I approached one of the soldiers, who peered down at me from beneath his helmet. “I’m rooting for you guys,” I said. “Thanks,” he said, and laughed before remembering he was in character. “We will win!” Before the battle a band of Normans marched past the camp on the way to their headquarters across the field. Saxon warriors heckled them: “Go home, Normans, go home!”

Every year English Heritage hosts a re-enactment at Battle Abbey around the anniversary of the 1066 Battle of Hastings. Every year the Normans ride again, knights on horseback charging into battle behind William the Conqueror; every year the Saxons erect their shield wall, standing firm until the fateful arrow finds Harold Godwinson’s eye. The outcome is predestined, but somehow, watching the re-enactment last weekend, there was still an element of suspense, a bloom of hope that this time the invaders could be repelled.

Why was I rooting for the Saxons, I asked myself? We all were. Throughout the crowd there was an unspoken agreement — a bit tongue in cheek, but there nonetheless — that the Saxons were our guys, and the Normans were not. Some spectators waved mini versions of Harold’s Fighting Man banner. William was played with a cartoonish French accent. The crowd booed him and the Normans throughout the display, as though the battle had happened yesterday and not nearly 1,000 years ago. I thought of George Orwell’s comment, in his essay “England Your England”: “What English people of nearly all classes loathe from the bottom of their hearts is the swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs and the crash of boots.” Did this instantly recognizable truth about the class system actually reflect a deep hatred of the Norman overlord 1,000 years on? It certainly felt like it.

The announcer narrating the clash was firmly on the side of the Saxons. “Cheer now to put strength into their sword arms,” he shouted during a fierce bout of man-to-man combat. “Cheer now to make sure they throw the invader back into the sea.” When the battle was over, Harold dead and the Saxons decimated, the crowd grumbled at the announcer’s order to cheer for the new king. “There he is, your new lord and master,” the announcer said. “Your taxes are due.”

This was an especially amusing event to watch as an American, and also an educational one. We love to talk about how old things in Britain are. The churches, the pubs — we’re astounded at anything that’s been standing here for longer than America even existed. But it’s not just places: events seem to last forever here too. Living in England, I’ve often thought that it’s this long memory that gives the country its essential stability. The Brits have had enough excitement over the course of history and they’d very much like to avoid having any more. But it also means there are deep cultural nerves running through the nation, and one of these is the memory of foreign invasion from over the sea and the fear of it happening again.

We see this today in the rising anger over small boats, in the flags that line the streets. Resentment over immigration policies has emerged this year as a powerful enough force to potentially reshape British politics, with polls showing Reform UK continuing to gain momentum. This sentiment has also translated into a visible manifestation of national pride: in the past several months, people around the country have raised Union flags and St George’s flags as part of “Operation Raise the Colors”, a social media movement that started in Birmingham.

Patriotism remains a bit of a taboo among British liberals, something a bit embarrassing that has taken on Right-wing political connotations. But glimpses of it can be seen during moments like the Hastings re-enactment, or in other socially-permitted contexts like the World Cup or Royal weddings. It is otherwise kept to a bare minimum by a still Norman-minded elite who prefer to stifle this instinct.

To an outsider, this aversion to patriotism remains a striking feature of British culture. Though this same tendency exists in America in intellectual and Left-leaning circles, it isn’t nearly as mainstream. While American conservatives are more likely to display the flag and revel in patriotic iconography, they don’t have a monopoly on it the way the Right seems to here. To win a US presidential election, you have to love America harder than the other guy. Flag pins are a standard political accessory in both parties. And it remains commonplace for schoolchildren to pledge allegiance to the flag every day in state schools, though they have a constitutional right to refuse. A town displaying a lot of flags wouldn’t be worth remarking upon. On the drive back to London from Sussex, someone in the car remarked on the number of Union flags on show in a suburb we drove through. I hadn’t even noticed.

