Richard
Fletcher.
Bloodfeud: Murder and Revenge in Anglo-Saxon England.
London: Allen Lane/The
Penguin Press, 2002.
xv,231pp.
Hardback, ISBN
071399391X.
Publisher's
recommended price £14.99
In 1016,
as King
Canute was completing his subjugation of the north of England, he
commanded
the appearance of the greatest of his northern subjects, Earl Uhtred of
Northumbria, at a place called Wiheal. Uhtred had been loyal to
Canute's
predecessor, Ethelred the Unready, but came with forty retainers to
make
his submission. But Uhtred and his men were ambushed and slaughtered by
an old enemy called Thurbrand, with Canute's connivance. This act set
in
motion a bloodfeud that lasted for three generations and almost sixty
years,
which is the subject of this book.
Those
years included
some of the most unsettled in English history. As he traces the feud
down
the generations, Fletcher is able to throw light on myriad aspects of
English
life at this crucial juncture: he shows us how England was, and
sometimes
wasn't, governed, how difficult the north was to control, and how
distinct
it was from the rest of the country. But he is also able to touch on
the
power of the church, the economic boom of the eleventh century and the
role of women, and above all to demonstrate the violent tenor of life.
Here too are some of the greatest figures of the age: Uhtred himself,
Archbishop
Wulfstan of York, Canute, Earl Godwin of Wessex and his sons (the
Kennedys
of eleventh-century England) Tostig and Harold - who for a few brief
months
in 1066 was king of England.
Our
sources are
few and fragmentary. One of the delights of the book is to see the
historian
as detective, piecing together what we do and don't know, what can
reasonably
be surmised and where we must simply let the imagination take over.
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