Hi, my name's Edmund. I'm a proud
Anglo-Saxon and my family have lived here for many, many years.
Us Anglo-Saxons, we've been living here for hundreds of years. We came over from
countries that you might know as Denmark and Germany, came over the sea as
settlers. Peacefully we've integrated into the society here, we've built a
wonderful society which is fair and just and equitable for everybody.
Now, the society of course has a structure to it, very important, but
everyone knows their place and everyone is happy in their place. At the top of,
the top of the tree, we have the King. The King is the most important person, chosen by God. He makes the rules but he doesn't make the rules on his own you see,
there's something called the Witan which is composed of all of the Earls.
Now the Earls are just below the King and the Earls comprise the Witan, they're the
powerful landowners. They own large parts of the land here and they advise the
King, they help the King to make correct decisions. Now the Earls are in charge of
the Thegns. Now the Thegns, they're landowners but they own smaller amounts
of land and they're very important, they're very well-off, very wise people,
and they look after those who are below them. Below the Thegns there are the
Ceorls. The Ceorls are your kind of bog standard everyday sort of, you know, good
sort of chaps, you know, no problem, good people and they do the work,
they work the farms, they make the clothes, they make the tools and the
weapons, they do all of those sorts of jobs below the Ceorls
you have the Thralls. Now a Thrall is someone that you might think of as a
slave but perhaps not in the way you think of slaves. So sometimes Thralls are people who have been enslaved because they've lost a
battle and so they're now captured but mostly the Thralls are people who because
they're very poor and have they've committed a crime of some kind,
they've killed something or they've stolen something, maybe they killed your
chickens or whatever, and they can't afford to pay. You're looking at me
strangely? Yeah, so in our society if you can't afford to pay for your crime
you become a Thrall. Okay so we have something which is called the Wergild.
Now Wergild is a system where everything has a price, from the nail on
your little finger all the way up to the King's life. Okay everything has a price
to it so if you break my arm, or if you kill my uncle, or if you kill
the Thegn, there's a price, a cost attached to each of these things and you have to
pay it. You pay it to the victim of the crime, okay. And if you can't afford to
pay the Wergild then you have to pay off your debt as a Thrall, you have to
work it off. But of course Thralls still have some rights. There are some days
each year where Thralls are free to do what they want, they have time off and
they can earn money, they can receive gifts which they can then sell, they can
make things to sell so Thralls don't have it all bad and then after your
time's done, you're no longer a Thrall, you move up to Ceorl, and then you can
move up to Thegn and Earl if you're good enough, but maybe you will
and maybe you won't. So all of this is known as the Danelaw. Now the Danelaw is the area of England which is to the east and the north and it's an area
ruled by the Danes which is why it's called the Danelaw. So the Vikings
originally came over from the north and they raided, and stole things, and killed
people, and then eventually they started to settle down and as they settled down
and they started to build villages and towns and things, and then their King
fought with the Anglo-Saxon King and there was an agreement that part of the
land would be given up to the Danes and part of the land to the Anglo-Saxons. And
so the bit given over to the Vikings was called the Danelaw and that's this bit
around that you can see here. So we had an idyllic society here, everyone knew their place, everyone was happy, it worked, it just worked really, really well, no
problems. And then 1066, Battle of Hastings, William of Normandy, there are
less pleasant things he could be called, came across from Normandy and attacked our society, attacked us, and Harold, son of Godwin, was killed, the rightful King
was killed, at the Battle of Hastings. William cheated and very soon after, the
Earls, many of the Thegns lost their land. Pretty much only the Ceorls and
the Thralls stayed in the situation that they were in because, you know, they were
just working the land, they carried on working the land, except the fields that
William salted. But of course William has changed the
Forest Laws, he's changed the laws of the land so now he's taken land but he
hasn't just given it to other people and left everything the same no all of the
forests he's claimed for himself which means that I, as an Anglo-Saxon, am not
allowed to go into the forests now and hunt and collect wood for myself without
permission from the local Norman leader. Which means that if I'm poor and he
doesn't like me I get nothing, right? I get nothing at all. He's changed the way
that men and women are together so women are no longer allowed to own property,
they're no longer allowed to inherit things. It used to be that women had the
same rights as men, I think you'd agree that's fair. Women do not have the same
rights as men under Norman rule. That's not right! That's just not right and I
don't know how people could not understand that. I mean the Anglo-Saxons, we have it right, the Normans are wrong! And they've taken all of this away from
us. So, of course, you know that the King has changed all the rules. The thing is
the King now owns everything, he is absolute power, okay. The Witan's
gone, all of that kind of structure has gone, it's just the King, it's the King
and then he gives money and land to his Barons but there's there's this issue. So
we used to have Wergild, so if I harmed you, I paid you. Now, Wergild,
gone! So if you're an Anglo-Saxon and you hurt an Anglo-Saxon, the Normans don't
care, yeah whatever. If someone kills your chicken and eats
it, "Sorry mate, you lost your chicken" but if you harm a Norman, then you've got to pay for that. You're gonna be, you're gonna be charged. If you
kill a Norman, there's something called the Murdrum fine,
okay, and they take money, but it's not they just take it from you, they take
money from the whole community. So if you kill a Norman everyone has to pay for it.
So you really have to think carefully because everyone's going to be punished
for this and the money doesn't go to the family of the person who's harmed, no the money goes to the king because any hurt to a Norman is a hurt to the King so the
King gets it all, so it's all going to the King now, he gets everything. So you
know, you kill someone, "Oh all right then I've got a pay, pay you Norman scum!"
Right and also worse than that, see the Battle of Hastings was fought and a lot
of it fought by mercenaries and mercenaries are soldiers but they're
paid soldiers who you buy in for the battle, okay.
And William bought in mercenaries for the Battle of Hastings and now he's got
to pay them and that money where is it coming from? It's coming from muggins
here isn't it? You know we've got to pay something called a Geld tax so that he
and his Normans don't get poor from winning a battle against us, we've got to
pay for it! "Here's your Geld tax!" So, I mean, William's changed all kinds of things. Now the Normans, they are Christian, just like we are, but what William's done is, he's taken
most of the Anglo-Saxon clergy, most of the Anglo-Saxon religious, religious
leaders, and he's got rid of them, kicked them out, and he's brought in his own
people, his own clergy who will do what he wants them to do. He's just changed
everything. And up and down the country, in centres
of population, Anglo-Saxon population centres, William has been pulling down
churches and houses, making the local populations pull their own houses down
to build castles, loads of wooden castles going up around the country to suppress
and to keep down the local populations. Here in Norwich nearly a hundred houses
have been destroyed to build a castle and it's absolutely wrong!
