Empire: World History - 401. Norman Conquest: Secrets of the Bayeux Tapestry (Part 1)

Episode Date: October 4, 2026

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: [e-mail] 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

This episode is brought to you by our friend Plaud, the world's number one AI note-taker brand. Now, when it comes to research, we all have our own methods sitting for hours in the archive, reading the secondary works, capturing every detail, grilling top scholars. But often we have to lose material in order to remain engaged when doing an interview. We've all been there sitting there with our notes, missing half the vital bits of conversation. and that no longer need happen ever again. Because now you just put Plaud on your collar and bingo. It records everything you say and transcribes it into sensible action points that you can refer to afterwards.

I only picked up Plaud a few weeks ago and already it's changing the way that I work. With One Press, the device transcribes those real conversations and turns them into clear actions. It also has a brilliant feature called Ask Plaud, which calls up details of hazy, long-gone conversations. in seconds. Empire listeners can go to UK.plaud.aI.4-E-I-Fourd-A-I-Ford-S-E-E-R-E-R-E-R-E. That's UK. dot P-L-A-U-D dot A-I-FORD-E-E-FAR. And use the promo code, Empire, to get 10% of any plaud device. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, William Drenple. And I'm afraid no, Anita today, because Anita's got another project. And so I am diving in on our new series.

alone and our new series is around the Beotapestry, 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 Beaudaubster at a press briefing and it is everything that it's cracked up to me. So you must go and see it. But what we decided to do on Empire was 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 conquest, 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 Franckapan 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 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 9th 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 it on the Empire Pod when it comes to to. to Normans and Vikings,

and it is, of course, the great Eleanor Balacombe. Eleanor, welcome back. 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 sort of... You're in a very colourful state today, Eleanor. Very colour, but I'm going to a Viking ship, Equinox boat burning down a butts of farm tomorrow. And for the occasion,

my hair is now, shall we say, high low to pink and rather start. It's 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 runstone themed sort of highlights that you've got on. 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 Ellen's hair because it's going to be one of the most memorable things of the whole podcast. If Peter Frankopan doesn't have hair like this, I will be very disappointed.

I'm having all your guests to Broke Pink. Eleanor, this is absolutely your territory. And you were with us recently talking about the Dane 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 the impression one gets to the Bayo 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 9th century France, introduce us to what happened after Charlemagne. I mean, I always remember that date from my history lessons of Charlemagne being made only 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, Elena. Exactly that. 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. It does. And you're exactly right, because in the same way, if we're thinking of memorable dates,

Of course, the famous raid is Lindisfan, 793, off the northeast coast of England. And people, well, certainly sort of from a British and Irish perspective, that last decade of the 8th 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 neighbor and a very powerful Christian southern neighbor 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 sort of 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.

of a Dane, as it were, we don't know exactly what he would have called himself, but a king called Godfred who starts to appear in the Carolingian records. He's raiding the towns, particularly trading towns. He's striking all these rich coastal targets. And this is the coast or up the rivers? Because I always remember that's the image of the Vikings burning down Notre Dame. Is that if I made that up? Is that from my distant...

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 Godfred and his successes 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. The Vikings steal merchants. 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 them up. And meanwhile, exactly as you say, they're coming in via these waterways. Right up the seine, right up the Loire. Exactly, exactly. There's the Frisian trading town of Dorostat, 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-Arles 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 Pius, 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 one monarch dies, the next sort of power struggle begins. That's when the Vikings start to take control. And 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 Elba, the Sen, you know, the Loire. And things start to get really nasty quite quickly. 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,

They're not as powerful as the Carolingians with an 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 defeat the Vikings more effectively and fight them off more effective? They also use bridges. Is that right? I have a memory of fortified bridges. The fortified bridges is a big thing. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, 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. The other side would be the Carolingian. Your history lessons, so much more fun than mine. I was studying Ethel Rendthian and Agnesaxon Charters and Simon Keynes, not doing board games with Eleanorcloth, sadly.

