In Our Time - The Norman Yoke

Episode Date: April 10, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ‘the Norman Yoke’ – the idea that the Battle of Hastings sparked years of cruel oppression for the Anglo Saxons by a Norman ruling class. ‘Norman saw on English oak,On English neck a Norman yoke;Norman spoon in English dish,And England ruled as Normans wish.’Taken from Sir Walter Scott’s novel ‘Ivanhoe’, these words encapsulate the idea of ‘the Norman Yoke’ – that the Battle of Hastings sparked the cruel oppression of Anglo-Saxon liberties by a foreign ruling class. Certainly, William the Conqueror proclaimed his power in great castles and cathedrals, turned the church upside down and even changed the colour of scribal ink. But was it really such a terrible time for the Anglo Saxons or was the idea of beastly Norman oppressors and noble Saxon sufferers invented later to shore up the idea of Englishness? With Sarah Foot, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Christ Church, Oxford; Richard Gameson, Professor in the Department of History at Durham University; Matthew Strickland, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, 1066, William of Normandy. Was it as the verse has it? Norman saw on English oak,

on English neck, a Norman yoke, Norman spoon in English dish, and England ruled as Norman's wish. taken from Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe, these words encapsulate the idea of the Norman yoke that the Battle of Hastings sparked the cruel oppression of Anglo-Saxon liberties by a foreign ruling class. Certainly William the Conqueror writ large

is occupying power in castles and cathedrals, but how true is the idea of a Norman yoke or were tales of beastly Normans and suffering Saxons invented by later generations looking for the origins of Englishness? With me to discuss the Norman Yoke are Richard Gameson, Professor in the Department of History at Durham University Matthew Strickland, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow and Sarah Foote, Regis Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Christchurch, Oxford.

Sarah Foote, can you flesh out the received idea of the Norman Yoke for us? The Northern Norman Yoke is really a myth, an historical construct that argues that when the Normans colonised England after their victory at Hastings in 1066, that they then deprive the free Anglo-Saxons of their native historic liberty, that they didn't just take their lands away from all the noble ruling classes, but even lesser people who had previously held land by right of inheritance, now held land of Norman Lords through service or by contract, that they took away the free laws of the Anglo-Saxons imposed their own tyrannical constructs

and unjust judges, that women lost the... native freedoms that Germanic women had historically had in terms of law and landowning, that the church was taken over. Anglo-Saxon saints' relics were thrown out and burnt, and that foreign Normans came in and took over English churches, so that it's a wholesale tyrannical imposition of an outside foreign rule, putting a yoke on the neck of the formerly free English, which they deeply resented. And that has played through since the 12th century. reaching its Amperger in the 19th with World Scotland.

That's what we're going to discuss in this programme, how true that was. Although you put it so emphatically that I'm sure that everybody's saying, yes, that's what really happened. I agree with Sarah Foote. That's what really happened. Let's start before the beginning then. Before 1066, there was a certain normalisation

of let us call it this country for the sake of ease, already underway, wasn't there? Yes, Edward the Confessor came to the throne relatively later. in life at the age of 40, having spent the early part of his manhood in Normandy. And when he came and took the throne in 1042, he brought with him a number of men of Norman extraction. And so the court had become much more cosmopolitan than it had been under Adlerod and Knut. And there were Normans holding ecclesiastical positions,

such as the abbot of Barry St Edmunds, as well as people in his own circle. And it caused possibly some resentment among the English already, that there was this sort of French colonisation or starting long before William himself became king. But of course the idea that the Normans imposed a yoke of tyranny on the English does rather depend on our acceptance of the antithesis of that view, which is that the English were inherently free

and that they'd brought with them native traditions, freedoms out of the Teuton forests, and that there had never been any imposition on them. They'd never owed service. They'd always had free access to the king, in some of the most extreme 19th century variants of this. They'd had universal suffrage and free parliaments. Yes, but we're needing talking covered letters about this all the time. There can be truth in it without there being sort of great hambleau truths, can't they?

