In the English-speaking world, the year 1066 is forever immortalized as the year that William,
Duke of Normandy, defeated the Saxon King Harold Godwinson at the battle of Hastings,
thereby ending centuries of Germanic, Anglo-Saxon rule over the lowlands of Britain,
and ushering in a period in which England would be dominated by a French-speaking aristocracy.
Of course, the Anglo-Saxon peoples did not simply vanish after the Norman conquest,
nor did their customs, or the Old English language they spoke. In this video, we will
discuss what life was like for the Saxons under Norman rule, the relationship they had with their
new Francophone overlords, and the linguistic and cultural intermixing between conquered
and conqueror which played a seminal role in the creation of the modern English identity.
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Before we dive into the main topic of our video, let us first discuss the history of the Saxons and
the events leading up to the Norman conquest. In the 5th and 6th centuries, three distinct Germanic
tribes from northern Germany and Denmark: the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes, began migrating to
Britain. The Anglo-Saxon period saw Old English become the dominant language in Britain, and Saxon
culture spread throughout the land. Around this time, the Old English epic Beowulf was written,
although it is likely the story existed in oral tradition for some time prior.
These tribes would remain separated into smaller groups and kingdoms until the reign of King
Æthelstan from 924 to 939 AD. It was Æthelstan who first came to rule over all Anglo-Saxons,
who he united into one realm: The Kingdom of England. By now, the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy
had become the predominant power in Britain, but this was not to last. For thousands of years,
people have believed that celestial bodies could govern the lives and events of mortal men.
In March 1066, Halley’s Comet appeared in the skies. The great-tailed star was perceived
by many to be an omen of things to come. To the Anglo-Saxons, it was the harbinger of ill fortune.
However, across the channel, the Normans saw a more favorable omen, which would
eventually give them their battle cry of “Nova stella, novus rex,” A new star, a new king.
The year 1066 saw the death of King Edward the Confessor, and the beginning of a power struggle
that would spell the end of Anglo-Saxon rule over Britain. King Edward, an extremely pious man,
had fathered no children, and so the line of succession was cast into doubt. Harold Godwinson,
the Earl of Wessex and brother of Edward’s wife, succeeded Edward immediately following his death.
However, across the seas to the south and east there were other contenders to the throne.
Duke William of Normandy, cousin of King Edward, asserted that Edward
had promised the throne to him, and that the new King Harold had promised to support him.
In Norway, King Harald Hardrada also claimed the English throne, citing his predecessor King Cnut
who had been King of Denmark, Norway, and England until his death in 1035. In early September 1066,
Hardrada set sail for England, stopping at the Norwegian-owned islands of Shetland and Orkney
to strengthen his forces with Scottish soldiers supplied by his ally, King Malcom III of Scotland.
On the 8th of September 1066 Hardrada met up with Tostig Godwinson at Tynemouth, in northeast
England. There, Hardrada began a campaign of looting and pillaging, defeating a small English
force at the Battle of Fulford on the 20th of September. When word of Hardrada’s invasion and
the English defeat at Fulford reached King Harold on the south coast he immediately gathered his
army and marched north to meet them. Harold pushed his men hard and crossed the distance
of 185 miles in just four days. The opposing armies met at the Battle of Stamford Bridge on
the 25th of September. Harold’s haste had taken Hardrada by surprise, and the ensuing battle saw
the Norwegians routed, and Hardrada killed. However, the tide of war would soon turn
against the victorious King Harold. On the 28th of September Duke William of Normandy landed his
forces at Pevensey on the south coast of England. William began to burn the English estates in the
south to force Harold into a confrontation as soon as possible, before his army could rest
and reinforce. This tactic worked, and Harold marched out to confront William.
The two sides met on the 14th of October, just outside the town of Hastings.
There are various accounts of the battle that followed, although many are contradicting.
What is known is that sunset that day was early, at 6:24pm, so much of the battle was
fought in darkness. When the sun rose the next morning Harold lay dead on the field,
killed by a Norman arrow to the eye. The reign of the last Anglo-Saxon king was over.
On Christmas Day of 1066, William would be crowned King of England and immortalized
throughout history as William the Conqueror. The Anglo-Saxon nobility had suffered heavily
during the Norwegian and Norman invasions and many fiefs were left without their lords, which William
replaced with loyal Norman nobles. In many cases the remaining family members of the former lords
were married into Norman families, cementing Norman influence in the nobility. However,
much of the remaining Anglo-Saxon nobility would not accept the new status quo without a fight.
