Lesson video

Hello, and welcome back to KS three history with me, Ms. Dawson.

This is our second lesson of six lesson enquiry into how much life changed in England during the Norman conquest.

If you've done the first lesson of this enquiry already, well done, you're in the right place.

If you haven't, then I suggest you go back and take a look at that one first, before you take a look at this lesson so that it makes more sense.

Our lesson today is all about the role of Saxon noblewomen in the Norman conquest.

And if you're not sure what that means, don't worry too much because I'll tell you.

What I'm going to do now is get my head out of the way of the screen so you can copy down today's title.

So once my head disappears, what you need to do is pause the video, write your title down, and then resume the video so that we can get started.

Let's go.

Great.

Let's get started.

So for today's lesson, all you're going to need is a piece of paper and a pen.

And goes without saying that you should try and make sure that you're sitting somewhere nice and quiet so that you're away from distractions and that you've got lots of space to work.

Well done, if you're already set up and ready to go.

If you're not quite ready, then what you can do is pause your video, go and find your equipment, get ready, and then resume it once you're ready to start.

Off we go.

Brilliant.

So I'd like us to start by taking a look at this image.

I'll give you some clues in a moment of things to focus on.

But before that, take a look at the picture, try and pick out some details.

What can you see and why do you think we're looking at this today? Now that you've had a look on your own.

Here's two things that I would have tried to pick out.

So first of all, we can actually look at what the image is made of.

This is a stained glass window.

So already we can think about where we might find a stained glass window and why somebody might be shown in a stained glass window.

This might tell us that whoever this figure is, they're very, very important.

The second thing I've picked out is the text at the bottom and the text says "Countess Gytha." So we can gather that this Gytha is this person's name.

And that they've got a title of countess.

So again, to me, this would suggest that whoever this individual is or was, they were very important.

If you notice that, very well done.

If you didn't, don't panic too.

So now that we've had to think about some of the key parts of this image, I'd like you to have a little go at writing up an answer based on this picture.

So what we're going to do in a second, you're going to pause the video and you're going to write down something you can see in the image.

So a clear detail from the picture, and then what you think that means.

So what does this image suggest to you? Now, if you would like to, you can feel free to use my sentence starters on the left hand side of the picture.

So when you're ready, pause the video, write down your answer about two sentences.

And then when you finish, resume the video and we can have a look at what I would have written.

Off you go.

Brilliant, welcome back.

Now, a reminder for me, that your answer might look a little bit different to mine, but still be correct.

So don't panic too much if what you've written is different.

I have written, in this picture I can see that a portrait has been made of a woman in stained glass.

This might mean that she was a powerful and important person.

So what I've done, is I've used what I know about how this image has been made and use it to make a guess about what this person could be like.

If your answer looks anything like that, very well done, give yourself a big tick.

It might well have some correct details, but not look like this.

You might have written about the fact that it says there were countess and that might make you think they're important.

That's also correct.

So, very well done.

If you think that you may have missed this one, please feel free to pop your video on pause and add some detail.

If not, let's keep going.

So we've correctly worked out that whoever Gytha was, she was a very important woman.

So let's find out a little bit more about her and how she links into our enquiry.

Gytha was actually the mother of Harold Godwinson.

You may remember that Harold Godwinson was the man who William the Conqueror killed in order to take the crown of England.

So Harold Godwinson was a very, very important Anglo-Saxon noble.

He was so important that when the King of England, Edward the Confessor died without leaving any children, Harold was the next natural choice to take the thorn.

So therefore we could gather that his mother would have been a very important figure in Anglo-Saxon England.

Gytha story gets even more interesting than that.

After Harold Godwinson was killed at the battle of Hastings, Gytha was very famous for being so brave that she approached William the Conqueror in order to try and claim her son's body back.

So the story goes, she offered William the Conqueror Harold's waiting gold in order to have his body back so that she could give her son a proper honourable burial.

William is alleged to have said that the crows would give Harold the burial that he deserved and to have refused her offer.

Gets even more interesting than that.

Gytha after William took over England was linked to a rebellion in Exeter in the year 1067.

So this word rebellion means when people fight back against a King.

So just one year after William has taken over Gytha, obviously unhappy about the death of her son and not being able to bury him properly is alleged to have encouraged some of the rebels in Exeter.

It was a very long time ago, and it's difficult for us to get the full picture.

So we're not 100% sure exactly what her role was or if she had a role.

But that's what the stories that are told about her say.

Gytha also had her land taken from her in the Norman conquest.

And we might remember from last lesson that one of the very first things that William the Conqueror did when he took over control of England was claim that all the land was his and start redistributing it.

