Anglo Norman Literature
Anglo-Norman literature refers to the body of literature produced in England following the Norman Conquest in 1066. It encompasses a wide range of genres, including epic poetry, romances, and historical chronicles, written in the Anglo-Norman language. This literary tradition reflects the fusion of Norman and Anglo-Saxon cultural influences and played a significant role in shaping medieval English literature.
6 Key excerpts on "Anglo Norman Literature"
eBook - ePub- Trevor Rowley(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- The History Press(Publisher)
...However, Old French gained rapidly over English as the language of romance poetry, commerce and architecture. Anglo-Saxon personal names fell out of fashion and were replaced by Norman alternatives, which were primarily of French or continental German origin, and a little later with Biblical names, which had been rare in Saxon England. In Winchester, for example, Norman personal names were soon to be in the majority after the Conquest, as they were widely adopted by the Anglo-Norman population. ANGLO-NORMAN LITERATURE The growth and influence of Anglo-Norman literature should be seen against the broad cultural relationship between Normandy and England, beginning in the decades before the Conquest. The influence was mutual: Norman art and sculpture show the influence of English design and English skills in such differing areas as coinage and embroidery, and these were preserved by the Conqueror. The vernacular literature of Anglo-Saxon England was established and highly developed with an output unequalled by any other European vernacular. In contrast Norman literature was almost non-existent, although after the Conquest Norman writers turned to Anglo-Saxon literature, law and cultural traditions for inspiration and information. Anglo-Saxon writing provided the Normans with a plentiful source for serious, high-quality literature, written in the vernacular for the education and entertainment of the aristocracy. Post-Conquest England encompassed a tri-lingual culture. Latin, being the international language of the Church and scholarship, was introduced as the language of government by the Norman kings in place of English. French became the language of the rulers and of polite society, but gradually altered from the French spoken on the continent. English was effectively relegated to third place as a literary language...
eBook - ePubBeowulf and Other Stories
A New Introduction to Old English, Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman Literatures
- Joe Allard, Richard North(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Now and again, from the East Midland area which Danes settled in the ninth and tenth centuries, the Insular tradition delivers a saga style. The spirit of the hero lives on. English in Anglo-Norman England An idea of the Norman period as the new Dark Ages is still current in the study of early medieval language and literature. This is a myth founded on the fact of Norman oppression. According to this myth, an Anglo-Saxon vocabulary barely clings on in the place names and farmyard usage of the underclass. Cow and calf in the field, beef and veal on the table and so on. There’s truth in every myth, but let us examine this one. It says that aristocrats, clerics and administrators share a sophisticated but provincial insular culture that breeds the hybrid languages of Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Latin. To be sure, there is great and unique literary expression in Anglo-Norman epics like the Song of Roland, in the historicising accounts of Arthur, the Celtic king whose prophetic return echoes down the ages, as well as in the Breton love stories translated into the Anglo-Norman Lays of Marie de France. But the texts themselves? Of these, the myth says they are localised copies surviving in the backwaters of the innovative fast moving continental culture which produced the originals and then read the manuscripts to pieces or tossed them away as a new fashion took hold. Years later, hard on the dusty blood-stained heels of the Peasant Rebellion plotted and led by unruly Essex men in 1381, a new English literary culture boils up from a rising mercantile and artisan class. It is they who make use of an English where the cases are largely stripped out to serve the expressive needs of people concerned with trade, craft, barnyard and law. It’s only a coincidence that Anglo-Norman shows the similar simplification of case structures and genres in Old French...
eBook - ePubCultural Difference and Material Culture in Middle English Romance
Normans and Saxons
- Dominique Battles(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The relationship between the conquerors and the conquered was made most obvious by language; French was the language of politics, of law, and of the court, of Norman life, while English remained the demeaned language of the native Anglo-Saxons. 7 Thus, Robert’s very choice to write in English, rather than Latin or French, becomes an assertion of a native perspective on the events he covers. He remembers the Conquest from the vantage of the conquered, in the language of the conquered. 8 This book explores how that memory was expressed in some of the popular English literature of the post-Conquest period. It examines how the cultural distinctions and conflicts between Anglo-Saxons and Normans originating with the Norman Conquest of 1066 prevailed well into the fourteenth century and are manifest in a significant number of Middle English romances including King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Sir Orfeo, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Tale of Gamelyn, among others. More specific, the study looks at how the material culture of these poems—architecture, battle tactic, landscapes—systematically and consistently distinguishes between Norman and Anglo-Saxon cultural identity. In addition, it examines the influence of the English Outlaw tradition, itself grounded in Anglo-Saxon resistance to the Norman Conquest, on Middle English romance. More specifically, I discuss how the story of Hereward, the Anglo-Saxon resistance fighter whose deeds survive in numerous chronicle accounts, forms an important subtext for these well-known English romances. I argue that these English poems capture and explore the often tumultuous and polarizing past events and experiences that brought the Anglo-Saxon and Norman peoples together, in the process distilling some of the hallmarks of both side’s cultural identity. Concretely, a significant number of Middle English romances set up a dichotomy of two ruling houses headed by powerful lords, who compete for power and influence...
