#normady

[ID: Euler diagram showing geographic (green) versus political (blue) labels.]

William conquered England, below, and then had the Pope approve of his new position by Easter. Yes, you heard correctly. This guy had such an inferiority complex that he became the internationally-recognized monarch of a neighboring country within a year. For the next hundred odd years, Anglo-Norman and not Old English was the official language of England. The whole British Imperialism thing starts to make a little more sense: they had it done to them first and they lost badly. Eventually, William’s (still Normand) descendants known as the “Plantagenet Kings” stretched themselves a little thin trying to claim all of France as their kingdom as well and decided to re-brand themselves as English and reinstate Old English as the official language to cope. And yes, this is those Plantagenets who will give rise to the Yorks and Lancasters who will cause the English War of the Roses where all the royalty kills each other for power and leaves the Tudors to come to power. But we’re not there yet.

[ID: picture of the British Isles and Northern France which shows the lands controlled by William the Conqueror by 1087 in pink. Notably, he controlled only England and not Wales or Scotland.]

Before the Normand royals of Britain all kill themselves, they have to stir up international drama. Edward I claimed in 1295 to the members of parliament that the King of France planned to invade England and extinguish the English language. Yes, this was a NORMAND king who was doing the same thing a generation or two ago. Then in 1346, his still-Normand grandson Edward III forged an ordinance from Philip VI of France calling for the destruction of the English and presented it to his parliament. This little performance kicked off the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453 CE). It’s towards the end of this major conflict that the royals decide to incite civil war, by the way, because they really were too dramatic to live. Just so you know, I skipped over TWELVE WARS between William the Bastard’s (yes, a real moniker) invasion and the Hundred Years’ War so that this article wouldn’t drag on forever. By the time that the Hundred Years’ War is over, the (Welsh) Tudors are on the English throne and, excluding that time the English invaded France in 1475, the two nations decided to stop trying to conquer each other. This is Europe, however, and they’ll continue to be fighting each other through proxy wars at least twelve more times before we get to the 1770s. A lot of this proxy fighting happens over Italy, in case you’re interested.

If you thought that 700 years of nearly continuous armed conflict (a decade or two doesn’t really count as a break in the long run) wasn’t enough to justify the hate between England and France, you’ve underestimated the power of religion. France hosted the (what we call Roman) Catholic Papacy in Avignon from 1309 to 1376. France is to this day a VERY Catholic nation, with up to 88% of its population belonging to the Church if you count lapsed members. Between William (1066) and the 1770s, a little itty bitty religious movement you might have heard of called the (Protestant) Reformation shook Europe when the German Princes decided they were tired of listening to this Roman Pope dude, so they supported this funky little scholar-monk-priest name Martin Luther whose students eventually said fuck it, the papacy is trash let’s start our own church. Christians, being Christians, took this as a new thing to hate about each other despite the fact that most of the doctrine is still the same and whether you were Catholic or Protestant became very important to people from the mid-1500s CE onward. In comes the man with many wives, Henry VIII. He was king while the German Princes were revolting and decided he wanted a divorce from his first wife. The Pope said along the lines of unless you give me a good reason, it’s a no from me and Henry replied something like the fact that I want to marry a younger woman is reason enough, I’m going to make up my own damn church and I get to have as many divorces as I want and then he established the Church of England. And then he went on the have six wives (and one mistress whose bastard he acknowledged) who were either beheaded or divorced except for the last one. I personally regret he never got to the full eight-piece set he must have been going for. Since 1534 when Henry VIII first flaunted papal authority by divorcing his wife, the French and English have also had the pleasure of hating each other over religious differences.

[ID: French corsairs with booty and British prisoners in 1806, depicted in a later painting by Maurice Orange from the Wikipedia page on French state-sanctioned pirates called “corsairs” that I didn’t have the space to get to in the article.]