So Gytha is lost a lot in the space of one year.

As a result of that, Gytha decided there was nothing left for her in England anymore.

She wasn't originally from England.

She was from Scandinavia and she decided to leave England and return to her family.

Before we go anywhere else, we need to make sure that we're sure on the definition of this word, noble.

Nobles where people of high status who held land and important titles.

It's really crucial that we understand this word today because it's part of our lesson title.

I'm going to go into it and a little bit more detail in a second, but for now, pause your video, copy down this definition and resume it once you've done that so that we can move on.

Brilliant, welcome back.

Now, our definition, just there said that nobles were people in society of high status.

So it's worth returning to this picture of the feudal system diagram.

When we say status, we're talking about how important somebody was.

And if we look at this diagram, we know that the person with the highest status or the most importance in Norman England was the King.

And then nobles, are people who come just below the King.

So clearly their also very, very important.

So, as we said, the nobles were the most important people in society after the King.

Now, to be noble, you have to have certain things in your possession.

Nobles were born wealthy, with lots of land, which they passed down to their children.

So if you were a member of the nobility or a noble, it meant that you and your family had lots of land, and that made you very rich.

Now, normally when the word noble is used, people tend to picture men.

But there were noble women as well in Anglo-Saxon England and Gytha was one of them.

If we notice, it says underneath her picture that she was a countess.

And when I said noble people had titles, that's what I meant.

She was given the title of countess because she had lots of land in her possession.

So what does Gytha's story tell us then about noblewomen in this time period? According to the story of Gytha, did Saxon noblewomen have money? And did they have land? Is that something that women had in this time period? What I would like you to do, is to pause your video and to write down anything that you have noted from the story of Gytha about what life might have been like for Anglo-Saxon noblewomen.

Just one or two sentences would be absolutely fine, and I'll check it in a moment.

So pause your video, write down an answer to this prompt and resume the video when you're ready to check your answer.

Off you go.

Well done, welcome back.

So, remember that your answer might look very different to mine and it could still be correct, but let's have a look at potential answer that we could have written to this question.

According to the story of Gytha, Anglo-Saxon noblewomen must have had money, as she offered William gold for Harold's body.

Saxon noblewomen must have also owned land, as William and the Normans took Gytha's his land from her.

This suggests that women could have been important figures in Anglo-Saxon England.

Well done, if your answer looks anything like that.

You'll notice that what I've done in this answer is used evidence from the story to back up the points that I've made.

Give yourself a big tick if your answer looks anything like this, and if there was anything missing, please feel free to pause the video and add it into your notes.

Now, before we go any further, I need to give us a quick warning.

It is really, really difficult to talk about the experiences of women in this time period.

Although it's fantastic for us to be able to do so, we need to be clear and difficulties that we face in talking about the lives of women from almost 1000 years ago.

One of the reasons that this is difficult is because of the lack of written evidence.

In many, many cases, the stories that are written are told about men.

This is because often they occupied a lots of the more important positions in society and therefore women wouldn't have been written about in the same frequency.

The story of Gytha is an unusual one.

One of the reasons that it is widely told and that we know more about her is because she was the mother of a very, very famous noble man.

Another thing that we have to bear in mind is that women's experience was very different depending on who they were.

For example, if they were rich or poor, married or unmarried.

In this time period, women did not all have the same lives.

So what's true for one woman may well not be true for everyone.

So just as I said, this story of Gytha is perhaps an example of how every Anglo-Saxon woman's life would have looked, and not even how every Anglo-Saxon noblewoman's life would have looked.

That's not to say that we can't use it, we can't study it, but we just have to make sure that we're aware that one story may not tell us everyone's story.

Let's remind ourselves of how we're doing so far in our enquiry.

So we're looking at how much life in England changed during the Norman Conquest.

Last week, we learned all about the changes that the Normans made to who owns the land and why.

This week we're looking at the role of Anglo-Saxon women.

And it's really interesting that this comes just after the lesson on land, because the two things are very, very connected as you're going to see in a moment.

And we'll remind ourselves of the time scale of this enquiry.

So, 1066 was when William was crowned King of England after the battle of Hastings.

So before 1066, England was ruled by Anglo-Saxons.

So Anglo-Saxons are the people who had been living in England before the Normans came.

We could hear people referring to them as the English, but what they are not, is Norman.

After 1066, William who had come from Normandy in Northern France, and his Normans took over and were in charge.

So if we hear the term Anglo-Saxon, we are thinking of those people who lived in England, whose country was invaded by the Normans.

