WELCOME TO RACHEL’S FICTION WRITING AND REVIEWS BLOG
This is where Rachel keeps you up to date with her novels and stories and also shares reviews, highlights and extracts from other authors.
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.
The Saxon Secret to Avoiding a Bad Ruler
What if the worst rulers in English history didn't have to happen?
Bad kings - the weak, the cruel, the catastrophically incompetent - weren't inevitable. They were the consequence of a system that handed the most powerful job in the kingdom to whoever happened to emerge from the right womb in the right order!
Primogeniture, succession by (male) birth order, gave England Edward II, whose personal failings and political incompetence ended in his deposition and probable murder. It gave England Richard II, whose erratic tyranny triggered a constitutional crisis and cost him his throne. It gave England Henry VI, whose mental collapse plunged the country into thirty years of civil war. These weren't accidents of fate. They were what happens when a system prioritises birth order over every other human quality.
But before the Normans locked this system in place, the Anglo-Saxons did something far more interesting.
The Aetheling System: Choose the Best, Not the First
