This article is an edited transcript of 1066: Battle of Hastings with Marc Morris, available on History Hit TV.

Harold Godwinson met Duke William of Normandy, later William the Conqueror, on a battlefield near Hastings in September 1066. The English king had just defeated Viking invaders in the north, at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, and had rushed the length of the country to meet William on the battlefield in Sussex.

The first thing to say about the Battle of Hastings is that it was a very unusual face-off – a fact that contemporaries recognised. You can see it clearly on the Bayeux Tapestry, a contemporary source which shows that the English elite did not fight using cavalry.

Instead, they stood to fight in the tradition of their Anglo-Saxon predecessors and their traditional enemies, the Vikings. They drew themselves up in the famous shield wall and presented this static face to their enemy.

The Normans, since giving up being Vikings a century or so earlier, had completely embraced the Frankish mode of warfare, which was based on mounted cavalry.

The Norman elite hurtled up the hill on their horses trying to break the Saxon shield wall by throwing missiles, javelins and axes at it, but they didn’t have much effect.

The shield wall breaks

For hours, the shield wall held. Then, in what might have been a ploy, or an accident that became a ploy, the Norman line started to give way.

There was a panic on the Norman side and a rumour ran through the Norman line that William was dead.

On the Bayeux Tapestry there’s a famous scene where William takes off his helmet and rides along the line, showing his men that he’s still alive and encouraging them to follow him. William personally stopped the line from collapsing.

Whether that was a ruse or not is unclear. But, when the Anglo-Saxons up on the ridge saw that the Normans were running away, they believed that the battle was over and started running down the hill to pursue them. The Normans then wheeled around and picked off the scattered Anglo-Saxons at will.

The flight of the Normans, feigned or otherwise, compromised the integrity of the shield wall.

From that point on, the Anglo-Saxons started to become more vulnerable and gaps began to open up in the formerly impenetrable barrier.

An unusually long battle

It was also very unusual that the battle went on all day. It was a long attritional conflict, which was only ended by groups of Anglo-Saxon warriors breaking discipline and charging, getting surrounded and cut off, and finally being cut down. It was a very slow moving battle.

At that time, you would have expected such a battle to have been over in an hour or a couple of hours.

The unusual length might have been due to the fact that there were two different types of warfare clashing, but it also shows that the two sides were well matched.

There are any number of books guessing the numbers on both sides, but the truth is that we haven’t the foggiest idea of how many were fighting for either army. It is likely there were no more than 10,000 Normans, however.

That estimate is based on the numbers who fought in battles that occurred in later centuries, from which we have better evidence, such as payrolls and muster lists.Since no English king in the later Middle Ages ever managed to get more than 10,000 men across the Channel, it seems almost impossible that William the Conqueror – who was, after all, only the Duke of Normandy at that time – could have topped that figure.

There was possibly about 10,000 on both sides at the Battle of Hastings – simply based on the fact that the battle went on all day, which suggests the two armies were extremely well matched.

The shield wall’s strength was in its unity; when solid it could last all day. But once it was fractured, it became very vulnerable.

We’re told that the shield wall was compromised and that the Anglo-Saxons started to fall in greater and greater numbers. But that didn’t have to mean the end for Harold; although he would have likely lost the battle regardless at that point, the Anglo-Saxons could have started running away.

But Harold ends up dying – perhaps because he stayed and fought. His death naturally put an end to his chances of resisting William any further and cemented the Norman conquest of England.

He was the son of the about-to-be duke of Normandy, Robert. But he was the product of Robert’s liaison with a woman of fairly humble origins from the town of Falaise called Herleva. Despite this, however, Herleva was treated honourably and so was William. The assumption was likely that Robert might go on to marry a more church-sanctioned match with whom he would produce other children.

This article is an edited transcript of William: Conqueror, Bastard, Both? with Dr Marc Morris on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 23 September 2016.

But what surprised everybody at Christmas in 1034, when William was still a little boy of six or seven, was that his dad decided to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem from which he never came back. And before he went off to the Holy Land, Robert took the precaution of getting the nobles of Normandy to swear an oath that they would accept William in the event that he didn’t return.

A state of Richard the Good, as William’s father was known, in Falaise town square. Credit: Michael Shea –imars / Commons

And so that’s what happened when the news came back from Nicea in 1035 that Robert had perished in the sands of the Middle East – the nobles accepted the illegitimate boy William as their new duke.

The problem with having a child on the throne

William’s illegitimacy wasn’t particularly a problem because the Normans were originally Vikings and the Vikings had traditionally been pagan. The Normans themselves were considerably more civilised than their Viking ancestors by 1035, but they were not particularly hung up on the idea of a church wedding.

