Get that a French King defeated another French King, on the way back to his provinicial castle. Wonder where he'd have sat his arse if he'd been crowned the French King.
The English army was nearly always third rate, unless the Scots or Irish improved them moving it up to second rate. Thank God it was the French army facing the Nazi's in 1940, if it was the British, the British wouldn't have got away.
The English army was nearly always third rate, unless the Scots or Irish improved them moving it up to second rate. Thank God it was the French army facing the Nazi's in 1940, if it was the British, the British wouldn't have got away.
Historically that second/third rate army has done fairly well for itself.
As for the fall of France in 1940, the fact was that the Dunkirk perimeter was defended by the British Army and no French Division would have got away if it wasn't for them.
Oh, and the fact that the French lasted between 10th May and 14th June before they decided on an 'armistice'
The English army was nearly always third rate, unless the Scots or Irish improved them moving it up to second rate. Thank God it was the French army facing the Nazi's in 1940, if it was the British, the British wouldn't have got away.
Only true some of the time. The New Model Army was feared throughout Europe for example as was the English armies after Agincourt.
Christ almighty there are some strange English haters around on CL. ONLY in this country would there be such a wide variety of twisted viewpoints on all sides but then we are a nation of mongrels and self loathers. What irony English,Welsh,Scottish and Irish all come from the same mashed up gene pool, interbred over centuries of migration around this very small island.
Everyone is the same anyway, don't get all this 'my country is better than your country'. Who cares? None of it was the person bragging, just happens to be born on the same island.
Ironic given that were it not for that little French away trip in 1066, we would still be speaking a dialect of German. Maybe both nations should be mutually grateful for that.
Who did the French invade?? I know we were invaded by the Normans and that evil fiend william the Bastard.. I don't believe Normandy was part of France at the time. The Normans were of Scandanavian/Viking Descent.. Normandy even means something like "Land of the Northman"...
Everyone is the same anyway, don't get all this 'my country is better than your country'. Who cares? None of it was the person bragging, just happens to be born on the same island.
That's far too sensible for this thread. Great post!
Ironic given that were it not for that little French away trip in 1066, we would still be speaking a dialect of German. Maybe both nations should be mutually grateful for that.
Who did the French invade?? I know we were invaded by the Normans and that evil fiend william the Bastard.. I don't believe Normandy was part of France at the time. The Normans were of Scandanavian/Viking Descent.. Normandy even means something like "Land of the Northman"...
The invading army was drawn from all over France - Normandy, Flanders, Brittany and elsewhere.
The Normans had been in Normandy for a century and a half by then. They'd married local woman for generations, converted to Christianity and had developed a dialect of French.
They were no more Vikings than a sixth generation decendant of Heugenots in England is French.
Historically that second/third rate army has done fairly well for itself.
As for the fall of France in 1940, the fact was that the Dunkirk perimeter was defended by the British Army and no French Division would have got away if it wasn't for them.
Oh, and the fact that the French lasted between 10th May and 14th June before they decided on an 'armistice'
Historically English armies would not and could not compete against the best Continental armies after the Medieval period. Occasionally great Commanders such as the Duke of Marlborough, were able to unite allies and choose their campaigns. The Battle of Hannut, and The Siege of Lille were all important on allowing the withdrawal of troops at Dunkirk: not withstanding the last defence of Dunkirk being by 50,OOO French soldiers
There are many impressive achievements by Britain, but very rarely have the English/British Army been world beaters. The pathetic attacks on the French Armies in WWII neglect the fact that they fought bravely against the best army in the world, who would have destroyed British forces in similar circumstances, and probably even quicker.
I exagerated my previous comment, but the truth is the Germans were vastly superior to the British army. As the Prussians had been for hundreds of years.
All this English pride in Agincourt is bollocks. Having to fight for your King, and then by murdered by your foe whilst that silly sod King get's ransomed is a waste of everyone's summer holidays.
As for Normandy it was a fiefdom of the French Kings, and like all invaded countries was populated by few of the conquerors.
Just about to start reading Max Hasting's new book "Catastrophe 1914". Anyone else read/reading it?
I will be interested in how it comes across, the first acknowledgement is a CL poster from time to time who took Max on the recce for the book. There is a BBC Documentary on 1914 with Max Hastings due to be screened in the New Year to compliment the book.
Ironic given that were it not for that little French away trip in 1066, we would still be speaking a dialect of German. Maybe both nations should be mutually grateful for that.
Who did the French invade?? I know we were invaded by the Normans and that evil fiend william the Bastard.. I don't believe Normandy was part of France at the time. The Normans were of Scandanavian/Viking Descent.. Normandy even means something like "Land of the Northman"...
