1066 and Before All That Quotes

“Eventually English was adopted by the new aristocracy, but it was a changed language, and Old English is totally incomprehensible to us. Today at least a quarter and as many as a half of English words are of French origin, and the Norman invasion helped to add great nuance to the language. French words are usually more formal or aristocratic sounding: ascend, rather than rise, status rather than standing, mansion rather than house, cordial rather than hearty. Almost all words relating to government and justice are Norman, including prison, jury, felony, traitor, govern and, of course, justice. Likewise titles are mostly Norman French, including sovereign, prince, duke and baron—although not king or lord.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“The biggest impact of the Norman invasion was on the English language, which was replaced by French and Latin as the medium of government and law for three centuries. It might well have gone extinct, just as at least eight previous native languages of England had been, but most likely sheer weight of numbers and its established literature helped it survive.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“Even William felt regret for all the oppression and brutality he had dished out, and on his deathbed speculated on his legacy: ‘I fell on the English of the northern counties like a raving lion, subjecting them to the calamity of a cruel famine and by so doing became the barbarous murderer of many thousands, young and old, of that fine race of people. I have persecuted its inhabitants beyond all reason. Whether noble or commons I have cruelly oppressed them; many I have unjustly disinherited.’3 If only modern politicians could be so honest in their autobiographies.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“William was probably a bit too old and fat to be doing this sort of thing by now. During the siege of Mantes his horse jumped awkwardly, by one account frightened by the flames, and his saddle ripped into William’s stomach; it became infected and he spent five or six weeks in agony, but at least he died doing what he loved best—burning down cities and killing its inhabitants.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“William spent the winter of 1066 in England while his wife ran Normandy, and when he and his cronies returned to France in the spring the Parisians were ‘dazzled by the beauty of their clothing, which was embroidered with gold’. The new Norman elite were vastly wealthy; according to a 2000 Sunday Times estimate Bishop Odo, who was given Kent and land in twenty-two counties, was worth £43.2 billion ($52 billion) in today’s money, which would put him ahead of the most rapacious third world kleptocrat. William’s other half brother, Robert of Mortain, was worth £46.1 billion ($56 billion) while William of Warenne a staggering £57.6 billion ($71 billion); he held lands in thirteen counties. The new king was richer still, but despite William being staggeringly wealthy, the Godwin family had been probably even richer than he was.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“Harold may or may not have been hit in the eye: the story first appears one hundred years later, and the arrow shaft on the famous Bayeux Tapestry may have been only added in the eighteenth century by bored nuns. It’s possible also that the eye story was Norman propaganda, since blinding was the biblical punishment for oath-breakers; but either way he was dead. One story has William leading this death squad but it is extremely unlikely he’d have done something so risky; likewise with a later tale that Gyrth unhorsed William before the duke killed him, which is most likely borrowed from The Iliad. By the end of the day the Normans had lost 2,500 men, the English 4,000, including most of the country’s nobility. After the battle William didn’t bother to bury the defeated, and it was left to Harold’s mistress, Edith Swan-Neck, to identify him by a part ‘known only to her’, as his face had been so badly mutilated. However the indignity continued; William wouldn’t give up the body, even after Harold’s mother offered him her son’s weight in gold if she’d return him, and to this day no one knows where England’s last English king lies.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“Feudal Anarchy This period was characterized by what’s now called ‘feudal anarchy’, a situation where real power lay not with kings but with local lords. Because kings had not effectively centralized power yet, and the concept of nations was still vague, if you had a castle and a private army there wasn’t much anyone could do to stop you. There was private justice and war against all—generally speaking not the best time to be alive, and much more violent than the later medieval period by which time a local lord couldn’t just hang anyone who annoyed him.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“Driving this expansion was the cult of the knight, so that as one historian put it, ‘Chivalry in later ages may have had merits, but in the eleventh century it was a social disaster. It produced a superfluity of conceited illiterate young men who had no ideals except to rise and hunt and fight, whose only interest in life was violence and the glory they saw in it … they were no good at anything else, and despised any peaceful occupation’.5 These young men ‘just by existing … created wars’. On top of this there was the Norman system of primogenitor, which gave all the inheritance to the eldest son, and this drove the relentless Norman expansion, first to England and later Wales and Ireland, led by landless aristocratic younger brothers.