As a man of Kent I would like to point out we were never conquered, we were clever enough to see the writing on the wall and welcomed the Norsemen (sits nicer with me than calling them French) into England
1) Angles and Saxons were from what is now Germany. One bunch went north to what is now Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia. Another lot went west to Britain
2) The Scandinavian Saxons in time became the Norse men (North men), who went among other places, south to northern France. And also, after a bit of rape and pillaging in Britain, they found they liked doing that so much they ended up staying.
3) The French Norseman got fed up eating frogs legs and omelettes, so nipped across the channel for a traditional Sunday roast. And so the poor old Brits got done in again.
In conclusion: So in time the Brits, having got their land back after Roman Britain declined in debauchery and bankruptcy (like most governments, I suppose),got invaded by Saxons (Germans).
Then the Saxons got invaded by 2nd-generation Saxons (VIkings).
Then the Saxons and Viking collaboration got overan by 2nd generation Vikings (Normans), who happened to be 3rd generation Saxons. Bit of a triple whammy there for the Saxons against the poor old Brits.
No wonder Alfred burnt the cakes, Edward Confessed and Harold got an arrow in the eye. I blame Germany.
Bad - the French won away from home. It's obviously the home fixtures they struggle with like, Agincourt, Crecy and the other fixture when ground-sharing in Belgium at Waterloo.
Thought the Battle of Hastings was between mods and rockers. Seeing as Battle is soon to be my local town then I'm glad it happened. Great fireworks celebrations too.
Incredible coincidence that it happened in a place called Battle!
This is an extract from a speech given by the late Julian Rathbone years ago, which says what I think much more eloquently than I'm able to. He's also written a great novel about the Norman invasion called "The Last English King"
"The English. There are two strands in Englishness which I believe achieved a sort of uneasy meld, uneasy because of the basic contradictions between them, by about 1450, and remain dominant right down to present times. They derive from two cultures.
First, the Anglo-Saxon-Danish. The Anglo-Saxons were teutonic, Germanic. When their conquest of what we now call England began they were a split culture - the males were warriors and focussed on their leader or king. Women lived in an almost separate realm where they were powerful and respected. It is arguable that the Freudian conflict between war and work on one side and hearth and sex on the other was not entirely resolved. On the male side at least obedience and loyalty were the most highly-rated virtues.
"The Danes, whose more or less assimilated descendants amounted to at least a third of the population by 1066 but had their own traditions and laws, the Danelaw, were also a warrior culture but perhaps based on smaller units whose size was circumscribed by the number of men in a long-boat. They valued individualism and individual feats more then the Anglo-Saxons did, individual pride over-rode a loyalty that could become servile in the Anglo-Saxons.
The political organisations of both retained strong traditions of a democracy an anarchist like Peter Kropotkin would have found congenial. A sort of mutual-aid ran through village-based society, moots or meetings at all levels took decisions after endless discussion, all principal offices including kingship were elective, and so on...
Then came the Normans who were, and are, like their leader, bastards. It is true that they were descended from Norsemen who had arrived in northern France a hundred or so years earlier, but during that hundred years they had lost their language and most of their way of life. If I may interpose a thought here, I think historians generally have failed to make enough of the effects of intermarriage between conquerors and conquered. Conquerors rarely bring their women with them and certainly never enough women. The Danes arrived in England and intermarried into a culture that in many ways was significantly similar to the one they brought with them, and they thus retained much of their own identity. The Normans, from the same roots, arrived in a France where the culture was very different, and within a hundred years no longer lived, nor even looked much like the Norsemen they were descended from.
Following 1066 the Normans imposed a rigid hierarchical, ethnically-based authoritarian bureaucracy on the anarcho-democratic systems they found. They were anal, dull, cruel. They practised ethnic cleansing in the West Country and South Yorkshire, in the latter case reducing a well-populated, prosperous area to what the Doomsday book itself, twenty years later, called a barren wasteland. They did not assimilate. Laws were not written in English until the 1390s, and the first postconquest king to speak English easily was Henry V. Imagine Germany had won the last war. It is as if the official language would not revert from German to English until 2,300.
However, the Normans were few in number, not more than 10,000 initially, maybe less, and they brought few women with them. They therefore relied on Anglo-Saxon collaborators to fill the minor posts of government and the lower echelons of the church, and to some extent they interbred - initially by rape.
