What have the Normans ever done for us?

[Montegriffo]

I didn't ask for that.

What is your ethnicity, Monty. Do you even recognize it?

ethnicity
Dictionary result for ethnicity
/ɛθˈnɪsɪti/
noun
noun: ethnicity; plural noun: ethnicities

the fact or state of belonging to a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition.

See answer above.

That's all very interesting, but your ethnicity is English. Dancing around that fact is ridiculous.

What is particularly ridiculous is your trying to claim ethnicity as a Norman or a fucking Viking when you just in another thread created a lying straw man that I claimed to be English and then proceeded to argue that can't be possible because I am so far removed from my English ancestors.

Are you honest even with yourself??

I think you are misrepresenting one of Bjorn's posts there not mine.

StA, seriously... you are not English. Some far distant ancestor of yours may have been, but they're long, long dead. So how about letting those who actually ARE English decide who belongs to their tribe, or not?

You're a foreigner telling a native that it should be your foreign, juvenile fantasy ideal of "Englishman" that dictates who's English or not... Cut your goddamn arrogance down a notch. You don't belong to his culture. He does and those rugby players he showed photos of, do too. Elizabeth Warren would have been Cherokee if the Cherokee themselves at some point had accepted her as member of their culture and tribe. They didn't. Her flaw was, excatly like you, mouthing off about her belonging to a culture that in no way accepted her as one of their own.

I just said that Samoans and Tongans are culturally more British than you are.

[GloryofGreece]

They might not have been forced out per say but instead gravitated to the Norman language/writing b/c that is where the power lay at. If you wanted to work at that level you would naturally learn to speak with Normans in their vernacular. They were the power.

[Speaker to Animals]

Normans didn't make as big an impact as people assume. It was only a few nobles that came in, not all of Normandy. The Norman aristocracy replaced the Saxon aristocracy. But the English people remained mostly Saxon.

Even the Danes didn't make that much of a dent.

Nor did the Romans or anybody else.

There was a study I read about a while back that compared the DNA of the people in some English town with the DNA of the paleolithic remains found in the area, and they are the same people.

[TheReal_ND]

Yeah I think it's likely that native traditions weren't in vogue with the ascendant petty nobles so they never bothered to write them down. They may have continued to write them down if French language and culture wasn't so highly regarded, I suppose. Hard to say.

[Speaker to Animals]

I suspect the absolute colonization and replacement of indigenous people didn't happen that often until the Age of Discovery, really.

Imagine how difficult that would be in the medieval or ancient world.

More likely you are looking at linguistic and cultural changes as the ruling elite change, but not much else, and even then it's very gradual.

[Speaker to Animals]

I want to find that article again. One of the interesting things they discussed was the Britons share more in common with Basque people genetically than anything else, because the re-conquest of what becomes the British isles after the Younger Dryass happened from that region.

[TheReal_ND]

Yes we've heard you mention it about a hundred times in every monty vs you argument.
Not what I meant when I mentioned the fact that native English writers were replaced by French writers. I thought it was possible that the Normans just replaced all the scholars intentionally and especially since most of the people writing things down worked in monasteries I would imagine a lot of French eager for power just bribed the king to take them over. Idk. It seems more plausible that French just became in vogue like GoG thinks.

[GloryofGreece]

I want to find that article again. One of the interesting things they discussed was the Britons share more in common with Basque people genetically than anything else, because the re-conquest of what becomes the British isles after the Younger Dryass happened from that region.

Do they know if Celtic (or Britons or whatever were the "original" peoples) were on the isles themselves from beginning of whenever the first men migrated there?

I guess the Jutes and Viking types mostly raided/pillaged and left and came back but rarely settled there permanently?

You don't think the Romans for hundreds of years didn't have more of a cultural impact? I mean id imagine soldiers on the line would be having kids with Celtic women for hundreds of years.

[Montegriffo]

The Normans wiped out indegenous history. No one is quite sure why but when they arrived all the native scholars and writers were replaced with French ones. Apparently they are responsible for the reason the English have very little pre Norman folklore. I was just watching a documentary about J.R.R. Tolkien where an Old English professor was lamenting this. Pretty good btw would recommend

Will watch that later. Was it implied that the Normans deliberately ''wiped out indigenous history'' or was it simply lost or forgotten?
As far as I know, they did not pull down Saxon churches or burn their manuscripts. We still have the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles for example.

The professor didn't imply either he said it was just a case where for some reason local writers disappeared and they were all replaced by French which was partly to blame for losing so much local traditions that Tolkien lamented England had a dearth of. The other reason was the industrial revolution hit England too soon inasmuch that by the time Grimm started collecting fairy tales, the English decided to try and do the same but by that time most of it had been lost due to industrialization and the uprooting of peasant life.

Sounds interesting. I'll listen later. The Norman period was when the English identity really established itself for the first time. A far more unified time than under Alfred the great who only ever ruled Wessex, a small part of England. Not Cornwall, Mercia or Northumbria. He was never King in East Anglia where I live now.



The Normans were the first to permanently secure our borders against wave after wave of foreign invasion allowing us to develop and retain our culture independently (mostly) for a thousand years unbroken.
It was also under the Normans when we first expanded English control to parts of Scotland and France and became a rich trading nation.

[C-Mag]

It was NOT an Invasion.

Merely a series of raids, more akin to immigrants fleeing oppression and looking for a better life.
Sure there was some conflict that originated in the Xenophobia of native racists under Godwinson, but they hated all immigration, Norse immigration, or Norman immigration.