Astral Codex Ten

Normandy

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Normandy

Article

Normandy is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 03, 2025 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “the military aristocracy of Normandy”; “landed an army in Normandy and went around taking and besieging towns”; “Henry V of England, who intended not merely to reclaim Normandy”. It most often appears alongside Alexander, Scotland, Wikipedia.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: July 03, 2025
  • Last seen: August 01, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability
July 03, 2025 · Original source
In favor of Normans being genetically smarter - the Normans who invaded England were the military aristocracy of Normandy, which was itself descended from the military aristocracy of Denmark. If military aristocrats are selected from the smartest/strongest/healthiest portion of the population, then they might have better genes than the unselected Saxons.
Inline links: military aristocracy
Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
Agincourt was the standard model of battle - Henry V "made it his course to busy the minds of his people with foreign quarrels", to misquote Shakespeare, landed an army in Normandy and went around taking and besieging towns. When the French went up to engage him, Henry attempted to withdraw, took up a position on good ground and when the French attacked the English broke them utterly. Halfway through the battle the order was given to kill the prisoners instead of holding them for ransom, and so the battle was not merely a defeat for the French, but a disaster, with a generation's worth of military leaders dead in a single day.19
Inline links: 19
Naturally, Philip had opponents at court who objected to his abuse of the treasury for his private purposes. They wanted to abuse the treasury for their private purposes, and it simply wasn't fair that Uncle Philip got to monopolize it all! The head of this party was Philip the Bold's nephew and Charles the Mad's brother, Louis of Orleans, but for some bizarre reason his party was called the Armagnacs.22 Louis took advantage of a moment of lucidity on his brother's part to get the regency, but was dismissed for corruption23 and then when he continued to cross the Burgundians, murdered - but he had a son who inherited the blood feud and the two sides took advantage of the long truce in the war with England to go at it hammer and tongs, riots alternating with coups interspersed with outright field battles. Commoners and nobles alike rallied to one side or the other, and loyal Frenchmen could consider either faction to be the lesser evil. When Henry V invaded, the Armagnacs had happened to be in control of the government, and so their leaders had been at the battle of Agincourt and few escaped. The Burgundians were faced with a foreign invasion on the one hand and domestic strife on the other, so John the Fearless, then Duke of Burgundy, offered the Armagnacs an end to the feud and an alliance against the English, conditional on the Armagnacs yielding the regency to the Burgundian faction. The Armagnacs agreed. The two sides met to discuss terms, and then - with Henry V and his army rampaging around Normandy, taking towns at will! - the chiefs of the Armagnac faction had John the Fearless murdered in retaliation for Louis's earlier murder.
Inline links: 22, 23
Charles the Mad played no particular role in the Anglo-French treaty that resulted. The key figures were Henry V of England, who intended not merely to reclaim Normandy but to press his great-grandfather’s claim to the French throne; Philip the Good of Burgundy, who had a blood feud to pursue; and Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France, a ruthless and ambitious woman who probably deserved better than she got from history; she'd done a fine job playing the political game and trying to keep her family alive during the Armagnac-Burgundian Feud, but by this point she was all out of cards. The treaty said that Henry V would wed Charles's daughter, that Isabeau of Bavaria would swear that the Dauphin24 Charles (an Armagnac) was no son of the king's but the product of an incestuous25 affair between her and Louis of Orleans, and since that meant they were all out of male descendants of Charles the Mad, why, Henry would serve as regent for him and inherit through his own wife when he died.
Inline links: 24, 25