What would have happened if the Normans had lost the Battle of Hastings?
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
I don't think there's any reason to suppose that. Syllabaries like Japan's lend themselves to a certain kind of language, specifically one with a bunch of open syllables and simple onsets. Linear B seems to have been a pretty poor system for writing Greek, with lot's of vague approximations (e.g. 'pe-ma' for the word sperma), so unless the Greek of Linear B had less complex onsets and codas than the Ancient Greek we know, I don't imagine it would have stuck around in that form much longer anyway.
Incidentally Korean hangul is organized into syllable blocks in imitation of Chinese characters but is alphabetic in every other sense, which is actually good evidence for how writing will be changed or reinvented to fit the spoken language.
For those who don't know, Dan does a fantastic history podcast [0], and a pet fascination of his is exploring these what-if scenarios. The podcast comes with my highest recommendation.
- there might have been more interest in the early English kings.
- 11th c England would be darker to history, because there wouldn't be a Doomsday Book.
- Harold II would have a great-king reputation for beating Tostig, Hardrada and William.
- England would have remained politically chaotic, including ...
- A likely civil war between Harold II and his own relatives.
Not addressed:
- Changes to English society and life. Would feudalism have been imported anyway?
- No diaspora of English nobility, many of whom left rather than become subject to Normans
Paul Kingsnorth's novel The Wake is an intriguing historical novel imagining how the Norman conquest affected everyday English folk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard
"Composed primarily of Scandinavians for the first 100 years, the guard began to see increasing numbers of Anglo-Saxons after the successful invasion of England by the Normans.
[..]
the Guard was commonly called the Englinbarrangoi (Anglo-Varangians) [after a point]"
(That is all I really read about that subject.)
Edit: But please expand on the subject, as if I had meant that. It would be interesting. :-)
Christianity wasn't that nice either. Exterminating all competing religions (Asatru, Catharism, South American religions etc) and probably even worse pogroms than the Muslim world, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gytha_Thorkelsd%C3%B3ttir
Edit: Worth listening to are these BBC 4 In Our Time Podcasts.
The Battle of Stamford Bridge: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011jvlt
The Domesday Book: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b040llvb
Also, they had enjoyed some gender equality whereas the Normans introduced feudalism and its regressive society.
On the whole, though, looking back, it's remarkable that their conquest indirectly lead to where we are today --not dominated by Spanish, or Portuguese or French or Ottoman or even Chinese or Russians or anyone else who might have filled the role the English played in how the world organized and developed laws and international relations.
One of the take-aways from this is that the upheaval from conquest can lead to interesting new societies.
[1] http://www.historyhitpodcast.com/1066-battle-of-hastings-mar...
“The Saxon/Norman origin of liberal democracy in the English-speaking world is the key to understanding why the discoveries of sociobiology have appeared to be so congenitally politically controversial.”
In the beginning, they burned and pillaged the churches and the cloisters. When they went to England, they had already started to build them instead.
BBC had a good tv series about the Normans btw, worth seeing. I didn't know much about the Italian history, for instance.
(Re losing the religion -- as a hard line atheist from the Nordic countries, I'll admit that even Christianity was a step up from what was before. :-) )
How can you know that? What sorts of historical documents (and practices) are you thinking of?
Check e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmgang
A good illustration is the Swedish "peace laws" from the 13th century -- it became forbidden to steal women, kill people in church and attack others during harvest. Consider what that means about the time before those. :-)
My reply was that the Norman lords were literally Norse.
Christianity had spread to Scandinavia by this time too. Everyone involved was Christian, and from the 1000 foot view the Anglo Saxons, Danes, Norse, Normans and even Gauls were much the same. Feudalism was evolution not revolution, although William used the opportunity to install lords who owed him. After his death the tail end of Norman rule was just as chaotic and splintered as the pre Norman infighting.
I recently read and recommend http://www.historia.su.se/publikationer/nya-publikationer/de... (not sure if available in English sorry).
This was 1066, not 1200+ or something. Christianity was then quite old in Normandy and very new in Scandinavia. (Also, the population density was really low, compared to France -- changes must have been slow, hard to control what happened at distant farms.)
Most of what I have read say that south of Scandinavia they were beyond a clan society at this time, but you still had it at least in Sweden/Norway (Denmark ought to be more connected, from geography.)
