Defining these peoples also becomes ridiculous at a certain point anyway, because they were all of the same Germanic stock. William was related to the Anglo Saxon kings, and Rollo himself was obviously a Viking. The Normans were a creation of Viking fathers and French mothers, and then many of the Norman lords married local Anglo women. Scotland is even more interesting because its aristocracy has a Norman element, a Norse element, a Hiberno-Norse element, a Scot element and perhaps even a Pictish element.
It always makes me laugh too that the leftist types conveniently ignore that the Anglo Saxons were capable of atrocities above and beyond the Normans, and practised slavery.
This is true, but they did have differences in how they preferred functioning. The few simple/fee tail land ownership was a big one, as was primogeniture, as was tenancy versus lords just farming larger tracts. All of which gave the Normans their unique flavor
As Will has mentioned, I think those changes were coming anyway as the ‘arms race’ that had occurred in France over the centuries before the conquest were going to be adopted by everyone eventually (castles, cavalry raids, harrying etc). It was a case of adapt or die.
There is also the interesting Spenglerian perspective that like Charlemagne’s Frankistan, the Anglo Saxon kingdoms religiousness were a pseudomorphisis of Eastern flavour (Orthodox) whereas the reforms that the Normans brought with them were from the birth of our Faustian culture that had arisen in northern France. Whereas before the eastern concept of baptism had been the important ritual (often at sword point), more and more confession and the focus upon the individual was placed at the centre.
Yes, the Anglo-Saxons were also a warrior aristocracy. Considering their most iconic relics include Beowulf and the Sutton Hoo helmet it's weird that anyone thinks of them as egalitarian peaceniks.
Besides that, William and Harold Godwinson (and Hardrada too for that matter) were pretty clearly cut from the same cloth.
Ha, yes. They were not. However, I do think the differences in land ownership and tenure gave the Normans more of an outward focus than the Anglos, and that had significant differences in how they ended up behaving, particularly in the fights for the Angevin lands
The peacenik thing was a buffoonish way that the doggers, then Paine, then the chartists tried to make the Anglos look even more egalitarian, from what I can tell. It’s much more myth than reality, as you note, and is part of why I think the myth is so harmful
Maybe. Land ownership was centralizing in England too which was the reason for the downward mobility of those ceorls.
Also the fact that the Norman Conquest wasn't one of migration (as the Saxon one had been) but one by a group that still had their homeland surely factors into that "outward focus" - like King Canute going after Norway.
Anyway I don't say any of that to sell the Normans short. Their success speaks for itself (in the Italo-Norman Conquest as well as the Anglo-Norman one). I'm just not really a Carlylean on the Saxon Question.
Also if I can shill, I wrote an article on my page about Carlyle vs Paine & the Conquest a few weeks back (much narrower historical focus though).
👏👏👏 Thank you, Will for an outstanding piece that deserves to go viral! For the most part, I agreed with your argument here! The leftist reading of history which all about the oppressor/oppressed binary is complete nonsense and not reflective of the historical record. Can hierarchies and inequalities be bad? Yes. But are they always? No. As Will shows here in this excellent, we’ll-written and researched piece, the Norman conquest of England was hugely beneficial for the Anglo-Saxon people and helped propel them to a better future. A future where they built one of the world’s greatest empires and spread their culture, language and traditions around the globe much to humanity’s benefit. We have so much to be thankful to the Normans for. There was no “Norman yoke” that is complete b.s.! We need to stop looking at history that way. Also, can we stop worshiping leftist heroes or at the very least, lionizing them. I won’t go as far as Will does here about Dr. King and Nelson Mandela, both are historical figures I greatly respect. But can we stop acting like they were saints?
