....it is what
you can remember.
1066 and
All That
by
Rose Hanna
(forwarded to me by James Hanna)
The
Norman Conquest of England: A Shift in Focus for Western Civilization
Some events in history are
so significant that we can almost define everything else as happening either
before or after. The Norman Conquest of Anglo-Saxon England, in 1066, was one
such pivot point in Western Civilization. Pre-1066 England’s political interests and attention was focused on the
happenings in Scandinavia. Post-1066 the
Normans wrenched England’s gaze towards toward continental Europe, which it is
still in today. But to understand how
this shift happened, it is necessary to understand the players involved.
Who were
the Anglo-Saxons?
At
the beginning of the 5th century Rome was no longer the superpower
that it once had been. Divided between
the East, whose capital of Constantinople was in modern day Istanbul, and West Rome’s
resources were simply stretched too thin to actively protect its furthest
outpost; the island of Britain. Geoffrey Hindley tells us:
The empire [Rome] was under
general attack and in 410 Alaric the Visigoth actually occupied Rome; Britain’s
military garrison was soon called back to Rome leaving the defense of the
embattled province to the local Romano-British population… The Western Emperor
Honorius sent word that thenceforward they would have to fend for themselves
(Hindley, 3).
With
Roman authority now gone, it did not take long for local warlords to start
fighting for land and power. One such
individual, named Vortigern, decided to borrow the Roman tactic of hiring
mercenaries to fight for him. So, led by
the brothers Hengest and Horsa, three ships full of warriors arrived to first
fight for the Roman-British against other Roman-British, and shortly thereafter
against their former employers for themselves.
These warriors were the Angles, Saxons and Jutes and they had arrived in
England to stay.
Fury of
the Northmen
For
the next 400 years England would be carved up into as many as nine separate kingdoms
whose rulers fought each other for power.
By the mid ninth century, however, what were once disorganized Viking raids
had developed into a full scale occupation that was threatening to consume all
of England. Hindley tells us, “It was the Wessex of Alfred the Great that
prevented Anglo-Saxon Christian civilization from being submerged… The Battle of Edington of 878 was the
decisive turning point for England…”
(Hindley, 205).
Vikings are nothing if not
tenacious, so by the early 11th century, aided by the poor
leadership of the King Aethelred II “the Unready”, the English crown passed to
a Dane. Cnut, who was already king of
Denmark, would also in time be king of Norway and Sweden, formally shifted
England’s focus towards the Scandinavian orbit.
Who were
the Normans?
The Vikings were not only
attacking England during the 9th century, France was a popular
target as well. In 911, Charles III of
France gave land to one group of Northmen, by the mouth of the Rouen River, in
the hopes that they would keep other groups from sailing further into France. With regard to this arrangement, Francois
Neveux states, “He [Rolo, leader of the Normans in 911] kept an effective watch
on the lower Seine, which ceased to be the route through which Vikings
penetrated the heart of the heart of the Kingdom” (Neveux, 70).
Relatively quickly the former Vikings accepted the French language and
merged French culture with their own; hence, the Normans were, quite literally,
Frenchified-X-Vikings. Neveux says,
“They merged into the surrounding population, marrying local women and were
quickly “gallicized” even abandoning the use of the own language by the middle
of the tenth century” (Neveux, 194).
Over the next 150 years the
Normans would become a force to be reckoned with not only in France, though
they technically remained a vassal to the French king, but also in southern
Italy and as far away as Byzantium in the Eastern Roman Empire. Their culture
was violent and their leaders ambitions to acquire more power. So, in 1066 when William, Duke of Normandy,
decided on an all-out invasion of England he was very much acting in character.
The Issue
By
1066 England and Normandy had ties going back over fifty years. David Douglas says, “The long developing
relationship between Normandy and England had thus at last produced a situation
which involved the medieval destiny of a large part of northern Europe” (Douglas,
180).
A significant player in the
Anlgo-Saxon-Norman relationship was the twice queen of England, and mother of
two English kings, Emma of Normandy. Emma,
sister of the then Duke of Normandy, married King Aethelred but, as Pauline
Stafford tells us, “Her first significance was as a Norman” (Stafford, 7). Emma would eventually return to England, but
her two of her sons were raised in Normandy. One of these sons, Edward, was so
familiar and comfortable with Norman culture that when he became King in 1042
he brought many Normans with him to the English court.
