1066 The Year of the Conquest by David Howarth

Howarth’s book is a rather refreshing approach to history in that he does not attempt to feign the objectivity and transcendent stance that characterizes so many attempts at history and generally makes them rather unreadable at best, implausible at worst. Howarth feels little sympathy for the Normans and even less for William, who he refuses to even address by the appellation of Conqueror which history has foisted upon him. Instead, Howarth wears his loyalties and biases on his sleeve, and even opens the book with this rather remarkable explanation.
I find this particular approach to history as refreshing as it is honest. The notion that one can come at any period of history in a detached and objective manner is to completely miss the point of history. History is not merely a sequence of events, but is a tapestry of people filled with a wide variety of feelings, emotions, motives, desires, ignorance, and whatever else might characterize the human condition. History cannot merely be observed from a distance, because no one experiences any event in that way. To pretend to do so is to actually engage in a great fallacy, for it tries to make history something that it is not. In our experiences we have our biases, our ignorance, our responses to events and people that shape and color the way we view the world and the way we react to it. The notion that there can be a passion-less and detached approach to history strikes me as misguided and doomed to failure from the outset.
At any rate, Howarth’s writing style is superb. He weaves the narrative cleverly by means of using a sterotypical English village as a sort of foil for the progression of events and the common Englishman’s reaction to them. The village of Horstede is chosen to fulfill this role, as much for its generalized value as for its proximity to the author’s our home growing up.
Howarth begins with New Year’s Day of 1066 and moves through the year sequentially, dividing it up into convenient chucks of time to help the reader keep track of the various events as they progress. In the midst of the this narrative thread Howarth presents some brief biographies of some of the major players- Edward the Confessor, his successor King Harold, Duke William, etc.