Gone Medieval - 1066: What Became Of The Anglo-Saxon Children?

Episode Date: February 26, 2022

1066 is a year carved into the history of western Europe. It radically transformed the cultural, political and built landscape of England in a way that is hard to overstate - and yet its immediate aftermath is often forgotten. By Domesday, just 20 years later, around 94 percent of England's land remained in the hands of the Normans and their allies, and their children would inherit its vast majority.So what became of those Anglo-Saxons who were too young to fight in 1066? In this episode Matt is joined by Dr Eleanor Parker, author of the fascinating new book Conquered: The Last Children of Anglo-Saxon England, to find out more about the fates, fortunes and misfortunes of those last people born and raised in pre-conquest England.Eleanor's book is available on Amazon here.Don’t forget to leave us a rating and review while you're here!For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to the Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hits. I'm Matt Lewis. If you're anywhere near History Twitter, you'll almost certainly have come across my guest today at her handle Clark of Oxford. And Anna Parker's new book, Concord, the Last Children of Anglo-Saxon England, draws out the stories of the often-forgotten aftermath of the Norman conquest. 1066 is a year very much carved into the history of Western Europe, and it radically altered the cultural, political and built landscape of England in a way that's hard to overstate. Say the conquest and everyone knows precisely what and when you mean.

By Doomsday in 1086, only about 6% of land still remained in the hands of non-Normans. Concord takes us into that intervening 20 years. What was it like for those too young to fight off the Normen? Normans in 1066, but forced to live with the outcomes of the Battle of Hastings. Stark choices, reduced prospects, and a loss of all that had been expected faced those who had been children and teenagers in 1066. How did they deal with it? Well, Eleanor is here to explain it all to us. Thank you very much for joining us, Eleanor. Thanks for having me. So I think one person that people may be aware of who was directly and immediately impacted by

the events of 1066 is Edgar Etheling. Can you tell us a little bit about him, please? Yeah, Edgar Etheling is kind of one of the most important members of this generation that I'm interested in for the book. He was a descendant of the Anglo-Saxon royal line, really the only remaining male representative of that line after Edward the Confessor died at the beginning of 1066. And he was still only in his early teens at the time that Edward the Confessor died. Edward was his great uncle. And it seems likely that Edward had kind of, at least at some point, considered Edgar as a possible heir, someone to come after him, because that's what the title Etheling suggests. It's like a throne-worthy person. So Edgar's claim to be King of England was

quite strong in 1066, but he was obviously too young to do much to defend it. And as anyone who knows anything about the history of the battles of 1066 will know, he didn't kind of manage to participate in any of all of that was going on between Harold and William and so on. He got very much sidelined. But he is then in the immediate aftermath of Hastings, he's kind of thrust to the forefront by the Anglo-Saxon adults desperately trying to find a reaction to Hastings, because they effectively elect him as king and sort of push him out there almost against William, don't they? That's right.

Yeah, there's this kind of brief period where some among the surviving English nobility kind of fix on Edgar and try to, yeah, as you say, elect him as king. But it really lasts a very short period of time, unfortunately, because they didn't have the strength, the resources to resist the Normans. So by the end of 1066, Edgar had had to, so that was a very short-lived attempt to kind claim his position. And then for a little while, he kind of lived in Norman-ruled England for a few years and then left the country with his sisters and his mother and headed to Scotland. And from there, he started to now kind of coming into his own a bit, started to try and organise some

military resistance to the Normans. And for a little while, he was successful with his allies. But again, it didn't last very long, unfortunately. I suppose it's another of those unanswerable what-ifs from history that if Edgar had been a few years older in 1066, could we have ended up with another battle following on from Harold Hardrada's invasion and then William the Conqueror's invasion, we could have ended up with another epic battle to define who would be in control of England, but Edgar just wasn't in a position to defend the claim that others sort of thrust upon him. And so does he then, how does he get involved in rebellion and how does William react to this kind of sion of the Anglo-Saxon house going against him? Well, one of Edgar's problems

