradition the crown jewels with it, had gone into the mud of the Wash a few days before.

King John’s heir was nine years old. They crowned the boy at Gloucester nine days after John’s death, in an abbey church a long way from Westminster, because Westminster was in enemy hands. Also the Archbishop of Canterbury was abroad. There was no crown, so the boy’s mother gave up a plain gold circlet of her own and they used that. William Marshal, the greatest knight in Europe and seventy years old, knighted the child before the ceremony began, and then agreed, without much enthusiasm, to govern the country as regent until he grew up. The boy was King Henry III.

Three years later, a letter went out to the royal judges telling them to find some other way of trying men accused of serious crime, because the ordeal was finished. It was the sort of decision that changes how justice works in a country, and it was issued in the name of a boy of eleven who had never yet made a decision in his life.

And that time period was pivotal. For ten years England was governed in the name of a king who did not govern. The judges conducted the local courts, the writs went out, the sheriffs answered for their shires, and a regent and a council ran the country. The men who ran England in 1258 had grown up knowing that England could be governed by a council, and not by the king, because they had watched it happen.

William Marshal, the regent, used the years well. His first act was the shrewdest thing anyone did in that whole miserable war. He reissued the Great Charter, the same charter the rebels were supposedly fighting for, in the boy’s name. It cut the ground from under them. They could not continue to fight, as what they were fighting John for was granted by his heir, the nine-year-old King Henry III.

Some rebels remained, but they were beaten on the streets of Lincoln in May 1217. In August the fleet coming to relieve them was caught off the Kent coast near Sandwich. The English ships worked upwind of the French ships and threw pots of powdered lime into the air so that the wind carried it into the faces of the French. They then attacked the half blind sailors. After that Louis of France went home. The Charter was issued again to mark it, and again in 1225 in the form it kept from that day on. Because of those reissues, Magna Carta became part of the law of England.

King Henry the Third grew up gentle, devout and interested in beautiful things. He rebuilt Westminster Abbey, the church you can walk into today, and it was the great work of his life. He was also, as a ruler, a disaster with money.

The trouble was mainly that he loved giving it away. He married Eleanor of Provence, and her uncles came with her and were given lands and offices, and his half-brothers arrived from France and were given more. English barons who had waited years for a wardship or a manor watched them go to charming strangers from Poitou and Savoy who could not be bothered to learn the language of the country that was paying for them. Then in 1254 the Pope offered Henry the crown of Sicily for his younger son Edmund, and Henry accepted, agreeing to send an army and to stand surety for papal debts of some ninety thousand pounds, but King Henry had neither.

So he sold plate, jewels, rights and privileges to anyone who would buy them, and when the barons and the bishops told him he could not have their money, he told them that servants do not judge their master and vassals do not bind their prince with conditions.

They bound him anyway.

In the spring of 1258 he had to summon a great council and ask for money, and the answer he got was a price. Twenty-four men would be chosen to reform the government of England, twelve named by the king and twelve by his opponents. They met at Oxford that June, and what came out of it was the most radical document England had yet produced. Later generations called that meeting the Mad Parliament, which tells you what the people who lost thought of it.

The Provisions of Oxford put the king under a council of fifteen. The chancellor and the treasurer and the justiciar were to answer to that council rather than to King Henry. A parliament was to meet three times a year, and whether the king wanted them to meet or not. In every county four knights were to be elected to sit in the county court and write down complaints from anyone who had been wronged by a sheriff or a bailiff. And the chancellor was forbidden to seal any new writ on the king’s word alone.

That last clause is easy to read past. It meant that the machinery the second King Henry had built was no longer entirely the king’s to alter. The law had grown up around royal writs for a hundred years, and now the men who lived under it had a hand in their writing.

The proclamation announcing the new arrangements was sent to every sheriff in England, and it went out in English as well as in Latin and French. No royal document had been issued in English since the Norman Conquest, nearly two hundred years before. Somebody had worked out that this one needed to be understood by people who had never learned French.

It was around this time that a new word began to attach itself to these meetings. The old name was a colloquy, a talking-together, which is what the chroniclers called it when William the Conqueror took deep speech with his wise men before the Domesday survey. The new word came from the French for speaking. Parliament.

The man who drove it all was not English. Simon de Montfort was born in France, a younger son of a crusading father, and came to England as a young man to claim the earldom of Leicester through his grandmother. He married the king’s sister in secret, which caused a scandal, governed Gascony for Henry, quarrelled bitterly with him about it, was put on trial and acquitted, and forgave none of it. He was hard, devout, impatient and entirely certain of himself, which is a dangerous combination in a man who is usually right.

What made him more than another angry earl was what he did next. Having forced the king to answer to a council, he turned round and told the barons that the same rules applied to them. He took up the cause of the lesser knights, the landholding gentlemen who actually ran the shires and who had banded together under the name of the Community of the Bachelors of England, and he began rebuking great lords for the way they treated their own people. That was the moment the baronial party split, and it never properly came back together.

In 1261 the Pope released King Henry from his oath to keep the Provisions, and Henry threw out the officials the barons had appointed. For a while there were two governments in England, each cancelling the other’s orders, and both of them sent for representatives of the shires, the barons summoning them to St Albans and the king to Windsor on the same day.

In the end the quarrel was put to Louis of France, who was famously just and would in time be made a saint. In January 1264, at Amiens, he found for King Henry on every point and declared the Provisions void. He was a king, and he did not believe a king should answer to a council.

So it came to war, and the war was ugly. Along the Welsh border Simon’s sons burned out the lands of men who had sided with the king. In London and Worcester and other towns his supporters attacked the Jewish communities, killing people and destroying the written records of debts owed to them, and Simon did not stop it. That belongs in the same story as the parliament, and it should not be left out of it.

Then the war came to Sussex.

On the morning of the fourteenth of May 1264 the royal army was quartered at Lewes, in the castle and the priory below it, and Simon’s army came over the downs before dawn and drew up on Offham Hill above the town. His left was made up of Londoners, volunteers with little armour and less training. Prince Edward, the king’s son, took the royal cavalry straight through them, rode them down, and then, boiling with an old grudge against the city, chased the survivors for miles instead of turning back. By the time he came back his father had been driven down into the town and taken, along with the king’s brother, and there was nothing left to rescue.

Simon had been thrown from his horse some weeks earlier and had travelled to Sussex in a covered litter. However, he was well enough to fight by the morning of the battle, and he left the litter standing on the hill with his banners on it, and shut the royalist hostages inside for safekeeping. Edward’s men found it, took it for Simon’s command post, and killed the men they found within. Those men were on their side.

By nightfall Simon de Montfort held the King of England, the king’s brother and the king’s son. For fifteen months he ran the country in Henry’s name, and Henry, treated throughout with elaborate courtesy, went where he was taken and put his seal to what he was given.

Which brings us to the writs that went out on the fourteenth of December 1264.

They summoned a parliament to Westminster for the twentieth of January. Bishops and abbots were called, and the earls and barons Simon could trust, which was not many, twenty-three in all. Two knights were to be elected in every shire. And two men were to come from each of the larger towns, from York and Lincoln and Sandwich, and four from each of the Cinque Ports, chosen by the townsmen themselves.

That last part had never been done before.

Knights of the shire had been summoned before, usually when a king wanted a tax and needed the counties to agree to it. Townsmen had not. A burgess was a man of business, a wool merchant or a draper, who owed his standing to trade rather than to land or blood, and the crown had never had any reason to want him in the room. Now the writs went out in the depths of winter at five weeks’ notice, and the townsmen who had rarely ridden beyond the next market town rode to Westminster to sit amongst earls.

It would be pleasant to say this was done out of principle. It was not, or not only, done out of principle. Simon summoned the towns because he needed friends and the barons were deserting him, and everybody at the time understood that perfectly well. The parliament dutifully approved what he had already decided.

But the writs had been sent, and a thing that has been done once can be done again.

By the summer it was over. Edward escaped his guards at Hereford at the end of May, on the pretext of trying out horses, riding each one until it tired and then going off on the last fresh one. He gathered the Marcher lords, cut Simon off from the east, and caught his son’s army sleeping in the town below Kenilworth Castle. Simon, penned in the west and knowing nothing of it, crossed the Severn and marched for Evesham.

On the morning of the fourth of August 1265 the watchmen saw banners coming down from the north and cheered, because they were the banners of Simon’s son. They had been taken at Kenilworth three days before. Edward was flying them deliberately.

It was remembered afterwards that Simon looked at the army on the hill, twice the size of his own, and said that they were coming on well, and that they had learned it from him, and that they had better commend their souls to God because their bodies were Edward’s. He offered any man who wanted to go the chance to leave. Then he took the bishop’s blessing and rode up Green Hill into a thunderstorm.

It lasted a couple of hours and was not a battle so much as a slaughter. Edward had picked twelve men and told them to find Simon, kill him, and take no ransom, which broke every rule of war those men had been raised on. They killed his eldest son in front of him. They killed his horse under him and he fought on foot until they beat him down. Afterwards his body was hacked apart and the pieces sent about the country as trophies. A chronicler who lived through it wrote that it was the murder of Evesham.

The old king was on the field, dressed in his captors’ colours and half forgotten, and was nearly cut down by his own son’s knights before he pulled off his helmet and shouted that he was Henry of Winchester, their king, and they were not to kill him. Somebody recognised him and got him out.

What followed was two years of misery. Simon’s followers were stripped of their lands, which left them nothing to lose, and the fighting went on in the woods and the fens. Kenilworth Castle held out for six months. But Edward, who was ruthless and not at all stupid, worked out that hanging every rebel in England would not leave him a country worth ruling. In 1266 the disinherited were offered their lands back at a price they could pay, and in 1267 a parliament at Marlborough re-enacted the best of the reforms Simon had fought for. Four of its clauses are still on the statute book today, the oldest working law in the country.

The monks of Evesham buried what was left of the earl in their abbey church, and people began arriving at the grave. They came from all over England for fifteen years, and the monks wrote down every cure and every wonder reported there until the crown made it too dangerous to go on. He had been a hard man and a proud one, he had helped himself to a good deal of confiscated property, and he had let terrible things be done in his name. But the poor had understood him to be on their side, and they did not forget it.

Henry the Third died in November 1272, having reigned for fifty-six years, and was buried in the abbey he had spent his life rebuilding. He had been a bad king and an unlucky one, and the two things from his reign that still matter both came out of his failures.

In the meantime, his son was on his way home from crusade and took two years to arrive. Edward the First was everything his father was not, and he had personally destroyed the man who first thought of calling ordinary men to Westminster.

He used the idea anyway.

In November 1295, needing money for wars in Wales, Scotland and France at once, King Edward, Edward Longshanks, sent out writs summoning knights from every shire and burgesses from every borough, and the writ carried a line of old Roman law his clerks had dug out that has been quoted ever since. What touches all should be approved by all. He did not mean it as a principle of liberty. He meant that if he was going to tax the whole kingdom it was easier to have the whole kingdom in the room when he asked.

Two years later the sentence was taken out of his hands. By the autumn of 1297 he had taxed so hard and so often that his barons were armed, his clergy were refusing him and the wool trade was in revolt. To avoid another civil war he sealed a confirmation of the Charters, granting for himself and his heirs that he would take no such tax again except by the common assent of the realm.

That is the bargain the rest of this story turns on. The king had the crown, and the crown needed money, and the money now had a price, and the price was asking.

You can walk up Offham Hill above Lewes on a spring morning and look down on the town the way Simon’s men did, at the castle and the roofs and the river going out towards the sea. At Evesham the abbey is gone and only the bell tower is left standing in the grass, with a spring called Battle Well below the hill where the last of his knights were cut down. Nothing there tells you that anything had begun. But what had begun was that the king had to ask Parliament for money.

The next king but one, King Edward the Third, would want a great deal of money, and by then there was only one way to get it – to ask Parliament. He wanted the money for a war in France, and that war would begin with a claim to the French throne and lead, within ten years, to English archers standing in the mud at a place called Crécy.

For the last years of the thirteenth century, and the beginning of the fourteenth, William Wallace had shown Scotland that England under Edward Longshanks could be beaten.

On the tenth of February 1306, less than six months after William Wallace was put to death at Smithfield, in London, two Scottish noblemen met in Greyfriars Church in Dumfries.

The two men were Robert Bruce and John Comyn, and they were the two most powerful men left in Scotland. They were rivals for the Scottish Crown, and they hated each other, but they had agreed to talk, and talk in a church, a sanctuary and a place where no man could lawfully draw a weapon against another.

Nobody knows what was said between them, and only one man came back out of the church – Robert the Bruce. To the men waiting outside for him he said, in the flat voice of somebody who could not believe what they had done, that he doubted he had killed John Comyn. One of Robert’s followers, Roger Kirkpatrick, said that he would make sure of it, and went back inside with a knife.

John Comyn was dead. It was sacrilege, a murder carried out in front of the high altar of a church. Repercussions were soon to follow. The Pope would excommunicate him, and the Comyn family would never forgive him. Their kinsmen spent the next twenty years looking for chances to bring Robert the Bruce down.

It was also, from that moment onwards, impossible for Robert to turn back. He had murdered the leader of a rival faction in a church. And on top of this, there would be no pardon from King Edward, no quiet return to his estates, no waiting to see how things turned out. He had one road left, and it went straight to the throne of Scotland.

He took it – fast.

The reason for the speed was that he knew the excommunication was coming and could not be stopped, and an excommunicated man cannot be crowned King. But a papal bull (an official public decree), had to be written in Rome and then carried all the way to Scotland, and that took time. If Bruce could get a crown on his head before the document arrived, he would be King of Scotland, and that could not easily be undone.

Seven weeks after the murder of John Comyn, on the twenty-fifth of March 1306, Robert Bruce was crowned King of Scotland at Scone.

It was a strange coronation. The Stone of Destiny was gone, taken to Westminster by King Edward ten years earlier, so he was crowned without it. The ceremony was performed by bishops who knew perfectly well they were defying an excommunication. And the man whose hereditary right it was to place the crown on a Scottish king’s head, the Earl of Fife, was a boy in English custody and could not come.

His sister Isabella came instead. She was married to a Comyn, she had taken her husband’s warhorses and had arrived at Scone a day late and missed the whole thing. Robert thought her presence mattered enough that he went through the entire coronation a second time, so that a MacDuff could put the crown on his head as a MacDuff always had crowned all the Scottish kings.

It cost her four years of her life, though nobody in the abbey at Scone knew that yet.

The rapid crowning of Robert the Bruce was an act of desperation dressed up as a coronation. And within four months, it had completely fallen apart.

To understand what Robert did next, you have to understand who he was, because he was not William Wallace and it does him no favours to pretend otherwise.

William Wallace was minor gentry with nothing to lose, and Robert was one of the greatest landowners in Britain, Earl of Carrick, lord of vast estates in Scotland and substantial ones in England, grandson of the Robert Bruce who had competed for the crown in 1290. He had been raised to inherit, to calculate, to survive.

And for the eight years before the murder in Dumfries, he had done exactly that. He had changed sides repeatedly. He had sworn loyalty to King Edward, broken it, and sworn it again. He had fought for the Scots, then submitted to King Edward, then been pardoned, then submitted again. When Wallace was Guardian of Scotland, Bruce was not at his side. When Wallace was hunted through the years of defeat, Bruce was making his peace with the English king.

This was normal conduct for a medieval nobleman and carried no particular shame. But it does mean that the man who was crowned at Scone in 1306 had no great record of loyalty behind him, and everybody knew it.

What Robert had instead was something Scotland had not yet had – authority. Wallace had been a soldier of genius who never held political power. The Scottish nobles had held political power and never fought. Bruce was a great lord who was prepared to fight, and that combination, once he committed to it, turned out to be the thing that mattered.

But first he had to survive.

King Edward I was sixty-six years old and frail, and the news from Scone of Robert the Bruce’s coronation made him incandescent with rage.

He sent an army north under Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, a cousin of the King and one of the greatest men in England. He was also the murdered John Comyn’s brother-in-law. Edward had chosen him deliberately, the one commander in the country with a private reason to want Bruce dead, and he sent him north with orders that were unusually explicit. Valence was to raise the dragon banner, which meant that the ordinary conventions of war were suspended and no quarter would be given to anyone, and Bruce’s supporters were not to be treated as enemies. They were to be treated as criminals.

In June of 1306, at the village of Methven, six miles west of Perth, Valence caught Bruce’s small army in a surprise attack and destroyed it. Bruce escaped with a handful of men. A few weeks later, at Dalrigh, he was attacked again by the MacDougalls of Lorn, who were John Comyn’s kinsmen, and he was beaten again.

What followed was the worst period of Bruce’s life, and it was worse for the people around him than it was for him.

His sister Mary, and the Countess Isabella, who had put the crown on his head, were each shut in what the records call a cage, Mary at Roxburgh and Isabella at Berwick. They were not the open birdcages of later storytelling. Each was a small chamber of timber lattice and iron, about eight feet across, built onto the castle wall with a privy in the corner. The cage and chamber had been designed that way because it was meant to be lived in for a long time.

Edward’s written order about Isabella survives. She had not struck with a sword, he said, so she would not die by one. But because of her unlawful crowning of Robert, she was to be kept at Berwick where everyone who passed could see her and know what she had done. She was fed, she had a servant, and she was not going to be killed, because a dead hostage is worth nothing. She was simply put where the entire town could look at her, and she was left there for four years.

Also, three of Robert’s brothers were caught and executed. The Earl of Atholl was hanged in London, and because he was a nobleman related to the royal house, Edward granted him the privilege of a higher gallows than the others.

Bruce himself vanished. In the autumn of 1306 he crossed to Rathlin Island, off the coast of Antrim, and spent the winter there, a crowned king with no kingdom, no army, and most of his family dead or in cages.

This is where the story of the spider belongs. Robert, at his lowest point, watching a spider try and fail and try again to swing its thread across a gap. What Robert learned from the spider was to keep going and not give up. It is a wonderful story, but of course there is no evidence at all that it happened. It first turns up five hundred years afterwards, in Sir Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather, a history of Scotland he wrote for his young grandson and published in 1828. It was in a history book, aimed at children, by the most famous Scotsman alive, which is how a good story becomes a fact. Scotland has kept it because it is the right story for the moment, but it is not the same as being true.

What is true is that Robert spent that winter somewhere alone, with every reason to give up, but he didn’t.

He came back from Rathlin in the spring of 1307 with a very small force, landing on the Ayrshire coast at Turnberry, where he had been born and where his family’s castle now held an English garrison. And this time he did not repeat Wallace’s mistake.

William Wallace had won at Stirling Bridge and then, at Falkirk, had let himself be brought to a pitched battle against an army built to destroy him. Robert the Bruce had watched that happen, and for the next seven years he refused to fight any battle he had not chosen.

Instead he fought another kind of war, a guerrilla war. He moved constantly and lived rough. He struck at night, in small numbers, against isolated garrisons, and vanished before a response could be organised. He drove cattle away and burned the grass so English armies marching north would find nothing to eat, which was Wallace’s strategy at Falkirk, but Bruce made it the whole war rather than a prelude to one.

He had two lieutenants who made this possible. Thomas Randolph, his nephew, ran campaigns and took cities. Sir James Douglas ran the border.

Douglas was a small, dark man with a lisp, courteous and quiet in company, and by common account of the people who fought alongside him quite unrecognisable once a fight started. He raided English-held country for twenty years without ever really stopping. He took his own family castle back from the English on three separate occasions. The Scots called him the Good Sir James and the English called him the Black Douglas.

Robert also dealt with his enemies at home, and he did it with a cold efficiency. The Comyn lands in the north-east had never accepted Robert as King, and in the winter of 1308 he went through Buchan and destroyed it, burning the crops, the barns, the houses and the people’s means of living. The herschip of Buchan, it was called, the harrying, and the district was still visibly impoverished fifty years later.

Then he began taking castles, and the way he took them tells you how his mind worked.

The English held Scotland through a chain of stone fortresses, each with a garrison, each impossible to storm by an army without siege engines, which Bruce did not have. So he did not storm them. He took them by trickery, at night, by climbing.

The stories of how he did it came down to us from a poem written by a Scottish priest called John Barbour, but it was sixty years after the events, so they have had time to be improved in the telling. But they are the only account there is, and they are wonderful.

At Linlithgow a local farmer named William Bunnock, who supplied the garrison with hay, drove his cart into the gateway and stopped it dead under the portcullis so it could not be lowered, and armed men came out of the hay. At Roxburgh, Douglas’s men crawled up to the walls on their hands and knees at dusk with black cloaks over their armour, and the sentries above took them for cattle in the field. At Edinburgh, Randolph found a man in his own force whose father had served in the castle garrison, and who as a young man had climbed down the north face of the rock at night to visit a girl in the town. The man remembered the route. Thirty men went up the cliff in the dark behind him.

And then, every time, Bruce pulled the castle down. He did not garrison them. He destroyed them so that the English could never use them again, and no future Scottish lord could hold one against his king. By 1314 almost every major fortress in Scotland was either in Scottish hands or in ruins.

Stirling was one of the last castles to hold out.

The English governor of Stirling Castle had made an agreement with Robert the Bruce’s brother Edward, and it was the kind of agreement medieval knights found honourable and Robert found infuriating. If no English army came to relieve the castle by midsummer 1314, it would be surrendered.

It was chivalrous. It was also a public invitation to invade, with a date attached, and it handed the English exactly the thing Bruce had spent seven years avoiding, which was a fixed place and a fixed time to bring their full strength against him.

King Edward had died in 1307 on the road north, still trying to reach Scotland, and had asked his son to carry his bones at the head of the army until the Scots were beaten. His son did not. Edward II was a very different man from his father, and he came north seven years later in the summer of 1314 with an army that reflected it: enormous, magnificent, but badly led.

Approximately twenty-five thousand men crossed the Tweed, with at least three thousand armoured knights and men-at-arms. Against it Robert had perhaps ten thousand, mostly the same hard spearmen who had fought at Falkirk with William Wallace, along with a small cavalry force and few archers.

Robert had every reason to withdraw, and he very nearly did. But he had spent seven years thinking about Falkirk, and he had worked out three things.

The first was ground. He chose a position where his flanks were protected by dense woodland on one side and boggy carseland on the other, so that the English could not get round him. At Falkirk the archers had been walked into position and allowed to shoot at their leisure. Here there was nowhere for them to stand.

The second was the ground itself. Across his front, where the English cavalry would have to charge, Bruce’s men dug hundreds of small round holes about a foot deep, and covered them over with branches and turf so that they were invisible. A galloping horse that puts a foot in one goes down and brings its rider with it. They were called pottes, and they worked so well that English archers copied the idea at Crécy thirty-two years later.

The third was the one that mattered most. Robert kept his small force of mounted knights back, out of the fight, waiting. They had only one job, and it was not to charge the enemy. It was to wait for the English archers to be moved into a position where they could shoot into the schiltrons – the great rings of spearmen, packed shoulder to shoulder and bristling outwards in every direction – and then to ride them down before they could start.

Falkirk had been lost because the schiltrons could not answer the archer. Bruce had spent seven years designing the answer.

On the twenty-third of June 1314, the day before the battle, the English vanguard came up towards the Scottish position, but something happened that Scotland has never stopped talking about.

Robert was out in front of his lines on a small horse, a light horse rather than his heavy war-horse, wearing a gold circlet over his helmet so his men could see him. An English knight named Henry de Bohun saw the circlet, recognised what it meant, lowered his lance, and charged him.

It was a reasonable decision. Bohun was in full armour on a destrier war-horse, at the gallop, with a twelve-foot lance. Robert was on a pony with a battle-axe. Every man on both sides watched them come together.

At the last possible moment, Robert stood in his stirrups, turned his horse aside so the lance went past him, and then brought the axe down on Bohun’s head as he passed. It split the helmet and the skull beneath it, and Bohun was dead before he hit the ground.

Robert’s commanders, when they reached him, were furious with him for risking everything on a stunt. Bruce is said to have looked at the broken shaft in his hand and remarked that he was sorry about the axe.

The battle proper began the next morning, the twenty-fourth of June 1314, and it went exactly as Robert had planned it.

The English heavy cavalry came down the slope, across the Bannock Burn, and charged uphill towards the schiltrons. The pottes, the holes in the ground, broke up the charge before it arrived. What was left of it hit the spear points and stopped dead.

A contemporary account describes the noise of that first collision, the great horses driving into the Scottish pikes as into a thick wood, and the crash of splintering lances and screaming horses, and the two armies locked together and neither giving way.

And then, for a long time, nothing moved. Which was the point.

Because behind the fighting line, the rest of that enormous English army was arriving on a front barely two thousand yards wide, with a stream behind it and marshy ground on either side, and there was nowhere for it to go. Men kept coming forward into a battle they could not reach. The English archers tried to shoot over the top and hit their own men, exactly as the Norman archers had at Hastings. The most powerful army in Europe was jammed into a space too small to fight in.

Then somebody thought to move some of the archers around to the Scottish left flank, where they could shoot into the schiltrons from the side.

That was the moment Bruce had been waiting seven years for. He sent in the cavalry he had been holding back, and they rode straight through the archers before a single volley could be organised and drove the survivors back into the mass of their own army, which was already beginning to lose its shape.

After that, the battle came apart quite quickly. Somewhere on the hills to the English right, Robert’s camp followers, the servants and drivers and boys who had been left with the baggage, came over the crest waving whatever they had and yelling, and the exhausted English army took them for a fresh Scottish army. Edward II’s personal guard led him off the field. Once the King had gone, the army broke.

The schiltrons, which had spent the whole battle standing still, now walked forward down the slope into a mass of men who could not run, and the killing went on all the way back to the Bannock Burn and beyond it. Churchill’s judgement is that no worse slaughter of English chivalry ever took place in a single day, and that a Scottish army of spearmen destroying an army of cavalry and archers must be counted a prodigy of war.

The Scots claimed thirty thousand dead or captured, which was more men than the English army contained. But the scale of the exaggeration is itself evidence of the overwhelming victory, but winning the battle of Bannockburn did not win the war.

The battle was fought in 1314, but it took another fourteen years for England to admit Scotland was independent.

Robert spent those years making it impossible for the English to do anything else. He raided northern England until the northern counties were paying him protection money to be left alone. He sent his brother Edward to Ireland with an army of Bannockburn veterans, hoping to open a second front and export the whole model of resistance to another Celtic country under English rule. Edward Bruce was crowned King of Ireland in 1316, but the Irish chiefs would not unite behind him. Then a famine ruined the country he was trying to hold, and Robert’s brother Edward was defeated and killed at Dundalk in 1318.

And then in 1320, the barons and freeholders of Scotland sent a letter to the Pope.

They were trying to get Robert’s excommunication lifted and Scotland’s independence acknowledged. The letter was drafted at Arbroath Abbey by men making a legal argument. But somewhere in the middle of it they wrote a sentence that has outlived every other document of the period. They told the Pope that they were not fighting for glory or riches or honours, but for freedom alone, which no honest man gives up except with his life.

In the letter, called the Declaration of Arbroath, they also said something that is still being argued about today. They told the Pope that if Robert the Bruce ever submitted to the English crown, then they themselves would drive him out and choose another king. The letter was written to defend Robert’s kingship, and it contains the conditions under which his own subjects would be able to remove him. A king, it says, holds his crown from the community of the realm, and holds it only as long as he defends them.

Nobody in Europe was writing sentences like that in 1320.

Peace came in the end, and it came because Edward II fell. He was deposed by his own wife and her lover in 1327 and murdered at Berkeley Castle. The regency that governed on behalf of his young son had no appetite for the Scottish war, and in 1328 the Treaty of Northampton acknowledged what the Battle of Bannockburn had established fourteen years earlier: Scotland was an independent kingdom, and Robert the Bruce was its lawful king.

He had been fighting for Scottish freedom for twenty-two years.

Robert the Bruce died the following June, in 1329, at Cardross on the Clyde, of an illness the chroniclers called leprosy, although modern doctors reading the accounts are not convinced. He was fifty-four.

He had asked, since he had never managed to go on crusade as he had vowed to, that his heart be taken to the Holy Land after his death. So they opened his chest, took out his heart, sealed it in a silver casket, and gave it to Sir James Douglas.

Douglas set off in 1330 with a company of Scottish knights and the casket hung around his neck. Passing through Spain, he found a Christian army fighting the Moors at Teba and joined it, because that was the kind of thing Douglas did. He was cut off in the fighting, surrounded, and finished.

The story that has come down, from the French author Jean Froissart and through every Scottish schoolroom since, is that Douglas took the casket from his neck and threw it into the enemy ranks ahead of him, and shouted at it to go forward as it had always gone before, and that Douglas would follow it or die.