And just to unpeal this little before, Edward the Confessor's mother was Norman and the idea of a passage between, let's call the England and Normandy, just as in the north between Scandinavia and the northeast. This is a time when kings are moving around and they're occupying different lands. Yes, and when relationships between kings across Europe exist, no single polity contains only people of a single ethnic origin. England had a very diverse population, not simply Germanic Anglo-Saxons, but after Knut's conquest in 1016,

we have a genuinely Anglo-Scanadian realm. All Edward is doing is adding another ethnic mix to this, but this is something that you could parallel in other parts of Europe. It doesn't make England look very unusual. It's Anger, Scandinavian Norman that we're talking about. Yes, exactly. It's a mixed culture. Let's stick with the Normans for a moment, the Richard Gamer. We tend to think almost French now, but they had been in France for a comparative of a short time.

Indeed, the Normans themselves saw the foundation of Normandy going back to 9-11, and supposedly at that point a charter from the Frankish King Charles the Simport to one of the invading Vikings called Rollo, established it as an independent polity. Whatever the exact truth, it certainly seems that Viking invaders were settled in and around Ruin at that time and began to build up a political unit. We can see that for the first couple of generations, there was significant Scandinavian settlement there, place name evidence shows us that.

On the other hand, after a couple of generations, those settlers gradually adopted the French language, On the other hand, that didn't mean they lost contact entirely with their Scandinavian homelands, and it's clear, for instance, from the amount of Norman coin that turns up in Scandinavia throughout the 10th century into the early 11th century, that they're still closely linked or intermittently linked with Scandinavia up until the early 11th century. So Norman is Northman? Norman is indeed Northman, and indeed, if William the Conqueror comes to the throne, albeit very young, in 1035, and a decade or so before that,

their first local historian, Dudo of Cincentin, writes an account which embodies precisely the mythological account of their origins that we've just been hearing. So although they are French-speaking, they have Scandinavian origins, and the key point to stress is they are definitely not part of France. Northern France, as we now identify it, a series of independent duchess and polities. The Kingdom of France proper was the area around Eald of France.

Flanders was independent, Normandy was independent and so on. And the history of Normandy in the 10th and the 11th century is one of diplomacy and military conflict with its neighbours, striving to establish itself and grow big, and those neighbours, of course, include England. So if Scandinavia really dominating the scene, Anyway, these men in their longboats coming down the east coast of Britain and then Normandy, and a fact going right around Europe into the Mediterranean across to the eastern Mediterranean.

But let's stick with that a little bit for the moment. So it's almost in one way, there's a family quarrels going on here, or a quarrel inside a group of people who come from much the same place. And indeed, England and Normandy, as we've already heard, are closely linked in this because around the year 1000, Atholred Unread, Ethelred the Unready, one of his strategies to try and beat back the Scandinavians who are attacking him is a marriage alliance with Normandy. And he marries Emma, the daughter of Duke Richard of Normandy,

and it is their son who becomes Ed with the Confessor. Now, of course, Athelred Unrad can't hold back the Vikings and loses ultimately to spend Forkbeard and Canute, as we've heard. and during the reign of the Danish kings, Knoot and then his two Scandinavian sons throughout all this period, Edward the Confessor is spending his youth and his early manhood in Normandy, his mother is Norman and he's living in Normandy. Can we, thank you, Matthew Sirickland, can we clear up the reason for William, who became known as the conqueror, his justification for this attack?

Well, he claimed the throne by kinship to Edward the confessor. His great aunt is Emma. So he claims it by kinship, he claims it also by designation because in 1051 probably Edward the confessor trying to free himself from the power of the very powerful Godwin family may well have offered the throne. That's the Anglo-Saxon family in the sex. That's the, in the sense, the chief minister,

and the man who's been effectively the power behind the throne since the arrival of Edward in 1042. So in 1051 it seems that Edward makes an approach to William. Certainly this is what the Norman propagandists are very keen to say post-1066. And so that this is the basis of his claim, kinship designation. Harold, of course, is the man on the spot when Edward the confessor dies in January of 1066. And it seems more probable, I think,

that the opinion of the majority of the Anglo-Saxon nobility favoured Harold in 1066, that Edward bequeathed the throne in 1066 on his deathbed to Harold. Norman apologists are very, very keen to say, well, in fact, this does not override Williams' earlier gift of the throne by the confessor. But I think in real terms, the Anglo-Saxon political nation favor Harold over William. And William sets off to invade the country. It has a favourable wind.

