Replies

This is a misconception.

The Norsemen arrived on the coast of Armorica in the early 900s, and were granted a fief there by the King of France in 911. They were vassals of the French King. Unruly vassals, to be sure. But then, there were no kings anywhere outside of Byzantium who had any centralized control. The Norsemen owed their fealty to the French King and were given a fief in the land.

Had the conquest of England happened at that time, it would have indeed been a Viking conquest of England.

But there is an important piece of that story which is missing, and which changes everything.

The Vikings who landed in Armorica were overwhelmingly MEN. Pagan warrior men. They did not load up their boats with the comely pagan women of Scandinavia and sail to the coast of France. They landed, like Spaniards in Mexico, and they stayed. Unlike the Spaniards in Mexico, they did not take the French capital. The French King, to buy peace, gave the Vikings a fief in exchange for a theoretical suzereinty over these pagan Viking men.
But that was 911.

The Norman Conquest of England was in 1066, one hundred and fifty-five (155) years later. What happened in that intervening century and a half?

Well, what DIDN'T happen was a mass migration of Scandinavian women into Armorica. And absent that, the Vikings would have ceased to exist in one generation.

What happened was that the Viking men of 900 married French, Catholic women. The Viking men went off to war: that what Vikings did, and well too. But their wives and children were in Armorica. And their CHILDREN were not Vikings. They were half French. Their mothers were French. Also, tellingly, their religion was not the pillars of Wotan, but Catholicism. And their language was not Norse, but French. That takes us to about 940. Then the next generation came. Still no Scandinavian women. Now men who are half-Viking and half-French, with their fathers' taste for battle and bravery, but their mothers' religion, language, and manners of court, married French women. Their children were 3/4ths French and 1/4 Viking. Both their parents spoke French, were Catholic, and had Catholic manners of court. That takes us to 970.

Then they married, and the kids became 1/8 Viking and 7/8ths French by blood, more or less, but were 100% French by language, courtly customs, food, and religion. And all still vassals of the French King.
They preserved, of course, the particularly militaristic organization of their Viking roots. But they were not Vikings at all in any sense of the word. Actually, they FOUGHT against Viking raiders.
That takes us to 1000.

Cycle two more generations, and we are at 1066. The men are French speaking, have French customs and cultural mores and law. They hate paganism and are fired up with Catholic zeal (the Vikings are still pagans at that time). They kill Vikings who come ashore. They have peculiar organized military customs of Normandy which are not like the rest of France, but Normandy looks NOTHING like Norway in any sense: different language, different religion, different mores, different food, different laws, different customs and beliefs.

The Normans were proud of being Norman, and Norman was a very distinct and dangerous breed of Frenchman (much like a Texan is, because of his history and culture, a very distinct and dangerous breed of American), but after 6 generations and 155 years he is no more a Viking than someone whose great, great, great, great, great grandpa who fled Prussia to come to America is a German.
The Norman piece of France had its own nobility, of the lineage of the Viking men who settled there. And their own tough military customs. But this was France.

What happened to the Vikings in France is what happened to the Germanic Franks before them, or all of the invaders of China: male warriors settled and were culturally absorbed.

As to Normans not being "French", none of the French are "French". All of the pieces of France are some other ethnic culture subsumed into a French norm. The East is Germanic. The Northeast is Flemish. The South is Italian or Catalan, The Center and Britanny are Celtic and ethnically more Irish than Latin. Normandy descends from a mixture of French women and Viking men, with French culture, language, and religion completely absorbing Norse culture, language and religion.

The only thing "Norse" about the Normans by 1066 was the proclivity for war.
Normans are still aware of their origins. I am Norman myself. But Normandy is France, and it was France in 1066. The invaders of England spoke French. They had the laws and mannerisms of the French court, not Scandinavia.
Their religion was Catholicism, not sacred poles and Odin. And William was a vassal of the King of France.
He ended up being the French King's RICHEST vassal, and ultimately the 100 years war was about the English-French aristocracy trying to gain possession of the whole of the rest of France. But that age was before nation states. If you asked a Kentish Saxon, or a peasant in Brittany, or a German orchard tender in Swabia what he was, the Saxon would not have said "a Saxon" or "an Englishman", and the Breton or the Parisian would not have said "a Frenchman", and the Swabian certainly would not have said "a German" or even "a Swabian". They would have all answered "a Christian". And if you asked them about politics, they would have told you who was their lord and who was their king. If you asked a Norman in 1066, he would have called himself a Christian (and he would have said it in French). He would have said that his lord was Duke William, and that his King was whoever the French king in Paris was.

Modern nationalism didn't exist. The Norman conquest was not a French political conquest of a political nation, England. It was a noble political conquest of Norman-French nobles over Anglo-Saxon nobles that resulted in a cultural conquest of England.

The extent of that political conquest is visible by dissecting this very sentence and noting the number of French words that predominate in it.