The result of 1066 is the English: two, possibly three conflicting strands which I believe are with us today and make us what we are. On the one side individuality and the rights of the individual are more highly valued here than almost anywhere else in the world. Most of us object to government, do not respect politicians, hate and fear bureaucratic interference. We are hedonistic, pragmatic, empirical, pluralist, hate dogma. We like a good time. We do not understand spirituality because we reject the duality that is a precondition of the concept of spirituality. We are Roger Bacon, William of Occam, John Wycliffe, Jack Cade, Wat Tyler and the Lollards; Langland, Milton and the Levellers; Blake, Tom Paine and the Chartists; Turner and Darwin. We are lager louts and we hate the French. We are adventurers. We believe a change is as good as a rest.
On the other side we are Normans. We are superior, we rule by right, we obey the rules, though we congratulate each other when we get away with breaking them. We are one of us. We are control freaks. We are bossy. We like systems so long as we are in charge of them. We march, we do not amble, we fire as one and not at will, and we take our hands out of our pockets when we speak to me. We tabulate, order, divide. We are deeply prejudiced (God is an Englishman - a Norman actually) and intolerant.
And worst of all, somewhere in between, we are collaborators- In exchange for security, a certain status, we will keep order for the Normans, we fear change, we are tidy, we clip our hedges, we keep off the grass (pun intended), we do as we're told.
With these contradictory strands, no wonder we don't know who we are, but I believe, in spite of 1066, we are at best Vikings with some of the stolidity, reliability, even dullness of the Anglo-Saxons, and, well, pardon my Anglo-Saxon, fuck the Normans and the collaborators. I really do believe that at last, like the House of Lords, they've had their day."
The Normans ethnically cleansed England ------------they imposed French language on us ( most words re government are from the French) they slaughtered villages and whole areas of the North. The tore down churchs and built their won on the rubble, St Paulinus at Crayford is one example.
The English dead at Hastings were left to rot and not buried for 8 years, There is no real grave for Harold the last Englisg King as they chopped his body up and threw it on the heap of the dead.
A decade ago the time of the Saxons was still called the dark ages --- barbarians with no culture. Now they realise how wrong they are and its one of the fast areas of historical research. Strange how once aboriginals had a "rich oral history" yet the Saxons who also had a mainly oral story telling tradition were "barbarians" ?
Agincourt where Saxon archers saved Nornan bollox was fought in October.
Oh Dear. Someone in our family has traced our origins back to the Normans: two brothers who came over with William and settled in the west country. There's a plaque commemorating the life of one of them in Truro cathedral. Didn't realise they were such a bloodthirsty lot Sorry everybody.
It was nearly 1000 years ago. I don't think many of us can realistically identify with the English at Hastings, however convenient it might be for an anti-French rant (and Aboriginies, apparently).
The BBC is reporting that a new book by Nick Austin Secrets Of The Norman Invasion is claiming that it was actually the Battle of Crowhurst. So, will Crowhurst change it's name to Battle and what will Battle now be called? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15305391
sorry so now its not 25% of the archers at Agincourt were Welsh its all the Longbow men were Welsh-------------------sorry still laughing.
Still lets also miss the point about aboriginals having a "great oral tradition " and the Saxon oral tradition meaning they were Barbarians---- indeed your correct next time we hear aboriginal cultures discribed as " a rich oral tradition" please do try your luck by calling them barbarians with no culture !!
Of course we shouldnt identify with the Saxons at Hastings ------- i mean that might actually be a search for what ever our actual "English"culture was . That cant be right i mean thats to silly isnt it ----- i mean next someone will be writing a book called Roots or something.
That was a great read Jints, and very interesting.
Enjoyed your comments, Oggy, but I must be a bit of a pedant....as a Kentish man (born in SE London, therefore north and west of the Medway) I would traditionally have been of Saxon origin. Those born south and east of the Medway are supposed to be of Jutish extraction. Now, these people (of Hengist & Horsa fame) were arguably the first Englishmen as they were the first to conquer what is now England (they landed at Pegwell bay and you can see a replica of one of their longboats there donated as a gift by the Danish government after the war) and establish a Germanic kingdom, namely the ancient and glorious Kingdom of Kent, within which our beloved Valley historically falls. They came from Jutland in northern Denmark, hence the name. They also later settled in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.
