The Normans (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

In the English-speaking world, the Normans are almost always thought of in the context of William the Conqueror and his defeat of Harold of England at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The processes by which Normandy came into being and the activities of Normans in other parts of Europe, notably southern Italy and the Levant, are little known except by Norman enthusiasts and specialist scholars. It is the aim of this book to bring the story of the Norman achievement to the general reader – considering not only the Normans in Normandy and England, but also Norman activities in the Mediterranean – and to assess the overall place of the Normans in medieval history and their impact in its entirety.

The Norman story at first seems deceptively straightforward: the area which was to become known as Normandy was ceded to the Vikings by the western Carolingian empire in the early tenth century and then went on to become the most powerful principality in northern France. The energy, ruthlessness and administrative ability of the Normans enabled them to subdue and, in some cases, annex the lands of their Frankish neighbours and also to mount a military campaign that was able to defeat a formidable united Anglo-Saxon kingdom in England. In addition, Normans were able to conquer the Byzantines and Latins in southern Italy and the Muslims in Sicily, thereby creating a powerful Mediterranean kingdom consisting of southern Italy and Sicily known as the ‘Two Sicilies’. This kingdom provided the springboard for the conquest of Malta and a large section of the North African coast. Normans from both north-western Europe and Italy were involved in the First Crusade, enabling them to establish a formidable presence in the Holy Land and a crusader kingdom at Antioch in the Levant. Norman armies, sometimes by themselves and sometimes with allies, also undertook campaigns in Spain, the Balkans and the Aegean and were even capable of besieging Constantinople at the heart of the Byzantine Empire. The scale of the Norman achievement has prompted some scholars to talk of an interrupted Norman empire stretching from Wales in the west to Syria in the east and from Scotland in the north to Tunis in the south (1).

Such, then, are the bare bones of the Norman story between AD 900 and 1200, yet each of these above statements masks numerous questions and caveats which need to be addressed if we are to understand more fully the character and nature of the Norman world. The term ‘Norman’ is simply French for ‘Scandinavian’, and was applied to the inhabitants of the region of France taken over by Vikings in the tenth century – the Terra Northmannorum or the Northmannia. The general perception is that the Normans who came to conquer England with William were essentially Vikings who had been converted to Christianity. There is, however, considerable evidence to suggest that by the beginning of the eleventh century Normandy was essentially a Frankish principality, in many respects not unlike its neighbours. There are also serious questions to be asked about the Viking character of early Normandy, particularly about the numbers of Scandinavians who migrated and colonised the duchy. It now appears that a relatively small number of Scandinavians took over the reins of power in the tenth century from the Franks and, although there was limited later migration by Viking settlers into Normandy, it was on nowhere near the scale imagined by earlier historians. By the middle of the eleventh century there is little evidence of Viking culture surviving in Normandy and, although William himself was directly descended from a Viking warlord (Rollo), few of the knights and their followers who defeated the English at Hastings had Viking blood in their veins. The Franks for the most part had assimilated the Vikings and the resulting cultural blend was Norman.

1 Map showing the full extent of Norman possessions in the twelfth century

Nevertheless, it is an indisputable fact that in 1066 William, Duke of Normandy, defeated and killed King Harold of England at the battle of Hastings and went on to take the English throne. There is, however, room for doubt about the long-term impact of the Conquest of England. The immediate impact of the Norman take-over of Anglo-Saxon England was dramatic and at times brutal. The military conquest was associated with a total transfer of land ownership from Anglo-Saxon thegns to continental knights. The Domesday Book (1086) provides a vivid account, within its sombre and painstaking record, of the way in which England passed from Anglo-Saxon ownership to Norman hands. At face value the Domesday Book indicates a peaceful and well-organised transfer of land from Saxon to Norman; but on the ground the story must have been very different, with much local violence, suffering and confusion. By 1086, out of 10,000 holdings only a handful remained in Saxon hands. It was probably true that Saxons often continued as manorial reeves, and perhaps were often able to maintain a considerable degree of control, but the political and military reality was that the Normans had won, and that they took all the spoils. Similarly in the Church, Saxon leaders were comprehensively replaced by Normans and their allies. Nevertheless, at grass-roots level there was even less Norman folk settlement in England than there had been Scandinavian settlement in Normandy. Furthermore, the families of those Normans that did come to England with William were rapidly anglicised, and within a century of the Conquest it is far more accurate to refer to Anglo-Norman England than to Norman England.

Even at this distance of time it is difficult for the English to view the Normans objectively. English attitudes to the Norman Conquest display a persistent mixture of fascination, admiration and incredulity. Fascination with the very fact of the last continental conquest of England, admiration towards those who undertook the venture, and incredulity that the forces of this small duchy could overcome the English, who were fighting on home soil.

Attitudes to the Norman Conquest of England and to their subsequent occupation have fluctuated considerably over the last centuries. The concept of the ‘Norman yoke’ has been part of popular English mythology over the generations. Sir Henry Spellman (d.1641) and Sir Robert Cotton (d.1631) traced many illegal abuses back to the Normans and the Norman feudal system, a theme enthusiastically taken up and developed by nineteenth-century writers such as Charles Kingsley and George Burrow. The perception was that before 1066 the Anglo-Saxons lived as free and equal citizens, governed by representative institutions. It was thought that the Norman Conquest was responsible for depriving the English of these liberties, establishing the tyranny of an alien king and alien landlords. Theories of this nature were almost certainly in vogue throughout the Middle Ages and account for the popularity of Edward the Confessor, both as an English king and as a saint, and King Alfred, who assumed the role of symbol of national independence. Thomas Paine (1737–1809) went one stage further and attributed all the problems that England experienced after 1066 to ‘the French bastard and his banditti.’

During the Victorian period there was a tendency to regard the Norman Conquest in a more positive light and as marking the start of the present line of monarchy. By the 1930s, historical attitudes had changed once more and scholars such as Sayles suggested that the Norman Conquest was only a minor irritation that did little to interrupt the continuum of Anglo-Saxon society and institutions. This attitude hardened during the Second World War in the face of another continental threat to the British Isles and some scholars, such as Sir Frank Stenton, who had previously seen the Norman Conquest as a watershed, came down on the side of continuity. In recent years the divide has tended to concentrate on differences between archaeologists and historians. Medieval archaeologists, with concepts of cultural continuity, have found it difficult to accept that the Conquest affected all but a relatively small section of society. While some historians, such as Allen Brown, have emphasised the Norman achievement on a European scale, others have been more circumspect and have pointed to the essentially adaptable nature of Norman society that in England was the blend of Anglo-Saxon and Norman, and in Italy a mixture of Norman, Muslim and Byzantine. In recent years scholars have used the phrase ‘aristocratic diaspora’ to describe European events in the tenth to thirteenth centuries, during the course of which lords and knights from the heartlands of the former Carolingian empire conquered and settled lands – England, Spain, Italy, Greece – on the periphery of Latin Christendom.

Although much of the evidence for the Norman Conquest of England is historical in character, there is enough physical evidence to provide the archaeologist with a unique opportunity of examining an invasion of Britain within the context of a wealth of documentary evidence. It is generally accepted that the Norman Conquest of England was achieved by a relatively small force, in total no more than 10,000 people, and, although there was some migration from continental Europe into England following the Conquest, there was no major population movement. In some areas, such as warfare and the church, there were fundamental changes, whereas in others, such as rural settlement (apart from in the north of England where many post-Conquest villages appear to have been founded), the impact of the Conquest was imperceptible.

What of the Normans in southern Europe? The Norman take-over in Italy was very different from the Conquest of England. It was led by groups of...