King and Conqueror. Taking the History out of Historical Fiction.

This article first appeared in the June 2026 issue of The Brazen Head. 

https://brazen-head.org/2026/06/15/king-and-conqueror-taking-the-history-out-of-historical-fiction/ 

Warning. Opinionating in progress.

The dust has settled and King and Conqueror has faded away to wherever TV series go to be forgotten. Nominally based on the events leading up to the Norman Conquest, it attracted criticism for its many historical inaccuracies. The history was wrong; the changes to chronology dizzying; characterisation was preposterous; the costumes and the armour were bad; men said fuckalot and everyone and everything was permanently dirty. Some of its defenders pointed out that it was not a documentary but ‘historical fiction’, a sensible defence undermined by repeated claims by those involved with the series that it was historically accurate.

 

If the history was so inaccurate it can’t be called ‘historical’, the fiction was the latest instalment in a collective infantilisation of the Middle Ages. Instead of the rich strangeness of the past appearing in historical dramas, film makers insist on confusing history with fantasy while erasing the differences between past and present. By leaning on the tropes of modern film, and fantasy films in particular, they present an adolescent version of the past which is rarely as dramatic as the reality it pretends to dramatize.

 

There’s a probably apocryphal story about the screening of the film, Titanic. Someone in the audience started to object, loudly, because the pattern of the rivets on the ship’s hull was not historically accurate. 

 

Every historical film brings out the Rivet Counters. Harold’s cloak is fastened incorrectly. The armour is wrong. The hairstyles are wrong. It gives people with specialised knowledge the opportunity to air their expertise. King and Conqueror has given the Rivet Counters many reasons to object. You will find their objections on YouTube. 

 

Not all historical objections are rivet counting and more is at stake than the lack of colour in the clothing or the preposterous attempts at ‘armour’, especially in this case because those involved with the production have repeatedly claimed their version is historically accurate.

 

A consulting company called SceneSpan claim on their website: 

 

‘King And Conqueror.

In this project, history was the script.

Brought in during early development, we advised across the script to ensure historical authenticity from the ground up: story arcs, character motivations, political dynamics, and cultural detail. Set during the Norman Conquest, the series required careful navigation of both Anglo-Saxon and Norman worldviews. Our role helped ground the drama in the lived realities of 11th-century power and identity.[emphasis is theirs]’[i]  

 

What grounds a story in the ‘lived realities’ of the past is a question: in this place and time, would a character of this rank say this, or act in this way?[ii] The failure to consider this ruins King and Conqueror and almost every other film set in and around this period. 

 

In the first episode characters are ignorant of their own history. When William and Matilda are arguing with the king of France, the latter scornfully suggests that only a fool would try to sail an army across the channel. It’s meant as dramatic irony, given that we all know that’s what William will do, but the historical king of France would have known armies had been sailing back and forth across the Channel and the North Sea for centuries. How else did he think Sweyn Forkbeard conquered England or the ‘Normans’ got to ‘Normandy’?

 

At other times characters act with no knowledge of the lived reality of their world. 

 

William rides away from the coronation on his own. He’s a Duke. In a culture where public display was essential, there should be a retinue and all the other signs and symbols of his wealth and status. He’s also a royal guest, which meant the king was responsible for his safety and would have provided guides and an escort. He had been ambushed on the way there, but apparently this doesn’t make him cautious on the return journey. How was he going to find his way to Pevensey on his own? Did the writer imagine a modern road with signposts?[iii]

 

The changes to chronology are dizzying. William was born in 1028. Even if he had attended the coronation (he didn’t) you can work out his age. In King and Conqueror an adult William leaves the pregnant wife he didn’t marry until the 1050s to attend the coronation in 1043, where he is introduced as the victor of Val es Dunes, a battle he didn’t fight until 1047. The events at Dover, which are being plotted at the coronation, and which will lead to Godwin being banished, happened in 1051.

 

If time is treated loosely, characters are melded together, their names are changed, or they are left out. The Evil Earl of Mercia is called Morcar. At the time of Edward’s coronation, Leofric, was earl of Mercia. His grandson, Morcar, became earl of Northumbria when the locals rose against Tostig and deposed him in 1065. Making him earl in 1043 means the devious goings on of 1065, which potentially reveal so much about Harold’s character, have been erased[iv].

