How the Norman Conquest Affected England and English Literature - Coursework Example

Lindsey Warren, Mrs. Watkins, English IV, 7th period, Feburary 13 How the Norman Conquest Affected England and English Literature--causes, impact, and result: Introduction: The tussle for supremacy between England and France goes back to ancient history. After several failed attempts in previous centuries, the Normans finally defeated the English in the Battle of Hastings in the year 1066, thereby changing the course of the island’s history significantly. Not only did the Normans take over the political reigns but also effected profound changes to the cultural and linguistic heritage of the people of England. This essay will attempt to show how the Norman Conquest of England left a lasting impact on future generations of English in the social, political, literary and cultural realms. Immediately following the Norman Conquest, the religious orthodoxy of England faced a serious threat to their material possessions, as the new rulers ordered despoliation of church treasures, imposition of punitive gelds and taxes, introduced new mandates of knight service, and lay magnates seizure of the estates belonging to churches if they were strong enough to do so. In addition to such strictures, the autonomy and authority of monasteries were undermined, as bishops were bestowed with powers to annex a wealthy monastery. Further, “the establishment of an Episcopal see in an abbey threatened not only the wealth of the community, which had to be divided to provide for the bishop and his familia, but also the independence and the status of its head, and it is not surprising that communities so threatened resisted vigorously. Tension between religious houses and bishops is a dominant theme in post-Conquest ecclesiastical histories”. (Jane Dick Zatta, 2005, p.306) Older historical accounts of medieval England presented a rather simplistic picture. The authors of these accounts do not venture beyond stating the obvious political and cultural transformations of the period. But as the methods of research got more advanced alongside developments in such fields as archaeology and anthropology, revisionist histories and subaltern studies have given new perspectives into English past. As a consequence, such popular interpretations of medieval English history as recorded by the great nineteenth century historian William Stubbs are being revised and rewritten. In Stubbs’ works, for instance, the introduction of French feudalism to England is given a sympathetic treatment. But for contemporary historians, feudalism is a purely exploitative enterprise devoid of civil merits. Similarly, the Magna Carta and the Parliament of the thirteenth century England have now come to be seen “not as responses to popular protest but as the outcome of negotiation among the political elite, to a large extent as instruments controlled by kings who sought to mask the exercise of brute royal lordship behind a facade of communal consent” (Jane Dick Zatta, 2005, p.306). Moreover, the Norman Conquest does not pertain only to England, for it was truly a British people’s history that comprised the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish and the Cornish. Studied in light of these new perspectives, we learn that the French speaking Normans’ conquest of the island kingdom did not induce sentiments of retribution and revenge among the conquered subjects. To the contrary, the natives easily fraternized with their new masters, leading to a state of harmony and socio-cultural assimilation. In contrast to the Austro-Hungarian and Finish ruling classes of recent centuries, the Norman aristocracy was open to intermarry as well as accept the indigenous language of the subjects. Such intermingling of ethnicity, culture and language would lead, in subsequent years, to the most dynamic and versatile of literary traditions in England. But the smoothness associated with social assimilation did not easily carry over to the language traditions of French and English. In fact, historical analysis of medieval literature reveals the then existing linguistic antagonism between the two language traditions. Given the long warring legacy between the two kingdoms, this should come as no surprise. As the English nation was forever at war with their trans-channel neighbor, it seemed apt that their languages should be dragged into a conflict as well. In particular, the notion of gender cleansing is “portrayed, enacted, and consummated in its linguistic incarnation. As the Englishmen are virile, rugged, honest, and virtuous, so must be their language, in opposition to the womanish, effete, deceptive, and perfidious language of the French” (Vincent, 2003, p.61). Such stereotypes are far too simplistic to be true. Nevertheless, the linkage between the English language, the Anglo-Saxon ethnic roots and the notion of the English nation is very strong indeed. Centuries later, when English theatre flourished under the reign of Queen Elizabeth, literary artists, including Shakespeare, would explore this sense of English identity. It also means that literature can be a useful source material for ascertaining political and cultural dynamics of England under the rule of Normans. A prominent theme in Elizabethan theatre is the concept of common identity and brotherhood amongst the English peoples; a concept that is reinforced through the English nation’s perennial battles against France. “The French armies could not be transported into the theater, but in a sense they were already there. Not the armies that Henry V fought at Agincourt, but the Norman armies of three-and-a-half centuries before, who imposed a French-speaking nobility and repressed English to an unwritten plebian jargon. While the foreign rulers were slowly domesticated in the centuries of Anglo-Saxon twilight, a thick stratum of French vocabulary survived in English. With it survived, too, the native English resentment, in the English-speakers unconscious sense that French words are arrogant, mannered, and even rude”. (Steinsaltz, 2002, p.317) It is no surprise then that the playwright of the day exploited this resentment in the English psyche. As a result the enterprise of literary art of the Elizabethan period is characterized by the sense of identity the people of England associated with their language. A classic exemplification of this theme is Shakespeare’s Henry V, which is marked by its disparaging view of the French language. Ever since the Norman Conquest in the middle of eleventh century, French had been the language of the courts and the ruling classes. Even during the fourteenth century, when the English aristocracy regained the throne, they continued to treat French as their first language. The lingual divide between the classes is illustrated by Edward the Third’s decree in 1362 which stated that “court proceedings be conducted in English rather than French because French is much unknown in the said realm” (Steinsaltz, 2002, p.317). The working class’ view of French language as alien to their own language, as well as carrying other negative connotations springs from this fact. The Norman Conquest precipitated the emergence of co-operation between the two peoples that was surely unprecedented in their common history. The erstwhile distinct Anglo-Saxon and Norman ethnic groups now became irreversibly assimilated and they strived to collectively defend their nation against extraneous threats as well as helped their nation towards progress. This mixing of blood had