The invading army was drawn from all over France - Normandy, Flanders, Brittany and elsewhere.
The Normans had been in Normandy for a century and a half by then. They'd married local woman for generations, converted to Christianity and had developed a dialect of French.
They were no more Vikings than a sixth generation decendant of Heugenots in England is French.
The Normans and The Franks were both Norsemen as I said above, hence the word Norman, just like England is derived from Anglander. Angles, Saxons and Jutes were all originally Norse so there is no mongrelisation at all although some local interbreeding DNA checks suggest strong uniformity. The Rosse (Russ) are also a Norse tribe as are other settlements along the Vulgar. Bretaigne's (Brittany) are a distinct group and are Celtic, just like the Brits that our islands are named after. The Welsh (of Wales of course) and the Picts from Highland Scotland all Celts. Lowland Scotland is much more Norse as are the Scottish islands.
Historically that second/third rate army has done fairly well for itself.
As for the fall of France in 1940, the fact was that the Dunkirk perimeter was defended by the British Army and no French Division would have got away if it wasn't for them.
Oh, and the fact that the French lasted between 10th May and 14th June before they decided on an 'armistice'
The Battle of Hannut, and The Siege of Lille were all important on allowing the withdrawal of troops at Dunkirk: not withstanding the last defence of Dunkirk being by 50,OOO French soldiers........
The pathetic attacks on the French Armies in WWII neglect the fact that they fought bravely against the best army in the world, who would have destroyed British forces in similar circumstances, and probably even quicker...........
I exagerated my previous comment, but the truth is the Germans were vastly superior to the British army. As the Prussians had been for hundreds of years........
All this English pride in Agincourt is bollocks........
As far as Dunkirk is concerned, initially the Belgian army defended the eastern part of the pocket surrendered on 28th May and the size of the pocket was reduced. The eastern part is then defended by the French and British troops.
The British evacuation began on 27th May but on 30th May the British troops are still playing a role in the defense of the pocket on the eastern part with the French. It is fact that by the beginning of June, about 30,000-40,000 French troops constitute the very last barrier to cover the evacuation of the BEF against about 130,000 German troops. But they are defending their Country from invasion. also it allowed 123,000 French Troops to evacuate. Two British Divisions remained in France after the evacuation.
No doubting The French army fought bravely - they were defending their own land, fighting on their own ground and were fairly well prepared.
Again, no disputing the German Army were vastly superior to the British Army at the start of the war, but this was mainly because they'd spent the six previous years building up their armies and their materiel and tested it all out in Spain prior to invading Poland. We had a standing army of 224,000 men whereas the Germans had 1.5 million. The British Army hardly suffered a strategic defeat from 1943 onwards.
And I shall continue to celebrate this famous English Victory over a 'superior' and vastly larger French army on French soil every St Crispins Day.
ColinTat I am interested in the statement "but the truth is the German Army were vastly superior to the British Army as the Prussians had been for hundreds of years"
You should publish this theory in a wider forum than CL as it flies in the face of current thinking of the vast majority of military historians and the accepted international view.
It would make a fascinating paper if delivered to the British Commission for Military History, Sandhurst War Studies Department, Shrivenham or the Royal United Services Institute I would be happy to facilitate/arrange for you to come and speak to us at any of those venues as we accept that you should always re-evaluate history, none of us have all the facts and your take on events sound intruiguing.
•This is an extract from a speech given by the late Julian Rathbone years ago, which says what I think much more eloquently than I'm able to. He's also written a great novel about the Norman invasion called "The Last English King"
"The English. There are two strands in Englishness which I believe achieved a sort of uneasy meld, uneasy because of the basic contradictions between them, by about 1450, and remain dominant right down to present times. They derive from two cultures.
First, the Anglo-Saxon-Danish. The Anglo-Saxons were teutonic, Germanic. When their conquest of what we now call England began they were a split culture - the males were warriors and focussed on their leader or king. Women lived in an almost separate realm where they were powerful and respected. It is arguable that the Freudian conflict between war and work on one side and hearth and sex on the other was not entirely resolved. On the male side at least obedience and loyalty were the most highly-rated virtues.
"The Danes, whose more or less assimilated descendants amounted to at least a third of the population by 1066 but had their own traditions and laws, the Danelaw, were also a warrior culture but perhaps based on smaller units whose size was circumscribed by the number of men in a long-boat. They valued individualism and individual feats more then the Anglo-Saxons did, individual pride over-rode a loyalty that could become servile in the Anglo-Saxons.
