T.D. Asch's 'The Century of Calamity' 2021

 

Amberley Publishing first edition - 2021

A slightly odd book to Blog about. The author studied Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford and has taught History in secondary schools for 15 years, so he has a pedigree. But I can best describe the effort as a series of musings, interlaced with a chronological narrative. All history books dealing with the Middle Ages and before - particularly the so-called Dark Ages - must inevitable lead to, hopefully inspired, guesswork, but Asch posits so many questions that one is left often more confused than not. After his frequent 'Why?' he regularly as not comes out with no answer. One gets used to 'probably', 'possibly', 'appears to have' in medieval history books, but Asch excels at this. There were eight 'maybes' in one paragraph. Perhaps his favourite word is 'perhaps': there are three in four lines on page 57. The final page boasted twelve! But, as Asch says, It's all speculation; nobody knows for sure.

Asch is clear in his mind that Ǣthelrǽd was indeed a bad man and a bad king; that Edward the Confessor was not perfectly suited to kingship, and perhaps he was lucky that his reign coincided with the least turbulent period of the eleventh century but he should be given credit for he did not harry his own kingdom...he did not raise vast sums in taxation...he did not have his own subjects executed or mutilated...when he made mistakes, he put them right. Tostig is also more positively assessed than by some historians: he respected the demands of Christianity. He was faithful to his wife. And he was generous to religious houses...in a way, he was a model earl...History has not been kind to Tostig, and history ought to be ashamed of itself. Cnut, for all his serious errors, is given some praise for leadership. On the other hand, the two half-brothers and sons of Cnut, Harold Harefoot (d.1040) and Harthacnut (d.1042) are given short shrift.

I found Asch's style too ruminative and found my attention wandering after yet another 'on the one hand, but on the other' approach. Too often he descends into the colloquial, but, to be fair, does manage to sustain a sense of genuine time passing. He gives ample space to an assessment of the character and machinations of Harold II and is judicial about Duke William the Bastard, crowned on Christmas Day 1066 as William I. After all the bloodshed and slippery dealings of the decades before, William's death somehow puts a seal on everything, if not on the too-small coffin. After dying in a priory just outside Rouen, his body was retrieved, and taken to St. Stephen's Abbey in Caen...for the funeral...it turned out that the stone sarcophagus which had been prepared for William's corpulent frame was too small. The body had to be forced into the coffin, but that burst the diseased intestines, which unleashed a foul odour throughout the building.

One feels a certain sympathy (and admiration) for Edgar Ǣtheling (c.1052-c.1125) who survived under William I, William II and Henry I - no mean feat. If he had been born a decade earlier, perhaps (!) he could have succeeded Edward the Confessor and we might never have had a Norman line foist upon us.