The historian Michael Wood tells a story of winning an essay competition at school about the conquest. He had argued that it was bad for England. As a result of winning he somehow found himself invited to dinner in the House of Lords by Montgomery, who had liked the essay but wanted to argue that the conquest had, in fact, been a Good Thing. Wood goes along, all intimitated as a teenager would be, and sits there listening to Montgomery speak and is, of course, too nervous to argue back. But then he recounts a moment when, looking at Monty talk, it all clicks into place. He realises: 'He is a Norman!' 1066 is still alive.
Someone once published a brilliant novel about this period but I can't recall the title right now ...
Occasionally I am still haunted by the 'what if?' question around the Battle of Hastings. If only William had not survived that fall from the horse ...
I have a sense that he felt indestructible after defeating Hardrada. His own brothers, and all his advisers, told him to wait for reinforcements; or even not to head the army himself. But he rushed off, and not only did he die, but all his potential English successors did too. What was the hurry? It's a haunting question.
Isn’t it also fascinating that here we are almost a thousand years later, still ruminating this - and what it meant. Our history would be very different and I would probably be in Normandy now! Historical roots are deeper that we like to think.
Peter Rex's (non-fiction) book 'Hereward, the last Englishman' is very good. I used it as a source for my novel. I hadn't heard of this one. I will add it to the list. I'm sure it is an easier read.
Walter Scott had a soft spot for the Saxon exiles, I think it was Count Robert of Paris set at the time of the First Crusade where the hero is an exiled Varangian guard. Otherwise we don’t really know much about what happened to them and their descendants.
Kievan Rus was very much a part of Christendom in the 11th century. Edward the Exile, a grandson of Aethelred the Unready displaced by the conquest of England by Canute ended up taking refuge there (and also in Hungary) for a while. And a daughter of Yaroslavl the Wise became Queen of France.
There was an article about the boundary between the two areas by Steph Mastoris in the Thoroton Society Transactions, vol 85,1981, but I can't find it online.
“The Shortest History of England” has a couple of nice lines about the new Norman elite being “Up on their high horse” - because they literally were, whenever they encountered a local - and so “Looked down their noses” at the peasants.
Let’s not forget though that the Anglo-Saxons had themselves once formed an elite, crushing the Britons with force and then returning to their mead-halls to celebrate. They proved themselves still excellent at smiting the enemy in 1066 at Stamford Bridge, then yomped the length of the land to narrowly lose against these chevalier geezers.
Personally, I believe the AS spirit lived on after 1066 in the navy, among the seasoned foot soldiers and among artisans like, er, toolmakers. Was it Ed who once wrote that the Norman cavalry officers probably learnt to speak English in order to interact with their sergeants on the field of battle? As a rule of thumb, I think of the current British Army like this: officers, Normans; NCOs, Saxons; private soldiers, Britons.
I believe there is no consensus that the Anglo Saxons 'crushed' the Britons. The traditional view was the the Anglo Saxons invaded and violently displaced them. On the other hand the current, left-influenced view in the academy is that it was a peaceful migration and merging of communities ( to use the words of an academic on a BBC podcast a couple of years ago, the native Britons were somehow 'choosing their identity' in becoming English-speaking subjects of English rulers). Presumably the truth is somewhere in between and there would have been a lot of nastiness for the Romano-British communities on lands coveted by Anglo Saxons, but also the incomers were presumably wise enough not to wipe out entire prosperous communities where it made more sense to just rule them or trade with them, especially where the Anglo Saxon's own numbers were limited . 'Empire and Barbarians' by Peter Heather gives a good detailed non-ideological view of all the late Roman Empire migrations and has a chapter on Britain.
Fair point. Personally, I suspect there was peaceful migration into Norfolk and thereabouts in the later Roman period, after the Romans outsourced eastern coastal defence (against Picts paddling down the shoreline from the Firth of Forth) to the Saxons. Then, when Roman Britain collapsed down to a London+ rump, the AS became the G4S to the frightened Romano-Britons, who then either ran out of money to pay their bodyguards, or who were ousted by them because they could and they felt like it!
For various reasons, I believe the A-S WERE an elite who went on to culturally and economically “crush” the remaining natives, by force if necessary (which was a lot, at first). Over time,I agree the lines got more and more blurred, but with AS ways prevailing until 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".