The political organisations of both retained strong traditions of a democracy an anarchist like Peter Kropotkin would have found congenial. A sort of mutual-aid ran through village-based society, moots or meetings at all levels took decisions after endless discussion, all principal offices including kingship were elective, and so on...
Then came the Normans who were, and are, like their leader, bastards. It is true that they were descended from Norsemen who had arrived in northern France a hundred or so years earlier, but during that hundred years they had lost their language and most of their way of life. If I may interpose a thought here, I think historians generally have failed to make enough of the effects of intermarriage between conquerors and conquered. Conquerors rarely bring their women with them and certainly never enough women. The Danes arrived in England and intermarried into a culture that in many ways was significantly similar to the one they brought with them, and they thus retained much of their own identity. The Normans, from the same roots, arrived in a France where the culture was very different, and within a hundred years no longer lived, nor even looked much like the Norsemen they were descended from.
Following 1066 the Normans imposed a rigid hierarchical, ethnically-based authoritarian bureaucracy on the anarcho-democratic systems they found. They were anal, dull, cruel. They practised ethnic cleansing in the West Country and South Yorkshire, in the latter case reducing a well-populated, prosperous area to what the Doomsday book itself, twenty years later, called a barren wasteland. They did not assimilate. Laws were not written in English until the 1390s, and the first postconquest king to speak English easily was Henry V. Imagine Germany had won the last war. It is as if the official language would not revert from German to English until 2,300.
However, the Normans were few in number, not more than 10,000 initially, maybe less, and they brought few women with them. They therefore relied on Anglo-Saxon collaborators to fill the minor posts of government and the lower echelons of the church, and to some extent they interbred - initially by rape.
The result of 1066 is the English: two, possibly three conflicting strands which I believe are with us today and make us what we are. On the one side individuality and the rights of the individual are more highly valued here than almost anywhere else in the world. Most of us object to government, do not respect politicians, hate and fear bureaucratic interference. We are hedonistic, pragmatic, empirical, pluralist, hate dogma. We like a good time. We do not understand spirituality because we reject the duality that is a precondition of the concept of spirituality. We are Roger Bacon, William of Occam, John Wycliffe, Jack Cade, Wat Tyler and the Lollards; Langland, Milton and the Levellers; Blake, Tom Paine and the Chartists; Turner and Darwin. We are lager louts and we hate the French. We are adventurers. We believe a change is as good as a rest.
On the other side we are Normans. We are superior, we rule by right, we obey the rules, though we congratulate each other when we get away with breaking them. We are one of us. We are control freaks. We are bossy. We like systems so long as we are in charge of them. We march, we do not amble, we fire as one and not at will, and we take our hands out of our pockets when we speak to me. We tabulate, order, divide. We are deeply prejudiced (God is an Englishman - a Norman actually) and intolerant.
And worst of all, somewhere in between, we are collaborators- In exchange for security, a certain status, we will keep order for the Normans, we fear change, we are tidy, we clip our hedges, we keep off the grass (pun intended), we do as we're told.
With these contradictory strands, no wonder we don't know who we are, but I believe, in spite of 1066, we are at best Vikings with some of the stolidity, reliability, even dullness of the Anglo-Saxons, and, well, pardon my Anglo-Saxon, fuck the Normans and the collaborators. I really do believe that at last, like the House of Lords, they've had their day."
If you look at coroners records, certainly as late as the 1390's, you will see loads of French names, especially sheriffs and officials, and those members of the population worth naming. Others are mentioned, but as 'a boy', or 'passers by', or 'a woman'. Dates are describes according to the church calendar 'the feast of St Jude and St John', and times according to the church day 'at the hour of vespers'. certainly London, as seen through those records is a very church dominated society, and all the people with wealth and power have French names. This is nearly 250 years after the conquest.
Here is an example (from Oxford)
DAVID DE TREMPEDHWY ; December 22, 1296
(Coroner's Roll 128, Record Office). n ^96 of the Crown for the time of Adam de Spald- ing, Cojoaer of the tawn of Orford ; in the 25th year of King Edward.
It came to pass on Saturday, the morrow of St. Thomas the -Apostle, in the 25th year of King Ed- ward, that a clerk named David de Trempedhwy died in his lodging, where he abode towards the east gate of Oxford. And the same day he was . ewe.i by Adam de Spalding, Coroner of Oxford; and he had a wound with a long knife under the left breast, very deep. An inquest was held thereon the same day before the said coroner by means of the four neighbouring parishes, to wit, St. Peter's- in-the-East, St. Mary's, St. Mildred's, and All Saints. And all the sworn men in the said inquest say upon their oath that on Sunday next after the feast of St. Nicholas the said David, about the hour of curfew, took a harlot named Christiana, of Wor- cester, with him, even to a street called Scolestrete, and entered one of the schools, and there certain clerks, whose names are unknown, came upon him, who were lying in wait for the said David, and made an assault on him. and so in that assault he was wounded, whereof he died on the Saturday aforesaid, and so he lived for twelve days, and had all church rights, and never after could it be found out who were guilty of his death.