Harold is massively disadvantaged by having to have the battle at Stamford Bridge 19 days before the Battle of Hastings. There's a long forced march. He arrives with time to gather more troops and so on, by which time William the Conqueror is reasonably entrenched. Harold has sent out a fleet, which is to stop the force which has been wrecked by a storm. His coastal defences have been neglected and so on.

and yet it's still a close-run battle, as I understand it. Absolutely. I mean, William is extremely fortunate. It's a huge gamble, this military undertaking. And under other circumstances, Harold really should have won the Battle of Hastings. I think if Harold had faced William without the threat of the Norwegians and without having fought Stamford Bridge, where the Chronicles say he loses many of his best men, he may well have annihilated William. on the beaches, as it were, on the beachhead.

One of the reasons why Hastings is such an interesting battle is because the Anglo-Saxon method of fighting was primarily on foot, whereas the Norman's place created a reliance on cavalry. But Harold attempts to take William by surprise. He's out-maneuvered by William. William scouts see the approaching English. They force Harold to take a defensive position on Sennelight Ridge, but nevertheless it's so strong that even with a relatively small force,

John of Worcester says that Harold fights with only one third of his army drawn up and that he didn't stop in London and take on as many troops as he perhaps should have done. Even with those disadvantages, the battle lasts from the third hour, 9 o'clock in the morning, until dusk. And I think one also has to say that Harold comes very close to winning even in these circumstances. At one point in the battle, the left wing of the Norman army, the Breton contingent, breaks in panic. there is a general rumour that William has been killed and the famous scene in the biotapestry where William pulls back his helmet in his malehood

and says, I am alive and by the grace of God I shall yet conquer he rallies his forces but it was a very close-run thing and William could have been killed just as easily as Harold in which case we wouldn't be talking about the Norman Yoke and yet there by the other way the second thing maybe I'm too intrigued by this I'll promise I won't linger too long on the actual matter But London was very, very heavily fortified.

As I understand it, the forces gathered by William could not have taken London because he didn't have enough men and it was very, very heavy fortified. So why didn't they stick it out there? Why did they surrender? Two reasons. One is there is a crisis of leadership that with the death not only of Harold but his brother's girth and L'Offe Winner at Hastings, the only person left who is the legitimate heir to the West Saxon dynasty is Edgar Atherling, Edgar the prince,

and he's a boy perhaps less than 14 years old. And he is initially perceived to be the next candidate, the poor old Abbott of Peterborough, recognises him, since he goes off to be confirmed as Abbott of Peterborough by Edgar Atherling, only to find that William is effectively the ruler. So there's a crisis that the Anglo-Saxon magnates gathered in London, stigand Edwin and Morkar vacillate. It's a fatal move. And William forces their hand by leading a devastating march

through the home counties, encircles London, crosses the Thames at Wollingford, and then cuts London off from reinforcements from the north. And at that point, the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy, and Edgar effectively. No, no, on Christmas Day, sorry, interrupted you. On Christmas Day he's crowned Rex Anglorum, the king of the English, and he speaks French throughout,

and it's over 300 years before another English king crowned in Westminster Robbie speaks in English, which we might come to. And it takes him four years. What's called Harry's the North, which sounds like a very nice thing, except he brutally laid waste. to the north and thousands of people's eyes and it's starved and then there was Harrywood the Wake that was that two was crushed and he started to that seems to me Sarah Ford when after these two uprisings his mood and his policy changed

yes I think 1070 marks really a major changing point you could argue that in the very first months after after his coronation Christmas at 1066 that William tried a policy of reconciliation, a softly, softly approached to see if he could get the English to accept the realities of what had happened, the fact that so many of the flower of the West Saxon, especially aristocracy, had died, but except that in the new circumstances this was a new legitimate king, consecrated by the Archbishop of York, with whom they could work. I think it's after the rebellions and the ferocity of the rebellions,