Douglas died. The heart was recovered from the field afterwards and carried home, and it lies at Melrose Abbey. Robert the Bruce’s body lies at Dunfermline.

His heart never made it to the Holy Land. But Scotland has kept the story alive for seven hundred years.

What William Wallace had proved was that the English could be beaten once. What Bruce proved, over twenty-two years of murder and exile and patience and burnt fields and stolen castles, was that they could be beaten permanently.

Scotland would not be conquered again for another three hundred years, and when the two kingdoms finally came together it would not be because of an English army attacking it, it would be because a Scottish king rode south to be crowned king of both Scotland and England.

In May 1297, in the small settlement of Lanark in the Scottish lowlands, a young man walked into the house of the English sheriff and killed him, but nobody knows exactly why. Later stories said it was revenge, because the sheriff had murdered a woman the young man loved. Now the story may be true, or it may have been invented afterwards by people who wanted a reason for what came next, which was an uprising.

The reason for the uprising? Scotland’s lords had surrendered, but nobody had thought to ask the Scottish people what they thought about surrendering sovereignty.

Within weeks, men were coming down out of the hills, out of the woods, and the market towns of southern Scotland to join forces with this young man. Within months, the English administration of Scotland had begun to come apart, and inside a year, King Edward I had been forced to abandon his war in France and come north to deal with a man he had never heard of. That young man was William Wallace.

And to understand why the uprising happened, you have to understand what had happened in Scotland in the previous year.

In 1296, King Edward I of England had marched north and taken the country apart. He had destroyed the great trading town of Berwick and killed thousands of its people. He then went on to defeat the Scottish army at Dunbar, and had forced King John Balliol to surrender his crown. Then he had stripped King Ballioil of his royal arms in a humiliating public ceremony that earned the deposed king the mocking nickname ‘Toom Tabard’, the empty coat.

After that, King Edward I started to organise Scotland. He replaced Scottish sheriffs with English ones. English garrisons occupied Scottish castles, and English clerks began the work of assessment and taxation. All Scottish landowners were required to sign a document acknowledging King Edward I as their rightful king, and most of them signed it. Then King Edward stole the Stone of Destiny, the ancient stone on which Scottish kings had been crowned for centuries, from the village of Scone, and took it back to Westminster Abbey. He then had a chair built to hold it, so he could sit on top of it

It was, on paper, a complete conquest, and King Edward had every reason to believe the Scottish matter was closed. He went home, appointed officials to run Scotland and England, and then turned his attention to his war with France.

But a conquest is only complete when the conquered agree and cooperate. The Scottish people didn’t agree and they were not about to cooperate, even though the Scottish lords and nobles had given in, and now had estates on both sides of the border, along with family connections in England, and they had a great deal to lose. But the Scottish people had no estates to lose. All they had was the Scottish land under their feet and an English tax to pay.

So when the uprising came, it did not come from the council chambers or the Scottish lords and nobles. It came out of the farms and the small settlements, down from the mountains, and out of the forests, and the man who lead it came from the same place, which is probably why so little is known about him.

Almost everything we know about William Wallace comes to us either through chroniclers who hated him or through poets who loved him, and neither group was very concerned with accuracy.

William Wallace was probably born around 1270, somewhere in the west of Scotland. His family were minor gentry, one of the lower rungs of the knightly classes, which meant he had been trained to fight and to ride but he had no wealth, no title, and no political importance. He was not a lord, and was not summoned to councils. When the great men of Scotland gathered to argue about the succession, nobody sent for William Wallace.

By all accounts he was physically a very big man, but this may have been an exaggeration of the chroniclers and poets. What is not in doubt is that he was a soldier of extraordinary ability, and even though he had never been in command of anyone until the uprising, when he was handed an army of untrained farmers and townsmen, he knew exactly how to lead them.

He was also, from the very beginning, uninterested in compromise of any kind.

This was the thing that made him different, and dangerous. Scotland’s nobles were negotiators. They had spent generations balancing their loyalties, taking oaths and finding reasons to break them, playing England and Scotland against one another to their own advantage. William Wallace did not negotiate. His goal was simple, the English out of Scotland – permanently, and at no point in his life did he ever indicate that he would settle for anything less.

And he was not alone. In the north, at almost the same moment, another uprising had begun, lead by Andrew Moray.

Andrew Moray was a young nobleman from Moray in the far north-east, the son of a Scottish knight who had been captured at Dunbar and was rotting in an English prison. Andrew had been captured too, but he had escaped. He went home, raised his father’s tenants in rebellion, and began systematically taking English-held castles across the north, one after another, in a campaign of remarkable skill.

By late summer of 1297 the two uprisings had joined together. Moray from the north. Wallace from the south. Together they had something that had not existed a year earlier, a Scottish army.

The English response was slow and contemptuous, which is the response that experienced armies usually give to peasant uprisings, and it is usually correct. Peasant uprisings are typically crushed when the professionals arrive, and the mob discovers that courage is not the same as training, and it always ends badly.

That is what everyone expected to happen at the Scottish town of Stirling.

In the east of Scotland, the sea cuts deep into the country, the Firth of Forth, a great tidal barrier splitting the lowlands of the south from the north. To get an army across it, you had to go inland, right to the head of the estuary, where the river narrowed enough to be bridged. That crossing was at the town of Stirling, watched over by its castle on its volcanic crag. Whoever held Stirling controlled the road north. There was no other way through to the north.

In September 1297, an English army came up the road to take Stirling.

It was commanded by John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, an experienced soldier who had beaten the Scots comprehensively at Dunbar the year before and had no reason to expect a different outcome this time. With him was Hugh de Cressingham, the Treasurer of the English administration in Scotland, a heavy, unpopular man whose job was collecting the money and who was anxious that this campaign should not cost more of it than necessary.

Wallace and Moray were watching and waiting for the English on the far bank, on the Abbey Craig hill.

The bridge across the river at Stirling was made of wood, and it was narrow. Two horsemen could cross it side by side, but no more. Beyond it, on the northern bank, the ground was a loop of soft flat marshy ground enclosed by a bend in the river. It was a place where an army coming over the bridge would arrive slowly, in small numbers, with water on three sides and nowhere to go.

At least one man in the English camp could see this perfectly clearly. A Scottish knight in English service, Sir Richard Lundie. He told John de Warenne plainly what would happen. It would take eleven hours, he said, to move the whole army across that bridge. What did the Earl imagine the Scots would be doing during those eleven hours? He knew of a ford further upstream where sixty horsemen could cross abreast. Give him a force, and he would go around and come at the Scottish position from the flank.

It was excellent advice, but Hugh de Cressingham refused it. Every delay cost money, and the Treasurer had had enough of the expense. The army would cross the bridge at Stirling.

So they began to cross, two by two, and William Wallace stood on the slope above and watched them come.

Wallace was not in a hurry. This is the thing that is genuinely remarkable about Stirling Bridge, and the thing that tells you Wallace was not simply a brave man with a grievance, he was clever and calculating. He let the English army come. He let the vanguard cross and form up on the meadow below him. He let more follow. He waited while the column crawled over the narrow timbers and spread out on ground it could not get off, and he kept waiting until precisely the moment when there were enough Englishmen across the bridge to be worth destroying and not yet enough to fight back.

At the right moment he sent his spearmen down the hill to take the bridgehead.

What happened next was not a battle. It was an annihilation. The Scots drove straight for the northern end of the bridge and seized it, and the moment they held it the trap closed. The English on the north bank were cut off from their own army. They could not retreat, because the way back was in Scottish hands. They could not be reinforced, because nothing could get across. They could not manoeuvre, because the river was behind them and the ground was soft and marshy under the horses.

Hugh de Cressingham was among them. He was killed in the press on the meadow, and the Scots, who hated him more than they hated any other Englishman in Scotland, did something to his body afterwards that is impossible to justify. They flayed the skin from his corpse and legend says that William Wallace took a strip and made it into a belt for his sword.

That detail is worth pausing on, because it tells you what kind of war this had become. It was a war without limits, in which ordinary decencies had stopped applying on either side, and it would get worse before it got better.

John de Warenne, watching from the south bank, could do nothing. When the slaughter was over he ordered the bridge destroyed and rode for the border, and he did not stop until he reached the town of Berwick. Behind him, the English garrisons across Scotland began to fall one by one. By the end of the year the English held almost nothing north of the river Tweed.

After the battle of Stirling, Andrew Moray was carried from the field badly wounded, and he died some weeks later, and Scotland lost the other half of its command at the very moment of its greatest victory, which left William Wallace entirely in charge.

He was knighted, probably by one of the Scottish earls, and appointed Guardian of Scotland. It is worth stopping to appreciate how extraordinary this was. A man of no rank, no lands and no name had been made ruler of a kingdom, entirely on the strength of having won a battle nobody thought he could win. There is no other example quite like it in medieval British history.

William Wallace governed in the name of King John Balliol, the deposed king, who was at that point a prisoner in England and had no prospect of ever returning. Wallace never claimed the crown for himself, never showed the slightest interest in it, and never wavered on this point. He was fighting for his country and not to enrich himself.

He then did the thing that guaranteed King Edward I would come for him personally.

In the winter of 1297, Wallace led the Scottish army south across the border into Northumberland and Cumberland, and burned everything he found. Mills, barns, villages, churches. A chronicler writing at the time recorded that between Newcastle and Carlisle the church services simply stopped, because the priests had gone and so had almost everybody else. It was a deliberate, systematic devastation of the northern English counties, retaliation for what had been done to Berwick and to Scotland, and it was carried out with a thoroughness that emptied whole districts. Refugees fled south. Fields went unsown, and the north of England was still recovering from it years afterwards.

Wallace was not a gentle man and this was not a gentle war, and it does no service to him or to the reader to pretend otherwise. He did to England something close to what England had done to Scotland, and he did it because he believed it was the only language King Edward I understood.

He may have been right, as it certainly got King Edward’s attention.

The King came north in the summer of 1298 with an army unlike anything Scotland had ever faced before. It had one purpose, to utterly destroy the Scottish army.

King Edward had learned something during his wars in Wales. He had seen what massed archery could do, and he had spent years recruiting and training longbowmen, and he brought them with him now in numbers no Scottish commander had ever faced. He also brought the full heavy cavalry of England, thousands of armoured knights. He had assembled the most expensive and formidable striking force in Europe.

Wallace tried to avoid him. He knew perfectly well that his army could not beat King Edward’s in open battle, and his strategy was the correct one for a weaker force facing a stronger, which was to withdraw, burn the country behind him, and let hunger do the work.

It nearly succeeded. King Edward’s army, marching through a deliberately stripped landscape, came close to starving. The supply ships did not arrive, and there was nothing left in the fields to take, because the Scots had already taken it. And when the King gave his Welsh infantry wine instead of the food he did not have, they drank it and then fought a pitched brawl with his English troops in which men were killed. The Welsh threatened to change sides altogether. King Edward, who was not easily rattled, said he would be glad if they did, since he could then beat the whole lot of them at once.

But he was beaten, and he knew it, so he gave the order to fall back towards Edinburgh.

Then two Scottish earls rode into his camp, betraying Wallace and telling King Edward where he was, twenty miles away, near Falkirk, and everything changed.

Now Wallace had to fight. Not because he wanted to, but because he no longer had a choice. His army was infantry. Edward’s was cavalry. Men on foot cannot outrun men on horses, and the moment the English knew where the Scots were camped, withdrawing was no longer an option, as they would simply be ridden down and crushed in the open.

So William Wallace chose his ground instead. He drew up his men on rising ground with a wood behind them and boggy ground in front, and he arranged his spearmen in the formation Scotland had made its own, the schiltron.

A schiltron was a great ring of men, hundreds strong, packed shoulder to shoulder and bristling outwards with twelve-foot spears in every direction. Against cavalry it was very nearly perfect. A horse will not run onto a wall of spear points, whatever its rider wants, and a schiltron that held its nerve simply could not be broken by a mounted charge. It was a hedgehog made of men.

It had one weakness, and Edward found it inside an hour.

The English knights charged first, and the schiltrons stopped them exactly as they were designed to. The cavalry came on in successive waves, hit the spear points, and were flung back with heavy losses, and for a while it looked as though Wallace’s formations might hold all day.

Then Edward pulled his cavalry back and brought up the archers.

A schiltron cannot move quickly and cannot spread out. It is, from the point of view of an archer, an enormous stationary target packed so tightly that every arrow that falls into it hits somebody. Edward’s longbowmen were placed in the gaps between his horsemen and told to shoot into particular points in the Scottish schiltrons. They did so, and for as long as it took.

Wallace and his army had nothing to fight back with. The Scots had few archers of their own and almost no cavalry, so there was no way to drive the bowmen off and no way to close the distance. The schiltrons could only stand and endure it. And they did stand, for a long time, while the arrows came down and the rings of men grew thinner and thinner, until in places there were more dead and wounded men than living ones. Gaps began to open in the wall of spears.

Then the English knights charged through the gaps, and it was all over.

The Scottish army broke and ran for the woods, but thousands were killed in the pursuit. William Wallace escaped, but everything he had built at Stirling Bridge was destroyed in an afternoon, and the reputation that had carried him to the Guardianship went with it. Within months he had resigned, or been removed, and the Scottish nobles took the leadership back into their own hands.

What Wallace did for the next seven years is largely unknown. It is thought he went abroad for some of it. There is good evidence that he travelled to France and possibly to Rome, trying to win diplomatic support for Scotland from the French king and the Pope, which suggests a man with a considerably better grasp of the wider world than the wild highland outlaw of later legend suggests.

And he came back, and he fought on. Not as a commander of armies now, but in the older, harder way, in small bands ambushing and raiding and vanishing, while the war ground on year after year. The Scots called it a war in which every winter undid every summer’s work. King Edward would come north in the campaigning season, take castles, receive submissions, and go home. The moment he left, it would all come apart again.

Most of the great men of Scotland made their peace with King Edward during those years, at one time or another. Robert Bruce did. John Comyn did. They submitted, were pardoned, and rebelled again when it suited them, which was the normal conduct of medieval politics and carried no particular shame.

But William Wallace never did. In seven years of defeat and exile and hiding, in a cause that any sensible man could see was lost, he never once submitted. It is the single most important fact about him.

Eventually he was betrayed, near Glasgow, in August 1305, by a Scottish knight in English service. He was captured and taken south in chains.

He was tried in Westminster Hall, in London, and it was not a trial in any sense we would recognise.

William Wallace was charged with treason, and Wallace made the only defence available to him. He could not be a traitor to King Edward, he said, because he had never sworn allegiance to him. He had never signed the roll, he had never taken the oath.

The court did not engage with the argument, because the verdict had been decided before Wallace arrived. He was crowned with a wreath of oak leaves in mockery, on the grounds that he had called himself king of outlaws, and condemned.

William Wallace was then dragged through the streets of London to Smithfield and put to death that same day, on the twenty-third of August 1305. It was a terrible death, a punishment reserved for traitors. It was designed to be as prolonged and as public and as humiliating as human ingenuity could arrange, and it was carried out in front of a crowd. He was hanged, drawn and quartered.

Afterwards his body was cut into four parts and sent to Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Perth, to be displayed in each. His head was set on a spike on London Bridge.

The message was crystal clear. King Edward wanted Scotland to see what happened to men who would not submit to his rule, but it did not work. What King Edward had actually done was take a defeated guerrilla leader, a man the Scottish nobility had quietly discarded, and handed him back to Scotland as a martyr. The pieces of him nailed up in four Scottish towns did not serve as a warning, all they did was galvanise an already angry people.

William Wallace had lost every battle but one, and he had held power for less than a year, and he died beaten, betrayed, and alone, and for a cause he refused to abandon, but he had shown the Scottish people something that its lords and nobles, with all their lands and their titles had never managed to show them. He had shown them the English army could be beaten. He had shown them that a country did not have to consent to its own conquest simply because the people at the top had already agreed to it, and the revolution William Wallace started did not end with his execution at Smithfield, it continued under the leadership of Robert the Bruce.

The great grey horse surged through the trees, its rider low in the saddle, cloak streaming behind him. Ahead, the stag was tiring, its breath coming in ragged gasps, its hooves slipping on the wet ground. Most kings would have reined back and left the kill to the hounds, or at the very least to the hunting spear. Not this one. King Edward I spurred forward, drew alongside the exhausted animal, and cut it down from the saddle with his own sword.

That was how King Edward I did everything.

Edward I of England was thirty-three years old when his father, the weak and hapless Henry III, died in November 1272. By that age he had already lived through a civil war, fought against the brilliant rebel Simon de Montfort at the battles of Lewes and Evesham, and learned, through bitter defeat and hard-won victory, what it took to hold a kingdom together. He had carried his father’s government on his own shoulders for years, doing the work Henry could not or would not do, and waiting for the crown with a patience that surprised everyone.

When the news of Henry’s death reached him, Edward was not even in England. He was in Sicily, on his long way home from crusading in the Holy Land, where he had fought with courage and nearly died from a wound that some said was from a poisoned blade. Without waiting for him, the great magnates of England, along with the whole country, proclaimed him king at once. It tells you something about the man, and about the country’s desperate need for him.

He was enormously tall, a head and shoulders above most men, and his long legs gripped the saddle so tightly that he earned the nickname ‘Longshanks’. His arms were sinewy and powerful, a swordsman’s arms, and his hair, which had been yellow as a boy and jet black as a young man, would eventually turn snow-white. He had his father’s drooping left eyelid, and he stammered slightly, though when he chose to speak he could be devastating. The motto he chose for himself was ‘To each his own’, and he meant it. Justice, as Edward understood it, was not a gentle thing. It was something to be measured, weighed, and enforced, and it applied to everyone, including the greatest lords in the land.

His first great act as king was to find out what was wrong with England, and to fix it.

Within weeks of his return in 1274, Edward sent commissioners riding out across the land armed with a list of forty questions. They were to visit every county, every town, every corner of the realm, and to ask: what are the King’s rights here, and who has stolen them? Which officials are corrupt? Which sheriffs have taken bribes, or turned a blind eye to crime ‘for prayer, price, or favour’? The questions were blunt, and the answers, when they came back, were damning.

What followed was an extraordinary period of lawmaking. Over the next eighteen years, year after year, statute after statute, Edward reshaped the government of England. He was not, for the most part, inventing anything new. He was sorting out what previous reigns had left in chaos. He told his barons, through the writs of Quo Warranto, to prove their right to hold their own courts and dispense their own justice, or lose the privilege. He told the Church, through the Statute of Mortmain, that it could no longer quietly swallow up English land through gifts and bequests without the King’s permission. He told the whole country, through law after law, that there was a rule above any lord’s whim, and that he intended to enforce it.

This was not tyranny. Edward was not seizing power for himself. He was building a broader foundation for the crown, one that rested not on the loyalty of a handful of great barons but on the interests of the whole people. The merchants, the lesser landowners, the ordinary folk who had spent generations being ground between a grasping Church above and predatory lords below, found in Edward a king who noticed they existed.

His officials and inspectors were everywhere. He travelled the country ceaselessly himself, arriving in towns unannounced, asking questions, writing things down in careful, legalistic detail. If you were a corrupt sheriff in 1280, the sound you dreaded most was hoofbeats.

Behind Edward, the king lawmaker and soldier, there was a marriage.

Eleanor of Castile had come to England from Spain as a girl of around thirteen to marry the young prince Edward, and for thirty-six years she was at his side. She travelled with him to the Holy Land on crusade. She bore him at least fourteen children, and endured the grief of burying most of them in infancy. She was, by every account, the centre of his world.

In the autumn of 1290, while the court was travelling through the Midlands, Eleanor fell ill, and Edward stayed with her. She died around the age of 48 in the village of Harby, near Lincoln, on the twenty-eighth of November, and King Edward was devestated

What followed tells you more about King Edward than any statute or any battle.

The Queen’s body was carried in a slow funeral procession from Lincoln to Westminster, a journey of nearly two hundred miles through the grey of an English winter. At every place where the procession stopped for the night, Edward ordered a magnificent stone cross to be raised in her memory. Twelve crosses in all, marking the twelve resting places of her last journey south. At Lincoln, Grantham, Stamford, Geddington. At Northampton, Stony Stratford, Dunstable, St Albans. At Waltham. And finally, at the village of Charing, just outside the walls of London, where the last cross stood at what we now call Charing Cross.

Most of those crosses are gone now. Three survive, weathered and worn, at Geddington, Hardingstone, and Waltham. But the grief that raised them has never quite faded from the English landscape.

In the same year that Eleanor died, King Edward committed what may be the darkest act of his reign.

For generations, the Jewish community in England had occupied an impossible position. They were forbidden from owning land. They were forbidden from entering most trades. What they were permitted to do, and what made them useful to kings and lords who needed ready money, was lend. And lend they did, filling a role that the Church forbade Christians from performing, and being despised for it.

As land began to change hands more freely in England, some of it had passed to Jewish moneylenders through mortgages and debts. It was not a great deal of land, but it was enough to be noticed, and enough to make people angry. Small landowners struggling under mortgages, nobles who had borrowed recklessly and did not wish to repay, and everyone found it easier to blame Jewish money lenders than themselves.

King Edward saw his opportunity. Italian bankers had arrived in England who could serve the same financial purpose, and the King had awkward debts of his own that might quietly disappear. In 1290, he ordered every Jewish man, woman, and child expelled from England. They were stripped of almost everything they owned and driven from the country, taking with them only what they could carry.

The expelled families made their way to France, to Spain, to North Africa, beginning again with nothing. It was a pattern that had repeated itself across Europe and would go on repeating for centuries to come. England’s doors would not reopen to Jews again for over three hundred and fifty years, until Oliver Cromwell quietly allowed their return in the 1650s.

Churchill called it ‘the simple and well-trodden path of anti-Semitism’. Unfortunately, even today, it is all too familiar.

In any event, King Edward had come to the throne with unfinished business in the west.

Wales had never been truly conquered. Not by the Romans in any lasting way, not by the Saxons, and not by the Normans. For centuries the Welsh princes had held their mountain country against all comers, raiding when they were strong, retreating into the hills when they were pressed, and emerging again as soon as the pressure eased. The current prince, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, grandson of the great Llywelyn, had caused serious trouble during King Henry III’s reign, and King Edward I was not a man who left problems unsolved.

King Edward went about it with cold, methodical patience. Over several years of persistent campaigning, using Welsh soldiers in his own pay alongside regular troops and one of the last musters of the old feudal levy, he wore the Welsh resistance down. His most devastating weapon was time. While previous kings had fought the Welsh in summer and gone home when the weather turned, Edward kept his armies in the field through the brutal mountain winters, cutting roads through frozen forests, hauling supplies along muddy tracks, and denying the Welsh the breathing space they had always depended on. It was miserable work for the soldiers who had to do it, sleeping in the open in December with the rain driving sideways off the mountains. But it was effective, and KIng Edward was not a man who counted the cost in other people’s comfort.

When the fighting was done, King Edward built castles. Not the simple motte-and-bailey fortifications of the early Normans, but enormous stone fortresses with towered walls and sea-supplied garrisons, designed to hold down a conquered people permanently. Caernarfon, with its banded masonry and eagle-topped towers. Conwy, perched above its river. Harlech, on its rocky outcrop. Beaumaris, the last and most perfectly symmetrical castle of them all. They ringed the Welsh heartland like a chain of iron, and several of them still stand, more than seven hundred years later, and they are amongst the most formidable military buildings in Europe.

At Caernarfon, in 1284, the King’s son Edward was born, and he was proclaimed the first English Prince of Wales, a title that has been given to the heir to the English throne ever since.

But something else came out of the Welsh wars, something that would change the nature of warfare itself. In South Wales, the English encountered the longbow.

The Welsh had been using it for generations. It was drawn not to the chest, as other archers drew their shorter bows, but all the way back to the ear, unleashing an arrow with tremendous force over a great distance. One of the English Marcher lords left a record of what the weapon could do. A Welsh arrow, he wrote, had pierced a knight’s mailed shirt, then his mailed breeches, then his thigh, then the wooden frame of his saddle, and finally buried itself deep in the flank of his horse. A single arrow, through five layers of protection.

Nothing like it had been seen in warfare since the fall of Rome. For the first time, ordinary foot soldiers possessed a weapon that could punch through the armour of mounted knights. King Edward recognised what he was looking at – a powerful new weapon. He recruited Welsh longbowmen into his own armies and began training English archers in the same technique. The longbow would not reach its full devastating glory until the next century, at the great battles of Crécy and Poitiers. But it was King Edward who understood its power first, and it was King Edward who made it an English weapon.

Then came Scotland, and the tragedy that would define the rest of his reign.

For as long as anyone could remember, England and Scotland had lived in peace. The border was quiet. The two kingdoms traded freely, and their royal families were linked by marriage and alliance. It was the longest unbroken peace the island had known, but in in March 1286, it ended with a stumble in the dark.

Alexander III, King of Scotland, had dined that evening at Edinburgh Castle. Against the advice of his companions, who warned him that the night was wild, he insisted on riding home to his young wife at Kinghorn, across the Firth of Forth. The storm was fierce, and somewhere along the cliff path on the Fife coast, in the wind and the blackness, his horse missed its footing. The King’s body was found on the beach the next morning, his neck broken.

King Alexander left behind a single heir: his granddaughter Margaret, a little girl of three, known as the Maid of Norway because her mother had married the Norwegian king.

A bright and hopeful idea took shape. Margaret would inherit the Scottish throne, and she would marry King Edward’s son, the young Prince of Wales. The two kingdoms would be joined in peace, by marriage rather than by war, and the ancient quarrel between England and Scotland would be laid to rest. Almost everyone agreed it was a fine plan. The Scottish lords accepted it, King Edward accepted it, and the Pope approved of it.

Margaret, the Maid of Norway set sail in 1290. She was seven years old, but she never reached Scotland. Somewhere on that crossing, in rough autumn seas, the little girl died, and the dream of a peaceful union between Scotland and England died with her.

Scotland was left with no clear heir, and the question of who should be king threatened to tear the country apart. From a crowd of claimants, two men stood out: John Balliol and Robert Bruce. Balliol had the stronger legal claim through primogeniture – firstborn child inheritance. And Rober Bruce argued that he was closer in blood to the old royal line. Neither man would yield, and behind each stood a powerful faction of Scottish lords ready to fight for their candidate.

King Edward stepped forward. His reputation as a lawmaker was unmatched in Europe. He had already arbitrated a succession dispute between Aragon and Anjou, and the Scots, seeing no better option than civil war, agreed to accept his judgement. King Edward consented, but only after extracting a formal acknowledgement that the English crown held overlordship of Scotland. The Scots, in their desperation, agreed.

In 1292, King Edward pronounced in favour of John Balliol. It was the right decision. Later scholars have not seriously disputed it, but unfortunately King Edward had not settled the issue of the Scottish crown, he had inadvertently made matters worse.

Now King John Balliol owed his crown to King Edward, but Edward treated him not as a fellow king but as a servant, summoning him to English courts, overriding Scottish law, and making plain at every turn that Scotland’s independence was finished. The Scottish lords were furious, and appointed a council of twelve to govern alongside King John Balliol and protect their country’s rights.

And then Scotland made the move that brought King Edwards fury upon them. Faced with an impossible position, the Scots allied themselves with France, England’s great rival, whose king Philip the Fair was already at war with King Edward over the English territories in Gascony.

King Edward was enraged, and he summoned King Balliol to answer for it, but the Scottish lords refused to let their king go, and from that moment, the talking was over.

King Edward struck Berwick first.

Berwick-upon-Tweed was, in 1296, one of the great trading towns of northern Europe. It was rich, busy, and prosperous, and it was entirely unprepared for what was fell upon it. A century of peace had left it without proper defences. When King Edward’s army appeared before its walls, the townspeople threw up wooden palisades and grabbed whatever weapons they could find, but it was not enough.

The English swept through the makeshift defences within hours, and what followed was a slaughter that shocked even that brutal medieval age. Thousands of men, women, and children were killed, and the most determined resistance came from only thirty Flemish merchants who had barricaded themselves inside their trading depot, a building called the Red Hall. The merchants fought until the building was burned down around them.

Berwick, which that morning had been one of the busiest ports in Britain, was destroyed. It never recovered, and the prosperous medieval town became the quiet border settlement that exists today.

And then, with the blood barely dry, King Edward changed his manner entirely. To every Scottish town and lord that now came forward to submit, he offered forgiveness, easy terms, and gentle treatment. Perth surrendered. Stirling surrendered. Edinburgh surrendered. King John Balliol gave up his throne and English officials moved in. English law replaced Scottish custom. The conquest of Sccotland, King Edward believed, was complete.

