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Viking Wars – England, 1000-1066 – Don Hollway
204 Plays1 year ago
Ep 043 – Nonfiction. For England, the decades leading up to 1066 were defined by bloody wars in which Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, and Normans vied for supremacy. Don Hollway joins me to discuss his new book, “Battle for the Island Kingdom: England's Destiny 1000–1066.”
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Transcript
Viking and Norman Warfare Evolution
00:00:00
Speaker
the style of fighting in these days, the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons really fought the same kind of way, mostly on foot. They were not cavalrymen, they rode to battle, but they did not ride in battle. The standard formation was a shield wall, which was basically a big long line of guys with their shields up, standing behind it, and you just faced another shield wall.
00:00:23
Speaker
and you basically didn't even charge it. You just walked up to it and started pushing and tried to hack over the top of it into the guy behind it. And that was the way that they fought. The Normans, although they were descendants of Vikings, they had a different tradition. They were more horsemen. They had been on the continent, the southern part of the continent there, where France, where Attila the Hun, had come over. The horse soldiers off the east had been over there and sort of taught Western Europe horse fighting.
00:00:53
Speaker
King Charlemagne had a strong cavalry tradition because he formed that first Holy Roman Empire and needed to get on horseback to get to the far corners of it to do his fighting to defend his frontiers.
Meet Don Hallway: Historian and Fencer
00:01:17
Speaker
Hi everyone, this is AJ Woodham's host of the War Books Podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war-related topics. Today, I am extremely excited to have on the show Don Hallway for his new book, Battle for the Island Kingdom, England's Destiny, 1000-1066.
00:01:40
Speaker
Don is an author, illustrator, and historian. His critically acclaimed first book, The Last Viking, is a gripping history of King Harold Hardrada. He has published articles in History Magazine, Military Heritage, Renaissance Magazine, and many others. Don, how are you doing today?
00:01:58
Speaker
I am well. How are you? I'm excellent. I'm so glad to have you on the show. Thanks for asking me. I appreciate it. Yeah, and this book is right at my alley, so I'm very excited to talk about it. I do want to point out first, though, for everybody who's picked up a copy of this book and has not opened up to Don's bio,
00:02:19
Speaker
Um, it says, Don, you are a classic rapier fencer. I am. What got you into that? Cause I think this is a first for the war books podcast. Ah, well, you know, I, I have to say when I was a kid, I saw the three musketeers movies, the two from that was 73 and 74. I think they filmed them both at the same time, but released them separately. And these, uh, one of my
00:02:44
Speaker
Fencing instructor said that's one of the few three musketeers movies where it actually looks like the guys are trying to kill each other instead of just dancing and I was just so fascinated with that and Never knew where to go to learn more about it always wanted to try it
Unpacking Don's Book on Pre-1066 Conflicts
00:03:00
Speaker
And years ago, probably 10, 15 years ago now, I started modern fencing with a foil, like a radio antenna kind of. Okay. I'm glad you explained that because I actually know nothing about fencing. Yeah. Well, I did that for a couple of years, but then a rapier fencer, a rapier is the kind of sword that the musketeers use. It's a lot longer, a lot heavier, a lot stiffer.
00:03:26
Speaker
interest in that is gaining ground here lately in the West. And we had an instructor come in and, man, that was actually what I was gravitating towards the whole time. I mean, the foil is cool, but it's very stylized. You get out because you get a little tap that real life wouldn't hurt you, but you lose the point. Whereas you get hit with a rapier, you get hit.
00:03:54
Speaker
I don't imagine there were, there was any rapier fencing going on in the Viking era, which you write about the, the rapier evolved. The rapier was actually more of a civilian weapon in this, in the 17th century, when you saw them, there were still heavier swords on the battlefield.
00:04:13
Speaker
But the rapier was a civilian weapon. You didn't figure you were going to have to go through somebody's armor. This was if you bumped into a guy in a bar and you got into a scrap, you took him outside and you went at it.
00:04:25
Speaker
Wow. Well, yeah, maybe the Viking equivalent is taking some battle axes. I have found an instructor in battle axes waiting yet. Well, John, one of the questions that I like authors to start out by answering for the show is, first, in your own words, you just tell the audience, what is your book about?
00:04:52
Speaker
Well, there's a lot of books been written about 1066, the year of three battles, when the Vikings and the Normans invaded England and the Normans, actually, spoiler alert, the Normans conquered England in 1066. But there aren't that many books written about the decades leading up to that when the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons who lived in England at that time went back and forth and back and forth for 60 years
00:05:23
Speaker
just constant warfare to try and figure out who was going to run the place and the Vikings got a hold of it for a little while and then the Anglo-Saxons took it back over again
00:05:36
Speaker
And all this happened before the Normans ever showed up on the scene.
