Noble Blood - William the Conqueror, Christmas King

Episode Date: December 26, 2023

William the Conqueror is considered the first King of England. But the road to his victory at the Battle of Hastings was strange and challenging, and it would take more than a coronation to get England to submit to him. Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon — Merch! — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong,

dance and then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHeart Podcasts presents Soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. This is my best friend, Janet. And we have been joined at the hips since high school. Absolutely.

A redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer. games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? They had a bogo.

Well, then you got them. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. Hey, this is Dana Schwartz, host of the podcast, Noble Blood. just checking in before the episode to do a little bit of housekeeping. First of all, thank you for being a listener. But if you want to contribute and support the show,

I put episode scripts and additional reading materials up on our Patreon, which is patreon.com slash nobleblood Tales. There's a link in the episode description. And over on the Patreon, I also do a weekly show with a friend of mine where we rewatch episode by episode, the CW television show, Rain, about Mary Queen. of Scots. So if that interests you, head over to the Patreon. There's also Noble Blood merch. There's an amazing sweatshirt that I wear pretty much every day. It's a crewneck. I

could not recommend it highly enough. So if that interests you, that link is also in the bio. Thanks so much. When Edward the Confessor, King of England, died childless on January 5th, 1066, The council had already determined that his successor would be his brother-in-law, a man named Harold Godwinson, the most powerful noble in the country. Harold was crowned the very next day, January 6, 1066. Holding a coronation so quickly after the last king's death seems, frankly, a little suspicious. It's the sort of thing that a historian, might look back on and double-check the dates about, smelling something akin to a coup.

There is a perfectly reasonable explanation that all of the nobles in England were already at Westminster for the Feast of the Epiphany. But we would be naive to imagine that Harold wasn't interested in securing his throne as officially as he could, as quickly as he possibly could. Because even though the English nobles supported him, his claim to the throne of England wasn't particularly airtight. He was the brother of the dead king's wife, and the dead king Edward had allegedly chosen him as his successor on his deathbed. But there were other men who wanted the throne of England. In the north, there was Harold Hadrata, Viking king of Norway, and in the the south, in Normandy, there was William. Harold Godwinson knew that William was planning on

invading England with a fleet of ships, and so in the spring of 1066, Harold posted a standing army at the southern coast of England. He and his men would be ready when William, Duke of Normandy, finally sailed across the channel to fight for England. But there was one problem. William just wasn't coming. He was ready, don't be mistaken, and he wanted to invade England. The problem was the weather. For months, William and his large force of men and mercenary soldiers, thousands of them, just sat in a field in Normandy, waiting for the winds to change.

William was a strong and ambitious leader, ready to fight for a throne, for a throne that he believed was rightfully his, a claim that the Pope himself backed up, incidentally. But instead, William had to watch day by day and week by week, as his stores of supplies diminished gradually, and as his soldiers began fighting illness and the loss of morale that came from doing nothing. William didn't want to be worrying about food supplies or sanitation in a Norman field.

He wanted to be winning battles, conquering a country, becoming a king. But fate had other ideas. And, as the soldiers began to mumble to themselves as the weeks turned into months, maybe fate did not want William conquering England. In the middle of September, William finally led his Norman fleet north from the River Dive in Normandy, but rather than making it across the channel, the winds blew them east across the French coast to Poitiers, where they were forced to spend another two weeks in terrible weather, trying to suppress the growing certainty that the universe was sending them some sort of sign. But fate is tricky and even trickier when we're looking back on events a thousand years ago

through the narrative of propaganda and folklore. While William was waiting with his rain-soaked and weakened fleet in Poitier, watching the weather vein every day, he could not have known that the rain was protecting him, that the delay in crossing the channel would prove to be a strategic coup when it came to his ultimate battle with King Harold at a place called Hastings. William Duke of Normandy is sometimes referred to as William the bastard because of his illegitimate birth, but he has another more famous nickname, William the Conqueror.

I hope it's not a spoiler then to tell you that when William and his fleet ultimately did make it to England, they would defeat Harold in arguably the most famous and influential battle in all of English history. But the journey to cross the channel was not the only challenge William faced. In fact, even after his victory at the Battle of Hastings, his future as King of England was far from secure. Like his predecessor, William would put together a coronation as quickly as possibly. William knelt in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066, where he was anointed with oil and proclaimed King William I. He had won the Battle of Hastings, but William's battle for

