DHP Ep. 122 Reissue: Principal Ruffian & Chief Among Plunderers: The Norman Conquest of England
The Dangerous History Podcast
CJ
4.6 • 647 Ratings
🗓️ 5 November 2025
⏱️ 107 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
(Originally published Oct. 2016)
In 1066, the course of English history was dramatically altered, as the realm was conquered by Normans from across the Channel.
Join CJ as he discusses:
- Some backstory on Medieval England & Normandy
- The death of Edward the Confessor & coronation of Harold Godwinson
- William of Normandy’s preparations for invasion to seize the English crown
- The invasion of Northern England by Harald Hardrada of Norway, and Harold Godwinson’s defeat of this force at Stamford Bridge
- William’s invasion of Southern England shortly after Stamford Bridge
- The climactic Battle of Hastings, a hard-fought battle that was ultimately won by the forces of William
- The aftermath and legacies of the Norman conquest of England
This is an episode that got a lot of positive feedback back when it was originally published, but the DHP’s audience was a lot smaller then than now, & CJ figures a lot of DHP listeners haven’t checked this one out as it’s a stand-alone episode kind of overshadowed by some of his big series.
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Howdy, everybody. This is CJ in early November of 2025. And what I'm going to share with you now is a reissue of a Dangerous History podcast episode from almost exactly nine years ago. |
| 0:16.1 | It's an episode I did about the Norman Conquest of England all the way back in 1066. |
| 0:24.6 | And it's a story I've always been very interested in and fascinated by, for a variety of reasons, that I'll let myself from nine years ago tell you. |
| 0:34.3 | But I think it's a really cool episode, you know, with all the usual caveats for, |
| 0:38.9 | I was only a couple years into doing this podcast and, you know, |
| 0:42.5 | I was still figuring out how to make the audio good and how to be used to talking on a microphone |
| 0:46.6 | in an empty room and all that stuff. |
| 0:49.5 | But I think it's a really cool one, and it got a lot of positive feedback when I released |
| 0:53.9 | it, but |
| 0:54.3 | of course my audience back then was quite a bit smaller than it is today. And it's been off the |
| 0:59.4 | public feed for a while, but even a lot of my Patreon supporters, especially if they're newer |
| 1:04.3 | Patreon supporters, probably haven't gone back and listen to the episode. But I think it's really cool, and I really think that we lost something when we stopped |
| 1:15.6 | teaching people English history, at least, you know, before the American Revolution. |
| 1:22.7 | There was a time when, I think, almost all, reasonably well-educated Americans, knew at least some of the signposts, the main events and things, of English history going back, at least to the Norman conquest, if not to the Roman period. |
| 1:42.7 | And I wonder, how many Americans today, just random people walking around |
| 1:46.1 | the street, including people with, you know, college degrees, could even tell you anything about |
| 1:52.6 | the Romans occupying England for centuries. Probably very few of them would even really know |
| 2:00.2 | that England had been under Roman rule for a while. |
| 2:03.7 | But anyway, most people used to know things like the Norman Conquest, |
| 2:10.2 | or the story of Magna Carta, or even the 1688 Glorious Revolution. |
| 2:17.5 | And they might have known a little bit about the story of the English Protestant Reformation. |
| 2:22.5 | Now, to be fair, I'm not saying that people would have known, you know, a huge amount of detail about these things, |
... |
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