Foreigners grew wealthy with the spoils of England, whilst her own sons were either shamefully slain or driven as exiles to wander hopelessly through foreign kingdoms.

So wrote the English monk Orderic Vitalis in the 12th Century. Fortunately we have statistics to back up this hyperbole – thanks to the Norman enthusiasm for census taking that resulted in 1086’s Domesday Book, we can see the vast majority of the Saxon-held lands had, in the aftermath of 1066, been gradually placed in the hands of a new Norman aristocracy.

This process was overt in the sense that lands were taken outright by the command of England’s new ruler from those Saxons who fell in battle and redistributed to his loyal followers, and more indirectly over the following years.

Rebellions were crushed and the North was Harried, while marriage, purchase and political manoeuvring (some Anglo-Saxon lords enthusiastically backed their new neighbours) settled the rest. The powerful Anglo-Saxon earldoms were broken up into smaller Norman holdings and the Anglo-Saxon (and Anglo-Scandinavian) elite had been disappeared with only lower ranking nobles – thegnage – continuing to hold their lands, titles and influence.

By the early 12th Century, the status of the Anglo-Saxon lords had begun to recover slightly with the marriage of Henry I to Matilda of Scotland in 1100. Born Edith, she was the daughter of Margaret of Wessex (aka Saint Margaret of Scotland), not only was she a descendent of the House of Wessex, but Matilda’s uncle had been 1066’s other Anglo-Saxon king – the shortlived Edgar the Ætheling.

This not only spurred a little bit of Anglo-Saxon reassessment – Matilda was proud of her lineage and her links to Edward the Confessor (near to whom she was eventually buried in Westminster Abbey) – but the marriage may have been an attempt by Henry I to paper over the pain of the past half century.

Supporting this shift in consensus, William of Malmesbury conveniently published his history of England, patterned on Bede this traced the Norman kings back to Edward the Confessor, celebrating the virtue and the values of the Anglo-Saxons.

Not that this stopped bitchy Norman nobles from calling the couple “Godric and Godgiva” – two typically Anglo-Saxon names. Similarly, while Anglo-Saxons began to return to local government, tensions remained.

Eadmer of Canterbury wrote of the prejudice against Anglo-Saxon churchmen (Norman Abbots clashed with their Anglo-Saxon monks, but largely the monasteries were a carefully preserved hold-out for Anglo-Saxon culture), Osbert of Clare reported that the Conquest loomed large, and William of Malmesbury recorded heated debates between Normans and Anglo-Saxons over the conduct of William the Conqueror:

The Normans and the [Anglo-Saxons], spurred on by different motives, have both written of King William. The former have praised him excessively, extolling to high heaven his good and bad actions; the latter, out of enmity between peoples, have heaped undeserved reproach on their lord and master.

Jump forward over a century from the Conquest to 1189, the start of the Third Crusade and the time of our handsome forest-dwelling daredevil and the battle lines between the two are vaguer than ever. Middle English is replacing Old English, inducting loanwords from Norman French, intermarriage has made a mockery of the old signifiers, Norman naming conventions had started be applied to traditionally ‘English’ names and Norman names becoming popular with the elite.

I’ve been using “Anglo-Saxon” and “Norman” to differentiate between the two groups, but the former were simply known as “English” and eventually the latter were too. It helped that they started looking outwards almost immediately, with ventures into Wales and Ireland, the arrival of a Jewish community who – alas – served to underline the shared Christianity and cultural values of the two aforementioned groups, and Holy Wars in the Levant.

The trappings of Norman culture – associated with power and rule – held on in the ruling elite, to the point where people claimed that their ancestors had arrived with the Conqueror in order to reap some cache. This was an indulgence, a distraction. In 1215 and Magna Carta, when push to came to shove and the barons were arguing for the ancestral rights of “the English.”

So, to return to Robin Hood: if this incarnation of the character were real and his father/grandfather have survived the turbulent decades following 1066, the worst that might have happened might have been a little ribbing for his poor breeding and crass Anglo-Saxon habits while his neighbours argue outdo each other arguing about who's grandfather stood the closest to William at Hastings.

Sources: The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship by Rosamond Faith, From Norman Conquest to Magna Carta: England 1066–1215 by Christopher Daniell, and The Norman Conquest: England After William the Conqueror by Hugh M. Thomas