The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

  We see how strongly men’s minds had turned to prophecies, recent and ancient, in their efforts to understand history, its pattern and its working out. Orderic in the Twelfth Book of his Historia tells of the death of Duke Robert of Normandy on 10 February 1134, then calls attention to the fulfilment of much of the prophecy of Ambrosius Merlin to Vortigern, from which he cites some points that ‘seem relevant to our time’. He does not name Geoffrey, but relates the struggle of the red and white Dragons, with the variation that the red one becomes Saxon, the white one British. Then he deals with the Norman domination and the final expulsion of the invaders, in much the same language as Geoffrey’s Historia, but without the addition on the death of Henry I. He was writing before that event of 1 December 1135; for he comments that much of the prophecy was destined to bring joy or grief to those yet unborn, but that parts would be comprehensible to those who knew histories of Hengist and others; he mentions several English and British princes down to the days of Henry and Griffith, ‘who yet await the doubtful lot of forthcoming events divinely ordained for them by the ineffable decree’. He was writing between the deaths of Duke Robert and King Henry.[556]

  The prophecies, which are so concerned with Arthur the great liberator who will return, and which foresee the expulsion of the Normans, could only derive from a deep popular agitation, even though many of the sources are Breton or Welsh. In 1113 some canons of Laon visited England with relics on a fund-raising tour. In Danavexeria (? Devon) they were told that they trod the very land of Arthur and were shown his chair and oven; at Bodmin a dispute broke out between one of their company and a man with a withered arm who had come to be healed. Just as the Bretons are wont to wrangle with the French on behalf of king Arthur,’ says the narrator Hermann, the cripple insisted that Arthur still lived. A brawl broke out, a crowd gathered with weapons, and bloodshed was narrowly averted. Alanus de Insulis in the twelfth century said that the belief in Arthur’s return was so deeply and widely held in Brittany that to deny it might cost a man his life. (The tale of the canons of Laon and their Bodmin troubles exists also in an Icelandic version.) The legend spread to Sicily, for Gervase of Tilbury, the first to tell of Arthur sleeping in the otherworld of a Hollow Hill, says that recently a groom of the bishop of Catania, following a strayed horse into the recesses of Aetna, came on a fair plain full of all manner of delights and Arthur lying on a bed, with wounds that broke out afresh each year. Arthur sent back gifts to the bishop which many saw and marvelled at. (Gervase had been in Sicily as a follower of its king William about 1190.) Geoffrey’s Historia was translated into Anglo-Norman verse by Wace, who refers to Wassail and Drinkhail, but knew no English, a language which he compared with the barks of dogs. Layamon translated it into English verse about 1205.[557] The most remarkable illustrations of the Arthurian legend are found, not in France, but in manuscripts from Naples, Bologna, and Milan.

  Geoffrey claimed that he based his work on old books. In 1129 at Oxford he came to know Walter of the collegiate church of St George and borrowed from him, he says, a history in the British tongue which he translated into Latin. Holding back the Prophecies, he did not issue the Historia till after the death of Henry I, whom it was meant to glorify. But it had a great success in both England and Normandy, and as early as 1139 Henry of Huntingdon saw a copy at Bec. Before that, between Henry’s death in 1135 and the remarriage of Adeliza of Louvain in 1139, a copy was held by the northern baron Walter Espec (whom we met at the Battle of the Standard). It was borrowed by Ralph fitzGilbert, a man of importance in Lincolnshire, who married Constance, a Hampshire heiress with some education. The poet Gaimar says that she gave him a silver penny for the Life of Henry I, written by David for Adeliza; she kept it and read it in her chamber. It seems then that she could herself read; and as Gaimar compares the work with his own, it must have been in French. (It is doubtful if Adeliza could read Latin, though her predecessor did.) Constance got Geoffrey’s Historia from her husband and gave it to Gaimar to work on. He began his Estorie des Engleis in Hampshire and completed it in Lincolnshire. With the presumed exception of David’s lost work, it was the oldest Chronicle in French; the first of its kind, it was called a Brut after Brutus the Trojan, the legendary founder of the kingdom of Britain. Gaimar added a sequel bringing the country’s story down to the present; he thus set the pattern for popular history for some three centuries. According to his epilogue, he used not only Walter Espec’s book (Geoffrey’s) but also ‘the good book of Oxeford’ which had belonged to Walter the archdeacon; in fact he was using this good book before he got hold of Espec’s book. He evidently thought that Walter had two books, one in Latin which he used, and one in Welsh, translated by Geoffrey.[558]