especially in the north that he changes his mind, because perhaps he didn't completely understand the extent to which England had actually been unified before 10th C.6. England had been run as a single realm, but the North had always maintained its own independence. The Dane law is so called because they lived under their own Danish laws. And kings from Edgar in the 10th century onwards had quietly let the North get on with doing their own thing. William wants to impose his own direct rule upon the North. They don't like it and the forcible putting down. of his own rebellion, does rather change the climate of opinion.

Just one little footnote to that, that one argument for the biotapestry, having been commissioned at a very early date, is that it does show a very favourable presentation of the Anglo-Saxons. They're shown as heroic, it's not in any sense a derogatory presentation of them. Even Harold is shown in a relatively positive light. And one argument is that it was commissioned at least and designed at this, very early stage when before the harrowing of the north, before the rebellion, and when relations were relatively peaceful.

Matthew? Yes, can I just come in there? I think that the question of William claiming to be the legitimate heir of Avedo of the confessor is absolutely fundamental to his perception of his kingship. Unfortunately, there is a dynamic working directly against that, which is the fact that he must reward his Norman followers, who've put a huge amount. of their own resources, and they put their lives on the line for this great expedition. And as Sarah says, in 1067, perhaps in the first months of 1068,

we see the conqueror perhaps striving for a rapprochement. But the men on the ground, the castellans, the sheriffs, really abuse their power, particularly when William is in Normandy in 1067, Odo and William Fitzosbin, are seen to be these oppressive vice regents. And I think by 1060, the end of 1068, early 1069, as you say, Sarah, the North rises up. They've seen the writing on the wall.

And they've realised that there is deceasing of Anglo-Saxon ability happening at an alarming rate. Behind and surrounding this conversation is the idea of the Norman Yoke, the oppression. It seems to me that one can see the beginning of it in, I don't like this word harrying very much because it's too gentle, really. It was, they laid waste to north. We just must get this very clear. I told thousands of people died of starvation. And so can you just flesh that out a bit more?

The contemporary sources, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is still being continued in this period, and it's giving you a year-by-year account of what happened. And so you can compare the accounts given of the harrying of the North with accounts of early devastation of particular regions. And it's very clear that the language used in the Chronicle is much more violent, and all the chroniclers are unanimous, that something out of the ordinary happened. This wasn't just a victorious army

raping a few women, taking a few spoils. This was the deliberate devastation of great swathes of land. So seed corn was destroyed. Cattle were killed. It was impossible for the ordinary people to go on continuing their agricultural lifestyle. And at the same time as the chronicler never ceases to remind you, the king was taxing the people very heavily

and that taxation was felt to be tyrannically. oppressive so that having nothing with which to support themselves they're then supposed to be paying for his activities. And the building, and what, the great building started, didn't it? The fortress like cathedrals and the fortresses themselves. Indeed. Just starting with castles there, again, the bad tapestry shows us almost immediately that William has arrived in England. They throw up a moton bailey castle and the main routes, the roots from Dover, through Canterbury, Rochester, up to London. At a very early stage,

Moten Bailey castles, earthworks with palisades are put up to fortify those, and along with the harrowing of the north, the various military campaigns, warring down particular areas, then a Motten Bailey Castle will be the first stage of reinforcing control over that region. Subsequently, these were often replaced by stone buildings.

But what we have to remember is that the stone castles and keeps we see today, were relatively slow to construct. Even with rapid and forced labour, it would take, for instance, about nine years to put up a significant stone keep. You could build them at a rate of about eight feet a year, something like that. Matthew Strickland. I was just going to come back to this idea of the harrying, because it is genocide. I think there's no other word for it, and it represents a failure of the castle building that we see in the 1068, when William thinks he can subdue the Midlands and the North

by building these major military institutions. And so in a way, it reflects his failure to come to terms with the North and become an effective Anglo-Norman king. And Doomsday Book is eloquent testimony to the sheer devastation. 60% of the manners in Doomsday Book in Yorkshire were waste. They didn't return taxable accounts. and, in fact, are bear of livestock and human being. And it's not simply Yorkshire, it's Staffordshire, part of Shropshire.

