All the eye witnesses and near-contemporaries agree that these were terrible events. Enslavement and devastation of the countryside, deliberate burning of fields, refugee crises, famine, people surviving on insects and rats. These were the news stories of the day. Their descriptions match the worst horror stories of modern war reporting. Then, as time passes, we begin to read chroniclers who offer a wider overview of how things seemed to them, a generation or two later. Though these are not primary sources, written in 1066, their snapshots are fascinating insights into the way the next generation saw things.
William of Malmesbury, for example, who wrote in the 1120s, had a Norman father and an English mother, so he was caught between the two sides. He writes that this was 'a fateful day for England, the melancholy havoc of our dear country', because it fell under foreign lords. Around the same time, another historian of mixed descent, Orderic Vitalis, reports the deathbed confession of William the Conqueror. According to Orderic, this is what William said:
'I've persecuted the natives of England beyond all reason, whether gentle or simple. I have cruelly oppressed them and unjustly disinherited them, killed innumerable multitudes by famine or the sword and become the barbarous murderer of many thousands both young and old of that fine race of people.'
Did William ever say that? It seems hard to believe that Orderic really had access to an eye-witness account of the Conqueror's last words. Most likely this is what the English would have wanted him to say. But his text certainly shows us how some people felt 40 years on from William's death, 60-odd years after Hastings. And perhaps this is a pointer to why the tale persisted in myth for so long afterwards.
some mong in the last thread just said that kasabian are bigger than the libertines lmao
Jaxon Parker
not him but ive done heroin its pretty good but you sit sit in your own little world its not like cocaine where you can seize the world by the balls and overdosing is easy
The Normans were brutal, ruthless occupiers. The problem was that William had promised his allies and friends a cut of the cake, but first he had to hold on to England and consolidate his grip. This was done with a network of Norman castles right across the country, fighting platforms gouged into the landscape. From these the native population could be terrorised and intimidated, and any local risings snuffed out. Not surprisingly there was a lot of local resistance in those opening years, and of course some of the resistance stories later became legends - legends such as the story of Hereward the Wake and the siege of Ely. Hereward has been immortalised in ballads and stories and Victorian novels, all of them based on a real person - an Anglo-Saxon land-owner from the fens, who led local resistance against the Norman oppressors.
His allies in that resistance were real people too - we can identify them and their native villages. And we can go to what was the edge of the Cambridge fens, around the villages of Willingham and Over, north of Cambridge, and still see traces of Duke William's siege causeways, which were driven through the fen to overwhelm the Anglo-Saxons on the old 'isle of eels', Ely. The duke was not a man to cross.
The siege of Ely was one of many local acts of resistance against the Normans. The most bitter and sustained warfare was in the north. When the Northumbrians rose against William in 1069 he punished them by deliberately devastating the entire province. He marched through Northumberland burning crops, destroying villages and driving the people off. That is what Orderic Vitalis meant when he speaks of William's murderous campaign with 'famine and the sword'.
Jeremiah Wood
thats my mum delete this
Ethan Edwards
190 running scared from the heroin suggestion lmao
Jordan Reed
wonder why her fanny is so itchy
Blake Young
christ it's a bit cold today
Nathan Fisher
really want to try heroin
Joshua Rodriguez
stop pulling my pisser
Wyatt Foster
In fact we can see just how William laid waste to Northumbria by looking in the pages of Domesday Book, the survey of England made for the Conqueror in 1086. In its pages you can follow the track of William's army beyond the Humber and up the Great North Road through Yorkshire, a track visible in the devastated villages whose value had plummeted between 1066 and 1086 - and had not recovered.
Even 17 years after the devastation of the north, many of these places were worth nothing. Northumbria would take a long time to recover. And the loss was across the board. We lack, for instance, the ecclesiastical archives for Northumbria going back to the seventh century, most of which were lost in 1069. Looking back one can only sympathise with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicler, who remarks, grimly, 'King William was a hard man ... sunk in greed'. A man ruling an alien land, determined to impose his will by force.
How many Normans came over during those first 20 years or so after the Battle of Hastings? No one knows, but maybe 20,000 more troops followed the original army. How many others migrated from Normandy and Brittany is anyone's guess. There would have been merchants, dealers, labourers, entertainers, and so on. All were needed to provide the service industries for the new settler state. What we do know now is that for the next century or more they maintained themselves rigidly apart in terms of marriage and intermixing - a form of racial separation that has been compared to the apartheid system.
The Old English were relegated to the lower social classes. The manors of the Anglo-Saxon ruling and land-owning classes, including huge tracts of land, were given to the main Norman leaders. Of the 1,400 tenants-in-chief in Anglo-Saxon England, only two were still in place by 1086. Of the several thousand lesser 'thegns' (freemen and women) below them, some still held their family lands in 1086, but often owing service to a Norman overlord.
