It’s Sunday, and let us hope that you are about to have lunch. As you prepare to enjoy the roast beef, it may, possibly, occur to you that but for an event on this date, October 14, centuries ago, you might be about to eat the same joint but you wouldn’t be calling it beef. That event was the Battle of Hastings (aka Senlac Hill) in 1066, as a result of which William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, became William the Conqueror, King of England.
The English language is unusual in that we have different names for farm animals in the field or byre, and the flesh of these animals when they appear on the table. In Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe, a Saxon peasant explains that the oxen, calves, swine and sheep are good Saxons tended by Saxons when alive, but turn into Norman-French when they are ready to be eaten as beef (or beeves), veal, pork and mutton.
So, if you were to begin by asking, in Monty Python style, “what have the Normans ever done for us?” you might first reply that the most enduring consequence of the Conquest is the richness of the English language, with its Anglo-Saxon base and Franco-Latin superstructure. This mixture gives us a huge vocabulary, and many words with essentially the same meaning, yet a different shade of emphasis: fatherly and paternal, for example.
Without the Norman Conquest, Shakespeare would not have been Shakespeare, because his language would have resembled 16th-century German or Dutch. He would never have written a phrase like “the multitudinous seas incarnadine”. Our language often loses vitality if it moves too far from the Anglo-Saxon and is overweighed by Latinate words, but much of its richness and scope derives from its dual inheritance. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate.”
English – and British – history would have been different, too. Certainly, the Normans didn’t change everything. Even if the old Saxon ruling class was submerged, and replaced by a Norman-French one, much of the conquered state structure survived. The old English shire system indeed did so till the 1970s. The English common law has its roots in Anglo-Saxon England and is very different from the Roman law of France and other European countries. In the 17th century, opponents of the Royal Supremacy talked of “the Norman yoke” imposed on the free English people, and even derived the institution of Parliament from the Saxon Witenagemot (or Witan). In truth, the constitutional development of England has a mixture of Saxon and Norman elements. Mediaeval kings, when in trouble, regularly promised to abide by the laws of King Edward – that is, of Edward the Confessor, the second-to-last Saxon king.
The extent of the constitutional changes resulting from the Conquest were fiercely debated by the Victorian historians E A Freeman and J H Round. What is certain is that it tilted the focus of the ruling class away from the northern world towards France. This was unavoidable since so many of its members, and the king himself, held lands in France. William and his sons were dukes of Normandy. Later, by inheritance and marriage, the Plantagenet kings governed much of northern and western France. Gascony was an English province for more than 200 years, long after King John lost Normandy. All these kings of England were Frenchmen and French speakers. Edward I (1272-1307) was the first king since the Conquest to have an English name. If England had remained a Saxon state, there would perhaps have been no Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453), and the history of England and France might have been very different.
The Conquest affected Scotland too, because the Scottish kings were happy to recruit Normans and Bretons and give them lands. When the old Celtic line of Scottish kings became extinct in 1286, the two chief candidates for the throne, John Balliol and Robert de Brus, belonged to Norman families settled in Scotland for a couple of generations, members of which had married into the Scottish royal family. The Stewart (or Stuart) kings of Scotland were descended from a Breton noble who had come to Scotland in the household of David I – who, thanks to marriage, had also been Earl of Huntingdon in England. They inherited the throne because a Stewart married Robert the Bruce’s daughter. Queen Elizabeth II is descended from him, but also from the Saxon Alfred the Great, the Norman William the Conqueror, and Malcolm III of Scotland.
You might write an exercise in counterfactual history starting with the assumption that Harold Godwinson had defeated William the Bastard at Hastings – Senlac Hill, incidentally, was the name for the battle preferred by pro-Saxon Victorian historians. But you would soon run out of steam. It is well nigh impossible to imagine how different British history would have been without the Conquest. Would there have been an English attempt to conquer Ireland? Or Wales and Scotland? Would the kingdoms ever have been united?
To be sure, William’s victory at Hastings and the replacement of the Saxon aristocracy by a French-speaking ruling class gave a new direction to our history. Its first result was a much closer relationship with France and indeed with Rome (William’s invasion had the approval of the Pope). Second, whatever there has been of smooth development in constitutional history also stems from the Conquest. Third, the most enduring legacy is also the richest: our wonderful hybrid language and the golden treasury that is English literature. There are also visible reminders of the Conquest – Norman churches, the Tower of London and the majesty of Durham cathedral. Worth thinking of as you tuck into your roast beef; amusing also to reflect that long ago the words went back over the Channel, leading Frenchmen to speak of the English as “les rosbifs”.