Nelson Mandela was a believer in socialism, committed violent acts of sabotage in South Africa that would technically be classified as terrorism, embraced despots and terrorists, was responsible for the 1994 Shell House Massacre, and invaded Lesotho in 1998. Dr. King was a philanderer who often cheated on his wife, plagiarized papers he wrote in college and at seminary school and was sexist and homophobic by our standards today. I’m not trying to take away from the great things these men did but they weren’t angels. Eldridge Cleaver was NOT a hero! He was a monster who murdered a man he thought was his wife’s lover, said raping white women was an act of revolution, buddied up with North Korea and its brutal dictator Kim Il Sung, received regular stipends from Le Duan’s murderous regime in North Vietnam while living in exile in Algiers, was convicted of rape and assault in 1958, and was a psychopath. Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, The Black Panthers, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and third world independence movements get celebrated these days. Okay, well let’s make some things clear here. Fidel Castro was a brutal dictator thus why hundreds of thousands of people fled Cuba on rafts. Che Guevara was a psychopathic killer, a racist, a homophobe, dreamed of firing nuclear missiles at New York City, a bad soldier, a coward, and lived in luxury while the Cuban people lived in abject poverty. The Panthers may have done good when they first started, but they soon developed into a brutal and violent organization. Huey P. Newton was a junkie and a cop killer. Bobby Seale actually ordered the murder of a Panther party member as he suspected him of being a police informant.
Shakur was also a cop killer who fled to Cuba to hide out from the authorities. Angela Davis kissed up to Communist dictatorships. Third World independence movements tended to be under Communist influence and ran their respective countries into the grown once they got control. Furthermore, natural hierarchy can be a good thing and there are many examples of this from history. Whether it be the Virginia gentry, the English gentry, the Romans and the Normans in Britain, or European colonialism. Nor are those who claim to be fighting against oppression always good by default. Hierarchy is bad? Then why did the English settlers in Virginia go out to the New World and carve out civilization there? The English did the same thing in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The British greatly improved the lives of Indians, Pakistanis, Egyptians, Sudanese, Yemenis, Irish, Scots, Welsh, Burmese, Nigerians, Ghanaians, Kenyans, and Malaysians. The French greatly improved the lives of Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Senegalese, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Syrians, and Lebanese. The Belgians lifted the Congo out of the Stone Ages.
The Germans brought peace and prosperity to the peoples of East Africa. The Dutch improved the lives of Indonesians. Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia’s black populations were better off than their fellow Africans anywhere on the continent. The English gentry took good care of those under them as did their counterparts in Virginia who by the way, also produced some of America’s greatest leaders including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Marshall, and Robert E. Lee. As to the Civil Rights Movement, yes it did a lot of good for America but it declined and devolved into the corrupt civil rights establishment we see today which is all about race hustling and dividing people.
We don’t need to apologize for the Old South, European colonialism or any other old systems. As to the comments on the French Revolution. Yes, the Bourbans warts and all, were much better than the Jacobins. Yes, the Tsars warts and all, were better than Lenin and the Bolsheviks. When one replaces natural hierarchies with egalitarianism it never works out well. These are just facts and they can’t be disputed. We need to start looking at history in a nuanced and objective way and stop seeing it through these leftist lenses and oversimplified ways.
Great stuff and I do agree, but as a localist, I do more the replacement of commons and nobles freely farming with the introduction of “feudalism” with manor-estates and serfs who work the land. I do understand that serfs weren’t slaves and did have problems more freedoms than we do in some areas and they were the “stinking dirty” stereotype we’re taught about. Still, I do prefer the local shires and I do like the Magna Carta that limited the king’s powers. Weird, when I was younger, I fantasized about a based king putting nobles in their place, but now I realize, Absolutism is gay modernist crap. Lol!
Well, the other side of that that Magna Carta was largely baron’s revolt, and the Lord’s saw it is their duty to reject the tyrannical usurpations of the king
Further, it was because they had the resources they did collected as they did that they were able to resist in the ways they were
There’s a trade-off to all of these things, and I do think that Norman system that reasonable job of arranging resources and talent so that there was a more general and continuous sort of flourishing as opposed to the sort of decay that characterized late Anglo-Saxon Britain
Fair enough. I can see the good the Normans brought, like you said, there’s good and bad. And some of the bad was dragging England into centuries of conflict with France over the Normans’ claims in the region. But the Anglo-Norman-Celtic Spirit was a force to be reckoned with on the world stage.
