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After Duke William's infamous conquest of England in the year 1066 AD, the formerly Anglo-Saxon-ruled island was fundamentally changed. Norman French became the language of law, politics and high society in England, ruling over an English-speaking peasantry whose language they did not bother with learning for some 300 years. Some scholars have gone so far as to describe Norman-occupied England as a colony, especially during the 12th and 13th centuries, when William's Norman and later Plantagenet successors spent much of their time in France or, in Richard the Lionheart's case,
on Crusade, treating England as little more than a personal piggybank. This raises the question: how were the Anglo-Saxons, who vastly outnumbered their French-speaking rulers, unable to overthrow their conquerors and restore native English rule? Was one defeat at Hastings truly enough for the Saxons to accept the permanent Norman yoke? In this video, we will explore those very questions. The Background Within a generation of the Roman Empire's departure from Britain in 410 AD, the island came under the rule of new occupiers, an assortment of migratory West Germanic tribes from across the North Sea, such as the Angles,
Saxons and Jutes, whose diverse identities history has simplified into a single ethnonym: the Anglo-Saxons. Within a generation of their arrival, the topography of lowland Britain was dominated by a tapestry of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, in which dialects of Old English gradually replaced the pre-existing Latin and Celtic languages. Of all the Saxon monarchies, it was the Kings of Wessex who consolidated Anglo-Saxons lands during the tumult of the Viking invasions, forging the Kingdom of England by 927 AD. Except for a brief interlude when England was annexed
to the North Sea Empire by the Norwegian King Cnut the Great, the Anglo-Saxon House of Wessex ruled the Kingdom for over a century. Then, in January of 1066, the reigning King Edward the Confessor died with no sons to succeed him. Amid this succession crisis, two foreign rulers emerged as claimants to the English throne. The first was Harald Hardrada, the King of Norway, who sought to revive Cnut's North Sea Empire under Norwegian rule. The second was Duke William of Normandy. William was the furthest thing one could be from an Anglo-Saxon Lord. His ancestor,
Rollo, had been a pagan warlord who settled in northern France in 911 AD. His descendants and their followers had since integrated themselves into French society, converting to Catholicism, adopting a hardy register of the French language. William, however, was a distant cousin to Edward the Confessor and upheld a nebulous claim that the late English Monarch had promised the throne would pass to him upon his death. There still existed one male heir to the ancestral House of Wessex, Edward's grand-nephew Edgar Atheling, but Edgar was a green boy, unsuited to face the foreign
threats now bearing down on English shores. Thus, a council of English nobles, the Witan, came together and elected the formidable Saxon nobleman, Harold Godwinson, to be their King. A three-way contest ensued, with Hardrada and his Norwegians coming from the North, William and his Normans coming from the south, and Godwinson stuck in the middle. While the Saxon King won a decisive victory against the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge, he was subsequently slain at Norman hands at the infamous Battle of Hastings. Thereafter, William of Normandy was crowned the King of England,
and the English-speaking Anglo-Saxon people came under the foreign rule of his French-speaking aristocracy, the descendants of whom make up the upper crust of modern British society to this day. Initial Anglo-Saxon Resistance In the aftermath of Hastings, many English fiefdoms were left vacant, allowing William to simply fill them with Norman nobles. However, not all the native English nobility had died in battle. The Anglo-Saxon Lords of Northumbria remained powerful; the sons of Harold Godwinson had fled across the sea to Ireland,
and the last male relative of Edward the Confessor, Edgar Atheling, remained at large. Moreover, the powerful monarchs of Denmark and Scotland offered both refuge and support to these Saxon rebels and exiles, hoping to use them to strengthen their influence over England. This diverse assembly of political actors churned up a maelstrom of fierce anti-Norman rebellions in the years after Hastings, forcing King William to take extreme measures to maintain control over the island he had conquered, resulting in up to 100,000 deaths in Northern England and a near
