The Norman Conquest was a cataclysm for the English people. After 1066, the country was clenched in a mailed fist. Castles, until then a rarity, sprang up everywhere. Many still stand, handsome and crenelated, their geographical situation advertising their grim purpose. For these were not defences against a foreign foe, but instruments of internal repression, from whose arrow-slits new proprietors peered out at a beaten people. Having put down the North with terrifying savagery, leaving stretches of country depopulated, William began to rule as an absolute monarch. Quite how absolute can be seen from his compilation, some years afterwards, of a comprehensive inventory of the kingdom he now possessed. For there was no question in his mind that England was his to do with as he would. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle put it: “So very thoroughly did he have the inquiry carried out that there was not a single hide of land, not even – it is shameful to record it, but it did not seem shameful to him to do it – not even one ox, nor one cow, nor one pig which escaped notice in his survey.” The resulting tome became known as the Domesday Book, for it was said that you might as well try to deceive God on the Day of Judgment as hide your goods or chattels from the king’s officers. William parcelled out almost the entire country among his mercenaries and liegemen. At least 92 per cent of England was owned by men who had been born on the other side of the Channel. Of more than 200 landowners who held their estates directly from the king, only two were Anglo-Saxons: Thorkell of Arden and Colswein of Lincoln. Equality before the law was forgotten as the new aristocracy settled down to enjoy its privileges. Men were required by law to work on their lord’s estates, and forbidden to leave without his permission. Englishness became, almost by definition, a badge of subjugation. Human nature being what it is, people soon began to adopt the names and manners of their overlords. On one English farm in 1114, records Peter Ackroyd, the workers were listed as being called Soen, Rainald, Ailwin, Lemar, Godwin, Ordric, Alric, Saroi, Ulviet and Ulfac. By the end of the century all those names had disappeared. The status of the defeated English is often illustrated with reference to the vocabulary of meat. The Anglophone farmer in the field used plain Saxon words for his livestock: cow, pig, sheep. But by the time these animals found their way onto his Norman master’s plate, they had acquired French-derived names: beef, pork, mutton. More telling, though, is the political vocabulary introduced under the Normans. Out go witan, folkmoot and folkright. In come fealty and homage, fief and vassal, villein and serf. The progress toward personal liberty, free contract and equal access to the common law was suspended. In the words of the early twelfth-century chronicler, Orderic Vitalis: “The English groaned aloud for their lost liberty and plotted ceaselessly to find some way of shaking off a yoke that was so intolerable and unaccustomed”. The idea of “throwing off the Norman yoke” was to animate English radicals for the next seven centuries. Civil War Roundheads spoke of struggling against “William’s lieutenants”, meaning that the landowners of their own time were heirs to the men who had expropriated the English. “Wurðe god se ende þonne God wylle”, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, lamenting the subjugation of 1066: May the end be good when God wills. The seventeenth century struggles may be seen – were seen by the key actors – as a belated reversal of the catastrophe. It is that reversal which truly deserves to be celebrated.