also handed the royalty more military and economic power. New opportunities for prosperity also presented itself, which the youth were only eager to avail. “Capable and eager, the youth of the country strove for distinction; and reward as yielded richly to those who had the wisdom to seek it aright. Success, it was evident, lay not in harking back to a past from which the people was definitely severed, but in seizing the advantages of the present and reaching forward to those seemingly still more abundant in store. As a result of the Battle of Hastings, England was finally removed from isolation, and impelled into the strong currents of international life. The Anglo-Normans, possessed as they were of enthusiasm, energy, and executive skill, vied successfully with their Continental kin, and stirred their fellow-countrymen to like achievement”. (Schofield, et. al., p.25) Under these new circumstances, literature flourished as did renewed interest in reading and learning among the common people. If one work of literature has to be picked among the entire medieval English canon, which typifies the dynamics of change witnessed in the art, then it would have to be Vie Seinte Osith, which is not very well known then as is now. The Vie Seinte Osith is a classic Anglo-Norman verse life of an early English virgin martyr. The saint venerated in this life is a “pseudo-historical composite made up of three Anglo-Saxon holy women connected to the seventh and tenth centuries” (Jane Dick Zatta, 2005, p.306). Although very little documentation exists of this saint’s followers prior to the Norman Conquest, it certainly did rise in prominence during the years of Norman rule, for the Normans supported all Anglo-Saxon saints. This goes to show the profound impact the Normans have had in the social, religious and intellectual aspects of English life. For example, the house of the Holy Trinity Aldgate in London which played a crucial role in the composition of Vie Seinte Osith, was patronized by Bishop Richard as well as King Henry I himself. As early as the first decade of the twelfth century it earned renown for its intellectual culture. It encouraged writers from all classes, so that even those in rural settlements could enjoy literature. The importance of “the cult of St. Osyth at the heart of the intellectual circles close to the Norman and Angevin kings makes her Anglo-Norman life, by far the longest and most complete of the extant lives, especially important to a study of the development of vernacular literature in the twelfth century.” (Jane Dick Zatta, 2005, p.306) Conclusion: More broadly, in the literary scene of England, traditional Anglo-Saxon authors found themselves replaced by a new breed of Anglo-Norman authors, whose literary styles and emotional sensibilities were very different. The new Anglo Norman nobility acquired new tastes for literature. This transformation came to define the emerging national character of England. How the English literary scene would have transpired in the absence of Norman rule is a matter of conjecture. What is more certain is the fact that prior to the Norman Conquest, the native Anglo-Saxons had a body of indigenous literature that is decidedly superior to anything comparable in continental Europe. This is particularly true of English narrative prose. But meritorious as it surely was, the ascendancy of English literature preceding the Normans should be judged in light of equally impressive, if not more brilliant writings of Norsemen between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, where political and climatic conditions were not much different from that of the English isles. While acknowledging the vibrant tradition of native English literature, it should also be noted that the Normans came to their land at a time when such an upheaval was urgently needed; “for ignorance was then rife in all parts, learning and culture were dying of inanition, and darkness seemed gathering round” (Schofield, et. al., p.25). The Norman infusion resulted in a radical rejuvenation of national life. It inspired the people to work toward a prosperous future and a common destiny. Works Cited: "Anglo-Norman Studies" Medium Aevum 74.1 (2005): 185. Garnett, Richard, and Edmund Gosse. English Literature: An Illustrated Record. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935. . Schofield, William Henry, and William Henry Schofield. English Literature, from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1931. Steinsaltz, David., "The Politics of French Language in Shakespeares History Plays." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 42.2 (2002): 317+. Vincent, Nicholas. "The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066-1284." History Today Dec. 2003: 60+. Zatta, Jane Dick. "The Vie Seinte Osith: Hagiography and Politics in Anglo-Norman England." Papers on Language & Literature 41.3-4 (2005): 306. Appendix: Source material for research, with parts used printed in brown. The Vie Seinte Osith: Hagiography and Politics in Anglo-Norman England. by Jane Dick Zatta The Vie Seinte Osith is a little-known Anglo-Norman verse life of an early English virgin martyr. The saint commemorated in this life is a pseudo-historical composite made up of three Anglo-Saxon holy women connected to the seventh and tenth centuries. (1) Little is known about the pre-Conquest history of this saints cult, (2) but a church dedicated to Osyth, dependent on the See of London and served by a small community of chaplains, existed at Chich in Essex at the time of the Conquest. The cult of St. Osyth rose to prominence under the Norman encouragement of Anglo-Saxon saints. In 1076, her relics were translated by Bishop Hugh, and again in 1186 by Maurice, but the real promotion of Osyth came under Bishop Richard Belmeis I of London, who founded a house of black canons there whom he endowed with the manor of Chich and other churches. The canons who settled at Chich came from the house of the Holy Trinity Aldgate in London, which had been founded about 1107 by Queen Matilda on the advice of St. Anselm. (3) The house, richly gifted by Bishop Richard, an intimate of Henry I, as well as by the king himself and the Archbishop of Canterbury, early achieved a reputation as a center of learning in the social and intellectual milieu of the Anglo-Norman royalty. William of Malmesbury mentions its reputation for letters in his Gesta Pontificum: "There were and there are there clerks distinguished in letters, so that it may be said that the countryside blossoms with their happy example." (4) At least four lives of Osyth were composed in the twelfth century. One of these, now lost, was written by William de Vere, who grew up in the court of Henry I and his second wife, Adelaide of Louvain, and who was the patron of Walter Map, Gerald of Wales, and Robert Grosseteste. (5) In the reign of Henry II, John of Salisbury was an ardent advocate of the house, defending its rights against the attempts to expropriate certain of its churches by Richard II of Belmeis, Bishop of London (1152-62). The prominence of the cult of St. Osyth at the heart of the intellectual circles close to the Norman and Angevin kings makes her Anglo-Norman life, by far the longest and most complete of the extant lives, especially important to a study of the development of vernacular literature in the twelfth century. On both the secular and the ecclesiastical level, Anglo-Norman England was marked by a struggle between an institutional hierarchy and a subject population that was struggling