Longboats came and went but still the king's law ran the shires.

　　His churches and abbeys were built more beautifully than ever, and a town that would one day be called London was beginning to grow and prosper on the banks of the Thames.

　　Then one invasion succeeded where the others had failed, and there was a Viking on the throne.

　　His name was Canute, the man we remember for trying to hold back the tides.

　　While he turned Anglo-Saxon England into part of his vast maritime empire, he went out of his way to change nothing.

　　He even chose as his closest advisor one of the most powerful Anglo-Saxon nobles, Godwine, Earl of Wessex.

　　A scheming, ruthless man, Godwine became virtual co-ruler with Canute over what was still recognisably Anglo-Saxon England.

　　But with Canute's death in 1035 began a chain of events that would culminate in the one invasion that Anglo-Saxon England would be unable to swallow.

　　And what a saga it was.

　　It started with a bloody and unsparing fight for Canute's throne amongst the surviving elite.

　　Treachery, murder and mutilation were par for the course.

　　The last man standing with any kind of claim to the throne was a descendant of Alfred the Great, a prince of the Saxon royal house.

　　Called Edward, he would become forever known as The Confessor.

　　He was crowned on Easter Day, 1043.

　　He inherited more than just the crown.

　　He also got Earl Godwine, in no mood to lose power just because there was a new king.

　　Unlike Canute, Edward had good reason to hate the right-hand man forced on him.

　　For Godwine had arranged his older brother's murder.

　　There was nothing he could do about his bloodstained rival, not yet anyway.

　　He knew that Godwine held the keys to the kingdom.

　　When Godwine offered Edward his daughter in marriage, what could he do but take her?

　　Godwine was not Edward's only problem.

　　He'd also to learn how to govern a country he knew little about.

　　For he'd grown up in exile in a very different world across the English Channel in Normandy.

　　We think of Edward the Confessor as the quintessential Anglo-Saxon king.

　　In fact, he was almost as Norman as William the Conqueror.

　　After all, his mother Emma was a Norman and he'd lived here in Normandy for 30 years, ever since she'd brought him as a child refugee from the wars between the Saxons and the Danes.

　　But Normandy was not just an asylumfor Edward, it was the place which formed him politically and culturally.

　　His mother tongue was Norman French.

　　His virtual godfathers were the formidable Dukes of Normandy.

　　The Normans were descendants of Viking raiders, but had long since traded in their longboats for powerful war-horses.

　　The Duchy of Normandy was in no sense just a piece of France.

　　Though the Dukes did formal homage to the kings of France, they were fiercely independent, possessed of castles, patrons of churches.

　　These warlords were constantly in the saddle imposing their will on vassals, fighting off revolts and forging shaky coalitions.

　　But the duchy was also humming with energetic piety.

　　In the 11th century, handsome stone monasteries and churches with Romanesque arches began to appear.

　　Grandiose stone castles, as tough as the Norman lords who'd built them, became part of the landscape.

　　So until the throne of England tempted him back across the Channel at the age of 36, this was Edward's home, and while he was here a child was growing up who would change the course of British history.

　　It was at the site of this castle at Falles in 1027 that William, known to his contemporaries though not to his face as William the Bastard, was born.