It's a great swath of territory. And we have a heart-rending account from the Abbey of Evesham of starving refugees dying at the gates of the Abbey, having crawled there for aid. So it's one of the conqueror's darkest moments. Well, let us move on from that. There began to be an intermingling in terms of... of marriage. That was the beginning of the what might call it the second stage and the more lasting stage

of the settlement. Is that right? Yes, inevitably. The number of Normans who came and settled in England, I think, can be disputed, but possibly not more than 10,000. 10 to 20,000. 10 to 20,000 aristocrats and, yes, they do start to marry into the English population. So within 100 years, a tax note. as the dialogue of the Exchequer,

talking about there had been, after the conquest, there was a particular punishment was imposed if you killed a Norman without just cause, the murder and fine, then there were particular penalties. In the writing from 1177 onwards, the author of the dialogue of the Exchequer says it's getting very difficult to tell who's a Norman and who's an Englishman,

because there's been so much intermarriage, so unexpected deaths will carry the murder. Very thick, because I want to move on, Richard. As it happens, many of our earliest chroniclers, or several of our earliest chroniclers, were themselves the products of mixed marriages. And of course, because they were chroniclers, they tell us a little bit about themselves. So we know, for instance, that William of Malmesbury, Aldrich Vitalis, these are people who have one parent from one race, one parent from the other.

And they're being born in the 1080s, the 1090s. So as early as that, we can see into marriage. And they show slightly conflicting. ideas about what they thought about the conquest. So, Audric Fitalis, on the one hand, has positive things to say about William as a king, and he spent, he's English-born, but he spends most of his career in Normandy. But when he came and visited England in the reign of Henry I, the first, he talks about how peaceable a country it is, but on the other hand,

he's the one contemporary writer who uses the word yoke. We can look at this as well in terms of the effect on the language over the next couple hundred years, about 10, 12,000 Norman French words were brought in. And you had to have three languages, didn't you? Latin was the language of the church and the law. French was the language

of power, Norman French of language of language of power, and English was the language of the fields and the streets. So in order to talk up and down, and across society, you had to be trilingual. It was a massive input of language from the top. Again, it's from the top, isn't it? I've got a few examples here. to do with war, there's army, archer, soldier, to do with rule, there's crown throne, duke, to do with law, there's arrest, justice, judge, jury, and on and on it goes. Because it's not simply the language, it's once you have imported a foreign aristocracy, the French aristocracy, you have those men dictating cultural patronage.

So it's not simply language, it's literary taste, it's the type of work that is being commissioned. And yet even there we see a cultural fusion by the late 1130s. We have a man called Geoffrey Gaimard who was writing in Lincolnshire, and he is a Norman, probably a clerk and a poet. And he writes a work called Lesothes de lais de angles, the history of the English. So it's the first history of the English in vernacular French, including, interestingly enough, tales about Herriwood the Outlaw.

So this is written for a local Norman gentry family, in Lincolnshire, but it's about the English past. These are wonderful and very important little ripples, but I think the main drive of the tide is the fact that the English language. Again, most people who worked in church at had, they pretended that the working knowledge of Latin. Most of them didn't. They conducted that in Old English. Now, that was a third-class language.

Right, it ceases to be the language of the court, and I think that's crucial. And ceases to be a documentary language. It ceases to be a documentary. Most important of all, because it has been a written language for a very long time. And that dies out, we think, in Peterborough in 11, that's 54. A couple of comments on picking up what you were making about status. The classic example of this is the dinner table. That the item that you farm out in the fields or that the peasant looks after, we still use the old English name for. Whereas the item that we eat at table, we use the French name because that's the high status version.

