Dovecotes, deer, vineyards and lots of castles.... apart from that, what did the Normans ever do for us?

In spite of their propaganda effort with the Bayeux Tapestry, the Normans have generally had a bad press. Sweeping like mailed gauleiters across the face of Anglo-Saxon England after 1066, they were certainly violent and greedy — yet no one can deny that they had energy or that they transformed England in ways that have since rippled across the globe.

Across the country, they rapidly flung up mottes and baileys, those earthen hills topped by a wooden palisade and a rough, fortified dwelling. Rebellions were repressed with iron-fisted severity. By the time the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, swathes of Yorkshire and Durham were described as ‘wasta’, testament to the scorched-earth policies they adopted in the grim Harrying of the North. Those Anglo-Saxon nobles, the thegns (or thanes), who survived Hastings were dispossessed: in a generation, 95% of their lands had been turned over to Norman knights. Most of the people who lived on those lands became serfs, trapped in the intricate hierarchy of the new feudal system.

The English Church — the seat not only of faith, but of learning, gentility and art — was likewise purged. The last Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury, Stigand, was replaced by a French monk, Lanfranc, in 1070 and the whole church hierarchy was restaffed with Continental bishops and clergy, with papal blessing. Close on the heels of the clergy came the lawyers, as the old system of shire government met the strictures of Roman law, which favoured the Crown.

Small wonder, then, that, over time, the Norman settlement seemed to cast a baleful shadow across the sunlit uplands of Anglo-Saxon England. The country, people said, groaned under the Norman yoke. The Diggers and Levellers of the Civil War looked back to pre-Norman England as a golden age for the working man. Thomas Jefferson took the free, egalitarian Anglo-Saxons as his model for America and considered the Normans to be a bunch of carpetbagging foreign toffs. Victorian Protestants admired pre-Conquest England as a land beyond Romish influence; even Monty Python condemned the Normans as rude and snobbish. ‘Your mother,’ says a castle guard in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with a thick French accent, ‘was a hamster, and your father smells of elderberries.’

William of Malmesbury was a 12th-century historian with a Norman father and English mother and took quite a different line. The incomers, he wrote, ‘breathed new life into religious standards, which had been declining everywhere, so that now you may see churches and monasteries rising in a new style of architecture in all the towns, villages, and country places’.

A whitish freestone the Normans brought from Caen in France was the foundation of the new style. It takes carving easily and was used liberally. From an intricate chancel arch at St Peter’s in Tickencote, Rutland, to the rounded apse of London’s St Bartholomew the Great, Norman churches exude an air of confidence, as simple as they are sublime — soaring to the indescribable glories of Durham Cathedral, work on which was begun in 1093. Embellished, damaged and restored down the centuries, the stone churches the Normans built for their new estates remain today at the heart of the English parish system.

The Normans were especially keen on towers. They experimented at Caen in 1067 and swiftly brought the idea across the Channel. By the time of Henry I’s death in 1135, every Saxon cathedral in England, at Winchester and Rochester as at Worcester and Ely, had been torn down and rebuilt in a massive Romanesque style, with suitable towers (even before the Conquest, Edward the Confessor, brought up in Normandy, used Norman masons at Westminster Abbey and sent Norman knights to build castles along the Welsh border).

Then, the Normans gave us French. Nobody knows how these Norse men managed to learn French so quickly themselves, having arrived in Normandy as rude Vikings barely a century earlier, but they did. The English, typically, eventually managed to cram French vocab from the Normans, but utterly failed to master the grammar. By the time we gave up the effort and reverted to writing in English (Henry IV, who reigned from 1399, was the first king to speak English), we had absorbed thousands of words. In particular, French terms for government and law made their way into common English, words such as parliament, court, jury, justice, crown, tax, prison, judge and verdict.

The result of the collision of Norman French and Old English is a language truffled with French terms and equivalents, such as royal/kingly, enquire/ask, insane/mad. The French equivalent still implies status, so although you might live in a flat, you offer to sell an apartment. Curiously, scholars dismiss the widespread belief that as the lords ate beef and pork, the peasants looked after cows and pigs. The so-called Norman food myth ignores the fact that the way the words are used today only began 500 years after the Conquest and may simply reflect the later prestige of French cuisine.

Much of what the Normans introduced to England in brutal and simple form would mellow into something more suited to the English temperament. The free and easy Saxons never bothered much with castles, but the Normans were wild for them, creating architectural marvels such as the White Tower at the Tower of London or Rochester Castle in Kent, which thrill the visitor to this day. Castles were useful for subduing the locals and good insurance against being murdered in your bed by the disgruntled peasantry you had just reduced to serfdom.

The feudal system, which the Normans imposed on England, buttressed by those forbidding castles, tended to produce a highly tenacious landowning class with a firm grip on its acreage and a penchant for deer parks and productive farms. Soon, aristocrats were to be found adding creature comforts to their strongholds and hanging their halls with self-aggrandising mottos and escutcheons (it was the Normans who wore devices on their shields, to identify them in battle, which slowly morphed into the intricate glories of 13th-century heraldry).

Having established the pattern, the baronial landholding softened in style as the centuries rolled by. The grip, however, remained firm. Castles, chilly and cramped, gave way to manor houses and fine country houses, ‘amidst their tall ancestral trees’. English estates came complete with home farm, deer park and hunting rights and, sometimes, even a surname (Old French sur and nom) based on their location. The feudal idea of land as the basis of hereditary rank, held from the Crown, was buttressed by the idea of primogeniture, which saw estates pass down intact to a single heir, rather than being divided among children. Primogeniture wasn’t a direct Norman import, in the way of fallow deer or escutcheons, yet it was implicit in how the law developed after 1066, reinforced by strict laws of entail.

Under the Normans, the shift from Winchester to London accelerated, not least because English trade, in wool especially, now ran in a southerly direction. Wine came back together with the stone and so did the skills to maintain and expand the English wine industry. The conquerors also brought fallow deer for the hunt, as well as introducing dovecotes for pigeon flesh, eggs, manure and feathers. As to whether the Normans brought rabbits, the jury — something else they introduced — is out on that one.

Dovecotes and vineyards appear in the Domesday Book, commissioned two decades after the Conquest and completed in only two years. A unique investigation into rights, duties, landholdings and resources, nothing like it was to appear anywhere in Europe for another 800 years. The Anglo-Saxons had laid the administrative groundwork, but it was the Normans that made the system serve central government, so the Crown could tax, adjudicate and govern England with confident precision. Named for the chequered cloth that covered the counting-table and making twice-yearly audits at Easter and Michaelmas, the Exchequer grew directly out of this Norman appetite for prying and recording — as did the concept of juries, embodied in those sworn juries of local men (English and Norman) that gave evidence to Domesday’s royal commissioners.

The Anglo-Norman amalgam worked so well and was so sophisticated for its time that it also shielded England from later developments in Continental law. Magna Carta, which curbed the power of the monarch and established the early notion of English liberties, was the consequence.