Lesson video

Hello, it's Mr. Charles here, ready for another history lesson.

And this is lesson two of our inquiry question, which is, how did a Norman become king of England? Today we're going to look at a very famous date, which is 1066 and the build up to it.

And we'll be focusing a little bit more on England today rather than Normandy.

And we'll also look at what succession crisis is and what that means.

And what you need to make sure you do is get a pen and paper or something to write with.

And also make sure you're in a quiet place and you're free of all distractions.

So if there's anything that could possibly distract you from this fantastic history lesson, then please make sure it's away from you now.

You need to pause the video to make sure you're ready, then please do and then press play when you're ready to continue.

Now you're all ready, and you're free of distractions.

Let's kick off the lesson.

So what we've got on this slide, we've got the image of a man.

And I want you to think about who this man might be, and what job maybe he does.

And you can even think about that for a second or two.

If you need to, you can pause the video, and then we'll just go through.

So what I'll do is I'll just draw attention to some parts of this picture.

Now this image is actually been created fairly recently.

This isn't an image from 1000 years ago.

But nevertheless, the illustrator who has made this image has looked at what kind of man this person was according to historical sources from the time.

So there are a couple of things I want to draw your attention to.

For one, we can see a cross which he is holding and this is a symbol of catholic Christianity.

So we know that this person is religious.

The second thing I want to draw your attention to, is some of the clothes that he's wearing.

There are different colours, they look fairly expensive, one might say, and they're not rags.

And we know that this person is probably someone from the upper parts of society.

And lastly, I want to draw your attention to the thing on his head, which is the crown.

Now, this is actually the image of someone who was a king of England at one point.

His name was Edward the Confessor.

And today in this lesson, we're going to be looking at who he was, and what kind of mess he maybe left behind, once he died.

So, if we have a look here, we can see that Edward the Confessor, I've already mentioned that he was once a king of England, he was a king of England, between 1042 and 1066.

So when he became king was 1042 when he died, it was in 1066, that famous date I mentioned at the start, that's in the title.

Now, as I mentioned, that image is from recently, so it's not something that was actually from 950 plus years ago.

And another thing we should mention as well about Edward is that he had a legitimate claim to the throne.

So he was a rightful ruler of England.

There was nothing controversial, or funny or odd about him becoming king.

He was absolutely meant to become king and he was king.

Something else, he was the son of Ethelred the Unready and Emma of Normandy.

Ethelred the Unready was also a king of England, that was his father.

And he was given maybe a bit unfairly, the name, The Unready, because of his poor advisors.

That led to some maybe poor decisions, and is also the son of Emma of Normandy.

Now, Emma of Normandy, we know about Normandy because we looked at Normandy last lesson, and we know that William is from there.

Now William is actually the great nephew of Emma of Normandy.

So Emma is a lot older than William, but she was the great aunt, if you will, of William.

So, Edward didn't have any children as a king, which is a little bit odd, because quite often kings want to make sure that their children will then become king or queen, and so on and so forth.

They want to keep the power in the family.

But Edward didn't actually have any children, which meant they were going to be problems when he died.

And as mentioned, he died in 1066.

And we call this as historians, a succession crisis.

So succession crisis, is when there is no clear king or queen to follow the previous one.

So it's not clear who will be the next king.

So this relates to our inquiry question of how would a Norman or how did a Norman, sorry, become king? It relates to that because we're thinking, who became king and how, after 1066, after Edward the Confessor's death.

So this is our zoomed-out timeline of the Norman invasion, where we've got it here in 1066, is when it happened that's in the 11th century.

And obviously, we know today is the 21st century.

Now, this is our zoomed-in specific timeline.

So again, we're just looking at the 11th century.

So in these lessons, we're not going outside of that, we're just looking at the 11th century.

So it's anything with a 10 in front of it.

So the first thing we've got on there and something we learned last lesson is that William becomes Duke of Normandy or became Duke of Normandy in 1035.

Then, in 1042, Edward became king of England, that's something we've just learned.

And something I'm about to go onto, in a couple of slides time, will be Edward's family tree.

And he actually marries someone called Edith Godwin in 1045.

And then something we haven't looked at yet, but we will start looking at 1066 very shortly, is the Norman invasion and the succession crisis as well that is mentioned in the title, that will also be happening in 1066.

So just take a moment to take stock of this timeline, and just what we know so far.

We looked at Normandy last lesson, and today's focus is going to be more on England.

We can see that Normandy and England are not too far apart.

The sea in between them is called the English Channel.

Now, England is where Edward reigned over, that's where he was king.

And we can also see that it's all that red bit where the arrow is pointing to.

We can see that Wales and Scotland are not part of England's political rule.

