SPOILER ALERT for anyone who hasn’t seen King & Conqueror!

I’m going to assume that Osprey blog readers are history buffs, at least generally familiar with English history leading up to and including the pivotal year of 1066. For the rest of you, spoiler alert: they don’t call it the Norman Conquest for nothing. Everybody knows how the BBC’s miniseries King & Conqueror is going to end. The question is whether such historical dramas measure up to the story.

I like to think I’m a bit beyond “history buff” status on this subject. My very first magazine article, back in the early ’90s, was on the 1066 Battle of Hastings, and I’ve written two books for Osprey on the era: The Last Viking and Battle for the Island Kingdom. For some 30 years this movie has been playing in my head, and I’ve been looking forward to seeing how King & Conqueror compares.

Unlike, say, Vikings: Valhalla, which rather took a number of historical figures and events and threw them together in a muddle verging on fantasy, K&C largely sticks to the historical script, probably because every Brit alive was taught the story in school. I’m not going to recap it beyond the general outline: the childless King Edward the Confessor is said to have promised his throne to both England’s Earl Harold of Wessex and Duke William of Normandy. The Anglo-Saxons claimed that Edward, on his deathbed, promised it to Harold, but the Normans claimed that he had already promised it to William. Who was right is still a matter of opinion, since there were no witnesses to William’s acceptance, and no unbiased witnesses to Harold’s. K&C takes a very pro-Norman viewpoint, as do most of the historical records, not least because after the Conquest taking Harold’s side was considered treasonous, a shortcut to the executioner’s block. History, as they say, is written by the winners.

The series takes its biggest liberties in creating a years-long friendship between Earl Harold and Duke William in order to increase the stakes at the end. In reality, as far as we know, they only met twice, once in Normandy about a year before the battle and again – briefly – at Hastings itself. That’s just one of K&C’s many historical inaccuracies, but then every historical drama has those. The key word is drama. It’s entertainment, not a documentary, and if you rail at every little incorrect detail you’re not going to enjoy it much. I very much wanted to enjoy K&C, and I did, at least at first.

My Battle for the Island Kingdom starts at the dawn of the millennium and chronicles the decades in which the Vikings Svein Forkbeard and his son Cnut the Great made England part of their North Sea Empire. King & Conqueror picks up the story about halfway through the century, after Cnut has died, his empire has sundered and England has reverted to Anglo-Saxon rule. A brief exposition on that would have helped explain the mutual dislike between the pro-Viking Earl Godwin, the pro-Norman Queen Emma and her half-English son King Edward. The show really didn’t go into Godwin’s part in the betrayal and murder of Edward’s brother “Aethel” (actually Prince Alfred, son of King Aethelred the Unready). I suppose to delve too far into that would distract from the main Harold-William story, but it might have explained why those three acted as they did.

A number of the characters’ personalities were changed for dramatic purposes. Edward the Confessor was indeed a religious ascetic, but not quite the holy-rolling nut depicted. Although the enmity between him and Emma was real, he didn’t kill her. He didn’t have to. He simply relieved her of all her power and banished her to her country estate far from court. I’ll grant that K&C’s take was more dramatic.

When researching Battle for the Island Kingdom I did not find Harold Godwinson to be the relentless schemer depicted in the series. He more or less had to play the hand he was dealt, which sometimes involved hard choices. His big brother Sweyn Godwinson wasn’t such a whiner, nor was he outwitted by Harold; he was a thoroughly malicious aspiring earl who kidnapped a nun, murdered his cousin and screwed up his life all on his own, without his brother’s help. On the other hand, Harold’s little brother Tostig was not as inept as shown; he was in fact sent north as Earl of Northumbria to tame the unruly half-Viking locals, which he did with such a heavy hand that they eventually rebelled. His wife Judith did not die in childbirth, either. She lived for another 30 or so years after 1066, remarrying and becoming Duchess of Bavaria. The actual Morcar of Mercia was little more than a boy at this time. His army was destroyed by Tostig and Norwegian king Harald “the Hard Ruler” Hardrada at the Battle of Fulford (fought totally off-screen in the series). He did not march the survivors all the way down to Hastings only to betray King Harald by staying out of the battle. Finally, Hardrada – near and dear to my heart as the subject of The Last Viking – is depicted as almost a caricature of evil. As I showed in the book, by this late stage in his life he was certainly no saint, but neither did he decide to invade England out of sheer malevolence. He felt he had a claim to the throne equal to Harald’s and William’s.

For me, where the series went off the rails was the depiction of the Battle of Stamford Bridge, between Harold on one side and Tostig and Hardrada on the other. The English certainly surprised the Vikings, not in the dawn attack depicted, but by appearing on the field after a 200-odd mile forced march that few other medieval armies could have matched. Stamford Bridge was the biggest battle in English history to that point, in which Vikings and Anglo-Saxons stood toe-to-toe to decide the future of the Island Kingdom. Who wouldn’t want to see that? Maybe a bunch of chain-mailed warriors chopping each other to pieces would have lessened the impact of Hastings, in the next episode, and the producers saved their budget for the historically more important battle. A shame.

Personally, I would have loved to see that nameless, legendary lone Viking warrior, as recorded by several English chroniclers, who temporarily held Stamford Bridge against the entire English army (even if it never happened). Likewise the Norman minstrel Taillefer, whose famous end, riding out between the armies at Hastings to die in single combat, ensured his place in history. Maybe, hopefully, those scenes are still on the cutting-room floor and we’ll see them in a director’s cut.

But to skip the famous pre-Stamford conversation between Harold and Tostig, in which the king offered his estranged brother half the realm to call off the battle, is practically a crime against both history and drama. To make up for it we get Harold, however improbably and ahistorically, personally killing both Hardrada and Tostig, the latter by accident, conveniently absolving him of fratricide.

Likewise, good storytelling requires Harold to die heroically at Hastings, but only due to Morcar’s treachery, and be slain by the Conqueror himself. That last part, at least, is more or less true, though it wasn’t such a one-on-one fight; Harold was essentially ridden down by William and three other horsemen. That said, I liked the way the series resolved the whole arrow-in-Harold’s-eye controversy. (It’s depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry, but according to eyewitnesses never happened, being a later invention by Norman writers and French embroiderers.)

There was some unintentional comedy, as when Sweyn tells Harold to “pull his head out of his arse.” I laughed out loud when Tostig introduced himself as “Tostig Godwinson, son of Godwin,” in case that wasn’t clear, and I yelled at the TV, “Harold, clean that bloody sword before you stick it back in the sheath!” And Duke William’s mustache is entirely too ’70s. The Normans were clean-shaven, even the backs of their heads, so much so that Harold’s emissaries took them to be an army of monks and priests. It was the Anglo-Saxons who were mustachioed. (Geoff Bell, as Earl Godwin, pulls off the most authentic look with his handlebar ’stash and Prince Valiant haircut.)

All in all, I did enjoy King & Conqueror, even if I question some of the producers’ edits to history. To me, the decades leading up to 1066 have more than enough human interest, betrayal, love angles, bloody wars and sheer drama to satisfy any audience. If you want the real story of those decades, look no further than Battle for the Island Kingdom. It’s a Military History Matters Magazine Book of the Year nominee, and is available from Osprey in hardcover, paperback, e-book and audiobook. Free sample chapters and links to buy are available on my website.