He was wrong.

Scotland’s nobles had failed, and its king had been humiliated, but the people of Scotland had not surrendered. They had watched the slaughter at Berwick. They had watched their lords give in. And somewhere underneath, out of sight, in the forests and glens of the south-west, where the English writ did not run and the wild country offered shelter, something else was stirring. A figure was rising, an outlaw knight with a burning hatred of English rule and a gift for war that nobody had yet suspected.

His name was William Wallace.

When the news came that King Richard the Lionheart was dead, his brother John was in Brittany, deep in enemy country, and he knew at once that his life was in danger.

He was at the court of his nephew Arthur, a boy of twelve, and Arthur’s people had no love for John. The men around him, the Breton lords who had backed Arthur’s claim to the English throne for years, now had every reason to seize John and the throne, and John did not wait to find out whether they would. He left, rode hard and fast, and did not stop until he was out of Brittany and back amongst friends.

It was a telling start.

King Richard, the Lionheart, had named his brother John as his successor. But there was another candidate, and the question of who had the better claim would tear the family, and the empire, apart. Geoffrey, John’s elder brother, was dead, but he had left behind a son, young Arthur, Prince of Brittany. By one reading of the law, Arthur’s claim was stronger than John’s. He was the son of an elder brother. If primogeniture, the principle that inheritance passes through the eldest line, was the rule, then Arthur should be king.

But primogeniture was not yet settled into law. The old Archbishop of Canterbury and William the Marshal, the greatest knight in England, talked over the issue and decided in favour of John. So did Queen Eleanor, now in her late seventies, who stood by her surviving son against a grandson whose mother she had never liked. England accepted King John without argument, but in France, where it mattered just as much, the opposite view prevailed. Brittany rallied behind Arthur. The King of France, Philip Augustus, who had been circling the Plantagenet empire for years, watching for the moment to strike, saw his chance and took it.

No one would have envied the man who now sat on the English throne. King John had inherited a vast empire, but he had inherited it without the thing that had held it together – his brother, King Richard the Lionheart’s reputation.

He was not King Richard. Everyone knew it, and everyone felt it, and it influenced everything that followed.

What kind of man was King John? The honest answer is that nobody, either then or today, has been able to agree. He could be patient and cunning, coldly intelligent, and sometimes even generous. He had a restless, inquiring mind and loved his books, carrying a small library with him as he travelled, which was unusual for a king of that age. King John was a capable administrator and, when cornered, a capable soldier. But he was also ruthless, suspicious, and possessed a violent temper that could flash into cruelty without warning. The monks who wrote the chronicles of his reign hated him, and they had reason to. The picture they painted was of a man consumed by greed, treachery, and malice. It was not the whole truth, but it was not a lie either.

John showed his nature early. At Rouen, when they handed him the symbolic lance of the Dukes of Normandy, the new duke turned to whisper some joke to the men standing behind him and dropped it on the floor. The people watching thought it was an omen. They were not wrong.

The war with King Philip Augustus and with Arthur dragged on through the fitful pattern of the age, raids and truces, sieges and negotiations, but without the Lionheart to frighten the French it was a losing fight. In 1202, King Philip, as King John’s overlord for his French territories, summoned King John to appear before his court in Paris to answer charges brought against him by the barons of Poitou. King John refused. King Philip said he was summoned as Count of Poitou, but John said the King of England could not submit to such a trial. King Philip replied that the King of France could not lose his rights over a vassal simply because that vassal happened to have become a king as well. When King John still refused to attend, King Philip declared him stripped of all his French lands and invaded Normandy.

At the same time, Arthur made a mistake. He was fifteen now, knighted by King Philip, and given the Plantagenet lands that King Philip had taken from King John. Arthur was also betrothed to King Philip’s daughter. Hearing that his grandmother, old Queen Eleanor, was at the castle of Mirabeau in Poitou with only a small guard, Arthur marched south, surrounded the castle, and stormed the outer walls. Soon, he was within hours of capturing the most important woman in the family.

However, Queen Eleanor just managed to get word to King John. And King John, for once, moved like his brother. With a full army behind him, he covered eighty miles in forty-eight hours, fell on Arthur and his men at daybreak, and took them all. Arthur, two hundred knights, the rebel lords, the whole lot.

Arthur was taken to the castle of Falaise, and then to Rouen, and everyone knew he was in mortal danger. The barons of Brittany begged King John to release the boy. King John refused. He knew, and it was true, that he would never be safe as long as Arthur lived. King Philip would always use the boy against him. Arthur, caught in open war, besieging his own grandmother, was a prisoner who could never be set free without becoming a weapon again.

No one knows exactly what happened at Rouen. The commander of the castle, a man named Hubert de Burgh, gave out that King John had sent men to castrate the boy, and that Arthur had died of the shock. Later, Hubert changed his story and said Arthur was still alive. King John said he was glad his orders had been disobeyed. But Arthur was never seen again. It was believed at the time that King John had ordered his murder, and it has been believed ever since. How Arthur died, whether he was blinded, mutilated, or simply killed, remains unknown to this day.

This all happened at a time when kings and princes were put to death for reasons of policy, and no one was greatly surprised. But the murder of a nephew, a boy of fifteen, by a king who was already distrusted, confirmed the worst that everyone believed about King John. And it did not even achieve what King John had hoped. Arthur was gone, but King Philip Augustus was still there, and King Philip did not need a puppet. He needed a cause, and King John had given him one.

Over time, Normandy crumbled. Province by province, and fortress by fortress, the great Plantagenet empire fell apart. King John poured in money and supplies, but his nerve failed him, and in the end he abandoned Normandy altogether, taking a ship for England and leaving the French to pick up the pieces. In March 1204, the great Château Gaillard that King Richard himself had built, the fortress he had loved and called his own, fell to King Philip’s army, and the road to Rouen lay open. Three months later the capital surrendered, and Normandy, after a hundred and thirty-eight years under the English crown, became French.

It was a humiliation, and King John bore the blame.

But the loss of Normandy, in the long run, did England a favour. It forced the English nobility to look inward. The great lords who had held land on both sides of the Channel now had to choose, and most of them chose England. The ruling class, which for a century and a half had been half Norman and half English, with their eyes always turned towards France, now became, for the first time, simply English. The dangerous, expensive, distracting business of holding a foreign empire was over. England would have to learn to be a country on its own.

King John was not a man to sit quietly after defeat. He schemed for years to build a Continental alliance against Philip, sending money and ambassadors across Europe, courting the Emperor and the counts of Flanders and Toulouse. But before he could launch his grand counter-attack, he picked a fight much closer to home that would prove far more costly.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, died in 1205, and the question of who would replace him brought King John into conflict with the most powerful Pope of the Middle Ages – Innocent III. Both the king and the monks of Canterbury put forward their own candidates, but Pope Innocent rejected them both and, to John’s fury, installed his own man, an English cardinal named Stephen Langton, a scholar of the highest reputation who had spent his career to date in Paris and Rome.

King John was outraged. He had agreed in advance to accept the Pope’s decision, expecting his own candidate to win, but he had been outmanoeuvred. He refused to accept Langton and began a campaign of harassment against the English Church, seizing property and driving monks from their monasteries.

Pope Innocent struck back with the heaviest weapon the medieval Church possessed. In March 1208 he placed all of England under an interdict.

The effect was devastating, not to King John, who cared nothing for it, but to ordinary people. The church bells fell silent. The doors of every church in the country were barred shut. No one could be married in church, or buried in consecrated ground, or receive the last rites of the dying. For more than six years, across the whole of England, the spiritual life of the nation was suspended. Think of what that meant to people who believed completely, that their immortal souls depended upon the grace of the Church. A child could still be baptised, and the dying could still confess, but everything else, every wedding, every funeral, every Sunday that gave shape and comfort to ordinary people, was gone. People went to their graves in fear of damnation, and they blamed their king.

When King John only hardened, Pope Innocent went further. In 1209 he excommunicated the king himself, releasing all John’s subjects from their oaths of loyalty and inviting his enemies to overthrow him as a holy act. But King John did not flinch. He seized the empty bishoprics and abbeys and pocketed the revenue, and his treasury overflowed with the spoils of the Church, and for a time, it looked like he might get away with it.

He didn’t. By 1213, King Philip Augustus was assembling an invasion fleet, with the Pope’s blessing and the Church’s full backing, and King John was cornered. He could not fight France and the Pope at the same time, so he did something extraordinary – he completely submitted. And then went further than anyone expected. He offered to make England a fief of the Papacy, handing his entire kingdom to the Pope and receiving it back as a vassal. It was an act of abject surrender, or, looked at another way, a stroke of cold genius. Innocent, who could never resist an addition to his worldly power, accepted with delight. Overnight, King John went from excommunicate to the Pope’s favourite. King Philip, who had been preparing to invade England as a holy crusade, found that the ground had been pulled from under his feet. The Pope was now King John’s protector.

It was clever, even brilliant, but it solved nothing at home.

The English barons had grievances that went far deeper than the Church quarrel. King John had taxed them relentlessly to pay for his wars in France. He had abused his feudal powers, charging outrageous fees for inheritances, wardships, and marriages. He had used the efficient machinery of government that his father King Henry II had built, the courts, the sheriffs, the Exchequer, not to serve justice but to squeeze money and crush opposition. Everything King Henry had created to bring order, King John had turned into an instrument of oppression. The travelling judges, the efficient Exchequer, the network of sheriffs, all of the machinery that had once been England’s strength, now served a king who used it not for justice, but for control. The barons had endured it while there was hope of recovering Normandy. When that hope died, their patience died with it.

In 1214, King John’s grand plan finally came together. The idea was a pincer movement. He himself would sail to Poitou and attack King Philip from the south, stirring up rebellion among the French barons. Meanwhile, a great allied army led by his nephew Otto IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, along with the Earl of Salisbury would march on King Philip from the north, catching the French king between two forces.

The southern campaign failed first. King John landed in Poitou but could not hold his ground, and when a French army advanced against him he withdrew without a fight. That left the northern allies to face King Philip alone.

They met at Bouvines, in northern France, on a hot Sunday in late July. It did not last long. King Philip crushed them. Emperor Otto fled the field, and the Earl of Salisbury was taken prisoner. And with that single afternoon’s fighting, every hope King John had placed in years of diplomacy and borrowed money was gone. He returned to England a beaten man.

The barons saw their moment. They came together, armed and angry, and demanded terms. Left to themselves they might have demanded nothing more than the protection of their own privileges and the settling of their own scores, but they had a powerful supporter – Stephen Langton. Langton was the archbishop King John had fought so hard to keep out of Canterbury, and now he stood with the barons, and he gave them something larger than their own grievances to fight for. Archbishop Langton persuaded the barons to base their demands not on personal resentment, but on the old laws and customs of the realm, the principle that there was a law that stood above the king, and that even the king must obey it.

It was not a new idea. It reached back through King Henry’s Common Law, through King Alfred’s code, to the oldest understanding the English had of what a king was for. But no one had ever written it down, made it a contract, and forced a king to agree to it, this was the baron’s chance to do so.

On a Monday morning in June 1215, on the great flat meadow at Runnymede, between Staines and Windsor, the barons and churchmen gathered and waited. They had set up a small throne and a tent. Their armed retainers stood at a distance, because armed rebellion against the crown was the supreme crime of the feudal world, and no one wanted to make it look worse than it was.

Then a small group of riders appeared from the direction of Windsor. King John, the Papal legate, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, along with several bishops. They dismounted without ceremony, and the process began. Someone, probably Langton, stated the terms and John agreed at once, sealing and confirming his agreement in a single document.

The document is called Magna Carta, and it is not what you might expect.

It is not a ringing declaration of human rights or democratic principles. It is a long, detailed legal contract of sixty-three clauses, most of them dealing with the particular complaints of the feudal barons, matters of taxation, inheritance fees, wardships, and the procedures of the royal courts. The word ‘freeman’ in its pages was a technical feudal term that probably did not include even the richer merchants, let alone the ordinary people of England. It was a deal struck between a king and his nobility, and the nobility took care of themselves first.

And yet what Magna Carta said, beneath the feudal detail, was something that had never been said quite so plainly before. It said that there was a law above the king. That the king was not free to do whatever he pleased. That even a crowned and anointed sovereign was bound by rules he could not simply ignore. The idea was not invented at Runnymede, it was already old, buried deep in the customs and traditions of the English people. But at Runnymede, for the first time, it was written down, sealed by the king himself, and made into a promise that could be held up and pointed to whenever a future king tried to ride roughshod over the rights of his people.

But Magna Carta was just the seed, and what grew from it, over the centuries, was almost everything we now mean by freedom under law: Parliament, trial by jury, the idea that a government answers to its people. But that was a long way off, and the barons who stood on that meadow would not have recognised it. They were not democrats, and they were not thinking about the rights of common men and women. They were thinking about their own land, their own money, and their own power. But the principle they forced King John to accept, that government must mean something more than the will of one man, that custom and law must stand even above the throne, proved impossible to put back in the box once it was out.

King John died the following year, still fighting, still scheming and never reconciled to his nobles. He is buried in Worcester Cathedral, and his tomb effigy, carved in Purbeck marble and said to be a true likeness of the man. It can still be seen there today, and is the oldest royal effigy in England.

The meadow at Runnymede is still there too. It is a quiet place now, flat and green, with the Thames running beside it and the trees standing where they have always stood. There is a memorial there, paid for not by the British but by the American Bar Association, because the lawyers of America understood, perhaps more clearly than anyone, what had begun in that field. When the men who wrote the American Constitution sat down to build the governing laws of the United States, they were building on a foundation that was laid on a June morning more than five hundred years before, by a handful of angry and frightened barons who forced the worst king England ever had to put his seal to a document he had no intention of honouring.

In the year before his death, King John did not honour Magna Carta, but it outlived him and the age that created it. And the idea at its heart, that no one, not even a king, is above the law, is one of the foundations of freedom under law in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

In the summer of 1189, Richard, the eldest surviving son of King Henry II, went to war against his own father.

He was not the first of King Henry’s sons to rebel. His brothers had done it before him, encouraged by the King of France, who understood that the easiest way to destroy the great Angevin empire was to set its heirs against each other. But Richard’s rebellion was the last, and the worst. Allied with King Philip of France, he attacked King Henry’s lands in the Loire, and at Le Mans he routed the old king’s army and sent it fleeing.

King Henry ran. Behind him, covering the retreat, rode one of his most loyal knights, a man named William Marshal. And it was Marshal, stationed in the rearguard with the dust of the fleeing army still hanging in the air, who looked up and saw Prince Richard thundering toward him at the head of the pursuing cavalry.

Richard was not even wearing his mail. He was reckless, furious, and utterly exposed. Marshal, mounted and armed, could have killed him in a heartbeat. But killing a prince who was almost certainly about to become king was not the same as killing an enemy. It was a decision that would follow a man for the rest of his life, one way or the other.

Richard saw the lance. ‘Spare me,’ he cried out.

Marshal turned his lance and drove it into the prince’s horse instead. The animal went down. Richard crashed to the ground in a tangle of dust and reins while Marshal looked down at him.

‘I will not slay you,’ Marshal said. ‘The Devil may slay you.’

Then he rode away.

The insult was worse than death. To be unhorsed and spared, publicly, by a man who could have ended you, was a humiliation that most princes would have remembered with a burning desire for revenge. However, when King Henry died a few weeks later and Richard became king, Marshal and his friends waited with real anxiety to discover what the new ruler would do to them.

What the new King Richard did surprised everyone. He summoned Marshal, spoke calmly and even with admiration about the incident at Le Mans, confirmed him in every office and honour, and sent him to England as his representative. Then he gave Marshal a rich heiress in marriage, making him one of the most powerful barons in the country.

It was quietly noticed, that the new king’s favour fell most warmly upon those who had stood loyally by his father against him, even at the expense of those who had been Richard’s own allies in the rebellion.

This was the kind of man King Richard was. Grand. Generous. Surprising. And almost entirely uninterested in the kingdom he had just inherited.

King Henry II, the restless, brilliant, rough-handed king who had rebuilt English law and quarrelled with Thomas Becket, died at Chinon in Anjou on the sixth of July 1189. He was fifty-six years old, exhausted, and broken. His sons had rebelled against him, one after another, encouraged by the King of France. His wife Eleanor had supported her sons and spent sixteen years in captivity for it. The great Angevin empire King Henry II had spent his life holding together was cracking under the pressure of its own contradictions, exactly as the patient French king had always hoped it would.

At the end, so the story goes, King Henry turned his face to the wall and said, ‘Shame, shame on a vanquished king.’

Richard knelt beside his father’s body no longer than it would have taken to recite the Lord’s Prayer. Then he stood up and turned to the business of being king.

He was crowned at Westminster Abbey on the third of September 1189. He was thirty-one years old, and he would reign for ten years. In that time he would become the most famous warrior in Christendom, fight a crusade that would echo through the centuries, spend a fortune that would bleed England dry, and set foot in his own kingdom only twice, for a few months each time.

Yet somehow, against all reason, the English never stopped loving him.

What did this new king look like?

He was tall and well-proportioned, long-limbed and strong, with reddish-gold hair and a bearing that made people look twice. He was a superb horseman, a devastating fighter in single combat, and he moved with the easy confidence of a man who had never doubted, for one moment of his life, that he was born to lead armies. He loved war the way some men love music, not just the strategy and the grand sweep of it, but the physical business of fighting, the weight of a sword, the shock of impact, the roar and chaos of a cavalry charge. He wrote poetry and sang well. He spoke French and the language of southern France, and Latin too, and he had a sharp, restless intelligence that could turn cruel when he was bored or crossed.

He was, in short, everything a medieval king was supposed to be. His contemporaries called him Cœur de Lion, the Lionheart, and they meant it as the highest compliment they knew. In those days the lion was the most admired creature in heraldry, and more than one king tried to claim a connection with it. When they gave the name to Richard, it stuck, because everyone who saw him in battle knew it was true.

But the people of England barely knew him. He had grown up in France, in his mother Eleanor’s warm, cultured duchy of Aquitaine, surrounded by troubadours (travelling poet musicians), southern sunshine and the soft vowels of the langue d’oc. England was cold, wet, and far away. He had no attachment to it. He did not speak English. What England had, and what King Richard wanted, was money because he was going on a crusade.

Three years before Richard became king, something had happened in the east that sent a shudder through every Christian country in Europe – Jerusalem had fallen.

The Christian kingdom that the First Crusade had established nearly a century earlier had always been fragile, a narrow strip of coastline held together by fortified castles, military orders, and the disunity of the surrounding Muslim powers. That disunity ended when a Kurdish-born general named Saladin rose to become Sultan of Egypt and then took Damascus and Aleppo, encircling the Christian territories from every side.

In 1187, Saladin proclaimed a jihad, a holy war. At the Battle of Hattin – a rocky hilltop in the waterless hills above the Sea of Galilee – his forces destroyed the Christian army. The Crusader knights, weighed down by armour in the terrible heat, gasping for water that did not exist, were surrounded and cut to pieces. The King of Jerusalem was captured, and the Grand Master of the Templars was taken. In October of that year, Saladin entered Jerusalem.

The shock was enormous, and the Pope’s legates raced across Europe demanding that Christian princes stop fighting each other and fight the infidel instead. Pictures were shown of the Holy Sepulchre defiled by the horses of Saracen cavalry. A special tax, the Saladin Tithe, was levied on everyone who did not take the Cross. The three greatest kings of the West, the rulers of England, France, and Germany, pledged themselves to the rescue.

King Richard, newly crowned, threw himself into the crusade with a single-mindedness that was breathtaking. He sold everything he could lay his hands on. Offices, castles, lordships, entire towns, all went to the highest bidder. He sold the right to govern whole counties. He released the King of Scotland from his oath of allegiance in exchange for ten thousand marks. He is supposed to have said, ‘I would sell London itself if I could find a buyer.’

England, which had only just recovered from the long bleeding of King Henry II’s reign, was bled again. The shires that had been patiently rebuilt, the courts that had been carefully restored, the treasury that had been slowly refilled, all of it was raided to pay for a war in a country most English people could not have found on a map, had maps existed for them to look at.

But Richard did not care about any of that. He had a war to fight, and it was the only thing that mattered to him.

King Richard the Lionheart left England in December 1189 and would not return for more than four years.

The Third Crusade was the greatest military expedition of the Middle Ages. King Richard sailed with a fleet of over a hundred ships, carrying a vast force of knights, men-at-arms, and siege engineers. He stopped in Sicily, where he quarrelled spectacularly with the local king and took the city of Messina almost as an afterthought. He conquered Cyprus on his way past, deposing its ruler in a matter of weeks, and arrived at the siege of Acre in June 1191. The war that had been dragging on for two years suddenly caught fire.

Acre was a walled port city on the coast of what is now Israel, and the Christian forces had been besieging it without success since 1189. King Richard’s arrival changed everything. He brought men, money, siege engines, and above all he brought himself, a commander of ferocious energy who drove his troops forward by sheer force of will. Even when he fell ill with a fever so bad that his hair and nails began to fall out, he had himself carried to the front on a litter and went on directing the siege from his stretcher, choosing positions for his crossbowmen and watching the bombardment through the tent flaps.

Acre fell in July 1191. It was the first great Christian victory in the Holy Land for a generation.

What followed was one of the most famous military marches in history. Richard led his army south along the coast toward the port of Jaffa, the gateway to Jerusalem. The column moved slowly through the scorching heat of a Palestinian summer, the men drenched in sweat inside their armour, flies blackening every wound. Saladin shadowed them the entire way, sending his cavalry in wave after wave against the Christian flank, probing for a gap, trying to break the formation apart.

But King Richard’s discipline held. He kept his army in tight formation, the infantry on the landward side absorbing the Saracen arrows and charges, the knights in reserve, forbidden to break ranks until the moment was right. Men fell and the column kept moving. Horses screamed and the column kept moving. The Saracen arrows came so thick at times that the infantrymen looked, according to one chronicler, like porcupines bristling with shafts, and still the column kept moving.

At the Battle of Arsuf, when Saladin committed his full force, King Richard launched his cavalry in a devastating counter-charge that broke the Muslim line and sent them streaming from the field. It was a textbook victory, perfectly timed, and it confirmed what every soldier in the Holy Land already knew. In battle, King Richard was extraordinary.

But battles are not the same as wars.

King Richard advanced to within a day’s march of Jerusalem. Twice he brought his army close enough that the soldiers could feel the prize within reach. But he knew, with the hard clarity of a professional soldier, that he could not take the city and hold it. His army was too small, the supply lines too long, the desert too unforgiving. If he stormed the walls and won, Saladin’s vastly larger forces would simply encircle him and starve him out. The Christian army at Hattin had been destroyed because it was surrounded and cut off from water in open country. Richard could see that the same thing would happen to him inside Jerusalem, only worse, because walls that keep an enemy out also keep an army in.

He turned back. It was the right decision, militarily. It may have been the hardest decision of his life. The whole purpose of the crusade, the thing he had sold half his kingdom to achieve, stood shimmering on the horizon, and he rode away from it.

In September 1192, Richard and Saladin agreed a truce. Christian pilgrims would be allowed to visit the holy places in Jerusalem. The coastal cities would remain in Christian hands. It was something, but it was not what the crusade had set out to achieve. Jerusalem remained under Muslim rule. It would not return to Christian hands in Richard’s lifetime, or in any lifetime after.

There is a tradition that Saladin sent Richard a gift of fruit and snow to cool his fever during the campaign, and that the two men, who never met face to face, developed a grudging mutual respect. Whether or not every detail is true, it captures something real about both of them. Saladin was a man of genuine honour and considerable magnanimity, and Richard, for all his violence, recognised quality when he saw it.

King Richard the Lionheart left the Holy Land in October 1192. He would never return, but his journey home became a disaster.

Richard’s ship was driven ashore in the Adriatic, and he was forced to travel overland through territories ruled by men he had offended during the crusade. He tried to pass through Austria in disguise, but the disguise was poor and the grudge was deep. Duke Leopold of Austria, whom Richard had publicly humiliated at the siege of Acre by tearing down his banner from the walls, had him seized near Vienna just before Christmas 1192.

Leopold handed his prisoner over to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI, who locked King Richard away in a castle and demanded a ransom so enormous that it beggared belief. One hundred and fifty thousand marks of silver, roughly two to three times the entire annual revenue of the English crown, and England was stripped bare to pay it.

A special tax was levied on every free man in the country. The churches gave up their plate. The Cistercian monks, who owned no gold or silver because their rule forbade it, handed over their wool clip, the only wealth they possessed. Farmers and merchants who had never left their own county, who had never seen the king and never would, reached into whatever they had and gave, because the alternative was a kingdom with no ruler and the chaos that would follow. Richard’s mother Eleanor, now seventy years old and released from her own long captivity, drove the collection with fierce determination.

It took more than a year to raise the money. In February 1194, after fifteen months in prison, King Richard was released. He returned briefly to England, showed himself to his subjects, raised yet more money, and left again within weeks.

He had unfinished business in France. While King Richard had been rotting in a German cell, King Philip of France had been busily seizing his territories, and King Richard’s own brother John had been scheming to take the English throne. King Richard dealt with John contemptuously, calling him a child who had been led astray by bad advisers, and turned his full attention to Philip.

The last five years of his life were spent in a grinding war across Normandy and the Loire valley. King Richard fought Philip with the same energy and tactical brilliance he had shown against Saladin, and he was winning. He built a great fortress on the Seine, Château Gaillard, the most advanced castle in Europe, and boasted that he could hold it even if its walls were made of butter. It was a masterpiece of military engineering, and it was also a statement. King Richard was not going to lose France.

Then, in the spring of 1199, he besieged a small, insignificant castle called Châlus-Chabrol in the Limousin. The garrison was tiny. The castle was nothing. There was a rumour, probably false, that a peasant had found a hoard of Roman gold and the local lord had refused to hand it over. It was the kind of petty quarrel King Richard would normally have settled in an afternoon.

On the evening of the twenty-fifth of March, King Richard was riding around the castle walls inspecting the siege works. He was carrying a shield but wearing no armour. A crossbowman on the battlements, a man some sources call Pierre Basile, took aim and shot him in the left shoulder, near the neck.

Unfortunately, after the bolt was removed, the wound turned gangrenous. Quite soon, King Richard knew he was dying. He sent for the crossbowman and, according to the chroniclers, forgave him. ‘Live on,’ he is supposed to have said, ‘and by my bounty behold the light of day.’

Whether the crossbowman actually survived King Richard’s mercy is another question. Some accounts say that after the king died, his mercenary captain, Mercadier, had the man flayed alive. The age of chivalry had its limits.

Richard I, King Richard the Lionheart of England, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine, Count of Anjou, Cœur de Lion, died on the sixth of April 1199. He was forty-one years old. His mother Eleanor was at his bedside.

He had been King of England for ten years and had spent barely six months of those years in his own kingdom. He had taxed the English mercilessly, first to pay for his crusade, then to pay for his ransom, then to pay for his wars in France. He had given them nothing in return except a name, a legend, and the memory of a man who had fought like a lion and lived like one too, restless, magnificent, and always somewhere else.

His bronze statue stands today in Old Palace Yard, outside the Houses of Parliament in London. King Richard on a horse with sword raised. It was placed there in 1860, nearly seven centuries after his death, because by then it was the legend that mattered, not the ledger.

What King Richard left behind, was a kingdom drained of money and patience, and a younger brother who had already shown, during King Richard’s captivity, exactly how much trouble he was capable of causing.

His brother’s name was John.

They were the strangest pair in Christendom.

King Henry, with his rough hands and cracked voice and plain clothes, riding hard through the rain from one end of England to the other. And beside him, as often as not, his Chancellor, Thomas Becket, dressed in silk and fur, laughing easily, keeping up with the king on horseback as though he had been born to it.

They hunted together, they ate together, they argued about law and money and bishops, and then went hawking together as though none of it mattered. The king’s own son, the young prince Henry, lived in Becket’s household, and it was Becket who oversaw his education. People at court said the two men were closer than brothers.

It was a friendship that would end in blood on the stone floor of a cathedral. But in the early years of King Henry’s reign, nobody could have seen it coming.

Thomas Becket was not born to greatness. His father, Gilbert, was a merchant in London, a Norman who had settled in Cheapside, and done well enough for himself without ever becoming truly rich. Thomas grew up sharp, charming, and ambitious. He had a gift for making people like him and a talent for getting things done. As a young man he entered the household of Theobald, the Archbishop of Canterbury, where he quickly made himself so useful that the old archbishop began sending him on important missions, including trips to Rome. When King Henry needed a Chancellor in 1155, Theobald recommended Becket. It was the best advice the archbishop ever gave, and the worst.