was that he kind of didn't have very, I mean, apart from his, you know, his ancestral claim to the throne. He hadn't really, he wasn't born in England because his father had been forced into exile before he was born. And so he didn't kind of have very firm roots in England or English possessions or anything like that. So he really was very dependent on allies. And in the few years after the conquest, his most important ally was the king of Scotland, Malcolm, who became his brother-in-law. And so for a little while Malcolm was prepared to kind of back Edgar's claim. And there were still some members of the surviving English nobility who were also kind of working with him, although whether they were just, they were actually trying to support his claim to the throne or whether

were sort of just more trying to resist the Normans and maybe had their other ideas, had their own ideas about who ought to reign is a difficult question. But Edgar, they managed to win a battle at York in 1069, and they managed to kind of capture York and hold it against the Normans for a bit. So there were some sort of short-lived military successes, but as we know, it didn't last very long. And I guess it's difficult to discern whether Edgar, as you say, is being used as a pawn by everybody else who has their own motives.

You know, the King of Scots is always going to be keen to cause trouble for the English king, and there will be those Anglo-Saxon nobles who've been pushed aside. So does it become difficult in the sources to tell how much of this is Edgar leading in his own name or whether this is Edgar still being pushed along in front of everybody else who just wants to oppose William somehow? It is really hard to tell. And the sources in the years after the conquest actually tell us very little about Edgar altogether. They don't seem very interested or willing to record what he was doing

or tell us very much about him. There are one or two sources kind of from the English perspective, which clearly retained an interest in him. So the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, still trying to write English history despite the Norman Conquest. He's still really sympathetic to Edgar and interested in what he was doing. But Norman historians hardly talk about him at all. So it's very hard to kind of sort of build up a picture of what he was intending to do or what he might have wanted or what his plans were. Which is so frustrating because he's such a fascinating character with such a great story at such a pivotal moment in history.

And he's so difficult to pin down. I mean, we know he goes on crusade, don't we? But we don't know all that much about what happens to him in between everything that is recorded. Yeah, that's right. I mean, he actually lived a really long life after the conquest and its immediate aftermath. We kind of then tend to forget about his story, I think, but he lived on into the 1120s. So he did lots of other things in his life. He travelled around quite a lot. As you say, he went on Crusade, maybe. It's not quite clear what the details are. He went to Italy, went to Normandy. He was kind of getting involved in other people's battles and squabbles and things like that, but never really have it in a position of much power himself and always really dependent on his allies and anyone who could support him. And what do we know about Edgar's two sisters, Margaret and Christina? How well recorded are they in the aftermath of the conquest? Margaret's life is actually very well recorded, more so really than her brothers. Because, as I said, so she went to Scotland with her brother and probably the youngest sister, Christina. And Margaret married Malcolm as part of Malcolm's alliance with Edgar and, you know, willingness to support him against the Normans. And so contemporary sources are really quite interested in Margaret, in what happened to her. They talk a bit about the circumstances of this marriage, about whether she really wanted. to marry him or whether she was kind of forced into it by circumstances, as seems likely. But then it became quite a successful marriage, apparently. They had many children. And Margaret

became a kind of venerated figure as a holy queen and later a saint. So there are quite a lot of records of her life and the kind of things she did when she was living in Scotland. And it's through Margaret that the Norman kings of England then kind of managed to connect themselves by marriage back to the Anglo-Saxon royal line when Henry I first married Margaret's daughter. So, of course, because of that marriage, there was a lot of interest on the Norman side as well in sort of recording her life and her ancestry and telling her story. Christina always gets a bit kind of forgotten out of the picture, though I'm quite interested in her. What we know about her was that she became a nun, Romsey Abbey in Hampshire, maybe for a time,

Wilton Abbey as well. And while she was there, she educated her sister's daughters. One of the very few things that we know about her, apparently, from what Margaret's daughter, Edith said, was that she, Christina kind of tried very hard to protect her nieces from what seemed like sort of Norman attacks on their walk, kind of Norman suitors who wanted to marry them. Christina was a very protective aunt. So we have an interesting kind of picture of her character from that, but we really don't know very much about her otherwise. And does that first story sort of highlight the difference between the ways that the conquest

affected men in Anglo-Saxon England and women? So Edgar is able to get himself involved in rebellion initially, then comes to terms with William, is involved in some of the politics on the Norman front and all of that kind of thing. Whereas Margaret is kind of married off in an effort to promote Edgar's position. Christina ends up in a nunnery. Does that highlight the ways that perhaps men were, although they didn't get a great outcome in all cases, men were much more able to determine their own fate in the aftermath of the conquest, whereas women were pushed around a little a bit more on the chessboard kind of thing? Yeah, that's very much the case.

