The Sky is Falling! Halley's Comet, the Bayeux Tapestry, and the Four Portents in ‘Lady of the Castle’
On This Day in History, 1066 and the Terrible Portents in Lincoln, 1185
In the spring of 1066, something extraordinary blazed across the English night sky. For several weeks, a brilliant comet hung over England, visible even in daylight, trailing a luminous tail that stretched across the heavens like a wound in the fabric of the world. People stopped in the streets to stare at it. Monks recorded it in their chronicles. Kings, it was whispered, trembled.
They were right to. Within months, Harold Godwinson was dead, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England had fallen at Hastings, and a Norman duke sat upon the English throne. Whether the comet caused any of this is, of course, a question for a different kind of historian. But what it meant — that, the medieval mind had no doubt about whatsoever.
A Star With Hair
Bayeux Tapestry Comet detail
The word "comet" comes from the Greek kometes, meaning "long-haired star," and the medieval imagination ran wild with that image.
Comets weren’t merely astronomical phenomena; they were messages.
Written in fire across the sky by God, or Providence, or Fate, depending on which tradition you were drawing from, they announced upheaval.
Famine. Plague. The death of kings.
The comet of 1066 was what we now call Halley's Comet, named for the astronomer Edmond Halley, who in 1705 calculated that various historical comet sightings were in fact the same object returning on a roughly seventy-five-to-seventy-six-year orbit. The 1066 apparition was an unusually bright one, reaching its closest approach to the sun in late March and remaining visible to the naked eye through much of April. Contemporary accounts describe it as awe-inspiring and terrifying in equal measure.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded it with characteristic understatement: a star appeared, unlike any other, with rays streaming from it. But behind that restraint lay genuine dread. England in early 1066 was already a kingdom in crisis: Edward the Confessor had died in January, Harold had seized the throne, and the political air crackled with the threat of invasion from multiple directions.
The Monk Who Saw Destruction Coming
In 1066, Eilmer of Malmesbury Abbey predicted the comet meant the destruction of England. Months later, the Normans invaded.
On the 24th of April 1066, the comet became visible in the British Isles, and at Malmesbury Abbey, an elderly Benedictine monk named Eilmer looked up at the blazing tail and had a premonition.
Eilmer, also known as Aethelmaer, had seen this comet before. As a young man in 989, he’d watched it cross the sky. Now, some seventy-seven years later, here it was again, and Eilmer knew it for what it was. He is recorded by the twelfth-century chronicler William of Malmesbury as having addressed the comet directly, crying out:
"You've come, have you? You've come, you source of tears to many mothers."
And he warned that great calamity was coming — that the comet heralded the destruction of the country.
He was writing in real time, with no knowledge of what the autumn would bring. And yet, within six months, the Saxon world that monk inhabited, including its language, its laws, its aristocracy, its entire social order, had been swept away as comprehensively as any physical destruction.
He had looked up at the sky and seen, with perfect clarity, what was coming. Or so it seemed, in retrospect.
That is precisely how portents worked in the medieval mind: their meaning crystallised in the light of what followed.
Stitched Into History
We know how at least some people felt about the comet of 1066 because somebody sewed it into a tapestry: the Bayeux Tapestry, the extraordinary seventy-metre embroidered chronicle of the Norman Conquest that is coming to England for an exhibition soon, includes a scene with a group of men gesturing in awe up at a blazing star. Below them, a caption reads, in Latin: ISTI MIRANT STELLAM: "These men marvel at the star." And marvel they might: the comet is shown with a dramatically stylised tail, and beneath it, a ghostly fleet of longships seems already to be assembling.
Nearby, Harold himself is shown on his throne, but he is being told of the omen whilst the star blazes above.
The tapestry's designers understood exactly what they were doing. This was propaganda, deployed as evidence that Harold's reign was doomed from the outset, that God and the heavens themselves had declared against him.
The Earth below and the Sky above Lincoln, Spring 1185
The 1185 East Midlands Earthquake destroyed much of Medieval Lincoln
coincidences;
Within the space of a few weeks, Lincoln experienced one of the most violent earthquakes in English history, a lunar eclipse that turned the full moon the colour of blood, and a major solar eclipse that swallowed the sun in broad daylight.
Later in the novel, there are more portents: the shimmering crimson curtains of the northern lights blazing across a winter sky further south than many had seen before.
For the people living through those times, these were not coincidences; this was God’s warning.
The Earthquake
The earthquake struck at dawn on the 15th of April 1185, the very morning that opens Lady of the Castle.
Magnitude 5 or above, it was one of the most damaging ever to strike the British Isles, and its effects were felt as far away as Norway. In Lincoln, it was catastrophic. The cathedral, rebuilt only forty years earlier, was described in the chronicles as having been split from top to bottom. Only the great west front survived. Whole houses collapsed, and villages were obliterated entirely.
