Those Forking Normans

-- Or, The Normans’ Long Reinvention For Posterity

"Bloody Normans!" - "Maudits Anglais!"

Since July, the BBC has been running what they call a season on The Normans, plugged first by BBC History Magazine and website, then appearing as a documentary strand on BBC Two and BBC Four. I suspect the BBC use the term season rather than the more logical thematic one of "strand" due to the fact the programmes get repeated over and over across an entire calendar season and beyond - to the point it’s hard to remember after a while what you’ve seen and what you haven’t. (Clips and other info from the main programmes are still available online
here - and a set of DVDs has already appeared in the BBC’s online shop.)
This well-meaning historical onslaught now seems to be continuing with follow-up spinoff BBC4 programmes like Michael Wood’s Story Of England (tracking a village through Domesday records etc) and Churches: How to Read Them (the earliest surviving churches being Norman). It turns out that this is just the start of a 2-year interactive project, with BBC Learning (formerly BBC Schools) providing tie-in “Hands On History” educational materials, “to highlight the effect that the Normans have had on our civilisation.”

With almost no criticism to be heard of this invading, enslaving regime, the tv coverage was definitely not – to use a US hunting term – open season on Normans. However this was not always the case. For centuries, the Normans have been the heavies or villains in popular depiction, as in Scott’s Ivanhoe, which is set in the 1190s, as the Robin Hood tales usually are, so that protest is not against an “English” king but the hated new Norman regime. In an earlier post on Robin Hood, I mentioned how the Normans were so hated that to ride 100 yards from their castle was to risk an arrow through the throat from some disgruntled peon armed with the national weapon, the longbow. The later tales of Robin Hood were moved back in time-setting from a 13-14C setting to an earlier Norman one to capitalise on this, making the hero more of a freedom-fighter, the underlying idea being the Normans were such a Bad Regime that assassinating their officials was ok. (William The Conqueror was known more at the time as William the Bastard, his father known as Robert The Devil.) Setting the tales in the reign of Richard I was a masterstroke, for Robin could be heroic fighting his usurper brother evil King John, then bend his knee to rightful authority when Richard reappeared at the end, back from the Crusades and/or captivity abroad. The real Richard in fact spent almost none of his reign in England, having no interest in the place, for the original Norman colonists were just as concerned to protect or expand their Continental holdings.

This wicked-Normans-versus-benign-Saxon motif even creeps into in what is regarded as the most intelligent drama about the Normans, Jean Anouilh’s hit Broadway play Becket. The long-hard-to-see 1964 film version with Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton was also televised on BBC4 to pave the way for their “Norman” season proper (as well as issued on a Telegraph-giveaway DVD). The Guardian did one of their ‘reel history’ write-ups [reviewing historical films for their accuracy], heading it “Becket: forking Normans and a not so turbulent priest .. Misplaced Saxons, rubber swords ... they even got the cutlery wrong in this error-strewn drama…”. (The forks which are a dialogue point are actually an anachronism.)

Anouilh’s 1959 play Becket Or The Honour Of God is set in the reign of Henry II (father of kings Richard and John) and portrays Thomas Becket as an educated Saxon who depends on his Norman overlord for his position. Of course, Becket was not really Saxon at all, or he would not have been appointed Chancellor of England and Archbishop of Canterbury, especially as he was a merchant’s son. (The same sleight-of-hand was performed on later figures like the “Scots” freedom fighters William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, both descendants of Norman knights.) When the historical error was pointed to Anouilh before the first production, he declined to correct the play, no doubt as it would not work otherwise. For if Becket had been depicted as the Norman knight he was (he even went along on Norman crusades, and Victorian writers styled him as the more noble-Norman sounding “Thomas à Becket”), he would not have remained sympathetic - as most of the time he reluctantly acquiesces to his king against his own “conscience.” More recently, Becket was named, in a 2006 BBC History Magazine poll, as the 2nd-worst Englishman ever (right after Jack the Ripper), for stubbornly creating a church-state schism while using his position to enrich himself (his wealth in modern terms apparently would be £25 billion).

Nevertheless, the 1170 martyrdom-assassination of the Archbishop of Canterbury in his own Cathedral over the Xmas holidays by 4 of the king’s knights remained a right royal grade-A public-relations disaster, Henry having to allow himself to be flogged by monks as part of his penance - as the film shows. Whereas the Normans’ 1066 invasion had been endorsed by the Pope as a holy crusade, the assassination of this “turbulent” priest (some sources have Henry saying “Will no one rid me or this troublesome priest?") became a turning point. It meant the ending of Norman supreme feudal state power due to church opposition. Henry was excommunicated and Becket was made a martyred saint, and his tomb was the #1 English pilgrim destination for centuries, as in Chaucer's late-14C Canterbury Tales.

This is also the subject of the other serious play on the topic (based partly on a surviving eye-witness account by a young cleric), a 1935 religious pageant verse drama by poet T. S. Eliot. (Despite his bleak modernist Waste-Land views, Eliot was a keen Church of England supporter). Eliot’s Murder In The Cathedral is still acted out in churches and schools across Britain despite the complexity of its text. Though we’ve had several dramas about 1066 in the past year (covered in earlier posts), still to come is a Hollywood production of a stage play about the foursome who killed Becket and had to go onto hiding: Four Knights, from what we might term the Blackadder School Of History, with ribald jokes mixed in with mordant reflections.)

The Normans of course had a bad rep going back to the days [8-11C] when they were the roving Norse or Northmen, before one branch relocated from Denmark and Norway to settle among the coastal Franks in north-western Neustria, renaming it Normandy, and merging their language with Frankish or early French. (Thus after 1066, Germanic Old English became the French-influenced Middle English.) There is said to have been a monastic prayer from the days the raiding Northmen or Norsemen sea-rovers, the so-called Vikings (this just means "inlet-ers") who pillaged European coasts for centuries: "Protect Us O Lord, from the wrath of the Northmen." (You can see and hear this apocryphal prayer spoken by Orson Welles in the 1958 film The Vikings, in the explanatory scene-setting animated prologue cleverly based on Bayeux Tapestry imagery.)