 

The defence against these objections, and even in the first episode there is so much more to object to, is that this is not a documentary, but historical fiction. It’s a sound defence. Some historical inaccuracies need not ruin a film, and accuracy does not guarantee a film will be entertaining. 

 

If you take the history out of historical fiction the characters are left flapping in the wind. In the complex context of their time, their choices and actions defined them. Remove that context and the characters are just names. Remove the history as context, and something must replace it. In King and Conqueror, the replacement is always so much less than what it replaces. 

 

The period between the coronations of Edward the Confessor and William 1^st is covered by well-written, historically accurate books aimed at a non-specialist audience. Without learning Old English, Anglo-Norman and Latin, it’s easy to stack a shelf and be up to date with the current knowledge of the time and the characters. It is depressing to think that the writer and producers of King and Conqueror didn’t bother. It is even more depressing to think that they did and then decided to throw out the history because they thought their version was better.

 

Godwin was banished in 1051 because of an incident in Dover. 

 

The facts are murky. Different versions of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle give slightly different versions of the events. Returning to the continent, Eustace of Boulogne and his men were involved in an altercation with the inhabitants of the town. There were deaths on both sides. Eustace seems to have raced to the king and given his version of the story. Without waiting to ask Godwin to investigate, Edward called on him, as the relevant earl, to reestablish the king’s justice by punishing the town[v].

 

When Godwin refused, and according to some versions demanded Eustace’s men be punished, he was called on to answer charges of treason. Turning up to court without guarantees of safe conduct, including the formal exchange of hostages, was never a good idea. Godwin was old enough to remember at least one culling of the earls. He refused to appear and called out his armed supporters. The king was expected to keep the peace and punish wrongdoing. Edward could not withdraw the order without losing face. Edward and the Witan found Godwin guilty of treason. The other earls sided with Edward. Godwin fled and his family scattered into exile. [vi]

 

Earls were not kings, they were the king’s appointed officers, and their job was to enforce the king’s rule. When Godwin refused the order to ravage Dover he was challenging the king’s authority. For nearly ten years he had been the most powerful man in the country. His daughter was the queen. He must have thought he was secure enough to ignore a royal order.

 

Why did Godwin refuse a direct order from his king: arrogant self-confidence that reveals his own bad judgement and his poor opinion of Edward? Or was he feeling his influence slide, his advice ignored, his proteges passed over and trying to assert himself? Did he have a personal dislike of Eustace, or of the ‘foreigners’ who Edward seemed to be favouring? 

 

Was Edward overconfident? Not thinking clearly? Desperate to please a foreign relative? Was he looking for an excuse to break Godwin’s hold over him. Did he expect Godwin to protest and then back down and was taken by surprise when he didn’t?  

 

No ‘personal’ records survive from this period. We don’t know what the characters were thinking. The writer of historical fiction is free to explore the possibilities within the framework of the historical events and to offer an interpretation.  

 

King and Conqueror replaces this with simplistic nonsense about Godwin being accused of ‘breaking The Treaty’. It’s clear to the audience that whatever happened in Dover was due to the machinations of the Evil Mercian Morcar and the Wicked Queen Mother. Godwin becomes the ‘Good Guy’ done over by ‘The Baddies’. It’s childish in the most derogatory sense of that term. 

 

Fictional characters don’t have to be ‘realistic’, but they need a coherent story world in which to operate. Mangle the history, and the possibilities of coherence become increasingly small. The fashion for presenting characters in ‘the past’ as though they were modern people with the approved attitudes and fashionable responses adds to the mess[vii].

 

In the first episode, Sweyn has sex with a bride on her wedding night as it’s his ‘right as her lord’^[viii]. His brothers are disgusted, and he has to threaten Tostig to prevent him from telling their father. Their disgust is a modern reaction. If it were his right, legal and customary (which to be clear, it wasn’t) why would they have been disgusted? They would have normalized the behaviour. 

 

Harold promises his mistress he’ll never let his father force him into a ‘church marriage’ with anyone else. This is the romantic, individualistic modern lover of popular fiction speaking. If Harold Godwinson ever said that to Edith Swanneck, they would have both known that he was lying[ix].  

 

Without the historical context, King and Conqueror settles for importing the adolescent tropes of modern fantasy. The result is fiction as bad as the history. 

