Ed West > Quotes

“It was Martin Luther King who said, ‘In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.’ That is why I felt I could not be silent today.”
― Ed West, The Silence of Our Friends

“Eventually English was adopted by the new aristocracy, but it was a changed language, and Old English is totally incomprehensible to us. Today at least a quarter and as many as a half of English words are of French origin, and the Norman invasion helped to add great nuance to the language. French words are usually more formal or aristocratic sounding: ascend, rather than rise, status rather than standing, mansion rather than house, cordial rather than hearty. Almost all words relating to government and justice are Norman, including prison, jury, felony, traitor, govern and, of course, justice. Likewise titles are mostly Norman French, including sovereign, prince, duke and baron—although not king or lord.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“The biggest impact of the Norman invasion was on the English language, which was replaced by French and Latin as the medium of government and law for three centuries. It might well have gone extinct, just as at least eight previous native languages of England had been, but most likely sheer weight of numbers and its established literature helped it survive.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“We have shouted aid to the world but no one has listened to us. Where is the Christian conscience? Where is human consciousness? Where are my brothers?”
― Ed West, The Silence of Our Friends

“Even William felt regret for all the oppression and brutality he had dished out, and on his deathbed speculated on his legacy: ‘I fell on the English of the northern counties like a raving lion, subjecting them to the calamity of a cruel famine and by so doing became the barbarous murderer of many thousands, young and old, of that fine race of people. I have persecuted its inhabitants beyond all reason. Whether noble or commons I have cruelly oppressed them; many I have unjustly disinherited.’3 If only modern politicians could be so honest in their autobiographies.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“Instead the Latin-speaking British elite did what all defeated people do and headed for higher ground, or across the sea to Armorica, which became known as Brittany, or “Lesser Britain” (which is why Britain is “Great Britain”).”
― Ed West, Saxons vs. Vikings: Alfred the Great and England in the Dark Ages

“An immigration policy that ignored an individual's (potential) group identity would ignore the effects it had on wider society; a colour-blind immigration policy certainly does not lead to a colour-blind society.”
― Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right

“Varys put it: “Why is it always the innocents who suffer most, when you high lords play your game of thrones?”
― Ed West, Iron, Fire and Ice: The real history behind Game of Thrones

“In the most popular British book and film series of recent years, the heroes have the very Anglo-Saxon sounding surnames Potter and Weasley, while the baddies go by the Normanesque Voldemort”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“Scottish history is complicated because a lot of its identity was made up in the nineteenth century by romantic novelists like Walter Scott and is now used to sell golfing holidays.”
― Ed West, England in the Age of Chivalry . . . And Awful Diseases: The Hundred Years' War and Black Death

“He had a good memory and knowledge of history, and could converse with people of education, although his tastes weren’t that highbrow. His favourite court jester was one Roland the Farter, who was given a manor in Suffolk on condition that every Christmas he ‘gave a jump, a whistle and a fart before Henry and his courtiers’. The”
― Ed West, 1215 and All That: A very, very short history of Magna Carta and King John

“The Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons were closely related by ancestry and language, since the latter had themselves only left Denmark three hundred years previously. But while the Saxons had settled down and found God, the Vikings were aggressive, pagan, and suffering serious overcrowding at home”
― Ed West, Saxons vs. Vikings: Alfred the Great and England in the Dark Ages

“Game of Thrones is not history, and as historian Dan Jones put it: “It is alt-history, not a reconstruction of a known past. It is historically literate without ever claiming to be history.”1 And yet there are some clear and obvious historical parallels, and one that George R.R. Martin has spoken of is between Tywin Lannister and King Edward I. Like Tywin Lannister, Edward “Longshanks” was the ultimate medieval warlord,”
― Ed West, Iron, Fire and Ice: The real history behind Game of Thrones

“the cultural influences of the civilized south only clothed their barbaric tendencies like a nightclub doorman wearing an ill-fitting dinner jacket.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“William was probably a bit too old and fat to be doing this sort of thing by now. During the siege of Mantes his horse jumped awkwardly, by one account frightened by the flames, and his saddle ripped into William’s stomach; it became infected and he spent five or six weeks in agony, but at least he died doing what he loved best—burning down cities and killing its inhabitants.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“Harold may or may not have been hit in the eye: the story first appears one hundred years later, and the arrow shaft on the famous Bayeux Tapestry may have been only added in the eighteenth century by bored nuns. It’s possible also that the eye story was Norman propaganda, since blinding was the biblical punishment for oath-breakers; but either way he was dead. One story has William leading this death squad but it is extremely unlikely he’d have done something so risky; likewise with a later tale that Gyrth unhorsed William before the duke killed him, which is most likely borrowed from The Iliad. By the end of the day the Normans had lost 2,500 men, the English 4,000, including most of the country’s nobility. After the battle William didn’t bother to bury the defeated, and it was left to Harold’s mistress, Edith Swan-Neck, to identify him by a part ‘known only to her’, as his face had been so badly mutilated. However the indignity continued; William wouldn’t give up the body, even after Harold’s mother offered him her son’s weight in gold if she’d return him, and to this day no one knows where England’s last English king lies.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“greatest Byzantine general, Belasarius, had already conquered the region”
― Ed West, Iron, Fire and Ice: The real history behind Game of Thrones