I mean, obviously, these family are in a kind of a very special position because they've got royal blood. And so to be a descendant of the Anglo-Saxon kings, it has a lot of value for all kinds of different people who want to sort of use them and push them around and so on. But that kind of thing we see where women get kind of sought out by Norman men as kind of a means of like establishing their power by marrying into English families. And of course, English women didn't necessarily likely have much choice in the matter there. one sense they kind of become quite integrated into Anglo-Norman England to the new regime.

But then, of course, they're in this difficult position where they're kind of, you know, being pushed into participating into a regime they may not have sympathised with and, you know, maybe had kind of surviving family members as Margaret did with and Christina did with Edgar, who they wanted to help but couldn't help or something like that. It was a difficult position to be in. It sounds like in an odd way the women may have absolutely not felt this way, but at least had some value in the aftermath of the conquest, whereas the men were a threat, the women were an opportunity or a gateway to integration in England.

I'm sure the women didn't feel that way when they're being pushed into some of these marriages, but they were much less under threat maybe than some of the men. Yeah, I think that's right. They were less under a kind of direct threat of being dispossessed or pushed out of England or whatever. They had some kind of value, but then it wasn't a value you necessarily wanted to have,

if that made you a target for, say, an unwanted marriage. So, yeah, they were kind of in this difficult in-between position. And I guess it highlights it perfectly if you're having to put your daughters into a nunnery protected by your sister, just to have them raised without being hunted down by Normans who want to marry them. And so some of the others who were active in the aftermath of the conquest but are quite often overlooked are the children of Harold Godwinson, so King Harold who dies at the Battle of Hastings. What do we know about how they reacted to the conquest and what happened to them in the end? Yeah, so Harold Goldmanson actually left quite a few surviving children, some of whom were

sort of already in their middle-late teens, and then some of them were much younger. And his brother had also left some surviving sons. So they were in a really interesting and difficult position. Obviously, they're now the sort of heirs to a completely discredited, shattered, controversial family name, family line, and so on. And the Godwin family had been incredibly rich and powerful before the conquest, and they just kind of lost it overnight, effectively. So the survivors now had to sort of work out what to do next. So some of Harold's sons briefly became involved in rebellions against the Normans. So they went to Ireland and they got a bit of Irish support and then came back to England and raided in the southwest and the kinds of places where the

Gobbein family had formerly been powerful. But they were fought off quite successfully by the local forces there, so that didn't last very long. And then, and the rest of the family apparently led by their grandmother, Githa, went first to Flanders and then to Denmark, where Githa was from originally. And she was a close family connection of the Danish king. So he took them in, this is King Svain Estrason, he took them in and kind of supported them and arranged marriages for marriage for the daughter, who was also called Githa. But we don't know what happened to Harold's sons after that, really. There are very few kind of scattered references that suggest they stayed in Scandinavia, but we don't really know. And in the book you talk about one of Harold's daughters, Gounhild, who gets

involved in a bit of scandal. Can you tell us a little bit about her? Yeah, so Gurnald was the only one who really seems to have stayed in England. And she was living at Wilton Abbey. So again, you know, living in a nunnery, presumably because it was a safe place to be. And her aunt, Edith, who was Edward the Confess's widow, was also living there. So she was probably kind of left in Edith's care. But at some point in the years after the conquest, we don't know exactly when or how she left the nunnery and she had a controversial relationship with Alan Rufus, who was a non-year. nobleman, who was one of the most powerful men in the north of England. They don't seem to have got married. They might have had a child. The details are all quite murky. But we kind of only really

know about this relationship because the Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm, wrote some very kind of angry letters to Gunhill telling her how shocking this relationship was and telling her to go back to the nunnery. But as far as we know, she didn't do that. So there's something really interesting going on there. And it would be so fascinating to know a bit more about the circumstances in which she met Alan Rufus, why she, if she decided to go with him or kind of what happened there, she may well have been one of those women that we were talking about who kind of finds themselves sought out for the sake of that family connection and the sort of ancestral wealth and line that she kind of represented maybe. And in the aftermath of the conquest, I think Herriwood the

