What is the significance of Hastings? Can you elaborate on how the current world is influenced by the Normans?
Sir, what would be your view on this? I have little information on this so yours and Austerlitz's views would be very welcome.
The language you are posting in
In WWI the Germans knock out the Russians ( The also played a big part in Russia becoming the "Soviet Union."
Could you kindly elaborate, what would have happened if King Harold had won? What would be different then?
These excursions into parallel history, the history of what might have been, are always slippery constructs, liable to slip out of one's mental grip and fall and shatter into a thousand little pieces on encountering some fact somewhere else which had not been taken into account. They are also quite worthless, of course. What happened, happened, and is not going to un-happen anytime.
When William beat Harold, William gained an extra centre of power, which he and his descendants built into a platform for conquering the rest of the British Isles, more or less. That gave them a firm base from which to look at the rest of the world, and to decide where to be seen and to be heard. They were secure, far more than they would have been in Normandy.
They also built a military power; the combination of French, or rather Norman-French panache and Anglo-Saxon phlegm seems to have amalgamated into a very potent fighting combination. As someone somewhere said, the Europeans scored over the rest of the world because of their mastery of organised violence.
They had a strong incentive to go to the sea, as a nation. I am told that no part of Britain is very far from the sea; some accounts say 72 miles, some say 90. At any rate, enough so that there is a fad in Britain that to be seen messing around in little boats over a weekend is seen to be very 'in', very normal activity. Just think how many Indians would voluntarily get into a boat and sail out, in spite of the enormous length of coast that we have. Or Pakistani, considering that they have a stretch from the Rann of Kutch right out to the Iranian coast. Or Bangladesh, considering that we were practically a nation floating on water.
One of the main products of Britain was wool, grown on sheep, grazed on large fields, and processed through complex processes, a vital product in the cold of northern Europe. The need to control this, the animals, the fields, laws of land tenure, the competition between farm and field, the processing of wool, first, by manual means, next, by machine-processing, exports, dealing with commercial transactions at home and abroad, the participation in the deployment of capital into trade, shipping, to carry product, created a rich environment for agricultural, industrial, commercial, financial, maritime, legislative and administrative growth.
There was nothing like this in Normandy. Nothing closer than Brabant, and it is noteworthy that the Dutch, and their neighbours, the Brabanters whom we call Belgians today, were the closest to the British in history, for years, till the British finally broke away and raced ahead only a couple of hundred years ago.
Mastery of the British Isles also meant having to deal with fishing as an industry, and with similar results as for the wool trade. It forced development in ship-building, in seamanship, in fishing agreements and treaties and laws of the sea, in processing of fish, in trade in fish, in oceanography, and in navigation. Britain shared this environment with many other nations in Europe, and the distinctive advantages, or features of Britain's position need to be thought through carefully, by comparison with other fishing nations. This is a task on its own.
The ability to settle the laws of a kingdom on their own, without being constantly subjected to interference by neighbouring monarchs, was another very significant factor behind the rise of Britain, and Hastings initiated the process, by forcing a review of land-holding and of the ownership of land, and the loyalties of those owners. No other major kingdom in Europe really got this chance, not even the de Hautevilles in Sicily, who were subject to interference from almost everybody with an idle six months on their hands. It is interesting to note that common law in Britain was influenced by fiqh law, which came in from Sicily.
I would not like to tie a ribbon around these random facts and present a neat, well-packaged conclusion, because that is really not possible. However, these points might provoke the reader to read more about Britain on his or her own, which will be a Good Thing.
