Thanks Bull Snipe.
Posted on 10/14/2017 8:50:32 AM PDT by Bull Snipe
The last successful forceful invasion of England.
Now a successful slow invasion is taking place, one moslem at a time.
Also Eisenhower’s bday, too.
...agree at the end, they are ‘transitioning’ as we type. But most people still think of the England of 50 years ago...very, very, sad.
He has also always been known as William the Bastard, as well as William the Usurper, and William the Conqueror. When I was in school in the 1960s and 70s, no teacher would have used the term “bastard” in a classroom. In addition, I very much doubt that we learned anything about that era in Britain.
The Bastard’s son William II was known as William Rufus (”the Ruddy”; also had a hot temper, one of his buddies ‘accidentally’ shot him while a group of them were out hunting). The third king of the dynasty was Henry I (long reign), and the fourth and last of the House of Normandy was Stephen, who reign is known as “the anarchy”, a period when the so-called nobility were distracted from their usual activities beating and harassing the commoners and were instead beating and harassing each other.
The death of King Harold was the end of very interesting but now somewhat unfamiliar time, and what followed was the imposition of brutal foreign occupation and rule. Not long after the Norman conquest, Cavanaugh, one of the kings in one of the Irish kingdoms, asked for some Norman help against another Irish kingdom, and that presence went from then through the 20th century — the 21st, if one considers the six counties of Northern Ireland.
Alfred the Great (the only “the Great” among all British kings) did what he did of course, but of the Anglo-Saxon period kings, probably my favorite, fightinest king, was Aethelstan. He beat a lot of foreign asses and was a pretty good ruler, y’know, for an absolute monarch.
Thanks Bull Snipe.
I wonder if that could be true. i don't think they had firearms in 1100AD in England.
looks like first recorded use of firearms was around 1300.
first govt attempt to confiscate them: 1301....
It’s good to be the king.. I mean Duke!
Actually there was a successful (in a sense!) invasion of England by the French it was during the civil war called “The Barons War”. It was a war over King John’s refusal to acknowledge the Magna Carta. A future French King - Louis VIII backed the barons, landed with an army to support them and captured London and was crowned king there. He had a fair amount of support. In those days the difference between an Englishman & a Frenchman was mostly location. However he eventually got kicked out. The British don’t like to mention that this little slip up happened.
You’ve heard of shooting an arrow, I suspect.
The Roman army had artillery, but it didn’t use gunpowder.
Also, Henry II, founder of the Angevin dynasty, landed an army and kept it in England as negotiations were under way for some kind of agreement over the succession — until the designated heir to the throne died, at which time the House of Normandy came to an appropriately ignominious end.
Yep! All sort of brushed under the rug by popular British history.
except it is a lot harder to accidentally shoot someone with an arrow.
. Historical references show artillery was first employed by the Roman legions at Syracuse in 399 BC,[citation needed] well before the Christian era. Until the introduction of gunpowder into western warfare, artillery was dependent upon mechanical energy which not only severely limited the kinetic energy of the projectiles, it also required the construction of very large engines to store sufficient energy. A 1st-century BC Roman catapult launching 6.55 kg (14.4 lb) stones achieved a kinetic energy of 16,000 joules, compared to a mid-19th-century 12-pounder gun, which fired a 4.1 kg (9.0 lb) round, with a kinetic energy of 240,000 joules, or a late 20th century US battleship that fired a 1,225 kg (2,701 lb) projectile from its main battery with an energy level surpassing 350,000,000 joules.
Not if it’s a crossbow. And it may have been an assassination.
He was known as William I; William the Conquerer; William the Bastard; the first Norman King of England.
The crossbow is portrayed as a hunting weapon on four Pictish stones from early medieval Scotland (6th to 9th centuries): St. Vigeans no. 1, Glenferness, Shandwick, and Meigle.[49] The use of crossbows in European warfare is again evident from the Battle of Hastings until about the year 1500. They almost completely superseded hand bows in many European armies in the 12th century for a number of reasons.
In modern tests, longbows showed a higher rate of shot than crossbows of the same energy, due to the difficulty of the shooter in handling the mechanical parts for loading in the same time as the bow was pulled. With lots of training, a longbowman can achieve a high degree of accuracy that is comparable to the much steeper learning curve in aimed shooting with the crossbow. Despite strength training, there are physical limits to the longbow, unlike the crossbow, which can store several times the energy, but will be less efficient in translating stored into kinetic energy due to the thicker spring material.
There is no record from the Middle Ages comparing longbowmen and crossbowmen shooting in one army from a similar position, although such occasions are known with visiting Englishmen in the Baltic and Scots in the French army.
In the armies of Europe,[50] mounted and unmounted crossbowmen, often mixed with slingers, javelineers and archers, occupied a central position in battle formations. Usually they engaged the enemy in offensive skirmishes before an assault of mounted knights. Crossbowmen were also valuable in counterattacks to protect their infantry. The rank of commanding officer of the crossbowmen corps was one of the highest positions in any army of this time. Along with polearm weapons made from farming equipment, the crossbow was also a weapon of choice for insurgent peasants such as the Taborites.
Mounted knights armed with lances proved ineffective against formations of pikemen combined with crossbowmen whose weapons could penetrate most knights’ armor. The invention of pushlever and ratchet drawing mechanisms enabled the use of crossbows on horseback, leading to the development of new cavalry tactics. Knights and mercenaries deployed in triangular formations, with the most heavily armored knights at the front. Some of these riders would carry small, powerful all-metal crossbows of their own. Crossbows were eventually replaced in warfare by more powerful gunpowder weapons, although early guns had slower rates of fire and much worse accuracy than contemporary crossbows. Later, similar competing tactics would feature harquebusiers or musketeers in formation with pikemen (pike and shot), pitted against cavalry firing pistols or carbines.
Thanks!
The battles of Crecy (1346, the Plague first struck Britain in 1348) and Agincourt (1415) were both in large part due to the English proficiency with the (Welsh) Longbow.
The longbow has been said to be one of the casualties of the Black Death — breakdown of the feudal economy led to wage labor, which in turn led to the hoi polloi using the new income to, basically, go shopping, instead of practicing their archery.
This was one of those mixed blessing events
I’m a Wessex Saxon of over half my DNA
But I acknowledge the Normans were more organized and formidable
But they got usurped by Saxon ovaries in the long run
Besides Danelaw ovaries already had a foothold two hundred years before Rollo cousins killed poor Harold
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