The Danes fled at his approach, and he occupied York. He bought off the Danes, who agreed to leave England in the spring, and during the winter of —70 his forces systematically devastated Northumbria in the Harrying of the North , subduing all resistance. In early , having secured the submission of Waltheof and Gospatric, and driven Edgar and his remaining supporters back to Scotland, William returned to Mercia, where he based himself at Chester and crushed all remaining resistance in the area before returning to the south. William also oversaw a purge of prelates from the Church, most notably Stigand, who was deposed from Canterbury.
The papal legates also imposed penances on William and those of his supporters who had taken part in Hastings and the subsequent campaigns. Both sees were filled by men loyal to William: Lanfranc , abbot of William's foundation at Caen , received Canterbury while Thomas of Bayeux , one of William's chaplains, was installed at York.
Some other bishoprics and abbeys also received new bishops and abbots and William confiscated some of the wealth of the English monasteries, which had served as repositories for the assets of the native nobles. In Sweyn II of Denmark arrived to take personal command of his fleet and renounced the earlier agreement to withdraw, sending troops into the Fens to join forces with English rebels led by Hereward the Wake , [m] at that time based on the Isle of Ely.
Sweyn soon accepted a further payment of Danegeld from William, and returned home. Edwin and Morcar again turned against William, and although Edwin was quickly betrayed and killed, Morcar reached Ely , where he and Hereward were joined by exiled rebels who had sailed from Scotland. William arrived with an army and a fleet to finish off this last pocket of resistance. After some costly failures the Normans managed to construct a pontoon to reach the Isle of Ely, defeated the rebels at the bridgehead and stormed the island, marking the effective end of English resistance. William faced difficulties in his continental possessions in , [83] but in he returned to England and marched north to confront King Malcolm III of Scotland.
Whether this meant only for Cumbria and Lothian or for the whole Scottish kingdom was left ambiguous. Another earl, Waltheof, despite being one of William's favourites, was also involved, and some Breton lords were ready to offer support. Ralph also requested Danish aid.
William remained in Normandy while his men in England subdued the revolt. Norwich was besieged and surrendered, and Ralph went into exile.
Norman conquest of England - Wikipedia
Meanwhile, the Danish king's brother, Cnut , had finally arrived in England with a fleet of ships, but he was too late as Norwich had already surrendered. The Danes then raided along the coast before returning home. By that time William had returned to the continent, where Ralph was continuing the rebellion from Brittany.
Once England had been conquered, the Normans faced many challenges in maintaining control. To find the lands to compensate his Norman followers, William initially confiscated the estates of all the English lords who had fought and died with Harold and redistributed part of their lands. A measure of William's success in taking control is that, from until the Capetian conquest of Normandy in , William and his successors were largely absentee rulers.
For example, after , William spent more than 75 per cent of his time in France rather than England. While he needed to be personally present in Normandy to defend the realm from foreign invasion and put down internal revolts, he set up royal administrative structures that enabled him to rule England from a distance. A direct consequence of the invasion was the almost total elimination of the old English aristocracy and the loss of English control over the Catholic Church in England. William systematically dispossessed English landowners and conferred their property on his continental followers.
The Domesday Book meticulously documents the impact of this colossal programme of expropriation, revealing that by only about 5 per cent of land in England south of the Tees was left in English hands. Even this tiny residue was further diminished in the decades that followed, the elimination of native landholding being most complete in southern parts of the country. Natives were also removed from high governmental and ecclesiastical office. After all earldoms were held by Normans, and Englishmen were only occasionally appointed as sheriffs.
Likewise in the Church, senior English office-holders were either expelled from their positions or kept in place for their lifetimes and replaced by foreigners when they died. By no bishopric was held by any Englishman, and English abbots became uncommon, especially in the larger monasteries. Following the conquest, many Anglo-Saxons, including groups of nobles, fled the country [] for Scotland, Ireland, or Scandinavia. Before the Normans arrived, Anglo-Saxon governmental systems were more sophisticated than their counterparts in Normandy.
