6 Key excerpts on "Anglo Norman Literature"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Normans

  • Trevor Rowley(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  English was undoubtedly spoken, even in aristocratic Norman households. Many Normans took English wives, and it is reasonable to assume that a large section of society, even of the nobility, was bilingual. Many of the higher clergy spoke and preached in English, and it is said that ‘the pulpit was the cradle of English prose’. Indeed, it was devotional literature in the vernacular that preserved the tradition of English prose writing during the Anglo-Norman period. At Worcester, owing to the influence of the English Bishop Wulfstan, who held the see until 1095 and whose own life was written by a Worcester monk in Anglo-Saxon, the persistence of the native language in religious works was particularly strong. Collections of sermons, Anglo-Saxon versions of sections of the Bible, service books and lives of saints continued to be copied there in the twelfth century. 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. In the post-Conquest period, authors writing in Anglo-Norman were using source material in English, Latin and perhaps Welsh, while later writers in English drew on French or Latin material. The choice of language was dictated by the taste of the expected audience or patron, or by the nature of the topic. More significantly, language was not yet perceived as part of national identity. The material moves easily from one vernacular to another within the same manuscript or even within the same poem. This flexibility is demonstrated by the large intake of Romance vocabulary into English throughout the Anglo-Norman period and means that its literary influence is pervasive rather than distinctive. Anglo-Norman literature develops more through its response to Latin than to English, often representing the popularisation of more scholarly Latin writing.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Beowulf 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

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Cultural Difference and Material Culture in Middle English Romance

  Normans and Saxons

  • Dominique Battles(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  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. This book examines the cultural heritage behind each of these pairings to show how poets repeatedly contrast essentially Norman and Anglo-Saxon values, priorities, and ruling styles. It shows that in some of the popular literature of the post-Conquest period, poets and audiences still shared a coherent understanding of these two distinct peoples and of the historical experiences that brought them together. Poets could still conjure an essentially Anglo-Saxon hero over two hundred years after the Conquest, and draw moral distinctions based on that cultural memory.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  America's British Culture

  • Russell Kirk(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  During the eighth and ninth centuries, the terrible Danes came down upon England—first as pirates and ravagers, later to occupy two thirds of the country and eventually to settle down peaceably among people of Anglo-Saxon stock. The Danish tongue being closely related to the Anglo-Saxon (or Old English), the two languages blended in northern England. 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. (Some philologists, however, argue that the triumph of Middle English did not occur until after the year 1200.) The Normans, Logan Pearsall Smith writes,

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The 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)

  56 The ‘French’ here were in fact primarily Anglo-Normans. 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. From then on, the ‘Normans’ became just one of several groups under the rule of the kings of France. Both royal officers and narrative sources distinguished carefully between the different regional groups of the Capetian kingdom, not least to show respect for regional customary law as well as for political reasons, and this no doubt helped to reinforce definitions of who was ‘Norman’ along the borders of the duchy.57 Meanwhile, in England the term ‘Norman’ became virtually synonymous with ‘alien’, as a marker of those Anglo-Norman landowners who had chosen to remain in the duchy in 1204: in royal records the ‘lands of the Normans’ frequently include those of Bretons, Manceaux and Flemings,58 although royal sources do sometimes specify the ‘lands of the Normans, Bretons and other foreigners’.59 The novelty of this usage is clearest in royal records referring to the Channel Islands, which distinguish not only between the Islands and ‘Normandy’ but also between the islanders and the ‘Normans’; it is very unlikely that such distinctions would have been made before 1204.60 In many respects, though, the Channel Islands continued to form part of Normandy, as they remained in the diocese of Coutances and the ecclesiastical province of Rouen, and their inhabitants observed Norman customary law and used the tournois currency.61

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  A History of Old English Literature

  • 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. Poetry was an aristocratic genre, and its fate was therefore linked to the fortunes of the aristocracy, from which the ranks of bishops and abbots were drawn. Old English prose continued to be copied into manuscripts as late as the thirteenth century in the monastic cathedrals at Canterbury, Rochester, and Worcester (see Treharne 1998: 231) – not to mention the updating of the Peterborough Chronicle to 1154 – and some have taken this to evidence a certain monkish resistance to Norman hegemony (e.g. Clanchy 1993: 165–6 and Swanton 2000: xxvii). To be sure, a large portion of the copied texts comprises laws and charters (see Pelteret 1990), documents in which the Normans took considerable interest, the copying of which thus does not suggest anti-Norman sentiment. Yet there seems to have been more than a ­little antagonism between Saxon and Norman ecclesiastics, and a kind of national feeling, looking back nostalgically to an earlier age, is ­perceivable in some Latin and Middle English texts of the first two centuries after the Conquest.1

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book