
What would have happened if the Normans had lost the Battle of Hastings? - benbreen
http://www.newstatesman.com/2016/10/what-would-have-happened-if-normans-had-lost-battle-hastings
======
Balgair
God I love what-ifs. My favorite is What if the Bronze Age Collapse [0] never
happened? Quick recap: due to some crazy things (the enigmatic 'Sea Peoples',
maybe famine), all Mediterranean civs died in a 40 year timespan (best guess)
back in 1200 BC. Like, this is _just_ when we have civilizations in more than
just Eqypt and Sumer, and blammo, ancient sea barbarians just wreck face in 1
lifetime. The Greek Dark Ages follow this up, as expected, and you just have
all these terrible things happen to the people alive then in the area. Like,
Rome and the rest of Egypt come out of what is left of these peoples after
this event. Its like taking the Cambrian Explosion and then snuffing it out.
Humans had finally figured out this city thing, we have palaces and kings and
priests and the barest merchant class, and then whammo, sea peoples come and
mess it all up. We have this Cambrian proliferation of cultures and we start
having wars and stuff and its all fun happy evolution times. Yay! Art n stuff!
Yay history! Yay literacy! And then a flippin meteor that is sea peoples comes
in and kills all the dinosaurs (wow, I am straining metaphors here). Anyways,
if the Collapse had not happened, things would be just radically different in
terms of culture and human history. And the best thing is that no-one really
knows this happened, it was so long ago. Like, we had this whole history and
civilization thing just starting out, it's silenced before it really starts,
and then we all go 'meh' and try it again. We live in _at least_ civ2.0, if
not even later.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse)

~~~
m_mueller
For one, I think our writing system would likely be more similar to Korean and
Japanese syllable systems. Linear A and B, the Bronze age greek versions of
that, died in that collapse. The greek dark ages apparently deserve their name
much more than the medieval ones - AFAIK Greece lost literacy for around 400
years after that event!

~~~
getoj
>I think our writing system would likely be more similar to Korean and
Japanese syllable systems.

I don't think there's any reason to suppose that. Syllabaries like Japan's
lend themselves to a certain kind of language, specifically one with a bunch
of open syllables and simple onsets. Linear B seems to have been a pretty poor
system for writing Greek, with lot's of vague approximations (e.g. 'pe-ma' for
the word sperma), so unless the Greek of Linear B had less complex onsets and
codas than the Ancient Greek we know, I don't imagine it would have stuck
around in that form much longer anyway.

Incidentally Korean hangul is organized into syllable blocks in imitation of
Chinese characters but is alphabetic in every other sense, which is actually
good evidence for how writing will be changed or reinvented to fit the spoken
language.

~~~
m_mueller
It could be a chicken-and-egg problem though, no? Do we know how Linear A / B
were pronounced? I'd be surprised at that actually. I always thought that much
of the Japanese pronunciation is an effect of Hiragana, not the cause of it.

------
beschizza
To recap:

\- there might have been more interest in the early English kings.

\- 11th c England would be darker to history, because there wouldn't be a
Doomsday Book.

\- Harold II would have a great-king reputation for beating Tostig, Hardrada
and William.

\- England would have remained politically chaotic, including ...

\- A likely civil war between Harold II and his own relatives.

Not addressed:

\- Changes to English society and life. Would feudalism have been imported
anyway?

\- No diaspora of English nobility, many of whom left rather than become
subject to Normans

Paul Kingsnorth's novel The Wake is an intriguing historical novel imagining
how the Norman conquest affected everyday English folk.

~~~
kirian
"No diaspora of English nobility, many of whom left rather than become subject
to Normans" \- do you have any other links or more information about this
comment, i.e. which nobles and where did they go? I'm curious to find out more
as was not aware of this aspect. Thanks

~~~
berntb
Well, you got an influx to this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard)

"Composed primarily of Scandinavians for the first 100 years, the guard began
to see increasing numbers of Anglo-Saxons after the successful invasion of
England by the Normans.

[..]

the Guard was commonly called the Englinbarrangoi (Anglo-Varangians) [after a
point]"

(That is all I really read about that subject.)

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
Though I seriously don't think that not having English Varangians would've
changed the course of Byzantine History-Manizkert, the Crusades, and lots of
infighting and civil wars would've probably still happened. Manzikert was only
5 years in the future.