The next step was for the branch which left their base in Normandy to abandon the hated Norman (from the Latin for Norse /North-men) identity and rebrand themselves completely (rather like the present royal family changing their surname in WWI from von Saxe-Coburg to Windsor). The Norman identity in a sense began to be abandoned as early as 1100, when William the Conqueror’s unpopular (anti-clerical) son and heir William Rufus fell dead with an arrow in him in the New Forest, and his brother rode off and left the body lying there in order to quickly secure the crown as Henry I. (The legitimate heirs were another branch of the family, his brother Robert’s, whom Henry put in prison for life.) A 19-year civil war over succession, known as The Anarchy, followed Henry I’s death, and when Henry II took over, he adopted a new name for his branch of the royal tree. The family’s actual dynastic name was Anjou, whereas the new dynastic name, Plantagenet, which they adopted (later as a surname) came from a French word, a nickname for Henry II’s father after a sprig of broom he wore in his hat. It was adopted by the Angevin branch of the dynasty, suggesting a metaphor of a transplanted gens or people. (The French word gens implies a noble people defined by their role in history, so there is a special phrase for “ordinary people” - gens sans histoires: people without a history, associated with people of the servant class, which is what the English people had suddenly become.)

What have the Normans ever done for us?
All this new tv and media-kit coverage seems by way of rehabilitating the reputation of the Normans, a sort of what-have-the-Romans /Normans ever-done-for-us riposte to their brutal reputation in historical records. Our interest here is in codex books, and the Norman Conquest of course led to an immense national land-holdings project culminating in several bound codex volumes known collectively as the Domesday Book. This has recently been put online in more simplified form for the general public (earlier versions being for academics). The BBC season had a programme on the Domesday Book as the definitive guide to the new Norman feudal allocations in 1086.

Over lunch with a local archivist and historian, I was discussing this issue of the Normans supposedly “giving” us civilised features (including forks), and the way the season seemed as uncritical about the Normans as tv coverage of the Romans, who supposedly also brought civilisation with them. (Both are credited with introducing rabbits to Britain; the remains of a Romano-British era rabbit dinner were unearthed this spring by a county council archaeological unit in Norfolk.) He pointed out the Domesday Book does not in fact really show a snapshot of Norman England at all but one of pre-Conquest England. It shows how well Saxon England was run as a church-state partnership, much of it a legacy from the days of Alfred the Great. It’s not so much an example of a new more competent Norman administration but the exploiting of the work of an earlier civil service.

In fact, because Harold of Wessex who opposed the 1066 invasion was officially persona non grata (declared a perjurer and blaspheming heretic over a loyalty oath he supposedly swore to William over a saint’s bones hidden from him beneath a table-cloth), his coronation and acts like his land-holding appointments were considered legally void, and thus Domesday omits his reign and portrays land-holdings as they existed in the time of his predecessor. Coincidentally, there is another new related searchable database of Anglo-Saxon names of persons and places, put online in August, with the wonderful title The Prosopography Of Anglo-Saxon England. (A prosopography is a sort of collective comparative biography, a historian’s method used to establish how a group of people lived etc.; the database is a searchable one so you can see all the manuscript references to e.g. Cerdic, official founder of the kingdom of Wessex – despite his name being merely an Anglicised Celtic one -Caradoc.)

The BBC coverage did mention the so-called Harrying of the North, a virtual genocide of Nazi-style reprisals on towns and villages resisting the Norman yoke (and was followed by the Norman Conquest of Ireland) - though this did not stop at least one pro-Norman English historian from saying how “it only took the Normans a single day to conquer England,” i.e. at Hastings. I’ve read statements by military historians that on the contrary if Harold had been able to hold out for just one more hour, the Normans would have had to withdraw to their boats.

There was little BBC coverage either, of the way the new Norman regime’s official commemoration narrative, the Bayeux Tapestry, was a self-justifying propaganda account of the Conquest whose details are suspect – an 11th-C dodgy dossier, as one wag put it. One example of this was the most famous detail, Harold’s arrow-in-the-eye demise at the Battle of Hastings, as (apparently) depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, despite this being contradicted by surviving codex accounts. (The controversial arrow-in-the-eye moment from the Tapestry is used as the cover of the new BBC DVD.) I’ve blogged before regarding a surviving codex account, the Vita Haroldi, which claims that Harold even survived the Battle, nursed by a Saracen woman who was a healer. (Saracen women were sometimes brought back to England from the Crusades - Becket’s mother was said to have been one, though this was left out the film version of Anouilh's play, perhaps as it is fanciful – she was as Norman as his father). Harold became a non-person, erased from history as a wandering pilgrim, his mutilated face concealed behind a cloth mask. This odd survival legend [earlier blog entry here] was at the very least also a subversive whispering against the new Norman regime lasting up the Normans’ rebranding themselves as Plantagenets.

A more significant aspect of the post-Conquest “rehabilitation” of the Normans as Plantagenets which was not delved into was the Celtic Breton influence on the Arthurian legend. The season did include a programme called The Making Of King Arthur, which supposedly “reveals that King Arthur is not the great national hero he is usually considered to be. He's a fickle and transitory character who was appropriated by the Normans to justify their conquest, he was cuckolded when French writers began adapting the story and it took Thomas Malory's masterpiece of English literature, Le Mort d'Arthur, to restore dignity and reclaim him as the national hero we know today.”

This self-serving farrago is designed to give the almost-culture-free Normans credit for the development of Arthurian Romance. Whether or not he ever existed as an actual king or general, Arthur was depicted as a heroic national saviour in chronicle and legend well before the Norman-French court poets got their hands on the legend. In fact, it was no doubt because his name was so well-known that fabled “King Arthur” became the anchor-point in terms of scene-setting for the fashionable new genre of knightly romances that were otherwise quite fantastical. And Malory lived several centuries too late to be regarded as a Norman. In any case, he was little more than a compiler and translator, whose work was done for the first printed compilation of the various stories into a single narrative, by England’s pioneer printer, Caxton, in 1485.

