The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

  We must then see the post-1066 process as involving above all the imposition of the Norman fief system on the old English agricultural and land-holding basis, in which there were similar elements but in a looser form: and thus also the imposition of the sharp Norman concepts of property relationships on the very much broader field of old English law. This imposition was not achieved once and for all by a single set of actions, but was the result of a continuous tension, conflict, and synthesis of the two elements. The tension, we must stress, was continuous and prolonged; it took centuries in its working out. Indeed it was never worked out in the sense of reaching a complete synthesis. Rather it went on through a complex and hard-fought series of conflicts and integrations, each of which in turn transformed the ground on which the tension operated. One key tension was that between certain ruling class systems of ownership and exploitation and a comprehensive system of folk forms, which both stimulated the sense of immemorial local and personal liberties, and strengthened the royal struggles for unification. To say this is not to introduce later ideas of democracy and its opposite into the feudal situation — though we may validly claim that those later ideas would never have evolved without the earlier conflicts, compromises, unions and disunions. The folk in the England of the eleventh century were real enough, though harder to describe precisely than the lords who controlled the state system and its various expressions. They had their traditions, customs, ideas and methods, which were appropriate to their needs in their specific historical situation, and through which they expressed themselves; they had their notions and emotions of solidarity and freedom, as also many divisive activities and ideas, which limited their solidarities. The problem is to realize both the cohesive and the divisive aspects, and not to distort them by anachronistic perspectives, nor to lose sight of them or dissolve them in too abstract and remote an analysis of the society, and of the factors and forces both rending that society and holding it together. We may indeed say:

  In the field of institutions continuity is the essential theme of English history. The monarchy, the shire courts, the hundreds with their courts, the towns, the geld system of assessment and collection were all products of Anglo-Saxon experience and skill. The principal means and instruments of royal administration, the royal chapel, the solemn charter, and the sealed writ were familiar in late Anglo-Saxon days. The very coinage and system of weights and measures were convenient and fostered by the Norman conquerors. Only in their feudal attributes do the Normans appear as conspicuous innovators. Elsewhere it is as constructive builders on solid Anglo-Saxon achievements that their principal virtues find expression (Loyn).[569]

  And yet that gives too static an impression of what happened. The Norman system of fief feudalism was indeed all that the aliens introduced; but in the circumstances the impact was violent, pervasive, dynamic. The old institutions were set in a new framework, but this meant more than a mere new setting. It meant the slow but unceasing recreation of the old forms in terms of new needs and new relationships.

  The kingdom of Jerusalem may be taken as an example of almost the exact opposite of the Norman procedure in England. There fief feudalism was imposed grandiosely on a society, or at least a region, which was in many ways richer and more complex than that of its conquerors; but though a clever dovetailing of the various components of the kingdom was worked out, there was hardly any significant cross-fertilization. In Sicily the advent of Norman power had much happier results, and a much more complicated system, drawing on Greek and Moslem experience, was evolved; but there was really nothing comparable to the total interpenetration of two systems, sharing certain important elements and yet powerfully opposed, which we find in England. Perhaps we can roughly suggest the difference between Norman Sicily and England if we compare the powerful and original structural unity of Durham cathedral, its sheer organic force, with the diverse elements, Norman, Byzantine and Moslem, brought most impressively together at Monreale, but never fused into a significant sort of new structure.

  *

  We may now ask afresh the question: what was it that held men together during the Anglo-Norman era — held them together as members of a group and provided for each of them an inner unifying element, a sense of spiritual security? If we consider the peasants and smaller landholders in the light of laws and charters, we see them mainly as economic or social groups; in the charters, if they figure as individuals, we learn little more than their names and status. At best we see them as men who must have shared emotions of satisfaction and comradeship as they worked and talked together in a village community, or of frustration and stifled revolt as they suffered the same exploitations or oppressions under the local lord.

