Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Normans and Saxons? No Such Thing!" video.
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@Ugly_German_Truths Not so. There had once been separate kingdoms but they had been united 200 years before the Norman Conquest by Alfred the Great. By 1066 Mercia and Northumbria were just regions or earldoms (Sussex, Essex, and Kent had lost their independence well before Alfred's time and passed back and forth between Wessex and Mercia) and the country as a whole was referred to as England (Engla-londe). Harold's title was not King of the Anglo-Saxons or King of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, it was Rex Anglorum, King of the English. But the concept of England as one land preceded the actual political unification, Bede used the term as early as the 7th century.
And the division between Angles, Saxons, and Jutes was probably always more mythological than real. There were certainly linguistic differences between the regions settled by the Anglo-Saxons, but they probably developed after they came to England and did not reflect different points of origin on the continent.
These aren't my personal opinions, I'm just telling you want I learned in university and in considerable reading since then.
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@BigHenFor Nonsense. There was absolutely an English language in 1066, and it is called that by many writers of the period, and universally referred to as such (Old English) today. And the country was referred to as England ("Engla-londe") as early as the 9th century. The English kings styled themselves as "King of the Angles," not the Anglo Saxons, from the early 10th century.
The Normans were descended from Vikings, but they had lost that tongue entirely by 1066 and spoke a local dialect of Old French.
And as you yourself point out was more than 300 years before the English kings became native speakers of English (which had by that time changed radically under the Norman influence).
Exactly how, when, and where the nobility transitioned to being native speakers of English is not clear, but it certainly took some time. For at least a century of the conquest they would have thought of themselves not as English lords, but as Norman lords with lands and titles in England. Of course nobles with holdings in different kingdoms was a very common thing in medieval Europe, and national identity was only just beginning to emerge: most of the nobles of France at the time probably wouldn't have thought of themselves as French nobles either, but rather as nobles who were the vassals of the King of the Franks (the term "King of France" wasn't even used until the late 12th century, although the term "King of England" was used
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It is probably true that few, if any of the men fighting at Hastings thought of themselves as fighting for or against England, as opposed to the individual claimants to the throne, but that was partly because William purported to be just the rightful heir to the English throne, and not (other than to the people he promised land and titles in return for fighting for him) someone who would entirely replace the native ruling class with a foreign one.
Had the English upper classes and free yeomen had any idea what was in store for them if William won, it might have been a very different story. However, it's worth noting that the English Witenagemot, the assembly of nobles, had chosen Harold over William as Edward the Confessor's successor, so most of the prominent men of the kingdom probably regarded William as an usurper - the ones who survived, anyway. And while we might argue about how oppressive the new ruling class really was, it is certainly true that with the imposition of French-style feudalism on England, the legal rights of people below the ruling class were certainly diminished.
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It's more complicated than that, but the fact remains that 1066 represents a radical political, cultural, and legal break in England. The native nobility was almost entirely replaced by William's leading mercenaries (who were, granted, from all over Europe, but chiefly from Normandy, Brittany, and France proper) and their descendants, the political system became much more like French feudalism than England had ever been before, architecture was transformed (castles as such were virtually unknown in England before the Normans), and most importantly, the language changed almost beyond recognition.
Try reading Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales in their original language and it is incredibly obvious that a massive social transformation took place between their writing, even greater in linguistic terms than that which took place in France from the end of the Roman Empire to the writing of La Chanson de Roland around the time of the Norman conquest.
And while it's true that the sharpness of the division 1-200 years later was greatly exaggerated by later writers, the division in this language remains apparent to this day, even if few English speakers are consciously aware of it. As WW2 scholars, you might recall it being pointed out that in the last sentence of Churchill's famous speech of June 4, 1940, the sentence beginning with "We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans..." the only word of certain Norman French derivation that the PM used was "surrender". You can be sure this was no accident.
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@Dave_Sisson This is where it gets tricky. The Harrowing of the North was certainly real and terrible, and there was probably an ethnic component to the natives' resistance to the new overlords, but in William's mind he was not carrying out ethnic cleansing against Anglo-Saxons, he was putting down a rebellion and getting rid of a troublesome segment of the populace, the exact same way Henry VIII did 450 years later. He certainly wasn't bringing in any new people to replace the ones he killed, or trying to change the ethnic composition of the region, which remained entirely English for everyone but the upper class.