Becket took to the Chancellor’s office like a man who had been waiting for it all his life. He ran the royal household, managed the king’s money, oversaw the courts, led embassies abroad, and even commanded troops in battle. He was brilliant at it. He was also, without apology, spectacularly extravagant. His household was one of the largest in the kingdom. He threw lavish dinners, wore magnificent clothes, and travelled with a train of servants and horses that made foreign courts stare. When he went as ambassador to Paris, he took twenty-four changes of clothing with him. He was, in every way that mattered, the king’s right hand. He enforced the king’s will, collected the king’s money, and backed the king’s authority over the Church without a second thought.

King Henry loved him for it.

And then Theobald died.

The Archbishop of Canterbury was the most powerful churchman in England. He crowned kings. He answered to the Pope. He controlled a vast web of Church courts, Church lands, and Church wealth. And when Theobald died in 1161, King Henry saw an opportunity that seemed almost too good to be true.

He would make Thomas Becket the new Archbishop.

Think about what Henry was trying to do. He was building a system of law that would cover the whole kingdom, from the Common Law and the travelling judges we heard about in the last chapter to the Exchequer that counted every penny. But there was one great flaw in that system. The Church ran its own courts under its own rules, and those courts answered not to the king but to the Pope in Rome. If a priest committed a crime, even a serious one, he could not be tried in the king’s court. He was sent to a Church court, where the punishments were far lighter. A man who would have been hanged or mutilated under the king’s justice might face nothing worse than a penance or the loss of his position.

King Henry thought this was outrageous. Stories circulated of more than a hundred cases of murder by members of the clergy that had gone effectively unpunished. The king wanted the Church to hand over these criminal clerics to his courts for proper punishment. The Church refused. Its courts were sacred, its clergy answerable only to God and the Pope. No king, however powerful, could change that.

Unless, of course, the Archbishop of Canterbury was your closest friend.

That was the plan. With Becket in Canterbury, Henry would have an ally at the very heart of the Church. Together they would bring the Church courts under the king’s law and close the gap in the system. It was clever. It was bold. And it was a catastrophic misjudgement of the man Henry thought he knew.

Becket did not want the job. He is said to have warned the king, looking down at his own fine clothes, that Henry would soon come to hate him as much as he loved him now. Whether he truly said this, or whether the story was exaggerated after everything that followed, nobody can be sure. But in June of 1162, Thomas Becket was ordained a priest one day and consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury the next. He was, overnight, the highest churchman in England.

And overnight, he became a different man.

The silk and fur vanished. The lavish dinners stopped. The magnificent household was stripped bare. Becket put on the plain black robes of a monk. Beneath them, against his skin, he wore a hair shirt, a coarse, scratchy garment deliberately uncomfortable, crawling with lice, worn as a private act of penance. Nobody saw it while he lived. He rose before dawn to pray. He washed the feet of the poor. He ate simply, drank little, and threw himself into the duties of his office with the same fierce energy he had once given to the king’s business.

He resigned as Chancellor.

The transformation stunned everyone, the king most of all. Whether Becket’s change of heart was a genuine spiritual awakening, or whether he simply threw himself into his new role as completely as he had thrown himself into his old one, is a question that people have argued about ever since. What mattered was the result. The man King Henry had appointed to be his obedient servant in Canterbury had become the most determined defender of the Church’s independence in all of Europe.

The quarrel between King Henry and Becket started with small things. Becket reclaimed lands and rights he said had been taken from Canterbury. He clashed with the king’s officials. He opposed Henry publicly at a council at Woodstock, embarrassing the king in front of his own court. And then the great issue, the one that had been simmering from the beginning, came to a head over the criminal clerics.

In January 1164, at a royal hunting lodge called Clarendon Palace, near Salisbury, King Henry summoned his bishops and presented them with a set of sixteen rules that he called the Constitutions of Clarendon. These were meant to spell out, clearly and in writing, the old customs that governed the relationship between the crown and the Church. The most controversial rule was the one about clerics who committed serious crimes. They would be tried first in a Church court, but if found guilty, they would be handed over to the king’s court for punishment. No more hiding behind a bishop’s robes after committing murder.

Some of the bishops were willing to agree. Becket, at first, reluctantly accepted the Constitutions. But then, almost immediately, he changed his mind. Pope Alexander III condemned them. Becket, bound by his loyalty to Rome, refused to sign. He said the Constitutions violated the ancient freedoms of the Church. He would not put his seal to them, no matter what the king demanded.

King Henry was furious. He had expected obedience from his old friend, and what he got was open defiance. In October 1164, he summoned Becket to Northampton Castle and put him on trial, not for the Church dispute itself, but for financial irregularities during his time as Chancellor, charges that many people believed were invented simply to bring Becket down.

The trial was a humiliation. Becket was found guilty. His property was forfeit. The king demanded his submission.

Becket refused. Instead, in the middle of the night, he fled. He crossed the Channel in secret, slipped into France, and threw himself on the protection of King Henry’s great rival, King Louis VII. For six years, the Archbishop of Canterbury lived in exile, moving between French monasteries, kept alive by the grudging support of Louis and the distant, cautious sympathy of the Pope, who needed King Henry’s support too much to risk taking Becket’s side openly.

For six years, the quarrel festered.

It was a strange kind of war. No armies marched. No battles were fought. But across the Channel, letters flew back and forth, bitter and accusing. Becket threatened to excommunicate the king. Henry threatened to seize all of Canterbury’s property. Papal legates travelled between the two men, trying to broker a peace that neither truly wanted. The Pope urged compromise. Becket refused to bend. Henry refused to give way. Year after year, the impasse dragged on.

Then, in the summer of 1170, King Henry did something that broke the deadlock, though not in the way he intended.

He had his eldest son, Henry the Young King, crowned as joint ruler of England. It was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s ancient right to crown English kings, and everyone knew it. But Becket was in exile, so Henry had the Archbishop of York perform the ceremony instead.

It was a calculated insult, and it worked. Becket was enraged. The Pope, too, was furious at the violation of Canterbury’s privileges, and threatened to place all of England under an interdict, a punishment that would close every church in the kingdom. Under this pressure, King Henry was forced to negotiate.

In July 1170, King Henry and Becket met in France and spoke privately for the first time in six years, and they agreed to a peace – of sorts. Becket would return to England, and his rights as Archbishop would be restored. Whatever passed between them, it was enough for Becket to believe it was safe to go home.

He crossed the Channel in early December 1170. Crowds lined the roads to welcome him back. Monks wept with joy. The people of Kent came out in their hundreds to see the Archbishop restored to Canterbury at last.

But before he left France, Becket had done something that would cost him his life.

He had excommunicated three of the most powerful churchmen in England, the Archbishop of York and the Bishops of London and Salisbury, for their part in the unauthorised coronation of the young king. It was within his rights as Archbishop. It was also, given the fragile state of the peace, spectacularly provocative.

The three excommunicated churchmen crossed immediately to Normandy and reported what Becket had done to King Henry, who was spending Christmas at his court near Bayeux. Henry, who had thought the quarrel was finally over, exploded.

What he said next has been repeated for more than eight hundred years. No one knows his exact words. The version most people remember is ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ But the earliest account, written by a man who was there, gives something rather different. Henry raged at his household, calling them miserable cowards and traitors who stood by while a low-born cleric treated their king with contempt.

Whatever the words, four knights heard them.

Their names were Reginald Fitzurse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, and Richard le Breton. They were men of Henry’s own household, eager to prove their loyalty. Without telling the king what they intended, they slipped away from the court, rode for the coast, and crossed the Channel to England.

On the twenty-ninth of December, 1170, the four knights arrived at Canterbury.

They found Becket in his palace, beside the cathedral. They told him he must come with them to the king and answer for his actions. Becket refused. The argument grew heated. The knights left, and Becket’s monks, terrified, urged him to take shelter inside the cathedral, where Vespers, the evening prayers, were already being sung.

Becket walked through the cloister and into the great dark church. The monks tried to bar the doors behind him, but Becket stopped them. ‘It is not right,’ he said, ‘to make a fortress out of the house of prayer.’ He ordered the doors left open.

The four knights came back. They had put on their armour and drawn their swords. The cathedral was dim, lit by candles, full of shadows and the sound of chanting. The knights pushed through the darkness, shouting for the traitor.

‘Where is Thomas Becket, traitor to the king and country?’

No answer came. They shouted again.

‘Where is the Archbishop?’

Becket stepped forward out of the knot of monks who had gathered around him.

‘Here I am,’ he said quietly. ‘Not a traitor to the king, but a priest.’

What happened next was swift and savage. The knights seized him, tried to drag him outside. Becket clung to a pillar. A sword came down. Edward Grim, a visiting cleric who was standing beside the Archbishop and who later wrote down what he saw, tried to shield Becket with his arm and was badly wounded. Another blow struck the Archbishop’s head. A third sent him to the ground. A fourth sliced away the crown of his skull. His blood and brains spilled across the cold stone floor.

A fifth man, not a knight but a clerk who had followed them in, stepped forward and set his foot on the dead Archbishop’s neck. ‘He will not get up again,’ he said.

It was dark by then. The twenty-ninth of December, four days after Christmas.

The news spread across Europe like fire.

King Henry, when he heard what his knights had done, is said to have been overwhelmed with horror and grief. Whether he had truly meant for Becket to be killed, or whether his angry outburst had been taken further than he ever intended, no one has ever been able to say for certain. But it did not matter. His words had set the four knights in motion, and now the most famous churchman in England lay murdered on the floor of his own cathedral, and the blood was on the king’s hands.

The monks of Canterbury prepared Becket’s body for burial. When they stripped away his robes, they found the hair shirt beneath them, crawling with lice, and they understood what kind of man he had been in secret. The story of the hair shirt spread quickly, and it sealed his reputation. Within days, people were coming to touch the place where he had fallen. They reported miracles. The sick were healed. The blind could see.

On the twenty-first of February, 1173, barely two years after his death, Pope Alexander III declared Thomas Becket a saint. It was one of the fastest canonisations in the history of the Church.

King Henry moved quickly to limit the damaging fallout from the murder. He negotiated with the Pope. He agreed to a formal settlement at Avranches in Normandy, where he swore that he had not ordered the murder, though he admitted that his angry words had caused it. He made concessions and was absolved.

But he did not go to Canterbury. He did not kneel at the tomb of the man who had once been his closest friend. That, he could not bring himself to do, but this was not enough, so his own family then tore his world apart.

In 1173, Henry’s wife Eleanor, proud and bitter after years of being pushed aside, encouraged their elder sons to rise against him. The Young King Henry, who had been crowned but given no real power, and his brother Richard both demanded a share of the kingdom their father refused to let go. They found allies everywhere. Louis VII of France, who had waited a generation for this moment, joined them eagerly. William the Lion, King of Scotland, invaded from the north. Rebels rose across England and Normandy. The empire Henry had held together by sheer force of will was coming apart, and his own sons were pulling it to pieces.

People whispered that they knew the reason. God was punishing the king. The man who had caused the death of a saint was being destroyed through his own blood, and no settlement with the Pope, no formal absolution, could save him. Only one thing could. He had to go to Canterbury, to the tomb itself, and beg forgiveness from the friend he had betrayed.

So in the summer of 1174, and with enemies pressing in from all sides, King Henry went to Canterbury. He walked barefoot through the streets of the city, wearing sackcloth instead of his royal robes. At the cathedral he knelt before the tomb of the man who had once been his closest friend, and submitted to a scourging, which meant that every monk in the priory could and did strike the king with a rod. He spent the night in prayer and fasting on the cold stone floor beside the grave of Thomas Becket.

The very next day, by an extraordinary coincidence that people at the time took as a sign from God, news arrived that the King of Scotland, who had invaded the north, had been captured. Immediately, King Henry’s fortunes turned.

Meanwhile, Becket’s tomb became the most famous pilgrimage site in England. For three and a half centuries, people came from all over Europe to pray at the shrine of Saint Thomas. The cathedral grew rich on the offerings of the faithful. Two hundred years after the murder, a poet named Geoffrey Chaucer imagined a group of pilgrims riding from London to Canterbury to visit the saint’s tomb, and the stories they told each other along the way became one of the greatest books in the English language, The Canterbury Tales.

Then, in 1538, another King Henry – the eighth, who had his own quarrel with the Church and his own reasons for despising a churchman – sent his men to Canterbury. They destroyed the shrine, scattered the bones, and seized the treasure. The pilgrims stopped coming. The candles went out.

But the cathedral still stands.

You can walk into it today, through the same door the monks tried to bar on that December evening more than eight hundred and fifty years ago. You can stand in the place where Becket fell, where a single candle burns in the north-west transept and the stone floor is worn smooth by the feet of all the people who have come, over all the centuries, to remember what happened there. The knights are gone. The king is gone. The silk and the hair shirt and the argument about who should judge a priest who committed murder, all of it is gone.

What remains is the story. A friendship that turned to hatred. A stubborn king and a stubborn priest, each of them certain he was right. And a question that still has no easy answer, even now: when a king and a church disagree, who has the final word?

The civil war was over.

For nineteen years, since King Stephen had seized the crown that the great lords had sworn to Matilda, England had been tearing itself apart. Castles sprang up without permission, barons stole what they pleased, and ordinary people suffered so terribly that it was said Christ and his saints slept. But now King Stephen was dead, and the country that had been falling to pieces was about to be put back together by the most restless pair of hands it had ever known – Henry of Anjou, who only six weeks after the death of King Stephen would cross from France to England.

In December of 1154, in a courtyard of a castle in Normandy, in the grey half-light before dawn, the wagons were loaded, the horses saddled, and the whole court was ready to leave, exactly as Duke Henry had ordered.

There was just one problem. The Duke was still in bed.

This was what it was like to serve him. One morning he would announce an early departure and then sleep until noon, while his entire household stood around in the cold with the pack-horses steaming and stamping and the heavy rolls of parchment that served as his office already lashed to the wagons. The next morning, without warning, he would be up and gone hours before the appointed time, riding hard into the dark, and everyone from his treasurer to his chaplain would have to scramble after him as best they could.

Nobody knew which morning it would be. Nobody dared ask.

Duke Henry was twenty-one years old when he was crowned King of England, and he would become known as Henry II – King Henry Plantagenet, and he would rule for thirty-five years. In that time he would govern more of France than the King of France, reform English law so thoroughly that its outline still stands today, and quarrel so bitterly with his closest friend that the quarrel would end in murder on the stone floor of a cathedral. But all of that was ahead of him. For now, in the cold December of 1154, he was still in bed.

So how did a twenty-one-year-old Frenchman come to be King of England?

Matilda, King Henry I’s daughter, the woman the great lords had sworn to accept and then betrayed, had lost the war with Stephen. But she had one thing he did not. She had a son.

His name was Henry, and he was the child of her second marriage, to a French count named Geoffrey of Anjou. Geoffrey was a handsome, energetic man who, the story goes, had a habit of wearing a sprig of yellow broom flower in his hat, a plant the French called planta genista. From that bright little flower came the family name that would mark one of the most powerful dynasties in English history. The Plantagenets.

Young Henry grew up in France, restless and ambitious. While still a teenager he had already crossed the Channel more than once to fight against Stephen’s forces. He was not yet king, but everyone could see what was coming. Stephen’s own son Eustace died suddenly in 1153, and with that death the last real obstacle fell away. Stephen, old and tired, agreed to a deal. He would remain king for the rest of his life, but when he died the crown would pass to Matilda’s son, Henry. It was called the Treaty of Winchester, and it was the price of peace after nineteen years of misery.

Stephen died the following year, in October 1154. Henry crossed the Channel and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on the nineteenth of December, and a new age began.

What did this new king look like? The people who knew him left a vivid picture, and it is not the picture you might expect of the most powerful ruler in western Europe.

He was not tall, but he was powerfully built, square and thick-set, with a bull neck and strong arms. His hands were coarse and rough, the hands of a man who spent his life outdoors. His legs were bandy from so many years in the saddle that he looked as though he had been shaped by the horse. He had a large, round head, closely cropped red hair, and a freckled face. His voice was harsh and cracked. He dressed plainly, ate simply, and cared nothing for the fine robes and elaborate feasts that other kings enjoyed.

What he cared about was work, and hunting, and power, roughly in that order.

King Henry was always moving. He rode from one end of his territories to the other with a restlessness that wore out everyone around him, arriving without warning in places where he was not expected, turning up in England when people were certain he was still in the south of France. Behind him, strung out along whatever road he happened to be on, came the heavy wagons loaded with the rolls of parchment that were his government. His court and household gasped and stumbled in his wake. The servants dreaded him, and the nobles complained. Nobody could keep up.

His moods were as unpredictable as his schedule. In times of real danger he was calm, steady, even gentle. But when the crisis passed and the pressure lifted, he became bad-tempered and impossible, snapping at anyone who came near. He had a fierce energy that needed something to push against, and when there was nothing to push against, he pushed against the people closest to him.

Yet for all his roughness, Henry was no brute. He was very well educated, sharp-witted, and genuinely interested in ideas. He spoke French and Latin, and was said to understand several other languages, though he never spoke English. He was the Lord’s Anointed, a Christian king who feared damnation and hoped for heaven, and who swung between worldly ambition and sudden, violent fits of remorse. He could be generous and warm, but he could also be coldly ruthless. He was, in short, a complicated man, and he had inherited a complicated world.

His kingdom was enormous.

Through his mother Matilda he held England and Normandy. Through his father Geoffrey he held the county of Anjou and its neighbouring lands. And through his wife, he held more of France than any man alive.

His wife was Eleanor of Aquitaine, and she was one of the most remarkable women of the Middle Ages. She had been Queen of France, married to the cautious and pious Louis VII, and had accompanied him on the disastrous Second Crusade. The marriage was unhappy. Eleanor was clever, proud, strong-willed, and bored stiff by a husband who seemed more monk than king. She bore Louis only daughters, and in 1152 the marriage was annulled.

Within eight weeks, to the fury and astonishment of the French court, Eleanor married Henry of Anjou, who was eleven years her junior. She brought with her the vast duchy of Aquitaine, the richest territory in France, and suddenly Henry, who was not yet even King of England, controlled more French land than the King of France himself.

When Henry was crowned in December 1154, his subjects boasted that his authority ran from the Arctic Ocean to the Pyrenees. It was an exaggeration, but not by much. He was Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou, Lord of Aquitaine, Brittany, Poitou, Maine, and Guienne. He held territory from the borders of Scotland to the foothills of the Pyrenees. After the Holy Roman Emperor, he was the most powerful ruler in Christendom.

But this vast empire was not as strong as it looked.

It was a patchwork, stitched together by marriage, inheritance, and luck, and it had no real unity. There was no common government, no shared law, no single treasury. The only thing holding it together was Henry himself, his energy, his will, and his ceaseless, exhausting travel. The empire existed because Henry existed. Without him, it would fall to pieces, and one day, that is exactly what happened.

The King of France understood this perfectly well. Louis VII was not a strong king, but he was a patient one, and he knew that the best way to fight King Henry was not to meet him on the battlefield but to encourage every quarrel, every grudge, every petty rebellion within Henry’s sprawling dominions. If he could not destroy the empire from outside, he could pick at it from within. He set one local lord against another, fed old resentments, and waited. It was a strategy that would take a generation to succeed, but in the end, with the help of Henry’s own sons, it would succeed.

Henry, however, was not a man who worried about things a generation away. He had a ruined country to fix.

The England he inherited in 1154 was in a wretched state. For nineteen years the law had meant nothing. Barons had built castles wherever they pleased, taxed the people however they chose, and answered to no one. The old system of royal justice, which Henry’s grandfather had carefully built up, had collapsed. If you were wronged, you could not look to the king’s court for help. You could only look to your local lord, and your local lord was very likely the one who had wronged you.

Henry set about changing this with extraordinary speed. He tore down the hundreds of unlicensed castles across the country. He dismissed the sheriffs who had grown fat and corrupt under Stephen and replaced them with men he trusted. He sent the foreign mercenaries who had terrorised the countryside packing. Within months, the country felt the grip of a real king again.

But tearing down castles and sacking bad sheriffs was only the beginning. What Henry did next was far more important, and far less glamorous, and it changed the world.

He began to build a system of law.

Before Henry, justice in England was a patchwork of local customs. Every manor, every lordship, every town had its own courts and its own rules. If you had a dispute with your neighbour over a strip of ploughland, you went to your lord’s court, and the judgement depended on whatever local tradition happened to apply in that place. There was no consistency, no appeal, and no guarantee that the same dispute would receive the same judgement twenty miles down the road.

King Henry changed this. He sent his judges out from the royal court to travel the country on regular circuits, holding courts in fixed places at fixed times. These travelling courts were called assizes, and the judges who ran them applied the king’s law, the same law applied in the same way wherever they went. For the first time, a farmer in Yorkshire and a merchant in Devon could expect the same justice for the same offence. The law was common to everyone.

It became known as the Common Law.

King Henry reformed the way disputes were settled too. Under the old system, arguments over land were often decided by trial by battle, where each side put forward a champion and the winner was assumed to have God’s support. King Henry replaced this, for some types of case, with a new method. Twelve local men, people who actually knew the facts of the dispute, were brought together to examine the evidence and give their verdict under oath. It was called a sworn inquest, and it was the seed of something that would grow, over the centuries, into the jury.

He reorganised the Exchequer, the royal treasury, until it became the most efficient system of taxation in Europe. Through his government, and through the work of his brilliant Chancellor Thomas Becket, the old tax of scutage was expanded and enforced as never before. Scutage allowed a lord to pay money instead of serving in person as a soldier. It sounded like a small change, a matter of convenience. In practice, it quietly undermined the whole feudal system from within. A lord who paid money instead of bringing his knights was a lord who mattered a little less to the crown with every passing year. The king no longer needed him in quite the same way. Henry may not have planned it as an act of revolution, but that is what it became.

And he did something else, something less dramatic but equally important. He gathered up the old Anglo-Saxon traditions of local self-government, the shire courts and borough courts that had existed long before the Normans came, and wove them into his new system. King Henry did not sweep away everything that had come before him. He took what worked, from Saxon and Norman alike, and built something new from both. The Anglo-Saxon idea that free men had a right to govern themselves in their own communities, under the king’s authority, survived because King Henry Plantagenet chose to keep it alive.

None of this sounds exciting. There are no battles, no arrows, no ships going down in the dark. But it mattered more than almost anything else in this story.

King Alfred, three hundred years earlier, had gathered together the old laws and written them down. That was the foundation. King Henry Plantagenet built the structure that stood upon it. What he created with his assizes, his travelling judges, and his Common Law was a system of justice that would spread, in time, to every corner of the earth where English is spoken. When the American colonists wrote their Constitution, they built it on foundations that a red-haired Frenchman had laid six centuries earlier. When a court sits today in Sydney or Toronto, it works on principles that trace their origins to a king who created an English justice system in the twelfth century.

It is one of the great quiet facts of history that almost everyone in the English-speaking world lives under the law he built.

King Henry could not have known any of this, of course. He was not thinking about centuries to come. He was thinking about the next county to ride to, the next dispute to settle, the next lord to bring into line. He was thinking about his French territories, which needed constant attention, and about the watchful King of France, who never stopped probing for weaknesses. He was thinking about Ireland, which he brought under English lordship in 1171 and added to his already staggering collection of lands and titles.

And he was thinking, increasingly, about a problem that no amount of energy or legal cleverness could solve.

The Church.

In medieval England, the Church was not simply a place where people went to pray. It was a power. It owned vast estates and collected enormous wealth. The Church ran its own courts under its own laws, answering not to the king but to the Pope in Rome. A bishop was not just a man of prayer. He was a great landowner, a political figure, someone who could raise soldiers and excommunicate his enemies. The question of who truly controlled the Church, the king or the Pope, was the most dangerous question in all of Europe, and it had no easy answer.

King Henry believed, as his grandfather had believed, that the king was master of everything in his realm, including the Church in its worldly affairs. He did not want to destroy the Church or deny its spiritual authority. But he wanted its courts to answer to his law, and its bishops to obey the crown. He saw the Church’s independence not as a sacred principle but as a gap in the system he was building, a hole in the Common Law through which powerful men could escape the king’s justice.

He needed someone in Canterbury, as Archbishop, who understood this. Someone who would work with him. Someone he trusted completely.

He thought he had exactly the right man. A friend. A companion. The cleverest, most capable, most loyal servant in his whole kingdom. A man named Thomas Becket.

What happened next would become the most famous story of the English Middle Ages.

But that is for next time.

In the early autumn of 1087, in a priory on the edge of the French city of Rouen, the most powerful man in the western world lay dying, and he could not decide what to do with all that he had won.

He was William the Conqueror, King of England, the man who twenty-one years before had crossed the sea and taken a whole kingdom at the point of a sword. King William had held it in an iron grip ever since, but even an iron grip cannot last forever. That summer, riding through the burning town of Mantes in a quarrel with the King of France, King William’s horse had stumbled, and the heavy old king had been thrown hard against the front of his saddle. He was badly hurt, and for six weeks he lay in pain, growing weaker, while the question that troubled him more than the pain, went round and around in his mind. He had two great possessions: England and Normandy. He had three living sons. And he did not love all three of them equally.

His eldest son was Robert. Men called him Curthose, which meant something like ‘short boots’, a teasing name for his short legs, and it was the kind of name you give to someone you are fond of but do not quite take seriously. Robert was brave, generous, and good company. He was also lazy, easily led, and hopeless at saying no. He and his father had quarrelled bitterly for years, and more than once they had faced each other on opposite sides of a battlefield. Even now, with his father dying, Robert was far away and sulking, in the court of the King of France.

There had been a fourth son too, Richard, but he had died years before in a hunting accident, in the great forest his father had made in the south of England, known today as the New Forest.

So the king’s favourite, and the one he chose to inherit the English crown, was his third son, another William. Because of his red face, which grew even redder when he was angry, everyone called him William Rufus, which simply meant William the Red.

And the youngest? His name was Henry. To Henry, the dying king left no land at all. He left him five thousand pounds of silver and the cold comfort that one day, perhaps, he might come into greatness of his own. Henry was the cleverest of the three brothers and the most patient, and patience, as it turned out, was the most dangerous weapon in the whole family. He took the silver and waited.

William died on the morning of the ninth of September, 1087. And the moment he died, something unusual happened. The great men who had stood around his bed did not weep, or pray, or keep watch over their dead king. They ran. Each of them bolted for his horse and rode for home as fast as he could, desperate to guard his own lands and castles now that the hand which had controlled everything lay still. The servants left behind stripped the room. They took the hangings, the silver, and the clothes of the dead king, and left the body of William, the Conqueror of England, lying on the floor.

In the end a humble knight, out of plain decency, paid to have the King’s body taken down the river to the city of Caen, and the great abbey church the king himself had built. Even the funeral went wrong. As the bishops were speaking, a man pushed forward out of the crowd and shouted that the church stood on land that had been stolen from his father, and the whole service had to stop while the matter was looked into. He was right, as it happened, and had to be paid. Then came the worst of it. The stone coffin had been made too short. The body, swollen and rotten after weeks of summer heat, would not fit, and when the monks pressed it down to force it in, they released a smell so foul that the mourners fled into the open air.

It was not a dignified end for the mightiest man of his age. All his life King William had held his kingdom together by the sheer force of will, and the moment that will was gone, everything started to unravel. The looting, the bolting nobles, the squabble over the church for his funeral, were small signs of a far bigger problem. His sons would fight over what King William had left behind.

So the inheritance was split. Robert, the eldest, was given Normandy, the French dukedom, and William Rufus was given England and its crown. And almost at once the trouble began, because there were already powerful barons in place who held land on both sides of the Channel, and they did not at all like serving two masters. Better, they thought, to have one. The very next year a group of them rose in revolt, led by the dead king’s own half-brother, a fighting bishop named Odo, with a plan to push King Rufus off the throne and hand the whole inheritance, England and Normandy together, to easy-going Robert.

It might have worked. But it depended on Robert, and Robert, true to form, never came. He stayed in Normandy, the ships never sailed, and the rebellion crumbled without him. King Rufus kept his crown.

