The Normans and the 'Norman Edge'

Peoples, Polities and Identities on the Frontiers of Medieval Europe

Keith Stringer, Andrew Jotischky, Keith J Stringer, Andrew Jotischky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317022534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Modern historians of the Normans have tended to treat their enterprises and achievements as a series of separate and discrete histories. Such treatments are valid and valuable, but historical understanding of the Normans also depends as much on broader approaches akin to those adopted in this book. As the successor volume to Norman Expansion: Connections, Continuities and Contrasts, it complements and significantly extends its findings to provide a fuller appreciation of the roles played by the Normans as one of the most dynamic and transformative forces in the history of medieval 'Outer Europe'. It includes panoramic essays that dissect the conceptual and methodological issues concerned, suggest strategies for avoiding associated pitfalls, and indicate how far and in what ways the Normans and their legacies served to reshape sociopolitical landscapes across a vast geography extending from the remoter corners of the British Isles to the Mediterranean basin. Leading experts in their fields also provide case-by-case analyses, set within and between different areas, of themes such as lordship and domination, identities and identification, naming patterns, marriage policies, saints' cults, intercultural exchanges, and diaspora–homeland connections.

The Normans and the 'Norman Edge' therefore presents a potent combination of thought-provoking overviews and fresh insights derived from new research, and its wide-ranging comparative focus has the advantage of illuminating aspects of the Norman past that traditional regional or national histories often do not reveal so clearly. It likewise makes a major contribution to current Norman scholarship by reconsidering the links between Norman expansion and 'state-formation'; the extent to which Norman practices and priorities were distinctive; the balance between continuity and innovation; relations between the Normans and the indigenous peoples and cultures they encountered; and, not least, forms of Norman identity and their resilience over time. An extensive bibliography is also one of this book's strengths.

1 Norman identity and the identity of Normandy, c.900–c.1300¹

Daniel Power

1 I am grateful to Simon John and Charles Rozier for their comments upon a draft of this article, and to the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust for supporting parts of the research upon which it is based.

The Normans are one of the most studied peoples of the Middle Ages, and their identity has been the subject of very extensive research.² The present chapter seeks to build upon that research by reviewing Norman identity in Normandy itself. This brief and avowedly selective survey is intended to provide context for studies of Normanitas and the activities of the Normans far from their homeland that formed the main concern of the Norman Edge project. It therefore will not reappraise the conclusions of the many excellent previous studies of Norman activity across Europe and the Mediterranean, but instead will concentrate upon the duchy of Normandy. After a preliminary consideration of medieval identities and the sources for them, the chapter will consider the changing meaning of ‘Norman’ between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, before offering an overview of possible distinguishing features of Norman identity.

2 The most significant, influential or best-known works include F. Lot, Fidèles ou vassaux? (Paris, 1904); H. Prentout, Essai sur les origines et la fondation du duché de Normandie (Caen, 1911); C.H. Haskins, Norman Institutions (Cambridge, MA, 1918); J.-F. Lemarignier, Recherches sur l’hommage en marche et les frontières féodales (Lille, 1945); D.C. Douglas, The Norman Achievement, 1050–1100 (London, 1969); M. de Boüard, Histoire de la Normandie (Toulouse, 1970); J. Le Patourel, The Norman Empire (Oxford, 1976); R.H.C. Davis, The Normans and their Myth (London, 1976); R.A. Brown, The Normans and the Norman Conquest (2nd edn, Woodbridge, 1985); D. Bates, Normandy before 1066 (London, 1982); E. Searle, Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, 840–1066 (Berkeley, CA, 1988); L. Musset, Nordica et Normannica (Paris, 1997); C. Potts, Monastic Revival and Regional Identity in Early Normandy (Woodbridge, 1997); L. Shopkow, History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Washington, DC, 1997); F. Neveux, La Normandie des ducs aux rois, XIe–XIIe siècle (Rennes, 1998); M. Chibnall, The Normans (Oxford, 2000); E. Albu, The Normans in their Histories: Propaganda, Myth and Subversion (Woodbridge, 2001); D. Crouch, The Normans: History of a Dynasty (London, 2002); P. Bauduin, La première Normandie (Xe–XIe siècle). Sur les frontières de la haute Normandie: identité et construction d’une principauté (Caen, 2004); N. Webber, The Evolution of Norman Identity, 911–1154 (Woodbridge, 2008); S. Burkhardt and T. Foerster (eds.), Norman Tradition and Transcultural Heritage: Exchange of Cultures in the ‘Norman’ Peripheries of Medieval Europe (Farnham, 2013); Stringer and Jotischky (eds.), Norman Expansion; D. Bates, The Normans and Empire (Oxford, 2013); M. Billoré, De gré ou de force: l’aristocratie normande et ses ducs (1150–1259) (Rennes, 2014); D. Bates and P. Bauduin (eds.), 911–2011: penser les mondes normands médiévaux (Caen, 2016); M. Hagger, Norman Rule in Normandy, 911–1144 (Woodbridge, 2017). For other works, see the following footnotes. I have not been able to consult T.H. Chadwick, ‘Normanitas Revisited: Reconsidering Norman Ethnicity, 996–1159’ (University of Exeter PhD thesis, 2017).