What's often glossed over here is that the Anglo-Saxons practiced chattel slavery and also had classes that were little more than serfs (cottagers and aetemenn for example were technically-free men who weren't technically tied to an estate - but all their property was).
Clearly the Conquest wasn't an emancipatory project, and Norman barons made use of the preexisting slaves in England, but chattel slavery had already given way to serfdom in Normandy so they also had little interest in maintaining it, and so it did gradually disappear in England too.
The Church had openly condemned it since the 900s so probably some kings took a dimmer view than others, but the estimates I've found range from 10%-25% of the total English population were slaves in 1066 (not counting the aforementioned serflike classes, who were more like downwardly-mobile ceorls).
Just wanted top say that most people don't want the social ostracism that comes from holding "the wrong view". The IDAGF meter is a de-regulation of our conditioning, so even when people know the truth, few will dare say it. Conformity is a built-in suvival tool that must be transcended.
Excellent article. We all have to accept that at best we are milk toast post Liberals but refuse to settle for mere Classical Liberalism and Whig history.
Very interesting - great article! I think the ground is softening somewhat among younger people in terms of their willingness to engage with history outside of the leftist box it's been packaged in for far too long. Whether that is out of spite or a real desire to understand the past is hard to tell. I am a student at a reasonably conservative institution, and I can definitely say that my peers are not nearly as ideologically inclined to accept triumphalist historiographical premises as most of the older people I know. Perhaps within a generation or two, the Pavlovian response to "make the world safe for democracy" will have quietly disappeared. One can certainly hope!
I went to Washington and Lee and started to see this by the end of my time there; the students, at least the conservative ones, were much less willing to reflexively attack Lee than the professors
Defining these peoples also becomes ridiculous at a certain point anyway, because they were all of the same Germanic stock. William was related to the Anglo Saxon kings, and Rollo himself was obviously a Viking. The Normans were a creation of Viking fathers and French mothers, and then many of the Norman lords married local Anglo women. Scotland is even more interesting because its aristocracy has a Norman element, a Norse element, a Hiberno-Norse element, a Scot element and perhaps even a Pictish element.
It always makes me laugh too that the leftist types conveniently ignore that the Anglo Saxons were capable of atrocities above and beyond the Normans, and practised slavery.
This is true, but they did have differences in how they preferred functioning. The few simple/fee tail land ownership was a big one, as was primogeniture, as was tenancy versus lords just farming larger tracts. All of which gave the Normans their unique flavor
As Will has mentioned, I think those changes were coming anyway as the ‘arms race’ that had occurred in France over the centuries before the conquest were going to be adopted by everyone eventually (castles, cavalry raids, harrying etc). It was a case of adapt or die.
There is also the interesting Spenglerian perspective that like Charlemagne’s Frankistan, the Anglo Saxon kingdoms religiousness were a pseudomorphisis of Eastern flavour (Orthodox) whereas the reforms that the Normans brought with them were from the birth of our Faustian culture that had arisen in northern France. Whereas before the eastern concept of baptism had been the important ritual (often at sword point), more and more confession and the focus upon the individual was placed at the centre.
Yes, the Anglo-Saxons were also a warrior aristocracy. Considering their most iconic relics include Beowulf and the Sutton Hoo helmet it's weird that anyone thinks of them as egalitarian peaceniks.
Besides that, William and Harold Godwinson (and Hardrada too for that matter) were pretty clearly cut from the same cloth.
Ha, yes. They were not. However, I do think the differences in land ownership and tenure gave the Normans more of an outward focus than the Anglos, and that had significant differences in how they ended up behaving, particularly in the fights for the Angevin lands
The peacenik thing was a buffoonish way that the doggers, then Paine, then the chartists tried to make the Anglos look even more egalitarian, from what I can tell. It’s much more myth than reality, as you note, and is part of why I think the myth is so harmful
Maybe. Land ownership was centralizing in England too which was the reason for the downward mobility of those ceorls.