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British liberals have reacted to people raising Union flags and St George’s flags the same way many Americans would to the sight of a Confederate flag. “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality,” Orwell wrote in that same essay. “In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings.” Much the same is true today: instead of seeking to understand the deep anger over immigration that is making people want to fly these flags, the focus of British liberals has been on suppressing them, citing the involvement of far-Right activists in organizing the campaign. Social media is full of often quite classist comments about “flag shaggers”. Councilors and MPs call for the flags’ removal to tamp down on “division”. In my neighborhood in South London, I noticed this week that someone had put up a St George’s flag emblazoned with pro-immigration slogans. “There is no such thing as true British culture,” read the all-caps letters printed on the red cross. “This flag was originally made by Saint George — a Turkish/Palestinian immigrant.” (Saint George died hundreds of years before the cross associated with him came into use.)

Whether intentionally or not, the flag campaigners have forced British elites into the unappealing position of disavowing their own national flag for political reasons. If they think it has been successfully co-opted by the far-Right, they only give it more power by fearing it. The cleverer play would be to display the flag as a symbol of opposition to the Right; to accept that people have a desire to feel patriotic and appeal to that, instead of pathologizing it. Lately, there does seem to have been some recognition of the need to reclaim the flag among the country’s liberal power players. Both the Labour and Lib Dem party conferences were festooned with flags, and the Prime Minister has spoken about his pride in all the flags of the UK. But they are playing catch-up against a movement that has much more successfully linked itself to the Union Jack; one that has been more proactive in channeling the down-to-earth Saxon instead of the lofty Norman.

Writers here have always had a better read on England’s Saxon yearnings than politicians. There’s a rich tradition of Anglo-Saxon nostalgia among English writers over the past century or so. In 1911, near the end of the imperial century, Rudyard Kipling imagined a Norman baron’s take on the rugged Saxon: “The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite. / But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right. / When he stands like an ox in the furrow — with his sullen set eyes on your own, / And grumbles, ‘This isn’t fair dealing,’ my son, leave the Saxon alone.” Here, Kipling depicts the Saxon as the forefather of cherished British values like fair play.

Kipling was writing during a time when Britain still projected itself out onto the world, at the tail end of a period that echoed the terrible greatness of the adventuring Normans. Yet he, like other 20th-century writers who mythologized the Saxon past such as J.R.R. Tolkien, saw something more authentic and fundamental to the culture in the Saxons, who stayed put here and defended their island against all comers. Perhaps this old Anglo-Saxon ache persists today and explains some of what’s happening now — a repressed tribalism with ancient roots that is playing out in modern politics.

At the battle last weekend, I thought about how, a millennium later, the Saxon fans in the crowd are just as Norman as they are anything else. It was an audience no doubt full of Williams, Richards and Henrys cheering for a lost army of Oswalds, Godfrics and Cuthberts. But this didn’t seem to matter. There’s always next year. Maybe the Saxons will finally win.

In this context, how should we interpret the recent tussle between England and France over whether the Bayeux Tapestry should be loaned to the British Museum? At present the 224-foot tapestry, which depicts the Battle of Hastings, is due to be displayed at the British Museum for nine months, from September 2026.

But experts warn that the fabric is so fragile it’s impossible to transport safely. A campaign and petition have now mobilized in France to prevent the loan going ahead. Are the French and the English still covertly fighting over territory? Not exactly: Macron is in favor of the loan, while the opposition campaign is drawn from conservation experts and ordinary French people. At face value, the disagreement seems to be geopolitics versus heritage.

But at least on this side of the Channel, the ambivalent legacy of the Norman Conquest also suggests a second interpretation of the disagreement: an interpretation that turns on the tapestry’s fragility. The Bayeux Tapestry stands as a potent symbol of a hinge moment in English politics, that would eventually give rise to today’s elite consensus. But though it still commands international elite support, the consensus is — like the Bayeux Tapestry — growing more difficult by the day to preserve.

