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The Guardian
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
This month's best paperbacks: Mick Herron, Armistead Maupin and more
My Battle of Hastings Xiaolu Guo Delightfully frank and moving This is the third memoir by Xiaolu Guo, who grew up beside the East China Sea where her grandfather was a fisherman. When she inherited some money from the sale of her parents' house in China after they both died of cancer, Guo begins looking for a place to live and work on the South Coast of England. Having lived in London, she missed 'the salty wind, the contour of shorelines, and the ceaseless changing waves in the viewfinder of my eyes'. Guo eventually settled on 'rain-stained dilapidated' Hastings, which she describes as 'a cursed place but, at the same time, sexy, mysterious and somehow quintessentially English'. Her modest requirements are a 'sea view and a tub' in which 'to soak my body in the endless cold English evenings'. She moves into the tiny top-floor flat in December 2021. Divided into the four seasons, the book is an account Guo's first year in a run-down part of the seaside town. Discovering a copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in a second-hand bookshop, she also buries herself in the ancient history of the area. Aware that the locals seem uninterested in their city's remote past, she wonders why she, 'a Chinese immigrant to Europe, a woman with neither power not any Western ancestry', should care about the fate of King Harold or the invasion of the Normans in 1066. After visiting a re-enactment of the Battle of Hastings ('a strange and wonderful idea'), she concludes that a country that is able to view a great defeat from its past as an entertainment for families, reveals a detachment from its history that would be unimaginable in China: 'I must admit that this is one of the good qualities the British have.' As well as exploring Anglo-Saxon history, Guo describes the challenges of her new life, such as renovating the cold and damp flat, as well as the pleasures, including walks in the countryside to gather wild garlic for cooking and visits from her partner and 9-year-old child, Moon, who collects shells on the beach. Her chronicle of life in Hastings with its 'loudly crying seagulls' becomes a wonderfully evocative meditation on migration, history, war (two months after she moves in, Putin invades Ukraine, which she compares to the Norman Conquest), and politics (after the third prime minister in a year, she concludes 'the country which I have adopted as my home cannot be saved'). Guo's delightfully frank and often moving memoir is also a poignant exploration of identity and belonging. At one point she memorably compares herself to a jasmine seed blown in the wind: 'we drift and then we land somewhere, we try to grow in its soil…We either germinate or turn into dust.'
The Independent
28-01-2025
- General
- The Independent
How a royal loo helped track down the lost palace of England's last Anglo-Saxon king
Archaeologists have discovered the site of the long-lost palace of England's last Anglo-Saxon king. Using a combination of ground-penetrating radar, data from past archaeological excavations (including a medieval loo) and information from an 11th century artwork, investigators from two UK universities have succeeded in locating the political headquarters of King Harold ii, the English monarch who was defeated and brutally killed at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The archaeological investigations - carried out in and around the village of Bosham, near Chichester, West Sussex - has revealed that Harold's royal palace complex covered around an acre and consisted of several buildings including a large timber hall. Located next to a harbour and a church, it was surrounded by a 250 metre long 3 metre wide moat. But the new research also has potential implications for understanding where Harold may have been buried. He is the only English monarch whose final resting place is uncertain. Traditionally, he is often said to have been buried at Waltham Abbey in Essex. But some medieval sources provide information that would be more consistent with him having been buried adjacent to his palace. Indeed, in 1954, the remains of a high-status Anglo-Saxon man were found under Bosham church - but have never been scientifically tested, despite several aspects of the Individual being consistent with what is known about Harold and his death. The village of Bosham: The palace complex has been identified through multiple strands of evidence. Firstly, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle indicates that Harold's palace was located in or near Bosham. Secondly, the Bayeux Tapestry - the 11th century embroidered pictorial account of the Norman conquest - shows Harold approaching a very high-status building in Bosham. But those medieval sources do not show precisely where the palace was in the Bosham area. However, a recent re-analysis, by archaeologists from the universities of Newcastle and Exeter, of archaeological data from Bosham, have managed to pinpoint the exact location of the palace - by identifying clues indicating a very high-status Anglo-Saxon building - clues which include a substantial moat, evidence for a large tiled building (as illustrated in the Bayeux tapestry) and an internal en-suite loo, a feature in the Anglo-Saxon era normally only associated with very high status buildings. Although Harold is famous for being England's last Anglo-Saxon king, he only reigned for just over nine months. His defeat and death at the Battle of Hastings was arguably the single most significant event in English history - because it totally and permanently changed the political, cultural, legal, social and linguistic nature of England and ultimately of Britain and much of the wider world. However Harold's violent demise was part of a wider phenomenon of endemic political and military violence throughout medieval Europe. Indeed the 1060s - the decade in which the Battle of Hastings was fought - saw literally dozens of wars raging in virtually every part of Europe including France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Hungary and of course England. What's more, the defeat of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066 was part of a complex international geopolitical series of conflicts. William was supported by the vast German empire (also known as the Holy Roman Empire), the Kingdom of France and the Papacy. Harold was just supported (perhaps even militarily) by Denmark - and perhaps politicly by Ireland. The geopolitical situation was further complicated by there having been no less than four claimants to the English throne in 1066 - William, Duke of Normandy (who won the Battle of Hastings), the Norwegian king (Harald Hardrada); Edgar, an Anglo-Saxon teenage prince who was the grandson of an English king who had died half a century earlier); and of course Harold (who had no royal blood but had been elected as king of England by the English 'Witan' - a sort of national parliament). The new research, published this month in The Antiquaries Journal, was led by Dr Duncan Wright, Senior Lecturer in Medieval Archaeology at Newcastle University in association with Professor Oliver Creighton of the University of Exeter. The original excavation at Bosham, which has provided much of the key evidence for the search for Harold's palace, was carried out by West Sussex Archaeology. "Looking at all the evidence, it is beyond reasonable doubt that we have now identified the location of King Harold's main power centre, the one famously depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry,' said Dr Wright. The research at Bosham was carried out as part of an important wider Newcastle University and the University of Exeter research programme, the Where Power Lies project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project aims to explore the origins and early development of aristocratic centres like Bosham, assessing for the first time the archaeological evidence for such sites throughout England.
