Balder Ex-Libris

Authors : Nugent John
Title : The Normans Blessing or Curse ?
Year : 2013

Link download : Nugent_John_-_The_Normans_Blessing_or_Curse.zip

IT HAS BEEN NEARLY 500 YEARS NOW since anyone, with open military force, successfully conquered the English, a fierce and resolute white mixture of Germanics with a dash of Kelts and pre-Indo-Europeans. The Spanish armada, Napoleon Bonaparte and others all failed to defeat the “Sceptered Isle.” But back in 1066, a group of people, a mixture of French and Scandinavian origin, called Normans (fromthe French word for “Northmen”), slew the English nobility and its common soldiers at Hastings, just days after the English army had rushed south from defeating an invasion by Danish Vikings in northern England. The Normans were descended from Norse people who had settled in Neustria (today called Normandy) in the 9th and 10th centuries and adopted the Gallo-Romance language of Old French, spoken there by the natives, while retaining a fair amount of Norse vocabulary. The new language is called “French Norman” by linguists. The Viking settlers of Normandy took up the native French way of life almost completely. The French themselves were a mixture of Germanic Frankish invaders with an underlying Romanized population of Kelts, known as Gauls. After invading England, a new dialect evolved there, called “Anglo-Norman.” Hastings was the catastrophic end of purely Anglo- Saxon England—of its original language, its Germanic culture and its semi-isolation fromthe troubles of the European mainland and of the world. Ever since that October day in 1066, Normans and the Jewish immigrants they brought in have played a large role in England’s leadership. Were they a blessing or a curse, or both ? ...