This very year is regarded as the end of the Middle Ages, and Caxton’s preface says he is publishing the book after being pressured by various noblemen who claimed Arthur was a great (and historical, not fictional) Christian ruler. Arthurian romances had political-propaganda potential, and it was this that probably got the earlier romans d’aventures sponsored at the English court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. It’s thought the code of chivalry that these romances espouse as a behavioural model was invented to try to control knights from the new Norman landholding dynasties who were otherwise out of control, killing anyone who got in their way.

These courtly romances may have been written in Old French, but the thematic material was Celtic-British: it came largely from Breton conteurs (minstrels) whose predecessors had brought the original tales of Arthur with them from the West Country when they fled across the Channel to Brittany and Normandy to escape the Saxon takeover of southern Britain. It is estimated that around a third of the “Normans” arriving in 1066 were in fact Bretons, who would regard themselves as returning to their old mother country. (This is now thought to include the parents of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who around 1135 wrote in Latin prose a History Of The Kings Of Britain, the pseudo-history which really launched Arthur as a claimed historical ruler of a great kingdom - the earlier Arthur was more of a general.) The Breton presence was useful to the relatively uncultured new Norman regime as they tried to pass themselves off as a legitimate regime, based on an ancestry older than any Saxon presence.

But if anything, it was the wily Breton conteurs and Welsh nationalists who were putting one over on the uncultured Normans, who were never accepted as British. The Breton conteurs and Welsh clerics at the Norman court could read Celtic script (Welsh or Breton) and used earlier Celtic-British folktale motifs which had been maintained at the courts of the Dark Ages exiles in their colony of Brittany or “Little Britain” where the place names were based on West Country ones, like Cornouaille from Cornwall. (Geoffrey Arthur alias Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed his work was based on "an old book in the British tongue" - which has never been identified.)

For instance, in the programme blurb reference to Arthur being turned into a cuckold, i.e. Guenevere being unfaithful with Lancelot, this was not an invention of Norman-French writers, but a reflection of an old Celtic-British social practice. Centuries before, Julius Caesar on visiting Britain mentioned that among the Britons the 10-12 men of a warband would often agree to share a wife (not a servant or slave), with any paternity designated to her first consort. This was probably inspired by a shortage of women to travel with a warband, but something similar is known to have survived in the free non-Romanised north, where Pictish noblewomen consorted, apparently at their own wish, with the warriors at court. In fact their royal descent may have been matrilinear – with no son apparently succeeding his father in the Pictish Kings-list codex – the mother was more important, the identity of the actual father probably being unclear due to this practice. As one Pictish princess visiting Rome told some shocked Roman matrons, whereas Roman women consorted secretly with the vilest of men, Pictish noblewomen consorted openly with the finest. Though not much is known of the Picts, I’ve read that the Pictish word “cing” meant not a monarch but a champion, so here we would have the cultural basis of Lancelot the court champion winning Guinevere’s favour over the now older former battle champion turned sedentary monarch, Arthur.

The Norman-founded dynasty lost their original Continental holdings under militarily weak kings. Kings like John and Edward II, who were unwilling or unable to expend sufficient resources to fight the French in what became known as the 100 Years War, which with periodic English victories like Agincourt in 1415 lasted over a century. This lengthy war was at once followed by a dynastic civil war lasting almost as long, known as the Wars Of The Roses. This split the post-Norman Plantagenet dynasty again into two branches or forks, the rival Houses of Lancaster and York, based on yet another dispute over succession between “cadet” branches. (The Lancastrians were supposedly the Plantagenet descendants, but there were Plantagenets on both sides: the Yorkist leader, the father of Richard III, was Richard Plantagenet.)

It ended with Richard III’s crown falling under a bush at Bosworth in 1485, the same year as Caxton printed the final and definitive edition of the Arthurian legend at the behest of those unnamed noblemen. (Malory was dead by then, having spent part of the civil war in prison for various un-knightly offenses, and it was there he supposedly researched and wrote his Morte d’Arthur compilation.) Henry II’s attempt to leave the hated Norman stigma behind backfired because of his own misconduct. His role in getting Becket killed led to people muttering the dynasty was “the devil’s brood,” cursed by God. Later around 1200, Henry and Eleanor’s joint role in killing off their late son Geoffrey of Anjou’s teenage son Prince Arthur [1187-1203?] of Brittany when he got involved in the dynastic feud led to more whispering against the dynasty. (Henry and Eleanor’s son King John usually gets the credit for castrating, blinding and drowning the imprisoned teenage Arthur.)

This in 1485, all this came to a conclusion with both the end of the Wars Of The Roses and – perhaps no coincidence – the first printed, “definitive” version of the Arthurian cycle. The odd title change Caxton imposed on Malory’s vast compilation The hoole booke of kyng Arthur & of his noble knyghtes of the rounde table, to emphasize only the last act, may have been political. There had already been a final “death of Arthur” volume, which Malory had used for his final section, the prose post-Vulgate [Vulgate = not in Latin] work called “Le Mort le Roi Artu” (usually since known just as the Mort Artu).

This was a disillusioned mid-13C. take on the legend (with an aged Arthur etc), which came with a preface saying it had been commissioned by Henry II himself to finish the story up to death of Arthur et al. It ends with a note saying the matter has now been bought to “a proper conclusion” and that “no one ever afterwards can add anything to the story that is not complete falsehood.” It was clearly meant to forestall any unauthorised follow-ups. Henry II was long dead by then, but in his lifetime may have felt the Arthurian cycle an embarrassment inviting comparisons between “emperor” Arthur, mighty and wise king of 30 domains, and Henry, accursed excommunicated king of England, Ireland, and half France, and unsuccessful Crusader ruler of Jerusalem, not to mention failed husband and father. (The play The Lion In Winter, filmed in 1968, with Peter O’Toole this time as a post-Becket Henry some 20 years on, makes a meal out of his dysfunctional family situation.)


The court-sponsored Arthurian Romances depicted an ideal world no real king could ever come close to living up to.

