Norman Conquest Research Articles

GENRE PECULIARITIES OF THE LITERATURE OF THE NORMAN PERIOD (12TH 13TH CENTURIES)

The period of French domination left an important mark on the later history of English literature, which, in some cases, is more common with the artistic devices and style of French literature of the Norman period than with the study of Anglo-Saxon literature, from which it was artificially divorced. The Norman conquest conditioned certain specific features of language development. The main one was the spread of three languages in the Kingdom of England – French among the ruling class, English among the broad masses of the population, and Latin in church affairs and administration. This affected the linguistic and genre character of English medieval literature.Methods used in the study: general scientific (analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction), methods of theoretical research (from abstract to concrete), historical method Among the feudal lords, the most popular genre was chivalric poetry, which was brought from France by trouver singer-poets. The most common manifestation of chivalric poetry was the rhyming chivalric novel, which reflected the customs of the upper feudal class, promoted heroic deeds, the code of chivalric morality, and examples of human virtues. The novels about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table became the most popular.

French Literature of the British Isles after the Norman Conquest: A Digital, Data-Driven Investigation

Abstract According to the traditional model, the use of French in Great Britain was fundamentally tied to the Norman Conquest of 1066. The language of the conquerors rapidly replaced English within administrative and cultural domains, and it maintained its foothold in these domains until the thirteenth century, when English began to regain prestige. Yet research of the past few decades has shown that this model is significantly flawed. This article is aimed at supporting an ongoing revision of this model through a quantitative approach centred around a catalogue of manuscripts containing French literature and copied in the British Isles. The results presented here indicate clearly that, in the century following the Conquest, English literature was being produced in much greater quantities than French literature. Indeed, the peak of French literary production did not occur during the century following the Conquest, but rather during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Perhaps even more surprisingly, the analysis presented here reveals that in the centuries following the Conquest, works in French circulated most commonly with works in other languages — especially Latin. The approach adopted here thus sheds light on the history of French while decentring the canonical works that typically lie at its heart.

Even a Compensation Culture has Its Limits: Arbitrating Homicide in Fifteenth-Century England

ABSTRACT Historians have long argued that arbitration was the preferred means of resolution for most disputes in later medieval England; but does this apply also to the settlement of homicides? Despite the strenuous efforts of the English legal system after the Norman Conquest to force homicides through the royal courts, historians have argued that homicide continued to be settled out-of-court throughout the medieval period. This study examines six cases of arbitration centred on homicide from the fifteenth century to demonstrate that arbitration was rarely implemented as a means to resolve homicides. When it was, it was a relatively small, inter-related group of gentry who exploited the provision because they were well placed to manipulate the law and because their behaviour was supervised by the kingdom’s magnates only once problems had arisen. Accordingly, arbitration for homicide was unusual and the practice was anything but inclusive.

The Feudal Contract and the Monarchy in Medieval England

In interpreting the feudal contract between kings and nobles in medieval Western Europe, Western historians have tended to elaborate on its interaction, equivalence, and even equality, with an emphasis on the resulting restrictions on the king’s authority. However, this was not the case in England during this period. After the Norman Conquest, “imported feudalism” became a strong support for the English monarchy. On this basis, the feudal contract between kings and nobles evolved from an oral to a textual contract and from “personal commitment” to “collective negotiation,” in a process strongly marked by the coercion and inequality bestowed on such contracts by hierarchical feudal roles. In the course of this process, the English kings ceaselessly consolidated their power by breaking down the feudal customs reflected in agreements between the two sides. Although the Magna Carta, as a text-based feudal contract, made explicit provision for feudal customs, it failed to effectively constrain royal power. History shows that if we seek to elaborate on the reciprocity and even equality of the feudal contract from the perspective of modern social contract theory and thus exaggerate the nobles’ right to resist the king, we will inevitably construct a mythical “feudal contract determinism.”

