HISTORY
John Carey
Conquered
The Last Children of
Anglo-Saxon England
by Eleanor Parker
Bloomsbury Academic
£20 pp256
Ever since the publication in
1930 of Sellar and Yeatman’s
comic hit, 1066 and All That,
the Norman conquest has
been a bit of a joke. But for the
defeated Anglo-Saxons it was
a world-shattering disaster,
and it instigated profound
and lasting changes in English
culture and the English
language. This is the subject
of Eleanor Parker’s
outstanding new book. The
Normans, she observes,
effectively wiped out the
English elite and deprived
them of their estates. By the
time of the Domesday Book,
1086, it is estimated that
only 6 per cent of England
remained in English hands.
Meanwhile, a line of castles
across the country was a
humiliating reminder of
Norman dominance. History,
as usual, was written by the
victors. The Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle in its various
versions presented an English
perspective, but after the
conquest Norman historians
predominated.
Parker’s focus is on the
lives of those who were in
their childhood and
adolescence in 1066. Some
members of this generation
sought safety abroad, but
others, mostly young
aristocratic men, rebelled
against Norman rule. Parker
also studies the position of
women in these years. Some
entered nunneries, fearing
sexual violence from Norman
soldiers. Her book’s cover
illustration is from the
Bayeux Tapestry (probably
embroidered by English
needlewomen) and shows a
woman and child fleeing a
burning house as it is set
alight by Norman soldiers.
Their miniature size,
compared with the men,
emphasises their
vulnerability.
The most famous of the
rebels against Norman rule,
Hereward the Wake, turns
out, under Parker’s lens, to
be largely an invention. The
stories about him seem to
according to the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, to Malcom III of
Scotland. The Chronicle likens
her to a sparrow caught in a
snare. She bore Malcolm eight
children, but was renowned
for her good works, paying
the ransoms of English
captives who had fled abroad
after the conquest and been
reduced to slavery. Her
saintliness is stressed in her
Latin biography, written by
the prior of the monastic
community at Durham, and
she was officially canonised
in 1250.
Of Margaret’s siblings, her
brother Edgar led a restless,
wandering life, visiting the
courts of the Greek and
German emperors. But her
sister Cristina became, it
seems, the abbess of Romsey
Abbey and educated
Margaret’s daughters, Edith
and Mary. To protect Edith
from the lust of the Normans,
Cristina made her wear a veil,
like a nun. Edith hated it,
threw it off and stamped on
it and, she later recalled, she
often got slapped by Cristina
as punishment. Edith was tomarry Henry I of England, so
uniting the Norman and
Anglo-Saxon lines.
Another aristocratic family
whose fortunes Parker traces
was headed by Godwin, Earl
of Wessex, and his Danish
wife, Gytha. Godwin had died
in 1053, but Gytha lost three
of her six sons at Hastings,
and after the battle begged
William in vain to allow her
to have the body of one of
them, King Harold, for burial,
offering him the body’s
weight in gold as recompense.
So a family that had been
among the most powerful in
Britain was reduced to a
scattered and endangered
group of widows and
fatherless children.
Several of them made lives
for themselves outside
Britain, in Denmark, Norway
and as far afield as Russia,
where Harold’s daughter
Gytha married Vladimir II,
gave birth to a son in
Novgorod, and lived on in
Russia for some 30 years.
Even more adventurous were
a band of Englishmen who, in
the 1070s, made their way to
Constantinople, joined the
Byzantine emperor’s
Varangian Guard, and
founded a colony in the area
of the Crimean peninsula they
called “New England”.
After these stories of exile
and displacement Parker
ends her book peacefully with
the life of Eadmer of
Canterbury. He had been a
choirboy in the cathedral
before the conquest and grew
up to be one of the foremost
historians of his generation.
He twice accompanied the
new archbishop, Anselm, to
Rome, and he remembers
many details of life in the
cathedral before the
Normans came.
Conquered is beautifully
produced and written with
flair and great scholarly
acumen. Parker teaches
medieval English literature at
the University of Oxford and
she dedicates her book to
her students. Because of
the pandemic these young
people, she points out, like
the young people in her book,
have had to cope with
upheaval, loss and a sudden
change in the expected
course of their lives. They
have faced it with courage and
determination, but, she
writes, “it is no doubt an
experience that will remain
with them”. cincluded fighting a savage
bear and rescuing a princess.
He learnt that back home the
Normans had killed his
younger brother and seized
his father’s lands, so he
avenged his brother and
formed a band of outlaws.
Like Robin Hood in later
centuries, he was an expert at
trickery, hoodwinking the
Normans by disguising
himself as a potter or a
fisherman. It is an escape into
romance from history’s hard
truths. The real price of
opposing the Normans is
illustrated, in Parker’s book,
by the story of Waltheof, the
young Earl of Northumbria,
who was beheaded for
rebellion against William in- Buried at Crowland
Abbey in Peterborough, he
was venerated by the English
as a saint and martyr.
Another character
allocated a separate chapter is
Margaret, the granddaughter
of Edmund Ironside, king of
England. She had wished to
remain a virgin and dedicate
herself to God, but was
married, against her will
GETTY IMAGEShave arisen from oral
tradition in the fenlands that
covered most of what is now
south Lincolnshire, west
Norfolk and Cambridgeshire.
Prior to 17th-century drainage
schemes, this area was a
morass of swamps and
reedbeds, ideal for guerrilla
warfare of the kind
Hereward purportedly waged.
His feats are recorded in an
early 12th-century Latin text
called the Gesta Herwardi,
which presents him as a
teenage tearaway whose
father persuaded Edward
the Confessor to exile him
for disobedience. His
adventures while abroadSmash and grab
Guerrilla warfare, the first Robin Hood — and how two decades
after 1066 the English owned only 6 per cent of their own land
Some English
exiles went to
the Crimea
BOOKS
Little Englander Oversized
Normans persecute Anglo-
Saxons in the Bayeux Tapestry26 6 February 2022