Also the fact that the Norman Conquest wasn't one of migration (as the Saxon one had been) but one by a group that still had their homeland surely factors into that "outward focus" - like King Canute going after Norway.
Anyway I don't say any of that to sell the Normans short. Their success speaks for itself (in the Italo-Norman Conquest as well as the Anglo-Norman one). I'm just not really a Carlylean on the Saxon Question.
Also if I can shill, I wrote an article on my page about Carlyle vs Paine & the Conquest a few weeks back (much narrower historical focus though).
👏👏👏 Thank you, Will for an outstanding piece that deserves to go viral! For the most part, I agreed with your argument here! The leftist reading of history which all about the oppressor/oppressed binary is complete nonsense and not reflective of the historical record. Can hierarchies and inequalities be bad? Yes. But are they always? No. As Will shows here in this excellent, we’ll-written and researched piece, the Norman conquest of England was hugely beneficial for the Anglo-Saxon people and helped propel them to a better future. A future where they built one of the world’s greatest empires and spread their culture, language and traditions around the globe much to humanity’s benefit. We have so much to be thankful to the Normans for. There was no “Norman yoke” that is complete b.s.! We need to stop looking at history that way. Also, can we stop worshiping leftist heroes or at the very least, lionizing them. I won’t go as far as Will does here about Dr. King and Nelson Mandela, both are historical figures I greatly respect. But can we stop acting like they were saints?
Nelson Mandela was a believer in socialism, committed violent acts of sabotage in South Africa that would technically be classified as terrorism, embraced despots and terrorists, was responsible for the 1994 Shell House Massacre, and invaded Lesotho in 1998. Dr. King was a philanderer who often cheated on his wife, plagiarized papers he wrote in college and at seminary school and was sexist and homophobic by our standards today. I’m not trying to take away from the great things these men did but they weren’t angels. Eldridge Cleaver was NOT a hero! He was a monster who murdered a man he thought was his wife’s lover, said raping white women was an act of revolution, buddied up with North Korea and its brutal dictator Kim Il Sung, received regular stipends from Le Duan’s murderous regime in North Vietnam while living in exile in Algiers, was convicted of rape and assault in 1958, and was a psychopath. Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, The Black Panthers, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and third world independence movements get celebrated these days. Okay, well let’s make some things clear here. Fidel Castro was a brutal dictator thus why hundreds of thousands of people fled Cuba on rafts. Che Guevara was a psychopathic killer, a racist, a homophobe, dreamed of firing nuclear missiles at New York City, a bad soldier, a coward, and lived in luxury while the Cuban people lived in abject poverty. The Panthers may have done good when they first started, but they soon developed into a brutal and violent organization. Huey P. Newton was a junkie and a cop killer. Bobby Seale actually ordered the murder of a Panther party member as he suspected him of being a police informant.
Shakur was also a cop killer who fled to Cuba to hide out from the authorities. Angela Davis kissed up to Communist dictatorships. Third World independence movements tended to be under Communist influence and ran their respective countries into the grown once they got control. Furthermore, natural hierarchy can be a good thing and there are many examples of this from history. Whether it be the Virginia gentry, the English gentry, the Romans and the Normans in Britain, or European colonialism. Nor are those who claim to be fighting against oppression always good by default. Hierarchy is bad? Then why did the English settlers in Virginia go out to the New World and carve out civilization there? The English did the same thing in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The British greatly improved the lives of Indians, Pakistanis, Egyptians, Sudanese, Yemenis, Irish, Scots, Welsh, Burmese, Nigerians, Ghanaians, Kenyans, and Malaysians. The French greatly improved the lives of Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Senegalese, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Syrians, and Lebanese. The Belgians lifted the Congo out of the Stone Ages.
The Germans brought peace and prosperity to the peoples of East Africa. The Dutch improved the lives of Indonesians. Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia’s black populations were better off than their fellow Africans anywhere on the continent. The English gentry took good care of those under them as did their counterparts in Virginia who by the way, also produced some of America’s greatest leaders including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Marshall, and Robert E. Lee. As to the Civil Rights Movement, yes it did a lot of good for America but it declined and devolved into the corrupt civil rights establishment we see today which is all about race hustling and dividing people.