But although William’s illegitimacy wasn’t a huge problem, his age was. In a warrior society in the early 11th century, having a child on the throne was a recipe for disaster. Lots of people who had ancient grudges with their neighbours took advantage of William being on the throne and took authority into their own hands.

So, very quickly, society in Normandy went to hell in a handcart and there were fires and rebellions all over the duchy.

One of the problems of that period is that contemporary sources aren’t that great; the very detailed ones are from about 100 years after the event. But we’re told that William was sleeping in his chamber in Normandy when his steward was murdered – had his throat cut – in the same chamber.

The question mark is whether William’s own life was actually in danger? Whether those who killed his steward were also planning to kill and replace him? Or whether it was simply factional fighting, an attempt to replace the people around William? It was probably the latter because if someone had wanted to take a seven-year-old boy in those circumstances then they wouldn’t have had a problem. 

So, the people who were killed in that period were William’s protectors and guardians and they were replaced by their rivals who crop up in the very next charter or source as the people running the show.

But although William himself wasn’t killed, it would certainly have been a very frightening time for a seven or eight-year-old boy.

A young William takes charge

In any period of history like that, it suits some people when law and order breaks down or when established authority breaks down because people with ancient grievances can settle them themselves. So it suits men with strong right arms and twitchy swords. But the majority of people would have lamented the breakdown of order. 

What ultimately righted the situation was William taking personal charge. We’re told he was knighted at a young age – around 15. That is pretty young but not impossibly young, and once he had been knighted it signified that he had come of age and was able to sort of wield the sword in his own right.

He was also associating by that age with other young men, other Norman nobles and magnates, who were his kind of boon companions throughout the rest of his life.

But although what turned the situation in Normandy around was William asserting his personal authority from the mid-1040s, the forces that arranged against him didn’t go down without a fight.

At the start of 1047, it looked like he was facing his biggest danger to date – there seems to have been a genuine attempt to replace him, a rebellion that broke out in the west of Normandy. It was sufficiently serious that William ran away to France to seek the help of his overlord, the French King Henry I. 

The king obliged William and the two sides came to battle in a place near Caen called Val-es-Dunes. William was still only in his late teens at that point, but he was successful and so vindicated his right to rule.

Looking beyond Normandy

What William did in the first instance in terms of looking elsewhere, beyond Normandy, was to look elsewhere for a bride and he got married to the daughter of the Count of Flanders, Matilda. She was about the same age as William, just a little bit younger. But at that point he wasn’t starting to look with an acquisitive eye at other territory. 

A statue of Matilda of Flanders in Paris. Credit: Tom Hilton / Commons

Throughout the next 10, 15 years of William’s career, he was on the defensive. Normandy was invaded by the Count of Anjou to the south, and William also fell out with the King of France, the man who’d come to his rescue in 1047.

But although Normandy was under threat for most of the 1050s, the crucial turning point in William’s career came in the year 1051 when he was invited to England.

That is something that has been debated in the 20th century, but it seems absolutely clear from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that William crossed the channel in 1051 to visit his second cousin King Edward the Confessor.

Apparently, that was the point at which William was promised the English throne by Edward upon his death. That obviously marked the seed being sown for the Norman conquest of England 15 years later. It’s entirely possible that that development is what caused the other magnates of France, particularly the king, to turn against William in the 1050s.

As a result, although William is set up to perhaps inherit England in 1051, for most of the decade that followed he was on the defensive and trying to protect Normandy’s borders rather than trying to enlarge them.

The problem with William is that, to some extent, we’re well informed about his activities because we have a contemporary biography written of him by his chaplain William of Poitier.

But because it was written for William or at least for William’s court, by a very sycophantic biographer, we only get this strident propagandist description of William’s “wonderful personality” and “wonderful achievements”.

What William of Poitier doesn’t tell us is why the King of France and the Count of Anjou and others turned against him. 

But certainly in terms of the political balance of that part of the world, the notion that the Duke of Normandy and the King of England might be one and the same person at some point in the future would have been deeply worrying. So you can see why some people would have wanted to remove William before that happened.

William’s relentlessness

Despite the unreliability of William’s biographer, his reputation as an extraordinary leader is borne out by the way his career unfolded. We know that he was successful in battle in 1047, we know that he was successful in battle in 1066.

One of the key things that leaps out at you while going over the sources is William’s relentlessness. Relentlessness or words to that effect are used by both William’s Norman biographer and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. 

There’s a telling line that says, “He was too relentlessness to care, even though everyone might hate him”. He’s almost got an ideological streak that says “God is on my side, I’m right. I’m going to do this, no matter what anybody says”.

So whether it was leading troops through the frozen wastes of northern England in 1069, 1070 when all of his soldiery were deserting, or chancing all at Hastings, he was prepared to take risks. 