for independence and self-determination, a struggle inscribed in secular and ecclesiastical writings alike. Political and ecclesiastical interests expressed through well-recognized genres such as history, law, and hagiography created expectations that could be manipulated by authors, sometimes transgressively. In the context of a complex network of colliding interests, authors with different institutional allegiances and social purposes exploited genre conventions to present their audiences with different constructions of the role institutional authority played in the realization of individuals goals. (6) Official histories written for Norman and Angevin monarchs in the first two generations after the Conquest promote the belief that submission and obedience to an idealized monarch result in a transfer of his qualities--noble origins, natural superiority, and divinely favored success--from the ruler to the subject almost in the same way that hereditary traits are passed from father to son. (7) They offer obedient subjects a subsumed participation in the national authority from which they would otherwise be excluded. (8) Likewise, from the twelfth century, but especially from the thirteenth, competition with an increasingly hegemonic and centralized monarchy led the church to encourage the reorientation of devotional practices away from the direct and personal spirituality advocated by an Anselm or a Bernard, and towards a piety contained within the liturgy. The religious didactic literature that promotes a sacramental program of salvation, in which the church plays an indispensable role in mediating the relationship between God and individual, views the relationship between institution and individual in much the same way as the official histories: these works teach patience and obedient submission to the institutional church, of which the submission and obedience the individual owes to secular authority is an analogue. (9) At the same time, emerging classes sought literary forms that would legitimize their own aspirations. The Anglo-Norman Brut translations of Geoffrey of Monmouths famous chronicle, in vogue during the twelfth century, translate down the social scale the authorizing value of the Latin histories, but in adapting Geoffreys grandiose and imperializing vision of British destiny to promote the interests of the lesser nobility, they shift the emphasis from the obedience owed by subjects to the gratitude owed by rulers. (10) Romances of English heroes, which began to appear towards the end of the twelfth century, appropriate the authorizing strategies of the histories, but they do so to subvert, not to legitimize, the absolute power of monarchy. As Susan Crane has shown, the romances of English heroes reflect the aspirations of the tenurial class for a social order in which access to land and power is based on justice, law, and merit rather than rank. (11) They challenge the devaluation of the individual that characterizes the court histories and promote an ideal of personal merit as the quality on which the legitimacy of lordship depends. A genre that is potentially remarkably similar to romance in its hostility to institutional authority and in the radical claims it makes for the legitimacy of individual actions--even when these threaten the hierarchical ordering of society--is the virgin martyr story. (12) It is not hard to see in these stories, which pit a spotless virgin against a comic-book tyrant, the subtext of an ecclesiastical polemic against secular government. But stories in which an obtuse, brutal, and ignorant secular ruler is successfully challenged by a young girl question not only the authority of the secular ruler; potentially, they question all hierarchical social ordering, even that of the church. (13) The Vie Seinte Osith is a particularly striking example of a saints life that employs the authorizing conventions of the virgin martyr story to offer a strong criticism of the abuse of power by the episcopal hierarchy and give voice to the aspirations of the ecclesiastical menus gents for self-determination and autonomy. (14) English religious houses faced a variety of threats to their lands and wealth after the Norman Conquest: despoliation of church treasures by the Conqueror, the imposition of punitive gelds and taxes, the requirement of knight service, and lay magnates seizure of the estates belonging to churches if they were strong enough to do so. An additional danger to the wealth and independence of monasteries came from episcopal encroachments, since bishops could significantly augment their own finances by annexing a wealthy monastic house. The establishment of an episcopal see in an abbey threatened not only the wealth of the community, which had to be divided to provide for the bishop and his familia, but also the independence and the status of its head, and it is not surprising that communities so threatened resisted vigorously. (15) Tension between religious houses and bishops is a dominant theme in post-Conquest ecclesiastical histories. By the early twelfth century, the number of monastic cathedrals had more than doubled, increasing from the pre-Conquest number of four to nine out of a total of seventeen. (16) It is important to realize that the struggle for the survival of the English churches cannot be reduced to a Norman-English conflict or even to a church-state conflict. Norman abbots energetically fought off the encroachments from Norman lay and ecclesiastical lords alike on the wealth and patrimony of the houses on which the abbots own fates depended. (17) The first line of defense for an abbey whose wealth and independence were threatened by lay magnates or by episcopal usurpation lay in the production--often the forgery--of documents, especially royal charters, attesting to the ancient privileges and exemptions the house enjoyed. In seeking the kings protection on the basis of supposedly Anglo-Saxon royal charters, the Norman abbots were exploiting the Norman myth of continuity with the English past. (18) In addition to forged charters, religious houses promoted their political interests by seeking to increase the prestige of the abbeys founding saint through elaborately staged ceremonies celebrating the translations of his or her relics and the production of written lives. Religious biographies of Anglo-Saxon saints not only continued, but increased under Norman rule. (19) Saints lives of English founding saints written to vindicate the independence of the houses on which their cults centered stressed the antiquity of the cults, the personal nature of the associations between the religious houses and the founding saints, and their establishment by royal or sometimes papal dispensation. The politics of French language in Shakespeares history plays by David Steinsaltz Amid his arduous and apparently superfluous wooing of Princess Katherine of France, Shakespeares King Henry V exclaims, "It is as easy for me, Kate, to conquer the kingdom as to speak so much more French." (1) Since he has just conquered the kingdom this is no idle boast, but why does he speak so much French? And why is an entire scene of the same play conducted in French, save for a few words of comically mispronounced English? Why are French words and phrases sprinkled liberally through the speeches of French and English alike? While it is not quite true, as George Watson has suggested, that Shakespeare is "the only Elizabethan dramatist to write at length in a foreign language"-- Thomas Kyds "language of Babel" in The Spanish