Quote Originally Posted by Greyblades View Post
Elucidate, historian. Was the norman conquests not a substanstive enough societal change to consider a book mark in history to lable pre and post?
Oh, no it was, and it was catastrophic, the economy, the administration utterly collapsed under Norman incompetence. England's famed coinage which had been 95% pure silver (what became sterling silver) since probably the time of Offa of Mercia was debased.

However, when you describe it as "pre-feudal" you're perpetuating a post-medieval myth that before the Normans came we were living in some sort of Tolkienesque idyll. In reality, even before the Conquest every Englishman needed a liege lord and whilst it wasn't strict Norman feudalism it wasn't exactly "not feudal", though. It was terrible principally because the English became, to quote Robert Bartlett, a "subject people".

So, we should describe the period before the Normans as "pre-Norman" or "pre-Conquest" as opposed to "pre-feudal".