The Norman Conquest
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Although the south of England submitted quickly to Norman rule, resistance continued, especially in the North. After six years William moved north in , subduing rebellions by the Anglo-Saxons and installing Norman lords along the way. However, particularly in Yorkshire, he made agreements with local Saxon Lords to keep control of their land under Norman-named Lords who would "hold" the lands only from a distance in exchange for avoidance of battle and loss of any controlling share.
Hereward the Wake led an uprising in the fens and sacked Peterborough in Harold's sons attempted an invasion of the south-west peninsula. Uprisings also occurred in the Welsh Marches and at Stafford. William faced separate invasion attempts by the Danes and the Scots. William's defeat of these led to what became known as The Harrying of the North in which Northumbria was laid waste to deny his enemies its resources. Many of the Norman sources which survive today were written in order to justify their actions, in response to Papal concern about the treatment of the native English by their Norman conquerors.
The conquest of Wales was a gradual process, concluded only in during the reign of King Edward I. Edward also subdued Scotland , but did not truly conquer it; it retained a separate monarchy until , and did not formally unite with England until Once England had been conquered the Normans faced many challenges in maintaining control. The Anglo-Norman speaking Normans were in very small numbers compared to the native English population. Historians estimate their number at 5, armored knights.
Revolts had sprung up almost at once, from the time of William's coronation, led either by members of Harold's family or disaffected English nobles. William dealt with these challenges in a number of ways. New Norman lords constructed a variety of forts and castles such as the motte-and-bailey to provide a stronghold against a popular revolt or increasingly rare Viking attacks and to dominate the nearby town and countryside.
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Any remaining Anglo-Saxon lords who refused to acknowledge William's accession to the throne or who revolted were stripped of titles and lands, which were then re-distributed to Norman favorites of William. If an Anglo-Saxon lord died without issue the Normans would always choose a successor from Normandy. In this way the Normans displaced the native aristocracy and took control of the top ranks of power.
Absenteeism became common for Norman and later Angevin kings of England, for example William spent months from onward in France rather than in England, using writs to rule England. This situation lasted until the Capetian conquest of Normandy. This royal absenteeism created a need for additional bureaucratic structures and consolidated the English administration. Kings were not the only absentees since the Anglo-Norman barons would use the practice too.
Keeping the Norman lords together and loyal as a group was just as important, as any friction could easily give the English speaking natives a chance to divide and conquer their minority Anglo-French speaking lords. One way William accomplished this was by giving out land in a piece-meal fashion. A Norman lord typically had property spread out all over England and Normandy, and not in a single geographic block.
Thus, if the lord tried to break away from the King, he could only defend a small number of his holdings at any one time. This proved an effective deterrent to rebellion and kept the Norman nobility loyal to the King. Over the longer term, the same policy greatly facilitated contacts between the nobility of different regions and encouraged the nobility to organize and act as a class, rather than on an individual or regional base which was the normal way in other feudal countries.
The existence of a strong centralized monarchy encouraged the nobility to form ties with the city dwellers, which was eventually manifested in the rise of English parliamentarianism. William disliked the Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury , Stigand, and in maneuvered to replace him with the Italian Lanfranc and proceeded to appoint Normans to church positions.
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The changes that took place because of the Norman Conquest were significant for both English and European development. One of the most obvious changes was the introduction of the Latin-based Anglo-Norman language as the language of the ruling classes in England, displacing the Germanic-based Anglo-Saxon language.
Anglo-Norman retained the status of a prestige language for nearly years and has had a significant influence on modern English. It is through this, the first of several major influxes of Latin or Romance languages, that the predominant spoken tongue of England began to lose much of its Germanic and Norse vocabulary, although it retained Germanic sentence structure in many cases. Even before the Normans arrived, the Anglo-Saxons had one of the most sophisticated governmental systems in Western Europe. All of England had been divided into administrative units called shires of roughly uniform size and shape, and were run by an official known as a "shire reeve" or "sheriff.
Anglo-Saxons made heavy use of written documentation, which was unusual for kings in Western Europe at the time and made for more efficient governance than word of mouth. The Anglo-Saxons also established permanent physical locations of government. Most medieval governments were always on the move, holding court wherever the weather and food or other matters were best at the moment. This practice limited the potential size and sophistication of a government body to whatever could be packed on a horse and cart, including the treasury and library. The Anglo-Saxons established a permanent treasury at Winchester, from which a permanent government bureaucracy and document archive had begun to grow.
This sophisticated medieval form of government was handed over to the Normans and grew even stronger. How do the words above provide clues to these questions? The Renaissance Shopping Basket. The age of dictionaries. By using this site, you agree we can set and use cookies. For more details of these cookies and how to disable them, see our cookie policy. Sign up for our e-newsletter.