Caxton’s 1485 Morte d’Arthur, produced at the insistence of unnamed nobles (Geoffrey Ashe has suggested this was political, from high up) was most likely another attempt at ending a propaganda cycle that had outlived its usefulness and largely backfired, the comparison with chivalrous Arthur only drawing attention to the Plantagenet line’s feet of clay. It was the end of an era. In 1485, the final successor of all this splitting (perhaps we should sat forking) into rival dynastic branches, crowned as Henry VII, claimed kingship largely based on his Welsh ‘Tewdr’ or Tudor roots on the distaff side, the House of Plantagenet being extinct in its male royal line due to all the centuries of bloody disputes. Though Henry’s chosen heir, suitably named Arthur, died young, the “House Of Tudor” would prove a more long-lasting claim, with the heir to the throne today still known as the Prince Of Wales.

See The Film - Read The Codex?

I know many people come to this subject area for the first time after exposure to it via some popular work which references an old manuscript as authority for its plot hook. The Da Vinci Code is an obvious (if dubious) example of this, hence my use of it in the blog sub-title. (launched the blog deliberately the week The Da Vinci Code film came out in cinemas.) So I thought it would be appropriate to consider what’s in the pipeline in terms of screen adaptations derived ultimately from pre-Gutenberg manuscripts. I’m including works without regard for their original bindery format, i.e. even if they were originally rolled-up scrolls rather than bound like a book - many Greco-Roman manuscripts only survive due to disintegrating original scrolls being copied out by mediaeval scribes into bound codex volumes. I'll also incorporate a link to any original codex version if one is readily available online.
I suppose we have to start with a Da Vinci Code update, and ask the question whatever happened to Dan Brown? Five years after he wrote The Da Vinci Code, Brown’s publishers are still waiting for his planned followup novel. Reportedly it is called The Solomon Key and concerns how the USA was really founded by Freemasons along lines that suited their secret plans for state control, having planted various clues in public art and architecture for reasons best known to themselves. However as the story doesn’t seem to involve ancient manuscripts much (Masonic founding legends of Hiram etc seem to be unsourced historiography), we can move on to more interesting developments.
There are still more popular works appearing about the Knights Templar. One that is imminent is the US TV miniseries version of Raymond Khoury’s novel The Last Templar, another contemporary-set thriller-with-flashbacks-to-Biblical/mediaeval times. Its plot hook is an ancient ‘insider’ journal (I will say no more) which resurfaces after two thousand years in readable condition, threatening to undermine Christian orthodox history by its revelations. (Amazingly durable material, that ancient papyrus, apparently!) The idea that any such works to do with the Templars and the holy-blood mythos are based on any such definitive ancient source is dubious at best. I’ve already written various items on the Templars, including a blog post elsewhere on new film-TV versions for their official “400th” last year, so don’t propose to go into this further here.
Several projects have been announced which sound of interest, but turn out to be more in the Hollywood action genre. Another version of the story of the former Roman gladiator Spartacus is being remade as a TV series for US pay-for-cable. (There was a 1960 epic feature version starring Kirk Douglas and a 2004 US TV miniseries, both from a 1951 novel by Howard Fast.) The new version is to be ‘a totally R-rated, hard, hard show... [with] decapitations, people being split in half,’ and will film entirely in a studio using the ‘green screen’ technique of backgrounds added in via CGI. This is the same approach to filming used in Beowulf and 300, the 2007 adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel on the Spartans’ heroic stand at Thermopylae.
Also in this category, I suspect, will be Bran Mak Morn. This is being made by a major British production company for 2010 from the stories by ‘Conan’ creator Robert E Howard about the supposed last warrior-king of the Picts. Howard’s Conan and Bran Mak Morn stories were built on his interest in his Celtic heritage, inspired by his reading a library book on the Picts. Sadly, the film won’t however be based on any ancient source – we don’t have one for the Picts beyond a basic king-list chronicle prefaced by a short account of their dynastic origins, plus a few Roman historians’ passing references.
Ditto for a long-awaited film about the famed ‘Lost Ninth Legion,’ which was supposedly annihilated by northern barbarians. (This is the 3rd such project announced, two earlier attempts to turn it into a gory action adventure epic having failed to get funding.) This one is from one of Britain’s most talented directors, Kevin Macdonald, but is being publicised as ‘a swords-and-sandals western,’ in which ‘the Romans speak with American accents.’ Again, there is no ancient source - in fact nothing is known beyond the fact the Ninth disappears from official records, and historians suggest it was more likely just redeployed overseas. Instead, it’s being adapted from Rosemary Sutcliff's 1954 juvenile novel The Eagle Of The Ninth.
NBC is also planning a ‘green screen’ remake of Jason And The Argonauts, though how much of the original 3rd-C BCE Argonautica (by Apollonius of Rhodes, and perhaps others) will survive is unclear. If it’s for US TV, I suspect it will be a youth-oriented version like the last such (in 2000).
The Mel Gibson-produced project about Queen Boudicca as ‘a simple peasant girl’ may also fit the recent trend of prequel story setups to capture the youth market. It was seen last year in BBC One’s Merlin (teenage apprentice-wizard Merlin meets teenage trainee-knight Arthur and teenage scullery-maid Guinevere). The Mel Gibson project may have been delayed by ITV’s Boudica, starring ER's Alex Kingston and adapted by the top man for period adaptations, Andrew Davies (BBC’s Pride & Prejudice etc), which was condemned for its boorish and simplistic mud-n-blood depiction. (Historian and TV presenter Michael Wood: "off-the-wall period hokum ….the absurdity of script and direction only made bad history … The first few minutes said it all. Long-haired ancient Britons roaring like England football fans, knocking back beer, muddy faces daubed in woad, loose sexual morals ... you know the sort of thing. Not the remotest inkling of what an Iron Age society might really have been like.") Known in Hollywood as Braveheart-with-a-bra, the Gibson version seems to be finally set to film, with Gavin O'Connor directing, under the working title Warrior [ an earlier TV version was titled Warrior Queen] for 2010 release. It is however likely to be a gory Jacobean (perhaps we should now say Gibsonean) revenge melodrama, complete with scenes of savage flogging and rape, culminating in an orgy of mass violence and sexual mutilation of women who 'collaborated' with the Romans.
In a category by itself is Feelgood Fiction’s Four Knights, a kind of sequel-spinoff to Becket. I'll quote from its official synopsis, lest you think I’m caricaturing: ‘Western-style version of the murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. The assassins are a bawdy gang of adventurers constantly on the run from the authorities.’ You can sense the major Hollywood money and thinking behind this – a bit like ‘Young Guns’ except they use broadswords to kill authority figures who are ‘asking for it.’ (Director Paul McGuigan: ‘Being from Scotland, I don’t have this reverence for the history. I see it as a modern film. It’s a kind of road movie, because they are always fleeing and they are on the road all the time. It’s a medieval Wild Bunch, full of big characters and great action.’) In fact it seems to be partly based on a 1999 black-comedy stage play, Four Nights In Knaresborough, about the foursome holed up at an inn and depressed about having made a rather bad career move – i.e. murdering the head of the church in his cathedral during Xmas services. (If you want to read the original 12C eyewitness account of Becket being hacked to bits, it’s here .)
…. In the more-interesting-sounding projects category, two versions of King Lear have been announced. Sadly this competition has since scuppered the version that was to star Anthony Hopkins. The 2nd one is to star Al Pacino and be directed by Michael Radford. Lear of course is not just a Shakespeare play – like all his works, it’s based on earlier tales, in this case, one recounted in Geoffrey Of Monmouth’s 12C History Of The Kings Of Britain as an existing Celtic legend taken from an ancient ‘British’ (possibly meaning Breton-dialect) book. Shakespeare of course ‘took liberties’ with his direct source (usually Holinshed’s Chronicles), so you need to go back to studies of Geoffrey Of Monmouth, and how he adapted earlier versions for 12th-C nationalist propaganda purposes.
A feature version may be in the works to wrap up the unresolved plot strands of the award-winning HBO/BBC TV series Rome, which dramatised the dirty-politics underside of Rome’s transitional period from republic to virtual monarchy amidst civil war. The TV series ended abruptly story-wise when the 3rd series was cancelled in mid-term. The original kernel of it was a reference in Caesar’s Gallic Wars memoir to two ‘ordinary’ soldiers who recover the Legion’s captured brass eagle. The original plan was for 5 seasons, the last focussing on how the Roman authorities dealt with the troublesome rise of a certain ‘messiah’ in Palestine, but cancellation led to this subplot being abandoned and other plotlines combined into highlights. The primary source seems to have been Suetonius’s gossipy Lives Of The Caesars (download details below).
