However, Kelly goes on to claim that “only the Normans conquer”, correctly affirming the British acceptance of the Roman invasion but also wrongly inferring that the Norman subjugation hadn’t become increasingly useful, in a calculated celebration of the nation’s own conquest, as a way to justify the new imperial identity of Britain.  It is pertinent that a Victorian replica of the Bayeux Tapestry was finished in 1886, coinciding with the reemergence of imperialism in Africa.  It seems that the “embarrassment” and humiliation of invasion and occupation, both Roman and Norman, were able to legitimize this “rehearsal of the same” in Africa.

Ironically, the town of Dorchester in the south of England is twinned with Bayeux in Normandy.  What surpasses even the initial irony that Bayeux owns a famous tapestry which depicts the successful invasion of England, is the reason for the association between the two towns is that the Dorset regiment was the first to enter Bayeux after the liberation of the collaborationist Vichy regime.  In his text The English Resistance: the Underground War Against the Normans, Peter Rex argues that the first five years of Norman occupation were similar to the same period of French resistance under the Nazi occupation!