The Misfortune of History

The Great Man interpretation of history — the idea that civilization is driven by a few exceptional men of will who impose their vision on the world and shape the development of humanity — was never particularly true, but it’s only been recently that it stopped being taught. Most of what we learn of history in school is still driven by the reading of mankind as a record of impressive figures who rose to great moments, and by the memorization of significant dates in which those figures chose to exert their will on the world. But we have come to understand that these figures were often hapless, helpless, or simply the beneficiaries of good fortune, and that everything from mass movements to ill wind placed them where they were.

1066, the date of the Norman invasion of England, is one of the most imperishable numbers in the record of human history, and even in the modern understanding of the past, its significance cannot be underestimated. In his groundbreaking 1977 book 1066: The Year of the Conquest, British historian David Howarth approached it with a wide-ranging understanding of all the curious factors that made the even what it was, and yet we still encounter many complex and crucial figures, from William the Conquerer himself and the opportunistic Viking hard-ass Harald Hardrada to the ill-fated Anglo-Saxon king Harold Godwinson and his quixotic, doomed brother Tostig. But more than that, Howarth shows in this slender but compelling volume the many threads of a tapestry that show how one event can be made up of a million little things, and that their ultimate form can take a whole nation in directions no one, not even the principals whose names we are taught to remember, could have possibly intended or predicted.

We learn, for example, how Harold Godwinson was never quite prepared to be king, and was wholly unprepared for the nearly apocalyptic changes that came about from an invasion he ultimately was able to see coming but was helpless to do anything about. We learn about the blustery, violent Harald and how his ego and love of violence — culturally inculcated in him by a Viking worldview he did everything to further — allowed him to be all too easily manipulated We learn that William never had any intention of being a conquerer, and that internal pressures and sheer luck contributed as much to his stunning victory as any qualities of martial prowess or leadership he might have possessed. And we learn that Tostig was a true wild card, driven by jealousy and resentment and other factors too unpredictable to even speculate on, who, against all odds, found himself almost unwittingly orchestrating the utter demise of the kingdom to which he felt himself entitled.

But we do not learn just about these great men. We learn about their wives, their companions, their subjects and their lords, and how each of those exerted their own sort of influence. We learn that England in the 11th century maintained a feudal society entirely different in character to that of France, and that its corps of knights bore little resemblance to those across the channel, who were essentially the Proud Boys of medieval Europe. We learn that the English king had to do much more convincing of his vassals to get them to participate in any kind of unified action than did his French equivalent. We learn that the King of Norway was an entirely different creature than his counterparts elsewhere. We learn about what the church meant to all of them, and what it didn’t, about the internecine complexity of their arranged marriages, about the expectations their families had of them, and what kind of characters they all possessed, at least some of which would be described in contemporary terms using the language of mental illness.

Even beyond that, though, we learn, through Howarth’s casual and conversational but extremely careful narration, about the rhythms and characteristics of everyday life that contributed so much to how the invasion played out. We learn about the weather, and how much it ha to do with both sides’ preparation for battle. We learn not just the expected qualities of war — the superiority of Norman knights thanks to their training, weaponry, and practice; their greater knowledge of fortification; the way communication over distance gave the whole proceedings an air of uncertainty and even unreality — but also the unexpected ones, such as how the Vikings, alone in the area, possessed the ability to steer and navigate their ships, and how the entire invasion would likely never have taken place if an unlucky combination of wind and rough seas hadn’t blown a single ship off course. And, in a meta-textual sense, we learn how we’ve learned all these things, and what sources we ought to trust and which we oughtn’t, in one of the most stark lessons on how history is generally written by the victors.

For reasons that should be obvious, the book begins with a look at the pastoral and curiously eternal rhythms of English country life and ends with the massive upheavals that took place because of the fallout of the Norman invasion. But it never loses sight of how these great events and “great men” intertwined with the lives of ordinary people, even going so far as to spell out with some precision how, prior to 1066, the power of the monarchy was at least partially attributable to the consent of the people and limitable by its withdrawal. As has been said about China, so many miles distant, the emperor is very far away. It took years for news of the change in rulership to reach some of the more remote points of the British Isles, despite the vast changes that resulted from the conquest.

Those changes were incalculable, and are still with us today. Among other things, it resulted in a huge shift in written and spoken language (and the development of what we now know as “English”, a bastard amalgam of Saxon and Gaelic and French and Latin that is the furthest thing from the ‘pure’ language imagined by reactionaries); the end of slavery as it was known at the time (and the ultimate transformation of it to the race-based horror it would become); huge demographic shifts that would echo for centuries; and the beginning of what we can now understand as the age of imperialism and colonialism. Howarth anticipates those changes and guides us from the very small to the very large with skill and precision. As well-informed as it is, it can’t come close to encompassing how much the invasion of 1066 meant to the world, but it’s a hugely impressive and entertaining introduction that lays out dozens of paths that the curious can follow from there.