Even before the armies met at Hastings, there were well-developed traditions of historical writing in both England and Normandy. In both countries history was largely in the hands of churchmen, particularly monks.

Apart from the social, economic and cultural consequences, the Norman conquest caused an explosion of historical writing that finds no contemporary parallel. From the initial raw shock to the more restrained polished expressions of regret later on, we can follow how, on the victims’ side, the English came to terms with defeat.

The first written English narratives

From 1066, the Norman version of events became the accepted account of the succession. The overwhelming reaction of first-generation Normans was one of legitimizations and justifications which were, in fact, abstract moralizations to bury any sense of guilt or shame.

The English version went underground.
The English people were at first too traumatised to write histories.
A few fragmentary remarks about 1066 are to be found in sources which predate the monastic versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and those which reflect the English point of view are very bleak. The catastrophe was too appalling and too recent for an author to face it.
The shortage of information about the Conquest in English sources which date from the decades immediately following it can to some extent be made good by looking at Continental sources. Most of these express horror and moral indignation at the bloodbath and loss of life. English authors would surely have expressed the same sentiments, had they been less stunned.

50 or 60 years after the Conquest, the monks of that time were acutely aware that they were losing touch with the past. There is a pattern here which can be traced elsewhere. First comes the epic event, a moment of triumph or disaster according to one’s point of view. About two generations later comes the realization that aspects of the event which were once common knowledge are common knowledge no longer; hence the urge to collect information and pass it on, usually by oral communication to younger people, but sometimes in writing.

One effect of the Conquest was to turn English monks back to their Anglo-Saxon past in an attempt to salvage what they could of it.
The first accounts of the Conquest to be written down in England, all of them brief and all of them written by monks, took the forms of additions to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. In the two generations which followed the Conquest, English monks experienced a very deep sense of loss and shame which had a national dimension, an institutional dimension and a personal dimension as well.
Most of the English chroniclers, like the Normans, accepted that the English had been punished for their sins by the just judgement of God. They presented a theological rationalization of the collective national shame, a common enough literary reaction to defeat in battle.
There were, however, protests about Norman oppression. The various entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle all condemn the invasion. The dissension was concerned, not with King William’s right to the throne, but with the later stages of conquest and settlement, and the justice or injustice of the ruthless measures adopted by the conquerors.
The most evocative expression of grief in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle comes in a poem written by the skald Thorkill Skallason for his master Earl Waltheof, after he had been executed for treason in 1076. The most intriguing aspect of this poem is its theme of Waltheof’s betrayal by William the Conqueror: ‘William crossed the cold channel / and reddened the bright swords, / and now he has betrayed / noble Earl Waltheof. / It is true that killing in England / will be a long time ending.’

There is, however, one exception to the rule of the tabula rasa of post-Conquest personal commemoration in England, and that is the Deeds of Hereward, the biography of an Anglo-Saxon nobleman and a leader of local resistance to the Norman Conquest of England. The Latin text was written between 1109 and 1131 by a clerk at Ely, probably called Richard. He used a now lost Old English biography by Hereward’s chaplain Leofric, which he claims to have combined with the reminiscences of several of Hereward’s companions.
Hereward’s adventures cover two distinct phases. During the first in the 1060s, he fought as an exiled mercenary for a variety of masters in Cornwall, Ireland and Flanders. During the second phase, he led the uprising in the Fenland and the siege of Ely 1971.
The Deeds of Hereward is very much an attempt to cope with the trauma of defeat, not by theological rationalization and depersonalization, but by romanticizing heroic behaviour through the medium of epic narrative. Its personal nature may be partly due to the original version having been written by a secular priest in the vernacular, the language in which most of the oral stories must have been told.

The English popular traditions

Not surprisingly, the written Latin narrative sources were known at first only to a very limited readership.
The great majority of the population picked up their historical knowledge from the more popular histories, whether poetic and vernacular or traditional and oral. There was always an undercurrent of oral memories, legends and traditional family history, an important element none the less in shaping the collective memory of the past. Oral stories were more personal and emotional. This oral tradition for a time ran parallel to the written tradition which attempted to cope with the past by seeing the defeat of 1066 in terms of God’s punishment for the sins of the English nation.

These traditions were a mine of pro-English sympathies rich in adulation of Anglo-Saxon monarchy and pervaded by tacit criticism of Norman moral virtue.
For the most part, the veneration of pre-Conquest saints continued without interruption. There is evidence of folk-memories of Alfred as a symbol of national independence, and as a model of valour, caution and patience.
The real bitterness and loss of the dispossessed was preserved in popular memory. Resentment was refuelled in each generation. A tendency persisted in popular writings to describe all oppressive or wealthy rulers and administrators as Norman, and all poor and oppressed people as English.
These traditions also kept alive legends of heroic English resistance.