Tragedy is a well-known counterexample--these French passages are too prominent and unconventional, even disruptive for those spectators not conversant in French, to pass unremarked. (2) At the same time, unlike Thomas Middleton who passed off a kind of pidgin English as Dutch for c omic effect in No Wit, No Help Like a Womans, Shakespeare did write essentially correct French, relying on its familiarity to much of his audience. This final act of Henry V has been knocked about for centuries by shifting currents of critical fashion. One line of critics, tracing descent from Samuel Johnson, has dismissed act V outright as an ill-conceived and inapposite sequel. (3) In recent years, though, as the play has, in the words of Katherine Eggert, "assumed a surprisingly prominent place not only in Shakespeare criticism, but [also] in wider critical debates over the relations between literature and hegemonic political power," the two French scenes have begun to come into focus. (4) A consensus has developed that these scenes--the courtship scene in particular--are no mere comic interludes or superficial nods to romantic convention. They may, in fact, be the keystone in the plays dramatic structure, and in the sociopolitical project of the entire tetralogy. What exactly this structure and this project are, though, and why exactly the French scenes are so crucial, have occasioned rather less consensus. Do they consummate the personal developments of Hal-Henry, (5) or demonstrate the public "lesson of harmonious marriage" (6) that unites and pacifies the warring nations? While the bilingual singularity of the French scenes of Henry V is no longer ignored, as it often was in earlier work, the language is often relegated to a sideshow for political, social, and sexual conflicts. (7) Eggert, for instance, extending an observation of Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore, relates the princesss English lesson to the Archbishops disqusition on the arcana of Salic law, another scene which criticism has traditionally disparaged or ignored, and to anxieties about the potency and legitimacy of a female monarch, ever more salient in the last decade of Elizabeths reign. (8) The French language is not, however, an arbitrary sign for something foreign or feminine. J. M. Maguin points out that Shakespeare in Henry V "presents the French language in a ridiculous light," and, more significantly, that "the national epic is a co-exalting of the virtues of the hero and the virtues of the tongue." (9) These ideas deserve further exploration. There is a scheme of linguistic antagonism that pervades the histories, something more precise than the "sort of delayed revenge for the Norman Conquest" that Watson has espied there. (10) As the English nation is perpetually at war with the French, so must their languages be at war. In particular, the gender cleansing that Eggert described is portrayed, enacted, and consummated in its linguistic incarnation. As the Englishmen are virile, rugged, honest, and virtuous, so must be their language, in opposition to the womanish, effete, deceptive, and perfidious language of the French. Contrary to Watsons suggestion, this linguistic ethnicity rooted in the languages ancient Anglo-Saxon loam, forming the core of English nationhood itself, was not Shakespeares own discovery. (11) Not only was it a fashionable topic for Elizabethan writers, but it was also backed by an estimable literary and political tradition, in which the historical Henry V himself had played a substantial part. In his history plays Shakespeare has set himself a formidable task, made explicit in the almost self-abasing Chorus that opens Henry V: to represent "two mighty monarchies" with the limited means of the theater, "Turning th accomplishment of many years / Into an hour-glass" (Prologue 20,30-1). This "accomplishment" was, at least in part, the forging of a united English nation in the struggle against the ancient enemy France. The French armies could not be transported into the theater, but in a sense they were already there. Not the armies that Henry V fought at Agincourt, but the Norman armies of three-and-a-half centuries before, who imposed a French-speaking nobility and repressed English to an unwritten plebian jargon. While the foreign rulers were slowly domesticated in the centuries of Anglo-Saxon twilight, a thick stratum of French vocabulary survived in English. With it survived, too, the native English ressentiment, in the English-speakers unconscious sense that French words are arrogant, mannered, and even rude. In quest of purely poetic means to manifest the titanic national struggle, it is no wonder that the dramatist should reach into this persistent cleavage in the English speaking audiences deepest sense of their own language. While most evident and thematically essential in Henry V, this linguistic polemic runs throughout the history plays. (12) The inaptitude for speaking French, which Shakespeares Henry V asserts and simultaneously demonstrates, may startle the historically aware theatergoer. Is it plausible that an English monarch of the early part of the fifteenth century would have lacked fluency in French? The record is not entirely clear. Since the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, French had been the native tongue of the English nobility. During the fourteenth century, while the nobles gradually adopted English, the royalty remained incorrigibly francophone. So, while Edward IIIs parliament in 1362 decreed that court proceedings be conducted in English rather than French (because French "is much unknown in the said realm") it is doubtful whether Edward himself (Henrys great-grandfather) could speak more than rudimentary English. (13) In the fourteenth century, the status of vernaculars began to rise throughout Europe. While this was primarily an assertion of the popular speech against the prerogatives of Latin, for the first time the native tongue became a primary banner and cause for national identity. (14) The English, in particular, saw themselves dispossessed and alienated in their own land by a foreign tongue. Thus the chronicler Robert of Gloucester, writing around 1300, lamented   Vor bote a man conne frenss me telth of him lute. Ac lowe men holdeth to engliss & to hor owe speche zute. Ich wene ther ne beth in al the world contreyes none That ne holdeth to hor owe speche bote engelond one. (15) The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066-1284. by Nicholas Vincent The Struggle for Mastery Britain 1066-1284 David Carpenter Allen Lane/Penguin Books xxiv + 616pp 25 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0-713-99065-1 HISTORY TODAY BOOKSHOP PRICE 22 [pounds sterling] The English and the Normans Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity 1066-c. 1220 Hugh M. Thomas Oxford University Press xii + 462pp 65 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0-19-925123-1 HISTORY TODAY BOOKSHOP PRICE 55 [pounds sterling] From Norman Conquest to Magna Carta England 1066-1215 Christopher Daniell Routledge xiii + 258pp. 15.99 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0-415-2215-X (hb), 0-415-2216-8 (pb) ENGLISH MEDIEVAL HISTORY used to be a simple matter of kings, battles and constitutional progress. What mattered about 1066 was that it brought both Norman kingship and French feudalism into England. What mattered about the thirteenth century was that it witnessed the recognition of English liberties in Magna Carta, the birth of Parliament, and, to English readers