Norman Yoke Research Articles

The perils of national narratives

The perils of national narratives

THE ANCIENT CONSTITUTION AND THE LANGUAGES OF POLITICAL THOUGHT

AbstractHistorians of political thought speak of ‘languages’ of politics. A language provides a lexicon, an available resource for legitimating positions. It is looser than a ‘theory’, because protean, and not predictive of particular doctrines. Some languages attract considerable scholarly attention, while others languish, for all that they were ambient in past cultures. In recent scholarship on early modern European thought, natural law and civic humanism have dominated. Yet prescriptive appeals to national historiographies were equally pervasive. Many European cultures appealed to Tacitean mythologies of a Gothic ur-constitution. The Anglophone variant dwelt on putative Saxon freedoms, the status of the Norman ‘Conquest’, whether feudalism ruptured the Gothic inheritance, and how common law related to ‘reason’, natural law, and divine law. Whigs rooted parliaments in the Saxonwitenagemot; though, by the eighteenth century, ‘modern’ Whigs discerned liberty as the fruit of recent socio-economic change. Levellers and Chartists alike talked of liberation from the ‘Norman Yoke’. These themes were explored from the 1940s onwards under the stimulus of Herbert Butterfield; one result was J. G. A. Pocock's classicAncient constitution and the feudal law(1957).

Irish Nonhumanness and English Inhumanity in A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland

In Spenser’s Vewe, the Irish are fragmented, in flux, contingent: they are “barbarous” “relickes” or “scumme” who break upon the English “like a sudden tempest”; they deny hereditary rights to land and leadership; and their culture is a heterogeneous pastiche of multiple origins with no common birthright or ethnicity. Their communities are mobile; their rulers are situational; and their most recognizable trait is their shared opposition to colonialism. The Irish categorically reject Elizabethan governmentality, and the Vewe justifies England’s right to subjugate them by stripping them of their humanity. However, the text contrasts the nonhuman Irish with problematic accounts of the English as “obedient,” “cyvill,” “degenerate” subjects who have shouldered the Norman yoke and now impose it upon their colonized others, and whose inhumanity reveals itself in their willingness to commit atrocities. As it explores the intractable corporality of the Irish, the Vewe disrupts the machinery of colonial biopolitics...

Gerrard Winstanley and the Context of Place

This paper explores the development of Winstanley's ideas in terms of the context of place. Although the influence on Winstanley of his early experiences in Wigan and London is difficult to determine, in Surrey we can see a clear connection between locality and the shaping of his ideas. Winstanley moved to the Surrey parish of Cobham in late 1643, and his observations and experiences of tensions and conflicts within the local community there can be seen to have fed directly into his Digger program of 1649–1650. This program drew on local traditions of social conflict, but it would seem that Winstanley departed significantly from these traditions in his outright hostility to custom and in his adoption of Norman Yoke theories. Custom had long been invoked in conflicts between tenants and lords of manors, and was a crucial weapon in the defense of popular rights, but for Winstanley it always formed part of the armory of the oppressor. His rejection of custom did not, however, prevent him from gaining significant support for the Digger venture from among local inhabitants.

Harry Potter – National Hero and National Heroic Epic

Joanne K. Rowling's teenage wizard has enchanted readers all over the globe and Harry Potter can truly be called an international hero. However, as I will argue, he is also very much an English national hero, complying with the national auto-image of the English gentleman as well as with the idea of Christian masculinity, another English auto-image holding that outdoor activity is more character-building than book learning. I will also show that the series can be read as a national heroic epic in two respects. First, Harry Potter, alias Robin Hood, has to fight the Norman yoke, an English myth haunting the nation since the Norman invasion in 1066. The series displays as a national model an apparently paternalistic Anglo-Saxon feudal society marked by tolerance and liberty as opposed to foreign rule. Second, by establishing parallels to events which took place in Nazi Germany, the series takes up the idea of fighting it, which is a popular topos in British (children's) literature which serves to reinforce a positive self-image.

