Norman England

TO MANY HISTORIANS, 1066 MARKS the beginning of Medieval England. The Norman Conquest—when William the Great of Normandy killed England’s King Harold II on the battlefield and took the English crown for himself—had rippling consequences that have affected England to this very day. William’s conquest—and the subsequent rule of two of his sons and one grandson—changed the entire dynamic of England. No longer was England Saxon in nature; now it was French.

From the 12th to 14th centuries, educated Englishmen were trilingual: while English remained their mother tongue, they would be familiar with Latin and speak fluent French. French became the language of real estate and law, of song and verse. The English language would become associated with the uncivilized and uneducated, and from 1070 on, Latin replaced English in the government, English church, and aristocracy. One historian noted:

No one today can read Old English without specialised training. Speakers of French or German or Spanish have a much easier time with their earliest literature. And the reason the English of Chaucer and Shakespeare and the present day is separated by such a gulf from that of the Anglo-Saxons is that, after the Norman Conquest, the language of power and courtly culture was French. This eclipse of the English language resulted in a simplification of English grammar, but also in a wonderful enrichment of vocabulary as thousands of French words entered English. Modern English has a wealth of synonyms—we can still be loving (English) or amorous (French), hungry (English) or famished (French).

French excellence in the fields of music, architecture, and literature helped the French language to become an international rather than just a national language, a language that was embraced—both in writing and speech—by anyone who wanted to be seen as civilized. It’s no surprise, then, that in the wake of the Norman Conquest, many Englishmen turned their back on Saxon names and preferred French ones (e.g. William, Robert, Henry, etc.).

The Norman Conquest’s affect on language is just a prologue to the litany of changes that would be wrought in England during the reign of William I and his Norman successors. Since the Normans were Frenchmen, and since they brought their French language and culture across the Channel, French culture became interwoven with England’s societal fabric. Another historian writes, “The Norman Conquest… ushered in a period during which England, like the kingdom of Jerusalem, can fairly be described as part of France overseas… [In] political terms, it was a French colony (though not, of course, one that belonged to the French king) until the early thirteenth century and a cultural colony thereafter.” English politics became a sideshow of French politics. From 1066 to 1204 the histories of England and Normandy are interlaced, as the “Norman Kings” (those English kings who were also Norman dukes) and their Angevin successors tried to keep rule and order in both their continental and island holdings. England and Normandy, formerly two different states, became a single cross-channel political entity. 1066 marks a major shift in England’s orbit: since the days of the Anglo-Saxon invasions, England’s affairs had been wrapped up with the Scandinavian countries of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden; but under the Norman kings, England’s affairs shifted south across the Channel and became entwined with France and is duchies.

William I saw to it that the Anglo-Saxon nobility was displaced by his Norman favorites. By 1086, when the infamous Domesday Book was compiled, the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy had been all but eliminated, and in its place was a Norman elite. By that date there were only four English lords, and more than 40,000 thegns had lost their lands and been replaced by a group of less than 200 barons. In 1066 (twenty years before the Domesday Book), less than thirty percent of Winchester property owners had non-English names, but by 1207 over 80 percent of the city’s property owners had non-English ones (primarily French names like William, Robert, Richard, and Henry). William I ensured French culture’s survival in England not by supplementing the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy with a French one but by wholly replacing it; he went further still, replacing Saxon mead-halls with wine taverns, destroying English churches and abbeys and rebuilding them in the Romanesque style popular in France and Rome, and he restructured the Anglo-Saxon witan into something akin to a French-style curia regis, or “King’s Council.” Other changes include the creation of royal forests (which had their own laws), the building of castles (a French phenomenon), higher taxes (which would continue to rise under subsequent rulers, culminating in the Baron’s Rebellion during the reign of the Angevin King John in the early 13th century), and (though this is a bone of contention among medieval scholars) the spread of French-style feudalism throughout England.

William I would reign over England until his death in 1087. One of his younger sons, known by the nickname William Rufus, would succeed him. William II would die at the turn of the 12th century, and his younger brother Henry would succeed him. Henry I would rule until his death in 1135, at which point Norman England was caught in the throes of a bloody civil war known as The Anarchy. The English throne was wrested by Stephen of Blois, a grandson of William the Conqueror. Stephen’s reign was marked by a number of violent conflicts with England’s neighbors (the Scots to the north, the Welsh to the west, and Stephen’s detractors across the Channel), and though he held out for a while, eventually he lost the advantage and ceded the English throne to the first Angevin king: Henry II.