Trafalgar Day was this week as well .. Late October seems to have been a fortunate time of year for British power on both land and sea .. except for Balaclava
Comments
The English army was nearly always third rate, unless the Scots or Irish improved them moving it up to second rate. Thank God it was the French army facing the Nazi's in 1940, if it was the British, the British wouldn't have got away.
As for the fall of France in 1940, the fact was that the Dunkirk perimeter was defended by the British Army and no French Division would have got away if it wasn't for them.
Oh, and the fact that the French lasted between 10th May and 14th June before they decided on an 'armistice'
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_War_of_Scottish_Independence
The Normans had been in Normandy for a century and a half by then. They'd married local woman for generations, converted to Christianity and had developed a dialect of French.
They were no more Vikings than a sixth generation decendant of Heugenots in England is French.
There are many impressive achievements by Britain, but very rarely have the English/British Army been world beaters. The pathetic attacks on the French Armies in WWII neglect the fact that they fought bravely against the best army in the world, who would have destroyed British forces in similar circumstances, and probably even quicker.
I exagerated my previous comment, but the truth is the Germans were vastly superior to the British army. As the Prussians had been for hundreds of years.
All this English pride in Agincourt is bollocks. Having to fight for your King, and then by murdered by your foe whilst that silly sod King get's ransomed is a waste of everyone's summer holidays.
As for Normandy it was a fiefdom of the French Kings, and like all invaded countries was populated by few of the conquerors.
The British evacuation began on 27th May but on 30th May the British troops are still playing a role in the defense of the pocket on the eastern part with the French. It is fact that by the beginning of June, about 30,000-40,000 French troops constitute the very last barrier to cover the evacuation of the BEF against about 130,000 German troops. But they are defending their Country from invasion. also it allowed 123,000 French Troops to evacuate. Two British Divisions remained in France after the evacuation.
No doubting The French army fought bravely - they were defending their own land, fighting on their own ground and were fairly well prepared.
Again, no disputing the German Army were vastly superior to the British Army at the start of the war, but this was mainly because they'd spent the six previous years building up their armies and their materiel and tested it all out in Spain prior to invading Poland. We had a standing army of 224,000 men whereas the Germans had 1.5 million. The British Army hardly suffered a strategic defeat from 1943 onwards.
And I shall continue to celebrate this famous English Victory over a 'superior' and vastly larger French army on French soil every St Crispins Day.
Cry God for Harry, England and St George!
You should publish this theory in a wider forum than CL as it flies in the face of current thinking of the vast majority of military historians and the accepted international view.
It would make a fascinating paper if delivered to the British Commission for Military History, Sandhurst War Studies Department, Shrivenham or the Royal United Services Institute I would be happy to facilitate/arrange for you to come and speak to us at any of those venues as we accept that you should always re-evaluate history, none of us have all the facts and your take on events sound intruiguing.
"The English. There are two strands in Englishness which I believe achieved a sort of uneasy meld, uneasy because of the basic contradictions between them, by about 1450, and remain dominant right down to present times. They derive from
two cultures.
First, the Anglo-Saxon-Danish. The Anglo-Saxons were
teutonic, Germanic. When their conquest of what we now call England began they were a split culture - the males were warriors and focussed on their leader or king. Women lived in an almost separate realm where they were powerful and respected. It is arguable that the Freudian conflict between war and work on one side and hearth and sex on the other was not entirely resolved. On the male side
at least obedience and loyalty were the most highly-rated virtues.
"The Danes, whose more or less assimilated descendants amounted to at least a third of the population by 1066 but had their own traditions and laws, the Danelaw, were also a warrior culture but perhaps based on smaller units whose size was circumscribed by the number of men in a long-boat. They valued individualism and individual feats more then the Anglo-Saxons did, individual pride over-rode a
loyalty that could become servile in the Anglo-Saxons.
The political organisations of both retained strong traditions of a democracy an anarchist like Peter Kropotkin would have found congenial. A sort of mutual-aid ran through village-based society, moots or meetings at all levels took decisions
after endless discussion, all principal offices including kingship were
elective, and so on...
Then came the Normans who were, and are, like
their leader, bastards. It is true that they were descended from Norsemen who had arrived in northern France a hundred or so years earlier, but during that hundred years they had lost their language and most of their way of life. If I may interpose a thought here, I think historians generally have failed to make enough of the effects of intermarriage between conquerors and conquered.