Rufus was not a king easy to love, and the men who later wrote the history of his reign were monks, who loved him least of all. King Rufus was greedy. He taxed hard, seized land where he could, and quarrelled furiously with the Church, leaving bishoprics, ( areas of land and the revenue it generated) empty so that he might pocket the bishop’s wealth. He had no patience for holy men or their warnings, and when monks came to tell him of dreams that foretold his death, he laughed in their faces. Yet King Rufus was no coward, and he thought big. In London he raised a hall so vast that men came to simply stare at it. You can stand in it yourself today, for it became the heart of the Houses of Parliament, and is called Westminster Hall. When someone told Rufus the hall was too large, he answered that it was not half large enough, and was a mere bedchamber compared to what he meant to build one day.

For years the two brothers, Robert and King Rufus, circled each other, one moment fighting, the next patching up an uneasy peace. Then, in 1096, the whole of Christendom caught fire with the call to go on a Crusade, and to march east and take the holy city of Jerusalem from those who held it. Robert, who could never resist an adventure, was desperate to go. But Crusades cost money, and money was the one thing Robert never had. So he did something that tells you everything about him. He pawned his dukedom. He handed Normandy over to his brother Rufus to look after, in return for ten thousand marks of silver to pay for the journey, and rode off to the wars in the East. For the moment, King Rufus held both England and Normandy – almost the whole of his father’s inheritance, while the rightful duke of Normandy was a thousand miles away.

Now for the New Forest.

When King William the Conqueror had wanted somewhere to hunt, he created a place. In the south of England he threw whole villages off their land, pulled down houses and even churches, and let the woods and heath grow back over the ploughed fields, so that he and his sons could ride after deer in peace. The people who had been driven from their homes called it the New Forest, and they hated it, and the cruel laws that guarded the king’s deer more fiercely than they guarded ordinary men. It was a beautiful place built on other people’s grief. And it was already known to be unlucky for the Conqueror’s family, for it was here that King William’s son Richard had met his death.

On the morning of the second of August, 1100, King Rufus rode out into the New Forest to hunt. With him went a small party of nobles, and among them his youngest brother, Henry. As the long summer evening drew on, the hunters spread out through the trees. Rufus and a French lord named Walter Tirel, who had a name as a deadly shot, found themselves alone in a clearing as the light began to fail. A stag broke from cover. The king loosed an arrow and missed. And then a second arrow flew, and it struck the king full in the chest. No one knew where the arrow had come from.

Rufus fell without a word, and within moments he was dead.

What happened next, happened fast. Walter Tirel did not stop to help, or to explain. He leapt on his horse, galloped for the coast, took ship to France, and never came back to England. The other nobles scattered to look to their own affairs, exactly as the men around the Conqueror’s deathbed had done thirteen years before. The dead King Rufus was left lying on the forest floor until a local charcoal-burner named Purkis loaded the body onto his cart and trundled it all the way to Winchester.

Was it an accident? A stray arrow at dusk, a piece of terrible bad luck? Or was it murder? People asked the question at the time, and they have never stopped asking it, because no one, even today, can prove the answer either way. But there is one fact that has always made people suspicious. Of all the men in that forest, one knew exactly what to do, and did it without a moment’s hesitation. Henry, the patient youngest brother, did not ride to his brother’s body, or see to his funeral, or grieve. He spurred his horse straight for Winchester, where the royal treasure was kept, and seized it. From there he rode hard for London, and within three days, before his brother Robert could so much as hear that the throne stood empty, Henry had himself crowned King of England.

Whether he had planned the whole thing, or simply snatched a chance that fell into his lap, no one can say. What is certain is that the cleverest of the Conqueror’s sons was now the king.

And here is the strange thing about King Henry. The same coldness that makes him a prime suspect in the death of his brother Rufus, made him a very good king for England. After years of King Rufus, the country was weary of greed and lawlessness, and King Henry gave it order. He was clever and well educated, so much so that men nicknamed him Beauclerc, meaning ‘the fine scholar’. He wrote things down. He sent his judges out across the land to settle quarrels and punish wrongdoers, so that an ordinary man might hope for fair dealing and not merely rely on the will of the strongest baron nearby. King Henry built up a careful system for gathering the king’s money and keeping account of every penny of it, the beginnings of real, organised government. He could be hard, even brutal, but he kept the peace, and a hard king who keeps the peace is worth a great deal to people who have to plough fields and raise children, neither of which they can do in the middle of a war. Later ages would call him the Lion of Justice.

He did one more thing that mattered more than he perhaps knew. He married a princess of the old English royal house, a descendant of the line of King Alfred the Great, the very line the Normans had swept aside at Hastings. Their children would carry in their blood both the Norman conquerors and the old kings of England, the winners and the beaten joined at last in a single family. After more than thirty years in which the English had been treated as a defeated people in their own country, it was a small, quiet sign that the two peoples might one day simply become one.

There was still the matter of his brother. Robert came home from the Crusade at last, a hero of the fighting in the East, expecting to take up again his Normandy dukedom . Instead he found his clever little brother on the throne of England and in no mood at all to share. For a few years the two of them manoeuvred and bargained. Then King Henry crossed the sea with an army, and on the twenty-eighth of September, 1106, the brothers met in battle at a place in Normandy called Tinchebrai.

It did not last long, perhaps an hour. King Henry won. And when it was over, he had his own brother in chains. Robert Curthose, eldest son of the Conqueror, the brave, foolish, open-handed man who had pawned a dukedom to ride to the wars, spent the rest of his life as his brother’s prisoner. He was shut away in Cardiff Castle, and there he stayed for twenty-eight years, until he died an old, old man who had outlived almost everyone he had ever known.

So it was done. King Henry now held everything, both England and Normandy, the great inheritance gathered up again under one of the Conqueror’s sons. The turmoil of the brothers was over. After all the fighting, the family had come through to firm ground. Henry had a strong kingdom, a wise and careful government, and, best of all, a son to leave it to, a boy named William, like his grandfather, growing up to be the next king. Everything the old Conqueror had fretted over on his deathbed had, in the end, come right.

And then, on a cold November night, the sea took it all away.

In the autumn of 1120, King Henry and his court were at the port of Barfleur, on the coast of Normandy, waiting to sail home to England. The king’s son William was seventeen now, almost grown, the bright centre of everything that was still to come. As Henry’s own ship was making ready, a sea-captain came to him with an offer. His name was Thomas, and his father, he said proudly, had captained the very ship that carried William the Conqueror across the Channel in the great year of 1066. Now Thomas had a fine new vessel of his own, the fastest afloat, and she was called the White Ship. Would the king do him the honour of sailing in her?

The king had already arranged his own passage. But he let his son go aboard the White Ship instead, along with a great crowd of the young lords and ladies of the court. It must have seemed a fine idea, all the young people together in the newest, swiftest ship in the fleet, free of their parents for one night.

It was a disaster from the very start. Wine was carried aboard, and the young nobles and the crew drank wine right into the night. When priests came down to the harbour to bless the ship before it sailed, as was the custom, the laughing, drunken company waved them away. It was nearly midnight of a bitterly cold night by the time the White Ship sailed. The passengers, full of wine and high spirits, called out to the oarsmen to row hard and overtake the king’s ship, which had sailed hours before. The crew, just as drunk, bent to the oars and drove her forward into the dark at full speed.

A mile out of the harbour, going fast, the White Ship struck a rock.

The hull tore open. The sea poured in. In the panic and the dark and the freezing water, almost everyone aboard was lost within minutes. The crew did manage to get young William, the king’s son, the heir to England and Normandy, down into a small boat, and pushed it clear of the wreck, saving his life.

And then, across the black sea, he heard a voice. It was his half-sister, still clinging to the sinking ship, crying out to him not to leave her. William ordered the little boat round and rowed back for her. But as it drew close to the wreck, the people still struggling in the water flung themselves onto it, and the small boat, swamped under the weight of too many people – sank. William drowned, and his sister with him, and very nearly every soul who had stepped aboard the White Ship.

When the sun came up, the fishermen of Barfleur found a single living man. He was a butcher from the city of Rouen named Berold, who had come aboard only to chase up some money he was owed. He had clung all night to a piece of the broken mast in the icy water, while one by one the others who clung beside him lost their strength and slipped away into the sea. He was the only one to survive out of around three hundred people.

No one dared tell King Henry. For a whole day the court at Barfleur knew, and could not bring themselves to tell the king. In the end it was a small, trembling boy, who told King Henry that his son was dead. They say the king fell to the floor as though he had been struck down, and for the rest of his life, he never smiled again. A monk writing soon afterwards put it more plainly than anyone has managed since. No ship, he wrote, had ever brought England so much sorrow.

Think for a moment of all that was lost on that rock in the dark. Not only a boy of seventeen and his sister, although that was grief enough for any father. The whole careful work of King Henry’s life went down with them. He had schemed and fought and imprisoned his own brother to gather the great inheritance into one safe pair of hands, and now there was no one to pass it on to. King Henry was an old man now, and his wife had died some years earlier. So in hope Henry married again, but no more children came.

In the end he did the only thing left to him. He had one other true-born child, a daughter named Matilda, a proud and able woman who had been married to the Emperor in Germany and was now a widow. Henry named her his heir, and made all the great lords of England swear a solemn oath to accept her as their queen when he was gone. They swore, and Henry must have hoped that an oath would be enough.

It was not. When King Henry died in the winter of 1135, after, the story goes, greedily eating a dish of lampreys (a fish), the lords who had sworn their oath to Matilda, broke their word. King Henry’s nephew Stephen moved fast, exactly as Henry himself had once moved faster than his brother Robert, and snatched the crown before Matilda could reach it. At that moment, England fell into nearly twenty years of the cruellest civil war it had ever known, a time so dark that people said openly that Christ and his saints slept. But that is a story for another day.

King William the Conqueror had taken England, he once boasted, with both his hands. He had held it, and Normandy too, in a grip that nothing could loosen while he lived. But no man’s hands can grip for ever. Within the lifetime of those who had known him, two of his sons and his best-loved grandson had come to grief by an arrow in his New Forest and a rock in his sea, and the great inheritance he had fought so hard and so cruelly to win had slipped, in the end, clean through his children’s fingers.

The New Forest is still there. You can walk in it today, out on the heath and under the old oaks, in the forest William the Conqueror created. Somewhere among the trees a stone still marks the place where, they say, a king fell with an arrow in his chest on a summer evening more than nine hundred years ago – The Rufus Stone. The forest keeps its secret, and it will not say whether what happened there was an accident, or something darker, or simply the price that is always paid, in the end, for a crown.

It was Christmas Day, 1066. Westminster Abbey smelled of candle smoke and damp stone and the icy breath of winter coming through the great door. Outside, London waited in uneasy silence. The battle at Hastings had been in October, less than three months before, and the streets were still in shock, the city still trying to understand what had happened. Men who had been Englishmen when they woke up in September had found themselves, by November, living under foreign rule.

Inside the Abbey, the most powerful man in England was about to be crowned.

William, Duke of Normandy, knelt before the altar as Archbishop Ealdred of York placed the crown of England upon his head. It was the same crown that had sat on King Harold’s head in the same place barely a year before. The Norman knights standing in the abbey were armed, their hands on their sword hilts, their eyes scanning the crowd. They had fought their way here, and they were not yet sure the fight was over.

When the congregation were asked to shout their assent, their approval, to the coronation – in the Norman manner, the sound startled the Norman guards outside. They heard what sounded like a commotion inside the Abbey and panicked. Within minutes, the houses around Westminster were burning, and frightened Londoners were running into the streets. Inside the Abbey, the ceremony continued as smoke began to drift in, and the congregation scattered.

William was crowned King in a half-empty church, with his new capital city on fire outside. It was not the most promising beginning.

William was forty years old when he took England and became king, give or take a year, and he had been fighting for most of his life. He had survived a childhood in which three of his guardians were murdered in quick succession. He had fought off a rebellion when he was barely twenty, riding for his life through the night, and then turning to smash his enemies before they could regroup. He had conquered the county of Maine, on Normandy’s southern border, beaten back the King of France, invaded England with a borrowed army, and killed his rival King Harold. William was not a man who stopped to rest when there was still work to be done. And there was plenty of work to be done.

England in 1066 was not a kingdom that had simply switched rulers at the top and would now carry on as before. What the newly crowned King William had won was a country in shock, a country with powerful earls in every corner who had spent years fighting each other and were not necessarily willing to stop fighting just because a new Norman King had taken power. King Harold was defeated and dead, but England was still England. Its people still spoke English, its laws still Saxon laws, and its great landowners still powerful men with armed followers who had not been asked whether they wanted to be conquered and ruled by a foreign king.

King William’s first moves were careful ones. He kept some of the old Saxon earls in their positions, at least for a while. He kept the old Saxon laws in place, at least officially. He promised to govern as King Edward the Confessor had governed, and he wanted England to understand that this was not destruction but replacement, and that life would go on. Powerful Saxon men could remain powerful if they behaved themselves. It was a sensible plan, but it only lasted about three years.

The rebellions began in the west, in the north, and in the east. Some were led by Saxon earls who had submitted after the Battle of Hastings but could not stomach the reality of Norman overlordship. Some rebellions were stoked by the Danes, who were watching events in England with hungry interest, remembering the days when their own king had ruled the island. In 1069, a Danish fleet sent by King Sweyn of Denmark sailed into the north of England, and the whole of Northumbria erupted into open revolt.

It was the rebellion in the north that brought out the worst in King William, and the worst of what a conquest can become when a king decides that the only way to keep order is to make sure there is nothing left to support a rebellion.

King William marched north in the winter of 1069, into the coldest months, when no sensible army went to war. His men moved through Yorkshire in the snow, and wherever they went they burned. Not just settlements that had harboured rebels. All of them. The crops in the fields were set alight, though there was little left by winter. The livestock were slaughtered. The ploughs and tools were destroyed. The stores of grain that families had gathered to see them through the winter were tipped into the mud or taken. Village after village was left as a smear of ash on frozen ground.

It was thorough. It was deliberate. And it was terrible.

An early twelfth-century chronicler named Orderic Vitalis, himself half-Norman, wrote about it with horror. He recorded that King William’s campaign killed more than a hundred thousand men, women and children, most of them not through the sword, but through the famine that followed. Modern historians treat that figure as an exaggeration from a chronicler writing a generation after the event, but even so, there is agreement that the death toll ran into the tens of thousands, in a country whose entire population numbered no more than two million people. The Domesday Book, compiled sixteen years later, still recorded vast stretches of Yorkshire as wasteland, empty and untaxed, too sparse to count.

Even Orderic, who admired much of what King William had done, could not bring himself to defend the Harrying of the North – as it came to be called. He wrote that in his dying weeks, King William himself repented of it. Whether that is true, no one can say. But the fact that a loyal Norman writer felt the need to say it, tells you something about what the Harrying looked like to those who lived through it, and to those who came after. After the north was broken, there were no more rebellions.

England was now truly conquered, and King William set about remaking it from the ground up. The change began with the land.

In the old Saxon system, great earls had held their estates by tradition and inheritance, owing the king service and loyalty but otherwise ruling their own lands in their own way. King William swept almost all of that away. He distributed the land of England as he saw fit, and he saw fit to give most of it to other Normans.

Not just any Normans, his Normans. The men who had crossed the Channel with him, who had fought at Hastings in the October rain, who had marched north in the winter cold. These men were now rewarded with something more lasting than silver. They were given England itself, in pieces, to hold as their lord’s tenants in return for military service.

This was feudalism, (society structured around a strict hierarchy of land ownership and reciprocal obligations to the king) and King William understood it with a soldier’s clarity. The king was lord of all. Below him, the barons held their allotted portion of land, gifted to them by the king. In turn, the barons owed the king a fixed number of knights for when the king called for them. Below the barons, the knights held their own portions of the barons’ land and owed arms and men to the baron in turn. Below the knights, the peasants worked the land, and owed their labour and a portion of their harvest to whoever sat above them in the chain.

It was a pyramid, and William sat at the top of it.

By the time his survey was completed, (the Domesday Book) the land of England looked like this: where two thousand Saxon thanes and landowners had held estates in 1066, around two hundred Norman barons held all the estates by 1086. The old Saxon aristocracy had not merely lost power. It had almost ceased to exist.

The new Norman lords started to build in stone right across England. Castles went up, first in wood on earthen mounds, then in stone, as time and money allowed. They were not houses. They were statements of power, and amongst England’s first stone castles since the Romans. Every Norman castle said the same thing to the population around it: we, the Normans, are here. We are the new masters of England, and we are not leaving. By the end of King William’s reign, more than eighty castles had been built across his new kingdom, each one the centre of a lord’s authority, each one a garrison from which the surrounding land could be controlled. The villages that lay in the shadow of those castles did not easily become rebellious again.

Norman French was the language of power now. It was spoken at the royal court, in the law courts, and in the great Norman households. English went on being spoken, of course, in the fields and the markets and the homes of ordinary people, because you cannot conquer a language any more than you can conquer the weather. But the English who wanted to rise in the new order would have to learn French, and over the next two centuries the two languages pressed against each other and mingled, until the language that came out on the other side, was something new and strange and rather wonderful, full of Old English bluntness and Norman elegance, of Saxon words for the animals in the field and French words for the meat on the plate. The modern English we speak today carries both of those languages inside it.

The Church changed too. King William brought in Norman bishops and abbots to replace the English ones, slowly but deliberately. He was a religious man in the practical Norman way, building churches and abbeys, observing the forms. He was a king who understood that the Pope and the Church was a power he needed to keep on his side.

In 1085, a threat from Denmark reminded King William that England was only as secure as he kept it. King Canute IV of Denmark was raising a fleet and an army with the intention of pressing an old claim to the English throne. But King Canute IV never sailed. He was murdered by his own men, who were less enthusiastic about the venture than he was. But the threat from across the sea had been real, and it reminded King William of something he already knew: that he could not defend his kingdom if he did not know what it contained.

In December of 1085, King William called a great council at Gloucester and gave an order that had never been given before in the history of England. He wanted to know everything.

Not just which lord held which estate. Everything. A complete survey of the entire kingdom. Every farmer, every mill, every fishpond. Every ox, every cow, every pig. Who had held it before the Conquest, and who held it now. What it had been worth in King Edward the Confessor’s day, what it was worth when the surveyors arrived, and what it might be worth if it were properly managed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded the scope of the thing with barely disguised indignation, noting that King William’s surveyors left nothing out, not a single yard of land, ox, cow, nor pig.

Commissioners — the surveyors — rode out across England early in 1086, divided into circuits, each circuit covering a region. They called the local people before them, the barons and the priests and the village reeves, and questioned them under oath. The information flowed back to Winchester, where clerks compiled it into a vast written record.

They called it the king’s survey. The people of England, knowing that it was final and beyond appeal, called it the Domesday Book. Doomsday, the day of judgement, when everything is known and nothing can be hidden. The name has lasted.

The Domesday Book was finished in 1086, all of it compiled in a single year. It remains one of the most extraordinary feats of medieval administration ever attempted. The book records over thirteen thousand places across England, though it left out some significant gaps: London and Winchester were not included, probably due to their size and complexity, and the far north, still raw from the Harrying, barely appears. But for everything else, it is there, every field and mill and villager, a frozen snapshot of a single year, but King William did not live to make much use of it.

In the summer of 1087, King William was campaigning in France, in the border region between Normandy and the French royal lands, and he attacked the town of Mantes in the Seine valley. The town burned, and as he rode through the smouldering ruins, his horse stumbled over debris in the ashes and lurched forward, throwing King William hard against the pommel of his saddle, hurting him internally. Injured and unable to continue, King William was carried to the priory of Saint Gervase outside Rouen and put to bed, and there he stayed, growing more ill through August and into September.

King William died on the ninth of September, 1087, aged about fifty-nine, having reigned in England for twenty-one years.

His end was not dignified. The men who had attended him at his deathbed, servants and courtiers alike, left the moment he died, stripping the room and taking everything they could carry. King William’s body had to be carried to Caen for burial at the abbey he had built there, and the ceremony went wrong. The grave was too small for a man who had grown very big and heavy in his later years, and those present had to press the body down into it. The smell of the king’s decaying body on that warm September day was never forgotten.

History judges William the Conqueror as a great and terrible man in the same breath. When he became King, William found England to be a country of competing powers. On his death, England was a unified feudal kingdom under a single crown. King William brought architecture, administration, and a new language. He also brought devastation, dispossession, and the Harrying of the North.

The Domesday Book is his most famous legacy. The original two volumes of the book still exist, and its home is the National Archives in Kew. The entries for English towns or villages, if they existed in 1086, can still be read in the original Latin today.

King Edward the Confessor was buried on the morning of the sixth of January, 1066, in the great church at Westminster, that he had spent the last years of his life building. Before the congregation had left the abbey, Harold Godwinson, the son of the great Earl Godwin and for thirteen years the real power behind King Edward’s throne, was crowned king. It was the fastest succession in English history.

King Edward’s body was barely cold, and Harold’s supporters had moved with a speed that suggests they had been planning for this moment very carefully. They had good reason to hurry. Somewhere across the Channel, the Duke of Normandy believed the English throne had been promised to him. And far to the north, beyond the grey waters of the North Sea, the King of Norway was already building ships.

Harold was not of royal blood but the Witan, the council of great men, accepted him. London cheered, and the Archbishop of York placed the crown upon his head. But Harold had become king at a particularly dangerous time.

Two men wanted the English crown for themselves, and they were both dangerous.

The first was William, Duke of Normandy. William was the bastard son of Duke Robert and a tanner’s daughter, and he had clawed his way through a childhood of murder, conspiracy, and civil war to become the most feared ruler in northern France. He claimed that Harold had sworn a sacred oath to support William’s right to the English throne. Whether Harold had sworn freely or under the kind of pressure is not known, but the oath existed, and in the feudal world, an oath was everything.

The second man was Harald Hardrada, the King of Norway. King Hardrada stood nearly seven feet tall and had spent his youth fighting as a mercenary in the imperial bodyguard at Constantinople. He was the most experienced warrior in Europe. His claim to England was old and thin, and rested on ancient agreements between the English and the Danish kings, but King Hardrada was not a man who spent much time worrying about the strength of his legal position. He had a fleet, he had an army, and he meant to use them.

King Harold knew they were both coming, but he did not know when, or who would come first.

Then, in the spring of 1066, a strange light appeared in the sky. It was a great star trailing a blazing tail, and it hung over England for weeks, bright enough to see at dusk. People stared up at it from fields and doorways and the dark lanes of market towns, and they were afraid. Lights in the sky meant something. The monks said it was a warning from God. But a warning for whom?

We know now that it was Halley’s Comet, following its long, slow orbit of the sun, as it had done many times before and would do so again. But nobody in 1066 knew that. They saw a blade of light in the sky, and they waited for whatever was coming.

All through the summer, King Harold waited with them.

He stationed himself on the south coast with his huscarls, his household troops, watching the sea for William’s fleet. The fyrd, the militia army, had been called out across the whole of southern England, and thousands of men stood ready along the Channel shore, watching the horizon, sleeping rough and eating whatever the local people could spare.

But the wind blew steadily from the north, and William’s ships could not cross the Channel. Week after week, the English waited. As the summer wore on, the men of the fyrd started to worry about their crops. They had fields and farms to harvest, but could not leave their posts.

Then, on the eighth of September, with no sign of an invasion, King Harold disbanded the fyrd and sent the men home to take in the harvest.

It was exactly the wrong moment.

A few days later, whilst King Harold was watching the empty English Channel, three hundred ships appeared off the coast of northern England. King Harald Hardrada had sailed from Norway, gathering warriors from Orkney, from the Scottish isles, and from the Isle of Man, and at his side was a man King Harold knew well. Tostig, Harold’s own brother, and driven out of his earldom of Northumbria the previous year. He had gone to the King of Norway with a grudge and a plan.

The Norwegian fleet sailed up the Humber and into the River Ouse, landing at Riccall, about ten miles south of the city of York. The northern earls, Edwin and Morcar, gathered what forces they could and marched out to meet the invaders.

On the twentieth of September, the two armies clashed at Gate Fulford, on the flat, marshy ground south of the city. The English fought bravely. Edwin and Morcar had brought a considerable force, and for a time they held their ground. But King Hardrada was an experienced commander with a larger army, and the English were pushed back into the marshes and the flooded ditches. The defeat was total. The northern earls escaped, but their army was destroyed.

The city of York was now open and undefended, so it submitted. In response, King Hardrada did not sack the city, but he demanded hostages and supplies, and he arranged to receive them at a place called Stamford Bridge, about eight miles to the east, where the old Roman road crossed the River Derwent.

King Hardrada and his army settled down to wait. The weather was fine. They had won their battle, taken the city, and the countryside was quiet. Many of the men left their armour on the ships at Riccall and lounged in the September sunshine in tunics and shirtsleeves.

They did not know that King Harold was already coming.

The news of the invasion had reached the king in London. Without hesitation, King Harold gathered his huscarls, his bodyguard, and rode north. The distance from London to York is nearly two hundred miles, and King Harold covered it in four days, calling out the local militia as he passed through each shire, and gathering men on the move. It was a punishing march. The men slept in their saddles, ate what they could find, and did not stop.

On the twenty-fifth of September, King Harold reached York. The city gates opened. He did not pause. He marched straight through and out the eastern side, heading for Stamford Bridge.

King Hardrada and his army saw the dust before they saw King Harold’s army, a great cloud rising on the road to the west, and beneath it, the glint of iron and the movement of thousands of men coming fast. The surprise was absolute.

What happened next is one of the famous stories of English history, though nobody can say with certainty how much of it is true. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a single Norwegian warrior planted himself on the narrow wooden bridge over the Derwent and held it alone against the entire English army. He was a huge man, wielding a great axe, and he cut down every man who came at him. Behind him, on the far bank, his comrades scrambled to form their battle lines.

The lone warrior held the bridge until an Englishman floated beneath it in some kind of half-barrel or tub. Through the gaps in the planking, he thrust his spear upwards. The great Viking fell, and the English surged across.

The battle was savage. King Hardrada had been caught entirely off guard, but his men were experienced fighters, and even without their armour they formed their shield wall and held. The fighting raged around a great banner called Land-Ravager. Ultimately though, King Hardrada was struck in the throat by an arrow, and he went down.

Tostig took command. King Harold, in a gesture that tells you something about the kind of man he was, sent his brother an offer of peace and a full pardon, along with restoration of his earldom. He also offered to spare every Norseman still standing.

The offer was refused. The Norsemen shouted back that they would rather fall, one across the other, than accept mercy from the English.

So the fighting went on. A force of Norwegians who had been left with the ships at Riccall arrived at a run, carrying their mail coats. Some threw their armour aside and charged into the fight as they were. Nearly all of them were killed.

When the battle ended, the field was thick with the dead, and King Hardrada lay in the English earth he had come to conquer. Tostig lay dead beside him. Of the three hundred ships that had carried the Norwegian army to England, only twenty-four were needed to carry the survivors home.

King Harold buried King Hardrada with honour and allowed his son Olaf to depart in peace. King Harold had won one of the great victories of the age, and the Battle of Stamford Bridge ended the Viking threat to England forever. Never again would a Scandinavian army seriously threaten the English crown.

But King Harold had no time to rest.

On the twenty-eighth of September, just three days after victory, messengers arrived from the south. The wind had changed and William the Bastard’s fleet had crossed the Channel from St Valery, at the mouth of the Somme, and landed at Pevensey, a place to the northeast of the present-day town of Eastbourne.

Nobles and landless knights from all over northern France, from Brittany, Flanders, and even from southern Italy, had invested in William’s invasion. Their investment was in the ships and armed men, and they expected a share of English land if William succeeded.

William’s army was perhaps seven thousand strong. Among them were several thousand mounted knights, the finest heavy cavalry in Europe, and the horses were carried across the Channel in specially built ships. William and his army landed without opposition. The local fyrd, called out four times already that year to watch the coast, and having decided that the danger was past because it had not yet arrived, had gone home.

As William stepped from his boat he stumbled and fell flat on his face. The watching soldiers saw a bad omen. William, thinking fast, held up fistfuls of sand. ‘See,’ he said. ‘I have taken England with both my hands.’

William then went on to build defences around his fleet and loot and raid for food from across the Sussex countryside. He then waited.

King Harold and his huscarls, battered and diminished by the fighting at Stamford Bridge, rode south. They covered two hundred miles in about seven days, arriving in London in the first week of October. King Harold stayed in London for five days, gathering every man he could. The thanes and militia of Wessex and Kent came, but the northern earls, Edwin and Morcar, whose army had been broken at Gate Fulford, were far behind and moving south at their own pace. Whether they would arrive in time, or would fight for King Harold at all, no one knew.

On the evening of the thirteenth of October 1066, Harold marched south from London and took up his position on a ridge of high ground about seven miles from the town of Hastings, and blocking the road to London. The hill had no name then. It would later come to be called Battle.