at least, the English conquest of Wales. This version of history, passed down by the pupils of the great nineteenth-century medievalist William Stubbs, has in recent years come under increasing attack by historians. Feudalism is now most definitely a dirty word, erased from the historians vocabulary. Magna Carta and the thirteenth-century Parliament are now seen not as responses to popular protest but as the outcome of negotiation among the political elite, to a large extent as instruments controlled by kings who sought to mask the exercise of brute royal lordship behind a facade of communal consent. As for the Welsh, the very idea of writing the history of the English as Britains master race has come to be seen as entirely unacceptable, to be replaced by a truly British history in which the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish, and the Cornish, are afforded the same honour mid importance as their bullying English neighbours. All three of the books under review here reflect this new spirit of political and ethnographic correctness. The best of them is David Carpenters account of Britain from the Norman Conquest to the Conquest of Wales. Carpenter writes so well, with such apt metaphors and in such compact sentences, that his readers may be lulled into assuming that they are back in the days of Macaulay and Stubbs, when history was still regarded, even by professional historians, as one of the higher forms of literary entertainment. Carpenter describes the Dialogue of the Exchequer (a famous though by no means reader-friendly treatise on royal accountancy), as a work of proud and passionate precision. The phrase would serve just as well to sum up Carpenters own achievement. Llewelyn of Wales was a flinty warrior, but also a sinuous politician. The rule of Henry III brought peace, but it was peace with injustice. Phrases such as these echo in the readers memory, and mark out Carpenter as a master of his craft. By delving deep, both into the records of royal government and into some of the least penetrable works written by his academic colleagues, Carpenter hopes to replace the old-fashioned political narrative of a Battle for the Constitution, with a much updated Battle for Britain. To this end, he marries a survey of England to excursions into the wilder reaches of Welsh, Scottish and even Irish history. Aware of, and in many cases responsible, for the new discoveries upon which his findings are based, he conducts the reader from 1066 to the reign of Edward I upon a richly-woven fabric of anecdote, analysis and biography, from the halitosis deemed sufficient cause for divorce in Wales, through to the jewels and splendour of Westminster Abbey. Whether he will entirely convince his readers that England was first amongst equals in a commonwealth of British nations remains to be seen. A glance at his index, in which ten columns are devoted to England, four to Scotland and a mere three to Wales, suggests that his sources may insist upon telling a predominantly Anglocentric story. Social and economic historians will be delighted that Carpenter has at least recognised the existence of English, or as he would prefer British, society, but in other respects his remains an analysis that is essentially personal and political, based upon an assessment of the ambitions and limitations of individual kings and their subjects, rather than upon the nature of kingship itself. This is nonetheless a magnificent book that can be recommended ahead of any of its many competitors. Hugh M. Thomas study of the Normans and the English is unlikely to rival Carpenters success, if only because of its ludicrously high price. It is nonetheless a thoughtful and in many ways thought-provoking survey of the intermingling of peoples, cultures and self-perceptions that resulted from the Conquest of 1066. Thomas poses a series of questions that are important but that are too often assumed to be unanswerable. Why did the Norman Conquest lead to assimilation rather than enduring hostility? Why did the Normans in Normandy maintain a Scandinavian identity, but once transplanted to England come to think of themselves as more English than French? The answers that he supplies are intriguing. Unlike the Austro-Hungarian, or indeed the Finnish aristocracy of more recent times, the Norman nobility came to intermarry with and to adopt the language of the people whom they had conquered, in part because distinctions in rank were not so developed amongst the eleventh and twelfth-century nobility as they were subsequently to become, in part because the English were so crushed by their defeat at Hastings that they thereafter posed no real threat to their conquerors. Perhaps to be successful, all conquering elites have to reinvent themselves--a theory that would apply just as well to the English in India as to the Normans after 1066. Many of the ideas with which Thomas is working are derived from the social sciences, in which the whole idea of race or of pure-bred ethnic identity has become taboo, not only in light of anthropological enquiry but with reference to events in Nazi Germany. Some of his insights are borrowed from other writers, most notably Ann Williams and Sir Richard Southern, who have demonstrated the ways in which Anglo-Norman or English monks composing the history of the Conquest after 1066 helped to raise Englishness to a status which even the highest born of Normans were prepared to adopt as their own. It is to Thomass credit, however that many of his investigations are entirely new--on the survival of English officials in towns and the middle ranks of the Church for example--and that he never allows theory to get in the way of good solid fact. His book will interest anyone who wishes to probe beneath the surface of national identity. After two such fine studies, it would be pleasing to report that Christopher Daniells more workmanlike textbook succeeded in blending the new political narrative with a broader perception of Britains place in medieval Europe. There are many excellent things in his book, which ranges far beyond the politics of the elite to consider such matters as music, painting, the Kings menagerie and the relationship between ruled and riders in a society in which bishops were more accustomed to trampling infants under foot than to dismounting to deliver the sacrament of baptism. His is a compendium of interesting facts, that may in time be of great benefit both to university students and to general readers. Meanwhile there are factual and grammatical problems from which his text is badly in need of rescue. Daniell has not been well served by his copy-editors, and on occasion his to apparent unfamiliarity with the sources leads him to repeat statements that are simply not true. To write of a 12th-century, archbishop of Canterbury, as Theodore, rather than Theobald, might be accounted a mirror lapse were the lapse not repeated on at least four occasions. To be told, however, that there are references to Eleanor of Aquitaine leading 300 of her women dressed as Amazons during the Second Crusade and that the object of that Crusade was to attack Jerusalem (at that time, let it be noted, firmly under Crusader rule) is to stretch the readers trust in authorial expertise well beyond breaking point. Those in search of knowledge about medieval England may one day be able to turn to a corrected edition of Daniell. In the meantime they are strongly urged to read Carpenter, and if their income permits it, to invest in a copy of Thomas. Nicholas Vincent is the