The Anglo-Norman chroniclers

Historians writing in the first decades of the 12th century were able to see the effects of the conquest in perspective; and those who were of mixed parentage were well aware of conflicting views.

Orderic Vitalis, the son of a French priest in the household of Roger of Montgomery and an English mother, was born in Shropshire in 1075. He was sent to Normandy to become a monk in the abbey of Saint-Evroult ten years later. He remembered the dispossessed magnates and starving peasants whom he had seen as a child in England. But he also revisited his homeland in 1119, and found the country peaceful and thriving under Henry I. When he wrote his Ecclesiastical History, of which a great part is the history of the Norman people, one of his principal sources for this period was the work of William of Poitiers, the Norman chronicler.
But Orderic’s quotations and allusions were selective: he cut out the passages about King William’s justice and mercy towards the English, and stated plainly that many were dispossessed and driven into exile. ‘The English’, he wrote, ‘groaned aloud for their lost liberty and plotted ceaselessly to find some way of shaking off a yoke that was intolerable and unaccustomed’. He put into the mouth of Abbot Guitmund of La-Croix-Saint-Leufroi the following words: ‘After carefully examining the matter I cannot see what right I have to govern a body of men whose strange customs and barbarous speech are unknown to me, whose beloved ancestors and friends you have either put to the sword, driven into bitter exile, or unjustly imprisoned or enslaved. Read the Scriptures, and see if there is any law to justify the forcible imposition of God of a shepherd chosen from among their enemies’.
And when he described the Conqueror’s ruthless harrying of the north in 1069, when William had destroyed the seed corn with the crops and slaughtered the plough oxen along with the other beasts, Orderic’s condemnation was unrestrained. He wrote: ‘In consequence so terrible a famine fell upon the humble and defenceless populace, that more than 100,000 Christian folk of both sexes, young and old alike, perished of hunger. My narrative has frequently had occasion to praise William, but for this act which condemned the innocent and guilty alike to die by slow starvation I cannot commend him’. Such a deed could be avenged only on the Day of Judgement.

Another historian of mixed blood, writing slightly later than Orderic, noted both the military ferocity of the Norman Conquest and the beneficial consequences of it. Henry of Huntingdon wrote a comprehensive History of the English People. The down-to-earth tone, attention to the practical side of life and willingness to move away from abstract theological moralizations are surely due to a non-monastic environment.
‘The Normans’, he said, ‘surpassed all other people in their unparalleled savagery‘. By 1087, ‘there was scarcely a noble of English descent in England, but all had been reduced to servitude and it was even disgraceful to be called English’.
Yet when he surveyed the whole stretch of history, he considered that the Normans, like the Saxons who had built on what they had gained, and unlike the purely destructive Danes, had suddenly and quickly subdued the land, and had rightly granted the conquered their life, liberty, and ancient laws.
The seeming inconsistency is not surprising, since Henry was slowly coming to terms with his own position as a man of mixed blood in a kingdom where conquerors and conquered were gradually becoming assimilated, and the Normans were claiming the English inheritance as their own.

Different kinds of historical media

During the four or five centuries after the conquest, consideration of the conquest and its effects was not confined to the writers of Latin chronicles.

• Oral traditions still kept alive events and imagined events that had passed into legend.
• Laymen and women who commissioned vernacular works – often in poetry – that described the deeds of their ancestors (this shows the extent to which the intellectual sub-culture of historical romance was liable to intrude into more critical history down to recent times, and including at least the 19th century).
• There were also hagiographers and monks investigating the foundation histories of their houses.
• Administrators and lawyers were daily involved in the practical working-out of the changes.
• Antiquaries were fascinated by buildings no less than early records.

The 13th and 14th centuries

In the years prior to Magna Carta (1215), the charge that King John (1166-1216) did not respect the laws of Edward, the Saxon king and saint, had become a very familiar one. But some started to claim that the same was true of all the other post-Conquest kings, including Henry I and the Conqueror itself.
On this view, continuity had not been briefly ruptured by the aberrant John, or even by all the Angevin kings, but at and by the Conquest itself. The Conqueror had not affirmed English liberties and the laws on which they were founded, but suppressed them. He had broken his word as soon as he felt secure enough to do so. Not only were the lands of Englishmen seized from them ‘at will, without any judicial procedure’, and handed out ot Normans, their heards were shaved and their hair shorn.
The call was for the resurrection of those laws and liberties, for the creation of a new continuity with pre-Conquest England by throwing off the tyranny which had been imposed in 1066. It was a rallying cry with a heady future.

