The idea that England's rulers have become estranged from its people is often treated as a recognisably right-wing complaint. Its history is much less convenient than that. Arguments about an alien ruling class also belonged to English radicalism.
One influential version blamed the Norman Conquest. Before 1066, the story went, the English had enjoyed their own liberties. A foreign aristocracy then seized the land and imposed institutions serving its own interests. Later oppression was explained as the continuation of that original theft.
The history behind the story was often romantic. The political questions it raised were real: who owns the land, who controls the law and to whom do rulers owe their loyalty?
A radical argument
Seventeenth-century radicals used the idea of a Norman Yoke to challenge inherited power. Leveller arguments about law and liberty and Digger arguments about land drew on accounts of freedoms lost through conquest. They weren't all making the same case, and describing them as a modern political party would be anachronistic.
The connection still matters. A complaint about a distant elite wasn't automatically a defence of aristocracy or reaction. It could be an argument against them. The historian Christopher Hill examined that radical use of the Norman Yoke tradition.
Today, someone saying that an elite shares more with its international peers than with the people it governs may be making a different claim in different circumstances. The family resemblance is worth noticing. We shouldn't decide whether the complaint has merit simply by assigning it a modern political label.
What survived the conquest?
Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins used surnames to investigate the persistence of social status over long periods. Their research on England found continued over-representation of some high-status surname groups in elite educational records across many generations.
That is striking evidence of persistence. It isn't proof that an unchanged Norman ruling caste controls modern Britain. The authors discuss how adoption and changes in surnames can affect what the records tell us about actual descendants. Their explanation of the mechanisms of persistence is also open to argument.
The distinction matters. A surname pattern can't establish someone's loyalty, beliefs or right to belong, and it doesn't demonstrate that a particular modern institution has been captured.
A history we don't need to romanticise
Anglo-Saxon England wasn't a lost democracy. It contained major inequalities and enslaved people. The conquest didn't introduce every form of domination to an otherwise free society.
That weakens the golden-age story. It doesn't remove the question of whether rulers serve the people subject to their decisions. Institutions can be distant or unaccountable without their occupants having the wrong ancestors.
Orwell returned to a related discomfort in *The Lion and the Unicorn*: intellectuals on his own side could be contemptuous of English attachments while claiming to speak for the country. His socialism didn't prevent him from noticing it.
That is the part of the older argument I think remains useful. Judge an institution by what it does, whom it serves and whether the people affected can hold it responsible. Neither a patriotic claim nor an accusation of reaction answers those questions for us. The ancestry of whoever happens to hold the office doesn't either.