author of The Holy Blood (Cambridge University Press, 2001). CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION I THE Norman Conquest inaugurated a distinctly new epoch in the literary as well as in the political history of England. AngloSaxon authors were then as suddenly and as permanently displaced as Anglo-Saxon kings. The literature afterwards read and written by Englishmen was thereby as completely transformed as the sentiments and tastes of English rulers. Clearly reflecting the altered attitude of the leaders of the people, the new styles of writing reveal in a measure the new national character, and betray important conditions determining its growth. The Christian religion had been imposed on the Saxons by their leaders, working upon the common folk from the chieftains down. At first the alien creed was but superficially accepted. Little by little, however, the new instruction greatly modified mens religious ideas, and Roman definitely replaced Germanic ritual. Likewise, the foreign types of literature introduced at the Conquest first found favour with the monarchs and courtiers, and were deliberately fostered by them, to the disregard of native forms. No effective protest was possible, and English thought for centuries to come was largely fashioned in the manner of the French. Throughout the whole period that here engages our attention, in forms of artistic expression as well as of religious service, the English openly acknowledged a Latin control. Nevertheless, though there was little independence in letters during this epoch, though it was not distinctively English as we now use the term, it is far from being the dull and barren stretch that so many literary historians would have us believe. If under Anglo-Norman rule compositions in the English vernacular were few and of slight account, this was certainly not occasioned by the peoples inertia or distress, as the impression is often improperly given. Much to the contrary, the era was one of extraordinary intellectual activity, when, with greatly broadened horizons, with new interests awakened in Continental and Eastern affairs, constantly in contact with races of unlike temperament and tradition, Englishmen were in a state of growth and development when writing was inevitable, when some way of satisfying the demands of the many alert and prosperous who were eager for knowledge and entertainment had to be contrived, when patriotic sentiment demanded expression, abuses called for a pen to denounce, and abounding piety sought support in books. What would have become of English literature had the foreign dominion not been established, no amount of speculation will ever determine. The fact is too often ignored that before 1066 the Anglo-Saxons had a body of native literature distinctly superior to any which the Normans or French could boast at that time: their prose especially was unparalleled for extent and power in any European vernacular. It should, moreover, be kept in mind how brilliant were the writings of the remote Norsemen during the eleventh and two succeeding centuries, how they in Iceland and the Western Isles, under conditions doubtless no more exceptional than might have developed in England, produced much noble poetry and marvellous prose that we still read with delight. But, while admitting the possibility of a revival of interest in literature amongst the English, one cannot deny that the Normans came to their land when they greatly needed an external stimulus; for ignorance was then rife in all parts, learning and culture were dying of inanition, and darkness seemed gathering round. The Conquest effected a wholesome awakening of national life. The people were suddenly inspired by a new vision of a greater future. They united in a common hope. Sooner than is generally believed, the Saxon element lost its initial hostility to the new-comers, the bonds of sympathy growing with the realisation that the fortunes of both races were indissolubly knit, that all were anxious to maintain the dignity and integrity of the land. From the consequent blending of blood came a generation of increased power. From the incitement of opportunity came impulses to work. Capable and eager, the youth of the country strove for distinction; and reward was yielded richly to those who had the wisdom to seek it aright. Success, it was evident, lay not in harking back to a past from which the people was definitely severed, but in seizing the advantages of the present and reaching forward to those seemingly still more abundant in store. As a result of the Battle of Hastings, England was finally removed from isolation, and impelled into the strong currents of international life. The Anglo-Normans, possessed as they were of enthusiasm, energy, and executive skill, vied successfully with their Continental kin, and stirred their fellow-countrymen to like achievement. Literature could not but profit by the new sense of security and enlargement of view. The Conquerors not only brought with them soldiers and artisans and traders, they quickly imported scholars to revive knowledge, chroniclers to record memorable events, minstrels to celebrate victories, or sing of adventure and love. These gained a hearing and a following. Learning flourished anew, and writer multiplied. The most obvious change in literary expression appears in the vehicle employed. For centuries Latin had been more or less spoken and written by the clergy in England. The Conquest, which led to the reinvigoration of the monasteries and the tightening of the ties with Rome, determined its more extensive use. Still more important, as a result of foreign sentiment in court and castle, it caused writings in the English vernacular to be disregarded, and established French as the natural speech of the cultivated and high-born. The clergy insisted on the use of Latin, the nobility on the use of French: no one of influence saw the utility of English as a means of perpetuating thought, and for nearly three centuries very few works not deliberately devised for the ignorant laity appeared in the native vulgar tongue. Those, meanwhile, who controlled the destinies of the kingdom, fought its battles, administered its laws, organised its churches, founded its schools, and worked otherwise for its welfare--all with one accord encouraged the vogue of French fashions without feeling that they did amiss. Thus not only the bias of prevailing attitude, but the stamp of English style, was incalculably changed. When the English language finally became supreme in England, it was employed primarily to perpetuate conceptions and methods of writing originally French. In process of time the foreign types, like the foreign words in the vocabulary, were accepted by high and low without demur. To appreciate properly the significance of this substitution of foreign for native styles, the new trend of literary inclination that began soon after the Conquest, we must consider that in the early Middle Ages France was the literary centre of all Western Europe. Then, more than at any other period, she enjoyed an hegemony in the intellectual domain, and led the fashion in literary production. The epoch was one of new birth--of new trials and new successes. In every departure France seems to have anticipated the slower thought of other nations and discovered the paths which they later found it best to tread. She devised and others imitated. She set the standard, and by it all were measured. Surpassing any degree of influence to which she has since attained, her dominion was