Faulty towers: Reform, Radicalism and the Gothic Castle, 1760-1800

Who has not been on an amusement park ride that proceeds through a haunted house, complete with cobwebs, coffins, once opulent furnishings, and a ghost or two? It is an idea that we have encountered countless times in novels and movies alike yet one that continues to mystify us. How did the trope of the haunted Gothic castle/mansion materialize so quickly in the late eighteenth century? Although we have more or less recognized Walpole’s castle of Otranto as its prototype, we are yet unacquainted with the rapid construction of the so-called “haunted castle/mansion/house” trope, particularly between 1777 and 1800. This essay contends that far from being accidental, the foundations of this trope were heavily impacted not only by populist histories that detailed the beginnings of Britain’s stately castles, abbeys, and houses and the dark tales of their presiding tyrants, but more significantly by the simultaneous campaigns for parliamentary reform and religious toleration. I demonstrate how historians began to identify the chief features of Gothic architecture as Norman during a period in which reformers and radicals were also beginning to revive the myth of the Norman Yoke and stir up resentment against the church and aristocracy. I also show how reformers were increasingly inclined to deploy architectural metaphors in their discussions of Britain’s political institutions and establishments: just as conservatives argued for the retention of the Gothic castle, progressives argued for its destruction, regarding it in some instances as either haunted or filled with harpies (i.e., Jeremy Bentham). Finally, I analyze the means by which Jacobin and Gothic novelists adopted the Gothic castle as a criticism of Britain’s so-called “establishments” and, more interestingly, came to explore the idea of identification between villains and their dark abodes in their novels.

BOOK REVIEW: edited by Joan Allen and Owen R. Ashton.PAPERS FOR THE PEOPLE: A STUDY OF THE CHARTIST PRESS. London: The Merlin Press, 2005.

Reviewed by: Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press Jamie L. Bronstein (bio) Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press, edited by Joan Allen and Owen R. Ashton; pp. xx + 232. London: The Merlin Press, 2005, £45.00, £15.95 paper, $79.95, $32.95 paper. The definitive history of the Chartist movement has yet to be written—a fact that has given rise to an extremely vibrant and interesting field of historical writing. The local [End Page 748] studies in Asa Briggs's 1959 collection of essays, Chartist Studies, encouraged books and articles on Chartism in many localities; G. D. H. Cole's 1965 Chartist Portraits was followed by a spate of excellent individual biographies of Chartist leaders. In the 1980s, with the publication of Gareth Stedman Jones's essay, "Rethinking Chartism" (in Languages of Class, 1983), and a second major set of essays edited by Dorothy Thompson and James Epstein, The Chartist Experience (1982), Chartist historiography entered a new phase. In addition to continuing to explore the social history of the Chartist movement, historians began to explore Chartist cultural history. They interpreted the message of the Chartists as refracted not only through the radical press, but also through material culture, gender roles and ritual, Chartist poetry and fiction, and the use of Chartist spaces, such as the Land Company allotments. Even the familiar chronology of the Chartist movement was expanded as Margot Finn traced the Chartists' entry into their post-petition, internationalist phase. More recently, Miles Taylor and Andrew Messner have called for historians of Chartism to move on from these social and cultural preoccupations, urging historians to reintegrate Chartism into the broader political narrative, to examine the political and economic thought of the Chartist movement, and to study the impact of Chartism in Britain's colonies and elsewhere abroad. In their introduction, Joan Allen and Owen Ashton position Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press as a response to this critique. While only a few of the essays in the volume actually do engage with that challenge, taken together they show the vibrancy of the Chartist public sphere and the ease with which it could be undermined by financial misfortune and government oppression. The volume opens with an essay by Aled Jones that touches on the iconography of the Chartist masthead and the relationship between Chartist journalism, the war of the unstamped, and the later Victorian popular press. Looking mainly at the Northern Star, Jones argues that the Chartist press resembled later popular newspapers in being crowded and full of variety, but that its embattled focus on politics made it unique. Malcolm Chase provides a sophisticated and convincing look at Chartist iconography, particularly the steel-engraved portraits that the Northern Star distributed to its subscribers in order to boost sales. He argues that these expensive, high-quality engravings of male leaders—in conventional poses, and abstracted from the controversial activities of the Chartist movement—catered to popular appreciation of portraiture but also legitimated the respectable "gentlemen leaders" who so prospered in the movement. Michael Huggins uses two short-lived Irish Chartist papers of 1848 to sketch a revisionist history of the Irish Chartist movement. He argues that Irish Chartists were holdovers from earlier, Enlightenment radical movements—that they were Jacobin descendants rather than Fenian ancestors. Their failure to ally with the Catholic masses or to create a mass platform kept them from crafting a national appeal. Only in 1848, when they were able to create a short-lived alliance with a few nationalists—leading to the creation of newspapers—was their message effectively communicated. Scottish Chartists faced a similar set of issues, as Hamish Fraser shows. Although more pro-Chartist newspapers survive for Scotland than for Ireland, Chartism there gravitated toward temperance, legal reform, and moral force. Just as English Chartists created an alternative history of Chartism that focused on the Norman Yoke, so Scottish Chartists created their own version of nationalism, which compared them with the Covenanters. Nonetheless, as in Ireland, the Scottish Chartists' inability to support a [End Page 749] Chartist press between 1842 and 1847 was not only a symptom of weakness in the Chartist...

