Tag: Anglo-Saxon

Review of “Harold the King” by Piers Compton

MarkLeave a comment

Piers Compton has what is quite possibly the most interesting background of any author of a royal biography that I have yet read. A former Catholic priest, he was the literary editor of a Catholic weekly for nearly a decade and a half, and he wrote a number of popular histories and biographies. He is best known, however, for his last book: a gossipy work claiming that the Freemasons had infiltrated the Catholic Church and, through Vatican II, were undermining it from within. Because of all this, I picked up his biography of Harold with a wide range of expectations as to what I would find in it.

And somehow, Compton managed to exceed every one of them. His book provides a readable narrative of Harold’s life that examines it in three parts, describing in succession his life prior to becoming king, his reign up to his victory over Harald Hardrada at the battle of Stamford Bridge, and William’s invasion and Harold’s death at Hastings. Though imbalanced chronologically, it does favor the aspects of Harold’s biography that mattered most, and I especially appreciated that Compton waited until the second part of the book to provide his description of the England that Harold inherited. It’s an approach to the material that helps keep the author’s focus squarely on the monarch, and I’m surprised that more biographers of the kings of the era haven’t adopted it.

Yet as well as Compton tells the story of Harold’s life, from the start I found myself taking issue with much of what he had to say about it. Part of the problem is the authorial license Compton employed to evoke the scenes of Harold’s life, which often provides a degree of detail more likely to come from his imagination than from any of the surviving sources. A more serious issue, though, is his interpretation of the events of the era, which relies on an uncritical reading of the sources and frequently resorts to stereotypes that were going out of fashion even when Compton wrote his book. He gives particular weight to the oath William extracted from Harold in 1064, emphasizing its sacredness and largely glossing over the question as to whether the circumstances invalidated it.

That Compton gives this oath such weight reflects what distinguishes his biography the most from the others on Harold. Throughout his book Compton presents developments from the faith-based perspective of the people of the era, describing matter-of-factly the signs of God’s disfavor with Harold and the divine intervention that made possible the Normans’ passage across the English Channel. While this approach is one that a reader is more likely to find in a work written in the tenth century than one from a millennia later, more importantly it’s another reflection of Compton’s a too-credulous acceptance of the post-Conquest account perpetuated by the Normans, which has long been understood as concerned more with bolstering William’s legitimacy by emphasizing his divine right to the English throne than on proving an accurate account of events. In depicting Harold as the king upon whom God turned His back for violating a sworn oath, Compton unknowingly plays right into this.

Undoubtedly William would have approved of Compton’s unquestioning reliance on the Norman interpretation of events in telling Harold’s tale. For a modern biography of Harold, however, it is a fatal flaw. As entertaining as it might be to read, his book provides a portrait of its subject that was already outdated when it was first published nearly sixty years ago. Because of this, and with two more modern biographies of Harold from which to choose, there is no reason why readers today shouldn’t give Compton’s distorted account of the king a hard pass.

Review of “Harold: The Last Anglo-Saxon King” by Ian W. Walker

Mark1 Comment

One of the things that I did not appreciate until I sat down to write up my review of Ian Walker’s biography of Harold is that all three modern biographies of him share one thing in common: all of them were written by non-academic historians. Whereas Peter Rex was a retired day school teacher and Piers Compton a former Catholic priest who worked as an editor for a Catholic weekly newspaper, Ian W. Walker was a civil servant with the Scottish Office who wrote history books in his spare time, most of which were about aspects of English and Scottish history during the High Middle Ages. His life of Harold was his only foray into biography, and when it was originally published in 1997 it was the first book about the king in over three decades.

Yet for all of his unorthodox background as an author of medieval histories, Walker employs a scholarly approach towards his subject. This is evident from the start, as his introduction provides a perceptive analysis of the available sources on Harold’s life and reign, explaining the biases they possess and weighing their utility in understanding Harold’s life. It’s an extraordinarily helpful exercise here, not just as a demonstration of the labor that Walker brings to his book, but by laying bare the judgments he is making about them.

From there Walker launches into a Godwine-centric survey of the course of 11th century English history. His presentation details the Godwins’ rise over three generations from historical obscurity to the throne of one of Europe’s leading monarchies. He bases this both in the documentary record and on the scholarship on the era, which he employs to the fullest extent available. Unfortunately, this does not always get Walker to where he wants to go, leading him to fill in the gaps with supposition and speculation. Though his assessments are reasonable, they do show the thinness of the available record on his subject.

