The Anglo-Norman Realm (Medieval Studies)

Introduction
The Anglo-Norman world was created by the union of Normandy and England in 1066, when William, duke of Normandy conquered the kingdom of England. Its beginning date is therefore obvious, but historians differ on when it ended. The most common date is 1154, the end of the reign of William the Conqueror’s grandson Stephen, even though during those eighty-eight years England and Normandy were jointly ruled for only approximately sixty-three. Because Stephen was a son of a count of Blois, some historians consider that the Anglo-Norman period ended with the death of Henry I or in 1144, when Stephen lost control of Normandy; and some carry the date forward through the first dozen years of the reign of Henry II, which makes an even century (1066–1166) and can be justified on the grounds that the major changes of Henry’s reign began about 1166. The conventional date of 1154 for the Anglo-Norman period will be used in this article. The Norman Conquest of England had profound effects not only for England but also for Normandy. Estimates of how much change it brought to each area vary from historian to historian: some argue that most of the developments in England after 1066 would have occurred without the Conquest, and others argue that its consequences were profound, whether for good or for ill. Nonetheless, every historian who discusses any aspect of life in the Anglo-Norman realm must consider the changes that occurred and how much difference they made. The on-again off-again war between England and France that began in 1066 (because William the Conqueror was by then already involved in war with his theoretical overlord the king of France) ended only with the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. The Anglo-Saxon nobility was almost completely replaced by a French (primarily Norman) aristocracy, and many Norman families were greatly enriched by land in England. The church in England rapidly came to be headed by men of Continental extraction with Continental ideas about everything from liturgy to architecture, and the church in Normandy was enriched both directly by gifts of loot from England and indirectly by the wealth that its lay patrons acquired there. Normans began to build and rebuild in England and use their new wealth to build and rebuild in Normandy. The French language, castles, and Jews were all new in England after 1066. While changes in law, government, the economy, and society are more difficult to assess, they must also be considered. Because some inhabitants of the Anglo-Norman realm moved beyond its borders while retaining their sense of being Norman, this bibliography also includes sections on the Normans in European History, Normans in Southern Italy, and Normans on Crusade and in the Crusader States.
Bibliographies
Many of the works cited in other sections have excellent bibliographies. In addition, several stand-alone bibliographies exist. Altschul 1969 covers the same period as this article but emphasizes works on England: Normandy comes up only in conjunction with England. Bates 1987 is the only modern bibliography of Domesday Book. Brown 1988 is the best of several roughly contemporary collections of studies of the Bayeux Tapestry.
Altschul, Michael. Anglo-Norman England, 1066–1154. London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
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The only bibliographical work specifically devoted to the Anglo-Norman period. Not annotated but organized by topic and with an index of authors. There are 1,838 entries.
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Bates, David. A Bibliography of Domesday Book. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1987.
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The 4,684 entries here are divided between general studies and works on individual counties, some annotated.
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Brown, Shirley Ann. The Bayeux Tapestry: History and Bibliography. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1988.
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A brief history of the tapestry as an object and a historiography of the tapestry followed by chronologically arranged annotated bibliographies of studies of the tapestry, related documents and reproductions and facsimiles, plus non-annotated alphabetically arranged bibliographies of literary sources and background readings. There are 523 total entries.
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Journals
Anglo-Norman Studies: Proceedings of the Battle Conference and Haskins Society Journal, two series of annual publications, are valuable for keeping up with the latest advances in scholarship.
Anglo-Norman Studies: Proceedings of the Battle Conference.
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An ongoing series of volumes of articles published in Great Britain. The papers for each year were originally given at the annual Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman studies. The first four volumes were published under the title Proceedings of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies.
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The Haskins Society Journal.
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An on-going series of volumes of articles derived from the papers originally given in the United States at the annual conference of the Haskins Society for Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, Angevin and Viking History. The table of contents for volumes 1 (1989) through 18 (2006) is online.
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The Normans in European History
In the 11th and 12th centuries people from Normandy migrated, peacefully, by conquest or by a combination of the two, not only to England (and from there to Wales, Scotland, and eventually Ireland) but to many parts of the Mediterranean world including southern Italy and Sicily, Spain, and the Holy Land, for many of the participants in the first Crusade were Normans or of Norman extraction. It is common in histories of the Normans in European history (the title of a book published in 1915 by Charles Homer Haskins, the dean of modern historical study of the Normans) to note that in the first half of the 12th century the Anglo-Norman kingdom and the Norman kingdom of Sicily were the richest, best-governed states in Europe, and the Norman principality of Antioch was the strongest of the Crusader states. The Normans, in other words, had a major impact in the 11th and 12th centuries in many areas outside of Normandy, not just in England. The works in this section are studies of this general phenomenon. The Normans began as Vikings, men from the North, who acquired the lands that became Normandy in the course of the first half of the 10th century. Neveux and Rouelle 2008 looks at Norman history from their Viking days onward, as does Chibnall 2000. See also Bates 1982, cited under the Question of Norman Exceptionalism. Douglas 1969 and Douglas 1976 are a two-volume treatment of the Normans in Europe in their heyday of conquest and rule, from the mid-11th century to the mid-12th. The articles in Harper-Bill and van Houts 2003 provide recent summaries of the Normans’ activities in many areas, both geographic and topical. Chibnall 1984 takes an unusual vantage point, looking at Norman achievements through the eyes of their greatest chronicler, the 12th-century historian Orderic Vitalis. In addition to works in this section, Brown 1984 (cited under the Question of Norman Exceptionalism) looks at the Normans all over the European world. For sources on Normans everywhere see van Houts 2000, cited under Collections of Excerpts.
Chibnall, Marjorie. The World of Orderic Vitalis. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984.
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Shortly after completing her edition and translation of Orderic’s history of the Norman world (see Sources on the Anglo-Norman Realm: Histories Written in Normandy), Chibnall produced this analysis of the Norman world of the early 12th century as seen through the eyes of its greatest historian.
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Chibnall, Marjorie. The Normans. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
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A survey of the Normans throughout the range of their activities, from the origins of the duchy through the aftermath of the reabsorption of Normandy into the kingdom of France in 1204.
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Douglas, David Charles. The Norman Achievement, 1050–1100. London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1969.
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Looks at the Normans across Europe in the half century in which they made their greatest marks on the history of Europe and the Mediterranean. Emphasizes the Normans’ consciousness of themselves as one people and the “inherent unity in all the Normans wrought” (p. 218).
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Douglas, David Charles. The Norman Fate, 1100–1154. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976.
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Continues the story of the Normans through the first half of the 12th century. Emphasizes that Norman activities in Europe and the Middle East “formed part of a single Norman endeavor which must be studied as a unity” (p. 3) and had influence far beyond the borders of the Norman states.
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Harper-Bill, Christopher, and Elisabeth van Houts, eds. A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2003.
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Provides a valuable set of recent studies of the Normans in Normandy, England, and the Mediterranean and of developments in institutions, the church, literature, and architecture.
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Neveux, François, with Claire Ruelle. A Brief History of the Normans: The Conquests that Changed the Face of Europe. Translated by Howard Curtis. London: Constable and Robinson, 2008.
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Covers Norman history from the advent of the Northmen in Europe to the Norman conquests of England and southern Italy, with brief attention to the 12th- and 13th-century history of these areas. French original: L’Aventure des Normands (VIIIe-XIIIe siècle) (2006).
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The Question of Norman Exceptionalism
Orderic Vitalis certainly thought that the Normans were acting as one people in all their areas of activity and thought of themselves consciously as one people. See Orderic Vitalis 1969–1980 cited under Histories Written in Normandy and Chibnall 1984, cited under Normans in European History. Most of the works that discuss Norman activities around Europe (see Normans in European History) agree that certain particular characteristics of the Normans explain their conspicuous successes and that the Normans were conscious of being one people engaged in one enterprise of expansion. Agreement is not universal, however. Bates 1982 is a work by the most prominent historian to reject this argument and assert, instead, that the Normans were unexceptional among the peoples of northern France of their day. Power 2004, cited under Anglo-Normans and their French Neighbors similarly argues that the Norman frontier was not exceptional in ways that previous historians had suggested. Warren 1984 directly controverts the thesis of Norman exceptionalism in one area in which their superiority has usually been unquestioned: administrative efficiency. Davis 1976 raises the issue of Norman exceptionalism in especially provocative fashion by arguing that the uniqueness of the Normans and the idea that they were engaged in a common enterprise all over the European world were 12th-century myths rather than 11th- and 12th-century reality: the idea that the Normans thought of themselves as one, exceptional people engaged in a common enterprise of conquering as much of the world as they could was a product of 12th-century Norman historians, especially Orderic Vitalis, he said; and, in fact, in the 11th century the Normans were much more concerned with portraying themselves as no different from other Frenchmen. This thesis was directly challenged by Loud 1981, which cited much of the evidence that historians before Davis had uncritically assumed meant that the Normans thought of themselves as having a common purpose and noted that Orderic cannot be responsible for much of this because he wrote fairly late and because no one except possibly other monks of St. Evroult read Orderic’s work in the Middle Ages. Brown 1984 unproblematically re-asserts the thesis that the Normans were exceptional and were conscious of themselves as a people apart.
Bates, David. Normandy before 1066. London and New York: Longman, 1982.
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The best general introduction to the history of the duchy of Normandy from its beginnings in the early 10th century until the Norman Conquest. Bates argues against the thesis of Norman exceptionalism espoused by Brown, Douglas, and other scholars.
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Brown, R. Allen. The Normans. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1984.
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Attributes Norman successes to their superior characteristics and “extraordinary powers of assimilation and adaptation” (p. 19). Argues that Normans everywhere used the same “method and pattern of expansion, in an almost exclusively aristocratic colonization, of lords and knights, prelates and monks, by means of castles, monasteries and churches” (p. 62).
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Davis, R. H. C. The Normans and Their Myth. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976.
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Controversial discussion of “how [the Normans] became Normans, how they changed their ideas of what a Norman was, and how eventually they lost their identity” (p. 16).
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Loud, G. A. “The ‘Gens Normannorum’: Myth or Reality.” Anglo-Norman Studies 4 (1981): 104–116.
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Explicitly critiques Davis 1976. Concludes that the Normans did have a myth, a conception of themselves as “a distinct people with their own character” (p. 116) and that it is found in the 11th-century accounts they wrote about themselves. It was not a creation of the 12th century.
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Warren, W. L. “The Myth of Norman Administrative Efficiency.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 34 (1984): 113–132.
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. Argues that the Normans in England were anything but administratively efficient based on an analysis of English coinage, legal practice, shire organization and the purpose of Domesday Book as a tool for assessment of the geld.
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The Anglo-Norman Realm
This section includes works that are primarily narrative or political in scope and that deal either with the Anglo-Norman realm as such or with English relations with other parts of the British Isles. Huscroft 2005 gives a narrative of the period all the way up to the end of the reign of King John in the early 13th century. The first half of the work is on the Anglo-Norman period. Daniell 2003 covers the same period partly narratively and partly analytically. Bartlett 2000 also covers about 150 years beginning shortly after the Conquest: his approach is almost entirely topical. Although all three of these are explicitly about England, no history of England in this period can avoid talking about Normandy (and, after 1154, much of the rest of France as well) since the kings of England were heavily involved in Continental affairs from 1066 on. Le Patourel 1976, however, insists that one cannot center one’s attention on England or Normandy alone in the period between 1066 and 1144. The book makes a very strong and quite controversial argument, adumbrated in Le Patourel 1971 that despite the frequent separations of Normandy from England, both the rulers and their aristocratic followers thought of the Anglo-Norman realm precisely as one Anglo-Norman entity, not two separate polities that were sometimes united because of military or dynastic happenstance. Bates 1989 is a careful critique of the major premises of Le Patourel’s construct.
Bartlett, Robert. England under Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225. Oxford: Clarendon, 2000.
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The relevant volume of the New Oxford History of England and the standard (primarily analytical rather than narrative) history of the period.
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Bates, David. “Normandy and England after 1066.” English Historical Review 104 (1989): 413, 851–880.
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Looks at the relationship of the two parts of the Anglo-Norman realm. Compares and contrasts its conclusion with those of Le Patourel. With an appendix on the use of the term Normananglorum by the Hyde (or Warenne) chronicler.
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Daniell, Christopher. From Norman Conquest to Magna Carta: England, 1066–1215. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
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After two chapters narrating English history for the century and a half after the Conquest, Daniell turns to a topical analysis of relations with other states, politics and government, religion, economy, society, and the arts. The book has no strong thesis but provides accounts of developments in all these areas.
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Huscroft, Richard. Ruling England, 1042–1217. London: Pearson, 2005.
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A narrative of the history of England from the run-up to the Norman Conquest through Magna Carta with a primarily political and governmental emphasis.
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Le Patourel, John. Normandy and England, 1066–1144. University of Reading, 1971.
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The Stenton Lectures for 1970 provided Le Patourel the opportunity to summarize briefly the conclusions that he later fleshed out in The Norman Empire.
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Le Patourel, John. The Norman Empire. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976.
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Surveys developments on both sides of the Channel and argues that Normandy and England formed one coherent unit throughout the period from 1066 to 1144. Le Patourel’s theses are controversial, but the book remains important for understanding how study of the Anglo-Norman realm has evolved in the last generation.
