By: Eleanor Jackson,
on 11/21/2015
In July 1867 the British historian Edward Augustus Freeman was in the thick of writing his epic History of the Norman Conquest. Ever a stickler for detail, he wrote to the geologist William Boyd Dawkins asking for help establishing where exactly in Pevensey soon-to-be King Harold disembarked in 1052.
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By: Kirsty,
on 3/3/2011
The Norman Conquest of England, recently examined in Rob Bartlett’s television series, offers some striking parallels. The term is jargon, of a type beloved by politicians, because it attempts to foreclose on reflection and debate. The manner of the ‘change’ – by armed force – is veiled, and the agent unspecified, even though both are always obvious. Less obvious is why a particular ‘regime’ requires ‘change’ by foreign military intervention. In the case of Iraq, our own regime has tried and tried again to make the requirement obvious to us, and perhaps also to itself. One such attempt was so ‘sexed up’ that it will go down in history as the ‘dodgy dossier’.
Going back almost a millennium, we find evidence for a similarly sophisticated attempt on the part of a foreign power to justify the replacement of this country’s regime. There are, of course, many differences, in particular Duke William’s claim that he was dutifully suppressing Harold II’s brief, tyrannical usurpation, and, in his own person, restoring the true heir to Edward the Confessor. As such, the official Norman line, embodied in Domesday Book, was that English legitimacy had been restored. Old England continued, and not even under new management. In this respect, the recent forceful change of regime in Iraq was quite different. There, a pretence has been made of imposing a novel and utterly foreign system of government, on the assumption that it is the sole, universally valid type. But in terms of the elaborate efforts made to justify Duke William’s actions, to provide legal cover for endorsement by the eleventh-century equivalent of the UN – the papal curia –, the parallels in tendentious legal scrupulosity are uncanny. We tend to think of medieval rulers, and the clerics who worked and wrote for them, as crude, simple types, unconcerned with diplomatic niceties. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Our distance from 1066 makes it easier to evaluate the results of this particular regime change. The mantra of continuity with Old England, epitomised in a ubiquitous acronym for the status quo in the ‘time’ of King Edward, in turn provided cover for the systematic removal of the English aristocracy, and a transformation in the terms on which their French replacements held their new English lands. This was elite ethnic cleansing. By seizing control of England’s past, the Normans transformed its future, and reconstructed it in their own image – all the while proclaiming that nothing had changed. Harold II was soon airbrushed out of history. By the time Domesday Book was produced, at the end of the Conqueror’s reign, Harold II had never been king. Every major English church had been or was soon to be demolished and rebuilt in the new continental style. Fifty years after the Conquest, England had been rendered almost unrecognisable, and all in the name of a regime change founded on the premise that there had been no change of regime.
Justification and reality were revealingly juxtaposed in York on Christmas Day 1069, on the third anniversary of William’s coronation. In response to English rebellion in the North, he had laid the region waste. Finally, his troops had even torched York Minster. William then arranged for his regalia to be sent up to York, so that he could solemnly display his regality in the burnt out shell of the church. In Iraq thus far the conquest seems to have been much less successful, and therefore the antithesis between the theory and the brutal facts of regime change has not (yet) been as sharply delineated.
George Garnett is Tutorial Fellow in M
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By: Rebecca,
on 10/14/2008
On this day in history, October 14, 1066, the Battle of Hastings was fought between William the Conqueror and King Harold. To help us learn more about one of history’s most infamous battles I turned to Oxford Reference Online. From there I was led The Oxford Companion to Military History which had the entry below by Matthew Strickland on the battle. I hope your 14th is peaceful in comparison.
Hastings, battle of (1066)
Fought on 14 October 1066, between the forces of William ‘the Conqueror’, Duke of Normandy and King Harold (Godwinson) II of England, Hastings was one of the most decisive battles in the history of western Europe. William had a claim to the English throne and Harold expected him to invade, but William fortuitously landed on the Sussex coast when Harold was preoccupied with an invasion in the north. On hearing of William’s arrival, Harold immediately began a forced march south from York, refusing to wait in London for reinforcements, and arriving in the vicinity of Hastings on the night of 13 October. Less than three weeks earlier, at Stamford Bridge, he had defeated the army of Norwegian King Haraldr Harðraða, which he had caught completely by surprise. Now he hoped to repeat this successful strategy against William, but the latter was forewarned by his scouts and attacked Harold’s force before a third of it was drawn up, forcing him into a strong but confined defensive position on Senlac ridge. Harold, moreover, had lost some of his best men in the earlier battles of Fulford Gate and Stamford Bridge on 20 and 25 September .
The Norman archers, supported by heavy infantry, began the battle, but made little headway against the close infantry formations of the Anglo-Saxons, so densely arrayed, noted Duke William’s biographer William of Poitiers, that the dead could not even fall. Assaults by the Norman cavalry initially fared little better, and the well-equipped housecarls did terrible execution with their great two-handed axes. William’s left, comprised of Bretons, broke in panic amidst rumours that the duke was slain, and William narrowly avoided catastrophe by rallying his fleeing men and removing his helmet to show he was still alive. Launching a counter-attack, the Normans cut down those Saxons who had broken ranks in pursuit, and, exploiting the efficacy of this manoeuvre, they executed several ‘feigned flights’ with considerable success. Renewed assaults by Norman archers and knights gradually thinned the remaining English formation, which lacked sufficient archers to neutralize the Norman missilemen. Harold’s death effectively ended the battle; wounded first in the eye by an arrow, he was then cut down by Norman knights.
Hastings was by no means the inevitable triumph of feudal heavy cavalry over ‘outmoded’ Germanic infantry; the battle raged from dawn to dusk, the Normans came close to complete disaster, and it was chance alone that Harold, not William, was slain. Contemporaries regarded the battle as so closely fought that only divine intervention could explain William’s eventual victory.
