1066 is the one date every British schoolchild knows. On 14 October, at a hill near Hastings, William, Duke of Normandy, defeated and killed King Harold II, and England acquired a new ruling class within a single afternoon.
Who they were
Normans were Norsemen. In 911 the French king granted land around Rouen to a Viking leader called Rollo in exchange for defending the coast, and within a few generations his descendants had adopted French language, Christianity and continental customs while keeping the military appetite. “Norman” is simply “Northman”.
1066
Three men claimed the English throne when Edward the Confessor died childless in January. Harold Godwinson was crowned; Harald Hardrada of Norway and William of Normandy both invaded.
Harold destroyed the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire on 25 September, then marched his army 250 miles south in under two weeks to meet William, who had landed in Sussex. The English fought on foot in a shield wall on Senlac Hill and held for most of the day before breaking. Harold was killed — by an arrow in the eye, according to tradition and to the Bayeux Tapestry, though the evidence is ambiguous.
What followed
Resistance continued for years, and William’s response was ferocious. The Harrying of the North in 1069-70 laid waste to Yorkshire and beyond, destroying crops, livestock and villages so thoroughly that famine followed and some areas were still recorded as waste seventeen years later.
The English aristocracy was almost entirely dispossessed. By 1086, of some 200 major landholders, only two were English.
Castles and cathedrals
The Normans built to hold the country down: hundreds of motte-and-bailey castles first, then stone keeps. The White Tower at the Tower of London, Durham, Rochester and Colchester are theirs. They also rebuilt almost every major English cathedral in the Romanesque style, and Durham Cathedral is among the finest Norman buildings anywhere.
The Domesday Book
In 1086 William ordered a survey of England of extraordinary thoroughness — who held what land, how many ploughs, how many pigs, what it was worth before the Conquest and now. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle complained that “not one ox nor one cow nor one pig was left out”.
It was called Domesday because there was no appeal against it, as at the Day of Judgement. It survives, and it remains the most remarkable administrative document of medieval Europe.
The language
French became the language of court, law and government for around three hundred years. English survived as the speech of ordinary people and absorbed an enormous French vocabulary — which is why English has so many pairs of words meaning nearly the same thing, one plain and Germanic, one formal and French: begin/commence, freedom/liberty, kingly/royal, ask/enquire.
Legal English still shows it: judge, jury, court, verdict, evidence, attorney, plaintiff are all Norman French.