Characters

"I have conquered England — but I am not sure I shall keep it."

William, Duke of Normandy, was the illegitimate son of Duke Robert I and a tanner's daughter — known in his youth as 'William the Bastard.' He survived a violent minority in which several guardians were murdered, mastered his turbulent duchy by force, and built Normandy into one of the most formidable military powers in Europe. When Edward the Confessor died childless in 1066, William pressed his claim to the English throne — based, he said, on a promise from Edward and an oath sworn to him by Harold Godwinson himself. His invasion was a colossal gamble: a Channel crossing with cavalry, archers, and a polyglot army of Normans, Bretons, and Flemings. Victory at Hastings made him king, but it took five more years of castle-building, siege, and ruthless devastation — above all the Harrying of the North — to subdue the country. As king he transformed England: dispossessing the English aristocracy, redistributing their lands to his followers, reforming the church, and ordering the unprecedented Domesday survey of 1086 to record exactly who held what. He died in 1087 from an injury during a campaign in France, and his funeral descended into farce when his swollen body burst as it was forced into a too-small stone coffin.

"He will give them as much English soil as he is tall — and a little more, since he is taller than most men."

Harold Godwinson was the most powerful nobleman in England, Earl of Wessex and the right hand of Edward the Confessor. On Edward's death in January 1066 the English Witan chose Harold as king — the realm's most capable defender, though not of the old royal line. His brief reign was a whirlwind of crisis: an invasion from Norway in the north and the looming threat of Normandy in the south. Harold's generalship in the autumn of 1066 was brilliant and tragic. He marched north at extraordinary speed and annihilated Harald Hardrada's Norwegians at Stamford Bridge, only to learn within days that William had landed in Sussex. He raced south again with a depleted, exhausted army and met the Normans at Hastings on 14 October. For hours his shield wall held the ridge; but feigned Norman retreats and Norman arrows broke it at last, and Harold was killed — by tradition, with an arrow to the eye. He was the last crowned Anglo-Saxon king of England, and his death ended an age.

"I'll not flee — I came to win England or die."

Harald Sigurdsson, called Hardrada ('hard ruler'), was perhaps the greatest warrior-king of the Viking age. As a teenager he fled the lost battle of Stiklestad, then served for years in the elite Varangian Guard of the Byzantine emperors, fighting from Sicily to the Holy Land and amassing a fortune before returning north to seize the throne of Norway. His reign was a long, hard struggle to dominate Scandinavia. In 1066, claiming the English crown through an old dynastic agreement and allied with Harold Godwinson's exiled brother Tostig, Hardrada launched the last great Viking invasion of England. He smashed the northern earls at Fulford and took York. But Harold Godwinson's lightning march caught him unprepared at Stamford Bridge, many of his men without their armor. Hardrada was killed by an arrow to the throat amid the slaughter. His death is often taken to mark the end of the Viking age — and his invasion, by drawing Harold north, helped hand England to the Normans instead.

"May God forgive them."

Edward, called 'the Confessor' for his reputation of saintly piety, was king of England from 1042 to 1066 and the last of the old House of Wessex to rule securely. He had spent much of his youth in exile in Normandy during the Danish conquest of England, and his reign was marked by deep Norman influence at court and a long tension with the overmighty Godwin family. He founded Westminster Abbey, where England's kings would be crowned and buried thereafter. Edward's fatal failure was dynastic: he died childless, leaving no clear heir and a throne that at least three powerful men believed had been promised to them. His ambiguous deathbed words — said to have gestured the succession toward Harold Godwinson — could not settle a claim that William of Normandy insisted Edward had long ago promised to him. Edward's death on 5 January 1066 thus lit the fuse of the whole catastrophe. He was canonized a century later and became, for a time, the patron saint of England.

"He would rather die with honor than flee his brother's kingdom."

Tostig Godwinson was Harold's younger brother and Earl of Northumbria, but his harsh rule provoked a great northern rebellion in 1065. When King Edward — and Harold himself — declined to restore him by force, the embittered Tostig was outlawed and driven into exile, nursing a fierce grievance against his own family. In 1066 Tostig threw in his lot with England's enemies, raiding the coast and then joining Harald Hardrada's Norwegian invasion. He fought beside the Norwegians at Fulford and Stamford Bridge, where he was killed alongside Hardrada by his brother's army. His defection split the house of Godwin at the decisive moment and helped draw Harold's strength north, away from the Norman landing — a personal feud that became a national catastrophe.

"A bishop who wielded a club, that he might not be guilty of shedding blood with the edge of the sword."

Odo was William's younger half-brother, whom the duke made Bishop of Bayeux while Odo was still a youth. A worldly, ambitious, and warlike prelate, he fought at Hastings — wielding, by tradition, a mace rather than a sword so as to avoid the canonical ban on a churchman shedding blood. He is widely believed to have commissioned the Bayeux Tapestry, the embroidered chronicle of the conquest, for his cathedral. After the conquest Odo became Earl of Kent and one of the richest and most powerful men in England, often acting as regent when William was in Normandy — but also notorious for rapacity and oppression. His overreaching ambition eventually led William to arrest him, and he later rebelled against William's son. He died in 1097 on his way to join the First Crusade. Through the Tapestry, Odo did as much as anyone to shape how the conquest would be remembered.

"The uncrowned king, who outlived all his rivals."

Edgar the Ætheling was the grandson of King Edmund Ironside and the last male heir of the ancient royal House of Wessex — and thus, by blood, the strongest English claimant to the throne. But in 1066 he was only a teenager with no army or experienced backers. After Hastings the English leaders proclaimed him king, yet they submitted to William within weeks without his ever being crowned. Edgar spent the following years as a focus of English and Scottish-backed resistance, fleeing to Scotland — where his sister Margaret married King Malcolm — and joining the northern revolts that provoked William's terrible Harrying. He eventually made his peace with the Normans and led a remarkably long and adventurous life: crusading, campaigning in Scotland and Normandy, and dying in obscurity around 1126, having outlived the Conqueror, his sons, and nearly everyone connected with 1066.

"While there is breath in the men of the Fens, the island shall not be taken."

Hereward — later called 'the Wake,' meaning the watchful — was an Anglo-Saxon thegn who became the most celebrated leader of native resistance to the Normans. Returning from exile to find his family's lands seized and his brother killed, he raised a revolt in the Fenland of East Anglia. In 1070, joined by a Danish fleet, his men sacked the wealthy abbey of Peterborough to keep its treasures out of Norman hands. His last stand came at the Isle of Ely, the watery stronghold deep in the marshes where the surviving rebels and the earl Morcar gathered. The Fens defied Norman assault until William's army built a great causeway across them — and, legend says, the monks of Ely betrayed the secret paths. The isle fell in 1071, but Hereward himself escaped into the marshes and into folklore, becoming a enduring symbol of English defiance against the conquerors. His ultimate fate is unknown.