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Sources on the Anglo-Norman Realm
No medieval historian would ever claim to have sufficient information about the period and place that he or she studies, but the sources for England and Normandy in the period from 1066 to 1154 are, in fact, relatively abundant, for there was an efflorescence of historical writing in both areas in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest. Sources were written not only in Latin, which was the most popular written language in 11th- and 12th-century Europe, but also in Anglo-Saxon and in French. Short 1992 (cited under Cultural History) and others have pointed out that the earliest writings in French in the late 11th and 12th centuries are associated with the Anglo-Norman realm; and he suggests that this precocity was related to the fact that after 1066 England was a trilingual country. A sense of the mixing of cultures may have stimulated the historical thinking of three of the most important historians. Orderic Vitalis in Normandy and both William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon in England were the products of mixed unions, probably in all three cases unions of French fathers with English mothers. In addition to a striking numbers of works of history in three languages, the Anglo-Norman realm saw the production of many other kinds of sources in comparison with contemporary areas elsewhere in Europe. Two of these are extraordinary. The Bayeux Tapestry, which is actually an embroidery, is a pictorial account of the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings and the battle itself; a few scraps of other contemporary embroideries are known, but all of them are fragmentary, and none of them forms a narrative. Domesday Book, a detailed survey of the tenurial arrangements and productive capacity of England in 1086 (with much information about 1066 as well), is unique: there is nothing like it anywhere else in Europe in its day or for centuries thereafter. Many more prosaic documents, letters, treatises, and so on survive from Normandy and England in this period, some of which have been translated in the collections of excerpts listed here.
Collections of Excerpts
All these collections of excerpts from sources include both historians and documentary sources. Douglas and Greenaway 1981 is the exhaustive collection of material of all sorts for virtually every aspect of life in England in the century and a half between the beginning of the reign of Edward the Confessor and the death of Richard the Lionheart. Brown 1984 concentrates on the Conquest and its aftermath. Wilkinson 1987 covers the whole Anglo-Norman period and is particularly useful to students for the questions it poses about each translated source. Van Houts 2000 collects material about the Normans all over Europe. Translations of the major descriptions of the Battle of Hastings will also be found in Morillo 1996, cited under Battle of Hastings.
Brown, R. A., trans. The Norman Conquest of England: Sources and Documents. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1984.
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The scope of this selection of translated documents is wider than the title indicates, for it includes material from Normandy before the Conquest as well as from both Normandy and England in and after 1066.
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Douglas, David, and G. M. Greenaway. English Historical Documents, 1042–1189. 2d ed. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1981.
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A selection of sources of all types, from excerpts from the historians to translations of many representative documents of all the kinds produced in England in this period. This is the standard, comprehensive set of translations.
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Van Houts, Elisabeth, ed. and trans. The Normans in Europe. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000.
DOI: 10.7765/MMSO.47503Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The works translated are primarily excerpts from historians but include some charters and other documents. The areas covered include Normandy, Britain (especially England), Italy, Spain, the Holy Land, and relations with Norman neighbors in France and with Byzantium.
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Wilkinson, Donald, ed. The Normans in Britain. London: Macmillan, 1987.
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Brief selections from contemporary accounts of the period from just before the Conquest to 1154, organized both topically (concerning the effects of the Conquest on Britain) and chronologically (by the reigns of the kings from William I to Stephen). Intended for students, each set of selections ends with questions for thought.
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Histories Written in Normandy
The writing of history in Normandy in the century after the Norman Conquest of England was to some extent a common enterprise. William of Poitiers’s biography of William the Conqueror (see Contemporary Lives) and William of Jumièges, et al. 1995 (William of Jumièges’s portion of this history of the Norman dukes) were begun independently (though for the dukes from Rollo through Richard I Jumièges relied on the history that an earlier cleric, Dudo of St. Quentin, wrote in the early 11th century); but they come together in Orderic Vitalis 1969–1980, whose author used Poitiers for some of his emendations to Jumièges before he went on to write his own massive history of the Normans around the world.
Orderic Vitalis. The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis. 6 vols. Edited by Marjorie Chibnall. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969–1980.
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This massive and extremely informative work was originally merely intended to be a history of Orderic’s own abbey, St. Evroult, but widened out to comprise the secular as well as ecclesiastical history of the Normans in Normandy, England, southern Italy, the Holy Land and even Spain. Ends in 1141.
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William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Robert of Torigni. The gesta Normannorum ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Robert of Torigni. 2 vols. Edited by Elisabeth M. C. van Houts. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995.
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During the reign of William the Conqueror, William of Jumièges wrote a history of the dukes that two other monastic chroniclers, Orderic Vitalis and Robert of Torigni, subsequently continued. This complex work is the most extensive account of the doings of the dukes of Normandy from Rollo through 1137.
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Histories Written in England
Prior to the Norman Conquest, one historical source dominates English history: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 1986, written in the vernacular from its beginning (the beginning of the world) to 1154, when the last surviving version, kept at the abbey of Peterborough, ceases. From King Alfred’s reign in the late 9th century on, the Chronicle was written virtually contemporaneously with the events it records, and it is a crucial source for the events leading up to the Conquest and for the Anglo-Norman period: it is also the closest we can get to the Anglo-Saxon view of what was going on. After the Conquest, England like Normandy saw historical writing flourish, and most of these works have received excellent translations in the last few decades. Three contemporary works cover the Anglo-Norman period as well as earlier English history: two were written by monks, William of Malmesbury 1998–1999 and John of Worcester 1998; the third by a secular cleric, Henry of Huntingdon 1996. Both William and Henry were of mixed Norman-English parentage, and William explicitly claims that this enabled him to be impartial in his depiction of the interactions of the two peoples. William of Malmesbury 1998 continues his account into Stephen’s reign. The Canterbury monk Eadmer’s account, Eadmer 1964, is restricted to the events of his own lifetime; of Anglo-Saxon origin, he spent most of his career at Canterbury under the first two “Norman” archbishops, Lanfranc and Anselm.
Whitelock, Dorothy, David C. Douglas, and Susie I. Tucker, eds. and trans. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Revised Translation. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986.
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The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is one of the most important sources for English history in the 11th century, and one version of it continued to be compiled at Peterborough until 1154. This is a translation of the whole of the Chronicle, with multiple versions where they exist, from beginning to end.
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Eadmer. History of Recent Events in England (Historia novorum in Anglia). Translated by Geoffrey Bosanquet. London: Cresset, 1964.
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Biographer of St. Anselm, the Canterbury monk Eadmer also wrote this history of events from the Norman Conquest to the end of Anselm’s tenure as archbishop. Valuable account from a firsthand witness who was also a sometimes sympathetic observer of the post-Conquest changes in the English church and country.
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Henry of Huntingdon. Historia Anglorum: The History of the English People. Edited and translated by Diana E. Greenway. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
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Henry of Huntingdon began to write before 1130. The History covers English history to 1154 and claims to be based on the author’s own knowledge from the reign of William Rufus on.
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John of Worcester. Chronicle. Vol. 3. Edited and translated by P. McGurk. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
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Earlier historians may refer to this work as by Florence of Worcester, but John is almost certainly the author. This volume covers 1066–1141. John’s Chronicle, written beginning in the 1120s, is based in part on a version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that does not survive.
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William of Malmesbury. Gesta regum Anglorum. 2 vols. Edited and translated by R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998–1999.
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The English monk William of Malmesbury claimed to be impartial observer of the English and the Normans. Volume 1 of this edition is William’s account of English history through 1120 with a continuation to 1127. Volume 2 is commentary by the editors.
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William of Malmesbury. Historia Novella. Edited by Edmund King and translated by K. R. Potter. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998.
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This work is dedicated to Henry I’s illegitimate son Robert, earl of Gloucester, half-brother and supporter of Matilda’s claim to the throne against Stephen. It was written contemporaneously with Stephen’s reign and covers 1128–1142.
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Historical Poems
Poetry was an important vehicle for the communication of all sorts of ideas in the ancient and medieval worlds, and this includes several poetical works of history written in the Anglo-Norman period. Two Latin poems are directly relevant to the Battle of Hastings itself. Guy of Amiens 1972, if the poem is what it claims to be, is the earliest known account of the battle. However, its reliability and even its authenticity have been questioned. Baudri of Bourgueil 1988 is a poem written for William the Conqueror’s daughter Adela: in part it describes a wall hanging depicting the battle. The wall hanging, if it ever existed, does not survive; but the poem is interesting in showing that the Bayeux Tapestry may not have been unique and, to some extent, for details it provides about the Battle of Hastings. The other two poems are histories of the English and Norman peoples, both written in French: Gaimar 2009, though written by a French cleric, depends on English sources, especially some version of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, to narrate the history of the English. Wace 2004, written in Normandy by a Norman cleric, narrates the history of the dukes of Normandy up through Henry I’s conquest of Normandy.
Baudri of Bourgueil. Adelae comitissae. Translated by Michael W. Herren. In The Bayeux Tapestry: History and Bibliography. Edited by Shirley Ann Brown, 167–177. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1988.
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Lines 207–572 of this Latin poem, “To Countess Adela,” translated here, describe a wall hanging depicting the Battle of Hastings. Relevant to study of the Bayeux Tapestry and, to a lesser extent, the Battle of Hastings itself. Countess Adela is Adela of Blois, the Conqueror’s daughter and King Stephen’s mother.
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Gaimar, Geffrei. Estoire des Engleis. Edited and translated by Ian Short. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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Poem in Norman French written for an Anglo-Norman lady, Constance, wife of Ralph fitz Gilbert, using almost exclusively English sources. Covers English history from the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons to the 12th century. More favorable to the Conquest and the Anglo-Norman monarchs than many writers of English history.
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Guy of Amiens. The Carmen de Hastingae proelio of Guy, Bishop of Amiens. Edited and translated by Catherine Morton and Hope Muntz. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972.
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The title of this Latin poem may be translated “Song of the Battle of Hastings.” An important source for the events of the Norman Conquest specifically, though its reliability has been questioned.
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Wace, Robert. The History of the Norman People: Wace’s Roman de Rou. Translated by Glyn S. Burgess with notes by Burgess and Elisabeth van Houts. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2004.
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Written in Norman and French in the 1160s and 1170s. Covers the period from Norman origins to 1106. On the basis of his reading of the earlier written sources and his local knowledge, Wace tells a rousing but somewhat unreliable tale.
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Contemporary Lives
The biography was another popular genre of historical writing in the Middle Ages, most especially in the form of saints’ lives. The three works listed here, however, are secular in orientation, though one of them, Eadmer 1962, is of a saint, Anselm of Canterbury. William of Poitiers 1998 is one of the basic sources for the life of William the Conqueror and the Norman Conquest of England, though it lauds its subject so much that its reliability is questionable. The anonymous account of the reign of King Stephen, Potter 1976, is an important source for that reign, which, interestingly, changes its point of view in the course of writing.
Eadmer. The Life of St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. Edited and translated by Richard William Southern. London and New York: Thomas Nelson, 1962.
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Eadmer, a monk of Canterbury who knew Anselm personally, wrote this laudatory biography of the second post-Conquest archbishop of Canterbury who was also one of the most prominent theologians of the Middle Ages.
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Potter, K. R., ed. Gesta Stephani. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976.
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This anonymous account, whose title translates as “the deeds of Stephen,” was written during Stephen’s reign, probably in two parts: the first, completed about 1148, tends to favor Stephen, while the later part, completed about 1153, favors his rival, the future Henry II.
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William of Poitiers. The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers. Edited and translated by R. H. C. Davis and Marjorie Chibnall. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998.
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A highly laudatory and somewhat untrustworthy biography of William the Conqueror written by a member of his court. In its current state it ends abruptly in 1067.
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The Bayeux Tapestry and Domesday Book
In the first two decades after the Norman Conquest, the Anglo-Norman realm saw the production of two remarkable sources, unparalleled among surviving sources from the Middle Ages anywhere in Europe: the Bayeux Tapestry and Domesday Book. The Bayeux Tapestry, probably commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux, the Conqueror’s half-brother, but made in England depicts the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings and the battle itself. It is still on display in the city of Bayeux. It is possible that there was once at least one other similar work: see Baudri of Bourgueil 1988 in Historical Poems. However, no other narrative textile remains in existence from the European Middle Ages. Foys 2013 is a convenient web-based iteration of the tapestry but is available only by subscription. Musset 2005 is a readily available reproduction of the whole tapestry in color, with informative commentaries. For bibliography on the tapestry, see Brown 1988 (cited under Bibliographies). For a series of studies of the tapestry see Lewis, et al. 2011, cited under Modern Studies of the Sources. Domesday Book is unique. No other medieval ruler anywhere in Europe ever tried to take what amounts to a census of all those holding land from him and their economic wherewithal, as William the Conqueror did in 1086. In addition to its statistical data, the book includes notices of disputes of land, most of them arising from the consequences of the distribution of land to new tenants after the Conquest. Williams and Martin 2002 is a complete translation of the book and Open Domesday contains photographs of the whole book on line and many features useful for finding particular things in the book. Domesday Book is the single most important source for studying the effects of the Conquest both on the aristocracy of England and on the masses. See Domesday Studies for works on how the book was made and ways in which modern historians have used it to cast light on a wide variety of aspects of life in England in the late 11th century. See Fleming 1998, cited under Law for a detailed discussion of the dispute-resolution aspect of the survey. For bibliography of Domesday Book see Bates 1987 (cited under Bibliographies).
Foys, Martin K., ed. Bayeux Tapestry Digital Edition. Scholarly Digital Editions. 2013.
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An updated version of an edition originally produced on CD-ROM, now available only online. The original CD-ROM was produced in Leicester in 2003. Must be purchased to be used.
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Musset, Lucien, ed. The Bayeux Tapestry. Translated by Richard Rex. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2005.
