#oooooooooooooooh i wish i could be succinct

[fumblingmusings]

Imagining a young Arthur thinking the Normans are irredeemable doomed for hell monsters from the moment they killed King Harold, made the heir Edgar and his sisters flee, wrecked Arthur's language and broke his legal systems, made 10% of his country a wasteland, killed over 100,000 of his people by starving them to death and leaving them freeze... All that horror from William I and II...

But then Henry I becomes King. He was born in Selby, not Normandy. He was a fourth son (like Arthur), set to inherit nothing and isn't trusted by any of his older brothers. He just maybe happens to be there with one of the said brothers is killed in a hunting accident (oh no....) and becomes King. He marries Edith, the daughter of Arthur's last Anglo-Saxon princess, ensuring that Alfred the Great's bloodline lives on. He uses the Anglo-Saxon justice and taxation system because it's still better than anything Norman. He puts Englishmen back in positions of government and the Church. Henry and Edith called their daughter Matilda aethelic when in private and gave their son William an Anglo-Saxon title of aethling... Those imported Norman aristocrats mocked them for it calling them 'Godric and Godifu' - that foolish King and Queen pretending to be lesser than. Playing at being English and not Norman.

But it works. Arthur and England are at peace for the first time in... a long, long long time. Yes northern France is a nightmare but what does Arthur care for that. These guys are stamping out slavery and serfdom... That's pretty stupendous. Plus, his way of life is winning out long term, not the Norman. At least, that's what he tells himself.

And having the thought that maybe his people and culture won't be as wiped out by this King playing politics in order to carve out his own space distinct from his brothers... little Arthur sees a little bit too much of himself in this guy. Only for Henry's only son to drown on a crossing from France back to England (trying to save his sister oh my God) and then it just sets the stage for the Anarchy upon Henry's death because god forbid Matilda is Queen like...

Point is I can see Arthur just going full on fuck it once Henry II becomes King (like what was the point of it all if Matilda's son was going to be King anyway). I like to think of it as the turning point from where he's a somewhat put upon forgotten about rainy droopy island that Vikings keep plundering to a nightmare himself. That desperation to prove himself, to be worth something, to take all that grief and pain and make it someone else's problem. It takes him 100 years after the invasion, but that's the point when the Arthur who used to hide in the woods from Denmark and Scotland disappears, and instead you get the Arthur who's... a bit of a giant hypocrite. And looks the other way.

The forcing a language on a population, the replacing the ruling class with loyal people, the leaving just enough of the old systems of government in place for purely pragmatic purposes, the use of scorched earth tactics if need be. Sometimes it feels like nothing changes.

What happened to him was wrong and yet what does England do to others for so long? I like the idea of an Arthur who learnt the wrong lessons from that invasion and thinks he was weak when it happened. Because to think otherwise would be to realise he'd done nothing wrong, and to realise that he was a victim.

And that's something Arthur just cannot be.

#oooooooooooooooh i wish i could be succinct #hetalia #hws england #headcanon #historical hetalia #op #there's this great book about the Norman conquest which talks about how the invasion was seen as so awful that the English people #did what most people back then did #they thought - we must have offended God so much he's sent us to this hell as penance. hell being the normans that is #the famous quote of “Christ and his saints were asleep” regarding the Anarchy... #how far had the people fallen that the Pope himself once called Angels (not Angles... get it. get it. oh the pun. Oh lord)