I supposedly have one ancestor who fought in William's army, but like most such claims, it isn't documented until at least the 15th century and is extremely doubtful. By that time there was no meaningful ethnic distinction between the classes in England and "Norman" ancestry was mostly just something social climbers like my ancestor used to give their (largely invented) pedigree an extra cachet. Sort of like the "imputed arms" invented much later for periods well before heraldry in the late medieval sense really existed - no one in William's day had a formal coat-of-arms, and Edward the Confessor and Harold of Wessex most certainly didn't. And of course the other 99% of my ancestry is just English/Scottish/Irish mutt like everyone else who isn't named Spenser or Churchill or Howard, so I don't feel like I have a dog in that fight at all. (Now, Cavalier vs. Roundhead, that's another story, and there's a reason all my ancestors came to Virginia and not Massachusetts or Pennsylvania.)
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@spartacus-olsson On language, that is 100% wrong. By the 8th century there was a significant linguistic barrier between Danes and English caused by hundreds of years without much direct contact, however the various dialects of English had changed significantly over the succeeding 270 years and by 1066 most of the differences had been smoothed over to the point where English and Danes from the same regions were able to understand each other pretty well. This process of change in Old English is pretty well understood and unmistakable, there is no question that there had been significant differences. It's the main difference English became such an analytic (uninflected, i.e., words mostly keep the same form and their grammatical relationships are indicated by word order or helper words) language; Old English was highly inflected like Latin is, but the inflections were completely different from those of Norse (and sometimes the same inflection was used in both languages to mean completely different things, which understandably led to a lot of confusion), whereas the root vocabulary was almost the same, so speakers of both languages took to using just the uninflected roots to avoid confusion and as a result English syntax and grammar began to resemble more modern forms.
Whether we call Old English and Old Norse separate languages or Germanic dialects is something we could argue from now until Christmas, but the basic fact is that as of around 800 AD most people in England could understand people from other parts of England to some degree, but had a much harder time understanding Danes who came over from Scandinavia, and this difficulty largely lies behind the changes in Old English we see from the 8th to the 11th centuries.
But where you really go wrong is the Normans: they did not speak a Germanic language with some Latin/French loan words, quite the opposite: they spoke a local dialect of French with some Germanic loan words (in addition to the ones already present in Old French). While there were undoubtedly people in England who spoke medieval French, Old English and Norman French were radically different languages, as different as French is from English or German today, and they were in no way mutually intelligible. Norman French had some influence from the Normans' original Old Norse the same way Parisian French has some influence from Celtic and Germanic languages, but it is absolutely a Romance language and not a Germanic one.
(Trust me, I had to struggle with Law French, which is more or less an evolved form of Norman French that stayed on in English law long after even the royal court had stopped using Norman French for any other purpose, when studying legal history, and it's a Romance language.)
"Undoubtedly the conquering clans did not take all and exterminate all the previous landowners"
They did not exterminate all the landowners , but the did mostly exterminate, expel, or dispossess almost all of the nobles , and the remaining landowners were reduced to serfs or feudal vassals, which had, for the most part, not been the case in Anglo-Saxon England (although this is a complicated subject and manorial systems, though not on terms you could accurately call feudal, had made a good bit of headway in England before the conquest). At the same time slavery was abolished and the former slaves moved up in the social system to become serfs - but probably less than 10% of English people had been slaves before the conquest, while probably 40% of the population was subject to some form of serfdom by around 1200, and most of the rest of the rural laborers were subject to other feudal obligations and were less than entirely free.
Land ownership in Anglo-Saxon England is itself a complicated subject, but the long and short of it is that most land was freely held in the feudal sense (though not necessarily by an individual, farming was largely communal at the village level) and most farmers were free in the sense in which that word is used with respect to feudalism - they were not serfs and not legally bound to the land or to a lord. That changed rapidly after the Norman conquest, partly because the Normans had adopted French laws and customs, and partly because it proved convenient for William solidifying his rule and retaining the loyalty of the nobles and knights who had put him on the throne. As circumstances changed this changed as well and feudalism proper began disappearing faster in England than in areas on the continent where it had become entrenched.
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@fredbeard7710 No, the English army had no significant number of Normans in it and not all that many Norsemen, and none of William's army was Norse in any meaningful sense except by distant ancestry. Spartacus and Indy are dead wrong in saying they were all that similar or, for the most part, related. Tostig siding with Harald Hardrada was pure opportunism, they had nothing in common except both wanting to get rid of Harold Godwinson and scheming together to do it. There probably were some Englishmen in William's army as well because not everyone was happy with Harold's taking the crown (which is in itself a long story), but it was predominantly Norman, French, or Breton mercenaries supplemented by other mercenaries from all over Europe.