Have days and days of insomnia after doing cocaine.
Anyone else know this feel?
Brandon Lee
Stop stealing
Stop being a nigger
Stop being a globalist
Michael Carter
arrogant student alert
David Lee
>he cant counter his uppers with downers
Jonathan Gray
A few middling families continued to hold local influence. The descendants of Thurkell of Arden in Warwickshire, for example, would be the ancestors of the great Tudor gentry family, the Ardens (of which Shakespeare's mother Mary was a distant kinswoman). But for most, the situation for the first generation or two was unremittingly grim.
There is one vivid detail in the Domesday Book which describes an Anglo-Saxon farmer at Marsh Gibbon in Buckinghamshire, a man called Aelfric. At Marsh Gibbon, the compiler noted, Aelfric had held the land freely in 1066, 'but now holds it off William, a Norman - graviter et miserabiliter [miserably and with heavy heart]'. If only we had Aelfric's autobiography.
It would be easy to think that such racial antipathies were the simple product of prejudice born of ignorance, shaped by a complete lack of knowledge of each other's culture. But the reverse is true. For long before the Conquest, Anglo-Saxon England's relationship with continental Europe had been close. Over 200 years before, the common threat posed by the Vikings had brought the Carolingian kings of Francia and the kings of Wessex and Mercia together. There had been royal marriages between the West Saxons and the Carolingians, and intellectuals and churchmen had frequently moved between the two courts. Later on, Ethelred the Unready had married a Norman wife, and his son, Edward the Confessor, had a Norman mother.
There were many Normans and French present in Edward's England, as there probably had been in the tenth century when there were already merchant colonies from Rouen and Ponthieu living in London. So, a certain amount of Normanisation had already happened in Anglo-Saxon England. Indeed, the English had always been receptive to foreign culture, foreign architecture and foreign ideas
Austin Barnes
pretty based
Sebastian Hill
190cm is SHITTING himself at the thought of doing heroin I though he was a proper tough guy too who could handle anything but turns out hes a little beta sissy boy you can call yourself a true drug connoisseur until you've tried heroin
Jason Thompson
He unironically posts on Jow Forums under a Marxist flag
Charles Hall
My ma was watching the news and nodding to some bint ranting about wog educayshun innit so I called her a globalist tart
the strokes shit all over any 2000's british indie band
Colton Bennett
>190 bores us for months, if not years, on end about all the drugs he apparently does >gets genuinely scared when told to try heroin STARTING TO THINK the drug talk is all bollocks!
Thomas Cox
But the Conquest was a different matter altogether. This was a foreign military takeover of an older and superior civilisation by a ruthless war leader, who had gathered support by offering his followers their share of the possessions of the vanquished. Henceforth, it was often said, the Normans seemed to treat the English as inferiors. There are accounts which say as much from as late as the 13th century, still complaining that the rulers spoke only French and made no attempt to learn English, which is how it seemed to Robert of Gloucester:
'The Normans could then speak nothing but their own language, and spoke French as they did at home and also taught their children. So that the upper class of the country that is descended from them stick to the language they got from home, therefore unless a person knows French he is little thought of. But the lower class stick to English and their own language even now.'
Another 13th-century writer, Robert Manning, says, '... the English have been held in subjection ever since the Conquest'. And the feudal system he sees as a consequence: 'For all this thralldom that now on England is, through Normans it came, bondage and distress.' The idea of a distinct ruling class, which spoke French and reserved all the best jobs for people of French origin, was always dismissed by historians in the past as being special pleading and fantasy. But recent scholarship on intermarriage shows that this distinction was maintained for a very long time. It seems that in this case the old stories are true.
Josiah Cruz
bairns are on about their drugs again
Kayden Foster
True. The Libertines were peddled by the NME as the British version of The Strokes but they simply failed. The Libertines were truly awful.
Brandon Moore
the strokes were manufactured
Jackson Long
And of course, when we look at the broad spectrum of evidence, this makes sense. The archaeology, the texts, and the administrative records all show that the Conquest was a cataclysmic and traumatic event. The people of England were dispossessed and the old ruling class displaced. The likes of William of Malmesbury and Orderic Vitalis were speaking, in the 1120s, from the comfort of their monasteries. And they tell us it was a catastrophe even from the side of the relatively well off.
So perhaps today we have to be careful to understand the intense psychological impact of the Conquest upon the conquered. Anglo-Saxon society was an old society, an established and ordered state, which had created a sense of allegiance between its communities long before 1066. It is not surprising, then, that the wound was apparent for a long time afterwards.
