I always wondered how different history might have been if Hastings had come before Stamford Bridge. We could all be Danes - well up here at least.
None of us - not one single person alive in the UK today, would be here now. So, on that basis, I am very grateful for the result!
The course of history would have been so dramatically changed, that not one single person alive today, would have been born.
Really? William's line didn't last very long as it was. It's not like the peasants etc changed all that much after Hastings.
Butterfly effect.
The sons and daughters that every killed soldier *would* have had, never existed. The descendants of the victors would not have existed, had they been slain. In the forty subsequent generations, the natural mix of Britain's inhabitants is such that no-one alive today would have been alive had Harold won.
I always wondered how different history might have been if Hastings had come before Stamford Bridge. We could all be Danes - well up here at least.
None of us - not one single person alive in the UK today, would be here now. So, on that basis, I am very grateful for the result!
The course of history would have been so dramatically changed, that not one single person alive today, would have been born.
Really? William's line didn't last very long as it was. It's not like the peasants etc changed all that much after Hastings.
I agree. Playing "what if...." is great fun but not sure how Chizz and Stig are getting to the conclusion that none of us would be here.
The Norman replaced an English ruling class with a connection to the ordinary people. The Saxon Lords spoke the same language and shared a culture.
Imho the Norman conquest meant a suppression of an English culture and the creation of a distinct ruling class that didn't value English traditions while looking to France as the culture to aspire to. Our obsession with class goes back to 1066 Imo.
England didn't need the Norman to be great. It was already a very wealthy and we'll administered country.
Try Michael Wood - in search of England.
Its butterfly effect, Henry. Each of us is only here due to the monumentally unlikely circumstances of our parents meeting; and their parents; and their parents, and so on...
Go back five generations, and there are 32 people who need to have existed, met and procreated (2 (your parents) x 2 (their parents) x 2 x 2 x 2).
Go back 40 generations, and there are - assuming each generation had two parents - more than 1 trillion people in that generation who would have had to meet and procreated. There would have to be a significant amount of inter-breeding, by definition, for you to have existed. Because the population of the country in the 11th century was only around 2 million. It's mathematically impossible for anyone alive today also to have been alive given a different result in the Battle of Hastings. Had the battle ended differently, some people would have lived and gone on to procreate who otherwise didn't; and others would have died, thus terminating their subsequent lineage.
The total number of participants in your lineage (and that of anyone alive now in this country) is around 2.2 trillion. At least *some* of those people would either have fallen into or out of your line of descendency, if the result of the Battle of Hatings had been different. If that had happened at any one of those 2 trillion "links", you wouldn't exist - someone else might. That's true of everyone around today.
I think I may have posted this before, but I've always enjoyed Julian Rathbone's rant about the Normans although it's obviously a gross over-simplification:
I am not a scholar or an academic. I am not a historian, sociologist, ethnologist, anthropologist… or even a cultural critic. I am an undisciplined creative artist, more specifically a writer, a novelist. I am also emotionally if not intellectually, a Romantic – as will become apparent. I’m here because I have written two books that, amongst other things, explore my ideas of Englishness, The Last English King(1997) and Kings of Albion which was published by Little, Brown in May 2000.
A general assertion: a culture is self-perpetuating as long as nothing intervenes to change or destroy it. At a micro-level you can see this in schools where the entire pupil population can change every five years but traditional patterns of behaviour repeat themselves over decades, even centuries without being codified or imposed – the songs sung at the back of the bus that takes teams on trips to away matches, initiation rites, and so on. There’s a PhD thesis waiting to be written about back-of-the-bus subcultures. Therefore my thesis that what is English has its roots in pre-conquest culture, though warped horribly by the Normans, is not vitiated by the thousand years that separates us from that terrible date.
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 postc-onquest 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.
Sort of what I was saying about class but an 100 time better.
The Rathbone books are worth a read too.