The thing about the Battle of Hastings and the Norman invasion of 1066 that people tend to forget is that it was very likely to have ended the other way around. Most of the risk was with William – he had to get all of his horses and ships of men across the channel. He was the one sailing into adverse weather. It was an incredibly, insanely risky undertaking.

You don’t do that kind of thing unless you think God is on your side. Unless you think that you will be vindicated when swords are drawn. And that seem to be the most striking thing about his personality – the belief that God was on his side, as well as the relentlessness driving him on.

This article is an edited transcript of William: Conqueror, Bastard, Both? with Dr Marc Morris on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 23 September 2016. You can listen to the full episode below or to the full podcast for free on Acast.

William the Conqueror started his reign of England by professing to want continuity. There’s a very early writ, now preserved in the London Metropolitan Archives, that was put out by William within months, if not days, of his coronation on Christmas Day in 1066, essentially saying to the citizens of London: your laws and customs will be exactly as they were under Edward the Confessor; nothing’s going to change. 

So that was the stated policy at the top of William’s reign. And yet, massive change followed and the Anglo-Saxons weren’t happy about it. As a result, the first five or six years of William’s reign were ones of more or less continuing violence, continuing insurgency and, then, Norman repression. 

What made William different from the foreign rulers who came before him?

The Anglo-Saxons had coped with various rulers during the medieval period who had come over to England from abroad. So what was it about William and the Normans that led the English to keep rebelling?

One major reason was that, after the Norman conquest, William had an army of 7,000 or so men at his back who were hungry for reward in the form of land. Now the Vikings, by contrast, had generally been happier to just take the shiny stuff and go home. They weren’t determined to settle. Some of them did but the majority were happy to go home. 

William’s continental followers, meanwhile, wanted to be rewarded with estates in England.

So, from the off, he was having to disinherit Englishmen (Anglo-Saxons). Initially dead Englishmen, but, increasingly, as the rebellions against him went on, living Englishmen too. And so more and more Englishmen found themselves without a stake in society.

That led to great change within English society because, ultimately, it meant that the entire elite of Anglo-Saxon England was disinherited and replaced by continental newcomers. And that process took several years.

Not a proper conquest

The other reason for the constant rebellions against William – and this is the surprising bit – is that he and the Normans were initially perceived by the English as being lenient. Now, that sounds strange after the bloodbath that was the Battle of Hastings.

But after that battle was won and William had been crowned king, he sold the surviving English elite back their lands and tried to make peace with them.

At the start he tried to have a genuinely Anglo-Norman society. But if you compare that to the way that the Danish king Cnut the Great started his reign, it was very different. In the traditional Viking manner, Cnut went around and if he saw someone who was a potential threat to his rule then he just executed them.

With the Vikings, you knew you had been conquered – it felt like a proper Game of Thrones-style conquest – whereas I think people in Anglo-Saxon England in 1067 and 1068 thought that the Norman conquest was different.

They might have lost the Battle of Hastings and William might have thought he was king, but the Anglo-Saxon elite still thought they were “in” – that they still had their lands and their power structures – and that, come the summer, with one big rebellion, they would get rid of the Normans. 

So because they thought they knew what a conquest felt like, like a Viking conquest, they didn’t feel like they had been properly conquered by the Normans. And they kept rebelling from one year to the next for the first several years of William’s reign in the hope of undoing the Norman conquest. 

William turns to brutality

The constant rebellions resulted in William’s methods for dealing with opposition to his rule ultimately becoming even more savage than those of his Viking predecessors.

The most notable example was the “Harrying of the North” which really did put an end to the rebellion against William in the north of England, but only as a result of him more or less exterminating every living thing north of the River Humber.

The Harrying was William’s third trip to the north in as many years. He went north the first time in 1068 to quell a rebellion in York. While there he founded York Castle, as well as half a dozen other castles, and the English submitted.

The remains of Baile Hill, believed to be the second motte-and-bailey castle built by William in York.

At the start of the following year, there was another rebellion and he returned from Normandy and built a second castle in York. And then, in the summer of 1069, there was another rebellion – that time supported by an invasion from Denmark. 

At that point, it really did look as though the Norman conquest was hanging in the balance. William realised that he could not hang onto the north simply by planting castles there with small garrisons. So, what was the solution?

The brutal solution was that if he couldn’t hold the north then he would make damn sure that no one else could hold it.

So he devastated Yorkshire, literally sending his troops over the landscape and burning down barns and slaughtering cattle etc so that it could not support life – so that it could not support an invading Viking army in the future. 

People make the mistake of thinking that it was a new form of warfare. It wasn’t. Harrying was a perfectly normal form of medieval warfare. But the scale of what William did in 1069 and 1070 did strike contemporaries as way, way over the top. And we know that tens of thousands of people died as a result of the famine that followed.