  He drew much on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; so he seems to have been capable of working with English books. (He seems to have used two copies of the Chronicle, probably because he moved about.) His name is perhaps Norman. We see that the Normans were now taking a strong interest in the past of their conquered land, the Norman-Welsh in the British and Anglo-Normans in the English past. Gaimar tells of St Edmund of East Anglia, his martyrdom and the finding of his severed head by a wolf, of King Edgar’s wooing of Aelfthryth and his marriage. He was also familiar with Danish traditions (probably met in Lincolnshire). He used the tale of Haveloc but had some trouble fitting him into the list of English kings. He has four short passages dealing with Danish kings, apparently local legends which he modified in terms of contemporary feudalism; he may also have had direct access to Celtic traditions. Lives of Irish and Scottish saints, some now lost, were being read in English: an interest stimulated by Henry I’s marriage and his later links with Scotland.

  Gaimar was thus one of the many twelfth-century writers who, while stirring interest in the English past, did much to depress English writing through their translations into Latin or French: later writers were not concerned about going back to the originals. No one wrote in local dialects any works that aspired to be of lasting value. Works like Gaimar’s further show the transition from the epic to the romance, which we find fully developed in, say, Tristam by Thomas about the time of Henry II. Like Wace, Thomas may have been patronized by Queen Eleanor; her daughters would have been the agents introducing his poem to Spain, Germany and Sicily; her grandson Henry III would have introduced it to his ally Haakon IV of Norway. Wace the Jerseyman was living at Caen; he finished his Brut in 1155 and presented it (according to Layamon) to the queen. It became fashionable and supplanted Gaimar’s work.

  The work of Gaimar is of interest as showing again the importance of the lady’s chamber in the development of poetry, and in the convergence of elements from many quarters to build an Anglo-Norman culture which retained English (or Celtic) elements and looked forward to the day when English and French traditions would merge. We see the same sort of attempt at harmonization of English and Norman view points, in a simpler and more direct way, in the work of William of Malmesburv. No Norman had recorded the life of an English bishop who died after Oswald and before Wulfstan. William wrote in the prologue of his Deeds of English Pontiffs:

  What task could be more agreeable than to tell of the favours conferred on us by our ancestors, so that you may come to know the deeds of those from whom you received both the rudiments of your faith and the encouragement of right living. I thought it was very slack and shameful not to know at least the names of the leaders of our province, when in other respects our knowledge extends to the lands of India and whatever lies beyond hidden by the boundless ocean. And so, for these reasons, I have dragged my pen, both here and elsewhere, through the most obscure histories, although the sources for this work are not as plentiful as for the Deeds of the Kings. For there, when I had made an abstract of the Chronicles which I had before me, I was advised, just as by a torch shining from a high watchtower, in which direction I could freely bend my steps. But here, deprived of almost all comfort, I grope within the thick dark clouds of ignorance, making my own path, with no lantern of history to lead
the way.

  Behind such statements many deep cohesive forces were at work, socially and politically. We saw how some Englishmen rallied early to the royal cause. These groups would have come from the middling and lower sections of free landowners, who, when it became clear that no effective basis remained for a revival of the English monarchy, were ready to support a foreign king in preference to his foreign barons. By the time of Henry I the possibility of rallying yet wider sections of the English to the king was stronger, as he was aware. Hence his marriage with Matilda who had inherited the claims of the English royal house. The Norman lords mocked at him and his wife as Godric and Godgifu, but the union was an important step forwards. Ailred of Rievaulx complained that Stephen’s intrusion had once more broken the ties of the crown with the old English royal family.

  Orderic (probably following William of Poitiers) gives a rosy picture of the situation after 1070:

  The English and French lived peaceably together in the boroughs and towns, and intermarried. You would see some places and markets full of French traders and goods, and everywhere you would notice that the English, who, when they used to wear their native dress, were considered uncouth by the French, were now affecting foreign fashions.

