401. The Norman Conquests: Secrets of the Bayeux Tapestry (Part 1)

The Bayeux Tapestry shows one of the defining moments in English history. But look closer at its dragon-prowed ships and its warriors, and there's another story stitched into the Battle of Hastings. Why does the Norman invasion look so much like a Viking raid? Who were the Normans before 1066, and how much of their Norse past did they carry with them across the Channel? William Dalrymple is joined by the brilliant Eleanor Barraclough, author of Embers of The Hands, to discuss the domino effect which takes us from Viking river invasions in Western Europe to the Battle of 1066… Brought to you by Plaud. Empire listeners can use code 'EMPIRE' to get a 10% discount on their first order at this link: https://uk.plaud.ai/empire Brought to you by Betterhelp. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/EMPIRE. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com. Email: [email protected] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Bruno Di Castri Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:15Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to Empire with me, William Drumpel. And I'm afraid no Anita today, because Anita's got another project. So I am diving in on our new series alone. And our new series is around the Beaux Tapestry, the exhibition of the year at the British Museum, which certainly my Instagram has been flooded with for the last two weeks. And I got to see the Beaux Tapestry at a press briefing and it is everything that it's cracked up to be. So you must go and see it. But what we decided to do on Empire was

• 2:59Speaker 00

  not to just dwell on the story in the tapestry and the Norman conquest of Britain, but to open it up, as this is a global history podcast, to all the Norman conquests, which means telling the story after Hastings of the Norman conquest of South Italy and the extraordinary Norman kingdom of Sicily. And we're going to be getting the great Peter Frankopan on to tell us about that. And then beyond to the Crusades and the Norman contribution to the Crusader states, which was the great principality of Antioch, a very, very long way from the Norman heartlands in France. But to open the series, we're going to go

• 3:39Speaker 00

  back in time before William the Conqueror to the settlement of the Normans in Normandy and the whole story of how far the Normans were or were not the Vikings who landed in Normandy in the ninth and 10th centuries. Is the Norman conquest the last great Viking conquest of Britain? Or had something completely different happened to the Normans in between them landing? And there is only one person we can go to on the Empire pod when it comes to to Normans and Vikings. And it is, of course, the great Eleanor Balakoff. Eleanor, welcome back.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you so much. It is so nice to be here. I should say, for anyone who is watching this rather than listening, how should you put it, I am, I'm sort of-

• 4:22Speaker 00

  You're in a very colourful state today, Eleanor.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  Very colourful. I'm going to a Viking ship, Equinox boat burning down at Butts of Farm tomorrow. And for the occasion, my hair is now, shall we say, high lighter pink and rather sparkling.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  It is very, very Viking indeed. And we should put in the show notes where you can get this Viking cut, and these wonderful, very, what are they called, the rune stone themed sort of highlights that you've got on there. Anyway, I would strongly advise to anyone that is listening to this on a podcast to just turn on YouTube and have a look at Eleanor's hair, because it's going to be one of the most memorable things of the whole podcast.

• 5:02Speaker 03

  If Peter Frankopan doesn't have hair like this, I will be very disappointed. I'm hoping all your guests are bright pink.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  Eleanor, this is absolutely your territory. And you were on with us recently talking about the Dan law and the Viking settlement of the north of England, which is such a fascinating thing, which left such an extraordinary mark on the landscapes. And what we want to explore today is how far Normandy was like that or not. How far is it different? And, you know, the impression one gets of the Beaux Tapestry, which is in all our minds at the moment, is of these very specific mounted warriors in chain mail, looking frankly, very different from the Vikings. And if anyone's looking Viking, it's actually the English with their double edged swords on the hilltop at the Battle of Hastings. So take us back now to

• 5:50Speaker 00

  ninth century France. Introduce us to what happened after Charlemagne. And I mean, I always remember that date from my history lessons of Charlemagne being made Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day 800 in Rome. Now, that is already after the first Viking raids have attacked Lindisfarne. And so the whole creation of Charlemagne's empire is happening even as the whole thing is beginning to crack around Anglo Saxon and Pictish Britain. So tell us that story, Eleanor.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  Exactly that. I always, I'm very grateful to Charlemagne for being sort of crowned on that day in that year. It makes it a really easy date to remember.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  It does.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  And you're exactly right, because in the same way, if we're thinking of memorable dates, of course, the famous raid is Lindisfarne 793 off the north east coast of England. And people, well, certainly sort of from a British and Irish perspective, that last decade of the eighth century is very memorable. But we have to think that's when it's also ramping up across the channel, you know, across the North Sea, because there's a different sort of political instability going on there. It's partly because of Charlemagne. So he's been muscling in on, well, you know, Saxon territory to start with. But as a result of what he's doing there, he ends up as the southern neighbour and a very powerful Christian

• 7:11Speaker 03

  southern neighbour to the Danes, you know, just sort of on that southern edge of Scandinavia. And that creates a huge amount of instability there. And so we start to get hints of some pirate infested waters on the edges of Charlemagne's kingdom. You know, we know that in 800, he tries to build a fleet to counteract them. We start to hear, this is sort of the era of a Dane, as it were, we don't know exactly what he would have called himself, but a king called Godfrey, who starts to appear in the Carolingian records. He's raiding the towns, particularly trading towns. He's striking at all these rich coastal targets.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  And this is the coast or up the rivers? What, because I always remember this image of the Vikings burning down Notre Dame. Is that, have I made that up? Is that from my distant?

• 7:59Speaker 03

  No, no, no, it's both. Basically, if you get waterways, you get Vikings. That's the best way of doing it. They see, so you're definitely getting them around the coast. So for example, we know that Godfrey and his successors are sort of basically going in, taking merchants from these international trading towns and sort of moving them into their own territory so they can cream off the profits from it.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  The Vikings steal merchants?