wake is one of those characters who I find absolutely fascinating and some people know the story quite well, but I think he has evaded some other people. And he's kind of a prototype Robin Hood kind of character rebelling against William the Conqueror. So what do you think about his experiences drove him into such a fierce rebellion in the aftermath of the conquest. Harrowwood is an interesting one because he is, as you say, for some people, the most famous anti-Norman rebel. But actually we know very, very little about the historical Herriwood. We know he was a real person.

He wasn't from the kind of distinguished background of the other people we've been talking about. He was probably just a minor Lincolnshire landowner who got kind of caught up in the anti-Norman rebellions that were taking place in the Fenland and East Anglia and so on, around 1069, 1070. And there was a point at which English rebels gathered on the Isle of Ely, which in those days was really an island, so quite a good place for rebels to hole up. And the island was besieged by Normans for a while.

And Herald was part of that. But as far as we know then, what happened to him afterwards is much more a question of kind of legend than history. And all of these stories grow up around him, which exactly, as you say, are sort of prototypical Robin Hood stories about this outlaw and his band of followers and how they, you know, capture the Normans and make fools of them and prove that, you know, the English are just as good

and just as clever as the Normans. And then the story goes that Herod would sort of finally made peace with the Normans and got his father's lands back from the Normans and was kind of allowed to live on in peace. But we don't know if that's true or if that's just legend. It's a bit of a mystery. As you listen to this, me and Team History Hit are on our way down to the Weddle Sea, joining the expedition mounted by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust to the place where we believe the endurance lies on the seafloor. If we find it, it'll be the greatest underwater discovery since the Titanic. So get ready.

Dan Snow's History Hit podcast is the exclusive place to follow in real time the search for the lost endurance shipwreck in Antarctica, with regular episodes and updates dropping in the feed throughout the month. I've said before if you read the Chronicle stories of Harrywood, it gets very much like an episode of the A-Team or something like that, you know, all of these incredible escapes from very nearly being captured and escape from prison and, you know, beating everybody who gets in his way kind of thing. It almost defies belief. And is Harrywood, do you think, the only or the most successful rebel against William? The Chronicles do talk about William coming to respect Harry Wood. And in the end, Hero would gets his family lands back and comes to terms with William. William, is he an example of one of the very few who managed to succeed in rebelling against the conquest? I think the thing is, all of that is probably a fantasy. I don't really think William had ever heard of Harry Wood the Wake or knew anything about him. But it's clear that for people in this area

in Lincolnshire and the Fens and East Angler and so on, he was a real sort of folk hero. So they really wanted to believe that William respected him, that he had shown the Normans, you know, how good the English could be, that he had, yes, been like the one success. for rebel, the only one to have really won Norman respect and managed to kind of get his own way and get his lands back and so on. So I think it's a kind of, at least these stories sort of start life as a kind of fantasy about the Normans coming to respect England and the English. And actually, you know, Herriwood was probably, in the scheme of things, a very, very minor figure, but he becomes this hugely important figure in legend. And that's a very interesting

kind of insight, I think, into what sorts of stories people wanted to tell in the aftermath of the conquest, that they wanted some stories like this in which you've got, yes, successful rebels and people who were able to kind of beat the Normans at their own game. It's a kind of wish fulfillment, I think, in a way. Yeah, because I guess there's an element of the Anglo-Saxon English not being able to deny the fact that they've lost, they've been beaten, they've been taken over by the Normans, but I guess what Herriwood gives them is this way of saying, but, you know, there is some resistance. We were successful in some ways.

We weren't 100% beaten. You know, we have this little shaft of light out there in the fens who managed to beat William. Yeah, kind of someone they can latch onto as a real hero of the English at a time when being English is a really bad thing and there's probably quite a lot of sense of, you know, the English having been humiliated and defeated and conquered and everything. Heroad is like the one sort of hero they can cling to.