  The account of the influx of French traders and wares may well contain much truth, but the picture of ensuing harmony is certainly overdone; Orderic himself often gives us a much more realistic account of the conflicts between the two peoples. And in the passage cited above about murdrum, fitzNeale is certainly exaggerating when he insists on the complete uniting of English and Normans above serf level by the mid-twelfth century. The significance of these statements lies rather in the recognition that the two people should and must become one. The men whom Henry I ‘raised from the dust to do him service’ were almost all aliens; only under Stephen a slow change began. By the early thirteenth century, probably soon after the loss of Normandy, a poet like Chardri, writing in French, could in his Petit Plet set English women and knights above French ones. He is a poet with a note of ironical gaiety, and this work of his is the only medieval one in which youth vanquishes old age in argument. But who are his ‘English’? Anglo-Saxons, Normans who have intermarried with the natives, Normans who see themselves as belonging to England rather than to the continent?

  Events that decisively stimulated the growth of English-Norman unity were the loss of Normandy under John and the outbreak of the Hundred Years War. The nobles then had to consider themselves landlords in England without a network of feudal connections on the mainland. The fall in the status of the peasants that occurred was part of a development in all the west and would have happened whether there had been a Norman conquest or not. The fact that the landlords were intrusive aliens complicated the social issues, but throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the conflict of alien landlords with indigenous peasants became more and more the plain antagonism of peasant and landlord. The great revolt of 1381 expressed not only a maturing of the inner conflicts of feudal society but also something like the re-emergence of the English people as a united and conscious force. We find too in Lollardism the advent of an English form of heresy. (Heresy is too simple a term to use of Lollardism without qualification, but the movement reflected burgess elements in the situation which, linked with the general upheaval and the growth of the textile industry, led in due time to protestant and puritan positions.)[559] The delayed development of certain aspects of social cohesion — aspects concerned with the relation of the free peasants and craftsmen, the burgesses, to the governmental structure and the forms of exploitation used by the ruling class — meant that when this cohesion did begin to appear, it was extremely strong, and led on in time to the Tudor State and the English Revolution.

  *

  The crucial factor preventing a quick absorption of the Normans was the difference in language. Probably a few men at Edward’s court spoke French, but only a few. England had been unique in developing a vernacular as well as a Latin literature, even in church culture. By 1000 a matured and rich prose style had been formed, and soon after came the official English used by the government. Under the Normans the displacement of the native tongue in many spheres was not rapid; men still pleaded in it in the shire courts under Henry I; official documents sometimes used it, e.g. the confirmation of the privileges of Londoners by Henry. William is said to have tried to learn English, but after 1071 he had little motive for doing so. A certain amount of intermarriage seems to have gone on at the level of the smaller landholders, but not enough to have much effect for a long time. Latin officially displaced English, then French crept into the official sphere and became the language of the lawcourts, then (in the thirteenth century) of the first universities and of early parliamentary procedure. However, English gradually reasserted itself. Henry III issued a trilingual proclamation as early as 1258; but it took the Hundred Years War to drive French out and to end the Alien Priories. We see a growing effort by the court to find English roots in such matters as the move to canonize Edward the Confessor and the advent of a Norman king named Edward. In the mid-thirteenth century the barons reiterated that castles must not be entrusted to aliens and that heiresses were not to be married with disparagement: ‘that is, to men not of the nation of the realm of England’. In 1362 at the opening of Parliament the chancellor first read his speech in English, and soon afterwards English displaced French in the lawcourts, though records were still kept in Latin, as in most medieval departments of state. The lawyers resisted, and a mangled French persisted till its formal abolition in 1731 — though Cromwell had long past condemned it.

  The names of ordinary folk show a slow taking-over of Norman names. The old English peasants had names like Ragge or Bugge, while the west Saxon royal family liked names that began with aethel- (noble) or ead- (rich) and ended with such words as -weard (guardian) or -mund (protection). Norsemen brought in names like Sweyn and Harold — Hereward was the Old English equivalent. (So we see that King Harold and the outlaw Hereward had in fact the same name.) The Normans carried on the names they had been used to in the duchy: William, Richard, Hugh, Robert, Roger, Geoffrey, Fulk, Walter, Rao (Ralf or Radulf), and Maud (Matilda in Latin), Alice, Agnes, Catherine, Margaret, Joan, Mary, Elizabeth, Ann. At first the result was to increase the stock of names; but soon a few Norman names began driving out the English ones. William and Robert became favourites; John in the thirteenth century, Thomas after Thomas Becket’s murder. Edward we noted was the one royal name taken over from the English. By the later thirteenth century most Old English names had faded out. Surnames gradually came in. The Normans had added the name of castle or estate; and in time ordinary folk used a calling, a locality or the father’s name plus -son, while nicknames or diminutives increased the variety.[560]

