In 1066 Duke William of Normandy landed at Pevensey Bay in East Sussex, and killed Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon king, at the battle of Hastings. England was conquered. Two meteors had collided. Edmund Burke called it ‘the great era of our laws’ when the poor stream of English jurisprudence was replenished ‘as from a mighty flood’. Later, F. W. Maitland, our pre-eminent legal historian, in a memorable phrase stated that ‘the Norman conquest is a catastrophe which determines the whole future of English law’.

Well was it and did it? Yes and no. The effects of the Norman Conquest are debated to this day. Certainly immigration, insemination and assimilation were nothing new. The Normans were the last in a long line of conquering invaders, from the Romans, through the Anglo-Saxons themselves, to the Vikings. They themselves were only just French, having been Norse raiders – or ‘pirates’ – until the early tenth century when they were granted settlement rights in what became the Duchy of Normandy. Nor were they strangers to England. Edward the Confessor's mother was Norman – she was William's great-aunt – Edward himself spent his youth in Normandy, and Norman clerics already held some ecclesiastical positions in England.

William ‘the Conqueror’ is somewhat misnamed, and it is not an appellation coined in his time – contemporaries called him ‘the Bastard’.