Settings: 1066 and All That (The Time Meddler)

The Chase was originally intended as the second season finale, and that’s apparent from watching it. This, however, means that The Time Meddler feels a little like a season opener, even though it takes the finale slot. It’s another episode where opinions tend to differ between older and younger fans, with the former holding it up as a particularly strong episode and the latter often finding it more middling. 

What can’t be denied, though, is that it’s a significant story in the ongoing development of the series. Most notably, perhaps, it’s the first of what fans refer to as ‘pseudo-historicals’ – stories set in the past that nonetheless have science fiction elements other than the presence of the time travellers themselves. Later, that will usually be the presence of monsters, but here, it’s arguably more low-key. It’s also much closer to the sort of story that time travel RPGs tend to focus on… and not just because it’s set at a particularly memorable moment in history.

Where & When

The story is set in late August or early September 1066, a few weeks before the Battle of Stamford Bridge. It takes place in and around a village on the coast of ‘Northumbria’ – then a term for essentially the whole of northern England. Although never named in the story, the village might correspond with a place named “Scarðeburg” in a Viking saga about the life of Harald Hardrada – often assumed to be present-day Scarborough. If not, it’s somewhere close by.

Setting

First, a bit of historical background. In January 1066, Edward the Confessor, King of England, died without an heir. The nobles awarded the crown to his brother-in-law, Harold Godwinson, but two foreign rulers both claimed that they were the rightful king, invading England almost simultaneously that autumn. The first, Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, scouted out the northeast coast of England before sailing up the Humber and seizing the city of York. The English forces under King Harold engaged with Hardrada’s Viking troops at the Battle of Stamford Bridge on the 25th of September, defeating them.

Unfortunately for Harold, just two days later, the other claimant, William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, landed his force at the opposite end of the country. Harold rapidly marched his army 240 miles to Sussex, where the exhausted warriors were famously defeated at the Battle of Hastings on the 14th of October.

Elsewhere, for context, the Normans rule not only Normandy but also the County of Apulia in southern Italy. Burgundy is still a significant power lying between France and Germany, the Holy Roman Empire still includes Rome, the Byzantine Empire rules most of the Balkans, and most of present-day Spain and Portugal are Muslim. The Scandinavian kingdoms are already well-established by this point, as is England itself. The latter, however, is smaller than today, with the Welsh border lying further east and what is now Cumbria in northwest England still being a part of Scotland. 

The story takes place somewhere along the east coast of Northumbria. This is a large area, covering most of England north of the Humber, and the story doesn’t give any specifics. According to a Viking saga about the kings of Norway, Hardrada first landed somewhere called “Scarðeburg”, generally claimed to be modern-day Scarborough. So it could be that the village is near there… but equally, since Harald himself doesn’t land in the story, it could be somewhere further north.

Scarborough lies on a natural harbour between cliffs not unlike those depicted in the story. The oldest archaeological record of the town dates to the 12th century, when the castle was built, but it’s hard to imagine that there wasn’t something there earlier, even if we discount evidence from the saga (if nothing else, the Romans had built a signal station there). Moreover, the village of Falsgrave lay just a mile or so inland from the harbour. It’s now merely a district of Scarborough, but significantly, we know that it existed as a Saxon village prior to the Norman Invasion. That evidence comes from The Domesday Book, which states that the population was just twenty in 1086. However, it had been partially destroyed around 1070 during the Harrying of the North, so it might have been larger before that. 

While this is hardly proof – and it’s unlikely the writers had anywhere specific in mind – it is at least consistent with what we see in the serial. We’re told that the villagers are farmers, as we would expect, but they also have a decent supply of meat from animals they have caught, including venison, and Edith implies that they also spend some time fishing off the coast. Plus, they have mead, which implies beehives. While Wulnoth has a sword, indicating some degree of status, the others are armed with weapons we’d expect of non-noble hunters: spears, knives, and shortbows.

The buildings we see are typical of Saxon housing at the time, with wooden walls supplemented by wattle-and-daub and thatched roofs. They are single-story and single-room, with a central hearth beneath a smoke-hole. Archaeological evidence suggests that the floors of such buildings were often sunken below ground level, possibly as shallow storage areas covered by boards.

The villagers, however, would not be ‘peasants’ in the sense we usually think of them from the later medieval period. In Saxon times, they were ‘carls’, free men not directly in service to their lord as later peasants would be and with legal rights that their successors would have lacked. They would have paid tax to a thane in a nearby manor house, although he’s not in evidence in the story – perhaps he’s off fighting somewhere, or the manor isn’t as close as we might suppose. Although hardly emancipated by today’s standards, women seem to have enjoyed more freedom than they would in later centuries.

