Fashion and Lifestyle

Other badges came to signify the Normans and their ‘Normanness’, or as they would have called it, in Latin, their ‘Normannitas’. We cannot peep inside the wardrobe of William the Conqueror, though, so far as we can tell, the basic repertoire of clothing, shirts, vests, cloaks, hose for the men, longer more flowing garments for the women, were much the same in England before 1066 as they were in Normandy. The Bayeux Tapestry, our chief source here, nonetheless suggests that there was a quite deliberate distinction between Norman and English ways of dressing hair. Hair itself is a major though often neglected aspect of human history. From the hairy Esau to the smooth Jacob, and from Christ depicted without a beard to the bearded kings and emperors of the twelfth century, shifts in the aesthetics and cultural significance of hair may tell us a lot about more profound social change. Norman men, it is clear, wore their hair short and in a style that today one associates with those too mean or too mad to pay a barber, with the back of the head shaved a long way upwards towards the crown. The Bayeux Tapestry and contemporary Norman chroniclers tell us that the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy wore their hair long, combed and anointed ‘nancy boys’, as one highly idiomatic modern translation of the Song of the Battle of Hastings puts it. Certainly, the Normans regarded long hair as a sign of effeminacy. The court of William the Conqueror’s son, William Rufus, became notorious for allowing its men to grow their hair parted in the middle so that their foreheads were shamefully bared, for encouraging them to wear absurd shoes with pointed toes curling backwards at the tip like scorpion tails, and for dousing the lights so that all manner of crimes might be committed after sunset. We have already encountered the 1102 sanctions against sodomy, enacted two years after William Rufus’ death, and it was almost certainly as a sodomite that the chroniclers sought to portray Rufus, albeit posthumously.

Like gay-bashing through the ages, this in fact tells us as much about the writers of such reports as it does about those whose deeds they reported. If for the Normans moral corruption was associated with effeminacy (and we need to remember here that women in general were believed tainted with the sin of Eve), then moral strength lay in the masculine and the manly. If jests and absurd dress were the qualities of a sodomite, then only those who took themselves very seriously indeed could hope for redemption. Despite the wealth released by the Norman Conquest, the Normans themselves were not to be tempted into luxury or ease. In their own eyes, they were more Spartans than Romans, Greeks rather than lazy Trojans blinded by Helen’s beauty. Seriousness and a refusal to laugh at oneself are qualities essential to any would-be empire builder. From the Pharoahs to Cecil Rhodes, and from Nebuchadnezzar to Mussolini, the would-be imperial court is a place where laughter has to be concealed behind a scowl and where the absurd has to be accepted, at least in public, with absolute seriousness. Such places also tend to pose very stark alternatives between good and bad, loyalty and treason, the ins and the outs. Time is short, and empires, even on the map, are generally not coloured in shades of beige.