• 8:23Speaker 03

  They steal merchants. I'm trying to remember which one it is off the top of my head that he does. But it's a Slavic one. He basically brings it over and he says, this is mine now, or at least according to the records. And I think there's some archaeological evidence to back that up. And meanwhile, exactly as you say, they're coming in via these waterways.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  Right up the Seine, right up the Loire.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. There's the Frisian trading town of Dorusstadt, and that gets hit very badly from around Charlemagne's death in 814 onwards. You start to see that being hit again and again and again. So initially, it's not quite so much, you know, British Isles and Ireland, it's monastic settlements that they're hitting. Here, they seem to start with something different, which is the trading towns. But over time, you know, by 837, Charlemagne's son, Louis the Pious, is having to build coastal defences for protection against them. So what you're seeing is basically when a polity is weak, and often that happens when

• 9:28Speaker 03

  one monarch dies, the next sort of power struggle begins, that's when the Vikings start to take control. And they, they're like, right, this is when we strike, this is when we go in. And so, yeah, they start to go down the waterways, you know, we're talking the Elbe, the Seine, you know, the Loire. And things start to get really nasty quite quickly.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  Do they do any better? Because the impression you get is that Anglo Saxon is split up, of course, you've got Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex, that they're smaller kingdoms. And in my head at least, that, you know, they're not as powerful as the Carolingians with the enormous Europe, you know, kind of mini European community, which is spreading right from France and Germany and Italy. You know, it's a big, powerful polity. Do the Holy Roman emperors and Charlemagne's successors-

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Defeat the Vikings more effectively and fight them off more effectively. They also use bridges. Is that right? I have a memory of fortified bridges.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  The fortified bridges is a big thing. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we can, we can, we can talk about their various tactics. I used to, when I used to lecture on this to undergraduates, we used to have a board game. I made this board game where basically they would pretend to be the Vikings one side and the other side would be the Carolindians.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  Your history lessons are so much more fun than mine. I was studying Ethelred the Unready and Anglo-Saxon charters and Simon Cades, not doing, not doing ballgames with El the Baraklough, sadly.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  But, but I mean, that's exactly what we were doing. We were looking at the different ways that the Carolindians, the Franks tried to counteract and what works and what doesn't. So it's exactly as you said, it's things like fortified bridges, it's paying them off, it's battling them, it's what's going to work. You mentioned about the strength, relatively speaking, to Anglo-Saxon England or those various kingdoms. And you're right, it's, it's of a different magnitude. And so it's interesting to note, for example, what happens in eight forty. So Louis the Pious, Charlemagne's son, dies and a civil war breaks out essentially between his three sons.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  Hang on, we can't go on without mentioning who this is about. This is Ragnar Harybreaches, which is a very El the Baraklough character.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Love, love a good. Again, he probably had the bright pink highlighter hair. I mean, that, that we can probably say historically, right? Yeah. But, well, Ragnar Harybreach, yeah, this is, so we've got to think about what's happening across what was Charlemagne and then Louis the Pious's sort of, you know, this huge area. So it gets split up into three. We've got Charles the Bold, gets West Francia, which is very roughly what France is. And then Lothar gets Middle Francia, which is sort of, you know, the bit in the middle. And then Louis the German, as he gets called now, gets East Francia, which is roughly Germany, very roughly.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  But the middle is what, sort of Belgium and Luxembourg and that kind of stuff?

• 12:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And the problem is that all of these, as we've said, have these very lovely navigable deep rivers that go very, very far into their territories. And so, yeah, they, you know, they're sailing, as we said, to the Seine, throughout the Elbe. And so we have Rouen, for example, which we'll come back to later in our story, getting sacked in eight four one. Paris gets attacked repeatedly. And exactly as you say, eight forty five, there's a reference in the annals to a Viking leader called Regenherus, which might, might be the historical version of the figure that we come to know as Ragnar Harybreaches.

• 12:57Speaker 00

  Do we, do we know what his breeches were made of to, to bring this wonderful description?

• 13:01Speaker 03

  I was like, I, I'm trying to remember what they, whether it's kind of their ruff, um, you know, is it, is it the, the material? It all gets, the problem is that that comes from the sagas and the sagas about Ragnar Harybreaches get more and more fantastical. Because he's the one that famously is said to have been killed in the pit of snakes and he gives this amazing death speech. And I always think, well, who was there to write down this amazing death speech? Are the snakes in there sort of transcribing it? You know, so it all gets a little bit funny.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  Secretarial snakes.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  Yes, secretarial snakes.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  Now, you mentioned, Eleanor, this whole business of paying them off. Now, as we know from Ethelred the Unready, if you pay Dame Geld, it just brings them back again. And I think you, you said a very nice analogy of it being like, uh, leaving, leaving milk for a stray cat.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. Basically, if you're trying to get rid of a stray cat by leaving it milk, it's going to drink the milk, go away, say thank you very much, and then come back for more milk. And that's exactly what the Vikings do. So there's a great entry from the annals of Saint-Bertin from eight four five. You know, they say, it's a very hard winter in March. A hundred and twenty ships of the Northmen sailed up the Seine to Paris. They laid waste everything on either side and meeting not the least bit of opposition, which is important. Basically, everyone's shocked.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  Hundred and twenty ships is a big one.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  It is, if it's true. So people argue a lot about how many ships were involved because a hundred and twenty is a nice round number. And the question is always, who's counting the ships? I don't think it's impossible, but people do, um, there is a, a very niche branch of academia, which is basically people get very exercised about how many ships, you know, these, and not just when we're, we're talking about, you know, Western Europe, but also, for example, in Byzantium, on the Caspian Sea, how many ships actually are there? Um, but this particular annal says he makes a deal with them. He hands over seven thousand pounds of silver as a bribe. Basically, it says, he persuaded them to go away. But what's interesting is what happens next, according to the annals. So

• 15:09Speaker 03

  Horick, King of the Northmen, sent six hundred ships up the Elbe in Germany against Louis the German. So they're like, thanks very much for the money, silver, slash, Horick, yeah.

