The 11th century witnessed two conquests of England, first by the Danes, and then

by the Normans.

The Danish conquest

During the reign of Anglo-Saxon King Æthelred the Unready (r. 978–1016),
England was subjected to waves of invasions by Danish armies. In 1012, the
English had met a vast ransom demand for Ælfheah, the Archbishop of
Canterbury.

They paid the Danish army £48,000 for Ælfheah’s release, only to see him
recaptured, bludgeoned with bones and ox skulls, and then killed by a blow to the
head with the blunt end of an axe. In 1013/14, Æthelred was deposed by Swein
Forkbeard, the leader of the invading Danish forces, and then, in 1016, Swein’s
son, Cnut, finally toppled the West Saxon dynasty and seized the crown of
England.

The most telling Anglo-Saxon response to these events is found in what is

arguably the earliest surviving political speech in the English language, written by
Wulfstan, Archbishop of York (r. 1002–1023). Wulfstan warned his audience of the
dissolution of society:

The sermon of the Wolf to the English when the Danes persecuted them most,
which was the year 1014, from the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

Beloved men, realise what is true: this world is in haste and the end approaches;
and therefore in the world things go from bad to worse, and so it must of necessity
deteriorate greatly on account of the people’s sins before the coming of Antichrist.

According to Wulfstan, the Danish attacks had been brought on by idolatry,

treachery, enslavement and the violation of sanctuary. Barbarous humiliation
followed military defeat. Wulfstan recounts how English nobles were forced to
stand by while their wives and daughters were raped.

But this evidence should be set alongside examples of co-operation between the
English and Danes. Wulfstan was himself responsible for drafting the law-code
issued by Cnut around 1020, while Cnut made active efforts to cultivate the English
Church. In 1019, for instance, he confirmed the lands held by Christ Church,
Canterbury, as recorded in the Cnut Gospels.

Consequences of the Danish invasion

After 1016, the kingdom of England became one component in a larger empire,
ruled together with Denmark (from 1019) and Norway (from 1028). The legitimate
Anglo-Saxon heirs — the sons and grandsons of English kings — were
dispossessed or murdered, or lived in exile on the Continent, while the lands of the
old aristocracy were parcelled out among Cnut’s associates. Power at the centre
was reorganised to allow delegation, a necessity for kings who were frequently
absent from England for months on end.

Cnut created four earldoms, reproducing the old English kingdoms of Wessex,
Mercia, East Anglia and Northumbria. In time these earldoms mutated into
dominant power blocs ruled by dynasties bold and powerful enough to challenge
the king. The most telling sign of this changed political reality was the accession of
Harold, Earl of Wessex in 1066, son of Cnut’s appointee, Godwine. Later that year,
Harold would become the last Anglo-Saxon king of England.

The Norman Conquest of England

When William the Conqueror defeated King Harold at Hastings in 1066, this
marked the end of the rule of England by Anglo-Saxon kings.

William was in fact a blood relative of the Anglo-Saxons (being the cousin of
Edward the Confessor (r. 1042–1066), the Anglo-Saxon king who preceded King
Harold. The new Norman regime therefore projected itself not as a conquest but as
the proper succession.

In the years that immediately followed, the Normans consolidated their power by
forcibly taking over the property of nobles and churches, and by brutally
suppressing any uprisings.

Despite the bloodshed, three great legacies of the Anglo-Saxons survived the
conquest:

1. A written language
2. A landscape populated by many of the places we know today
3. A centralised system of administration capable of keeping the peace and
raising tens of thousands of pounds of revenue each year

Norman taxation
Anglo-Saxon England was famously wealthy, a reputation borne out by the scale,
sophistication and centralisation of its carefully regulated coinage, running into
millions of silver pennies. It was also intensively governed.
The system of justice and revenue-raising was based on sworn testimony gathered
in the locality in the hundred and reported to the shire or county, at which point the
sheriff answered to central government.

In turn, the shire and hundred enabled the collection of geld, the tribute first
commanded by the king in order to pay off the Danish armies. This system
underpinned the information-gathering that created Domesday Book.

Central government had the capacity to assess, record and tax the locality in a
staggeringly intrusive fashion. Contemporaries frequently complained about the
punitive burden of taxation.