The priory of St Gervais, near Rouen in Northern France.
The year is 1087.
William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy and King of England, is dying.
He's surrounded by clergy and his most trusted barons and knights.
As the sun rises, William confesses his sins
and calls on the Virgin Mary to pray for him.
BELL TOLLS
And then, he dies.
What follows is a horrible scene.
The men around William's body panic.
Some galloped off, fearful of the chaos to come.
Those who stayed plundered the King's possessions, seizing arms, vessels,
linen, clothing, anything they could lay their hands on.
Then they abandoned his corpse, stripped half-naked.
So ended the life of one of the most powerful rulers in 11th century Europe.
William the Conqueror established the Normans as a formidable force in history.
He dominated Normandy for 52 years.
But his greatest achievement was the conquest of England in 1066.
The years that followed saw one of the most fundamental transformations in British history.
The reign of William the Conqueror marks the end
of Anglo-Saxon England. He imposed a new aristocracy, a new language,
a new culture.
He transformed England into a Norman stronghold.
And the Normans didn't stop at the borders of England.
Scotland, Wales and Ireland were also to feel their impact.
The political and cultural landscape of Britain and Ireland today
was forged by the Normans.
England, 1066.
One of the wealthiest and most efficiently-run states in medieval Europe.
Now a country under Norman occupation.
Just two months after his victory at the Battle of Hastings, William the Conqueror was in Westminster Abbey.
He was about to achieve his greatest ambition,
coronation as King of England.
But it wasn't quite the glorious occasion William had in mind.
The Archbishop of York asked the assembled Anglo-Saxon bishops and nobles
if they were willing to have William crowned as their lord.
Something of a formality, since they had already submitted to his power.
With one voice, they dutifully cried out their assent.
But the Normans on guard outside the abbey, hearing what they described as "incomprehensible shouting",
feared treachery, and set fire to the buildings around the abbey.
The coronation of England's first Norman King was descending into chaos.
But greater turmoil was to follow.
The coronation of William the Conqueror marks one of the sharpest breaks
there has ever been in English history.
Anglo-Saxon England was dead.
The country was now ruled by the Normans.
But the disastrous ceremony at Westminster Abbey was an indication
that the relationship between the English and their new rulers wasn't going to be an easy one.
William moved quickly to secure his power.
He began distributing his newly conquered lands among Norman nobles and bishops.
Within weeks, the English landscape was being transformed
by the construction of motte-and-bailey castles.
Built by locally conscripted labour,
they were huge mounds of earth topped with wooden stockades.
Many would later be replaced with monumental towers of stone.
The English had never seen anything like this before.
Traditional Anglo-Saxon fortifications were large defensive enclosures
built to shelter the people from attack.
Norman castles were compact military bases
designed to defend the power of William's newly-imposed lords.
This one in Colchester was partly built with bricks from ancient Roman ruins.
It was the largest keep in Europe.
Almost 80 years after the conquest, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was still reporting
that the Normans were "oppressing the men of the land with forced labour on the castles".
And when they were built, "they filled them with devils and evil men".
Clearly the local population regarded these places as dark and evil.
And that was the Normans' intention -
to intimidate the local community.
Within 30 years, the Normans had built hundreds of these fortifications across the country.
Few places were more than a day's journey from a castle.
This was a complete militarisation of England.
This stone keep was built to guard over William's new capital.
It was the tallest building in the city.
We now know it as the Tower of London.
But England still wasn't safe for William's army of occupation.
The Abingdon Chronicle tells us that Adelelm, the new Norman abbot of Abingdon,
"in the first days of his abbacy went nowhere unless accompanied by armed knights".
The situation was volatile.
Anglo-Saxon rebels set up secret ambushes for the Normans
and killed them in woods and remote places.
To protect himself and his men from ambush and casual knifings,
William introduced a special penalty targeting the English.
It was known as the Murdrum Fine.
Whenever an unknown man was found murdered, the surrounding villages
had to provide evidence that he was English.
In the absence of such evidence, it was presumed he was French and the villagers were fined.
In William the Conqueror's England, the killing of Normans required a special punishment.
Anglo-Saxon resistance was growing.
In the North of England, it erupted into open warfare.
Hundreds of years of Scandinavian influence
had created a Northern aristocracy that was largely of Danish origin.
Now the rebels joined forces with the King of Denmark, who was making his own claim on the English throne.
In 1069, William marched on York to crush the rebellion.
The Normans devastated the North of England.