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Reproduces the tapestry in full in color and comments on its history and characteristics. Includes a detailed commentary on every scene in the work. Original publication: Paris: Editions Zodiaque, 2002.
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Open Domesday.
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A free online searchable version of Domesday Book including photographs of all the pages and many useful features, but not a complete translation.
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Williams, Ann, and Geoffrey H. Martin, eds. Domesday Book: A Complete Translation. London: Penguin, 2002.
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One-volume version of the translations originally published by Alecto Historical Editions as separate volumes. Counties are in the order in which they occur in Great Domesday followed by the three counties in Little Domesday. Index of place names only. Useful glossary.
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Modern Studies of the Sources
There is currently no single, primarily descriptive work of introduction to the major historians of the period, though the introductions to the editions cited in Sources on the Anglo-Norman Realm and the chapters on sources in many of the works cited in Biographies and Norman Conquest of England will be useful, as will Elisabeth van Houts’s discussion in Harper-Bill and van Houts 2003, cited under Normans in European History. A number of modern historians have tried to use these contemporary writers to explore various aspects of life in the Anglo-Norman realm. Both Shopkow 1997 for Normandy and Albu 2001 for the Normans all across Europe presume prior knowledge of the writers they analyze. For English writing, Gransden 1974 and Partner 1977 are more straightforward. One particular source, the Bayeux Tapestry, has been the subject of a remarkable amount of commentary, not only in editions of the tapestry (see Bayeux Tapestry and Domesday Book) but in many articles, including those in the most recent collection, Lewis, et al. 2011.
Albu, Emily. The Normans in their Histories: Propaganda, Myth and Subversion. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2001.
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Studies 11th- and 12th-century Norman writings about Normandy, Italy, the First Crusade, and the principality of Antioch. Argues that Norman “willingness to shed one ethnic identity for another may signal not strength but rather a profound dissatisfaction with the strictures of Normanness, both cultural and mythic” (p. 239).
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Gransden, Antonia. Historical Writing in England, c. 550 to c. 1307. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974.
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Only five chapters are on the writers of the Anglo-Norman period, but they provide the best introduction to these historians.
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Lewis, Michael J., Gale R. Owen-Crocker, and Dan Terkla, ed. The Bayeux Tapestry: New Approaches. Oxford: Oxbow, 2011.
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Nineteen articles in total. Roughly half of these are on the tapestry as an object and the other half on what it can tell us about the 11th century. Includes black-and-white plates of the tapestry.
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Partner, Nancy. Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.
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Analyzes the works of Henry of Huntingdon and William of Newburgh as well as others to convey the essence of what each had to say about the world.
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Shopkow, Leah. History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997.
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Analyzes the writings of, among others, William of Poitiers, William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Robert of Torigni, arguing that the outlook of the 11th-century historians was more positive than that of their 12th-century successors.
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Biographies
The movers and shakers in the Anglo-Norman realm were men and women with strong personalities who experienced dramatic events. As a result, many of them have attracted biographers the way sugar syrup attracts hummingbirds. The lists in this section only skim the surface of what is available. In most instances, the most recent biography is the one listed here: readers can easily find earlier biographers from the bibliographies of the later works.
Dukes and Kings
During the Anglo-Norman period, Normandy and England were subject to five rulers. Four of them were kings: William the Conqueror (1066–1087), his sons William II Rufus (1087–1100) and Henry I (1100–1135), and his grandson Stephen (1135–1154). The fifth was the Conqueror’s eldest son, Duke Robert Curthose, who ruled Normandy from 1087 to 1106. Crouch 2002 is a collective biography of all the dukes of Normandy, with brief accounts of the pre-Conquest Norman dukes and somewhat longer narratives of the lives of the post-Conquest rulers. On the Conqueror, Bates 1989, while not the most recent biography, is the most consistently perceptive. As he does for Normandy in Bates 1982 (cited under the Question of Norman Exceptionalism), Bates emphasizes the way in which William was typical of rulers of his day rather than exceptional. Readers who want to find other interpretations will find them in the works cited under Norman Conquest of England. Aird 2008 gives a relatively sympathetic account of the life of Curthose, the least competent of the Conqueror’s sons; and Mason 2005 does the same for the least attractive of them (at least by reputation) William Rufus. Although recognized as the ablest of the Conqueror’s sons and the most important of the Anglo-Norman kings after William I himself, Henry I has been relatively neglected by biographers. However, two accounts of his life and reign appeared in the first decade of the 21st century, of which Green 2006 is the shorter, more recent and more accessible account. Even though the last monarch of the dynasty, Stephen, was much less successful (to say the least) than his uncle, he has been the subject of a remarkable number of biographies in the last few decades, of which King 2010 is the most recent.
Aird, William M. Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy, c. 1050–1134. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2008.
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Argues that Curthose was a much more able ruler than the man depicted by the 12th-century sources, which were written after his fall and therefore were inclined to see weakness throughout his career.
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Bates, David. William the Conqueror. London: George Phillip, 1989.
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Emphasizes William’s similarity to other 11th-century rulers, except that his task was complicated by his need, after 1066, to govern his disparate territories. Characterizes William as an able ruler but “not an especially appealing man” (p. 4) and the conquest of England as his personal achievement.
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Crouch, David. The Normans: The History of a Dynasty. London: Hambledon and London, 2002.
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A serial biography of all the Norman rulers from Rollo, the first ruler of what became the duchy of Normandy, through Stephen, the last Anglo-Norman king of England. Provides an outline of the narrative history of the duchy as well as brief lives of all these rulers.
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Green, Judith. Henry I: King of England and Duke of Normandy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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Narrative of the life of the third Anglo-Norman king-duke with several analytical chapters on rulership, patronage of the church, and court culture.
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King, Edmund. King Stephen. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
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The latest of a spate of early-21st-century biographies of the last of the Anglo-Norman kings. Puts much of the blame for Stephen’s difficulties on the fact that he was never his own man but always “acting a part. And never with real conviction” (p. 339).
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Mason, Emma. William II Rufus the Red King. Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2005.
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Portrays Rufus, whose terrible reputation is based largely on the antagonism of monastic chroniclers, as a better ruler and a nicer man but also as a somewhat less able military leader than previous biographers have asserted. Concludes that Rufus’s death was probably an assassination, not an accident.
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Royal Women
In general, biographical information about women in the Middle Ages is much harder to come by than information about their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons; but four of the women of the Anglo-Norman royal family, each of them of dynamic personality and political importance, have been the subject of recent biographies. Borman 2011 describes the life of William the Conqueror’s wife, Matilda of Flanders: the work needs to be read with care because the author tends first to tell the juicy but untrustworthy stories (of which there are many) and to discuss their unreliability afterward. William and Matilda had at least four or five daughters, perhaps more: the uncertainty is in itself an indication of how little information there can be about women of even the most elevated status. Of these girls, only Adela, who married the count of Blois and became the mother of Stephen (the last Anglo-Norman king), played a large role on the world stage and left enough material for a biography. Lo Prete 2007 makes the most of this material to study Adela’s life and times in detail. William and Matilda’s son Henry, the third Anglo-Norman king of England, married another Matilda, originally called Edith: daughter of the king of Scotland and a princess of the Anglo-Saxon royal house (who also happened to be a saint) she united the blood of the Anglo-Saxon royal line with that of the Normans. In modern historical study, she has been overshadowed by the other Matildas of this period: her mother-in-law (whom she would not have known) and her daughter. Honeycutt 2003 attempts to rescue her from obscurity. The third Matilda, daughter of Henry I and Edith-Matilda, wife of Emperor Henry V and Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou was Stephen’s rival for the throne of England and mother of Stephen’s successor, Henry II. She is the subject of Chibnall 1991. A fourth Matilda, from the Continental comital house of Boulogne, and Stephen’s queen (who probably was a better governor and military commander than her husband) has not yet found her modern biographer. Information about her can be found in any biography of Stephen, including King 2010 (cited under Dukes and Kings), and in Tanner 2004 on the house of Boulogne (cited under Anglo-Normans and their French Neighbors).
Borman, Tracy. Matilda, Queen of the Conqueror. London: Jonathan Cape, 2011.
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Every biography of William the Conqueror discusses his wife, Matilda of Flanders, who played a significant role in the events of his career, but this is the only modern biography devoted to the lady herself.
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Chibnall, Marjorie. The Empress Matilda: Queen Consort, Queen Mother, and Lady of the English. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991.
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Matilda was the daughter of one king, mother of another, wife of an emperor and a count, and an aspirant to rule England in her own right. She was one of the strongest personalities in 12th-century England. This biography studies her career with attention to the role that gender played in her successes and failures.
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Honeycutt, Lois L. Matilda of Scotland: A Study in Medieval Queenship. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2003.
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The first modern biography of the least famous of the three Anglo-Norman Matildas, emphasizing her importance as a politician and as a patron of religious institutions, literature, and art. An appendix translates the long version of the mid-13th-century Life of St. Margaret of Scotland, Matilda’s mother.
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Lo Prete, Kimberly A. Adela of Blois: Countess and Lord (c. 1067–1137). Portland, OR: Four Courts, 2007.
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Massive work on the Conqueror’s daughter, Adela, wife of the notoriously cowardly crusader Stephen, count of Blois, who lived to see her son become king of England. This book discusses every known aspect of her life and, along the way, many aspects of aristocratic life.
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Archbishops and Bishops
In 11th- and 12th-century England and Normandy, the prelates of the church played important roles not only in church affairs but also in secular government. Most of the bishops and many of the abbots of great monasteries were large landowners and royal functionaries as well as (indeed sometimes more than) religious leaders. All five of the archbishops of Canterbury appointed between the Conquest and the early reign of Henry II are the subjects of modern biographies. Lanfranc, the subject of Cowdrey 2003, was an Italian lawyer, prior of the Norman monastery of Bec and abbot of William the Conqueror’s foundationSt. Stephen’s, Caen, as well as a canon lawyer and theologian before he became the first Norman-appointed archbishop of Canterbury. Anselm, one of the most prominent theologians of the Middle Ages, was also Italian and a monk of Bec, who became abbot of that monastery before being appointed to Canterbury. Many studies of him are interested primarily in his theological significance, but Southern 1990 and Vaughn 2012 concentrate on his career as prelate. Truax 2012 briefly delineates the lives of the three successors of Anselm who were archbishops in the first half of the 12th century. Of the archbishops of York in the Anglo-Norman period, only Thurstan, who ruled York from 1119 to 1140, is the subject of a book-length biography (Nicholl 1964). Of bishops, perhaps the most interesting in the whole period is Wulfstan of Worcester, for Worcester was, after Canterbury and York, the most influential episcopal see in 11th-century Britain, and Wulfstan was one of the very few Anglo-Saxon prelates to survive and thrive after the Conquest. Mason 1990 sets his life in context. Kealey 1972 similarly attempts to give a rounded picture of the life of Roger of Salisbury, a Norman cleric who became not only bishop of Salisbury but, in effect, the first chief justiciar of England under Henry I and Stephen. Bates 1975 briefly discusses Odo of Bayeux, who, although his see was in Normandy, spent most of his political career in England. Except as they show up as English bishops, unfortunately, clerics from Normandy in the Anglo-Norman period have not been studied as much.
Bates, David. “The Character and Career of Odo, Bishop of Bayeux (1049/50–1097).” Speculum 50 (1975): 1–20.
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Sketch of the life of the Conqueror’s half-brother, not only bishop of Bayeux but earl of Kent and sometimes regent for his half-brother in England, who probably commissioned the Bayeux Tapestry and may have aspired to the papacy.
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Cowdrey, H. E. J. Lanfranc: Scholar, Monk, and Archbishop. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
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Emphasizes Lanfranc’s career as a prelate, especially as archbishop. Argues that despite his importance as an advisor to William the Conqueror in both Normandy and England, he was much more important as monk and bishop than as a royal administrator.
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Kealey, Edward J. Roger of Salisbury, Viceroy of England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.
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Attempts to portray all aspects of the life of a man who rose from relatively humble beginnings to be second in command in England to Henry I and, until his fall, to Stephen.
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Mason, Emma. St. Wulfstan of Worcester, c. 1008–1095. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990.
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Studies the transition from Anglo-Saxon to Anglo-Norman England from the perspective of the diocese of Worcester and its great bishop. Argues that Wulfstan was an important mediator between the two cultures.
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Nicholl, Donald. Thurstan, Archbishop of York, 1114–1140. York, UK: Stonegate, 1964.
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Argues that like any other medieval archbishop of York, Thurstan had to be as much a politician as a priest and that his “genius for friendship” (p. 247) made it possible for him to reconcile ideologies that broke into open opposition after his death.
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Southern, Richard William. Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
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Sums up a lifetime of study of the great theologian and archbishop, with emphasis on his thought as it interacted with his life, on his relationship with his first biographer (Eadmer), and on his lasting legacy. Argues that in theology he was neither a humanist nor a scholastic.
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Truax, Jean. Archbishops Ralph d’Escures, William of Corbeil and Theobald of Bec: Heirs of Anselm and Ancestors of Becket. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012.
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Studies the three more ordinary men who served as archbishops of Canterbury between Lanfranc and Anselm, a great organizer and great theologian, respectively, and the great martyr Thomas Becket, arguing that their reigns matter as a transition between the two famous 12th-century archbishops. With appendices of translated documents.
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Vaughn, Sally N. Archbishop Anselm, 1093–1109: Bec Missionary, Canterbury Primate, Patriarch of Another World. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012.
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The most recent biography of St. Anselm, by a scholar who has devoted much of her life to studying him. Includes a long appendix of translated documents.