Mark Faulkner. A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century: Language and Literature between Old and Middle English

Mark Faulkner’s book is a milestone in the study of early English, and essential reading for any scholar engaged with England’s literary and linguistic landscapes in the High Middle Ages. As he notes, scholarly treatments of the evolving language and writing of the period between securely ‘Old’ and safely ‘Middle’ English have suffered from a traditional perception of rupture, loss, and absence in the record, resulting from the (literal and figurative) marginalization of English during an efflorescence of Latin and French literature. This apparent literary scarcity following the Norman Conquest has led scholars to offer ideological readings of English writings and their relative absence alike, as assertions or failures of English identity embodied in a newly subaltern language; the earliest Middle English works have been described as fundamentally isolated and deracinated. Faulkner’s substantial achievement, quietly and painstakingly traced through a seriously impressive weight of written evidence and close analysis, is to show that both of these perceptions are incorrect.

Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature: Authority, Exemplarity and Femininity, by Juliette Vuille

Juliette Vuille investigates the figure of the holy harlot in medieval English literature: those female saints who, following a sinful (read: sexual) youth, repent in favour of a particularly ascetic spirituality. Vuille’s ambitious project encompasses English literary history from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries and considers works in three of England’s vernacular languages: Old English, Middle English, and Anglo-Norman. She argues that the holy harlot offers a ‘much more inclusive and overarching presentation of femininity’, one that allows womanhood to symbolise both the best and worst in humanity (p. 223). Medieval English literature constructs the holy harlot with such capaciousness, she contends, that she comes to represent Everyman, a symbol of humanity writ large as both fallen and redeemed. The first chapter investigates the earliest Old English lives of holy harlots from the ninth and tenth centuries. Vuille posits that pre-Conquest England provided particularly fertile ground for lives of holy harlots to flourish, given the multiplicity of non-traditional paths for women to religious life, and the pre-existing literary traditions for heroic women. She argues that, contrary to their Latin sources, these Old English texts represent the holy harlot’s conversion to sanctity as a queer transcending of gender, allowing any reader to ‘move beyond trajectories set by one’s gender’ (p. 56). These queer possibilities were closed off, however, after the Norman Conquest, as Vuille discusses in her second chapter. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Vuille contends, hagiography had been deeply affected by the rises of romance and affective piety. As both harlot and lady of romance, the saint could therefore represent the worst and best of femininity, transforming from prostitute into bride of Christ. Rather than transcend femininity, the harlot saint embraced it, thereby aligning herself fully with Christ’s feminised humanity. In her third chapter, Vuille demonstrates how the lives of holy harlots changed following the advent of Wycliffism. In response to Mary Magdalene’s prominence in the Wycliffite defence of lay preaching, she argues, John Mirk wrote a version of the Magdalene’s life that minimised her radical preaching, while Osbern Bokenham, more sheltered by the influence of his powerful patroness, instead presented a Magdalene who retained her persuasive speech but worked in harmony with clerical authority. The multivalent possibilities of the holy harlot come into full bloom in Chapter Four’s discussion of the Digby Mary Magdalene. In rendering the Magdalene as simultaneously fallen and sanctified, Vuille argues that the play ‘stages the universality of the holy harlot mode to represent Everyman’ (p. 141). Vuille demonstrates the availability of that mode to women in particular in her final chapter, which focuses on how Christina of Markyate, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and Elizabeth Barton took inspiration from Mary Magdalene in order to sanctify and justify their public spiritual lives.

Nicholas Karn. Kings, Lords and Courts in Anglo-Norman England.