They sacked every village and farmstead as they went.
Then William divided his troops into smaller bands who destroyed any crops and livestock they could find.
This campaign of systematic slaughter and destruction is known as the Harrying Of The North.
The Anglo-Norman historian Orderic Vitalis reports that more than 100,000 people died.
Those who survived were reduced to eating horses, dogs and cats,
and some say, even human flesh.
A stream of refugees began pouring south.
A monk of Evesham tells of "a huge crowd of old men, young men,
"women with infants, fleeing the misery of famine".
He describes their wretched state.
"These people lay throughout the village, in doors and out, even in the churchyard.
"They were sick, destroyed by famine before they arrived here.
"Many died just as they tasted food."
A huge area across Northern and Central England was laid waste
by this scorched-earth assault on the Northern rebels.
Plotting the settlements destroyed by the Normans shows the scar
that was carved across the country by William's army.
16 years later, these areas were still desolate wastelands.
William was unrepentant.
He spent Christmas 1069 celebrating amid the squalor and death in York.
He even had his full coronation regalia sent up from London.
And on the third anniversary of his coronation,
he wore his crown and robes in the ruins of York Minster,
a symbolic gesture of triumph over the rebels.
All over England, Normans were taking the place of Anglo-Saxon bishops, sheriffs and landowners.
English culture was being transformed.
The conquest brought a small, mainly male group to power in England,
a ruling elite of perhaps no more than 10,000 men.
Inter-marriage was common, and the children of these Anglo-Norman marriages
spoke English, because their mothers or wet-nurses were English.
And the French and English languages are still today playing out that dance they began in 1066.
In the three centuries that followed the conquest,
thousands of French words entered the English language.
At first, they were the words of power...
..politics...
..and law.
But soon the language reflected Norman influence in every aspect of life.
Some of the new words were very important, like "war"
and "peace", "justice" and "court".
And the reason the modern English language has so many different words for the same thing
is that the Normans introduced French alternatives.
So "royal" is derived from the French.
"Kingly" or "queenly"
from the Old English.
The same with "country" - French.
"Land" - English.
"Amorous" - French.
"Loving" - English.
One of the things that can make Anglo-Saxon history
seem strange or distant to us is the unfamiliarity of the names, the Ethelberts and Egberts.
The Norman names - William, Henry, Richard, Robert -
caught on amongst the conquered, and endure to this day.
The ruling elite set the fashion.
Soon William was the most common male name in England, even amongst the peasantry.
Surnames beginning with "fitz"
go back to the Norman practice of using "fils", meaning "son of", as part of the name,
giving "Fitzsimmons", son of Simon, or "Fitzgerald", son of Gerald.
The languages were blending together but French remained the tongue of the ruling class.
And nowhere are these class divisions clearer than with meat and drink.
"Pig" is English, "pork" French.
"Sheep" is English, "mutton" French.
So when it's in a cold and muddy field, covered in dung, it's named in English.
When it's been cooked and carved and put on the table with a glass of wine, it's referred to in French.
This association of "Frenchness" with the English upper class
and Anglo-Saxon with coarseness and vulgarity
is one of the Normans' most enduring legacies.
But over the decades, the cultural distinction between Normans and Anglo-Saxons gradually evaporated
and English evolved and prospered to become one of the most influential languages in the world.
About 100 years after the Battle of Hastings,
the King's treasurer, Richard Fitzneal, wrote that,
"with the Normans and the English living side by side and inter-marrying,
"the peoples have become so mingled
"that nowadays it's impossible to tell who is of English and who of Norman descent."
And French, the language of power of the Normans, was, by 1500,
simply a foreign tongue to be learnt at school.
But under William's rule, some Anglo-Saxons were still trying to resist Norman occupation.
A few years after the conquest, an exiled English rebel called Hereward
secretly returned to eastern England.
When Hereward entered the house of one of his father's knights, he found them all in mourning.
Only the day before, his younger brother had been killed by the Normans.
His severed head was hanging above the door of the family house.
Hereward found a group of drunken Normans still singing and celebrating.
He jumped from the shadows and slaughtered them.
When he left the house, Hereward hung the severed heads
of the Normans above the door, in place of his brother's.
His legend grew. Later he would be called Hereward the Wake.
Some say because he was "ever watchful".
Whatever the reason,
Hereward was now ready to wage guerrilla war against the Normans.
Like the rebels in the North, Hereward formed an alliance with the Danes.
The Fens in the East of England became the centre of their revolt.