So, for instance, mutton, mutton is what we eat, but sheep, the Old English word, is what was farmed out in the field. Pork, pork is what we eat, but it's a swine herd from the Old English swine who looks after the animal while it's out in the field. And then picking up the point about the writs and the written language, as you were saying, old English was a flourishing literary language, and we have, still from the 11th century,

well over 100 manuscripts written principally in the vernacular, and those old English language manuscript books just vanish as we move into the 12th century, and we've got about 20 or 30 from the 12th century. And even more obviously at the time I'd have thought, much more obviously at that specific time, just at the late part of 11th century, was the change in landowning. We know that half the country was in the hands of 190 men,

given it by William and a quarter of the country was in the hands of 11 men all of whom, none of whom spoke English. You would see that, that would be around all the time when the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy was... They have effectively disappeared as a ruling elite. They're either killed or they're diseased. So yes, indeed, that what happens is that there is a tenureal revolution

and pre-conquest what you'd have, you had a pattern of provincial earldoms, these very large earldoms that covered more than one shire. But underneath that, between 4 to 5,000 Thanes holding land, whether under a lord or directly from the king. So the conquest radically changes the political landscape. And as you say, these tenants in chief, as they're called, men who hold land directly from the conqueror in return for military service,

become the dominant elite. They, of course, sub-infudate. In other words, they grant land as fiefs to their own vassals, rewarding them for their service. But there's a great deal of controversy about how different patterns of landholding are forms of tenure pre-and-post conquest. But I think the most important thing is that the people in charge, it's a radical change.

And that there are Anglo-Saxon survivors, but they're pushed down the social scale. Can I just say, is something similar happening in the church, which is, we know, a mighty force then and became, if there is a cathedral, it's even mightier force. Was that taken over? There is a very substantial takeover of personnel in the church. From 1070 onwards when Lampfranc is appointed as Archbishop of Canterbury. Lampfranc is interestingly Italian by birth,

but has had a career in northern France, firstly at Avranchan, and lately at the Abbey of Beck in Normandy, where he's renowned as a teacher and also as a theologian engaging in contemporary debates. And his appointment to Canterbury in 1070, in place of the excommunicated English stigand, is a very important moment for the history of the English church. And you could argue that this is one of the most significant changes of the conquest, that it really brings England into the mainstream of continental developments. This is the height of the so-called Gregorian reform in the Catholic Church,

when Pope Gregory the 7th has been leading a movement to improve standards of ecclesiastical behaviour across the church throughout Europe so that trying to get rid of the buying and selling of offices and indeed the paying of money for getting sacraments, trying to clamp down on clerical behaviour, stopping the clergy from marrying or from living with women. So making criminal and indeed in Gregory's terms heretical, something that had 50 years before been deemed to be completely normal behaviour, before this, no understanding that the clergy should be celibate, monks should be, but not secular priests.

So these are innovations. And these are the things that Lampfranc tries to impose. And with that, there goes a whole change in personnel. Abbots of English religious houses become Normans, sometimes in very difficult circumstances, with riots and bloodshed. And the bishoprics all change hands. So by 1087, only three English bishops had also served under Edward the confessor. Richard, the idea of the yoke, can we turn to that more specifically now,

was that around at the time? Enough has been said by the three of you of not only winning a battle, but in many areas the literal devastation of a country, the change in land ownership on an almost unimaginable scale, when you think of it, you know, quarter of the country suddenly owned by 11 men, none of whom spoke the language of the country, and what you've said about the north,

and what you've just said about the church, Sarah. Are people at the time expressing the idea that became the Norman yoke, or around the time, in the next 20 or 30 years? We have a series of chroniclers providing information about this period, and as I mentioned earlier, several of them are of Norman and English parentage, and they each have different views on what exactly is going on. They all have criticisms of the Normans, and often a quite positive view of the Anglo-Saxons,

but their views are more nuanced and we have a range of different perspectives. I suppose the first thing, we have to get a bit of a move on, I'm afraid. First thing to say, are they nuanced because they're frightened of their big heads chopped off if they don't actually toe the party line? Sorry to be so crue.

