Normans

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Slide 1

The Norman Yoke…

conquest

castles

war & waste

forest law

rebels & outlaws

merrie England

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The day England acquired a new royal dynasty, a new aristocracy, a new Church, a new language, a new …

Hastings, 13 October 1066

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Harold killed

Dover burnt

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The Conqueror’s footprints

Plotted by the destruction recorded in Domesday Book

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Castles of the Conquest

Castles of the Conquest

The castle was introduced into England by the Normans, who built them:

It has been estimated that possibly 500 castles were built by the end of the eleventh century, an enormous capital investment; but fewer than 100 can be securely documented

‘far and wide throughout the country, and oppressed the wretched people’

(Anglo-Saxon Chronicle)

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Castles of the Conquest

Domesday Book names the majority of those castles known to have existed by 1086

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Castles of the Conquest

Ludlow

Chepstow

Chepstow

Hastings

Shrewsbury

Slide 8

Genocide in Yorkshire

The Conquest, the rebellions which followed the Conqueror's coronation, and the ferocity with which some were suppressed, laid waste large areas of England. The infamous ‘harrying of the north’ between 1069 and 1070 was an act of genocide which left much of northern England uninhabited for a generation. One chronicler, Ordericus Vitalis, wrote of this ‘harrying’:

Slide 9

Genocide in Yorkshire

‘He [the Conqueror] harried the land and burnt homes to ashes. Nowhere else had William shown such cruelty. In his anger he commanded that all crops and herds, chattels and food of every kind, should be brought together and burned to ashes with consuming fire, so that the whole region north of the Humber might be stripped of all means of sustenance. In consequence, so serious a scarcity was felt in England, and so terrible a famine fell upon the humble and defenceless populace, that more than 100,000 Christian folk of both sexes, young and old, perished of hunger’

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