 

Emma, the queen mother, is the only woman in history to have married two kings of England and had two sons, by different fathers, who ruled the country. She survived the reigns of five kings before Edward, her son by her first marriage, was crowned. Matilda alludes to all this before William leaves for England. Yet the writers do not have Emma behave with the subtlety of a survivor and successful political operator. She is a strident pantomime witch. Harold is a tousled haired womble with daddy issues. He likes to bite noses during combat. He’s dominated by his mistress and portrayed as an untrustworthy liar. You’d think twice about following him to the pub.

 

The characters are juvenile, leaning heavily on the tropes of popular film. We know these are hard men because they say fuckalot. Both William and Godwin have wandered in from a film about gangland struggles for control of the neighbourhood. Godwin seems to be the last survivor of the Kray Brothers gang. And there’s the ‘Bromance’[x].

 

The film industry has a long record of treating the Middle Ages as a vague backdrop and mangling history in the process. In the general slop of cheap art chasing money at a time of rising historical ignorance, it would be surprising if King and Conqueror wasn’t the mess it was. 

 

Does it matter that King and Conqueror is less true to the 11^th century than House was to a modern American Hospital? 

 

We knew House was fiction. But King and Conqueror has been presented as history. This is not a story about fictional characters in a vaguely rendered past. The distinction seems important. It uses the names of historical persons in a way that suggests this is a representation of those people in their specific historical setting. Publicity for the series made repeated claims for its accuracy as history. 

 

Responding to criticisms about historical inaccuracies, James Norton, the actor who plays Harold, stated: 

 

The truth was, they were friends. They met at the coronation, we know that William invited Harold over to Normandy to fight against the Baron of Brittany, he did swear, he acknowledged William’s rightful claim to the crown over the relics – whether he meant it or not, we don’t know. But so much of what we tell, in terms of their relationship and friendship, is true.[xi] 

 

It is not the truth. They were not friends. They did not meet at the coronation. They probably didn’t meet in person until 1065 when Harold was (possibly shipwrecked) on the continent [xii].We don’t know why he was on that ship but none of the suggested reasons include an invitation from William ‘to fight against the baron of Britanny’. We do know Harold was in William’s custody. We do not know what oath Harold made, if he made an oath, over relics while he was there. William had no ‘rightful claim’ to the crown of England. 

 

Whether this is ignorance or indifference, the insidious lie; ‘This is true’, is where the damage is done. One can guarantee that there are now people who believe this is ‘the real story’ because James Norton said so, and for them an actor is a more reliable source of information than any historian. There are people who believe Clive Owen’s King Arthur revealed the identity of the real king Arthur because the film was advertised as ‘The untold true story that became the legend’[xiii]. No amount of fact-based refutation is going to change their minds. They saw it on the screen.  

 

Perhaps it’s a minority view, but King and Conqueror turns a period of unusual historical importance into a pantomime. It would be naïve to expect any film maker to treat the past with respect or have any respect for people who do. Art chasing money doesn’t have a conscience. The idea art should, or could, be responsible, seems quaintly, almost embarrassingly, old fashioned. The period between the coronations of Edward and William I is crucial in the history of the British Isles. Old fashioned as it seems, it’s possible to believe it deserves better than to be presented as a second-rate episode of Game of Thrones or Bored of the Rings without the attempted humour. 

 

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[i] https://scenespan.com/our-work/ Their emphasis in bold. The kindest thing to say about this quote is that perhaps they worked on a different King and Conqueror to the one we all watched.

[ii] To be very clear I don’t mean they should be speaking Old English or a faked version of it. 

[iii] William never learnt to speak English, so he couldn’t ask for directions either. 

[iv] Tostig, was unpopular as Earl of Northumbria. In October 1065, while he was away at the royal court, the locals killed his followers, and marched south. They were joined by the Mercians under their earl, Edwin (Eadwine). The Northumbrians then offered the earldom to Morcar, Edwin’s brother. King Edward wanted to call out the army and crush the rebellion. The army refused to muster. Harold acted as mediator, and Morcar became earl and Tostig was banished. The date is not known but either before or after the uprising Harold married the sister of Edwin and Morcar. Harold swore he was not involved in planning the uprising. Tostig was probably not the only person who didn’t believe him.