New types of history flourished in the later Middle Ages, including town chronicles and antiquarian histories that appealed to a widening circle of literate readers.

Several 13th- and 14th-century chroniclers, writing in Middle English verse, commented on the linguistic differences, with French the speech of the gentry and English that of the peasantry. They gave a new twist in their references to the Norman Conquest.

Thomas of Castleford, writing c. 1327, proclaimed that: ‘From English blood, England William robbed, / Not one manorial land with them he left. / They shall all remain villains and slaves, / And do all that until slavery falls.’ In this way, he linked serfdom with English blood, and attributed the misfortunes of the English to the taking of their land by the Normans.
Robert Mannyng, whose Chronicle was completed before 1338, used still stronger language: “From the time William and his followers had the land in heritage / The English have lived in servage / He set the English to be slaves, that earlier were so free’.
Both chroniclers were living at a time of acute economic crisis, accompanied by storms, epidemics, famine and civil disturbance. They observed peasant hardship and distress. They also noticed that English was the language of the poor, whatever their racial origins, whereas it was only one of two or three languages for the better-off. This, taken together with statements in earlier chronicles about the seizure of land by the Norman aristocracy, could have led them to suppose that the Normans had enslaved and impoverished the English. These chroniclers provided material for a view of English and Norman disharmony that could later resurface in another guise.

The writings of the later Middle Ages show that after four centuries, men and women looking at the world around them were most aware of possible consequences of the Norman Conquest through language and law. Lordship was becoming associated with the conquest. Legal records stored up potentially explosive interpretations of the effects of the Norman Conquest.

Sources:
Marjorie Chibnall, The Debate on the Norman Conquest, 1999
Elisabeth van Houts, “The Memory of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066“, 1999
Robert Garnett, The Norman Conquest in English History, 2020

A renewed interest in the history of the Norman Conquest

• The invention of printing and the spread of literacy among educated laymen led to an outburst of historical and antiquarian interest.
• The context of the Reformation was decisive. Henry VIII and his close advisors were very interested in invoking precedents for English royal control over the clergy, away from Papal domination. This was the first occasion on which the pre-Norman past was deployed in support of a king’s pretensions, rather than against them. The king himself signalled his enthusiasm for Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum.
• Historical interest was further stimulated by the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the flood of manuscripts from monastic libraries that found their way into the collections of nobles, new colleges, churchmen such as Archbishop Parker, and newly-enriched country gentlemen. The dispersal of these manuscripts created the potential for them to be used as sources if and when the Conquest should again become a subject of current interest.

Such an outburst of historical and antiquarian interest is evidence of the value set on history: of the conviction that present rights and wrongs had their roots in the past, and that the past could help to provide solutions for present problems.

Legal scholarship

The most potent legacy from the Middle Ages was legal, because the obligations attached to different forms of tenure, particularly military tenure, were part of the daily business of the law courts. So the first reassessments of the conquest came from lawyers and legal historians.
Some legally-minded scholars deplored the changes introduced after the conquest in law and language. In his Dialogue between Pole and Lupset (written in the 1530s), Thomas Starkey spoke of the ‘tyrannical customs and unreasonable bonds’ imposed by the Conqueror ‘when he subdued our country and nation’. He argued specifically against the feudal burdens of wardship and marriage, complained that the common law was written, disputed and taught in French, to the dishonour of the English nation.
In Archeion, William Lambarde‘s (1536-1601) survey of the higher English courts, first drafted in the late 1570s, he expressed the view that the continuity of English law had been interrupted by the Conquest. He asserted that the English had not received a confirmation of their laws from King William shortly after the Conquest, but on the contrary had been enslaved by ‘a mere and absolute power, as in a Realm obtained by Conquest’.

New accounts of the Conquest

Raphael’s Holinshed‘s (1525-1582) Chronicles was first printed in 1577. The date of 1066 marked the division between the two volumes printed, because it was implicitly recognised as the major dividing line in English history. The Norman conquest was a ‘politic Conquest’ which had imposed an ‘intolerable bondage’ or ‘yoke of thralldom‘ – an ‘outrageous tyranny’ – on ‘Nobility’ and ‘Commonaltie’ alike, with new laws, including forest laws, in ‘the Norman tongue, which the Englishmen understood not’. This innovation by the Conqueror was a ‘pestilent policy of a spiteful mind, and savouring altogether of his French slavery’.

Such accounts made extensive use of the few relevant histories already available in print, all of which had been written after the 12th century. But they also made a point of frequently citing, and using, many histories available only in manuscript, including the major writers of the 12th century.

Sources:
Marjorie Chibnall, The Debate on the Norman Conquest, 1999
Robert Garnett, The Norman Conquest in English History, 2020