the future of England was far from over. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. Before William the Conqueror, King of England was William the Conqueror King of England, he was the Duke of Normandy. And if you'll indulge me, I think it's worth just a momentary detour to explain historically exactly who the Normans were. Because the Normans weren't French, at least not at the beginning. The 9th century was a time that pagan Vikings from Denmark, Norway, and Iceland, enjoyed plundering across the British Isles and France. And they did so fairly successfully. So successfully, in fact, that in 911, the king of the Franks, Charles III, also given the unfortunate nickname Charles the Simple, made a deal with the Viking King Rollo to give him the land that eventually

would become the Duchy of Normandy. You can think of it as a, take this land and leave us alone deal, with the added bonus that the Vikings, or Northman on the north coast of France would protect the Franks from other Vikings, and so those Vikings, or Northman, became Normans. Over the next hundred years, the Normans converted to Christianity and intermarried with the French, adopting the French language, but always remaining their own unique people, known for their reputations as cunning and ruthless fighters, particularly fast and brutal in war. William was probably born around 1027, a direct descendant of the legendary Rollo himself. William was the son of the Duke of Normandy, a man given the pretty great nickname of Robert the Magnificent.

As you might have guessed by the fact that I couldn't give you an accurate birthday for William, we don't know a ton of details about his early life. We do know, though, that his parents were not married. William's father was the Duke of Normandy, but his mother was usually identified as the daughter of a tanner. Though that sort of partnership out of wedlock wasn't uncommon in Normandy, even among the noble class, William was, as everyone knew, illegitimate, which brought about his first nickname, a nickname given by his enemies that would appear in chronicles and history, books for centuries, William the bastard. But illegitimate as he was, William was his father's only son,

and so he was officially recognized as Robert's heir in 1035, when William was about eight years old. It was a designation complete with a swearing-in ceremony and the approval of the French king, and it was a good move on the part of William's father because Robert the Magnificent, died before William turned 10 years old. Even though it had been established that William was his father's heir and he was now Duke of Normandy, it didn't prevent the chaos and breakdown of order that sometimes happens when a child becomes a ruler. It would be generous to call William's early years as Duke tumultuous.

He was constantly surrounded by murder and war, under constant threat of assassination, his tutor was murdered, three of his guardians died violently. It's hard to try to unpack the psychology of a historical figure, and even more challenging when that figure lived a thousand years ago. But we know that when William will grow up, when he conquers England, he will rule with an iron fist. He will build great towers that stand as monuments to his power and control. He will crush his kingdom within a...

a vice of order and hierarchy. And so maybe it's not too great of a leap to imagine that that instinct might have been a perfectly natural response to a childhood spent understanding viscerally the discomfort of anarchy, living in a duchy tearing itself apart without a strong leader. At 15 years old, William was knighted, and he finally began his campaign as a young adult. to bring order to the anarchic lands he ruled over.

He grew into a striking figure, not tall but taller than average and broad, with red hair and a reputation as an incredibly level-headed leader who understood when to take risks in battle and when to play defensively. And so now, with a young William squarely on the throne of the Duchy of Normandy, let's pop back up across the channel over to England. The king, Edward the confessor, had no sons.

Edward was William's cousin. Edward's father had been married to William's grandfather's sister. Not close cousins, but cousins. And Edward had been dealing with his own challenges as a leader in England. Danish Vikings had invaded and taken the throne, and so for a time, Edward was actually in exile in Normandy. That was still when William was a young man, but according to Norman sources, the two cousins really connected. Edward knew that soon he would return to England and become king,

and he promised young William that if he died without a son, he would be his heir to the English throne. At least that's the way William and the Normans tell it. As an adult, William had his eyes set on English. But a passing comment that an exiled king had made to him back when William was a child wouldn't be enough to claim the throne. And so when William was in his early 20s, he married the daughter of the Count of Flanders, which gave him more strength and firepower, enough, allegedly, that he was able to strongarm the still-airless Edward into officially making William his heir in 1051. least that's how the Normans tell it. But over in England, there were other nobles vying for

control, especially as King Edward began to weaken. The most powerful nobleman in England at the time was a man named Harold Godwinson, whose sister was married to King Edward the Confessor. Consider Harold like the English hometown hero. Earlier in Edward's rule when England lost some popularity for seemingly showing favoritism to Normans, it was Godwin and his sons who were able to rally forces and use the situation to their advantage. Harold had fought campaigns, subjugating whales and dealing with rebellious Northumbrians.