And someone else that you discuss in the book is Walthioph, the Earl of Northumberland. So in 1066, he manages to make peace with William and retains his earldom and his lands in the north. What do you think soured that initial cordiality with William? So Wealthyof has an interesting kind of trajectory of peace with the Normans and then rebellion and then peace and then rebellion and so on. So he started off in 1066 as, so he was a fairly minor earl at that time. His father had been Earl of Northumbria. And Northumbria, of course, is a huge and powerful, important earldom. So a really kind of major position. while Theof only held quite a small earldom at the time of the conquest, and he was probably, you know, again, quite young in his teens or something.

So he submitted to William at the end of 1066, along with Edgar Atheling and the other English nobles. But then he joined in Edgar's rebellion a few years later. He was part of the army that conquered York from the Normans. So he was like, you know, kind of one of the figureheads of that rebellion. But then he submitted again to William, and this time he was given a really very generous peace settlement. He was allowed at that point to become Earl of Northumbria, as his father had been. And he also married William the Conqueror's own niece, Judith. So he was, you know, as a very kind of honourable position he was given there,

he was treated incredibly well. But a few years later, he rebelled again. He joined a rebellion of some other earls. And that time, he was executed, even though he'd apparently repented of this latest rebellion and tried to get mercy from William and wasn't really one of the leaders of that revolt. William had kind of had enough of him, I think, by that point. So what do you think drove Wolfieoff into those several revolts then? I mean, if he's allowed to keep his lands and titles married to one of the conqueror's nieces, that seems like a ridiculously good settlement for an Anglo-Saxon nobleman. What do you think he felt he wasn't getting or what did he think he could get more?

It's really not clear what his motives were or what he wanted, kind of at any stage in the different rebellions. Because, I mean, he's one of those people, I think, as I was mentioning earlier, he fought alongside Edgar Atheling. But it may not. have been his intention to sort of make Edgar king. He might have had other kinds of preferences about who should rule. It might have been the king of Denmark. It might have been Harold Godwins and sons. Who knows what his goal was. And actually, the kind of mystery about his motives has been something that people really

puzzled over sort of right from the start. I mean, right, even at the time when he was in prison awaiting execution, it seems not to have been clear kind of why he was in that position, what he had wanted, what his intentions had been. But there was a sense, at least from some people, that he'd been unfairly treated because he was English. So, you know, he'd been treated better than the most of the conquered English earlier on by William. But then when he rebelled, he got a much harsher punishment than anyone else did. He was actually the only person to be executed, of someone of this status to be

executed during William's reign. So there was a sense that he was a kind of, I don't know, an outlier in a way he'd, you know, maybe been made an example of because he had rebelled numerous times. And then so for some people, that made him actually not just a kind of a hero, but a martyr, an actual saint. You wonder whether he was, treated so harshly because he'd initially been treated so well. So he kind of threw that generosity back in William's face, which drew a more harsh reaction from William than anybody else was getting. Yeah, I think that's the impression that you get. And you mentioned there that a kind of cult and an idea of sainthood springs up around Wolfie Off. What do you think that tells us about

the attitudes of the English to those who resisted the Norman conquest? I guess it fits a little bit with what we talked about, Harry Wood, wanting to see some form of fight back against this conquest. Yeah, it's an interesting one because the area, so Wealthyoff was not a widely popular saint. He was popular in one specific area, and it's the same area where Herod was really popular. So Walthioth was buried at Crowland Abbey in Lincolnshire, and Herrowood also had a link to Crollan. This is kind of exactly the same Fenland area where stories about Herriwood were popular. So I think the fact that at Crowland, Walthioph starts to be venerated as a saint, that people come to his tomb for healing, that miracles are taking place, kind of does suggest that a similar sort of impulse in that area,

you know, this desire to find a hero of the English resistance, even though a defeated one, and to sort of think about, you know, the ways that he'd been badly treated by William, as they saw it, that William had been kind of cruel to him and that he was innocent, really, even though he's rebelled all these times, they kind of told these stories about how he had repented of it completely and really regretted it and had been sort of saintly right up to the moment of his death. So on the one hand, I think there's clearly a sort of popular interest in him as a kind of