[v] Ravaging towns that broke the King’s peace was not unusual. Godwin, Leofric and Seward ravaged Worcester for three days under the previous king after two of the king’s men had been killed in the town.

[vi]  King and Conqueror begins by stating that England is emerging from decades of ‘bloody civil war’.  This is historically wrong. Cnut had ruled from 1016-1035, and while there was disagreement over the succession, it didn’t lead to ‘a civil war’. Despite the popular idea that medieval people went to war at the drop of hat, there is evidence to suggest that those in power in England at the time preferred to avoid armed conflict. This might explain why the Earls first sided with Edward, and then the ease with which Godwin was allowed to return. 

[vii] For an extreme example, see ‘The King’ (2019) in which Henry V is presented as a pacifist who is shocked to discover his courtiers are making money from the war against France. 

[viii] The idea of ‘Premier Noce’ or ‘Droit de seigneur’ or ‘jus primae noce’ has been shown to be a myth invented by much later writers. The historical Sweyn was banished after eloping with an Abbess and murdering his cousin. 

[ix] Calling Edith his mistress is unavoidably and unintentionally derogatory. She was his wife ‘after the Danish fashion’.  This was a marriage that was not sanctioned by the church but regarded by everybody else as a marriage. It allowed aristocratic men to choose a wife, knowing that when the time came and they entered into a church marriage for political reasons, (and all aristocratic marriages were political), they would not be entering into a bigamous relationship. 

[x] I dislike this term as it cheapens friendship but it’s exactly what is presented in King and Conqueror. 

[xi] https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/king-conqueror-stars-address-criticism-nikolaj-coster-waldau-james-norton_uk_68b034efe4b0bbcc3f8e4d8a For similar claims see https://www.televisual.com/news/james-norton-on-king-conqueror/

[xii] There is not only disagreement about what happened but about when it happened. Edward’s most recent biographer puts it in 1065. William’s opts for 1064. 

[xiii] This phrase appeared on the poster for the film, popularising the candidature of L. Artorius Castus for the role as ‘the real king Arthur’. However, King Arthur is a good example of a film that is both entertaining and historically inaccurate. 

William the Marshal, or, the Joys of Research.

 William the Marshal, realising that the French King has no interest in Peace:

'Good Sir, I'd appreciate it if you'd explain one thing: in France it's the custom for traitors to be treated like scum-burnt at the stake or pulled apart by horses! But now they're part of the establishment; they're all lords and masters!'

'That's fair enough,' the king replied. 'It's all a question of business now-and they're like shit-rags; once you've done your business, you chuck them down the privy.'

The History of William the Marshal, translated by Nigel Bryant. 

Not much has changed.

Second thought.

The History has to be one of the most enjoyable and 'readable' of early Thirteenth Century texts, all the more so since its central character was both 'Europe's Greatest Knight' and by the end of his life a major figure in the politics of the period.  Interesting too, given that it's such a good story, full of incidents and drama, and that the man himself is a fascinating conundrum, that no one has ever turned the Marshal's life into a film. Though if it were filmed, they'd probably ruin it, so perhaps it's for the best. 

1217 The battles that Saved England by Catherine Hanley A review of sorts

1217 The Battles that Saved England. By Catherine Hanley. Osprey 2024

 

1217 tells the story of a siege and two battles; one on land, one on sea, that ‘saved England’.  As a story it has a great plot and a fascinating cast of characters. But while Hanley writes with the skill of a novelist, her story is true and grounded in a careful use of the available sources.  

 

Background.

 

By 1215 King John and his barons were at an impasse. He had been forced to concede what later became known as Magna Carta, but he had placed England in the hands of the Pope. In a radical about face, the Pope moved from excommunicating John and putting England under Interdict, to declaring the Charter null and void and threatening to excommunicate anyone who rebelled against the rightful King.  In response some of the barons invited Louis, the son of the French King, Phillip Augustus, to become the King of England. 

 

The first French contingent landed in December 1215. Louis set sail with a small invasion fleet in 1216, landed unopposed in May, and was proclaimed King of England on the second of June 1216. Proclaimed, but not crowned. Hanley suggests this was a crucial error while accepting that as an excommunicate he couldn’t take part in a church service.