Medieval identities and ethnogenesis

The history of Normandy and the Normans was for long written within the straitjacket of nineteenth-century nationalist views of territory, peoples and customs. Such views depicted a clearly defined solid bloc of territory called Normandy that was occupied from the outset by a self-conscious people called the Normans, who derived their identity from the Vikings, followed a defined body of law called the customs of Normandy and spoke a uniform dialect of the langue d’oïl. Over the last half-century, that view of Norman identity has been fairly comprehensively demolished, although it lingers in popular works of history on both sides of the English Channel. Historians now have very different understandings of medieval narratives, documentary sources and ethnogenesis from those of their nineteenth-century predecessors. They also recognise that identities can be multiple, shifting according to context, and contested, and that identification as a member of a people must be set alongside other identities, whether social (especially, for the subject in hand, the status of knighthood and the dignity of being noble), religious, tenure of office or occupation, and so on.

Graham Loud’s 1981 article ‘The gens Normannorum: myth or reality?’ provides a convenient summary of the influences upon medieval authors when discussing identity, ranging from Old Testament descriptions of gentes and nationes to Sallust and Caesar and to Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies. Medieval authors usually depicted the members of a gens as sharing a common ancestry, even though the same writers recorded the careers and assimilation of individual immigrants.³ Just as important was a common origo legend. Dudo of Saint-Quentin and the Gesta Normannorum Ducum elevated the Normans to the respectability of a recognised gens by providing them with a legend concerning their origins. Dudo skilfully circumvented the problem of the Normans’ heterogeneity, as a mixture of Danes, Norwegians and Hiberno-Norse, Franks, Bretons and others, with the famous story of Rollo’s dream, in which the founder of Normandy saw a variety of birds becoming one flock through the waters of Christian baptism.⁴ Yet Sigbjørn Sønnesyn has noted that such an idea of a people’s past was by no means unique: other peoples from the ancient Romans onwards developed legends that recognised and even celebrated their diverse origins, and the transformation of diverse individuals into a new people lay at the heart of the Christian story itself.⁵

3 G.A. Loud, ‘The gens Normannorum: myth or reality?’, reprinted in his Conquerors and Churchmen in Norman Italy (Aldershot, 1999), chapter 1; cf. S. Reynolds, ‘Medieval origines gentium and the community of the realm’, reprinted in her Ideas and Solidarities of the Medieval Laity: England and Western Europe (Aldershot, 1995), chapter 2.

4 Dudo (Lair), pp. 146–7 = Dudo (Christiansen), pp. 29–30. See C. Potts, ‘Atque unum ex diversis gentibus populum effecit: historical tradition and the Norman identity’, ANS, 18 (1996), pp. 139–52; and, for a recent reappraisal of Rollo’s baptism in Dudo’s work, B. Pohl, Dudo of Saint-Quentin’s Historia ­Normannorum: Tradition, Innovation and Memory (York, 2015), pp. 203–15 (cf. pp. 225–31, for its reuse by later Norman historians). Rollo’s dream is similar to a vision attributed by Albert of Aachen to one of his fellow canons of Aachen concerning Godfrey de Bouillon, in which the birds represented the ‘pilgrims’ who flocked to Jerusalem on the First Crusade: AA, pp. 448–50 (brought to my attention by Simon John).

5 S.O. Sønnesyn, ‘The rise of the Normans as ethnopoiesis’, in Burkhardt and Foerster (eds.), Norman Tradition, pp. 203–18.

Furthermore, over the last forty years extensive research into the process of ethnogenesis in the centuries leading up to the rise of the Normans, from the late Roman Empire onwards, has dispelled traditional views of early medieval peoples as ‘tribes’ or as distinct biological groups, bred in a pure ‘Germanic’ world, which formed the ‘barbarian’ kingdoms from which the European system of nation-states evolved. The war-bands of the late Roman and post-Roman world were often very fluid entities, formed around successful warleaders, and both their own understanding of their identity and external descriptions were heavily influenced by Roman and Judeo-Christian concepts of gentes and nationes.⁶ The frontiers of the Roman Empire and the post-Roman polities have also been revealed as broad cultural zones, not clear-cut borders defined in territory and by ethnicity.⁷ This appreciation of the nature of early medieval identities gives greater importance to the attempts by authors to define groups and distinguish between them. While the main weight of this work has concerned the transition from the ancient to the medieval world, it has great significance for the later emergence of other groups, including the Normans and some of the peoples whom they encountered in their expansions during the central Middle Ages.⁸ The place of the Normans within changing Frankish or French identities, both within northern France and elsewhere, appears particularly problematic.

6 See, for example, W. Goffart, Barbarians and Romans, 418–584: The Techniques of Accommodation (Princeton, NJ, 1980); P. Amory, People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489–554 (Cambridge, 1997); P. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, NJ, 2002).

7 For example, D.H. Miller, ‘Frontier societies and the transition between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages’, in R.W. Mathisen and H.S. Sivan (eds.), Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 158–71.

8 Sønnesyn, ‘Rise of the Normans’, pp. 204–7, provides an extensive bibliography for early medieval debates, and notes its relevance for discussion of the Normans.

The problems of the sources for Norman identity

The problems of using medieval sources for understanding identities are familiar and are significant for the question of Normanitas across Europe. Firstly, do different types of sources produce different types of insights, thereby precluding comparison between them? For instance, can the conscious references to – and commentaries upon – Norman identity or characteristics in the narrative ...