The heart of Walker’s book is a five-chapter examination of Harold’s life prior to becoming king and the question of his claim to the throne. While it’s filled with a good deal of interesting information, it’s also here where his partisanship towards Harold becomes apparent. Though it’s of a piece with his assessment of his father (whose flight into exile Walker regards as an act of statesmanship), it becomes more evident with his direct engagement with Harold’s own life. Nowhere is this better demonstrated in his account of Harold’s assumption of the crown, which Walker argues was a selfless decision motivated to keep William off of the throne. It’s an excessively charitable interpretation in a book peppered with them, and it conveys an impression that Walker’s goal was less to write a biography of Harold than a defense of him.

Such an approach is not without its merits considering the understandable bias against Harold in the Norman-centric sources. And it does not necessarily disqualify many of Walker’s conclusions about Harold, especially with regards to his judgment in response to the military situation he faced during his brief reign on the throne. But in does limit the book’s usefulness as an assessment of its subject. While it’s unlikely that Harold was the sinner that William’s chroniclers sought to portray him as, neither was he the Anglo-Saxon martyr of Walker’s too-favorable portrayal. In that respect his book can serve as a useful counter-balance to that traditional bias, but as a measured assessment of Harold’s character and achievements it falls short.

Review of “Harold II: The Doomed Saxon King” by Peter Rex

MarkLeave a comment

Anyone seeking to assess the life of Harold Godwinson faces a challenge right from the outset. While Harold enjoyed a visible presence in English life in the middle of the 11th century, after his death most of his activities were filtered through the lens of Norman propaganda, propagated to denigrate his character and delegitimize his brief tenure on the throne. Among English monarchs, only Richard III faced such a concerted campaign of historical demolition, though the greater abundance of documentation from the 15th century makes it easier to develop alternate perspectives on his reign.

This is one of the reasons why I looked forward to reading Peter Rex’s biography of Harold. Though written early in his post-retirement burst of publishing, his accounts of the lives of Edgar and Edward the Confessor demonstrated his familiarity with both the era and the source material on it. I trusted that he would appreciate the difficulties in giving Harold his due, and that he would do justice to his subject.

In this I was not disappointed. Rex’s account is as fair-minded an evaluation of Harold as one could hope for. This becomes apparent in his early chapters, in which he provides the 11th century political context and a brief history of the Godwine family. While these serve as more of a general history of the period, they help to explain the complicated and sometimes treacherous world in which Harold was raised. This comes into play in the later chapters when Rex addresses the question of the succession directly. Here he makes a convincing argument that Harold was Edward’s clear choice to succeed him, and that the claims of both Harald Hardrada and William were grounded more in opportunism than anything else.

As valuable as these chapters are, however, the real worth of the book comes in Rex’s assessment of Harold as a ruler. Here he supplements his analysis of Harold’s truncated reign by looking at his more extensive (if less well documented) activities as earl. From them he makes the case for Harold as a shrewd politician and capable leader, who was an effective servant for Edward and who showed promise as a king in his own right. Rex’s description of Harold’s activities as a military commander in Wales were especially interesting, as they point to a clear assessment of what was the most successful long-term strategy for expanding England’s domain. From it Rex implies that had Harold survived his challengers his reign would likely have been a remarkable one.

Instead Harold enjoyed only nine months on the throne before his death in the battle of Hastings. The thinness of his record as king makes any assessment speculative at best, but even setting that aside Rex does a fine job of assessing Harold using what little evidence survives. It’s a work that measures up to the standard he set with his other works on the rulers of the era, giving us a solid account of his path to the throne and his efforts to defend it. While Harold himself may not have lived long enough to demonstrate what kind of king he might have been, Rex has written a biography of him that can stand credibly alongside those of the rulers of his era who had.

On to Harold!

MarkLeave a comment
Harold being crowned king.
Scene from the Bayeux Tapestry.

The year 1066 was one of those rare years in which England had three kings. It began with Edward the Confessor as their sovereign and ended it with William the Conqueror. Between them was Harold Godwinson, the son of the Earl Godwin and the contested inheritor of the throne when Edward died in January. Forced to defend his throne, he succeeded in repelling an assault by a Norwegian, Harald Hardrada, only to be defeated by the Normans at the battle of Hastings and killed in combat.