Viking History and England's Shifting Role
00:05:40
Speaker
And meanwhile, Duke William of Normandy, he was living a real vagabonds existence. I mean, the odds against him even living to adulthood were extremely high against it. And he led a pretty exciting lifestyle to the point where he conquered a dukedom and then turned around and conquered a kingdom. And I just thought, boy, nobody ever talks about this. I mean, the first article I ever wrote
00:06:05
Speaker
back in the 90s was about the battle of Hastings. And at that point, I knew very little about what had happened before that. Nobody ever talks about that. That's so interesting because I like to keep my thumb on the pulse of war books that are coming out or books about periods of conflict like you've written. And yours is actually the first that I've had in the show that deals with
00:06:30
Speaker
medieval or European, I don't know if you would call this, I guess we're on the cusp of medieval times here, but I find there aren't a lot of books being written about, not just this period in time, but this particular era in European history. Why do you think that is?
00:06:51
Speaker
Well, I think it's becoming more popular because of that television show Vikings and Vikings Valhalla. I think it is becoming more popular. Which we were talking about before we started recording. So I think it's a lot more popular now than it was even 10, 15 years ago. But I think if I'm to go out on a limb a little bit, it's a bigger world market now. And maybe England isn't as central to
00:07:20
Speaker
Western history or not seem to be as central to Western history as it was, you know, in Victorian times during the, you know, Victoria's empire when England was, you know, the world's great superpower. And then after World War I, when they sort of bled themselves white and after World War II, when they lost all their colonies, I think a lot of the worldwide market said, you know, not everything has to be about England or America, you know, and maybe they weren't so much interested in English history at that point.
00:07:49
Speaker
Yeah, and that's interesting that you bring that up because there is fiction that I feel like it's written about for this time a lot. A book that comes to my mind that was written a couple years ago is actually about this period that you talk about in your book. It's a book by an author named Ken Follett. Oh, I know Ken Follett, yeah. Yeah, he wrote a book called The Evening in the Morning, and I think it starts in the year
00:08:13
Speaker
999 in England and so I already knew a little bit about series a couple of books out he has that one about the building of a Cathedral I think there was another one takes place in the same place
00:08:32
Speaker
but like 100 years after or something like that. Yeah, his whole series is about this one town in medieval England. And he actually just came out with a new book, which I have up on my bookshelf, but I haven't read yet, which takes place not in medieval times, but in the 1700s. Anyway, what I'm getting at is, for some reason, it's been hard to find nonfiction books that cover this period of time so
00:09:00
Speaker
Glad you wrote it. I'm saying maybe I can capture the entire market. I think you got the market you're done. Your book is Battle for the Island Kingdom. You talked briefly about 1066, very famous Battle of Hastings, and that gets talked about a lot. This period right before,
00:09:25
Speaker
William the Conqueror comes to England.
Medieval Life and Warfare Realities
00:09:28
Speaker
Is there a war that we can say is going on? Would we call it the Viking Invasions? How do we categorize this period in history? Well, I pick it up at the very turn of the millennium, the year 1000.
00:09:42
Speaker
And at that point, the Vikings have been, the Anglo-Saxons have won, and the Vikings, now there are still a lot of Danes living in England, but they're English subjects. The Viking kings have been pushed out. The Danelaw doesn't exist anymore, which was the Danish half of England when the Vikings ruled it. But eventually the Anglo-Saxons pushed them out. Now there are still a lot of Danes in there, and in the north of England, and particularly where the Danelaw used to be,
00:10:13
Speaker
they're not Vikings anymore, but they're practically Vikings. I mean, they have still that mindset and everything. And that's actually where I start the book is with the St. Price's Day Massacre when King Ethelred decided that, you know, he had been fighting Vikings off and on for, you know, the long reign, I guess for probably 10 years, 15 years at this point and decided
00:10:41
Speaker
We're just going to eradicate the Danes in England. And if you when you read the book, some of the accounts are pretty violent. I mean, it makes you think of what's going on in the Middle East right now. It was no nothing nice about it. It was it was a slaughter. And I mean, they didn't just kill people. They killed them with extreme prejudice as they use the term.
00:11:02
Speaker
Yeah, and that was actually one of my questions I was going to ask you is there's a lot of different periods of time that I talk about on the show. This one seems particularly violent. How would you categorize the violence? I mean, what's the average life expectancy of just like your normal Anglo-Saxon in this time? And what do people feel about violence? Even the kings who had great diets, good living conditions,
00:11:31
Speaker
Harold Hadrada only made it to like 50 and Edward the Confessor I believe made it to 60 but you know the vast majority of people never made it half that far I mean there was just constant disease I make I make a point of the in the book of there they even had a term for it
00:11:50
Speaker
called Elfshot, which was, you know, they envisioned it as an invisible elf shot you with an arrow. It just stood for death by random chance. I mean, there was so much disease. If you got a wound and it got infected, you were as good as dead. The life expectancy was not good. Yeah. Well, take us on a tour of, we'll start in the year 1000. So you had just mentioned a little bit about the relationship between the Vikings and England as they
00:12:20
Speaker
Previous to the year 1000, they had invaded England, conquered it, but were pushed out by, I believe, Alfred, King Alfred, Alfred the Great. Alfred pushed them back. He wasn't ultimately there when they left, but he got it all started. He basically, the Anglo-Saxons problems where they hated each other, Mercia and Wessex, they had these different areas and they didn't like each other any more than they liked the Vikings. It was Alfred that really got them together and said, look,
00:12:48
Speaker
Set your differences aside. We're Anglo-Saxons. If you got to hate somebody, hate the Danes, then let's push them up. So he was the one who sort of got that started. And that was before your book takes place. And so your book is really kind of the second wave of Viking invasions. So I'm curious if just, if we're thinking about the year 1000, if you could just take us on maybe a tour of England and what was going, or not England, I'm sorry, of Europe and what was going on in Europe
00:13:18
Speaker
particularly in England, Northern France, and Denmark, where a lot of the story takes place. Politically, what's going on? Who is fighting who? What's the story in Europe at this point in history? Well, it all starts out, there are three separate kingdoms. England, all those, all the Mercia and Wessex, those are all earldoms, kind of like states in America, or I don't know, is it counties in England?