But, I mean, that's exactly what we were doing. We were looking at the different ways that the Carolingians, the Franks, try to counteract and what works and what doesn't. So it's exactly as you say 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 of a different magnitude. And so it's interesting to note, for example, what happens in 840. So Louis the Pius, Charlemagne's son, dies and a civil war breaks out essentially between his three sons. Hang on, we can't go on

with that mentioning who this is about. This is Ragnar Hairy Breaches, which is a very other Barclough character. Oh yeah, love a good, again, he probably had the bright pink highlight of hair. I mean, that we can probably say. I'm pretty sure he did. Right? Well, Ragnar Hairy Breaches, yeah, this is, so we've got to think about what's happening across what was Charlemagne and then Louis the Pius's sort of, you know, this huge area. So it gets split up into three. We've got Charles the Bald gets West Francia, which is very roughly what France is.

And then Lothar gets middle Francia, which is sort of the bit in the middle. And then Louis the German, as he gets called now, gets East Francia, which is roughly Germany, very roughly. But the middle is what sort of Belgium and Luxembourg, that kind of stuff. 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're sailing, as we said, the Sen, the Elbe. And so we have Ruin, for example, which we'll come back to later in our story, getting sacked in 841. Paris gets attacked repeatedly, and exactly as you would say, 845, there's a reference in the annals to a Viking leader called Regen Heres,

which might, might be the historical version of the figure that we come to know as Regen Heros, which might be the historical version of the figure that we come to know as Regen-Harrus, which might be. hairy britches. Do we know what his breeches were made of to bring this wonderful description? I'm trying to remember whether it's kind of they're rough, you know, is it the material? It all gets, the problem is that that that comes from the sagas and the sagas about Ragnahary Bridges 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, he was there to write down this amazing death speech. The snakes in there sort of transcribing it, you know. So it all gets a little bit funny. Secretarial snakes. Yes, secretarial snakes. Now, you mentioned, Eleanor, this whole business of paying them off. Now, as we know for Bethlehend already, if you pay Dane Geld, it just brings them back again. And I think you said a very nice analogy of it being like leaving milk for a stray cat.

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-Bertan from 845. You know, they say it's a very hard winter in March, 120 ships of the Northmen sailed up the centre of Paris. They laid waste to everything on either side and meeting not the least bit of opposition, which is important. and basically everyone's shocked. 120 ships is a big one.

It is if it's true. So people argue a lot about how many ships are involved because 120 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. There is a very niche branch of academia, which is basically people get very exercised about how many ships. And not just when we're talking about Western Europe, but also, for example, in Byzantium on the Caspian. how many ships actually are there. But this particular annal says he makes a deal with them.

He hands over £7,000 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 Horik, King of the Northman, sent 600 ships up the Elbe in Germany against Louis the German. So they're like, thanks very much for the money. Horik. Horik, yeah. Why did you not call one of your children Horik?

I mean, there's still time. There's deed polls, right? We can add that in. I think the next one's got to be Horic. Definitely. What about the stray cat? The stray cat can be horick. You know, if I'm starting, I think that's as far as we're going to get.

Horic hairy breaches has a great rigue. Horic hairy breaches. That's got to be a thing, surely. Anyway. 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 burning, they're ravaging the coastal regions. Doing their Viking thing. They're doing their Viking thing.

Exactly. They're Viking slash stray cat thing. Now, as we know from our last episode, this all culminates in England in 865 with the Great Army, our old friends who I used to dig at Repton and Cat Jarman's lovely Amber Beed and all that sort of stuff. Now, am I right in thinking that half that army would be. of that army splits off and having ravaged England and Mercia and Northumbria and East Anglia and created complete mayhem that a chunk of them set off and they land in France. Yeah, so this seems to be the idea that 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 there's 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 idea seems to be that they're sort of bouncing across the channel, depending on where the easiest pickings are. And are these sort of groups of, you know, one villager from Norway with all his mates and their five ships?