In the years following his victory, William engaged in an extensive propaganda campaign designed to discredit Harold and the legitimacy of his claim to the throne. With so few contemporary records of Harold – and with little benefit to be gained by deviating from the royal line – is it unsurprising that there is not much in the way of materials about Harold’s reign on which to base a biography, and much of that is presented to portray him in the worst possible light.

Nevertheless, there are three authors who have used what is available to provide readers with modern biographies of Harold. These I plan to read in reverse chronological order, starting with Peter Rex’s 2005 book Harold II: The Doomed Saxon King. After reading his biographies on Edgar and Edward, I’m excited to read his take on Harold, which if it measures up to his earlier works will be both revealing and well-written.

After that I will turn to Ian Walker’s Harold: The Doomed Anglo-Saxon King. This predates Rex’s book by nearly a decade, and looks to be as much of an extensively researched analysis of Harold’s life and reign as Rex’s. The comparison between the two should prove interesting.

The last biography of Harold I will read is Piers Compton’s Harold the King, which was originally published in 1961. A prolific author, Compton write this book at a time when few historians were interested in studying Harold’s reign Compton undertook a biography that remained the only modern work on him for the next thirty-five years. I’m curious to see the result, as well as learning why Compton was inspired to write about him.

Review of “The Life of King Edward Who Rests at Westminster,” by Anon.

MarkLeave a comment

When Frank Barlow published his biography of Edward the Confessor in 1970, it was not his first contribution to studies of the king, Six years earlier, he published a translation of a much older Latin work, Vita Eadwardi regis qui apud Westmonasterium requiescut, or The Life of King Edward, who rests at Westminster. Written in the early 12th century, it is attributed to “an anonymous monk of Saint-Bertin” whose identity is unknown to us today. Though the text was likely revised and portions of it are missing, it offers nonetheless a rare near-contemporaneous account of Edward’s life and reign.

Yet Barlow does more than simply provide a translation of the work. In a substantial introduction taking up nearly half of the book, he summarizes Edward’s life, recounts the history of the Vita Eadwardi, situates it within contemporary literary traditions, and considers the evidence for the two monks, Goscelin and Folcard, whom he regards as the most likely candidates as the anonymous author. It is scholarly work of the highest order, and it does an excellent job of giving the reader a context in which to understand the Vita Eadwardi and the circumstances in which it was written. He supplements this with four appendices which detail the textual relationship between the Vita Eadwardi and two other contemporary historical works, subsequent interpretations of Edward’s Prophecy of the Great Tree, a biography of Goscelin and list of his works, and a history of the cult of Edward that anticipates his later work on it for his biography of the king

Sandwiched between these two sections is the text of the Vita Eadwardi itself, which Barlow divides into two parts, designated as books i and ii. The first book is the more straightforwardly historical account of the two of them, and presents a number of different episodes from Edward’s life. The Godwins feature prominently in them, which Barlow notes reflects the patronage of Queen Edith – to whom the work is dedicated – and suggests some of the original intentions of the book when it was first commissioned. The second book is an account of Edward’s religious life, and includes accounts of the miraculous cures attributed to Edward as king, as well as a pair of visions he had. The text itself is in both Latin and in English, with the Latin on the left-hand page and Barlow’s English translation on the right, which adds to the value of the book and provides Latin-proficient readers with a handy means of checking Barlow’s tradition with the original text.

All of this makes Barlow’s work an indispensable resource for anyone studying Edward’s life, especially for those seeking to understand how he was viewed by his contemporaries. The impressive part is that Barlow even makes the Vita Eadwardi work as a biography for a modern reader who picks it up without any real background knowledge about Edward or his times. It really is a remarkable effort, and while people today may prefer a more up-to-date work in terms of interpretation and accessibility, it can definitely be recommended for someone seeking something a little different from the norm for English royal biography.

Review of “Edward the Confessor” by Frank Barlow

MarkLeave a comment

Frank Barlow was one of the most distinguished medievalists of his era. A prolific author, he wrote and translated over a dozen other books, including biographies of William Rufus and Thomas Becket and an anonymous account of Edward the Confessor’s life originally written in the early 12th century. Over the course of his career he was elected to both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, and he capped it all off by being appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his work as a historian. Reading his biography of Edward, it’s easy to see how he earned his accolades. Not only is it among the best books that I have read so far for this project, it’s one of the best historical biographies I have ever read, period.