widespread and unquestioned. Fortunately, it was at this period, when the French genius appears effectively to have controlled Western ideas, that England was in closest contact with France. By reason of their language and political conditions, Englishmen were kept familiar with all contemporary thought. Their reading was substantially that of the rest of Europe. If France was thus the supreme arbiter of European literary styles, it was in part at least because the French writers were themselves cosmopolitan, because they were not provincial in sympathy or inhospitable to others ideas. They had inherited, to be sure, a large body of epic verse concerning Charlemagne and his peers which was peculiarly theirs, and this they revived with zeal; so well, in fact, that, national as it was, foreign races repeated it readily and long. But they were not content to win admiration in this special province alone. Early they sought out other themes--stories of the Orient, of Greece and Rom e, and ancient Britain--and so transformed these as to win still greater acclaim. One of the chief glories of Old French literature is the Body of Arthurian romance which it presented to the world. But Arthur was originally a Celtic, not a French hero. The "Matter of Britain," which, through the medium of French redactions, was made accessible to all Europe and welcomed with rejoicing wherever it found its way, was a splendid contribution of France; but it was not hers by right of inheritance. The great poets of mediæval Germany, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and the rest, were essentially imitators of French writers, but imitated them, it should be noted, where they were themselves imitatorsimitated works which were French not in substance but in form. Partly owing to this situation, the distinctive characteristics of the literatures of different lands were in the Middle Ages far less marked than now. The various peoples of Europe had not as yet developed the striking peculiarities they at present exhibit. There was a general harmony of poetic impulse. Men everywhere sang under the same inspiration, and enjoyed one anothers song. Their themes being usually such as came from an indistinct past; being in nowise more the possession of one race than another, nation did not rise up against nation to assert exclusive claims. In all hands primitive myth, Aryan folklore, the fables of remote ages, were handled with the freedom of acknowledged right, without a thought of dispute. Yet thus, in this handling, race distinctions gradually made themselves manifest, and in course of time so fixed themselves upon the outcome of human thought that they assumed an appearance of their own, and were recognised as peculiar by common consent. The interdependence of the different literatures of mediæval Europe is a matter of much moment in the study of any one of them. It makes the comparative method of inquiry essential to safe judgment Middle English literature cannot be well understood without full familiarity with the sources from which it drew and some acquaintance with the history of the themes it favoured. It but echoes in the main the sentiments and tastes of an international society centralised in France. Another striking characteristic of mediæval literature worth consideration at this point is its general anonymity. Of the many who wrote, the names of but few are recorded, and of the history of these few we have only the most meagre details. Nor is this a simple accident. Formerly, the importance attached to an authors personality was far less than now. In case either of a narrative or a didactic work, it was the substance above all that attracted attention. Originality of matter was deplored as a fault. Independence of treatment meant to our forefathers contempt of authority, a heinous offence in their eyes. It was as unsafe for a story-teller to depart from the well-marked lines of inherited tradition as for him to disregard orthodox beliefs. And even the greatest dared not present new views without at least claiming august support. A prudent author sought a powerful patron in order to ensure success, or fathered his inventions on some ancient worthy who could not deny them. But the last thing he would have deemed wise would have been to copyright them as his own. Necessarily, then, most composition was impersonal. Rarely do popular mediæval works seem to have been called forth by the inner, the subjective feelings of their authors. They indicate prevailing ideals, tastes, or needs, but seldom the peculiar aspirations of an individual. We scrutinise them not so much to discover the genius of particular men as the development of types; not so much to find out the qualities of him who wrote as those of the society that suggested the writing. II If now we inquire regarding that part of the Middle Ages in England which we are particularly to study, as a critic should in questioning any epoch: Who are the best exponents of its tastes and ideals? who most notably reflect its conditions? we discover that our concern is chiefly with representatives of the nobility and the clergy. The third "estate," the labourers, were not then producers of literature. They have, indeed, significance in our research, but almost solely because they perpetuated tradition. Poor and down-trodden, ignorant and illiterate, they were, nevertheless, the heirs of much ancient lore which delighted them worthily, and which, because of their retentive memories, reaches us even to-day, preserved in songs, ballads, and popular tales, still powerful to please when our jaded ears refuse to listen to the fine sophistications of the hour. The English folk always responded in song to tense emotional appeal. They were stirred to unified utterance by such local or national events as touched their hearts. They sang, we know, of Hereward, the valiant resister of the Conquerors might, and of other outlawed heroes who strove against oppression. They sang of private griefs. And this, we may be sure, without ever ceasing, though historical records but rarely note their festival or funeral chants. From the Conquest to Chaucer, as indeed before and after, the combined dance and song of rustic folk was a conspicuous feature of English wayfaring life. The Battle of Bannockburn (1314) found the steadfast nation in the same mood as the Battle of Maldon (991). "After many days," says Fabyan, "it was sungyn in dances, in carolles of the maydens and mynstrellys of Scotland." Simple and sincere, the ballads of the people kept issuing forth from the living well-springs of poetic impulse, but for the most part only to vanish again, like "the snows of yester year," leaving no definite trace. Literature as literature (except for the ballads) owes only a slight debt to the peasants, and we dismiss them from our more particular heed. One fact, however, deserves emphasis here, namely, that in former times the tastes of the different ranks of society were not so unlike in character as in quality, that the lower classes enjoyed the same sort of literature as the nobility, only in a ruder form. When versions of sophisticated tales were prepared by men of humble origin for the lowly of the land, they were stripped of their polite embellishments and made straightforward and direct in style. The people were fond of sentiment but not of subtlety, of vigorous phrase but not of rhetoric, of proverbs rather than laboured conceits. They preferred narrative to disquisition, folklore to science. They liked to hear of princes and noble ladies