a hero, a slightly herald-like hero. And yet a lot of the people who were sort of recording, at least the stories of his life and death, are not actually sort of from that kind of background, really. It's like the Norman abbots of Crowland Abbey and a wealthy off's own descendants. So who had, through his marriage to Judith, he had a daughter who, of course, therefore, had Norman ancestry as well as English ancestry. And she seems to have been one of the people who kind of helped to promote his cult and record them the memory of his life. So for her, you can't imagine it was a sort of anti-norman act of rebellion. It must have been more about sort of remembering her ancestry and the sort of the links that she had to pre-conquest England and the inheritance,

the line of inheritance that stretched back a long way and the value that that had for her and her descendants. So there are all these kinds of different people who are interested in telling the story of Wealthiov. And I think this sense of him as an anti-Norman hero is one part of it, but actually there are other kinds of things at play as well. Do you think the effort to having portrayed as a saintly figure is in some way a reaction to the Normans portraying Anglo-Saxon England as a heretical kingdom that needed to be conquered in the aftermath of the conquest. They say that, you know, Harold, is this oathbreaker who doesn't deserve to be a king and that England is rife with all of these problems. So do you think the effort to portray

someone who was rebelled against the Normans as a saint is almost a way to counterbalance that image of the English as heretical? Yeah, one of the interesting effects of the conquest that you get, especially kind of once you're into the 12th century, so a little bit of distance from the immediate events of 1066, is you get a real interest from both the Normans and the English in what Anglo-Saxon England was like, what pre-conquest England was like, and sort of trying to find ways to tell the story of those pre-conquest centuries. And on the Norman side, there's an interesting kind of, I guess, appropriating that history,

really, sort of saying, well, we're here now, we rule England. So England's history is our history. What are the interesting parts of this story that we want to talk about? about. And so, you know, there's an interest in sort of recording stories from Anglo-Saxon history from that point of view. But on the other side, you also get this sense of, you know, from some English historians of kind of loss of something that's been forgotten or cut off from them by the conquest and an attempt to sort of bridge that gap. And I think in the stories of people like Wealthyof, you do see this interest in trying to kind of make connections with what

seems like an increasingly distant English past, something that's been sort of separated from and by this watershed moment of the conquest. And so touched on it a little bit there, but who was telling these stories? Why were they recording for posterity tales of rebels who were more often considered by particularly the monk chroniclers of the time as unworthy and figures to be condemned? Why were they being so well recorded and in some cases held up as exemplars? That very much depends on who's doing the recording really. There were some monk chroniclers who, as you say, were very kind of

critical of rebels and saw them as treasonous and very much to be condemned. But clearly some monks were quite fond of rebels. I mean, the monks of Ely and Crolland seem to love stories about rebels. So there's a kind of a diversity of interest there. I think partly because of that sense of of, you know, something that had been lost at the conquest, this sense of injustice. And actually that applies both to, I mean, in the kind of in 12th century Ely, for instance, the history of the Norman siege of Ely is their history too, whether they're English or Norman. Everyone living in that community seems to have taken quite an interest in that story as an exciting part of local history, I guess. So that's one motive. And then other stories are recorded by people, I mean, I mentioned

Wealthyolf's daughter, for instance, people like her or Margaret of Scotland's daughter, these women who are interested in recording the history of their mother or father's generation and how they navigated the conquest, how it was that they maybe came to be part of these mixed Anglo-Norman marriages or whatever it might be. And there's that sense of, you know, trying to narrate that gap in history or that break with the Anglo-Saxon past to sort of smooth it over to tell stories of continuity and of adaptation and so on. And then the other thing that's worth saying is that quite a lot of these stories, especially when it comes to the family of Harold Gobinson, are actually hardly recorded in English sources at all. We have to sort of look to sources elsewhere,

so Scandinavia, for instance, to get a sense of what happened to them. So there were some people whose stories were maybe sort of seen as too controversial or too delicate a subject for anyone to want to write very much about. And I guess that almost dangerously magnifies people like Herrywood that you spoke about. So where we do have evidence of someone doing something, we lack evidence for the children of Harold Godwinson to some extent. So where we have evidence of a person, it's easy to latch onto it and almost exaggerate and magnify this character into something that he never really was.