After beginning his book by describing the world into which Edward was born, Barlow takes his readers through Edward’s early years abroad, through the circumstances that led to his ascension to the throne in 1042, to his twenty-four year reign as king. Throughout the book Barlow is careful not to go beyond the evidence, and he is candid about the gaps in what we know about Edward’s life. But he makes the best use of the available sources (which are more extensive than they are for most of Edward’s predecessors) to explain Edward’s achievements as king, particularly in his management of the Godwin family and the challenges they posed during the first decade of his reign.

What makes Barlow’s book stand out from the others that I’ve read, though, is his ability to use his materials to bring his subject to life in his narrative. Barlow gives his reader a real sense of Edward’s personality, one that penetrates through the hagiography and the misconceptions it generated to show him for the ordinary person that he was. While giving Edward due credit for his achievements as king, in the end he concludes that he was a mediocrity lacking in distinction beyond surviving on the throne.

How this mediocrity became a saint is the subject of the penultimate chapter of the book. In it Barlow identifies the intermittent development of Edward’s saintly reputation in the decades after his death and notes the agendas of the people who cultivated that image opportunistically into a figure worthy of canonization. How they achieved it makes for an account of religious politics that benefits enormously from Barlow’s matter-of-fact retelling of how it happened.

The result is a sober, evenhanded account that brushes past the image of the saintly king to show how Edward reclaimed the crown and survived nearly a quarter-century on the throne. In some respects reading it first may be unfair to the other Edward biographies awaiting me, as thanks to its measured analysis and clear judgments this will be a very difficult book to match in terms of quality, much less surpass.

Review of “Æthelred the Unready: The Failed King” by Richard Abels

MarkLeave a comment

While reading Richard Abels’s biography of Æthelred II, I discovered that I now had a new point of assessment for my project. Whereas until now I have been comparing biographies of a particular monarch with each other, as a volume in the Penguin Monarchs series Abels’s book also provokes comparison with the previous book I read in the series, which was Tom Holland’s biography of Æthelstan. While I knew that both were part of the same series when I first identified which books I would read, it wasn’t until I was well into Abels’s book that I found myself comparing it not just to Williams’s biography of Æthelred but to Holland’s study of his predecessor as well. This ended up shaping my assessment of the book in some important respects.

Foremost among them was that it helped me appreciate the advantages that Abels enjoyed in writing his book. The first is that there are far more sources available about Æthelred’s time on the throne than for nearly all of his predecessors. Not only did this provide Abels with more raw material for his analysis, but it also resulted in a greater amount of scholarship about the period for him to draw upon. Having already written a biography of Alfred the Great Abels could also bring to the task the experience he gained in using the limited amount of information available about the era to reconstruct the life of an Anglo-Saxon king. Finally, as Æthelred’s most recent biographer, Abels could build upon the biographies previously written about him by Ann Williams, Levi Roach, and Ryan Lavelle, all three of which he credits generously in his book.

All of this helps to explain why Abels’s book stands out among the biographies of Anglo-Saxon kings that I have read up to this point. Enjoying as he does a relative wealth of material, Abels uses it to construct a coherent narrative account of Æthelred’s life. The nature of the series probably helped here, as in writing what is meant to be an introduction to the monarch Abels was not expected to go into the sort of detail that simply doesn’t exists for us about the period. In this respect Abels’s book embodies an ideal combination of information and length for his subject.

In it Abels offers a sympathetic though not uncritical account of Æthelred’s reign that hews closely to the available sources. This balance is evident early in the book with his examination of Edward’s murder and the degree to which Æthelred was responsible for it. Here Abels makes some perceptive points (such as the lack of any punishment for Edward’s assassins) while leaving it to his readers to draw their own conclusions. As Abels notes, regardless of his responsibility for it, Edward’s murder and posthumous martyrdom cast a shadow of ill-omen over Æthelred’s reign, one that was enhanced by the resurgence of Viking raids a few years later. Abels’s description of Æthelred’s response to these attacks is similarly even-handed. As he points out, purchasing piece was in fact a common response to Viking incursions, yet he faults Æthelred for not using the lull such payments provided to better prepare for their inevitable recurrence. Abels also sees in Æthelred’s repeated delegation of military commands to his ealdormen a failure to assume a role that was widely expected of him, which likely didn’t help his standing among his men. Nevertheless, Abels credits Æthelred with ruling over a prosperous kingdom and with attempting to respond to the resurgent external threats England faced, even if that response proved far from successful.