Most of the English army was the English fyrd - a militia of free landholders - but Harold had dismissed them for the harvest before Hastings (in part because William had waited until the very end of the campaining season to cross the channel) and was only able to muster a comparative few of them after William landed. The rest were his personal retainers or housecarls and those of the leading nobles. They were professional soldiers and some would have been foreign but most were native English or Danes who lived in England and had become culturally Anglicized to a large extent.
However, it is probably true that they would have considered themselves to be fighting for Harold rather than for England or the English people, but that's because most of them had little idea of the radical political and social transformations William intended to make - he purported to be nothing but the rightful heir to the English throne (again, long story) returning to claim his own.
The English (Anglo-Saxon, though no one used that term at the time) nobility were almost entirely killed, exiled, or dispossessed by William so he could redistribute their lands to his mercenaries as their payment for fighting for him, and native Englishmen almost universally regarded the new nobility as foreigners and usurpers for at least a generation. William and his immediate successors ruled entirely by fear and military force. As time went on the cultural distinction became more of a class one but it has never entirely disappeared.
The subject of nationalism is very complex. Certainly the modern conception of the nation-state did not exist in the 11th century, but the concept of England as a country and an English people who were distinct from Danes, Normans, or Celts absolutely did. Creating a nation of England out of the various former Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was one of Alfred the Great's major projects, and he is generally regarded as the first King of England, as opposed to an English King of Wessex, Mercia, etc. That was more true in England than most of Europe at that time, a person living in England would be much more likely to describe himself as an Englishman than a person in Scotland, France, or (the small Christian rump of) Spain would be to call themselves a Scot, Frenchman, or Spaniard.
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@spartacus-olsson Incredibly sparsely populated? Scandinavia, maybe, but not the British Isles or France. The kingdom of France, which excludes large parts of the modern country, is thought to have had around 7,000,000 inhabitants in the 11th century, and the population of England was probably somewhere between one third and one half of that, with another 1-1.5 million people living in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. That's much lower than modern urban populations, of course, but the rural areas of those countries were nearly as thickly inhabited, and in some areas more thickly inhabited, than they are today.
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@spartacus-olsson It was not true for Harold's forces, which were almost entirely native English. William's army was made up almost entirely of mercenaries, so it was polyglot, but the bulk of it was ethnically Norman, Breton, or French, and Norman French became the exclusive language of William's court (along with Latin for scholars and diplomats, of course). Harold's army was a mix of his housecarls, professional soldiers who were in personal service to Harold or to the Crown, and fyrdmen, who were the local militia. The housecarls would have been an ethnic mix but probably almost all born in England, with a mix of Englishmen and Danes plus a few foreign, mostly Danish, mercenaries, but the fyrdmen were all Englishmen from southern England. And Harald's army, like all Viking "armies," was also a mix of mercenaries from all over northern Europe including a number of Englishmen who, like Tostig, were unhappy with Harold's rule, but since it was defeated and repelled, indeed, almost entirely annihilated, it doesn't have much relevance when discussing English society after 1066.
Harold's army would have been even more ethnically English but for the particular circumstances of the battle. He had dismissed the fyrd because they needed to harvest their crops, and because William had delayed his invasion (mostly due to weather) until the very end of the season in which weather allowed an invasion at all. He then had to march his remaining army north to fight Harald at Stamford Bridge, only to receive word of William's landing. Because of the speed with which he marched south to meet William he left most of his army in Yorkshire, only binging the core of his housecarls to Hastings, to be joined by a much reduced portion of just the local fyrd who could be mustered in time. Had William landed in August, he would have been met by a mostly fyrd, and thus almost entirely native English, army at least twice the size of the one he met at Hastings.
Your point about the Normans being a class rather than a people is probably the best way to look at it, but there was definitely a perceived ethnic difference, particularly with respect to language. Most of the native English nobility were either killed, exiled, or dispossessed, and for at least a generation most Englishmen regarded the new Norman nobility as foreigners and usurpers. This was the cause of unceasing discord and rebellion for the rest of William's life. And it was several centuries before the language of the English royal court became the same as that of the common people, long after even the language of the people had changed dramatically under the influence of the French-speaking upper classes.
