In his marvellous book, The Norman Conquest, Marc Morris gives a very detailed explanation of the events leading up to the invasion of 1066, beginning over fifty years earlier with King Ethelred’s marriage to a wife from Normandy – thus introducing the notion of a Norman claim to the throne of England – following the complex story up to the bloody Battle of Hastings, and then a full description of the aftermath, the rebellions and reprisals, the cities and towns and countryside burned and devastated, the gruesome process of colonisation – before a final, sketchier summary of the struggle for the succession after the Conqueror’s death in 1087. In the final chapters, Morris weighs the achievements and the costs of the Conquest, some of which are obvious, some less so.
I have summarised the main story in another blog post:
In this blog post I am summarising the consequences of the Norman Conquest.
The English language
English can be regarded as a ‘creole’, that’s to say a language created by two or more distinct language groups as a mid-way between them. Whereas a ‘pidgen’ is a simplified form which two language users or groups create with each other on a temporary basis, a creole is a full and stable entity in its own right.
With the Conquest Anglo-Saxon ceased at a stroke to be the language of court or church, replaced by Norman French and Latin respectively. But the new landowning class had to communicate with its serfs somehow and, as the years passed, intermarriage took place between conquerors and conquered, and not just between their bodies and estates, but between their words.
After King John lost most of his French possessions in the 1210s, the Norman aristocracy had to face the fact that its future lay in this foggy island and reconcile itself to its history and culture. And so English went into hibernation, unrecorded in official documents for centuries, but undergoing profound changes of grammar and vocabulary. When it re-emerges into the written record three hundred years later, during the 14th century, it is an English substantially altered from its Anglo-Saxon predecessor and stuffed full of French vocabulary and phraseology.
The language had already absorbed a fair amount of Viking terminology during the Dark Ages. Now it emerged larded with French and Latin words and with a looseness of grammar which made it flexible and adaptable: in the coming centuries it would easily absorb terms and phrases from languages spoken all over its vast new Empire. By the late 20th century English had the largest vocabulary of any European language, while precious, purist French had the smallest.
Snobbery
Latin was reinforced as the language of the church and of official documents; French as the language of court. Right up to the present day the study of Latin distinguishes state from private schools, is still associated with logic and reason, and is periodically defended by chaps who went to that sort of school, although their essays always struggle to express the real justification for its continued teaching: it is the language of power. Similarly, to this day the ability to speak French is taken as a particular mark of style and sophistication, of being chic, of having savoir faire, although plenty of other cultures and languages are ‘stylish’. Because that strand of ‘conqueror-worship’ is part of English culture’s DNA.
Cathedrals
William supported religion – after all, the invasion was given full backing by Pope Alexander II (just as Pope Sixtus V gave his support to Philip of Spain’s attempt to invade England in 1588). Soon after his victory William commissioned a new abbey at Battle and set about comprehensively rebuilding England’s cathedrals. By 1097 nine of England’s ancient cathedrals had burnt down or been demolished in the various rebellions and reprisals which followed the conquest, and new Romanesque buildings were replacing them. Over the next generation the remaining six would be rebuilt in the new style along with every major abbey. Amounting to a revolution in English ecclesiastical architecture.
Religious revival
Contemporary chroniclers lamented the irreligion of the Anglo-Saxons – William of Malmesbury gives a hilarious description of the English living in wattle huts, covered in tattoos and drinking till they spew – and unanimously praised William and the Normans for their religious zeal. The Conquest happened to coincide with the coming to power of a succession of reformist popes – notably Gregory VII (1073 to 1085) – so it was a time when the Catholic Church reformed and renewed its laws and encouraged godly rulers to apply them to all aspects of society. Morris records another elementary aspect of the religious revival following the Conquest – the numbers:
- in 1066 there were around 60 monasteries in England, by 1135 more than 250
- in the Confessor’s day around 1,000 English monks and nuns, by the 1130s as many as 5,000
Castles
Wherever they went the Normans introduced the military innovation of the castle. William built Windsor, Warwick, York, Norwich, Winchester, Colchester and the Tower of London, as well as scores of others, and his Norman followers did the same, so that within a generation there were some 500 castles scattered across the land, built to house the oppressor, impregnable bases from which to sally forth and defend their land.
Land and colonisation
For the Normans had a different attitude to land-holding from previous invaders; they came not to pillage moveable goods but to seize and hold the land itself, to create the largest possible estates and then hand them down to their heirs through the new rules of primogeniture. Compare and contrast with the mercenaries who accompanied King Cnut’s invasion of 1016; after they’d helped Cnut to the throne they took their gold and left. The Normans stayed and implemented sweeping changes to land tenure, law and administration.
The end of political murder
Cnut executed the small number of senior English aristocrats he thought were a threat and left the vast majority in place. Fifty years later William adopted a strikingly different policy, rarely executing the natives (possibly under the influence of his religious mentors) he preferred to fight, capture, imprison or exile them.