I would add Kent seems to have been particularly influenced by Frankish culture for reasons I suppose are extremely obvious. 6th century archaeological finds include a great deal of Frankish material in a way the rest of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms simply did not, which probably explains why the King of Kent had a Frankish queen - it probably became some kind of client kingdom of the Frankish juggernaut across the Dover Strait. And indeed what Anglo-Saxon finds have been found in Western Europe at the time have been primarily from Kent.
It strikes me, although this is largely conjecture that it very likely that the reasons Offa from Mercia switched from the old Anglo-Saxon sceatta based coinage to a system based on silver pennies weighing one 1/240th of a Roman pound (exactly equivalent to Carolingian denarius) was because of trade between Kent and Mercia, wherein Kent would have been the main intermediatary for Carolingian goods. If Kent were as heavily dominated by the Frankish empire as some think it seems likely they would have at least partially adopted Charlemagne's currency reform around this same time at least externally. If this was the case then it would have made sense for the Mercian penny to align with the Carolingian silver denarius (or later denier) - as well as to faciliate the standardisation of payments to the church in the form of Peter's Pence. Certainly the old coins disappeared in the areas around the south of England close to Kent first, it took a good 100 years before areas around Northumbria started to adopt the new currency, and even then it found itself in competition with Viking coinage for some time.
"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..."
One should also note that during the High Middle Ages, French saw a massive growth in prestige as a distinct language (now having diverged sufficiently from Gallo-Roman in the Early Middle Ages). They formed a massive component of the Crusades. Subsequently, the Crusaders states were called the French term "Outremer", were largely ruled by monarchs of French origin, and even had their laws printed in French rather than Latin.
The Muslim world refers to the Crusades as "the Frankish Wars", while the "Latin Empire" set up in Constantinople after the Fourth Crusade was described by locals as "Frankokratia":
The Normans makes more sense when you consider that they were basically shined-up Vikings, through a few generations of native concubines who taught their children their Romance tongue in the cradle. Like them, their descendants traveled to far-flung places in search of fame and booty at the expense of native people, and changed those people in the doing. I'm not sure the English by themselves would have been up to that.
Their impact on the history of Western Europe is quite remarkable all told. Indirectly they lend to the fall of the Carolingians and their replacement with the Capetian family via the Robertians - due to Charles the Fat's inept handling of Rollo's siege of Paris. And then later the invasion of England and the complete reordering of the social structure as defined here. And also around the same time their invasion of Sicily and southern Italy that effectively eliminated the Byzantines as a power in Italy, strongly contributing to the coterminous Great Schism between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East. And without the Norman aristocracy in England, France and southern Italy the prosecution of the First Crusade would likely have been completely impossible - and without that much of the innovations in art and knowledge that came in the 13th century would likely not have happened. Then of course the effects and consequences of Strongbow's expedition to Ireland. I don't think it is too much of an exaggeration to say that the aftereffects of the Norman adventurers' conquests were the primary cause of much of what became the distinct culture of the High Middle Ages.
I'm just reading Marc Morris's "The Norman Conquest" and is there a revisionist case for the Harrowing of the North (Morris doesn't do this it should be noted)?
OK , even pro-Norman sources seem to think it was a bit much - but there was a rampaging Danish army on the loose, various English earls scooting down from exile in Scotland causing trouble and the first rumblings of dicontent from William's own men in England and Maine (next to Normandy at home) getting uppity.
The Harrowing did stop rebellion from that part of England and William must have though extreme measures were necessary so total anarchy didn't descend which would have prolonged the misery for the ordinary peasants (at least the ones who weren't on the receiving end of the Harrowing).
Maybe a series of pro-Norman invasion posts can follow!
The contemporary chronicler, Symeon of Durham writes:
"so great a famine prevailed that men, compelled by hunger, devoured human flesh, . . . others sold themselves to perpetual slavery, . . . It was horrific to behold human corpses decaying in the houses, the streets, and the roads, swarming with worms, while they were consuming in corruption with an abominable stench. For no one was left to bury them in the earth, all being cut off either by the sword or by famine, or having left the country on account of the famine. Meanwhile, the land being thus deprived of any one to cultivate it for nine years, an extensive solitude prevailed all around. There was no village inhabited between York and Durham ; they became lurking places to wild beasts and robbers, and were a great dread to travellers."
I really don't think one can justify such butchery by calling it revisionist history.
"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".
Of course in that context the endless lionising Richard I, who spoke French and was buried in France, in English history was absurd.