 

John died in October 1216.  Hanley sees this as the best thing he could have done to help his cause. To anyone placing bets it looked like the Angevins were finished. Large parts of the country were in rebel hands and John’s son, Henry, only nine years old, and surrounded by a shrinking group of royalists. However, while John had often seemed to go out of his way to alienate everyone, Henry was surrounded by a small group of exceptionally capable men. Their acknowledged leader was William the Marshall, ‘Europe’s greatest Knight’. His loyalty to the royal family was both famous and so unshakeable that it could be described as pathological. 

 

 

1217

Hanley tells the story of how those loyal to Henry  staged an improbable military comeback to insure that an Angevin King would stay on the English throne. It is far more entertaining and interesting story than most fictional ones set in the Middle Ages.

 

How much was at stake in 1217 is hard to see in retrospect. For the 90 percent of the population living below the nobility, would it have mattered if a French (Capetian) or a French (Angevin) king were ruling them? 

 

However, Hanley presents the events as crucial in the development of a sense of Englishness. She frames the sea battle off Sandwich as an English fleet defending England against a French invasion. The defeat of the French fleet is compared to the later, more well-known destruction of the Spanish Armada, with Hanley arguing the latter was of lesser consequence.  Hanley also suggests that throughout the war there is a definite shift towards a sense of ‘England vs France’. 

 

At the time, however, nationality might not have played a decisive role: it may have seemed clear cut. Henry was the King’s son. The royalists risked everything and stood by him.

 

Not all the rebels stood by Louis. As the war went on there was significant wavering in their ranks. This may have had little to do with nationalism either. Men who had hated John had no reason to hate his infant son and if successful Louis would be obliged to reward his French followers, but at whose expense? 

 

Hanley has a healthy scepticism about some of the leading players. Without denying the Marshall’s role in the war, she acknowledges his failure to protect the citizens of Lincoln and notes his acquisitiveness.  The Marshall’s flattering biography is one of the chief sources for the period: Hanley avoids both uncritical acceptance and uncritical dismissal. 

 

Likewise, while acknowledging Hubert de Burgh’s essential role in the defence of Dover, her description of his actions at the battle of Sandwich, often claimed as his great victory, doesn’t make his participation a deciding factor in the battle.

 

IF 1217 has a great plot, it also has an outstanding cast. At the centre, though missing from the action for obvious reasons, is Henry III, a nine-year-old boy whose father was disliked by almost everybody, overwhelmed by his coronation. William the Marshall, ‘Europe’s greatest knight’, who at 70 was given the task of regent and the job of saving the Angevin line, enthusiastically charging into battle at Lincoln. Eustace the Monk, renegade pirate who had turned his coat so many times no one knew which was inside or out anymore, leading Louis’ fleet. Wilkin of the Weald, a commoner who led a ‘guerilla’ war against the French; Blanche of Castille, Louis’ wife who could be described as formidable without any exaggeration.

 

Hanley’s contribution to the story is to bring others into the limelight. Phillip D’Albini, who may have been as responsible for victory at the battle of Sandwich as De Burgh. Nichola de la Haye, who in her sixties held Lincoln for the Royalists, held her nerve throughout the siege, and was rewarded by being removed from her post so William Longespee, who had swapped sides during the war, could be rewarded. Hanley describes the regency’s treatment of Nicola as ‘one of the most astonishing acts of ingratitude imaginable’ but adds in a footnote that it was Nicola who ‘had the last laugh’. 

 

If one of the advantages of a book like this is it gives 254 pages to events that are covered in one paragraph of David Carpenter’s biography of Henry the Third, some characters still seem inscrutable. 

 

Louis is a shadow in the narrative. His father had refused the military and financial support that would have given him a formidable invasion force. His campaign stalled first in front of Dover Castle, and then came to a halt when, after the defeat of his army at Lincoln, the reinforcements sent by his wife, Blanche, were destroyed off Sandwich. He wasn’t present at either of the two decisive battles. Hanley’s narrative suggests one of the contributing factors to the French defeats was that no one seems to have been in overall command at crucial times.

 

Floating through this, as invisible as usual, is Isabella of Angouleme. John’s marriage to her in 1200 had been politically disastrous. In 1207 she had given birth to John’s first legitimate child, Henry, and had then given birth to three more children.  She was offered no part in the regency. This seems strange but so was her response. She returned to France at the end of 1217, leaving her son a crowned King, but a child surrounded by advisors. 