• 15:19Speaker 00

  Why did you not call one of your children Horick?

• 15:24Speaker 03

  I mean, there's still time, there's deed polls, right? We can add that in.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  I think the next one's gonna be Horick. Definitely.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  And what about the stray cat? The stray cat can be Horick, you know, if I'm, I think that's as far as we're gonna get.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  Horick Harybreaches has a great ring to it.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  Horick Harybreaches, that's gotta be a thing, surely.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  Anyway.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  But basically, yeah, it's just this idea that they just take the money, they keep going, they find somewhere else, they do the same thing. And, you know, so basically they're plundering, they're, they're, they're burning, they're ravaging the coastal regions.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  Doing their Viking thing.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  They're doing their Viking thing. Exactly. Their Viking slash stray cat thing.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  Now, as we know from our last episode, this all culminates in England in eight six five with the Great Army, our old friends who, who I used to dig at Repton and, and Kat Jarman's lovely amber bead and all that sort of stuff. Now, am I right in thinking that half that army or a bit of that army splits off and having ravaged England and Mercia and Northumbria and East Anglia and, and created complete mayhem, that a chunk of them set off and they land in France?

• 16:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. So this seems to be the idea that I, I think of it almost like they're small. We talked about this when we were talking about the Great Heathen Army in that era before, but they're small, mobile war bands. It's not sort of this big army as we might think of it now. And that means they're very movable and they're able to react to what's going on locally, but also what's going on nationally, internationally. And so, yeah, this, this idea seems to be that they're sort of bouncing across the channel, depending on where the easiest pickings are.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  And are these sort of groups of, you know, sort of, you know, one villager from, from Norway with all his mates and his, their five ships? Is that the kind of thing we're talking about?

• 17:13Speaker 03

  We can't tell is the honest answer, but I think it probably is something a bit like that in that in order to have a ship, you have to be pretty wealthy. You've got to have resources. So you're likely to be locally powerful. There's a good chance you might come from the, the ruling family, locally speaking. And we do see, for example, this is much later, but you know, Invar the Far Traveller, you know, he sets off east.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  The Far Traveller.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  Oh, he's, it's beautiful. Yeah. I just, in Vidfarli. But what's wonderful is that while we have a saga of him and his very fantastical travels, full of, um, you know, demons and, and dragons and all sorts of things, we also have a collection of rune stones from Sweden, from the same place in Sweden, quite close to Stockholm. And these rune stones are all set up to the men who died out in the east with Invar, and they all come from the same area. And so we do have these suggestions that certainly we have local bands coming together to some extent.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  That makes sense.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. And so you're, you're setting off on your, you know, your, your gap here, your great adventure. And then, yeah, if, if you decide actually, you know, the locals look like they are, for example, building some really great bridges and we're having trouble actually getting through this, well, let's try our luck elsewhere.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  Elsewhere, yeah.

• 18:35Speaker 03

  I think we've got to think it's, it's much more mobile, much more flexible than maybe we have in our minds.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  Now, tell us about Rollo, because he's the key figure. He's the Norman that fans Normandy.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  And am I, am I right in thinking that he's a cousin of, of Norwegian Earls of Orkney? Is that right?

• 18:54Speaker 03

  So I, I think, I think there is a, a relationship, but I, off the top of my head, I'm not going to put money down on exactly what that looks like.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  I've, I've, I've definitely read that, that, that Rollo has, has Orcadian cousins.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  Well, which completely makes sense.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  Cousin of Saint Magnus, maybe. Isn't that wonderful?

• 19:12Speaker 03

  Well, but this is it because it's a diaspora and it's this huge amount of connections. And I think, again, that comes back to this idea of this flexibility, this sense that people are moving, people are connected. And of course, when we get up to ten sixty six, we see one version of the conclusion of that, that this is a hugely interconnected world. And, and yeah, certainly true of Rollo.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  It's Rollo rather than Rollo.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  I think, well, it's Rolf.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  You're the, you're the, you're the Scandinavian.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no. Because Rolf is how, so if we're looking at, from a Scandinavian perspective, he crops up in the sagas as a Ganga Rolf, like Rolf the walker, Rolf the goer. He's meant to be so big that no horse can take his weight. And he's this, again, like Ragnar Harybreaches, he becomes this semi legendary, almost mythical character, you know?

• 20:05Speaker 00

  A nog in the nog is gonna turn up before long.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  But it really, it really, they're memorable.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  Say his, say his name again. What, what do they call him in Norway?

• 20:16Speaker 03

  So Rolf.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  Rolf.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  Like Rolf or Ralph. Well, no, actually Ralph may be slightly different, but yeah.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that's so interesting because we have all these Normans when they get to England. There's, there's Ralph this and Ralph that, and it sounds a thoroughly French name, but it's a, it's a Nordic name.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  Exactly. And, and again, you see that in other parts of this great Norse diaspora. You know, we have, uh, you know, Kyven Rus, we have Igor and Olga ruling there. Very similar time to Rollo or Rolf. But that's again, they're Norse names. It's Ingvar, like Ingvar the Far Traveller and Olga, Helga. You know, so yeah, we have, it's, it's much more interconnected than we might think.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  So give us a picture of, of Ralph or Rollo. Or, um, uh, he's, he's too, he's too fat to get on the horse? No, he's always so muscular that he sort of collapses the horse or.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, after they, I mean, I've done quite a lot of, of my research trips, particularly in Greenland, actually on the back of Icelandic horses. And they are rather small and built a little bit like saggy sofas. So I can just imagine.