As to Marc Bloch, if you want to understand English society, I would recommend sticking to English historians. And "feudal society" itself, as Bloch describes it, was a concept mostly foreign to England until it was imported by the new Norman ruling class. If, for example, we look at it in military terms, the Anglo-Saxon fyrd was more like the citizen militia of the classical world or the early United States, organized and led by leading local men but directly responsible to the state, than it was like the private armies of great magnates of feudal Europe, held together by personal and contractual bonds of loyalty between lord and vassal. (It should be noted that William's and Harald's mercenary armies and Harold's housecarls were not feudal armies in any sense of the word, although once William took the throne he immediately began the process of transforming his army into a feudal one by granting English lands to which he had no lawful title.)
I have addressed your contention about population above, but I will say again that most estimates place the population of 11th century England at between two and three million souls, not a few hundred thousand. England was a fairly densely populated country in 1066 by the standards of the time, and its society, language, and political structure were extremely different from those of Normandy or France proper.
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@spartacus-olsson It's more complicated than that WRT the Germanic dialects, but the more important point is that few of William's followers, who became the new English nobility, spoke any Germanic dialect. Most of them weren't even ethnically Norman, they were Breton or French. Most of the Normans natively spoke the Norman dialect of French, which had most had a few dozen loan words from Norse. They had been in France for nearly 200 years by that point and had merged culturally with the much larger local populace just as their descendants had merged with the local English culture 200 years later.
The inarguable truth is that there was a massive new influence of French on the English language in the century or two following the conquest, with just about zero influence of English on French (as spoken outside of England) at the same time. The only rational conclusion is that this was caused by the well-documented replacement of almost the entire English upper class with William's French-speaking followers. If the international upper classes were as polyglot and interrelated as you claim (without any evidence, and no, the foreign languages spoken by English monarchs 500 years later in the Renaissance are not evidence for anything in 1066), how do you explain the radical and well-documented influence of the French language on the English language that suddenly appeared in the decades following 1066 and the complete absence of any evidence of similar changes before that date? (English did undergo major and well-documented changes before the conquest, of course, but the influences we see are entirely from Old Norse, "Danish" as it was called in England at that time, and not from French.)
Have you ever looked at Beowulf in its original language, and any of the Norse sagas, and anything in Old French like the Chanson de Roland or 12th century legal documents? I can't believe you have, because I have, and if you had you wouldn't be making such outlandish claims. Old English and Old Norse were absolutely, positively, distinctly different languages, though much more similar to each other than either is to French, and the language imported and used by the new Norman nobility was absolutely, positively a medieval dialect of French with no more influence from Germanic languages than modern French has, easily recognizable as an ancestor of modern French. I'm sure the new nobles fairly quickly learned to speak enough English to make themselves understood by their servants, but the language they used in their daily lives and their courts was the Norman dialect of Old French, and was no more intelligible to their English subjects than Greek or Russian or Latin would have been, whereas the language used in daily life and court by their immediate predecessors was the exact same English those subjects spoke.
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@spartacus-olsson "No one spoke English until the 16th century… Old English is about as much English as Welsh is."
Sorry, that is absolute rubbish. Yes, English has changed quite a bit over the last 1200 years, but to say Old English is as close to modern English as Welsh is nonsense. Modern [High] German wouldn't be understandable to anyone from Clovis' or Alaric's day either, but it is still German and not Spanish or Hindi, and the differences between ancient and modern English, just as the differences between ancient and modern German or Latin and modern French, are regular, systematic, and predictable once you understand the rules that govern them. A modern English speaker can learn to understand Old English very quickly, much more quickly than speakers of any other language except Dutch, and MUCH more quickly than he can learn Welsh (although familiarity with a highly inflected language like Latin was also useful in my experience).
If Professor Tolkien were here today he would give you a good knock on the head with Grond, the Hammer of the Underworld for saying Welsh is as much like modern English as Old English is. (Or at the very least tell you not to be so hasty and then set about writing a 6,000-word essay on why you're wrong which would have to be reassembled from six different scribbled, typewritten, and heavily corrected partial manuscripts.)
And there are COPIOUS records about the Plantagenet monarchs; the reason most people today aren't too familiar with them has little to do with language OR destruction of records, IMO it's because the society they lived in was so different from ours that it's much harder for modern students to connect their lives and policies to anything in their own personal experiences than it is for rulers from the early modern era onward. it's the same reason that students of ancient history, as I have observed, have a much easier time (and more interest in) understanding, say, Roman society than that of ancient Egypt or Babylon.
