"Indeed, by the thirteenth century there is some evidence that among the yeoman class people couldn't tell French from English any longer."
In The Debate on the Norman Conquest, Marjorie Chibnall elaborates on this traditional view on page 128:
"As Ralph Davis put it, 'the paradox of the Normans is that though it was in England that they reached their acme and fulfilled themselves as Normans, yet in the long run the conquest of England turned them into Englishmen'. The date when the Normans in England can be said to have disappeared came, in his view, certainly before the end of the twelfth century,"
"In one place Davis suggested that in some ways the English were becoming Norman about 1140;"
"In particular, John Gillingham, who has devoted a number of articles to the question, suggests a date somewhere in the late 1130s."
This is precisely when the personal name Farthegn reappears on the coinage and is found once again in written records.
From The Normans, page 138:
"During the twelfth century, when bitter memories were fading and a new generation had been reared in Norman ways, Englishmen were to become more prominent and were even to be used as a counter-weight to the king's too-powerful barons."
But even before that time, immediately after the Conquest, Ann Williams tells us in The English and the Norman Conquest, page 11:
"Native-born Englishmen were retained, and in some cases, advanced."
In his book, English Genealogy, Anthony Richard Wagner writes on page 20:
"Behind the English knightly class there were both English and Norman blood, for the conquerors even from the first intermarried to some extent with the conquered and as time went on their blood became even more commingled."
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