Band of Brothers: Harold’s Progeny Rise
Although he had been crowned King of England, the West Country remained loyal to Harold, where his mother Gytha had set up her powerbase while her three grandsons Godwin, Magnus and Edmund sailed to Ireland to muster an army. With the ex-queen mother and three potential heirs to the throne in residence, Exeter became a beacon of resistance, and supporters of Harold flocked there. William could not allow such a challenge to his authority to remain, and so as soon as he was in a position to, he rode for Exeter to force the queen’s submission. Ooe-er! Sounds kinky! (Shut it, you!) He arrived with a large force and besieged the castle (nothing a Norman liked better than a good siege) which held out for eighteen days before surrendering.
Though he suffered heavy losses as the town was determined to resist him, William finally managed to breach the walls by the use of mines, said to be the first time this technique was ever used in England. Gytha, seeing the game was up, had had it away on her toes in a boat, fed up of waiting for her worthless son’s nippers to come to her rescue, and William took the city, perhaps surprisingly sparing all its defenders and citizens. Maybe he'd worked out all his aggression putting down the northerners. He then did something which again became de rigueur for Normans, and built a castle at Exeter, ensuring it would remain loyal to him. Gytha ended up on the Island of Flat Holm, waited, waited and waited some more, than said **** this and headed back to Flanders, from where she vanishes from history.
Meanwhile, the three sons of the defeated and dead King Harold Godwinson had fled after Hastings to Ireland, where they petitioned the king, Diarmait Mac Máel na mBó for assistance. The Irish, always ready to strike a blow against their neighbours to the east, agreed and sent a small fleet to engage William’s forces. William had by now left Devon, but his men engaged the brothers and put up stiff resistance, sending them yelping back across the Irish Sea, possibly one brother short. The king grumped “You feckin’ lads back already? Did yiz get that Norman bastard? Yiz didn’t? Holy Jaysus! Do I have to do everythin’ meself here? Look, here, take these men and boats and for the love of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, will yiz get the job done this time, or don’t bother comin’ back! I tell yiz, it won’t be Ireland of the thousand welcomes for you hoors if yiz come back defeated again. Now get up that yard!” Or words, vaguely, to that effect.
Back the brothers went in June 1069. Still no William (he was oop north) but Brian of Brittany, his second cousin, met them in battle and the superior Norman forces, with those all-important cavalry units, kicked their arses and sent them home. It’s reported that the Irish king decided to get very drunk that night, and wasn’t seen for several days. The remaining brothers followed their mother out of history, and that was the end of any challenge by the line of Godwinson to the rule of William the Conqueror.
But what about our man Edgar the Halfling, sorry Atheling, still hiding out under Malcolm’s kilt? Well, not much really. He literally did hide in Scotland until William decided it was time Malcolm bent the knee, and in 1072 part of the deal was that Edgar should be kicked out of Scotland, and indeed out of Britain. He went, where it seems all deposed/exiled/on the run kings, queens, nobles and persons of dubious birth went: Flanders. Eventually he decided to give up and accept William as his sovereign, so he doesn’t really feature much more in the story of the Norman conquest of England.
But the Welsh do.
The Dragon Awakes, Look You! Eadric’s Wild and Possibly Savage Revolt: A Prelude
You have to feel cautious engaging anyone with “the Wild” as their suffix, and Eadric was a wealthy owner of land in Shropshire and Herefordshire, said to be (though unconfirmed) a brother of that jolly ealdorman, Eadric Streona. Fiercely resistant to William’s rule, he nevertheless realised that he needed allies, and turned to the west, where he joined forces with the Welsh princes Bledden and Rhiwallon ap Cynfyn, princes of Powys and Gwynedd. Around the time William was counting out gold pieces of whatever into Sweyn II’s eager hand to enable* him to **** off home and leave Edgar high-tailing it back to Scotland, Eadric and his Welsh allies attacked Shrewsbury Castle, while others of their forces took on the newly-built one at Exeter. Neither were successful, both pushed back and the Anglo-Saxons beginning perhaps to learn the value of a good stone castle at your back, so much more so if it was a Norman one.
However, as it was necessary to take a left-turn in the History of Ireland to look into that of Scotland, as I research more I feel that the same is important here, so that we can better understand the relationship, not only between Wales and England, but between the Welsh themselves. Like any nation of the time, their country was never really at peace, rival kings and princes fighting among each other for control of this or that territory, and while there was, to my knowledge, no actual war of Welsh independence, the land of the Valleys has always been one of the most fiercely independent of the United Kingdom. Okay, we all have - Ireland and Scotland too, but I’m not very familiar with the actual history of Wales, so before I go too much further and start talking about princes and alliances and grievances and wars, it would probably be helpful to know who and what I’m talking about.
This, then, is obviously not intended to be a history of Wales, but a quick retelling of how the Welsh got to where and how they are. Considering that they are so deep, as it were, in English territory, how did they stay virtually independent, even up to today? Scotland you can understand: it’s way up there in the cold, frozen north, and it has highlands and crags to defend itself, plus the weather is awful in general and even as* you come down closer to the south, the people from the likes of Sunderland and Newcastle are more closely aligned with Scotland, in some ways, than they are with England. They did, after all, bear the brunt of invasions from England when kings rode north to try to conquer Scotland, and there have been certainly instances of the Scots and the men from the north banding together against a marauding king. This king, almost invariably, would have been an English one, but the English in the north were not prepared to smooth his way.
Add to this the fact that, as mentioned above earlier, places like Northumbria* had a tradition of being settled by Vikings (Saxons) and had been covered under Danelaw from about the eighth century. They had fought against kings of Wessex and Mercia, and held their own land as long as they could. There was no real loyalty in the north to the king, who traditionally ruled from, and in, the south, as today. London might as well have been a million miles away from places like Newcastle, and the north did not really regard the English king as theirs. Mind you, they weren’t about to submit to the Scottish one either, but in general, unless forced to, as we saw in the War for Scottish Independence, the Scots didn’t tend to bother too much about crossing the border into the south, so it’s now as if Northumbria was being constantly menaced by Scottish armies.
All of this, then, makes it easy to see how Scotland, for a time at least, was able to maintain its own independence, even if seen by the king as being part of his dominions. In some ways, it probably just wasn’t seen as worth going all that way to try to bring them to submission. Let them stay up there in the cold and think they were independent; when the time came, the king could march on them, but for now, the toasty throne room of London was much more attractive. Not so though with Wales. Wales essentially takes up most of the lower west half of Britain, and is more like a part of it than is Scotland. So how was it that the Welsh avoided being invaded and subjugated for so long?