In his classic 19th-century History of England, the Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay argues that, “until the fourth generation” the Normans were “not Englishmen”. It wasn’t until after King John lost the Norman territories in France, he claims, that this colonising elite “gradually came to regard England as their country, and the English as their countrymen”.
In this context, how should we interpret the recent tussle between England and France over whether the Bayeux Tapestry should be loaned to the British Museum? At present the 224-foot tapestry, which depicts the Battle of Hastings, is due to be displayed at the British Museum for nine months, from September 2026.
But experts warn that the fabric is so fragile it’s impossible to transport safely. A campaign and petition have now mobilised in France to prevent the loan going ahead. Are the French and the English still covertly fighting over territory? Not exactly: Macron is in favour of the loan, while the opposition campaign is drawn from conservation experts and ordinary French people. At face value, the disagreement seems to be geopolitics versus heritage.
But at least on this side of the Channel, the ambivalent legacy of the Norman Conquest also suggests a second interpretation of the disagreement: an interpretation that turns on the tapestry’s fragility. The Bayeux Tapestry stands as a potent symbol of a hinge moment in English politics, that would eventually give rise to today’s elite consensus. But though it still commands international elite support, the consensus is — like the Bayeux Tapestry — growing more difficult by the day to preserve.
Whether, as an English person, you view the “heritage” of the Norman conquest as your own or not depends on an aspect of national identity that has, in recent years, become uncomfortably politicised: ancestry. Today, at elite level anyway, this topic tends to be politely skated over: for example Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum, described the Tapestry and loan agreement as illustrating the “deep ties between Britain and France”. This is, we might say, an odd way of spelling “a thousand years of intermittent war”.
But we never used to be so coy about national divisions. The Normans themselves, per Macaulay, initially didn’t think of themselves as “English”. Instead, they rewrote national mythology to replace “English” with “British”, to their benefit. The medievalist Francis Young describes how around a third of the knights who fought alongside William were not Norman but Breton, and justified their invasion of England by viewing themselves as distant kin to the Brythonic peoples displaced by the Anglo-Saxons. To this end, in place of Anglo-Saxon histories such as Bede, this new aristocracy encouraged the circulation of “Celtic” and Arthurian legend via authors such as Geoffrey of Monmouth. And this turn served the conquerors politically, by antedating their claim to be more originally “British” than the “English” peasants they had conquered: the original propagation of “British values” as a governing-class project.
For Macaulay, the history of the English nation proper began in the moment of reconciliation when the Normans lost their French holdings and embraced an English identity of their own. But that embrace always had an edge of ethnic and class wariness that, to this day, remains rooted in material disparities. Even in the 21st century, British people with Norman surnames such as Glanville are more likely to be wealthy than those with Saxon ones such Smith or Cooper. Some of modern Britain’s richest people, such as the billionaire Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, can trace their lineage all the way back to 1066.
The meaning of the Norman conquest, then, depends somewhat on where you stand in a class hierarchy that has, for the last thousand years, contained a trace element of ethnic hostility. But this tribal aspect has historically tended only to surface at times of bitter class conflict and popular dissatisfaction. For example, the 17th-century agrarian proto-socialist Diggers made much of Norman oppression, describing England’s aristocracy as still foreigners and colonisers: “The last enslaving yoak that England groaned under, (and yet is not freed from)”.
Similarly, the 18th-century radical Thomas Paine, whose The Rights of Man would be influential in inciting the nascent United States to shake off their own “Norman Yoke”, dismissed any duty to respect England’s aristocracy by dismissing this group as “A French bastard arriving with armed banditti and establishing himself the King of England against the consent of the natives”.
By Macaulay’s day, as the rising tides of the British Empire floated all boats, this narrative of racist Norman overlordship had lost its sting. As a Whig historian, Macaulay is keen to depict all lines of progress as converging on the supreme cultural and political supremacy of 19th-century England. And in his account, the Normans are plainly the prototype for England’s later imperial adventures around the globe — that is, both as brutally oppressive to the conquered Saxons, and also deserving victors on account of obvious cultural superiority.
They were, he writes, at the time “the foremost race of Christendom”, extraordinary in their “valour and ferocity” as well as their relative cultural refinement. And yet, following William’s victory in 1066, Macaulay describes how “[t]he subjugation of a nation by a nation has seldom […] been more complete”. This total militarised colonisation was, he writes, marked by brutal suppression of the natives, and by violent insurgency from those thus oppressed.