This article is an edited transcript of William: Conqueror, Bastard, Both? with Dr Marc Morris on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 23 September 2016. You can listen to the full episode below or to the full podcast for free on Acast.

William the Conqueror is very hard to empathise with. His counterinsurgencies to put down the many rebellions in England that followed the Norman conquest make him sound like a sort of sadistic maniac.

Despite this, we were always told for the last 60 or so years that, when William died in 1087, some people at his funeral remembered some very surprising qualities about him. He was cheerful, he was eloquent, he was affable, they said – so there was apparently this other side to his character, which you might not necessarily associate with the brutal conqueror. 

However, that was actually the result of Hugh of Flavigny’s Chronicle having been mistranslated – all those positive adjectives were actually about the Abbot of Verdun. So, we no longer have any really good evidence for a cheerful, affable William the Conqueror. 

William’s English obituary writer

Having said all that, it’s still useful to look at what was said about William by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle because one of the very best sources for the Norman king’s reign and character is his obituary in the Chronicle.

One, because it’s long and detailed but, two, because it was written by an anonymous Englishman – it’s written in Old English – who says he lived at William’s court and saw him with his own eyes. So it’s written from the point of view of the conquered. 

As you’d expect, this writer says there are certain good things about William’s rule, that he kept good order and he feared God and those kinds of things. And he built an abbey at Battle, the site of the Battle of Hastings. He also lays into William for the bad things, however. 

He says he was greedy, that he extracted way too much gold, and that he built far more castles than was necessary.

That’s another crime against him, because William commanded hundreds of castles to be built in the 20 odd years of his reign.

The writer also condemns him for introducing the Royal Forest. So, there are lots of things that the Chronicle gets exercised about. But the surprising thing is that he doesn’t accuse William of being cruel, a chant that is often laid at William’s door by modern historians – that he was a cruel, savage man, because he chopped people’s hands or feet off.

Hands and feet but not heads

So we have this silence from the Chronicle regarding William being cruel or savage. The thing is, William did do all those things – he did chop off people’s hands and feet if they rebelled against him. But that was true of every other 11th-century warrior or warrior king.

That is the way that people did politics and warfare in the mid-11th century. If you look at the Vikings or the Anglo-Saxons before 1066 they’re doing exactly the same thing, if not worse. 

William may have had people’s hands and feet chopped off, but not their heads.

The interesting thing about William is that we’re told he locked up his prisoners for a long time and kept people in prison forever and ever and ever. And again, modern historians have said that that shows what a cruel man he was, but the alternative to locking people up is chopping their heads off.

What differentiated William from earlier kings of England and, indeed, other rulers in the Anglo-Saxon or Viking worlds is that he didn’t chop people’s heads off – almost without exception.

He didn’t execute his political enemies in the way that Viking and Anglo-Saxon rulers prior to the Norman conquest of England in 1066 had done as a matter of routine. 

So there have been arguments around for about a quarter of a century now suggesting that William was the king who introduced chivalry to England. At the same time as there were rebellions kicking off everywhere in England following the Norman conquest, with hundreds of thousands of people being killed, the way that the English did politics at the highest level changed as a result of William’s rule.

It meant that if  people were captured or surrendered then they were not executed; instead, they were imprisoned or held for ransom, and, maybe, one day further down the line, even released.

William’s legacy today

His legacy during his lifetime and after his death was obviously one of extreme violence and upheaval and disruption. People also noticed every major church being rebuilt, as well the building of hundreds of new castles. So the physical appearance of England was drastically changed by William. 

But 950 years on, very few of those consequences are so apparent. The thing we live with today that is a direct result of William and the Norman conquest, of course, is the language we’re speaking now, which is a mongrel tongue of English and Norman, Norman-French.

This article is an edited transcript of The Unknown Invasion of England with Marc Morris on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 21 May 2016. You can listen to the full episode below or to the full podcast for free on Acast.

By the end of the summer of 1215 Magna Carta, the charter that was created in an attempt to make peace between King John and a group of rebel barons, was as good as dead. It had been quashed by the pope and John had never had any interest in sticking to it.

So the barons came up with a much simpler solution – get rid of John.

By September 1215 they were at war with the king of England.

Being at war with his own subjects, John found himself trying to get foreign mercenaries from the continent, while the barons had found an alternative candidate in Louis, the son of the king of France. Both sides were looking to the continent for support.

Consequently, the south-east of England became the crucial theatre for the conflict.

King John in battle with the Francs (left), and Prince Louis of France on the march (right).

The war started with a spectacular siege of Rochester Castle in Kent, the tallest castle tower and secular building in Europe.

