Plausible ways for England to keep Normandy
- Thread starter jkarr
- Start date
Normandy
Very difficult. You would need a way for the Norman population to feel more "English" than "French". Normans settled in England after the conquest of 1066, rather than vice-versa. Even English rule ultimately collapsed in Gascony, where it was popular and lasted for at least 3 centuries. I can't see a permanent English presence in Normany.
Very difficult. You would need a way for the Norman population to feel more "English" than "French". Normans settled in England after the conquest of 1066, rather than vice-versa. Even English rule ultimately collapsed in Gascony, where it was popular and lasted for at least 3 centuries. I can't see a permanent English presence in Normany.
This. It was a matter of military success that created states and nations, more than the other way around.
A continued "English" control of Normandy would cause a very different England by now, possibly a Romance-speaking one, though this is not a given.
Yeah. At the very least, it would be an England invested in power on the Continent - and no, to head off the obvious response, this is not necessarily mutually exclusive with the Royal Navy being as powerful as it was OTL. Britain could afford both,it had a small army for reasons related more to ideology (fear of standing armies initially) than economy.
It also has a significant impact on France if Normandy stays in the hands of the same person who is king of England.
Can the English keep Brittany, Guyenne, and Gascony too, and cut off France from the sea?
It would need to gain Flanders in addition to all those for that. And Toulouse, come to think of it, since the Mediterranean counts as salt water.
Indeed, true. If you would have France a kind of balkanised, like at this thread I started yesterday, then it would be quite plausible.
Can the English keep Brittany, Guyenne, and Gascony too, and cut off France from the sea?
But it isn't needed to cut off France from sea if the country is a bit balkanised. And you don't have to have Flanders if Flanders is independent, or part of a Federation of the Low Countries or something similar. However, the fragmented France as at my thread I already mentioned above does have a tiny bit of acces to sea...
England was unlucky that they got two extraordinarily incompetent kings in a row (Richard and John) just at the time when the Capetian monarchy's reforms made the French monarch a financial player again.
At the time of the 11th and 12th centuries, just about every region in France was autonomous, and had a long-enough history of it. As for the Plantagenet realms, it was not so much an 'English' empire, but a collection of autonomous realms who were united insofar as they were ruled by the same dynasty. A dynasty from Anjou.
If you asked anyone back then how they would have identified themselves, it would have been with the duchy or county they were born in before anything else. Plus, many parts of France were divided by linguistic and ethnic lines to some degree or another. For example, Bretons did not view themselves as French, and nor did the French really count them among their own. And there were the Gascons, the Provencals and the Aquitainians, who had a long history of regional autonomy and cultural distinctiveness from the northern French. And there were even the French-speaking Burgundians.
England and its institutions were owned and operated mostly by Normans. By families whom owned land on both sides of the English Channel. From their perspective, the Normans saw the occupation of their duchy by Philip II of France as a conquest. Some of their noblemen may have switched allegiances from King John to Philip in 1202-4, but they still wished to live under their own laws. In the centuries after Philip's takeover of the duchy, the crown needed the co-operation of the Exchequer in Rouen to levy new taxes in Normandy. The duchy's formal existence was finally ended in 1469 by King Louis XI.
But it isn't needed to cut off France from sea if the country is a bit balkanised. And you don't have to have Flanders if Flanders is independent, or part of a Federation of the Low Countries or something similar. However, the fragmented France as at my thread I already mentioned above does have a tiny bit of acces to sea...
If the country is a bit balkanized, you still need sizable areas outside "France" to avoid any access to the sea Not impossible - but Flanders (whether also independent or part of a federation or whatever) does need to be dealt with, which is why I mentioned it. Just the Angevin Empire isn't enough.
The only way I can see it happening is if they somehow manage to beat the French and also keep Gascony later on as Normandy seems too small to survive by itself. The other option is that they do better in the Hundred Years' War - thanks to say better kings, worse French ones, the battles go in England's favour etc. - and regain it, but at that point it's not an English Normandy a French one that happens to have an English king on the French throne which doesn't seem like what you're after. As a possible alternative how about they manage to do better in the Hundred Years' War due to their candidate winning in Brittany and Burgundy staying on-side so that whilst they win it's no heavily enough to conquer France? Instead the French contender is forced to recognise Brittany and Burgundy as independent, renouncing any rights to or over them along with Normandy, Gascony, and Calais that England keeps. England, Brittany, and Burgundy then commence a revolving dance of diplomatic relations between themselves and France to try and keep things balanced enough to counterweight French power and maintain their independence.
Well if you can keep Brittany free and anti-French, have Gascony and Normandy English, and perhaps have Burgundy seize Flanders that keeps Frrance's coastal access limited to a small strip with Boulogne-sur-Mer as their main port in the north and the Mediterranean in the south. If they wanted to be really mean they could try for an expanded Pale of Calais to plug they gap but I think that might be pushing it a bit.