total disenfranchisement of the native English aristocracy, resulting in the permanent dominance of Norman aristocracy over the island. But we are getting ahead of ourselves, so let us first rewind and restart our playback in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Hastings. 72 days after his triumph over Harold Godwinson, Duke William of Normandy was crowned the King of England in Westminster Abbey in London on Christmas Day. He began his rule with a spree of building, with his Norman lords rapidly erecting castles across the land to project power and domination
over their new English subjects. Yet William also initially adopted a conciliatory attitude towards the remaining Anglo-Saxon nobility, allowing some who swore fealty to him to keep their lands and even installing an English noble, Copsig, as the earl of Northumbria. Unfortunately for William, neither appeasement nor power projection successfully dissuaded rebellion, and by his second year on the throne, native uprisings had flared up in every corner of the country. In the west, an Anglo-Saxon noble named Eadric the Wild waged a bloody guerrilla war,
ravaging the occupied counties of Herefordshire and Shropshire and even allying with the ancestral enemies of the Mercian Saxons, the Welsh Kingdoms, to plunder the lands of the Norman marcher lords. However, after failing to besiege the Norman castles at Hereford and Shrewsbury, Eadric submitted to William's overlordship. In the east, the men of Kent sent emissaries across the channel to one of William's continental rivals, Eustace, Count of Boulogne, seeking his aid in seizing Dover Castle. This rebellion ended in failure, with neither Eustace nor the Kentish Saxons breaching the Norman fortress, whose garrison ultimately drove
the rebels off the White Cliffs or scattered them into the hills. Finally, in Northumbria, William's appointee Copsig was beheaded by the local nobles, after which the northern lords replaced the Norman toady with a native lord named Cospatrick. Opting for the pragmatic solution, William allowed Cospatrick to retain the earldom in return for a hefty bribe and an oath of fealty, securing peace in the north, albeit one which would be all too short-lived. Back in the west, a new figurehead of native resistance arose in the form of Lady Gytha, the elderly mother of the late
Harold Godwinson. Gytha established the city of Exeter as her fortified base, banking her success on the hope that her grandsons- Harold's sons- would return from their exile in Ireland with an Irish mercenary fleet that would join forces with her English rebels and crush William's armies in battle. William gathered a force of native English fyrd militiamen and 500 Norman cavalrymen and marched to besiege Exeter. When the king arrived, the city continued its defiance, with one account claiming the defenders on the walls lowered their trousers and farted in
William's general direction. Exeter resisted the Normans for eighteen days, but with her grandsons and their Irish army nowhere to be seen, Gytha lost heart and abandoned the city, sneaking out by boat along the river Exe. Thereafter, Exeter's remaining leaders surrendered to William and swore their fealty. It was only shortly after this that Gytha's grandsons arrived on the coast of Bristol with their fleet, too late to make any difference. There, they raided the coastline but failed to rouse any support from the local population, who had grown disillusioned towards rebellion.
The Great Northern Rebellion By the second anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, William must have been confident that the situation was calming down. Major rebellions launched by native English nobles had erupted across the country, but their failure to properly organize and coordinate with one another had prevented a countrywide uprising, resulting instead in pockets of regional unrest that the Norman occupiers snuffed out piecemeal. In the south of England, both the Anglo-Saxon nobility and commonfolk seemed to be losing
their appetite for insurrection, submitting to King William's mercy and, in some cases, fighting alongside the conqueror against their fellow Englishmen. Moreover, each new castle built represented a root of Norman permanence, growing deep into English soil, allowing a small Norman garrison to dominate vast swathes of the countryside and its native populations. However, the tranquillity of the autumn of 1068 was only calm in the eye of the storm. It is here that the last heir to the royal house of Wessex reappears in our tale. Edgar Atheling had fallen into William's clutches after Hastings, but had since slipped out of the
conqueror's grasp, and was now a guest at the court of King Malcolm III of Scotland. This made William understandably nervous, especially when he likely received credible reports that Cospatrick, the Earl of Northumbria, was in cahoots with the Scottish King and his would-be Saxon usurper. Tightening up his grip on the north, William appointed a loyal deputy named Robert de Comines to replace Cospatrick as the Earl of Northumbria. de Comines, entered his new earldom with a pack of Flemish mercenaries who indiscriminately looted, pillaged and slaughtered
