It was on September 28, 1066, that William the Conqueror landed in England and began the Norman Conquest.  Do you think his life would’ve turned out differently if he’d been named William the Florist?  Or maybe if they just called him Bill?  But I digress.

 

It all begins in the Garden of Eden, but let’s jump forward a bit.  On January 5, 1066, King Edward the Confessor dropped dead.  It happens.  There was no clear successor to the English thrown, but Bill, who was just the Duke of Normandy then, really thought the English crown should be his.  After all, King Ed, his childless cousin, supposedly promised Bill the thrown when he died.  I’m telling you, you got to get these things in writing.  So anyway, some guy named Harold Godwinson got the job – that’s King Harold to you.  And that caused William to say, “I don’t think so,” only he said it with an invading army. 

 

They all made a play date for October 14, 1066, at the Battle of Hastings, where King Harold was killed, and then William the Conqueror was crowned King of Everything on Christmas Day, 1066.  And boy howdy, things did change around England.

 

First of all, they got stone castles.  I mean, that would’ve been enough, but come to find out that was the minor part.  As far as the bigger parts go, first the politics changed.  All of England’s ruling class was replaced with French speaking nobility.  So there was an interim in there were nobody knew what anybody was saying, not that it makes a whole lot of difference with politics. 

 

As well, England’s political future became tied to the continent.  What happened in mainland Europe directly affected England.  Things also changed for the little guys, with a strict feudal system being put in place, guaranteeing that the ruling class would be able to tax the surfs for everything they had. 

 

The biggest change, at least as far as we’re concerned here at the Press, was with the language.  It was the beginning of the English language as we know it.  Before the Norman Conquest, people in English were speaking Old English, which is closer to German than anything we know now.  It had such things as gender for nouns, all those compound words, complex verb congregations, and a runic alphabet.  Yeah, if you went back in a time machine, you wouldn’t be able to understand any of it. 

 

After the Norman Conquest, folks were speaking Middle English, though I’m fairly certain they just called it English.  More than anything, English became a language of the commoners, and not just something spoken in court.  It lost all of that gender nonsense, and overall became a whole lot simpler, and therefore easier to convey meaning.

 

And that led to a change in the creative stuff that people wrote.  Old English literature, what little of it that survived, is more the heroic poetry, stuff like Beowulf.  These are poems where manly men do manly things all in the name of God.  With the Norman Conquest, literature themes shifted to love, courtly romance, and chivalry, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the English Kings, which is one of the first recorded histories (though mostly made up) of Arthur and his buddies, and you don’t get any more chivalrous than that. 

 

And by combining French and English, there were more words, so language could be more nuanced.  You ever wonder why there are two different words for the same farm animal, like cow and beef?  With the influx of all those French words (over 10,000 of them), farm animals, like cows and pigs and sheep, kept their original English.  The cooked versions of those animals, especially when served to the rich, took the French:  beef, pork, and mutton.

 

In the end, the Norman Conquest made such writers as Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, Milton, and even me possible, as well as pretty much everything else we read that was written in English.  Of course, if it never would’ve happened, if Harold Godwinson had won the Battle of Hastings, we never would’ve known the difference, but that’s beside the point.

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