Why Saxons Failed to Overthrow the Normans

0:05 After Duke William’s infamous conquest of England in the year 1066 AD,

0:11 the formerly Anglo-Saxon-ruled island was fundamentally changed.

0:17 Norman French became the language of law, politics and high society in England,

0:22 ruling over an English-speaking peasantry whose language they

0:26 did not bother with learning for some 300 years.

0:31 Some scholars have gone so far

0:33 as to describe Norman-occupied England as a colony,

0:36 especially during the 12th and 13th centuries,

0:39 when William’s Norman and later Plantagenet successors spent much

0:43 of their time in France or, in Richard the Lionheart’s case,

0:47 on Crusade, treating England as little more than a personal piggybank.

0:53 This raises the question: how were the Anglo-Saxons,

0:57 who vastly outnumbered their French-speaking rulers,

1:00 unable to overthrow their conquerors and restore native English rule?

1:05 Was one defeat at Hastings truly enough

1:08 for the Saxons to accept the permanent Norman yoke?

1:13 In this video, we will explore those very questions.

1:21 The Background Within a generation of the Roman

2:01 Empire’s departure from Britain in 410 AD,

2:04 the island came under the rule of new occupiers,

2:08 an assortment of migratory West Germanic tribes

2:11 from across the North Sea, such as the Angles,

2:14 Saxons and Jutes, whose diverse identities history

2:18 has simplified into a single ethnonym: the Anglo-Saxons.

2:22 Within a generation of their arrival, the topography of lowland Britain was

2:27 dominated by a tapestry of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms,

2:31 in which dialects of Old English gradually

2:34 replaced the pre-existing Latin and Celtic languages.

2:37 Of all the Saxon monarchies, it was the Kings of Wessex who consolidated

2:43 Anglo-Saxons lands during the tumult of the Viking invasions,

2:46 forging the Kingdom of England by 927 AD.

2:50 Except for a brief interlude when England was annexed

2:53 to the North Sea Empire by the Norwegian King Cnut the Great,

2:58 the Anglo-Saxon House of Wessex ruled the Kingdom for over a century.

3:03 Then, in January of 1066,

3:06 the reigning King Edward the Confessor died with no sons to succeed him.

3:11 Amid this succession crisis,

3:13 two foreign rulers emerged as claimants to the English throne.

3:17 The first was Harald Hardrada, the King of Norway,

3:21 who sought to revive Cnut’s North Sea Empire under Norwegian rule.

3:26 The second was Duke William of Normandy.

3:29 William was the furthest thing one could be from an Anglo-Saxon Lord.

3:34 His ancestor, Rollo,

3:35 had been a pagan warlord who settled in northern France in 911 AD.

3:41 His descendants and their followers had

3:44 since integrated themselves into French society,

3:47 converting to Catholicism, adopting a hardy register of the French language.

3:52 William, however, was a distant cousin to Edward

3:56 the Confessor and upheld a nebulous claim

3:58 that the late English Monarch had promised

4:01 the throne would pass to him upon his death.

4:05 There still existed one male heir to the ancestral House of Wessex,

4:10 Edward’s grand-nephew Edgar Atheling, but Edgar was a green boy,

4:14 unsuited to face the foreign threats now bearing down on English shores.

4:20 Thus, a council of English nobles, the Witan,

4:23 came together and elected the formidable Saxon nobleman,

4:27 Harold Godwinson, to be their King.

4:30 A three-way contest ensued,

4:31 with Hardrada and his Norwegians coming from the North,

4:34 William and his Normans coming from the south,

4:37 and Godwinson stuck in the middle.

4:39 While the Saxon King won a decisive

4:42 victory against the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge,

4:45 he was subsequently slain at Norman hands at the infamous Battle of Hastings.

4:50 Thereafter, William of Normandy was crowned the King of England,

4:55 and the English-speaking Anglo-Saxon people came under

4:58 the foreign rule of his French-speaking aristocracy,

5:01 the descendants of whom make up the upper

5:04 crust of modern British society to this day.

5:08 Initial Anglo-Saxon Resistance In the aftermath of Hastings,

5:10 many English fiefdoms were left vacant,

5:12 allowing William to simply fill them with Norman nobles.

5:16 However, not all the native English nobility had died in battle.