They are separate countries at this time, okay.

So Wales and Scotland, is not like today where they're a part of the something called the UK, the United Kingdom.

They are not part of that, the United Kingdom is not a thing in the 11th century.

All there is is England, and that's all Edward is in charge over.

So England in the 11th century, we need to have a little look at what it looked like to be in England in the 11th century.

So we know it was ruled by King Edward the Confessor, we know he ruled from 1042 to 1066.

We now know where England is, it's that red shaded part there on the map.

Now, the population is 1.

5 to 2 million people.

And its size is 130,000 kilometres squared, so fairly large, still not as large as some countries around the world.

And its army size, I've put here 13,000 at most.

Now it's very hard for historians to get an exact number of say, the amount of people in England at the time or the exact amount of people they had in their army.

So we're working really with estimates here.

And it doesn't necessarily mean that any battles they go into, they're always going to have 13,000 troops, they might have less than that.

This is just a rough estimate to tell you about how much of an army they can raise.

It should be remembered that even though you're looking at this, and it says 1.

5 to 2 million people, you think there's quite a lot of people in England there, well, why can't they raise a bigger army than that, only 13,000.

And this is partly because lots of people in England at the time, the vast majority of people, they worked on farms, where they did farming.

And farming is seasonal, and it requires a lot of work.

So you couldn't have people just staying in the army when there was no wars or battles going on.

So you mainly had to have people work in the farms and on occasion, sometimes you might get some people joining the army in times of need.

But they didn't have just a massive army at all times because people were too busy working the field.

Lastly, how rich, it was fairly rich country, had lots of raw materials, lots of things to mine, and it had a good tax system as well.

So they were able to take in money from tax and therefore the king, in this case, Edward the Confessor could decide to build a nice castle or a nice palace or something like that.

As a pause point, you can pause this video in a second.

And I just want you to copy down in your books or wherever you are writing, three facts that you think are most important from the fact file above.

So it's your choice of what three facts, three facts you think are most important, from the fact file above.

Pause your video now to do that.

Now here we have Edward the Confessor's family tree and there's three families I really want to have a look at, within this family tree.

So one is the yellow one, which is Normandy.

And there's a bluey one, which are the English kings.

And there's also a purply one, which I'll come to in a second, which is the Godwins.

So we all know people marry in to a family.

Now, in the 11th century, this wasn't always for love, but quite often, it was for power.

Because a family could maybe marry off their daughter or son to a different family, and that would make an alliance or a friendship between those families.

So quite often in the mediaeval age, people did this.

So we can see that Normandy, Emma of Normandy, has got married to an English king called King Ethelred, Ethelred the Unready who we looked at earlier.

And they have had a son, and that son is King Edward the Confessor.

And King Edward the Confessor, it should be noted, was a very, very religious man, and maybe he didn't have time for children or maybe it was never a priority because he was devoting his life to God.

But we can see that, he actually never had a child.

There's no lines coming out of Edward and his marriage to Edith, there's no children to Edward the Confessor.

Maybe partly because he was a deeply religious man.

Now, the last family I want us to have a quick look at is the purple family, which is the Godwins.

Now we can see that King Edward the Confessor married someone called Edith Godwin, Edith Godwin was the daughter of someone called Harold Godwin.

And Edith was also the sister of someone called Harold Godwinson.

Now the reason Harold Godwinson is called Godwinson and not Godwin is because he is Earl Godwin's son, hence, the name Godwinson.

So, to re-emphasize that, King Edward the Confessor is married to Edith Godwin and her brother, is Harold Godwinson, and this person is particularly important for what we're going to look at shortly.

Harold Godwinson was from Wessex.

On this map, you can see England, it has lots of different areas and they're all in red.

So Northumbria is up in the north of the country.

East Anglia is in the east, Wessex is in the West, the southwest of the country.

And this is where the Godwin family and Harold Godwinson, that's where their power originated, that's where their house is from.

So, as I mentioned, Harold's father was particularly powerful.

And Harold Godwinson inherited his title once his father died.

So Harold Godwinson was a noble and he was also particularly powerful.

He was friendly with particularly in the South many other nobles.

He had Great military expertise, and he was also a very good politician.

Often we think of Kings as being the most powerful person in the kingdom.

And that is true, and it was probably true with Edward.

However, Harold Godwinson was, maybe this man behind the throne who had a lot of power, and Edward had to be very careful about keeping him on side.

What you're all going to look at now, is a little bit more information about Harold and his relationship with Edward, and also what happened in 1066 with this succession crisis, when there was no clear next king after Edward died.

So what I want you to do, is pause this video and click onto the next bit of the website, and please read through the information and then answer the five questions towards the end.