Is that the kind of thing we're talking about? 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 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.

The Far Traveller. Oh, it's beautiful. Yeah, I just, I mean, vidferli. But what's wonderful is that while we have a saga of him and his very far, fantastical travels full of, you know, demons and dragons and all sorts of things. We also have a collection of runestones from Sweden, from the same place in Sweden, quite close to Stockholm. And these runstones are all set up to the men who died out in the east with Ingvar,

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. That makes sense. Exactly, exactly. And so you're setting off on your gap here, your great adventure. And then, yeah, 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. Elsewhere, yeah. I think we've got to think it's much more mobile, much more flexible than maybe we have in our minds. Now, tell us about Rolo, because he's the key figure. He's the Norman that founds. Normandy. And am I right in thinking that he's a cousin of our Norwegian earls of Orkney? Is that right?

So I think, I think there is a relationship, but off the top of my head, I'm not going to put money down on exactly what that looks like. I've definitely read that that Rolo has, has Orcadian cousins. Well, which completely makes sense. Cousin of St. Magnus, maybe. Isn't that wonderful? 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 1066, we see one version of the conclusion of that, that this is a hugely interconnected world.

And, yeah, certainly true of Rollo. It's Rollo rather than Rollo. I think, well, it's Rolfsler. No, no, no, no, no, because Rolfer is how, so it's, So if we're looking at, from a Scandinavian perspective, he crops up in the sagas as Gengar Rolfo, 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 Ragnaraybreech as he becomes this semi-legendry, almost mythical character. A nog in the nog is going to turn up before long.

Yes, he's fantastic names. Yes. And it really, they're memorable. Say his name again. What do they call it in Norway? So Rolfer. Rolfer. Like Rolf or Ralph.

Well, no, actually Ralph may be slightly different, but yeah. Well, that's so interesting because we have all these Normans when they get to England. There's Ralph this and Ralph that. And it signs a thoroughly French name, but it's a Nording name. Exactly. And again, you see that in other parts of this great Norse Diaspora. You know, we have, you know, Keev and Ruse, we have Igor and Olga ruling there. Very similar time to Rolo.

or Rolfer. But that's, again, they're Norse names. It's Ingvar, like Invar the Far Traveller, and Olga, Helga. You know, so, yeah, we have, it's much more interconnected than we might think. So give us a picture of Ralph or Rollo. He's too fat to get on the horse, no. Or he's so muscular that he sort of collapses the horse. Yeah, I think it's poorly.

I mean, I have to think, I mean, I've done quite a lot of my research trips, particularly in Greenland, actually, on the back of Icelandic horse. And they are rather small and built a little bit like saggy sofas. So I can just imagine. This is this. I just saw in Edinburgh yesterday the Lewis Chessman there. Yes. And their horses are tiny little Shetland ponies.

They're teeny whiny little things. Exactly. And they really are. 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 host. having metal plates put in her arms. It's a proper Viking horse. It was a proper Viking horse and it was proper... Yes, but in my head, when I think of Gangorulfur on this horse, it's basically him with his legs trailing along the ground because he's just too big for the... But of course, that's the point. 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. But you think he's probably the same guy that appears in the rap version that the saga version as Rolf the Worker. They're certainly suggesting that this is because 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 Yarl in West Norway, and he conquers Normandy. 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. That's so interesting.

So you've got the French sort, You've got the, what's he called the Dudo? Ah, yes. Okay. 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. Exactly, which is possibly why I like that version so much. Yeah, exactly as you say.