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The Norman Conquest of England
The Anglo-Norman realm was created by the Norman Conquest of England in and after 1066. The Norman Conquest of England can seem like a simple story of military conquest, but in fact virtually every aspect has been much debated. One set of questions concerns motivations and the likelihood of the events at all, for it is not at all clear why William thought he had a claim to the throne of England; a number of unpredictable things also had to fall into place before William could even contemplate so hazardous an adventure as crossing the Channel to fight for a kingdom. Again, there was only one major battle, the Battle of Hastings in 1066, but its outcome was not by any means certain until late in a long day. Historians who study the battle come to different conclusions about whether the Normans were militarily superior to the Anglo-Saxons or, instead, the Norman victory was the result of a number of particular events that might well have turned out differently. Moreover, it is at least arguable that England was not securely in William the Conqueror’s hands until about 1070 or even until about 1085, so even the primarily military accounts of the Conquest do not stop on the evening of 14 October 1066. The amount of change that the Conquest brought to England is also much in dispute: Was it a great deal or negligible? Was it for the better or the worse? Would many of the changes usually attributed to the Conquest probably have occurred even if William had never crossed the Channel?
The Battle of Hastings
On 14 October 1066 Duke William of Normandy defeated King Harold II of England at a site near the Sussex town of Hastings in southern England. The battle is often characterized as one that changed the world. While it did not in and of itself make the permanency of William’s conquest of England inevitable, it certainly made it likely, in part because the obvious leaders of any later resistance to the Norman takeover were killed in the battle. It was also one of relatively few pitched battles that occurred in western Europe in this period, and it lasted unusually long for a medieval battle. Since “more is known about Hastings than any battle fought in the West since the end of the Roman Empire” (Lawson 2002, p. 45), it is important not only to the history of the establishment of the Anglo-Norman realm but also to study of medieval military strategy, tactics, arms, and armies. Discussion of the battle is, of course, part of every biography of William the Conqueror (see Dukes and Kings), and almost all discussions of the Norman Conquest devote attention to it (see Conquest and Its Immediate Effects). The works in this section have either the battle or the run-up to it as their principal topic. Körner 1964 is an unusually thorough and sometimes revisionist discussion of the sources for the events that led up to 1066. Bradbury 1998 and Lawson 2002 make the battle their primary concern. Morillo 1996 collects both the contemporary accounts of the battle and commentaries by modern historians.
Bradbury, Jim. The Battle of Hastings. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1998.
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Primarily narrative, with analytical chapters on “Arms and Armies” and “The Sources for the Battle.” Emphasizes the similarities between Anglo-Saxon and Norman military organization and practice, although the two principal differences between the armies, Norman cavalry and Norman use of archers, helped to determine the outcome of the battle. Well illustrated.
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Körner, Sten. The Battle of Hastings, England, and Europe, 1035–1066. Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1964.
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A careful, perceptive analysis of the contemporary sources for the events leading up to the Conquest. Debunks the idea that William had international support for the Conquest.
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Lawson, Michael Kenneth. The Battle of Hastings, 1066. Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2002.
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More analytical than narrative and narrowly focused on the battle itself and the military capabilities of the combatants. Emphasizes difficulties of interpreting contemporary accounts of the battle. Argues that the Anglo-Saxon army “was the product of a complex, wealthy and powerful system of government” (p. 161). Heavily illustrated.
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Morillo, Stephen, ed. The Battle of Hastings: Sources and Interpretations. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1996.
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Includes translations of the major accounts of the battle in the contemporary sources and analytical articles by modern historians that cover a wider range than the title of the work might suggest.
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The Conquest and Its Immediate Effects
The Norman Conquest has fascinated people since the moment it occurred. Its causes and effects on both England and Normandy have been the subject of a plethora of investigations and speculation through the centuries. Chibnall 1999 looks at the historiography of the Conquest briefly for the centuries from the 11th through the 19th and in greater depth for the 20th century. Discussions of the causes and effects of the Conquest make up a large part of every biography of William the Conqueror (see Dukes and Kings) and every general discussion of the Normans in Europe (see Normans in European History). Essentially from the 17th century to the late 19th, contentions about the causes and especially the effects of the Conquest were often seen as having contemporary political implications, and debates on these matters were sometimes characterized by more heat than light. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, most historians have been more temperate and conclude that the effects of the Conquest varied from area to area of human activity (see Golding 2013, Huscroft 2009, and Thomas 2008). Still, the question of how beneficial or harmful the effects of the Conquest were has not disappeared. For the most negative view of the effects of the Conquest on all things English, see Garnett 2009, in which the author expands on the conclusions of an earlier book that the Conquest was an unmitigated disaster for the Anglo-Saxons, whose culture and institutions were virtually completed wiped out after 1066. The other extreme, that the Conquest’s effects were remarkably mild, is represented by Williams 1995. Kapelle 1979 considers the Norman advance specifically into northern England and the borderlands with Scotland. For a short but perceptive account of these matters, the best single place to begin is Thomas 2008.
Chibnall, Marjorie. The Debate on the Norman Conquest. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999.
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Traces the history of interpretations of the Conquest, with emphasis on 20th-century historians. This is the place to start in order to understand how views of the Conquest and its effects have evolved in modern times.
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Garnett, George. The Norman Conquest: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
DOI: 10.1093/actrade/9780192801616.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Despite its title, this is not a brief narrative of the events of the Conquest. Instead, is a topical analysis of the effects of the Conquest, emphasizing how catastrophic they were for all people and things Anglo-Saxon.
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Golding, Brian. Conquest and Colonisation: The Normans in Britain, 1066–1100. 2d ed. Houndmills, UK, and London: Macmillan, 2013.
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Combines a narrative of the Conquest with an analysis of the interactions of English and Normans thereafter to argue for a complex evolution of government and church in the last third of the 11th century.
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Huscroft, Richard. The Norman Conquest: A New Introduction. Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2009.
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Provides an analysis of the causes of the Conquest, a narrative of the events of the Conquest and its aftermath up to 1106, and a middle-of-the-road assessment of the effects of the Conquest on England.
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Kapelle, William E. The Norman Conquest of the North: The Region and its Transformation, 1000–1135. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979.
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Controversial argument that “northern separatism was a serious political force in the eleventh century” (p. 5) that explains why the north resisted the Conquest so fiercely and that the north was not fully colonized or subdued until well into the reign of Henry I.
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Thomas, Hugh M. The Norman Conquest: England after William the Conqueror. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008.
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Brief and consistently perceptive. Not primarily a narrative but makes valuable points about the Hastings campaign. Very clear on the bases of its arguments about the effects of the Conquest on England and how its conclusions differ from others.
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Williams, Ann. The English and the Norman Conquest. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1995.
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Concentrates on the reactions of the conquered to the Conquest and on the ways in which Anglo-Saxons and Normans merged into one English identity perhaps as early as the second generation after 1066. Sees relatively great continuation of pre-Conquest practices and customs in government, society, and religious practice and cult.
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Institutions
By the end of the 12th century, England had a highly developed and relatively efficient system of government as well as a precocious legal system. Many of the reasons for its advances in both areas have been attributed to the effects of the Norman Conquest, though the relative contributions of Anglo-Saxons and Normans have been much debated.
Government
Though Warren 1984 (cited under the Question of Norman Exceptionalism) argues that the Normans were not particularly good at governing England, most historians have concluded that, compared with contemporary areas elsewhere in Europe, the government of the Anglo-Norman realm was unusually highly developed and effective. It is often said that the only comparably well-governed state at the time was the Norman kingdom of Sicily, and commentators who make this point usually attribute the similarity of England and Sicily to the Norman input into both. For this reason, most of the works that comment on the Normans in European history generally (see Normans in European History) discuss the governments of England and Sicily. Works that discuss the consequences of the Conquest for England (see Conquest and Its Immediate Effects) also discuss governmental effects. The works in this section are explicitly devoted to the study of the government of England in the century after the Conquest, or some part of that period. Mason 1991 gives a brief overview of matters discussed much more extensively in Chibnall 1986. Green 1986, while concentrating on the reign of Henry I, has much to say about earlier reigns as well. In addition, all the works in Anglo-Norman Realm discuss government at some length: Bartlett 2000, Daniell 2003, and Huscroft 2005 for the government of England, and Le Patourel 1976 for government on both sides of the Channel. For the government of Normandy alone, see also Haskins 1911, cited under Feudal Tenure.
Chibnall, Marjorie. Anglo-Norman England, 1066–1166. Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1986.
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Valuable general overview of English history in the century after the Norman Conquest with emphasis on governmental affairs. Concludes that the century saw an amalgamation of English and Norman elements that produced a genuinely Anglo-Norman state and society and laid the basis for later developments in government and law.
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Green, Judith A. The Government of England under Henry I. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511560248Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Based primarily on an analysis of the one surviving treasury record from Henry’s reign: the Pipe Roll of 1130, but contains much about the reigns of William I and William II as well.
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Mason, Emma. Norman Kingship. Bangor, ME: Headstart History, 1991.
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Brief but trenchant topical survey of the characteristics and practices of the rulers of England from William the Conqueror through Stephen. Emphasizes the importance of the church, coronation ritual, and the personality and abilities of the kings.
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Law
The conventional picture of the early history of the common law of England is this: The first century after the Norman Conquest witnessed an increasingly complicated legal situation in which Anglo-Saxon and Norman practices worked uneasily together and produced growing confusion and difficulty as time passed. This situation led Henry II, beginning exactly a century after the Conquest, to introduce new procedures that because of their popularity led to a fundamental restructuring and nationalization of the legal system—thus constituting the creation of the common law as a legal system. In the late 20th century this thesis began to encounter skepticism, with some historians, exemplified by Hudson 1994 and Hudson 1996, arguing that many of the practices formerly attributed to Henry II actually began earlier, especially under Henry I (that is, within the Anglo-Norman period). Although Fleming 1998 is much narrower in scope, it suggests that the formation of some aspects of the common law occurred in the course of the Domesday survey’s attempts to deal with disputes over land that had arisen in the aftermath of the Conquest. In addition to the works cited in this section, Dalton 1994 (cited under Norman Settlement of England) contains a valuable chapter on the significance of his study of Yorkshire for the development of English land law in the century after the Conquest.
Fleming, Robin. Domesday Book and the Law: Society and Legal Custom in Early Medieval England. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511585364Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A brief but scintillating analysis of Domesday Book as a legal text, followed by a calendar of 3,217 entries that refer to legal matters. Emphasizes the importance of the inquest itself as the means by which “the Conquest was at last fitted snugly and publicly within the law” (p. 35).
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Hudson, John. Land, Law and Lordship in Anglo-Norman England. Oxford and New York: Clarendon, 1994.
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Analyzes the development of the law of land in England from the Conquest to Henry II’s reign, arguing that much of the development usually attributed to Henry II was actually the product of a long slow development over the preceding century, in which the reign of Henry I was especially important.
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Hudson, John. The Formation of the English Common Law: Law and Society in England from the Norman Conquest to Magna Carta. London and New York: Longman, 1996.
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Considers the early history of the common law in England in the 150 years after the Conquest. Argues that the precocious development of a countrywide legal system was derived from both Anglo-Saxon and Norman roots and occurred over the whole period rather than being primarily to the credit of Henry II.
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Feudal Tenure
The debate about the relative contributions of Anglo-Saxons and Normans to post-Conquest English institutions has raged especially fiercely on the subject of feudal tenure, which has for the better part of a century been the subject of more vigorous debate than any other aspect of Anglo-Norman history. Indeed, there is even a debate as to whether to use the term “feudalism” for feudal tenure; and, except when quoting someone else, this article will use the term “feudal tenure” and refer to the concept of “feudalism” only in quotation marks. Round 1895 formulated what became for half a century or more the standard view that feudal practices were developed in Normandy by 1066 in the form in which they can be observed in both Normandy and England a century later and that William the Conqueror introduced them at one blow to an England in which they were previously unknown. Adopting Round’s thesis, Haskins 1911 describes the feudal institutions of Normandy, and Stenton 1961 does the same for England. Since the mid-20th century, however, Round’s thesis has been challenged from two sides. Some historians of late Anglo-Saxon England have argued that the Anglo-Saxon state had comparable institutions or even that many aspects of Anglo-Norman feudal tenure trace back to Anglo-Saxon rather than Norman roots. Hollister 1969 collects excerpts from the most vociferous of these historians as well as from those who controvert them. The assertion that feudal practices were of Anglo-Saxon origins has been less often asserted recently, but Gillingham 1981 gives it a modern formulation. Barrow 1980 (cited under Scotland) argues that Scottish evidence is against this interpretation. The other direction of attack on Round’s thesis has had more prominence beginning in the 1980s, when some historians of Norman feudal tenure began to argue that the definitions of services characteristic of late-twelfth-century feudal tenure in Normandy and England developed considerably after 1066. This view is stated most strongly in Tabuteau 1981. See also Bates 1982 cited under the Question of Norman Exceptionalism.
Gillingham, John. “The Introduction of Knight Service into England.” Proceedings of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies [= Anglo-Norman Studies] 4 (1981): 53–64.
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Strong restatement of the view that the quotas of service considered by Round to be the essence of the post-Conquest introduction of knight service into England were actually of Anglo-Saxon origin. Reprinted with a postscript in John Gillingham. The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and Political Values (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2000), pp. 187–209.
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Haskins, Charles Homer. Norman Institutions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1911.
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Haskins develops John Horace Round’s thesis about the Norman origins of Anglo-Norman feudal practices, arguing that they were fully formed in Normandy by the time of the Conquest. He also discusses many other aspects of Norman government from 1035 to 1189.
