It’s not much of a place, Quetteville – a hamlet of only 400 souls in Lower Normandy. The food and drink isn’t bad: this is Calvados country. And Pont-l’Evêque is just down the road. But much as I wish it was, Quetteville is not one of those heart-meltingly beautiful French villages which tempt English holidaymakers to make their foreign sojourn permanent. Quite the reverse.

This is the land from which the Normans – I should say, we Normans – sprang instead to launch the Conquest of this island – a process which began 950 years ago today, when Edward the Confessor died, beginning the most celebrated year in English history. On this very day almost a millennium ago, freemen plodding about in Northumbria or in the Fens had no idea that their lives, their language, their laws, their society, their religious beliefs, and yes, their penchant for long girly hair, were about to be annihilated by a band of shaven-headed foreigners with an unseemly love of horses.