What have the Normans ever done for us?

[Montegriffo]

I want to find that article again. One of the interesting things they discussed was the Britons share more in common with Basque people genetically than anything else, because the re-conquest of what becomes the British isles after the Younger Dryass happened from that region.

Do they know if Celtic (or Britons or whatever were the "original" peoples) were on the isles themselves from beginning of whenever the first men migrated there?

I guess the Jutes and Viking types mostly raided/pillaged and left and came back but rarely settled there permanently?

You don't think the Romans for hundreds of years didn't have more of a cultural impact? I mean id imagine soldiers on the line would be having kids with Celtic women for hundreds of years.

The gist was that all the historical invasions and migrations mattered little to the genetic makeup of this area. The people just kept on keeping on, probably changing language and culture over time.

Why are you linking ethnicity with genetics?
Ethnicity is a shared cultural tradition.

[Montegriffo]

Around 8000 Normans settled after the conquest. The population at the time was around 1.5 million.
Those 8000 would now own most of the land though so be in control of the whole country and its wealth.
Towns built up around Norman castles and churches and trade networks were expanded.
Society changed almost overnight.


WIKI debates the consequences of the conquest.

Debate over the conquest started almost immediately. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, when discussing the death of William the Conqueror, denounced him and the conquest in verse, but the king's obituary notice from William of Poitiers, a Frenchman, was full of praise. Historians since then have argued over the facts of the matter and how to interpret them, with little agreement.[124] The theory or myth of the "Norman yoke" arose in the 17th century,[125] the idea that Anglo-Saxon society had been freer and more equal than the society that emerged after the conquest.[126] This theory owes more to the period in which it was developed than to historical facts, but it continues to be used to the present day in both political and popular thought.[127]

In the 20th and 21st centuries historians have focused less on the rightness or wrongness of the conquest itself, instead concentrating on the effects of the invasion. Some, such as Richard Southern, have seen the conquest as a critical turning point in history.[124] Southern stated that "no country in Europe, between the rise of the barbarian kingdoms and the 20th century, has undergone so radical a change in so short a time as England experienced after 1066".[128] Other historians, such as H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, believe that the transformation was less radical.[124] In more general terms, Singman has called the conquest "the last echo of the national migrations that characterized the early Middle Ages".[129] The debate over the impact of the conquest depends on how change after 1066 is measured. If Anglo-Saxon England was already evolving before the invasion, with the introduction of feudalism, castles or other changes in society, then the conquest, while important, did not represent radical reform. But the change was dramatic if measured by the elimination of the English nobility or the loss of Old English as a literary language. Nationalistic arguments have been made on both sides of the debate, with the Normans cast as either the persecutors of the English or the rescuers of the country from a decadent Anglo-Saxon nobility.[124]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_co ... ermarriage

[C-Mag]

Around 8000 Normans settled after the conquest. The population at the time was around 1.5 million.
Those 8000 would now own most of the land though so be in control of the whole country and its wealth.
Towns built up around Norman castles and churches and trade networks were expanded.
Society changed almost overnight.

Your love of castles alone should make you a big fan of the 1066 Norman Immigration incident.

[Montegriffo]

The Normans wiped out indegenous history. No one is quite sure why but when they arrived all the native scholars and writers were replaced with French ones. Apparently they are responsible for the reason the English have very little pre Norman folklore. I was just watching a documentary about J.R.R. Tolkien where an Old English professor was lamenting this. Pretty good btw would recommend

Will watch that later. Was it implied that the Normans deliberately ''wiped out indigenous history'' or was it simply lost or forgotten?
As far as I know, they did not pull down Saxon churches or burn their manuscripts. We still have the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles for example.

The professor didn't imply either he said it was just a case where for some reason local writers disappeared and they were all replaced by French which was partly to blame for losing so much local traditions that Tolkien lamented England had a dearth of. The other reason was the industrial revolution hit England too soon inasmuch that by the time Grimm started collecting fairy tales, the English decided to try and do the same but by that time most of it had been lost due to industrialization and the uprooting of peasant life.

Just watched the section (around 22 min mark) you mentioned.
Seemed to me that he was talking more about the loss of Scandinavian myths rather than any local traditions.
I suspect that Christianity had more to do with the disappearance of Norse mythology than the Normans.

Anglo-Saxon and Viking sagas were oral traditions for the most part and in the old language so it's not really too surprising they got lost at a time everything was written in Norman-French and later in Anglo-French.

[TheReal_ND]

No he was specifically mentioning how English folklore was lost. I think you should rewatch it. He compared it unfavorably to how mutch folklore survived in other parts of Europe and explained that was the reason why Tolkien saught them out to the level he did. He wanted to give the English a mythology of their own.

[Montegriffo]

Around 8000 Normans settled after the conquest. The population at the time was around 1.5 million.
Those 8000 would now own most of the land though so be in control of the whole country and its wealth.
Towns built up around Norman castles and churches and trade networks were expanded.
Society changed almost overnight.

Your love of castles alone should make you a big fan of the 1066 Norman Immigration incident.

Wasn't so much an immigration incident as a case of regime change.
Edward the Confessor should have screwed his wife instead of dying a virgin and there would have been no succession crisis coming as a result of his childless marriage.
A bit more lead in his Anglo-Saxon pencil and the whole nasty affair could have been avoided.
Even the gay Normans like Edward II had children (4 in his case) to make sure there is a successor.

Castles are just one example of the improvements brought by our new overlords (whom I welcome).

[TheReal_ND]

Around 22 minutes

How was England de-mythologized? I would say the short answers are 1066 and the industrial revolution. In 1066 the English literary class was eliminated or dispossessed. We don't know what, went down the plug with them, but we do know that native English literature was replaced very soon by a French based literature. And what we got left from before 1066 are fragments. We got Beowulf with Grendel, we got Beowulf with a dragon, we've got the strange *sic* creatures who comeout of exodus. We don't have any old English references to *sic* we only got references to some people remembering them some hundred years later. But the memory of them some hundred years later indicate that perhaps there was a time when people really did know what they were because all that's been eleminated. So a whole tradition of non-human supernatural creatures has just been wiped away with only a few smears and scratches remaining. And that is something that happened to England because of 1066 which didn't happen to other European countries.

And then the industrial revolution came along and of course it came earlier to England than in other countries. And when it came along it took people's interests away from the fairy tales and the folk tales that they used to get from their nannies. Now in Germany they were still telling them in the 19th century when the Grimms made their collection. Now when English collectors went around trying to make similar collections inspired by the Grimms in the later 19th century, there wasn't very much left to be found at all.

How the fuck did you get this: "Just watched the section (around 22 min mark) you mentioned.
Seemed to me that he was talking more about the loss of Scandinavian myths rather than any local traditions."

From that?

[C-Mag]

Why is immigration of Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Scandinavians and Irish acceptable, but not Normans ?

[TheReal_ND]

Because the Normans brought Jews with them to collect their taxes due to the loans they took raising the fleet to invade.

Heh, kind of the story of England forever after.

[SuburbanFarmer]

The Normans were Franks (French), unless I’m mistaken.