No, no, no. There's a very good... William the Conqueror was very much a party-line person, wasn't he? You went with him or you'd had it. There's a very good example of that in someone who wasn't writing at the time of William the Conquer, but afterwards, William of Malmsbury, born in the 1090s. Now, in his first version of his chronicle, he's relatively critical of William.

So you might argue him, he's writing after William, long after William's death, but he sees William as oppressive at one level, and he sees William Rufus as even more oppressive. That's William's son. And says when William Rufus is buried in the old Minster, Winchester, its tower promptly falls down as a judgment of God. But in his revised version, he has a... a slightly more balanced view written by the 1130s

that actually William the Conquer was oppressive but then he needed a lot of money to organise England and rather more revealing he says yes the Tower of the Old Minster did fall down but it was probably because it was cracked and not sufficiently stable I see. There is just one Anglo-Norman writer who uses the word yoke. Orderick Vatalis says in his great ecclesiastical history

that the English lamented the loss of their freedoms and sought daily to shake off the yoke that was so burdensome and so unprecedented. So you think that's the voice of truth, don't you think? Well, you've said that, there's no doubt. And anybody listening to this programme has got a straight between the eyes. But Orderick had other positive things to say about William. But that's, I don't know any other example of anybody else using that term.

No. But I think, I mean, Audric is the next generation. And as you say, he is from an Anglo-Norman background, has a very schizophrenic view of that. And my favorite reflection of that, he is working with the text of a man called William Poitier who writes a biography, a panegyric of William the Conqueror. And he gets to the point where William Poitier is excusing the herring of the North. And at this point, Audrey, you can feel the indignation and anger. And he says, some people by their lying flatteries have tried to excuse the conqueror for this deed. but God will find him, you know, lacking when he weighs him in the balance.

One indication of sort of a gradual coming together of the nations and a changing tone and a sense that even though there may be a perception of the Norman yoke, the Normans can't have been all bad, is what you choose to name your children. And what we see is that up to about 1,100, on the whole, people will be given Anglo-Saxon names by... All treachery. Exactly. Ethel Giefu and so on. And a nice example of this is actually a document

from Canterbury from the 1170s. And someone writing in the 1170s says his grandparents, gives the name of his grandparents from 1100, Anglo-Saxon, the name of his parents from about 1125, born 1125,

one Anglo-Saxon, one Norman continental name, 1150. He and his siblings are all given Norman continental names. Yeah, there's one nice way to look at it, There's one nasty way to look at that, isn't? If you want to get on, you call yourself after those who are ruling you. I mean, that's sort of a one.

I'm very crude. I do apologise, but you can understand what goes on, can't you? Can I go back a bit? There is one thing that we haven't mentioned, and that's Doomsday Book. This great tenureal statement, who is owning what in 1086, and how much geld would they pay for it? And in many ways you could interpret this as a serious attempt to legitimise this takeover of land that has happened. So this is, it may have been arbitrary seizure. It may have caused much, much dissent. But this is a statement now. Let's make a legal formal statement.

Who owns what this is the new status quo? At beginning, not an end. Sorry, forgive me. I want to move quickly to two more periods in history where the idea of the yoke was developed. First of all, the English civil war. The idea of the conservative Normans and the freedom-loving Anglo-Saxons

played a big part in the ideology of the English Civil War, out of which a lot of ideology are current ideology still flow. Would you agree with that, Matthew Strickman? I'm not sure about that. The Norman Yoke really reaches its apogee in the Interregnum. And it's very much the currency of the radicals. But of course it's fighting against the idea of the ancient constitution, which is that it's peddled by people like Sir Edward Cook,

the great Chief Justice under James I, that there is, unbroken continuity and that what you turn to to safeguard yourself against Stuart despotism and absolutism are the liberties, the free liberties of the Anglo-Saxons, the laws of Edward the confessor. So for one element, continuity is the key. The radicals, of course, turn that on its head and they say, you know, the Normans have imposed these laws. Would you agree with that, sir, huh? Yes, I, I think that's fair. sense that, but it's interesting that it's for the common man

that the traditions of English liberty are the most of the English Civil War periods. Yes, talking about the 17th century. And so they're brought in to reinforce ideas of liberty. Yes, and an idea of an unbroken tradition of a free English people who should not have to be ruled

by kings who are tyrants so that if your king behaves tyrannically, it's not illegitimate therefore to get rid of him. Yes, well, what I would comment is I bring it a little bit more up to date and move on to the period around 1800. And our first modern history of the Anglo-Saxons written by Sharon Turner around 1799 puts them into academic debate as a people of liberties who have a monarchy but also have representative institutions. That was a very popular book. It went through three editions.