• 21:20Speaker 00

  This is, this, I just saw in Edinburgh yesterday, the Lewis Chessman there.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  And their horses are tiny little Shetland ponies.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  They're teeny weeny little things. Exactly. And they really are. They, they even have a special gate. I have to say, sort of to my undying shame, my mum once came up to Iceland to visit me on a research trip. I took her riding on one of these Icelandic horses. It threw her off, came back and jumped on her and she spent the rest of the trip in hospital, having metal plates put in her arse.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  It's a proper Viking horse.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  It was a proper Viking horse and it was proper, yes. But in my head, when I think of Gangorolfur on this horse, it's basically him with his legs trailing along the ground because he's just too big for them. But of course, that's the point. It's, it's fantastical. It's very hard to separate when it comes to sagas. The historical reality from the sort of the fictional wrapping that gets put around them.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  But you think he's probably the same guy that appears in the rap version, the saga version as Rolf the worker?

• 22:17Speaker 03

  They're certainly suggesting that this is because, you know, they're talking about how basically what he does. So things change. So we can look at the different sorts of sources for him. I think that's important. But the sagas think that he's a jarl in West Norway. And it, it, it's, he conquers Normandy, you know, he raids the Hebrides, the Irish Sea, Francia, and then he conquers Normandy. So I think he's certainly meant to be the same character.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  That's so interesting. So you've got the French sources, you've got the, what's he called? The Dudo?

• 22:47Speaker 03

  Ah, yes. Okay. So.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  So we've got a very kind of slightly sort of establishment version from Dudo. And then we got the wacky, pink haired version from, um.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  Exactly. Which is, which is possibly why I like that version so much. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. As you say, the fullest account is Dudo. And he's, you know, Saint Cantin and he's writing a century later.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  And he's a monk?

• 23:08Speaker 03

  He's a monk and he's writing for Rollo's descendants.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  So that's going to not be nearly as much fun as the saga version.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  No. Well, yeah, I mean, it's, it, it, it is interesting in the what happens. And maybe we need to sort of rewind slightly because it's possible that he was at the Siege of Paris in eight eight five to eight eight six.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  Rollo was.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, very much as a Viking.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  Quick question here. Sorry. I'm, I'm obsessed with the Siege of Paris and the idea of the, the Vikings burning Notre Dame.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Is, is Paris a big deal already at this point? Or is it, is it us retrospectively sort of making Paris more important than it was?

• 23:44Speaker 03

  No, it's, it's, it's a big enough deal. Um, that it, this, this is, this is a big shocking event, definitely. And it's one where they don't really know how to respond. And, you know, in the accounts of it, it's very much tales of Daringdo that managed to sort of break the siege. It's, I, I think, yeah, no, I think it would have been quite a shocking event.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  And you think Rollo could easily have been there?

• 24:07Speaker 03

  I think, I think there's a suggestion that he was. What we then have, he follows this up with the Siege of Chartres in West Francia in the spring of nine eleven. He's well established by this time, you know, he knows what he's doing, he knows what works. But this time he's up against Charles the Simple, who's the great grandson of Charlemagne. He's now king of the West Franks and it's Charles's army that defeats the Viking raiders.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  Charles the Simple doesn't sound a very promising name.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  I think, yeah, I'm, I'm trying to remember. It's always a bit, I think it's in the sense of.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  Not simple minded?

• 24:42Speaker 03

  No, more sort of like the, the, the pure.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. In the same way, when you get sort of the fat, it doesn't really mean the fat. It means sort of like the stout in that sort of multivalent version of the word, you know? So I think it's more that. So Rollo legs it, you know, with a few of his men. And at this point, Charles the Simple, we've been talking about these board game strategies for seeing off these Viking raids. You know, he could leave him to get on with it and catch him next time he comes around, but that's not great. He could pay them off, but he's successful at this point. He could build a few more bridges. He could, you know, hope that he goes and, you know, gets killed on another raid, but he tries something new. And this is this idea that's been described as poachers turned gamekeepers.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  Because what he basically does is he grants Rollo land around Rouen in exchange for Rollo's baptism.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  Is that his land or is it somebody else's land he's giving it?

• 25:38Speaker 03

  I do know, I'm not, it's probably, I don't know. I can imagine it's probably someone who was a bit pissed off at that point. I'm sure there was someone who was enjoying that land.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Because what, what Alfred does of course is give, is give the, the Vikings Danilor, which is the opposite end of the country for a bit.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  Well, it's very similar. It's a very similar strategy and it's something we've already seen under Louis the Pius as well. Where basically if you, and yeah, we remember with, with Alfred, it's Guthrum and Guthrum is given this, one of the, he's one of the Viking raiders, one of the Viking leaders. He's given a sort of Christian Anglo-Saxon name and he's baptized and Alfred is his sponsor. And he's sent off to, yeah, rule East Anglia, basically. And it's not dissimilar. And it's this idea of setting a thief to capture a thief. How are we going to put it? If you have former Vikings who now have a stake in that land, who own that territory.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  They're not going to want raiders to come down the rivers any more than anyone else is. And so you've now got, you've made yourself almost like, we've, we've had cats, we've had poachers, gamekeepers, you know? I think of it like a Viking plug. You've basically plugged the river up with Vikings who are on your side. And who are basically now your heavies.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  But this is obviously can go badly wrong because they can also invite all their cousins in and, and the whole thing goes to hell in a hand card.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  It can go very badly wrong. Exactly. But I think, yeah, and, uh, I, you know, there are points where sort of the land that he's given is expanded, but I think it's all the strategies at one point or another go badly wrong. But this one gives them enough of a stake.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  Dealing with these guys is always going to be tricky, whatever you do.