The most recent genetic studies intriguing suggest that Germanic peoples were actually here when the Romans arrived, although it is hard to estimate what proportion of the population they made up - but they appeared to have many of the same markers as the modern Dutch, if I remember rightly. Further studies will spread more light on this, but other possibilities point to the possibility of a Basque rather than 'Celtic' origin for many of the earlier inhabitants of the British Isles.....very interesting. There is a lot more of this story to come and the waters have been muddied by political interpretations of the availabe evidence (I'm looking at you, Stephen Oppenheimer).
Did 1066 matter? At the time, we were arguably the most prosperous and peaceful country in Europe (following an awful lot of aggro). You have to wonder how the course of history might have been different if those in the shield wall hadn't got carried away and charged down at the Normans they thought were in complete disarray....I guess we'll never know!
Still lets also miss the point about aboriginals having a "great oral tradition " and the Saxon oral tradition meaning they were Barbarians---- indeed your correct next time we hear aboriginal cultures discribed as " a rich oral tradition" please do try your luck by calling them barbarians with no culture !!
Of course we shouldnt identify with the Saxons at Hastings ------- i mean that might actually be a search for what ever our actual "English"culture was . That cant be right i mean thats to silly isnt it ----- i mean next someone will be writing a book called Roots or something.
Yes I expect that you are right about the Saxons' culture being underplayed GH, and that inferring that they were barbarians is probably grossly unfair. The trouble is we don't really know. People whose culture is only transmitted orally don't get to write history, so their side goes largely unheard. Given that there are no written records of Saxon times until Bede some 300 years after they settled, it is hard to say with any great accuracy what their culture was really like. But it must be tempting for historians to see the move from Roman culture to Saxon culture as a step backwards if for no other reason than because the written record was lost.
There are two big differences with aboriginal cultures which lead to them being described as rich whilst the Saxon's culture isn't (or even, whilst the Saxons' cultures aren't ). Firstly, we have witnessed those cultures first hand; anthropologists have gone to great lengths to live with, talk with and study various aboriginal people. So there is no doubt that they have a rich culture. Secondly, many aboriginal people are still living and it would, of course, be highly insulting to insinuate that some other person's culture somehow has less value than our own. There is no such stigma in critiquing what is known of Saxon culture or even dumbing-down what we don't know about it, because the Saxons are dead. Sure there are people that descended from them, you'll probably be one, so will I. But It's not quite the same, is it?
Should we identify with the Saxons at Hastings? First of all I'd query why anyone would want to. What can we learn about ourselves by looking at what people did back then? Practically every aspect of our lives today is different to their lives. They had a caste structure that included a form of slavery; we have capitalism. They led a rural existence; ours it predominantly urban. They lived either in long shared halls or in grubenhäuser (depending on your historian); we live in increasingly small houses partitioned into smaller rooms. Their chief means of transport was on foot, though they could sail and had animals for heavy transportation; we have cars, trains, buses etc. They would have eaten a fairly fixed diet based on certain animals and seasonal crops; we have a varied diet with foodstuffs (and cuisines) imported from around the globe; they worshipped several gods imported from Europe; we have imported middle eastern monotheism, or no god at all. They were great chess players; we are great Playstation players. They spoke a language that would be barely intelligible to us! In short, we have for far more in common with some bloke sitting in a flat in Tokyo, with whom most of us would not be able to converse, than we do with the people who may be our direct ancestors.
The second reason I'd query it, is to ask why this particular group of people? The Victorians, Edwardians and Tudors all occupied the same physical space as us, they all passed on their genes to us, and they have passed on their culture to us in ways that are far more tangible than the Saxons. And yet, if people were to outwardly associate themselves with one of these groups they'd be laughed at. It seems to me the big difference comes precisely from that distance in time. From romantic notions that these are people that came from over the sea to be here. From the fact that actually we don't know that much about them. And, of course, we like the idea that our swear words largely derive from them.
