The Enslavement of the Anglo-Saxons
When the Normans conquered England, it was not simply a change of leadership regime, but a complete paradigm shift. Christianity had, of course, found its way to England well before the Norman invasion. However, the Anglo-Saxons maintained an overtly Germanic cultural worldview which retained many of the aforementioned values. Indeed, their Christian practice consisted of a large number of pagan beliefs and practices simply modified with Christian imagery. Scholar Karen Louis Jolly says, ‘This is Christianity succeeding by way of acculturation and Germanic culture triumphing in transformation’ (Jolly, 11). This example is congruent with James C. Russell’s research presented in his book, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, which discusses just how ‘Germanized’ Christianity had to be in order to be accepted initially by the Teutonic people.
The Normans were more strictly in line with the Roman Church and brought drastic changes to institutionally accepted theological perspective with them. Whereas the clergy had been comparatively more in line with the worldview of the common folk in the Anglo-Saxon era, Jolly says that ‘As the intellectual development of Christian doctrine increased in complexity with the advent of scholasticism in the twelfth century, the gap between the formal and the popular widened, causing some previously acceptable popular practices to appear ridiculous in the eyes of the new rationalists’ (Jolly, 26). She is speaking specifically of religious practice, but I argue that this is a direct result of, and in correlation with, the new Norman hierarchical structure which applied to both the religious and secular spheres. What she describes is a vast chasm between the elites and the common folk, which is precisely the scenario we encounter in the Robin Hood legend. She also describes a religious parallel to the secular example of the Norman nobility scoffing at cultural customs of the Anglo-Saxons – and, of course, we know that in the High Middle Ages the line between the religious and secular spheres was virtually non-existent.
https://arktos.com/2018/10/17/nothing-new-under-the-sun-elite-driven-social-engineering-and-the-norman-conquest/