The fullest account is Dudo and he's, you know, San Quintan and he's writing a century later. And he's a monk? He's a monk and he's writing for Rollo's descendants. So that's going to not be nearly as much fun as the, saga version. No. Well, yeah, I mean, it's, 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 885 to 886. Rolo was. Yeah, very much as a Viking. Quick question here. Sorry, I'm obsessed with the siege of Paris, the idea of the Vikings burning Notre Dame. Is Paris a big deal already at this point? Or is it,

is it us retrospectively sort of making Paris more abortions? than it was. No, it's a big enough deal that 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 daring do that managed to sort of break the siege. It's, I think, yeah, no, I think it would have been quite a shocking event. And you think Ronald could easily have been there?

I think there's a suggestion that he was. What we then have, he follows this up with the siege of sharks. in West Francia in the spring of 9-11. 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. Charles the Simple doesn't sound a very promising name. I think, yeah, I'm trying to remember it. It's always a bit, I think it's in the sense of... Not simple-minded? No, more sort of like, the pure.

Right. 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 way. 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 games 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 hope that he goes and gets killed on another raid but he tries something new and this is this idea

that's been described as poachers turned gamekeepers because what he basically does is he grants Rolo land around Rueong in exchange for Rolo's baptism Is that his land or somebody else's land he's giving it?

I do you know I much it's probably I don't know. I can imagine there's probably someone who was a bit pissed off at that point. I'm sure there was someone who was enjoying that land. Because what Alfred does, of course, is give the Vikings' day law, which is the opposite end of the country from him. 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 Alfred, it's Guthram. And Githrim 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 rule East Anglia, basically.

And it's not dissimilar. And it's this idea of setting a thief to catch 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, 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. But this obviously can go badly wrong because they can also invite all their cousins in and the whole thing goes to the hell on the hand card.

It can go very badly wrong, exactly. But I think, yeah, and I, you know, there are points where sort of the land, 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 state. Dealing with these guys, it's always going to be tricky, whatever you do. 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 of what happens when Rollo gives homage and is sort of made to king.

Tell us the story. It's a great story. It is such a Viking story. It's a very Viking story. And it sounds like a Viking saga and it sounds almost certainly not true. but tell us anyway. Exactly. And it's basically Viking slapstick humour where he's told he has to kiss the king's foot, you know.

Having accepted the land and agreed to be his liege man. Exactly. And agree. You know, he's been baptized. And so instead, he's not, I'm not bending to any king. So he tells one of his men to do it. And the man just basically lifts the royal foot and like, lift it up, but tips the king, Charles backwards out of his chair.

You know, who knows? 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 wonderful sort of borderland between facts and fantasy and legends and gossip and rumour. Stories told around fires, yeah. Exactly. And that's what makes it such a Viking origin myth. Brilliant. We're going to take a break now. When we come back, and I want you to tell me about how much Normandy feels like the day in law. Let's go there after the break. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Now, as historians, we spend a lot of time studying

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There's sunny Lima. However you imagine your sunny escape, Air Canada can take you there. Book hot fairs and vacation packages today. Nice travels. Welcome back. Now, Eleanor, in the last series you did with us, we had great fun in the Dane Law,

and we saw all those extraordinary crosses which have scenes of Ragnarok and Sigurd and all these Viking legends turning up improperly on crosses and religious monument. 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? 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 old north toft. We've got Beck, which is sort of stream or creek. Which we have in Yorkshire as a root name for a river. It is the same. It's Becker, yeah.

We used to have the Beck that ran behind my school, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, and it's there. It's there again, yeah, in northern Normandy. Again, when you recognise Dal Valley from Dadler. My name. Yes, exactly, exactly. And yeah, and again, in Yorkshire, we've got the Dales, you know, it's all there. Dalrymple means Wiggly Valley. I love that Wiggly Valley.

That's what my name means. It's so beautiful. Our enemies would probably do it as Crooked Dyke. Also excellent. I love both. Both are really. And then you get Viking personal names, in the names. And my favourite one is Toki'sville, which becomes de Tokville.