It'd be so much more interesting to have a full account of, say, Edgar Athelings' life of the detail that we have about Herriwood's life. I mean, you know, as I said, a lot of it's fictional. but at least it shows people were really, really interested in telling stories about him, whereas so much of what happened to Edgar Atheling after the conquest is, you know, full of gaps and people not really wanting to recall what he was doing. And do you think to some extent this generation that is covered in your book was doomed to their fate?

So they're sort of stuck between this old world that surely they would have remembered as children and teenagers and that probably promised them a pretty bright future. But they've been unable to prevent the loss of that. and the new one was something alien to them and which treated them often with suspicion. So were they sort of doomed to this in-between fate of not being reconciled to the regime, constantly rebelling, sort of on this revolving cycle of trying to find a place in that world? I think it was a really difficult position to be in because, I mean, what was kind of interesting to me about this generation was that they just,

they weren't at the time of the conquest in quite enough of a position of power to take much control of their lives or of what was going on. They were sort of completely dominated by William and the, you know, much more powerful people on the Norman side. And so they were really very much sort of victims of circumstance. They could try and rebel, but they never really succeeded in doing that. And of course, that, you know, wasn't an option for anybody. And especially for those at the highest level of society, who are sort of, as I was saying about the children of Harold Gobinson, kind of airs to this incredibly controversial legacy where the Normans have chosen to blacken Harold's name and his entire family. how do you then cope with that as the inheritors of that legacy?

And I think it's not surprising that they didn't remain in England. They felt it seems like Harold Robinson's children, with the one exception of his daughter, Gunild, kind of didn't see any future for themselves in England. And that's probably true. They probably were better off getting out. And so how long do you think that friction lasted? Do we see it sort of fading away in the next generation,

who were almost presented, I guess, with the fate of complete, it's a done deal for them? do they find it less problematical to live under Norman rule? And do the Norman kings find them less problematical as subjects? Or is it something that persists for quite a while? Yeah. So in the next generation, we already start to see a kind of more integrated population because you start to get the birth of a generation who then, I mean like wealthiest children, have ancestry on both the Norman and the English side. So they're no longer necessarily strongly identifying themselves as one or the other. It's a mixed kind of society. And of course, as time went

on, that started to, you know, that increased and more and more, and you get a much more integrated society generally and much less clear distinction between the English and the Normans. But I think the fact that stories like Harrowwoods go on being popular right through the 12th century up into the 13th century, and I mean, I kind of never cease being popular really, suggests at least a real continuing interest in this sense of what might have been lost at the conquest or, you know, some sense of like England had lost its way or had lost something valuable anyway, even though this new society had emerged, there was some sense of kind of loss and injustice still persisting. Even from a Norman perspective, everything probably seemed fine, but there were definitely

still from the English side of things, a sense of loss, I think, certainly. I guess the danger is the previous Anglo-Saxon English period could almost take on a rose-tinted spectacle view as an idyllic past that the Normans have come along and smashed, which maybe it never quite was. And so then I guess all these chronicles talking about rebellions and uprisings and the fate of that generation, is that maybe a way for them to talk about and try and heal and address and come to terms with what has happened, what's changed, what's been lost? Yeah, I think it's certainly true that the further away you get from the real Anglo-Saxon past and from the people who had memories of the pre-conquest world, the more it becomes this

kind of idealised place. And the sort of stories that are told about Hero would fit in with the kind of other very fictionalised romance-type stories you get in the 12th and 13th century, which is sort of set in this idealised version of. Anglo-Saxon England. And by that stage, it's out of living memory, and it's very much like how people want to imagine this past society to have been. Doesn't bear much relationship to what Anglo-Saxon England was really like. That's absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us, Eleanor, to go through the details of that. Can you tell us where we can get our hands on your book conquered the last children of Anglo-Saxon England? It's out now, and you should be able to get it,

all good bookshops. I thoroughly recommend it to anybody. Don't forget to join Dr. Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. And don't forget also to subscribe to Gone Medieval wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you do get a moment, please drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts, including Spotify. It really does help new listeners to find their way to the podcast. If you're enjoying this and you're looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, then subscribe to the Medieval Monday's newsletter. Just follow the links that are in the show notes below. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval

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