History and Ideology: Milton, the Levellers, and the Council of State in 1649

Martin Dzelzainis seeks to clarify the views of Milton and the Levellers in relation to the “Norman Yoke,” the belief that the Conquest had installed an alien legal system that continued to restrict the natural rights of free subjects. Although Milton was in 1649 asked by the Council of State to respond to two incendiary Leveller pamphlets, he never seems to have done so in print (although other polemicists did). Many modern commentators have sought to interpret this silence as evidence of Milton’s views. Dzelzainis argues that Milton, recently appointed as secretary for foreign tongues, could not easily have refused the request. He shows that the Levellers’ own anti-Norman posture was at the time being modified; thus Milton’s anti-Norman rhetoric after 1649 is no indication of support for the Levellers. Furthermore, such rhetoric was applicable to those who opposed the Rump, including Presbyte77. See Milton, Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis (Cambridge, 1991), xxi–xxv. 78. See James Tyrrell, The General History of England, 3 vols. (London, 1700–1704), 1:110–11, 115–16, 150; 116 (second pagination); for more on Whig responses, see Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s “History of Britain”: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1991), 176–78. 79. Tyrrell, General History, 1:vi (second preface). This content downloaded from 207.46.13.128 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 06:14:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Degrading Forms of Pantomime: Englishness and Shame in De Quincey

Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings, than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that 'decent drapery', which time, or indulgence to human frailty, may have drawn over them ... and for any such acts of gratuitous self-humiliation from those who can be supposed in sympathy with the decent and self-respecting part of society, we must look to literature, or to that part of the German, which is tainted with the spurious and defective sensibility of the French. (1) ********** THOMAS DE QUINCEY BEGINS HIS CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM Eater by identifying himself as an English writer with English Feelings. His nationalism is defined in contradistinction to the markedly different behaviors of the exhibitionist and Germans, whose self-disclosures he finds to be shamefully indecent. Scars and ulcers, corporeal metaphors for metaphysical traits, create a spectacle that should be, in all decency, concealed. Throughout much of his writing, De Quincey describes the desired literary and cultural characteristics of English identity as distinct from continental mores and their insidious infiltration into English sensibilities. While much analysis has been done of De Quincey's reactions to the Empire's commodities and its imported infections, I am fascinated by a more proximate other that displays itself time and again in De Quincey's lesser-known writings. (2) This European other--more specifically, the against whom England waged wars from 1793-1815--is definitionally opposed, and thus foundational, to De Quincey's sense of Englishness. I am not challenging the indisputable fact that English national identity was formed in large part by its imperial incursions, but rather shifting emphasis from what has become, in recent criticism, the most pressing of nineteenth-century international relations. In light of recent scholarship on De Quincey's orientalism that links his political fears of the Orient with his personal psychological guilt, I propose a reading of his shorter pieces on European cultural differences and the power of English nationalism, namely English Mail Coach, French and English Manners, and Pronunciation. In describing the manners and morals of continental Europeans, De Quincey is formulating a sense of his national identity that stems from negation--he is not (or German)--as much as from any more positive sense of community. But I suspect that his supercilious descriptions of the civilized other derive from the insecurities, embarrassments, and failures that define De Quincey's own personal identity and, by extension, his sense of national identity as well. In recent years, scholars have postulated different theories about British nationalism. (3) Eric Evans cogently describes two of these interpretations. The first focuses on the experience of waging war against Catholic France, which caused the elite of England, Scotland, and Wales to unify as both Protestant and British. With the threats of invasion that occurred in the 1790's and then in the early 19th century, British patriotism defined itself through a repulsion not only of physical incursions but also of culture. This identity was essentially conservative, propagated by the elite and the middle-classes against a common enemy, and defined oppositionally. As Evans states, A growing sense of national identity can, therefore, be a function of patriotic response to external challenge .... To resist it, a sense of Protestant British identity was invoked against a threat variously characterised as Catholic or atheist (224). The second interpretation of British patriotism, according to Evans, is based on the radicalism prominent in the period. This sense of national identity was egalitarian and independent, based as it was upon the insistence that the ruling elite be overthrown. Norman Yoke theory proposed that ever since 1066 true English liberty and freedom had been lost, and that the English must look to their Saxon ancestors to challenge the authority of the ruling classes. …

Home Is Where the Heart Is: National Identity and Expatriation in Charlotte Smith's The Young Philosopher

Home Is Where the Heart Is: National Identity and Expatriation in Charlotte Smith's The Young Philosopher

The Debate on the Norman Conquest (review)

Reviews 219 Gudridr's powers of lactation (smuggling in the theme of milk again) is linked to a contemporary social mission to foster a virile younger generation (witness the 'Karitane' movement in N e w Zealand). The book is rounded off with an Epilogue, glancing at postcolonial treatments of the story in late twentieth-century British and American literature. Here Vinland is shown evolving from a robustly physical to a metaphorical location. The schema ofnecessity excludes Canadian contributions, such as Farley Mowat's The curse of the Viking grave, not to mention his insouciant 'historical' reconstruction Westviking: the ancient Norse in Greenland and North America. That is perhaps a pity considering that the only known N e w World Viking site is on Canadian territory. At all stages Barnes's discussion is elaborately documented, drawing on a great mass of material, but thanks to an diverting prose style and a series of well-chosen and often entertaining quotations it never sinks under its own weight. The book is handsomely produced, with attractive readable fonts, high-quality paper, and elegant binding. Very few misprints appear. One might harbour niggling doubts as to how far the literature dissected in this monograph deserves such dedicated scholarly attention, but there is no doubting Barnes's verve in communicating it to us. Russell Poole School ofEnglish and Media Studies Massey University Chibnall, Marjorie, The Debate on the Norman Conquest (Issues in Historiography), Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999; cloth; pp. viii, 168; R R P £45.00; ISBN 0719049121. The Norman Conquest of 1066 has been a fecund source of historical interpretations for a 1000 years, each generation seeing it through eyes of their own constitutional, social and cultural preoccupations. 'Few subjects', writes Marjorie Chibnall in this collection of historiographical summaries and reflections, 'provide a more significant touchstone ofthe way historians in every generation have interpreted the world in which they live.' Chibnall's elegant, but regrettably short, chapter on the medieval historians surveys their chronicles which were accumulated accounts of dispossession and legal restraints, the sufferings ofthe poor, and debasement ofthe native language 220 Reviews because 'children in their schools...are compelled since the coming of the Normans to abandon their own tongue.' The priest Robert Mannyng's Chronicle (1338) alleged that William 'sette the Inglis to be thralle.' These historians, lacing their chronicles with accusations that the Normans were guilty of 'unbearable tyranny, injustice and oppression' in England and Wales, saw the Conquest as a 'Norman Yoke' imposed upon freeborn English people. Seventeenth-century historians picked up the subversive implications of these medieval chronicles in the decades before the Civil War, when historical precedents were so politically explosive that even London's venerable Society ofAntiquaries was closed by the government. Contemporary academic lawyers made several penetrating studies, especially Matthew Hale, whose History ofthe Common Law argued that because William had formally claimed the English throne his conquest secured him only thoserightshis predecessor had enjoyed, implying that any changes were illicit. Thus, Henry Spelman's argument that the Normans had introduced tenurial feuds formed the basis of legal challenges during the 1630s, and tenurial abolition by the Long Parliament. Equally explosive was the view that oppressive Norman 'feudalism' had subverted ancient Saxon liberties, the 'Norman yoke' so hated by Civil War radicals. Hale's work also implied that the conquest was not entirely imposition, but involved some adaptation of existing Anglo-Saxon law. A century later Wright developed the idea, arguing that post-Conquest feudal tenures were merely an adaptation of existing English law: the crucial implication was that England was not the monarch's demesne, which in turn implied the freedom and consent of the commune consilium - the underlying premise of the protest of Magna Carta. These highly significant historical questions encouraged the systematic publication of official records, .notably Rymer's Foedera, Madox's Formulare Anglicanum, Abraham Farley's Domesday volumes and the Rolls Series, which in turn stimulated nineteenth-century constitutional and institutional scholarship, as well as the popular historical novels of Kingsley, Scott and Disraeli. As Maitland observed, the word 'feudalism covers a multitude of ignorances', and it became clear to those w h o worked in archives that the term required...