Except there is a ruling class in just about any culture you can think of. The Saxons, like the Romans before them, arrived as the ruling class. The peasants and ordinary people didn't change very much, except who's land they worked on. Over centuries the language fed down. Class has been a part of British life for far far longer than the Normans.
I always wondered how different history might have been if Hastings had come before Stamford Bridge. We could all be Danes - well up here at least.
None of us - not one single person alive in the UK today, would be here now. So, on that basis, I am very grateful for the result!
The course of history would have been so dramatically changed, that not one single person alive today, would have been born.
Really? William's line didn't last very long as it was. It's not like the peasants etc changed all that much after Hastings.
Butterfly effect.
The sons and daughters that every killed soldier *would* have had, never existed. The descendants of the victors would not have existed, had they been slain. In the forty subsequent generations, the natural mix of Britain's inhabitants is such that no-one alive today would have been alive had Harold won.
Unless you get 100% Genocide Of the defeated families, which didn't happen in 1066 or any other War or conflict in the history of this Country, then your Conclusion looks flawed. when the Romans had their 400 years here, many tribes from the south east fled to Wales and Cornwall to regroup.
The butterfly effect and the maths of the 40 generations is correct. but that has as much to do with the random nature of the winning Sperm which makes all our lives a miracle and would be the equivalent of winning the lottery Jackpot every week for a Year.
I always wondered how different history might have been if Hastings had come before Stamford Bridge. We could all be Danes - well up here at least.
None of us - not one single person alive in the UK today, would be here now. So, on that basis, I am very grateful for the result!
The course of history would have been so dramatically changed, that not one single person alive today, would have been born.
Really? William's line didn't last very long as it was. It's not like the peasants etc changed all that much after Hastings.
Butterfly effect.
The sons and daughters that every killed soldier *would* have had, never existed. The descendants of the victors would not have existed, had they been slain. In the forty subsequent generations, the natural mix of Britain's inhabitants is such that no-one alive today would have been alive had Harold won.
Unless you get 100% Genocide Of the defeated families, which didn't happen in 1066 or any other War or conflict in the history of this Country, then your Conclusion looks flawed. when the Romans had their 400 years here, many tribes from the south east fled to Wales and Cornwall to regroup.
The butterfly effect and the maths of the 40 generations is correct. but that has as much to do with the random nature of the winning Sperm which makes all our lives a miracle and would be the equivalent of winning the lottery Jackpot every week for a Year.
What I am explaining is that everyone alive today (apart from very recent migrants) has a lineage (whether they can trace it or not) that includes virtually everyone alive in the eleventh century. So, if the result of the battle had been different, the mix of people after the battle would have been different. (More Saxons, fewer Normans). Therefore, everyone's lineage would have changed. No-one alive today (apart from the very recent migrants) would be alive today if the battle had ended with a different result.
I always wondered how different history might have been if Hastings had come before Stamford Bridge. We could all be Danes - well up here at least.
None of us - not one single person alive in the UK today, would be here now. So, on that basis, I am very grateful for the result!
The course of history would have been so dramatically changed, that not one single person alive today, would have been born.
Really? William's line didn't last very long as it was. It's not like the peasants etc changed all that much after Hastings.
Butterfly effect.
The sons and daughters that every killed soldier *would* have had, never existed. The descendants of the victors would not have existed, had they been slain. In the forty subsequent generations, the natural mix of Britain's inhabitants is such that no-one alive today would have been alive had Harold won.
Unless you get 100% Genocide Of the defeated families, which didn't happen in 1066 or any other War or conflict in the history of this Country, then your Conclusion looks flawed. when the Romans had their 400 years here, many tribes from the south east fled to Wales and Cornwall to regroup.
The butterfly effect and the maths of the 40 generations is correct. but that has as much to do with the random nature of the winning Sperm which makes all our lives a miracle and would be the equivalent of winning the lottery Jackpot every week for a Year.