We don’t need to apologize for the Old South, European colonialism or any other old systems. As to the comments on the French Revolution. Yes, the Bourbans warts and all, were much better than the Jacobins. Yes, the Tsars warts and all, were better than Lenin and the Bolsheviks. When one replaces natural hierarchies with egalitarianism it never works out well. These are just facts and they can’t be disputed. We need to start looking at history in a nuanced and objective way and stop seeing it through these leftist lenses and oversimplified ways.
Great stuff and I do agree, but as a localist, I do more the replacement of commons and nobles freely farming with the introduction of “feudalism” with manor-estates and serfs who work the land. I do understand that serfs weren’t slaves and did have problems more freedoms than we do in some areas and they were the “stinking dirty” stereotype we’re taught about. Still, I do prefer the local shires and I do like the Magna Carta that limited the king’s powers. Weird, when I was younger, I fantasized about a based king putting nobles in their place, but now I realize, Absolutism is gay modernist crap. Lol!
Keep up the great work. 👍 Peace ✌🏻
Well, the other side of that that Magna Carta was largely baron’s revolt, and the Lord’s saw it is their duty to reject the tyrannical usurpations of the king
Further, it was because they had the resources they did collected as they did that they were able to resist in the ways they were
There’s a trade-off to all of these things, and I do think that Norman system that reasonable job of arranging resources and talent so that there was a more general and continuous sort of flourishing as opposed to the sort of decay that characterized late Anglo-Saxon Britain
Fair enough. I can see the good the Normans brought, like you said, there’s good and bad. And some of the bad was dragging England into centuries of conflict with France over the Normans’ claims in the region. But the Anglo-Norman-Celtic Spirit was a force to be reckoned with on the world stage.
What's often glossed over here is that the Anglo-Saxons practiced chattel slavery and also had classes that were little more than serfs (cottagers and aetemenn for example were technically-free men who weren't technically tied to an estate - but all their property was).
Clearly the Conquest wasn't an emancipatory project, and Norman barons made use of the preexisting slaves in England, but chattel slavery had already given way to serfdom in Normandy so they also had little interest in maintaining it, and so it did gradually disappear in England too.
Was Anglo Saxon slavery being phased out by this time anyway? I’ve read about it in the context of Alfred, but much less so by the Conquest
The Church had openly condemned it since the 900s so probably some kings took a dimmer view than others, but the estimates I've found range from 10%-25% of the total English population were slaves in 1066 (not counting the aforementioned serflike classes, who were more like downwardly-mobile ceorls).
Oh fascinating
Just wanted top say that most people don't want the social ostracism that comes from holding "the wrong view". The IDAGF meter is a de-regulation of our conditioning, so even when people know the truth, few will dare say it. Conformity is a built-in suvival tool that must be transcended.
This is very true
Interesting
Thank you!
Excellent article. We all have to accept that at best we are milk toast post Liberals but refuse to settle for mere Classical Liberalism and Whig history.
Thank you!
Ha, yes, it is entertaining how even the more right wing people of today are mere squishes compared to yesteryear
Very interesting - great article! I think the ground is softening somewhat among younger people in terms of their willingness to engage with history outside of the leftist box it's been packaged in for far too long. Whether that is out of spite or a real desire to understand the past is hard to tell. I am a student at a reasonably conservative institution, and I can definitely say that my peers are not nearly as ideologically inclined to accept triumphalist historiographical premises as most of the older people I know. Perhaps within a generation or two, the Pavlovian response to "make the world safe for democracy" will have quietly disappeared. One can certainly hope!
Thank you! I very much hope so
I went to Washington and Lee and started to see this by the end of my time there; the students, at least the conservative ones, were much less willing to reflexively attack Lee than the professors
Wonder what was JRR Tolkien’s position on the Norman Conquest?
Ascribing human flourishing as a measure of which the royal is to be measured is a leftist framing.