Gabriel Ronay

All of us know about the Battle of Hastings, but how many of us know about the man who, had he lived, might have prevented the disaster?

When King Æthelred II died in 1016, the Danes under Cnut were trying to conquer England and Æthelred's son Edmund Ironside was trying to hold them off. Then Edmund died and Cnut took over by default. Various members of the old Saxon royal family fled from the Danes; these included the future King Edward the Confessor (Edmund's half-brother) and two sons of Edmund, who are the subject of this volume. The longer-lived of them, most widely known as Edward the Exile, is the main character of this book.

Edward was very young when he fled England -- certainly under three, and very possibly not even one year old -- and little was known in England about what happened to him in the next forty years, although he eventually ended up in Hungary. Tracing through many old and obscure chronicles, Gabriel Ronay makes a good case for what happened in those years. I am not entirely sure he is right -- it's all built on faint hints from sources that might not be trustworthy -- but it makes sense.

Meanwhile, in England, Cnut and his two sons had died and Edward the Confessor had become king. But Edward had no children, and by 1053 it was starting to look as if he never would, and members of the old royal family were few and far between. When Edward died, there would be no obvious heir, and a lot of squabbling people who might want to take over -- including William the Bastard of Normandy, of whom much more would be heard. Edward (or someone) came up with a good answer in the 1050s: call back Edward the Exile (Edward the Confessor's half-nephew) and make him heir.

This took some doing, because Hungary and England were a long way apart and Edward the Exile didn't even remember England. But, eventually, he came.

And promptly died.

Up to this point, everything Ronay has done has been good work and a useful addition to our knowledge. But Ronay is absolutely convinced that Edward was murdered. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does not say that he was murdered; it only says that his death was a pity. Maybe, for political reasons, it refused to say it was murder; Ronay isn't the first to suggest homicide. But not everyone is convinced. Including me. (Indeed, I haven't read any other histories that say with certainty that Edward was murdered, and some that consider it very unlikely.) Edward was about forty when he died, and the English royal family of this period was notably short-lived; if King Edgar the Peaceful, King Æthelred II's father, hadn't died at (about) age 32 in (about) 975, the whole situation likely wouldn't have arisen -- Æthelred wouldn't have come to the throne as an incompetent child, the English royal family would have been more robust, and the Danes probably wouldn't have been able to take over. And Edward the Exile, before is death, had traveled far, and been exposed to conditions he had never faced before; a natural death was surely a possibility.

Ronay doesn't even treat the possibility. He just assumes homicide, and starts looking for the murderer -- and decides that it was Harold Godwinson, the future Harold II who died at Hastings. It's at this point I start really having problems with the book. Ronay detests Harold, and consistently treats the worst possibility for what happened as the only thing that could have happened. Even though Harold eventually became King, this certainly wasn't an inevitability in 1057 -- Harold's power was not absolute; Edward the Confessor was still young enough that children by a second wife were possible; the barons might not want to elect a king from the over-powerful House of Godwin. Committing murder behind Edward's back was an awfully high risk for a very uncertain reward; it's possibly, but I certainly wouldn't bet on it!

This tendency to ignore other possibilities continues in the last chapters of the book, as Ronay looks at the fate of Edward the Exile's son, Edgar the Atheling, who probably would have succeeded Edward the Confessor had the Confessor lived longer -- but who was only in his early teens when Edward died, so Harold II took the throne, and then William the Bastard beat Harold at Hastings and took over. It's a sad ending in more ways than one.

This is an interesting and provocative book, supplying information not seen in other histories of Anglo-Saxon England, and giving us a good reminder of what might have been had things been a little different. But there is just too much axe-grinding at the end for my taste.

[Edit 2/11/2022: corrected "Kind" to "King" in paragraph 2; changed "Edward lived longer" to "the Confessor lived longer" in the next-to-last paragraph.]… (altro)

This fascinating and colourful book describes the life of Edward the Exile who, together with his brother Edmund, the baby sons of King Edmund Ironside, were spirited out of England after their father's defeat at the hands of Canute in 1016 and his death shortly afterwards in suspicious circumstances. Canute wanted to have the boys killed but without appearing to be directly responsible so sent them to Sweden to be dispatched. However, the Swedish king took pity on the young lads and protected them. Some years later they began their peregrinations in Eastern Europe. This first took them to the court of the Kievan Prince Yaroslav the Wise, who was related to their mother, where they became acquainted with another pair of exiled princely brothers, from Hungary. At the end of their 20s, they followed their new found friends and helped to put one of them, Andrew, on the Hungarian throne. Much of this story was not known to the Anglo Norman chroniclers, who knew only of the boys' dispatch to Sweden and their moving to Hungary; the further details of their exploits in Russia and Hungary have become generally known only much later through Russian and Hungarian chronicles. The author makes a good case to support his narrative, and the book is immensely readable. Sadly, Edward's journey ended in 1057 when he was recalled by the childless King Edward the Confessor to become his heir to the throne of England, but died very shortly after his arrival; the author makes a fairly convincing case that it may have been Harold Godwinson who bumped him off, rather than William of Normandy as is often assumed. After the main narrative ends, the author covers the somewhat similar peregrinations of Edward the Exile's son Edgar the Atheling following his initial submission to William at the end of 1066, and the life of the Exile's elder daughter St Margaret of Scotland, wife of King Malcolm III Canmore. A really fascinating look at a little known corner of history.… (altro)