when these were found to act according to homely ideals. They eagerly repeated tales of heroism and adventure when they could applaud with understanding. Thus, unconsciously, merely by the nature of their tastes, they determined the selection of works to be turned into the vernacular, as well as the fashion of their reproduction. Popular literature in the native tongue assumed a definite, demcratic attitude and a rugged simplicity during the long period of its disregard by the nobility. When the rulers finally realised its richness and took an interest in its cultivation, it had passed beyond any narrow control, it had become English in the large sense of the word, a mirror of the whole nations spirit and sensibility. The patrons and producers of mediæval works, as has been said, belonged almost exclusively to the clergy and the nobles. In patronage credit seems about equal so far as amount of writing is concerned, but unequal if the estimate be based on its lasting worth. The didactic and religious works favoured by the monks were in the main far less original and less artistically valuable than the lays and romances especially prepared for knights and ladies. Still, ecclesiastical and secular works were read by both classes alike. The nobles were frequently pious and learned, and priests as often frivolous and dense. The former kept clerks engaged at service in their castles, and the latter had minstrels regularly in their employ. Most writers, moreover, made a general appeal. The monks tried to produce legends and chronicles so interesting as to rival secular poems in popularity. The minstrels adorned the heathen narratives they treated with Christian sentiment, and found it expedient to point a moral in their loosest tales. The Conquest had been the signal for a large increase in the number of castles and monasteries. These existed alongside of one another in all parts of the land. By the time of Stephen the embattled keeps of the feudal barons were so prominent everywhere that they threatened the power of the central government, and it was arranged by the treaty of Wallingford in 1153 that no less than 365 of them were to be destroyed--an agreement in part performed. Each knightly abode was a stimulus to literary production, for the residents felt the need of constant entertainment, and listened eagerly to invigorating stories of war and chivalry, or to such free tales as provoked unrestrained mirth when in the great hall after meat high and low enjoyed glee together. As gentleness and refinement increased, the nobles delighted more in the new courtly lays than in the communal epic songs of their past. The ladies they "served" became a literary force, and exerted their influence to procure poems embodying their conceptions, to gain a means of solace in the loneliness they were forced to endure when war called their husbands and lovers away. Religious foundations likewise prospered abundantly in the new era. If in Pope Gregorys time Christian monks had gone to Britain say "threescore and ten persons," the Lord had made them almost "as the stars of heaven for multitude." Unlike, however, the mighty God of Israel whom they worshipped in name, "they regarded persons and took reward." Steadily, … ……In the twelfth century the University of Paris was a place of fine stimulation, a meeting-ground of distinguished men, an exalted mart of thought. Crestien de Troyes reveals to us at the beginning of Cligès the opinion of the learned of his land that France had inherited the best traditions of antiquity. "This our books have taught us," he says, "that of chivalry and of clergy [i.e. learning] Greece had the highest praise. Afterwards to Rome came chivalry; and the height of clergy, which now hath passed to France. God grant that it here be retained, and the place please it so well that from France may never depart the honour which there has tarried. To others God had lent it; for of Greeks and Romans is said neither more nor less; of them has mention ceased, and extinguished is their vivid flame." With conscious dignity the clerks of Crestiens time wore the mantle of superiority which had, they thought, fallen upon them. Eagerly they strove not only to express in their own speech new ideas, but also to revive knowledge of the past, to reopen the treasure-house of forgotten wisdom, and to reveal its glories for the benefit of their own people. The widespread revival of interest in the past restored the study of the classics, and a genuine renaissance of antique culture got well under way. But the Church retarded its flowering time. True learning and illumination yielded to didacticism and prejudice. The University of Paris became eventually a place of subtle dialectics and sententious dispute, rather than of free, original thought. In the thirteenth century, however, Paris was still in English esteem the focus of Western culture. Witness the words of Bartholomew, the English encyclopædist: In the same manner as the city of Athens shone in former days as the mother of liberal arts and the muse of philosophers . . . so in our times Paris has raised the standard of learning and civilisation not only in France, but in all the rest of Europe, and, as the mother of wisdom, she welcomes guests from all parts of the world, supplies all their wants, and subjects them to her pacific rule. Considerably later, in 1345, the renowned bibliophile Richard of Bury, Bishop of Durham, indulged in a like panegyric: O Holy God of Gods in Sion, what a mighty stream of pleasure made glad our hearts whenever we had leisure to visit Paris, the paradise of the world, and to linger there, where the days seemed ever few for the greatness of our love! But Richard had new conditions to remark that were important for English development. Alas! he exclaims, by the same disease which we are deploring [the lack of earnest devotion to study] we see that the Palladium of Paris has been carried off in these sad times of ours, wherein the zeal of that noble university, whose rays once shed light into every corner of the world, has grown lukewarm, nay, is all but frozen. There the pen of every scribe is now at rest; generations of books no longer succeed each other; and there is none who begins to take place as it new author. They wrap up their doctrines in unskilled discourse, and are losing all propriety of logic, except that our English subtleties, which they denounce in public, are the subject of their furtive vigils. Admirable Minerva seems to bend her course to all nations of the earth, and reaches from end to end mightily, that she may reveal herself to all mankind. We see that she has already visited the Indians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians and Greeks, the Arabs and the Romans. . . . Now she has passed by Paris, and now has happily come to Britain, the most noble of islands, nay, rather a microcosm in itself, that she may show herself a debtor both to the Greeks and to the barbarians. At which wondrous sight it is conceived by most men that as philosophy is now lukewarm in France, so her soldiery is unmanned and languishing. There was much to warrant this boast. It was no longer necessary for Englishmen to cross the Channel for a good education. Oxford meanwhile and Cambridge had grown from preparatory schools for the University of Paris to dignified rivals. In England, in fact, early in the fourteenth century were to be found the intellectual compeers of any scholars in Europe, men of independence and virility, earnest in the search for truth. Read More