The Norman Myth

As so often in human history, the apparent pride and arrogance of an imperial people masked deep-rooted anxiety as to the justifications for empire. Superficially, after 1066 the Normans seemed to be riding high. Not just in England but in southern Italy, and from the 1090s, in the Holy Land and Jerusalem itself, they carved a swathe across Christendom that their rivals and contemporaries regarded as little short of incredible. Like the Huns in the fifth century, or the armies of Charlemagne in the eighth, the Normans seemed to have erupted into human history fully formed and invincible. Beneath this veneer of invincibility and racial superiority, however, there were more troubling and complex realities. The Normans sought to present themselves as a master race of warriors, unbeatable in war, the chosen people of God. This, the so-called ‘Norman Myth’, was questioned even at the time and ever afterwards has fuelled the speculation of historians. In reality, the Normans had never constituted a race or a single bloodline. Like most other European tribal allegiances, with the possible and bizarre exception of the Basques, they comprised a mixture of Viking, Gallo-Roman and Frankish elements even before they emerged onto the historical stage. Their culture was the adopted Latin Christianity of Rome, and even their language was borrowed from France with only a small smattering of Scandinavian loan words, often for the technicalities of the sea by which the Vikings had first come south.

The Christian culture of which they made so much, and by which they claimed their status as a chosen people of God, was itself compiled from a kaleidoscopic palette of Lombard, Lotharingian, Burgundian and Roman elements, as foreign churchmen, none more famous than Lanfranc, the first ‘Norman’ archbishop of Canterbury, were welcomed to the ducal court. Even the building style that they came to adopt in England after 1066, was not a truly native Norman style, but acquired, like the Norman war horse, in part from Spain, in part from Lotharingia and the German imperial lands of the north. Just as the Normans ransacked the libraries of conquered England for their most precious Anglo-Saxon books, so the books that they themselves introduced were for the most part copied not from Norman exemplars but from other centres of learning. The works of St Augustine, acquired by the new Norman cathedral at Sarum (later Salisbury) were copied from exemplars supplied from Flanders and Lotharingia, not from Normandy.

In learning, in building, even in their warfare, where, after 1066, at their battles such as Tinchebrai or Brémule they adopted King Harold’s technique of riding to battle but fighting on foot, the Normans were the most brazen and parasitical of plagiarists. Their greatest thinkers, first the Italian Lanfranc, then the equally Italian Anselm, were outsiders. As with the later American acclamation of immigrant intellectuals and artists, from Rachmaninov to Einstein, it was as if the Normans lacked confidence in their own native talent. Like the British imperialists of the nineteenth century who insisted that their greatest musicians all have German or Italian names, as if no one named Smith or Jones could compete with a Hallé or a Melba, the Normans may have harboured something of a chip on their shoulder about their relative lack of cultural sophistication. Normannitas or Normanness was chiefly something related to warfare and the ability to win battles. Real culture, the Normans seem to have felt, was to be found somewhere other than Normandy itself.

So far so good. Most modern historians have been happy to puncture the ‘Norman Myth’. Deeper than this, however, the Normans after 1066 experienced real problems over the definition of authority. In recent years, it has become fashionable to suggest that their lack of confidence led them increasingly to resort to law and to legal arguments as a means of legitimizing their conquests. Law and law-making, which were to emerge as vital themes in the history of twelfth-century England, were pursued by the first generation of Norman settlers as a means of discovering legal justifications for the violent seizure of English land. One such justification could be obtained from the canon law of the Church, which sanctioned succession blessed from one generation to another in the way, for example, that bishops succeeded bishops, tracing their origins back to the first apostles and hence to Christ as their first originator. In this way, perhaps instructed by Archbishop Lanfranc, William the Conqueror deliberately presented himself as the legally nominated successor to the Anglo-Saxon kings and specifically to Edward the Confessor as his ‘antecessor’ or immediate predecessor.

This is all very well. However, there is actually precious little evidence that the early Norman kings saw themselves as law-makers as opposed to law-keepers. It was the laws of Cnut that were supposedly renewed by both Edward the Confessor and William the Conqueror, and even the so-called ‘Laws of Henry I’ turn out, on inspection, not to be newly forged statutes but a procedural guide, perhaps written at a very local level, for one of the bailiffs of the hundreds of the county of Surrey, as to how existing laws might best be administered. Rather than fortify their claim with jurisprudential justifications, the Normans possessed a far simpler and more easily understood explanation for their victory, as an act of God. God had sanctioned the Normans as conquerors to purge the sins of the English, and perhaps specifically the failings of the English Church. God had permitted the Normans to seize England, just as the crusaders subsequently laid claim to Jerusalem, and just as in centuries gone by the Romans or the Arab conquerors of much of the known world had claimed their lands, by right of conquest.