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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
Muriel of Lincoln
Nicola de la Haye held Lincoln Castle against a French siege and saved England, and everyone remembers her name.
Almost no one remembers her grandmother.
Muriel of Lincoln didn't lead armies or defy kings in any spectacular fashion, but without her calculated survival and strategic positioning, there would be no Nicola, no legend, no castle defense that changed the course of English history.
This is the story of the invisible foundation upon which greatness was built.
The Survivor's Daughter
After 1066, most Saxon lords lost everything—their lands, their titles, their entire futures disappeared as William the Conqueror handed England to his Norman knights like spoils of war.
But Muriel's father, Colswein of Lincoln, somehow managed to keep his holdings, and the Domesday Book provides the documentary proof of this remarkable survival.
This wasn't luck or accident—this was cold, hard value in the eyes of the new regime. The Normans needed more than swords and intimidation to actually rule England in any sustainable way; they needed local networks, local loyalty, and men who could make occupation feel less like conquest and more like legitimate governance. Colswein was one of those rare men who proved too useful to destroy, whose cooperation was worth more than his elimination.
And the fastest, most permanent way to lock in that kind of usefulness? Marriage between the old world and the new.
