Timpblue wrote:
cos we owned the fucking place, that's why
the french were our bitches
for a significant period of time, yes
EalingBlue wrote:
Wasn't it the other way round? what with the norman conquest and all.
briefly. and they were normans. some weird arse mix of norse and french, when teh vikings decided to fuck french women instead of eat them. definitely identified as norman rather than french, but speaking viking with a french accent, smelling of garlic and eating sausages made out of horses arseholes still makes you french.
Danny's Studs wrote:
The Norman conquest was a pivotal event in English history. It largely removed the native ruling class, replacing it with a foreign, French-speaking monarchy, aristocracy, and clerical hierarchy. This, in turn, brought about a transformation of the English language and the culture of England in a new era often referred to as Norman England.
and wiped out the anglo saxon art and architecture. the language became quite intermingled though, although general "common" words or phraases were kept as anglo-saxon, whereas the official terms were french.
EalingBlue wrote:
Thanks for that:rolleyes:
Also the last successful invasion of our country, go us!
and we invaded the bastards back plenty of times in return. edward I turning an army of 10k or so into a rampaging terrorist force intended to show the french that their king couldn't protect them and they'd be better off under english rule. this pissed off the bulemic king, or rather the french nobility who pressed the king to do something, who then set out to eradicate the english animals. this largely involved hiring genoese mercenaries, crossbow-men to be exact. the two armies met at crecy, after it had been pissing with rain.
the thing about crossbows is they are remarkably complex compound machines, and the bowstrings are a bugger to get off. so, seeing as it had been raining, the crossbow range was massively reduced. added to this the genoese usually fought from behind massive curved shields -pavises- and these were at the back of the french baggage train. when reloading the crossbow the idea is to duck behind their shield to do it. our longbow men, 7,500 or so of them, had simply unstrung their bows and put the string under their hats, keeping it dry. so the crossbows fire short, the longbows don't. they massacred the genoese, who then retreated towards the french lines and were pretty much finished off for not earning their pay by the french.
the french, not the cheese eating surrender monkeys we know these days, but proper french, bloody thirsty bastards with a sense of entitlement to everything they see, then send in the heavily armoured knights... however the horses aren't heavily armoured. there were three types of head for arrows. normal kind, a sort of armour piercing head called a bodkin - only effective at 50yards or less and at a dead on angle - and a swallow or broad head for horses. so a lot of knights get unhorsed, or wounded and the amount of metal these fuckers are wearing makes it nigh impossible for them to get themselves back up... after several charges by french knights, night approaches and one last charge is made across the body strewn and blood-slicked field, and ends spectacularly when the longbowmen retreat over the brow of a hill - behind previously dug pits with spikes in them - and repel the final charge with a mixture of bodkins and horses and riders falling into the spiky traps. lots of wounded knights were finished off on the field with misericords, long knives designed to slip between plates of armour, or under armpits, or through visors if the longbowmen were feeling "playful".
we pretty much wiped out huge chunks of the french aristocracy, and with peasents that were trained to use the longbow from the age of about 12, for 2 hours after church every sunday, in a remarkably long sighted edict passed by edward. the thing that grated most was that the cream of french nobility had been slaughtered by commoners.
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