As the series ended with young Octavius defeating Anthony and Cleopatra and becoming Rome’s first Emperor, Augustus, the feature will presumably overlap the timeframe of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, which is also being remade by writer-director Jim (My Left Foot) Sheridan. Hollywood has wanted ever since the 1976 BBC hit series to do its own feature version; last year a version to star Leonardo DiCaprio fell through after the backers fell out. Graves’s 1934 novel developed the idea, not found in the main source material, that stammering C-C-Claudius (r 41-54 AD) was a pose cultivated to protect an intelligent man from assassination, while he wrote a secret history of his time.
The real, 8-part history Claudius wrote is sadly lost, which would have given us a firsthand account of the Romans in Britain in AD43, for Claudius himself joined in the campaign. There is a chapter on Britain in the sequel, Claudius The God, but this is largely Graves’s own speculations along the lines of his The White Goddess. In the BBC version all we get is a few lines delivered in Rome by the captive British resistance leader Caractacus, and even these are not the ones originally reported. The new film may however include the invasion for a bit of spectacle. Graves elaborated his novels largely from Suetonius’s c121 AD Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, which Graves had translated himself, cross-referencing it with other information from the era. It is available in Penguin Classics paperback as well as downloadable from here and here .
Sony-Columbia Studios have commissioned a script from The Anabasis of Xenophon. (Anabasis means a journey up-country.) A manuscript dating back to 400 BC, Xenophon’s is the first detailed, eyewitness military-campaign account we have from history. It recounts another episode in the Greek-Persian wars, an epic march homeward across Persia by 10,000 Greek (including Spartan) and allied mercenary soldiers after they are betrayed and left leaderless on campaign. (Xenophon, an expert on horses, was a member of the ad hoc officers council who helped organise the retreat.) No doubt the studio can use CGI to paint in most of the huge armies involved, but the story itself remains a challenge, contradicting any traditional simplistic view one might have about what happens in a wartime survival situation.
The basic story has been the classic template for many an action film, where an elite group of pros head into enemy territory on a covert mission to burn out a remote base, etc. Having stirred up a hornet’s nest, they barely make it home after high-level betrayal and other setbacks, with superior enemy forces hot on their heels and difficult survival decisions all the way. But the original Long March homeward of The Ten Thousand is on a larger scale than seen thus far on screen. (Xenophon’s Anabasis , since the 19C a set text for pupils of advanced Greek, is available in English as a Penguin Classics paperback under the title The Persian Expedition, as well as a downloadable text, here). The project may have been prompted by two recent (2005) historical-cultural studies: Tim Rood’s The Sea! The Sea! The Shout Of The Ten Thousand In The Modern Imagination and The Long March: Xenophon And The Ten Thousand edited by Robin Lane Fox (a consultant to Oliver Stone on his ill-fated 2004 Alexander). The people behind it are not only successful Hollywood producers but keen historians who have co-authored historical books and documentaries, one having been co-producer on HBO’s Rome. So hopefully it won’t just be an animated graphic-novel gorefest like 300.
Speaking of which, Universal Studios is developing another script about the 300 Spartans i.e. their inspirational 480 BC heroic holding-the-pass last stand against 100,000 Persian invaders. (‘Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie.’) It’s called Gates Of Fire, a souped-up version of the meaning of the place name, Thermopylae, the Hot Gates, and is based on a 1998 novel by historical-action author Steven Pressfield. The original manuscript source, from c.440 BC, is the ‘father of history’ himself, Herodotus, who became known to a wider public through references to him in The English Patient. (The scale of the war Herodotus describes remains so great historians have trouble accepting it as accurate.) Herodotus’s Histories is available in Penguin Classics paperback as well as downloadable text (Links on Wikipedia page here.)
Closer to home, the development that most interested me when I heard of it, is a set of 3, possibly 4, rival films about the Norman Conquest of 1066, which will be the first feature films ever made on the Battle Of Hastings. One is from British company Qwerty Films with no title set so far, and the focus here is on the earlier friendship and love lives of William (happily married) and Harold (‘a dashing figure who had numerous girlfriends’).
A 2nd is being produced by a Hollywood “indie” company called Killer Films, a $39.25 million (£25 million) epic titled William The Conqueror which will focus on the rise of Harold’s Norman nemesis, with Daniel Craig’s name being mooted as star.
A 3rd is a $75 million (£50 million) production titled simply 1066, co-written by director Robin Jacob and historical novelist (Harold The King) Helen Hollick. This is being shot in 70mm in Wales with former Oliver child star Mark Lester as King Harold, and focuses (with a 3 hr 45 min length) on the 50-year rise and fall of the Godwin dynasty.
The IMDB also lists another 1066 being made for Channel 4 by Justin Hardy, with a cast list that doesn’t include Harold or William. This would normally suggest a children’s drama serial (where the children are eyewitnesses to some great event), but the writer’s and director’s CVs suggest it may be instead a black-comedy worms’-eye view of history.
There is yet another film work-titled 1066, this one from Kudos Pictures [USA], aiming at a 2011 release. (This may be the same production earlier credited to Shine, which makes BBC’s formulaic youth dramas Spooks and Merlin.) Early announcements indicated this was to be another former-buddies-fall-in-love-and-then-fall-out-over political differences story. (Shades of the 1960s play and Richard Burton/Peter O’Toole film Becket, which also turned the ultra-wealthy Norman churchman into a Saxon underdog.) However this version is being scripted by William Nicholson, whose sensitive work adapting Shadowlands (on CS Lewis and Joy Gresham) got him the job of developing Gladiator into something more than warmed-over chunks of Ben Hur, Spartacus and The Fall Of The Roman Empire. He did this by giving the hero a longing for death, and I’ve been hoping that this version will present the hitherto-obscure sad tale I would personally like to see.
The most famous account of 1066 is of course that prototype of all comic books and graphic novels, the Bayeux Tapestry. But there are also near-contemporary manuscript accounts which are regarded as more definitive than the public propaganda art of the tapestry. The Tapestry’s best-known detail, the arrow-in-the-eye, is in fact contradicted by these codex accounts. (The fatal arrow is not in the earliest illustrated manuscript copies, and seems to have been added later, during some re-stitching.)
Two years ago, I put together a blog post (since linked to by a TV channel) concerning another mediaeval manuscript account of Harold’s death – not in 1066, but years later. The 13th-C Vita Haroldi (Life Of Harold) tells of his surviving the Battle Of Hastings, left so facially disfigured and traumatised that he spends the rest of his days as an anonymous pilgrim. This is not the usual folktale survival-scenario where the hero (Arthur or whoever) goes off to well-deserved rest in a cave, awaiting the clarion call to return in his country’s hour of need. It is a very sad and all too human story, without any of the usual miraculous or ‘inspirational’ aspects we get from these legends.
The original 1066 production poster had an intriguing tagline that seemed to hint it was partly based on the controversial 13th-C. Vita Haroldi wherein Harold survived Hastings with terrible facial wounds, being tended by a “Saracen woman” for two years before becoming a masked hermit. The film’s original poster tagline read “I am Harold Godwinson, the last king of England.” This is slightly odd semantically, and I wondered if it came from the payoff line in the Vita Haroldi, where the masked hermit makes a deathbed confession to a priest using similar words. That the cast list also shows a “Saracen Woman” and the film’s press-release final comment is “There is more to the story than told in school history books” seemed to support this. However, on the film’s website poster image, the line has now been changed to “I am Harold Godwinson, chosen king of England.”
Personally, I fear Harold will now get an arrow in his eye three times over (what sleazier Hollywood producers call ‘the money shot’), in a big CGI-boosted Lord of The Rings style battle with a gory and eye-smarting finale. If anyone wants to read the alternative version - a summary of the original early-mediaeval account suggesting Harold survived, disfigured, as a wandering pilgrim - my earlier blog post is here: The Man In The Cloth Mask .