• 27:21Speaker 03

  Exactly. Exactly. It's the stray cat, you know, again. So, yeah, I think this is one where you give them enough of a stake in it. You make them have a personal fealty. Then they are more likely to respond in a way that means that everyone's going to have a good outcome as far as you're concerned. But of course there is that brilliant story, um, of what happens when Rollo gives homage and is sort of made to king.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  Tell us the story. It's a great story.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Well, it's, it is such a Viking story.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  It's a very Viking story. And it sounds like a Viking saga and it sounds almost certainly not true, but it, tell us anyway.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  Exactly. And it's, it's basically Viking slapstick humour where he's told he has to kiss the king's foot, you know?

• 28:09Speaker 00

  Having accepted the land and agreed to be his, his liege man.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  Exactly. And agree, you know, he's been baptized. And so instead he's, he's not, I'm not bending to any king, like. So he tells one of his, his men to do it and the man just basically lifts the royal foot and like lifts it up, but tips the king, Charles, backwards out of his chair, you know? Who knows if it happened, you know, like all of this, we're dealing with this one. I love it, you know, because it's so strange. This, this wonderful sort of, uh, borderland between facts and fantasy and legends and gossip and rumour.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  Stories told around fires. Yeah.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  Exactly. And that's what makes it such a Viking origin myth.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  Brilliant. We're going to take a break now. When we come back, uh, Ellen, I want you to tell me about how much Normandy feels like the Danilor. Uh, let's go there after the break.

• 29:09Speaker 00

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• 30:53Speaker 00

  Welcome back. Now, Eleanor, in the last series you did with us, we had great fun in the Danloor, and we saw all those extraordinary crosses, which have scenes of Ragnarok and Sigurd and all these Viking legends turning up improbably on crosses and religious monuments erected in northern England. And we also saw how all these names up and down the coast, Grimsby, Scunthorpe, all these Viking names are littered around the Yorkshire coast, very clear evidence of a heavy Viking settlement. Now, is that true of Normandy? Or are we talking a much lighter Viking touch on this part of the world?

• 31:34Speaker 03

  I think lighter Viking touch is a really beautiful way of putting it, because it is essentially that. It's not that these things aren't there, but there's definitely a difference when we look at what's happening in Britain and Ireland in terms of, yeah, you know, the place names. So, I don't know, around northern Normandy, particularly the coastline, you've got place names with like Tot, which is kind of homesteads, it's all Norse toft. We've got Bec, which is sort of stream or creek.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  Which we have in Yorkshire as a name for a river.

• 32:03Speaker 03

  Exactly. It is the same. It's Becker. Yeah.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  We used to have the Beck that ran behind my school. Yeah.

• 32:08Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah. And it's there. It's there again. Yeah. In northern Normandy. Again, one you recognise, Dal, Valley from Dattler.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  My name.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. Exactly. And yeah, and again, in Yorkshire, we've got the dales, you know, it's all there.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  Dalrymple means Wiggly Valley.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  I love that Wiggly Valley.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  That's what my name means.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  It's so beautiful.

• 32:27Speaker 00

  Our enemies would probably do it as Crooked Dyke.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  Also excellent. I love both. Both are really.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  And then you get Viking personal names in the names. And my favourite one is Toky's Ville, which becomes de Tokville.

• 32:44Speaker 03

  That's it. Exactly. And Toky, you know, absolutely very, very Norse personal name. You know, Gonneville, Omenville, Tourville, you know. So you've got that. But what's interesting is the amount you've got it, because it is much thinner.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  And they're mixed with French ville.

• 33:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  It's not thwait or be.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  No, we do get that again in Britain, where you'll have elements that are, say, Old English, combined with elements that are all Norse.

• 33:11Speaker 00

  Helmsley.

• 33:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. They, yeah, but it's of a lesser magnitude, I'd say. Archaeologically, again, you know, you mentioned all those lovely stone sculptures and carvings from Britain. You don't get those to the same extent in Normandy. You know, you've got the on burial. And then you've got the question of, well, why? Which is the big, and sometimes one way of thinking about that is, okay, how many people are settling there?

• 33:40Speaker 00

  So was he Rollo no mates? Did he have no friends?

• 33:42Speaker 03

  Well, yes. This is, and it's tricky, because you can't really tell if he's work, because you do, again, you've got names that some of his mates might have had. You know, you've got Ingouf, Ozouf, Osmont, you know, Tostan. They're very Norse, but it's just the scale of it. I know there's some work going on at the moment. The University of Leicester's involved, also French universities, I think. They're looking at that Y chromosome. Basically, they should rename the study. They're looking at the male genetic line, and it is essentially, did Rollo have any mates? And how many mates did he have? If so, like, what does that genetic heritage look like?

• 34:20Speaker 00

  And what are they finding?

• 34:22Speaker 03

  It's sort of, it's fairly small scale. My understanding from what's come out so far is that there is definitely Scandinavian ancestry among individuals, male individuals in this case, who can trace their family line back in the area since the time of that sort of 10th century settlement. But again, it's not huge, and genetics is really tricky, because there's always the question of when does that line come in? But no, there are sort of, I think there was one study, there were like three strands that they could see. So it's not that it's not there, but there's a question of how integrated they are. And again, that comes back to this idea of what does that Norse diaspora look like as it's spreading into different parts of the world?

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Now, as we discovered last time, and you were brilliant explaining this last time, that Anglo-Saxon and Norse are related languages.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  And were kind of a bit mutually comprehensible.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  They could just about understand each other, although there are big differences were there. But French and Norse is obviously very different altogether. So Rollo, particularly if he had no mates, had to learn French pretty quick.