This watery wasteland was studded with small islands, perfect hiding places for the rebels.
Hereward was holed up in the island monastery of Ely.
The Fens provided a natural defensive position.
And because the rebels had stocked Ely with supplies of food,
Hereward was confident he could survive the longest siege.
The rebels had local allies who helped them find their way across the treacherous marshes.
William prepared a major offensive against Ely.
He constructed a long wooden ramp to gain access to the island.
The Normans rushed across the causeway, eager for the loot they hoped to obtain,
but under their weight, the causeway collapsed.
In their heavy mail coats, the Norman knights had no chance.
They sank into the muddy water.
Skeletons in rotting armour were still being pulled from the fen many years later.
For the next attack, William brought in siege machines.
He also summoned supernatural forces.
An old witch was recruited to terrorise the rebels.
She was placed on a raised platform in the middle of his troops.
From her lofty position,
she ranted at the isle and all who dwelt there.
She threatened destruction and defeat,
and she always concluded her incantations by flashing her bare backside at them.
Now Hereward set fire to the Fens.
The platform burned down and the witch broke her neck.
But it was too late.
Local monks had betrayed the rebels, and led the Norman army along a secret path to the island.
Hereward's forces were defeated.
William, victorious, marched on.
And work soon began on another monumental symbol of Norman authority,
the magnificent abbey church at Ely.
The Normans were among the greatest church builders in Europe.
Alongside hundreds of castles, they built abbeys and cathedrals
on a scale never seen before in England.
In Normandy, they'd used them to proclaim their fervent Christianity, wealth and power.
Now they were stamping the same monumental style over their newly conquered territory.
Ely Cathedral has the Norman trademark stone columns and soaring arches.
It also has one of the longest naves in the country.
Cathedrals like this were built to last.
Scarcely a stone survives from the cathedrals of Anglo-Saxon England,
but go to Ely, or Durham, or Gloucester, or Winchester,
and you can still see the magnificent churches the Normans built.
They were imposing sights and also a permanent reminder
to the Anglo-Saxons that they were a conquered people.
20 years into his reign, William launched an entirely new venture.
Until now, he hadn't tampered with England's efficient tax system.
It was still pouring silver into the royal treasury.
But now his tactics changed.
In 1086, Norman officials arrived in towns and villages all over England.
They came with soldiers, but they were also armed with parchment and ink.
These were William's commissioners and they summoned apprehensive men from every village in the shire.
The commissioners asked the following questions -
"What is the name of the manor?
"Who held it in the time of King Edward?" Who holds it now?
"How many hides of land are there?
"How many ploughs belonging to the lord?
"How many belonging to the peasants?
"How many villagers are there in the manor? How many cottagers?
"How much meadow? How many mills?"
These questions were being asked in public inquests all over England.
The Normans had begun the greatest national audit ever undertaken in Europe.
The Survey Of The Whole Of England
is what the Normans called it,
but the English people, whose homes and fields, livelihoods and livestock it catalogued,
had another name for it - Domesday, the Day of Judgement.
The Domesday inquisition was carried out with characteristic Norman energy and discipline.
Within six months, almost the whole country had been assessed and documented.
And this is the final document, Domesday Book itself.
The smaller volume is a detailed survey of East Anglia,
the larger volume, a survey of the rest of the country - Great Domesday, it's called.
It was written throughout by one scribe who used running headings,
red ink and capitals to pick out individual entries.
It's a masterpiece of design and layout.
We're not sure why William commissioned Domesday.
But the very last question asked by the survey gives us a clue.
"Can more be had than is had?"
William was looking for more money.
Domesday Book gives us a unique insight into the Anglo-Norman world.
And it gave William more information about his kingdom than any previous English king.
We know, for example, that this was an overwhelmingly rural society.
No more than 5% or 10% of the population lived in towns.
Domesday tells us there were 6,000 mills in the country.
And we know that on the lords' farms in East Anglia, there were 150,000 sheep and 35,000 pigs.
The Domesday entry for the village of Gidding near Huntingdon
records that 65 peasant families worked the land here in 1086.
It also shows what the conquest of England meant for ordinary Anglo-Saxons.
Domesday Book tells us that most of Gidding had passed into the hands of Norman lords,
William Engaine and Eustace the sheriff.
And it records the moment of dispossession.
"In Gidding there are six free men, Alfwold and his five brothers.
"Now Eustace holds that land.
"Alfwold and his brothers claim that Eustace took the land from them unjustly."
