As laid out with unending patience and expertise in two new books, Judith A Green’s The Normans (Yale, £25, ★★★★★) and Levi Roach’s Empires of the Normans (John Murray, £25, ★★★★☆), the real history of the Normans reveals itself as a vast and almost incomprehensibly tangled web woven back and forth across Europe, Asia and Africa over 300 years. What is more, it is only a tiny part of the Norman story as a whole. It goes without saying that the truth of the Norman Conquest is more complicated than the version lodged in my memory. After a little while the Normans were no longer sort-of-Frenchmen but proper Englishmen. Cunningly, however, the English had the last laugh. After that it was all motte-and-bailey castles, Domesday books, barons and the introduction of foreign words like boeuf, porc and droit du seigneur. It was a good fight – and I could probably still draw you the battle plans if you gave me a minute – but then there was the arrow in Harold’s eye, and William won. The Normans were sort of French (but somehow not actually the French) and were led by William the Conqueror, whose name should have given Harold pause for thought. In a last gasp of island pride, temporary king Harold Godwinson managed to defeat a Viking invasion at one end of the country, before turning round and marching to the other end to face a Norman one. Before them came the cake-burning Anglo-Saxons, who were bad at holding off Vikings and fell into disarray the moment Edward the Confessor died.
In the version of English history I was exposed to at school, the Normans figured with unequalled prominence.
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