1066 and the birth of two nations

What the Normans did to us

Gerald Grosvenor, the 6th Duke of Westminster, when asked by a journalist what advice he’d give to a young entrepreneur hoping to become rich, gave the helpful suggestion: ‘make sure they have an ancestor who was a very good friend of William the Conqueror’.

The late duke’s forebear Hugh d’Avranches, nicknamed ‘le gros veneur’ or the ‘fat huntsman’, had been given lands by Duke William in Cheshire, and in the 1170s his descendent Robert le Grosvenor was granted the manor of Budworth in the county. The Grosvenors still have their seat, the Eaton Estate, in Cheshire and when the duke passed away in 2016 he left £8 billion to his son. A very good friend, indeed.

The Conquest which enriched Hugh and many others had been disastrous for the native aristocracy. As historian Elisabeth van Houts put it, ‘No other event in western European history of the central Middle Ages can be compared for its shocking effects: the carnage on the battlefield, the loss of life and the consequent political upheaval.’

Those who survived Hastings were thrown off their land, and by the time of the Conqueror’s death just 5 per cent of England was owned by the natives, with between a third and half of the country shared out between 170 Norman barons, and the rest going to the king and the Church; there were just two English major landowners left by the times of the Domesday Book. The English were also removed from the upper echelons of the Church, and by the end of William’s reign there was just one English bishop out of 16, and a decade later even he was gone.

The new Norman elite were absurdly wealthy; according to a Sunday Times estimate a few years back, William's half-brother Bishop Odo, who was given the entirety of Kent and land in 21 other counties, was worth £43.2 billion in today’s money, which would put him ahead of the most rapacious kleptocrat. The conqueror’s other half-brother, Robert, Count of Mortain, was worth £46.1 billion while William de Warenne a staggering £57.6 billion. The new king was richer still, although these kind of historical comparisons come with a million caveats.

Bringing with him a new ruling class composed of French aristocrats, William has often been blamed for creating lasting class conflict in England, some of which can be traced to the present.

The divisions between Normans and Saxons has long been a theme of English political discourse. In his 1999 book Things Can Only Get Better, Labour Party activist John O’Farrell wrote how ‘The Normans of Fulham still drank wine and owned land in France and the Saxons of Fulham still drank ale, used “Anglo-Saxon” vocabulary and tended small strips of land behind the playing fields.’

O'Farrell was echoing Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, the 1845 century novel of British class divisions which came to inspire the concept of ‘one-nation politics’. Disraeli’s idea that the country was divided into ‘two nations’ originated, he said, with ‘the conquerors and the conquered’.

He was certainly not alone. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, published ten years later, the northern factory owner Mr Thornton proudly declares his Saxon roots, stating that ‘I belong to Teutonic blood; it is little mingled in this part of England to what it is in others; we retain much of their language; we retain more of their spirit.’ He was not, he was affirming, a toff, a Frenchman.

A generation earlier, one of Britain’s most popular novels, Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, told the story of a heroic Saxon being hounded by the country’s Norman rulers while brave King Richard is off on crusade. The 19th century was a high watermark for English national self-confidence and pro-German feeling, and it was during this time that the Robin Hood myth, originally set in the 13th or 14th century and about economic discontent, was transferred to the 1190s and featured a Saxon rebel resisting a Norman elite.

There was a sort of real Robin Hood, a charismatic 12^th century London demagogue called ‘William long beard’, who ‘plotted great wickedness in the name of justice, a conspiracy of the poor against the rich’. At public rallies ‘he proclaimed himself the king of the poor, and their saviour,’ and also called himself the ‘advocate of the people’; at St Paul’s he argued that the rich should bear the burden of financing the crusade.

In reality, this populist agitator was a university-educated Anglo-Norman with the embarrassingly aristocratic name of William Fitz Obsert, but chose to play down his origins and instead grew his hair and beard in tribute to his Saxon ancestry. Today he would almost certainly be a Just Stop Oil activist.

By that point, the division between the two groups was starting to disappear. While a judge in 1157 could speak of ‘we Normans’ needing protection ‘against the wiles of the English’, just 20 years later crown treasurer Richard FitzNigel observed that ‘the races have become so fused that it can scarcely be discerned who is English and who is Norman’.