Shrugging off the Norman Yoke: Milton's History of Britain and the Levellers

Previous articleNext article No AccessOriginal ArticleShrugging off the Norman Yoke: Milton's History of Britain and the LevellersHUGH JENKINSHUGH JENKINSUNION COLLEGE Search for more articles by this author UNION COLLEGEPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by English Literary Renaissance Volume 29, Number 2Spring 1999 Published in association with the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6757.1999.tb01152.x Views: 43Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Norman Conquest and the Common Law: The Levellers and the Argument from Continuity

Twenty-five years ago J. G. A. Pocock first argued that the Norman conquest was the rock upon which all arguments for the continuity of the common law finally came to wreck. Believe in the conquest qua conquest, and you could not believe that English law represented a continuous stream of unviolated custom or fail to see it as very much the offspring of Norman parentage. In the English revolution, the Levellers exemplified the logical necessity of Pocock's argu ment. Having seen the conquest for what it was, the group criticized the common law as none other than a Norman yoke and surrendered all appeals to history. By re-examining the Leveller use of history, this essay tests that proposition, turning it not upside down but on its side, and suggests an alternative conclusion both about the Levellers and the doctrine of continuity itself.

Freedom and Marriage in Medieval England

M Yr EDIEVAL peasant liberty always seems to have recently died. For England a number of occasions between the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons and the thirteenth century have been variously suggested as dates at which a primitive, Rousseau-esque, Germanic peasant freedom was destroyed by seigneurial oppression. Stenton saw such a subjugation as the main theme of the whole of Old English society.2 Others have attributed it to the imposition of the Norman Yoke. More recently Prof. Hilton has propounded a dramatic depression of the peasantry at the ends of the twelfth century.3 Fundamentally, these dates all rest on the assumption that what is newly recorded is new, and that what is new is worse. Such assumptions are able to dictate a pattern for six hundred years of history because during this time the direction of movement has to be deduced from unrelated, static evidence, coming almost entirely from the end of the period. Proof of the initial state of bliss is lacking, as Stenton himself allowed. Once belief in it is suspended, and it is accepted that exactions may change in form and emphasis, and oppressions become more manifest as familiar terms appear and records multiply, then it is possible to discern signs that the peasant's lot in fact improved. There is only one identifiable group of peasants and only one identifiable custom. Taken together they offer means of testing the whole thesis of subjugation. For the liberty to take a spouse and have a family is so elementary as to provide a reliable index not only of a peasant's freedom but also of his status as a human being, and of the nature of the society he inhabits.

