Country Matters – Arrowsmith Jan 26: Bonne annee

Pictured: 12th Century Norman Farm

Let’s get it straight from the outset: it wasn’t an ancestor of Arrowsmith’s who made the arrow that got King Harold in the eye, leading to the French takeover of England. We weren’t to blame for the Normans redistributing land ownership amongst their own prominent families who’d shared in Guillaume (William) the Conqueror’s victory which began in 1066 at The Battle of Hastings.

The dominance of those ‘aristocratic’ families remains today with an estimated one third of farmland still being owned by the descendants of Norman invaders.  For instance, the Dukes of Westminster – the Grosvenor family, their involvement in agriculture (about 140,000 acres) has only recently been challenged by English investors like Sir James Dyson who owns more than 33,000 acres. 

William the first, (also known as ‘The Bastard’) didn’t spend much time in England but frequently returned to Normandy, passing local responsibility to Lords and Barons to whom he granted control of particular areas of land, and they in turn allotted portions of land to Vassals and Knights whom they made responsible for smaller portions of their fiefdom.

At the bottom of the pile were the conquered English who became subject peasants and serfs with no freedom under the authority of the hierarchy of the Norman French, their military in which they could be made to serve, and the Church which governed their moral and social behaviour.

The extent to which the bureaucracy of Norman rule continues today is seen from the way many of the words in modern English legal language began as French.  When the English parliament passes a law, it cannot come into force until it receives Royal Assent and is signed off with the words: ‘Le Roi le veult.’ (Norman French for ‘The King wills it.’)  One of William’s first orders was to survey the entire country and compile the record of who owned what and where, which remains as the Domesday Book, and legitimised the Normans’ land grab.

The legacy of the ancestors of today’s elite remains in the many Cathedrals (Durham), Castles (The White Tower at the Tower of London) and numerous parish churches with their well-known round arched doors and windows, and the Norman stonemasons are credited with having inspired the development of the craft for centuries after the conquest.

It’s been suggested the powerful and wealthy Normans also favoured the practice of building to the west of the settlements they controlled, because the prevailing winds in both England and Normandy are Westerly, and farmlands and tradespeople’s workplaces created odours and fumes which could be offensive.  It was also recognised that building on the lee of a settlement could result in increased rates of diseases, so began the tendency for the east end of towns and cities to be where the homes of socially disadvantaged people would be built. A less generous theory was that the Normans built upwind of the English peasants because they considered them dirty and smelly.

At primary school I remember being taught about the Feudal System and being told about strip farming.  We were given lolly sticks, twigs and straw to make model buildings and corrugated cardboard, green and brown plasticene and all sorts of craft materials to make a model farm which some of us brought our Britains toy farm animals to stock.  In the cardboard fields we planted tiny cabbages made of rolled up balls of dark green tissue paper and learned that nine centuries later we could still see the ridges and furrows.

But we do seem to have forgotten that French aristocrats still rule many of us Anglo-Saxon villeins.

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