The Anglo-Norman period, which stretches from the Norman Conquest of 1066 to the accession of Henry II in 1154, occupies a difficult place in English legal history. It is unhelpful that its source base is more intractable than those of either the preceding or the following eras, not providing even the semblance of a clear account of how law worked. Yet the period’s unyielding sources have pressing questions to answer because profound differences between the periods show that Anglo-Norman England witnessed fundamental legal change. It is not fair to say that the Anglo-Norman legal world has been neglected, but it is rare for a book-length study to take England’s early medieval legal inheritance seriously and wrestle with the problem of how it transformed to produce the more familiar world of the late twelfth century. This is what Nicholas Karn’s Kings, Lords and Courts in Anglo-Norman England does with remarkable success. It is one of those rare books that appreciably advances historical knowledge on a well-worn topic.

A Similar-Sounding Surnames Sequel: Haplogroup R-FT70038

Historical and Y-DNA analysis suggests that men with Branan and similar-sounding surnames of haplogroup R-BY140757 originated from the de Braham of Norman origin, who settled in Suffolk after the Norman conquest of England. Over the centuries, these de Braham took on important roles in English and Irish governance, military, and judiciaries. And in Ireland, the Norman surname took on, as was not uncommon, a Gaelic sound and written appearance, i.e., Branan and similar. Descendants of Irish colonial settlers in Virginia with Branan-sounding surnames (Branham, Brannan, Brannon, etc.), who belong to the sub-haplogroup R-BY140757>FT70038, have been identified as the progeny of two notable eighteenth-century colonial North American settlers – Caron Brannon and Kenyon Branan. This article identifies genealogical lines with known or hypothesized connections to Caron and Kenyon. Caron Brannon’s will indicates he had four sons, three of whom have direct male descendants documented and one documented to have died without children. Additionally, there are birth records for a fifth son, the eldest, who finds no mention in Caron’s will. Paper genealogy shows Kenyon Branan had one son with certainty, but three other lines are widely speculated to descend from him. This project identified and recruited descendants from Caron’s and Kenyon’s lines for DNA testing. Y-DNA results for descendants of two well-documented sons of Caron Brannon form sub-haplogroups, R-FTC4333 and R-FT101136. This result is consistent with the hypothesis that Caron Brannon is the patriarch of R-FT70038. However, a striking new sub-haplogroup to R-FT70038, dubbed R-Y10443, was discovered matching two of the three lines previously thought to descend from Kenyon. The eldest son of Caron is shown as a possible father to Kenyon or as the patriarch of R-Y10443, but he cannot be both. This new insight suggests strongly that the patriarch of R-FT70038 was one to three generations prior to Caron Brannon and that Kenyon Branan plays a minor role in the lineages of the haplogroup. The number of potential R-FT70038 haplotree options is now clearly defined. A combined analytical assessment of Y-SNP, Y-STR, and autosomal results reinforces the well-documented genealogies, debunks the speculative ones, and reveals new connections and chronologies that no single previous approach provided. Statistical modeling of the combined DNA data prefers the Haplotree with R-Y10433 descending directly from the patriarch and Kenyon Branan descending directly from Caron Brannon through his eldest son John.

Royal chancery after 1066

This paper explores linguistic and sociolinguistic mechanisms that facilitated collaboration between English and Norman administrators in the decades following the Norman Conquest. First, a community of royal and episcopal chancellors and scribes is reconstructed from historical and documentary sources and their ties and networks are described. In the second step, two subcorpora are used to illustrate the processes of lexical selection and focusing in their common professional language, Latin: royal writs of William I and circuit returns of the Domesday inquest for the South-West. Both parts of the study demonstrate high involvement of Norman actors in the leading bureaucratic positions but, at the same time, point to their wide collaboration with the local administrative and scribal personnel. As a result, the two vernaculars are mutually enriched with new professional vocabulary, while in the written Latin standard, common to both, compromise lexical features emerge.