Round One went to John, who broke Rochester Castle – which had previously been captured by baronial forces – in a seven-week siege, famously collapsing the tower.

It was one of the few sieges that saw room-to-room fighting in the keep and must be regarded as one of the most spectacular medieval sieges.

Most sieges tended to end with a negotiated surrender or starvation, but Rochester was the scene of a truly spectacular conclusion. John’s men collapsed a quarter of the tower but because the tower had an internal cross wall, the baronial troops fought on for a short time using it as a second or final line of defence.

The Barnwell chronicler remarked:

“Our age has not known a siege so hard pressed nor so strongly resisted”.

But in the end, when the keep was broached, that was it, the game was up. The baronial forces ultimately surrendered.

It was looking quite glum for the barons by the end of 1215, but in May 1216, when Louis landed on English shores, the advantage moved to the barons.

Rochester Castle, the scene of one of the most spectacular medieval sieges.

Louis invades

Louis landed at Sandwich in Kent, where John was waiting to confront him. But, true to form, John, who had a reputation for fleeing, watched Louis land, thought about fighting him and then ran away.

He fled to Winchester, leaving Louis free to occupy all of south-eastern England.

Louis took Kent and Canterbury before arriving in London, where he was received by cheering crowds because the barons had held London since May 1215.

The French prince was acclaimed as a king, but never crowned.

Was Louis the king of England?

There are examples in history of uncrowned English kings, but in this period coronation was necessary before you could really claim the throne.

There was a window before the Norman conquest when all you needed was acclamation.

People could get together and acclaim the new king, get them to swear an oath and then they could just be crowned whenever they liked.

If you take Edward the Confessor, the penultimate king of Anglo-Saxon England, he was sworn in in June 1042, but not crowned until Easter 1043.

The Normans, however, had a different take on it – you only became king when the holy oil, the chrism, was poured on your head during a coronation service.

Richard the Lionheart is a good example, being the first king for whom we have an accurate coronation description. The chronicler refers to him as the duke up to the moment of his anointing.

What that means, of course, is that there was potential for a period of lawlessness between one monarch’s death and the next monarch’s coronation.

When Henry III died in 1272, his son, Edward I, was out of the country on crusade. It was decided that the country couldn’t wait for months and years without a king. So, before Edward went on crusade, his rule was proclaimed – it would start immediately when Henry died.

Consequently, after 200 years the possibility of an uncrowned king returned to England. But you couldn’t be an uncrowned king in 1216.

This article is an edited transcript of The Unknown Invasion of England with Marc Morris on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 21 May 2016. You can listen to the full episode below or to the full podcast for free on Acast.

In September 1216, King John was running out of places to hide. Louis had attacked, immediately putting John on the back foot, and the emboldened English barons were claiming back their castles.

W. L. Warren’s biography has a wonderfully evocative line. He talks about John being like a rabbit caught on a patch of grass that a mower is steadily reducing.

John was essentially down to the West Midlands after the Scots invaded Yorkshire, and was running out of places to hide.

King John, depicted in the illuminated manuscript De Rege Johanne.

John’s final days were miserable. Things had been going badly for many years, but the last week of his life was especially disastrous.

At King’s Lynn, he became badly ill. There are reports that he overindulged, but more sober chroniclers mention dysentery.

Whatever his illness was, it’s safe to say he was exhausted. His itinerary shows that he’d been covering 30 miles a day on horseback for weeks – he was losing a civil war and had to keep moving around just to stay in the game.

King John’s lost treasure

Then, as if things weren’t already bad enough, John lost his treasure while crossing the Wash, a huge tidal estuary with vast mud flats on the east coast of England.

For some reason, bad planning or not having the right guides, perhaps, his baggage train was sucked down into the quicksand.

The scale of the incident isn’t certain.

Roger of Wendover’s account reads like the sinking of the Titanic, with men and horses being sucked into the abyss. But Ralph of Coggeshall’s description is more sober, suggesting that John lost some bits of his chapel.

Interestingly, when Henry III was crowned a few weeks later, it wasn’t with any of the old crowns. Instead it was with a circlet borrowed from his mother. It’s also noteworthy that John’s crowns don’t show up in the early inventories of the treasure in Henry III’s reign. It seems quite likely that John lost at least one crown in the accident.

To see his crown being lost to the depths of the Wash must surely have felt to King John like a final divine judgement of his widely criticised reign. Three or four days later he was dead.

How John’s death saved his dynasty

Perversely, dying was probably the best thing John could have done to protect the Plantagenet’s position in England.

The oldest of John’s two sons, Henry, was only nine when he died.

Had he been 19 and involved in that civil war then he would likely have been tarred with the same brush and disposed of. But being nine was very useful because it meant he was blameless and innocent.

