The Normans

- Season 1

(2010)

The name Normans originally simply refers to Vikings, Germanic people raiding the Eurpean coast from their Scandinavian homes for centuries. As the clergy, their main prey, wrote histories, they got an excessively bad press. Norwegians led by Rollo actually conquered present Normandy, a maritime part of weakened France, and got royal sanctioning by accepting to became a 'vassal' duchy. They soon adapted very well to feudal continental Eurpoean ways, while preserving enough of their military force to become a formidable power. William, one of Rollo's successors, an ...

William the Conqueror's Westminster coronation accidentally turned into bloodshed, prophetic of the grim way Norman rule was imposed on the reluctant Anglo-Saxon subjects. Any resistance was bloodily suppressed, there even were severer sentences for crimes against a Norman. The English language itself was largely gallicised, adding a French vocabulary especially in spheres of interest to the new nobility, which took over nearly all the feudal lands. The rather efficient taxation was extended and reorganized, as testified by the Doomesday Book. A French invasion of his...

Independent of duke William's conquest of England, poor Norman knights sought and found landed fortune in southern Italy, defeating the Byzantines, Saracens on Sicily and even a papal army. The result was the Neapolitan kingdom of Sicily, for centuries a beacon of tolerance and patronage, where the Normans again were absorbed into a culturally rich mixture. Tancred and Bohemund, junior members of the emigrated Norman noble family de Hauteville, played a crucial part in the first crusade and established short-lived crusader principalities in Antioch and Tiberias (...