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3 Episodes 2010 - 2010
Episode 1
60 mins
The name Normans originally refers to Vikings, Germanic people raiding the Eurpean coast from their Scandinavian homes for centuries. As the clergy, their main prey, wrote histories, they got an excessively bad press. Norwegians led by Rollo actually conquered present Normandy, a maritime part of weakened France, and got royal sanctioning by accepting to became a 'vassal' duchy. They soon adapted very well to feudal continental Eurpoean ways, while preserving enough of their military force to become a formidable power. William, one of Rollo's successors, an illegitimate son from a local commoner mother, expertly uses it after consolidating himself as duke to mount an invasion of England. The Bayeux tapestry illustrates various complications, such as the unclear pretext concerning his English rival for the throne, Earl Harold, whose forces were exhausted after defeating a fresh Norwegian invasion from king Harald. William's victory in the battle of Hastings in 1066 made Anglo-Saxon England a semi-gallicized nation.
Episode 2
60 mins
William the Conqueror's Westminster coronation accidentally turned into bloodshed, prophetic of the grim way Norman rule was imposed on the reluctant Anglo-Saxon subjects. Any resistance was bloodily suppressed, there even were severer sentences for crimes against a Norman. The English language itself was largely gallicised, adding a French vocabulary especially in spheres of interest to the new nobility, which took over nearly all the feudal lands. The rather efficient taxation was extended and reorganized, as testified by the Doomesday Book. A French invasion of his Norman duchy was stooped in blood. William's successors would extend the conquest over the British Isles. St. Margareth, an Anglo-Saxon royal princess, helped 'modernise' the Scottish dynasty on Norman model but keep the northern real independent. Marcher lords, virtual independent Anglo-Norman vassals, moved into Wales, were some Celtic principalities remained separate for centuries. The FitzGeralds made the first wave of incursions into internally divided Ireland, Henry II made the isle's colonization a royal project extending beyond the Middle Ages.
Episode 3
60 mins
Independent of duke William's conquest of England, poor Norman knights sought and found landed fortune in southern Italy, defeating the Byzantines, Saracens on Sicily and even a papal army. The result was the Neapolitan kingdom of Sicily, for centuries a beacon of tolerance and patronage, where the Normans again were absorbed into a culturally rich mixture. Tancred and Bohemund, junior members of the emigrated Norman noble family de Hauteville, played a crucial part in the first crusade and established short-lived crusader principalities in Antioch and Tiberias (Galilee).