Indeed, the writs that he initially put out talk about him being nothing to do with the arguments of his father’s reign.

The effigy of William Marshal, who became head of Henry III’s regency government, in Temple Church, London.

William Marshal became head of Henry III’s regency government, and his first significant act was to reissue Magna Carta, albeit with the clauses that were most damaging to the crown stripped out.

Even with the omissions, two-thirds of Magna Carta was intact, so a lot of the things that the rebels had been complaining about and lobbying John for were reissued in good faith. A good move on the regency government’s part.

Marshal was also a very experienced warrior and in prosecuting the war now he was prepared to make bold moves of the kind that John always ran away from.

In spring 1217 his Royalists defeated Louis’ French and baronial forces at Lincoln. It was a widely celebrated and decisive victory that went a long way towards re-establishing the Royalists’ power.

A combination of pledging Magna Carta in good faith, having a blameless monarch, and being able to win military victories – all the things that John had failed to deliver – meant that within a year of his death, the civil war that John had created was over.

This article is an edited transcript of Magna Carta with Marc Morris on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 24 January 2017. You can listen to the full episode below or to the full podcast for free on Acast.

Some people say Magna Carta is the most important single document in the history of the human race, while others consider it to be little more than a piece of political pragmatism.

So how important is Magna Carta really?

As is so often the case, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle ground.

In the immediate context of 1215, Magna Carta was highly unsuccessful because it was a peace treaty that resulted in war within a few weeks. In its original format, it was unworkable.

Its original format had a clause at the end that allowed England’s barons, who were against King John, to go to war with him if he didn’t stick to the terms of the charter. So, realistically, it was never going to work in the short term.

Crucially, Magna Carta was reissued in 1216, 1217 and 1225 as a somewhat more royalist document.

In the reissues, the important clause that meant the barons could rise up in arms against the king to compel him to adhere to the document was dropped, as were several other clauses which damaged the prerogative of the Crown.

The essential restraints on the money-getting power of the king were preserved, however.

Consequently, Magna Carta had a good, long afterlife in the 13th century when people did appeal to it and did want it reconfirmed.

In 1237 and 1258, as well as in Edward I’s reign, people asked for Magna Carta to be confirmed two or three times. So clearly it was very important in the 13th century.

The iconic power of Magna Carta

Magna Carta was then revived in the 17th century, in the wars between Parliament and the Crown. Thereafter it became iconic, particularly the resonant clauses buried in the middle – 39 and 40.

Those clauses were about justice not being denied, justice not being delayed or sold, and no free man being deprived of his lands or persecuted in any way. They were taken out of their original context somewhat and venerated.

A romanticised 19th-century recreation of King John signing Magna Carta at a meeting with the barons at Runnymede on 15 June 1215. Although this painting shows John using a quill, he actually used the royal seal to confirm it.

It went on to be the foundation of lots of other constitutional documents around the world, including the Declaration of Independence and other constitutions in Australia.

There are only, depending on which version you’re using, three or four clauses of Magna Carta still on the statute book, and they’re there for historic reasons – that the City of London shall have its liberties and that the Church will be free, for instance.

As an emblem, however, Magna Carta continues to be very important, because it says a fundamental thing: that the government will be under the law and that the executive will be under the law.

There had been charters before Magna Carta but none had contained such blanket declarations about the king being under the law and having to abide by the law. In that sense, Magna Carta was innovative and fundamentally important.

This article is an edited transcript of Magna Carta with Marc Morris on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 24 January 2017. You can listen to the full episode below or to the full podcast for free on Acast.

If you’re the king of England and your nickname is Softsword then you’ve got a big problem.

King John’s nickname, “Softsword”, entered circulation at the height of his reign, around 1200, and isn’t often regarded as complimentary.

Interestingly, however, the monk who reported it, Gervais of Canterbury, implied that the moniker was given to John because he made peace with France. Something he himself seemed to regard as a good thing. And peace is usually a good thing.

But there were clearly some people at the time who felt that John had ceded too much in the way of territory to the king of France and should have fought harder.

The risk-averse king

Softsword is certainly an epithet that John went on to earn over the rest of his reign.

John liked war; he wasn’t a milquetoast king like Henry VI or Richard II. He loved beating people up, going blood and thunder at the enemy and burning and destroying. So John’s reign saw spectacular sieges of castles like Rochester.

What John didn’t like was risk. He wasn’t fond of confrontation when the outcome was anything less than guaranteed in his favour.

A good example is the scant resistance he put up when Philip Augustus, King of France, attacked Chateau Gaillard in 1203.

Chateau Galliard was built by John’s older brother, Richard the Lionheart, in the late 1190s. Barely finished by the time Richard died in 1199, it was huge and highly state-of-the-art when Philip launched his attack.

