England...Since the normans bet the anglo-saxons at the battle of hastings...does that mean the majority of...

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brother_in_magic

The Normans were primarily a ruling aristocracy. Sometimes you hear of wealthy families whith surnames such as De vere,Lucy, or Despenser (Spencer)--these people had a Norman ancestor.
As others have mentioned, the Normans themselves had viking blood although they spoke Norman French. Other parts of Britain had Viking incursions from an earlier time, mainly the Scottish Isles like Shetland and Orkney,and many of the people living there have been proved to have Viking ancestry.
New DNA has shown some new and unexpected things regarding England anyway. At one time it was believed the saxons invaded enmasse and slaughtered or drove all the indigenous people west, but this has turned out to be something of an exaggeration. many, if not most, people in England have roots far older than saxon times--going back to neolithic and even older peoples some 14000 years ago!
It was interesting to note that recent isotope testing on the teeth of burials in an early 'saxon' cemetary showed that most of these 'invaders' were infact British born. only a few women (and these seemed to be low status judging by grave goods) had come from Saxony.

Avondrow

No, for several reasons. It was the Normans who won at Hastings, which is not the same as the French, and it was really a battle amongst the aristocracy. The Normans who settled here were the military elite, and such intermarriage that occurred took place between the nobility.
The plebs of England stuck to their own. Recent DNA tests have shown how amazingly undiluted British blood still is - I wouldn't have believed it,, I was always under the impression we were a mongrel race, product of waves of invasions, but apparently not so!

Dad's found yer scoo'er

A lot of them went to Scotland as well which is why there are more Martins than Smiths in the Glasgow telephone directory.

fiona

Not to be confused with the Royal Family, who are Germans by descent (with a smattering of Greek)

Moscow

You are completely WRONG!!!!.

The Normans were descendants of Vikings who had conquered that part of France before.

So the Normans were of Danish stock. Also the Normans didn't settle en-masse. It was mainly their nobility and army that settled.

However this idea that the English are not a pure-blood race and in fact a mongrel race can be applied to every nation across the globe. There is not a people or a nation that has not either been conquered or has not interbred with it's neighbours etc. They say that 1 in 4 people on this planet have some of Genghis Kahn's blood in them.

However, if your point is that we Brits have no rights over this land because many, many hundreds of years ago our forefathers came from overseas, you really are clutching at straws if you think that merits acceptance of the mass immigration of alien people and cultures onto these islands today and you are seriously deluded.

Georgie C

While the Normans (who as someone said actually were derived from Vikings (Northmen) anyway) won the Battle of Hastings and some populated the island, the old Anglo-Saxon stock remained, along with the pre-Roman Britons.

My DNA for example is Anglo-Saxon, but there are people from Norman-French stock, and one very white guy in Yorkshire whose family have lived there for century upon century whose DNA is African. It is possible that that comes from the Roman occupation, who used African troops to garrison the outposts.

All fascinating stuff!

Christina K

Luckily for us the Normans, were not themselves true french, but had viking ancestry, hence normans from 'norsemen', so there is a bit of viking in there as well as the rest of the mix.

Seznoz

There is little evidence of Norman genetic input. There are two main reasons for this:

1. The Normans were of Danish Viking stock with a bit of the native French thrown in. Since England had already been invaded and settled by Danish Vikings it is almost impossible to distinguish Norman and Danish Viking genetic influence. It is made even harder by the fact that the Anglo-Saxons themselves originated from Denmark and Northern Germany. Norman, Danish Viking and Anglo-Saxon were closely related peoples.

2. The Normans came over in relatively small numbers and set themselves up as a ruling class. It was not a mass people movement such as the Anglo-Saxon migrations and is therefore not likely to have had that much of a genetic impact upon the existing population of England.

Norman impact seems to have been primarily on language and culture.

Angel

All the worlds countries are populated with a mixture of bloods, it's not just the English. what does it matter?

Orla C

As is quite a lot of Ireland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Scotland, Spain, Scandinavia ... the list goes on.

Any Irish person whose name starts with Fitz are descendants of Anglo-Normans, who were largely French-speaking. The castles in Ireland were originally built by these people.

My husband is Dutch but his brother did some family tracing and discovered that they are in fact descended from French Huguenot refugees who moved north to escape persecution in France.

I also have ancestors from Spain, Portugal and Morocco, and I am red-haired Irish. The official records are lost, but apparently my maternal grandmother from the west of Ireland was one of the last of a line the name of which came from Spain, and they were Jews who eventually converted to Catholicism. Of course, Spain and Portugal in turn had been invaded by the Moors, who were from Morocco ....

It's not clearcut, black and white, we're all mixed. Personally I have no truck at all with this racial purity nonsense.

Father Jake

Not only French blood...Our language is a bastard form of French too!

James

what did they bet on?

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