Why I Focus on the Normans
The Anglo-Norman Achievement
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Was the greatest Christian gentleman in American history, Robert E Lee, of Norman descent? Probably. Was George Washington descended from a Norman? Yes, actually.1 So too are the Grosvenors, Percys, and Fitzwilliams, those noble families from across the Atlantic about whom I occasionally write.
But why does it matter? The Normans are long since gone, after all, their blood and spirit having faded like that of Tolkien’s Numenorians into the general mass of the population. Yet their deeds stand as a testament to a different age, one of shimmering glory rather than droll “progress”, and it is the addition of their spirit that made the English people a great and world-conquering force, changing them into a protagonist of history.
For one, the Normans are one of the most impressive people groups in world history. Small bands of them conquered England, half of France, Sicily, and Southern Italy while also terrorizing the Byzantines and the Mohammedans. They were the history-shaping force of the Medieval world, and did it in little bands of mounted men who couldn’t be stopped.
Such a story is fun and fascinating, and also worth keeping at the top of one’s mind. For example, Erik Prince recommends men read the book To Dare and to Conquer to be reminded of the fact that little bands of great men can achieve incredible things. Much the same is true of studying the Normans and their descendants. During the mid-Medieval period, it was they who, like the subjects of To Dare and to Conquer, achieved unimaginable feats as small bands of intrepid and excellent warriors. As such, to read of them is to be reminded of how personal excellence can shape history, and thus why it must be cultivated.
Then there’s the matter of rejecting leftist tellings of history, namely the tale of the supposed “Norman Yoke”—the claim that the Norman aristocracy was uniquely exploitative in how it ruled the British people after the Conquest.
That phrase has been nonsense from the beginning: its author intended it to castigate William the Conqueror for his harsh rule (he was indeed a scoundrel and tyrant, if also a great man of history), but admitted that Henry I was a great and just king.2 The phrase soon died out, as the Plantagenet kings were on the whole well-liked, and it was not until the 17th century that it re-appeared. At that point, it was appropriated by the Levellers and Diggers of Cromwell’s day, who wanted to expropriate the property of others. Two centuries on, it was then resurrected by the Chartists (socialists, essentially) of the mid-19th century.
To this day, the “Norman Yoke” remains a popular phrase used to push the idea that great estates ought be expropriated because they are inherently tyrannical. Such concepts must be pushed back upon, for reasons I have before explained.
The Norman Spirit: The One Who Does, Rather than the One To Whom Things are Done
The main reason I write about and focus on the Normans, however, is the great bequest they made to the English-speaking world—their spirit—and what it can teach us today.
Before the Normans, the Anglo-Saxons had become the people to whom things were done rather than the people who did things, to use Fussell’s famous phrasing from Class. Such, in fact, was true of British history generally. The Britons were blue-painted bog dwellers drinking beer until the Romans showed up, and little else happened for about five centuries; the Britons were ruled, and that was their contribution.
Then the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived. For a brief flicker of time, they were the ones who did things: they inflicted themselves upon the Britons, and conquered Britannia. Out of their brave and intrepid conquest comes the name “England,” or Angle-land.
But they did little with it. Brave warriors at the small scale level, those who became the Anglo-Saxons were soon content with what they had. They were happy to be small farmers, to not look beyond their shores, to exist and feud over that which they already had rather than that which they might conquer. No Anglo-Saxon expeditions were headed to seize Jerusalem back for the Cross, much less conquer some godforsaken place like Sarawak or Virginia. They were content, and even those brave and mighty Huscarls who are rightly the stuff of legend for their courage and prowess felt no need to go out and conquer.
Nothing, however, can long exist in a state of stasis. That which is not growing is dying. And so soon the Odin-worshipping axe-wielders descended upon Lindesfarne, and soon the Anglo-Saxons were the ones to whom things were done. They were constantly fighting back, the receivers of blows they tried to fend off and later tried to reverse.
Many times they were heroic warriors, a set of battles and stories that Bernard Cornwell has done much to memorialize in his The Last Kingdom series. Sometimes they paid the Danegeld. But never did they set out to strike back and conquer Norway or Denmark; they contented themselves with trying to win back the Danelaw and fend off future blows. Because they were content with Albion, no grand expedition to strike the Vikings at their root was ever embarked upon. Instead they built burhs.
