If you're open to a bit of interesting fiction, _The Wake_ by Paul Kingsnorth is a post apocalyptic novel set after the Norman invasion of 1066. Kingsnorth wrote the book in an invented version of old english:
Here's Kingsnorth writing about the consequences of the Norman invasion upon England today:
> [...] legacies of 1066 remain with us. Take that law enacted by Guillaume in 1067. In Anglo-Saxon England, the idea that one man — the king — literally owned the entire landbase of the nation would have been unthinkable. Today, it remains a legal reality: England is still owned, as a whole, by the Crown. The hereditary monarchy introduced by the Normans remains too, and the French concept known as ‘primogeniture’ — in which estates are inherited wholesale by the first-born son, rather than parceled out between children as was more common in Anglo-Saxon England
> [...] Today, Britain is the country with the second most unequal distribution of land on Earth, after Brazil. More than 70 per cent of the land is owned by fewer than two per cent of the population. Much of this is directly traceable to Guillaume, whose 22nd-great-granddaughter sits on the English throne today.
> [...] ask yourself whether the development of early modern capitalism in England would have been possible without that concentration of land, and therefore power and wealth. What about the consequent empire? Did the industrial revolution begin in England because that funnel of power and money made it possible? Or what about class, which is directly connected to all of those things? We are still one of the most socially and economically stratified countries in Europe. In today’s England, the rulers still drink wine and the ‘plebs’ still drink beer, just as they did in 1066.
> [...] The Duke dealt with this problem in characteristic style: with violence. He marched his army up through the south-east, burning, looting and raping. He circled London, burnt Southwark to the ground and then marched west, brutalising the populations of Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Middlesex, and Hertfordshire.
Quite, some good old fashioned respect for the rule of law there...
The Wake is an exceptional book. It introduced me to the fact that Welsh meant slave in old English. It also led me to wonder whether the British trait of forelock tugging or deference to a supposed upper class was really just “colonization of the mind”.
Come come old chap, you don't get to be editor of an esteemed organ like the Daily Torygraph by cultivating self-awareness, irony, or other kinds of flim-flammery.
I'd love to know how they think William came to acquire that property.