Welcome to the British History Podcast. My name is Jamie and this is episode 376.

Lost years and lost lands.

This show is ad-free to remember support and as a way of thanking members for keeping the show independent,

I have for members only content including extra episodes and rough transcripts.

And right now on the members' feet we're talking about William of Normandy and the world he was raised in.

We just launched episode 3 which focuses on his guardians, the men who were tasked with governing Normandy while William was too young to rule.

And it was also their job to make sure William had the proper training to become the man who would be in the future.

And I'll let you decide if they did a good job.

And you can get instant access to that episode and all the other members' episodes by signing up for membership at the British History Podcast.com

For about the price of a lot of money and thank you very much to Chris, Sigurd and Cam for signing up already.

Things are moving quickly in our story now.

Pieces are moving into place and the board is shifting rapidly.

Thanks to the benefit of hindsight we can see where this is going and see how these events are leading to a calamity that's just a few years away.

But for the people living through it, the events of these years were chaotic and tense and there wasn't a clear outcome that it was driving towards.

Their world was on the edge of a knife.

I mean just think about the uncertainty we've been discussing that surrounded the years of 1057 and 1058.

To the north you had King Malcolm Bighead warring against King Lulach over the throne of Scotland.

And to the south you had the English court desperately trying to arrange an error for the throne.

And then trying to work out what they were going to do once their perfect choice, Edward the Exile, up and died mere days after arriving on English shores.

I mean that's wild and some folks on our Reddit community have been speculating if Edward had been assassinated.

And to be fair, that wouldn't be the first time someone was murdered over a throne.

But so far no one's fessed up and honestly plenty of people during this time got sick and died while traveling.

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