00:13:45
Speaker
But they're all united. England is one kingdom. Over in Normandy, Normandy is not France. It's just this little slice. If you look at the D-Day beaches for people who are familiar with World War II, that's Normandy. I mean, that's all there is of it. And that is just one piece in a bunch of different countries that exist then. Even France is not that big of a country. France itself is only basically centered around Paris at this point.
00:14:13
Speaker
And then when you get up to Denmark, Denmark and Norway have been on and off parts of a Viking kingdom up there. At one point the Danes were conquering the Norwegians and another point the Norwegians were conquering the Danes. And the great age of the Vikings, which has been going on since the 700s, is really coming to a close. The Vikings are actually doing more fighting against each other.
00:14:41
Speaker
And that only intensifies as the story as the decades go along. So everybody at the beginning of the story is, you know, minding their own business. But the Vikings have been coming over and sort of resuming raiding on England. You have the king's fine fork beard.
00:14:58
Speaker
And he is trying to step up the raids bring in some more money to to his to Denmark and part of one of his allies is Normandy he's been stealing stuff in England taking it across the channel and his dragonships and selling it in Norman Normandy Duke William hasn't been born yet King Ather red in England. He says well, you know, we cannot take these Vikings They are defeating us every time they come over here. We just can't stand against them
00:15:28
Speaker
But I can cut off their markets over here in Normandy. I'm going to teach those dirty Normans a lesson and they are not going to be taking any more Viking goods. So he launches a little raid into Normandy. The purpose, I don't know if it was just to punish the Normans. There was some some of the writers then said that the guys were supposed to actually capture the Duke of Normandy at that point. But that seems a little far fetched to me. I think they were just over there to basically
00:15:57
Speaker
be Vikings themselves against Normandy. Well, the Normans, the Normans were ex-Vikings. They were descendants of Vikings and pretty much dealt the Anglo-Saxons a big defeat right there at the beginning. And that's actually the first incidents in the book. And I say that the war between England and France, which really went on for like 800 years, if you count the hundred years war and the polyonic wars, to me, to my mind, really got started right there around the year one thousand one, one thousand two.
Anglo-French Conflicts Begin
00:16:28
Speaker
Yeah. Isn't that so interesting that, I mean, we're going to skip way ahead here, but England and France had been at war for like 800 years and then World War I comes around and all of a sudden they're on the same side. I always find that completely fascinating. Well, it's because they had a new common enemy in Germany. Sure. That tipped the balance of power. Yeah. Well, let's, coming back to the year 1000, what's warfare like at this time in history?
00:16:57
Speaker
Are there are there big armies fighting each other? What kinds of weapons are being used? What are some of the tactics? What's what's war like? You don't see too many mercenary armies. Nobody really has a standing army It's more or less like these guys are all farmers for the most part of the year Until the king sends the word around we're gonna go raiding or we're being raided
00:17:20
Speaker
Grab your swords and join me and we're going to have a war here or whatever. So not professional soldiers? No. Well, each one of the kings, the English kings and the Vikings had their house corals, which was their household guard. And those guys were paid soldiers.
00:17:39
Speaker
They were professional soldiers, but there weren't that many of them. They were kind of the elite. The style of fighting in these days, the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons really fought the same kind of way, mostly on foot. They were not cavalrymen. They rode to battle, but they did not ride in battle.
00:17:58
Speaker
The standard formation was a shield wall which was basically a big long line of guys with their shields up Standing behind it and you just faced another shield wall and you basically didn't even charge it you just walked up to it and started pushing and tried to hack over the top of it into the guy behind it and That was the way that they fought the Normans although they were descendants of Vikings. They had a different tradition They were more horsemen
00:18:26
Speaker
They had been on the continent, the southern part of the continent there, where France, where Attila the Hun, had come over. The horse soldiers off the east had been over there and sort of taught Western Europe horse-flighting. And King Charlemagne, he had a strong cavalry tradition because he formed that first Holy Roman Empire and needed
00:18:47
Speaker
to get on horseback to get to the far corners of it to do his fighting to defend his frontiers. So they kind of passed that on to the Normans. So the Normans had a different fighting style than either the Vikings or the English Saxons. Now, do you think, I mean, fast forwarding up to 1066, because obviously, you know, the Normans conquer England, do you think that gave them a pretty significant advantage over the Vikings and the English? Yeah, when you look at the Battle of Hastings, you look at that
00:19:17
Speaker
as a battle of cavalry against against the shield wall but the shield wall wasn't pervious to cavalry if you held it if you stayed in formation because you had all these shields and spears sticking out between them and horses will not throw themselves on a hedge of spears they're smart enough to do that they'll hit the brakes and the the guys in the shield wall what they're hoping for their ideal solution is for the guy on the horse to fly over its neck and land in front of them where they can kill him
00:19:47
Speaker
So a shield wall, if it remains intact, can hold off cavalry. Actually, King Harold, God Winston, found that out earlier in 1066 when he fought the Vikings at Stamford Bridge because they had a shield wall. And he, having spent some time in Normandy by this time, was trying out cavalry tactics. And his cavalry could not break through the shield wall until the Viking shield wall broke. Then they were able to get through.