The Man In The Cloth Mask

Many codexes or codices survive in a single manuscript (like Beowulf). These often give us unique insight into the past we would not otherwise have. Yet where they contradict orthodox history, they languish in obscurity, dismissed academically as fabrications - unless some more adventurous scholar becomes intrigued, and dares to publish an accessible version. Such is the case with the strange tale, preserved in one 12th-13th Century codex in the British Museum, of “the man in the cloth mask.” I call him this as the controversy is over his identity. For if he was indeed who he claimed to be, then English history is wrong on a key point.
The tale is reminiscent of the folk-tale of the king who went about disguised as a beggar to discover some home truths about his kingdom. Historians also class it with romantic folk legends of some national figure who is not really dead, but slumbers on in a cave, awaiting the moment to return. Thus many historians dismiss it as a concoction, although it was preserved in an English monastic library as a true story of the Vita (Latin "Life") genre we see in Saint’s Lives. Yet one of the most respectable mediaeval scholars, Richard Barber, points out many of its details do not fit the pattern of such stock tales. These details are curious - if true, would mean English history would need some rewriting.
The conventional view has meant the work is little known. It was left aside at the time other such works were being translated, and was only translated into English in 1885 by an assistant in the British Museum manuscripts department, with a modern translation by Michael Swanton in 1984 in his compendium Lives Of The Last Englishmen. The most recent published version seems to be in the Folio Society's 1998 anthology British Myths & Legends, now out of print (Amazon UK has one copy for sale for £35.) It is edited by medievalist Richard Barber, who says “this is a different kind of survival story.”

