Conquered: The Last Children of Anglo-Saxon England

by Eleanor Parker

"Outstanding." - The Sunday Times
"Beautifully written." The Times
"Superbly adroit." The Spectator
"Excellent." BBC History Magazine

The Battle of Hastings and its aftermath nearly wiped out the leading families of Anglo-Saxon England – so what happened to the children this conflict left behind?

Conquered offers a fresh take on the Norman Conquest by exploring the lives of those children, who found themselves uprooted by the dramatic events of 1066. Among them were the children of Harold Godwineson and his brothers, survivors of a family shattered by violence who were led by their courageous grandmother Gytha to start again elsewhere. Then there were the last remaining heirs of the Anglo-Saxon royal line – Edgar Ætheling, Margaret, and Christina – who sought refuge in Scotland, where Margaret became a beloved queen and saint. Other survivors, such as Waltheof of Northumbria and Fenland hero Hereward, became legendary for rebelling against the Norman conquerors. And then there were some, like Eadmer of Canterbury, who chose to influence history by recording their own memories of the pre-conquest world.

From sagas and saints' lives to chronicles and romances, Parker draws on a wide range of medieval sources to tell the stories of these young men and women and highlight the role they played in developing a new Anglo-Norman society. These tales – some reinterpreted and retold over the centuries, others carelessly forgotten over time – are ones of endurance, adaptation and vulnerability, and they all reveal a generation of young people who bravely navigated a changing world and shaped the country England was to become.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Medieval, Audiobook, Anglo Saxon, Historical, Medieval History

245 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 24, 2022

About the author

https://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com.au/

Reviews

[G.K. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing.
This was not what I was expecting. Nothing in here was new to me. All the information can be obtained in freely available textbooks, no need to trawl through medieval texts for anything you'll find in here. The book concerns itself with just a very few of the Anglo-Saxon children caught up in the Norman Conquest, so it's a handy one stop shop if you want to know what happened to a few high profile Anglo Saxons after 1066.

[Jason Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This excellent book examines the fates of some those we know after the Norman conquest and many we don’t . In doing so it asks what the sources show about how people processed this disaster. Why had it happened ? How did old Saxon and Norse royal lines adapt and work within the new regime ? How did the new culture both respect and obliterate the old? How did it try to legitimise itself by using records such as the Anglos Saxon Chronicle?
Along with Hereward there is the fascinating study of Margaret of Scotland .
Scandinavian born, married into the English royalty, after the conquest a refugee in Scotland , finally married to the Scottish king. She provided a haven for many refugee English until Scotland finally yielded but at the cost of the religious life she had wanted which would have saved her from being a marriage pawn and given her intellectual expression. She was a well read woman and nuns were scholars . Her sister Christina would try in vain to protect her niece from dynastic marriage to England . Her family would continue to be significant in the hew regimes relations with Europe .

After other stories the book ends poignantly with the story of the monk Eadmer, dealing with the loss by fire of his church in 1067, clinging to relics of Dunstan as he sought to preserve Saxon Christian culture from Norman stamping . This is a terrific insight into a nation sharply set on a different course .

[Edward Dunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dive as deep as possible (there aren't many sources) into the lives of people reacting to the Norman Conquest. There's some nice really personal details, such as a bromance between two monks, that bring the period alive and let you try to stand in the subjects' shoes.

[BAM doesn’t answer to her real name · Rating 4 out of 5]

ROYALTY READS PROJECT 2023

I am definitely going to listen to this book again. It was nicely written and strengthened my interest in the ruling classes before Edward the Confessor, which is the main reason I bought it. All of the history books I’ve read in the last several years I had no idea how names and such were pronounced correctly or how exactly Hastings was fought. So this book actually discusses the children of “the time before”. Very satisfying

[Walter King · Rating 5 out of 5]

An original take

Though I studied Medieval English history at school and university, I have never come across a study along these lines. It is a tour de force of historical research - balanced and humane. In our post-colonial world, it is good for England’s own subaltern story to be told.

[Carolyn Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insightful read though not quite the book that I expected. I thought that Conquered would be focused completely on the last generation of royal/noble children in Anglo-Saxon England at the time of the Norman Conquest, discussing elite Anglo-Saxon and Norman ideas of childhood and coming of age. Instead, Conquered is a study of how Anglo-Saxon chroniclers examined ideas of dislocation, exile and cultural change in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest with a focus on sources that discuss this last generation of royal/noble Anglo-Saxon young people. There's an extended section about Hereward the Wake that seems out of place with the theme of "The Last Children of Anglo-Saxon England" but is in keeping with the author's efforts to analyze Anglo-Saxon and Norman responses to the Norman Conquest through the surviving sources.