Yeah, that's it. And Toki, you know, absolutely very, very Norse personal name. You know, Gonneville, Omanville, Tourville, you know. So you've got that. But what's interesting is the amount you've got it, because it is much thinner. And they're mixed with French, Ville. Yeah, exactly. It's not Thwait or... No, we do get that again in Britain, where you'll have elements that are, say, old English combined with elements that are old Norse. Helmsley. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

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 armbarial. 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? So was he Rollo, no mates? Did he have no friends?

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 Inguf, Ozuvont, 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. 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 Volo have any mates and how many mates did he have? If so, like, what does that genetic heritage look like? And what are they finding? 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? Now, as we discovered last time, and you were brilliant explaining this last time, that Anglo-Saxon and Norse are related languages. Yeah. And were kind of a bit mutually comprehensible. They could just about understand each other, although the big differences were there. But French and Norse is obviously very different altogether. So Rolo, particularly if he had no mates, had to learn French pretty quick.

So yeah, she would call it Rolo some mates. Let's say, you know, Rolo's like a selective few mates. Yeah, exactly. So 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 Bayeur, to learn Norse, to learn sort of the Danish tongue.

Implying that Bayeer was one of the last places where Scandinavian was still spoken. Yeah, again, that seems to, yeah, exactly. And so sort of there are pockets. What dates that? So that is the 940s, I think. So again, it's not long. Then there's this moment, isn't there, when in, I think it's 1040s. 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. But that's exactly it. It's keeping up with the cousins. 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. 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 we'll go for marriages to India. Exactly. And we'll learn a bit of Bangor and so on and come back, speaking Italian of Hindi and Punjabi. Yes, exactly. 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 Ruin getting a visit from a Norse-Skoldic poet, Sigvater Thortheson. Can anyone understand him? 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. We've got another Viking king in England, yeah. 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, Harold Hardrada, hitting from the east, we're looking for

Canute 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 9-11 is when Rollo is given this land. We're talking just, you know, pretty 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 Sigvata the 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? people now and how do they see themselves? When I was at uni, 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 minimising all the stuff you love about, you know, or the Viking stuff and saying that pretty quickly they've converted to Christianity properly, that they're absolutely tied in with the church, that their law codes, that. are absolutely frankish, that they change 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 book was written,

I think, 30 years ago, or 40 years ago, I remember it being the hot new thing in 1985 when I was studying this. 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 francified. 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 Beir Tapestry and there's this wonderful bit where they are making the ships that are going to travel from Normandy.

And they're Viking ships. And they're Viking ships. They've got dragon prows. 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. 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 breaches. Yeah. And that's exactly it. The hairstyle is a number. other indicators. So again, if we're talking culturally, we're not now necessarily talking about language. A beard, sir. 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 crossed. It's the kind of Americans in East Anglian Air Force spaces all over again. Over here, overpaid and whatever else it is. Over sex, that's right. It's that. It's that. Is 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.

Well, the Saxons have all got sort of old-fashioned Battle of Britain moustaches. Oh, I know. I always, I don't know. I always think that the Normans were probably a smoother bunch, aesthetically speaking. You've always liked a Viking boy. I do like a good Viking boy. I really do like it. Anyway, so let's get finally 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 three generations from Rollo to William the Congra, four generations. Yeah, three or four, is it, you're trying to count up. What have we got? We've got longs we'll do it. Yeah, four is.

Four generations. Yeah, a small handful. And by this time, these guys have become dukes of Normandy. Yes, exactly. 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 Jumij and Mont Saint-Michel and all the rest of it. Beck, again, that Becker word, you know, the stream. They're drawing in the best minds in Europe. They're making future archbishops of Canterbury. So how's all that happening? Is that the Dukes of Normandy being sort of incredibly educated patrons of the arts? 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 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 didn'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 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. 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 de hautevilles of Gutants, 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.

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.