There is also a challenge question where you can expand a little bit on your answer, but that's what you need to do now.

So you need to just pause the video and come back to this video when you're finished with the questions.

Well done guys, awesome effort, really well done with reading and also with writing down your answers as well.

So what we're going to do, we're going to go through the answers now, and I'm going to give you an acceptable answer, and I'm going to give you a good answer.

A good answer often has maybe better punctuation or spelling, and also adds a little bit of extra information and is in full sentences.

So the first question was, where did Edward the Confessor spend some of his time when he was younger? And the acceptable answer is, he spent time in Normandy.

However, a really good answer would be if you add a little bit more to that.

So Edward the Confessor spent time in Normandy when He was young, this was to escape from Viking power struggles in England.

At the time, when before Edward actually became king, there were numerous problems with who was king.

And there was quite a tussle between different people over who was King of England.

And it was safer in some ways for him to spend some time in Normandy, which remember is where his mother, Emma of Normandy was from.

Question two, why was there a succession crisis in 1066? The acceptable answer is because Edward had no children, so no one knew who would be king.

But the good answer would be, there was a succession crisis in 1066, because Edward the Confessor didn't have any children from his marriage with Edith Godwin, therefore, there was a crisis because no one knew who would be the next king.

And this is what a succession crisis is.

It really is when no one knows who will be the next king because it's not clear.

Normally, if you are a king, then you would have your oldest son, would ordinarily become the next king.

However, Edward didn't have this.

And I say, son, and that's just because this is the mediaeval times, society was quite sexist, and women weren't given an equal chance quite often.

Okay, question three, which two people were thinking about invading England once Edward died? So an acceptable answer would be the two people thinking of invading England were William and Harald Hardrada.

If you just want to add a little bit of extra information there, a good answer would be, the two people thinking of invading England after Edward died were William of Normandy and Harald Hardrada, who was a Viking.

There's a tiny bit of extra information there, we're saying William of Normandy and we're mentioning that it was after Edward died, that's when they'd invade.

And also Harald Hardrada who was a Viking.

Vikings were from Scandinavia.

If your answers aren't looking exactly like this, do not worry, because quite often even teachers, as I've said before, can do things totally different to each other when they answer a question.

But if you just make sure you maybe write in, if you've maybe not added in some extra information, then that'd be great, you're doing superb so far.

Okay, who decided Harold should be the next king? The acceptable answer is the Witan decided.

The good answer would be putting a capital W, at the front of the Witan.

So the Witan decided that Harold Godwinson should be the next king.

They were a group of powerful English nobles and church people, they did this when it not clear who would be the next king.

So this doesn't happen in every country, or any mediaeval country.

This was particular really peculiar to England.

So there was a group of powerful English nobles and church people, people high up in the church, and they were deciding who would be the next king in the event that Edward the Confessor would not be able to.

And sometimes they decided other things as well.

They were like a council who decided things, and they decided obviously that Harold Godwinson should be the next king.

Question five, why did Harold think he should be the next king of England? So the acceptable answer is, Harold thought he should be the next king because the Witan had chose him.

The good answer, however, would be that Harold thought he should be the next king of England because of two main reasons, one reason is that the Witan chose him as the person to lead England and the second reason is that Edward chose him as king on his deathbed.

That was really crucial.

And clearly there could be some debate potentially about this.

Some people would question whether he did or whether he was even thinking straight if he was on his deathbed, but Edward the Confessor, apparently, according to Harold chose him to be the next king.

And lastly, we got a challenge question, what was Harold's relationship with Edward like? So an acceptable answer would be, to say that they had a mixed relationship.

Harold had a mixed relationship with Edward.

Sometimes they got along, sometimes they didn't.

But there's a little bit more information you can definitely put into that.

So a good answer would be, Harold and Edward had a mixed relationship.

Harold was extremely powerful in England, and so Edward had to be careful.

If Edward kept Harold on his side, it would be easier to rule England.

However, Harold had rebelled against Edward before, that was in 1051 I believe.

And Edward knew that Harold was someone who wanted to increase his power.

Therefore, once again, Edward had to be careful in case Harold opposed him again.

So there is a real mix of feelings really about this relationship.

There was really Edward, who maybe didn't always like him that much, remember Harold had rebelled against him but equally at the same time, he would have struggled to rule without Harold.

Because Harold was such a powerful man in England at that time.

Really well done on all those questions, guys.

Fantastic stuff and this is going to be the last exercise we do before your exit quiz.

So we're looking at how strong Harold's claim to the throne of England was.

So some people would argue that actually Harold had quite a weak claim to the throne.