 

Because of the limitations of the evidence, there are always questions that will never be answered, but the book also shows history as a series of accidents. Dover did not fall to Louis because it was a strong fortification held by a commander who held his nerve and Louis didn’t have the manpower he needed. But the battle of Lincoln was lost by the French when an inexperienced commander miscounted the oncoming royalists and instead of going out to meet them, where superior French numbers might have won the day, decided to stay inside the city walls. There’s also the secret entrance no one seems to have noticed which would be considered a unacceptable flaw in a fictional account. If the wind had been in the right direction when the French relief fleet originally sailed, then the English would have struggled to meet it, and the reinforcements might have landed. If …

 

1217 surprised me. I don’t like writers who use the first-person plural. Although it used to be common in factual writing it has become corrupted by politicians using it as an invidious positioning technique. But Hanley returns it to its courteous usage. Her style is that of a well-informed, capable guide, and while the tour goes round the usual places, she paces it carefully and stops to provide useful background information. She is very clear in her discussion of the sources. 

 

Books about the Middle Ages that focus on battles tend to misrepresent the period. There’s so much more to Edward III’s reign than Sluys, Crecy, Poitiers and deeds of daring do, but in this case the siege/s of Dover castle, the battle of Lincoln, and the sea battle off Sandwich are crucial events in a pivotal year.  There are times history swings on a hinge and at the end of 1216 a King of France on the throne of England was a distinct possibility. 1217 as a date would then have had had the same prominence in collective memory as 1066. Hanley’s excellent book, ironically, explains why this isn’t so.   

 

 

The Green Knight. (Film). A review of sorts

 

As someone who has opinionated about the depressing quality of filmed versions of Medieval stories, the hype surrounding The Green Knight was certainly exciting: art house meets medieval poetry. 

Reviews were very positive, I think I read two five star reviews in the Guardian alone. 

A medieval heart of darkness, a journey into the wilderness to confront the limitations of an ideology. They didn't say that, that's one way of thinking about the poem. Imagine what a young Herzog could have done with it.

So I watched the film twice as soon as it appeared on whichever streaming service it appeared on.

I liked King Arthur's accent.

Pierre Michon, 'Winter Mythologies' and Faking the Middle Ages.

 ‘Winter Mythologies’ contains two collections of very short stories by Pierre Michon: ‘Three Miracles from Ireland’ and ‘Nine passages from the Causse’.

Michon is a fascinating writer and there is so much to admire about these stories. They are far more seductive than something like Nightfall or The Last Kingdom. Perhaps because they are so good,  they provoke the question: how to retell medieval stories, or stories set in the middle ages, especially when it comes to dealing with matters of belief. 

Yale University Press publishes the English version, translated by Ann Jefferson, as Winter mythologies and Abbots. In the French ‘Edition Verdier’ Mythologies d’hiver the first three stories are called Trois Prodiges En Irlande. While prodige can be translated into English as miracle, it can also mean prodigy, which can apply to a thing or event as much as a person. ‘The fervor of Brigid’, ‘The sadness of Columbkill’ and ‘The levity of Sweeney’ are all prodigious. But none of them is a miracle in the religious sense of that word.

  

At first glance the stories mimic the brevity of medieval chronicles but on closer rereading, Michon tells them from the viewpoint of a skeptical modern sensibility, within the framework of modern understanding and belief. This is ‘faking the middle ages’.

Medieval miracle stories are commonplace. Read Bede, or Gerald of Wales, read any early medieval chronicle, they are full of stories of the miraculous.  So are saint’s lives and the records of their cults and shrines. People went on pilgrimage in the honest belief that the Saint’s relics would cure them.

We know there were fakes and we know there were skeptics even in the early middle ages, but the evidence suggests that the majority believed in miracles; in the ability of saints to intercede on their behalf and the fact that while the world worked to laws that existed but were not well-understood, God had the ability to alter those laws to show His favor, displeasure, or power. It should also be remembered that there are still people who hold these beliefs.

Michon’s three Irish Stories refigure this belief as a prodigious type of desire in search of an object. But this is a desire for something more than the tactile world can provide. It is an innate yearning that can never be satisfied.