By the end of Abels’s book I felt that I had something that I had not gained from any of the other biographies of Anglo-Saxon kings that I read up to this point, which was a coherent sense of his subject’s time on the throne. This shouldn’t be regarded as a criticism of those other works but as an appreciation of Abels’s achievement, as he sets a high bar in his presentation of Æthelred and his reign. While I’m looking forward to reading the remaining biographies of Æthelred on my list, they certainly have a difficult act to follow.

Review of “Æthelred the Unready: The Ill-Counselled King” by Ann Williams

MarkLeave a comment

In the preface to her biography of Æthelred, Ann Williams explains to her readers that the goal of her book “is simply to tell the story of Æthelred unræd, a king to whom posterity has not been kind.” It was a story that until that point had not really been told in many years, as there were no modern accounts of Æthelred’s life prior to the publication of Williams’s book in 2003 and Ryan Lavelle’s short biography the year before. Given that, there was an undoubted need for a new study of Æthelred that utilized the considerable amount of scholarship about the period that was now available to biographers.

What the reader gets in Williams’s book is somewhat different, though. The story she tells in her book is not so much of Æthelred’s life than it is of his reign. After a brief overview of his father Edgar and brother Edward, Williams explains how the kingdom functioned at that time and the challenges it faced during his nearly four decades on the throne. Her stated sympathy for her subject leads her to focus on the unræd part of Æthelred’s title by detailing his advisers and the operations of Æthelred’s court, highlighting their role in the decision-making process. Drawing upon the diplomas and other sources from the period, she assesses as far as is possible who Æthelred’s infamous councilors were, which she supplements with reasoned speculation as to how they came to hold such authority.

Williams’s focus on Æthelred’s advisers is a highlight of the book, but it also is part of its greatest flaw. In the process of reconstructing Æthelred’s court and recounting the Norse-inflicted travails it faced, she loses track of her main subject – Æthelred himself. Often absent for pages, in many chapters he is at best a supporting character to the men of his court or the Viking invaders conquering his territory. When she does focus on Æthelred, it is often just to recount his activities without offering any sense of his personality or his motivations, leaving an Æthelred-shaped hole in a book about him.

This is not a unique problem with biographies of Anglo-Saxon monarchs, of course, and that Williams refuses to stray too far from her sources is part of the book’s value. Yet this doesn’t change that the result is a book that is more of a study of Æthelred’s court than of the king himself. It has a lot to offer for anyone interested in Æthelred‘s reign and the late Anglo-Saxon era, but as a biography it provides at most only an outline of his life.

Review of “Edgar, King of the English, 959-75” by Peter Rex

MarkLeave a comment

For anyone interested in reading a biography of Edgar – Æthelstan’s grandnephew and king of England for over decade and a half – the pickings are slim, to put it mildly. There is exactly one modern biography of Edgar, which was written by Peter Rex, a former Head of History at Princethorpe College who in his retirement became a prolific author of books on the late Anglo-Saxon era. In one sense this is surprising: Edgar had a relatively long reign for an Anglo-Saxon king, and one that by modern standards was quite successful. In an era famous for Viking raids and extended conflicts with Scandinavian conquerors, Edgar became known as “the Peaceful” or “the Peaceable” for the lack of conflict during his time on the throne.

The irony, as Rex notes in his book, is that Edgar’s success is the very reason why there is a lack of information about him and his times. As he fought no wars “they cannot by described by the writers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, who turned instead to his religious activities,” yet even these passages requiring supplemental sources to fill in the details. For the scribes of the times to find your reign noteworthy, it seems, it helped to shed some blood.

That Edgar’s reign was so peaceful is all the more remarkable for how it started out. By contrast his older brother and predecessor Eadwig does not enjoy such a great reputation. Only fifteen when he assumed the throne in 955, within two years the notables in Mercia and Northumbria rejected Eadwig in favor of Edgar. On the surface this would be classified as a rebellion, yet the sources are unclear on this point and armed conflict was avoided in favor of a settlement that divided the kingdom in two roughly along the line of the Thames River. Because of this, Edgar reigned as king of Mercia and Northumbria for nearly three years before Eadwig’s death in 959 brought the rest of England under his control.

