Jack of Harts

The Normans ruled England with somewhere between an iron fist and a velvet glove depending on who you ask. The Saxon accounts in general hate them. Robin Hood has become a legendary dogooder throughout the English-speaking world for a reason. In most versions of the tale, he was a Saxon stealing things from the rich Norman nobility and returning the stuff to the Saxons they stole it from to begin with. On the other hand, the Normans never committed a widespread eradication of the Saxon people. They never even banned them from speaking what we now call Old English, even as the Normans continued to speak French.

Then one day the French monarch died. And wouldn’t you know it, the Normans were married into that royal family as well, and they wanted a piece of that action. The French had not forgotten that the Normans were just jumped up Norse raiders with delusions of grandeur though, and they refused to be ruled by barbarians. The very divided French kingdoms of the era could agree on that at least, and they went war to support their fellow Frenchmen over those jumped up Normans.

The Normans rather quickly realized that they could not win against a unified France, but they were not about to give up on their dreams. They needed more manpower, so they went to their Saxon underclass looking for more warriors. And what were those lower-class poor really good with according to every Robin Hood story we know? The bow. The English Longbowmen became the terror of the continent throughout what Historians would call the Hundred Years War that forged both the England and France that we know today.

France drove the Normans from Normandy in the end, and the Normans settled down in England. And in a hundred years and five generations of fighting the French, the Normans did what they did in France. They assimilated with the locals. They began speaking English, but not every word of French disappeared from their vocabulary. Many still remain. But that was the final result of the North Man’s mass migration from their Viking homeland. They disappeared into the land of England and just settled down. They assimilated, but they also left their mark on the lands they settled while doing so.