On 14 October 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, defeated the Anglo-Saxon King Harold II at the Battle of Hastings. Harold was killed — tradition holds by an arrow through the eye — and William was crowned King of England on Christmas Day at Westminster Abbey.
The Norman Conquest transformed English language, law, and aristocracy. Norman French flooded Old English, feudal structures replaced Anglo-Saxon governance, and new stone castles appeared across the landscape. Within a generation the ruling class spoke a different language from the people they governed.
The battle remains one of the most consequential military engagements in British history and gave England a cultural duality — Germanic roots and Latin-French overlay — that persists in the language today.