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invasion we'd still surely be speaking a very inflexible dialect of German, i.e. Anglo-Saxon, with three genders and five cases.Is language the only legacy of Hastings still here in 2008? Nope. I'm going to say something very dramatic now which you may find hard to believe: if you were to travel across to a parallel world in which the Battle of Hastings had gone the other way, I believe that everyone you saw would be a stranger to you: none of us would be there; none of them would be here. That seems quite a claim based on one battle on one October day in 1066 but hear me out. When William of Normandy successfully conquered England he started up a dynasty. One of his descendants was Edward III (reigned 1327-1377). Statisticians have calculated that he (a) lived so long ago and (b) had so many children (some legitimate and some... huh hum!) that every single person with any English ancestry in them must be descended from him. That means, taking it to its logical conclusion, that we must also all be descended from King Edward's grandfather's grandfather's grandmother's grandfather, William of Normandy. If the Normans had not invaded and mixed their seed with native English stock, that would presumably not have happened. Elizabeth I (reigned 1558-1603) was right when she said that "we" had never successfully been invaded. When gently reminded by one of her subjects about the Norman invasion she said, dismissively, "That was us".This brings me onto another change: monarchy. The last Anglo-saxon king to be the true inheritor of ALfred the Great's throne was Edmund Ironside (died 1016). The next king was a Viking usurper and the two after that were the usurper's sons. Next came Edward the Confessor. Yes, he was descended from King Alfred but he wasn't the prime inheritor of Alfred's and Edmund Ironside's throne. Next came Harold Godwinson, who had no claim to the throne and successfully stopped the rival claim of Harald Hardrada (by killing him and smashing his army to pices at Stamford Bridge) who also had no claim to the throne. Harold himself was killed at Hastings, leaving the throne to be occupied by William of Normandy (who, yes you've guessed it, also had no claim to it). So what had happened to Edmund Ironside's successors while all these usurpers had been hovering around? King Edmund's son was Edward the Exile (so called because, well, he was an exile - he wasn't able to take up his throne). His son was the long-forgotten Edgar the Aetheling. That man was

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