The Battle of Hastings was a military clash that occurred near the town of Hastings in southern England on the 14th of October 1066 between an army of Norman invaders from France led by William, Duke of Normandy, and an English army led by King Harold Godwinson. The Normans defeated the English in the battle and Harold was killed, following which William claimed the throne of England as King William I, though he is more commonly known to posterity as William the Conqueror. The battle was the key event in the wider Norman Conquest of England, which took until the early 1070s to fully complete. The conquest transformed England from a country of Germanic Anglo-Saxons, who arrived in the aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire, and Norse people, who had settled in the north and East Anglia since the ninth century, into one where the ruling elite were now the Normans from France. In the 1070s William’s closest followers colonized the country as they were granted huge estates on which they built Norman stone castles. Over time the politics, culture and society of England was altered irrevocably in a great many ways.[1]
Chronology of events
In the early medieval period England had experienced waves of invasion and settlement. This began in the fifth century when the Romans withdrew from Britain in 410 CE and Germanic groups such as the Angles and Saxons launched amphibious invasions. The region which we know as England today, the name of which is rendered from ‘Angle-land’, was subsequently ruled by the Anglo-Saxons for several centuries in small kingdoms such as those of Mercia and Wessex. In the ninth century a new people emerged in the shape of the Danes, Vikings from Norway and Denmark, who conquered much of northern England and East Anglia. What all of this meant was that England became a land where many royal lines from around the North Sea had claims to the throne of England at the advent of the High Middle Ages.[2]
It was in this environment that William, the young Duke of Normandy in northern France, developed a claim to the English throne in the middle of the eleventh century. William was himself a descendant of a line of Norse rulers who had conquered the lower reaches of the River Seine in northern France in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, eventually establishing a small principality there. They became known as the Normans over time as a rendering of ‘North-men’. These Normans had become the most effective fighting forces in Europe by the middle of the eleventh century, branches of them would also conquer Sicily and southern Italy, and lead the Christian crusades to the Holy Land. William decided to use their fighting prowess to claim the throne of England when King Edward the Confessor died in January 1066 without a clear heir.[3]
He was opposed by King Harold Godwinson, a scion of a prominent Anglo-Saxon aristocratic family in England with ties to the Danish royal line. Owing to Harold’s opposition, William gathered an army and sailed across the English Channel to claim the throne of England through conquest in September 1066. There the Normans clashed with the English forces under Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings in Sussex in southern England on the 14th of October 1066. The battle was fought after English forces had already been depleted repelling an invasion by another claimant to the throne, Harald Hardrada, at the Battle of Stamford Bridge just three weeks earlier. Consequently, the Normans comprehensively defeated the English at Hastings. Godwinson was killed in the fighting and William claimed the throne as King William I. However, establishing full control over the country was a more difficult task and it took a half a decade until the early 1070s before the Normans completed the conquest of England.[4]
Resulting migration
In the years following the Battle of Hastings many Norman knights and their followers migrated to England from Normandy in northern France as William rewarded them with extensive estates in his new kingdom for their contribution to the conquest. In some instances, this was a form of military colonization as Norman knights like Robert de Beaumont, later first earl of Leicester, and William D’Evreux were given lands in the West Midlands and other regions where they would aim to secure the border with Wales, and if possible extend Norman control into that country. Owing to the comprehensive Domesday Book, which was drawn up as a record of English landholders in the mid-1080s, it has been possible to estimate that some 8,000 Normans settled in England in the two decades following the battle of Hastings.[5]
Demographic impact
While many thousands of Normans arrived to England from France, they were still dwarfed from a demographic perspective by the Anglo-Saxons and other English people. Despite their small numbers, though, they had an outsized impact on the country as they emerged as the dominant political class. As a consequence, French became the language of government and high society. Over time this transformed Old English or Anglo-Saxon, which had been spoken in England for centuries, into the English language which we know today, which is effectively a hybrid Romance-Germanic language as thousands of French words were absorbed into Old English.[6]
Similarly, the English law system, which up to that point had been grounded on Germanic law, was influenced by the arrival of French law codes which in turn had been adapted in France from the civil law of the Romans. A major sign of this was seen in the fact that French remained the language of the courts in England until the eighteenth century. Given all of this, while the Norman conquest of England, of which the battle of Hastings was the key event, might not have led to enormous demographic changes in England in the short run, it utterly transformed the culture and society of a country which would have an outsized impact on world affairs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[7]
See also
Explore more about the Battle of Hastings
- “My Ancestors were Normans” – Oh really? Prove it! at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Finding Your Medieval Roots: Five Simple Tips at MyHeritage Blog
- Battle of Hastings at World History Encyclopedia
- 1066 and the Norman Conquest at English Heritage
References
- ↑ https://www.bl.uk/anglo-saxons/articles/the-danish-and-norman-conquests-of-anglo-saxon-england
- ↑ https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/story-of-england/early-medieval/
- ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/Norman_Conquest_of_England/
- ↑ https://origins.osu.edu/milestones/october-2016-norman-conquest-england-1066?language_content_entity=en
- ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1323/the-impact-of-the-norman-conquest-of-england/
- ↑ https://www.medievalists.net/2016/10/the-linguistic-influence-of-the-norman-conquest-11th-century-on-the-english-language/
- ↑ https://culibraries.creighton.edu/rarebook/commonlawofengland