In those simple words, we have a stark image of the Anglo-Saxon dispossessed by the Normans.
Domesday reveals that every level of Anglo-Saxon society
was turned upside down by the conquest.
And it's not surprising who gained most from the process.
The King and his family possessed about 20% of the wealth of England.
Another 25% was in the hands of the Church.
Of the remaining 55%, the vast majority, half of England,
was now in the hands of Norman barons,
leaving a bare 5% to the surviving old English nobles.
This was the most complete replacement
of one ruling class by another ever recorded in English history.
As a result of William's new authority in England,
Normandy was now one of the most powerful principalities in France.
But in 1087, he had to defend his duchy from a French invasion.
He routed the French army, quickly took the town of Mantes and burned it to the ground.
But the battle ended badly for William.
By now, William was about 60 years of age and very fat.
One report says that his horse stumbled in the burning ruins of Mantes
and the pommel of the saddle pierced the King's distended belly.
He was carried back to a quiet priory in Normandy to recover.
The injured King was taken to the priory of St Gervais near Rouen.
All that remains from that time is the ancient crypt beneath the 19th-century church.
Clergy and aristocracy gathered around the King's bed.
William begged them to pray for him.
According to the historian Orderic Vitalis,
he also made a surprising confession of his sins against the English.
"I hated the native sons of the kingdom more than was just.
"I cruelly mistreated both the nobles and the common people.
"I unjustly dispossessed many
"and I killed a countless multitude by sword and famine."
This doesn't sound like the William we know,
but Orderic, as the son of an English mother and a Norman father,
must have had complicated feelings about William the Conqueror,
and, as a good monk, he gave William the kind of deathbed speech
that a repentant King ought to have made.
Whatever his final words,
soon after dawn on the 9th September, 1087, William died.
According to Orderic, when the citizens of Rouen heard the news they were completely terrified,
rushing around like drunken men
and hiding away their possessions in fear.
His knights and barons immediately left William's body, rushing off to protect their estates.
Looters now descended on William's body.
The man who'd been anointed King of England
was stripped of his possessions and left almost naked on the floor.
But worse was to follow.
Before his funeral, it was discovered that the specially prepared stone sarcophagus
was too small to contain the King's body.
The monks attempted to force William's corpse into the space.
According to Orderic, "His swollen belly burst,
"and an intolerable stench filled the noses of the crowd.
"Even the sweet smell of the incense used in the service couldn't mask it."
And so the funeral rites of the most powerful man in Europe were rushed to a hasty conclusion.
The Conqueror was dead.
But his legacy would endure.
For the next 500 years, the kings and queens of England
would also rule a large part of Northern France.
Britain's ties with Scandinavia were broken.
To this day, the country still looks south to mainland Europe for its alliances and influences.
England was now a Norman fortress.
Beyond lay Scotland, Wales and Ireland - three different lands,
three different encounters with the Normans,
three different legacies that endure to this day.
First came Scotland, with its own royal dynasty,
but poorer than England, and weakened by internal divisions.
The Normans didn't have to fight for Scotland.
They were invited in.
Dunfermline Abbey in Fife,
founded before the end of the 11th century by Margaret, Queen of Scotland.
Margaret was a member of the Anglo-Saxon royal dynasty.
She fled to Scotland after the Battle of Hastings,
took refuge in the court of King Malcolm, and became his wife.
Margaret was a formidable figure,
with the blood of the old Anglo-Saxon kings flowing in her veins.
She insisted on a new level of ceremony in the Scottish royal court.
And she was also a determined and active Christian
who prayed, studied the Bible and did good works for the poor.
She and her children would initiate a transformation of Scotland
that would make it more like Norman England, but also strong enough to resist it.
After her death in 1093, Margaret was regarded as a saint.
Her son David continued his mother's work on this grand abbey.
Dunfermline Abbey was built as a burial place for Scottish kings and queens.
Margaret, Malcolm and three of their sons all lie here.
It was built by a Scottish king, but in the finest Norman style.
In Scotland, this Norman masterpiece wasn't a declaration of conquest.
It was the symbol of a new alliance.
David's sister was married to the youngest son of William the Conqueror, King Henry I of England.
And David took full advantage of this family connection.
As brother-in-law of the English king,
David had already won rich prizes - land, office, and the title of earl.
And as a relative of the English king, he was unafraid of the Norman barons.
He understood that Norman knights and castles
could be used to buttress his kingdom rather than destroy it.
