What happened to the Anglo-Saxon nobility during and after the Norman conquest?

by OdBx

I understand many of them lost their lands and titles, but do we know what happened to them after that? Did they just become peasants? Did they emigrate?

Faust_TSFL

The 14thC Saga of Edward the Confessor suggests that many of the pre-Conquest nobility fled England to found a 'New England' on the Black Sea/ Crimea. Caitlin Green wrote a very accessible post about it here (https://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/05/medieval-new-england-black-sea.html). It's obviously a controversial question and a lot in the Sagas is openly fictitious/magical, but there is some evidence (most notably place-names) that could support the argument of English re-settlement in the period in this area. Shepard's 'Another New England? — Anglo-Saxon settlement on the Black Sea' is probably the best place to carry on from Green's introduction, if you can stomach a full-on nitty-gritty paper (it's a wonderful piece of scholarship, but I appreciate it might be hard work).