The Second Book of General Ignorance (27 page)

Edgar the Ætheling.

There were four kings of England in 1066, one after the other. Edward the Confessor died in January and was succeeded by Harold. When Harold was killed at Hastings in October, Edgar the Ætheling was proclaimed king. He reigned for two months before William the Conqueror was crowned on Christmas Day.

Among many things the Normans brought with them that the English didn’t like was the idea that a king’s eldest son automatically succeeded him. Anglo-Saxon kings were elected, not born. The duty of organising this fell to a council of religious and political leaders called the Witan (short for
Witangemot
, or ‘wise-meeting’).

Royal blood was only one of the factors taken into account. The king had to be able to defend the country and a dying king could nominate anyone as his heir. When Edward the Confessor died childless and without naming his successor, there was a constitutional crisis. His reign had ended thirty years of Danish rule (begun with Cnut’s conquest of England in 1016) and his mother was a Norman. This gave both Cnut’s great-nephew, William, Duke of Normandy, and King Harald Hardrada of Norway and (in his opinion) Denmark, claims to the English throne.

Edgar was Edward the Confessor’s great-nephew. The word
Ætheling
(‘prince’) marked him out as a potential king, but he was only fifteen. With invasion imminent, the Witan rejected him as too inexperienced and opted instead for Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex and Edward the Confessor’s brother-in-law.

Harold promptly marched up to Yorkshire where he defeated (and killed) Harald Hardrada at the battle of Stamford Bridge, before having to rush all the way back down again, to lose his own life near Hastings on the Sussex coast. As soon as news of Harold’s death reached London, the surviving members of the Witan met to elect Edgar as king. But their heart wasn’t really in it. They soon rescinded their decision and surrendered the boy to William. He hadn’t even been crowned.

But Edgar, like Harold, was no milksop. Born in Hungary, son of Edward the Exile, he escaped Norman custody and became known as Edgar the Outlaw. He tried several times to recover the English throne, invaded Scotland, attempted to conquer parts of Italy and Sicily, took part in the First Crusade (in 1098) and may even have joined the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I’s elite band of axe-wielding, sea-going mercenaries known as the Varangian Guard. Based in Constantinople, feared across the Mediterranean, it was mostly composed of exiled Englishmen.

When Henry I (1069–1135), William the Conqueror’s fourth son, married Edgar’s niece Matilda, he pardoned the former boy king. Edgar died in Scotland in 1126, at the venerable age of seventy-five. Unmarried and childless, he was buried in an unmarked grave: the last Anglo-Saxon king and the last of the male line of the House of Wessex, England’s first royal family.

Not the Goths. It was the French, if anyone.

The Renaissance artist and historian Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) invented the term ‘Gothic’ for the now much-admired style of architecture in 1550. He meant it as an insult. In his opinion, pointed arches and huge vaulted ceilings were ‘monstrous and barbarous’ horrors of bad taste that he blamed on the Goths, the Nordic invaders who had sacked Rome and defiled Italy’s classical past.

Best known today for his
Lives of the Artists
– short biographies of contemporary painters, sculptors and architects such as Leonardo and Michelangelo – Giorgio Vasari was also an architect himself. He designed the Uffizi Palace in Florence for Cosimo de’ Medici (1519–74). Now world-famous as a museum, it was originally an office block for lawyers (
uffizi
is Italian for ‘offices’).

Vasari thought the northern French medieval style that reached its peak in the great cathedrals of Chartres, Reims and Lincoln was ugly, fussy and old-fashioned, denouncing it as ‘German’ as well as ‘Gothic’. In fact, it had no connection with either and had evolved out of Romanesque, the simpler, rounder, sturdier style known in Britain as ‘Norman’
architecture. If you’d asked a medieval cathedral mason what he was doing, he’d have said
opus Francigenum
: ‘French work’.