But this had an unexpected consequence: whereas Cnut beheaded all opposition and so ruled in peace and allowed most English aristocrats to stay in post, William’s relatively merciful attitude meant that he faced repeated rebellions and uprisings, as exiles returned or prisoners escaped to raise the patriotic flag. This led, in the end, to a far more sweeping replacement of English aristocrats and a far more thorough redistribution of their land than William might originally have intended.
Eventually, as the Domesday Book demonstrates, by 1086 the Normans had almost completely replaced the English at every level. Thousands of the highest ranks in the land were filled with Normans and the formerly wealthy English had been forced into servitude. Hence the lamentations of the various chroniclers like Henry of Huntingdonshire or William of Malmesbury, who saw the conquest as a thorough-going social revolution, as a traumatic act of colonisation.
Slavery
England had been famous for its slaves during Roman times: slaves were one of our most popular exports to the Roman Empire. Things probably didn’t improve when the Angles and Saxons and Jutes began invading in the 450s, and the Vikings in their raids from 800 onwards routinely took captives who they sold on as slaves. Although some Saxons kings tried to ban it, slavery was still a thriving business when the Normans invaded, so that around 10% of the entire country were slaves in 1086, the year of the Domesday Survey.
William’s archbishop, Lanfranc, encouraged him to ban slavery. The Normans as a caste and culture seem to have genuinely abhorred the practice. As late as 1102 an ecclesiastical council criticised the trade which treated humans like ‘animals’ to be be bought and sold but, as Morris points out, there were no further written bans after that date, which is evidence that they were no longer needed. He estimates that by the 1130s slavery in England had ended.
Of course there is a more cynical interpretation to the Normans abolishing slavery in England. it may simply have been that the Normans’ more ruthless attitude to seizing and exploiting land made it more profitable to have ‘free’ tenants who they could milk for rents and other costs, rather than slaves which the owners had to house and feed. Whatver the precise cause, the profit motive and the Norman religious revival, taken together, ended slavery in England.
It’s quite a big thought to reflect that slavery and the slave trade existed in England from the time of the Roman Conquest (starting in the 40s AD) until its final abolition in the early 1100s. Over a thousand years. For over a thousand years the English were subject to a slave trade and slavery…
Towards France and away from Scandianavia
William conquered England while retaining his Duchy of Normandy (in the next 20 years he was to spend as much time defending his Norman realm and fighting various threats to it as in putting down English rebellions). Morris points out that the French connection changed the entire focus of English culture and politics.
a) The Norman court (and all those aristocrats who copied and aspired to join it) was noticeably more interested in fine food, fine clothes and the fine arts than the Anglo-Saxon one had been.
b) More importantly, it now meant that successive rulers of England were drawn into French and continental power politics and wars, and away from the Scandinavian-Viking-North Sea zone which had been so powerful a cultural, linguistic and political influence over the previous 300 years. Successive rulers of England would now find themselves embroiled in wars against France, in France or making preposterous claims to the French throne, climaxing in the immense Hundred Years War which lasted from 1337 to 1453.
c) This shift maybe explains the sense of loss and nostalgia about our often-neglected Nordic heritage, which many English people feel. The north and east of England, the Viking zone for so many centuries, were treated particularly harshly by William during the ‘Harrying of the North’ and continue to this day to have a harsher, colder, more stone feel, a more rugged, ‘authentic’ feel to the names and accents and landscape. William and his successors’ courts in London had more in common, culturally, with the courts of Europe, with the poets of Provence or even Italy, than with their own compatriots north of the Humber. A sentiment echoed in a comment in today’s Guardian, lamenting that David Cameron’s government is focused on the wealthy south-east and doesn’t give a damn about the towns and villages affected by the recent flooding in Cumbria – showing how that north-south divide still persists. It is one of the Conquest’s most enduring legacies.
Anglo-Norman superiority complex
Morris makes one last, powerful point. The Normans, despite 20 years of destroying all the towns and cities which resisted them, despite completely replacing the ruling class and reducing the natives to serfdom – nonetheless introduced a genuine religious revival, a boom in magnificent new stone cathedrals, abbeys and monasteries, abolished slavery and political murder, and introduced new continental ideas of courtliness and chivalry.
Thus when they looked at their still-independent neighbours in Scotland, Wales and Ireland, they saw brutal savages, still indulging in endless internecine warfare, political assassinations, raiding for slaves, living in wattle and daub huts. Within a generation the chroniclers are dropping remarks about the Normans’ cultural and religious superiority to the savages on their border.
Arguably, the most profound consequence of the conquest was to give the English an enduring superiority complex over the other inhabitants of the British Isles, who we went on to conquer in succeeding centuries, before going on to apply the same sense of invincible superiority to half the rest of the world, as we carved out a global empire.
That might well be the subtle but profound and longest-lasting consequence of the Conquest.
Books & Boots 
tamara1121
/ December 15, 2015Thank you for the detailed summary. I had seen this come up as a suggestion for me to read and now I’m for sure going to check it out 🙂