I continue to do persona work for the Challenge and because I get a kick out of it. Always a good combination. Presently I’m reading a list of books on English life just before, during and after the Conquest. I set my persona 35 years after the Conquest (to @1100) because I didn’t want to be an oppressed and depressed people, thank you very much. But it’s still recent enough that the Normans are not fully assimilated yet and my Anglo-Saxon self has to take care.

BTW, one of the most interesting things I’m reading is about how very quickly the Normans did assimilate. Essentially “Englishness” won out by a century after the Conquest. Historian Hugh M. Thomas writes:

“The bitterness between the English and Normans lingered well into the twelfth century. Yet by the end of the twelfth century this hostile state of affairs was altered beyond recognition. Ethnic distinctions had broken down to the point that one could not know who was English and who was Norman. Although Norman French continued to be spoken, at least as a second language, until the fourteenth century, and though English society absorbed a tremendous amount of Continental culture, the aristocracy of England, descended in large measure from the conquerors, came to identify itself firmly as English.

“By the time of the Magna Carta revolt, rebels and then royalists attempted to use anti-foreign and especially anti- French sentiment as a rallying cry, and there remained a strong pro-English, xenophobic streak throughout thirteenth-century English politics. Despite the bitter warfare and deep hostility that marked relations in the decades immediately following the conquest, the two peoples merged quite quickly. Despite Norman victory and the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the conquerors, English identity triumphed.”

The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity, 1066-C. 1220. Hugh M. Thomas. Oxford University Press (2005)