The third reason is that it is actually rather strange the way people seem to imagine that they have a single line of descent; I come from Essex therefore I must be descended from the East Saxons. The Battle of Hastings was almost 950 years ago. If we assume that each generation of human beings is roughly 25 years, that means that there have been 38 generations between then and now. Because the number of direct ancestors doubles for every generation we go back, the number forbears we each have from the time of the battle is a staggering 274,877,906,944. That figure, some 137 thousand times greater than the 2 million estimate for the total population of England at the time, is only possible because the same people will appear at many different places on our family trees (cue the Adams Family song). What this means is, that with the exception of people whose families are recent immigrants, every English person will be a descendant of practically the whole population at that time; Saxons, Normans and anyone else who might have been about. It makes no more sense to identify yourself with one of these groups over and above any of the others.
Great post stig. I'm currently researching my family tree and ultimately could argue any point of my lineage. I guess most of us concentrate on the family surname but this ends up being a small part of our heritage.
Stig have no idea if im from Saxon heritage---- as you say very difficult to find out that far. I know our family name is from Saxony.
The point that i make badly is this--------We the English have no defined culture. I admire the Scots/Welsh and Orish for keeping theirs going and admit to being a tad jealous. Sometimes we try to define what it is but there is no real single thing that we could say is.
I find it hard to stomach when the redWedge/Guardianistas defend every other culture in the World yet belittle ANYONE or thing that attempts to define or defend ENGLISHNESS. In London alone (everyear) there are cultural events for West Indians (NHill), Latin Americans. Bangladeshies, and two for the Irish--------------------------------yet not one for the English.If it dosnt matter please explain why millions are spent on other culture and defending other cultures by law within the Uk (im not saying thats wrong)?
Seems I'm half Palestinian Jew and half Norman, but don't really care. I am me, I hold a British passport and I love castles for which I thank the Normans, and think the French should give us our embroidery back. Happy to admit that the subtler points may have passed me by ;-)
GH, I identify with the Pre-Norman English (who were a mix of Celts, Angles, Jutes and Danes) even though I know that 50% or less of my biological ancestry comes them. As SA I'm still British and English. I don't need to pass any racial purity test and neither do you. And be careful on basing ancestry on surnames. Most English people didn't have surnames pre- 1066 and most immigrants quickly adopt Anglicised names. Leon Briton is one example.
Stig is right in that we over romanticise them but they were more than an Oral Tradition. There were written records, books, laws, histories, buildings as well as oral tales. Many places names continue and if we have one thing to thank the Normans for it's the Doomsday Book that maps out the whole country.
It's not the red wedge/Guardianistas (sic) who ran down the Saxons. That was done for 100s of years by the ruling classes in this country, often descended from Normans, who saw them as the civilising force. Hence the record of Kings starting in 1066 when there were English kings before then.
See Michael Wood and his letter to Field Marshall Montgomery (good Norman name that)
Stig is right in that we over romanticise them but they were more than an Oral Tradition. There were written records, books, laws, histories, buildings as well as oral tales. Many places names continue and if we have one thing to thank the Normans for it's the Doomsday Book that maps out the whole country.
Indeed, Henry, surnames got changed and adapted/adopted all the time...........a Mr Saxe-Coburg-Gotha decided to change his name to Mr Windsor in 1917.
Comments
One bunch went north to what is now Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia. Another lot went west to Britain
2) The Scandinavian Saxons in time became the Norse men (North men), who went among other places, south to northern France.
And also, after a bit of rape and pillaging in Britain, they found they liked doing that so much they ended up staying.
3) The French Norseman got fed up eating frogs legs and omelettes, so nipped across the channel for a traditional Sunday roast.
And so the poor old Brits got done in again.
In conclusion:
So in time the Brits, having got their land back after Roman Britain declined in debauchery and bankruptcy (like most governments, I suppose),got invaded by Saxons (Germans).
Then the Saxons got invaded by 2nd-generation Saxons (VIkings).
Then the Saxons and Viking collaboration got overan by 2nd generation Vikings (Normans), who happened to be 3rd generation Saxons.
Bit of a triple whammy there for the Saxons against the poor old Brits.
No wonder Alfred burnt the cakes, Edward Confessed and Harold got an arrow in the eye.
I blame Germany.
;o)
Incredible coincidence that it happened in a place called Battle!
Yes, I know.
sort of uneasy meld, uneasy because of the basic contradictions between them, by
about 1450, and remain dominant right down to present times. They derive from
two cultures.