By 1068, Norman rule in England was under threat by rebellions. The city of Exeter had refused
to swear fealty or to pay taxes to the new king. Exeter had become a center of resistance against
the Normans, with Harold’s mother Gytha taking refuge there to gather support for an uprising
after sending Harold’s sons to Ireland to muster an army. William gathered a force of
native English fyrd militiamen and 500 Norman cavalrymen and marched to besiege the city,
stopping along the way to raid smaller towns and villages thought to be supporting Exeter.
When the king arrived, the city continued its defiance. William of Malmesbury, a prominent
historian born nearly 30 years after these events in 1095, wrote that men on the city’s wall removed
their breeches, exposed themselves, and passed gas in the direction of the King’s force.
During the ensuing siege, which lasted 18 days, Gytha was able to escape the siege by boat along
the river Exe, before the siege ended with the city’s conditional surrender. Exeter would swear
fealty to William and in return would not pay the extra taxes levied after the conquest. It was also
agreed that the city would be spared the looting which traditionally followed a city’s surrender.
Elsewhere in England, Eadric the Wild, an influential Anglo-Saxon who held lands in
Herefordshire and Shropshire, allied himself with the Welsh Princes Bleddyn
ap Cynfyn and Rhiwallon ap Cynfyn, co-rulers of the kingdoms of Gwynedd and Powys.
After a failed siege of Hereford castle, Eadric was forced back to Wales, from which he carried
out multiple raids on Norman-held towns. With the assistance of his Welsh allies, Eadric
would besiege Shrewsbury Castle, which William had ordered built in 1067. The siege failed,
and Eadric and his allies were defeated by William in 1069. Eadric would later submit to William.
William would continue to put down rebellions in the following years,
including the ‘Harrying of the North,’ a campaign to pacify the rebellious northern English counties
which had risen in support of Edgar Ætheling, the last remaining male heir to the House of
Wessex and nephew of Edward the Confessor. After Gospatric, the Earl of Northumbria rebelled and
supported Edgar Ætheling, William was forced to march north to put down the rebellion.
Edgar and many of the rebellious Anglo-Saxon lords fled to Scotland and William replaced Gospatric
with a Norman, Robert de Comines, who served as Earl of Northumbria only briefly before a new
rebellion killed him and many of his men. Edgar enlisted the support of Sweyn II, king of Denmark,
who landed an army on the east coast and, with the help of the rebellious Anglo-Saxon lords,
captured the city of York. William’s fury at this rebellion would result in disaster for
the native northern peasants and lords. After negotiations between the Normans and Danes,
it was agreed that the invading Danish army would return to Denmark in return for a large payment.
In the winter of 1069-1070, William conducted a scorched-earth campaign to target the rebels’
supplies and to ensure no opposing army could be fielded in the region. His army burned crops,
barns, tools, and homesteads, killing livestock and farmers alike. The Domesday book, a record of
lands and landholdings across England and Wales completed in 1086, lists almost two-thirds of
all northern estates and holdings as ‘wasted’ sixteen years later, and English chronicler
Orderic Vitalis wrote in the 1120s-1130s in his ‘Ecclesiastical History of England and
Normandy’ that as many as 100,000 people died of starvation following the harrying. All Anglo-Saxon
nobles in the north were replaced by Normans, cementing Norman control of the aristocracy.
Edgar would again flee to Scotland until William’s invasion in 1072 forced him to flee yet again.
However, after a two-year stay in Flanders with another of William's enemies,
Count Robert the Frisian, Edgar returned to Scotland in 1074. Finally, after attempting
to sail to France and becoming shipwrecked on the east coast of England, Edgar submitted to
William. His dream of claiming the English throne ended there, although Edgar’s niece Matilda
of Scotland would eventually marry William’s son Henry in 1100, becoming Queen of England.
By 1080, almost all the Saxon nobility were replaced by Normans and those who remained
married into Norman families. However, some influential Saxon landowners who supported
William had remained as ‘tenants-in-chief', such as Thorkell of Arden, Earl of Warwick, who would
later be known as Turchill de Ardern in the Norman French style. Norman French became the language
of the royal court and the upper classes, while the lower classes continued to use Old English.
One example of this language difference is in our modern English words for various meats.