  Certainly the aspect of work was crucial; but we still have only a thin and too general impression; we are far from the fully concrete situation. We have seen how, as early tribal bonds tended to break down, the relation of man and lord emerged as a powerful force. But it operated most strongly at the upper levels of society, where a vassal could feel intensely his fealty to a lord and the lord in return could exercise much generosity and goodwill. The feudal bond at lower levels was entangled with the bonds of kinship, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in fierce conflict. For the ordinary man his place in society was defined by this unstable merging of fealty ties and kindred bonds, with a hopeful turning to the king and his justice as an ultimate reconciler and unifier.

  The kindreds certainly played an extremely important part in the life of the common man, filling the gap between his role as a worker in a system with many cooperative elements and his connection with king or lord through the courts.[570] We know about their nature and activities almost wholly from the law codes, so that they come into view mainly in connection with killings and bloodfeuds. This limitation inevitably gives us a perverted as well as a restricted notion of them; we have only a few general statements that enable us to guess how a man’s place in a kindred filled out his life and gave him a sense of identity. Tribal concepts of the group were breaking down; the nationhood of the absolutist state and of bourgeois society was not yet born. It is thus hard for us to grasp just how medieval man saw himself in the world; the idea of nationhood has been so important since the sixteenth century that it is only by an extreme imaginative effort that we can think ourselves into the position of men who lacked it. In the eleventh and twelfth century class position was more basic than any embryonic national bond. A Norman baron felt warm affinities with a baron of Anjou or France, which he did not feel in the least with his own peasants —though the lack of mobility and communication among the lower classes prevented the English peasant from feeling any solidarity with Norman peasants in much the same conditions as himself. The peasant therefore tended to react only to local issues; but his sympathies too were essentially for members of his own class.

  Revolts occurred in the thirteenth century, as when the Dunstable tenants fought the monks in 1229. By the fourteenth century the peasantry had learned many lessons about organization and communication with other groups in England. In 1336 the people of Darnall and Over rose against the Cistercians of Vale Royal on whose manors they dwelt. The abbot locked them up ‘as though they were villeins and forced them to serve in all villein services’. Refusing to submit, they were again jailed. At last they gave in ‘and confessed that they were villeins, they and their sons after them’. The abbey Chronicle shows how they had learned common action and had used pilgrim routes to communicate with other parts of the country. They had:

  called together all their neighbours of their own condition, and plotted by night to get their liberty by rebelling against the aforesaid abbot. And they sent some of their number on behalf of them all on a pilgrimage to St Thomas of Hereford; and these men, contrary to their oath, came to the king in the northern parts and for many days were begging his favour, which they did not deserve to find; and afterwards they came to unforeseen adventures, for they robbed certain people of their goods and were all to their great chagrin carried off
to Nottingham jail, being wholly stript of all their own goods that they had with them. Afterwards, before the justices of the lord the king in that place, they were condemned to be hanged.

  Before the great revolt of 1381 the peasants were getting together in ‘conventicler’. Countryfolk, even when most scattered, had systems of union. In ordinances of the tenth century it seems assumed that men belonged to a village (villa or tunscipe); Domesday divided the country into counties, hundreds (wapentakes), and vills; and in the later Middle Ages the hamlet seems always to have existed within the boundaries of a vill. Further, however isolated the houses, men were drawn together by the rule that every male over twelve had to be in a tithing for police purposes, if he were to enjoy the rights of a free man. All men were joined also in ecclesiastical obligations to a parish church. The police-group, the parochia, and the vill might not coincide; but the village system tended to invade and control others: village churches tended to take the place of the old collegiate minsters, and in later years the tithing in some districts appeared in territorial form, identified with the vill or a subdivision of it.