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Hollister, C. Warren, ed. The Impact of the Norman Conquest. New York: Wiley, 1969.
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This collection of excerpts from the works of various historians is useful as an introduction to the dispute over whether Anglo-Norman feudal practices were of Anglo-Saxon or Norman origin.
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Round, John Horace. “The Introduction of Knight Service into England.” In Feudal England. Edited by John Horace Round, 225–314. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1895.
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The classic statement of the thesis that Anglo-Norman feudal practices derived exclusively from Normandy and were introduced into England by William the Conqueror in the immediate aftermath of the Conquest.
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Stenton, Frank W. The First Century of English Feudalism, 1066–1166. 2d rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1961.
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As the title suggests, Stenton develops Round’s thesis for English institutions in the century after the Conquest.
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Tabuteau, Emily Zack. “Definitions of Feudal Military Obligations in Eleventh-Century Normandy.” In On the Laws and Customs of England: Essays in Honor of Samuel E. Thorne. Edited by Morris S. Arnold, 18–59. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.
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Argues that the definitions of the amounts of service due from fiefs, which is one of the most prominent characteristics of 12th-century Norman and English feudal tenure, developed in Normandy not before the Norman Conquest but in the reign of Henry I in the early 12th century.
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Military Institutions
In the Anglo-Norman realm as generally in Europe in the Middle Ages, warfare was the central activity of men of the upper classes, and its organization and funding were among the major stimuli of the development of governmental institutions. Nor were the lower classes immune, for they ultimately paid the costs of wars, they served in the armies, and they suffered the direct and indirect depredations of wars. Beeler 1966 is still the best narrative account of the campaigns of the Anglo-Norman period but is unfortunately restricted to English campaigning. Morillo 1994 has a section on seven important battles of the Anglo-Norman period, of which only Hastings was in England. Every discussion of the Battle of Hastings (see Battle of Hastings) and many discussions of the Norman Conquest of England (see Conquest and Its Immediate Effects) include detailed discussions of that battle. Aside from Beeler, the other works included in this section are analytical rather than narrative. Hollister 1965 laid the groundwork for current understanding of how armies were raised and organized in England in the Anglo-Norman period. Some of his contentions have been challenged by later research, but the work must still be read to understand what others are arguing about. Both Morillo 1994 and Prestwich 2004 are primarily about how armies were organized and led. Strickland 1996 is closer to the ground of actual warfare: the work is concerned with how warriors themselves, primarily the knights (since we know little about individual infantrymen), thought about war, what their ideals of behavior were, and how they acted under the pressure of events. Strickland 1992 collects a number of influential articles into one convenient place. Discussions of Anglo-Norman warfare may be expected to discuss issues such as types of military campaigns, which Strickland 1996 defines as battles (including skirmishes), sieges and ravaging; their relative importance, frequency and nature; the roles of cavalry, archers, and infantry; the bases of recruitment of all types of soldiers, including the degree to which feudal tenure was or was not the basis of the recruitment of knights; the use of mercenaries; the quality of military leadership and of governmental organization of support for the armies; the economic effects, for good or ill, of fighting; the relative brutality of war; and how much change there was in all these respects across the period covered by each selection.
Beeler, John. Warfare in England, 1066–1189. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966.
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Primarily a chronological account of military campaigning from Hastings to the end of the reign of Henry II, with analytical chapters on manpower, both the knights and the non-feudal soldiers.
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Hollister, C. Warren. The Military Organization of Norman England. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965.
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The work with which modern study of the subject began and still the one against which others’ arguments are measured.
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Morillo, Stephen. Warfare under the Anglo-Norman Kings, 1066–1135. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1994.
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Topical analysis of warfare in England and Normandy. Argues that there was not much change in military strategy, tactics, arms, and organization between 1066 and 1135. Emphasizes the uncertainty of the outcome of pitched battles as explaining why they occurred so rarely in the period.
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Prestwich, J. O. The Place of War in English History, 1066–1214. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2004.
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Posthumously published Ford Lectures given in 1983. Analytical rather than narrative, covering military organization and practice and the economic effects of war, with appendices on “feudalism” and the composition of Anglo-Norman armies. Argues that war played a constructive as well as a destructive role in this period.
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Strickland, Matthew. War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066–1217. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
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Considers the complex relationship between chivalric ideals and the behavior of warriors using many examples of actual military campaigns from France and England between the Battle of Hastings and the civil war of the end of John’s reign.
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Strickland, Matthew, ed. Anglo-Norman Warfare: Studies in Late Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman Military Organization and Warfare. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1992.
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Republication of fifteen important articles that originally appeared in various journals. Includes a select bibliography of related works, topically organized but not annotated.
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Castles
As Strickland 1996 (cited under Military Institutions) p. 204 points out, “Castles dominated medieval warfare as they dominated the landscape.” They also dominated the lives of those who lived in or near them, and in the Anglo-Norman realm nearly everyone lived at least near a castle. Moreover, aside from the Jews and the French language, they were the element of post-Conquest England that had been least present in England before 1066. Already well known in France and prominent in the military, government, and spatial history of Normandy, in the generations after the Conquest they proliferated in England. For that reason the subject of castles is prominent in most studies of the organization of Normandy before and after 1066 and the effects of the Conquest on England (see Conquest and Its Immediate Effects). Renn 1968 provides a brief survey of the building of castles in England. Brown 1976 is the classic statement of the castle as primarily military in function. Liddiard 2003 collects a series of articles on castles that give a sense of trends in recent research on the topic: the introduction provides a survey of the recent historiography of castle studies. One of the most exciting approaches to the study of castles attempts to relate castles to their environments, to analyze them as parts of larger landscapes (whether planned or unplanned), and to argue that, from an early date, considerations of prestige and display might be more important than the military function of the castle. This approach is exemplified by Creighton 2002.
Brown, R. Allen. English Castles. 3d ed. London: B. T. Batsford, 1976.
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Discusses castles in England from their origins after the Conquest to their decline in importance, with attention to how they were built and their roles in war and peace. Embodies the traditional interpretation that the principal importance of castles was military. Many illustrations and plans.
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Creighton, O. H. Castles and Landscapes. London and New York: Continuum, 2002.
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Major statement of the thesis that castles were sited as parts of developed landscapes, concluding that they functioned “as estate centres, status symbols and residences, as well as fortresses” (p. 223). Detailed functional analysis of English castles, with many photographs and plans.
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Liddiard, Robert, ed. Anglo-Norman Castles. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2003.
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A collection of articles on this subject, originally published in various places, discussing various aspects of the history of castles in the British Isles and northern France from the 11th through the early 13th century. Excellent, topically organized select bibliography.
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Renn, D. F. Norman Castles in Britain. New York: Humanities, 1968.
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A brief survey of the history of the castle primarily in England down to 1154, followed by an Alphabetical Gazetteer of “castles built in the British isles before the reign of Henry III” (p. 83), including England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands. Many illustrations and plans.
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The Church
The Norman church functioned in tandem with the Norman dukes in the 11th century and provided the rulers of Normandy with much of the support that made them so strong. Within a few years of the conquest of England, almost all the English bishops had been replaced by men from the Continent, and after a generation almost all the abbots were of French extraction as well. How much change did Norman bishops and abbots bring to the English church? To what extent were cross-Channel linkages important to the church on both sides of the Channel? Bates 1982 cited under the Question of Norman Exceptionalism discusses the church in Normandy before 1066. Works on the effects of the Norman Conquest (in Norman Conquest of England: The Conquest and Its Immediate Effects) discuss effects on the church as well as other English institutions. For a brief overview of the Anglo-Norman church, primarily in England, see Christopher Harper-Bill in Harper-Bill and van Houts 2003 in the Normans in European History. The works in this section have the church, both secular and monastic, as their principal subject.
The Secular Church
The secular church consisted of those members of the clergy who had the cure of souls and dealt with lay people as part of their religious obligation: archbishops, bishops, and priests. All the men whose biographies may be found in the section Archbishops and Bishops were members of the secular clergy from this point of view, though many of them had been monks before they took episcopal office. How the church functioned in England and, to a lesser extent, in Normandy after 1066 is inevitably part of what their biographers discuss. Barlow 1979 is still the standard account of the English church in the Anglo-Norman period. Brett 1975 discusses what happened to the church in the reign of King Henry I. Aird 1998 looks at how the Conquest affected one particular diocese in the North of England. Gleason 1936 studies one Norman diocese over the whole period between the Conquest and King John’s loss of Normandy in 1204.
Aird, William M. St. Cuthbert and the Normans: The Church of Durham, 1071–1153. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1998.
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Local study arguing that the Normans caused relatively little change to the community dedicated to St. Cuthbert, which served as the cathedral clergy of Durham, in either ecclesiastical or tenurial arrangements and that the bishopric was not securely part of the kingdom of England until the later 12th century.
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Barlow, Frank. The English Church, 1066–1154. London and New York: Longman, 1979.
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Topical study of the evolution of the church both in England and in its Celtic neighbors after the Norman Conquest. Argues that, in general, the changes were ones that would have occurred even without the Conquest but that the Conquest sped developments up.
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Brett, Martin. The English Church under Henry I. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
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Institutional study of the secular church in England in the early 12th century in its relations with the king and the papacy and the internal relations among its members: archbishops, bishops, cathedral chapters and bishops’ officials, and parish clergy. Argues that there was relatively little specifically Norman about post-Conquest developments.
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Gleason, Sarell Everett. An Ecclesiastical Barony of the Middle Ages: The Bishopric of Bayeux, 1066–1204. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936.
DOI: 10.4159/harvard.9780674281783Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Brief, topically organized institutional study of the Norman episcopal see whose most famous occupant was William the Conqueror’s half-brother Odo. Primarily descriptive.
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Monasteries and Nunneries
Monks and nuns, unlike the secular clergy, were cloistered and were supposed to be separate from the world and to devote their days to prayer for the salvation of the world and all the people in it. Nonetheless, they had many interactions with the laity and the government. Great abbeys were large landlords, managed great estates, often owed military service to the king’s army, often supplied the kings with administrators, got their wealth from gifts from kings and wealthy lay persons, prayed for their benefactors’ souls, served as places where aristocratic families could place excess children, distributed alms to the poor, ran hospitals, welcomed elderly benefactors in as monks or nuns, and served as burial places for members of the aristocracy, to name only some of the ways in which these interactions occurred. Consequently, the abbeys of Normandy and England were at least as much affected by the Norman Conquest as the rest of the church. Vaughn 1981 looks at how the great Norman abbey of Bec interacted with the government of Normandy. Matthew 1962 discusses the Norman monasteries that acquired English lands and established priories in England after the Conquest. Cownie 1998 discusses how lay people patronized existing English and Norman monasteries between the Conquest and the death of Henry I. Thompson 1991 discusses houses for women that were founded in England in the century and a half after 1100.
Cownie, Emma. Religious Patronage in Anglo-Norman England, 1066–1135. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1998.
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Looks at lay patronage of monasteries in England and, to a lesser extent, in Normandy in the two generations after the Conquest, concentrating on monasteries that already existed in 1066 and arguing that the Normans did not only (or principally) despoil these houses but also admired and supported them.
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Matthew, D. J. A. The Norman Monasteries and their English Possessions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
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Brief history of the lands that Norman monasteries acquired in England, a few before 1066 and many after. Continues the story down to the suppression of these “alien priories” in 1414.
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Thompson, Sally. Women Religious: The Founding of English Nunneries after the Norman Conquest. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
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Topical study of 139 nunneries founded in England after the Conquest, mostly between about 1100 and about 1250. Emphasizes the degree to which women needed men’s support in order to follow a religious life.
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Vaughn, Sally. The Abbey of Bec and the Anglo-Norman State, 1034–1136. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1981.
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Bec schooled generations of churchmen from all over Europe and produced four of the five Anglo-Norman archbishops of Canterbury. Vaughn’s book gives a brief history of the abbey’s secular role in its heyday, plus translations of eight treatises on the lives of the Lanfranc, Anselm, and the two next abbots.
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Social and Economic History
Many people in Normandy and everyone in England were affected by the creation of the Anglo-Norman realm although there is no agreement on the degree to which different groups were affected, especially in England. See the contrast between Williams 1995 and Garnett 2009 (both cited under Conquest and Its Immediate Effects) for the extremes of the debate about how bad the effects were on the Anglo-Saxons and all the other works in that section for more moderate estimates of how various groups were affected. There is some degree of consensus that matters that related directly to the aristocracy were likely to change the most and that matters directly related to the lives of peasants were likely to change the least, with the towns somewhere in between. At present there is no book devoted to the history of towns in the Anglo-Norman realm, but many works are available on other aspects of social and economic history.
The Norman Settlement of England
The rather miscellaneous works in this section discuss some of the modalities and consequences of the residence in England of people whose origins were in Normandy and elsewhere in northern France. Many of the works in the sections Conquest and Its Immediate Effects and Feudal Tenure also discuss the topics of the books listed here. Rowley 1997 gives a sense of the physical presence of the Normans in England after 1066. Thomas 2003, at the other end of the spectrum of physicality, is a study of when and how the Normans became English. Most of the Normans and other Frenchmen who settled in England in the aftermath of the Conquest were warriors who were established on the land by grants directly or indirectly from the king. Prior to the publication of Fleming 1991, the standard view was that the settlement of Frenchmen on English lands was relatively orderly, directed by the king, and based on the “ancestor” principle, whereby the king awarded the land of individual dispossessed Anglo-Saxons to individual followers of his. Fleming paints a different portrait, of a settlement that was disorderly and characterized by a considerable amount of simple expropriation without any legal warrant. Some more recent works, such as Dalton 1994, have reasserted the position that the settlement was relatively orderly and involved a great deal of royal supervision.
