The Norman Conquest

I hope no one reading this blog thinks of history as "memorizing dates."  But there are still a few dates that everyone ought to know.  One of those is 1066, the date of the Norman Conquest of England.  It had major political, social, and cultural ramifications for England (and subsequently for the US.)

Between the seventh century and the eleventh, England was a Christian territory, with some scholars very well educated in Latin.  But its primary language was Anglo-Saxon, not the Old French of the territory right across the Channel.  England did not have the knights, the castles, or the fiefs that developed on the Continent in the first half of the eleventh century.

In 1066 King Edward of England died childless.  He was nicknamed "the Confessor" for his holy way of life--a confessor is a sort of second-class saint.  Several people were convinced they were Edward's rightful heir, including Harold Godwinson, an Anglo-Saxon lord, and William, duke of Normandy in France.

(Vikings had settled in Normandy--named for them--at the beginning of the tenth century and had in the subsequent generations become French, if lively French.)

Indeed, William claimed that Harold Godwinson had promised that he would be the next English king, after William had rescued him from shipwreck.  Harold remembered the whole event quite differently.  William is nicknamed "the Conqueror," so you can tell how this is going to turn out.

When Edward died, Harold Godwinson was elected king by the witangemot, the Anglo-Saxon general assembly of nobles. But no sooner was he crowned than he heard that England was being invaded--from Scandinavia.  A third claimant from there, Harald Hardrada, had allied with Harold Godwinson's brother and decided that he was rightful king of England.

Harold Godwinson met Harald Hardrada in a great battle and won.  Unfortunately for Anglo-Saxon purists, this great battle is now nearly forgotten, for no sooner had the English won than they learned that William had sailed from Normandy.  The exhausted English army met the Normans near Hastings and held their own remarkably well, in spite of just having marched on foot all the way down from Yorkshire, and in spite of having to face mounted knights.

But Harold Godwinson was killed, and many of the English lords with him.  William then declared his own men a witangemot, they elected him (who could have predicted?), and he was crowned king.

England under the so-called Anglo-Norman kings was immediately transformed.  Knights and castles were established on Continental models.  William declared the men who had accompanied him were now dukes and counts (earls) and insisted they hold from him in fief, the first time a king had been involved in fief-holding.  As English bishops died, they were replaced with French ones.

This was the beginning of the creation of the language we now call English, which has both Germanic elements (from Anglo-Saxon) and French/Latinate ones (from Norman French).  Modern English indeed has as many words as modern German and modern French combined.  In Anglo-Norman England, there were two distinct languages, one for the conquerors and one for the conquered.  In modern English, built on both these languages, a pig running around is a swine, a Germanic word, until it reaches the table and becomes pork, a French word--an Anglo-Saxon peasant raised swine, but a Norman lord ate pork.

Even now, the Germanic/Anglo-Saxon term is the simplest and pithiest, the French the more elegant.  You can say things in English in two ways.  It is possible to express a concept in English in a dual manner.  (See what I mean?)

© C. Dale Brittain 2015
For more on medieval political and social history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Medieval Monarchs

Medieval kings and queens are often assumed to have been absolute, "divine right" monarchs.  But this is not true--such monarchs instead are found only in the early modern period, the Ancient Régime (sixteenth through eighteenth centuries).  Medieval monarchs were elected.

Elected? you say.  You don't mean peasants had access to the ballot box?  No, of course not.  When the US was founded, only propertied men could vote, and women got the vote only after World War I, after many decades of effort by people like Susan B. Anthony, who didn't live to see it.  The ability of southern blacks to vote was tenuous at best until the 1960s.  So we shouldn't expect medieval voting rights to match the twenty-first century.

If one wanted to be a king in medieval Europe, one needed both to be part of a family considered royal and to be elected by a council of the powerful.  In the Merovingian dynasty in early medieval France (fifth-eighth centuries), any male descended in the male line from Clovis, the first king, seemed to imagine he had the right to be king, regardless of details like illegitimacy or a plethora of brothers and cousins.  This led to some extremely nasty family feuds.  A would-be king needed at least some of the powerful to support, follow, and elect him.

The Carolingian dynasty, Charlemagne's family, started with his father Pippin, who deposed the last Merovingian king, had himself formally elected by his followers, and persuaded a bishop to anoint him.  To add to this, he got the pope to bless him and his children as indubitably royal.

In the next centuries, a number of people challenged Carolingian rule, in all cases assembling nobles and bishops who were supposed to "represent" the will of the people, in order to be elected by them.  (Our form of representative democracy derives from medieval forms.)  Once kings, of course, they wanted to make the position hereditary, but it was hard to do so.  And it was not automatic that the oldest son inherit.

In England, the duly elected Anglo-Saxon king was defeated in 1066 by William, duke of Normandy, now known as "the Conqueror."  William was succeeded as king by his second, not first son, William II; the oldest son got Normandy.  William II was succeeded by his younger brother Henry I.  Henry, whose only legitimate son died by drowning (legitimacy had become more important than it had been during the early Middle Ages), was succeeded by his nephew Stephen (son of a daughter of William the Conqueror).  Stephen in turn was succeeded by Henry II, whose mother was a daughter of Henry I.  Henry II had five sons, but three of them died before he did, and the fourth, Richard "the Lionheart," died childless and was succeeded by his younger brother John.

(Interestingly, one of the sons of Henry II who predeceased him, Geoffrey, had had a son named Arthur.  Young Arthur went to visit his Uncle Richard one day and was never seen again.)

For all of these successions, none of which match our vision of inheritance by oldest son, the great lords of England had to give their consent.  We are now up to the early thirteenth century, and, for the first time, both French and English kings started asserting that their oldest son would inherit, even if not formally elected.  But it took a long time to get there.

The castle in the image is Château Gailliard in Normandy, built by Richard the Lionheart.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014