In summary, the tale of “the man in the cloth mask” is this. In the decades after the Battle Of Hastings, he spent his life as a pilgrim and a hermit. He went about in simple pilgrim's garb, including staff and hat. Yet his face was always kept covered by a cloth veil or mask, so that he depended on a servant or guide to lead him by the hand. Questioned about this wherever he went, he would only say his name was simply 'Christian' - as if he were a character out of the sort of mediaeval allegory plays John Bunyan later drew on for his Pilgrim's Progress. While Norman fire and sword swept the kingdom, he went on pilgrimage to Rome and other shrines. Homesick, he returned to live in a cave near Dover. He then went up to North Wales, where he persevered in his devotions for a number of years despite rough treatment from the locals. He spent his declining years at Chester, living at a chapel outside the city walls.
So far, we have a conventional pious ‘saint’s life’ type of story. But when dying and making his last confession, ‘Christian’ gave his real name as Harold Godwinesson and his ‘station in life’ as “formerly the king of England.” In other words, he was King Harold II, once the wealthiest man in England, previously Edward Confessor's army commander, who was elected king (the Saxon practice) in 1066, but proved last of the Saxon kings, ruling only 9 months before being cut down at Hastings by William The Conqueror's Norman knights.
The manuscript survives in a single copy now in the British Museum, known as the Vita Haroldi, and translated as The Life Of Harold Godwinson. Dated to circa 1205, it was copied and preserved for generations at Waltham Abbey outside London. Harold had become its patron after the monks nursed him following a 'stroke' that left him temporarily paralysed, and he was officially buried there.
The manuscript's anonymous author (presumably a monk at Waltham) gives its sources. He says some of it came from Harold's former servant (named Sebricht), who in his old age also became a hermit, and whom he visited regularly for years. He also cites other 'equally trustworthy authorities' who 'had known Harold after he had become a man of religion.' One seems to have been the priest who heard the deathbed confession, for the tale tells he broke his vow and went about telling people. The Vita Haroldi itself seems to have two authors or narrators: what the Waltham monk calls his book is followed by an account by another hermit. Some of the detail seems to derive from Harold himself.
Of course, as every schoolboy knows, Harold was slain at Hastings in 1066, transfixed with an arrow through his eye - which would have made his corpse easy to recognise even if he was stripped of his gear, as happened after the battle. Yet contemporary accounts of the battle don't mention an arrow in the eye - this comes from the misleading way the Bayeux Tapestry images are crammed together. The earliest version has him ridden down by four Norman knights, who hacked off his leg and head, and threw the scattered the parts to prevent proper burial.
Regarding the identification of his corpse, the orthodox version says this was done by his consort Edith The Fair alias Edith Swan-Neck, who said she saw on his chest birthmarks or tattoos with the names "Edith" and "England" (!) The Vita Haroldi says he was misidentified by a woman despatched by Waltham Abbey to recover the body for proper burial. (This sounds odd, but the traditional account clarifies it: Waltham Abbey had already sent two monks, who had no luck finding the king, and so they asked for Edith.) The Vita adds the woman was called Edith, and she knew him well from frequenting 'the secret places of his chamber.' This would fit Edith The Fair, who was in the eyes of the clergy his mistress rather than his wife. (Though he had 6 children by her, he had put her aside when he became king to make a marriage that was more ‘politic.’)
The Norman soldiers told her Harold was slain, based on what Saxon survivors were saying. In a pit (or a pile) of dead, she identified a mutilated corpse as his, and this was taken away by the Normans. The Vita says the real Harold was found, 'half dead' by several women come to minister to the wounded, and taken to a local hut, and from there in secret to Winchester. The conspirators put out the rumour the king had been found dead to prevent the Normans searching for him to finish him off. At Winchester, he was nursed back to relative health by a Saracen woman 'very skilled in the art of surgery' (Arab medicine was much more advanced than European), a process that took two years. This suggests serious injuries, and if he remained distinctively disfigured, that would explain the need for the mask or veil.
For the burial, the conventional story is William refused to release the body to the family, despite an offer of his body-weight in gold. This suggests the family knew nothing of the misidentification, which might have been discovered when they prepared the corpse for burial. However they were refused access. Supposedly William had the body buried Beowulf-style in a cairn-type tomb somewhere on the shore, complete with 'Viking funeral' pyre and on the cairn with his ashes, a kingly epitaph, which was perhaps meant to be ironic. (In reality, William must have known any such tomb would attract hero-worship, making this story seem more Norman propaganda.)
This, and a family link to a church by the sea not far from Hastings, at Bosham, has led to a modern campaign lasting nearly fifty years to have a stone coffin there excavated and the remains DNA-tested. The coffin had been opened in 1954 during renovations and was said to hold a skeleton with comparable injuries to the battle account cited above. The church court was petitioned in 2003 for an excavation to be financed by a TV company. The court ruled the whole notion was scientifically unlikely, even if there were any remains left. (A 2nd coffin, said to contain Canute’s daughter, had held only dust.) As the find has been cited to discredit the ‘survival’ scenario, the church court’s judgement is reproduced in full online here.
The judgement notes the 1954 find showed the coffin held only “the thigh and pelvic bones of a powerfully built man of about 5ft 6ins in height, aged over 60 years and with traces of arthritis” (Harold was 44 in 1066). It found the petitioners’ “argument so tortuous as to be almost self-defeating.” The whole argument about matching injuries of course becomes circular if the 4 knights hacked up the wrong man (the Tapestry shows Harold was dressed in a standard Saxon chain-mail outfit). One interesting aspect was the DNA was to be compared not only with that of bones in the Godwin family funerary chests in Winchester Cathedral, but with claimed living descendants known as ‘the Cheshire Godwins.’ (Cheshire was where our hermit spent his last years.)
According to the official annals of Waltham Abbey, his remains were transported there to be given a Christian burial, originally behind the high altar. As his remains are referred to as ashes, it seems that William's men did burn the corpse. The Vita says that “hacked about as it was, covered with blood, already becoming black and decomposed,” nobody noticed they had the wrong corpse. (The Bayeux Tapestry makes it clear kings then did not wear identifying insignia in battle.) Interestingly, when the grave under the official plaque was excavated not long ago, the tomb was empty. Legally of course, Harold could not be openly buried on consecrated ground as the Pope had excommunicated him for oath-breaking, so there may have been some pre-Reformation subterfuge here to get around this. However, the whole story of his death, the identification of his body, and interment remains full of discrepancies.
