   #copyright

Norman conquest of England

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: British History 1500 and
before (including Roman Britain)

   Bayeux Tapestry depicting events leading to the Battle of Hastings
   Enlarge
   Bayeux Tapestry depicting events leading to the Battle of Hastings

   The Norman conquest of England was the invasion of the Kingdom of
   England by William the Conqueror ( Duke of Normandy), in 1066 at the
   Battle of Hastings and the subsequent Norman control of England. It is
   an important watershed in English history for a number of reasons. The
   conquest linked England more closely with Continental Europe, lessening
   Scandinavian influence. It created one of the most powerful monarchies
   in Europe and engendered the most sophisticated governmental system in
   Western Europe. The conquest changed the English language and culture,
   and set the stage for English-French conflict that would last into the
   19th century. It remains the last successful military conquest of
   England.

Origins

   Normandy is a region in northwest France which in the 155 years prior
   to 1066 had experienced extensive Viking settlement. In the year 911,
   French Carolingian ruler Charles the Simple had allowed a group of
   Vikings, under their leader Rollo, to settle in northern France with
   the idea that they would provide protection along the coast against
   future Viking invaders. This proved successful and the Vikings in the
   region became known as the Northmen from which Normandy is derived. The
   Normans quickly adapted to the indigenous culture, renouncing paganism
   and converting to Christianity. They adopted the langue d'oïl of their
   new home through the introduction of Norse features, transforming it
   into the Norman language, and intermarrying with the local populations.
   They also used the territory granted them as a base to extend the
   frontiers of the Duchy to the west, annexing territory including the
   Bessin, the Cotentin Peninsula and the Channel Islands.

   Meanwhile, in England the Viking attacks increased and in 1002 the
   Anglo-Saxon king of England Aethelred II agreed to marry Emma, the
   daughter of the Duke of Normandy, to cement a blood-tie alliance for
   help against the raiders. The Viking attacks in England grew so bad
   that in 1013 the Anglo-Saxon kings fled and spent the next 30 years in
   Normandy, not returning to England until 1042.

   When the Anglo-Saxon king Edward the Confessor died a few years later
   in 1066 with no child, and thus no direct heir to the throne, it
   created a power vacuum into which three competing interests laid claim
   to the throne of England.

   The first was Harald III of Norway who had blood ties to the
   Anglo-Saxon family. The second was William, Duke of Normandy because of
   his blood ties to Aethelred. The third was an Anglo-Saxon by the name
   of Harold Godwinson who had been elected in the traditional way by the
   Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot of England to be king. The stage was set for a
   battle among the three.

Conquest of England

   King Harald of Norway invaded northern England in September 1066 which
   left Harold of England little time to gather an army. Harold's forces
   marched north from London and surprised the Vikings at the Battle of
   Stamford Bridge on September 25th. In the Anglo-Saxon victory, King
   Harald was killed and the Norwegians were driven out. It was the last
   Viking invasion of England. The victory came at great cost, as the
   Anglo-Saxon army was left in a battered and weakened state.

   Meanwhile William had assembled an invasion fleet of approximately 600
   ships and an army of 7000 men. This was far greater than the reserves
   of men in Normandy alone. William recruited soldiers from all of
   Northern France, the low countries, and Germany. Many soldiers in his
   army were second- and third-born sons who had little or no inheritance
   under the laws of primogeniture. William promised that if they brought
   their own horse, armour, and weapons to join him, they would be
   rewarded with lands and titles in the new realm.

   After being delayed for a few weeks by unfavourable weather, he arrived
   in the south of England just days after Harold's victory over the
   Norwegians. The delay turned out to be crucial; had he landed in August
   as originally planned, Harold would have been waiting with a fresh and
   numerically superior force. William finally landed at Pevensey in
   Sussex on September 28, 1066 and assembled a prefabricated wooden
   castle near Hastings as a base.

   The choice of landing was a direct provocation to Harold Godwinson, as
   this area of Sussex was Harold's own personal domain. William began
   immediately to lay waste to the land. It may have prompted Harold to
   respond immediately and in haste rather than to pause and await
   reinforcements in London. Again, it was an event that favoured William.
   Had he marched inland, he may have outstretched his supply lines, and
   possibly have been surrounded by Harold's forces.

   They fought at the Battle of Hastings on October 14. It was a close
   battle but in the final hours Harold was killed and the Saxon army
   fled. With no living contender for the throne of England to oppose
   William, this was the defining moment of what is now known as the
   Norman Conquest.

   After his victory at Hastings, William marched through Kent to London
   but met fierce resistance at Southwark. He then marched down the old
   Roman Road of Stane Street to link up with another Norman army on the
   Pilgrims' Way near Dorking, Surrey. The combined armies then avoided
   London altogether and went up the Thames valley to the major fortified
   Saxon town of Wallingford, Oxfordshire, whose Saxon lord, Wigod, had
   supported William's cause. While there, he received the submission of
   Stigand, the Archbishop of Canterbury. One of William's favourites,
   Robert D'Oyley of Lisieux, also married Wigod's daughter, no doubt to
   secure the lord's continued allegiance. William then travelled north
   east along the Chiltern escarpment to the Saxon fort at Berkhamstead,
   Hertfordshire and waited there to receive the submission of London. The
   remaining Saxon noblemen surrendered to William there, and he was
   acclaimed King of England around the end of October and crowned on
   December 25, 1066 in Westminster Abbey.

   Although the south of England submitted quickly to Norman rule,
   resistance continued, especially in the North. After six years, in 1072
   William moved north, 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 (
   1070). 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.

