The Normans had the opportunity, motive and means to undertake a huge propaganda campaign, and were almost duty-bound to align themselves to the supposedly "saintly" King Edward the Confessor if they were to justify their invasion to the pope and posterity.
1. The succession- lies and truth...
- King Edward the Confessor had in the late 1040's had already offered his crown to kings Swein of Denmark & Magnus of Norway(to conveniently stay off invasion by them after his delaying and indecision over the English succession- sound familiar?),
- Edward presumably hated Godwin for the alledged murder of his brother Arthur in 1036, so why then offer the crown to HIS son, Harold Godwinson? Clearly he either didn't now want an illegitimate and grasping Norman duke to succeed him, and/or he disbelieved the ridiculous Norman lies and contradictions about their enforced oath(thus invalid in England) over "hidden relics" with physical threats to Harold, Hakon and Wulfnoth?
- Edward offered the crown (with VIP witnesses including half-Norman courtier, and later Sheriff of Essex, Robert FitzWimarc) in the most important manner known to Anglo-Saxon nobles then- the VERBAL crown bestowal (written ones were not seen as relevant)?
- Why would Edward- who had no love for his Norman mother and barely even knew William the *******- still wish the illegitimate Norman to succeed in 1066, when that notoriously brutal and ruthlessly ambitious duke had also had one of Edward's own relatives murdered(Edward's nephew Walter, Count of Mantes, in 1064)?
2. Coast-huggers?
The Franco-Norman-Breton-Euro-mercenary army, having landed on the 29th Sept 1066 and KNOWING for certain(from FitzWimarc- who had witnessed Edward's bestowal of England to Harold) that King Harold was 250m to the north (leaving the roads to Winchester & London open) they hugged the south coast inexplicably for THREE WEEKS!
Quite a lengthy spell for a brave duke regrouping a fresh and prepared army- when previously the vikings sailed horses over the lethal Channel in the late 9thC from France... and barely rested?
3. Come on...Even though the Franco-Norman-Breton-Euro-mercenary army were rested, re-supplied and ready, with their elite cavalry and much-vaunted archers, they struggled all day (an "unusually long battle" - Poitiers the hagiographer) to beat an exhausted, depleted and "unprepared" army, with the best infantry in Europe(housecarls), at the battle at Santlache... and still v.v.very nearly lost!
4. Truth is the first casualty...The over-ambitious Normans manipulated virtually everything in their desperate attempt to justify their violent usurpation(1051 throne promise- unlikely... 1064 "oath"- enforced with death threats abroad- invalid... Santlache- explained above), and their abysmal failure to align the ******* to King Edward by airbrushing KING Harold II out of history, when the latter had been offered the crown by that same Edward, and elected "unanimously" and popularly by the all-powerful WITAN!
5. Their post-1066 coinage quality was woeful, rarely reminted, badly-struck and lacking much silver. Anglo-Saxon coinage wasn't.
6. They were so impressed by the highly-complex and already-flourishing English systems of Govt, administration and of taxation- the most sophisticated and experienced in Europe then- that they kept it running for several decades afterwards, basing their govt upon it.
7. Fit for purpose...?These supposedly great soldiers were severely troubled by several large-scale rebellions (Exeter; Chester; Ely- not just the countless Norman-French-Breton revolts against themselves either!)
ie. Successful guerilla-leader Hereward's huge and organised long-term revolt with Waltheof, Edric the Wild; Edwin and Morcar around Peterborough & the Ely fens for over a year, so much so that the ******* himself felt bound to cover his troop's shame by attending...and they still got trounced in many concerted & fierce ambushes (despite resorting to witchcraft!!!) and only ending when some Ely monks led them in by treachery!
Besides, their "invincible" myth had been blown apart long before taking all day to beat King Harold- in 1054 (and also 1057)at the battle of Dunsinane in 1054 their mercenary troops(allied to the Scots of Macbeth) were slaughtered by earl Siward's Anglo-Danish troops including housecarls(enlisted by exile Scottish soon-to-be-king Malcolm III).
8. They were being murdered and left unburied so often by the UN'conquered' English men & women for years after 1066, that they were forced to introduce the Murdrum Fine...
9. A flag from the sycophantic Italian puppet...?Having supposedly attained a papal banner from the pro-Norman pope (hardly wanting to upset his occupying Norman 'masters' in Italy?) to reclaim this country for the Pope and reform the A/Saxon church (even though a visiting Papal legate in 1061 was satisfied with the A/Saxon church AND the ******* himself defied the popery himself in the 1080's!), they then milked the country dry out of avarice...BUT allowed those same supposedly 'corrupt' English clerics in power until 1070! And later worshipped the ENGLISH saints Cuthbert and Bede!!
10. What's in a word...?Their slanted and transparent plagiarising in the 'style' of the Greco-Roman classics (Dudo? Poitiers and his hagiographies?) was laudable. Fact and balance were casualties first.
11. "The Normans were more outward looking"-Not necessarily so, they only looked abroad because youngest sons needed to grab lands further afield geographically(as did the vikings- their relatives) and out of sheer greed because they needed to preserve dual-lands in Normandy and England, the latter of which they had stolen from dead and dispossessed English nobles!
- The Vikings had looked further- Byzantium, Greenland, America!
- The English, traditionally insular, had been looking "abroad" ever since the first Anglo-Saxons harked back to their direct homelands in Germany/Denmark and Frisia for trade etc. Later still had the English looked outwardly with the viking invasions in the 8thC! Anglo-Saxon Kings had been venturing to see the Popes since before the age of Alfred the Great.
- There were many English embassies to the pope, ie. Tostig's near-disastrous embassy in 1061, when Ealdred was given the Archbishopric. HE crowned Harold as King in 1066, NOT Stigand, whom anyway the visiting papal legate soon after did not denounce.
- Earl Harold in 1057 had ventured across a dangerous Europe, meeting the pope himself, and successfully persuading the doomed Atheling, Edward, to return from exile in Hungary to his estranged England to become king.
If it was murder and not illness, the fact that Harold had literally gone to such lengths to bring him safely home, only for him to die "suddenly", ruled out the earl. More like he died of illness...............or maybe another usurping contender had this done(again to a rival, as many times before with poison?), with genuine delusions about another 'promise' made by the prevaricating Edward, and then twisted out of proportion in the early 1050's by an embittered and ousted Robert of Jumieges (fleeing and en route to Rome)???
So what was so original about the Normans?