Freedom and Marriage in Medieval England

M Yr EDIEVAL peasant liberty always seems to have recently died. For England a number of occasions between the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons and the thirteenth century have been variously suggested as dates at which a primitive, Rousseau-esque, Germanic peasant freedom was destroyed by seigneurial oppression. Stenton saw such a subjugation as the main theme of the whole of Old English society.2 Others have attributed it to the imposition of the Norman Yoke. More recently Prof. Hilton has propounded a dramatic depression of the peasantry at the ends of the twelfth century.3 Fundamentally, these dates all rest on the assumption that what is newly recorded is new, and that what is new is worse. Such assumptions are able to dictate a pattern for six hundred years of history because during this time the direction of movement has to be deduced from unrelated, static evidence, coming almost entirely from the end of the period. Proof of the initial state of bliss is lacking, as Stenton himself allowed. Once belief in it is suspended, and it is accepted that exactions may change in form and emphasis, and oppressions become more manifest as familiar terms appear and records multiply, then it is possible to discern signs that the peasant's lot in fact improved. There is only one identifiable group of peasants and only one identifiable custom. Taken together they offer means of testing the whole thesis of subjugation. For the liberty to take a spouse and have a family is so elementary as to provide a reliable index not only of a peasant's freedom but also of his status as a human being, and of the nature of the society he inhabits.

Cadwalader, Arthur, and Brutus in the Wigmore Manuscript

SCHOLARLY investigations have ably shown that the Norman kings of England took advantage of the legends of early Britain and the sanctity of Edward the Confessor to add to their prestige. Henry i, who had strengthened his position by marrying a daughter of Edward the Confessor, made it clear that Edward had prophesied glorious things for Prince William, who, however, did not live to realize them.' The canonization of Edward the Confessor and the powers of healing which came to be associated with his sanctity were highly advantageous.2 Geoffrey of Monmouth supplied for English sovereigns a King Arthur whose eminence and wide coniquests reflected glory upon his successors comparable to that shed upon French kings by Charlemagne.3 Geoffrey also provided the prophecies of Merlin, which were revised and interpreted again and again to fit new political conditions.4 From the prophecies, Henry i came to be referred to as the 'lion of righteousness,'5 and from them also arose the tradition that the ancient British line would eventually be restored. According to Geoffrey, Arthur was a world conqueror, whose liegemen spiritual and temporal corresponded closely to those from whom Henry i claimed allegiance.6 In the thirteenth century, Edward i, having conquered Wales, sought to establish his claim to Scotland by the use of evidence drawn from Geoffrey.7 In Wales the legends of the glory of ancient Britain had a special significance. According to prophecy, Arthur was believed to be, not dead, but merely waiting an auspicious occasion to return and free Britain from foreign bondage.8 The Welsh princes, therefore, boasted direct descent from Arthur, whom the Norman kings regarded merely as a glorious predecessor. Moreover, Brutus, of the Trojan line, who killed the giants and settled in Britain, was of still greater antiquity, being the ancestor of Arthur. Another Welsh prince, a descendent of Arthur, and the last true king of Britain, Cadwalader, was also the subject of prophecies and hopes for deliverance from the Norman yoke.9 It has been shown by scholars that Henry vii, making the most of a slender claim to royal prestige, traced his descent from Brutus in five score degrees, and was hailed by the Welsh as their king, the Bull of Mona, the resurrected Arthur come at last to rule over all Britain.10 In his coronation procession the red dragon of Cadwalader was borne by members of great families. The new sovereign was