Norman nobility would have enjoyed meat for most meals, while it would be the lower classes
who reared the animals. Because of this, we still use the Old English-origin words for the animals,
for example, pigs, cows, and chickens. However, we use French-origin words for the meats,
for example pork (from porc), beef (from boeuf), and poultry (from poulet).
Many minor Saxon landowners fled England following the Conquest. Many of these ended up
in an unlikely place: Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Játvarðar Saga,
a chronicle of Edward the Confessor’s life and the Norman Conquest, describes a great exodus
of Anglo-Saxons in a fleet of 300 ships sailing to ‘Micklegarth’, a Scandinavian word meaning
‘great city’, referring to Constantinople, widely regarded as the largest and most splendiferous
city in Europe. The chronicle details the exploits of the Saxons on their journey, including the
raiding of Menorca and Mallorca and their eventual arrival in Constantinople, where they defended the
city from a siege. The emperor is said to have rewarded the Saxons by gifting them land to the
north across the sea, in the area which we now know as Crimea, a land that had formerly been
controlled by Byzantium. Many of the Saxons sailed to this land and conquered it from the ‘heathens’
who inhabited it, establishing a colony that would become known as ‘New England.’ However,
it must be noted that the existence of the New England colony is impossible to verify, and the
only references we have are from chronicles written hundreds of years after the fact.
What can be verified is that many Saxon exiles joined a regiment of the Byzantine army known
as the Varangian Guard, which up until 1066 recruited mainly from Scandinavia. King Harald
Hardrada himself had been its commander after joining in 1034 while in exile from Norway.
The unit served both as personal bodyguards of the Byzantine Emperor and as elite troops for use in
decisive moments in battle and was known for their unwavering loyalty and dedication to duty. In the
years following 1066 many Anglo-Saxons fleeing the Normans found their way to the Varangian Guard,
and by the late 1070s were its most prominent ethnicity. The Varangian Guard would go on to
fight in several campaigns for the Byzantine emperor, including fighting against their old
enemies, the Normans, when an army of the Northern French Knights who previously had invaded southern
Italy, led by the wily Duke Robert Guiscard, now led an invasion of Byzantium. Guiscard’s force
met a Byzantine army led by Emperor Alexios I Komnenos at the city of Dyrrhachium in 1081.
Over the course of the battle, the 1,000-strong detachment of Varangians was separated from the
rest of the army after charging Norman cavalry. The Varangians took heavy losses, and survivors
were forced to retreat and find shelter in a nearby church. Unfortunately for the Varangians,
the pursuing Normans simply set the church alight, killing all inside. Anglo-Saxon exiles would not
have another chance for vengeance against the Normans while in service to the Byzantine Emperor.
Back in Britain, the Norman rulers had established complete control over England, as well as parts of
Wales and Scotland. The ruling nobles were almost exclusively Norman, speaking Norman-French and
practicing Norman customs. However, over time a new identity and language would begin to emerge in
the aristocracy; Anglo-Norman. With the merging of many Anglo-Saxon and Norman families by marriage,
younger generations of Norman nobles were representative of both cultures, speaking both
Anglo-Norman and Old English, and taking up some Saxon customs such as wearing mustaches and long
hair. The Anglo-Norman language diverged further from continental French, incorporating English
words and styles and growing into its own distinct dialect. By 1100, the confluence of Anglo-Norman
French and Old English had developed into a hybrid language, Middle English, distinct from
both of its parents. Latin and French vocabulary and spellings became common in written English.
Middle English continued to develop and became the primary language of both the peasantry and
nobility, with Anglo-Norman more commonly becoming a learned second language for the aristocracy.
The rising tensions between England and France during the Hundred Years War put pressure
on English nobility to further embrace their English identities rather than their Norman ones.
By the 14th century, the Norman identity had been assimilated by English,
which would once again become the language of royalty in 1399,
when King Henry IV became the first monarch in centuries to speak English as his mother tongue.
Although the Norman blood still ruled the English throne, it can be said that,
linguistically and culturally, the Anglo-Saxons had lived to see the end of Norman Britain.
So, to summarize an answer to the question ‘What happened to the Saxons after 1066?’:
They endured and evolved, and incorporated the Norman customs and language into their own.
With that in mind then, perhaps it would be fair to say that the true victors are those
who came after, who experienced a culture enriched by both Anglo-Saxons and Normans.
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