But Macaulay doesn’t need to be on the side of the “bold men” resisting their “oppressors”, or the militarily and culturally superior conquerors. In the context of the overall arc of his narrative, though, England proper began with the fusion of these once-warring peoples into a single one: the modern English. In this happy context, nothing need remain of the original hostilities except Macaulay’s distant admiration for both sides, and romantic adventure-histories such as Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake (1866).
By Britain’s turn-of-the-century imperial high-point, the Normans had been so far forgiven that little remained of the divide save a useful metaphor for class hierarchy. Rudyard Kipling’s 1911 poem “Norman and Saxon” drew on the 19th-century romantic version of this past to depict what are presumably Kipling’s contemporary observations on cross-class differences within English culture. In the guise of advice given by a Norman baron to his son, Kipling writes:
“The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow — with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, “This isn’t fair dealing,” my son, leave the Saxon alone”
In our contemporary age of austerity, high taxes, and economic stagnation, though, class resentment is once again on the rise. And we might interpret England’s recent outbreak of politically charged guerrilla flag-hanging as evidence that, as in the age of the Diggers, old wounds are beginning to re-open.
And it’s not a coincidence that even now the dispute is between English identity and “British Values”. Today this might refer to the bland, updated internationalist version first proposed by Gordon Brown — but that doesn’t mean older connotations have been forgotten. Just last week, GB News commentator and erstwhile Tory politico Jacob Rees-Mogg dusted off his Kipling for a discussion of the now-raging conflict between ruling-class universalists and their nation-loving underlings. Just as Kipling predicted, Rees-Mogg added, eventually “the Saxons will run out of patience with their overlords”.
This parallel draws — we have to assume deliberately — on a seam of national ressentiment that is both a thousand years old and at times revolutionary in impact. What’s more challenging to trace, though, is how the Normans’ original “British Values” became the post-national Brownite vision. Here, again, the Normans are there to help: the trajectory is encapsulated in microcosm, in a recent culture-war spat over the BBC’s controversial decision to embrace “colour-blind casting” in an otherwise scrupulously realistic dramatisation of the Battle of Hastings.
King And Conqueror didn’t employ colour-blind casting across the board, but only for the defeated and colonised Anglo-Saxons. The villainous colonisers are all white. This has tended to be interpreted as a “woke” effort to rewrite history. But it could also be read as a good-faith effort to transliterate the hierarchy of both race and class that characterised the Norman Conquest onto the only widely-understood modern template we have for parsing such a hierarchy: postcolonial and critical race theories. These theories were forged in a nation that sprang from England’s Norman legacy of seafaring and expansionism: America. And for specifically American historical reasons, these theories tend to conflate ethnicity with skin tone, and both ethnicity and skin tone with social class, more readily than makes sense in an Old World context — and which entirely obscures the nature of a conflict such as that between the Normans and Saxons.
In turn, this framework has boomeranged back from the new imperial hegemon to structure casting decisions in the old. In effect, the BBC has reworked the Norman Conquest as an origin-story for what critical race theorists call “white supremacy”.
And yet even here, the Normans-as-white-supremacists retain their old, ambivalent aura, as objects both of ressentiment and forelock-tugging admiration. For they pioneered the model of land-grab, elite replacement, and peasant suppression in England that would, eventually, be exported around the world — only in turn to give rise to an American ideological successor that proposed to develop the model by optimistically trying to dissolve “nations” entirely in favour of a universal empire of rules.
The BBC casting policy and bland British Museum directorial euphemisms alike show how enthusiastically this has been embraced by a contemporary British ruling class in which Normans remain overrepresented. This contemporary version of “British Values” is as distant a descendant of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s version as Hugh Grosvenor is of Gilbert le Grosvenour. Like Hugh Grosvenor, though, it’s recognisably a descendant, and recognisably still immensely powerful. It is a bitter irony indeed that ideas which began life critiquing the kind of ethnocentric smash ‘n’ grab pioneered by the Normans and perfected by their English descendants has, in the hands of today’s governing class, become yet another stick with which to beat the sullen Saxons.
But Kipling’s warning is apposite. The Saxon now stands like an ox in the furrow. And that governing class would do well heed the omen offered by the Bayeux Tapestry’s age and fragility, for how threadbare and delicate their own mandate has become. The French conservationists are right: we should stop trying to make the Norman legacy belong everywhere.
Instead we might read it as metaphor for the true interdependence of a ruling class with those they rule. The former may provide symbols and narrative thread, but without a (social) fabric upon which to embroider all you have is rags. Instead of demanding that it give way once again to the needs of international politics, our leaders should look to that desperately tattered cloth.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Mary Harrington
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://unherd.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.
