Guide Her Norman Conquest

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The Norman conquest of England was the 11th-century invasion and occupation of England by Their settlement proved successful, and the Vikings in the region became known as the "Northmen" from which "Normandy" and "Normans" are.
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Here, Marc Morris explains why the castle was the key to the Norman conquest. In , as everybody knows, the Normans invaded England. That most engaging of all medieval sources, the Bayeux Tapestry, shows them landing their horses at Pevensey in Sussex and racing to occupy nearby Hastings, from where they would shortly set out to fight the most famous battle in English history.

Before that, they paused to have an elaborate sit-down meal — barbecued chicken is on the menu — and attend to their own protection. The exceptions comprised a handful constructed a few years earlier by the French friends of King Edward the Confessor. The Conquest that followed 15 years later ensured it would not be the last, because the castle was the primary instrument by which the Normans stamped their authority on England. From having almost no castles in the period before , the country was quickly crowded with them.

Of course, England had not been without defences before The pre-Conquest landscape was studded with, among other things, Iron Age hillforts, Roman legionary forts, and the fortified towns built by the Anglo-Saxons themselves, known as boroughs or burhs. But all of these structures differed from what followed in that they were large enclosures designed to protect sizeable communities including, in some cases, non-military personnel. Castles, by contrast, were comparatively small affairs, designed to be defended by a limited number of fighting men.

They had originated in France around the turn of the first millennium as a result of the collapse of royal and provincial authority, when power ultimately devolved to those who had the means to build their own private fortifications and fill them with mounted warriors.

As well as being smaller in area, castles were also taller. But the crucial thing about castles was that they could be created without the need for such colossal investment. It was quite possible to obtain the same advantage of height quickly and on a fraction of the budget by throwing up a great mound of earth and topping it with a tower of wood.

After their victory at Hastings, as they set about crushing the remaining English resistance, the Normans continued to follow this method of construction. They added new fortifications to the ancient defences at Dover, and almost certainly created the castle at Wallingford by destroying a corner of the Anglo-Saxon borough.

The Norman conquest: women, marriage, invasion

When, late in , the citizens of London at last submitted to William the Conqueror, his first thought was to plant a castle in the south-eastern angle of the city — the site that would soon become home to the Tower. In the years that followed, the castle-building campaign intensified. Part of the reason for this intensification was the repeated attempts by the English to throw off the rule of their conquerors.

William crushed them all, marching in with his army and planting castles in major towns and cities.

‘Harrying of the North’

The foundation of castles, however, was far from being an exclusively royal affair. William may have raised armies to quell major rebellions, but for the rest of the time he relied on other Normans to keep order in his new kingdom. In the two decades after the king rewarded his closest followers with extensive grants of land in England, and the first act of any sensible incoming lord was invariably to construct a castle. In some instances it appears that these were planted on top of existing English seigneurial residences, to emphasise a continuity of lordship.

Sussex, for example, was sliced up into half-a-dozen new lordships, known locally as rapes, which paid no heed to earlier patterns of ownership. New lordships required new castles, and the rapes were named in each case after the fortresses that sprung up at Chichester, Hastings, Bramber, Arundel, Lewes and Pevensey. The reorganisation of Sussex into continental-style, castle-centred lordships seems to have been a decision determined by cold military logic. The rapes run north-south, and their castles are all located near the coast, as if to keep the route between London and Normandy secure.


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In recent decades, however, the scholarly trend has been to emphasise that castles had other roles beyond the military. The fact that they were often sited to command road and river routes, for example, meant that their owners were also well placed to control trade, and could both protect and exploit mercantile traffic. We are reminded, too, that part of the reason for building a castle could be symbolic. To judge from buildings such as Chepstow, Colchester and the Tower of London, it was a comparison that the king himself was keen to cultivate.

At the same time, we need to guard against hyper-correction. 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. 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.

Surprising Facts: , William The Conqueror And The Norman Conquest - HistoryExtra

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. Norman Conquest. Article Media. Info Print Print. Table Of Contents. Submit Feedback.

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Thank you for your feedback. Introduction Invasion of England Consequences of the conquest. Norman Conquest British history. Read More on This Topic. Get exclusive access to content from our First Edition with your subscription.


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Subscribe today. Learn More in these related Britannica articles:. Harrying caused by political disturbances or by incursions of the Scots or Welsh was only occasional….

The Norman Conquest of made little change in the mint system or in the coinage though the facing portrait acquired great popularity ; the pre-Conquest moneyers stayed in office and struck coins for William I. After his reign the number of mints tended to decline. One result of the Norman Conquest of was to place all four Old English dialects more or less on a level. West Saxon lost its supremacy, and the centre of culture and learning gradually shifted from Winchester to London.