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:’) The Normans tried the same thing as the Saxons had before them (uh, whoops, see that article on Anglo-Saxon genocide of the Britons), but only managed to replace the ruling class. A good many of Harold’s lords lay dead on the field of Senlac (the other name for the Battle of Hastings; the actual site of the battlefield is overlooked by the Battle Abbey, if memory serves), and the countryside was recarved into fiefs to reward William’s henchmen. One of the big genealogy kicks in the 19th century US was to look for ancestors who sailed over with the Conqueror. Some of my ancestors may or may not have (don’t really care) — but most of ‘em didn’t, and were good old solid rural farmers for dozens of generations, at least, by the time 1066 rolled around.

William’s son was an even bigger a-hole than his dad; he died in a “hunting accident”, shot (I think) by his “friend” who claimed he thought “Rufus” was a deer or some crap. The House of Normandy was just four kings long, and wound up degenerating as one would expect of an extended family of cutthroats, with a civil war between Wm I’s grandkids. The Conqueror’s granddaughter never ruled per se, but gave birth to the first of the Plantagenets, which itself wound up riven into Lancaster and York branches, and spent 35 years fighting the Wars of the Roses.

Anyway, in 1215 at Runnymede, King John, a politically incompetent and weak king, was forced to sign the Magna Carta by rebellious barons allied with the King of France. It sez here he later got the Pope to approve his own repudiation of the treaty, signed as it was under duress, and he tried to pick off the barons one by one. He died, and the Magna Carta (a small trickle of Roman imperial law) endures as the foundation of English common law and our own legal traditions.

The use of French language at court was one result of the Conquest; that continued for a long while, perhaps until Henry VII (first of the Tudors and another usurper), dunno. The struggle with France over the French crown went on for over a hundred years (still call it the Hundred Years War though ;’) and one idea I’ve seen repeated here and there is that the end of the HYW led to homecoming for loads of British professional soldiers, who were then idle, out of work, and highly skilled at pretty much just one thing; this surplus of armed veterans helped lead to the Wars of the Roses.

The English language remained the common tongue, and despite having royal houses from France, various parts of what is now Germany, and whatnot, English (with plenty of grammar and loanwords from Latin and French and others) wound up the way it is today, and the aristocracy — which is often at least party of Norman descent — is just a slowing withering appendix.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_England

[snip] Winston Churchill summarised the legacy of John’s reign: “When the long tally is added, it will be seen that the British nation and the English-speaking world owe far more to the vices of John than to the labours of virtuous sovereigns”. [end]