He seemed like the natural choice for a successor, for the King of England, because, well, he was already sort of handling the job. The problem, of course, was that he wasn't yet, King. Edward was, and Edward was using his childlessness to his advantage as a diplomatic tool, leading other people on, so no one attacked him. Around 1065, Edward sent Harold on an embassy to Normandy. According to the Normans, the purpose of that journey was for Harold to confirm that Edward was naming William as heir to the throne of England. But on the way to Normandy,

Harold was captured off the coast and ransomed. While he was being held as something between a hostage and a guest, Harold was made to swear on holy relics to promise that he would uphold William as Edward's heir. And Harold did swear it, at least according to the Normans. Whether it was under duress or because they were threatening him is another question. It was probably a around a year later, January of 1066, that Edward the confessor, still without his son and having caused so much trouble, finally died. According to England, on his deathbed, he turned to his brother-in-law Harold and declared that he would be his heir. Harold did not need to be told twice. The English Witten or counsel officially supported him, as did all the other nobles, and so Harold

quickly held a coronation at Westminster Abbey, knowing probably that he would have to deal with William eventually, but also probably correctly, thinking that it would be easier to deal with William from a secure place atop the throne of England. William in Normandy was, of course, furious, especially considering that Harold had sworn on holy relics that he would respect Williams' claim to the throne.

and so William did the medieval European equivalent of going to the manager. He petitioned the Pope. He told the Pope that Harold had forsaken his oath, an oath sworn on holy relics, and the Pope agreed with him and gave William his blessing to invade England. Harold actually made the decision not to send an emissary to the Pope to plead his case, probably thinking that because he had already been coronated and was a consecrated king, his position was secure. And so God was on William's side, even if the wind wasn't.

William assembled his fleet and soldiers on the northern coast, ready to set sail and battle herald in England, but, as I talked about in the introduction to this episode, the weather was not cooperating. The wind wasn't right, and so William had to wait, managing sanitation and food for thousands of soldiers doing nothing but losing morale by the day. It might seem like this might have put William at a disadvantage, but as luck would have it, he wasn't the only person trying to conquer England. In the north of England, Harold Hardrada, King of Norway, was invading, and Harold King of England had to march his soldiers up to take care of that.

And all the while, Harold King of England had been funding a standing army on the southern coast of England, just waiting for William and the Normans to arrive. Well, mid-September, after months of paying them to do nothing, Harold had to finally release the men and dissolve the force, which meant that when William and his men were finally able to sail up to England, they faced surprisingly little resistance until they reached Hastings. How many men did William have? Simply put, we do not know.

One chronicle gives the number at 14,000 men, but another says the force numbered 150,000. I've also seen 50 and 60,000. Like so many things about William the Conqueror's famous invasion of England, the stories have become a little distorted into legend. There are a handful of legends specifically about William's crossing.

As the fleet set out from Saint-Valley, the ship that William was on was of course the fastest and the sleekest. And in the darkness of the night crossing the channel, that ship accidentally sped ahead of its fellows, which meant that the next morning, William and his ship, awoke to find the rest of their fleet entirely out of sight. According to a chaplain, William of Poitier,

who is biased because he was so close to William the Conqueror, but an incredibly useful source, while other lesser leaders might have panicked in that situation, quote, like all great generals, William apparently displayed nothing, but sang Freud in that period of stress, and we're told he just sat down to a hearty breakfast, washed down with some spiced wine, end quote. One more legend, too cute, in my opinion, to be anything but apocryphal. When the ships finally reconnected and landed on the English shore,

William apparently tripped and broke his fall with his palms. The Norman poet Robert Waste wrote that William was, quote, grabbing England with both hands. Meanwhile, King Harold had defeated the Norwegian king in a particularly brutal battle at Samford Bridge. But with William's invasion, Harold had only two weeks to march his troops back down to counter the Normans. Harold and his men arrived on October 13th,

and were able to get themselves into a defensive position before William and the Normans attacked the very next morning. The Normans had archers and a cavalry, but the English had a shield wall and the advantage of a position on a hill. William sent charge after charge of cavalry riders up the hill, but no matter how fearsome his Viking-descended soldiers were, the English shield wall did not break.

And then, after several unsuccessful charges, a rumor spread among the Normans that their leader William was dead, killed in the fighting. One of the flanks of the Norman cavalry retreated down the hill in the confusion, and the English gleefully broke their ranks to follow them, assuming that victory was all but inevitable. But William wasn't dead, and according to the most common narrative of the battle, the narrative that was embroidered onto the famous Bayouet, tapestry afterwards. William pulled off his helmet to show his face to his men. Now, with the

