Gabriel Ronay

The Lost King of England

The Lost King of England is the story of two of the last pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon pretenders to the English throne. Edward, the son of King Edmund II (“Ironsides”), was an infant when the Canute conquered England in 1016 A.D., and was lucky simply to be sent into exile rather than being murdered. After decades as an exile and knight-errant in Sweden, Kievan Rus, and Hungary, in 1057 he returned to England with his young son Edgar, and might have become the heir of the  childless Edward the Confessor except that he was poisoned immediately. His son Edgar was raised by Edward the Confessor, and he too might have been an heir if Edward had lived long enough, but when Edward died in 1066 Edgar was too young to be a plausible heir.

The usurping minister Harold Godwinson became the leader of the Anglo-Saxon party in court, and ultimately became King -- though he almost immediately lost his throne to one of the other claimant, William the Conqueror of Normandy. (The fourth claimant was Harald Hadrada of Norway -- and Constantinople -- who was defeated at Stamford Bridge a few days before the Battle of Hastings). Before I read this book I already knew a fair amount about 1066 and all that, but I never had heard of Edward and Edgar. Ronay’s book fleshes out their story, and in the process gives us a vivid picture of the eleventh-century northern-European world.

This was the end of the Viking period, when the Norsemen were just starting to convert to Christianity and join the family of nations. After two centuries of helplessness, England and part of France had been militarily reconfigured, often by rulers who were themselves descended from Norsemen, and were for the first time able to push back. After Canute had conquered England, as the new King of England he returned north to pacify Norway --  something that the none of the earlier Norwegian kings or Anglo-Saxon kings of either England or Norway had ever been able to do. During this pacification, Canute drove Olaf Haraldson into exile -- the rather thuggish Christian who would later be named St. Olaf after dying in battle against one of Canute’s heirs.

Likewise, when the Norman, William the Conqueror, invaded England, it was the first time in many centuries that anyone from the Latin or Mediterranean world had extended his power that far – even Charlemagne was not able to do much in that regard.[1] 

Around 1000 AD England and Ireland and part of France were part of a Norse oecumene which stretched from Greenland and Newfoundland in the West, through Scandinavia and Russia, all the way to Constantinople and the Caspian Sea. Canute’s conquest of England and the conversion of Norway to Christianity represented the both the high point of the Norse expansion and the beginning of its end as a separate entity, as the now-legitimate Norman Christian states joined in with the rest of Christian Northern Europe to break into the Mediterranean and confront Islam. (The first Northern European incursion in that direction, the Norman conquest of Sicily, was not part of the Crusades at all, but was pure swashbuckling; the Crusades themselves might be thought of as a continuation of the Norman expansion, with the Pope coming along for a ride).

When he left England, Edward Aetheling traveled through that northern world. He first was taken to Sweden, and then to Kievan Russia via Lake Ladoga and Novgorod (always hosted by cousins of one sort or another), until he finally ended up in Hungary, where he received a fief as his reward for having helped his friend Andrew (whom he had met in Kievan exile)  claim his throne. (Hungary, like Scandinavia, had been only recently and thinly Christianized, and Andrew gained his throne  with neo-pagan help).[2] 

During the early part of his life Edward had been a pawn in the diplomatic schemes of Yaroslav of Kiev. When Yaroslav changed his strategy Edward became irrelevant for a time, but Edward the Confessor’s childlessness made him relevant again, and finally, at the age of more than forty, Edward returned to England -- where all he did was die.

For someone coming to this story from a background in Chinese / Mongol studies, a lot of things seem completely familiar: the dowager queen (Emma) having other women's children killed (or trying to do so) for fear that they might contest the succession; one sworn brother (Canute) having the other one murdered (Edward Ironsides); and the usurpation of the throne by the chief minister (Harold Godwinson).  This suggests to me that a lot of stereotypical situations in history are structurally necessary, and have little to do with the specifics of “culture”.

Gabriel Ronay is a British journalist and amateur historian who has written three entertaining, well-researched books which I can recommend without any reservation, but which do need special handling. Ronay does research in at least seven languages (including Hungarian, Russian, Latin, and apparently Danish), and as far as I can tell, his archival research is impressively thorough and uncovers a lot of new material.  Ronay also chooses interesting topics and writes about them very well.

On the other hand, Ronay's tendency to psychologize bothers me at times. He frequently speaks of Edward's distress at being away from England, but Edward left England as an infant and never even knew the place --he seems to have led the normal, privileged life of a military aristocrat, with little reason to feel any regret. Likewise, no psychological motive need be given for Edward's  leaving Kiev to serve of Andrew. War was the normal business of men of Edward's class, and by joining Andrew he succeeded in gaining the fief that made him at least a secure member of the aristocracy.

Ronay's methodology is more that of an old-fashioned man of letters than of a scientific historian. In the two of his books that I have at hand, he frequently leaps to conclusions which, though usually sound, sometimes are not. For example, in The Tartar Khan’s Englishman (Phoenix, 2000), Ronay tells a story by identifying as one man four Englishmen found in the archival records: one of them present at the signing of the Magna Charta, one involved in the siege of Damietta, one expelled from the Templars in the Holy Land, and one serving with the Mongols in Hungary. By my guess only the first of these identifications is even likely, and none of them is proven. In The Lost King of England, there are a number of places where Ronay leaps to conclusions where a more careful historian would reserve judgment.

Ronay's books have already recieved harshly critical reviews from people in the biz. His  combination of important research and questionable methods probably means that some professional historian will ending up retracing Ronay’s steps and redoing his work. It will be interesting to see how much has to be changed; I personally am cheering for Ronay. (After all, jumping skilfully to conclusions is the basic paradigm here at Idiocentrism.)

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I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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