Where the village in the story departs from real-world knowledge of Scarborough/Falsgrave is the presence of the monastery. Edith says this has been deserted for ‘a hundred years’ but she’s no historian, so she could easily be off by a few decades. Most likely, it was abandoned after a Viking raid, as many monasteries were at that time, including some far more significant than this is implied to have been. Since Scarborough, and Yorkshire in general, was under Viking rule until 954, the chances are that the monastery is younger than that, although it must have been empty for at least Edith’s lifetime (i.e. prior to the 1030s, if she’s the same age as her actress).

Assuming we don’t just want to make something up, an alternative here is to move the story further north to Streanæshalc (now Whitby). Hardrada probably at least sailed past it, although his saga doesn’t specifically record the fact, but historically it did have an abandoned monastery at the time. A counterargument is that the real-world monastery in question had been in ruins for not one but two centuries, making it hard to believe that it was even remotely habitable (the current abbey was founded in 1078). 

We don’t see a panoramic view of the monastery, but the limited angle that we do get suggests two intact buildings and at least one roofless ruin. One of the buildings is a typical Saxon-era wooden structure that we never see the interior of, but the main one is built from stone. This fits, as ecclesiastical buildings were among the few non-fortified structures made from masonry in the era. 

We mostly see what look to have been living quarters on the inside. While there must be a chapel somewhere, the largest room we see lacks an altar, and the sarcophagus there is fake, so it probably isn’t that – it could be the old refectory. While the structure appears to have two stories from the outside, we never see the upper floor; decades of abandonment would likely render it unsafe to use anyway. 

Two particular places are significant from a game perspective. One is the alcove holding the gramophone player, with remotely triggered bars to capture intruders. As shown, this wouldn’t be of much use against a party of PCs, although a larger room with a similar trap on the doorway might prove more effective. The other is the cell in which the Doctor is imprisoned, which conveniently has that most D&D of accoutrements – a secret door.

The door leads to an underground passage that surfaces some distance away in the woods. It’s overgrown with tree roots, as one might expect given how long it has been abandoned. Together with the low roof, this would make it difficult terrain (or the equivalent term) in most systems, but it’s not exceptionally difficult to traverse. 

We can also note that the Monk has a few electrical devices in the monastery. These are powered via cabling that should be relatively easy to follow, since it could hardly be concealed. The characters in the story don’t think to do this until they see the main cable coming out of the time machine, but it doesn’t change much if the PCs manage to trace it from further away.

Looking briefly at the surrounding landscape, it’s mostly wooded, as one would expect at the time, although the village has some fields that we don’t see. The Monk’s cannon is set up on a clifftop overlooking the North Sea and close to where the Viking scouts make landfall. The height of the cliffs is difficult to judge and would vary along their length anyway, but 50 metres (165 feet) is a perfectly reasonable figure for their real-world counterparts. There are at least two traversable paths (although the Vikings don’t find them) about a mile away from the village. 

We are, for what it’s worth, about 50 miles (80 km) north of the Humber, the estuary that Hardrada will use to reach the River Ouse and march on York - the nearest city, and the most important in northern England at the time. Stamford Bridge, where the battle will eventually take place if history stays on track, is a similar distance inland as the crow flies. 

The local weather at this time of year would be cool, with a typical daily range of 10 to 16 °C (50 to 62 °F), so it’s little wonder that Vicki feels cold sleeping outdoors at night without a blanket. There’s also at least some rainfall about one day in three.

Scarborough may have a nice beach in the summer, but it’s not California.

Scenario

Unlike many other historicals of the Hartnell era, this story is about time travel itself and only works in that context. While the original relies on the main characters being there by coincidence, it also lends itself to games where the PCs are employees of some kind of Time Agency that protects the timeline, since that’s the whole point of the plot. If they are random tourists, we need some reason for them to oppose the Monk’s schemes, but unless history is specifically unchangeable in the game setting, that shouldn’t be hard to arrange.

The Monk plans to destroy Hardrada’s fleet before it can land, killing most of the Vikings in the process. If he succeeds, the Battle of Stamford Bridge never happens and, so he believes, Harold Godwinson will be victorious at the Battle of Hastings. His plans after that are a bit nebulous, but, without a Norman dynasty, he expects to avoid the Hundred Years War and use centuries of peace to create a technological utopia.

This is, to be honest, unlikely to work in the long term – although it’s perfectly plausible that somebody with the Monk’s ego and ambition would think otherwise. There are a great many reasons for this, but from a game perspective, all that matters is that reversing the result at Hastings would have untold effects on British history and eliminate whatever world the PCs hail from. This should hopefully be motivation enough, even if they aren’t time agents.