~~~
berntb
Well, thinking about this a bit more... you could argue that my position is
really simplified.

Christianity wasn't that nice either. Exterminating all competing religions
(Asatru, Catharism, South American religions etc) and probably even worse
pogroms than the Muslim world, etc.

------
mark_l_watson
Historical what-if questions are fun enough.

My favorite is what would have happened if the English pirate [1] Francis
Drake had captured Cartagena Columbia. He had several ships and about 5000
marines for his third attempt and almost captured the city. Imagine if England
and not Spain had the gold and jewels flowing from Central and South America.
History would have been very different - and that last battle could have gone
either way.

[1] Both times I have been in Cartagena, I heard someone refer to Sir Francis
Drake as a pirate. Personally, I have nothing against the guy :-)

~~~
mlinksva
He was a slaver. That's at least one thing to hold against him, to say the
least. Everything named after him should be renamed, all statues of him in
public places should be toppled.

~~~
AlexeyBrin
Why not re-write all history books in the name of today's political
correctness? If we don't like something just erase it.

~~~
mlinksva
I don't want to erase slavers from history books, only from positions of
honor. Stalin and Hitler should be remembered accurately, not honored. Same
for other slavers.

~~~
afarrell
I'm no fan of slavery, but far too many things are named after Columbus,
Washington, Caesar, Alexander and the others in history who have taken and
held slaves.

~~~
mlinksva
1 thing is 1 too many. All should be renamed. Yes, that's a lot of things.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
Nothing can ever be named after anyone then, because all humans are flawed.

~~~
solipsism
A silly straw man. No one said things should only be named after flawless
humans.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
Where does one draw the line then? Clinton has done plenty of awful stuff; I
can totally imagine that in the future plenty of people will name stuff after
her if she has a decent presidential term.

~~~
ubernostrum
No, because a while back we passed a law that all things must be named after
Reagan. I'm just waiting for the Ronald Reagan Memorial Lavatory to show up at
a highway rest stop...

------
DonaldFisk
English would be much more like Frisian/Dutch/Low German than it is now?

~~~
trengrj
Yeah I think the language change would have been the most interesting thing
out of this. So many French words came into English via the Normans.

~~~
caf
I have heard that this is why there is the dichotomy in modern English between
the words for meats and the animals from which they come, where the former
(eg. pork, compare modern French porc) tends to have a Norman origin and the
latter (eg. pig/swine, compare modern German Schwein) an Old English one.

~~~
rfrey
I've heard that too... the Norman aristocracy was eating the meat and using
Norman words (pork/porc, beef/boeuf) and the peasants were tending and raising
the animals in old English (pig, cow).

~~~
pygy_
Indeed, and you can add mutton( _mouton_ )/sheep and (to a lesser extent in
modern English) poultry( _poulet_ )/chicken to that list.

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scentoni
My favorite English history what-ifs are: 1\. What if Catherine of Aragon had
borne an heir to Henry VIII? England might have remained Catholic and been
spared a few bloody wars over religion and royal succession. Or maybe the
English Civil War would have started earlier. Certainly the balance of power
in Europe would have been different. 2\. What if Henry VIII's older brother
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur,_Prince_of_Wales](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur,_Prince_of_Wales)
had survived to become King Arthur?

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WalterBright
With the Butterfly Effect, one can't even speculate on the consequences of
stepping or not on a bug. If your parents had done anything the slightest bit
different before you were conceived, you'd be a different person entirely (1
sperm out of zillions).

In my own life, there are several rather obvious nexus points where if things
had gone slightly differently, the course of my life would have changed
dramatically and unpredictably.

------
joey_meyer
Dan Carlin has an episode[0] of Hardcore History on this exact topic. I highly
recommend it (along with the rest of the podcast).

[0] [http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-10-the-
wha...](http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-10-the-what-ifs-
of-1066/)

