Howard of Warwick's THE DOMESDAY BOOK (NO, NOT THAT ONE)

If your favorite bit of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was phrases like "the ships hung in the sky in exactly the way that bricks don't", have I got a book for you.

If you love the Blackadder series but don't think it was quite farcical enough, have I got a book for you.

If you love the History Channel's drama Vikings but think the characters depicted aren't stupid or violent enough, have I got a book for you.

If you love The Hallelujah Trail but wish it could have been set in the days of the Norman Conquest of England, have I got a book for you.

Howard of Warwick, famed for the Brother Hermitage books, a series of comic medieval mystery novels I'm definitely going to have to have a look at sometime, is your man, and The Domesday Book (No, Not That One) is your book. Set in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings and featuring a ridiculous cast of historical and made-up figures, it's a deeply silly read that can easily be described in one choice excerpt:

From the north of Wisbech a cart load of Vikings. From the south a cartload of Normans. In the middle a band of wounded Saxons riding hell-for-leather. Well, riding as fast as most of their injuries would allow, which was actually pretty slow.

The Vikings have been dispatched on, of all things, a rescue mission; the Normans on one of capture; the Saxons, including a man of high repute wounded in the eye-or-thigh, are the targets of both. Because, you see, the knight who triumphantly brought King Harold's body to William the Conqueror's tent after the Battle of Hastings brought the wrong body, but this was not noticed until a lot of crowing and woofing had been done, and now the demented and homicidal William is demanding the real thing, loudly and violently... but in complete secrecy. Of course.

The story is mostly told from the points of view of two Saxons, Mabbut, drafted to act as a local guide for the Normans even though he's not really ever been to England, having grown up in France in the mistaken belief that his family are hostages (actually, his parents just like France better); and Siward, a village idiot and "filth man" kidnapped by the Vikings for the same purpose, even though he's never been a mile or two from home. Hilarity, mostly in the form of death threats and impatience with ignorant rustics, ensues in both storylines.

It's all deeply silly, though not quite in that Monty Python way you're probably hoping for. There's fun to be had here, but the fun is mostly for history nerds, I suspect.

I am one of those, so I laughed, often.