And if we're looking what claim to the throne means, which is what we looked at earlier.

I'll read out the definition again, claim to the throne is someone's reason or evidence why they should become king or queen.

So someone, for example, might say about me, Mr. Charles, they might say, you've got quite a weak claim to the throne.

And I do, and it's because for example, I'm not related to the royal family in any way, shape, or form.

Not that I know of anyway.

You never know after this lesson, I might come back as King Charles, you never know.

So I would have really quite a weak claim to the throne of England.

Now, as I say, some people thought Harold's claim was quite weak.

On the other hand, Harold thought that he had quite a strong claim to the throne of England.

He thought, "Yeah, it's absolutely right "that I should be the next king." So what I want you to do, I want you to create a table like the one below, where on one side you've got Harold had a weak claim to the throne of England, and on the other side you had Harold had a strong claim to the throne of England.

And I want you to come up with reasons why Harold might have a strong or a weak claim to become king of England.

There are two points that have already been done for you.

So, if we go on the left hand side first, Harold had a weak claim to the throne of England.

You could say one reason for that is that he only had a claim to the throne, because he was extremely powerful.

If he wasn't that powerful, he probably maybe, I'm not saying for definite, but he might not have been able to have the throne at all.

So he only really had that claim because he was quite powerful.

On the other side, you've got Harold had a strong claim to the throne of England.

And one of the reasons for that might be well, the Witan had chosen him, which gave him more legitimacy.

It made him more the rightful ruler.

So it meant the nobles of England supported it, which increases his claim.

The more people that support you probably the better.

So that's what I want you to do, come up with as many reasons as you can for Harold having a weak claim to the throne, and Harold having a strong claim to the throne.

As a challenge, if you want to test yourself, overall, do you think Harold had a strong or weak claim to the throne of England? You make your own decision.

So pause the video now and play again, when you've completed the task.

Okay, well done guys, awesome stuff.

So we're just looking at this table.

And this is a table I've made and maybe you've got some extra things you've added in or things I haven't even thought about.

So do not worry if you've included one or two things that aren't in there.

Or maybe I've worded it in a slightly different way.

It doesn't have to be worded exactly the same as mine.

You're all fantastic, I'm sure you've done a great job.

So let's start on the left, let's Start with reasons why maybe some people would say Harold had a weak claim to the throne of England.

So we've mentioned that he maybe only got it because he was an extremely powerful noble.

Another reason he might have a weak claim to the throne is that he was not a blood-relative of Edward the Confessor.

You know, he was only distantly related.

Edward the Confessor was his brother in law.

He was only related in some way because his sister married Edward the Confessor.

Another one, Edward had only said it on his deathbed.

So he may not have been thinking straight when he made that decision to supposedly make Harold King.

And lastly, on the left hand side, Edward's nephew would be a better option for the throne as he was related by blood, even if he was, or is at that time, very young.

We have to remember that Edward did have a nephew, but the Witan and thought that actually it would be too risky to put someone so young on the throne, hence why they opted for Harold.

On the right hand side, reasons why Harold might have a strong claim to the throne.

So we know the Witan gave him a bit of extra legitimacy.

They chose him, people supported him, particularly powerful people.

Another reason, the second one, Edward had chosen him to become king on his deathbed.

That's a big reason.

The King choosing his successor in the event that he has no children, that grants Harold some legitimacy.

The third reason, he was related to Edward, even if it was distantly related.

So the fact he was related at all, at least that's something is not like he's just some random person who's been plucked from Northumbria, all of a sudden, hey, you can be king of England.

It wasn't like that, he's at least related to Edward and knows him well.

And lastly, he was an Englishman.

That may help him have a stronger claim to the throne.

And that's unlike William of Normandy, who remember came from what is now France from Normandy.

And Harald Hardrada, someone who we only very briefly mentioned here, but who's from Scandinavia.

So the fact he's an Englishman maybe also gives him a strong claim to the throne.

And that's the end of the lesson guys.

Well done, you've completed Lesson two of four in our inquiry of, how did a Norman become king of England.

What I need you to do now, is I need you to do the exit quiz.

So click on to the next part of this lesson, and you'll be able to do that.

And also, I would like you to just think a little bit about what were maybe two or three things, you think you've really found interesting from this lesson.

So just look back at your notes, what two or three things are you going to have a look at, and really try to remember for next time.

What you need to do as well or what actually you can do, it's not a need at all, but what you can do is, you could ask if you're able to obviously, ask your parent or carer to share your work on any of those social media platforms, as of course, I'd love to see your work.

And I'm sure you'd love to show off.

So that's only if you're able to and only if you want to, but you must ask your parent if they're okay with first.

Okay, that's it, see you next time.