If we hear the term Norman, we are thinking of William and his men who invaded England.

So let's recap what we've learned so far about the Norman conquest.

I'm going to show you some statements, and then you're going to put your video on pause and write down whether or not they are true or false.

Remember to read them really, really carefully, to make sure that you can see where the truth is and the best that I've got wrong.

First one, when William took over England in 1066, he put his Anglo-Saxon nobles in charge.

Is this true or false? Two, when William took over England in 1066 he declared that all the land belonged to him.

Is this true or false? C, in 1066, there was an equal number of Anglo-Saxons and Normans in England.

True or false? And D, William loaned his land to those below him in exchange for loyalty.

Okay, put your video on pause, and write down very quickly whether these statements are true or false.

Once you're sure you've got your answers, resume the video and we'll check them in the next slide.

Off you go.

Welcome and back, well done.

Let's see how you did.

The first statement is false.

When William took over England, he did not put Anglo-Saxon nobles in charge.

Very well done, if you spotted the trick in here.

The Anglo-Saxons were already in England when William took over and he put his Norman nobles in charge.

Very well done if you spotted that.

If you didn't, don't worry, but correct your answer now.

Did you get the next one right? Let's have a look.

B, when William took over England in 1066 he declared that all the land belong to him.

This is true.

And we learned this last lesson.

He confiscated land of very important Saxon nobles and claimed it for himself as part of the feudal system.

Let's have a look at the next question.

C, in 1066, there was not an equal number of Anglo-Saxons and Normans.

This is really important.

The Normans invaded a population of two million Anglo-Saxon people.

There were around 10,000 Normans when they took over.

This is one of the reasons why it was really important for them to organise England into this feudal system so they could keep it under control.

Very well done if you've got that right.

If you didn't, don't panic, correct it, and have a think about the next one.

D, William loaned his land to those below him in exchange for loyalty.

This is true.

Well done if you noticed this.

So William claimed that all the land belong to him, but he never have been able to watch it all at once.

So in order for him to be able to have the whole country under control, he assigned bits of land to his Norman noblemen, who he trusted.

They controlled the land and they looked after the people below them.

They didn't technically own it though, it belonged to William and he was loaning it to them in exchange for their loyalty, doing what he wanted.

Give yourself a mark out of four.

Very well done, and let's get going with the next task.

It's important for us to remember the feudal system when we're talking about today's lesson.

Normally, when we talk about the feudal system, the idea of women and where their role in it was, it doesn't specifically come up.

And this is something that we want to change.

Our traditional stories of the feudal system don't necessarily mention women, what happened to them or why.

However, they were very important in order to make William's feudal system work.

And the treatment of Anglo-Saxon noblewomen in particular was something that he used in order to gain control of England very quickly.

Let's have a look at how.

Okay, it's time for our main writing task.

In a moment, we're going to read over the comprehension questions on the next slide.

After I've read them over to you.

What you're going to do is pause your video, go to the worksheet and read through the information there.

You're then going to use that to answer the comprehension questions in as much detail as you can.

After that, you'll resume the video and we can check the answers to see how you did.

Let's take a look at the question.

Question number one, what made Saxon noblewomen important? Question number two, describe one way in which Saxon noblewomen were more equal to men before the Normans took over.

Question number three, what problems did Anglo-Saxon widows experience before the Normans took over? Question four, how did the Normans treat Anglo-Saxon noblewomen after the Norman Conquest? Question five, how did this help William to keep control of England? And a challenge question, how did Anglo-Saxon noblewomen resist Norman control? You may feel like you know the answers to some of these questions already, but don't worry if you don't, because all the information that you need is contained within the worksheet.

So you're going to need, to pause the video, go to the worksheet and use it to answer these comprehension questions.

Remember to challenge yourself by trying to write in full sentences and to include as much detail as you possibly can.

Once you finished, resume and we will check over the answers.

Off you go.

Well done, welcome back.

Let's take a look at how you did.

Remember, your answers might look different to mine, and that's not a problem at all.

Question number one, what made Saxon noblewomen important? The correct answer is that they had land.

Very well done if you wrote this.

A better answer with more detail is that Anglo-Saxon noblewomen were very important because they and their families owned land.

It's the same answer, but in full sentences.

Give yourself a big tick if you wrote anything along those lines.

Well done, let's have a look at question two.

Question two, describe one way in which Saxon noblewomen were more equal to men before the Normans took over.

The answer is, they had some say in their marriages.

A more detailed answer is, before the Normans took over, Saxon noblewomen were able to agree to their marriages.

They also had some opportunities to own and inherit land.