Rex’s account of Edgar’s reign is generally positive, reflecting as it does the sources available for it. And here Rex’s observation about the focus in those sources on the religious activities in his reign points to a bias that helps explain why his reign is viewed so positively. Edgar’s reign was notable for the reintroduction of Benedictine monasticism, which was spearheaded by three outstanding religious leaders: Dunstan, Æthelwold, and Oswald. With Edgar’s support, over three dozen new monasteries and nunneries were established, an expansion that continued for a half-century after Edgar’s death. Given the predominance of religious records (the biographies of the three churchmen are important sources for the period) and the backing Edgar provided, it’s little surprise that his rule would be presented in a highly favorable light.

While Rex devotes a good deal of space to describing the religious reforms that took place during Edgar’s reign, he doesn’t neglect the other aspects of Edgar’s rule. Military institutions receive particular attention, as do the other tools of Edgar’s power, such as ceremony and the ruling classes. Rex examines these in a general fashion by going beyond their operations during Edgar’s time on the throne to discuss their development and functioning in tenth century England more generally. This certainly adds to the value of Rex’s book for those interested in the overall era, yet it also underscores the thinness of the extant sources about Edgar and his reign. In this respect Rex solves the problem caused by the absence of detailed information in the best way possible, but ultimately there is only so far what exists can be stretched.

The result underscores the point Christopher Brooke makes in his study of the Saxon monarchy about the problems facing biographers of Anglo-Saxon monarchs. And in this respect Rex’s solution is hardly unique, just one that is more focused on a few decades than Brooke’s older work. It results in a book that provides all that we know about a frustratingly elusive king within a useful primer for how government worked in 10th century England. Barring the discovery of some new collection or cache of documents it is likely to endure as a biography of Edgar, as well as an example of the limitations of the genre for the people of that era.

Review of “Athelstan: The Making of England” by Tom Holland

MarkLeave a comment

Tom Holland’s name is one that typically I associate with histories of the ancient Greek and Roman world written for a popular audience. Because of this, I was a little surprised when I first saw that he was writing a volume on Æthelstan for the “Penguin Monarchs” series, as it seemed a little outside of his scholarly bailiwick. My curiosity about his contribution grew while reading my earlier selections on the Anglo-Saxon monarchy and Sarah Foot’s biography on the king. Given what they wrote about him, I wondered what insights a scholar of ancient history might offer into Æthelstan’s life and career.

As I was reading his short book, I began to appreciate why the series’ editors selected Holland to write it. His writing contains more than a degree of flair, as instead of simply describing events he uses his prose to bring the past to life. Yet while occasionally it can border on cliché, Holland never strays from his material into imaginative reconstruction. The result is enjoyable in a way that doesn’t strain a reader’s credulity.

Holland’s scholarly faithfulness, though, forces him to address the same problem facing the other authors, which was how to write about Æthelstan with the limited resources available. His solution is similar to Humble’s, as he fits Æthelstan’s life within the history of 9th and 10th century Wessex. While Æthelstan disappears from Holland’s early pages, this decision helps him to explain the world in which Æthelstan grew up, showing what he inherited and clarifying what he built. Though his narrative lacks many of the insights that Foot’s more analytical approach provides, it provides a coherently chronological account of Æthelstan’s life that is not just informative but engaging as well.

Nevertheless, there is only so much that even a historian of Holland’s skills can achieve with his limited sources. While his book helps to situate Æthelstan’s achievement within the context of the realm-building undertaken by the House of Wessex during these decades, Æthelstan remains stubbornly elusive as a person. Here again Holland stops short of overt speculation, but the absence is a little incongruous in such a fluid and evocative text. In this respect, Holland simply underscores the basic problem facing any author attempting to write about the first king of England. While he succeeds in writing about Anglo-Saxon England in a way that brings the era to life, to do so for the person at the center of his book may well be impossible with the materials available to us. What he does offer is a great short introduction to Æthelstan that explains how he came to dominate England, but one that can only offer so much about who the king was, showing how he is a person who can elude even the most creative of historians.