I know there were rebellions during William’s reign, unsuprisingly . . . But, in Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott has Saxons plotting to put a Saxon prince on the throne as late as the reign of Richard the Lionhearted, which seems as hard to credit as Robin Hood’s role in the story. When did Saxons and Normans stop thinking of each other as different nationalities?
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This is a great question.
I think I remember hearing that it took a few years to quell sporadic unrest after the invasion. Perhaps it was much longer than that. I can’t imagine that a French speaking royalty would be very popular.
I’m looking forward to hearing a more educated answer.
A very complicated question, but IMHO The Hundred Years War really resolved the issue. At the beginning English Royalty spoke French and had land holdings in France at the end they spoke English and their French land holdings were gone. Now this is of course a gross oversimplification but I think it nails the gist or the matter. I have read about this quite a bit as you are seeing not only the rise of a cohesive English nation but of France and Spain as well. Now dopers poke holes I know they are coming
I’ve read criticism of Ivanhoe concerning that point.
I thought the Hundred Years War was long after Richard.
I think the persistence of Saxon nationalism can be seen being expressed in the continuing levels of Saxon violence on TV, in the movies, and on the internet.
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England in Richard’s time was just part of the larger Plantagenet Empire, and Richard spent most of his time and energy (when he wasn’t crusading) on the French bits, so it isn’t really odd that Saxon nationalists didn’t consider the King “one of them”.
After John lost the empire the its court became more “English” since that was where their remaining lands and subjects were.
But, to the point of plotting rebellion or some kind of Saxon restoration?
(BTW, in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, young Wart/Arthur encounters “Robin Wood” (who is Robin Hood, only the tendency of the lower classes to drop both initial h’s and w’s and to pronounce the name “Robin 'Ood” led to confusion), who is described as a “Saxon partizan.” Of course, this is all set in an alternate/fantasy history where the Pendragons are Normans, Richard Coeur de Lion is a non-historical “legendary” figure, and the whole story happens around the time of what would be the Wars of the Roses in OTL.)
No cite, but my reading on the subject supports what carnivorousplant said. Walter Scott played up the hostilities between Norman and Saxon as an important source of conflict in Ivanhoe (set during Richard’s captivity in Austria). Folks have pretty much accepted it as fact ever since.
It seems to me this idea of “nationalism” is highly anachronistic.
The ethnicity of your liege lord and your liege’s liege, and of your retainers and your retainers’ retainers was irrelevant under the feudal system.
Well, whatever word you use, apparently the English under William’s rule harbored a special resentment at being ruled by a king and nobility who spoke a different language.
Welsh, Scottish, and Irish restiveness under English rule are also much older than the word “nationalism.”
My point exactly, thank you
Legally irrelevant, maybe, but it still mattered to people. Henry III (John’s successor), for example, angered the English barons and his subjects by using his foreign relatives as ministers, to the point where the issue is usually cited as one of the primary causes of the revolt against Henry.
Ouch
Even as late as the 19th Century, Tennyson could write something like, “Kind hearts are more than coronets, / And simple faith than Norman blood,” and everybody knew what he meant. (Especially Alec Guiness.)
I’ve read Ivanhoe four or five times. I believe Cedric was only interested in keeping the Saxon royal line intact by marrying his ward Roweena (who had the hots for Ivanhoe) to Athelstane, the drunken gourmand. There was no plan for a revolt and Saxon restoration.
I just last night listened to episode 7 of the Norman Centuries podcast, which deals with the Norman Conquest and its immediate aftermath, up to the death of William over 20 years later. It doesn’t speak to long term resistance or resentment, but it does say that *organised *resistance was sporadic and ineffective after the first 5 years or so. The whole of the Saxon nobility and royal family were dispossessed or killed, and the Saxon cause had no effective leader - had there been one (instead of a boy-king) after Hastings, the Normans may still have been fended off or starved out of the country.
I know the above doesn’t directly address the extent of continued Anglo-Saxon identity (which I take to be the core of the OP), but may help explain why it was low-level at best.
Even so, the mere existence of a living Saxon claimant at that period seems implausible. For that matter, the mere existence of a landed Saxon nobleman at that period seems implausible – didn’t the Conqueror punish one of the English rebellions by dispossessing all the native nobility and replacing them with Normans?
I don’t think Saxon particularism per se had much of a half-life. William the Bastard did a pretty thorough job of de-fanging the sources of native disaffection in the 1060’s and 1070’s. Largely by the process of elimination, as it were. Where native nobility survived in power ( such as the minor Saxon family in Staindrop that would become the House of Neville ), they did so by judicious knuckling under - in that case going so far as to adopt a matrilineal Norman surname. There doesn’t seem to be any sign of serious Saxon resistance that could have risen to the level of a revolt after William I’s death in 1087. In twenty years or less he pretty much brought the country to heel. There was still plenty of disaffection in general of course. But it was of French-origined nobility against their French-origined king, not any sort of native particularism or proto-nationalism.
At any rate assimilation seems to have proceeded at a pretty steady clip from the bottom up. Not all that surprisingly it was the royal house(s ) and the court where French language and orientation lingered latest, probably through the reign of Henry III. Otherwise the farther down the chain you go the faster local nobility assimilated into the much deeper Anglo-Saxon strata. Already by the time of the first William Marshall’s posthumous biography ( post-1219, probably 1220’s ) we see tantalizing hints of an emerging “English” particularism by the nobility vis-a-vis the continent that speaks to the new blended culture. By the late 12th century it is highly likely that just about any local nobility in England spoke English fluently and the number of families with holdings in both France and England had shrunk considerably from the early post-Conquest days. The idea of a Saxon “Robin of Loxley” struggling against 13th century Norman oppressors is a 19th century invention.
I agree that whomever was in “England” assimilated invaders; I.E., the girls were pretty.
One of the Ivanhoe remakes places it at 11x6. William died in 1199. Perhaps Robin was 13th century and Scott takes literary license with dates.