How the French take-over changed England profoundly.
When Messrs Sellar and Yeatman produced their classic satire of the history that could be remembered from schooldays, they chose to include in their title the one date that every proverbial schoolchild knows: 1066 and all that. That year saw William the Conqueror invade Anglo-Saxon England, defeat the native forces led by King Harold at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066, and then establish Norman rule with brutal effectiveness. Although the significance of the Conquest, and the precise balance between continuity and change over the decades that followed have been much debated by historians, there can be little doubt that these events marked a decisive moment in English history.
The Conquest stemmed from the fact that William and Harold both claimed that the childless King Edward the Confessor had named them as his successor. William also asserted that Harold had previously accepted William’s claim, but then reneged on this after Edward the Confessor’s death in January 1066 and had himself crowned king. This prompted William’s decision to invade England. The Battle of Hastings was hard fought, but Harold’s troops were tired and depleted after an exhausting march to the north of England to defeat another claimant to the throne, the Viking Harald Hardrada. They also lacked the cavalry and the archers who were important features of the Norman army. In the end, Harold was killed and the Normans emerged victorious.
“Within five years of the Conquest, some 35 castles had been built”
It took several years for the Conquest to be fully secure. William conducted savage campaigns to crush any resistance from the English, including the ‘harrying of the north’ (1069-70), the suppression of Hereward the Wake’s rising in the Isle of Ely (1070-1) and putting down the revolt of the earls (1075). To maintain order and security, the Normans built castles all over the country: within five years of the Conquest, some 35 castles had been built. By 1087, when William died, there were around 500 castles in England and Wales, and by 1150 this figure had risen to about a thousand. There was also much building of churches and monasteries, and some of the remains of this building work are still visible today.
In governing England, the Normans naturally worked with what they found, but they adapted it in the process. Anglo-Saxon England already had an established principle of taxation, as well as a highly developed system of coinage and mints. All this was continued, as was the use of writs to convey royal instructions, except that these were henceforth written in Latin rather than Anglo-Saxon. The Conquest powerfully reinforced existing tendencies towards strong and efficient central control in ways that shaped the future development of English government and the law.
The Conquest also led to the cultural dominance of the Latin and French languages, and as a result an English vernacular culture was lost until Middle English emerged during the 13th century. Whereas the Anglo-Saxon language had been used by administrators, chroniclers and poets (as in Beowulf), Latin now became the official language of government and the Church. Legal proceedings were conducted in French and a particular variant of it developed called Law French, which was only finally abolished in 1731 (it now reads like a strange early form of ‘Franglais’). The Conquest helped to make England more cosmopolitan and less insular: for example, the first two post-Conquest Archbishops of Canterbury, Lanfranc and Anselm, were both Italians who had been Benedictine monks at the Abbey of Bec in Normandy.
Perhaps the most dramatic consequence of the Conquest was that the old English elite lost virtually all of its lands. Twenty years after the Conquest, a survey of all landownership called the Domesday Book was compiled, possibly as a way of establishing the new Norman lords as legitimate owners of their land. It showed that the old top layer of English society (earls and thegns) had been almost entirely replaced by a new elite of Normans and other French. By 1086, only about 5% of land was still in English hands: there were just two substantial English landowners to be found south of the Tees, and Wulfstan of Worcester was the sole remaining English bishop.
This meant that a population of 1.5-2 million was now ruled by about 12,000 Norman-French, speaking a different language from the English and tending to look down on the native population. The primary social distinction thus became that between French and English, and this remained true for decades to come. As late as 1300, the chronicler Robert of Gloucester wrote that “unless a man know French, people regard him little; but the low men hold to English and to their own speech still”. The latter ultimately resurfaced in the form of Middle English and produced a great flowering in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer (c1343-1400).
“The monarchs from William I to Henry III spent much of their time outside England and many of them were buried in France”
Norman rule thus imposed a new order and opened up fresh directions of development. Its sheer physical impact – the building of so many new castles and monasteries and churches – should not be underestimated, and it has been observed that an English person who left the country early in 1066 and then returned in 1100 would have found much of it unrecognisable. Despite certain elements of continuity, the balance of scholarly opinion now tends to the view that, as one historian recently put it, “The Norman Conquest resulted in the swiftest, most brutal, and most far-reaching transformation in English history”. Truly this was a decisive moment.
The Conquest had the effect of placing England under dynamic new management. The Norman monarchs who ruled from 1066 until 1154, and then their Angevin successors from 1154 to 1272, were often heavily concerned with their French dominions, although the English crown was their only royal crown. The monarchs from William I to Henry III spent much of their time outside England and many of them were buried in France. English monarchs continued to control significant parts of France until the inept rule of Henry VI put an effective end to these ambitions in 1453. Those four centuries of a powerful English connection with France were a direct consequence of the Norman Conquest.