and it's based on the information in that that we find things like the Ivanhoe concept of these free Anglo-Saxons who have their nice democratic institutions and the Normans come and impose themselves on that and suppress that. Ivanhoe had a huge influence because of its status as a novel

to the extent that the Regis Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford a chap called Freeman who wrote a monumental view, monumental six volumes on the Norman conquest devoted a whole appendix to refuting Ivanhoe. All I was going to say is that the stock of the Anglo-Saxons, the fact it was so high in the 19th century and their representation of liberties that were then pushed down by the Normans is actually also shown by historical painting of the time. And if you look through the lists of the subjects that were exhibited at the Royal Academy in the 19th century, you find that heroic moments from the Anglo-Saxons,

up to the death of Harold, are frequently represented, hardly anything from the Normans, except William occasionally confirming a liberty for a town, and then we have to wait for Richard I the first to come along again. And it's interesting, because it's in the 1860. Charles Kingsley writes his famous book, Harry Wood, Wait, The Last Englishman, 1866, 800. that. Passionately. It's a fabulous romp of Victorian fantasy

about English, the last Englishman. It's an expression of English nationalism, which is remarkable. And you can apply, once you have this argument, you can apply it to anything. So you can think about the church, and you can say that the early primitive Anglo-Saxon church was pure

and entirely free of influence from Rome, but nasty William came and fought under a papal banner. Yeah, but hold on just a second. You can say that, but is it true? I mean, and they're doing this. You don't think that's the case at all, then you're shaking your head. Is it true? No, of course it's not true. Well, let's do it. Before we go out of this program, which is going to happen in approximately two and a half minutes time, do you think the idea of the Norman yoke, as I presented it at the top, deliberately over-emphasizing it, do you think that still obtains or has the work of persons like yourselves modified it, undermined it, nuanced it to the extent that it's falling down? I'm afraid you'll have to be brief. Matthew. I will go back to the sources, and I will say that the last word is with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,

who says, I was at William the Conqueror's Court. He was a great man in many ways. He was stern. He was violent. But he oppressed poor men. He said he loved the stags as if they were his father. He imposed the forest law. The forest law is pre-wrought too, wasn't it? So for this chronicler's mind. You couldn't get their own food because of it was it.

Absolutely. In that sense of the Norman York, not some sort of radical 17th century myth, I would say there is a degree of truth in it. Richard. I would say that the impact of the conquest and its disruption should not be discounted. On the other hand, the Normans did enable many English strengths, such as manuscript production, literary production to continue. And in some senses it's a revitalisation of existing traditions.

I'd go back to the Anglo-Saxons and question the historical premises. on which the Norman Yoke is based. The idea that the English were all free, that they didn't owe service, that they had free access to the king, is something that we would no longer accept the idea that women had freedom in law and to own their own property

and all that was taken away at the conquest. If you think about it from the period before 1066, we would want radically to revise that view and so to question just how free the Anglo-Saxons really were. But did the Norman conquest make a difference to the peasant in the field? who had to till his fields and who had one landowner instead of another. I think I would say that at the moment that your peasant steps outside to herd his sheep,

the thing that is most different is the skyline. And perhaps it's visibly that the Normans made the greatest impact on England by all this massive building in stone. So England looked, sounded and felt like a very different place. They may not have been tyrants, but they changed a great deal. Well, thank you very much. Next week we'll be discussing the Irish poet WB. Yeats and his opinions and views and interest in Irish politics. Thank you all very much for listening.

Thanks to Sarah Foote, Richard Gambson and Matthew Strickland. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.