5:21 The Anglo-Saxon Lords of Northumbria remained powerful;

5:24 the sons of Harold Godwinson had fled across the sea to Ireland,

5:29 and the last male relative of Edward the Confessor,

5:32 Edgar Atheling, remained at large.

5:34 Moreover, the powerful monarchs of Denmark and Scotland offered

5:38 both refuge and support to these Saxon rebels and exiles,

5:43 hoping to use them to strengthen their influence over England.

5:47 This diverse assembly of political actors churned up a maelstrom

5:51 of fierce anti-Norman rebellions in the years after Hastings,

5:55 forcing King William to take extreme measures

5:58 to maintain control over the island he had conquered,

6:02 resulting in up to 100,000 deaths in Northern England

6:05 and a near total disenfranchisement of the native English aristocracy,

6:10 resulting in the permanent dominance of Norman aristocracy over the island.

6:15 But we are getting ahead of ourselves,

6:18 so let us first rewind and restart our playback

6:21 in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Hastings.

6:25 72 days after his triumph over Harold Godwinson,

6:28 Duke William of Normandy was crowned the King

6:31 of England in Westminster Abbey in London on Christmas Day.

6:35 He began his rule with a spree of building,

6:39 with his Norman lords rapidly erecting castles across the land

6:43 to project power and domination over their new English subjects.

6:48 Yet William also initially adopted a conciliatory

6:51 attitude towards the remaining Anglo-Saxon nobility,

6:54 allowing some who swore fealty to him to keep

6:58 their lands and even installing an English noble,

7:01 Copsig, as the earl of Northumbria.

7:04 Unfortunately for William,

7:06 neither appeasement nor power projection successfully dissuaded rebellion,

7:11 and by his second year on the throne,

7:14 native uprisings had flared up in every corner of the country.

7:17 In the west, an Anglo-Saxon noble named

7:20 Eadric the Wild waged a bloody guerrilla war,

7:24 ravaging the occupied counties of Herefordshire and Shropshire and even

7:28 allying with the ancestral enemies of the Mercian Saxons,

7:31 the Welsh Kingdoms, to plunder the lands of the Norman marcher lords.

7:36 However, after failing to besiege the Norman castles at Hereford and Shrewsbury,

7:41 Eadric submitted to William’s overlordship.

7:43 In the east, the men of Kent sent emissaries

7:47 across the channel to one of William’s continental rivals,

7:51 Eustace, Count of Boulogne, seeking his aid in seizing Dover Castle.

7:56 This rebellion ended in failure,

7:58 with neither Eustace nor the Kentish Saxons breaching the Norman fortress,

8:03 whose garrison ultimately drove the rebels off

8:06 the White Cliffs or scattered them into the hills.

8:09 Finally, in Northumbria,

8:10 William’s appointee Copsig was beheaded by the local nobles,

8:14 after which the northern lords replaced the Norman

8:18 toady with a native lord named Cospatrick.

8:21 Opting for the pragmatic solution,

8:24 William allowed Cospatrick to retain the earldom in return

8:27 for a hefty bribe and an oath of fealty,

8:30 securing peace in the north, albeit one which would be all too short-lived.

8:35 Back in the west, a new figurehead of native

8:39 resistance arose in the form of Lady Gytha,

8:41 the elderly mother of the late Harold Godwinson.

8:44 Gytha established the city of Exeter as her fortified base,

8:48 banking her success on the hope that her grandsons—

8:52 Harold’s sons— would return from their exile in Ireland

8:55 with an Irish mercenary fleet that would join forces

8:58 with her English rebels and crush William’s armies in battle.

9:03 William gathered a force of native English fyrd militiamen

9:07 and 500 Norman cavalrymen and marched to besiege Exeter.

9:10 When the king arrived, the city continued its defiance,

9:14 with one account claiming the defenders on the walls

9:18 lowered their trousers and farted in William’s general direction.

9:21 Exeter resisted the Normans for eighteen days,

9:24 but with her grandsons and their Irish army nowhere to be seen,

9:29 Gytha lost heart and abandoned the city,

9:32 sneaking out by boat along the river Exe.

9:35 Thereafter, Exeter’s remaining leaders surrendered

9:37 to William and swore their fealty.

9:40 It was only shortly after this that Gytha’s grandsons

9:43 arrived on the coast of Bristol with their fleet,

9:46 too late to make any difference.

