4 Quotes by Marc Morris

But they also awarded a quite respectable 55th place to Enoch Powell, thereby demonstrating that, for certain sections of the population, being an unpleasant racist constitutes no bar to greatness.

The muster roll for the 1300 campaign noted that Hugh fitz Heyr, a Shropshire landowner of little consequence, was obliged by the terms of his tenure to serve in the king’s war ‘with bow and arrow’. It also noted that ‘as soon as he saw the enemy he shot his arrow, then went home’.

Indeed, the point of the famous story about the king and the waves, as originally told, was not to illustrate his stupidity, but rather to prove what a good Christian he had been. ‘Let all the world know’, says a damp Cnut, having conspicuously failed to stop the tide from rising, ’that the power of kings is empty and worthless, and there is no king worthy of the name save Him by whose will heaven, earth and sea obey eternal laws.’2.

According to another contemporary author, writing in the 970s, the king ordered that thieves and robbers were to be punished by having their eyes put out, their ears ripped off, their nostrils carved open and their hands and feet removed, before being scalped and left in the open fields at night to be eaten by wild beasts and birds.