成人快手

Page 7 of 7

• 1. A new order
• 2. Melancholy havoc
• 3. Brutal occupation
• 4. Famine and the sword
• 5. A medieval apartheid
• 6. Continental influence
• 7. French ruling class
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French ruling class

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.

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.

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