English coinage was also superior to most of the other currency in use in northwestern Europe, and the ability to mint coins was a royal monopoly. This sophisticated medieval form of government was handed over to the Normans and was the foundation of further developments. By the end of William's reign most of the officials of government and the royal household were Normans.
The language of official documents also changed, from Old English to Latin. The forest laws were introduced, leading to the setting aside of large sections of England as royal forest. It was divided into sections based on the shires, and listed all the landholdings of each tenant-in-chief of the king as well as who had held the land before the conquest. One of the most obvious effects of the conquest was the introduction of Anglo-Norman , a northern Old Norse -influenced dialect of Old French , as the language of the ruling classes in England, displacing Old English.
Norman French words entered the English language, and a further sign of the shift was the usage of names common in France instead of Anglo-Saxon names.
The Norman Conquest
Male names such as William , Robert and Richard soon became common; female names changed more slowly. The Norman invasion had little impact on placenames , which had changed significantly after earlier Scandinavian invasions. It is not known precisely how much English the Norman invaders learned, nor how much the knowledge of Norman French spread among the lower classes, but the demands of trade and basic communication probably meant that at least some of the Normans and native English were bilingual.
An estimated Normans and other continentals settled in England as a result of the conquest, although exact figures cannot be established. Some of these new residents intermarried with the native English, but the extent of this practice in the years immediately after Hastings is unclear. Several marriages are attested between Norman men and English women during the years before , but such marriages were uncommon.
Most Normans continued to contract marriages with other Normans or other continental families rather than with the English. By the early s, Ailred of Rievaulx was writing that intermarriage was common in all levels of society. The impact of the conquest on the lower levels of English society is difficult to assess. The major change was the elimination of slavery in England , which had disappeared by the middle of the 12th century.
In some places, such as Essex, the decline in slaves was 20 per cent for the 20 years. Many of the free peasants of Anglo-Saxon society appear to have lost status and become indistinguishable from the non-free serfs. Whether this change was due entirely to the conquest is unclear, but the invasion and its after-effects probably accelerated a process already under way.
Cookies on the BBC website
The spread of towns and increase in nucleated settlements in the countryside, rather than scattered farms, was probably accelerated by the coming of the Normans to England. Little is known about women other than those in the landholding class, so no conclusions can be drawn about peasant women's status after Noblewomen appear to have continued to influence political life mainly through their kinship relationships.
Both before and after aristocratic women could own land, and some women continued to have the ability to dispose of their property as they wished. Debate over the conquest started almost immediately. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle , when discussing the death of William the Conqueror, denounced him and the conquest in verse, but the king's obituary notice from William of Poitiers, a Frenchman, was full of praise. Historians since then have argued over the facts of the matter and how to interpret them, with little agreement. In the 20th and 21st centuries historians have focused less on the rightness or wrongness of the conquest itself, instead concentrating on the effects of the invasion.
Some, such as Richard Southern , have seen the conquest as a critical turning point in history. Sayles, believe that the transformation was less radical. If Anglo-Saxon England was already evolving before the invasion, with the introduction of feudalism , castles or other changes in society, then the conquest, while important, did not represent radical reform.
But the change was dramatic if measured by the elimination of the English nobility or the loss of Old English as a literary language. Nationalistic arguments have been made on both sides of the debate, with the Normans cast as either the persecutors of the English or the rescuers of the country from a decadent Anglo-Saxon nobility. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Norman conquest disambiguation. Norman conquest of England. Battle of Stamford Bridge. Harrying of the North. Revolt of the Earls. He reigned from to , and died without children. He was the son of Edward the Exile, son of Edmund Ironside, and was born in Hungary, where his father had fled after the conquest of England by Cnut.
After his family's eventual return to England and his father's death in , [17] Edgar had by far the strongest hereditary claim to the throne, but he was only about thirteen or fourteen at the time of Edward the Confessor's death, and with little family to support him, his claim was passed over by the Witenagemot. After King Edward sided with the rebels, Tostig went into exile in Flanders. Copsi was murdered in by Osulf , his rival for power in Northumbria. Campaigns of the Norman Conquest. The Struggle for Mastery: The Penguin History of Britain — The Debate on the Norman Conquest.
