The Norman takeover of England was not like many other takeovers. Although, when a land is brought to heel, it is fair for the winners to take what is now theirs, the Normans went above and beyond in fucking over the English. They treated the good folk of our island sickeningly.
One need look no further than the Harrying of the North, in which more than a hundred thousand folk who did no wrong were killed for what had been done by higher-born men than them, for a time when the Normans were foul to us. Men were cut down, cows were slaughtered, crops and houses were burnt to ashes, towns were emptied and the townsfolk of the North were given great sorrow. Although this was how kings and high-born men fought in those years everywhere, today the Harrying of the North is thought to be a great wrongdoing against the folk of Northern England. A fight to wield the law of these lands, fought between the high-born men of England and the Normans from overseas, should not have meant the end of thousands of good, hard-working English men and womens' livelihoods only because some full-of-himself Frenchman born out of wedlock could get back at some of his foes.
Even with the European high-born's way of fighting and bickering at the time having made out the Harrying of the North to be fair game, would it have been good and right to do such a thing by the way of thinking at the time? Throughout all lands, everywhere and at every point in time, men have reckoned that the man who gets done in for doing wrong things should, first and foremost, be the man who did those things in the first place. This is why when a murder happens, the man who did it winds up in the pen before anybody else. It's not hard to understand, you don't have to be a smarty-long-Johns to figure it out. How were the folk of Northern England, the working men and women of the North whose way of living was seemly and good in the eyes of God, in any way in the wrong? The bickering that was going on between England's old wielders of the law and its new ones had nothing to do with them.
Do you think a low-born Englishman who worked on the fields, as his house was broken down and his fields of wheat and barley were set alight, would have thought that what William's men were doing to him was in any way good or right? Should he have been done in for something he didn't do?
The Harrying of the North was a slight against mankind, much like the ones done by Nazi Germany in fighting of the 1940s. There was no need for William to have done what he did - in truth, harrying the north must have thrown many a good thing down the drain anyway, as William's men could have used their time keeping things under wraps in the south instead. Twenty years after the Normans had taken over England, when the Domesday Book came out, towns all over the north are spoken of in French as being "wasted", having been emptied of men and livestock by the Normans. When we think about the Harrying of the North we should think not only about the dread they brought the working men of England, but also the wealth that was lost at the hands of bloodthirsty Normans.
The Normans who took over England were as bloodthirsty as the Nazis, if not moreso. When Hitler had Eastern Europe taken over by his men, he thought of it as a fight against a lesser folk which was good and right, and when the Jews were shoveled into deep graves outside of Auschwitz, at least the Nazis were telling themselves they were getting rid of a slimy, untrustworthy outsider folk. They may not have been right, but what did the Normans tell themselves they were doing when they came to England? Nothing. There was no good or wrong to them, only wealth and strength to be had off the backs of Englishmen.
The killing did not end there. What about all the Englishmen who died in fights against other lands further down in time, fighting a people who were near to them in blood and speech than the old Norman forefathers of the high-born, landowning men they fought under? What about the Englishmen who died in the hundred years' fighting against France over their Norman-born king's grounds for taking over French land, and the many other fights held between England and lands of the European mainland?
The Normans, after doing their grave wrongs against the men of England, did not die with their leader and become bygones like the Romans and old Celts did. They knowingly made it so that this wouldn't happen. In the years after the Normans took England, most English bishops and many English abbots were killed and had their seats taken up by Norman stooges and followers, in no small bit from the Holy Father (an Italian who did not understand our plight) giving the green light to William's takeover of England. After rightfully fighting against the Normans' wrongful ways time after time, the English high-born who had wielded the law of the land beforehand had their lands given away to Normans! Even today, many high-born "Englishmen" have Norman last names!
A life of ceorldom in England was much worse after the Normans came. Much like their Frisian brothers on the edge of the mainland, or the Swedes and Norwegians of the northern lands, ceorldom in England was better to live under than it was on most of the mainland before William landed in Sussex. The good men and women of England lost a great deal of freedom under their new Norman kings, as ceorldom like it existed in France was introduced to England shortly after. The English love for freedom that had been there before the Norman takeover luckily never died, but the truth that the freedoms we earned over the following centuries were only gotten by us from an unwilling, overbearing government should make any red-blooded English man think about what the Normans did to our land.
The Norman takeover of England was so bad that, within a few tens of years, French would become the tongue of law, trade and bookwriting all over England. Even though it was the 1000s and most of Roman Catholic Europe spoke Latin for the first and last of these things, the Normans thrusted their ugly language upon England so hard that Englishmen started speaking French!
Everybody knows that the English way of speaking has many words taken from the Norman tongue. Today, more English words have a Latin root than a Dutch one! You might not think this is a bad thing, but how much of a good thing is it in truth? The words we speak with shift the way we look at the world. Think about all the puns, all the wise sayings, all the things written in books telling us what is right and wrong, the talks we have inside our heads, and the words to God uttered in the English language that have been greatly shifted, not only in what is said but also how things are said, by the bringing of French words into English. We haven't only lost words and ways of doing things, we have also lost a great deal of the way our English forefathers saw the world and spoke about it.
Every truthful tale that can be told about the English-speaking world after 1066 goes the way it does only after the NORMANS are taken into thought. They have stolen our folk's way in this world, as the years go by. That is a wrongdoing as great as the Harrying of the North. We lost so many things at Hastings, and we are never getting them back.
In the span of a thousand years, the Normans made
into
Does what the Normans did to the men and women of England hang heavy over your soul as well?
Was there anything the Normans did or could have done that was good for England and the folk living there at all? It seems to me that all they did was bad for us, if anyone could speak of it in another manner I would like to hear what they have to say.