eBook - ePub- Russell Kirk(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This fusion simplified the general English tongue, gradually— which became an advantage for the English, long later. Until the seventh-century Christian missionaries from Ireland (speaking Celtic) began to school the northern English, and the Christian missionaries from Rome (speaking Latin) set to work among the southern English, the Anglo-Saxon peoples had no writing. Scalds and bards chanted or shouted their heroic poems (Beowulf the chief of these epics), and recited chronicles of kings. Not until King Alfred, late in the ninth century, directed the translation of some important Latin works into the English of the kingdom of Wessex, and commenced the writing of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, did a written prose literature begin to develop. In the course of five centuries and longer, only modest progress toward a high culture had been made among English-speaking folk. 3 Into this rather somnolent culture of the English there burst, in the year 1066, the Norman power. French-speaking William the Conqueror, swiftly mastering the whole of England, stripped the Saxon nobles and the Saxon Church of their powers, their honors, and their lands. Norman French promptly became the language of the court, of the king’s vassals who now were given power almost absolute in every shire, and of vernacular literature. Only the peasantry, after the Norman Conquest, clung to English speech. In the twelfth century it was said that two languages were spoken in the kingdom of England: Latin for the learned, French for the vulgar. No one worth mentioning still spoke the despised English. 4 Nevertheless, this seemingly dreadful blow to the English language paradoxically hastened the efficient development of that tongue. Not many years after the Conquest, Old or Early English gave way to the speech called Middle English...
eBook - ePubThe Normans and the 'Norman Edge'
Peoples, Polities and Identities on the Frontiers of Medieval Europe
- Keith Stringer, Andrew Jotischky, Keith J Stringer, Andrew Jotischky(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Right up to 1204, the distinction between the Normans and French continued to be unclear in certain contexts. 51 For example, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vi: MS D, ed. G.P. Cubbin (Cambridge, 1996), p. 80 (s.a. 1066), where Normen refers to Harald Hardrada’s Norwegians and Frencyscan to William of Normandy’s army; D.M. Wilson, The Bayeux Tapestry (London, 1985), plates 66, 68; Leges Henrici Primi, ed. and trans. L.J. Downer (Oxford, 1972), p. 288: Non procedit nec soluuatur murdro Anglicus, set Francigena, but cf. p. 284: Si quis Francigena uel Normannus uel denique transmarinus occidatur ; Sharpe, ‘Peoples and languages’. M. Bennett, ‘Stereotype Normans in Old French literature’, ANS, 9 (1987), p. 34, notes that Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis depicts Franceis at the battle of Hastings, but Normanz opposing Hereward a few years later. 52 Sharpe, ‘Peoples and languages’. 53 K.S.B. Keats-Rohan, ‘William I and the Breton contingent in the non-Norman Conquest, 1060–1087’, ANS, 13 (1991), pp. 157–72. 54 Davis, Normans and Their Myth, especially pp. 49–68, 103–6. 55 Brut y Tywysogyon or the Chronicle of the Princes (Red Book of Hergest Version), ed. and trans. T. Jones (Cardiff, 1955), from p. 27 onwards, although there are sometimes refinements (for example, at p. 115, where the ‘French’ are also called ‘Flemings and Normans’); A Medieval Prince of Wales: The Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan, ed. and trans. D.S. Evans (Llanerch, 1990), pp. 44–5 (‘French’ in Gwynedd); cf. pp. 34–5, for ‘Normans’ in Glamorgan. 56 Memoriale fratris Walteri de Coventria, ed. W. Stubbs (RS, 1872–3), ii, p. 206: Moderniores enim Scottorum reges magis se Francos fatentur, sicut genere, ita moribus, lingua, cultu, Scotisque ad extremam servitutem redactis, solos Francos in familiaritatem et obsequium adhibent. Fifth stage The final phase in the development of medieval Norman identity began with the establishment of Capetian rule in 1204...
eBook - ePub- Robert D. Fulk, Christopher M. Cain, Robert D. Fulk, Christopher M. Cain(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Conclusion Making Old English New: Anglo-Saxonism and the Cultural Work of Old English Literature It may not be obvious that the motives of scholars studying Old English literature are ideological. Yet nearly everyone will concede that the study of difficult texts from a remote period is unlikely to be undertaken by anyone for whom it serves no present purpose – that is, for whose benefit those texts are not perceived to perform some variety of “cultural work” in the present. And such cultural work can be performed only when those texts somehow engage the ideologies that inform, indeed constitute, the present and distinguish it from the past. We would not read Old English literature if it did not somehow touch on what we believe about ourselves. The aim of this Conclusion, then, is to sketch briefly the history of Anglo-Saxonism – that is, the study of the Anglo-Saxons and their literature – and to highlight a few of the ways that each age after the Norman Conquest has appropriated Old English literature for its own ideological ends. In this way Old English literature has continually been remade into something new, something it never really was, but something relevant to present purposes. Twenty-one years after the Norman Conquest, just one of the bishops in England, just two of the abbots, were English (James Campbell 1982b: 240). The displacement of English prelates naturally had a profound effect upon the production and transmission of English literature, activities that had been confined to religious houses. With rare exceptions (e.g. A Prayer and some copies of Cœdmon’s Hymn), after the Conquest, Old English verse ceased to be copied, and Durham – a poem that strays far from the formal standards of classical Old English verse – is the only poem in the ASPR standard collected edition of Old English verse known to have been composed after 1066...