Dalton, Paul. Conquest, Anarchy, and Lordship: Yorkshire, 1066–1154. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511560217Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Study of one county, the largest in England, in great detail. Argues that Yorkshire saw a relatively quick and orderly settlement whose effects on older structures of landholding were relatively moderate and that royal control was significant throughout the period, though it broke down temporarily in Stephen’s reign.
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Fleming, Robin. Kings and Lords in Conquest England. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511560224Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A thorough analysis of the effects on the holding of land in England of both 11th-century conquests of the country, Cnut’s in 1016 and William’s fifty years later. Fleming emphasizes the disorganized, even chaotic nature of the ways William’s followers acquired much of their English land.
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Rowley, Trevor. Book of Norman England. London: Batsford for English Heritage, 1997.
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Brief, well-illustrated description of the country in the decades after the Conquest. Particularly useful for its reliance on archeological evidence.
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Thomas, Hugh M. The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity, 1066–c. 1220. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199251230.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Complex and sophisticated analysis of the process by which the French conquerors began to identify themselves as English. Argues that this was a development of the 12th century, not the 13th.
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Domesday Studies
Domesday Book is “probably the most remarkable statistical document in the history of Europe” (Darby 1977, cited under Peasants and Rural Life, p. ix). Its status as “an icon of national identity” (David Roffe, Domesday: The Inquest and the Book, 2000, p. 7) for the English is exemplified by the celebration of its 900th anniversary, which produced Hallam 1986 and Holt 1987. Though it has been the subject of well over a century of serious study, there is no agreement on what the Domesday survey’s purpose was or how the book was created. Was it primarily a “geld book,” that is, intended to enable the government to tax more accurately and lucratively? That was the dominant interpretation of the 19th-century scholars who first used Domesday Book scientifically as a source. Galbraith 1961 and Galbraith 1974 vehemently attack the idea, but Roffe 2007 asserts that geld and service were the principal purposes of the survey. Was it primarily intended to inform the king of the resources of his new kingdom? Finn argues that it was. Was it intended to inform the king of the resources of his major tenants? Galbraith 1974 and Galbraith 1961 conclude that it was. Was it intended to uncover and begin the process of settling the many outstanding disputes about the rightful possession of land that had arisen as a consequence of the Conquest? Fleming 1998 (cited under Law) thinks so. Was the survey intended to result in the book from the beginning or was it an afterthought? Most scholars have concluded that the survey was intended to produce something like the book, or an even more extensive record of which the book, as it exists, is a hasty summary. However, Roffe 2007 asserts that the inquest and the book had different purposes and that the purposes of the inquest are difficult to deduce from the book. He even questions the usually accepted date for the compilation of the book. For a translation of the whole of Domesday Book see Williams and Martin 2002, and for a complete reproduction see Open Domesday (both cited under Bayeux Tapestry and Domesday Book). For bibliography, see Bates 1987 (cited under Bibliographies). For other works based primarily on Domesday Book, see Darby 1977, Finn 1970, Harvey 1988, and Lennard 1959 (all cited under Peasants and Rural Life).
Finn, R. Welldon. An Introduction to Domesday Book. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963.
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Somewhat outdated but still useful as an introduction to the basics of the book. A discussion of the survey and the making of the book is followed by analytical sections “The Land and the People” and “The Magnates and their Revenues.”
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Galbraith, V. H. The Making of Domesday Book. Oxford: Clarendon, 1961.
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Detailed examination of the way the survey was conducted and the way the book was compiled. Galbraith’s conclusions are not universally accepted but are still fundamental to understanding of the various attempts to explain the creation of Domesday Book.
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Galbraith, V. H. Domesday Book: Its Place in Administrative History. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.
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“Assumes the main conclusions” of Galbraith 1961 and looks at “the basic importance of Domesday Book in later English administrative history” (p. vii).
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Hallam, Elizabeth. Domesday Book through Nine Centuries. London: Thames and Hudson for the Public Record Office, 1986.
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Recounts the history of the book from its compilation to the present. Issued to commemorate the 900th anniversary of the survey. Well illustrated.
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Holt, James Clarke, ed. Domesday Studies. Woodbridge, UK, 1987.
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A collection of studies originally presented at a conference to commemorate the 900th anniversary of the compilation of Domesday Book. Most use Domesday Book as a source to illuminate late 11th-century England. Collectively they illustrate many of the ways in which Domesday Book can be of use to scholars.
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Roffe, David. Decoding Domesday. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2007.
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Historiographical introduction to earlier interpretations of Domesday and detailed examinations of the subjects on which Domesday Book provides information. Attacks “the three assumptions of modern Domesday historiography: the primacy of the Book, its authoritative content and its comprehensive range” (p. 21). Decidedly controversial.
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Aristocrats
One of the major effects of the Norman Conquest of England was the replacement of the Anglo-Saxon nobility by a French aristocracy. By the time of Domesday Book few of the great landholders of England were of Anglo-Saxon extraction. The French who took their places were primarily Norman but included quite a few Flemings and Bretons and a scattering of men from further afield. They settled into the country as a ruling aristocracy. Of the works in this section, Green 1997 discusses the new French aristocracy throughout the century after the Conquest, and Newman 1988 looks specifically at one generation. Both concentrate primarily on England and consider how the new French rulers of England dealt with the kings and dukes, how they acquired and managed their lands, and how they used marriage as a tool for familial advancement. Johns 2003 looks at these issues from the particular perspective of the women in these great families. Crouch 1986 looks at one powerful cross-Channel family of the second generation after the Conquest. Of works in other sections, Power 2004 (cited under Anglo-Normans and their French Neighbors) devotes considerable attention to the aristocracy of the frontier areas of Normandy in the 12th century, and every discussion of the consequence of the Conquest (see Anglo-Norman Realm and Conquest and Its Immediate Effects) includes an account of the new French aristocracy of England.
Crouch, David. The Beaumont Twins: The Roots and Branches of Power in the Twelfth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511897139Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that the younger twin, Robert, earl of Leicester, was a better politician than his brother, Waleran, count of Meulan. Concludes that for aristocrats such as these, wealth and numbers of followers provided only potential power; the actuality depended on wise use of wealth and on intangibles such as loyalty.
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Green, Judith. The Aristocracy of Norman England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
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Topical analysis of the lives of the Anglo-Norman upper class in the century after the Norman Conquest. Argues for a symbiosis rather than opposition between royal government and magnate power, which was based on kinship, control of military men, and possession of land.
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Johns, Susan M. Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power in the Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Realm. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003.
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Topical study of what literature, charters, and administrative documents reveal about the roles of female aristocrats in England and Normandy. Concludes that cultural changes during the century confirmed upper-class women’s importance. They could be “powerful members of the landed nobility . . . actively involved in deciding their own fates” (p. 200).
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Newman, Charlotte. The Anglo-Norman Nobility in the Reign of Henry I: The Second Generation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988.
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Primarily descriptive and about families rather than individuals. Concludes that the second generation’s lives often followed different patterns from their fathers’ and that royal favor and advantageous marriages were the most significant determinants of a family’s long-term success.
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Peasants and Rural Life
The nature of rural life and the peasantry of Anglo-Norman England are discussed in most of the work on the general effects of Norman Conquest (see Conquest and Its Immediate Effects) and some of those whose explicit subject is Domesday Book (see Domesday Studies). Of works in this section, Darby 1977 uses Domesday Book to look explicitly at both rural and urban life in England in the late 11th century; and Finn 1970, Harvey 1988, and Lennard 1959 all use the book to look explicitly at the lives of peasants in the same century. Faith 1999 sets those results, insofar as they pertain to the relations between lords and peasants, in a wider context.
Darby, H. C. Domesday England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511607981Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Topical survey of the information which Domesday Book provides about rural settlements, population, land use, estate management, industry, boroughs and towns, and the Welsh march. Sums up Darby’s six more detailed studies of the geographical information and statistics that Domesday Book provides.
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Faith, Rosamund. The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship. Rev. ed. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1999.
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Covers the relations of peasants and their settlements to landlords and their methods of estate management from the end of the Roman period into the 13th century, arguing that the Norman Conquest was the most important cause of change in peasants’ lives.
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Finn, R. Weldon. The Norman Conquest and its Effects on the Economy, 1066–1086. London: Longman, 1970.
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A detailed study of the information Domesday Book provides about the economy of England in the reign of William the Conqueror, both for the whole of the country and for individual counties. Argues that “from the Englishman’s point of view, the Norman Conquest was a catastrophe” (p. 4).
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Harvey, Sally. “Domesday England.” In The Agrarian History of England and Wales. Edited by H. E. Hallam. Vol. 2. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
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This chapter surveys information about all levels of society from peasants to great lay and ecclesiastical landlords but is especially useful on the subjects of population and the peasantry. Many of the topical chapters in the volume also have information about rural life in the Anglo-Norman period (1042–1350, edited by Joan Thirsk, pp. 45–136).
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Lennard, Reginald. Rural England, 1066–1135: A Study of Social and Agrarian Conditions. Oxford: Clarendon, 1959.
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Primarily a detailed analysis of the information which Domesday Book provides about estate management and the lives of peasants in the England of 1086.
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Women and Children
The status of women comes up in many treatments of the effects of the Norman Conquest. More specifically, every biography in Royal Women discusses the opportunities and constraints in the lives of the highest women in the Anglo-Norman realm. Johns 2003 (cited under Aristocrats) looks at the lives of noblewomen in this period, and Thompson 1991 (cited under Monasteries and Nunneries) looks at nuns. Clark’s chapter in Fell 1984 is primarily descriptive: it surveys what is known about the lives of women from all classes and nuns as well as laywomen for several centuries after the Conquest. Williams’s chapter in Fell describes the portrayal of women in secular and religious literature written in Anglo-Norman or English from the early 12th century into the 15th: it does not have a strong thesis about changes brought by the Conquest, except, of course, for the use of French for literature written in England. Both articles are predicated on the thesis, stated by Fell in the introduction to the book, that Anglo-Saxon women were much more socially and legally powerful than women were after the Conquest. Stafford 1994 directly controverts that view. The author argues for a complex picture in which women—or, at least, the upper-class women we know about—both before and after the Conquest sometimes could make their own decisions and control their own lives and sometimes could not. There was, in other words, no significant difference in women’s status as a result of the Norman Conquest; however, this is not because the status of Anglo-Norman women was higher than had been thought but because the status of Anglo-Saxon women was lower. For children as for women, what is known about the lives of the upper classes comes up in discussions of the lives of the great men and women of the day (cited under Biographies) and, to some extent in treatments of the aristocracy of England (cited under Aristocrats). It is not likely that the creation of the Anglo-Norman realm led to any significant changes in how children were raised, and, in any case, even less is known about children than about women. Turner 1990 discusses the raising of children on the basis of what is known about royal children, legitimate and illegitimate, in this period.
Fell, Christine E., with Cecily Clark, and Elizabeth Williams. Women in Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984.
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Despite its title, this book contains two chapters on the effects of the Norman Conquest on women in England, one on “factual evidence” by Clark and one on “the literary image” by Williams. Primarily descriptive but premised on the thesis which Stafford contests.
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Stafford, Pauline. “Women and the Norman Conquest.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 4 (1994): 221–249.
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The only recent study specifically devoted to the issue. Argues that “the idea of a sharp break” in the status of women at 1066 “is unsustainable” (p. 240).
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Turner, Ralph V. “The Children of Anglo-Norman Royalty and their Upbringing.” Medieval Prosopography 11 (1990): 17–44.
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Looks at what is known about the sons and daughters of the kings and dukes from William the Conqueror through Stephen to describe how children of the highest rank were raised and what their affective relations with their parents and siblings may have been.
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Jews
One could argue that the single greatest change in England in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest was the presence of Jews in the country: so far as is known, there were no Jews in England before 1066. There certainly were no Jewish communities. The post-Conquest communities of Jews in England consisted primarily of immigrants from the Norman Jewish community. Golb 1998 describes that Norman community throughout its medieval history. Hillaby 2003 briefly outlines the spread of Jewish communities in England down to 1189. Most of the scholarship on Jews in medieval England has concentrated on two themes. One is the treatment of Jews from Angevin days on, leading up to the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290, too late to be included in this article. The other theme is early stories of ritual murder, for the first known medieval allegation occurred at Norwich in 1144, resulting in the canonization of the young victim as St. William of Norwich. Several other of the earliest such accusations also happened in England. Langmuir 1984 provides an analysis of the Norwich case.
Golb, Norman. The Jews in Medieval Normandy: A Social and Intellectual History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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Chronological account of the Jewish community of Normandy, primarily resident in Rouen, from its origins to the expulsion of 1306. Pays some attention to the Jews of England because of close connections between the two communities and parallels in the attitude of authorities to both.
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Hillaby, Joe. “Jewish Colonisation in the Twelfth Century.” In The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary and Archaeological Perspectives. Edited by Patricia Skinner, 14–40. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2003.
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Survey of the settlement of Jews in England down to 1189. Finds settlements not only in London but also in twenty-four provincial towns.
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Langmuir, Gavin. “Thomas of Monmouth: Detector of Ritual Murder.” Speculum 59 (1984): 820–846.
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Thomas of Monmouth wrote the first life of St. William of Norwich. Langmuir’s article argues that Thomas himself was largely responsible for the promulgation (and perhaps the invention) of the story that the Jewish community of Norwich had crucified the young boy. Reprinted in Langmuir’s Toward a Definition of Anti-Semitism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.
