1066 and Culture Wars

If you listen to some of the flag shaggers on social media, you would think British history started in 2016 with a referendum and a bus. In reality our first proper culture war was 1066, when a bunch of heavily armed French property developers turned up and told the locals they were doing sovereignty wrong.

On one side you had the Saxons. Sunburnt, suspicious of anything foreign, convinced that their way of doing things was the only proper English way, even though half of their grandparents were Danes who had arrived earlier and set fire to everything. On the other side you had the Normans, essentially Viking descendants who had gone on an Erasmus year to France, discovered wine and feudalism and came back with a new accent and strong views on planning permission.

It was the original clash between Somewheres and Anywheres. Harold was the bloke down the pub, born within the sound of the local pig, who thought the foreigners should stay on their own side of the Channel. William was the metropolitan elite who arrived with consultants, a rebrand and a firm belief that the answer to everything was a castle and a steep new tax.

The Bayeux Tapestry was the GB News of its day. A long, tendentious strip of propaganda commissioned by the winners, explaining that actually the invasion was completely legal, Harold had it coming and anyone saying otherwise was basically unhinged. If you look closely you can almost see the caption: BREAKING – LOCAL MAN SHOT IN EYE – FIND OUT WHY HE DESERVED IT.

Imagine Saxon Facebook the morning after Hastings:

HAROLD123: Country ruined. Normans have stolen our freedom.
LEOFWINE_WARRIOR: This all started when we let the Danes in.
EDITH_LOSTCAUSE: It's the woke monks. You cant even burn a monastery these days without being called a bigot.

Meanwhile Norman Twitter is busy insisting that nothing has really changed except for the total replacement of the ruling class, the legal system, the language of power and who owns all the land. Take back control, but with more chain mail and better horses.

Then along comes the Domesday Book. The first great British data grab. One enormous medieval GDPR breach. Some monk turns up at your door, writes down your name, your livestock and how much swamp you own, and a few months later you discover that your council tax has gone up and William has "levelling up" plans involving a keep on your best field. Today it would be outsourced to Capita and cost three times as much, but the principle is the same.

What makes it funny - in a dark way - is listening to modern culture warriors wail about "our ancient Saxon freedoms" as if the Norman Conquest was a minor administrative tidying exercise. For the Saxon gentry, 1066 was the ultimate Great Replacement. They really were pushed out of power and replaced by French speaking toffs who behaved like they owned the place because, well, they did.

Fast forward a thousand years and you have people called Smith and Brown - surnames that came out of that Norman feudal system - shouting about pure Anglo Saxon heritage while waving a flag whose very heraldry is a mash up of Norman, Celtic and later political bodging. The same crowd who tell you "we want our country back" while standing in front of architecture built by Normans, Tudors, Georgians, Victorians and a bloke called Kevin with a van.

If you tried to tell an actual Saxon peasant living knee deep in pig and plague that his descendants would one day be furious about Polish plumbers, he would stare at you blankly and then ask whether they know how to thatch a roof properly. His culture war involved not being boiled alive for poaching the Norman kings deer, not whether Starbucks printed the right slogan on a red cup.

The irony is that everyone in this island is already a remix. Saxons, Normans, Celts, Romans, Vikings, Huguenots, West Indians, South Asians, Europeans of every flavour - history is basically one long people traffickers timetable with added paperwork. Yet here we are, solemnly pretending that letting in a few thousand refugees is an existential threat, while shrugging at seven centuries of French aristocrats running the place and writing the laws.

And just like the Bayeux Tapestry, our modern media sells you a heroic story where your lot are always the plucky victims and the other lot are always scheming villains. When opinion is given the same status as truth, you can convince yourself of anything. In 1066 the story was that God had backed William. In 2016 it was that Brexit would be easy and sunlit uplands would appear on demand. Same trick. Different horse.

If we really wanted to end the culture war, we would put up a big sign at Dover saying:

"Welcome. Please note: the queue for invading elites with an eye on your land started in 43 AD and is still moving. Take a ticket."

Instead we get red faced Saxon reenactors yelling at imaginary Normans on Twitter, while actual modern barons quietly buy up the housing stock, privatise the utilities and ship the profits offshore. The names have changed, the helmets are less stylish, but the basic story is the same as 1066. While you are busy shouting at foreigners, someone closer to home is writing you into the Domesday Book again.

So yes, by all means fly your flag and shout about "our" culture. Just remember that your ancestors lost the original culture war nearly a thousand years ago, and then promptly intermarried with the victors. That is Britain in a nutshell. We lose, we grumble, we make a joke, and then we stick the new lot in a sitcom.

If the Saxons and Normans could see us now, they would probably stop fighting, look at GB News, Twitter and the comments section, and agree on one thing at least.

"Blimey. They will believe anything, wont they."