What I am explaining is that everyone alive today (apart from very recent migrants) has a lineage (whether they can trace it or not) that includes virtually everyone alive in the eleventh century. So, if the result of the battle had been different, the mix of people after the battle would have been different. (More Saxons, fewer Normans). Therefore, everyone's lineage would have changed. No-one alive today (apart from the very recent migrants) would be alive today if the battle had ended with a different result.
The population of England at the time of the conquest was around 2 million - the number of Normans that settled in England after their victory was around 8,000 and most of those were gentry. Of course this would have had an effect on genealogy but would not have changed every single line today. The use of theoretical statistics is one thing - the reality is somewhat different.
Sort of what I was saying about class but an 100 time better.
The Rathbone books are worth a read too.
Except there is a ruling class in just about any culture you can think of. The Saxons, like the Romans before them, arrived as the ruling class. The peasants and ordinary people didn't change very much, except who's land they worked on. Over centuries the language fed down. Class has been a part of British life for far far longer than the Normans.
Yes, there would have been a ruling group but maybe not a ruling class.
As I said the big difference was huge cultural and language difference between the Norman and Saxons.
I always wondered how different history might have been if Hastings had come before Stamford Bridge. We could all be Danes - well up here at least.
None of us - not one single person alive in the UK today, would be here now. So, on that basis, I am very grateful for the result!
The course of history would have been so dramatically changed, that not one single person alive today, would have been born.
Really? William's line didn't last very long as it was. It's not like the peasants etc changed all that much after Hastings.
Butterfly effect.
The sons and daughters that every killed soldier *would* have had, never existed. The descendants of the victors would not have existed, had they been slain. In the forty subsequent generations, the natural mix of Britain's inhabitants is such that no-one alive today would have been alive had Harold won.
Unless you get 100% Genocide Of the defeated families, which didn't happen in 1066 or any other War or conflict in the history of this Country, then your Conclusion looks flawed. when the Romans had their 400 years here, many tribes from the south east fled to Wales and Cornwall to regroup.
The butterfly effect and the maths of the 40 generations is correct. but that has as much to do with the random nature of the winning Sperm which makes all our lives a miracle and would be the equivalent of winning the lottery Jackpot every week for a Year.
What I am explaining is that everyone alive today (apart from very recent migrants) has a lineage (whether they can trace it or not) that includes virtually everyone alive in the eleventh century. So, if the result of the battle had been different, the mix of people after the battle would have been different. (More Saxons, fewer Normans). Therefore, everyone's lineage would have changed. No-one alive today (apart from the very recent migrants) would be alive today if the battle had ended with a different result.
The population of England at the time of the conquest was around 2 million - the number of Normans that settled in England after their victory was around 8,000 and most of those were gentry. Of course this would have had an effect on genealogy but would not have changed every single line today. The use of theoretical statistics is one thing - the reality is somewhat different.
No-one alive today can trace their lineage exclusively to one side or the other. Which means that everyone alive today (save for recent immigrants) is descended from both sides of that particular battle. If the battle had ended differently, there would be a different "mix" of Normans and Saxons. That would mean that everyone's lineage would be different.
Hence, no-one alive today would be here now, if the battle had had a different ending.
Marking the anniversary of one of the most momentous occasions in European history.
the last time we were invaded
Successfully, only if you forget about the Dutch during The Glorious Revolution in 1688 which led to William of Orange becoming king. But there was also....