as they went. By subjecting the Northerners to such cruelty, the King had triggered the very uprising he had been worried about. On the 31st of January, 1069, a mob of Northumbrians fell upon their Flemish brutalizers as they quartered in the city of Durham, massacring them in the streets. Robert de Comines was among the casualties, ending his very brief tenure as Earl of Northumbria, and initiating a rebellion against Norman rule in the North of England. Seizing upon the opportunity, Edgar Atheling came down from Scotland and rendezvoused with Cospatric, who joined their forces with the insurgents and launched a furious assault on the
Norman-occupied city of York. Meanwhile, the sons of Harold Godwinson saw another window of opportunity and led another fleet across the Irish Sea to invade the West Country. Simultaneously, their mother, Gytha, was back in the game, having sailed on to Denmark. A Dane herself, she sought to solicit the military intervention of the Danish king, Swein Estrithson. Motivated perhaps by Northern England's centuries-old ties to Scandinavia from the Viking Age, King Swein agreed to invade. By the Spring of 1069, the walls were closing in on King William from all sides,
yet the saving grace of the conqueror came in the fact that, like the prior round of uprisings, his enemies once more were unable to coordinate their assaults, allowing the Normans and their allies to neutralize them one by one. To simplify events immensely, the conqueror was able to muster an army and smash the Northumbrian rebels at York before the Danish fleet arrived, while the sons of Harold were defeated in Devon by one of William's vassals, Brian of Brittany. When the Danes finally arrived and joined forces with what remained of Edgar and Cospatric's rebels,
they managed to seize York from its Norman garrison, but left the city too burnt out to hold. The royal Norman and Danish armies ultimately played a mutually fruitless game of cat and mouse along the Humber River until William paid them off with silver to go away. By the third anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, the great threats to Norman rule in the north of England had been pacified, and after three years of non-stop native rebellions, a wrathful William the Conqueror was prepared to take extreme measures to ensure that no
Anglo-Saxon or their allies would ever be able to rise against him again. His solution was simple: to pursue a scorched-earth strategy in the most literal sense. Knowing that Northumbria was still full of insurgents and supporters of Edgar Atheling, William ordered his men to starve them out. 'In his anger,' chronicled the Benedictine Monk Orderic Vitalis, writing some 60 years after the event, 'he commanded that all crops and herds, chattels and food of every kind should be brought together and burned to ashes with consuming fire, so that the whole region north of the Humber might
be stripped of all means of sustenance.' This policy of forced mass starvation, known to history as the Harrying of the North, is by far the most infamous chapter of the story of William the Conqueror. Orderic claimed that over 100,000 'Christian folk' perished in the desolation of Northern England. Meanwhile, the Domesday Book, a census of England taken in 1086, suggests that the population of the historic county of Yorkshire may have been reduced by as much as 75%. Modern historians have since downplayed these numbers, but have stopped short of denying that William's
tactics were utterly ruthless and destructive, even by medieval standards. They were, however, brutally conclusive. The Harrying of the North effectively ended organized Anglo-Saxon uprisings against Norman rule. In 1071, a final flame of uprising flickered in the midlands town of Ely, supported by some Northumbrian nobles in exile and the return of the Danish fleet. The figurehead of the thusly titled Ely Rebellion was the semi-legendary Hereward the Great, a Saxon noble who had been exiled to foreign lands during the reign of Edward the Confessor,
and only now returned to his homeland to oust its alien invaders. Surviving in English folklore as a Robin Hood-esque figure, Hereward was said to have roamed the fens of eastern England, protecting the smallfolk and Saxon churchmen from the rapacious Normans. Ultimately, however, William was able to pay off Hereward's Danish allies once more and subsequently scatter the forces of the outlaw prince and his Northumbrian allies. Thereafter, the French military elite of England was never again challenged by the island's native English-speaking population.