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting.

[Christopher Trend · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book following the Saxon children of the then Royal line. It shows the impact of the Norman conquest on them and also looks how an Anglo Norman culture began to develop.
I wonder how much if the Saxon line is still present in our current Royal Family?

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was... fine I guess? 2.5 starts but I'm rounding down.

It mostly felt like the names of the last gasps of Anglo-Saxon royalty were put in a randomizer and then the wikipedia articles were cued up and read one right after the other. Which isn't terrible but I guess I was looking for more context and just... an overall wider look at everything or anything. For example, I didn't get much sense of the cultural difference between the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans. In The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream, there's this aside about how the Norman Henry I and his Scottish/Saxon queen Matilda and how Norman aristocracy snidely called them ''Godric and Godiva' implying they were a little too Saxon (or in Henry's case Norman but so rustic/unsophisticated that he might as well be *gasp* a Saxon!) This told me more about the lingering tensions down through the generations than most of anything in Conquered.

Mostly you hear about how the Saxon princes were hunted down/exiled, while Saxon princess were highly prized as brides for the Normals to signal continuity to the peoples they conquered. But this kind of thing is common across all of history when one culture supplants another. I wanted to learn the things that made this particular cross-cultural collision unique and different. Specificity was just... overall lacking from this book in my opinion. I would say it served well as at least an introduction to some of the royalty from the era but again... once it got into stuff having to do with the William -> William Rufus -> Henry I's relationships with Saxon nobility I was having to mentally fill in the blanks with stuff I'd learned from other sources. So it just made me wonder what I wasn't hearing about for other historical figures I knew nothing about going in. It reminded me of She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth in that way.

[Jan-Joost Bouwman · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I was on the Anglo-Saxon thread, I thought I would continue with this book by Eleanor Parker. I have followed her blog posts she has written on the various Anglo-Saxon Saints and Viking raids on churches in South East England for some years and really enjoyed that. This book is more of that, but with a more thorough historical foundation. She is after all a historian, so what was I expecting... That meant it was slightly a harder read than expected, but I still enjoyed it, and may actually have learned some things. The book covers some of the better documented Anglo-Saxon people growing up right around and after the Norman Conquest. Documented in books and stories written about them, sometimes a long time after they actually lived. Hereward, hero of the Fens, of who we have very little concrete evidence; Margaret of Scotland, sister of Edgar Aetheling, last daughter of the Anglo-Saxon royal line, who married Malcolm of Scotland; Waltheof, the only noble to lose his head in the uprising against William, mostly because he was tried by the old English laws and therefore didn't get the chivalrous treatment, even though his role in the uprising was probably minor. And the grandchildren of Godwine and Gytha, of many of which not that much is known actually, because quite frankly they didn't matter to anybody anymore, except Harold's daughter Gytha who married into the Kiev royal line and Skulli, son of Tostig that gets a mention in Norse tales. And finally Eadmer, the monk who wrote a lot of these stories, and in writing these reveals much about his own life and opinions as well.
All in all interesting, but not that easy to read. Only for people with a keen interest in the subject I would say.

[Tom Fordham · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think the title of this book is a little bit misleading. I went into it thinking it would be look at the consequences of the conquest on the general Anglo-Saxon population and how people such as Hereward led the resistance (I am aware that historical sources are limited, rare, or non-existent when it comes to the general population). However, it was more about the royal children and how they survived to be a bit of a thorn in the Norman side. What I have learned from this, is how the Normans looked to squash the status and political potency of Harold, Hereward, Edward Atheling, Edmund Ironside, Waltheof and other Saxon nobility so that any thoughts of regaining their kingdom and accepting their suppression. In some ways its information that I already know i.e. Norman marriages to Saxon nobility to legitimise their Conquest, stripping of land, etc., but Parker has helped add some more perspective to this situation pre- and post-Conquest. You get a sense that younger people would have heard these stories and grew up with a nostalgia for a past they weren't part of. It's an interesting one. Even so, this was an interesting listen, these revolts are so easily glossed over under the wait of the impact of the Conquest but people forget that the English of the Anglo-Saxon era were warriors and wouldn't have sat idly and let it happen.

[Kyri Freeman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I felt like this was a dissertation expanded into a book, which doesn't always completely work.

