Why isn’t 1217 as famous a year in English history as 1066?
At first glance, there are certainly similarities: a violent dispute over who should be wearing the English crown, and an invasion launched from France by a man who would be king. The main difference, and the reason for 1217’s relative obscurity, is that the earlier invasion was successful – a new king, William the Conqueror, sat on the English throne, and history was rewritten. But this was not the case a century and a half later, when the incursion of the putative Louis I of England was fought off. And the word ‘fought’ is very much the operative one, because it was a series of military engagements that stemmed and then turned a tide that had been very much in Louis’s favour.