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Medicine
Kealey 1981 is the only book on the topic of medicine that is devoted to the Anglo-Norman period, specifically as it concerns England. It is based not on medical treatises but on what is known about the ninety doctors and 113 hospitals the author has identified in the England of Henry I and Stephen. It is a study of the practitioners rather than the medicine they practiced and does not discuss folk medicine.
Kealey, Edward J. Medieval Medicus: A Social History of Anglo-Norman Medicine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.
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Controversial study arguing that England “may have enjoyed better access to medical service between 1100 and 1154 that at any other time until the twentieth century” (p. 1) because of the presence of a number of physicians and the creation of many hospitals.
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Cultural History
Scholars evaluating the amount of change the Norman Conquest brought to England, whether they argue that it was massive or minor, usually conclude that it was greatest in the area of culture. A new language, French, was introduced to the linguistic mix in England, and writing in the distinctively Anglo-Norman dialect of French began soon after the Conquest on both sides of the Channel. A great building of castles in England and rebuilding of churches in both Normandy and England occurred, and the building in England was in the Romanesque style imported from the Continent. Influences in the pictorial and plastic arts, and even in music, moved both ways across the Channel. The brief lists of works in the sections that follow can only begin to scratch the surface of these topics. With the exception of music, scholars have devoted many library shelves of attention to these topics.
Art, Architecture, and Music
Immediately after the Conquest, the new Norman lords began to construct castles, reconstruct existing churches, and build new ones so widely that, as Fernie 2000 (p. 19) puts it, “The sheer volume in the first generation after the Conquest must have turned the country into a vast building site, with almost every city, town and village affected.” The scale of these buildings as well as their number is impressive: Fernie points out that, of the twelve late-11th-century and early-12th-century churches in western Europe that rivaled Rome’s St. Peter’s in size, nine are found in England. Norman styles of architecture were imported to England, but the wealth of England, much of which was transported back to Normandy, also permitted a great deal of rebuilding of churches in the most up-to-date styles in the duchy itself. Baylé 2001 illustrates and analyzes the Norman developments. In addition to the works cited here, Richard Plant in Harper-Bill and van Houts 2003 (cited under Normans in European History) discusses ecclesiastical architecture in both Normandy and England. Although somewhat less distinctive, sculpture and other arts in this period are still worth studying, as Zarnecki, et al. 1984 demonstrates at length. On the subject of Anglo-Norman developments in music, little work has been done, but Lord 2008 makes some suggestions.
Baylé, Maylis. L’architecture normande au Moyen Age. 2d ed. 2 vols. Caen, France: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2001.
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Volume 1 consists of articles by different scholars on various aspects of Romanesque and Gothic architecture, some of which consider interactions with architecture in England. Volume 2 discusses the chronological stages of development on the basis of many examples of both religious and secular buildings. Many photographs and plans are included.
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Fernie, Eric C. The Architecture of Norman England. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
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Thorough review of historical, functional, structural, and stylistic developments in both ecclesiastical and secular architecture from 1066 to the late 12th century. Argues that the distinctiveness of the Norman style evaporated after the mid-12th century. Well illustrated.
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Lord, Suzanne. Music in the Middle Ages: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008.
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General guide, intended for the non-specialist reader, to music in Europe from 1000 to 1450. Chapter 6, “The Music of the British Isles,” discusses changes brought about by the Norman Conquest.
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Zarnecki, George, Richard Gem, and Christopher Brooke, et al. English Romanesque Art, 1066–1200. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson in association with the Arts Council of Great Britain, 1984.
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Catalogue of an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. Heavily illustrated articles on architecture, manuscripts, wall paintings, stained glass, sculpture, ivory carvings, metalwork, decorative ironwork, seals, coins, bindings, pottery, and textiles, plus brief surveys of the history of the period and the historiography of the Romanesque style.
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Language and Literature
The languages of the Anglo-Norman realm and the literature produced in Normandy and England in the Anglo-Norman period are large subjects that can only be touched on here. For a brief overview of language and literature primarily in England, see Ian Short in Harper-Bill and van Houts 2003, cited under Normans in European History. Most historians of the English language conclude that it was hardly ever found in written form during the Anglo-Norman period. After about 1070, governmental records were all kept in Latin. The upper classes were French-speaking for a century or more after 1066, and the only extensive piece of writing in Anglo-Saxon after 1066 was one version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which ended in 1154. Treharne 2012, however, argues that many texts written in English in the 11th and 12th centuries have been ignored and that written English remained throughout the period a vehicle for the expression of resistance to foreign conquerors. When Middle English emerged starting in the 13th century, it had clearly been significantly affected by the French language. As Sir Walter Scott famously pointed out in the first chapter of Ivanhoe, modern English owes a great deal of its vocabulary to the French of the Norman conquerors. Jesperson 1982 discusses this phenomenon. Baugh and Cable 1978 sets the use of English and French in the Anglo-Norman period into the context of political and social developments. Berndt 1965 argues against earlier scholars who asserted that many people in post-Conquest England were genuinely bilingual and that there was a chance that England might wind up a French-speaking country. Instead, he contends, even in the first generation there were too few French speakers in England to make the victory of French a viable possibility. The Anglo-Norman realm was important to the development of the French literature as well. The dialect of French known to scholars, somewhat confusingly, as Anglo-Norman was a distinctive variety of French, common to Normandy and England. Writings in this dialect long outlasted the Anglo-Norman period of political history; but, as both Legge 1963 and Short 1992 point out: “French literature begins, to all intents and purposes, in twelfth-century Anglo-Norman England” (Short, p. 229). The earliest writings in French were in Anglo-Norman, and the earliest writings in Anglo-Norman come from England. For an extensive bibliography of works in and about Anglo-Norman French, see the OBO article French of England.
Baugh, Albert C., and Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. 3d ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978.
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As part of a discussion of the development of English from the Anglo-Saxons to the 20th century, this book discusses the use of both French and English in England in the period after the Conquest with a brief section on literature in Anglo-Norman.
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Berndt, Rolf. “The Linguistic Situation in England from the Norman Conquest to the Loss of Normandy (1066–1204).” Philologica Pragensia 8 (1965): 145–163.
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Surveys the linguistic orientation of the social classes of post-Conquest England to argue that the French-speaking population was always relatively small. Reprinted in Roger Lass, ed. Approaches to English Historical Linguistics: An Anthology (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), pp. 369–391.
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Jesperson, Otto. Growth and Structure of the English Language. 10th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
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Though little changed from its original publication in 1905, the one chapter that Jesperson devotes to the influence of French on the development of English vocabulary is still the best place to begin study of this subject.
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Legge, M. Dominica. Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background. Oxford: Clarendon, 1963.
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Discusses works written in England in Anglo-Norman from the beginning of the 12th century to the end of the 14th, partly chronologically and partly by genre.
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Short, Ian. “Patrons and Polyglots: French Literature in Twelfth-Century England.” Anglo-Norman Studies 14 (1992): 229–249.
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Intended specifically “to provide non-specialists with an idea of the scope, diversity, originality and importance of the French literature produced in England in the twelfth century” (p. 229). Covers religious writings, literature intended for lay persons, and evidence for the use of French in government and commerce.
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Treharne, Elaine. Living through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020–1220. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
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Finds many more surviving texts in English than most scholars thought extant. Stresses “how important English [was] as a political, intellectual, religious, and ideological tool through two conquests and beyond” (p. ix).
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Anglo-Norman England and Its Celtic Neighbors
Not long after they arrived in England, the Normans began to interact with the Celtic areas to their north and west. English penetration into Wales had begun in the late Anglo-Saxon period, and the kingdom of the Scots was a military and diplomatic problem for any king of England. Wales had no unified leadership, which made it relatively easy pickings for adventurous knights. The Normans rapidly established a number of lordships on the border between England and Wales, known collectively as the “Marcher lordships,” held from the English king; and they sporadically attempted (sometimes privately, sometimes led by the king) to advance farther into Wales. Scotland, however, was ruled by a king, and Norman penetration mostly took the form of grants of land by the Scottish king to individual Normans. In fact, the Brus family, which would eventually produce Robert the Bruce, hailed from Normandy: while the Stewart family that ruled Scotland (and eventually England) for several centuries descended from a Breton. In short, relations with Wales were (or were at least supposed to be) under the direction of the English kings, while in Scotland the Normans settled in as vassals of the Scottish king. Despite the differences, however, raiding was common on both sides of both borders, as it had been for centuries, and occasionally wars broke out. English penetration into Ireland did not begin until the 1160s, during the reign of Henry II, and so is not separately considered here. Given the relatively long periods of time they cover, however, both Frame 1995 and Walker 1995 discuss Ireland as well as Wales and Scotland.
General Treatments
Both the works under this heading cover time spans beyond just the Anglo-Norman era period; however, they provide introductions to the interactions of the Anglo-Norman rulers of England with Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Walker 1995 argues against overuse of the concept of colonization in analyzing the role of the Normans in England, Wales, Ireland, and especially Scotland. Frame 1995 emphasizes the centrality of England to the interactions of all four areas. For another treatment of all four areas, with particular reference to their dealings with the Continent, see Matthew 2005, cited under Anglo-Normans and their French Neighbors.
Frame, Robin. The Political Development of the British Isles 1100–1400. 2d ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995.
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Traces the advance of Anglo-Norman power in all four areas of the British Isles and the ways in which the Welsh, Scots, and Irish coped both with English pressure and with Continental involvements. Argues that for the three centuries covered the British Isles formed a single complex political sphere.
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Walker, David. The Normans in Britain. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
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Covers relations between England and the Celtic areas of the British Isles and Ireland from the Norman Conquest to the early 13th century. Pays a good deal of attention to the history of the church in each area. Includes a chapter on the architecture of churches and castles.
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Scotland
Barrow 1980 gives the date of the settlements of the first Anglo-Norman knights to arrive in Scotland as between 1094 and 1097, though Ritchie 1954 points out that there were Normans in Scots armies even before 1066. From the late 11th century until the late 13th century, Scots kings normally recognized that they held Scotland as a fief from the English king, and they sometimes also held fiefs in England. In the early stages of relations between the Anglo-Norman realm and the kingdom of Scotland, it was by no means certain where the border between the two countries would be, as Aird 1998 (cited under Secular Church) shows for the bishopric of Durham. Relatively amicable arrangements prevailed, despite the raids and wars, until 1296, when serious hostilities broke out that lasted, with truces, for almost three centuries and radically altered the relations between the two countries. Barrow 1980 discusses the whole of the two centuries between 1097 and 1296. Ritchie, however, ends his study with the reign of Malcolm IV (1153–1165) on the grounds that, after that date, there was little or no Anglo-Norman immigration into Scotland and the Anglo-Normans already there were assimilated into Scots society and leadership. In his preface, Ritchie complains that the study of the Normans in Scotland has been “comparatively neglected” (p. v), the comparison being to the study of the Normans in England. Six decades later, the complaint could still be made. Development of a Norman presence in Scotland appears in books about the Normans everywhere in Europe (see Normans in European History), in biographies of relevant English kings (see Dukes and Kings) and Scottish kings and in works with a relatively long chronological scope; but the two works cited here are the only two book-length studies of the subject.
Barrow, G. W. S. The Anglo-Norman Era in Scottish History. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980.
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Analysis of Norman settlement in Scotland to 1296. Depicts Scotland as a “land of opportunity” (p. 7) for Normans seeking estates, especially younger sons, who brought classic Anglo-Norman “feudalism” with them. Argues that among the migrants to Scotland were not only the founders of great families but also consisted of many less important people.
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Ritchie, R. L. G. The Normans in Scotland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1954.
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Narrative organized around the reigns of the kings of Scotland from Malcolm Canmore through Malcolm IV, and therefore mostly about war and diplomacy. Includes one section on “The Norman Contribution to Scottish Life,” defined as castles, sheriffdoms, burghs, and abbeys.
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Wales
Historians of the relationship between English kings, Norman Marcher lords, and the native Welsh usually define the Anglo-Norman period of border history as beginning in 1070 with the arrival of Normans on the frontier, and ending between 1169 and 1171, when the Marcher lords of Wales got distracted from their interests in that area by their newfound involvement in Irish affairs. Nelson 1966 is an interesting study of the movement back and forth of the frontier between Wales and England during this period, stressing the fluctuations in Anglo-Norman and Welsh power and consequent movement of the effective frontier as dependent primarily on how attentive the kings were to border affairs and how effective their policies were. The study is predicated on the classic Roundian view of Norman “feudalism” (see Feudal Tenure). Nelson also makes an interesting ecological argument for the placement of the frontier, predicated on the Normans’ desire to eat bread made of wheat. Kapelle 1979, cited under Conquest and Its Immediate Effects makes the same argument for the limits of Norman settlement in the north of England. Walker 1977 discusses all of Wales, not just the south, and is primarily about Norman-Welsh relations: his conclusion about the state of things as they were by early in Henry II’s reign is similar to Nelson’s.
Nelson, Lynn H. The Normans in South Wales, 1070–1171. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966.
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Argues that English royal policy vis-à-vis Marcher lords and the Welsh failed to achieve stability on the frontier, that the determinant of the frontier’s location was where wheat would grow, and that “the most highly Normanized society to be found anywhere, including Normandy, was on the marches of Wales” (p. 180).
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Walker, David. The Norman Conquerors. Swansea, UK: Christopher Davies, 1977.
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Brief discussion of Norman penetration into Wales from 1066 until the later 12th century. Argues that the presence of Normans merely exacerbated the state of permanent war in Wales and that the situation by Henry II’s reign was a “stalemate” (p. 96).