In
1051 Edward, supposedly and without the consent of his Earls, promised the
crown to William of Normandy. This,
along with a distant tie by marriage to the English crown and a heated dispute
over if Harold Godwinson has promised to support his claim, gave William the
pretense he needed to invade England and fight for the crown when he was not
selected as Edward’s heir in 1066. On
the speed that the English chose a king other than William, David Howarth says,
“Edward was buried in his abbey the morning after he died, and the same
afternoon in the same place, Harold was crowned” (Howarth, 56).
Under New
Management
How
1066 unfolded is a very complex story whose climax was the Battle of Hastings
between King Harold and Duke William.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has a lengthy entry for 1066, and about
Hastings it says:
William came upon them
unawares, before they had gathered; the king, nevertheless, fought very hard
against them with those men who would stay with him, and there were many killed
on both sides. There King Harold was
killed… and many good men. The French
held the field of the dead as God granted them because of the people’s sins
(Pick, 195).
Robert Lacy remarks, “…the Battle of Hastings was
one of the longest-recorded military encounters of the Middle Ages, and its
outcome changed the course of English history” (Lacey, 62). The Anglo-Saxon ruling class was systematically
replaced with King William’s loyal Norman and French followers.
The
Effect
The
Norman Conquest had the immediate impact of wiping out the entire Anglo-Saxon
ruling class in England and replacing them with a new, French speaking, group. Also,
significantly, it gave birth to Middle-English as Old-English, of the
Anglo-Saxons, and the French, of the Normans, started to combine. Most significant by far, however, was the
fact that England’s primary interest was no longer Scandinavia; it was Europe.
When William got to trade up
his title of Duke to King, as well as upgrade “the Bastard” to “the Conquer”,
it immediately created tension with France.
This was because even though William might be King of England, he was
still Duke of Normandy and thus technically a vassal of the French King; thus
the King of England was also a subject of the King of France.
Disputes over the English
king’s claims to lands in France, all originating from the conflict of the dual
role of king and duke, played a major part in English-French conflict over the
next 350 years.
Conclusion
Before the Norman Conquest
England’s involvement with continental Europe was a distant second to its
interest in Scandinavia. William of
Normandy’s victory at Hastings, however, brought England squarely into the mix
of all things European and was thus an extremely significant event in Western
Civilization.
It is worth nothing than
even though England was changed forever after the Norman Conquest, and all of
Europe with it, some things remained and have endured. Helen Hollick brilliantly sums this up in the
final words to her book Harold the King:
1066 is known as the Norman
Conquest, but it is still worth remembering that although William had himself
crowned king, and while most of the male aristocracy were replaced by Normans,
the ordinary English – the Saxons – remained English. England was ruled by Normans but never
became Norman – if that had happened we would be speaking French, not
English… (Hollick, 690).
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| The Battlefield, Battle, Sussex |
Works Cited
Douglas, David C., William the Conqueror.
Berkley: University of
California, 1966.
Hindley, Geoffrey. A Brief
History of the Anglo-Saxons. New
York: Carroll & Graf, 2006.
Hollick, Helen. Harold
the King. Great Britain: Silverwood Books 2011.
Howarth, David. 1066
The Year of the Conquest. New
York: Barnes & Nobel, 1977.
Lacy, Robert. Great
Tales from English History. New
York: Back Bay Books, 2003.
Neveux, Francois. A Brief
History of the Normans. London: Running Press Books, 2006.
Pick, Christopher, ed. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. Great
Britain, 1983.
Sellar, W.C. and Yeatman, R.J. 1066
and All That, A Memorable History of England. Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1993.
Stafford, Pauline. Queen
Emma & Queen Edith. Malden: Blackwell, 2001.
James Hanna on Facebook
Helen Hollick website
Helen Hollick website
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| Harold the King (UK edition title) I am the Chosen King (US edition title) ##thank you Rose (and James) for sharing! |