9:49 There, they raided the coastline but failed

9:51 to rouse any support from the local population,

9:55 who had grown disillusioned towards rebellion.

9:57 The Great Northern Rebellion By the second

10:00 anniversary of the Battle of Hastings,

10:02 William must have been confident that the situation was calming down.

10:07 Major rebellions launched by native English

10:09 nobles had erupted across the country,

10:12 but their failure to properly organize and coordinate

10:15 with one another had prevented a countrywide uprising,

10:19 resulting instead in pockets of regional unrest

10:22 that the Norman occupiers snuffed out piecemeal.

10:26 In the south of England, both the Anglo-Saxon nobility and commonfolk seemed

10:30 to be losing their appetite for insurrection,

10:33 submitting to King William’s mercy and, in some cases,

10:37 fighting alongside the conqueror against their fellow Englishmen.

10:41 Moreover, each new castle built represented a root of Norman permanence,

10:46 growing deep into English soil,

10:49 allowing a small Norman garrison to dominate vast

10:52 swathes of the countryside and its native populations.

10:55 However, the tranquillity of the autumn of 1068

10:59 was only calm in the eye of the storm.

11:02 It is here that the last heir

11:05 to the royal house of Wessex reappears in our tale.

11:08 Edgar Atheling had fallen into William’s clutches after Hastings,

11:12 but had since slipped out of the conqueror’s grasp,

11:15 and was now a guest at the court of King Malcolm III of Scotland.

11:19 This made William understandably nervous,

11:22 especially when he likely received credible reports that Cospatrick,

11:27 the Earl of Northumbria,

11:28 was in cahoots with the Scottish King and his would-be Saxon usurper.

11:32 Tightening up his grip on the north,

11:35 William appointed a loyal deputy named Robert de

11:39 Comines to replace Cospatrick as the Earl of Northumbria.

11:42 de Comines, entered his new earldom

11:44 with a pack of Flemish mercenaries who indiscriminately looted,

11:49 pillaged and slaughtered as they went.

11:51 By subjecting the Northerners to such cruelty,

11:54 the King had triggered the very uprising he had been worried about.

11:59 On the 31st of January, 1069, a mob of Northumbrians fell upon their Flemish

12:05 brutalizers as they quartered in the city of Durham,

12:09 massacring them in the streets.

12:10 Robert de Comines was among the casualties,

12:13 ending his very brief tenure as Earl of Northumbria,

12:16 and initiating a rebellion against Norman rule in the North of England.

12:21 Seizing upon the opportunity,

12:22 Edgar Atheling came down from Scotland and rendezvoused with Cospatric,

12:26 who joined their forces with the insurgents and launched

12:30 a furious assault on the Norman-occupied city of York.

12:34 Meanwhile, the sons of Harold Godwinson saw another window of opportunity

12:38 and led another fleet across the Irish Sea to invade the West Country.

12:44 Simultaneously, their mother, Gytha, was back in the game,

12:48 having sailed on to Denmark.

12:50 A Dane herself, she sought to solicit

12:53 the military intervention of the Danish king, Swein Estrithson.

12:58 Motivated perhaps by Northern England’s centuries-old

13:00 ties to Scandinavia from the Viking Age, King Swein agreed to invade.

13:06 By the Spring of 1069, the walls were closing in on King William from all sides,

13:12 yet the saving grace of the conqueror came

13:15 in the fact that, like the prior round of uprisings,

13:18 his enemies once more were unable to coordinate their assaults,

13:22 allowing the Normans and their allies to neutralize them one by one.

13:27 To simplify events immensely, the conqueror was able to muster an army and smash

13:33 the Northumbrian rebels at York before the Danish fleet arrived,

13:37 while the sons of Harold were defeated in Devon

13:40 by one of William’s vassals, Brian of Brittany.

13:42 When the Danes finally arrived and joined forces

13:45 with what remained of Edgar and Cospatric’s rebels,

13:49 they managed to seize York from its Norman garrison,

13:52 but left the city too burnt out to hold.

13:55 The royal Norman and Danish armies ultimately

13:57 played a mutually fruitless game of cat

14:00 and mouse along the Humber River until William

14:03 paid them off with silver to go away.