  *

  For long the Conquest dealt a deadly blow to vernacular literature, both prose and verse, though the English still had their songs and (we may strongly suspect) their minstrels who kept alive much of the old themes and techniques. Anglo-French writing had its lively aspects, but could not fill the gap. The chroniclers wrote in Latin, even when they owed a debt to Old English sources and origins, like William of Malmesbury, for all his interest in, and understanding of, the English past. Yet he:

  breathes nationality, and in excellent Latin. His very grasp of English history — so far in advance of anything seen for centuries — marks a step forward in national consciousness, and a very slight study of the Gesta Pontificum reveals an historical interest rooted in English soil. The same is true of his lesser contemporaries, such as Serlo, whose poem on the Battle of the Standard is entirely English in spirit. The stubborn and illiterate warrior-class, whose history and privileges alike began in 1066, held out rather longer (Galbraith).[561]

  William speaks of the folk of Canterbury as ‘more than other Englishmen breathing still an awareness of ancient nobilitas’, and Serlo calls English the patria. Robert of Gloucester complained near the end of the thirteenth century that there
was no land ‘that did not hold to its own speech but England alone’. The latter half of the fourteenth century saw English returning to the chronicles and being revived in other literary forms. Ranulf Higden, monk of Chester, noticed the change in attitudes; since 1066 children had not been taught in their own language, gentlemen had learned French from their cradle, countryfolk who wanted to gain advancement had had to learn French. Ranulf disliked this ‘corruption of the mother tongue’. John of Trevisa traced the return of English to the Black Death (1348-9), so that by 1385 ‘in all the grammar-schools of England children are giving up French and are construing and learning in English’. Even the gentry were changing their ways; by the end of the century the court could listen to Chaucer.

  But meanwhile big changes had taken place in the English language, many losses but also great gains. Regional differences increased and Norman usages affected spelling, grammar and punctuation after English became again the official language. The new standard English of the fifteenth century was mainly based on the dialect of the east midlands, the most economically advanced area. The great burst of poetry, using modified forms of the old alliterative verse, came from the west midlands and the north-west: Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight, Wynnere and Wastoure, The Parlement of the Thre Ages, The Avyntyrs of Arthure at the Tarn Wadling, and so on. (No doubt we have lost much; Gawayne has come down in a single manuscript.) The alliterative revival reached its climax in Piers Plowman, just as Chaucer was revealing the full potentialities of the new Norman-enriched English. The basic Germanic structure remained, but in more supple and elastic forms, wider in scope, and with a much extended vocabulary. In various indirect ways both the Latin and the Anglo-Norman culture of the centuries after 1066 had played their part in greatly increasing the potentialities of the language; the outburst of the fourteenth century was not simply an underground stream re-emerging into the light. We saw how writers like William of Malmesbury were strengthening the old traditions as well as departing from them, and how works like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia did much to fuse Norman present with English (and British) past, in anticipation of a new synthesis. In England as elsewhere the Latin-minded clerics gave an alphabet to the local dialects. After 1066 English fell behind French and Latin as a literary medium; but in the end the works produced in those tongues reacted on the vernacular, which in any event had not been standing still. The very existence of Norman French (as to a lesser extent the earlier existence of Danish) helped to strengthen men’s consciousness of being English. By the thirteenth century we have evidence for literary activities in English, which presupposed a reading public. There is for example the fine setting at Reading of the lyric on the Cuckoo; and an English version of the romance Floriz and Blanchflur was produced. There were also poems such as The Fox and the Wolf and the satirical The Owl and the Nightingale. By the late fourteenth century the vernacular had become a matter for patriotism, partly through the wars with the French, partly through the conflict (and half-union) with the alien language at home. A summons to Parliament in 1295 declared that the French king proposed to abolish the English language from the earth if his power corresponded to his detestable aims, ‘which God avert’. By the fifteenth century English was fully re-established. Henry V sent despatches from France to the city of London in English. England was strongly felt to be separate from Europe, with its own clear and vital identity. The Libelle of Englishe Policie in 1436 declared, ‘Kepe then the See, that is the wall of England.’ The poet anticipated the Tudor sentiment summed up in the speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II (ii, 1, 45).[562]