  In one sense medieval man, with varying degrees of comprehension and sophistication, saw himself as a member of the universe (reflected in God’s church and concretized in the actual edifice of worship); but except in so far as it bound him to the church, this cosmic sense did not much pervade his social consciousness. If he spoke of his patria, he would no doubt be referring to Normandy or Mercia, even Pisa or Florence, rather than to France, England, Germany or Italy. Primary groupings were provincial or regional, effective only when small enough for the prince, duke or count to know the area and its folk through personal contact and to control all immediate vassals, even though groupings were being consolidated in language as well as in geography by the time of the crusades. William of Malmesbury remarks, ‘The Englishman gave up his forest hunt, the Scot [or Irish] his familiarity with fleas, the Dane his ceaseless boozing, the Norwegian his raw fish.’ By the thirteenth century a feudal sense of belonging to the larger entities foreshadowed the full sense of nationhood of the sixteenth century.

  The term natio or nation was the sole word in medieval Latin to describe Slavs, English, Saxons or Florentines. In the fourteenth century it moved towards its modern sense; in the sixteenth century came the term ‘national’, in the seventeenth ‘nationality’ and ‘nationally’; in the eighteenth ‘nationalize’, in the nineteenth ‘nationalism’ and ‘nationalization’.[571]

  A small concentrated unit such as the town was necessary for the rebirth of a strong sense of group solidarity after the break up of the territorially based kindreds. As we saw, substitute kindred forms appeared in the organization of associates and of guildsmen; but though these were very important in providing models, they could not suffice to create a bond to embrace all the townsmen. To the extent that a strong kindred element was present in the groups founding or decisively enlarging a town, the process of achieving a new civic sense of unity would be helped; but in any event the deep conviction that some sort of kin bond was necessary for a secure and satisfying life would have led to an infusion of kindred emotions into the new situation. In Holland and north France we can see with special clarity how tenacious kin groups played a key part in providing the new town spirit. It seems certain that often the immigrants who provided the nuclei of towns did not enter as individuals but as kin groups; and we can probably see the conjurati and congildones, against whom so many enactments of capitularies are aimed, as kin groups who had entered into various agreements. Such bodies were certainly formed to a considerable extent with kindred help and on kindred models. The strength of the great merchant families was clearly based on kin solidarity, and led in time to measures being taken to limit the number of close kinsmen who might serve as urban or rural officials or councillors.[572]

  All this does not mean that we may claim that the kindreds were the sole bases of the new urban consciousness or of the town guilds. For one thing, as trade increased, there were strong influences from Byzantion, where guilds had developed out of the ancient corporations. From the twelfth century, we find in the western towns the same controls of trade and industry as in Byzantion: a strict surveillance of the members of guilds, the constant inspection of workshops, measures against middlemen and hoarding, restriction on the freedom of sales in the market, limitations of exports to what is not needed for consumption by the town’s inmates. But in the west there was a concern with equality not to be found in Byzantion; the civic spirit had new elements and potentialities. However, the link was certainly there. Analogous measures were taken by the heads of the imperial government and the urban principates of the west; Byzantine corporations were under the prefect as the urban trades in Lombard towns in the patrician epoch were put under senior members appointed by the town magistrates; we can pair off the obligation of Byzantine silk-makers to get the prefect’s seal on their bales with the sealing of cloth in the towns of Flanders and Brabant, to ensure quality as well as control export. (We must recall that 1147 saw the transfer of silk industries from Thebes and Corinth to Sicily.)[573]

  The extent to which guild forms helped to create the sense of London’s being the seat of a large body of citizens with a corporate existence can be guessed from the peace guild of late Anglo-Saxon days, which we noticed earlier. ‘This is the decree which the bishops and reeves belonging to London, eorl and ceorl, have published and established with pledges in our peace-guild, in addition to the laws given at Grately, Exeter, and Thundersfield.’ The guild was concerned with putting down thieves and keeping the peace of the district; but besides its policing duties it had both secular and religious obligations to its members, an elaborate organization, and a common purse. Its officials met once a month, generally when the butts were being filled, and had their meals together. ‘And they shall feed themselves as they themselves think fitting.’ This body perhaps gave its name to the Guildhall. The degree of political consciousness developed by the Londoners is shown by their claim in 1135 to have the right of choosing the king. They were known collectively as barons and were thus styled by the clerks who wrote the writs of Rufus and Henry I. Their city was refugium et propugnaculum regni, and it could be maintained that its liberties were necessary for the well-being of the whole kingdom. Civic consciousness was being tinged with a rudimentary national consciousness.