14:07 By the third anniversary of the Battle of Hastings,

14:09 the great threats to Norman rule in the north of England had been pacified,

14:14 and after three years of non-stop native rebellions,

14:18 a wrathful William the Conqueror was prepared to take extreme measures to ensure

14:23 that no Anglo-Saxon or their allies would

14:26 ever be able to rise against him again.

14:30 His solution was simple:

14:32 to pursue a scorched-earth strategy in the most literal sense.

14:37 Knowing that Northumbria was still full

14:39 of insurgents and supporters of Edgar Atheling,

14:42 William ordered his men to starve them out.

14:45 ‘In his anger,’ chronicled the Benedictine Monk Orderic Vitalis,

14:50 writing some 60 years after the event, ‘he commanded that all crops and herds,

14:55 chattels and food of every kind should be

14:59 brought together and burned to ashes with consuming fire,

15:02 so that the whole region north of the Humber might be

15:06 stripped of all means of sustenance.’ This policy of forced mass starvation,

15:11 known to history as the Harrying of the North,

15:14 is by far the most infamous chapter of the story of William the Conqueror.

15:19 Orderic claimed that over 100,000 ‘Christian folk’

15:23 perished in the desolation of Northern England.

15:26 Meanwhile, the Domesday Book, a census of England taken in 1086,

15:32 suggests that the population of the historic county of Yorkshire

15:37 may have been reduced by as much as 75%.

15:41 Modern historians have since downplayed these numbers,

15:43 but have stopped short of denying

15:46 that William’s tactics were utterly ruthless and destructive,

15:50 even by medieval standards.

15:52 They were, however, brutally conclusive.

15:55 The Harrying of the North effectively

15:58 ended organized Anglo-Saxon uprisings against Norman rule.

16:01 In 1071, a final flame of uprising flickered in the midlands town of Ely,

16:08 supported by some Northumbrian nobles in exile

16:10 and the return of the Danish fleet.

16:13 The figurehead of the thusly titled Ely

16:16 Rebellion was the semi-legendary Hereward the Great,

16:18 a Saxon noble who had been exiled to foreign

16:21 lands during the reign of Edward the Confessor,

16:24 and only now returned to his homeland to oust its alien invaders.

16:28 Surviving in English folklore as a Robin Hood-esque figure,

16:32 Hereward was said to have roamed the fens of eastern England,

16:36 protecting the smallfolk and Saxon churchmen from the rapacious Normans.

16:41 Ultimately, however,

16:42 William was able to pay off Hereward’s Danish allies once more

16:46 and subsequently scatter the forces

16:48 of the outlaw prince and his Northumbrian allies.

16:52 Thereafter, the French military elite of England was

16:55 never again challenged by the island’s native English-speaking population.

17:00 Why Were There No Further Rebellions?

17:01 In just three short years after the Battle of Hastings,

17:04 the Anglo-Saxon nobility of England had

17:07 expended their remaining manpower, their leverage,

17:11 and their symbols of legitimacy in a series

17:14 of ill-fated and catastrophic attempts at resistance,

17:18 leaving themselves depleted, demoralised and completely helpless to stop

17:22 their complete replacement with a new French-speaking elite.

17:26 What few native English lords did not die in the pitched battles

17:31 of 1066 and the subsequent failed

17:34 rebellions were systematically stripped of their lands,

17:37 with thousands of Anglo-Saxon nobles and their entourages fleeing the country.

17:42 Many of these English exiles travelled as far as the eastern

17:46 edge of Christendom and entered into the service of the Byzantine Emperors,

17:49 where they fought on the frontiers of the Eastern

17:52 Roman Empire as part of the elite Varangian Guard, including, ironically,

17:58 against another faction of Normans who happened

18:00 to be in the neighbourhood and conquering Italy.

18:03 One of these English Varangians was, allegedly, none other than Edgar Atheling.

18:08 After a very eventful life, we unfortunately cannot get into, the English

18:15 King-who-never-was finally died in 1125, ending the male line of the Anglo-Saxon

18:21 dynasty that had founded the Kingdom of England.

18:24 A generation after the Battle of Hastings,

18:27 the vast majority of the Kingdom of England were still native English speakers,

18:32 but the landowning nobility were French-speaking Normans.

18:36 Thereafter, any further native Anglo-Saxon uprisings became a distant hope.

18:40 With the Godwine family a spent force and the House of Wessex extinct,

18:46 there were no longer any Anglo-Saxon families left in England

18:50 capable of raising enough men to challenge the Normans.