Very well done, if you challenged yourself by writing in full sentences and including lots of detail.

If you want to pause the video and add in some more, go ahead.

If not, let's take a look at question three.

Question three, what problems did Anglo-Saxon widows experience before the Normans took over? An acceptable answer is that they were vulnerable.

A better answer with more explanation says Anglo-Saxon noblewomen were vulnerable if their husbands died.

This is because they owned desirable land, so people could try and pressure them to get re-married.

Very well done, if you wrote anything that looks like that.

If need to add some detail, go ahead.

If not, let's look at question four.

Question number four, how did the Normans treat Anglo-Saxon noblewomen after the Norman Conquest? The acceptable answer or the correct answer is that they forced them to marry Normans.

A better answer with a little bit more detail.

William wanted to be in control of all the land in England, so after the Norman conquest, he forced Anglo-Saxon noblewomen to marry Norman lords.

Very well done if you've got that answer correct.

Add some detail if you need to, you can pop the video and pause if you need to.

If not, let's take a look at question five.

Question number five, how did this help William to keep control of England? The correct answer is because this meant that Normans controlled the land.

Let's look at an answer with a little bit more detail.

By marrying Normans to Anglo-Saxon noblewomen, it meant that all the land was under control of Norman lords.

It also gave him, William an opportunity to get the Saxon nobles to swear loyalty to him in order to protect themselves.

Well done if you developed your answer with that detail.

Let's take a look at the next question.

Our challenge question says, how did Anglo-Saxon noblewomen resist Norman control? The correct answer is by speaking English.

A more detailed answer is that Anglo-Saxon noblewoman resisted Norman control by continuing to speak English to their children.

They may have done this because they didn't want their language to die out if the Normans forced them to speak French.

And it's worth us noting, that although it might not seem like it, this is a big active rebellion on their part because they'd effectively been forced into marriages that they didn't want to be in.

And even speaking English to their children was a way of them holding onto control when lots of it had been taken away from them.

So actually a really big active rebellion, even though we might not think of it as such.

Very well done, if you managed to pick that answer out.

Let's have a look at the next question.

Really well done if you've got this far.

There's an extension activity, if you feel like challenging yourself.

This question is all about change.

It says, how much did life change for Saxon noblewomen after 1066? In order to answer this question successfully, you need to have a think about some of the ways in which life did change and some of the ways in which it didn't.

On the screen, I have included some sentence starters that you can use if you find them useful.

Although you don't have to, if you can think of your own way to start the sentences.

And some key words of things that you may want to include that would make this a successful answer.

I'm going to show you some things that you could have written in a moment, but before that, try and do it independently.

So pause the video, return to the worksheet and try and pick out some details of things that changed and didn't change in order to help you answer this question.

Off you go.

Very well done, welcome back.

A remind that my answer may very well look different to yours, but yours will still be correct.

Let's take a look at the two model paragraphs I've written to show you how you could have approached this question.

In some ways, life changed a lot for Saxon noblewomen because they had less control over their marriages.

For example, William forced Saxon noble widows to marry Norman lords in order to increase his power.

This meant that the land would be under control of a Norman lord, and would pass on to their eldest son when they died.

Very well done if you picked out that their control over marriage was a way in which life changed a lot for these women.

Give yourself a big tick if you included anything that looks like this.

If your answer looks different, don't panic.

I've written a second one that looks slightly different.

Let's take a look at that one.

This alternative paragraph focuses on ways that life didn't change.

In some ways, life didn't change, as Saxon noblewomen didn't always inherit land before the Norman conquest.

Often, if their husbands died, the land would go to their eldest son who would be responsible for looking after them.

In some ways, this was the same after the Norman conquest.

Very well done, if you picked up on that.

This takes us almost to the end of today's lesson.

In a moment, I'm going to direct you to the exit quiz so that you can finish the last little bit of work for today.

But before that, I just wanted to say really well done for your very, very hard work today.

I'm hoping that we'll see you in the next lesson three of this enquiry, where we talk a little bit about rebellion against William the Conqueror and how this was dealt with.

Hopefully you've got a clearer idea now of some of the reasons why people might not have been too happy with him, and we can pick up on that next time.

For now, very well done.

I'm going to ask you now to complete the exit quiz and I'll see you next time.

Take care.

So don't forget, once you've exited this screen to complete the exit quiz so that you can see how much you remembered from today.

And if you'd like to, please feel free to ask your parent or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, tagging at OakNational with the hashtag, LearnwithOak.

Don't panic if you don't want to.

But if you'd like to, we'd love to hear from you.

Thank you very much.

See you next time.