THE Norman conquest of England, led exactly 950 years
ago by William, Duke of Normandy (“the Conqueror”), was the single greatest
political change England has ever seen. It was also very brutal. The
Anglo-Saxon aristocracy was stripped of its assets, and many of its members
suffered the humiliation of being forced to work on land they had once owned.
Even today, conquest by the French is still a touchy subject in some circles.
Nigel Farage, the
on-and-off leader of the UK Independence Party, is known to wear a tie
depicting the Bayeux tapestry, a 70-metre long piece of embroidery depicting
the event, to remind Britons of “the last time we were invaded and taken over”.
The tapestry is peppered with severed limbs and heads of vanquished Englishmen.
Other supporters of Brexit—Britain’s exit from the European Union—use the
language of the conquest to describe the nation’s “domination” by faceless EU
institutions. Academics have held similar opinions. “[F]rom the Englishman’s
point of view, the Norman conquest was a catastrophe,” argued Rex Welldon Finn
of Cambridge University in 1971.
But, while the blood and
guts were horrifying, the conquest also did a lot of good. It transformed the
English economy. Institutions, trade patterns and investment all improved. It
brought some of the British Isles into European circles of trade (“Brentry”, if
you will) and sparked a long economic boom in England which made the country
comparatively rich. The conquest and its aftermath also set a wealthy south
apart from a poor north, a geographical divide that continues to this day. From
those tumultuous decades on, England was indelibly European—and a lot stronger
for it. The Norman conquest made England.
The reasons for the
invasion were complex. Early in 1066 Edward the Confessor, then king of
England, had died heirless, sparking a crisis of succession. His
brother-in-law, Harold Godwinson, took over. But Harold’s claim to the throne
was weak and he faced resistance, especially in the north of the country.
William, Duke of Normandy, just across the English Channel, reckoned that he
was the rightful heir: according to William of Poitiers, a chronicler, Edward
had said that he wanted the young William to succeed him.
The Bayeux tapestry
shows what happened next. In September William invaded from France with an
enormous army. At the Battle of Hastings, on the southern coast of England,
Harold was killed and his body mutilated (one account describes how a Norman
knight “liquefied his entrails with a spear”). William went on to be crowned on
Christmas Day, 1066.
He celebrated his
coronation by going hunting and hawking, but then got down to business. The Anglo-Saxon
system of government and economy was razed to the ground. The lands of over
4,000 English lords passed to fewer than 200 Norman and French barons. The
English were removed from high governmental and ecclesiastical office. By 1073
only two English bishops were left, according to Hugh Thomas of the University
of Miami.
The best source for
assessing the impact of the Norman conquest is the Domesday Book, a survey of
English wealth commissioned by William in 1085. For 13,418 places under
William’s rule, Domesday Book contains data both on who the owner of the estate
was and how valuable it was as measured by how much “geld”, or land tax, it
could yield in a year. For some counties, it also tallied the population, the
amount of livestock and even the ploughs. Its thoroughness suggested it could
have been used for a final reckoning on the day of judgment—hence the name. Its
2m words of Latin, originally inscribed on sheepskin parchment in black and red
ink, were recently digitised by researchers at the University of Hull.
Respondents to the
survey were generally asked to give answers corresponding to three time
periods: 1066, 1086 and an intermediate period shortly after 1066, which
reflects when the manor was first granted to its existing owner.
This makes it
possible to perform a before-and-after analysis of the conquest.
The invasion certainly
caused damage in the short term. In Sussex, where William’s army landed, wealth
fell by 40% as the Normans sought to assert control by destroying capital. From
Hastings to London, estates fell in value wherever the Normans marched. One
academic paper from 1898 suggested that certain manors in the counties around
London were much less valuable by 1070 than they had been in 1066. Despite this
initial damage, however, the conquest ended up helping the English economy.
Wonks have long supposed that immigration tends to boost trade: newcomers are
familiar with their home markets and like to export there. The Normans were
invaders, not immigrants, but Edward Miller and John Hatcher of Cambridge
University conclude that the “generations after 1066 saw a progressive
expansion both of the scale and the value of...external commerce.” English
wool, in particular, was popular on the continent.
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