   The conquest of Wales took place piecemeal and finished only in 1282,
   during the reign of King Edward I. Edward also subdued Scotland but did
   not truly conquer it as it retained a separate monarchy until 1603 and
   remained an independent kingdom until 1707.

Control of England

   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 5,000 armoured knights. The Anglo-Saxon lords
   were accustomed to being independent from centralized government,
   contrary to the Normans who had a centralized system, resented by the
   Anglo-Saxons. 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. 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 favourites 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.

   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 range 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 1070 manoeuvred to replace him with the Italian Lanfranc and
   proceeded to appoint Normans to church positions.

Significance

   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 300 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.

   Another direct consequence of the invasion was the near total loss of
   Anglo-Saxon aristocracy, and Anglo-Saxon control over the Church in
   England. As William subdued rebels, he confiscated their lands and gave
   them to his Norman supporters. By the time of the Domesday Book, only
   two English landowners of any note had survived the displacement. By
   1096 no church See or Bishopric was held by any native Englishman, only
   by Normans.

   No other medieval European conquest had such disastrous consequences
   for the defeated ruling class. William's prestige among his followers
   gained a tremendous boost, for he was able to award them vast tracts of
   land with little cost to himself. His awards also had a basis in
   consolidating his own control; with each gift of land and titles, the
   newly created Lord would have to build a castle and subdue the natives.
   Thus was the conquest self-perpetuating.

Governmental systems

   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". The shires tended to be somewhat autonomous and
   lacked coordinated control. 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. The Normans centralised the autonomous
   shire system. The Domesday Book exemplifies the practical codification
   which enabled Norman assimilation of conquered territories through
   central control of a census. It was the first kingdom-wide census taken
   in Europe since the time of the Romans, and enabled more efficient
   taxation of the Norman's new realm.

   Systems of accounting grew in sophistication. A government accounting
   office called the exchequer was established by Henry I; from 1150
   onward this was located in Westminster.

Anglo-Norman and French relations

   Anglo-Norman and French political relations became very complicated and
   somewhat hostile after the Norman Conquest. The Normans still retained
   control of the holdings in Normandy and were thus still vassals to the
   King of France. At the same time, they were the equals as King of
   England. On the one hand they owed fealty to the King of France, and on
   the other hand they did not, as they were peers. In the 1150s with the
   creation of the Angevin Empire the Normans controlled half of France
   and all of England, dwarfing the power of France. Yet the Normans were
   still technically vassals to France. A crisis came in 1204 when the
   French king Philip II seized all Norman and Angevin holdings in
   mainland France except Gascony. This would later lead to the Hundred
   Years War when Anglo-Norman English kings tried to regain their
   dynastic holdings in France.

   During William's lifetime, his vast land gains were a source of great
   alarm by not only the King of France, but the Counts of Anjou and
   Flanders. Each did his best to diminish Normandy's holdings and power,
   creating centuries of skirmishes and battles in the region.

English cultural development

   One interpretation of the Conquest maintains that England became a
   cultural and economic backwater for almost 150 years. Few kings of
   England actually resided for any length of time in England, preferring
   to rule from cities in Normandy such as Rouen and concentrate on their
   more lucrative French holdings. Indeed, a mere four months after the
   Battle of Hastings, William left his brother-in-law in charge of the
   country while he returned to Normandy. The country remained an
   unimportant appendage of Norman lands and later the Angevin fiefs of
   Henry II.

   Another interpretation is it that the Norman Duke-Kings neglected their
   continental territories, where they in theory owed fealty to the Kings
   of France, in favour of consolidating their power in their new
   sovereign realm of England. The resources poured into the construction
   of cathedrals, castles and the administration of the new realm arguably
   diverted energy and concentration away from the need to defend
   Normandy, alienating the local nobility and weakening Norman control
   over the borders of the territory, while simultaneously the power of
   the Kings of France grew.

   The eventual loss of control of continental Normandy divided landed
   families as members chose loyalty over land or vice-versa.

Legacy

   The extent to which the conquerors remained ethnically distinct from
   the native population of England varied regionally and along class
   lines, but as early as the twelfth century the Dialogue on the
   Exchequer attests to considerable intermarriage between native English
   and Norman immigrants. Over the centuries, particularly after 1348 when
   the Black Death pandemic carried off a significant number of the
   English nobility, the two groups merged and became barely
   distinguishable.

   The Norman conquest was the the last successful conquest of England,
   although some historians identify the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as
   the most recent successful invasion. The last full scale invasion
   attempt was by the Spanish Armada, which was defeated at sea by the
   English Navy and the weather. Napoleon and Hitler both prepared
   invasions of Great Britain, but neither was ever launched (for Hitler's
   preparations see Operation Sealion). Some minor military expeditions to
   Great Britain were successful within their limited scope, such as the
   1595 Spanish military raid on Cornwall, small scale raids on Cornwall
   by Arab slavers in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Dutch raid on the
   Medway towns' shipyards in 1667, and the American raid on Whitehaven
   during the American War of Independence.

   For the importance of the concept in mass culture, note the spoof
   history book 1066 and All That as well as the iconic status of the
   Bayeux Tapestry.

   Similar conquests include the Norman conquests of Apulia, Sicily, the
   Principality of Antioch, and Ireland.

   Alan Ayckbourn wrote a series of plays entitled The Norman Conquests.
   Their subject matter has nothing to do with the Norman conquest of
   England.

   Retrieved from "
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_England"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