Normandy was under assault but John put up very scant resistance. Rather than attend the attack himself, he sent William Marshal up the Seine to try and relieve this siege, but the night-time operation was a complete disaster.

John opted to run away and, by the end of 1203, he’d retreated to England, leaving his Norman subjects to face the king of France leaderless.

Chateau Gaillard held out for another three months before submitting in March 1204, at which point the game was really up. Rouen, the Norman capital, submitted in June 1204.

A pattern begins to emerge

The whole episode proved to be pretty typical of John’s reign.

You can see his tendency to run away time and again.

He went back to France in 1206 and got as far as Anjou. When Philip approached he ran away.

In 1214, having scrimped and saved and extorted money from England for years, he returned to try and regain his lost continental provinces.

As soon as he heard that Louis, Philip’s son, was advancing towards him, he once again ran away back to La Rochelle.

Then, when the Louis invaded England in the spring of 1216, John was waiting on the beaches to confront him, but ultimately opted to run away to Winchester, leaving Louis free to occupy Kent, East Anglia, London, Canterbury and eventually Winchester.

This article is an edited transcript of Magna Carta with Marc Morris on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 24 January 2017. You can listen to the full episode below or to the full podcast for free on Acast.

There are two clauses in the 1215 draft of Magna Carta that can be seen as crucial to the evolution of parliament. Both clauses relate to the king being required to obtain parliamentary assent for taxation.

It’s likely that something to do with parliamentary representation would have emerged in the absence of Magna Carta. This is simply because war is very expensive and the way forward, given the need to raise taxes for such endeavours, was to ensure that consent was required for tax.

Curiously, these clauses were dropped from the reissues of Magna Carta. But, even so, when later kings broke these clauses, people were up in arms.

In 1297, Edward I was waging wars on several fronts – he was fighting wars against the Welsh, the Scots and against the French. In so doing he had to take vast sums of money out of the country with more and more taxation.

A chronicler reported on parliament voting on one of Edward’s taxes, noting, disparagingly, that, “It was just the people stood about in his chamber.”

There was a sense that this was out of order, that parliament had to be everybody. It had to be representatives from the shires, it has to be all of the magnate class, not just the king’s mates nodding it through.

Did Magna Carta lead to the development of a parliament in England?

It’s not unreasonable to think of Magna Carta as the crucial first step towards the development of a parliament. If we look at the 1215 draft, clauses 12 and 14 establish a new principle – that you have to summon everybody in order to get consent for a tax.

Before that point, there was only really talk of great councils.

The first official reference to parliament is in the 1230s. They clearly thought there was something new going on and it wasn’t just a change of nomenclature. The change was representation.

Everyone thinks representation started in 1265 with Simon de Montfort, but it was clearly already going on. There were the knightly reps from the 1250s and townsmen who were present, according to chronicle descriptions, in the 1240s and 1250s.

In which case, de Montfort wasn’t doing anything new in January 1265 and Magna Carta can be considered a much more important marker post in terms of the history of the development of parliament.

Did King John’s dysentery save his dynasty?

King John died of dysentery in 1216 and one could convincingly argue that, in doing so, he saved Britain for the Plantagenets and Magna Carta from being vetoed.

John himself had rejected Magna Carta, while Louis VIII, who had been offered the English throne by the rebel barons, showed no sign of wanting to uphold it.

Henry III, who was nine and entirely blameless, succeeded John and, within a year, Louis VIII’s invading French forces had been defeated.

Did King John’s death save Magna Carta?

Magna Carta was reissued within a few weeks of John’s death, in good faith, by Henry’s regents.

Had John lived and gone on fighting he would most likely have lost and it’s doubtful that Magna Carta would have been revived in anything like the form it took.

Louis talked about giving people their good laws and customs, but there was were never any specific references to Magna Carta in anything he said.

As a result of that twist of fate, Magna Carta has gone on to inspire reformers and radicals and people all around the world, largely due to this central idea that no-one is above the rule of law, even the king.

We might think it all belongs to the distant past but that central tenet is as vital as ever. It’s why people are fighting wars across the globe – to make sure that even leaders have to obey the law.

This article is an edited transcript of 1066: Battle of Hastings with Marc Morris, available on History Hit TV.

The year 1066 saw several candidates emerge as rivals for the English crown. Having defeated the Vikings at Stamford Bridge, King Harold Godwinson journeyed south very quickly to respond to the new Norman threat that had landed on the south coast.

Harold could have travelled 200 odd miles from York to London in around three or four days at that time. If you were the king and you travelled with a mounted elite, you could ride hell-for-leather if you needed to get somewhere quick, and the horses could be replaced.

Whilst he was doing that, Harold would have had other messengers riding out into the provinces, proclaiming a new muster in London in 10 days’ time.