00:20:15
Speaker
Well, let's talk about some of the leaders and the figures in your story. Let's start with the Anglo-Saxons and Ethel Redd, the unready, as he is known. First off, why does he have the nickname, the unready? And then if you just talk about him as a leader, what he was like, his personality.
00:20:40
Speaker
He's called the unready because in Old English, the nickname was unread, but that doesn't actually mean unready. It means ill-advised because his name, Ethelred, actually means well-advised. So the nickname was kind of applied to him because he was a pretty disastrous king. So everybody called him unready, unread, the ill-advised.
00:21:04
Speaker
But I don't think anybody called him that to his face. And I don't, I'm not sure that they even called him that while he was living. I think that name was kind of applied to him later on after he was gone. What was he like as a person? What was his personality? Was he, I don't know, a particularly vicious man? Was he liked by the public? What kind of defines his style?
00:21:31
Speaker
I don't think he was well-liked, and I don't think he was even really that bad of a king. I mean, most of the kings in that era could not stand against the Vikings. The Vikings tried to avoid pitch battles in the first place. They were raiders. The secret to their success was they never got caught in a major battle. When they did get caught, a lot of the times they got beat. Their thing was to appear out of nowhere, conquer, conquer, conquer,
00:22:01
Speaker
the enemy's armies could converge on them and get the heck out of there on their dragon boats and Nobody had found a solution to this. I mean they had been all down through France. They went over through Russia Nobody could stand against this technique of theirs They used those shallow draft boats of theirs to go so far upriver that nobody would have expected them to turn up so I don't think ethyl red can really be blamed as a bad king for not being able to defeat the Vikings and
00:22:29
Speaker
I think he can be blamed because when they say un-raid, ill-advised, he was ill-advised. A lot of the people who were advising him were treacherous and turned to bats. A lot of them joined the Vikings for a while. And then when that happened, he was very heavy-handed in his punishment and made enemies that way. And I think by the end of his reign, very few people did like him. He just wasn't trustable.
00:22:56
Speaker
Yeah. And what really kind of defines his, um, or maybe his fatal flaw is that his solution to getting the Vikings to stop invading England is to pay them, um, to pay them what's called the Dane guild. Right.
Viking Retaliation and Canute's Rise
00:23:13
Speaker
Right. And that at first, that sounds like a good solution. If you've got money, it sounds like a good solution rather than having these terrible Viking warriors burn all of your towns to the ground and, you know,
00:23:26
Speaker
pillage and kill, but then the Vikings just keep coming back. They keep coming back for more. It never ends, so he creates a monster. You pay a blackmailer, he's just going to keep coming back. Yeah. Well, talk about that journey and talk about the problems that that caused and how that led to Aethelred's final years.
00:23:52
Speaker
Well, what really got it going was that St. Brace's Day massacre that I talked about when they wiped out the Danes. They made the mistake of making a particular point of killing King's Fine, Forkbeard's sister. She was living in England at the time and they dragged her out, killed her husband and their son in front of her and then beheaded her. And when word of this got back to Denmark and King's Fine,
00:24:19
Speaker
now now it's beyond just getting money now it's now it's a blood feud you know somebody has to die for this and he was not i mean he was still his men were going to demand to have you know money for doing this but he was in it just for the destruction at this point he was there to exact vengeance for this death and that's basically the history of england for like the next 10 or 15 years is swine just coming over and just
00:24:44
Speaker
widespread murder and pillage and ethyl red being basically powerless against it. That's pretty much the early decades of the century.
00:24:55
Speaker
Well, let's let's shift a little bit to the leadership of the Vikings. Well, first, so would you say the Danes and the Vikings are those the same people? I know they didn't call themselves the Danes and Norwegians and even the Swedes are what we think of as Vikings. Now, the Swedes mostly went east into Russia, but the Norwegians and the Danes in various different periods were coming over into
00:25:22
Speaker
to England. They moved west and conquered England. And they did not call themselves the Vikings, correct? That was a later... Yeah, Viking was more of a verb than a noun. You went Viking. It was a term that meant raiding.
00:25:35
Speaker
I imagine the people that they raided heard that word enough. That's what they started calling it. And Viking culture was basically, raiding was that underpinned society, correct? That was a huge part. I mean, as I say, most of these guys, most of the Vikings were farmers for most of the time.