The Norman displacement, though possibly not planned initially (there were a lot of rebellions), was incomparably harsher than the later Elizabethan and Cromwellian displacement of the native Irish half a millennium later. In both cases, there were powerful supporters who might have become disaffected, and these realistically to be rewarded and this could only be done at the expense of the defeated. This this is a fundamental truth of politics which idealists on all sides tend to overlook. Whether the replacement of one lot of aristocrats with another made a huge difference to the peasantry is another matter.
I believe "Ivanhoe" and passed on second knowledge is the reason so many people knew about the 'cow'/'beef' distinction in English before the internet.
Or maybe not paradoxically? It would make perfect sense if this was a time with large numbers of native English speakers who had native Norman French speaking parents.
It's an interesting question. Quite likely it represents a co-mingling of dialects; bearing in mind that there was nothing resembling a standard English until much later - Chaucer's time, approximately. Also, I'd suspect that an importation of French and Latin terms consequent upon what is called the 12th century Renaissance.
The historian Michael Wood tells a story of winning an essay competition at school about the conquest. He had argued that it was bad for England. As a result of winning he somehow found himself invited to dinner in the House of Lords by Montgomery, who had liked the essay but wanted to argue that the conquest had, in fact, been a Good Thing. Wood goes along, all intimitated as a teenager would be, and sits there listening to Montgomery speak and is, of course, too nervous to argue back. But then he recounts a moment when, looking at Monty talk, it all clicks into place. He realises: 'He is a Norman!' 1066 is still alive.
Someone once published a brilliant novel about this period but I can't recall the title right now ...
Of course! I will do a post on Hereward soon so that novel may get a mention…
Occasionally I am still haunted by the 'what if?' question around the Battle of Hastings. If only William had not survived that fall from the horse ...
If Harold hadn’t rushed to York and back and waited to refresh his men and gather his reinforcements…
I have a sense that he felt indestructible after defeating Hardrada. His own brothers, and all his advisers, told him to wait for reinforcements; or even not to head the army himself. But he rushed off, and not only did he die, but all his potential English successors did too. What was the hurry? It's a haunting question.
Isn’t it also fascinating that here we are almost a thousand years later, still ruminating this - and what it meant. Our history would be very different and I would probably be in Normandy now! Historical roots are deeper that we like to think.
I must get around to reading The Wake - but The Saxon Tapestry by Sile Rice is a superb novel about Hereward.
Peter Rex's (non-fiction) book 'Hereward, the last Englishman' is very good. I used it as a source for my novel. I hadn't heard of this one. I will add it to the list. I'm sure it is an easier read.
...and don't forget the Canadians, the French ancestors of whom, from Caen, also landed on Sword beach and fought at Caen
Its fascinating that the Norman takeover was traumatic enough that a band of Anglo Saxon refugees went as far as to set up a colony in the Crimea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_(medieval)
Or indeed fight for the Byzantines as far away as Constantinople - actually this was much the same lot.
Walter Scott had a soft spot for the Saxon exiles, I think it was Count Robert of Paris set at the time of the First Crusade where the hero is an exiled Varangian guard. Otherwise we don’t really know much about what happened to them and their descendants.
Kievan Rus was very much a part of Christendom in the 11th century. Edward the Exile, a grandson of Aethelred the Unready displaced by the conquest of England by Canute ended up taking refuge there (and also in Hungary) for a while. And a daughter of Yaroslavl the Wise became Queen of France.
Nottingham is interesting in that separate Saxon burgh and Norman borough survived into the early medieval period. There's a brief summary here: https://www.nottsheritagegateway.org.uk/places/nottingham/nottinghampre1500.htm
There was an article about the boundary between the two areas by Steph Mastoris in the Thoroton Society Transactions, vol 85,1981, but I can't find it online.
“The Shortest History of England” has a couple of nice lines about the new Norman elite being “Up on their high horse” - because they literally were, whenever they encountered a local - and so “Looked down their noses” at the peasants.
Let’s not forget though that the Anglo-Saxons had themselves once formed an elite, crushing the Britons with force and then returning to their mead-halls to celebrate. They proved themselves still excellent at smiting the enemy in 1066 at Stamford Bridge, then yomped the length of the land to narrowly lose against these chevalier geezers.
Personally, I believe the AS spirit lived on after 1066 in the navy, among the seasoned foot soldiers and among artisans like, er, toolmakers. Was it Ed who once wrote that the Norman cavalry officers probably learnt to speak English in order to interact with their sergeants on the field of battle? As a rule of thumb, I think of the current British Army like this: officers, Normans; NCOs, Saxons; private soldiers, Britons.