The highly polyglot English monarchs you're talking about were from a completely different era as well. Certainly there was trade, diplomacy, and travel in the 11th century but not nearly as much of it as there was in the 16th, and the idea of a court full of official foreign ambassadors was completely unknown in northern Europe. You are conflating events from a lot of different periods with different influences. George III was certainly not the first English monarch who spoke mostly English on a regular basis; his father and grandfather didn't because they were Germans brought in because they were Protestant. We don't know what languages Harold Godwinson spoke; he probably did understand and speak Danish very well and very well may have had some French, but I'd bet the family farm against a donut he didn't understand a word of Portuguese (Or Galician, back then, I guess? - Portugal was still part of al-Andalus at that time) or Greek or probably even Latin.
French only became the lingua franca of diplomacy in the 18th century, before that it was Italian or, for much longer, Latin. The term "lingua franca" comes from a completely different context, a Mediterranean pidgin and trade language based primarily on Italian, with some influence from Occitan and Spanish and a little less from Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Berber, French and other Mediterranean languages, that few if any western European monarchs ever spoke, which was called "the language of the Franks" not because it had much to do with French but because "Franks" was the term used in the Byzantine Empire and many Muslim countries for any western (i.e., not Slavic or Greek-speaking) European since the days of the Crusades. If you're going to read "Frank" as "French" in this context you're going to have a great deal of difficulty understanding period sources.
If you're going to lecture people on a subject outside your specialty you really ought to know this stuff.
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@spartacus-olsson Genetics is a completely different subject IMHO. I am absolutely not talking about any sort of racial difference in the modern sense, it's a cultural one. I couldn't even guess what the genetic background of most of William's or Harald's armies might have been, and frankly I don't think it matters very much in this context: most humans are a big genetic mix anyway, and I don't think genetic ancestry has much to do with people's identity compared to cultural heritage.
And I think you are looking at it through too modern a lens if you're looking at it from the point of modern (i.e., Victorian and later) identity politics. Yes, a lot of nonsense had been written about Saxons and Normans and what it means to be English or British in the last 200 years, and quite a lot in the last 20 years - my understanding is that medievalism as an academic discipline has become more polluted by that sort of nonsense than it was in my student days, which, if true, makes me sad. And myths have been at the core of nationalism for centuries. But the fact that a myth leads to false conclusions doesn't mean it doesn't have a kernel of fact at its core, and disproving the myth is not disproving the facts cited in support of it. I think you are looking at the modern myths and working back to discredit them, which is fine as far as it goes, but gives you more of an understanding of the present than it does of the distant past.
I see this when you say, for example, that William didn't conduct an ethnic cleansing. No, he didn't, and that certainly wasn't his purpose - he was merely paying off his followers and installing nobles who were loyal to him personally, I don't think he gave a fig about the ethnicity or cultural identity of the people he was dispossessing or the people he was replacing them with, most of the latter weren't even actually Normans. But the result of his policy was an ethnic - in the sense of culture, not genetics - change, and the fact that it doesn't fit the modern idea of ethnic cleansing doesn't change that. The old nobles spoke the same language as the common people and shared a set of cultural experiences and expectations with them, and the new nobles spoke a radically different language and shared fewer cultural experiences and expectations with the commoners.
Nationalism is a very tricky subject, especially if you go back to the Middle Ages. I would agree that the modern concept of nationalism would have been largely alien to anyone in the 11th century, but that doesn't mean that there was never a sense of shared cultural identity that often fell along lines we today would call national. As I mentioned elsewhere, as early as the 7th century Bede could write about an English language and an English people, and his readers would understand what he meant, and that he was talking about a real and commonly recognized distinction between the English and the Welsh peoples, or between the English languages (as diverse a collection of dialects as it was) and Germanic languages spoken on the continent. That can't be a Victorian invention if Bede wrote about it 1200 years before the Victorians. If the Victorians drew some false conclusions about that, that doesn't change what Bede thought or wrote.