But Vasari’s contemptuous nickname stuck, just as the words Baroque, Cubist and Impressionist (all once terms of abuse) would later do. The ‘Gothic’ style soon spread all over Western Europe, but it wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that it lost its negative connotations, as artists and writers looked to the Middle Ages for inspiration. In architecture the ‘Gothic Revival’ led to buildings like Augustus Pugin’s Houses of Parliament (1835) and in literature to a new school of ‘gothic’ novels, full of ghostly ruins, haunted houses and fainting heroines. It was this literary sense of the word that led (in 1983) to teenagers who wore black clothes, painted their faces white and listened to gloomy music being called Goths.

The original Goths came from southern Sweden (still known today as Götaland) and the name ‘Goth’ simply meant ‘the people’ (from Old Norse
gotar
, ‘men’). Over four centuries, they migrated east and south to conquer large areas of France, Spain and Italy. In
AD
410, Alaric, the military commander of the western branch of Goths (known as Visigoths) attacked and looted Rome – the first time the city had fallen to a foreign power in 800 years. Although the emperor Honorius (
AD
384–423) had transferred his capital to Ravenna eight years earlier, it was still a psychological shock and a key moment in the long decline of the Roman Empire.

But the Goths weren’t all doom and gloom. They founded cities, converted to Christianity and established a written legal code that was still used in Spain centuries later. By the end of the sixth century, however, defeated by other Germanic tribes in the East and driven out of Spain by Islamic invaders from North Africa, the Goths gradually started to fade from history.

The last traces of the Gothic language were written down in sixteenth-century Crimea. All that survives is a list of
eighty words, and a song whose meaning no one now understands.

Neither Hungary nor Germany. The original Huns were more of an army than a tribe, so no modern country can claim to be descended from them.

The Huns arrived in Europe from Central Asia in the fourth century
AD
. In just eighty years, they built an empire that stretched from the steppes of central Asia to what is now modern Germany, and from the Black Sea to the Baltic. They rode small, fast horses, and spent almost all their time on them. The Romans said that the Huns fought, ate, slept and carried out diplomacy on horseback – so much so that they became dizzy when they set foot on the ground.

We don’t know exactly where they came from or what language they spoke, but most historians now believe the Huns were a multi-ethnic, multilingual army. All they had in common was their loyalty to their great leader, Attila (about 404–53), and their superlative technique as mounted archers.

After Attila the Hun died, his three sons quarrelled and his empire disintegrated almost as rapidly as it had formed. The remnants of his armies were defeated in 454 by an alliance of Goths and other German tribes at the battle of Nedao (now in western Hungary). Since there was no Hun state – no
buildings, laws, culture or common language – almost nothing of them has survived except stories. This has allowed many people across Europe and Asia to claim Hun blood (the implication being, of course, that they are related to the heroic warrior-king Attila). Given the racial diversity of the Huns, this is meaningless. If the Huns can be said to live anywhere today, they live everywhere.

In nineteenth-century English, ‘Hun’ meant much the same as ‘vandal’: someone given to mindless acts of destruction. It wasn’t until the very beginning of the twentieth century that ‘the Huns’ came to mean the Germans – and it was a German who started it. On 27 July 1900, Kaiser Wilhelm II was addressing his troops on their way to join an alliance of colonial powers putting down an anti-Western revolt in China. He urged them to show no mercy to the ‘Boxer’ rebels (the sarcastic Western name for the movement who called themselves ‘The Righteous Fists of Harmony’). ‘The Huns under the leadership of Attila’, he told them, ‘gained a reputation that is still remembered today. May the name of Germany become equally well known in China, so that no Chinaman will ever again dare to look askance at a German.’

When the First World War began in 1914, Allied propagandists seized on this remark. An editorial in
The Times
, headlined ‘The March of the Huns’, set the tone. It painted the Germans as even worse than the barbarians of old. Unlike the Kaiser, the article thundered, ‘even Attila had his better side’.

By the Second World War ‘Kraut’ and Jerry’ had become the popular British nicknames for the Germans, although Churchill (a keen historian) still preferred ‘the Hun’. In a 1941 broadcast he described the German invasion of the Soviet Union as the ‘brutish masses of the Hun soldiery, plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts’.