I believe there is no consensus that the Anglo Saxons 'crushed' the Britons. The traditional view was the the Anglo Saxons invaded and violently displaced them. On the other hand the current, left-influenced view in the academy is that it was a peaceful migration and merging of communities ( to use the words of an academic on a BBC podcast a couple of years ago, the native Britons were somehow 'choosing their identity' in becoming English-speaking subjects of English rulers). Presumably the truth is somewhere in between and there would have been a lot of nastiness for the Romano-British communities on lands coveted by Anglo Saxons, but also the incomers were presumably wise enough not to wipe out entire prosperous communities where it made more sense to just rule them or trade with them, especially where the Anglo Saxon's own numbers were limited . 'Empire and Barbarians' by Peter Heather gives a good detailed non-ideological view of all the late Roman Empire migrations and has a chapter on Britain.
Fair point. Personally, I suspect there was peaceful migration into Norfolk and thereabouts in the later Roman period, after the Romans outsourced eastern coastal defence (against Picts paddling down the shoreline from the Firth of Forth) to the Saxons. Then, when Roman Britain collapsed down to a London+ rump, the AS became the G4S to the frightened Romano-Britons, who then either ran out of money to pay their bodyguards, or who were ousted by them because they could and they felt like it!
For various reasons, I believe the A-S WERE an elite who went on to culturally and economically “crush” the remaining natives, by force if necessary (which was a lot, at first). Over time,I agree the lines got more and more blurred, but with AS ways prevailing until 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".
I would add Kent seems to have been particularly influenced by Frankish culture for reasons I suppose are extremely obvious. 6th century archaeological finds include a great deal of Frankish material in a way the rest of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms simply did not, which probably explains why the King of Kent had a Frankish queen - it probably became some kind of client kingdom of the Frankish juggernaut across the Dover Strait. And indeed what Anglo-Saxon finds have been found in Western Europe at the time have been primarily from Kent.
It strikes me, although this is largely conjecture that it very likely that the reasons Offa from Mercia switched from the old Anglo-Saxon sceatta based coinage to a system based on silver pennies weighing one 1/240th of a Roman pound (exactly equivalent to Carolingian denarius) was because of trade between Kent and Mercia, wherein Kent would have been the main intermediatary for Carolingian goods. If Kent were as heavily dominated by the Frankish empire as some think it seems likely they would have at least partially adopted Charlemagne's currency reform around this same time at least externally. If this was the case then it would have made sense for the Mercian penny to align with the Carolingian silver denarius (or later denier) - as well as to faciliate the standardisation of payments to the church in the form of Peter's Pence. Certainly the old coins disappeared in the areas around the south of England close to Kent first, it took a good 100 years before areas around Northumbria started to adopt the new currency, and even then it found itself in competition with Viking coinage for some time.
And where are the reparations for the Harrying of the North? :-)
It was called levelling-up, courtesy of that great friend of the people, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. Don't tell me you didn't notice.
They were certainly excellent at the levelling. Just they never bothered with the 'up' bit.
Indeed. But things are bound to get better now that proper Levellers are in charge.
The New Yorker magazine made a special D-Day edition with a cover illustration based on the Bayeux Tapestry:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/1d9hdoi/cover_of_the_new_yorker_celebrating_the_dday/
"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..."
One should also note that during the High Middle Ages, French saw a massive growth in prestige as a distinct language (now having diverged sufficiently from Gallo-Roman in the Early Middle Ages). They formed a massive component of the Crusades. Subsequently, the Crusaders states were called the French term "Outremer", were largely ruled by monarchs of French origin, and even had their laws printed in French rather than Latin.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assizes_of_Jerusalem
The Muslim world refers to the Crusades as "the Frankish Wars", while the "Latin Empire" set up in Constantinople after the Fourth Crusade was described by locals as "Frankokratia":
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankokratia
The Normans makes more sense when you consider that they were basically shined-up Vikings, through a few generations of native concubines who taught their children their Romance tongue in the cradle. Like them, their descendants traveled to far-flung places in search of fame and booty at the expense of native people, and changed those people in the doing. I'm not sure the English by themselves would have been up to that.