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William's army was not Scandinavian in any meaningful sense, nor, by 1066, were the Anglo-Saxons. Linguists may speak of proto-Germanic language, but even by Caesar's time there was no culturally or linguistically united German people, if indeed there ever had been. Gothic, Old English, Old Norse, Old High German, none of these were mutually intelligible even to the extent Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian are today. Old English had changed under the influence of 270 years of Danish incursions, and lost some of the features that made it less intelligible to Norsemen, but it was still a distinct language. And the Normans had completely lost their original language by 1066 and spoke a local dialect of Old French. Most of William's army wasn't even Norman, he recruited large numbers of mercenaries from Brittany and the rest of France, and others from all over Europe, who fought purely for personal gain in the form of lands and titles redistributed from English nobles who were killed or dispossessed during the conquest.
There wasn't that much intermarriage, either, outside the royal houses and a few of the very great houses. Very few if any of the men in William's army had a drop of English blood in them. Of course that changed rapidly after the conquest, but the linguistic difference lingered for generations.
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@guillaumedeschamps1087 "Course, most of their armies were by definition part of the warrior elite."
Not Harold's, most his army were fyrd , a citizen militia of freeholding farmers. However, he had dismissed most of the fyrd so they could harvest their crops and his much smaller remaining force was mostly his warrior elite, the housecarls, supplemented by the few local fyrdmen he could recall on such short notice. The housecarls were less like feudal knights than personal retainers/household troops like you saw in the late Roman Empire and early Middle Ages, or after the real feudal period in the Wars of the Roses, and most of them were either English, or Danes who were born in England and Anglicized to a greater or lesser degree. They were not a polyglot, international mix like William's mercenary army, nor were they feudal vassals like the armies of France or the HRE at this time.
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@TimeGhost Very little of that is true. German languages were not all mutually intelligible after, and possibly not even during, the Migration Period. Pan-Germanism is just as much a Victorian myth as Ivanhoe and Robin Hood. An 11th century Londoner and an 11th century inhabitant of Cologne or Nuremberg wouldn't have been able to understand each other much better than their modern equivalents could.
English was a distinct language in the 11th century just as much as it is today, and the fact that it changed during the Middle Ages makes that no less true than it is of German (that is, High German), which also underwent dramatic changes in the Middle Ages.
Old English was not mutually intelligible with Old Norse at first, but the basic vocabulary was mostly the same, and Old English changed over the 200 years or so before the Norman conquest to be less different from Norse, mostly by simplifying and dropping most of its inflections. This is a major component of the change from Old to Middle English.
France and England were not one linguistic melting pot; there was almost no Romance influence on English before the Norman conquest and there was almost zero influence of English on France at any time (although the early French language was influenced by the Germanic language of the early Frankish rulers of France). The melting pot was almost exclusively due to the introduction of French to England after the Norman conquest when the upper classes of Anglo-Saxon England were almost entirely replaced by William's followers, most of whom were not even ethnically Norman but almost all of whom did speak some form of French.
Old English is absolutely recognizable as English once you learn what to look for, the changes from one to the other were regular and systematic and it is much easier for a modern English speaker to learn Old English than it is for a modern native speaker of French or [High] German or Irish.
Middle English is much closer to modern English than to any modern German language other than Dutch or Frisian; educated modern English speakers can usually read Chaucer more or less accurately, if slowly. It may sound more like German in some ways, but that has little to do with the underlying structure or vocabulary and a German-speaker cannot understand it - nor read it as easily as a modern English speaker. Sindarin sounds a lot like Welsh, but try speaking Sindarin to a Welsh speaker and see how much you manage to get across.
And French was NOT the lingua franca of European courts until around the time of Louis XIV, before that it was Latin and then Italian. The term "lingua franca" doesn't even refer to French, it originally referred to a Mediterranean pidgin and trade language that was mostly based on Italian with a bit of every other language spoken around the Med thrown in; it meant "language of the Franks," not of the French, and "Frank" in that context was the word people in the Eastern Med (mostly the Byzantines and Arabs) used to refer to anyone from western Europe, i.e., any European who wasn't a Slav or Greek.
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@alisilcox6036 Generally no, but like everything in history, it's complicated. Edward the Confessor, the Anglo-Saxon king between Cnut's dynasty and Harold Godwinson, had been brought up in exile in the Norman court (because his line had been usurped by Cnut, who systematically exterminated the other survivors of the Royal House of Wessex while at the same time marrying Edward's mother to give his heirs some legitimacy on the English throne, which he taken purely by conquest) and was probably a native speaker of Norman French, and when he finally became King of England after Cnut's son died without issue, he brought some of his courtiers and officials from Normandy to England, where they were highly influential at court. I wouldn't go so far as to say Norman French became the main language of Edward's court, but it was certainly spoken there, and there was significant resentment by native Englishmen of the power and influence of those foreigners, which eventually had a part to play in the choice of Edward's successor, Harold.
