“William and his barons had ousted the Anglo-Saxon upper crust, supplanting it with men who built castles and parish churches, who spoke French and supped wine. Yet slowly but surely the country in which they had settled exerted its own influence.”

By Helen Kay

ON OCT. 14, 1066, Duke William of Normandy famously defeated the Anglo-Saxons at the Battle of Hastings and seized England for himself.

The conflict lasted barely three weeks, culminating in a decisive victory when the English king, Harold, was struck by an arrow in the eye. The Anglo-Saxon resistance crumbled – and the rest, as they say, is history.

Except that Harold didn’t succumb to a stray shaft. According to the only near contemporaneous account of his death, he was stabbed in the chest and gut, beheaded and castrated. Indeed, it took the concerted efforts of four men to bring him down.

Nor did hostilities cease with the Battle of Hastings. On the contrary, the English put up a long and formidable fight. And though William triumphed on the battlefield, it was the English national identity that ultimately came out on top. Ironically, the Normans won the war, but the English won the peace.

Here are six remarkable facts about the invasion of 1066 and its consequences.

It took a full five years to subjugate the English

The Battle of Hastings marked the beginning rather than the end of the Norman Conquest. In the autumn of 1067, a powerful Anglo-Saxon thegn known as Eadric the Wild combined with the king of Powys, in Wales, to launch the first of many uprisings against the new regime.

Northern England’s guerrilla fighters proved particularly difficult to subdue. Between 1067 and 1069 William marched north three times, chasing enemies who repeatedly eluded him. And whenever he turned south, the garrisons he left behind were destroyed.

In late 1069, the king decided to burn the rebels out. He split his army into small raiding parties and ordered them to reduce the entire region north of the River Humber to ashes, so that it could never again support a hostile force.

Even in an age renowned for its violence, this was regarded as an act of shocking brutality. Food was so scarce that the English were reduced to eating horses, dogs, cats and human flesh, the 12th-century chronicler John of Worcester reported.

Pockets of armed opposition still existed in the Fenlands, where Hereward the Wake held the Isle of Ely and Morcar, the dispossessed earl of Northumbria, joined him in a desperate last stand. But in October, 1071, William managed to crush these final vestiges of resistance. It had taken five years of constant warfare – not a single battle – to bring the English to their knees.

The king claimed all the land for himself

William had already confiscated the estates belonging to the Anglo-Saxon nobles who fought at Hastings. In 1067, he took the extraordinary step of declaring that, as England’s monarch, he owned every acre of land in the country.

The king kept part of the land for himself, granted some of it to the Church and divided the rest among his barons on condition that they swore an oath of loyalty to him and supplied him with men for his armies. The barons then granted part of the land they held to their followers, who promised to fight for their overlord when required. And they, in turn, granted little strips of ground to large numbers of peasants in exchange for working the fields.

William’s new landholding system was unprecedented. In Anglo-Saxon England, numerous lords and commoners held land freely. Now, the king was the nation’s sole landowner and his subjects were feudal tenants.

William’s land grab tied power to immoveable property

The Domesday Book – the result of a huge property survey which William commissioned in late 1085 – shows the scale of the king’s land grab. The church held about 26 per cent of the terrain included in the survey, but almost everything else was in Norman hands.

William headed the ‘rich list,’ with estates covering 17 per cent of England. Roughly 150 to 200 barons held another 54 per cent between them. However, there was an elite within the elite. Some 70 men held lands worth £100 to £650, while the ten greatest magnates commanded enormous fiefdoms worth as much as £3,240.

Another 7,800-odd Normans possessed relatively modest estates, many of which were worth £5 or less. Yet native landholders controlled only 5 per cent of the territory recorded in the Domesday Book, and the bulk of them held just one manor.

Within 20 years of invading England, William had displaced the Anglo-Saxons and created a new ruling class. He had also tethered power to the possession of real estate, for many of the invaders owed their social status to the lands they held rather than their lineage.

First sons would now inherit (almost) everything

William simultaneously changed the way landed wealth cascaded down the generations. In Anglo-Saxon society, when a man died, his lands were parcelled out among his sons under the principle of “partible inheritance.” But in Normandy there was a dual pattern of inheritance. An ordinary landowner could split up his estate. Conversely, a noble was obliged to pass all his inherited property to his first-born son, although he could dispose of his “acquisitions” – i.e., conquests, purchases and land obtained through marriage – as he wished.

The king followed Norman custom. He promised his Anglo-Saxon subjects that “every child [would] be his father’s heir after his father’s day.” Nevertheless, when he himself died, he left Normandy (which he had inherited) to his eldest son, Robert Curthose, and England (which he had acquired) to his second son, William Rufus. His youngest son, Henry, received a fortune in silver – but no soil to call his own.

Keeping an estate intact, rather than dividing it into ever smaller units, made it easier to defend. So the barons emulated William’s example and soon imposed a similar policy on their own followers. Within a century of the conquest male primogeniture was the norm.

The new Anglo-Norman nobility planted the seeds for the parliamentary system

This pattern of inheritance helps to explain why England’s new nobles evolved quite differently from most of their continental neighbours. Every medieval European nation had a patrician elite, but it was typically a single broad caste. The aristocracy held formal titles and enjoyed much the same privileges, no matter how rich or poor they were. They also split their estates among their children, albeit unequally, producing a multitude of heirs who claimed blue-blooded rank long after they lacked the money to support such a lifestyle.

In England, by contrast, there was a small group of titled magnates who held vast tracts of territory directly from the king, and a much larger group of lesser nobles – the gentry – who held land from the barons they served. The former enjoyed greater privileges than the latter. The law of male primogeniture also ensured that the English aristocracy as a whole gradually became less numerous but financially stronger than those in mainland Europe.

The magnates attended the royal councils that William established to replace the Anglo-Saxon Witan. But over time England’s middling landholders became actively involved in the running of the country, too. They served initially as constables, sheriffs, keepers of the peace and local jurors, and later as ‘knights of the shire’ after Simon de Montfort called for representatives from the counties to attend parliament in 1264.

Thus, the Conquest paved the way for a two-tier parliamentary system in which titled magnates sat, by right, in the House of Lords, while the gentry were only eligible for election to the House of Commons as emissaries of the counties in which they lived. A modified version of this structure exists in the United Kingdom even now.

England changed the Normans more than the Normans changed England

William and his barons had ousted the Anglo-Saxon upper crust, supplanting it with men who built castles and parish churches, who spoke French and supped wine. Yet slowly but surely the country in which they had settled exerted its own influence.

Just as the Normans transformed England, so England was transforming them. The descendants of the men who had crossed the Channel in William’s army gradually shed their Norman identity as immigrants married natives, administrators of Anglo-Saxon origin entered noble service and the English language displaced French in common parlance. Literate monks of mixed parentage, like Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmesbury, also defended the realm in their chronicles, ensuring that the English culture wasn’t extinguished.

By 1204, when Normandy fell to the French, the vast majority of England’s manorial lords had never even set foot in the motherland. And by 1362, when Edward III passed a statute making English the “tongue of the country,” it was impossible to tell the two peoples apart.

Normandy’s brutal foreign aggressors had become England’s country squires.

Helen Kay is the author of The 1066 Norman Bruisers (Pen & Sword, 2020). She explores medieval life through the lens of one family – the Boydells of Dodleston Castle – and shows how a bunch of Norman thugs evolved into the quintessentially English gentry.