Finally, on September 27, while Harold was occupied in the north, the winds changed, and William crossed the Channel immediately. Landing in Pevensey on September 28, he moved directly to Hastings. Harold, hurrying southward with about 7, men, approached Hastings on October Surprised by William at dawn on October 14, Harold drew up his army on a ridge 10 miles 16 km to the northwest.

But William, removing his helmet to show he was alive, rallied his troops, who turned and killed many English soldiers. As the battle continued, the English were gradually worn down; late in the afternoon, Harold was killed by an arrow in the eye, according to the Bayeux Tapestry , and by nightfall the remaining English had scattered and fled.


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William then made a sweeping advance to isolate London, and at Berkhamstead the major English leaders submitted to him. He was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day, Sporadic indigenous revolts continued until ; the most serious, in Northumbria —70 , was suppressed by William himself, who then devastated vast tracts of the north. The subjection of the country was completed by the rapid building of a great number of castles.

The extent and desirability of the changes brought about by the conquest have long been disputed by historians. Inside England the most radical change was the introduction of land tenure and military service. While tenure of land in return for services had existed in England before the conquest, William revolutionized the upper ranks of English society by dividing the country among about Norman tenants-in-chief and innumerable mesne intermediate tenants, all holding their fiefs by knight service.

The result, the almost total replacement of the English aristocracy with a Norman one, was paralleled by similar changes of personnel among the upper clergy and administrative officers. Anglo-Saxon England had developed a highly organized central and local government and an effective judicial system see Anglo-Saxon law. All these were retained and utilized by William, whose coronation oath showed his intention of continuing in the English royal tradition.


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The old administrative divisions were not superseded by the new fiefs, nor did feudal justice normally usurp the customary jurisdiction of shire and hundred courts. Increasing use was made of the inquest procedure—the sworn testimony of neighbours, both for administrative purposes and in judicial cases. William also transformed the structure and character of the church in England. William also presided over a number of church councils, which were held far more frequently than under his predecessors, and introduced legislation against simony the selling of clerical offices and clerical marriage.

A supporter of monastic reform while duke of Normandy, William introduced the latest reforming trends to England by replacing Anglo-Saxon abbots with Norman ones and by importing numerous monks. Probably the most regrettable effect of the conquest was the total eclipse of the English vernacular as the language of literature, law, and administration. Superseded in official documents and other records by Latin and then increasingly in all areas by Anglo-Norman, written English hardly reappeared until the 13th century.


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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.

Norman conquest of England

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.

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.

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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.

How profoundly changed was England through the Norman Conquest?

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. 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.

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University of California Press. In the centuries before England had experienced a number of invasions from oversee. But none was as lasting as the Norman Conquest after the battle of Hastings. Although William the Conqueror claimed to be the legitimate heir on the throne of England and was interested in retaining English institutions and customs, the difference in culture and political practice was obvious. Thus, it is likely to assume that the installation of a foreign hierarchy in England could only be achieved with a great effort and was accompanied by certain changes.

This essay investigates how profoundly changed England was through the Norman Conquest. Therefore, in examining the influence on major features of the Anglo-Saxon hierarchy, the investigation first focuses on changes in the English language and society, then on the Norman government in England and, finally, on the structure of landholding in Anglo-Norman England.

Norman Conquest | Definition, Summary, & Facts | theranchhands.com

It often is assumed that the Norman Conquest in brought an immense change in the society of England. And indeed, there is some evidence for a foreign influence on people's cultural habits and everyday life. Thus, the status of the English language seems to be profoundly affected, as it was superseded by the Latin language in the years after the conquest. With an estimated number of at the most 10, Normans that settled in England as a result of the conquest and a native English population of at least 1,, people [3] , it is unlikely that the use of language changed profoundly for the majority of the native speakers after the conquest.

Gradually, the new language was assimilated by the English language. It can, therefore, be argued, that the Norman influence gave "new life" to the English language by "releasing it from official constraints and then by enriching its vocabulary with numerous words derived from French and Latin" [4] ; but it did not cause a radical change in the language's use or structure. This argument is confirmed by the fact, that, with the mass of people having problems to understand the new leading churchmen from the Normandy, a rapid production of collections of homilies and other religious writings in English was necessary during the years after the Norman Conquest.

Similar to the assimilation of the Norman language, the Norman Conquest led to an intermixture between the incoming Norman and the native English families. The scholar Ann Williams points out, that, although there is only little evidence, intermarriage was a common characteristic of the post-conquest years, affecting all levels of society.

Here, it was, according to Williams, very likely that a Norman took an English wife, mostly a widow, to gain the land that was in her possession. But the contrary scenario, the marriage between an English man and a foreign woman must have occurred as well in the years after the Norman Conquest.

The situation in the English towns was similar: England and its Rulers. Fontana, , p.