00:25:55
Speaker
But a couple of times a year, you know, we're running a little low. We could use some money and it's all hopping our dragon ships and we're in England and, you know, steal some money and do that a couple of times a year. They very rarely stayed over the winter. After the Dain Wall, they didn't stay too much over the winter. They would come over and raid and go back. Now, again, as the decades go on, that kind of changes.
00:26:19
Speaker
We'll talk about the leadership for the Danes during this period you write about in your book. Well, it's fine. Forkbeard, he's after about 10 or 15 years of this, he has pummeled the English into so much submission that he is starting to think, you know, I can re resurrect the Danel again. And he already has Denmark and Norway. He's the ruler of both at this point. And if he adds England to this, that's that's a
00:26:48
Speaker
So that's what's called the North Sea Empire. Two different sides of the North Sea up there. And he can be the king of all that. So that becomes his goal. He wants to kill Ethelred, but he's perfectly happy to just run him out of the country and take over England at that point. He has a son Harold and a son Knut. And he was going to set them both up as kings on opposite sides of the North Sea. So that's his goal as time goes by.
00:27:17
Speaker
and he sees that he can actually subdue the English again. Yeah, and eventually the Vikings, they do subdue the English and the Vikings are, I believe they co-rule the island, is that correct?
00:27:37
Speaker
They get to that point eventually, but it's not like they just immediately agreed on that. Spine actually did achieve his North Sea Empire and was ruler of Norway, Denmark, and England, but only for a couple of weeks he died, probably of a stroke or maybe a fall off his horse, just a couple of weeks into it. And according to the Viking accounts, he bequeathed England to his son Knut,
00:28:03
Speaker
and gave Norway and Denmark to his other son, Harald, to rule over there. So right away, the North Sea Empire has sort of fallen to pieces again, as most empires do when you divide it up among the sons of the emperor, you know, things start going to pieces. So Knut is not, he's at this point, he's still basically a teenager.
00:28:26
Speaker
according to which count you go by. His age can be like early 20s down to like 10. So I assume that he's somewhere in the middle of that. But he is not anywhere near the battle commander that his father is. And King Aethelred, who has been run off the island and gone over to Normandy, he sees this and comes back to England and runs new off of England and takes back the kingdom.
00:28:54
Speaker
Again, it goes back and forth and back and forth. Knut goes over to Norway, gathers up his troops, comes back to England. The war resumes again. And for decades, you have these armies just marching back and forth over England and killing whoever's there on the assumption that they were aiding the other side when the other side was in charge.
00:29:15
Speaker
It just had to be murder on the people that were there. I mean, you hear accounts of Ethelred riding north to fight Knut after Knut had tried to reclaim the north and just take Ethelred just taking it out on the citizens up there and just slaughtering them like the Vikings would have done. You have to wonder how anybody survived it.
00:29:34
Speaker
And so he ultimately did chase Canute off the island again. Well, and go ahead. Well, I was going to ask what kind of what kind of ruler is Canute? I mean, he is obviously a Viking. Right. Is he is he particularly vicious? Yeah, I think as a boy, he was he was fairly vicious. They said when he had taken some English hostages down to Sandwich, which is on the eastern coast and is basically the last. It's one of the nearest points to the continent.
00:30:03
Speaker
Narrowest points of the English Channel and he took his hostages
00:30:07
Speaker
rather than take them across the channel and demand ransom for them. He butchered them right there on the beach, castrated some of them, cut the noses off of them, and then left them go. And that doesn't count as a nice king in my book. Well, let's say you're in the Vikings where London was their biggest city. So let's say you were just like your normal Londoner during this time period under the rule of canoe.
00:30:37
Speaker
What would kind of define your existence? Would you be pretty afraid of people in power? What do you think defines living under his rule? Under Ethelred's or Knute's? Knute. Well, as he grew older, after King Ethelred died, Knute ended up fighting with Ethelred's son, Edmond Ironside, and they are the ones who ultimately decided
00:31:04
Speaker
You know, as I said, after going back and forth and slaughtering each other's people, it's like, it's pointless to go on. And they sort of came to an agreement, as you said, to co-rule. Basically, Edmund was going to rule everything south of the Thames and in the Wessex, and Canute was going to rule everything north of there. So as a Londoner, you would have been under Canute, but...
00:31:26
Speaker
across London Bridge, I guess you would have been under Edmund Ironside. Now, that agreement didn't last very long either because Edmund was killed, assassinated a couple of, again, a couple of weeks after this agreement was made. And it's pretty certain that this was done on Knut's orders, that Knut decided, you know, where he had basically bled, you know, fought himself to a draw and couldn't keep, couldn't maintain the fighting.
00:31:53
Speaker
and decided we're going to declare peace with this, peace with Edmund, and then we'll kill him after that. And that's pretty much what they did. I mean, it was treacherous times. But as time went on, now at that point, Canute is the king. He's the uncontested king of England. And once he had nobody to fight, I think he did turn into a good king. He had to turn his
00:32:18
Speaker
turned his flating strategy outside. He tried to resurrect the North Sea Empire and actually did resurrect it again after a few years. He was, I think, a very beneficial king to his. He felt the same about the Anglo-Saxons as he did about the Danes, tried to treat them both equally.