Both Brigid and Columbkill want, in both the older and more common usages of the word. Columbkill desires the psalter. Denied his copy he goes to war, wins, takes the book only to discover: ‘The book is not in the book’. In the first three stories only Sweeney is happy with who he is and what he does. Michon doesn’t say whether Sweeney’s acceptance of his life as King or Bird is a kind of sanity bordering on sanctity, or proof positive he’s mad.

But if Michon accepts the existence of this desire, he is not prepared to believe in the existence of its object. When Saint Patrick is introduced in the first story, we are told that to convert the pagan Irish, ‘il suffit de quelques abracabras druidiques’ which sounds even more contemptuous than the English translation’s ‘all it requires is a few druidic spells’. Patrick is a fake who knows he’s a fake: a conjurer who is growing old.

Because they are juxtaposed in the one book, it’s possible to read the story of Saint Enimie, which runs through five of the Nine Passages on the Causse, as an elaboration on what is presented as a form of dishonesty. There is nothing holy about Enimie. Her own self titled story makes this very clear. She becomes a saint centuries after her death to meet the institutional needs of a religious foundation. Her posthumous career is created at the intersection of the shifting needs and literary abilities of the monks. It is based on a lie.

 If people can suffer in varying degrees from a prodigious desire for something that is absent, then in this version, religion is what you get when that desire is given an object that can’t be grasped. Inherent in that idea is that manipulation and exploitation are inevitable. Those who desire can be manipulated and exploited by those who can supply and claim to control that object. It’s how advertising and propaganda work. It is hardly an earth-shattering observation until it is applied to religion and medieval faith.  Accept the desire; deny the reality of the object of that desire.

And that’s where the modern mind and the medieval one part company.

We know the church as an institution became corrupt. We know its beliefs became easily exploited by the greedy and unscrupulous. There were enough fragments of the true cross in Europe to build a decent house and some of John the Baptist’s many fingers looked a lot like chicken bones.

But that doesn’t mean it was all faked. Bede and his audience expected miracles both from dead saints and living holy men and women. Miracles were the visible, tangible proof of an invisible power or an exceptional grace. When the Pagan priests and the Christian missionaries faced off in post Roman Britain, it wasn’t the equivalent of a conjurors’ Ok Corral. Writing it as though it were is entertaining and comforting to the modern mind, but another conjuror’s trick.

Nightfall, Pilgrimage and filming the middle ages

Filming the Middle Ages: Nightfall and Pilgrimage.

Warning, opinionating in progress yer honour

Both Nightfall and Pilgrimage are set roughly around about the same time. Both are set in historical contexts. Both revolve around a sacred relic. The difference lies not in ‘historical accuracy’ whatever that might mean, but in the attempt by Pilgrimage to capture a different way of thinking about the world, and the total failure of Nightfall to even make the attempt.

 What interests me about films or tv series set in 'the middle ages' or 'the dark ages' is their attempt, successful or other wise, to evoke a different world. You may not be interested in this aspect of films set in the past, and if not, its presence or absence should not affect your attitude towards them. 

Exactly what Nightfall is supposed to be is a problem in itself. Although from the history channel it’s obviously not ‘history’ in the sense of documentary history or reenactment. It’s fictional entertainment. But it’s pseudo historical entertainment, containing names that occur in the historical record.  And so, the question is why didn’t the writers create their own fantasy world, why did they hang their characters on real names, and place the action in real places, when they’re obviously not interested in how those characters would have acted. It’s possible they are simply shirt tailing the words Templar and grail, exploiting what people think they know about Templars or the grail in order to establish an intial audience base.

The rivet counters can complain about the fire bombs and the exploding ships and castles, the holy grail, the fact that some of the knights are called Gawain and Percival, and that there seems to be some confusion between Knights of the Temple and the Knights of the Round table. (It would take a far more subtle approach to pull this one off; the Templars were a religious order, the Knights of the Round Table were not.) A queen of France who wanders the streets of Paris alone and unattended? Mounted Knights who dismount to fight superior numbers?

I have no objections to any of this as entertainment: the minute the word Grail appears we’re in the land of fiction.

What put me off the story from the first episode is the idea of a ‘Master of the Temple’ having an affair with the Queen of France.