Waltheof: The Journey from Warrior to Saint

The elevation to sainthood of the English earl, Waltheof, who was beheaded, ostensibly for rebellion against William the Conqueror, exemplifies the process by which non-elite and elite communities coalesced to construct a saintly cult in late eleventh- and twelfth-century England. This paper traces the development of Waltheof’s cult from the time of his execution and burial through the mid-twelfth century and seeks to place his path to sainthood within the context of the use of hagiographical material as exemplars for the lives of the laity.
 We have drawn heavily on the Passio Waldevi, a hagiographical account of Waltheof’s life and martyrdom, written at Crowland Abbey in the early twelfth century, along with other materials, most notably early miracles of Waltheof, contained in the same manuscript (Douai BM MS 852). This account, though written to promote the official cult of Waltheof, nevertheless gives hints of earlier, spontaneous veneration of Waltheof. As a point of comparison, we look at earlier hagiographical materials, most notably English and Latin accounts of the life of St. Guthlac and several saints that figure prominently in Bede. To put Waltheof’s death and cult in historical context we consider historical materials in Old English (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Easter Table Chronicle), Latin (Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmsbury, among others), and Norman French (Geoffrei de Gaimar), and we briefly consider the Norse evidence (Snorri Sturluson) for Waltheof’s wider reputation. While most of our evidence is textual, we have also considered archaeological evidence, particularly as it relates to burials, both saintly and deviant. We argue that this evidence, takentogether, indicates that Waltheof’s cult draws on long-standing practices and attitudes towards sanctity and the Christian life in the centuries before the Norman Conquest of England.

Æthelflaed and Other Rulers in English Histories, c.900–1150

Abstract This article explains why Æthelflaed, ruler of Mercia, mattered to writers of history in twelfth-century England. It argues that these writers evaluated and compared rulers based not on sex or bloodline, but on the quality of a ruler’s achievements relative to the set and scale of challenges the ruler faced. They thought Æthelflaed remarkable because her triumphs for Mercia distinguished her from other rulers. The article shows that a new understanding of attitudes in twelfth-century England towards rulers, past and present, is required. It accounts for the absence of gendered comments about rulers, as well as the presence of non-binary concepts of gender, in medieval writing. It also challenges the enduring idea that Latin writers imposed a shared, Wessex-dominated national vision on the English past. They asserted Mercia’s independence under Æthelflaed’s sole rule, which shows that English regional interests persisted in the historical imagination long after the Norman Conquest.

Landed elites and education provision in England: evidence from school boards, 1871-99

I study the relationship between land concentration and the expansion of state education in 19C England. Using a broad range of education measures for 40 counties and 1,387 School Boards, I show a negative association between land concentration and local taxation, school expenditure, and human capital. I estimate reduced-form effects of 19C land concentration, geographic factor endowments, and the land redistribution after the Norman conquest of 1066. The negative effects on state-education supply are stronger where rural labour can easily migrate, where landowners had political power, is not offset by voluntary schooling, and not driven by a demand channel. This suggests that landowners opposed taxation in order to reduce state education provision.

Post-Conquest Forged Charters Containing English: A List

The paper presents a list of sixty-nine forged charters containing English pro- duced following the Norman Conquest of 1066. The list can be considered a supplement to The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1066–1220 (Da Rold et al. 2010) – a project conducted jointly at the University of Leeds and University of Leicester collecting all known texts containing English, in order to provide an insight and allow research into “transitional”, post-Conquest English. The paper outlines the significance of charters in the Medieval world, and discusses some key issues and misconceptions related to study- ing this period in the history of the English language.

How Merchant Towns Shaped Parliaments: From the Norman Conquest of England to the Great Reform Act

We study the emergence of urban self-governance in the late medieval period. We focus on England after the Norman Conquest of 1066, building a novel comprehensive dataset of 554 medieval towns. During the Commercial Revolution (twelfth to thirteenth centuries), many merchant towns obtained Farm Grants: the right of self-governed tax collection and law enforcement. Self-governance, in turn, was a stepping stone for parliamentary representation: Farm Grant towns were much more likely to be summoned directly to the medieval English Parliament than otherwise similar towns. We also show that self-governed towns strengthened the role of Parliament and shaped national institutions over the subsequent centuries. (JEL D02, D72, D73, K11, K34, N43, N93)

