I probably don't need to commend to fellow companions the pastime of browsing their local library's multi volume Oxford English Dictionary, a real mine of interesting, or at least useful, material drawn from the obscurer labyrinths of our incomparable language.

Nor need this be 'just' idle browsing for I often come across new and eminently useable words or fascinating information about the derivation of familiar ones. Less creditably, the volumes can be a rich quarry for strange words with which to .... counter the Norman managerial/employer classes. This last utility in turn arises from my long-standing observation that said Norman etc. etc. class just cannot resist trying to bluff their way through a conversation containing a richer vocabulary than their own. Viz.:

"What did you reckon of my report, Smithers?"
"I thought it was really feculent [*], sir"
" .... oh, right, good ...."

Personally, of course, I cannot recommend such irresponsible and unkind behaviour ....

On one recent occasion however, my search for enlightenment and mischief-material brought me up short with a chilling insight into history's treatment of our nation and what it must have felt like on the ground, at the time ....

Vol. V, page 256 details:

Englishry : the fact of being an Englishman, chiefly from legal phrasing, viz.: Presentment of Englishry, that is the offering of proof that a slain person was an Englishman, in order to escape the fine levied (under the Norman Kings) upon the hundred or township for the murder of a 'Frenchman' or Norman.

This little charmer was first attested c 1292 and not formally abolished until a statute of 14 E. 3. c.4 [whenever that might be] when the presentment of Englechery was wholly abrogated and annulled.

Whilst I presume that some penalty still attached to the murder of English folk during the relevant period (though if it were by a Norman I suspect that punishment would be mild even when a conviction was obtained) we have here an insight encapsulated with a obsolete word, itself buried away in a not exactly massively thumbed multi-volume work, of the relative status of our ancestors.

One can approach the notion from the pragmatic view that such a legal concept is only to be expected of a numerically small occupying race, anxious to impose collective punishment for resistance to their presence. Our own tragic century provides several glaring examples of such policies. And, after all, it was such a very long time ago. Times were different then ....

Yet, this knowledge (and much else I read in Widowinde such as Geoffrey Littlejohns' priceless series of articles about the Levellers and Diggers and the Norman Yoke) makes much become clear. I see now that, to this very day, the attitude of Britain's ruling classes to the common English people and Englisc culture has its roots in just such (feculent) soil.

Therefore, I think it salutary to keep in mind that there was a time when to be an Englishman in England was, legally, to be not much better than vermin.

Source

Oxford English Dictionary. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Second edition 1991 Volume V p 256
[*] "filthy, scummy or foul, of the nature of faeces', or to put it plainly: crappy.

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