Should Harold have waited?

What we’re told by several sources about Harold is that he was too hasty. Both English and Norman chronicles tell us that Harold set out for Sussex and William’s camp too soon, before all his troops had been drawn up. That fits with the idea that he disbanded his troops in Yorkshire. It wasn’t a forced march south for the infantry; it was instead a gallop for the king’s elite.

Harold would likely have done better to wait rather than to rush down into Sussex with fewer infantry than might have been ideal.

He would have had more troops if he had waited a bit longer for the muster, which involved counties sending their reserve militiamen to join Harold’s army.

The other thing to note is that the longer Harold waited, the more likely he was to gain more support from Englishmen who didn’t want to see their farms put to the torch.

Harold could have played a patriotic card, positing himself as a king of England protecting his people from these invaders. The longer the prelude to battle went on, the greater the danger for William’s position, because the Norman duke and his army had only brought a certain amount of supplies with them.

Once the Normans’ food ran out, William would have had to start breaking up his force and going out to forage and ravage. His army would have ended up with all the disadvantages of a being an invader living off the land. It would have been much better for Harold to wait.

William’s invasion plan

William’s strategy was to loot and sack settlements in Sussex in an attempt to provoke Harold. Harold was not only a crowned king but a popular one too, which meant he could afford a draw. As a 17th-century quote from the Earl of Manchester, about the Parliamentarians versus the Royalists, says:

“If we fight 100 times and beat him 99 he will be king still, but if he beats us but once, or the last time, we shall be hanged, we shall lose our estates, and our posterities be undone.”

If Harold was defeated by William but managed to survive, he could have headed west and then regrouped to fight another day. That exact thing had happened 50 years earlier with the Anglo-Saxons versus the Vikings. Edmund Ironside and Cnut went at it about four or five times until Cnut eventually won.

This illustration depicts Edmund Ironside (left) and Cnut (right), fighting one another.

All Harold had to do was not die, whereas William was gambling everything. For him, it was the biggest roll of the dice of his career. It had to be a decapitation strategy. He wasn’t coming over to plunder; it wasn’t a Viking raid, it was a play for the crown.

The only way William was going to get the crown was if Harold obliged him by coming to battle early and dying.

William thus spent time harrying Sussex to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of Harold’s lordship, and Harold rose to the bait.

Harold’s defence of England

Harold used the element of surprise against the Vikings to win his decisive victory in the north. He rushed up to Yorkshire, secured good intelligence on their location and caught them unawares at Stamford Bridge.

So surprise worked well for Harold in the north, and he attempted a similar trick against William. He tried to hit William’s camp at night before the Normans realised he was there. But it didn’t work.

Hardrada and Tostig were completely caught with their pants down at Stamford Bridge. That’s literally the case in terms of dress, because we’re told by an 11th-century source that it was a hot day and so they had gone from York to Stamford Bridge without their armour or their mail shirts, putting them at a massive disadvantage.

Hardrada really dropped his guard. Harold and William, on the other hand, were probably equally matched in their generalship.

William’s reconnoitring and his intelligence were better than Harold’s, however; we’re told that the Norman duke’s knights reported back to him and warned him of the impending night attack. William’s soldiers then stood guard throughout the night in expectation of an attack.

When an attack didn’t come, they set off in search of Harold and in the direction of his camp.

The site of the battle

The tables were turned and instead it was William who caught Harold unawares rather than the other way round. The place he met Harold at the time didn’t have a name. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says they meet at the grey apple tree, but nowadays we call that place “Battle”.

There has been some controversy in recent years about the site of the battle. Lately, there has been a suggestion that the only evidence that the monastery, Battle Abbey, was placed on the site of the Battle of Hastings, is the Chronicle of Battle Abbey itself, which was written more than a century after the event.

But that isn’t true.

There are at least half a dozen earlier sources that say William built an abbey on the site where the battle was fought.

The earliest of them is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in William’s obituary for the year 1087.

The Englishman who wrote it says that William was a great king who did many dreadful things. He writes that of the good things he did, he ordered an abbey to be built on the very spot where God granted him victory over the English.

So we have a contemporary voice from the time of William the Conqueror, an English voice from his court, that says the abbey is situated where the battle was fought. It’s as solid evidence as we will find for this period.

One of the most titanic, climactic battles in British history, saw Harold begin in a very good defensive position, anchored to a large slope, blocking the road to London.

Harold had the high ground. Everything from Star Wars onwards tells us that if you’ve got the high ground, you’ve got a better chance. But the issue with Harold’s position is that it was too narrow. He couldn’t deploy all of his men. Neither commander had an ideal position. And that’s probably why the battle descended into a long, drawn-out melee.