Norman Conquest of England - Legacy

Legacy

Debate over the conquest started almost as soon as the event itself. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, when discussing the death of William the Conqueror, denounced him and the conquest in verse form, but the king's obituary notice from William of Poitiers, a Frenchman, was laudatory and full of praise. Historians since then have argued over the facts of the matter and how to interpret them, with little agreement occurring throughout history. Modern historians in the 20th and 21st centuries have focused less on the rightness or wrongness of the conquest itself - instead concentrating on the actual effects of the invasion. Some historians, such as Richard Southern, have seen the conquest as a critical turning point in history. Southern himself stated that "no country in Europe, between the rise of the barbarian kingdoms and the 20th century, has undergone so radical a change in so short a time as England experienced after 1066." Other historians, such as H. G. Richardson or G. O. Sayles, take a view that the change was less radical than Southern's view. The debate over the impact of the conquest depends on what metrics are used to measure change after 1066. If Anglo-Saxon England was already changing before the invasion, with the introduction of feudalism or castles or the changes in society, then the conquest was important but not a radical change. But, if change is measured by the elimination of the English nobility or the loss of Old English as a literary language, then the change was radical and driven by the invasion. Nationalistic arguments have been made on both sides of the debate, with the Normans cast as either the persecutors of the English or the rescuers of the country from a decadent Anglo-Saxon nobility.