Ciggaar, Krijna Nelly Western Travellers to Constantinople: England and its Rulers: Blackwell Classic Histories of England Third ed. The History of a Dynasty. A Guided Tour of the Language Second ed. From Norman Conquest to Magna Carta: The Norman Impact Upon England. University of California Press. Just as the Normans became the typical exponents of Carolingian feudalism and of cavalry and castle warfare, so they also became in part the exponents and champions of religious orthodoxy.
Under the patronage of the ducal house of Normandy , religious life in the province flourished, and a number of Norman monasteries became renowned centres of Benedictine life and learning. This was chiefly due to the encouragement given to non-Norman scholars and reformers to make their home in Normandy. The great religious and ecclesiastical revival that marks 11th-century Normandy found another expression in the popularity among the Normans of pilgrimages to Rome and to the Holy Land.
This yearning for pilgrimages was one of the factors responsible for the Norman conquest of southern Italy. Many Norman nobles journeyed to the Mediterranean inspired by a naive mixture of religious devotion, a love of adventure, and a desire for fresh conquests.
Surprisingly, though, the part played by the Normans in the early Crusades was relatively slight, consisting chiefly of the erection of the short-lived principality of Antioch by Norman nobles in the 12th century. The Normans were quick to imitate whatever they saw, and this faculty of imitation is evident in all the different countries where the Normans settled. But Norman imitation was never slavish, and is certainly not the whole story of Norman achievement.
Struggling to get your head round revision and exams?
A truer explanation of Norman success would be that they combined a boundless self-confidence with a marked capacity for adapting to their own purposes the institutions they found in newly won territories. Thus, in Puglia and Sicily their control was based on faith in their own military superiority, their strategic use of castles and harbours, and their importation of feudalism to govern the relations of the count or king with his more important subjects.
In government, however, they adopted the highly advanced and largely literate techniques already developed by the Byzantine Greeks and the Muslims. In England the Normans similarly brought their own brand of feudalism and their own ideas of strong personal government and fiscal institutions.
But there too they adopted many of the existing institutions and customs. But under Norman direction, and with a number of Norman innovations such as the exchequer, the itinerant justices , and the sworn inquest, this system worked much more efficiently after than before, and, a fact of equal importance, England was made safe from foreign invasion. Norman influence on the church in England also worked powerfully in the direction of better organization and discipline. The role of the Normans in Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries may be summarized in saying that by their fierce energy and enterprise, they extended the practice of centralized authoritarian rule, feudalism, cavalry warfare, and religious reform.
We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind. Your contribution may be further edited by our staff, and its publication is subject to our final approval. Unfortunately, our editorial approach may not be able to accommodate all contributions. Our editors will review what you've submitted, and if it meets our criteria, we'll add it to the article.
- ADDITIONAL MEDIA.
- Where You Come From;
- BBC - History: Normans.
- The Fishermans Bones!
- AN UN-FATHERED WORLD.
Please note that our editors may make some formatting changes or correct spelling or grammatical errors, and may also contact you if any clarifications are needed. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Learn More in these related Britannica articles: Although the French-speaking Norman s were also of Viking stock, the English population initially regarded them as much more of an alien race than the Danes. Under the Norman and Angevin kings, England formed part of a continental empire, and the prolonged connection with France retained by its new….
Arichis and his son Grimoald III — were powerful rulers who held off the Franks, even if Grimoald temporarily had to pay tribute to Charlemagne after an invasion in They controlled the entire southern mainland except for the Bay of Naples and…. The whole community often lived…. Middle English versions Crusades In Crusades: The effects of religion guerrilla warfare In guerrilla warfare: Counterguerrilla warfare hunting In hunting: Hunting codes interior design In interior design: Languages In United Kingdom: The Normans — In Wales: Arrival of new enemies View More. Help us improve this article!
Contact our editors with your feedback. You may find it helpful to search within the site to see how similar or related subjects are covered. Any text you add should be original, not copied from other sources. At the bottom of the article, feel free to list any sources that support your changes, so that we can fully understand their context.
Internet URLs are the best.