For Nicola and the people of Lincoln, there was only one framework within which such a thing could be understood: divine punishment. Earthquakes in the medieval mind were associated directly with God's wrath, with the language of the Apocalypse, with the shaking of the world that Revelation promised would accompany the End of Days. The earth does not move of its own accord; it moves because He commands it to.
The Blood Moon
Blood Moon over Lincoln
Within a day of the earthquake, the full moon turned red.
A partial lunar eclipse on the 16th of April 1185 — the day after the quake — tinged the moon the colour of dried blood. Its timing, coming less than twenty-four hours after the earth had convulsed, would have struck every witness as anything but coincidental.
The blood moon carried its own ancient terror. The Book of Joel promised that before the great and terrible day of the Lord, the sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood. The Book of Revelation echoed it.
This is how I’ve drafted this moment in Lady of the Castle:
Night and day they heaved great masonry, lifted fallen pillars, and sifted rubble. Unable to eat, unable to sleep, Nicola was there, too, haunting the ruined cathedral, hefting stones with thick leather gloves, heaving buckets of dust, bringing ale to the men.
It was on the second, ice-cold night that the pale disc of the moon turned the colour of blood. The change came slowly, a bruising at the edges, until the rubble below glowed copper and the white dust on the men's backs ran red as a wound. Hands stilled. A bucket thudded down. The heaps of broken stone, the toppled pillars, the dark mouths of uncleared arches all ran the colour of rust, and every upturned face burned red. A woman dropped her bucket and crossed herself. A priest fell to his knees in the dust and began the Miserere. The singing spread, low and broken, until the whole ruined nave was full of it.
Everyone recognised God’s sign: Lincoln, of all places on earth, had been marked for punishment, like a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah.
The Solar Eclipse
The Solar Eclipse over Lincoln only two weeks after the Earthquake and the Blood Moon
Two weeks later, on the 1st of May 1185, the sun itself went dark.
A major solar eclipse crossed northern Europe — described in the Welsh chronicle as the sun changing its colour; documented in the Chronicle of Melrose as a moment when stars appeared in the daytime sky. In the novel, this eclipse falls on the day of the funeral of one of Nicola’s children, plunging the graveyard into an unnatural twilight at the very moment his coffin is lowered into the ground.
Three portents, in rapid succession. The earth shook. The moon bled. The sun went out. Medieval people had a word for this kind of accumulation: it was the language of the Last Days. That monk who looked up on the 24th of April 1066 and saw a country's destruction would have understood immediately what the people of Lincoln were feeling in May 1185. The sky was speaking again.
The Northern Lights
When the Northern Lights were seen so far south at the time of King Richard’s disappearance on return from crusade, people recognised it as an evil portent
Later (and featuring in the novel), more strange lights appear in the sky.
By Christmas 1192, Richard I had vanished on his return from crusade. He’d left the Holy Land in October and was captured near Vienna shortly before Christmas by Duke Leopold of Austria, though the full certainty of his fate took time to reach England. In that atmosphere of rumour and dread, a display of northern lights would have felt like more than beauty. It would have felt like a warning.
When the aurora appeared so far south, medieval observers often reached for the language of fire, blood, armies and heavenly conflict. The sky didn’t just glow; it issued a threat. Red light in particular carried the emotional weight of bloodshed, death and divine anger.
In Lady of the Castle, the gathered Christmas court has just left church when the heavens blaze:
Outside, a crowd had gathered. “Look!” somebody cried, pointing to the sky.
People gasped. Someone fell to his knees, shouting something in Latin.
Nicola looked up in awe. She’d never seen anything like it. Great shimmering curtains of light hung from the starlit night sky: greens, blues, and pinks, glowing and glimmering like a veil guarding the entrance to another world. She shuddered. The lights were stunning, almost intoxicating in their intensity, but the lower edge of the trembling riot of colour flared and burned in a fiery crimson, staining the skies as if blood were spilling out of Hell.
Maud de Braose started to howl. “Look! It’s a portent of death!”
Her husband wrapped his arm around her. “Hush, Maud, hush.”
“King Richard’s dead!” Maud cried. “He must be dead!”
Maud is wrong in the literal sense. Richard isn’t dead. But in another sense, she understands exactly how portents worked. The kingdom is leaderless, the king is missing, and the sky has turned crimson. For a medieval crowd, that was enough. The heavens had spoken; all that remained was to discover what disaster they’d foretold.
The earthquake, the blood moon, and the solar eclipse are all real historical events from 1185, and all feature in Lady of the Castle. If you'd like to explore the world Nicola inhabited further, you might also enjoy Lady of Lincoln, where her story begins.