Anglo-Normans

“ Of all the institutions of the Anglo-Norman state, none is more important and none more characteristic than the exchequer, illustrating as it does at the same time the comparative wealth of the sovereigns and the efficient conduct of their government. ”

“ The expulsion of the English colony was an effort beyond the power of the disunited Irish tribes; for in the darkest hours of the English settlement the power of England was ready, by some sudden effort, to reassert the English supremacy. But why did the Anglo-Normans wholly fail to subdue the Irish? ... 1. The large extent comprised in the grants made to the first colonists led to a dispersion of the Norman nobles over the more fertile portions of the country. The English colony never formed one compact body capable of combined action. ”

“ The Danish-Norwegian settlements, and the Danish dominion in England, by subduing for a time the political power of the Anglo-Saxons, had not only prepared the way for the first victory of the Normans, but also for the future progress and establishment of the Norman power in England, and especially for the ultimate triumph of the Norman popular spirit over the remains of the ancient Saxon nationality. ”

“ They can hardly be reckoned as specimens of literature, but they give us a comprehensive view of the beliefs and superstitions which were current in their days, and of the naïve theories which accounted for natural phenomena, and explained their inner and higher significance. History proved equally attractive to the Normans. Whilst in France, with a few notable exceptions, it continued to be written in Latin down to the time of Froissart, England was flooded with a mass of chronicles rhymed in French. ”

“ The Normans of Normandy originally came from these northern lands, and the Manx and Cumberland men came from Norway; where the custom of preferring the eldest daughter in default of sons [21] is an ancient one of the country. The evidence of south-eastern Scotland also points to Norway and the earlier Anglian lands, as does that additional evidence derived from isolated districts or manors in England in which, in default of sons, the eldest daughter succeeds to the paternal estate. ”

“ RESULTS OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST NORMAN ELEMENT IN THE ENGLISH PEOPLE The coming of the Normans to England formed the third and last installment of the Teutonic invasion. Norman merchants and artisans followed Norman soldiers and settled particularly in the southern and eastern parts of the island. They seem to have emigrated in considerable numbers and doubtless added an important element to the English population. The Normans thus completed the work of the Anglo-Saxons and Danes in making England a Teutonic country. ”

“ Of all those institutions so commonly and gratuitously ascribed to them, of representative government, trial by jury, and such machinery of political and social independence, there is not a vestige to be found in any age in Germany, from the Christian era to the present time. During the period of their dominion in England, the Anglo-Saxons, so far from showing themselves an enterprising people were notoriously weak, slothful, and degenerate, overrun by the Danes, and soon permanently subjected by the Normans. ”

“ Until the middle of the fourteenth century Anglo-Norman remained in every sense of the term a 'living' language, and the natural medium of expression of a considerable portion of the population, of the king's household, the nobility, the clergy, and even the merchants. ”

“ Among the red roofs and gray walls of the Norman towns, or the faint, bright colors of its country landscapes, among the green hedgerows and golden wheat-fields of England, the same flowers grow in more luxuriant fashion, but old Norway and Denmark sent out the seed that has flourished in richer soil. To-day the Northman, the Norman, and the Englishman, and a young nation on this western shore of the Atlantic are all kindred who, possessing a rich inheritance, should own the closest of kindred ties. ”

“ A spirit of adventure and enterprise, sound statesmanship and business capacity, an appreciation of art and literature, and above all a lively curiosity were grafted upon a nation which had grown effete and unnerved.
Norman literature, which had begun on the Continent with works of the highest promise, continued productive in England. La Chanson de Roland and Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne have been preserved in Anglo-Norman. MSS., and both were translated or imitated in English. Richard Cœur-de-Lion, Fulk Fitz Warin, King Dermot became the heroes of new epic legends. ”

“ The arrival, however, of the impetuous Norman race, securing as it did a close connection with the Continent, quickened the intellect of the people, raised their intelligence, was of inestimable benefit to the English, and played a most important part in raising England among the nations. Moreover, it has helped to produce the race that has peopled Northern America, Australia, and the south of Africa, holds possession of India, and stands forth as the greatest civilizer in the world. The Conquest of England by the Normans was achieved without even a shadow of right or justice. ”

“ If we cannot agree with this able champion in viewing the warfare he describes as a healthy process of evolution, we may at least gladly admit that some knowledge of this dark period, lighted only by the lurid torch of rapine and internecine strife, is as essential to a right understanding of the Anglo-Norman settlement as is the study of English history, for some generations before the Conquest, the necessary prelude to a comprehension of the Norman Conquest itself. ”

“ It is hard to keep the fortunes of all these races and kingdoms clear in our minds. We cannot help thinking of England, and looking at all this early history of the Normans and their growth in relation to it. Then we must keep track of the Danes and Northmen, who have by no means outgrown their old traits and manners, though their cousins in Normandy have given up privateering and the long ships. The history of France makes a sort of background for Normandy and England both. ”

“ The hot flood of Normans in chain-mail and pointed helmets sweeps this way, and the English with their leathern caps and their sturdy shoulders mailed like their enemies, swinging their long-handled weapons, pour back again, and so the day draws near its end, while the races mix in symbolic fashion in the fight as they must mix in government, in blood, in brotherhood, and in ownership of England while England stands. ”

