There seem to be a few sources suggesting that intermarriage between Normans and Saxons became common post-1066, and that eventually it became difficult to differentiate between Normans and the free Saxons.
However, if most of the Saxons were dispossessed of their land holdings after the Norman invasion, why would the Norman aristocrats intermarry with them, being that they had nothing to gain from such a marriage?
Was this intermarriage mostly between lower-born Normans and Saxons?
Thanks for any help you can give me in regards to this question!
To my knowledge this is still an area of fairly intense historiographical dispute. Scholars like Katherine Keats-Rohan (what a great name) have argued that there is little to no evidence that very high ranking Norman tenants took Anglo-Saxon wives after the conquest and that there was a significant amount of open hostility between the indigenous population and their new overlords. Others such as Eleanor Searle have contended that there was more significant intermarriage early on through their assessment of naming patterns, and the lingering evidence of English female names among Norman aristocratic families. "Women's Names in Post-Conquest England: Observations and Speculations" in Words, Names, and History: Selected Writings of Cecily Clark (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995).
According to Hugh M. Thomas there is an oft-quoted entry in the Dialogue of the Exchequer that by the twelfth century the "French and English had become so intermingled through living together and intermarrying that among free people it is impossible to distinguish between them." Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation and Identity 1066-1220 (Oxford: OUP, 2003), 96. There therefore seems to have been an impression amongst some contemporaries that the bloodlines of indigenous English and their Norman masters had successfully combined to create a new people. Likewise Thomas uses the example of William of Malmesbury who celebrated the fact that he was of mixed heritage.
Like Searle he believes it was entirely possible there was some degree of intermarriage throughout the Norman aristocracy with indigenous women although the numbers are pure speculation. He supports Searle's hypothesis that some Norman men appear to have intentionally married women from dispossessed families in order to create more stable bonds with these families and their land. In so doing the conquered could be at least partially mollified despite the dramatic losses. Through these women it was thought that Norman men could create immediate and legitimate claims on the land these families had previously held, and preserve an attenuated sense of continuity with the old family order as the Normans made it their own.