King & Conqueror – a new low?
I’ve been working hard on Book 2, which covers the 3+ centuries from the death of Athelstan in 939 to the end of Henry III in 1272. That includes the Danish and Norman Conquests, which I’ve been studying and writing about in detail. So I was interested to see what the recent series ‘King & Conqueror’ made of the latter. To say I’ve been ‘steeling myself’ to watch is not just because of the frequency of steel blades being thrust into guts but also because of the bizarre treatment of history. I enjoyed ‘The Last Kingdom’ (although more on Alfred below) because, although it invented its ambivalent lead character and other characterisations and dates, it stuck to a broad historical framework. Not so K & C which plays fast and loose with timescales, events and individuals within a maelstrom of savagery and thundering hooves.
Especially egregious is the treatment of Emma of Normandy, mother to Edward the Confessor. While she was no saint, she had survived being married to the badly-advised Aethelred and the ruthless but steady Cnut. On her son’s return from Normandy to take up the English crown, Emma had overplayed her hand and been banished from her son’s court to live the rest of her days in Winchester. Although she died in 1052 (of unknown causes), there seems no evidence to link her to attempting to secure the crown for William, later the Conqueror, not of a frenzied attack on her by her son. In K & C this elipsis is partly achieved by compressing a 10-+ year saga into a short period (though I lost track of who was attacking whom and when!) And why do Kings of England have to be portrayed as either pure tyrants or milksops (including Alfred in Last Kingdom)?
Does that matter?
While I’m not a purist, I see no need fundamentally to re-invent history unless it is made clear it’s almost total fiction, changing the characters’ names to emphasise that. Besides which, there is so much intrigue and fascinating detail in that period that what we do know (or think we know) is a far greater story than many of its adaptations. There is a more existential point. In a world where ‘truth’ is more abused and elusive than ever, do we want to make it worse? Extreme leaders have always re-invented history (I’ll come back to the Bayeux Tapestry another time!) but do we really wish to de-base our own past even further?