First, the Anglo-Saxon-Danish. The Anglo-Saxons were
teutonic, Germanic. When their conquest of what we now call England began they
were a split culture - the males were warriors and focussed on their leader or
king. Women lived in an almost separate realm where they were powerful and
respected. It is arguable that the Freudian conflict between war and work on one
side and hearth and sex on the other was not entirely resolved. On the male side
at least obedience and loyalty were the most highly-rated virtues.
"The
Danes, whose more or less assimilated descendants amounted to at least a third
of the population by 1066 but had their own traditions and laws, the Danelaw,
were also a warrior culture but perhaps based on smaller units whose size was
circumscribed by the number of men in a long-boat. They valued individualism and
individual feats more then the Anglo-Saxons did, individual pride over-rode a
loyalty that could become servile in the Anglo-Saxons.
The political
organisations of both retained strong traditions of a democracy an anarchist
like Peter Kropotkin would have found congenial. A sort of mutual-aid ran
through village-based society, moots or meetings at all levels took decisions
after endless discussion, all principal offices including kingship were
elective, and so on...
Then came the Normans who were, and are, like
their leader, bastards. It is true that they were descended from Norsemen who
had arrived in northern France a hundred or so years earlier, but during that
hundred years they had lost their language and most of their way of life. If I
may interpose a thought here, I think historians generally have failed to make
enough of the effects of intermarriage between conquerors and conquered.
Conquerors rarely bring their women with them and certainly never enough women.
The Danes arrived in England and intermarried into a culture that in many ways
was significantly similar to the one they brought with them, and they thus
retained much of their own identity. The Normans, from the same roots, arrived
in a France where the culture was very different, and within a hundred years no
longer lived, nor even looked much like the Norsemen they were descended
from.
Following 1066 the Normans imposed a rigid hierarchical,
ethnically-based authoritarian bureaucracy on the anarcho-democratic systems
they found. They were anal, dull, cruel. They practised ethnic cleansing in the
West Country and South Yorkshire, in the latter case reducing a well-populated,
prosperous area to what the Doomsday book itself, twenty years later, called a
barren wasteland. They did not assimilate. Laws were not written in English
until the 1390s, and the first postconquest king to speak English easily was
Henry V. Imagine Germany had won the last war. It is as if the official language
would not revert from German to English until 2,300.
However, the Normans
were few in number, not more than 10,000 initially, maybe less, and they brought
few women with them. They therefore relied on Anglo-Saxon collaborators to fill
the minor posts of government and the lower echelons of the church, and to some
extent they interbred - initially by rape.
The result of 1066 is the
English: two, possibly three conflicting strands which I believe are with us
today and make us what we are. On the one side individuality and the rights of
the individual are more highly valued here than almost anywhere else in the
world. Most of us object to government, do not respect politicians, hate and
fear bureaucratic interference. We are hedonistic, pragmatic, empirical,
pluralist, hate dogma. We like a good time. We do not understand spirituality
because we reject the duality that is a precondition of the concept of
spirituality. We are Roger Bacon, William of Occam, John Wycliffe, Jack Cade,
Wat Tyler and the Lollards; Langland, Milton and the Levellers; Blake, Tom Paine
and the Chartists; Turner and Darwin. We are lager louts and we hate the French.
We are adventurers. We believe a change is as good as a rest.
On the
other side we are Normans. We are superior, we rule by right, we obey the rules,
though we congratulate each other when we get away with breaking them. We are
one of us. We are control freaks. We are bossy. We like systems so long as we
are in charge of them. We march, we do not amble, we fire as one and not at
will, and we take our hands out of our pockets when we speak to me. We tabulate,
order, divide. We are deeply prejudiced (God is an Englishman - a Norman
actually) and intolerant.
And worst of all, somewhere in between, we are
collaborators- In exchange for security, a certain status, we will keep order
for the Normans, we fear change, we are tidy, we clip our hedges, we keep off
the grass (pun intended), we do as we're told.
With these contradictory
strands, no wonder we don't know who we are, but I believe, in spite of 1066, we
are at best Vikings with some of the stolidity, reliability, even dullness of
the Anglo-Saxons, and, well, pardon my Anglo-Saxon, fuck the Normans and the
collaborators. I really do believe that at last, like the House of Lords,
they've had their day."
Have you got a link to that speech please?
Michael wood's "in Search of England" is also excellent on the impact on "englishness" of hastiings.