Why Were There No Further Rebellions? In just three short years after the Battle of Hastings, the Anglo-Saxon nobility of England had expended their remaining manpower, their leverage, and their symbols of legitimacy in a series of ill-fated and catastrophic attempts at resistance, leaving themselves depleted, demoralised and completely helpless to stop their complete replacement with a new French-speaking elite. What few native English lords did not die in the pitched battles of 1066 and the subsequent failed rebellions were systematically stripped
of their lands, with thousands of Anglo-Saxon nobles and their entourages fleeing the country. Many of these English exiles travelled as far as the eastern edge of Christendom and entered into the service of the Byzantine Emperors, where they fought on the frontiers of the Eastern Roman Empire as part of the elite Varangian Guard, including, ironically, against another faction of Normans who happened to be in the neighbourhood and conquering Italy. One of these English Varangians was, allegedly, none other than Edgar Atheling. After a very eventful
life, we unfortunately cannot get into, the English King-who-never-was finally died in 1125, ending the male line of the Anglo-Saxon dynasty that had founded the Kingdom of England. A generation after the Battle of Hastings, the vast majority of the Kingdom of England were still native English speakers, but the landowning nobility were French-speaking Normans. Thereafter, any further native Anglo-Saxon uprisings became a distant hope. With the Godwine family a spent force and the House of Wessex extinct, there were no longer any Anglo-Saxon families left
in England capable of raising enough men to challenge the Normans. There may have been a thousand Egfrith the ploughmen and Egbert the goatherds for every one Lord Robert and Lord Humbert, but as only Robert and Humbert possessed the land and wealth necessary to raise, organize and feed knights and levies, then it was with Lord Robert and Lord Humbert that power would remain. By the end of William's reign, the old Anglo-Saxon administrations of England had been largely abolished, with the land divided between 180 Norman landholders, all of whom were obliged
to provide military service to the King and all of whom ruled their lands from castles. Castles, as mentioned previously, played a crucial role in entrenching Norman power in England, and for the most part, were unlike anything the natives had seen before. More defensible than the traditional fortified Saxon Burh, Norman castles fundamentally reshaped the English countryside in ways custom-tailored to Norman control. Of course, rulers in medieval Christendom derived their power as much from the religious world as the secular. Thus, to secure that lever of
power as well, William oversaw a full Norman takeover of the Catholic Church in England. William had maintained a strong relationship with the Pope, who had blessed the conqueror's invasion of England in the first place. Now, he leveraged that relationship to replace nearly every influential Anglo-Saxon bishop with Normans. Moreover, almost every notable Church and Cathedral was demolished and rebuilt in the so-called 'Romanesque' style brought over from Normandy. Through castles and churches alike, the Normans literally rebuilt England in their image,
with the historian George Garnett describing it as the most systematic transformation of English towns until the reconstruction after the Blitz of World War Two. The intention of King William was plain to see: whenever his English subjects beheld the symbols of the Kingdom of Men or the Kingdom of Heaven, they were to associate them not with their old rulers but with their new ones. Conclusion Having said all that, it might be surprising to hear that many modern historians believe that life for the average Anglo-Saxon peasant did not change all that much in the immediate aftermath of the Norman conquest,
and indeed, it was likely this reason above all that William did not face popular peasant uprisings after dismantling the Anglo-Saxon nobility. With the notable exception of the brutally harried lands around Yorkshire county, life largely went on for the peasantry, to whom it must have made little difference in where lay the homeland of the priest who chanted Latin at them during mass, or the Lord for whom they performed corvée labour and delivered their rent in kind. In post-conquest England, time and custom ultimately prevailed over language
and culture. By the 14th century, the bitter experiences of the Hundred Years' War against France led the French-speaking aristocracy of England to gradually shift to speaking English, albeit not before centuries of French influence had fundamentally transformed the English language. Indeed, around 30 to 40% of the words in this video are of French origin, including "conquest," "castle," "military," and even the word "language" itself. The peerage of the modern United Kingdom is still largely descended from the Norman military elite that crossed the Channel
in 1066 AD. Even to this day, modern Britons with Norman surnames are overrepresented in the highest echelons of society, including the most prestigious universities, the best-paying sectors, and the fields of law and politics. This is the legacy of a foreign ruling elite which, although long nativized to the island it conquered, remains the inheritor of most of its wealth and power to this day. More videos on medieval history are on the way, so make sure you are subscribed and have pressed the bell button to see it. Please consider liking, subscribing, commenting, and sharing - it helps immensely. Recently, we have started
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