What the Anglo-Saxons made of 1066 and all that followed

By any yardstick, the Norman Conquest was a ghastly business. Within two decades, the English aristocracy had been more than decimated, all of England’s cathedrals were being levelled and rebuilt, the north had been harried and the language of government changed. What made it worse was that it was utterly unnecessary. In 1066, Edward the Confessor had an heir of the blood royal – Edgar Ætheling, the grandson of Edmund Ironside (d. 1016). Had he not been shoved aside by bigger men, much fuss might have been avoided.

In her superbly adroit new history, Eleanor Parker examines how memories of Edgar and his like – the generation that straddled the Conquest – survived, or were melded to meet the needs of the time. For some this meant immortalisation; for others, oblivion. Edgar, surprisingly, has had to settle for the latter. After Hastings, he involved himself with some success in Scottish and Norman politics, fought in the First Crusade, was present at the capture of Antioch in 1098, and was subsequently entertained by both the Greek and German emperors. ‘If any figure from 11th-century English history seemed fitted to become a hero of romance,’ writes Parker, ‘it must be Edgar Ætheling.’

Why no romantic writer bothered is an excellent question and one Parker is well suited to address. A lecturer in medieval literature at Oxford (and the author of aclerkofoxford, the best medieval blog to be found), she has a facility for weighing stories, authors and their silences. As she shows, to 12th-century Anglo-Norman historians seeking to establish a narrative of continuity across the Conquest, Edgar’s legitimacy was an inconvenient truth. So it was that William of Malmesbury (d. c.1143), whose histories cemented prejudices until the modern period, dismissed him as an anchorless toff.