00:32:39
Speaker
Well, we haven't talked about the Normans yet, who have just kind of been biding their time, I guess you could say.
Duke William's Ambitions and Rule
00:32:48
Speaker
Talk about what's going on in Normandy, the leadership and what their goal is. Well, at this point, you have a Duke of Normandy, you have Duke Robert, who has achieved the position. Again, they think by assassinating his own brother, his brother and all his men all dropped dead at a meal, they think they were probably poisoned.
00:33:09
Speaker
So, Duke Robert is in charge of Normandy, which again is just this little slice along the French coast over there. Robert has an illegitimate bastard son, William, who is, you know,
00:33:23
Speaker
I, you say bastard, but that was not a, that was not a derogatory term in those days. It was just the term that said he's illegitimate. I didn't marry his mother, but I acknowledge him as my son. So it wasn't, it wasn't anything that anybody looked down on him about. But when William was about eight years old, uh, Robert suddenly was, uh, was struck by religion. I don't know if his conscience got the best of him for killing his brother.
00:33:50
Speaker
for basically beating Normandy into submission because they had all those rebellious barons who were trying to rise up against him and he was very heavy-handed in bringing all of them in line. So he decided he was going to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and all the barons said, well, the minute you leave Normandy, here's little William. We're gonna fall right back into anarchy again. And he's, Duke Robert was like, no, William, he's eight, but we'll appoint a guardian
00:34:19
Speaker
Everything will be fine. See ya. So he goes over to Jerusalem and never comes back, falls sick and dies along the way on the return. And immediately everything that they predicted happens. The barons all go their own way. They're all raising, uh, raising castles or in this time period, not so much stone. It's more wood like fortresses or something like that. And, uh, Normandy falls into anarchy and basically the name of the game because William is the designated Duke.
00:34:48
Speaker
Even at the age of eight, anybody who has control of William has him in hand, is effectively running, or has claimed to the dukedom. And so you have basically all these barons who are distantly related. They're all basically cousins to each other, but they're all fighting this anarchic war, trying to get control of William, who is basically on the run for much of his life. A lot of his closest advisors are assassinated along the way, and he has a very violent childhood.
00:35:18
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, that's probably the theme of most violence and killing and treachery is it runs deep in this book. So when do the Normans decide we want England? When do they decide that that is where their destiny lies? Well, part of it was Duke Robert before he departed.
00:35:43
Speaker
When Aethelred, do you recall, I said Aethelred had been driven out of England. He and his family were living in Normandy because Aethelred's wife Emma was a Norman Duchess before she became Queen of England. She was actually Robert's sister. So he took his sons, Edward and Alfred, took them over to Normandy and when he went back to England, although this doesn't, it's not, Edward and Alfred remained in Normandy for the long term. There was some crossing back and forth.
00:36:12
Speaker
But Robert had charge of both Edward and Alfred. And when Knut had taken over England, Robert started thinking, well, you know, I have the actual heir to the Anglo-Saxon king right here with me, Edward. And he sent a letter over to Knut and said, are you going to give up this kingdom and give it back to its rightful king? And Knut said, come take it. So Robert actually did attempt to do that.
00:36:39
Speaker
And the Normans were descendants of Vikings, but they were not sailors. Their fleet got completely blown off course and got turned back and Robert gave up the effort. So there was an attempted invasion of England. This was like 1035, I believe, but they didn't they didn't persist in it.
00:36:58
Speaker
Edward was sort of a king without a kingdom We'll talk about some of the more important battles from I mean, obviously there's at the very end the Battle of Hastings But from 1000 to 1066, what are the some of the more important battles that we should know about? Let me see well the battles between between Edmond and between Edmond Canute they would they would be some of the more important ones but none of them really ever decided anything the guys basically
00:37:29
Speaker
just slaughtered each other. Every time they came close to a battle, there was nothing really decided. So I can't really point to one of them and say that was the one that changed everything because they just fought until they got to a draw and decided we don't want to do this anymore. It's costing us both too many men and they decided we'll just declare a peace. So I can't really point to any of the battles that say that really made a difference.
00:37:55
Speaker
Well, was there a point where when something occurred that that William the Conqueror is like, oh, now is the time for me to get this invasion going and for us to do? Well, yeah, as I say, he had a violent childhood, but eventually
00:38:12
Speaker
That just turned him into a hardened soldier. I mean, by the time he was in his 20s and 30s, he was not somebody you wanted to mess with. He took no prisoners when he had to. At one siege, they made fun of him. The guys behind the walls made fun of him for being a bastard. And when he took prisoners, he cut their hands and feet off.