• 35:36Speaker 03

  So yeah, we've got Rollo some mates. Let's say, you know, Rollo.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  Few mates.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  Few mates. Yeah, exactly. So this is, this is a really, really interesting one, because it looks like within not very many generations at all, we've already got a sort of loss of Norse language. It's more sort of like a heritage marker rather than something that's actively being used. So Dudo, again, he says that William Longsword sends his son, Richard, to Bayre to learn Norse, to learn sort of the Danish tongue.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  Implying that Bayre was one of the last places where Scandinavian was still spoken.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, again, that, that seems to, yeah, exactly. And so sort of there are pockets.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  What dates that?

• 36:21Speaker 03

  So that is the 940s, I think. So again, it's not long.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  Then there's this moment, isn't there, when in, I think it's 1014, you get Normans from Normandy fighting with proper Vikings in Ireland at the Battle of Clontarf. That again, seems that they're still keeping up with their cousins and can't resist getting in a boat and plundering a few monasteries in Ireland.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  But that's exactly it. It's keeping up with the cousins. It's, and again, to use that word diaspora, the thing about a diaspora is you remain connected. And you have to, in a way, think, what is the point where Normandy drops out of that Norse cultural diaspora? And when we're talking about, we're talking about language, we're talking about family connections, we're talking about, all right, I hear that, exactly as you say, our cousins are over in Ireland, let's go help them out.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  You could compare it maybe to British Punjabis, who were brought up in Yorkshire or in London, and are thoroughly Anglicised and living here, but will go for marriages to India.

• 37:21Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  And will learn a bit of Bangra and so on, and come back, speaking a tiny bit of Hindi and Punjabi.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. I think, I think that is really the closest modern day comparison to what is going on as they sort of spread out across the world, because they're not just, it's not a sort of top-down cultural imposition. It's fluid. It's much more interesting than that, and it changes depending on where they are. There's a, you know, there's this wonderful, you mentioned 1014, Clontarf, but I think it's probably around the same year, you've got records of Rouen getting a visit from a Norse skaldic poet, Sigvater Thorferson.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  Can anyone understand him?

• 38:05Speaker 03

  Well, this is it. We don't really know. So he's on a trading trip, he's with his mate Berger, they're on their way to England. And you've got to think, this is the era where Knut the Great is getting going in England.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  So we've got another Viking king in England. Yeah.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  Exactly. So everything is interconnected there. And of course, Knut, when we get to 1066, and we're looking for the reason why there is a Norse claimant to the throne, Harald Harvada, hitting from the east, we're looking for Knut for the origins of that. And so, Sigvater, there's a surviving verse that he's said to have composed when he's on his way to England, but he's at Rouen. The question is whether anyone at the court would have been able to understand him, because we've already got, decades earlier, we've got the sons duke being sent away to learn the language. I suspect, I was trying to work this out. It was, okay, so 911 is when Rollo is given this land. We're talking just, you know, pretty

• 39:00Speaker 03

  much bang on, what, 103 years? And so I'm trying to think, is there anyone who? Would have been a child who might have remembered people who had come over at that point in that first settlement, who'd still be there at the court when Sigvarta visits. We're just moving out of living memory. And there's that question of what that means in terms of who are these people now and how do they see themselves?

• 39:26Speaker 00

  When I was at uni, I bought, I remember it cost me a fortune and I had to save up for it. But this is David Bates's Normandy before 1066. And he talks about his whole thing is about how quickly and how completely Normandy becomes frankified. And he's minimizing all the stuff you love about, you know, all the Viking stuff and saying that pretty quickly, they've converted to Christianity properly, that there's, they're absolutely tied in with the church, that their law codes are absolutely Frankish, that they changed their methods of warfare even, that they begin fighting on horseback and using the lance rather than double-headed axes and thrashing around with shield walls and that kind of stuff. Is that something that, I mean, this, this book was written, I think,

• 40:10Speaker 00

  30 years ago, or 40 years ago. I remember it being the hot new thing in 1985 when I was studying this. Is, is, is it still, have historians gone with that, that it's basically by the time we get to the birth of William the Conqueror, that it's three generations later that it's become entirely frankified?

• 40:26Speaker 03

  It's always more complicated, you know, in the sense that there's different metrics we can use to look at that. I think if we're, like we've said, if we're comparing it to say what's going on in Britain and Ireland at this point, yeah, it's a different scale, absolutely. But then there's that lovely thing, you know, we're talking about the Beaux Tapestry. And there's this wonderful bit where they are making the ships that are going to travel from Normandy.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  And they're Viking ships.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  And they're Viking ships.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  They've got, they've got dragon prowls.

• 40:56Speaker 03

  Exactly. And they've got the clinker-built sides. And I always love that, that little moment of something that we think of as being so Viking, but still there.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  I saw this last week. I went and saw the tapestry last week. And pass it, if you look at the people that are building the ships, they are Vikings. They've got these very Norwegian looking beards. I mean, they're very specifically beardy, hairy, you know, they'd have been hairy breeches.

• 41:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that's exactly it. The hairstyle is another indicator. So again, if we're talking culturally, we're not now necessarily talking about language.

• 41:28Speaker 00

  And beard style.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  We've got the beard. We've also got this thing that we may have talked about before. Anglo-Saxon writers absolutely hate the fact that Norse settlers are sexy with good hair and change their socks and wash, and the women fancy them, you know. So this is a thing and you see them getting really cross.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  It's this kind of Americans in East Anglian air force bases all over again, over here, overpaid and whatever else it is. Over sex, that's right.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  It's that, it's that, exactly. But one of the things that they complain about is the specific hairstyle they've got, which is basically short at the back, long and shaggy at the front. And again, if you look at the tapestry, you see that.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  Well, the Saxons have all got sort of ill-fashioned, Battle of Britain moustaches.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  Oh, I know. I, I always, I don't know, I always think that the Normans were probably a smoother bunch, aesthetically speaking.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  You've always liked a Viking boy.

