The history of England from the Norman invasion encapsulates all the major trends of the times.
Politically, the Norman kings and their heirs are the primary locus in European history where feudalism is converted into a working model of a centralized monarchy. The history of England all throughout the Middle Ages is one, long, almost uninterrupted set of conflicts engendered by the attempt to convert feudalism into monarchy. On the one hand are attempts to consolidate the power of the monarch over the power of feudatories; on the other hand is the resistance to monarchical aggrandizement and the subsequent assertion of privileges by feudatories over the monarch. The high point of monarchical power was attained during the reign of Edward I (1272-1307); the low points of monarchical power were scattered all throughout medieval English history: the reigns of John, Edward II, and Richard II being the bleakest.
From a cultural standpoint, the history of England involved a gradual absorption into a larger, European culture. While Anglo-Saxons had been fairly insular and unique culturally and politically, medieval England came increasingly dominated by continental culture. By the time of Chaucer and Richard II in the late fourteenth century, when England emerges as a major cultural force in Europe, very few indigenous Anglo-Saxon cultural practices remained in the "high" culture of England. The German language of England, Anglo-Saxon, still remained in some of its most essential aspects, but for the most part, the language of England, Middle English, had more in common with continental languages, particularly French. This cultural transformation occurred from the top down, so to speak. The Normans brought with them Norman culture, institutions, and social practices, but did not largely impose these on the native Anglo-Saxon populations. Beginning in the 13th century, however, almost all educated people in England had learned Norman, French, and Latin...