England, 1066: what if the other invading king had won?

The word “nostalgia” was first coined in the 17th cen­tury, from the Greek words for “homecoming” and “ache”. It was used to describe the homesick­ness experienced by Swiss mercenaries who were serving abroad for long periods. Literally, it means an ache or longing for home, but as much as home, it is a longing for the way things used to be, a longing for the past. It’s like a distorting mirror that scrubs away the unpleasant and lifts the mundane smells, tastes and feelings to the sublime.

Nostalgia is a powerful emotion that strikes often at the old, or adventurers, or expats. It was part of the reason why, then living in Hong Kong, I decided to write a series of books that examined England and Englishness through the stories surrounding 1066 and the Battle of Hastings, nearly a thousand years ago.

I might have been living on the 20th floor of a Hong Kong high-rise but I could imagine myself back in a field, kicking leaves, on a frosty autumn day. Or perhaps it was because I was living in a small Hong Kong apartment that I had to imagine myself in an English field. And so started a literary journey that has taken up the best part of a decade and spawned two novels, the second of which, Viking Fire (Little, Brown), has just been released.

As the nations of Britain tug at the bonds that have kept them together since the 1707 Acts of Union between England and Scotland, it seems a good moment to examine those relation­ships, and there’s nowhere better to start than 1066. The decades before were crammed with national heroes: Brian Boru in Ireland; the last Llewellyn to be king of all Wales; Macbeth, Duncan and the whole Shakespeare cast in Scotland; and, in England, there was Ethelred the Unready, Edward the Confessor, Harold Godwinson and then, of course, William the Conqueror. And their stories are all entwined. I wanted to capture that within the prism of fiction. ­So what, you might ask, is so important about a battle that took place 950 years ago this month?

It was late in the Battle of Hastings when King Harold II (Godwinson) was hit by an arrow. With his death, the English resistance broke and William of Normandy became king of England. That afternoon on a bare hillside, 95km south of London, was that rarest of occasions when the course of his­tory really did change, with repercussions that are still resonant.

William replaced the government and aristocracy with Frenchmen. French became the court language, English systems of gov­ernment and law were overturned and much of the 500 years of Old English literature, poetry and storytelling was lost, as Old English texts were cut up and used as, among other things, kitchen wipes.