The Normans: Blessing or Curse?

By John Nugent. It has been nearly 500 years now since anyone, with open military force, successfully conquered the English, a fierce and resolute white mixture of Germanics with a dash of Kelts and pre-Indo-Europeans. The Spanish armada, Napoleon Bonaparte and others all failed to defeat the “Sceptered Isle.” But back in 1066, a group of people, a mixture of French and Scandinavian origin, called Normans (from the French word for “Northmen”), slew the English nobility and its common soldiers at Hastings, just days after the English army had rushed south from defeating an invasion by Danish Vikings in northern England.

Bayeux TapestryThe Normans were descended from Norse people who had settled in Neustria (today called Normandy) in the 9th and 10th centuries and adopted the Gallo-Romance language of Old French, spoken there by the natives, while retaining a fair amount of Norse vocabulary. The new language is called “French Norman” by linguists. The Viking settlers of Normandy took up the native French way of life almost completely. [Read the entire article as PDF…]


Taken from

The Barnes Review, January-February 2013: The Norman Genocide of the Anglo-Saxons

VOLUME XIX, NUMBER 1


 

 

Posted in: TBR Articles and tagged: , , ,