1067: Edgar Aethling attacked the West Country twice (2)
1060s–70s: Sweyn Estridsson invades in the north and then East Anglia (2)
1208: The Channel Islands are seized by Eustace the Monk (1)
1216: The French invade Kent, which sees their leader crowned (1)
The Hundred Years War
1217: Eustace the Monk invades near Sandwich 1
1338 to 1339: Attack on Harwich, Southampton, Plymouth, Jersey (twice), Guernsey, Alderney and Sark (8)
1340: French raids along the south coast; at least six landings (6)
1360: Attacks on Sandwich, Rye, Hastings and Winchelsea (4)
1373: Another French invasion of Jersey (1)
1376: Attack on Rye (1)
1377: Raids on Rye (twice), Rottingdean, Portsmouth, Dartmouth, Plymouth, Isle of Wight, Winchelsea, Folkestone, Southampton, Poole (11)
1380: Winchelsea attacked again (1)
1386: Winchelsea attacked once more. There were also landings in Kent (2)
1415: Isle of Wight attacked (1)
1408–1415: Raids on Isle of Wight and two on Dartmouth by French privateers (3)
1418: Winchelsea raided once more (1)
1461: French invade Jersey (1). Two other raids on Winchelsea during the war are referred to in documents. The years are not known, but they are distinct from the ones named above (2)
1487: Lambert Simnel, the pretender to the throne, landed in Lancashire, backed by a foreign force (1)
1491: Perkin Warbeck, another pretender, lands in Ireland to gain support for his claim (1)
1495: Warbeck invades in Kent (1)
1497: Warbeck invades in Cornwall (1)
1545: Isle of Wight, invaded by French in campaign that saw the loss of the Mary Rose (1)
1595: Cornwall invaded by the Spanish (1)
1601: Spanish landings at Cork (1)
1627: Barbary pirates land and occupy Lundy (1)
1620s: Barbary attacks around Conwy (1)
1631: Barbary sacking of Baltimore, Ireland (1)
1636: Barbary raid on St Keverne, Cornwall (1)
1640: Barbary attack on Penzance (1)
1667: Dutch landings at Sheerness and Felixstowe (2)
1688: William of Orange lands, leading to the Glorious Revolution (1)
1690: French raid Teignmouth (1)
1719: Spanish land at Loch Alsh (1)
1745: French–backed Jacobites landed (1)
1778: John Paul Jones raid on Whitehaven and Solway Firth (2)
1779: French raids on Channel Islands (1)
1796: French invade at Fishguard (1)
1940: Skirmish involving Germans at Graveney Marsh, Kent (1)
just caught up with this thread. Living just yards from where William was supposed to have planted his Standard prior to the battle it's been an interesting read. We celebrated Harold's passing last week by attending the 1066 Pie Fest at our local pub. Hope I'm around for the 1,000 year anniversary of his death but seeing as I'll be 103 I'm not holding out too much hope !!
just caught up with this thread. Living just yards from where William was supposed to have planted his Standard prior to the battle it's been an interesting read. We celebrated Harold's passing last week by attending the 1066 Pie Fest at our local pub. Hope I'm around for the 1,000 year anniversary of his death but seeing as I'll be 103 I'm not holding out too much hope !!
Next year will be the 950th anniversary Large enjoy that one....like you can't see myself making 2066 (I'd be 101).
Some how missed Jints fantastic appraisal last Year. Just gave a like(better late than Never)
Soapy Jones is Right !
A Superb win at Stamford bridge in the first Match took so much out Of the 1st team that the weak squad and lack of new signing on the great march back from the East Riding of Yorkshire(River Derwent) to Sussex meant a depleted side just didn't have the Legs or stamina and the mid field on the mount were slow.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has it that a giant Norse axeman (Makienok of Naestved) blocked the narrow crossing, and single-handedly held up the entire English army. The story is that this axeman cut down up to 40 Englishmen and was only defeated when an English soldier floated under the small bridge in a half-barrel and thrust his spear through the planks and right up where the sun don't shine.
This is where the saying "they don't like it up'em" was first uttered.
Harold OhMyGodwinson was let down in the 2nd match by the solid 1-6000-500 Formations which Tutt-Tutt feels was too rigid and gave you no attacking options down the middle.
Harold wasn't helped by the fact that Edwin of Mercia and his brother Morkar played a full part in the victory at Stamford Bridge but then refused to attend the Second Round in Hastings. It is thought that they hoped to get a better contract under the new gaffa William.
