A medieval apartheid
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.
'Of the 1,400 tenants-in-chief in Anglo-Saxon England, only two were still in place by 1086.'
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.
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.