  Taking a broader view, we may claim that the feudal bond and the kindred bond, with their mixture of unity and conflict, entered into the other forms of association, those of work and locality, and were powerfully affected by the growth of the king’s law as a nationally unifying factor. The towns with their new concentrations of population, and new unions and exploitations, provided focal points for gathering and diffusing a new communal sense and new communal forms of organization, while at the same time they created new lines of class differentiation. Here we are still inside the feudal process; but in the countryside, with the steady breakdown of feudal relations, the lack of guild forms made possible the activities of the small entrepreneurs who laid the basis of capitalist wage relations in agriculture and craft industries — though their methods of exploitation also penetrated the towns, despite the many resistances there. Throughout this development the common man could not but have felt the hopeful pull of the varying unions as well as suffering the oppression of many divisive factors. Gradually the remnants of the extended kindred fell away and gave place to the restricted family as the normal unit; the feudal bond of man and lord was replaced by that of employer and wage-hand. What remained of the feudal period was the loyalty to the king and the acceptance of his law and administration as a unifying factor. The kingly system gradually became the expression of nationhood and men felt something of a sense of unity with all other members of the nation; the king was the symbol and effective expression of this unity. We must not idealize this new concept of unity, which in daily life was torn and denied by all kinds of oppressions, divisions, and exploitations; but it had its rea
lity nevertheless, both in the new complexity of concrete interconnections among men and in a general sense of human unity or brotherhood which it stimulated as well as distorted or limited. Men now existed in a tension between this new nationhood with its concept of unity, and their own particular loyalties in work, family, and linked associations; between this new corporate body with its multiple expressions in institutions and culture, and the various divisive factors ceaselessly acting upon them. A new stability had been reached, which overcame many of the conflicts and contradictions of feudalism, but which in turn created conflicts and contradictions on a new level, inside the new whole.

  *

  But these remarks need to be supplemented with an inquiry as to why European developments led to the medieval borough or commune, and to capitalist modes of production, and why such developments did not occur elsewhere. Why for example did the Byzantine or Moslem towns not evolve in similar ways? To answer such questions at all fully would need a new book, but we can glance here at some of the general points that would have to be discussed. The Byzantine world has never been properly analysed to bring out its similarities with and differences from the western states of the post-Roman era. Roughly we can say that that world for long stood out as far the most advanced section of Europe because of the extent to which it was able to retain elements from the ancient world, its governmental forms and its type of city, while modifying them to suit the new situation that was emerging. Feudalism therefore took a highly complex form, using and adapting ancient forms while giving them a new content. For long there was strong conflict between the lords of the big estates and the men who stood for the interests of the great mercantile cities with their extensive craft activities. This conflict is to be seen in the battles of the Green and Blue Factions grouped round the chariot teams in the great games. But the emperors maintained control, and with it they preserved a certain balance, though, as great landowners themselves, they inclined for the most part — or at crucial moments — to support of the feudalizing forces. Through the Theme system in its administration the state both facilitated the growth of feudalism (in the broad sense given to that term earlier in this chapter) and prevented the developing of full baronial power as in the West. The seventh century saw a decisive turn with the onslaught of Islam and the movement inwards of the Slavs throughout the Balkans and much of Greece. There is no need for us to follow the changes in detail, but we may note how under the Comnenes military service was largely determined by the system of the pronoia, under which the big landlords had to supply heavily armed cavalry in return for their grants, while the smaller landholders and the monasteries had to supply footmen. But such recruits needed to be supplemented by paid mercenaries. The defeat of Alexis by the Normans at Dyrrachium in 1082 was due to the lack of training of the pronoia-recruits. To raise new forces the emperor had to raid churches’ treasures.[574]