Radio Times: Review by:; David Butcher

People have long memories. Nearly a millennium after William and his Norman knights conquered Britain, it’s remarkable how the historic shock of 1066 still reverberates. (As presenter Michael Wood points out, people with French names are still the richest Britons today, on average better educated and longer lived.) The legacy of “the Norman yolk” that descended on the previously stable, prosperous Anglo-Saxon England is still around, and he meets people who clearly feel nostalgia for the society that was swept away. But the Normans very gradually became more English and vice versa, and the results, Wood finds, weren’t all bad.

About this programme

3/8. Michael Wood's history of Britain reaches the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest, asking what life was like for the Anglo-Saxon peasantry in the decades following 1066. To find out he joins the excavation of a castle at Mount Bures, Essex, and a community dig in the Suffolk village of Lord Melford. Moving on, he looks at the beginnings of trade and industry in Bristol, Wales and the Black Country, explores the battle for rights enshrined in the Magna Carta and considers how the nation was affected by the Barons' War and first Scottish War of Independence.