When David became king in 1124, he invited large numbers of Norman knights to settle in Scotland.
At this period, there was no fundamental barrier to being a lord both in Scotland and in England.
That was the Norman way.
And for David, it was perfect,
because it made Scotland more able to resist conquest from the south.
As Norman castles went up across the land, they also helped subdue the King's Scottish opponents.
By 1150, David had turned Scotland into a thriving European kingdom.
He addressed his royal charters "To all his officials and good men
"of the whole kingdom - French, Scottish, English and others born elsewhere."
Scotland was a multi-ethnic country united under its own royal dynasty.
At the end of the Middle Ages, Scotland survived intact as an independent kingdom.
Margaret and her descendents had ensured that.
It was a country partly settled and shaped by the Normans,
but still with its own laws, its own currency, its own identity.
A sovereign nation set apart from England in a way that has consequences to this day.
The story in Wales was very different.
Here the Normans came as conquerors into a land where many Welsh princes were fighting among themselves.
William's forces laid the foundations of their first stone castle in Wales
here at Chepstow in 1067.
A monumental keep, designed to intimidate.
This was the base from which the Normans intended to penetrate deeper into Wales.
But it wasn't going to be easy.
To conquer England, William had to defeat one Anglo-Saxon king.
In Wales, the Normans faced many competing princes and independent principalities.
England had been conquered in a day.
The Normans took Wales piece by piece.
The conquest of Wales took 200 years.
Norman knights and barons settled in the valleys and coastal plains,
sometimes inter-marrying with the Welsh princely families.
This is Cilgerran Castle, in the border country known as The March Of Wales.
In the 12th century, it was the home of a Welsh princess called Nesta.
She had married one of the Norman settlers, Gerald of Windsor.
Nesta was a famous beauty.
It appears that men found her irresistible.
Her cousin, Owain ap Cadwgan of Powys, was inflamed with passion for her.
One night, he and 15 companions burrowed under the castle door
intending to torch the place and abduct Nesta.
Her husband would surely have been killed.
But the quick-thinking Nesta ensured that Gerald of Windsor escaped
down the toilet chute.
Nesta's sons and grandsons dominated south Wales in the 12th century.
They became part of a new Anglo-Welsh aristocracy,
which maintained an uneasy autonomy from the English throne.
They were known as The Marcher Lords,
the lords of the frontier.
The Marcher Lords were fiercely independent.
In Wales, they were the ultimate authority,
with their own law-courts, chanceries and the right to make peace and war.
In the 13th century, one unfortunate messenger who turned up in the March
with a royal writ, was forced to eat it, along with its wax seal.
The King's writ did not run in the March.
Nesta's descendants were at the forefront of the next phase of Norman expansion.
But they weren't all warriors.
One was an influential clergyman.
He grew up here at Manorbier Castle on the south-west coast of Pembrokeshire.
His name was Gerald of Wales.
Gerald was destined for the Church from birth.
His older brothers wanted to become knights, like their father.
While they were building sand castles on the beach at Manorbier,
Gerald was busy constructing sand churches.
He was given the best literary education his age could provide.
And he went on to become one of the great historians of his time.
Gerald of Wales would write the most vivid account of the Norman expansion into Ireland.
He records that in 1166, Dermot Macmurrough, the deposed ruler
of the Irish kingdom of Leinster, was trying to win back his throne.
He enlisted Norman mercenaries,
with promises of "land and money, horses and armour, gold and silver".
Dermot found eager recruits among the Marcher Lords, many of them sons and grandsons of Nesta
and Gerald of Windsor - the Fitzgeralds.
Gerald of Wales recorded the exploits of his warrior relatives with a large dose of family pride.
"Who are those who penetrate to the heart of the enemy?
"The Fitzgeralds.
"Who are those who preserve the country?
"The Fitzgeralds.
"Who are they whom the enemy fears?
"The Fitzgeralds."
The Normans were on their way to Ireland.
Ireland was a collection of warring Christian kingdoms.
The first army of Norman mercenaries landed on the south coast, here at Bannow Bay, in 1169.
30 knights, 60 men at arms, and 300 archers.
The actions of this tiny force of Norman Welsh lords
would establish links between England and Ireland
that have been a determining feature of Irish history to this day.
Joining forces with the Fitzgeralds was another Norman,
Richard Fitzgilbert de Clare, better known as Strongbow.
Strongbow could trace his descent right back to the dukes of Normandy,
and his family had been amongst the richest in England.
