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Neither the Romans nor the Normans overrun/outnumbered the population. That is the main reason. The Angles, Saxons, Jutes and so on, plus the Vikings in the Nor
by memsom 12y ago
Neither the Romans nor the Normans overrun/outnumbered the population. That is the main reason. The Angles, Saxons, Jutes and so on, plus the Vikings in the North East, did. England was fairly unified by the time the Normans invaded - and had a well established culture.
The Normans didn't really bring anything that improved the way England was being managed. In many ways, they pushed the country back by removing the native administration and pushing a different model.
The Romans got up and left the Britons to it after Rome started to fail. Neither really did more than influence the direction of the country.
The Germanic people overtook and obliterated the native culture in an almost genocidal way. They did re-base everything.
- stan_rogers 12y agoThere's pretty good evidence that there were subtantial Saxon and Frisian settlements in Britain before the Hengist & Horsa incident. The old idea that the Saxon shore was actually an "anti-Saxon shore" still has some adherents, but to say that it is being reconsidered is something of an understatement. And Bede's account (and similar stories of the era) fail to explain why Old English had a much closer resemblance to Old Frisian than it did to Old Saxon, or why Celtic monuments disappeared from the southeast of England long before the invasion was supposed to have occurred. Yes, the Germanic peoples pretty much displaced the Celtic outside of Wales, Cornwall and the north of Scotland, but the story as most of us learned it seems to be horribly oversimplified and "heroed up" (with the Frisians largely edited out by Saxon-descended writers).