Whether, as an English person, you view the “heritage” of the Norman conquest as your own or not depends on an aspect of national identity that has, in recent years, become uncomfortably politicized: ancestry. Today, at elite level anyway, this topic tends to be politely skated over: for example Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum, described the Tapestry and loan agreement as illustrating the “deep ties between Britain and France”. This is, we might say, an odd way of spelling “a thousand years of intermittent war”.

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But we never used to be so coy about national divisions. The Normans themselves, per Macaulay, initially didn’t think of themselves as “English”. Instead, they rewrote national mythology to replace “English” with “British”, to their benefit. The medievalist Francis Young describes how around a third of the knights who fought alongside William were not Norman but Breton, and justified their invasion of England by viewing themselves as distant kin to the Brythonic peoples displaced by the Anglo-Saxons. To this end, in place of Anglo-Saxon histories such as Bede, this new aristocracy encouraged the circulation of “Celtic” and Arthurian legend via authors such as Geoffrey of Monmouth. And this turn served the conquerors politically, by antedating their claim to be more originally “British” than the “English” peasants they had conquered: the original propagation of “British values” as a governing-class project.

For Macaulay, the history of the English nation proper began in the moment of reconciliation when the Normans lost their French holdings and embraced an English identity of their own. But that embrace always had an edge of ethnic and class wariness that, to this day, remains rooted in material disparities. Even in the 21st century, British people with Norman surnames such as Glanville are more likely to be wealthy than those with Saxon ones such Smith or Cooper. Some of modern Britain’s richest people, such as the billionaire Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, can trace their lineage all the way back to 1066.

The meaning of the Norman conquest, then, depends somewhat on where you stand in a class hierarchy that has, for the last thousand years, contained a trace element of ethnic hostility. But this tribal aspect has historically tended only to surface at times of bitter class conflict and popular dissatisfaction. For example, the 17th-century agrarian proto-socialist Diggers made much of Norman oppression, describing England’s aristocracy as still foreigners and colonizers: “The last enslaving yoak that England groaned under, (and yet is not freed from)”.

Similarly, the 18th-century radical Thomas Paine, whose The Rights of Man would be influential in inciting the nascent United States to shake off their own “Norman Yoke”, dismissed any duty to respect England’s aristocracy by dismissing this group as “A French bastard arriving with armed banditti and establishing himself the King of England against the consent of the natives”.

By Macaulay’s day, as the rising tides of the British Empire floated all boats, this narrative of racist Norman overlordship had lost its sting. As a Whig historian, Macaulay is keen to depict all lines of progress as converging on the supreme cultural and political supremacy of 19th-century England. And in his account, the Normans are plainly the prototype for England’s later imperial adventures around the globe — that is, both as brutally oppressive to the conquered Saxons, and also deserving victors on account of obvious cultural superiority.

They were, he writes, at the time “the foremost race of Christendom”, extraordinary in their “valor and ferocity” as well as their relative cultural refinement. And yet, following William’s victory in 1066, Macaulay describes how “[t]he subjugation of a nation by a nation has seldom […] been more complete”. This total militarized colonization was, he writes, marked by brutal suppression of the natives, and by violent insurgency from those thus oppressed.

But Macaulay doesn’t need to be on the side of the “bold men” resisting their “oppressors”, or the militarily and culturally superior conquerors. In the context of the overall arc of his narrative, though, England proper began with the fusion of these once-warring peoples into a single one: the modern English. In this happy context, nothing need remain of the original hostilities except Macaulay’s distant admiration for both sides, and romantic adventure-histories such as Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake (1866).