But Strongbow had fallen on hard times.
He came to Ireland attracted by Dermot's offer of riches.
And the Irish King had also promised his daughter Aoife in marriage.
Under the leadership of another Fitzgerald, Raymond le Gros, or Raymond the Fat,
Strongbow's forces prepared for the next assault.
They landed here, at Baginbun, in the spring of 1170.
Centuries later, the battle was still remembered in a traditional rhyme.
"At the creek of Baginbun, Ireland was lost and won."
The small but deadly Norman army was heavily outnumbered by the Irish forces.
100 Normans versus 3,000 Irish.
But Raymond cunningly drove a herd of cattle into the Irish ranks, causing chaos.
And the Normans took advantage of the confusion to slaughter 500 of their enemy and take 70 prisoners.
One of the Marcher knights had brought his mistress with him on campaign, Alice of Abergavenny.
The lover of Alice of Abergavenny was one of the Marchers killed in the battle.
Her revenge was ruthless.
Wielding an axe, she beheaded each one of the prisoners with her own hands,
and the decapitated bodies were then tossed off the cliffs into the sea below.
Not long afterwards, 200 knights and 1,000 infantry
under Strongbow's leadership stormed the town of Waterford.
The Norman mercenaries would quickly restore Dermot to power.
The day after his victory, with the bodies of the dead still piled in the streets,
Strongbow won his prize and married Dermot's daughter.
Soon afterwards, he succeeded Dermot as ruler of Leinster.
Waterford, Wexford and Dublin were in his hands.
Another Norman knight had conquered a kingdom.
Back in England, Henry II, great-grandson of William the Conqueror, was worried.
This band of independent Normans appeared to be setting up a power-base across the Irish Sea.
In 1171, Henry became the first king of England to land on Irish shores.
And he came with a huge army.
400 ships carrying 4,000 soldiers and 500 knights.
But this was a bloodless invasion.
The Irish kings knew it was pointless to resist such a vast force.
Strongbow, too, capitulated.
When Henry returned to England six months later, he left a royal representative in Dublin,
an English presence that would remain for more than 700 years.
Ireland was England's first colony.
The first colonial institutions were moulded here.
And it was also the crucible of a new colonialist mentality.
In the National Library of Ireland, there's a remarkable manuscript dating to the late 12th century.
The Topography Of Ireland.
This is Gerald of Wales' extraordinary account of Ireland in an age of conquest.
And it reveals the emergence of a new attitude towards conquered peoples.
Gerald tells a story about some Anglo-Norman sailors driven to shore by a storm in the Atlantic.
They encounter a little boat being rowed by two Irishmen.
Here they are,
portrayed almost completely naked.
And nakedness is, of course, one of the great symbols of savagery.
These Irishmen marvel at everything they see, as if it's quite unfamiliar.
When they are offered bread and cheese, they decline it, not knowing what these things are.
They say they are accustomed to eat only raw meat, fish and milk.
Nor is their religious education anywhere near civilised standards.
"When asked whether they were Christians and had been baptised,
"they answered that until now they had heard nothing of Christ and knew nothing about him."
The story must be an invention.
The Irish were converted to Christianity long before the English.
What Gerald is doing is creating a powerful image of nakedness, rawness and religious ignorance.
He is justifying the Norman conquest and colonisation in Ireland
by portraying the native Irish as backward and barbaric.
The Normans colonised and exploited the fertile coastal plains of Ireland.
The poorer areas were left to the native Irish.
This gulf between the English and the Irish has never been bridged.
Ireland remains divided, not exactly as it was in the Middle Ages,
but as a direct consequence of the Norman invasion.
In England and in Scotland, the Norman story is one of
assimilation, inter-marriage and adaptation to local society.
But in Ireland,
the colonisers thought they were superior to the colonised.
They treated them with disdain and emphasised separation and distance, not integration.
They had taken a turn that was to be crucial
in the later history of European imperialism across the globe.
The Norman expansion into England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland was a decisive historic intervention.
In different ways, it shaped the future of each of these lands.
The Normans conquered England so thoroughly
that the native royal dynasty and aristocracy disappeared forever.
Scotland found a way to do business with the Normans, and has survived as a country distinct from England -
separate if not sovereign, with its own law, church and educational system.
Wales and Ireland became half-conquered countries.
Bitter divisions have flared up regularly ever since.
The Normans didn't only conquer England in 1066, they went on to
create the political and cultural landscape of Britain and Ireland that we know to this day.