Their impact on the history of Western Europe is quite remarkable all told. Indirectly they lend to the fall of the Carolingians and their replacement with the Capetian family via the Robertians - due to Charles the Fat's inept handling of Rollo's siege of Paris. And then later the invasion of England and the complete reordering of the social structure as defined here. And also around the same time their invasion of Sicily and southern Italy that effectively eliminated the Byzantines as a power in Italy, strongly contributing to the coterminous Great Schism between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East. And without the Norman aristocracy in England, France and southern Italy the prosecution of the First Crusade would likely have been completely impossible - and without that much of the innovations in art and knowledge that came in the 13th century would likely not have happened. Then of course the effects and consequences of Strongbow's expedition to Ireland. I don't think it is too much of an exaggeration to say that the aftereffects of the Norman adventurers' conquests were the primary cause of much of what became the distinct culture of the High Middle Ages.
Richard Sharpe is Anglo Saxon. James Bond is Norman
In the original books Bond had a French-Swiss mother, so I guess that sort of checks out as kind of Norman.
(And his father was Scottish, he was quite consciously a *British* figure, not an English one.)
Jack Aubrey? Horatio Hornblower?
Have you ever heard of Stephen Clarke's "1000 Years of Annoying the French" about the history of Anglo-French relations?:
https://books.google.ca/books/about/1000_Years_of_Annoying_the_French.html?id=pq0wtfSzAH0C&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y
Apparently, William the Bastard ironically disliked France and identified with his Scandinavian ancestry to a large degree!
I'm just reading Marc Morris's "The Norman Conquest" and is there a revisionist case for the Harrowing of the North (Morris doesn't do this it should be noted)?
OK , even pro-Norman sources seem to think it was a bit much - but there was a rampaging Danish army on the loose, various English earls scooting down from exile in Scotland causing trouble and the first rumblings of dicontent from William's own men in England and Maine (next to Normandy at home) getting uppity.
The Harrowing did stop rebellion from that part of England and William must have though extreme measures were necessary so total anarchy didn't descend which would have prolonged the misery for the ordinary peasants (at least the ones who weren't on the receiving end of the Harrowing).
Maybe a series of pro-Norman invasion posts can follow!
The contemporary chronicler, Symeon of Durham writes:
"so great a famine prevailed that men, compelled by hunger, devoured human flesh, . . . others sold themselves to perpetual slavery, . . . It was horrific to behold human corpses decaying in the houses, the streets, and the roads, swarming with worms, while they were consuming in corruption with an abominable stench. For no one was left to bury them in the earth, all being cut off either by the sword or by famine, or having left the country on account of the famine. Meanwhile, the land being thus deprived of any one to cultivate it for nine years, an extensive solitude prevailed all around. There was no village inhabited between York and Durham ; they became lurking places to wild beasts and robbers, and were a great dread to travellers."
I really don't think one can justify such butchery by calling it revisionist history.
https://archive.org/details/churchhistorpt203unknuoft/page/n145/mode/2up?q=1066
I never said it wouldn't be a difficult task
I shall resist the temptation to imitate a Twitter scold. Not least of all because my ancestors were Normans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashbourne_Hall
"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".
Of course in that context the endless lionising Richard I, who spoke French and was buried in France, in English history was absurd.
The Norman displacement, though possibly not planned initially (there were a lot of rebellions), was incomparably harsher than the later Elizabethan and Cromwellian displacement of the native Irish half a millennium later. In both cases, there were powerful supporters who might have become disaffected, and these realistically to be rewarded and this could only be done at the expense of the defeated. This this is a fundamental truth of politics which idealists on all sides tend to overlook. Whether the replacement of one lot of aristocrats with another made a huge difference to the peasantry is another matter.
I believe "Ivanhoe" and passed on second knowledge is the reason so many people knew about the 'cow'/'beef' distinction in English before the internet.
I think I read that Richard I spent only about 13 months of his 10-year in England.
The heaviest influx of French words into English began after 1250, which is paradoxically after King John lost Normandy:
https://tigerweb.towson.edu/duncan/brmideng.html#:~:text=1250%2D1400.,loss%20of%20Normandy%20in%201204.
Or maybe not paradoxically? It would make perfect sense if this was a time with large numbers of native English speakers who had native Norman French speaking parents.
It's an interesting question. Quite likely it represents a co-mingling of dialects; bearing in mind that there was nothing resembling a standard English until much later - Chaucer's time, approximately. Also, I'd suspect that an importation of French and Latin terms consequent upon what is called the 12th century Renaissance.
Also,can you now do the Carolingians vs Saxons and tell me what the difference was between these Saxons and Anglo,Saxons, also confusing to me.
The 'Saxons Overseas', as the Anglo-Saxons called the Germans on the continent https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/how-german-are-the-english
Thanks.