English wall broken, the Normans were able to turn their cavalry around to surround the English and begin their slaughter. King Harold was killed, supposedly by an arrow through the eye, and that was that. The Battle of Hastings was over, and William, Duke of Normandy, had become William the conqueror. But winning a battle wasn't going to make William the King of England just yet. He had helpfully reverse-engineered his claim to the throne by having had appealed to the Pope and by reminding everyone that he was the dead King Edward's second cousin. The idea was that he was simply succeeding Edward rightfully, as opposed to how it might look, which was that he was a Duke from Normandy

who had led an invading force to conquer a different country. After Hastings, William knew that he needed to take London, so he had his troops surround the city, so that he would be prepared in case he needed to starve it into a surrender. But to his surprise, when he crossed the Thames into the city, he found that London's most powerful bishops and the next in the Saxon line, Edward's great-nephew, were already ready to submit to him. no one was left to challenge William with any meaningful claim to the throne. And so William made the same decision that his predecessor Harold had made,

a quick coronation to secure his claim while he could. Rather than wait for his wife Matilda to arrive in England to be crowned alongside him, or rather than waiting to campaign around England to secure the rest of the country first, William had his coronation as soon as he could at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. The coronation was a conscious hybrid of both Anglo-Saxon and Norman traditions, read in both English and French, with traditions lifted from both. But the event didn't go as smoothly as William probably hoped. He had posted nights outside of Westminster Abbey, probably two years. to deal with anyone who thought they would take the opportunity to be an open rebel.

But during the coronation itself, when the people inside the Abbey were loudly proclaiming and celebrating William, the guards thought that some sort of assault was underway. Their response was to set the local houses around the abbey on fire. Because the Norman soldiers couldn't understand the local Anglo-Saxons and vice versa, the scene became like something out of a grisly comedy. Almost everyone who had been at the coronation in the abbey raced outside to see what all the fuss was about. William finished the ceremony with a skeleton crew inside.

The chronicler, Orderick Vitalis, wrote, As the fire spread rapidly through the houses, the people who had been rejoicing in the church were thrown into confusion, and a crowd of men and women of every rank and status, compelled by this disaster, rushed out of the church. Only the bishop and clergy, along with the monks, stayed, terrified in front of the altar, and only just managed to complete the consecration right over the king who was trembling violently. Nearly everyone else ran toward the raging fire,

some to fight bravely against the force of the flames, but more hoping to grab loot for themselves amid such great confusion. The English, believing there was a plot behind something so completely unlooked for, were extremely angry, and afterward held the Normans in suspicion, judging them treacherous. End quote. It was a grim omen for what the next few months of William's reign would look like. His goal was complete and utter submission, and to that end he constructed the central white tower of the Tower of London, meant to project strength and domination to the city.

William spent the next few years dealing with rebels throughout England, crushing them with a destructive violence that shocked contemporary chroniclers. He undid the English aristocracy at the time and replaced them with Normans, and they brought with them new systems that we can identify today as the foundation for some basic government practices. Even the English language itself is a testament to William's power. Take the words we use for animals, and the words we use when those animals become meat. There's swine, but there's also pork.

There's sheep, and then there's mutton. There's cows, and then there's beef. The former words, swine, sheep, cow, are Germanic Anglo-Saxon words. The latter, pork, mutton, beef, are Norman-Haw. French words. It was the Anglo-Saxon who were the lower-class farmers taking care of livestock and the new class of Norman aristocracy who were enjoying delicacies at their table. William had not just conquered land. He conquered the future of what England would become, remaking it in his image, clenched in his fist. That's the story of William the conquerors,

well, conquering, but keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit about his slightly gruesome ending. I'm Iris Palmer and my new podcast is called Against All Od, and that's exactly what the show is about, doing whatever it takes to be thoughts. Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns. I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Eva Langoria. I think I had like $200 in my savings account, and my mom goes, what are you going to do? And I was like, I'll figure it out.

We got a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month, and we all could not afford. Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month? I'm opening up like I've never before. For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me. Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the MyCultura podcast. Network, available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its

own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. If William's coronation was a minor disaster, his funeral was a catastrophe.

Even conquerors are humbled in death, and after William died in 1087 while on a campaign outside Normandy, his body was looted and he was left bare and naked until a passing night brought his body to monks in Cain for burial. In an eerie echo of his coronation, before, he was left bare and naked, before, William's body was prepared, a fire broke out nearby in town. Because of the delay in his burial, William's body became bloated and decomposed. There was a stone sarcophagus that had been commissioned for him, but William's body was simply too big. In the words of our favorite chronicler, Orderick, as they tried to, for lack of a better word, stuff him into the sarcophagus, quote, the swollen bowels burst and an intolerable stench assailed the nostrils of the bystanders and the whole crowd.

An appropriately gross ending for an episode of a podcast called Noble Blood. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manke. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and research. researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noami Griffin and Rima Il Kali, with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body. having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHeart Podcasts presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend, Janet. Hey.

And we have been joined at the hips since high school. Absolutely. A redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games

in the back of my Honda Odyssey. with all the snacks and drinks. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? They hit a bogo. Well, then you got it. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.