I'd also wonder if England and the British Isles more generally wouldn't have ended up more aligned with and culturally similar to the Nordics. Though there were of course already a history of ties to Southern Europe because of both the Romans and proximity.
They had already lost the language, the religion and much of the culture.
In the beginning, they burned and pillaged the churches and the cloisters. When they went to England, they had already started to build them instead.
BBC had a good tv series about the Normans btw, worth seeing. I didn't know much about the Italian history, for instance.
(Re losing the religion -- as a hard line atheist from the Nordic countries, I'll admit that even Christianity was a step up from what was before. :-) )
I was replying to the query as to whether England would have ended up more like the Nordic.
My reply was that the Norman lords were literally Norse.
Christianity had spread to Scandinavia by this time too. Everyone involved was Christian, and from the 1000 foot view the Anglo Saxons, Danes, Norse, Normans and even Gauls were much the same. Feudalism was evolution not revolution, although William used the opportunity to install lords who owed him. After his death the tail end of Norman rule was just as chaotic and splintered as the pre Norman infighting.
Interesting, but there was a viking invasion from Scandinavia weeks earlier!
This was 1066, not 1200+ or something. Christianity was then quite old in Normandy and very new in Scandinavia. (Also, the population density was really low, compared to France -- changes must have been slow, hard to control what happened at distant farms.)
Most of what I have read say that south of Scandinavia they were beyond a clan society at this time, but you still had it at least in Sweden/Norway (Denmark ought to be more connected, from geography.)
Edit: If I'm wrong here, I'd expect a dozen old SCA members or something to show up, with primary sources. :-)
Edit 2: I'm not really contradicting, I'm noting that afaik, Norway/Sweden (uncertain about Denmark) was quite a bit behind the rest of Europe in development. Especially 1066. (It was not until the 13th century they tried to get more of feudalism into Sweden, iirc?)
(This thread is too old for the SCA to turn up ;) )
The "Viking invasion" that Harold Godwinson defeated just weeks before was by Harald Hardrada, who is often considered by some as the "last true Viking".
But Harald Hadrada was Christian. He served in the Varangian Guard of the Holy Roman Empire, and he built an awful lot of churches when he returned to Norway. (He had a very eastern slant on his Christianity, and this made Norway was slightly unorthodox long before the schism.)
Harald Hadrada pushed Norway quite far on the path towards feudalism by trying to unite his kingdom and enforce hierarchy among the chieftains. So on the one hand he is a Christian Viking who uses Viking-style raiding to wage war, and on the other he is modernizing.
Sweden was at this time basically the area where the Norwegian and Danish kingdoms stopped. It was not nearly so united. But at the time kingdoms were just the areas where kings toured, extracting taxes in promise for protection. In modern terms kings were racketeers! In generally, it wasn't very populous. The harsh weather limited agriculture. This actually meant that plagues didn't really impact Sweden to the same extent that they did other countries as it was too sparse with a pocketed population.
Look at Harold Godwinson's name; its oozing norseness! He was actually a descendent from King Canute who united England and Danmark.
By this time England was ruled by a mingled Anglo-Saxon-Viking elite who were culturally mingled.
A good illustration is the Swedish "peace laws" from the 13th century -- it became forbidden to steal women, kill people in church and attack others during harvest. Consider what that means about the time before those. :-)