The ridge was a strong position. The English army formed their shield wall along the crest, packed shoulder to shoulder, their round shields overlapping, their long axes and heavy swords ready. Harold’s personal banner, the Fighting Man, flew at the centre of the line.

They had no cavalry. They had almost no archers. What they had was the shield wall, the high ground, and the courage of men who had already marched the length of England and beaten one of the finest armies in Europe.

At dawn on the fourteenth of October, William’s army came up from the south.

The battle opened with a strange piece of theatre. A Norman knight named Ivo Taillefer rode forward alone, tossing his sword and lance into the air and catching them, singing as he came. He charged into the English lines, and was killed at once.

Then the battle commenced.

Wave after wave of Norman cavalry charged uphill at the English shield wall, their heavy horses labouring on the steep ground, lances splintering against the packed wall of wood and iron. King Harold and his army held on. Between the cavalry charges, Norman archers poured volley after volley of arrows into the English ranks. The toll was dreadful, but the shield wall held.

The axemen cut down the horses and riders with blows that could split a man from shoulder to waist, and the Norman knights had never faced infantry like this. They could not break through. They could not pull the wall apart. They fell back, reformed, and charged again, and each time the English held.

On the Norman left, the cavalry broke and fled back down the slope in disorder. The men on King Harold’s right, many of them local fyrd rather than professional soldiers, saw the enemy running and charged after them. It was a fatal mistake. William, in the centre, wheeled his disciplined troops onto the pursuers and destroyed them.

The hours and the battle, ground on. The English line grew thinner but did not yield. The dead and wounded lay so close together on the hilltop that the fallen could not sink to the ground.

Late in the afternoon, William tried the trick that would decide everything. He had seen how readily the English right had broken ranks in pursuit. Now he ordered a deliberate feigned retreat, sending his cavalry tumbling back down the hill in apparent panic. Again, the less disciplined English troops abandoned their positions and pursued them. Again, William’s army turned on them mercilessly and cut them down.

What remained was only the heart of King Harold’s army, the huscarls, the men who had fought at Stamford Bridge and marched south without rest. They gathered around their king and his banner, and they fought on.

William ordered his archers to shoot high, so that the arrows would fall in a steep arc over the shield wall. It in amongst this storm of arrows, that King Harold was struck.

How exactly King Harold died is not entirely certain. The traditional account says an arrow struck him in the eye. The Bayeux Tapestry, stitched within living memory of the battle, appears to show this moment, although scholars have argued for centuries about which figure in the scene is King Harold and what exactly is being depicted. What we know for certain is that Harold Godwinson, King of England, fell at the foot of his standard on that October afternoon 1066.

His brothers Gyrth and Leofwine had already been killed. The surviving huscarls withdrew into the woods behind the ridge, still fighting. William’s cavalry, pursuing in the fading light, rode into a deep, hidden ditch on the reverse slope. Horses and riders tumbled in, and the English who were still alive, fell on them in the darkness, but the battle was over.

William had three horses killed under him that day. He had fought in the front ranks, and had earned his victory in iron and blood. England was his.

King Harold’s body was found among the fallen, stripped of its armour. His mother offered to pay the weight of the body in gold for the right to bury her son in consecrated ground, but William refused. King Harold, he said, should be laid upon the shore he had given his life to defend. The body was later moved to Waltham Abbey, which King Harold himself had founded. It lies there still, somewhere beneath the quiet ground, although nobody now knows exactly where.

The hill at Battle is quiet today. The abbey that William built on the spot where King Harold fell, in penance, or in triumph, or perhaps something in between the two, is mostly ruins. But the ridge is still there, and the slope where the Norman cavalry charged is still steep enough to make you catch your breath if you climb it.

If you walk across that hilltop on an October morning, when the mist sits in the hollows and the rooks wheel overhead, you can feel the shape of the ground beneath your feet, the long crest where the shield wall stood, the falling ground where the cavalry struggled uphill. The grass has grown over everything, and the bones are deep in the Sussex clay.

King Harold Godwinson won two of the three great battles that were fought in the year 1066. He marched the length of England twice, defeated one of the greatest warriors in Europe, and turned to face another without pause. But he lost on an autumn afternoon, on a hill with no name, and when he fell, the Saxon world fell with him.

The Palace of Westminster stood on a low marshy island at the bend of the Thames, a few miles upstream from the city of London. In the first days of January 1066 in a room in the new palace, it was very quiet. Candles burned low, and around a bed in this room stood the men who had run England for the last twenty years: earls, thanes – nobles, and churchmen. They had come to hear the last words of King Edward the Confessor, the last of the old Saxon kings.

King Edward was old, grey, and very frail. He had been sick for some time, drifting in and out of wakefulness, and in his fever he had spoken of things that frightened the men who listened. He had spoken of a time of evil that was coming upon the land. He had described green trees cut down and replanted, but bearing no fruit. The words made no obvious sense, but they landed on the listeners like the tolling of a bell. On his deathbed, the king seemed less like a man and more like a prophet, muttering warnings that no one could fully understand and no one dared to ignore.

Only one man in the room remained unmoved. Archbishop Stigand was a survivor, a churchman who had served three kings and knew a political performance when he saw one. He leaned across to the Earl of Wessex and whispered in his ear. ‘The king was old and sick. Age had robbed him of his wits. His words meant nothing.’

The Earl of Wessex listened, and nodded. His name was Harold.

On the fifth of January, 1066, King Edward of England died. He had been king for twenty-four years.

His title ‘The Confessor,’ had been given by the Church because the man had spent his life in devotion and piety. And King Edward the Confessor had been genuinely, deeply, almost entirely concerned with God. In a time when England needed a warrior, it had been given a monk.

To understand why Edward came to sit on the English throne at all, we need to step back from that candlelit room and follow a stranger story.

When the great Danish king Cnut died in 1035, the empire he had built – England, Denmark, Norway – crumbled almost at once. He left three sons, and they were nothing like their father. They were boorish, cruel, and short-lived. Within seven years of Cnut’s death, all three were gone. One died fighting in Norway, one was dead within a year of taking the English throne, and the last, Hardicanute, who was Cnut’s chosen heir for England, died suddenly in 1042 at a drinking feast in Lambeth, collapsing in the middle of a toast. He was in his mid-twenties. There was no warning. He just dropped dead.

England had a problem. Who was the king?

The answer, when it came, surprised everyone. There was still a man alive who could claim descent from King Alfred the Great and the ancient West Saxon line. He had been living in exile in Normandy, across the Channel, for nearly thirty years. He had grown up there, had been educated in Norman monasteries, spoke French as naturally as he spoke English, and had spent so long away from his homeland that he was more Norman than Saxon in almost every way that mattered.

His name was Edward, son of King Ethelred the Unready and his Norman wife Queen Emma.

Bringing Edward back to England was the idea of the most powerful man in England at the time, Earl Godwin of Wessex. Godwin was not royal. He was a nobleman, not a king, the son of a thane who had risen through his own ability and shrewdness to become the greatest earl in the kingdom. He had served Cnut loyally, taken a Danish wife, and accumulated land and power until the territory he controlled stretched from the Thames in the east to the Bristol Channel in the west. He had sons who were already earls. He was, in everything but name, the ruler of England.

Godwin could have chosen almost any candidate for the throne, but he chose Edward because Edward could be managed. A king who had been away for thirty years, who had no army and no English allies, who owed his throne entirely to Godwin’s support – was a king who could be kept in check.

Godwin’s terms were simple. Edward could be king, but he must marry Godwin’s daughter, Edith. Also, he must keep Godwin and his sons in their earldoms. And he must remember who had put him there.

Edward had little choice. He agreed, was welcomed home, and was crowned King of England in Winchester on Easter Day, 1043.

Edward was about thirty-seven years old when he became king. He was slight, pale and quiet, a man who had spent his youth in Norman monasteries rather than riding to war. One account of the time describes him as a kindly, gentle, chubby figure, with an almost otherworldly appearance. His Norman education had given him a genuine and deep religious faith, an appreciation of Norman architecture and Norman learning, and absolutely no experience of governing a kingdom.

He married Godwin’s daughter Edith as agreed. The marriage was, by all accounts, entirely formal. Edward seems to have regarded it as a duty rather than a union. This was not unusual for a man of Edward’s piety. He treated his queen respectfully enough, but his heart was elsewhere – in his prayers, in his devotions, and above all in the great project that would be his life’s real work.

He was going to build a church.

The church – or rather, the abbey – was to be at Westminster, on the marshy island where the Thames bent south. There had been a modest monastery there for some years, but Edward intended something altogether different. He wanted a building in the new Norman style, with great round arches and thick stone walls and a soaring nave that would fill the eye and lift the spirit. He poured money, energy, and attention into it for the rest of his life. Westminster Abbey was consecrated just days before Edward died, but he was too ill to attend the ceremony for a building that he had spent his entire reign building.

That was the man. Quiet, devoted, happiest among his monks and his mason’s drawings, increasingly withdrawn from the rough, treacherous world of earls and councils. He was not stupid. He was not entirely without cunning, but he was profoundly unsuited to the time and the place in which he found himself, and he knew it.

Meanwhile, England was being run by Godwin.

Earl Godwin of Wessex was one of the most able men of his age, and one of the most dangerous. He had helped raise Edward to the throne, and he intended to keep his hand on its back. His sons were given earldoms. One son, Sweyn, received Herefordshire and part of the west. Another son, Harold – the same Harold who would one day stand at Edward’s deathbed – became Earl of East Anglia. A third, Tostig, was given the north. The Godwin family, between them, controlled most of England, with a puppet king sitting quietly in the palace at Westminster, commissioning his stone carvings and praying his prayers.

Not everyone was content with this arrangement.

The Normans, who had sheltered Edward during his long exile, had followed him to England in considerable numbers. Norman priests appeared in the English Church. Norman clerks came to work in the royal household. Norman landowners began to acquire English estates. To the old Anglo-Danish nobility, this was an invasion of a different kind, creeping in through the doors of the king’s favour rather than storming up the beaches.

The arrangement between the two worlds – the Norman party around the king, and the great English earls, Godwin and his sons at their head – could not last forever.

The agreement broke in 1051.

A Norman archbishop, Robert of Jumièges, had been appointed to Canterbury, the most important position in the English Church. Godwin objected. A dispute broke out over the town of Dover, where local men had brawled with some of the king’s Norman guests. The king ordered Godwin to punish the town. Godwin refused. Suddenly what had been a long-running quarrel became an open crisis.

The earls gathered their forces. So did the king. For a few weeks England teetered on the edge of civil war. But Godwin, calculating that the odds were not in his favour, chose to withdraw. He and his sons crossed the Channel to Flanders, a region on the northern coast of what is now Belgium, and for the first time in twenty years the most powerful family in England was gone.

It was the moment King Edward had been waiting for. Norman influence flooded in. Robert of Jumièges remained as Archbishop. The Norman party strengthened its grip. And according to some accounts – though this is where history becomes uncertain, and the mists thicken – William, the Duke of Normandy, visited England around this time, received as an honoured guest at King Edward’s court.

William was a remarkable figure. His father, Duke Robert of Normandy, had spotted a tanner’s daughter washing linen in a stream near the town of Falaise and had fallen instantly in love with her, carrying her to his castle and keeping her there until she gave him a son. William was that son, born without the blessing of marriage, carrying the mark of illegitimacy that his enemies would never let him forget. His childhood had been dangerous: his father died when William was seven, leaving the boy a duke in name only, surrounded by great noblemen who saw a fatherless child as an opportunity rather than a ruler. Three of his guardians were murdered. For years his survival depended on luck, speed, and the occasional intervention of the King of France, who preferred a weak Norman duke to a strong one.

But William survived, and more than survived. By the time he came to King Edward’s court, in his mid-twenties, he was already proving himself a formidable soldier and ruler. William had broken his enemies, secured his borders, and looked across the Channel at England with the clear, calculating eyes of a man who was accustomed to taking what he wanted to and holding it.

What William wanted, it appears, was the English crown.

The story that King Edward promised the crown to William during that visit is Norman in origin, and the Normans had excellent reasons to tell it. King Edward had no children, no clear heir, and a king who had no children had to think about who would rule after him. William was his cousin, of a sort – the connection ran through KIng Edward’s Norman mother Emma and the family of the Norman dukes. And Edward trusted Normans. He had grown up among them.

Whether the promise was made or not, the matter was not yet settled. Because twelve months later, the Godwins came back from Flanders.

Earl Godwin had not wasted his year in Flanders. He had raised a fleet, called in favours, and gathered allies. His son Harold had done the same, raising ships in Ireland. In the autumn of 1052 they sailed for England from opposite directions, gathered their forces, and confronted King Edward with an army at their backs.

Edward looked at what was ranged against him, and did what a wise man does when he cannot win. He negotiated.

Godwin and his sons were restored to their earldoms. Most of the principal Norman agents were expelled. The Norman archbishop Robert of Jumièges fled the country. The king was back in his palace, back to his building works and his prayers, but the world around him had rearranged itself, and the Godwin family were stronger than before.

Seven months later, Earl Godwin was dead.

He died in 1053, at the king’s table during a feast at Winchester, suddenly stricken, carried from the hall, and dead within a few days. He had been in public life for over thirty-five years, and he died as he had lived: at the centre of power. His eldest surviving son Harold stepped into his earldom, his lands, and his authority.

Harold Godwinson, now Earl of Wessex, was about thirty years old. He was tall, strong, experienced, popular with the English nobility, and, in the view of almost everyone who dealt with him, extremely capable. For the next thirteen years, while the king prayed and planned his church, Harold governed England in his name.

Earl Harold was not always without opposition. His brother Tostig, Earl of Northumbria, resented his power. The Anglo-Danish earls of the north – Morcar and Edwin – were rivals, and the Normans never disappeared entirely from court. Harold navigated all of this with patience and skill, and the country held together. England, under Harold’s hand, functioned.

But under the surface, the questions were growing. King Edward was ageing and unwell. He had no children, no declared successor, no settled plan for the future. And across the Channel, William of Normandy had not forgotten whatever had passed between him and the king in 1051.

In 1064, Harold made a mistake. The exact reason for his journey across the Channel is not known. He may have been on a diplomatic mission. He may have been trying to secure the release of hostages. Whatever the reason, his ship was blown off course by a storm and he was wrecked on the coast of northern France, in the territory of the Count of Ponthieu.

The Count was not sympathetic. A shipwrecked man was, by the custom of the time, the property of whoever found him, and valuable for ransom. Harold found himself a prisoner, and his chances of ever leaving France grew uncertain.

It was William of Normandy who secured his release. He sent word to the Count – politely at first, then with rather more authority – that the Earl of Wessex should be delivered into Norman hands. The Count complied. Harold was escorted to William’s court.

What followed was both a friendship and a trap.

The two men liked each other. They are described hunting together, campaigning together against the Bretons, riding side by side with hawks on their wrists. Harold was honoured, feasted, and knighted by William. But William had not rescued Harold from the Count of Ponthieu out of generosity. He had rescued him because Harold was the most important man in England, and William had a use for him.

William put his proposal plainly. When Edward died – and King Edward, clearly ailing, would not live much longer – William intended to claim the English throne. He was offering Harold a share of the arrangement. Harold would become Earl of all Wessex, holding it under William as king. Harold would marry William’s daughter. William would be England’s king.

Harold swore an oath to this agreement.

The exact circumstances of that oath have been argued about ever since. Norman accounts say Harold swore willingly and knowingly on holy relics, giving the oath the most solemn weight it was possible for any promise to carry. English accounts say the terms were forced upon Harold, and that he swore under duress, with no real freedom to refuse. The relics, according to some later writers, were concealed beneath the altar, hidden from Harold until after the oath was taken, and Harold not fulling understanding what he was agreeing to.

What is certain is that Harold swore the oath, and that he went home. And equally certain is that in the autumn of 1065, the north of England rose in revolt against his brother Tostig. The Northumbrians had had enough of Tostig’s harsh rule and drove him out, calling for Morcar in his place. Harold, faced with the choice between his brother and a peace settlement, chose the settlement. Tostig was stripped of his earldom and sent into exile.

Tostig never forgave Harold. He sailed for Flanders, and there, burning with fury, began to look for allies who might help him take back what he had lost.

In December 1065, King Edward was too ill to attend the consecration of his beloved abbey at Westminster. He had spent the last years of his reign watching its stone walls rise, planning every arch and column, pouring the kingdom’s treasure into the building. Now it was complete, but he was very ill and took to his bed in the palace next door and did not rise from it.

In the first days of January 1066, the men of the kingdom gathered around him. They heard his confused, drifting words about green trees and blighted harvests, about a time of evil coming upon the land. The candles burned low. Beside the bed, Archbishop Stigand leaned towards Harold and whispered that the king had lost his mind.

But it was said that with his dying breath, Edward turned to Harold, the vigorous, competent man who had governed England in his name for thirteen years, and commended him to the kingdom’s care.

On the fifth of January, 1066, King Edward the Confessor died.

Within hours, Harold was made king.

It was the beginning of the most extraordinary year in the long history of England. The year of Halley’s Comet, blazing across the sky like a warning written in fire. The year of three battles – at Gate Fulford, at Stamford Bridge, and at a hill in Sussex that would change everything. Across the Channel, a Norman duke was sharpening his sword. Far to the north, in Flanders and beyond, a bitter exile was plotting his revenge.

And in Westminster, the new king stood in the newly consecrated abbey and received the crown that a Norman duke across the Channel believed had been promised to him.

King Edward the Confessor is one of the most puzzling figures in English history, not because we cannot understand him, but because he does not quite fit any of the usual shapes. He was not a warrior, not a statesman, not a clever politician playing the long game. He was exactly what he appeared to be: a man of genuine faith, more comfortable in a monastery than a council chamber, who happened to be a king.

He left behind a building that still stands. Westminster Abbey, rebuilt and added to over the centuries, has been the site of every coronation since William the Conqueror was crowned there on Christmas Day 1066 – nine hundred and fifty years of kings and queens receiving their crowns in a church that King Edward built.

King Edward also left behind a crisis – no clear successor.

There was disputed promise to a Norman duke. There was an English earl who had just taken the crown with the whispered blessing of a dying king. There was Tostig, Harold’s embittered brother, seething in exile in Flanders and already looking for someone to help him take his revenge. And, although no one in England yet knew it, a Norwegian king named Harald Hardrada who believed the English throne was rightfully his, and was already making plans to come and take it.

The lights of Saxon England, as one historian memorably put it, were going out. In the gathering darkness, a gentle man had murmured his warnings, and no one had truly listened. And now, in the cold January of 1066, those who had been standing around the bed turned from the dead king to the living one, and wondered what was coming next.

They would not have to wait long.

The silver was weighed out at Southampton. Forty-eight thousand pounds of it, heaped on scales and counted and loaded into chests while Danish soldiers stood over the English and watched. It was the year 1012, and England was paying its enemies to go away. Again.

This was the Danegeld, the tribute that had become a national humiliation. King Ethelred had been paying it for twenty years, each time a larger sum, each time buying a shorter peace. Ten thousand pounds in 991. Sixteen thousand in 994. Twenty-four thousand in 1002. Thirty-six thousand in 1006. And now forty-eight thousand, wrung from a country that was already starving. To enforce the collection, the Danes had sacked Canterbury and seized its Archbishop, Alphege. When the old man refused to let his flock be squeezed for ransom, they killed him at Greenwich, pelting him with cattle bones at a drunken feast.

The money never worked. The Vikings took the silver, sailed home, spent it, and came back for more. They were not stupid. Why risk your life fighting for a kingdom when its king would hand you its wealth and ask only that you leave? And if you did leave, you could always return next year, when the barns had been refilled and the people had just enough left to be worth robbing again.

Everything that King Alfred had built – the fyrd, the burhs – army and fortified towns – the navy, the laws, the very idea of a united English kingdom – was crumbling. Not because the system had failed, but because the man at the top had failed the system. Ethelred, whose name meant ‘noble counsel’, was known to his own people as ‘the Unready’, which did not mean unprepared in the way we use the word today. It meant ‘poorly counselled’ – a king who took bad advice and followed it. The Anglo-Saxons, who loved a dark joke, noticed the irony. Noble counsel, the ill-counselled. Even his name mocked him.

Under King Ethelred, the English did not lack courage. At the Battle of Maldon in 991, the ealdorman of Essex, a powerful lord named Byrhtnoth, had faced the Viking army across the tidal causeway at the river Blackwater and refused to pay. He told them they would receive nothing but spears and swords. When the tide fell and the causeway was exposed, Byrhtnoth even allowed the Vikings to cross so that the battle could be fought fairly. It was magnificent, and it was foolish. The English lost, and Byrhtnoth was killed. A group of his thanes – his nobles – knowing that everything was finished, fought on around his body until every one of them was dead.

That was the spirit of the English people. But spirit alone could not save a kingdom whose king paid silver instead of drawing swords.

In 1002, King Ethelred did something far worse than paying tribute – panicked. Convinced that the Danish settlers living peacefully in England were plotting against him, he ordered a massacre. On the thirteenth of November, St Brice’s Day, his men turned on every Dane they could find in the south of England, and killed them. Among the dead was Gunnhild, the sister of Sweyn, King of Denmark.

Sweyn’s revenge was terrible. For years his armies burned their way across England, sacking Exeter, Wilton, Norwich, and Thetford. The English built a new fleet in 1009, a desperate effort by a broken and starving people, but its commanders quarrelled among themselves, some ships were lost in a storm, and the rest were abandoned. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded it with weary contempt: the naval commanders let the whole nation’s toil pass away.

By 1013, Sweyn returned with his youngest son, a prince named Canute. The Danes of Yorkshire and the Five Boroughs of the old Danelaw submitted at once. Oxford fell. Winchester fell. London held out for a time, but it made no difference. Sweyn was accepted as King of England, and King Ethelred fled across the Channel to Normandy, whose duke’s sister he had married.

It looked like the end. But King Sweyn died suddenly in February 1014, and the English turned back to their old king. They would have King Ethelred again, they said, if only he would rule them better than before.

He did not.

The last flicker of King Alfred’s blood burned on in King Ethelred’s son, a young man named Edmund. At twenty, he was already a warrior of startling ability. Though his own father declared him a rebel, Edmund gathered forces, struck hard at the Danes, won battles, and relieved London when it was besieged. The English called him Edmund Ironside, and for a brief, brilliant moment it seemed as though the house of Wessex might survive.

But in 1016, still not yet thirty, Edmund Ironside died. The cause of his death is uncertain. Some chronicles hint at murder. Whatever happened, the last defender of King Alfred’s line was gone, and England surrendered.

At Southampton, even before Edmund’s death, the chief men of England – bishops, earls, and thanes, both Saxon and Danish – had agreed to set aside King Ethelred’s family for ever and accept a new king. All resistance, moral and military, collapsed. The last sons of the house of Wessex fled into exile. The young Danish prince who received this surrender was still in his early twenties. His name was Canute.

What happened next is one of the most unexpected stories in the history of the British Isles. The English expected a conqueror. They expected the son of King Sweyn to rule them as a Viking war-lord, with axe and terror and tribute. They had seen nothing else from the Danes for forty years. The country lay exhausted, its silver bled away, its towns burned, its people starved and beaten. If Canute had been cruel, no one would have had the strength to stop him.

Instead, he did something astonishing. He chose to become English.

There were, as the chroniclers understood, three ways a man could become king. He could take the throne by conquest, and no one could argue with a drawn sword. He could inherit it by blood, if his family had held it before him. Or he could be chosen – elected by the great men of the realm, who agreed that he was the best man to rule. Canute did not rely on conquest alone, though he had the power to do so. He had himself recognised as king by the English leaders, bound himself by oath to rule justly, and began his reign not as a tyrant but as a man who intended to earn his crown.

The first thing King Canute did surprised everyone. He sent the great Danish army home. This was the force that had conquered England, the army whose soldiers expected land and plunder as their reward. King Canute paid them off with a final, enormous levy and then dismissed them. He kept only a small personal guard of household troops, and for the defence of his new kingdom he trusted not to Danish swords but to the loyalty of the English people he had just defeated.

It was an extraordinary gamble, and it worked.

He married Emma of Normandy, who had been King Ethelred’s queen. Emma was one of the most remarkable women of her age. She was the sister of the Duke of Normandy, and she had already lived through more than most queens would see in three lifetimes – married young to a failing king, driven into exile, widowed in a ruined country. Now she married the man who had conquered her first husband’s kingdom. It was a political masterstroke for King Canute, because with Emma as his queen, the Normans had no reason to interfere in England on behalf of King Ethelred’s exiled sons. But Queen Emma was no passive pawn. She understood English customs and English politics. She had lived in the country for years, she knew its people, and she would outlast King Canute himself, surviving into the reign of her own son and shaping events long after the Danish king was dust.

Then King Canute set about rebuilding everything King Ethelred had broken.

He ruled according to the law. Not Danish law imposed on a conquered people, but the old English law that had grown up over generations, the laws of King Edgar and King Alfred before him. He made it known that these laws were to stand above even the king’s own power. When he sat in judgement, he judged by the same rules as everyone else. He even submitted himself to the regulations of his own household troops, following the same discipline he expected of his men. For an eleventh-century king, and a conqueror at that, this was extraordinary. Most rulers made the law serve them. King Canute made himself serve the law.

Of all his kingdoms – and he had many – King Canute chose England as his home. He was already King of Denmark. He won the throne of Norway. Scotland offered him its submission. The old Viking power, though weakening, still stretched from Scandinavia through the Baltic to the coasts of North America. King Canute ruled an empire that reached across the known world. But it was in England that he chose to live, in English churches that he prayed, and in the English manner that he governed.

He wished, we are told, to be seen as the successor of King Edgar, whose peaceful reign still glowed in English memory like a lamp in a darkened room. King Edgar had been dead for forty years, but his name still meant order, justice, and prosperity. King Canute wanted to be that kind of king.

He built churches and gave lavishly to English monasteries. He honoured the memory of the English saints, including St Edmund and St Alphege – the very Archbishop whose murder at Greenwich had been one of the most shocking acts of the Danish wars. King Canute carried Alphege’s relics to Canterbury with great ceremony, honouring a man his own people had killed. It was an act of remarkable political skill, but it was more than politics. King Canute seemed genuinely moved by the faith he had adopted. Early records describe him entering monasteries with his eyes fixed on the ground, weeping freely, beating his breast, praying aloud that he might deserve God’s mercy. The English noticed. Whatever else this Danish king might be, he was not pretending.

In 1027, he travelled to Rome as a pilgrim. He attended the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor, Conrad, and was treated as one of the great rulers of Christendom. From Rome he wrote a letter home to the people of England, promising to rule with justice and to protect the Church. The letter survives, and it reads like the words of a man who took his duties seriously. He wrote not as a foreign conqueror addressing his subjects, but as an English king speaking to his people.

Everyone knows the story of King Canute and the tide.

The king, so the tale goes, sat in his throne upon the seashore and commanded the waves to stop. The tide came in regardless, soaking his robes and his royal feet, and King Canute turned to his courtiers and said something they did not expect. He had not been trying to prove that he could control the sea. He had been proving the opposite – that he could not. The lesson was for his flatterers, the men who told him he was all-powerful and could do anything he wished.

No king, King Canute was telling them, is greater than the forces that govern the world. Only God commands the tide.

It is a good story, and it may even be true, though it was first written down by a chronicler named Henry of Huntingdon about a hundred years after King Canute’s death, so we cannot be certain. What matters is what the story tells us about how the English remembered their Danish king. They remembered him as a man who knew the limits of his own power, a king who was wise enough to be humble. In a century of arrogant fools and terrified weaklings, King Canute was something rare: a strong ruler who was not drunk on his own strength.

But King Canute was not a saint, and his court was not a peaceful place.

A story from the Norse sagas, written about two centuries after his death, gives a very different picture. One evening, so the saga tells us, King Canute was playing chess with his brother-in-law, Earl Ulf. The king made a bad move, and when Ulf captured one of his pieces, King Canute tried to take the move back. Ulf refused. King Canute insisted. Ulf, furious, knocked over the chessboard, stood up, and walked out.

‘Run away, Ulf the Fearful,’ the king called after him.

Ulf turned at the door. ‘You did not call me Ulf the Fearful at the river Helgeå,’ he said, ‘when the Swedes were beating you like a dog.’

Ulf went to bed. The next morning, King Canute sent a boy to kill him. The boy came back and said he could not do it because Ulf had gone to church. So King Canute sent a man called Ivar White, a Norwegian from his household, and Ivar went into the church, walked up to the choir, and ran his sword through Ulf where he stood.