I am interested in how people in the past thought of themselves and experienced their world, with identity and ethnicity being part of that. But, though seeming to address these topics, this book never really has any conclusions nor anything especially incisive to say. It does appear that at the time of the Norman Conquest there was some sort of concept of "Englishness", but the book doesn't go very far in analyzing that.

As far as what literally happened to people, what was people's real experience, it's not really here.

[Bridget · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this, it felt cohesive and fairly accessible - I liked how the different individuals discussed overlapped in places and the author took care to draw attention to this to help illustrate/appreciate the wider points being made. I do think though that Hereward the Wake could have done with being a later chapter - I get why he was placed first, but because there was much more ‘legend’ than ‘fact’ to trawl through there had to be much more ephemeral discussion of source provenance and societal commentary, which made it harder to situate as the reader into the time period and to get some momentum.

[Joseph Leake]

I'm always interested in — and find moving — the dark or neglected corners of history, the "dead ends" that didn't (according to our linear, progressive understanding of history) "go anywhere." Anything that sheds light on those dark corners is a welcome thing indeed; and any book that does so in such an eloquent, accessible, and fundamentally humane manner is doubly-welcome. Parker almost never loses sight of the complexity and humanity of her subjects — almost never; one of the flaws of the book comes from the occasional lapses into desultory and superficial appeals to vague banalities like "status" and "identity." Happily these lapses are rare!

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

Purchased after enjoying Winters in the World, by the same author. This book really suffers from the author’s need for completeness. She choses a variety of subjects across social class, but loses steam by discussing not only the well attested subject, but their less well attested relations and other fragmentary supporting tales. This makes each chapter overly long, with a noticeable drop in energy and clarity as it proceeds.

[Liam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Parker’s history reads how I like them: with texts from the period, rather than being filtered by a historian. Such is the nature of philology, and while the top reviewer complains that the book doesn’t inject in someone else’s opinions straight into their shallow brain, this is very accessible and worthwhile look at sources for a modern reader. Great perspective.

[Kourtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this read. It's about the children of Anglo-Saxon England who live through 1066 and the regime changes that happen and what happens as the children grow up. Recommend this for people who want to know more about Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Invasion.

[Sam D · Rating 3 out of 5]

An easy read but a little superficial. There's not a lot of depth given to any of the people discussed. That said, it's probably a good introduction to the topic for anyone who hasn't read too much about the Norman Conquest and its effects.

[Nicola · Rating 3 out of 5]

First two chapters are disjointed and not on topic, but the other chapters are on the actual children and it is interesting how their lives dramatically changed after the Norman conquest.

[Tara Schiraldi · Rating 4 out of 5]

So I was fascinated by the topic but found the writing style pretty dense. Still it’s impressively researched and a cool concept.

[Andrea Hickman Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very interesting and a subject that I'd never considered before, but really should have because it seems like such an obvious thing in hindsight.

[Gee · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5*

an unbelievably dry treatment of what should be a momentous historical transition.

[Louise Bath]

Did Not Finish - got to page 104.

I really thought I was going to enjoy this book, because I find the period interesting, and because I liked its premise of examining how the aftermath of 1066 affected the children of the English elite and their families. I also liked the book's layout, which made it look as though Conquered would be a smooth, easy to read account that would be less like a traditional history book and more like a narrative story.

Well, how wrong - and stupid - was I? I made it through the chapters on Hereward the Wake, Queen Margaret of Scotland (known in Scotland at one time as "Queen of the White Settlers," and probably still is), and partway through the chapter on the family of Godwine, former earl of Wessex, and his wife Gytha; but I finally had to admit defeat. The more I read, the more I realised I didn't know, and, feeling very much out of my depth, knew it was time to quit. There was no point in continuing with a book which assumes that the reader already has a good grounding in the history of the late 11th century, when I was faced with names and Histories that swam before my eyes, but meant nothing to me.

What I did learn is that the post-Conquest world was *far* more complex than I'd ever imagined, and that attempts were made to create links between the different communities in England via how English figures were written about. Chroniclers framed the story of - say - Hereward in terms that would be familiar to Danish/Scandinavian readers/listeners, for example. The facts might not be *strictly* true, but the narrative would be couched in terms and utilise tropes that would speak to Anglo-Danish and Anglo-Norman audiences and their understanding of what made a hero. In this way, chroniclers strove - and hoped - to show that English culture was worth preserving and celebrating by the conquerors.

A good read, I'm sure, but way over my head and level of understanding of the topic.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

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