The Vita says when he recovered, Harold left Winchester in 1068 for the Saxons' ancestral homeland in Denmark and Old Saxony to raise support for a comeback, but discovered the canny William had already forged alliances with these kingdoms. After a while he decided his downfall was God's will. The Pope had authorised the 1066 Conquest as a crusade as Harold was charged with breaking an oath, made over a box of holy relics, that he would accept William as the next king. Harold always said he had been tricked, the box of relics being hidden under a cloth. His father Godwin of Wessex had evidently dropped dead from Divine retribution: immediately after making one of those may-God-strike-me-dead-if-I'm-lying remarks, he choked on a crust of bread. Chroniclers also depicted the defeat at Hastings as God's punishment for the sins of the English nation. (There’s a “Vatican conspiracy” theory of course: that this was all part of a Papal drive to move Britain one step farther away from its original Orthodox church – Celtic, then Saxon. There’s a lengthy discourse on this here.)
So Harold decided to dedicate his life to religious devotions, wandering Lear-like around the countryside after a lengthy European pilgrimage to Rome and elsewhere to recover relics, which he donated to Waltham Abbey, whose royal patron had been Harold. He seems to have avoided all contact with his wife, former mistress, and family, or joining in the many revolts of the time. He returned from Europe to live in a cave near Dover for ten years, before going up to Cheswardine in Shropshire, where it is implied he deliberately exposed himself to local ruffian behaviour for self-mortification. (In his earlier life, Harold had 'subdued' Wales, campaigning in this area as King Edward Confessor's commander in the field.) His cloth mask and patently pious symbolic name obviously stirred up local curiosity, and probably hostility, wherever he went. He was repeatedly set upon, beaten, robbed and even stripped of his clothing. Presumably the locals thereby got a look at his face, which must have not too much of a giveaway – unlike the legendary Man In The Iron Mask, whose mask – in reality a velvet one – was thought to conceal some recognisable, perhaps royal, visage. In those days, what a king looked like was only known to a few.
Finally he settled at Chester, where a venerated local hermit's hut had just become vacant, near St James's Chapel in the churchyard of St John The Baptist outside the old Roman city walls. Historians say a rumour Harold had survived became current in the following century, and anecdotal evidence suggests some came to suspect Harold and 'Christian' were one and the same. When questioned about Harold and Hastings, 'Christian' would give cryptic replies full of hints, such as saying that he had been at the battle, and 'there was no one more dear to Harold than myself.'
He seems to have lived a long life. Some reports have him still alive in the reign of Henry I. As Henry was crowned in 1100, while Harold was born in 1022, this would make him 78 if he survived till then. The Waltham monk's account in the Vita is followed by another written by the 'venerable' hermit who, on the death of 'Christian', took his place at the hermitage outside Chester.
The monk-narrator mentions he visited the spot in France where, exactly 140 years before, Harold swore his fateful oath. As that was in 1064, this suggests a date of 1204 for the composition of the manuscript. This is a bit of a stretch for someone who knew Harold's servant Sebricht for years, but is just possible. (Normally you calculate 3 generations per century, but if Sebricht was a youngish man in the late 11th C., he could have lived till the mid-12th, when a monk still alive in 1204 was 50 years or so younger.) The Vita says a younger brother of Harold's, who had been a boy in 1066, was questioned in his old age by Henry.
This may have been what inspired Rudyard Kipling’s 1910 story “The Tree of Justice”, as the final chapter in his sequel to his popular children’s book Puck Of Pook's Hill, Rewards And Fairies. However Kipling evidently did not see the original source, and his use of the tale makes little sense. He presents Harold as a one-eyed, witless old “madman” who wanders about calling himself Harold of England and getting stoned by the locals, and contentedly dropping dead when brought before Henry I for amusement at a tournament. In the Vita, Harold’s now-aged brother tells the Waltham Abbey clergy bluntly “You may have some countryman, but you have not Harold.”
The Vita concludes with an account by his successor at the Chester hermitage, evidently a literate and pious cleric. He says he got the details about Harold from his attendant Moses, as well as “other faithful men.” This included the priest, named Andrew, who heard Harold's deathbed confession of his true identity, whom he says he knew well. Moses himself had served “the Lord Harold” for 7 years at Cheswardine and then Chester, before serving his successor, the narrator, for two years. Moses described the eyeless cloth mask Harold constantly wore over “his gashed face,” saying he did not know why his master wore it - whether it was vanity, to shun worldly sights, or from fear of being recognised by his fellow Saxons and perhaps being subjected to a veneration he felt he did not deserve.
The notion he survived is also alluded to in the official annals of Waltham Abbey, where he was officially buried. The cynical modern view is such claims by abbeys that famous people were buried there were designed to draw pilgrims - as with Glastonbury and the graves of Arthur, St Patrick, etc. But leading mediaeval scholar Dr Marjorie Chibnall says Waltham Abbey made an effort to discourage such traffic, relocating the grave twice to hide it. "I think the Waltham story convincing; there was a continuous tradition of liturgical commemoration there, and far from trying to attract pilgrims of the tomb the canons did all in their power to prevent the growth of a seditious cult so that they moved the body twice to prevent pilgrims coming to adore the Holy Cross passing by it.” The grave of ‘the man in the cloth mask’ remains unknown (was it also at Waltham?)
Despite the lack of proof, this unsentimental tale has an enduring appeal - Christian message balanced by historical irony. It also has elements of the Classical idea of tragedy - "how are the mighty fallen," punished by the gods, with great wealth replaced by the most spartan life imaginable. At the same time there is the tragedy of the man who must cast himself away in the wilderness as atonement, in possession of a great secret he must never speak. The Medieval History website concludes that the Vita Haroldi “is not like other classical romance fiction of the thirteenth century, which tends to be overlong on the fantastic. It has more in common with Asser's Alfred, that other devotional biography, plainly written, apparently with first hand knowledge… It is a simple and tragic story.”