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The Anglo-Normans and their French Neighbors
While study of the relations of the Anglo-Norman realm with its Celtic neighbors has languished in recent decades, relations with the Continent have been the subject of a number of recent studies of note. Of these, Matthew 2005 is by far the widest in scope, discussing not only England but Wales, Scotland, and Ireland in their relations with all of western Europe and the papacy. Power 2004 looks at Norman relations across all the borders of the duchy, especially with the king of France, and at the duke’s interactions with the aristocratic families whose estates lay on these borders. The author concludes that the Norman frontier in the 12th century was not unique, as earlier historians, especially Lucien Musset and Jean-François Lemarignier, had argued. Studies of the counties of Flanders and Boulogne enhance the picture of Anglo-Norman relations with other principalities of northern France. Interactions between Normandy and Flanders began well before the Conquest, though they were sporadic until William the Conqueror married the daughter of the count of Flanders; and they continued to gain in importance after 1066 for economic and strategic reasons. The treaty whereby, in the first year of his reign, Henry I of England retained Count Robert II to supply him with a thousand knights in return for £500 per year “opens a unique window on the mechanics of late eleventh-century and early twelfth-century warfare” (Oksanen 2012, p. 59). Diplomatic, cultural, and economic interests also linked England and Flanders, as did a “network of interpersonal and familial ties that united the elites on the two sides of the English Channel” (p. 252). The smaller unit of Boulogne, located between Normandy and Flanders, was involved in English as well as Continental affairs well before 1066, and its counts played a significant role in the Conquest itself and its aftermath. Eventually the heiress to the county, Matilda, married the future King Stephen of England, who on Eustace’s death became count of Boulogne in right of his wife. While the focus of Tanner 2004 is on the relations between the counts of Boulogne and their fellow counts of northern France and the Low Countries, Normandy, Flanders, and eventually England were the stronger political entities among which the counts had to maneuver and therefore play a large role in the story she tells.
Matthew, Donald. Britain and the Continent, 1000–1300: The Impact of the Norman Conquest. London: Hodder Arnold, 2005.
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Provides an unusual perspective on the relations among England, the other political entities of the British Isles, and Ireland and both secular and religious powers on the Continent. Only the second and third chapters are strictly concerned with the Anglo-Norman period.
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Oksanen, Eljas. Flanders and the Anglo-Norman World, 1066–1216. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139032322Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Explores relations among Normandy, England, and Flanders in the century and a half after the Conquest first through narrative and then by analyzing military relations, diplomacy, economic considerations, tournaments, and Flemish immigration to England. Argues that these relations “had a major influence on the history of north-western Europe” (p. 251).
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Power, Daniel. The Norman Frontier in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511470561
Topical study of the administration (ducal, royal, and ecclesiastical), politics, and aristocracy of the frontier between Normandy and its neighbors between the English conquest of the duchy in 1106 and the English loss of Normandy to France in 1204.
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Tanner, Heather J. Families, Friends and Allies: Boulogne and Politics in Northern France and England, c. 879–1160. Leiden, The Netherlands and Boston: E. J. Brill, 2004.
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Despite the focus on developments in the county of Boulogne itself, has much to say about relations with the Anglo-Norman realm because of the involvement of members of the family of Boulogne in Norman and English affairs.
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Normans in Southern Italy
At some time early in the 11th century, well before the conquest of England, Normans began to infiltrate southern Italy, eventually establishing a number of states. The most prominent of these men were sons of Tancred d’Hauteville, a minor western Norman lord. As many as eight of his sons probably migrated to southern Italy and two of them, Robert Guiscard and Roger, established the states that eventually developed into the Norman kingdom of Sicily, which dominated southern Italy as well as the island of Sicily for over a century and merged, for a time in the 13th century, with the domains of the Holy Roman Emperor. Most of the works in the section Normans in European History discuss the Normans in Italy.
Sources on the Normans in Italy
One of the major sources for the early history of the Normans in Italy is Orderic Vitalis’s history of the Normans (cited under Histories Written in Normandy). The histories Amatus of Montecassino 2004, Malaterra 2005, and William of Apulia 1961 were written in Italy and are specifically about the Norman input into Italian affairs. For a study of these Italian histories of the Normans, see Wolf 1995 in Topical Studies of the Normans in Italy.
Amatus of Montecassino. The History of the Normans. Translated by Prescott N. Dunbar and revised with an introduction by G. A. Loud. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2004.
The earliest surviving narrative of the Normans in Italy, written about 1080 by a monk of Monte Cassino, emphasizing the role of Richard of Aversa and Capua. Survives only in an early 14th-century French translation whose accuracy and completeness are matters of debate among scholars. Dates the first appearance of Normans in Italy to before the year 1000.
Malaterra, Geoffrey. The Deeds of Count Roger of Calabria and Sicily and of his Brother Duke Robert Guiscard. Translated by Kenneth Baxter Wolf. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
This work is “the principal source for the Norman conquest of Muslim Sicily” (p. vii). More about Roger of Sicily than about Robert Guiscard.
William of Apulia. La geste de Robert Guiscard. Edited and translated by Marguerite Mathieu. Palermo, Italy: Istituto siciliano di studi bizantini e neoellenici, 1961.
Written shortly after the death of Robert Guiscard. Concentrates on his activities in Italy and the Balkans. Possibly commissioned by Robert’s son Roger Borsa to bolster his claim against his half-brother Bohemond, eventual founder of the principality of Antioch (see works cited below in Normans on Crusade and in the Crusader States), to succeed their father in his Italian domains.
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General Modern Studies of Normans in Italy
The works below discuss the activities of the Normans in southern Italy and Sicily in all their aspects and in varying degrees of detail. Brown 2003 is a brief survey of the 11th century. Loud 2000 is by the premier English-language historian of this subject, and covers approximately the same period with more scholarly detail. Norwich 1967 and Norwich 1970 between them cover both the 11th and the 12th centuries. Matthew 1992 concentrates on the period in which the major Norman state in Italy was the kingdom of Sicily. Chalandon 1907 is by far the oldest and longest of these works but is still fundamental to the study of this topic.
Brown, Gordon S. The Norman Conquest of Southern Italy and Sicily. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003.
Brief narrative of the 11th-century activities of the Normans in Italy. Emphasizes the role of the d’Hautevilles.
Chalandon, Ferdinand. Histoire de la Domination normande en Italie et en Sicile. 2 vols. Paris: A. Picard, 1907.
The first serious modern study of the Normans in Italy, from their beginnings to 1194, and still worth consulting. Volume 2 includes a long analytical section on institutions. There is an English summary in chapters 4 and 5 of The Cambridge Medieval History. Vol. 5 (Contest of Empire and Papacy, Cambridge University Press, 1926), pp. 167–207. The full text is online.
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Loud, G. A. The Age of Robert Guiscard: Southern Italy and the Norman Conquest. Harlow, UK, and New York: Pearson, 2000.
A primarily narrative account of the Normans in Italy from the earliest beginnings to Robert’s death in 1085. Argues that as a result of the Normans “[from] being a frontier between Greek east and Latin west, and Christian north and Muslim south, southern Italy and Sicily became unequivocally part of the Christian west” (p. 291).
Matthew, Donald. The Norman Kingdom of Sicily. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139167741
Analytical study of the kingdom of Sicily from 1130 to 1194 and beyond. Discusses not only politics and military developments but social, economic, religious, and intellectual aspects of the area. Emphasizes the importance of information from contemporary narratives and documents.
Norwich, John Julius. The Other Conquest. New York: Harper and Row, 1967.
Rousing narrative account of the Norman takeover of southern Italy and Sicily and the early history of the kingdom of Sicily. Published in England as The Normans in the South, 1014–1130.
Norwich, John Julius. The Kingdom in the Sun, 1130–1194. London: Longman, 1970.
Continues the story of the kingdom of Sicily, begun in The Other Conquest, until its amalgamation into the Holy Roman Empire.
Topical Studies of the Normans in Italy
The works below study various aspects of Norman Italy in the 11th and 12th centuries. Wolf 1995 discusses the 11th- and 12th-century accounts written in Italy about the Normans in that country. Loud 1981 argues that the French settlement in southern Italy was predominantly Norman. Ménager 1975 comes to a similar conclusion, for which his assemblage of all known references to Normans in Italy provides the raw material. Loud 2007 is a thorough discussion of the church in Italy in the Norman period.
Loud, G. A, “How ‘Norman’ Was the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy?” Nottingham Medieval Studies 25 (1981): 13–34.
Argues that Normans did, indeed, predominate in the 11th-century French movement into southern Italy and Sicily but that the phenomenon was more an “infiltration” (p. 30) than a conquest.
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Loud, G. A. The Latin Church in Norman Italy. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511721083Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Analyzes the relations of the church in southern Italy and Sicily to both the Norman states established in the 11th and 12th centuries and the institutional church of western Europe. Pursues the theme enunciated in Loud 2000 (cited under General Modern Studies of Normans in Italy) that the Norman presence was responsible for the full incorporation of the area into western Christendom.
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Ménager, Léon-Robert. “Pesanteur et étiologie de la colonization normande d’Italie.” In Relazioni e communicazioni nelle Prime Giornate Normanno-Sveve del Centro di studi normanno-svevi. Bari, 1973: Roberto il Guiscardo e il suo tempore, Fonti e studi del Corpus membranarum Italicarum, IX, 189–214 and 260–390. Rome, 1975.
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A relatively short article on French settlers in Italy who were of Norman extraction (pp. 189–214) followed by a list of all the French and Norman émigrés in the 11th and 12th centuries whom Ménager could identify (pp. 260–390). Reprinted with the original pagination as Part 4 of his collected articles, Hommes et institutions de l’Italie normande (London: Variorum Reprints, 1981), where it is followed by “Additions à l’inventaire des familles normandes et franques émigrés en Italie méridionale et en Sicile” separately paginated as pp. 1–17. G. A. Loud’s article “How ‘Norman’ Was the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy?” discusses in English and expands on the results of Ménager’s research.
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Wolf, Kenneth Baxter. Making History: The Normans and their Historians in Eleventh-Century Italy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.
After introductory chapters on the Normans in Italy and their relations with the papacy and the abbey of Monte Cassino, discusses the works by Amatus of Montecassino, Geoffrey Malaterra, and William of Apulia cited in Sources on the Normans in Italy. Sees them as engaged in a joint project to make the Normans “look like they actually deserved to rule what they had taken largely by force” (p. 3).
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Normans on Crusade and in the Crusader States
Among those who responded most enthusiastically to Pope Urban II’s preaching of the First Crusade were men from Normandy and from the Norman principalities in Italy. Many of the heroes of the Crusade were of Norman extraction, including the duke of Normandy, Robert Curthose. While many of the Crusaders returned to their homes after the conquest of Jerusalem, some stayed to found the kingdom of Jerusalem and other Crusader states. Of these, two Normans from southern Italy were especially prominent in founding the principality of Antioch: Bohemond of Taranto, eldest son of Robert Guiscard, and his nephew Tancred. The first Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Arnulf of Chocques, was also a Norman. For the general history of the crusades, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies Online article The Crusades. The works cited here pay special attention to the Norman contribution to the First Crusade and the establishment of the Crusader states. Many of the works in the section the Normans in European History discuss the Normans as Crusaders. Aird 2008, a biography of Robert Curthose (cited under Dukes and Kings), is the best modern discussion of Robert’s participation in the Crusade, but David 1920 still has the most detailed account of his companions on the expedition. Ralph of Caen 2005 is a contemporary account of the Crusade and the establishment of the principality of Antioch. Asbridge 2000 is a modern study of the establishment of that principality. Nicholson 1978 is an older study of Tancred specifically. Beech 1993 studies the life of one Norman from southern Italy who established himself as a second-level lord in the Crusader states.
Asbridge, Thomas S. The Creation of the Principality of Antioch, 1098–1130. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2000.
Both a narrative of the early history of the principality and a topical analysis of its diplomatic and institutional history. Chapter 6, “Lordship in the Principality,” concludes: “It is likely that a high proportion of these [lords] came from a Norman background” (p. 168); its appendix gives the backgrounds of the most prominent lords and ladies of the principality, where known.
Beech, George T. “A Norman-Italian Adventurer in the East: Richard of Salerno 1097–1112.” Anglo-Norman Studies 15 (1993): 25–40.
Richard was a son of William, the first Norman count of the Principate in southern Italy, who was one of the Hauteville brothers. He played a noteworthy role in the First Crusade and became temporarily count of Edessa before establishing a lordship at Marash.
David, Charles Wendell. Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920.
DOI: 10.4159/harvard.9780674331228
As a biography of Curthose, this has been superseded by Aird 2008 (cited under Dukes and Kings), but it contains a valuable appendix on Robert’s companions on the First Crusade, of whom David counts fifty-three known by name.
Nicholson, Robert Lawrence. Tancred: A Study of his Career and Work in Relation to the First Crusade and the Establishment of the Latin States in Syria and Palestine. New York: AMS, 1978.
Republication of Nicholson’s 1938 doctoral thesis, originally privately published. Narrative account of Tancred’s life, which concludes: “He may be said virtually to have created the principality which was destined to outlive all other states founded in the Syro-Palestinian area by the crusaders” (p. 226).
Ralph of Caen. The Gesta Tancredi of Ralph of Caen: A History of the Norman on the First Crusade. Translated by Bernard S. Bachrach and David S. Bachrach. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005.
Ralph, from the Norman city of Caen, was a pupil of Arnulf of Chocques and became a chaplain in the army of Bohemond of Taranto. His work covers the history of the Crusade from 1096 to 1105, with particular attention to Bohemond and, especially, Tancred.