Nicky’s Comments (group member since Jul 30, 2013)

Nicky’s comments from the Ask Carol McGrath group.

Oh, and welcome Elizabeth! Lovely to see you on here.

I think regarding John and Arthur the major issue was always going to be age. John was in his majority by some years and Arthur was a child. There was no set precedence as to whether brother 2 of the deceased king or son of brother 1 had the greater claim. I believe in Brittany it was the latter and the former in Anjou which really muddies the water. Similar issues occurred with Richard II and Henry Bolingbroke and cue the Wars of the Roses.

There was strife in the continental lands. A boy king was not as secure as a full grown man and the threat was, I believe, that Arthur would follow Philip Augustus and then if anything happened to him Philip could claim all the continental holdings as overlord and leave England with no heir. John would have been in a very precarious position himself as a failed claimant to the throne and heaven knows what would have happened to him had he fallen into Arthur's hands, and thus Philip's.

So I do believe that Arthur was doomed, one way or another due to his age. A man could fight. A child and a woman, Constance his mother, were never going to prevail. Arthur's sister was considered so dangerous she remained under house arrest for the rest of her life in Bristol, comfortably yes, and John showed her his usual generosity in gifts, but she was a prisoner. Arthur's fate was therefore sealed the moment Richard died.

Ironic that through John, the one no one likes, that we have Edward I and Edward III, two of the great Medieval English kings, and through him, unintended by him of course, we have a monarchy that is answerable to its people.

Zoe wrote: "Alan Rufus resigned his post as commander of the siege of Saint Suzanne (more on that another time, perhaps) in about 1085. Over Christmas 1085, King William met with his Council (surely including ..."

Hi - have to correct you on a few Domesday Book points - ICC was not a trial run, it was a neat copy of the full returns for that area written by several scribes when it became apparent that it would never reach the Domesday Book scribe to be included in the survey. Had it been a trial run then Domesday satellites such as Exon Domesday (proven to be earlier version of the great Domesday book entries) would follow the same format - they do not. Little Domesday follows the exact pattern and rubrication of Great Domesday except it is not written in the full contracted form probably known only to the one scribe - the one who wrote up the entirety of Great Domesday.

Your suggestion that Count Alan was influential in the survey is OK, can't be proved or disproved, however, the bishop of Durham, William of St Calais was far more likely to have been the driving force behind Domesday Book. He was instructed by King William to make a new entry in the Exon returns, written by one of his own Durham scribes, and it was another of the Durham scribes who wrote the Great Domesday book, all of it - there are at least three other manuscripts in the Durham library written in the same hand. William of St Calais was also known to have been directly involved in at least two circuits of the survey (the circuits being the means to divide the country to make the inquisition manageable - there were probably seven in all).