The precise details of the plot in the serial don’t matter too much. We don’t, for example, need to split the party and have some of them try to rescue the others. We probably want to change the fact that the Monk is the only villain, since a party of PCs would likely deal with him in short order. The character that replaces him in a non-Who setting could have a team assembled from his native time, acting as security, scouting out particular areas, infiltrating Harold’s court, and so on. Equally, he could have recruited locals to his cause, since what he’s trying to do is directly beneficial to the Saxons and would save many English lives.

For that matter, if he has a team, he could have used them to take a group of real monks hostage, keeping the fact secret from the villagers. This would clearly require a different approach from the PCs once they work it out. 

While it is possible to use the same basic plot with the PCs being native to the period rather than time travellers, it’s not necessarily a good idea. If they’re Saxons, they have no reason to stop the Monk and, even if they initially oppose him for some other reason, they might decide to carry out his plan anyway once they have defeated him. From their perspective, after all, he’s just trying to defeat Viking invaders; if they do work out that he’s going to defeat the Normans as well, they have even more reason to help.

If, on the other hand, the PCs take the place of Sven, Ulf, and Gunnar as Hardrada’s scouting party, then they have the challenge of defeating the Monk without any help from the villagers. While that isn’t a problem, and having Vikings encountering 20th-century (or whatever) technology provides some interesting role-playing opportunities, an eventual victory may feel hollow. All they’ll have done is ensure that their fellows get defeated at Stamford Bridge a few weeks later; once the scenario is over, they lose either way.

Away from the time travel plot, however, there are plenty of opportunities for PCs, time-travelling or otherwise, to become involved in the events of the day. Viking raids were less common by the mid-11th century than they had been previously, but Hardrada’s invasion was not unique, nor even the last of its kind. A scenario could easily involve the PCs defending against – or participating in – a Viking raid with fewer nation-conquering objectives. Or we could move south and take in the Battle of Hastings three weeks later. Here, time travellers might need to rescue someone or recover an artefact, whether from the battle itself, or the skirmishing around London that followed it.

We don’t meet any real historical figures in the serial but, especially if we extend the story further afield, that might not be true in-game. Harold Godwinson, newly crowned King of England, is in his 40s, married with several children. (It may be worth noting here that we have no idea what happened to this family after the Battle, which may provide some scenario opportunities.) 

King Harald “Hardrada” Sigurdsson, sometimes considered the last true Viking monarch, was a former mercenary and military leader of noble birth who had led, according to his saga, a very eventful life, much of it in exile in Byzantium and what is now Russia. At the time of the invasion, he was probably in his early 50s and had only recently given up trying to conquer Denmark. His right-hand man in the invasion was Tostig Godwinson, King Harold’s exiled brother - who had spent most of the previous year plotting vengeance against his kin. So, plenty going on there, then.

Rules

The early medieval period of Saxon rule is probably less familiar to most people than the ‘High Middle Ages’ of later centuries, but it’s still not especially exotic. The tech level is 1 in Traveller, 2 in Doctors & Daleks, and 3 in GURPS, although not everything we would associate with medieval technology or architecture exists yet. 

Many Vikings did not wear any armour at all except a helmet and perhaps some leather, which is roughly what we see those in the serial wearing, and the Saxons were not much different. Wealthier and better-equipped warriors on both sides would have worn chainmail, sometimes just as a short-sleeved shirt, but often a fuller hauberk reaching to the knees with a coif under the helmet. Weapons consisted of broadswords and spears, with a dagger as backup; a great many Vikings favoured single-bladed axes as well. Most warriors would have used shields, usually medium-sized and round, although the heavy Saxon infantry favoured tall kite shields, as did the Normans. 

More significantly, we might also want to consider the atomic cannon. Ideally, this won’t actually be fired, but one can never be certain. What we see in the serial looks like a mortar and fires shells that remind Steven of neutron bombs from his own time. (This seems an odd choice, but the name ‘atomic cannon’ suggests the writers probably meant it to be taken literally.) 

But we don’t need to stick with that and can easily substitute it for any long-ranged science fiction weapon that could take out a wooden longboat… probably not a tall order. It’s the sort of detail we can probably handwave away unless we’re actually going to use the thing in a naval battle; for most purposes, we can say a ship is destroyed without having to specify how many hit points it would have had. 

In that light, we may as well just pick something suitable that already exists in the relevant game system. In Traveller, for instance, a PGMP-13 is probably adequate since that has a range of 1.5 km. Other systems may have laser or blaster cannons, rail guns, or high-tech missile launchers, any of which could fulfil the required function.