The Normans on BBC2

Above: writing about the programme in The Guardian, television critic Lucy Mangan says she "swallowed it whole", which is an unsettling image.

I watched the second in the series The Normans on BBC2 last night. Last week's programme I thought was a fairly workmanlike production but oddly old-fashioned. It seemed to be a rehash of the Victorian view that the Norman Conquest was an absolute dividing line in English history, with the ubermensch short-back-and-sides Normans utterly dominating and subduing the backward long-haired Anglo-Saxons (this view was popular with the Victorians as it provided a justification for 19th century colonialism).

The "Conquest" theory of history has been comprehensively debunked by many distinguished historians, so it was strange to see the presenter Professor Robert Bartlett putting this forward as a credible thesis. It was as if Professor Henry Loyn (that gentle intellectual giant) had never lived. It was as if Professor Robert Bartlett had never been put in an invigilated room and asked to write for three hours on the topic The Norman Conquest - continuity or change? Discuss.

Anyway, I watched the second programme last night and realised that for all its heavyweight endorsements this is not a serious production. Professor Bartlett was telling us Anglo-Saxon culture was eradicated (when in fact both the Domesday Book and the Bayeux Tapestry were almost certainly produced by Anglo-Saxons); that Scotland was a multi-ethnic state (Scotland in the 11th century was many things, but it was not a cosmopolitan society); that the Normans in Ireland were developing a blueprint for "colonialism" (when in fact they intermarried and went native within a couple of generations).

This is not a serious production. This is a stealthy attempt at diversity-awareness propaganda. My suspicians were reinforced when I saw that the producer was Fatima Salera (whose body of work includes Black Women the experience of Muslims around the world; and Southall Stories).

And on Domesday (also last night) I almost laughed out loud when historian Michael Wood told us the Anglo-Saxons were "economic migrants".

To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, the subtext seems to be: there was no such thing as Anglo-Saxon society, there were only immigrants.



Above: not all historians are media whores re-editing and politicising the narrative of history with an abandon that would shame Orwell's Ministry of Truth. In the latest Transactions of the Ancient Monument Society there is a fabulous article on Medieval Muniment Rooms by John Steane. This is history at its best.