1066: England Wasn't Conquered at Hastings. It Was Conquered in the 20 Years After.
About this episode
The episode discusses the true nature of the Norman Conquest of England, emphasizing the significant changes that occurred in the 20 years following the Battle of Hastings.
History tells us England was conquered at Hastings. That's the cover story. What happened on October 14, 1066 was a single afternoon of fighting that ended with Harold Godwinson dead in the dirt and William the Conqueror in possession of a battlefield. But conquest is not what happens on a battlefield. It's what happens in the 20 years afterward. In those 20 years, roughly 10,000 Normans replaced the ruling class of an entire kingdom of 2 million people. The old aristocracy. The old church hierarchy. The old landowners. All of them gone — not gradually over centuries, but in a single generation. By 1086, only 8% of England was still in Anglo-Saxon hands. The Domesday Book documented the new order in 800 pages and 2 million words, in a single year of administrative work that has no parallel in pre-industrial European history. This isn't conspiracy. It isn't ideology. It's architecture — and the architecture the Normans installed underneath the battle became the blueprint every successful conquering elite has read since. In this conversation with David Mainayar of the @Empire-Builders podcast: → Anglo-Saxon England in 1065: the most centralized, monetized state in…
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