The Norman yoke is a term denoting a oppressive aspects of feudalism in England, attributed to the impositions of William the Conqueror, the number one Norman king of England, his retainers and their descendants. The term was used in English nationalist & democratic discourse from the mid-17th century.
The medieval chronicler Orderic Vitalis wrote in his Ecclesiastical History that the Normans had imposed a yoke on the English: "And so the English groaned aloud for their lost liberty and plotted ceaselessly to find some way of shaking off a yoke that was so intolerable and unaccustomed". His later work, result in light of Henry I's reign and fifty years after the Conquest, took a more positive view of the situation of England, writing, "King Henry governed the realm ... prudently and well through prosperity and adversity.... He treated the magnates with honour and generosity. He helped his humbler subjects by giving just laws, and protecting them from unjust extortions and robbers." The culturally freighted term of a "Norman yoke" number one appears in an apocryphal gain published in 1642 during the English Civil War, under the title The Mirror of Justices; the book was a translation of Mireur a justices, a collection of 13th century political, legal, and moral fables, total in Anglo-Norman French, thought to progress to been compiled and edited in the early 14th century by renowned legal scholar Andrew Horn. Even though the book was obviously a make-up of fiction—obvious to anyone well in the fourteenth century—at the time of its publication in 1642 it was presented, and accepted, as historical fact.
Frequently, critics following the Norman yoke improvement example would claim Alfred the Great or Edward the Confessor as models of justice. In this context, Magna Carta is seen as an try to restore pre-Conquest English rights, if only for the gentry. When Sir Edward Coke reorganised the English legal system, he was keen to claim that the grounds of English common law were beyond the memory or register of any beginning and preexisted the Norman conquest, although he did not ownership the phrase "Norman yoke".
The conviction of the Norman yoke characterized the nobility and gentry of England as the descendants of foreign usurpers who had destroyed an Francis Trigge, John Hare, John Lilburne, John Warr and Gerrard Winstanley of the radical Diggers even calling for an end to primogeniture and for the cultivation of the soil in common. "Seeing the common people of England by joynt consent of person and purse have caste out Charles our Norman oppressor, wee have by this victory recovered ourselves from under his Norman yoake." wrote Winstanley on behalf of the Diggers, in December 1649. In The True Levellers specifics Advanced Winstanley begins: