CONQUEST, DIVISION AND BARRIERS

My friend says that if any other country in Europe was suffering the mess in the UK, there would be civil unrest.

The dead hand of history weighs against this, however. People often talk about the class system, particularly in England. I think that caste might be a better term. And much of it stems from the Norman Conquest and the three centuries which followed. During this time the English suffered something very like apartheid.

The nobles of England were slain or ‘disappeared.’ A Norman aristocrat was given the lands of ten of his English predecessors and English freemen became serfs. By the time of the Domesday Book only 5% of land remained in English hands. A mere eight thousand Normans and their French allies settled here after the invasion yet they managed to hold down a population of over two million.

They did this by neutering the English ruling class, by replacing them with Normans or French, by building intimidating castles throughout the kingdom and crushing resistance with astonishing savagery. They claimed their victory proved they were favoured by God and that they were a more advanced people than the English. The latter claim was fantasy. England was culturally, administratively and politically more advanced than Normandy and much wealthier. After all, let’s not forget that the Normans were Vikings in French clothing.

My first series of books is about Edgar Atheling who was proclaimed King of England a few days after the Battle of Hastings. Most people don’t know about him because the Normans, knowing that Alfred’s blood ran in his veins, did a comprehensive job of erasing him from history. Even now, he’s not considered a king because he was not crowned. But there’s no record of Alfred or his five successors being crowned and a monarch’s reign is officially dated from the death of their predecessor. So Edgar has a good claim to the title of the last English king of England.

Think about what it must have been like for the English. You were ruled by foreigners who could not understand your language. You could not understand theirs. The Normans promulgated and enforced laws, make decisions about your life, everything done without you realising what was happening. You lived in a sea of incomprehension. Your land and your heritage had been stolen.

In this way, an almost insurmountable barrier was built up between the majority of people in England, those from English stock, and the Norman rulers. England was by no means the only nation where wealth, prestige and power was concentrated in so few hands but it was made more onerous as the elite were foreigners. For 150 years after the conquest, the kings of England were far more interested in Normandy than England. After he’d systematically ravaged the north of England William spent over 75% of his time in Normandy. Richard the Lionheart or (as he would have thought of himself Richard Coeur de Lion), has been lauded as a true English king. Yet he was a true-blue Frenchman and only spent six months in England, most of that taken up bleeding the country dry to pay for his Crusade.

When I was taught history at school the superiority of the Normans was taken for granted. Even today we count our kings from the Norman Conquest. There were three kings called Edward before 1066 yet it was the man who ascended the throne in 1272 who bears the title King Edward the First. And it was not until 1399 that the first king who was native English speaker ascended the throne. Over three hundred years after the Norman Conquest.

But by this time, it was a very different English to that spoken before the invasion. It was an amalgam of Old English, Old Norse and Norman French, made simpler so that people could understand each other. Today, most English vocabulary is French although the words we use most often are from the English strand.

The mixture of English and French gives us a wild and wealthy language with an astonishing choice of words. In his novel Ivanhoe, Walter Scott says that when an English peasant reared animals they were called swine, cows or sheep. When the meat was eaten by the Normans the name was changed. It’s why we call our meat pork from the French porc, beef from boeuf and mutton from mouton (although it’s a long time since I’ve seen mutton in the shops.)

Not surprisingly, words relating to power tend to come from the French. Dukes, marquesses and barons are all derived from the language of the conquerors although, surprisingly, the English titles king and earl remained. The English shire became a county, the fortified burghs which were to protect people from being attacked became castles which were used to oppress them, laws were made by people in parliament (which comes from the French parle).

It's a fair bet that more formal words hail from French, the informal from English. Wedding or marriage, yard or garden, motherly or maternal, stench or odour, buy or purchase, lovely or beautiful, belly or stomach, freedom or liberty, they are all the children of the forced marriage between old English and Norman French.

I came across these differences soon after I moved to France and saw a poster saying ‘Demande votre vaccine.’ Demand, I thought, how rude - I would have asked for one. Maybe even begged.

Isn’t this all history, you may ask yourself? Does it really matter? Well, it is history but it’s also the present and it matters. We have got used to living in a country where the rulers and the ruled are different, where most of the wealth is owned by a tiny minority. Where some people still believe that some people are their betters. And it probably explains why people born elsewhere are too often blamed for the failures of the ruling class. Not to mention Brexit. (I’ll not mention it.)

It’s a barrier that seems insurmountable. And barriers are a theme to many of my novels including my current one.

Of course, the Norman Conquest was not the only one these islands experienced although it’s the one which has had the greatest impact for almost a millennium. Cnut conquered England fifty years before the Normans did and a hundred years before that his Viking predecessors were within a whisker of doing the same. They were stopped by Alfred the Great of Wessex whose own ancestors had displaced the Romano-British four hundred years before. And the Romans had scorched through the lands five hundred years previously. A fact worth remembering is that there were people from Africa, Arabia and the Middle East in these islands long before any Angles or Saxons arrived.

And finally, here’s a reconstruction of one of our earliest forebears, called Cheddar Man. He was called this either because he was discovered in a cave in Cheddar Gorge or because he was a cheesemonger. At any rate, he is ten thousand years old and with a rather thoughtful look. Perhaps he was wondering why people build so many barriers between one another.