What most versions of the middle ages on film fail to take into account is how different these people were in the way they thought.  They were not you and me in fancy dress. The Bold and The Beautiful in medieval costume doesn’t work except as pastiche or parody.

We’ve become inured to sex as an essential part of narrative, especially as part of historical fiction.  Everyone it seems was dropping their clothes at the drop of a hat. But the morality of an American soap opera doesn’t translate into the European middle ages.

In the story world of Nightfall, our central character does not believe God exists. He Knows God exists. He has touched the relic of the Last Supper.  For him Jesus is an historical character and he has seen the evidence. He wants to reclaim the Holy Land for the Christian church and is willing to die fighting for it because of this faith. It motivates him powerfully.

This man has sworn to this God a vow of chastity and poverty when he joined the order.  He knows adultery is a sin. He also knows that adultery with the queen is treason. And his sensuality will undermine everything his order stands for, if it’s found out it will hand his enemies a weapon he cannot fight against.  He cannot play the games soap opera characters play; I’m sorry, it didn’t really mean anything, it was just sex, a bit of fun. I won’t do it again.

Nor is it a matter of whether or not they can get away with it. He cannot ‘get away with it’ because his God is watching everything he does.  And in the crowded world of Paris, it’s unlikely that someone isn’t going to notice him climbing a wall and wonder where he’s going.

So this man is a lying, adulterous treasonous hypocrite. And a fool. If he’s not caught he’s going straight to a hell that he believes in. Even if he believes he can find absolution for his sins, when he is caught his death is going to be horrific and will damage his order irrevocably.

It’s this failure to understand that sex is out of bounds, and  the queen is simply off the planet that suggests the writers have not bothered to consider their material. There’s no attempt to understand the difference between now and then, and that reduces this to farce.

It’s interesting to compare Nightfall to the film The Pilgrimage (2017). Again your average rivet counter could probably find fault with the monks’ habits, their belts, their tonsures. I’m fairly sure a weapons expert might have something to say about some of the weapons on show. And the graphic violence might be off putting to some.

But what the film does is catch at something alien: a profound belief in the reality of relics. As someone says, ‘it’s a rock some dead saint bled on’, but for the monks, it is manifest holiness, and terrible in the precise meaning of that term. For the Cistercian and his masters, it is a thing of power that will aid them in their plans. For the Normans in Ireland, it is a piece that can be used to secure their future by giving it to a King struggling with the Pope.

There is an immanent violence all through the film. It’s not glamourized or sexualized, there’s nothing heroic or sexy about it, but it is there and the casual brutality and indifference to suffering that explodes sometimes unpredictability add a menace to the story which is missing from Nightfall.  In Pilgrimage faith exists in the face of such ugliness. And there are different types of faith, shades of belief and devotion, and in the case of the Cistercian, it is an ugly and unattractive faith.

The characters: the Monks, the Cistercian, and the Norman, Raymond, all feel like they belong in a different time. Raymond is by far a better character than the central Templar in Nightfall as an imaginative attempt to answer ‘what would someone in that time and place be like’? He is proud, brutalized, seething with contempt, worried that this family’s position is jeopardized by John’s unpredictability but still not ready to get rid of an aging father. And his ferocity simmers beneath a barely controlled frustration with the world. The Norman invasion of Ireland was not pretty, and the Irish resistance was not a matter of knights meeting in the open field. It was an encounter that brutalized both sides.  Just as the crusades did.

When, searching for the relic, Raymond says ‘I will find another rock and pretend it is the relic’ or words to that effect, he is not expressing a modern skepticism about relics, but a profound disillusionment and consequent lack of faith that defines him as a character against the believers in the film.

He would not have sex with the queen. Even if Isabella of Angouleme was the stunning beauty she is rumored to have been.  But if he’d lived, you can imagine him a few years down the track, having run out of patience, joining the baronial revolt against John and meeting the cruelty of John’s mercenaries head on.

My reaction to these two films is probably clouded by the fact I’m currently working my way through translations of the Works of Gerald of Wales, who was still alive at the time of Pilgrimage, who described the Norman Invasion of Ireland and the English and French attempts to subdue Wales. I admit I’d rather read Gerald than watch either, but Pilgrimage seems to resonate with his writing. Nightfall doesn’t.

End of opinionating.