“Slaves, also called ‘live money’, still accounted for over 10 percent of the population by 1066, and 25 percent in more remote areas like Cornwall, so it wasn’t quite the social democratic paradise that anti-Norman historians make out. In fact it was the Normans who phased out slavery, replacing it with the somewhat better condition of serfdom (which was still pretty awful, obviously).”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“All the arguments for multiculturalism — that people feel safer, more comfortable among people of the same group, and that they need their own cultural identity — are arguments against immigration, since English people must also feel the same. If people categorised as “white Britons” are not afforded that indulgence because they are a majority, do they attain it when they become a minority?”
― Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right

“The Anglo-Saxons had eight words for spear, twelve for battle, and thirty-six for hero, but before the Romans introduced them they had no concept of table, pillow, or street. The oldest words in the English language, dating from this period, include “tits” and “fart,” which suggest a society that must have had its moments, but was hardly on the verge of the renaissance. The language also had no future tense, which points to a certain lack of ambition.”
― Ed West, Saxons vs. Vikings: Alfred the Great and England in the Dark Ages

“Another Anglo-Saxon joke goes like this: Q: What has two ears and one eye, two feet and 1,200 heads, one belly, one back, one pair of hands and one neck? A: A one-eyed garlic seller with 1,200 heads of garlic. You probably had to be there.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“The moral of the story is—never try to be clever, as most people are too stupid to get it.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“England may have never come to exist were it not for this one man, and it is with good reason that Alfred is the only English king to be known as “the Great.”2 He fought off the Danes; he unified England (well, sort of); he helped found a common law for everyone; he built towns for the first time since the Romans left; he introduced a navy; and most of all, he encouraged education and the arts in a country just emerging from centuries of illiteracy. Having learned to read in adulthood, King Alfred personally translated Latin texts into English and was the only king to write anything before Henry VIII, and the only European ruler between the second and thirteenth centuries to write on the philosophy of kingship.”
― Ed West, Saxons vs. Vikings: Alfred the Great and England in the Dark Ages

“wandering around the North Sea with ten thousand Danish soldiers in perhaps the largest, longest and bloodiest gap year in history.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“All in all, Norse paganism looks like what you get if you let teenage boys design a religion, focused on fighting, formication, and alcohol; whereas Christianity seemed to them like it was thought up by their mothers.”
― Ed West, Saxons vs. Vikings: Alfred the Great and England in the Dark Ages

“In the east the Swedes settled along the rivers flowing down to the Black Sea where they created the first states in the region; the locals called them ‘rowers’ or Rus, and so their kingdom was named Kievan Rus, and later Russia.”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“The latest projections suggest that white Britons will become a minority sometime around 2066, in a population of 80 million, which means that within little over a century Britain will have gone from an almost entirely homogenous society to one where the native ethnic group is a minority. That is, historically, an astonishing transformation. No people in history have become a minority of the citizenry in their own country except through conquest, yet the English, always known for their reticence, may actually achieve this through embarrassment.”
― Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right

“Chivalry in later ages may have had merits, but in the eleventh century it was a social disaster. It produced a superfluity of conceited illiterate young men who had no ideals except to rise and hunt and fight,”
― Ed West, 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England

“the Prince of Wales issued city ordinances in 1403 stating that it was legal to kill any Welshman after dark with a bow and arrow. This law has never actually been repealed, but would-be assassins should note that the more relevant law against murder would still apply”
― Ed West, My Kingdom for a Horse: The War of the Roses

“The Britons called the invaders the Saesneg, as the English are today called by their neighbors to the west (in Scottish Gaelic it is Sassenach and in Cornish Sowsnek). They in turn referred to the natives as Welsh, which has a variety of meanings but none of them particularly positive, either “slave,” “foreigner” or “dark stranger” (likewise the French-speaking Belgians are called Walloons and Wallachia in Romania has the same etymology, while Cornwall, Walsall, and Walthamstow in London probably all come from Wal). The Welsh, or Cymraeg, referred to the neighboring country as “Lloegyr,” literally “the lost lands.”
― Ed West, Saxons vs. Vikings: Alfred the Great and England in the Dark Ages