• 42:19Speaker 03

  I do like a good Viking boy. I really do.

• 42:21Speaker 00

  Anyway, so let's go finally to, towards William himself, because we're just going to end this episode with the world of William's childhood and who he is. So it's, it's three generations from Rollo to William the Conqueror, four generations?

• 42:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, three or four, is it? Are you trying to count up? What have we got? We've got long sort of, yeah, four-ish.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  Four generations.

• 42:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, a small handful.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  And by this time, these guys have become Dukes of Normandy?

• 42:52Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly, exactly. And it's not anything that we would really recognise as properly Viking. You know, we've got that whole 11th century religious revival, for example, you know, you've got sort of Jimmyage and Mon Saint Michel and all the rest of it. Beck, again, that becher word, you know, the, the stream. They're drawing in the best minds in Europe. They're making future Archbishop of Canterbury.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  So how's all that happening? Is that, is that the Dukes of Normandy being sort of incredibly educated patrons of the arts or?

• 43:22Speaker 03

  I think it's that. They're plugged into this world of medieval Christendom, exactly that. And, you know, they have a lot riding on that. And, you know, so when we're looking at these origin stories, these foundation stories that being written about them, it's about secure, it's a really interesting double sort of frame in a way, because it's about securing that pedigree as we are here, we are part of medieval Christendom, we are big players on the scene, don't mess with us. But at the same time, we're a little bit edgy, we're a little bit Viking, you know, you also don't want to mess with us because of that. So there are times where you sort of see these two ideas competing. So it's like, we're not, we're not the same as you, but we are equal to you, which again

• 44:04Speaker 03

  is, is actually quite a big Viking thing. But by the time we get to William, we're very much Duke of Normandy territory. That's his pedigree. That's his legitimacy.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  And again, just to remind listeners, because this is where we're going to be going with this series towards the end, before William sets off on his expedition to England, another bunch of Normans, the Ottweils of Goutens, are renting themselves out as mercenaries in South Italy and setting up kingdoms in South Italy in the 1040s. That's a full 20 years before, this is during William's childhood presumably.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And we really have to think about this, that in a way, particularly, you know, we're both sitting somewhere in Britain, you know, talking about this. And so that tends to somehow, sometimes understandably, skew our geographical view of the world that the Normans are operating in. Because for us, the big date, 1066, you know, so it's that. But exactly as you say, they are also facing out into Europe and very far beyond that. And we're seeing them becoming big players on this international stage. And that's the context in which, exactly as you say, William is being sort of brought up. It is not an easy childhood that he's got.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  That's so interesting. So 1014, they're fighting with the Vikings in Clontoff. By the 1040s, they're very much part of the Mediterranean world.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  Kidnapping the Pope.

• 45:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:34Speaker 00

  Kidnapping the Pope in Southern Italy and getting him to give him the whole of Southern Italy and it's Italy.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  Exactly. This is it. And so when you're thinking about William within that context, because sometimes, I don't know, maybe this is just me, but I get this sense that, you know, all this, this kind of the to-ing and fro-ing about who was actually promised, you know, the throne of England and all the rest of it. And sometimes William is, I think, sort of treated as a bit of an upstart. You know, it's like, oh, what's he's just like in Normandy. And we, we don't realise that the heft of the sort of the world that he comes from. And of course, there is an issue there as well, because of course, although illegitimacy wasn't a barrier to inheriting the dukedom.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  Ha, so you were jumping at this without explaining that, that point. So yeah, he's William the Bastard. This is important.

• 46:24Speaker 03

  He is. And this is important because on the one hand, he is a big player in a big world with sort of big relatives. On the other hand, he is illegitimate. And that, as, as we say, that doesn't mean that he isn't allowed to become Duke, not at all, but it means he's insecure.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've just been reading the catalogue for the Beaux Tapestry that I bought in the British Museum to accompany it. And it makes the point that illegitimacy was not a big deal in Normandy at the time.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  No, exactly. It's not, it's not a big deal. Later on, it become, it becomes a bigger deal. Definitely. It's not. And it's, it's, it's fairly normal. The issue really is that William, so, so his, his father, Robert of Normandy, dies, returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  Again, looking towards the Mediterranean world.

• 47:13Speaker 03

  Looking towards the Mediterranean world.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  Not dies from a trip to the fjords.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. And you think about 1035, we've talked about the sagas a lot written down in Iceland. From a, from a point of view of sort of the Norse world, they've only been technically Christian for 30 odd years at that point. So, you know, we're, we're dealing with these very different worlds. And so, yeah, William at that point is maybe eight years old. And so it's not the illegitimacy so much as the fact that he's young and vulnerable. And it's a bloodbath. His guardians are just murdered. One has his throat cut in the room. It, well, it's, it's said to happen, you know, where William's sleeping. William has just moved from house to house.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  How come this is happening if he's the Duke's son? Because you'd imagine by this stage, the Duke is quite well established.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  There's other people who'd quite like that top job, basically, that, you know, and it's, it's never as simple as there's just one claimant to the throne. I mean, you know, and we, we, yeah, we see that again and again. It's basically who can hold the position? And that's it. So they're not just going to say, oh, okay, you know, you're, you're the Duke's son, therefore we'll all, he's eight. So it's actually with the help of the King of France, that he ends up taking control of his own duchy. It's the Valles Dunes in 1047.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  Huh. So he's semi-installed by the King of France?

• 48:36Speaker 03

  He's certainly helped on his way, it seems. Yeah, exactly. So, so he's there as a fairly junior sort of high status, but he's junior and he's vulnerable.