By then everyone could speak English fluently, and under King John in the early 13^th century the reference to all subjects, ‘Angli et Franci’, was finally dropped from royal charters. John, through his disastrous ineptitude, had lost all his possessions in Normandy, so forcing the Anglo-Norman elite to cut their ties with the continent. By this point their version of French had also become a laughing stock to Parisians, which must have helped reaffirm their sense of Englishness.

Yet the political idea of the two nations, Saxon and Norman, remained powerful. Walter Scott might have written anti-Norman propaganda, but even the Harry Potter series follows the tradition, setting the Anglo-Saxon named Potter and Weasley against the very Norman-sounding Voldemort and Malfoy. The Normans have become synonymous both with snootiness and Frenchness, which to many Anglo-Saxons are the same thing

Anglo-Saxonism as a political idea is relatively ancient. In the middle of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, riotous villeins threatened to ransack the Abbey of St Albans unless they handed over charters from the time of King Offa of Mercia in the 8th century proving that serfdom had not existed in those halcyon days. The abbot was left to plead helplessly that such a document obviously did not exist, but the mob could not be reasoned with.

After this violent outpouring of rage against government and foreigners, King Richard II, the last monarch to speak French as a mother tongue, crushed them ruthlessly, telling them ‘Rustics you were and rustics you are still; you will remain in bondage not as before but incomparably harsher.’

Many on the parliamentary side during the English Civil War saw their struggle as being for the restoration of Saxon liberties taken away by a foreign tyrant. Gerrard Winstanley, leader of the Diggers, wrote in his pamphlet The New Law of Righteousness, which advocated a sort of Christian Communism, that: ‘Seeing the common people of England by joynt consent of person and purse have caste out Charles our Norman oppressour, wee have by this victory recovered ourselves from under his Norman yoake.’ Thomas Jefferson would also identify with the defeated of 1066, and Thomas Paine warned that Americans under the Crown would be ‘ourselves suffering like the wretched Britons under the oppression of the Conqueror’.

It’s true the Normans were not exactly compassionate rulers. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded that after 1066: ‘When the castles were built, they filled them with devils and wicked men... they levied taxes on the villages... they robbed and burned… noble maidens were exposed to the insults of low-born soldiers, and lamented their dishonouring by the scum of the earth’.

However, contrary to Winstanley's fantasy, pre-Norman England was not an egalitarian paradise. The ancestors of those peasants in King Offa’s time indeed weren’t serfs, but slaves, as were between a tenth and a quarter of the Anglo-Saxon population before William abolished the institution.

The Norman Conquest brought England into France’s orbit, and it would remain culturally dominated by its neighbour for centuries, imitating its manners, fashions and language, although its arguable that this was going to happen anyway. France in the Middle Ages had a population four or five times as large as England, and its cultural power over the island long preceded 1066. As early as the sixth century, the cultural influence was felt in Kent with their conversion to Christianity through the efforts of a Frankish queen, and even grave diggings from the period point to Frankish influence in fashion. Many of the words which entered the English language from French pre-date the conquest, among them bacon, and most of those that followed came much later. Certainly the Conquest introduced England to more French influence in language and architecture, and it most likely made the country richer, increasing trade with the continent.

But there is an argument to the class theory. In The Son Also Rises, Gregory Clark observed that, even in 1800, people with Norman surnames were eight times as likely as the general population to be Members of Parliament, although that has narrowed since. Research published in 2011 found that people with Norman surnames are still richer than the population as a whole, by some 10 per cent on average. Of course the effect shouldn’t be exaggerated - the Grosvenor family have been especially astute at managing property and making well-chosen dynastic matches down the years, and the late duke was simply employing the self-effacing humour typical of the English aristocracy.

Among Clark’s findings was that Englishmen with Norman surnames were especially prominent in the military even four centuries after the Conquest, playing a prominent role in the later stages of the Hundred Years’ War, and they certainly remained so afterwards.

Almost nine centuries after the Conquest, an enormous armada was launched in the opposite direction, the British forces in the 1944 invasion of Normandy led by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery - his ancestor Roger de Montgomery having made the reverse trip with William. Bayeux, home to the famous tapestry, was captured by the British on June 7, and at the graveyard of the 56th British infantry division which took the town, there is today a Latin inscription which reads: Nos a Guillelmo victi, victoris patriam liberavimus: ‘We, once conquered by William, have now set free the Conqueror’s native land.’ The ferocious duke, no doubt, would have been proud of his descendants, both Norman and Saxon.

The UK edition of my book 1066 is published next month. Buy it here and make me as rich as a Grosvenor