When Ivar returned with the bloody sword, King Canute asked if the deed was done.

‘I have killed him,’ said Ivar.

‘You did well,’ said the king.

The monks closed the church and locked the doors. King Canute sent word that they should open them again and sing Mass. Then he gave the church a great gift of land, and those lands, the saga says, belonged to it ever after.

This is a saga, not a sworn account, and it was written long after the events it describes. But the story captures something true about the world King Canute inhabited. He was a Christian king who built churches and wept at the shrines of saints, and he was also a Viking war-lord who had men killed for defying him. He was both things at once, and neither cancelled the other out. The eleventh century did not ask its kings to choose.

What King Canute built, however, depended on King Canute. That was both the strength and the weakness of his reign. When the great man died in 1035, at Shaftesbury in Dorset, he was perhaps forty-five years old. And his empire died with him.

He left three sons. Two were by an earlier wife, Ælfgifu of Northampton: Harold, who was called Harefoot, and Sweyn, who was sent to rule Norway. The third was Hardicanute, his son by Queen Emma. None of them was fit to hold what their father had made.

Harold Harefoot seized England. Canute’s son Sweyn was driven out of Norway within two years. King Hardicanute, trapped in Denmark dealing with threats to his own throne, could not come to claim his English inheritance. The empire that had stretched from the North Sea to the edge of the known world fell apart in months.

In Normandy, two young princes watched and waited. They were Alfred and Edward, the sons of King Ethelred and Queen Emma, the last of the old West Saxon line. They had grown up in exile, guests at the Norman court, speaking French, learning Norman ways, remembering a country they had been forced to leave as children.

In 1036, the elder brother, Alfred, crossed the Channel. The chroniclers call him ‘the innocent prince’, and perhaps he was. He came, or so he said, to visit his mother. But England was a dangerous place for a son of King Ethelred. An earl named Godwin, the most powerful man in the country, had Alfred arrested. His companions were slaughtered. Alfred himself was blinded, and died soon afterwards in the monastery at Ely.

It was a crime that would echo through the next thirty years of English history. And it left only one surviving son of the old royal line: Edward, the younger brother, still waiting in Normandy, still watching.

Harold Harefoot died in 1040. King Hardicanute crossed from Denmark to claim the English throne at last, but he was a hard, joyless king who taxed the country savagely and achieved nothing of note. Two years later, at a wedding feast in Lambeth, King Hardicanute raised a drink and fell dead.

The sons of King Canute were finished. In seven years they had squandered everything their father had spent twenty years building.

And now the great men of England looked around for a king. The country was tired of Danish princes. The old West Saxon line, the line of the kings Alfred, Athelstan and Edgar, still carried a kind of magic in people’s minds, a sense of rightness that no amount of conquest could entirely destroy. Their eyes turned back across the Channel, to the last quiet prince of King Alfred’s blood. Edward, the son of King Ethelred and Queen Emma, came home to a country he barely knew and was crowned King of England. He would be remembered as King Edward the Confessor, and in the choices he made and the weakness he showed, he would set England on a path that led, thirteen years after his own death, to the most famous year in English history.

But that is another story.

King Canute’s body was buried at Winchester, in the Old Minster, the ancient church at the heart of the old West Saxon capital. His bones lay there for centuries, moved from place to place as churches were rebuilt and demolished and rebuilt again.

Today, in the medieval cathedral that replaced the Old Minster, there are six painted mortuary chests set high on the stone screens above the choir. They are old and battered, cracked by age and damaged by Parliamentarian soldiers who threw them to the floor during the Civil War, scattering the bones across the stone. The remains were gathered up and put back, but by then no one could tell which bones belonged to which king. Inside those chests, jumbled together by the carelessness of centuries and the violence of war, lie the remains of several Saxon and Danish kings. King Canute’s are said to be among them.

It is a strange ending for a man who held five kingdoms in his hand. But perhaps it is a fitting one. He came as a Dane and chose to become English. He was buried among English kings. And in the end, as the centuries passed and the bones were moved and muddled and forgotten, the conqueror became indistinguishable from the conquered. The bones of Denmark and the bones of Wessex lie together in the same quiet chests, in the same English cathedral, in the same ancient city where King Alfred himself once walked.

King Alfred died in 899, and the kingdom he left behind was the strongest it had ever been. The burhs – the fortified towns, guarded the coasts and river valleys. The fyrd – the army, could be called upon and kept where needed. The laws were written down, the schools were open, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was being kept year by year in monastery after monastery, a running record of the life of a nation that had very nearly ceased to exist.

But south of the river Humber was not the whole of England. To the north and east, across the old boundary line that King Alfred and the Viking leader Guthrum had agreed, lay the Danelaw, where Viking settlers had put down roots, married into the local community, farmed the land, built their own towns, and kept their own customs and traditions. They were not the same raiders who had burned Lindisfarne and waded through blood at York. A generation had passed. Many of them were Christian now, but they were still Danish, still independent, and still a kingdom apart.

King Alfred’s son Edward, known to history as Edward the Elder, set about changing that.

Edward was not his father. He did not write books or translate Latin or sit up late worrying about the state of learning in England. He was a soldier, and a very good one. Where King Alfred had built the system, Edward used it. He advanced north and east, year by year, building new burhs as he went, each one a day’s march from the last, extending the chain of fortified towns that his father had begun until it covered not just Wessex but the whole of the English midlands.

And he did not do it alone. Beside him, and often ahead of him, was his sister.

Æthelflæd, the Lady of the Mercians, is one of the most remarkable figures in early English history, and one of the least remembered. She was King Alfred’s eldest daughter, married to Ethelred, the ealdorman (an official and local leader) of Mercia, and when Ethelred grew ill and could no longer lead, Æthelflæd took command. Not as regent, not as a temporary stand-in, but as ruler in her own right. The Mercians accepted her, followed her, and fought for her.

She built burhs of her own. She led armies. She captured Derby, storming the town in 917 and losing four of her most trusted thanes – her noblemen, in the fighting. The following year the town of Leicester surrendered to her without a battle. When an abbot under her protection was murdered in the Welsh kingdom of Brycheiniog, she invaded within three days, took the queen and thirty-four hostages, and forced the Welsh king to submit. She was negotiating with the Viking rulers of York when she died in June 918, at Tamworth, in the heart of Mercia. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records her death in a single line, without sentiment. But the Mercian Register, a separate record that someone cared enough to keep, tells us more. It tells us that the people of York had offered to place themselves under her protection. Had she lived a few months longer, a woman might have united early England.

Edward survived her. By the time he died in 924, the Danelaw south of the Humber had been reconquered. Every Danish settlement between the Thames and the Humber now recognised the authority of the English King Edward. It had taken a quarter of a century of patient, grinding work, burh by burh, town by town, and it was the direct continuation of everything King Alfred had planned.

King Edward’s son Athelstan went further still.

King Athelstan was the third of the great West Saxon warrior kings, and perhaps the most ambitious of them all. He marched into Yorkshire in 926, and the north submitted. The Kings of the Scots and of Strathclyde acknowledged him as their overlord. The Welsh princes agreed to pay tribute. For a brief, shining moment, one English king held authority over almost the whole island of Britain.

It did not last. In 937, every enemy Athelstan had beaten rose up at once. Constantine, the King of the Scots, was an old man by now, cunning and proud, who had ruled his kingdom in the north for more than thirty years, and he had no intention of bowing to an English overlord. He joined with Olaf, a Norse king who ruled Dublin and wanted to reclaim the Viking kingdom of York. Norwegian raiders joined them from across the sea, along with the remnants of the old Northumbrian resistance. Together they assembled the largest hostile force the English had faced since the Great Viking Army. They meant to break the power of Wessex for good.

King Athelstan met them at a place called Brunanburh.

No one knows for certain where Brunanburh was. Historians have argued about it for centuries, placing it in locations from the Wirral to Scotland, and no site has been proven beyond doubt. But the battle itself was remembered. A victory poem was composed and entered into the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and it is one of the oldest pieces of English war poetry that survives. It sings of shields hacked apart, of swords hammering at battle-shafts, of the field stained with blood. It sings of the sun passing over the slaughter like a bright candle, and of the aftermath, when the ravens and the wolves came to feed on the dead.

The English won and Constantine fled north. Olaf sailed back to Dublin with the shattered remains of his fleet. King Athelstan, King Alfred’s grandson, had become one of the most powerful rulers in Europe. He styled himself Rex totius Britanniae on his coins and charters, King of all Britain, and the courts of Europe believed him. His three sisters married into the royal houses of France and the Holy Roman Empire. No English king before him had stood so high.

He died just two years later, in 939. He was followed by his half-brother Edmund, who was only eighteen, and then by Edmund’s brother Edred. Both were fighters. Both held the kingdom together against fresh rebellions and fresh Viking incursions from the north. And both died young. But by 954, when the last independent Viking king of York was driven out and killed, the work was done. The whole of England, from the Channel to the Scottish border, was under a single English crown.

It had taken eighty years and five warrior kings, starting with King Alfred and ending with King Edred. They had beaten the invaders, reconquered the Danelaw, and built a nation, but the cost in blood and suffering was enormous. Hoewever, underneath all the fighting, something quieter and more important had happened. A country had been made. Not just conquered, but organised, administered, and given a shape that would last.

Under King Edgar, who came to the throne in 959, this long building reached its height.

King Edgar’s reign was peaceful, which is precisely why most history books skip over him. There were no great battles, no dramatic sieges, no narrow escapes. But peace, when it is used well, can achieve more than war ever does, and King Edgar used it brilliantly.

The shires, the districts of the country, were reorganised, each one governed by a sheriff, a royal officer who answered directly to the king. The hundreds, smaller divisions within each shire, were established as units of local justice and taxation. The towns were strengthened and defended. An elaborate system of courts, running from the borough up through the hundred to the shire, maintained law and order across the country. There was one coinage, one system of weights and measures, one written language that all educated men could read, a King’s English. If you had stood in any market town in Edgar’s England, you would have found the same silver penny bearing the king’s name in your hand whether you were in Winchester or York.

And alongside this political rebuilding came something else. A great revival of monastic life and learning swept through England, led by three extraordinary churchmen. The greatest of them was Dunstan, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a man of exceptional ability who had served as advisor to kings since he was young. Dunstan was not just a churchman. He was a silversmith who made church plate with his own hands, a musician who composed hymns, a painter who illuminated manuscripts, and a scholar whose learning was famous across Europe. Under his guidance, and with the help of Oswald, the Bishop of Worcester, and Ethelwold, the Bishop of Winchester, monasteries across England were reformed and renewed. Monks who had become lazy were called back to strict observance. New houses were founded. Old ones, some of which had lain in ruins since the Viking wars, were rebuilt.

And from these monasteries came the most beautiful illuminated manuscripts in Europe, works of art that were prized across the continent, their pages blazing with gold leaf and rich pigments ground from lapis lazuli and other precious minerals, their text written in ink made from oak galls and iron. Many of these books were written not in Latin alone, but in English. The Catholic Homilies of Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham, are considered the first great achievement of English as a literary language, the earliest everyday language books in Europe to reach that distinction. What King Alfred had begun, with his patient translations by candlelight, had blossomed into a national literature.

King Edgar’s magnificent coronation at Bath in 973, a ceremony on which every English coronation since has been based, seemed to set a seal on everything that had been achieved. The island was civilised, unified, and at peace. The arts of building and decoration were reviving. Learning was flourishing again. From whatever direction you looked at it, tenth-century England was a country that had pulled itself out of the fire and built something extraordinary.

And then it fell apart.

King Edgar died in 975, and the succession was disputed. His elder son Edward, still a teenager, was murdered at a royal estate in Corfe, Dorset in 978, probably on the orders of his stepmother, who wanted the crown for her own son. That son was a boy of about ten years old, and his name was Ethelred.

History remembers him as Ethelred the Unready. The nickname does not mean what it sounds like. In Old English, his name Æthelred means ‘noble counsel.’ The nickname Unræd means ‘ill-counselled’ or ‘without counsel.’ It is a bitter pun. The king whose name meant good advice was the king who never took any.

In 980, the raids began again.

This time the Vikings were not settlers looking for land. They were professionals, armed and organised, sailing from Scandinavia and Denmark in fast, well-built ships, looking for silver. And they found a country that had grown soft.

The town of Chester was ravaged from Ireland. The people of Southampton were massacred. Thanet, Cornwall, and Devon all suffered butchery and pillage. The raiders came, they burned, they killed, and they sailed away before anyone could stop them.

In 991 a large Danish force landed on Northey Island, a tidal island in the Blackwater estuary in Essex, near the town of Maldon. It is a bleak, flat place even now, surrounded by salt marsh and mudflats, the kind of landscape where the wind never stops and the sky is enormous. A narrow causeway, submerged at high tide, connects the island to the mainland. Facing the Danes from the southern bank stood an English army led by Byrhtnoth, the ealdorman – the local lord of Essex, a tall, white-haired warrior who had served England his entire life.

The Vikings called across the water. They offered the usual bargain. Pay us silver, they said, and we will go away. Buy off this storm of spears before we share the bitter war.

Byrhtnoth’s reply was magnificent. He told the invaders that the English would give them spears and swords, not silver. He told them that an earl stood here, not a coward, with men who would defend their homeland, their prince’s people and fields. The heathen would fall in battle.

And then Byrhtnoth made a terrible mistake. The causeway was flooded, and the Vikings could not cross. All he had to do was wait. But as the tide went out and the path appeared, glistening with mud and seaweed, Byrhtnoth, in a gesture of warrior honour that belonged to an older, simpler age, allowed the Danes to cross and form up on the southern bank so that the battle could be fairly fought.

It was a catastrophe. The English were overwhelmed. Byrhtnoth was killed. Many of his men fled. A small group of his thanes – noblemen, knowing that all was lost, fought on around their lord’s body until every one of them was dead. An Old English poem, ‘The Battle of Maldon,’ preserves their last stand, and it is one of the most moving pieces of writing to survive from this period. But courage and poetry could not save England from what came next.

King Ethelred’s answer to the crisis was money.

In 991 he paid the Vikings ten thousand pounds of silver to go away. They went. They came back. In 994 he paid sixteen thousand pounds. In 1002, twenty-four thousand. Each payment bought a shorter peace than the last. Each time the Vikings returned hungrier and bolder, because they had learned that England would always pay.

The money had to come from somewhere, and it came from the people. The Danegeld, as the tax was called, was wrung from a country that was already bleeding. Farmers, merchants, monks, ordinary families who had nothing to do with the wars of kings, all of them were stripped of whatever they had to fill the purses of men who would only come back for more.

And then Ethelred did something worse than paying. In 1002, on St Brice’s Day, the thirteenth of November, he ordered the killing of every Dane living in the south of England. Not enemy soldiers. Settlers. Families. People who had lived on English soil for a generation or more, who farmed English land, married English men and women, and lived in peace. The massacre was carried out. Among the dead was Gunnhild, the sister of Sweyn, the King of Denmark.

Sweyn swore revenge. For two years his armies ravaged the country, sacking Exeter, Wilton, Norwich, and Thetford. Only famine drove them away, and only for a season. They came back. By 1006, Sweyn was ravaging Kent, burning Reading and Wallingford. Ethelred paid again, this time thirty-six thousand pounds of silver, the equivalent of three or four years of national income, for another truce that would not hold.

In their desperation the English built a fleet. Poor, broken, starving people who had been pillaged to the bone somehow found the strength to construct an immense number of ships, and the new fleet was assembled at Sandwich in 1009. Then the commanders quarrelled. Some ships were sunk in the fighting between the English themselves. Others were lost in a storm. The rest were abandoned. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the moment with quiet fury: ‘And then afterwards the people who were in the ships brought them to London, and they let the whole nation’s toil thus lightly pass away.’

The last recorded Danegeld payment, in 1012, was forty-eight thousand pounds of silver. To enforce its collection, the Vikings sacked Canterbury and took the Archbishop, Alphege, hostage. When Alphege refused to allow his people to be squeezed for his ransom, the Danes killed him at Greenwich, pelting him with bones and ox heads at a drunken feast before one of them struck him down with an axe.

In 1013 Sweyn came again, this time with his youngest son, a prince named Canute. The Yorkshire Danes submitted at once. The Five Boroughs of the Danelaw followed. Oxford and Winchester were sacked. London held out for a time, but it was no use. Sweyn was proclaimed King of England, and Ethelred fled across the Channel to Normandy, whose duke’s sister he had married.

Sweyn died suddenly at the beginning of 1014, and the English, with nowhere else to turn, sent for Ethelred, declaring that no lord was dearer to them than their natural lord, if only he would rule them better than he had done before.

He did not.

But at this darkest moment, one last flame of Alfred’s bloodline rose. Ethelred’s son Edmund, still barely twenty, took matters into his own hands. Though his father declared him a rebel and refused to support him, Edmund gathered forces and struck back. He won battle after battle. He relieved London when Canute’s army had it under siege. He fought with such ferocity and such stubborn, reckless courage that men who had given up all hope began to believe again. New forces sprang from the ruined land. When Ethelred finally died, worn out and useless to the last, Edmund was acclaimed king by the people of London. They called him Edmund Ironside, and for a few blazing months it seemed as though the spirit of King Alfred the Great had returned.

He was strong enough to force a partition of the kingdom, dividing England with the young Danish prince Canute. He was gathering his strength for the next round of the struggle when, in 1016, at the age of twenty-two, Edmund Ironside died. Some said he was murdered, but no one knows for certain.

With him died the last hope of the Saxon line.

The lords of England, gathered at Southampton, agreed to abandon the descendants of Ethelred for ever and recognise Canute as King. The last sons of the house of Wessex fled into exile. The people submitted. The long resistance, which had begun with King Alfred standing in the marshes a hundred and forty years before, was over.

Everything King Alfred had built survived, the shires, the courts, the coinage, the written language, the idea of England itself. These things were too deep in the soil to be uprooted, even by conquest. But the royal house that had built them, the warrior dynasty that had beaten the first Vikings and forged a kingdom from a patchwork of squabbling tribes, was finished. Its last prince lay dead at twenty-two. His surviving children were scattered across Europe, living on the charity of foreign courts.

England itself though endured. It had a name, a language, a law, and a shape on the map that no invasion could undo. But the men who created it were gone. And across the narrow sea, in a hard, well-organised duchy on the coast of France, a young duke was growing up who would one day claim that everything they had built belonged to him. He would go on to become William the Conqueror, but that was still decades away.

In the year 878, after seven years of war against the Vikings, King Alfred of Wessex had won his great victory at the Battle of Edington. The Viking army, starving and desperate behind the walls of Chippenham, had surrendered. Their war-leader Guthrum had knelt in a small Saxon church at Aller, in the Somerset marshes, and received Christian baptism, with Alfred standing as his godfather.

A treaty followed. By 886, after Alfred had recovered London, a formal agreement had been drawn up between Alfred and Guthrum. A line was drawn across the country, running up the Thames, up the river Lea, and then straight to Bedford and beyond, dividing the island between the English and the Vikings. Everything to the east and north of that line became the Danelaw, where Viking customs and Viking law prevailed. Everything to the south and west remained English.

It was not a perfect peace. There would be more fighting in the years to come. But for the first time since the Vikings had arrived in England, the two peoples who had spent a generation trying to destroy each other, had agreed to live side by side. And in the terms of the treaty, something new had appeared. The treaty document between Alfred and Guthrum does not speak of Wessex, or of the West Saxons. It speaks of the English. Alfred was no longer just the King of Wessex. He was becoming the king of a new English nation.

And now he turned his attention to something much harder than fighting – building.

It is easy enough to admire a king who wins battles. King Alfred had done that, against terrible odds, and the story of Edington and the marshes would be told for a thousand years. But what King Alfred did in the years after his great victory was, in many ways, more remarkable than anything he did on the battlefield. He looked at his battered, exhausted kingdom and asked a question that very few warrior-kings have ever thought to ask.

Why did I nearly lose?

The answer, when he found it, was not about courage, the Saxons had plenty of that. It was not about loyalty, or faith, or the willingness to fight. It was about organisation. The Vikings had been able to ravage through England because the English had no permanent defences, no standing army, and no way to respond quickly when an attack came. Every time the enemy appeared, the king had to send out messengers, wait for farmers to leave their fields, gather a militia, march it to the right place, and hope to arrive before the damage was done. And every time the militia had served its forty days, the men went home to tend their crops, and the country was undefended again.

King Alfred set about fixing this with the methodical intelligence of a man who understood problems and was good at solving them.

The first thing he changed was the fyrd.

The fyrd was an old system, and it was simple. Under the fyrd, when the king called, every freeman of fighting age was expected to come, bringing his own weapons and supplies. He served for a set period, usually around forty days, and then he went home. The fyrd was a citizen army, not a professional one, and it worked well enough in peacetime or for short campaigns.

Against the Vikings however, the fyrd had been a disaster.

The Vikings were professional soldiers. They did not go home after forty days. They stayed in the field for months, even years, moving fast, striking without warning, and waiting for the Saxon militia to give up and disperse before attacking again.

King Alfred’s solution was elegant. He divided the fyrd into two halves. While one half served, the other half stayed home and worked the land. When the first half’s time was up, the second half took over. This meant that there was always a force in the field, always men under arms, and always someone tending the crops so that the fighting men had food to eat. It sounds obvious now, but at the time, it was revolutionary. No English king had ever attempted it until King Alfred did.

The fyrd armies were smaller, but they were reliable. King Alfred no longer had to gamble everything on a single muster that might melt away after a few weeks. He had created something closer to a standing defence, a force that could match the Vikings’ endurance without starving the country that supported it.

But an army, however well organised, needs somewhere to stand – to live, when not fighting. King Alfred’s second great reform was the building of the burhs.

A burh was a fortified town. Not a castle, not a military camp, but a walled settlement where ordinary people lived and worked, protected by ditches, earth ramparts, and timber palisades. King Alfred planned a chain of these burhs running down the Channel coast, across to the Severn estuary, and back along the Thames valley, so that no part of southern England was more than a day’s march from a defended position.

Each burh was assigned a contributory district, a surrounding area of countryside whose people were responsible for manning the walls and keeping the fortifications in repair. The system was laid out in a remarkable document called the Burghal Hidage, which lists every burh and specifies exactly how many men were needed to defend it, calculated by the length of its walls. It is the kind of detailed, practical planning that most medieval kings had never attempted before. King Alfred did not just build defendable towns, he built a system to ensure it could be maintained and work.

The burhs changed the nature of the war. Before King Alfred, a Viking raiding party could land on the coast, ride inland, burn and plunder, and be gone before any organised defence could reach them. Now they faced a landscape studded with fortified positions, each one garrisoned and ready. A raiding party that rode past a burh risked being cut off from behind. A Viking army that tried to besiege one would find itself pinned down while the fyrd gathered to attack from neighbouring burhs.

Burhs were not glamorous, the age of beautiful stone castles was still hundreds of years away, but they worked. Building them was slow, patient, expensive work of digging ditches, raising embankments, cutting timber, and convincing local communities to maintain defences that they hoped would never be needed. It was the work of a builder, not a warrior. And it saved England.

King Alfred also looked to the sea. The Vikings’ greatest advantage had always been their ships. They could appear anywhere on the coast, strike, and vanish before a land army could respond. If England was to be safe, it needed ships of its own.

The king designed new vessels. The Saxon Chronicle describes them in some detail: long-ships that were well-nigh twice as long as the Viking vessels, some with sixty oars or more. They were both swifter and steadier and higher than the Viking ships. King Alfred did not simply copy the enemy’s design. He studied it, thought about what made the longships effective, and tried to improve on them.

It was a bold experiment, and like many bold experiments, it did not go entirely to plan. The big ships were difficult for their inexperienced crews to handle. In one early battle, when nine English ships engaged six Viking vessels, several of King Alfred’s fleet ran aground. The Chronicle records that only two enemy ships were captured, and the crews were executed by hanging at Winchester.

It was not yet the Royal Navy. But it was the beginning of the idea that a navy would define England’s future for a thousand years: that an island must command the sea around it to be safe.

With the fyrd reorganised, the burhs built, and the first English fleet at sea, King Alfred turned to the thing that perhaps mattered most to him. The law.

His Book of Laws, known as King Alfred’s Dooms, was not an entirely new creation. King Alfred was too careful, too respectful of what had come before, to sweep away centuries of custom. Instead he gathered the existing laws of Kent, Wessex, and Mercia and wove them together with Christian teaching and the old Germanic customs that still governed everyday Saxon life. He took the code of Moses from the Bible and blended it with the practical traditions of the people he ruled.

At the heart of his code was a principle that he adapted from the Gospels. The Golden Rule says, ‘Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you.’ King Alfred turned it around. His version was more cautious, more realistic, more suited to a world where people could not always be trusted to be good: ‘What ye will that other men should not do to you, that do ye not to other men.’

Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself.

It is the same idea, but from the other direction. Instead of asking people to be generous, it asks them not to be cruel. And King Alfred added an instruction for judges: put yourself in the other person’s place, and consider what judgement would satisfy you, if you were the one seeking justice.

In the preamble to his new laws, King Alfred wrote something even more remarkable. He explained, modestly, that he had not dared to set down too many laws of his own, ‘for I cannot tell what will meet with the approval of our successors.’ A king who had defeated the greatest military power in northern Europe, who had saved his country from conquest, who had every right to impose his will on anyone, chose instead to say: I do not know what future generations will want. I will leave room for them.

The laws of King Alfred, continually added to by his successors, grew over the following centuries into the body of customary law that became the foundation of English Common Law, the legal tradition that still governs not only England but much of the world.

King Alfred cared about the law because he cared about fairness and justice and learning. A kingdom without educated people could not be justly governed, because the men who administered the law and ran the churches could not read the books that told them how to do it.

The state of learning in England at the time appalled him. King Alfred wrote a letter to the Bishop of Worcester that has been preserved, and its words are worth reading because that letter tell us more about King Alfred the man than almost anything else he wrote.

King Alfred recalled how there had once been wise men throughout England, in both the Church and ordinary daily life, and how kings had obeyed God while keeping peace and enlarging their territory. He remembered how foreigners had once come to England to seek wisdom and instruction. He said with sadness, that learning had fallen away so badly that there were very few men left who could understand their service books in English, or even translate a letter from Latin.

King Alfred understood that a country which cannot read its own laws, its own history, and its own prayers is a country in danger of losing itself. The Vikings had burned the monasteries where learning lived. The books had been destroyed, and the teachers killed. A whole generation had grown up without the knowledge that had once made England one of the most learned kingdoms in Europe.

King Alfred set about restoring that learning. He invited scholars from across the kingdom, from Wales, and from the Continent. He established schools. He translated books from Latin into English himself, working through them slowly and carefully, so that ordinary people who could not read Latin might be able to read them.

And he did something else, something that would prove more lasting than any fortress or fleet of ships. He commissioned the writing of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a year-by-year record of events in England, beginning with the coming of the Romans and continuing through his own reign and beyond. It was kept up by monks in various monasteries for more than two centuries after King Alfred’s death, and it remains one of the most important historical documents in the English language. Without it, we would know almost nothing of this period. King Alfred did not just make history. He made sure it was written down.

All of these reforms were tested in 892, when the Vikings came again.

This time the invasion was enormous. Two hundred and fifty ships appeared off the Kent coast, carrying a great Viking army that had spent years ravaging France. They had besieged Paris itself, battered at its walls for more than a year, and failed to take it. Beaten on the Continent, hungry and restless, they turned once more to England.

They were followed by a second fleet of eighty ships under a war-leader called Hæsten, who sailed up the Thames and fortified himself on the southern bank at Milton, near Sittingbourne. Kent was caught between two Viking forces, attacked from the north and south at once.

But England in 892 was not the England of 878. The burhs held. The reorganised fyrd could keep men in the field for months without the army melting away. King Alfred’s son Edward, still in his early twenties, proved himself a formidable commander. His son-in-law Ethelred of Mercia fought alongside him. The old king, worn down by illness, was not always at the head of the armies now, but his system held, and the young leaders he had raised struck hard.

At Benfleet, on the Thames below London, King Alfred’s forces stormed the Viking camp, captured Hæsten’s wife and his two sons, and burned every ship they could not carry away. When a railway was being built a thousand years later, workmen found charred ship timbers and skeletons in the earth.

And then King Alfred did something that baffled his own people. He sent Hæsten’s wife and sons back.

The wife he returned on simple grounds of humanity. The two boys he returned because they had been baptised as Christians. King Alfred was godfather to one of them, Ethelred of Mercia, to the other. They were Christian brothers, and King Alfred would not punish children for their father’s war.

