I very deliberately used the word Norse instead of Norman. 150 years is sod all time for "cultural" change, 1000 odd years ago. Nowadays we have all this jingoistic, nationalistic bollocks going on. The articles on HN reflect this:
"British scientists discover their own arses", "Russian scientists forget humanitarianism", "Chinese scientologists discover Pi three million years ago"
Norman is a modern word and so is norse here, and both are English terms and both mean northman - ie bloke (or bird - let's not be sexist) from the "north"
Bear in mind that travelling by boat is far easier than land, when the Fosse Way hasn't been built, let alone the A38 or M5.
If you want to get to grips with the olden times, you have to lose silly modern notions of well ... everything.