Norman Rule of England

4 Key excerpts on "Norman Rule of England"

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  eBook - PDF

  Medieval Literature and Culture

  A student guide

  • Andrew Galloway(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  Most of the populace continued to speak their regional dialects of English; a considerable number of clerics RULERS AND HIGH POLITICS 23 continued to copy their most popular English sermons from the Anglo-Saxon period; and most of the previous royal administrators continued for a generation to operate the efficient Anglo-Saxon bureaucracy. But still larger changes soon begin to be evident, in language, government, church, law, and the social hierarchy. Perhaps the most visible change was the concentration of landlordship at the highest level into the hands of a dozen very powerful Norman lords, replacing the hundred or more Anglo-Saxon lords who had been the major landlords of Anglo-Saxon England. Norman culture did not grant rule automatically to the first-born, and William (r. 1066-87), who remained duke of Normandy as well as king of England, gave England to his middle son, William II (r. 1087-1100), and the duchy of Normandy to his oldest son, Robert. The dual inheritance remained a volatile element throughout medieval English military and political history. When Robert tried to conquer England for himself, this gave William II a good excuse to conquer Normandy back, putting it directly under English rule again. The venture was not completed until their youngest brother Henry I claimed the throne (r. 1100-35), sealing the victory by imprisoning his brother Robert for life. Since Henry had no son himself, he could only ask his barons to swear an oath of loyalty to let his daughter Matilda be the heiress to the throne; but when Matilda married the ambitious Geoffrey of Anjou the barons rejected their oath. Into the vacuum stepped William I's grandson Stephen, son of William the Conqueror's daughter Adela (r. 1135-54), and thus began England's most divisive and brutal civil war.

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  The History of Britain and Ireland

  Prehistory to Today

  • Kenneth L. Campbell(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  9 Wales remained politically fractious, not fully absorbed into the English kingdom, but not politically united under a single Welsh king either. Between the kings of England and Scotland, two rulers had essentially established their authority over the British Isles. These areas also came under the influence of a feudal political culture emanating from England. For instance, it became increasingly common for rulers with any claim to authority throughout the British Isles to have men willing to take up arms under the insignia of their ruler. In doing so, they contributed to a system that resembled the network of lord-vassal relationships characteristic of feudalism rather than the more traditional system of alliances based on kinship, marriage connections, and reciprocal gift giving that characterized the early medieval period. It is to a closer examination of the English political culture that prevailed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that we now turn.

  English Political Culture, 1100–1273

  In England, the Norman Conquest had not clarified the issue of monarchical legitimacy but only served to muddy the concept further because William’s own alleged “right” to the throne was predicated upon the competing claims of hereditary right and foreign conquest, which had seemingly overridden the tradition of election and coronation, which ensconced Harold on the throne. If anything, William’s invasion had established the principle that might made right and opened the door for future challenges to any ruler too weak to defend their claim militarily. The allegiance that vassals owed to their lords rested not only, or even primarily, on the sense of honor involved in the oath of homage and fealty, which they took, but on the respect that they had for their lord or king in a political network that relied heavily on interpersonal relationships. William I exacerbated the succession issue further by bequeathing his Norman duchy to his oldest son, Robert, and the English throne to his younger son, William Rufus, thus dividing his land between them and weakening the position of both.

  Henry I’s reign (1100–35) saw the granting of town charters as a further means of enhancing royal authority within his kingdom. Another change implemented by Henry was the practice of sending itinerant justices throughout his kingdom to hear civil and criminal cases to expand royal justice. The Normans retained the Anglo-Saxon administrative districts of “hundreds,” which presented those accused of the most serious crimes for trial when the judges arrived on their circuit. Lesser cases came before a judge in the monthly hundred court sessions held throughout the year. Twelve freeholders, or freemen, the origin of our modern jury system, would hear each case. The north remained a matter of special concern for Henry, though Judith Green describes his policy there as “reactive” rather than proactive.10

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  Feudal Empires

  • John F. Le Patourel(Author)
  • 1984(Publication Date)
  • Hambledon Continuum

    (Publisher)

  What it amounted to was this. The Norman Conquest had not been simply a military conquest; and in England its consequences were not just a change of dynasty and a number of debatable changes in insti-tutions and government. It involved a colonization of the country by a relatively small number of masterful men, led by the royal-ducal family, men who did not cut their roots in their homelands. It was a formid-able vested interest. II Given this vested interest, given the will of king and barons to hold on to the lands they had inherited or acquired on the Continent as well as those they had obtained across the Channel, the relationship between Normandy and England that was thereby created would clearly give rise to problems of government. The most obvious problem was one of geography - the division of the Norman lands by the English Channel and the sheer distance between their extremities, from Carlisle and Newcastle in the north to Alengon and Le Mans in the south. Yet the seriousness of this problem should not be exaggerated. A Channel crossing might be delayed by contrary or boisterous winds; but under normal conditions it would be easier to transport men and material in bulk across a relatively straightforward stretch of sea than to move them a comparable distance by land, easier that is to say to convey the king-duke, his household and his gear - and his troops if he had an army with him -from Rouen or Caen to Win-chester or London than from London, say, to York or Chester. The Channel was more of a highway than a barrier in the late eleventh and in the twelfth centuries. 17 This is a point which it would be worth while to work out in more detail. Until it is done, see Knowles, Monastic Order, ch. vi and p. 704 for the monasteries. The bishops are listed in Handbook of British Chronology, edd. F. M. Powicke and E. B. Fryde (Royal Historical Society, 1961) and the origins of at least the more important of them may be found in the D.N.B.

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  Ireland and Britain, 1170-1450

  • Robin Frame(Author)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • Hambledon Continuum

    (Publisher)

  4 Our response should not, I think, be a Gadarene rush to unravel political history and knit it up again according to a pattern labelled 'Anglo-Norman Realm' or 'Angevin Empire'. Quite apart from the existence of differing 1 W. L. Warren, Henry II (London, 1973), ch. 4, 'The Lordship of the British Isles', forms a notable exception. And of course since this essay -which I have left very much as it was delivered at Gregynog - was written, R. R. Davies has provided just such a model in, 'In Praise of British History', in Davies, British Isles, pp. 9-26. 2 To keep the discussion within practical limits, I have excluded from consideration Celtic and Scandinavian kings and lords, except where these were absorbed into the Anglo-French aristocratic scene. 3 M. Chibnall, Anglo-Norman England, 1066-1166 (Oxford, 1986), p. 5. 4 See J. Le Patourel, The Norman Empire (Oxford, 1976), chs 3 and 6. 151 152 Ireland and Britain, 1170-1450 views about the coherence of the core, there remains a distinctive English political history, concerned above all with a remarkably incisive royal gov-ernment and the reactions it provoked from the time of Ethelred II or Cnut onwards. 5 (Elements even of this history were exported beyond England; but that is another matter.) The lesson is, rather, that we need to give more thought to the contexts we employ. We are normally dealing with part of a wider scene; the part will have limited meaning until we decide what it is part of. As Le Patourel pointed out, the familiar design, in which 'national' history lies at the centre of our concerns, with local history on one margin and external relations on the other, is too clumsy and anachronistic an instrument for making sense of the twelfth century. 6 The trouble is that once we abandon it, anarchy seems to threaten; the past becomes more difficult to arrange and describe; even our vocabulary begins to fail.

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