Illuminated History Books in the Anglo-Norman World, 1066–1272

Illuminated History Books in the Anglo-Norman World, 1066–1272

Reassessing the Relationship Between Early Saxon Activity and Parish Boundaries

ABSTRACT The relationship between sites of Early-Anglo-Saxon activity and territorial boundaries, once much-debated, has been subject to little direct exploration in recent years despite its significance for landscape history. This article examines this important relationship using data from the Suffolk Historic Environment Record and the Portable Antiquities Scheme. It is suggested that the association between deserted settlement sites and parish boundaries has a much longer pedigree than is often suggested, persisting through the Norman Conquest and beyond. It is argued the origins of this relationship can be usefully understood in terms of territorial reorganisation following settlement abandonment.

Laughton en le Morthen, South Yorkshire: Evolution of a Medieval Magnate Core

ABSTRACT Towards the end of the first millennium, a fundamental change in the fabric of Western European elite society occurred as families began to promote themselves not on the basis of kin-groups but of their personal wealth. Key to self-aggrandisement was the ownership of local power centres, into which aristocrats poured investment. In England, few of these magnate cores have been investigated archaeologically, and understanding relies on a small corpus of well-excavated sites. Eager to shift this dependence on excavated evidence, research at Laughton en le Morthen, South Yorkshire used a range of methods to reveal the origins of an aristocratic centre, and its transformation in the wake of the Norman Conquest. This included construction of a motte and bailey castle that was perhaps never used for military purposes, but was instead curated as a folly-type feature expressive of new lordly power. The results from Laughton not only allow the evolution of the site and its landscape to be mapped, but also shows the value of adopting diverse archaeological research methodologies for understanding medieval magnate cores.

Northern Memories and the English Middle Ages

Northern Memories and the English Middle Ages

BRITISH JUDICIAL DISCOURSE: ILLUSTRATIVE AND LINGUISTIC EXCURSUS

This research is devoted to revealing the features of the modern British judicial discourse. In many ways, the modern legal discourse seems limitless. The scientific novelty is the comparison of the points of convergence of the British and French legal judicial discourse. In England, as in France, professional legal discourse uses professional vocabulary and a high language register. In addition, there is a tendency in the legal discourse of these countries to attach special importance to certain commonly used words. The presence of French terms is reminiscent of the role played by the Norman conquests in the development of English law. However, the specificity of the legal discourse in England is undeniable: not only its own concepts are developed in Common Law, but also through a multi-faceted and personalized discourse, which is not alien to the figurative form of expression, a pragmatic approach to the system of law is reflected, based not on an abstract code, but on inductive judgments. Thus, the English legal discourse is an emanation of the state foundations and cultural characteristics of England. The relevance of the study is explained by the growing interest in the study of language as a socio-cultural phenomenon of the era of globalization and the increasing importance of proficiency in a professionally-oriented language around the world.

Not So Foreign

Abstract The Norman Conquest and its tremendous linguistic impact on the English language is widely acknowledged among scholars and triggered a substantial body of literature. The great influx of French loanwords into the lexis of Middle English not only led to a profound restructuring of the lexicon, but also deeply affected the English morphology and patterns of derivation (Kastovsky 1994), as well as the English syntax to some extent (Smith 2012; Haeberli 2010). However, few studies have focused on a detailed analysis of these loans. Most researchers chose to focus on the quantitative aspects of the period of extensive lexical borrowing in Middle English, without dedicating much attention to the way and the extent to which French loanwords actually integrated and interacted with native vocabulary. This study thus sought to examine some excerpts of Middle English texts in more detail with the aim of getting closer to understanding whether these borrowings were already fully integrated in Middle English by the time these texts were written, whether this integration was determined by internal or external factors, and whether the process itself was abrupt or rather continuous.