The Norman Yoke myth shaped English radical politics for centuries

Evidence

[O]ne of the most remarkably persistent beliefs of all was that perfect “Liberties” had existed under the Saxon Kings and that these had been filched, together with their lands, from “freeborn” Englishmen by the invading Norman knights under William the Bastard in 1066. This myth of the “Norman Yoke” persisted until Chartist times [1840s] and was handed down by generations of Levellers, Whigs reared on “revolution principles,” London eighteenth-century radicals and democrats nurtured on the more recent doctrines of “popular sovereignty” and the “rights of man.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 235

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Golden-age ‘lost liberties’ myths recur across the reader’s library — the Saxon/Norman myth parallels the ‘little man’ Leveller ideal above and other invented tradition narratives.