Horse 1399 - Share A Coke And A Song...

... from 1066

Coca-Cola is running a neat promotion at the moment where if you buy a Coke and send in the relevant codes, you get to download a song from the year marked on the bottle or can. It is all very jolly.

At the beginning of 1066, the old king Edward who had a constant habit of doing really petty things, so  unworldly and pious was he and consequently he confessed to practically everything he'd done; evenb without being accused of anything. Complete chaos ensued after he died because the one thing he didn't confess was who was going to take over.

Eventually King Harold II became king and I remember just before my 18th birthday, in October of 1066, his government was looking for anyone to join the army so that we could drive back a French invasion force. They'd arrived at the Pevensey Vehicle Licensing Centre in late September and with a flurry of new tax discs on their horses and carts, they made for the city of Hastings' presumably for fish and chips.
No-one really likes the idea of being hacked to pieces in a field, but the landlord and local sheriff said that if we didn't, we'd be stabbed anyway and driven off our cabbage farm. Everyone knew that he was being paid £6 to raise an army which is a fantastic amount but we also knew that he'd be pocketing the lot for himself, so reluctantly we made the long trudge from our pathetic little farm, down a lot of narrow muddy, rutted roads in the English rain.

It was cold, wet and boggy and just outside the town of Hastings at a rather appropriately named place called Battle. Our mostly English army was led by that prize git King Harold and sponsored by the salt company Saxa (we will forever be called Saxans from now on). We met another mob led by the French king William The Bastard and his army with the most confusing roll call in history on account of every one if them being called Norman.
We started out by building a fort out of pointed logs at the top of the field and holed out there quite nicely. Most noblemen have their castles but being a rag tag rabble, we couldn't really build such a thing with only hours' notice.
As a stop gap defence, we did this neat trick of putting all our shields together, so that they formed a wall. Our "wall of shields" meant that their archers who were shooting their arrows from the field below, didn't really stand a chance.

Then for some odd reason it looked like they just gave up and retreated. Harold's idiot brother decided that we should go after them and after coming down the hill, we broke ranks, lost our wall of shields, and were massacred in the flat open fields by William's cavalry. Give up the high ground and you lose half the battle, which is precisely what we done did.
Not only did England get run by William and his Norman barons who couldn't even be bothered to learn English but we've been taxed to the eyeballs to pay for a war we lost. William gave himself a neat Christmas present by crowning himself King of England on Christmas Day 1066 and keeping with the tradition of naming things incorrectly had an embroidered cloth made (not a tapestry) in England (not in Bayeux).

So then, if you are looking to download some songs from my youth, have a look for these:
"What's it like to see a Wall of Shields?"
"We're kings of the hill" 
"Chase the Scaredy Norman"
"Don't call me Norman. My name's not Norman it's Norman"
"Why why why, did you get an arrow in the eye?"
"Mud, Merde, murder"
"You call him Conquerer, we call him Bastard"

You might want to download these songs soon because we're all being forced to learn Norman French or get stabbed and they're saying that by 1100 all the Saxon barons will be killed, which will sort of be strange justice for sending us to fight but not paying us, so we won't be able to download them anyway.