18:53 There may have been a thousand Egfrith the ploughmen and Egbert

18:58 the goatherds for every one Lord Robert and Lord Humbert,

19:02 but as only Robert and Humbert possessed the land and wealth necessary to raise,

19:08 organize and feed knights and levies,

19:10 then it was with Lord Robert and Lord Humbert that power would remain.

19:15 By the end of William’s reign,

19:18 the old Anglo-Saxon administrations of England had been largely abolished,

19:22 with the land divided between 180 Norman landholders,

19:26 all of whom were obliged to provide military service

19:30 to the King and all of whom ruled their lands from castles.

19:35 Castles, as mentioned previously,

19:37 played a crucial role in entrenching Norman power in England,

19:41 and for the most part, were unlike anything the natives had seen before.

19:46 More defensible than the traditional fortified Saxon Burh,

19:50 Norman castles fundamentally reshaped the English

19:53 countryside in ways custom-tailored to Norman control.

19:57 Of course, rulers in medieval Christendom derived their power

20:01 as much from the religious world as the secular.

20:04 Thus, to secure that lever of power as well,

20:08 William oversaw a full Norman takeover of the Catholic Church in England.

20:13 William had maintained a strong relationship with the Pope,

20:16 who had blessed the conqueror’s invasion of England in the first place.

20:21 Now, he leveraged that relationship to replace

20:24 nearly every influential Anglo-Saxon bishop with Normans.

20:28 Moreover, almost every notable Church and Cathedral was demolished

20:33 and rebuilt in the so-called ‘Romanesque’ style brought over from Normandy.

20:38 Through castles and churches alike,

20:41 the Normans literally rebuilt England in their image,

20:45 with the historian George Garnett describing

20:48 it as the most systematic transformation

20:50 of English towns until the reconstruction after the Blitz of World War Two.

20:55 The intention of King William was plain to see:

20:58 whenever his English subjects beheld the symbols

21:01 of the Kingdom of Men or the Kingdom of Heaven,

21:05 they were to associate them not with their old rulers but with their new ones.

21:11 Conclusion Having said all that, it might be surprising

21:13 to hear that many modern historians believe that life

21:16 for the average Anglo-Saxon peasant did not change all

21:19 that much in the immediate aftermath of the Norman conquest,

21:23 and indeed, it was likely this reason above all that William

21:27 did not face popular peasant

21:29 uprisings after dismantling the Anglo-Saxon nobility.

21:32 With the notable exception of the brutally

21:35 harried lands around Yorkshire county, life largely went on for the peasantry,

21:40 to whom it must have made little difference in where lay

21:44 the homeland of the priest who chanted Latin at them during mass,

21:47 or the Lord for whom they performed

21:50 corvée labour and delivered their rent in kind.

21:53 In post-conquest England,

21:55 time and custom ultimately prevailed over language and culture.

21:59 By the 14th century,

22:01 the bitter experiences of the Hundred Years’ War against France led

22:05 the French-speaking aristocracy of England

22:08 to gradually shift to speaking English, albeit not before centuries of French

22:13 influence had fundamentally transformed the English language.

22:17 Indeed, around 30 to 40% of the words in this video are of French origin,

22:22 including “conquest,” “castle,” “military,” and even the word “language” itself.

22:27 The peerage of the modern United Kingdom is still largely descended

22:31 from the Norman military elite that crossed the Channel in 1066 AD.

22:36 Even to this day, modern Britons with Norman

22:39 surnames are overrepresented in the highest echelons of society,

22:44 including the most prestigious universities, the best-paying sectors,

22:48 and the fields of law and politics.

22:50 This is the legacy of a foreign ruling elite which,

22:54 although long nativized to the island it conquered,

22:57 remains the inheritor of most of its wealth and power to this day.

23:02 More videos on medieval history are on the way,

23:05 so make sure you are subscribed and have pressed the bell button to see it.

23:09 Please consider liking, subscribing, commenting,

23:11 and sharing- it helps immensely.

23:14 Recently, we have started releasing weekly

23:16 patron and YouTube member exclusive content,

23:19 consider joining their ranks via the link in the description

23:22 or button under the video to watch these weekly videos,

23:25 learn about our schedule, get early access to our videos,

23:28 access our private discord, and much more.

23:30 This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one.