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@rockybalboa5743 Old Norse and Old English had evolved to the point of not being mutually intelligible by the 8th century, but Old English changed considerably under the influence of the Danish incursions, and the Norse spoken in Britain likewise changed under local influence, and by 1066 an English-speaker from what is now Yorkshire could probably understand a Dane from the same region better than either could understand an English-speaker from the Thames Valley. The changes were mostly to grammar and syntax since the basic vocabulary of all Germanic languages was pretty similar.
The Normans had become entirely French speakers by 1066 so their language was completely different from anything spoken natively in England at that time, although there were doubtless plenty of people in England who could speak Norman French because of the widespread contact between England and the continent. In fact Edward the Confessor, the king before Harold II, had been brought up in the Norman court (because Knut and his sons still ruled England during Edward's youth) and spoke Norman French better than he spoke English, and since many of his courtiers came with him from Normandy when he became king they were also native French speakers. However, many of the native English nobility resented the influence of people they viewed as foreigners and this tension was one of the factors leading to the Norman conquest.
Of course the language of the Church, and thus of diplomacy, science, and most law and written literature, was still Latin for most of western Europe at this time.
Curiously, Norman French, known as Law French, hung on for several centuries in England for legal purposes long after the language had merged with English as Middle English for all other uses. Anglo-American law still contains technical phrases that preserve this distinctively Norman and medieval form of French long after it disappeared entirely everywhere on the continent.
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It was absolutely an Anglo-Saxon defense against a primarily (but by no means exclusively) French invasion in terms of the ethnic and linguistic background of most of the direct participants. However in terms of the issue at stake they would have seen it as a defense of one claimant for the English throne against another claimant for the English throne. That is partly because William advertised his venture that way, while privately promising his followers that there would a complete replacement of the existing English upper class by them. However this was not any sort of planned change in the ethnic identity of England on William's part, certainly not any sort of nationalist project, he just had no other way to pay his mercenary followers.
The armies were by no means homogeneous. Very few of them would have been able to understand the language(s) spoken by the other side, and their personal reasons for being there were very different. The English army was about half fyrd, a militia of free farmers from the local region who were fulfilling a legal obligation to the crown. They were not from a military class and were entirely English in culture and language. The rest were housecarls, personal household guards of the king and the great lords who were professional soldiers, more akin to the buccellarii or scholae palatinae of late Rome than to true feudal armies, some foreign but most English (although no doubt many of them had Danish ancestry). They weren't fighting for England or for Saxon rights, they were fighting purely out of personal obligation to the man who employed them.
William's army had some men who were his feudal vassals, but the vast majority were mercenaries, some from Normandy, some from Brittany, and most of the rest from other parts of France, who were fighting purely for the promise of payment in the form of lands and titles to be stripped from their English holders (and which William had no legal authority to expropriate even after he won the throne).
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William claimed that Edward had promised the throne to him, but Edward had no legal authority to do that. William really had no claim but right of conquest. There was also a little charade with a captive Harold, years before he took the throne, swearing on a saint's relic (though not to his knowledge) to support William's claim, but again, Harold had no authority to give the crown away, picking the new king was the prerogative of the Witan, the assembly of nobles. William did have the support of the pope, which was certainly helpful, but again, in no way legally binding.
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"William of Normandy did rule the region as a vassal of the French King"
That is... complicated. As was feudalism. You could rule one territory as the vassal of one overlord, and another as the vassal of a different overlord, and yet another as vassal to no one. So while William was a vassal of the French king as Duke of Normandy, he was not a vassal of the French king as King of England. However, the French king could force him to do homage in the former capacity, and when it came to a war between the French and English crowns it got downright ugly.
It got even more complicated later when the Count of Anjou, who was also Duke of Normandy, became the first Plantagenet King of England. And then his descendants inherited the Duchy of Aquitaine from their mother, and later still inherited the French throne according to English, but not French, inheritance law. Positively messy, it was.
Free farmers in Anglo-Saxon England were not as poor or oppressed as you might imagine, although they certainly became more so after the Norman conquest. How much that was due to the conquest is still hotly debated.
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