Cow, beef, hen, pork, sheep, ox, veal. Arrow, bow, armour, battle, castle, tower, shield, spear, war, army. It was divided into sections based on the shires, and listed all the landholdings of each tenant-in-chief of the king as well as who had held the land before the conquest. One of the most obvious effects of the conquest was the introduction of Anglo-Norman , a northern Old Norse -influenced dialect of Old French , as the language of the ruling classes in England, displacing Old English. Norman French words entered the English language, and a further sign of the shift was the usage of names common in France instead of Anglo-Saxon names.
Male names such as William , Robert and Richard soon became common; female names changed more slowly.
The Norman invasion had little impact on placenames , which had changed significantly after earlier Scandinavian invasions. It is not known precisely how much English the Norman invaders learned, nor how much the knowledge of Norman French spread among the lower classes, but the demands of trade and basic communication probably meant that at least some of the Normans and native English were bilingual.
An estimated Normans and other continentals settled in England as a result of the conquest, although exact figures cannot be established. Some of these new residents intermarried with the native English, but the extent of this practice in the years immediately after Hastings is unclear.
Norman conquest of England
Several marriages are attested between Norman men and English women during the years before , but such marriages were uncommon. Most Normans continued to contract marriages with other Normans or other continental families rather than with the English. By the early s, Ailred of Rievaulx was writing that intermarriage was common in all levels of society.
The impact of the conquest on the lower levels of English society is difficult to assess. The major change was the elimination of slavery in England , which had disappeared by the middle of the 12th century. In some places, such as Essex, the decline in slaves was 20 per cent for the 20 years. Many of the free peasants of Anglo-Saxon society appear to have lost status and become indistinguishable from the non-free serfs.
Whether this change was due entirely to the conquest is unclear, but the invasion and its after-effects probably accelerated a process already under way. The spread of towns and increase in nucleated settlements in the countryside, rather than scattered farms, was probably accelerated by the coming of the Normans to England.
Little is known about women other than those in the landholding class, so no conclusions can be drawn about peasant women's status after Noblewomen appear to have continued to influence political life mainly through their kinship relationships. Both before and after aristocratic women could own land, and some women continued to have the ability to dispose of their property as they wished.
Debate over the conquest started almost immediately. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle , when discussing the death of William the Conqueror, denounced him and the conquest in verse, but the king's obituary notice from William of Poitiers, a Frenchman, was full of praise. Historians since then have argued over the facts of the matter and how to interpret them, with little agreement.
In the 20th and 21st centuries historians have focused less on the rightness or wrongness of the conquest itself, instead concentrating on the effects of the invasion. Some, such as Richard Southern , have seen the conquest as a critical turning point in history. Sayles, believe that the transformation was less radical. If Anglo-Saxon England was already evolving before the invasion, with the introduction of feudalism , castles or other changes in society, then the conquest, while important, did not represent radical reform.
But the change was dramatic if measured by the elimination of the English nobility or the loss of Old English as a literary language. Nationalistic arguments have been made on both sides of the debate, with the Normans cast as either the persecutors of the English or the rescuers of the country from a decadent Anglo-Saxon nobility.
The Norman Conquest
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Norman conquest disambiguation. Norman conquest of England. Battle of Stamford Bridge. Harrying of the North. Revolt of the Earls. He reigned from to , and died without children. He was the son of Edward the Exile, son of Edmund Ironside, and was born in Hungary, where his father had fled after the conquest of England by Cnut.
After his family's eventual return to England and his father's death in , [17] Edgar had by far the strongest hereditary claim to the throne, but he was only about thirteen or fourteen at the time of Edward the Confessor's death, and with little family to support him, his claim was passed over by the Witenagemot. After King Edward sided with the rebels, Tostig went into exile in Flanders. Copsi was murdered in by Osulf , his rival for power in Northumbria. Campaigns of the Norman Conquest. The Struggle for Mastery: The Penguin History of Britain — The Debate on the Norman Conquest.
The Norman Conquest
Ciggaar, Krijna Nelly Western Travellers to Constantinople: England and its Rulers: Blackwell Classic Histories of England Third ed. The History of a Dynasty. A Guided Tour of the Language Second ed. From Norman Conquest to Magna Carta: The Norman Impact Upon England. University of California Press. The Fall of Saxon England. Capetian France — Second ed.
Byzantine Armies AD — The Death of Anglo-Saxon England. Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England. The Battle of Hastings: Power, Symbolism and Landscape, to The Governance of Anglo-Saxon England, — Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 29 March