Some how missed Jints fantastic appraisal last Year. Just gave a like(better late than Never)
Kind of you Sam but I can't take the credit. It was written by the late novelist Julian Rathbone. If you enjoyed it, I recommend Rathbone's novel "The Last English King" covering the lead up to the Battle of Hastings and the battle itself from the perspective of one of Harold's housecarls.
Two things I came across yesterday. I haven't checked them out but thought they were interesting. Both were posted by people who tend do their research properly though.
When the richest man in Britain (recently departed Duke of Westminster) was once asked what advice he would give to young entrepreneurs if they wanted to get rich, he replied: “Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror”.
and
When the New Labour government ended the hereditary peers in the House of Lords, 100 of the ones chucked out were direct Plantagenets i.e. normans.
If you've not read the wonderful book Who Owns Britain by Kevin Cahill - a county by county analysis of the land registry, you should. Excluding MOD land most of it is still owned by the Norman thugs' descendents, topped up by land stolen from the church by Henry The Terrible and later during the Enclosures.
Two things I came across yesterday. I haven't checked them out but thought they were interesting. Both were posted by people who tend do their research properly though.
When the richest man in Britain (recently departed Duke of Westminster) was once asked what advice he would give to young entrepreneurs if they wanted to get rich, he replied: “Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror”.
and
When the New Labour government ended the hereditary peers in the House of Lords, 100 of the ones chucked out were direct Plantagenets i.e. normans.
If you've not read the wonderful book Who Owns Britain by Kevin Cahill - a county by county analysis of the land registry, you should. Excluding MOD land most of it is still owned by the Norman thugs' descendents, topped up by land stolen from the church by Henry The Terrible and later during the Enclosures.
If true we need a revolution.
Don't start with the Duke of Westminster again. Last time I mentioned what a healthy bit of land reform could do for us there were loads on here ready to get the Norman yoke out and go harrying all over again.
Two things I came across yesterday. I haven't checked them out but thought they were interesting. Both were posted by people who tend do their research properly though.
When the richest man in Britain (recently departed Duke of Westminster) was once asked what advice he would give to young entrepreneurs if they wanted to get rich, he replied: “Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror”.
and
When the New Labour government ended the hereditary peers in the House of Lords, 100 of the ones chucked out were direct Plantagenets i.e. normans.
If you've not read the wonderful book Who Owns Britain by Kevin Cahill - a county by county analysis of the land registry, you should. Excluding MOD land most of it is still owned by the Norman thugs' descendents, topped up by land stolen from the church by Henry The Terrible and later during the Enclosures.
If true we need a revolution.
Don't start with the Duke of Westminster again. Last time I mentioned what a healthy bit of land reform could do for us there were loads on here ready to get the Norman yoke out and go harrying all over again.
Sorry theenorth of course those people worked damn hard to steal all that land and to be our unelected representatives.
Comments
The sons and daughters that every killed soldier *would* have had, never existed. The descendants of the victors would not have existed, had they been slain. In the forty subsequent generations, the natural mix of Britain's inhabitants is such that no-one alive today would have been alive had Harold won.
Go back five generations, and there are 32 people who need to have existed, met and procreated (2 (your parents) x 2 (their parents) x 2 x 2 x 2).
Go back 40 generations, and there are - assuming each generation had two parents - more than 1 trillion people in that generation who would have had to meet and procreated. There would have to be a significant amount of inter-breeding, by definition, for you to have existed. Because the population of the country in the 11th century was only around 2 million. It's mathematically impossible for anyone alive today also to have been alive given a different result in the Battle of Hastings. Had the battle ended differently, some people would have lived and gone on to procreate who otherwise didn't; and others would have died, thus terminating their subsequent lineage.
