My review of Piers Compton's biography of Harold II is up on my website! Please enjoy with my compliments.

My review of Ian W. Walker's biography of Harold Godwinson is up on my website! Please enjoy with my compliments.

This has proven an even more interesting read than I expected, thanks to passages like this one about William of Normandy awaiting favorable sailing conditions:

It was then that William, confronted by the powerlessness of man and the perversity of nature, fell back upon his faith; and at his asking the body of St. Valéry, who had founded the abbey there in the seventh century, was carried in its shrine, with the abbot and monks in procession, and placed on a carpet spread upon the ground and exposed to the general view of the army. The great host, kneeling in ranks above the shrine, prayed for a favourable wind; offerings of money, to be used in beautifying the shrine, accompanied the prayers, and coins were showered down in such numbers that the saint's casket was soon covered.

     On the next day (Wednesday the 27th) the weather cleared; and glancing at the vane on the abbey tower, William saw that the breath of God, at the intercession of St. Valéry, had shifted to the south.

It's a passage I would expect to find in a work written in the twelfth century rather than the twentieth. It's not atypical of the book, either, as Compton sees God's disfavor with Harold as the basis for his defeat. It's little wonder that modern-day historians steer clear of this book.

It's not often that I crack open a book and almost immediately take issue with it, but then it's not often that I come across passages like this one about Edward the Confessor:

It was more than the passing of a king for which the people waited. For by popular agreement Edward was already a saint, one possessing not only the gift of holiness but also the healing touch. His was the faith that surmounted political and social barriers, so that the warmth of his charity and concern for general welfare were things experienced by the people, like radiated warmth. Men felt that they had, as it were, a stake in his sanctity, which is something that the vast impersonality of our secular time and country will scarcely understand.

While one of the reasons why I undertook my English monarchs reading project was to give me the context to detect bullshit like this, even if this was the first book I had ever read about the era I would have been able to pick up that last sentence for the utter nonsense that it is. Piers Compton had an interesting background as a Catholic extremist (in the 1980s he wrote a book arguing that Vatican II was proof that the freemasons had infiltrated the Church), and I was wondering if some of his more interesting views would pop up in this book. In that respect he didn't keep me in suspense for long.

My review of Peter Rex's biography of Harold Godwinson is up on my website! Please enjoy with my compliments.