Introduction

Abstract

In the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, the nations of Britain that we know today gradually took shape. Attacked time after time by foreign invaders — Angles, Saxons, Scots, Norwegians and Danes — Britain in the eleventh century was stable and prosperous: stable, because both Scotland and England were united kingdoms governed by strong rulers; prosperous because it was part of a well-established and profitable trading empire which linked the Channel, the North Sea and the Baltic countries. In the middle of the eleventh century, this world was disrupted by the arrival, in the south of England, of a small army of French-speaking adventurers. They changed, as much by example as by conquest, the relationship between Britain and the rest of Europe.