In 1066, England was primarily a Scandinavian country. “Country,” in this instance, is a code word for “wall-to-wall bar fight.” The island acted as little more than a place for people to stand while they tried to kill the next town over. Governance rarely grew more extensive or organized than the “raiding party” stage, and anyone who tried to impose some level of order tended to find themselves very, very dead, presumably for trying to ruin the fun. Politics was strictly a dagger-and-dagger affair; cloaks would just get in the way, after all.
Meanwhile, King Edward the Confessor is dead without an heir, and there’s a scuffle brewing between his appointed successor, King Harold Godwinson, and a French Duke with close ties to Edward by the name of William. William makes ready to invade, but a spell of nasty weather settles in and renders the English Channel a deathtrap (see: Spanish Armada, 1588), which is fortunate for Harold, because the Norwegians are trying to break a piece of the island off for themselves further north.
Loyalty to one’s king being too much of a high-falootin’ concept for the average fighting Brit in the day and age in question, Harold finds himself facing difficulties in maintaining an appreciably-sized force as he charges north. However, he manages to hold it together long enough to send the Nords back to the fjords up in Yorkshire…just in time for the Channel to clear up.
William and his gang amuse themselves with a large chunk of southern England while they wait on Harold to hussle to the tussle, putting it to the sword and torch. Finally, on October 14, Harold, William, and several thousand of their closest friends all have a get-together near the village of Hastings and play a ten-hour game of “kill”. Fairly late in the day, an anonymous Norman archer starts a petition calling for Harold to abdicate the throne by signing the king’s eye. Almost immediately, the archer’s friends reach out in a show of support and contribute to the cause, and Harold sees he has no choice but to step down and to liquidate his assets all over the ground.
That Christmas, William (now “the Conqueror”) is crowned king, and in the spirit of the season, he imports a massive order of feudalism, autocracy, and order and hands it out to everyone, also stuffing their stockings with French language and culture. Over time, the Anglo-Saxon ways and Anglo-Saxon genes begin to either assimilate or disappear, and within a few hundred years England takes the resulting blend of Continental culture and Scandinavian swagger and uses it to essentially take over the world.
References:
1. “Battle of Hastings: 1066.” Then Again. . . 15 June 2009 <http://www.thenagain.info/webchron/westeurope/Hastings.html>.
