Jake

Idle Thumbs 241: Suddenly the King of France

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As soon as Nick mentioned that he had "all" of the CK2 DLC turned on I knew exactly how his story would end: in Aztecs and defeat.

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At one point I think Nick described William the Conqueror as ‘the first king of England’. Strictly speaking, this isn't really true – England had plenty of kings before William – but without wishing to be pedantic, I've been thinking about the implications of this statement.

 

You could make a case for saying that William was the first ‘modern’ king of England, in that he was an absolute ruler who imposed forms of centralised administration, organised religion, and hi-tech military power on the populace in ways that had never been seen before. The castles and churches he built still stud our landscape as symbols of control to this day. And the guy William deposed, King Harold, is sometimes referred to as the last English king because his death at the Battle of Hastings broke the Anglo Saxon line of succession that stretched back to the tribes who emigrated to Britain in the first few centuries.

 

William’s crowning was very much the product of a brutal invasion by a foreign power; in fact, his reign was the last time that England was ever occupied by anyone. It used to be said that 1066 is the one year every British schoolboy knows because of its association with Hastings, but it’s commonly overlooked today just how violent and catastrophic the French/Norman invasion probably was have been for the average English person in the middle ages.

 

All of which, of course, makes it an exceedingly interesting period for a video game!

 

For further reading on this subject, there’s a short essay by Paul Kingsnorth here which describes the English resistance, both active and passive, against William’s occupation. He also wrote ‘The Wake’, which is a fantastic and very unusual novel that explores this period in a little more detail.

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At one point I think Nick described William the Conqueror as ‘the first king of England’. Strictly speaking, this isn't really true – England had plenty of kings before William – but without wishing to be pedantic, I've been thinking about the implications of this statement.

 

You could make a case for saying that William was the first ‘modern’ king of England, in that he was an absolute ruler who imposed forms of centralised administration, organised religion, and hi-tech military power on the populace in ways that had never been seen before. The castles and churches he built still stud our landscape as symbols of control to this day. And the guy William deposed, King Harold, is sometimes referred to as the last English king because his death at the Battle of Hastings broke the Anglo Saxon line of succession that stretched back to the tribes who emigrated to Britain in the first few centuries.

 

William’s crowning was very much the product of a brutal invasion by a foreign power; in fact, his reign was the last time that England was ever occupied by anyone. It used to be said that 1066 is the one year every British schoolboy knows because of its association with Hastings, but it’s commonly overlooked today just how violent and catastrophic the French/Norman invasion probably was have been for the average English person in the middle ages.

 

All of which, of course, makes it an exceedingly interesting period for a video game!

 

For further reading on this subject, there’s a short essay by Paul Kingsnorth here which describes the English resistance, both active and passive, against William’s occupation. He also wrote ‘The Wake’, which is a fantastic and very unusual novel that explores this period in a little more detail.

 

I think a lot of the general sense that William the Conqueror is the "first (proper) king of England" is the desire of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglophone scholars to establish a clean break with England's "barbaric" Germanic past, so that the concept of a unique "Englishness" could be identified. William did transform the country, mostly by necessity since the bulk of the kingdom's old nobility was killed at Hastings, but he shares a lot of his impact with the conquest of England by Cnut the Great a generation before, the Anarchy following the White Ship incident two generations afterward, and the Plantagenet inheritance a generation after that. It was a complicated time, the long twelfth century, for England!

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