His people were furious. The kingdom was fighting for its survival against brutal raiders, and the king was sending hostages home out of mercy. It made no sense to them. But this single act, above all others, is the reason why King Alfred is now called ‘the Great.’ Not from his battles, his laws, the ships or the burhs, but because of mercy.

The war ground on for four more years, but the Vikings could not break through. In 896 it ended. The great army dispersed, some settling in the Danelaw, some drifting back to France. The Chronicle, summing up years of desperate fighting in a single weary sentence, declared that by God’s mercy the Viking army had not afflicted the English people too greatly.

King Alfred died in 899. He was about fifty years old, which was old for a man who had spent his life at war and had suffered from painful illness since his youth. He was buried at Winchester, the capital of Wessex, in the Old Minster. Later his body was moved to the New Minster, and later still to Hyde Abbey, just outside the city walls. By the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, six hundred years after his death, the exact location of his remains had been lost. A single bone fragment, found during excavations in 2014, may belong to King Alfred or to his son Edward, but no one can say for certain. The greatest English king lies in an unmarked and unknown grave.

King Alfred left behind a kingdom that had been transformed. When he became king at twenty-two, Wessex was the last Saxon kingdom standing, battered, isolated, and on the edge of destruction. When he died, England south of the Humber was united, defended, and governed by law. The fyrd could be called and kept in the field. The burhs guarded the coasts and the river valleys. Ships patrolled the Channel. The laws were written down.

He left behind a son, Edward, who would carry the work forward with the same energy and skill. And he left behind a daughter, Æthelflæd, who would become the Lady of the Mercians and prove herself one of the most remarkable leaders of the age, conquering Leicester and receiving offers of submission from as far north as York.

But perhaps the most lasting thing King Alfred left behind was the idea that a king’s job was not just to fight, but to build. Not just to win battles but to make laws, teach children, write books, design ships, plan towns, and think carefully about what kind of country his people deserved to live in.

He was not called ‘the Great’ in his own lifetime. That title came later, when people looked back and tried to find a word large enough to contain everything King Alfred had done. He is the only English monarch ever to receive it.

The boy who had visited Rome, the young prince who had charged like a wild boar at Ashdown, the fugitive king who had burned the cakes in a cowherd’s cottage, the commander who had stepped out of the marshes to rally his people at Egbert’s Stone, had become something more than a warrior or a survivor. He had become a builder, and the things he built, the laws, the defences, the learning, the very idea of England itself, outlasted everything the Vikings ever destroyed.

It had been continuously raining for months.

The rain fell on the marshes of Somerset in great grey curtains, hammering the shallow water, drumming on the dead reeds, turning the world into a flat, drowned wilderness where land and water were no longer two separate things. There were no roads here, no villages, no church towers on the horizon. Just water and mud and the low black shapes of alder trees standing in the flood like sentries who had forgotten what they were guarding.

Somewhere in this desolation, in the early weeks of 878, a small group of men moved through the wetland, knee-deep in freezing water, carrying what little they had on their backs. They were exhausted, miserable and hungry. Some of them were wounded, and they had been walking for days, sleeping where they could, and eating what they could find or steal.

At the centre of the group was a man of about twenty-eight. He was not tall, not especially strong, and he had been ill on and off for most of his adult life with a painful condition that could strike him at any moment. He was the King of Wessex, the last Saxon kingdom left standing, and at this moment he was the most hunted man in England.

His name was Alfred.

To understand how a king came to be wading through a swamp with a handful of followers, hiding from an enemy that had conquered almost everything, we need to go back seven years.

Alfred had never expected to be king. He was the youngest of four brothers, the fifth son of King Ethelwulf of Wessex, and in the ordinary way of things the crown would have passed through all of his elder brothers before it ever reached him. But these were not ordinary times. The Great Heathen Army, which had landed in East Anglia in 865, had torn through one Saxon kingdom after another, and the fighting had killed Alfred’s brothers one by one.

His eldest brother, Ethelbald, had already died before the full attack came. His brother Ethelbert ruled briefly and died. His brother Ethelred became king in 866, just as the Viking army was ravaging the north, and Alfred rode at his side as his second-in-command.

They were different men. Ethelred was deeply devout, a king who believed that faith and prayer were the weapons that would defeat the heathens. Alfred believed in God too, but he placed his trust in policy and arms. He was practical, clear-eyed, and willing to act outside his Christian faith.

In January 871, the two brothers faced the Viking army on the Berkshire Downs, at a place called Ashdown. The Vikings had fortified themselves at Reading and were moving westward into the heart of Wessex. Both armies divided their forces into two commands, and the two sides advanced towards each other across the chalk hills.

The Vikings came up the slope with their brightly painted shields and golden arm-rings, clashing their weapons and raising long, defiant war-cries. They looked fierce and amazing. In comparison, the West Saxons, looked plain and weak.

Meanwhile, Ethelred was in his tent, praying. He had been praying for some time.

The two armies were closing in, and King Ethelred’s commanders sent urgent messages. The battle was about to begin, and the King must come. Ethelred replied that he had not finished his prayers. God came first.

Alfred, commanding the other half of the army, watched the Vikings getting closer and made his decision. He could not wait any longer. According to Bishop Asser, who had the account from people who were there, Alfred charged forward like a wild boar and led his men into the Viking lines before his brother arrived on the battlefield.

The fighting raged for hours around a single stunted thorn tree that stood alone on the hilltop. Asser saw the tree himself years later, and noted its position. The two sides hacked at each other with sword and axe, the Saxons pushing uphill, the Vikings holding the higher ground. When Ethelred finally arrived, his prayers completed, the battle intensified further.

At last the Vikings broke. They fled back towards Reading, and the Saxons pursued them through the night, right across the Berkshire hills. Among the dead, they found a Viking king and five of his earls.

It was the very first time the invaders had been beaten in open battle, and Alfred had proved that the Saxons could stand against the Vikings and win. But it was not enough.

All through 871, the fighting went on. Battle after battle, month after month. The Vikings were reinforced from overseas, fresh warriors arriving hungry for land and silver. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records seven or eight engagements that year, and the Vikings won the battle more often than not. At Wilton, barely a month after Alfred became king following Ethelred’s death from illness, the Saxons were defeated in the heart of their own country, tricked by the Vikings’ favourite tactic of a feigned retreat.

Alfred was barely twenty-two years old, newly crowned, and already losing.

He did something that must have been agonising for a proud man. He made peace with the Vikings and paid them to leave. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records it with blunt brevity: the Saxons made peace with the heathen on the condition that they should depart, and this they did. But they took three or four months before leaving, waiting for the money to be counted and handed over.

It was not a victory. It was a purchase of time. Alfred had bought five years, and he used every one of them.

During those five years of uneasy peace, the shape of England changed.

The Vikings who had come to raid were now settling. The warriors of one decade became the farmers and landowners of the next. They divided the conquered land among themselves, built fortified towns across the east and the Midlands, and planted themselves deeply in the English soil. The whole eastern half of England, from the Humber to the Thames, became Viking territory, and the people who lived there learned to live under Viking law.

The old kingdoms were gone. Northumbria, which had once stood at the forefront of European learning and culture, was broken. East Anglia had been conquered and its king martyred. Mercia, the great kingdom of the Midlands, had been reduced to a puppet state, with its king doing as he was told.

Only Wessex remained.

Alfred used the five year breathing space to strengthen what he had. He studied the problem of defence with the careful, practical intelligence that would mark everything he did. The old system of the fyrd, the part-time militia of farmers who served for forty days and then went home, had been proved hopelessly inadequate against a professional enemy that never went home . Something had to change.

But the full scale of Alfred’s reforms would come later. For now, the truce held, the Vikings farmed their new lands, and Alfred watched and waited.

Then, in the last months of 877, a new Viking war-leader named Guthrum brought his army to the borders of Wessex. He had been probing Alfred’s defences for two years, and what followed was a campaign of treachery and broken oaths that pushed Alfred to the very edge.

First, Guthrum occupied Wareham, close to Portland Bill on the Dorset coast, where a sea army joined him in Poole Harbour. Alfred hemmed in the land army and offered terms. The Vikings took his gold, swore peace on their most sacred object, the Holy Ring, and promised to depart.

Then, in the middle of the night, they broke every oath and rode for Exeter.

Alfred, gave chase, but arrived too late. The Vikings had locked themselves inside a fortress and could not be reached. But a storm smashed the Viking fleet as it tried to round the coast to join them. A hundred and twenty ships were wrecked near Swanage, and perhaps five thousand men were drowned. Guthrum, trapped in Exeter without his fleet, agreed to another peace, this time with oaths of still greater solemnity.

He kept the peace for five months.

In January 878, in the dead of winter, Guthrum struck.

Alfred’s court was at Chippenham in Wiltshire. It was Twelfth Night, the feast of Epiphany, and the Saxons were celebrating. Whether they were feasting, or praying, or simply exhausted after the long months of tension, they were not ready for what came next.

The Viking army attacked Chippenham without warning. The army of Wessex, the only force left in England that could resist the Vikings, was shattered in a single night. Men were killed where they stood. Others fled to their homes. Some abandoned the country altogether, crossing the sea to seek refuge at the court of France.

Alfred, with a handful of his closest men, escaped into the countryside.

This was the lowest point. The kingdom that had held out for seven years against the Vikings was broken. The Vikings controlled Wessex. Alfred was a fugitive in his own land, moving through forests and marshlands with no army, no fortress, and no certainty that anyone would follow him again. He had nothing.

He made his way to the Somerset Levels, the great expanse of waterlogged marshland that stretched between the Quantock Hills and the Mendips. In the middle of this wilderness, barely rising above the flood, lay a small patch of higher ground called Athelney, the Isle of Athelney, surrounded by impassable bogs of alder and willow.

Here Alfred hid.

For several months, through the worst of winter and into the early spring, the King of Wessex lived as an outlaw. He and his small band survived on whatever they could find or take, hunting in the marshes, raiding Viking supply lines, stealing from anyone, Viking or English, who had submitted to the enemy. Bishop Asser, who knew Alfred and wrote his life, described it plainly: the king led an unquiet life in great tribulation, for he had nothing except what he could seize, either by stealth or by force, from both the heathen and the Christians who had submitted to their rule.

It is from this desperate time that the most famous story about Alfred comes. The tale first appears in a later edition of Asser’s biography, and it has been told and retold for over a thousand years.

The story goes that Alfred, wandering in disguise, took shelter in the cottage of a cowherd. The cowherd’s wife, not knowing who he was, left him by the fire and asked him to watch her bread while she was busy elsewhere. Alfred, deep in thought about his kingdom and his plans, his mind far away from the cottage and the hearth, forgot the bread entirely. When the woman returned she found it burning, and she scolded him furiously.

The words she used, recorded in the original account in Latin verse of all things, were sharp and practical: why have you not turned the bread when you see it burning, especially as you are so fond of eating it hot?

She did not know she was shouting at the King of England.

Nobody knows whether the story is true. It may be a folktale that attached itself to Alfred because he was the kind of king around whom stories gathered. But true or not, it has lasted because it tells a deeper truth. Here was a king so reduced, so stripped of everything, that an ordinary woman could shout at him for burning bread, and he could do nothing but sit there and take it. The distance between the throne at Chippenham and the hearthside at Athelney was the distance between a kingdom and a cooking fire.

But Alfred was not finished. Even in hiding, he kept contact with his people, sending messengers through the marshes to the men of the western shires. He was planning.

While Alfred waited, the Vikings suffered a serious blow in Devon. Twenty-three shiploads of Vikings, having raided the Welsh coast, sailed east and attacked a Saxon stronghold on Exmoor. The garrison was outnumbered and the Vikings expected an easy victory. They laid siege to the place, confident that hunger and thirst would force a surrender.

Instead, the defenders came out at dawn and charged downhill into the Viking lines. They killed the Viking commander and most of his men. Eight hundred Vikings fell. Among the spoils was a banner called the Raven, said to have been woven in a single day by the three daughters of Ragnar Lodbrok. It was believed that the raven embroidered on it would flutter its wings before a Viking victory. On this day, the raven hung limp and still.

The news reached Athelney. Alfred must have felt a surge of hope, but he could not act on hope alone. He needed an army, and for that he needed the men of the western shires to believe he was alive, to believe he could still lead them, and to leave their farms and families and come.

Towards the end of May, Alfred sent out the call. The fyrd , the militia, was summoned. Come to Egbert’s Stone, near Selwood, where the borders of Somerset, Wiltshire, and Hampshire meet.

They came.

The men of Somerset came. The men of Wiltshire came. The men of Hampshire came. They came out of the fields and the villages and the forest clearings, carrying their spears and their shields and whatever weapons they had, and when they saw Alfred, alive and standing before them, the Chronicle tells us they received him as one risen from the dead, and they were filled with great joy.

It is one of the great moments in English history. A king given up for lost, stepping out of the marshes to rally his people for one final battle. Alfred had no certainty that he would win. He knew only that if he did not fight now, while the will to fight still held, the men would drift back to their farms and the chance would be gone.

He marched at once. The Vikings were still at Chippenham, resting on their plunder, and Alfred led his army to Edington, on the edge of the Wiltshire downs, where the two forces met on the bare, open hillside.

Everything depended on this battle. If the Saxons lost, there was nowhere left to fall back to. There would be no more retreats to the marshes, no more truces bought with gold. If Wessex fell, the last Christian Saxon kingdom in England would be gone.

Both armies dismounted. The horses were sent to the rear. The shield walls were formed, two long lines of men with their shields overlapping, packed so close together that they could feel the heat and the breath of the men on either side. And then they walked forward into each other.

The fighting lasted hours. It was the brutal, grinding, exhausting work of the shield wall, pushing, stabbing, hacking with sword and axe, each side trying to break through the other’s line, each side holding, stepping over the fallen, pressing forward into the terrible noise and stink of close combat. The Vikings had not lost the favour of battle in years. The Saxons had everything to lose and nothing behind them but empty country.

Finally, the Vikings broke.

They fled from the battle field, pursued by the Saxons, all the way back to their camp at Chippenham, where they locked themselves behind their walls. Alfred followed and surrounded them. For fourteen days he held them there, and this time there was no escape. No fleet would come. No reinforcements would arrive. The Vikings were starving, freezing, and, as Asser says, full of despair.

Guthrum sued for peace. He offered hostages, as many as Alfred wanted, and promised to leave Wessex immediately. It was the complete surrender of the most powerful Viking army in England.

But Alfred did not do what most men would have done. He did not slaughter the Vikings. He did not even humiliate them. Instead he did something extraordinary.

He invited Guthrum to be baptised.

Three weeks after the surrender, Guthrum and thirty of his leading warriors came to Alfred’s camp at Aller, near Athelney, the very marshes where Alfred had hidden as a fugitive. There, in a small Saxon church, the Viking warlord knelt and received the waters of Christian baptism. Alfred stood as his godfather. He lifted Guthrum from the font, called him his son, and gave him a new Christian name, Athelstan.

For twelve days, Alfred entertained Guthrum and his men. He gave them costly gifts. He treated them not as defeated enemies but as new brothers in the faith.

It was an act of extraordinary imagination. Alfred had Guthrum entirely in his power. He could have starved the Vikings into total submission and executed their leaders. Many of his own people, who had suffered years of burning and killing and plundering at Viking hands, must have wanted exactly that. But Alfred understood something that few leaders in any age have grasped: that a defeated enemy who is destroyed simply creates a space for the next enemy, while a defeated enemy who is brought into the fold may become a lasting neighbour.

Alfred did not try to drive the Vikings out of England. He accepted that they were there to stay. What he wanted was peace, a real and lasting division of the island between the two peoples, with agreed borders, agreed laws, and a shared faith. The conversion of Guthrum was not a humiliation. It was an invitation, and a handshake, and a promise.

In 886, after Alfred had recovered London, a formal treaty was drawn up between them. On Alfred’s side, the document names the counsellors of the English nation. On Guthrum’s side, it speaks of the people who dwell in East Anglia. A line was drawn across the country, running up the Thames, up the river Lea, and then straight to Bedford and beyond by the Ouse to Watling Street. Everything to the east and north of that line became the Danelaw, where Danish customs and Danish law prevailed. Everything to the south and west remained English.

It was not a perfect peace. There would be more fighting in the years to come, more raids, more broken promises. But the treaty of 886 was the foundation on which everything that followed was built. Two peoples, who had spent a generation trying to destroy each other, agreed to live side by side.

And in the terms of that treaty, something new had appeared. For the first time, the document does not speak of Wessex, or of the West Saxons. It speaks of the English. Alfred was no longer just the King of Wessex. He was becoming something larger, something that had not existed before.

He was becoming the king of the new English nation.

One summer day in the year 789, three ships appeared off the coast of Dorset.

They came from the north, from a place called Hordaland on the western coast of Norway, and they were unlike any vessels the people on shore had ever seen. Long and low, with high carved prows and rows of painted shields along their sides, they slid through the water like dark, narrow fish.

A man named Beaduheard, the king’s reeve, a local official whose job was to greet foreign merchants and direct them to the royal town, rode down to the harbour at Portland with a few of his men. He assumed the strangers had come to trade. He spoke to them with the authority of his office and ordered them to accompany him to see the king.

They killed him and all his men there and then, and they returned to their boats and left.

No one in England knew it yet, but this small, violent encounter on a summer afternoon in Dorset was the beginning of something that would tear the country apart for the next two hundred and fifty years. It was the first recorded arrival of the people the English would come to call the Danes, or the Norsemen, or simply – the Vikings.

To understand why the Vikings came, you have to look north.

Far beyond Britain, across the cold grey waters of the North Sea, lay the lands of Scandinavia, the countries we now call Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. These were hard countries, much of them covered in forest, rock, and ice. The growing seasons were short and the winters were long and brutal. The people who lived there were tough, practical, and very good at building things, especially ships.

Nobody drove them out. Unlike the Saxons centuries before, who had come to Britain partly because other peoples were pressing on them from the east, the Scandinavians moved of their own accord. Their population was growing. There were too many sons and not enough land. The younger ones, the ones without an inheritance, looked outward, to the sea, to the horizon, and to whatever lay beyond it.

What lay beyond it, as they soon discovered, was a great deal of wealth, most of it sitting in churches and monasteries with no walls around them and no soldiers to guard them.

The Viking expansion was extraordinary in its reach. One group of raiders and settlers pushed south from Sweden into the heart of what is now Russia, sailing down the great rivers all the way to Constantinople, which is today the city of Istanbul in Turkey. Another group sailed from Norway into the Mediterranean, raiding the coasts of Spain and North Africa. A third group carried the Norsemen westward, to the Scottish islands, to Ireland, to Iceland, to Greenland, and eventually, five centuries before Columbus, to the coast of North America.

One of these groups travelled westward. They came to the British Isles and they fell upon it like ravenous wolves.

Four years after the killing of Beaduheard, the storm broke.

In June of year 793, four years after the killing of Beaduheard and his men, a fleet of Viking ships appeared without off the coast of Northumbria and landed on the island of Lindisfarne, Holy Island, one of the most sacred places in all of Christian England.

Lindisfarne was a monastery, founded over a hundred and fifty years earlier by the Irish monk Aidan, and it had become the spiritual heart of the north. It was the place where the great saint Cuthbert was buried, a place of pilgrimage and prayer, and it was rich. Over the decades, kings and nobles had given it treasures, gold crosses, jewelled reliquaries, fine metalwork, and beautifully illuminated manuscripts. The monks lived quietly, studying and praying, on a windswept island connected to the mainland only at low tide.

They had no weapons. They had no walls. They had no warning.

The Vikings sacked the place. They killed monks, threw others into the sea, and carried away everything of value, the gold, the jewels, the sacred vessels, along with any monks young and strong enough to be sold as slaves in the markets of Europe.

The news of the attack sent a wave of horror across Christendom. Alcuin, a scholar from Northumbria who was living at the court of Charlemagne, the great King of the Franks, whose empire stretched across most of western Europe, wrote home in anguish. In almost three hundred and fifty years, he said, nothing so terrible had ever happened in Britain. That the heathens could sail across the open sea and destroy a place as holy as Lindisfarne seemed impossible, monstrous, a sign of God’s anger.

The following year, the raiders returned and struck at nearby Jarrow. This time the local people fought back. The weather turned against the Vikings, many were killed, and their leader was captured and put to a cruel death. The survivors carried such a grim report back to Scandinavia that the English coasts were left in peace for nearly forty years.

But it was only a pause. The taste for raiding Britain had spread, and the profits were too good to abandon.

But the Vikings could not have attacked Britain (or much of Europe), without one extraordinary object – the longship.

Over many generations, the shipbuilders of Scandinavia had developed and perfected a vessel that was unlike anything else on the water. It was built to do two things superbly well: to cross the open ocean in the worst weather, and to sail up shallow rivers far inland where no deep-keeled vessel could follow.

We know a great deal about these ships because several have been dug up almost complete. The most famous was discovered in 1880 at a place called Gokstad, in Norway, buried in a great mound of earth as part of a chieftain’s funeral. It had lain there for nearly a thousand years, preserved in thick blue clay.

The Gokstad ship was about twenty-four metres long and five metres wide, roughly the length of a tennis court, but narrow and low in the water. She was built of oak, plank by plank, each one overlapping the next and fastened with iron rivets. The planks below the waterline were astonishingly thin, no more than two or three centimetres, which made the hull light and flexible. In heavy seas, the whole ship could bend and twist with the waves rather than fighting them. She had sixteen oars on each side and a single square sail of heavy wool, and she could carry a crew of around thirty-four, with their weapons, food, and supplies, for weeks at a time.

In 1893, a group of Norwegians built an exact copy of the Gokstad ship and sailed it across the Atlantic Ocean from Norway to America. It took them twenty-eight days. The captain reported that the ship moved through the water beautifully, and that even in storms the flexible hull rode the waves as though it were alive.

Imagine that ship approaching your coastline. A low, dark shape gliding out of the morning mist, the carved prow cutting the water without a sound, the rows of painted shields, black and yellow, alternating, catching the early light. Then another ship behind it. Then another. Then a dozens and then hundreds.

That is what the people of England saw, and feared, for year after year, throughout the ninth century.

For a long time, the Viking raids followed a pattern. The longships would appear in spring or summer, the warriors would attack a monastery or a coastal town, take everything of value, and sail home again before winter. It was piracy, brutal, efficient, and immensely profitable.

But as the decades passed, something changed. The raiders began to stay longer. They wintered on the English coast, fortifying their camps with ditches and ramparts, bringing their horses ashore and riding inland to strike at targets that had thought themselves safe. And eventually, behind the raiders, came their families. What had begun as plunder was becoming settlement. What had begun as theft was becoming conquest.

The English were poorly prepared for this kind of enemy. Their system of defence relied on the fyrd, a call-up of local men, who were expected to serve as soldiers for about forty days when summoned by their lord. These men fought bravely enough, but they were part-time warriors with fields to tend and families to feed. When their forty days were up, they went home, regardless of whether the enemy had been defeated. Against an enemy who never went home, who moved fast, who fortified their camps and fought with professional discipline, the fyrd was hopelessly outmatched.

The Vikings were also cunning. They used tricks and stratagems that the straightforward English were slow to counter. One favourite was the feigned retreat, falling back in apparent panic, drawing the English forward into broken ground, then turning and cutting them to pieces. On one famous occasion, a Viking leader besieging a town announced that he was dying and begged the local bishop to give him a Christian burial. The bishop, delighted at the thought of a deathbed conversion, agreed. But when the body of the ‘deceased’ was carried through the town gates for burial, the mourners threw off their cloaks. They were armed warriors, and the sack and slaughter began at once.

The Viking sagas are full of legendary figures, and none is more famous than Ragnar Lodbrok, Ragnar ‘Hairy-Breeches’, a semi-legendary Viking king of Denmark whose story weaves through the royal families of Scandinavia. He was a raider from his youth. In 845 he led a fleet up the river Seine and attacked Paris. Later he turned his attention to Northumbria, but here his luck ran out. According to Scandinavian tradition, he was captured by King Ella of Northumbria and thrown into a pit full of venomous snakes. As the serpents coiled around him, Ragnar sang his death-song to the end.

His final words, so the skalds tell us, were a warning: ‘The little pigs would grunt now if they knew how it fares with the old boar.’

Ragnar had sons, and the stories say each one received the news of his father’s death in a different way. One gripped his spear so hard that the print of his fingers remained on the shaft. Another was playing chess and clenched a pawn until blood started from under his nails. A third was trimming his nails with a knife and kept cutting until he reached the bone. But the fourth son was the one who mattered.

His name was Ivar. They called him Ivar the Boneless.

Whether the story of Ragnar’s death is true, and many historians doubt it, its consequences were terribly real. In the autumn of 865, a vast Viking army landed in East Anglia. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls it the Great Heathen Army, and it was led by Ivar and his brothers. This was not a raiding party. This was an invasion.

The Great Heathen Army was organised on the basis of ships’ companies, but once ashore the warriors seized every horse they could find and became a fast-moving mounted force. They did not fight from horseback – they used the horses for speed, riding hard across country and then dismounting to fight on foot. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the moment with quiet dread: ‘a great heathen army came to the land of the East Angles, and there was the army a-horse.’

Ivar was a commander of brilliance and ruthlessness. He did not simply raid. He planned, he manoeuvred, and he conquered.

The army moved north in the autumn of 866. They crossed the Humber and seized York, the ancient city that had once been the Roman fortress of Eboracum, and was now the capital of Northumbria. The Northumbrians had been fighting among themselves, squabbling between two rival kings, and the Vikings took the city with little resistance.

But in the spring of 867, the two Northumbrian kings put aside their quarrel and united in a desperate attempt to drive the invaders out. They attacked the city in March and at first broke through the walls. For a moment it seemed as though the counter-attack might succeed. But in the narrow streets the Northumbrians lost their advantage of numbers, and the experienced Viking warriors overwhelmed them. Both Northumbrian kings were killed in the slaughter.

That was the end of Northumbria as an independent kingdom. The north of England, the land that had produced Bede, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and the great stone crosses of Anglian art, sank back into darkness. The monasteries were destroyed, the scholars scattered, the libraries burned. A kingdom that had stood at the front of European learning and culture was broken in a single afternoon.

Ivar set up a puppet king in the ruins and moved south.

His next target was Mercia, the great kingdom of the Midlands, which for nearly a century had been the strongest power in England. Ivar brought his army before Nottingham and laid siege to it. The King of Mercia sent desperately for help, and help came, from Wessex. King Ethelred and his younger brother Alfred marched to Nottingham and offered to attack the Viking lines.

But the Mercians chose to negotiate instead of fight, and a treaty was agreed that left Ivar in possession of Nottingham. It was the beginning of the end for Mercia.

Ivar was a strategist who used politics as skilfully as he used his sword. In York and Ripon he had not harmed the churches – he understood that terror was a tool, but so was restraint. He was content to set up obedient puppet rulers in the kingdoms he conquered, draining their wealth and their strength without the expense of holding every field and village by force.

After breaking the treaty of Nottingham, Ivar turned on East Anglia and subjected its king, Edmund, to a dreadful martyrdom. Edmund was later made a saint, and the town where he was buried, Bury St Edmunds, still carries his name.

Then, suddenly, Ivar left England for ever. He returned to Ireland and to Dublin, a city the Vikings themselves had founded, laden with spoils and seemingly invincible. The Irish chronicles record that the king of the Norsemen of all Ireland and Britain died there in 873, struck down by a sudden and terrible disease.

But the army Ivar had built did not leave with him. It stayed, and it grew.

The Danish warriors who had come to raid now settled on the land they had taken. They fortified a chain of towns across the east and the Midlands, Stamford, Nottingham, Lincoln, Derby, Leicester, and these became the strongholds of a new power in England. The soldiers of one decade became the farmers and landowners of the next. They divided the conquered territory among themselves, carved out estates, and planted themselves deeply in the English soil.

One by one, the old Saxon kingdoms fell. Northumbria was gone. East Anglia was gone. Mercia was broken and obedient, its puppet king doing as he was told. The Danes controlled the entire eastern half of England, from the Humber to the Thames and beyond.

Only one kingdom remained. In the south and west, behind the forests and the downlands, Wessex still stood, battered, frightened, but unbroken. Its young king was a man who had already ridden to war at his brother’s side, who had already seen what the Vikings could do. He had watched the other old kingdoms fall, one after another, and he knew that Wessex was next.

His name was Alfred. And in the story of what happened next, the fate of England, the idea of England itself, would hang by a thread.