The total number of participants in your lineage (and that of anyone alive now in this country) is around 2.2 trillion. At least *some* of those people would either have fallen into or out of your line of descendency, if the result of the Battle of Hatings had been different. If that had happened at any one of those 2 trillion "links", you wouldn't exist - someone else might. That's true of everyone around today.
Hastings was a major change for more than its casualties.
I am not a scholar or an academic. I am not a historian, sociologist, ethnologist, anthropologist… or even a cultural critic. I am an undisciplined creative artist, more specifically a writer, a novelist. I am also emotionally if not intellectually, a Romantic – as will become apparent. I’m here because I have written two books that, amongst other things, explore my ideas of Englishness, The Last English King(1997) and Kings of Albion which was published by Little, Brown in May 2000.
A general assertion: a culture is self-perpetuating as long as nothing intervenes to change or destroy it. At a micro-level you can see this in schools where the entire pupil population can change every five years but traditional patterns of behaviour repeat themselves over decades, even centuries without being codified or imposed – the songs sung at the back of the bus that takes teams on trips to away matches, initiation rites, and so on. There’s a PhD thesis waiting to be written about back-of-the-bus subcultures. Therefore my thesis that what is English has its roots in pre-conquest culture, though warped horribly by the Normans, is not vitiated by the thousand years that separates us from that terrible date.
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 postc-onquest 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.
Sort of what I was saying about class but an 100 time better.
The Rathbone books are worth a read too.
when the Romans had their 400 years here, many tribes from the south east fled to Wales and Cornwall to regroup.
The butterfly effect and the maths of the 40 generations is correct.
but that has as much to do with the random nature of the winning Sperm which makes all our lives a miracle and would be the equivalent of winning the lottery Jackpot every week for a Year.
As I said the big difference was huge cultural and language difference between the Norman and Saxons.
Hence, no-one alive today would be here now, if the battle had had a different ending.
RIP
Bollox, it's just like supporting the Addicks, crap home defeat after a promising unexpected away win!
RIP you Housecarls...
Just gave a like(better late than Never)
Soapy Jones is Right !
A Superb win at Stamford bridge in the first Match took so much out
Of the 1st team that the weak squad and lack of new signing on the great march back from the East Riding of Yorkshire(River Derwent) to Sussex meant a depleted side just didn't have the Legs or stamina and the mid field on the mount were slow.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has it that a giant Norse axeman (Makienok of Naestved) blocked the narrow crossing, and single-handedly held up the entire English army. The story is that this axeman cut down up to 40 Englishmen and was only defeated when an English soldier floated under the small bridge in a half-barrel and thrust his spear through the planks and right up where the sun don't shine.
This is where the saying "they don't like it up'em" was first uttered.
Harold OhMyGodwinson was let down in the 2nd match by the solid
1-6000-500 Formations which Tutt-Tutt feels was too rigid and gave you no attacking options down the middle.
Harold RIP.
At Hastings and other battles the Saxons would bang their shields and chant OUT, OUT, OUT, OUT.
A new one for tomorrow??
OOT OOT OOT OOOT!
Maybe uut uut uut uut
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=anglos+saxon+pronounciation&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-GB:IE-Address&ie=&oe=&gfe_rd=cr&ei=S_AAWK_AM6X38AfG6rKgDg&safe=active&gws_rd=ssl
certainly not
art art art art Bruv
I don't know it's all Saxon to me!
When the richest man in Britain (recently departed Duke of Westminster) was once asked what advice he would give to young entrepreneurs if they wanted to get rich, he replied: “Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror”.
and
When the New Labour government ended the hereditary peers in the House of Lords, 100 of the ones chucked out were direct Plantagenets i.e. normans.
If you've not read the wonderful book Who Owns Britain by Kevin Cahill - a county by county analysis of the land registry, you should. Excluding MOD land most of it is still owned by the Norman thugs' descendents, topped up by land stolen from the church by Henry The Terrible and later during the Enclosures.
If true we need a revolution.
Interesting read, Lincs.