How Important was the Battle of Hastings?
The Norman Conquest is credited with reshaping England, but was 1066 really all that?
‘It was the last time England was conquered by a foreign power’
Tom Licence is Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia
The idea that a battle might alter the course of history, though first popularised in the 19th century, is not without foundation. For as one writer remarked a generation after 1066, ‘French customs then took root through England and English affairs began to change in various ways’ (Herman the archdeacon, writing in the 1070s-90s).
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