00:38:38
Speaker
and loaded the hands and feet into a catapult and shot it into the city and said, that's what's gonna happen to the rest of you if you don't surrender right now. So these guys did not, they were not playing around. But what really happened was King Edward the Confessor had ultimately returned to England at the invitation of one of Knut's sons after Knut died, his son, Arthur Knut, invited, so this would be his half brother,
00:39:07
Speaker
Edward because Canute had remarried to Emma. Actually, the soap opera is just ongoing. Canute had married Ethelred's old queen. So you have these half-brothers here. And Arthur Canute, the Viking half-brother, invited Edward, the English half-brother, over to England as a co-king. And as luck would have it, Arthur Canute died shortly after that, whether he was assassinated or not. Nobody knows.
00:39:34
Speaker
seems mighty coincidental in my opinion, but Edward ended up ruling the kingdom, became known as Edward the Confessor. The crux of the matter is he did not have an heir, so he, being half Norman on his mother's side, invites
00:39:54
Speaker
Duke William, who is now conquered, invites him over to England and says, I would like you to have this kingdom after I die. I don't have any sons. I'd like you to have it. If you believe the Norman accounts, that was William's claim to the kingdom. If you believe the English accounts, it never happened. William goes back, this is in the 1050s, William goes back to Normandy and pretty much that's all forgotten.
00:40:20
Speaker
Now, when Edward dies in 1066, the very first week of 1066, he reneges on that promise and gives it to, gives the kingdom to Harold God Winston. He is now the second most powerful man in the kingdom. He's the Earl of Wessex. They call him Subregulus, the Under King, and Duke Sanglor, and they call him Duke of the English. And Edward says, you know, I'm dying. I want you to have the kingdom, just completely makes
00:40:50
Speaker
makes a whole different offer to Harold Godwinson, which Harold, hearing this from the king, accepts. Duke William of Normandy hears this and says, wait a minute. I've been promised this kingdom. You are not the rightful king. And Harold says, well, no, I'm the rightful king. You're over there. Tough luck. That's your problem. You think you can take it?
00:41:14
Speaker
come take it." And that's where William sees this as a mortal insult. Now he's been shamed in front of his men, and he's going to do what none of the Normans were able to do, which is build a fleet and sail her to England and conquer. Well, it's the original Game of Thrones in this time period. I think that story was based on the War of the Roses, I think, if I remember really. Well, what surprised you most in your research about this time period?
Brutality and Betrayal in Medieval Conflicts
00:41:45
Speaker
Uh, just how treacherous everyone was. I mean, everyone was, uh, you know, just a backstabber. You could not, uh, you could make whatever agreement you wanted to make with somebody. And man, the minute was, it was to their advantage to double back on that. They did. I mean, there was so much betrayal throughout this book that I don't know how anybody
00:42:09
Speaker
I don't know how anybody trusted anybody else. I don't know how you did it. You just basically had to have enough power on your side that no one would defy you. That was the whole goal. Would you say that we obviously these days, we think of the Vikings as being pretty brutal, but it sounds like the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons were in a lot of ways just as brutal. Would you say that that's the case?
00:42:32
Speaker
I would say that, I mean, everybody, nobody took prisoners in those days. I mean, everybody was evil. I mentioned about King, before they became Kings, Edward and his brother Alfred were actually, they thought, invited over to England to mount a rebellion and it turned out to be a trap. And a lot of people blame Earl Godwin for taking this over. Earl Godwin, who was
00:43:01
Speaker
who was a powerful role in that point, took charge of Prince Alfred when he came over and again betrayed him, slaughtered them and his men in just the most horrible fashion. I mean, there was scalping and dismemberment. They think they've actually found the skeletons of these guys who were killed and Alfred himself was blinded so cruelly that they think they stuck the knife too far into him and
00:43:30
Speaker
punctured his brain and that didn't kill him. The story is, I don't know how, I don't know how hardcore your audience is. The story is that finally to kill him, they cut him open, took his intestines out and nailed them to a post and then took white hot irons to a blind guy and drove him around the post until his guts were drawn out of him. That's, you know, it's imaginative given points for imagination, right?
00:43:59
Speaker
Well, what do you think like even like the biggest enthusiast of this time period? What do you think even the most diehard, like I know all about the Vikings, what do you think there is to learn about this period of time? What do you think they would be surprised to learn? I think the life was not as romantic and as easy as it's shown in some of the shows. It's not Hollywood.
00:44:30
Speaker
Like I was just saying, it's violent, it's bloody. If you're not being killed in a raid, you're dying in a blood feud with your neighbors or just of disease because the water was so foul with bacteria and everything that they knew nothing about. Life was short and, you know, it's a romanticized view. If you think you want to go back there and live in those times, I guarantee you did not. We're a lot better off the way things are now.
00:44:59
Speaker
Well, I'm curious what you, what personally, what got you interested in, um, the Viking era or, or this particular era?
