What Really Happened Inside an English Village the Week the Normans Arrived | History for Sleep

The Norman Conquest is usually remembered as a single afternoon on a Sussex hill in October 1066, an arrow, a fallen king and a new age beginning overnight. The record tells a different story. Historians describe a late Anglo-Saxon England of thegns, ceorls and reeves that had already lived through months of coastal watch, a strained harvest and an invasion in the north before the fleet of William, Duke of Normandy, landed at Pevensey on 28 September 1066.Across this long, quiet narration you will hear about the ordinary Sussex village of the late Anglo-Saxon period: thatched timber and wattle houses with open central hearths, ale as a daily drink, pottage and coarse bread, and woodland pigs fattened on acorns and beech mast in the Weald under the custom of pannage before the November slaughter the English called Blotmonath. West Saxon law set a wergild, a man's legal price, of 200 shillings for a free ceorl and 1,200 for a thegn, while rents and the church's dues fell around Michaelmas on 29 September. The fyrd, the shire levy, had guarded the south coast from early summer until King Harold Godwinson stood it down on 8 September, and many fighting men then rode north to defeat Harald Hardrada of Norway at Stamford Bridge on 25 September. Halley's Comet, seen across England in April 1066, was widely read as an omen.This picture comes from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the law codes of the English kings, charters and estate surveys, archaeological excavation of village sites, and the Bayeux Tapestry, an embroidered account roughly 70 metres long. The fullest record is Domesday Book of 1086, which surveyed more than 13,000 places and noted their value in the time of King Edward and after the Conquest, marking a number of manors around Hastings as waste.From the swine herds of the Weald to the Roman walls of Pevensey, this video separates the historical Anglo-Saxon village of 1066 from the legend around it.