That's so interesting. So 1014, they're fighting with the Vikings in Clontuff. By the 1040s, they're very much part of the Mediterranean world. Yeah, exactly. Kidnapping the Pope. Yeah. Kidnapping the Pope in Southern Italy and getting him to give him the whole of Southern Italy and it's Italy. 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 towing and throwing 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 just like in Normandy?

And we don't realize 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. Ha, so you were jumping at this without explaining that point. So, yeah, he's William the Baster. This is important. 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 we say, that doesn't mean that he isn't allowed to become Duke, not at all, but it means he's insecure. Yeah, I've just been reading the cat. for the Beow 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. No, exactly. It's not, it's not a big deal.

Later on, it becomes a bigger deal, definitely. It's not. And it's fairly normal. The issue really is that William, so his father, Robert of Normandy, dies, returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Again, looking towards the Mediterranean world. Looking towards the Mediterranean world. world. Not dies from a trip to this field. Exactly. Exactly. And you think about 1035,

we've talked about the sagas a lot, written down in Iceland, from a point of view of sort of the Norse world, they've only been technically Christian for 30 or years at that point. So, you know, 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 cuts in the room. It's said to happen, you know, where William's sleeping.

William has just moved from house to house. How come this is happening if he's the Duke's son? Because you imagine by the stage the Duke is quite well established. There's other people who'd quite like that top job, basically. And it's never as simple as there's just one claimant to the throne. I mean, you know, 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 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 darche. It's the Valisdun in 1047. So he's semi-installed by the King of France? He's certainly helped on his way, it seems. Yeah, exactly. So he's there as a fairly junior. sort of at high status, but he's junior and he's vulnerable.

An interesting point we should mention is, well, A, he's born 1027. That's an important date when he's born. And we said he's illegitimate. He's Duke Robert's son, but his mum is called a lever, 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 economic. He's not just a toff into riding and hunting and stuff.

He knows about commerce and industry and that whole world. 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'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 cotton, you'll get complaints. But, you know, he's not quaffing all day and sort of riding and, you know, hunting and having a lovely time, you know. 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. 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 occasion where they hang out all the skins? What's, what's that? The tanners? The tanners, yes. 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 to do it. So he's a bit of a brute, too, we should say. He's big physically.

He's a tough guy. Yeah, I can't say I'm particularly enamoured of him as a character. I find him. And you like your own Viking boys, sweet. Yeah, but I, no, you're not. You're not really not. If we're talking about who would I have liked to have come out tox 1066, I've got to say, I'm all for Harold Hardrada.

You know, he's a poet. Come on, he's classy. You know, he's off in Byzantium. And he'd been with the emperor of Byzantium. Impress, impress. Impress Zoe? 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'm much bigger. Exactly as you say, I think we in the conqueror. We later see him turn and we'll be dealing with this next time. Yeah. into a proper brute. I mean,

harring of the north is one of the worst war crimes of the era. Yeah, exactly. 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. Yes, exactly. I think there's that. I think there is something quite, I mean, who is this not sure?

But he feels very cold and calculating and brutal. And that's the one. that he comes from. It's the world that he inhabits generally. I mean, you know, it's not, 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 Beowulf? That was Gould Cuning. That was a good king. With William, I kind of feel I'm quite glad I wasn't around to see that. 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? I think so. He talks about how William, 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. I mean, he said it, not us.

But yeah, exactly. I think so, yeah. So this is the guy who is going to take us forward now into the next episode. William the bastard, William the conqueror, a bit of a brute. Big guy, I think they dug up his thigh bone and worked out that he was 5'10, 5'11. So that by 11th century standards is a big jab. Well, if he's descended from Gangorolfer, that makes sense, doesn't it?

The walker, big thighs. The walker, yeah. 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 Ponto

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 Baraclough, is not. It's stuff that's completely new to me. And I've never heard it done as excitingly. And we certainly haven't had Harold Harry Bridges, whatever he's called in anything 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 a wonderful newsletter and a host of other exciting benefits. 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.

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