In his classic 19th-century History of England, the Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay argues that, \u201cuntil the fourth generation\u201d the Normans were \u201cnot Englishmen\u201d. It wasn\u2019t until after King John lost the Norman territories in France, he claims, that this colonising elite \u201cgradually came to regard England as their country, and the English as their countrymen\u201d.<\/p>\n
In this context, how should we interpret the recent tussle<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n But experts warn that the fabric is so fragile it\u2019s impossible to transport safely. A campaign and petition<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s fragility. The Bayeux Tapestry stands as a potent symbol of a hinge moment in English politics, that would eventually give rise to today\u2019s elite consensus. But though it still commands international elite support, the consensus is \u2014 like the Bayeux Tapestry \u2014 growing more difficult\u00a0 by the day to preserve.<\/p>\n Whether, as an English person, you view the \u201cheritage\u201d 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\u00a0 over: for example Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum, described<\/a> the Tapestry and loan agreement as illustrating the \u201cdeep ties between Britain and France\u201d. This is, we might say, an odd way of spelling \u201ca thousand years of intermittent war<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n But we never used to be so coy about national divisions. The Normans themselves, per Macaulay, initially didn\u2019t think of themselves as \u201cEnglish\u201d. Instead, they rewrote national mythology to replace \u201cEnglish\u201d with \u201cBritish\u201d, 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 \u201cCeltic\u201d 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 \u201cBritish\u201d than the \u201cEnglish\u201d peasants they had conquered: the original propagation of \u201cBritish values\u201d as a governing-class project.<\/a><\/p>\n 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<\/a> than those with Saxon ones such Smith or Cooper. Some of modern Britain\u2019s richest people, such as the billionaire Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor<\/a>, can trace their lineage all the way back to 1066.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, describing England\u2019s aristocracy as still foreigners and colonisers: \u201cThe last enslaving yoak that England groaned under, (and yet is not freed from)\u201d.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cNorman Yoke\u201d, dismissed any duty to respect England\u2019s aristocracy by denouncing<\/a>\u00a0this group as \u201cA French bastard arriving with armed banditti and establishing himself the King of England against the consent of the natives\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe French conservationists are right: we should stop trying to make the Norman legacy belong everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n By Macaulay\u2019s 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\u2019s later imperial adventures around the globe \u2014 that is, both as brutally oppressive to the conquered Saxons, and also deserving victors on account of obvious cultural superiority.<\/p>\n They were, he writes, at the time \u201cthe foremost race of Christendom\u201d, extraordinary in their \u201cvalour and ferocity\u201d as well as their relative cultural refinement. And yet, following William\u2019s victory in 1066, Macaulay describes how \u201c[t]he subjugation of a nation by a nation has seldom [\u2026] been more complete\u201d. This total militarised colonisation was, he writes, marked by brutal suppression of the natives, and by violent insurgency from those thus oppressed.<\/p>\n But Macaulay doesn\u2019t need to be on the side of the \u201cbold men\u201d resisting their \u201coppressors\u201d, or the militarily and culturally superior conquerors. In the context of his overall narrative, 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\u2019s distant admiration for both sides, and romantic adventure-histories such as Charles Kingsley\u2019s Hereward the Wake (1866).<\/p>\n By Britain\u2019s 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\u2019s 1911 poem \u201cNorman and Saxon<\/a>\u201d drew on the 19th-century romantic version of this past to depict what are presumably Kipling\u2019s contemporary observations on cross-class differences within English culture. In the guise of advice given by a Norman baron to his son, Kipling writes:<\/p>\n \u201cThe Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite. 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\u2019s recent outbreak of politically charged guerrilla flag-hanging as evidence that, as in the time of the Diggers, old wounds are beginning to re-open.<\/p>\n And it\u2019s not a coincidence that even now the dispute is between English identity and \u201cBritish Values\u201d. Today this might refer to the bland, updated internationalist version first proposed by Gordon Brown \u2014 but that doesn\u2019t mean older connotations have been forgotten. Just last week, GB News commentator and Tory grandee Jacob Rees-Mogg dusted off<\/a> his Kipling for a discussion of the now-raging conflict between ruling-class universalists and their nation-loving underlings<\/a>. Just as Kipling predicted, Rees-Mogg added, eventually \u201cthe Saxons will run out of patience with their overlords\u201d.<\/p>\n
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow \u2014 with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, \u201cThis isn\u2019t fair dealing,\u201d my son, leave the Saxon alone\u201d<\/p>\n