Edit: If I'm wrong here, I'd expect a dozen old SCA members or something to show up, with primary sources. :-)
Edit 2: I'm not really contradicting, I'm noting that afaik, Norway/Sweden (uncertain about Denmark) was quite a bit behind the rest of Europe in development. Especially 1066. (It was not until the 13th century they tried to get more of feudalism into Sweden, iirc?)
The "Viking invasion" that Harold Godwinson defeated just weeks before was by Harald Hardrada, who is often considered by some as the "last true Viking".
But Harald Hadrada was Christian. He served in the Varangian Guard of the Holy Roman Empire, and he built an awful lot of churches when he returned to Norway. (He had a very eastern slant on his Christianity, and this made Norway was slightly unorthodox long before the schism.)
Harald Hadrada pushed Norway quite far on the path towards feudalism by trying to unite his kingdom and enforce hierarchy among the chieftains. So on the one hand he is a Christian Viking who uses Viking-style raiding to wage war, and on the other he is modernizing.
Sweden was at this time basically the area where the Norwegian and Danish kingdoms stopped. It was not nearly so united. But at the time kingdoms were just the areas where kings toured, extracting taxes in promise for protection. In modern terms kings were racketeers! In generally, it wasn't very populous. The harsh weather limited agriculture. This actually meant that plagues didn't really impact Sweden to the same extent that they did other countries as it was too sparse with a pocketed population.
Look at Harold Godwinson's name; its oozing norseness! He was actually a descendent from King Canute who united England and Danmark.
By this time England was ruled by a mingled Anglo-Saxon-Viking elite who were culturally mingled.
As far as I know, it was quite behind the rest of Europe and was on the brink of getting "integrated" culturally the 100-200 years after that?
Western Europe wasn't exactly Rome, of course. I should probably read up on European society around the time, before the plague. References welcome.
(Ah, it should have been more orthodox influences down in Constantinople.)
I borrowed "Den dynamiska medeltiden" many years ago, that was the best book I've read on the subject. This looks like a more modern substitute.
After this, I look forward to check the exact transitions of societies carefully. :-)
Thx for mentioning Den dynamiska medeltiden; I'll have to see if I can find it :)
My favorite is what would have happened if the English pirate [1] Francis Drake had captured Cartagena Columbia. He had several ships and about 5000 marines for his third attempt and almost captured the city. Imagine if England and not Spain had the gold and jewels flowing from Central and South America. History would have been very different - and that last battle could have gone either way.
[1] Both times I have been in Cartagena, I heard someone refer to Sir Francis Drake as a pirate. Personally, I have nothing against the guy :-)
It appears to be a valid question, in that slippery slope is not always a fallacy.
I don't think there's really a right and wrong here, it's just the fashion of the times. Who knows who will be rehabilitated 100 years from now and who will be stricken from the monuments :-)
Let me explain my idea on another, more clear cut example. Ancient Greece and Rome have been built on slavery. Almost all powerful and even educated men of that time used slave labour. Should we remove them from philosophy books and rename the months?
Should we just proclaim that everyone who lived then was evil, except the poor and the slaves themselves? But even they didn't hold some higher moral values, they just didn't have the means to enslave other people. So, we probably should say that everyone in ancient world was evil, period.
And if anyone's looking for something against the guy, his involvement in the (very early) African slave trade is probably a better choice.
To the English he was a privateer. To the Spanish he was a pirate. =P
And Francis Drake also oversaw the massacre of 600 surrendered Irish rebels and civilians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rathlin_Island_Massacre
So yeah, there's plenty of dirt on this guy.
And, ahem, the capital city of one of the 50 United States.
IIRC those words were not yet French; it always gets a bit confused with languages when we're referring back like this IMO.
This is a thorough working - https://slmc.uottawa.ca/?q=french_history - it appears to concur that French as a language used across France arose in the 13th Century.
To recapitulate: In 1066 France wasn't called France and didn't speak French and yet we [common people of England] talk of the French coming and bringing French language to the English court.
They were Norman French, or just "Norman" is you insist, which was one of the Oïl languages (and as such, closely related to modern French).
The written form of the language, at least, is mostly mutually comprehensible with modern French.
Also, the Normans were culturally and linguistically akin to the modern French to a much greater extent that the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of England whom they conquered were akin to the modern English, even if the Normans' heritage was Scandinavian.
*studied historical Romance linguistics in university.
Anglo-Saxon settlement of what is now England didn't start until approximately 450AD, and so Old English would not have been spoken here until then.
In my own life, there are several rather obvious nexus points where if things had gone slightly differently, the course of my life would have changed dramatically and unpredictably.
[0] http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-10-the-wha...