By Britain’s turn-of-the-century imperial high-point, the Normans had been so far forgiven that little remained of the divide save a useful metaphor for class hierarchy. Rudyard Kipling’s 1911 poem “Norman and Saxon” drew on the 19th-century romantic version of this past to depict what are presumably Kipling’s contemporary observations on cross-class differences within English culture. In the guise of advice given by a Norman baron to his son, Kipling writes:

“The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow — with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, “This isn’t fair dealing,” my son, leave the Saxon alone”

In our contemporary age of austerity, high taxes, and economic stagnation, though, class resentment is once again on the rise. And we might interpret England’s recent outbreak of politically charged guerrilla flag-hanging as evidence that, as in the age of the Diggers, old wounds are beginning to re-open.

And it’s not a coincidence that even now the dispute is between English identity and “British Values”. Today this might refer to the bland, updated internationalist version first proposed by Gordon Brown — but that doesn’t mean older connotations have been forgotten. Just last week, GB News commentator and erstwhile Tory politico Jacob Rees-Mogg dusted off his Kipling for a discussion of the now-raging conflict between ruling-class universalists and their nation-loving underlings. Just as Kipling predicted, Rees-Mogg added, eventually “the Saxons will run out of patience with their overlords”.

This parallel draws — we have to assume deliberately — on a seam of national ressentiment that is both a thousand years old and at times revolutionary in impact. What’s more challenging to trace, though, is how the Normans’ original “British Values” became the post-national Brownite vision. Here, again, the Normans are there to help: the trajectory is encapsulated in microcosm, in a recent culture-war spat over the BBC’s controversial decision to embrace “color-blind casting” in an otherwise scrupulously realistic dramatization of the Battle of Hastings.

King And Conqueror didn’t employ color-blind casting across the board, but only for the defeated and colonized Anglo-Saxons. The villainous colonizers are all white. This has tended to be interpreted as a “woke” effort to rewrite history. But it could also be read as a good-faith effort to transliterate the hierarchy of both race and class that characterized the Norman Conquest onto the only widely-understood modern template we have for parsing such a hierarchy: postcolonial and critical race theories. These theories were forged in a nation that sprang from England’s Norman legacy of seafaring and expansionism: America. And for specifically American historical reasons, these theories tend to conflate ethnicity with skin tone, and both ethnicity and skin tone with social class, more readily than makes sense in an Old World context — and which entirely obscures the nature of a conflict such as that between the Normans and Saxons.

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In turn, this framework has boomeranged back from the new imperial hegemon to structure casting decisions in the old. In effect, the BBC has reworked the Norman Conquest as an origin-story for what critical race theorists call “white supremacy”.

And yet even here, the Normans-as-white-supremacists retain their old, ambivalent aura, as objects both of ressentiment and forelock-tugging admiration. For they pioneered the model of land-grab, elite replacement, and peasant suppression in England that would, eventually, be exported around the world — only in turn to give rise to an American ideological successor that proposed to develop the model by optimistically trying to dissolve “nations” entirely in favor of a universal empire of rules.

The BBC casting policy and bland British Museum directorial euphemisms alike show how enthusiastically this has been embraced by a contemporary British ruling class in which Normans remain overrepresented. This contemporary version of “British Values” is as distant a descendant of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s version as Hugh Grosvenor is of Gilbert le Grosvenour. Like Hugh Grosvenor, though, it’s recognizably a descendant, and recognizably still immensely powerful. It is a bitter irony indeed that ideas which began life critiquing the kind of ethnocentric smash ‘n’ grab pioneered by the Normans and perfected by their English descendants has, in the hands of today’s governing class, become yet another stick with which to beat the sullen Saxons.

But Kipling’s warning is apposite. The Saxon now stands like an ox in the furrow. And that governing class would do well heed the omen offered by the Bayeux Tapestry’s age and fragility, for how threadbare and delicate their own mandate has become. The French conservationists are right: we should stop trying to make the Norman legacy belong everywhere.

Instead we might read it as metaphor for the true interdependence of a ruling class with those they rule. The former may provide symbols and narrative thread, but without a (social) fabric upon which to embroider all you have is rags. Instead of demanding that it give way once again to the needs of international politics, our leaders should look to that desperately tattered cloth.