Oh Dear. Someone in our family has traced our origins back to the Normans: two brothers who came over with William and settled in the west country. There's a plaque commemorating the life of one of them in Truro cathedral. Didn't realise they were such a bloodthirsty lot Sorry everybody.
It was nearly 1000 years ago. I don't think many of us can realistically identify with the English at Hastings, however convenient it might be for an anti-French rant (and Aboriginies, apparently).
There are two big differences with aboriginal cultures which lead to them being described as rich whilst the Saxon's culture isn't (or even, whilst the Saxons' cultures aren't ). Firstly, we have witnessed those cultures first hand; anthropologists have gone to great lengths to live with, talk with and study various aboriginal people. So there is no doubt that they have a rich culture. Secondly, many aboriginal people are still living and it would, of course, be highly insulting to insinuate that some other person's culture somehow has less value than our own. There is no such stigma in critiquing what is known of Saxon culture or even dumbing-down what we don't know about it, because the Saxons are dead. Sure there are people that descended from them, you'll probably be one, so will I. But It's not quite the same, is it?
Should we identify with the Saxons at Hastings? First of all I'd query why anyone would want to. What can we learn about ourselves by looking at what people did back then? Practically every aspect of our lives today is different to their lives. They had a caste structure that included a form of slavery; we have capitalism. They led a rural existence; ours it predominantly urban. They lived either in long shared halls or in grubenhäuser (depending on your historian); we live in increasingly small houses partitioned into smaller rooms. Their chief means of transport was on foot, though they could sail and had animals for heavy transportation; we have cars, trains, buses etc. They would have eaten a fairly fixed diet based on certain animals and seasonal crops; we have a varied diet with foodstuffs (and cuisines) imported from around the globe; they worshipped several gods imported from Europe; we have imported middle eastern monotheism, or no god at all. They were great chess players; we are great Playstation players. They spoke a language that would be barely intelligible to us! In short, we have for far more in common with some bloke sitting in a flat in Tokyo, with whom most of us would not be able to converse, than we do with the people who may be our direct ancestors.
The second reason I'd query it, is to ask why this particular group of people? The Victorians, Edwardians and Tudors all occupied the same physical space as us, they all passed on their genes to us, and they have passed on their culture to us in ways that are far more tangible than the Saxons. And yet, if people were to outwardly associate themselves with one of these groups they'd be laughed at. It seems to me the big difference comes precisely from that distance in time. From romantic notions that these are people that came from over the sea to be here. From the fact that actually we don't know that much about them. And, of course, we like the idea that our swear words largely derive from them.
The third reason is that it is actually rather strange the way people seem to imagine that they have a single line of descent; I come from Essex therefore I must be descended from the East Saxons. The Battle of Hastings was almost 950 years ago. If we assume that each generation of human beings is roughly 25 years, that means that there have been 38 generations between then and now. Because the number of direct ancestors doubles for every generation we go back, the number forbears we each have from the time of the battle is a staggering 274,877,906,944. That figure, some 137 thousand times greater than the 2 million estimate for the total population of England at the time, is only possible because the same people will appear at many different places on our family trees (cue the Adams Family song). What this means is, that with the exception of people whose families are recent immigrants, every English person will be a descendant of practically the whole population at that time; Saxons, Normans and anyone else who might have been about. It makes no more sense to identify yourself with one of these groups over and above any of the others.
GH, I identify with the Pre-Norman English (who were a mix of Celts, Angles, Jutes and Danes) even though I know that 50% or less of my biological ancestry comes them. As SA I'm still British and English. I don't need to pass any racial purity test and neither do you. And be careful on basing ancestry on surnames. Most English people didn't have surnames pre- 1066 and most immigrants quickly adopt Anglicised names. Leon Briton is one example.
Stig is right in that we over romanticise them but they were more than an Oral Tradition. There were written records, books, laws, histories, buildings as well as oral tales. Many places names continue and if we have one thing to thank the Normans for it's the Doomsday Book that maps out the whole country.
It's not the red wedge/Guardianistas (sic) who ran down the Saxons. That was done for 100s of years by the ruling classes in this country, often descended from Normans, who saw them as the civilising force. Hence the record of Kings starting in 1066 when there were English kings before then.
See Michael Wood and his letter to Field Marshall Montgomery (good Norman name that)
Mr Windsor in 1917.