Isaac Gray
Stroke a noose around your neck and kick the chair out you entry level plebeian faggot
Ryder James
yep ive been posting here for years posting sue for approaching 2 years
Nicholas Richardson
reckon 190cm should be banned from posting until he's tried heroin
Jaxson White
>Stroke a noose around your neck and kick the chair out you entry level plebeian faggot
telling someone you like the strokes is such a cop out its like you were trying to get into indie music but just couldn't be bothered
Bentley Williams
they're unironically quite rare
girls who claim to have an interest in left wing politics don't actually go through with it. they just claim to be lefty bc save the trees :3 pretty animals :3 refugees welcome :3
they essentially never actually formulate a proper opinion bc they tend to be stupid fucking liberals. not even being misogynistic rn, it's just how it is.
if you want an art gf do alternative chad activities such as djing or skateboarding but expect to be competing with up to 10 guys bc art hoe gfs tend to have all male friends aka beta orbiters.
You wank to cartoon? If so then don't fucking @ me my man, innit
I'm a simple man - If I see a cartoon watching gaymer gimp, I ignore him. Don't be a victim.
Noah Watson
why do people talk about food so much?
Jack Garcia
>Yeah, Pink Floyd? Yeah yeah of course.. Plebs, innit.
Cameron Morris
What makes The Libertines a massive band exactly? Their sales aren't particularly great and they didn't break any records. They didn't win many, if any at all meaningful industry awards. Their legacy is pretty much nought and they have pretty much no great follwing outside of the British Isles.
Noah Morris
notice how 190cm is avoiding all the heroin talk directed at him because he's a scared little loser who can only handle baby drugs and he thinks he's some kind of big shot
one bag of M&S Tortilla Chips straight down the gullet
Luis Roberts
This is a bait post. No bother
Robert Bell
the fact that they can sell out arenas night after night
Charles Mitchell
Vile tasteless shitskin.
Logan Richardson
yeah stadiums full over retarded boomers
Julian Adams
massive crowds at Reading and Leeds large devoted fan base considered one of the best live bands of the british isles
Elijah Nelson
You're non-white if you don't like the Libertnes, to be honest.
I reckon anything with "Albion" in non-whites think its racist or something.
Fuck off paki
Austin Hall
>the libertines dear oh dear...
Christian Smith
boomers are still people
Adam Edwards
yeah boomer loves early 00s indie stuff...
Caleb Wilson
I actually think some of the live stuff The Libertines do are better than their recorded album shite.
Jordan Walker
come on 190cm, what are you a big pansy?
why won't you try heroin?
are you scared of dying you big poofter
Kayden Gonzalez
pet rock just did 650mg of paracetamol and 10mg of phenylephrine hydrochloride
Daniel Lee
All of their live shows are better. That's how you know they're a good band.
Brody Hall
why did people stop using reddit flags?
Hunter Brown
Which arenas?
>massive crowds at Reading and Leeds Pretty much all festival bands attract big crowds, that doesn't make them a massive band.
>large devoted fan base How large? Clearly not large enough to get there last record to No. 1 in the charts
>considered one of the best live bands of the british isles So are lots of bands, even Kasabian are considered a great live band. That doesn't make you a massive band.
Christian Jackson
still there
Austin Reed
bc the script owner removed it
Eli Wilson
i'm brown eyed white
Parker Jackson
stupid pakis only listen to 192kbps youtube videos and make their judgements off that but they will never experience libertines live in small venue
Thomas Hill
Boomers love Pink Floyd and Led Zep. Numale boomers love "rap" music... like Will Smith.
Lol I fucking hate anyone over 40 except for my dad
Benjamin Murphy
190 is ignoring the heroin posts in favour of replying to himself.
Juan Thompson
kasabian literally are bigger than the libertines and have more recognisable hits
Grayson Morris
what you on about you chat some proper shite deary me
Asher Hill
literally every single arena in the country
look at their last couple of recent UK tours, all at arenas, all sold out
Daniel Davis
>Kasabian are considered a great live band LMAO by fucking who? You know fuck all about anything
kasabians last 2/3 albums have been absolute dogshit
literally just cashing in on their sellout album
the first couple of albums were very decent though
Adrian Miller
Maybe if Libertines played at a few mosques rasheed here would know how massive they are
Ryder Johnson
Fucking hell lads >went to pick up a pack of fags (about a 4 mile round trip) >listening to Orphx >phone screen goes bust half way through the trip >music still playing >end up listening to horrendous German techno shouting things >pick up fags >go for the trip back nothing bad happened but felt right dodgy as some lad screams german in my ears as I walked through otherwise empty country roads. makes me appreciate the ability to choose music as I walk.
