The Norman Conquest in English History

Abstract

This study pursues a central theme in English historical thinking—the Norman Conquest—over seven centuries. This first volume, which covers more than half a millennium, explains how and why the experience of the Conquest prompted both an unprecedented campaign in the early twelfth century to write (or create) the history of England, and to excavate (and fabricate) pre-Conquest English law. It traces the treatment of the Conquest in English historiography, legal theory and practice, and political argument through the middle ages and early modern period. It shows that during this period jurisprudence and legal practice became more important than historical writing in preserving the Conquest as a subject of interest. It concludes with an examination of the dispersal of these materials from libraries consequent on the dissolution of the monasteries, and the attempts made to rescue, edit, and print many of them in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This preservation of what had been written for the most part in the early twelfth century enabled the Conquest to become still more contested in the constitutional cataclysms of the seventeenth century than it had been in the eleventh and twelfth. The seventeenth-century resurrection of the Conquest will be the subject of a second volume.