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Chapters (88)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. I
  4. I
  5. II
  6. III
  7. IV
  8. V
  9. VI
  10. VII
  11. VIII
  12. IX
  13. X
  14. XI
  15. II
  16. I
  17. II
  18. III
  19. IV
  20. V
  21. VI
  22. VII
  23. VIII
  24. IX
  25. X
  26. XI
  27. XII
  28. XIII
  29. XIV
  30. XV
  31. XVI
  32. XVII
  33. XVIII
  34. XIX
  35. XX
  36. XXI
  37. III
  38. I
  39. II
  40. III
  41. IV
  42. V
  43. VI
  44. VII
  45. VIII
  46. IX
  47. X
  48. XI
  49. XII
  50. XIII
  51. XIV
  52. XV
  53. XVI
  54. XVII
  55. XVIII
  56. XIX
  57. XX
  58. XXI
  59. IV
  60. I
  61. II
  62. III
  63. IV
  64. V
  65. VI
  66. VII
  67. VIII
  68. IX
  69. X
  70. XI
  71. XII
  72. XIII
  73. XIV
  74. XV
  75. XVI
  76. XVII
  77. XVIII
  78. XIX
  79. XX
  80. XXI
  81. XXII
  82. XXIII
  83. XXIV
  84. XXV
  85. XXVI
  86. XXVII
  87. EPILOGUE
  88. Afterword

Orm picked out the letters. ‘E - I - N - S ... It looks German.’

‘I think it’s a name. Or several names. I don’t know what they mean. They would have made no difference anyhow. Give the thing to Odo. Let him puzzle over it. I’m done with it.’

There was a stir among the thegns. William was at the altar. The old coronation rite of the English kings was read, in English and Frankish. Now the nobles were asked if they accepted William as king. They all shouted in acclamation. ‘Yes! Yes!—’

There was a crash. Soldiers in long mail coats came bursting in through the church doors, their swords drawn, yelling. They had mistaken the acclamation shouts for a threat to William, and had come in to deal with it. The nobles’ retainers turned to meet them, raising their own weapons. Fighting broke out.

And smoke poured in through the open doors. In their usual way when faced with a crisis, the Norman troops were torching the buildings of Westmynster.

‘What a farce,’ murmured Sihtric. ‘Violence cloaked by piety and spurious legitimacy. What a bloody farce.’

As the stink of burning filled the church, as the fighting continued amid cries of anger and fear, the archbishop anointed the Bastard’s brow with sacred oil, and lowered the crown of England on to his head.

Afterword

Afterword

I’m deeply grateful to Adam Roberts for his expert assistance with the translation of the Menologium of Isolde, and for an invaluable reading of the book at manuscript stage.

Perihelia of Halley’s Comet, close approaches to the sun, took place at the dates indicated in the text. The intervals are irregular because of the perturbation of the comet’s orbit by the planets, among other effects. As seen from Earth, some of these visitations were more prominent than others.

Readable primary sources on the period from the end of Roman Britain to 1066 include Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (trans. Leo Sherley-Price, Penguin, 1990), and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (trans. Anne Savage, Tiger Books, 1995). As a general survey of the period Frank Stenton’s comprehensive Anglo-Saxon England (third edition, Oxford, 1971) is inevitably dated but hard to beat, and an unparalleled introduction to the spirit of the times is the epic poem Beowulf, especially Seamus Heaney’s translation (Faber and Faber, 1999).

Ken Dark’s Britain and the End of the Roman Empire (Tempus, 2000) is a recent and fascinating reference on the transitional centuries that followed the formal end of Roman Britain in AD 410. The sketch of the career of Arthur given here is based on the fragmentary sources available (see for instance Celt and Saxon by Peter Berresford Ellis (Constable, 1993)), and is of course speculative, as are all such accounts.