• 48:45Speaker 00

  An interesting point we should mention is, well, A, he's born in 1027, that's an important date, that when he's born. And we said he's illegitimate. He's, he's Duke Robert's son. But his mum is called Ailever and she's the daughter of a local tanner. In other words, middle class bourgeois in trade. And that presumably alters his outlook, makes him more sort of economically aware. He's not just a toff into, uh, into riding and hunting and stuff. He, he, he knows about commerce and industry and, and that whole world.

• 49:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And again, you can see that, I think, you know, we can't actually say this is, this is definitely the context in which he then becomes who he is. You know, look at when, you know, he, he, he's, he's precise, you know, everything is a legend. Look at Doomsday, but you know, it's this sense that everything has a price, everything has a value, everything has a place. And I think that that's a control thing, it's a personality thing. But yeah, I do wonder how much that other part of the world he comes from might have affected his outlook. Exactly. He's not just off, you know, able to kind of, this is so, so cutting, you'll, you'll get complaints, but you know, he's not quaffing all, all day and sort of riding and, you know, hunting and having a lovely time, you know?

• 50:01Speaker 00

  There's a bit of that. We see quite a few pictures of him with a hawk on his hand and this sort of stuff.

• 50:05Speaker 03

  There was quite a bit of that, exactly. But there's substance underneath it and that's important. And there's also, I, you probably remember a lot better than I do, there's, there's that horrible, what do they do? That, that, that occasion where they, they hang out all the, the skins that, what's, what's that?

• 50:20Speaker 00

  The tanners?

• 50:21Speaker 03

  The tanners, yes.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  When he's besieging, I remember this story, he's besieging a town and in order to insult him, they put out the, the tanned hides on the battlements, saying, you're not a real toff, your mum's just a tanner. And when he captures the town, he cuts off the hands and the legs of the people that do it. You don't do that at all. So he's a bit of a brute too, we should say. He's big physically, he's, he's, he's a tough guy.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can't say I'm particularly enamored of him as a character. I find him.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  And you like your Viking boys as we know.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, but I know.

• 50:55Speaker 00

  You're sort of Viking boy.

• 50:56Speaker 03

  Even though they're really not, if we're talking about who, who would I have liked to, to have come out top 1066, I've got to say I'm all for Harold Hardrada. You know, he's a, he's a, he's a poet, come on, he's classy, you know, he's off in Byzantium.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  And he'd been with the Emperor Byzantium, impress, impress. Emperor Zoe.

• 51:12Speaker 03

  According to his possibly own, there's possible Harold has quite a hand in his own saga and is like, yeah, she totally fancied me. And then he's like, there's a point where he's locked in the basement and he's fighting dragons and like demons. He's like, yeah, I'm so badass. So I'm like, yeah, I, I, I'm much bigger fan. Exactly as you say, I think we in The Conqueror.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  We later see him turn, and we'll be dealing with this next time.

• 51:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  Into a, a proper brute. I mean, Harrow of the North is one of the worst.

• 51:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:41Speaker 00

  War crimes of the era.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:44Speaker 00

  And when he dies, his corpse is desecrated because everyone hates him. But there's hints of that already, even though he's this sort of obviously very magnetic war leader who can attract people to him.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. I think, I think there's that. I think there is something quite, I mean, who is this not sure of, but he, he feels very cold and calculating and brutal. And that's the world that he comes from. It's the world that he inhabits generally. I mean, you know, it's not, I, I'm sure that's true of many, many people, but exactly as you say, what happens later on, I think, I don't get that sense, you know, what's in, in Beowulf, that was good cooning, that was a good king. With William, I kind of feel I'm quite glad I wasn't around to see that.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  I agree with you. There's a very interesting quote by the chronicler, Audric Vitalis, who I think is an Englishman living in Normandy, is that right?

• 52:34Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  He talks about how William the Conqueror, as we now know him, William the Bastard to his enemies, was the perfect duke to pull the Normans together. And this is what he writes, he says, "If the Normans are disciplined under a just and firm rule, they are men of great valor, who press invincibly to the fore in arduous undertakings and proving their strength, fight resolutely to overcome all enemies. But without such rule, they tear each other to pieces and destroy themselves, for they hanker after rebellion, cherish sedition and are ready for any treachery," says the Englishman.

• 53:11Speaker 03

  I mean, he said it, not us, but yeah, exactly. I, I think so, yeah.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  So this is what the guy who is going to take us forward now into the next episode. William the Bastard, William the Conqueror, bit of a brute, big guy. I think they dug up his thigh bone and worked out that he was five foot 10, five foot 11. So that by 11th century standards is a big jab.

• 53:34Speaker 03

  Well, if he's descended from Gango Rolfer, that makes sense, doesn't it? You like talking about.

• 53:39Speaker 00

  The walker, big thighs.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  The walker, yeah.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  And in the next episode, we are going to see what happens when a storm blows a ship off course in the channel and it lands on the coast of Puntu. And out of it, wet and furious, climbs the most powerful man in England, the Earl of Essex, brother-in-law of the king and the man everyone in England expects to rule when the childless Edward the Confessor dies. And this changes the entire course of William the Bastard's life and changes the entire course of English history. That is very familiar stuff, but what you've told us, Eleanor Baraklaff is not. It's, uh, uh, it's stuff that's completely new to me and it, I've never heard it done as, as, as, as excitingly. And we certainly haven't had Harold Harry Britches, whatever he's called, in, in anything

• 54:26Speaker 00

  that I was ever taught before. So thank you very, very much. Now, I'm sure everyone that has enjoyed this will want to join the club and hear the next episode immediately, because why wait a week when you could hear it now? You also get our wonderful newsletter and a host of other exciting benefits. And, and we're going to be doing a lot of live shows next summer, which you will get quick access to. So please go online immediately and join the Empire Club. But in the meantime, in the absence of Anita, who will be back next week, it's just goodbye from me and Eleanor, do you want to say goodbye to Anita's place?

• 54:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, goodbye.

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