Michael Lewis
speaker
310 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 8 Sep
Michael Lewis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And I think a lot of people would be surprised that the Normans were in Italy in exactly the same time they're in England.
Not
Okay, I'm sure most people who listen to this will know that, but other people might not.
And likewise, you know, a century later in Ireland, but also it kind of partners with places where the Normans came from.
So they look at the sort of Scandinavian influences that established the...
the Duchy of Normandy in the first place.
So it's kind of interesting because it's sort of an eclectic kind of group of countries in a way that are kind of touched by the Normans, either in terms of their origin story or their subsequent expansion.
And of course, you know, the Normans were masters at two things, in my view.
One was they were expansionist, which I don't think the Anglo-Saxons particularly were in the 11th century before the Norman conquest.
Obviously, that changes as a result of the Norman conquest.
But the English seem to be relatively...
comfortable with staying within their own borders and that obviously radically changes with the Norman conquest and obviously Victorian writers would look back to that period as a justification for themselves you know kind of expanding sort of Britain's influence even further and
so there's that aspect and then also the fact that the normans were experts at kind of changing within a culture so people sometimes think about the normans bringing stuff to britain but actually what the normans did was make the most of what england had so you know the doomsday book could have not happened in normandy it could only happen in england because of the mechanisms that the english had
If you look at Norman currency before 1066, that is not anything like the currency that's been produced in England.
England has this ability to raise tax, and obviously makes it attractive to people from overseas.
So likewise in Italy and in Sicily, where the Normans almost vanish within the local population because they make so much use of what was there.
They did the same thing in England.
And of course...
as part of the Year of the Normans, the Irish might be talking, for example, about the Norman influence.
What they're really talking about is the Anglo-Norman influence into Ireland, because the Normans have almost dissipated into a new English by that rate.
Showing 241–260 of 310 · page 13 of 16
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