Conquerors rarely bring their women with them and certainly never enough women.
The Danes arrived in England and intermarried into a culture that in many ways was significantly similar to the one they brought with them, and they thus retained much of their own identity. The Normans, from the same roots, arrived in a France where the culture was very different, and within a hundred years no longer lived, nor even looked much like the Norsemen they were descended from.
Following 1066 the Normans imposed a rigid hierarchical,
ethnically-based authoritarian bureaucracy on the anarcho-democratic systems they found. They were anal, dull, cruel. They practised ethnic cleansing in the West Country and South Yorkshire, in the latter case reducing a well-populated, prosperous area to what the Doomsday book itself, twenty years later, called a barren wasteland. They did not assimilate. Laws were not written in English until the 1390s, and the first postconquest king to speak English easily was Henry V. Imagine Germany had won the last war. It is as if the official language
would not revert from German to English until 2,300.
However, the Normans were few in number, not more than 10,000 initially, maybe less, and they brought few women with them. They therefore relied on Anglo-Saxon collaborators to fill the minor posts of government and the lower echelons of the church, and to some extent they interbred - initially by rape.
The result of 1066 is the English: two, possibly three conflicting strands which I believe are with us today and make us what we are. On the one side individuality and the rights of the individual are more highly valued here than almost anywhere else in the world. Most of us object to government, do not respect politicians, hate and fear bureaucratic interference. We are hedonistic, pragmatic, empirical,
pluralist, hate dogma. We like a good time. We do not understand spirituality because we reject the duality that is a precondition of the concept of spirituality. We are Roger Bacon, William of Occam, John Wycliffe, Jack Cade, Wat Tyler and the Lollards; Langland, Milton and the Levellers; Blake, Tom Paine and the Chartists; Turner and Darwin. We are lager louts and we hate the French.
We are adventurers. We believe a change is as good as a rest.
On the other side we are Normans. We are superior, we rule by right, we obey the rules, though we congratulate each other when we get away with breaking them. We are one of us. We are control freaks. We are bossy. We like systems so long as we are in charge of them. We march, we do not amble, we fire as one and not at will, and we take our hands out of our pockets when we speak to me. We tabulate,
order, divide. We are deeply prejudiced (God is an Englishman - a Norman actually) and intolerant.
And worst of all, somewhere in between, we are collaborators- In exchange for security, a certain status, we will keep order for the Normans, we fear change, we are tidy, we clip our hedges, we keep off
the grass (pun intended), we do as we're told.
With these contradictory strands, no wonder we don't know who we are, but I believe, in spite of 1066, we are at best Vikings with some of the stolidity, reliability, even dullness of the Anglo-Saxons, and, well, pardon my Anglo-Saxon, fuck the Normans and the collaborators. I really do believe that at last, like the House of Lords, they've had their day."
Dates are describes according to the church calendar 'the feast of St Jude and St John', and times according to the church day 'at the hour of vespers'. certainly London, as seen through those records is a very church dominated society, and all the people with wealth and power have French names. This is nearly 250 years after the conquest.
Here is an example (from Oxford)
DAVID DE TREMPEDHWY ; December 22, 1296
(Coroner's Roll 128, Record Office).
n ^96 of the Crown for the time of Adam de Spald-
ing, Cojoaer of the tawn of Orford ; in the 25th
year of King Edward.
It came to pass on Saturday, the morrow of St.
Thomas the -Apostle, in the 25th year of King Ed-
ward, that a clerk named David de Trempedhwy
died in his lodging, where he abode towards the east
gate of Oxford. And the same day he was . ewe.i
by Adam de Spalding, Coroner of Oxford; and he
had a wound with a long knife under the left
breast, very deep. An inquest was held thereon
the same day before the said coroner by means of
the four neighbouring parishes, to wit, St. Peter's-
in-the-East, St. Mary's, St. Mildred's, and All
Saints. And all the sworn men in the said inquest
say upon their oath that on Sunday next after the
feast of St. Nicholas the said David, about the hour
of curfew, took a harlot named Christiana, of Wor-
cester, with him, even to a street called Scolestrete,
and entered one of the schools, and there certain
clerks, whose names are unknown, came upon him,
who were lying in wait for the said David, and
made an assault on him. and so in that assault he
was wounded, whereof he died on the Saturday
aforesaid, and so he lived for twelve days, and had
all church rights, and never after could it be found
out who were guilty of his death.
Happy St Crispin's Day.
So military competence and incompetence celebrated on the same day.