Don's Research Journey and Future Projects
00:45:07
Speaker
Actually, it started with that first book about Harold Hadrada because he, uh, the Viking King, the Norwegian King, he is actually present through this whole story, but he's off. He's off in Constantinople. He's, he appears at the beginning and then he's off off screen off stage and returns at the very end, but he lives such a,
00:45:27
Speaker
such an incredible life. He lived the Vikings life. And I always thought he would be a great subject to write about. And I just never thought in a magazine article would do him any justice. But then when my agent said Vikings are hot right now because of this Viking show on TV, you know, you know anything about Vikings? And I was like, let me tell you a story. And that was what really got me into it. And then, as I say, as I researched that,
00:45:54
Speaker
Then it was like, wow, while he's over here in Constantinople, there's all this stuff going on here in England that people have completely forgotten. And I just thought it's, uh, you know, Vikings Valhalla, I don't, they really mess with the story and I don't know why they had to, why they took it upon themselves. The, it's more like they took all the, they took the characters names and a couple of the events and then they just threw them all together. And it's really.
00:46:19
Speaker
The story is already there. I mean, it goes on for decades. It's a soap opera with people appearing and, you know, disappearing, getting killed and having kids. And it's a, it's a great story in itself. I don't know why they had to mess with it, but it's entertainment, not a documentary, I guess. Sure. Yeah. Um, good point. Um, now this, is there anything that for, for like the Viking age, um, is, is there,
00:46:47
Speaker
Is there more to be explored about it about it still? Do you think that there's there's more that still needs to be told about vikings or do you think that that? Well, the Viking Age really ended in 1066. That's what they call the end of the Viking Age, when Harold Hadrada finally returned to the stage and invaded up north and spoiler alert, got killed. They really call his death the end of the Viking Age. But I think if you go back further to the time of King Alfred and the Danelaw,
00:47:16
Speaker
I mean, there was certainly a whole nother batch of treachery and soap opera goings on back then. Yeah, there's definitely another story back then.
00:47:27
Speaker
Well, Don, this has been a really great interview. Again, this topic is, I think maybe for me as an American, not having grown up in a place that goes back into medieval European history, but we're still obviously very tied to that. It's just fascinating. And I feel like I don't read enough books about it.
00:47:53
Speaker
I'm curious if you've got, are you working on anything next? What else is on the horizon for you? Well, I'm sort of working on a proposal about, and I haven't even submitted it yet. So I don't know how much I should say it could be completely rejected. I'm kind of interested in Oliver Cromwell. I think he was such a turning point in history. And I'm working on the proposal, but I haven't submitted it yet. And who knows, it may go somewhere. It may not. I don't know. All right. So you're turning.
00:48:24
Speaker
away from the Viking age, but turning back to the, uh, we started off talking about a classical rapier fencing. I believe that is the age of the Musketeers. The 17th century has actually been my, uh, primary point of interest. I mean, I liked the Viking age, but the 17th century, I'm a member of a reenactment group that does 17th century. And, uh, I just find that whole century to be completely fascinating. I mean, on one hand, you've got the,
00:48:50
Speaker
It's such high civilization like you think of Louis the 14th and Versailles, you know that magnificent palace and then at the same time in Germany at the exact same time a couple hundred miles to the east you have the 30 years war where Catholics and Protestants are exterminating each other. I mean they say that some parts of Germany lost half its population. I just think that's a it's such a
00:49:16
Speaker
Conundrum I mean it's hard to get your head around that and basically the same thing was going on in England when you see the English Revolution English Civil Wars There were some battles of extermination going on there as well
00:49:29
Speaker
And again, I'd like to explore that. Yeah. The 30 Years War in particular is fascinating to me. Maybe it's because you don't read too much about it or because it was so convoluted that there's just so much going on. It was so indecisive. It was like those wars in England. It went on for 30 years. The whole starting point was when the defenestration of Prague where the Protestants threw the three Catholic officials out of a third story window.
00:49:59
Speaker
the king's officials, the emperor's officials, actually. And they all three survived, but everybody declares war. 30 years later, the last battle of the war is on a bridge, practically in sight of that window that they threw them out of. Hardly anything changed. All those millions of people dead. It's just, I say, it's hard to wrap your head around it.
00:50:24
Speaker
One of the themes on the War Books podcast that comes up again and again is how futile most, most wars actually are and how little actually changes as a result of them, unfortunately.
Connect with Don Hallway's Work
00:50:37
Speaker
What I try to find is I'm not trying to write battle porn or anything like that, but I'm fascinating by why men throw themselves into that. A lot of times knowing that it's going to be futile and they're going to die for
00:50:54
Speaker
No good reason, but they go do it anyway. I was of the generation that skipped. I got out of all that. I was at the generation after Vietnam, too old for Vietnam, too young for a Grenada, and all these other ones are too old for that by then. I was never in the military, but I have the utmost admiration for the guys who are in. You just hope that their sacrifice isn't in vain.
00:51:23
Speaker
Don, if readers want to stay in touch with your work, want to see what you're up to and what you're doing, how can people stay in touch with what you're doing? Well, you can visit my website, which is DonHallway.com. That's H-O-L-L-W-A-Y.com. But for free sample chapters of Battle for the Island Kingdom and links to buy it on Amazon or the outlet of your choice, you can go to BattleForTheIslandKingdom.com or just for short, B4TIK.com.
00:51:52
Speaker
And again, sample chapters, free to read. Don, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Everybody check out Battle for the Island Kingdom, England's Destiny, $1,066 by Don Holloway. Go buy a copy. Go check it out from your library. Well, Don, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for having me.