By 1066, England was living under a Danish Occupied Government. King Cnut had conquered two generations before, after Aethelstan the Unready had hardly proven worthy of his warrior lineage. His issue had ruled for a few decades, and now Harold Godwinson, whose father had served Cnut and whose mother was related to Cnut by marriage, ruled. Harold was defeated at Hastings after a valiant effort reminiscent of the best of Anglo-Saxon tales—the Huscarls of Anglo-Saxon England are a testament to the warrior spirit of the English people—and soon England had a Norman Occupied Government rather than a Danish Occupied Government.
The Normans were harsh taskmasters at times, it is true. They tended to treat their Anglo-Saxon subjects as piggy banks, and were rarely worried overly much about cutting too close to the skin when shearing their manorial sheep. But they also changed something for England: it became the protagonist of history.
With the Normans at the helm, England was no longer the nation to whom things were done, whether by the Danes or Romans or anyone in between. It was the nation that did things to others. It conquered much of France, saved the day in the Holy Land, and conquered Cyprus.
That continued past the end of the Middle Ages, even as the Norman aristocracy gradually fused with the Anglo-Saxon people and the Anglo-Norman culture, which is essentially the upper-class part of English culture, developed. The English were now a people who did things. Notably, the Hundred Years’ War, along with the conflicts that preceded it, had taken place in France rather than England. With the Normans at the helm, the English were a protagonist of history who attempted to bring others under their dominion, rather than the opposite, which had been the case in British history up until then.
Such remained true in the many centuries that followed. They took the war to Philip across his world-spanning dominions, burning ports in Spain and capturing treasure fleets in the Caribbean. They conquered bits of the Mediterranean, set up trading companies abroad, conquered and settled the North American seaboard, and generally inflicted their will upon the world rather than having it inflicted upon them.
Yet better, the Anglo-Norman fusion was greater than the sum of its parts, a great flowering of a people that took centuries to occur but was a brilliant blossoming when it finally happened: a quarter of the world was theirs by the end, after all, and that would not have happened but for the Normans turning them into history’s protagonists.
There is much to say about the Anglo-Saxons that is good. There is much to say about the Normans that is good. The combination was best of all,3 and is what allowed them to cultivate England into a garden while bringing a quarter of the world’s land and all of its seaways under their Dominion. The Anglos would have done the former but not the latter. The Normans would have attempted the latter and neglected the former. The combination intertwined the two, and used the flowering fruit of it to great effect.
Such is why I write about the Normans. We need their addition to the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon people back. Ever since the Parliament Bill, the English have been the ones to whom things were done again, a process that has culminated in unwashed hordes of rape and rapine-minded migrants washing up upon their shores in a conquest and harrying far worse than anything William and his mailed thugs did. It must be turned back, defeated, scoured from the Shire. America, Australia, Canada, and the rest of the Anglosphere are little better: their native born have things done to them, rather than being the ones who do things, and the results are dire.
That must change, and recovering the Norman spirit is the way to do it. That little drop of blood and spirit contained within it, like the Cavalier “leavening” given to Virginia, raised our people up once and taught them to be the conquerors who made sure to enforce their will upon the rest rather than having anyone else’s will enforced upon them.
More is needed to make a society functional, of course, which is the steadying influence the Anglo-Saxon added to the English (and thus American) soul.4 But the leaven must not be forgotten. The drive to dominate, to conquer, to be the protagonist must be brought along too. The Norman influence is needed, is good, and must be recovered. Such is why it is a subject about which I write, and why I find it so important.
"King Henry governed the realm ... prudently and well through prosperity and adversity. ... He treated the magnates with honour and generosity. He helped his humbler subjects by giving just laws, and protecting them from unjust extortions and robbers,” Orderic Vitalis wrote.
Interesting post, but aside from the solidifying of Catholicism in England, I prefer the Anglo-Saxon system that was more decentralized and I believe had more upward mobility.
If you don't mind, would you take a look at this article by an Englishman? I know you're not a fan of large Pan-Nationalist entities, but I think you could offer some good critiques.
https://johnarcto.substack.com/p/details-of-my-hypothetical-western?r=2eufma&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
What did the Normans ever do for me, eh?