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“Obviously this worldview would end up having a destructive influence and cause countless deaths, but the warlikeness of the northern French helped them to expand across the West, so that by 1350 twelve of Catholic Europe’s fifteen monarchs were Frankish in origin.4 During this period the entire region became Frankified, which is why you probably know someone called William, Charles, Henry, Robert or Richard but not many Eadrics or Hardicnuts, and also why Europeans today are known generically in various Asian languages as ‘firang’ (in the Vietnam War this is what the locals called the Americans). And the Franks were not only the prime movers in the Crusades but in places like Spain and today’s Poland they led military campaigns against Muslims and pagans, and were ruthless colonists in Ireland and elsewhere.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“Others were not so keen on the ‘ferocious Normans’, as William of Apulia called them. One Lombard prince, facing Norman warlords in southern Italy, described ‘a savage, barbarous and horrible race of inhuman disposition’.3 Another Italian called them a ‘cunning and vengeful people’. Even Henry of Huntingdon, half-Norman himself, said they ‘surpassed all other people in their unparalleled savagery’.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“Even before their conquest of England, the Normans had gathered a reputation for violence, turning up all over Europe for fights that they seemed to hugely enjoy. Hervey de Glanville, who led an attack on Lisbon, asked of them: ‘Who does not know that the Norman race refuses no effort in the continual exercise of its power? Its warlikeness is ever hardened by adversity, it is not easily upset by difficulties nor, when difficulties have been overcome, does it allow itself to be conquered by slothful inactivity, for it has learned always to shake off the vice of sloth with activity.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“wandering around the North Sea with ten thousand Danish soldiers in perhaps the largest, longest and bloodiest gap year in history.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“Another Anglo-Saxon joke goes like this: Q: What has two ears and one eye, two feet and 1,200 heads, one belly, one back, one pair of hands and one neck? A: A one-eyed garlic seller with 1,200 heads of garlic. You probably had to be there.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“In the east the Swedes settled along the rivers flowing down to the Black Sea where they created the first states in the region; the locals called them ‘rowers’ or Rus, and so their kingdom was named Kievan Rus, and later Russia.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“The weather must have made all of this even more unpleasant. England was far hotter in the tenth and eleventh centuries than it is now, with London enjoying the same climate as central France does today. There were almost forty vineyards in the south of Britain, spread as far north as Suffolk, not considered by wine buffs today as great grape country.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“Slaves, also called ‘live money’, still accounted for over 10 percent of the population by 1066, and 25 percent in more remote areas like Cornwall, so it wasn’t quite the social democratic paradise that anti-Norman historians make out. In fact it was the Normans who phased out slavery, replacing it with the somewhat better condition of serfdom (which was still pretty awful, obviously).”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“In the most popular British book and film series of recent years, the heroes have the very Anglo-Saxon sounding surnames Potter and Weasley, while the baddies go by the Normanesque Voldemort”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“Indeed the word ‘bigot’ was originally a Parisian insult for Normans, and came from their habit of using the Germanic oath ‘bei Gott’ or ‘by God’.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“The moral of the story is—never try to be clever, as most people are too stupid to get it.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“Edward was not exactly saintly—more weird than anything. In the words of one historian, ‘the personality described by eyewitnesses is that of a … neurotic with a tendency to paranoia and possessed of a fearsome temper that often made him impervious to reason’.2 While ‘his “saintly” detachment can be read in quite another way, as the “schizoid” alienation of the classic lone wolf, who has decided that since no one cares for him he in turn will care for nobody’.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“Chivalry in later ages may have had merits, but in the eleventh century it was a social disaster. It produced a superfluity of conceited illiterate young men who had no ideals except to rise and hunt and fight,”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“the cultural influences of the civilized south only clothed their barbaric tendencies like a nightclub doorman wearing an ill-fitting dinner jacket.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“England was far hotter in the tenth and eleventh centuries than it is now,”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England