“ Poems based on Biblical stories are numerous and still imperfectly known, but they are surpassed in number by treatises on the Deadly Sins, the follies of mankind, poems on the Love of God, exhortations to saintly life, dull reading when judged by modern standards, but not devoid of interest as the source of some of the earliest Middle-English writings. But the real value of Anglo-Norman civilization lies in the new orientation it gave to human thought. ”

“ There are only a very few Englishmen who keep great estates at all like those of the chief Normans; but it is quite a mistake to think that every Englishman was driven out of his hearth and home. Crowds of Englishmen keep small estates or fragments of great ones, sometimes held straight of the King, sometimes of a Norman or an Englishman in William’s favour. And when any man, Norman or English, had a claim against any other man, Norman or English, it was fairly set down in the book, for the King to judge of. ”

“ Under the name of “Normans” are included all those swarms of Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes, which, from the close of the eighth until far into the eleventh century, either laid waste or settled on the eastern and southern coasts of the Baltic, as well as the coasts of the west and south of Europe. “Norman” signifies neither more nor less than a man from the north. The Danish conquest of England was therefore just as fully Normanic as the conquest, by the Norwegians and Danes, of a part of France, called, after them, Normandy. ”

“ Many, of course, believed in the right of the North, and in one of other of these items of sincerity; few, I think, in the right, in the sincerity throughout, and [Pg 133] in the success as well. The delusion, that the North, after using up its Irish and German population and its incoming immigrants, would quail before the necessity of hazarding also a large proportion of its own settled Anglo-Saxon population, was extremely prevalent. ”

“ But I would plead that the Middle Ages should be better known, especially that period of the Middle Ages in which France and England shared a common language and a common literature, and took part in the same social and religious activity. The study of Anglo-Norman, revealing, as it must, the points of contact as well as the differences between the two nations, will lead to surer knowledge and greater mutual appreciation. ”

“ These tall blonde men with their defiant blue eyes, who obeyed their kings while they had confidence in them, and killed them when they had forfeited their respect, were the ancestors of the Normans who under William the Conqueror invaded England, and founded the only European state which has since reached the highest civilization and the highest liberty, through slow and even stages of orderly development. ”

“ But much of the news was sad, for the times were evil in England. The Normans had conquered the country and were the lords and officials in the land, and they cruelly oppressed the common people, who were Saxons. ”

“ The Norman nobles of England were everywhere fortifying their castles, which had been [Pg 94] sternly prohibited by the recent king. Law and authority were for the time being abrogated, and every man was preparing to fight for his own hand and his own land. A single day, almost, had divided the Normans of England into two factions, not yet come to blows, but facing each other like wild beasts at bay. And England and the English were the prey craved by both these herds of human wolves. ”

“ Hardened and embittered by the selfish treasons that had beset his early boyhood, and which had forced him into manhood before his time, he came to England as one called thither by the late king’s designation, and, therefore, the lawful heir. The Norman law, a confusion of the old Frank and Roman codes, and of the Norwegian pirate customs, he seems to have been glad to leave behind. His native Normans must be ruled by it, but he was an English king by inheritance, and English laws he would observe; Englishmen should have their national share in the royal favor, and in their native land. ”

“ The ‘Normans’, that is North-men, married French wives, and became the cleverest, the fiercest, and, according to the ideas of the day, the most pious of Frenchmen. They did not cease to be adventurers, and we find their young men seeking their fortunes all over Europe. They thought their Saxon neighbours very slow and stupid fellows, who were somehow in possession of a very desirable island which they managed very badly, and which it was the Normans’ duty to take if possible. ”

“ Some of these changes were made merely for the time, while there was still a distinction between English and French. This last is the word commonly used to take in both the Normans and all the other French-speaking people whom William had brought with him. Frenchmen who had settled in King Edward’s time were to reckon as Englishmen. Normans and Englishmen were to live in peace, but as the Normans were often killed privily, a special law was made for their protection. If the murderer was not to be found, the hundred was to pay. And for some purposes each nation was to keep its own law. ”

“ The Northmen spread themselves at length over a great extent of country. We can only wonder why, after their energy and valor led them to found a thriving colony in Iceland and in Russia, to even venture among the icebergs and perilous dismal coasts of Greenland, and from thence downward to the pleasanter shores of New England, why they did not seize these possessions and keep the credit of discovering and settling America. ”

“ A recent investigation [21] has shown that before 1300 few letters were written in Anglo-Norman except by members of the aristocracy, but fifty years later all but the lowest classes of the community conducted their correspondence in that language. But bilingualism, the severance of intimate intercourse with Normandy (after 1204) , and the gradual absorption of the Norman element in the population accelerated the decay of Anglo-Norman. For a long time, however, it maintained itself as the language of the aristocracy. ”

“ But it was not till the beginning of the tenth century that the Normans settled in that part of the mainland of Gaul which from them took the name of Normandy. The English had thus been living for six hundred years in their land, when the Normans had been living only about a hundred and fifty years in theirs. The English therefore in the eleventh century were more thoroughly at home in England than the Normans were in Normandy. Among the English the adventurous spirit of new settlers had spent itself in the long wars with the Welsh which established the English dominion in Britain. ”

“ For England, the Norman Conquest determined permanently the orientation of English politics and English culture. Geographically belonging, with the Scandinavian countries, to the outlying lands of Europe, the British Isles had been in serious danger of sharing their remoteness from the general movements of European life and drifting into the back waters of history. The union with Normandy turned England southward and brought it at once into the full current of European affairs—political entanglements, ecclesiastical connections, cultural influences. ”