Mark Hagger
Reader in Medieval History
 |
| For more of the author’s
work, see his most recent monograph |
The following paper comprises the text of a talk given during the Four Nations History Festival, held at Bangor on Friday and Saturday, 25–26 October 2019. The text remains more or less as it was when the paper was delivered—as will be all too obvious to the reader.
Before we get going on the question of what the Normans did for us, I need to say a few words about who the Normans were and whom I have taken the ‘us’ of the question to be.
The Normans were not a single people, but rather a recently concocted mix. The Normans were in part the Christianized descendants of the Vikings who had been settled at Rouen around 911 by King Charles the Simple, in part the Scandinavian settlers who had made their home in the north west of what would become Normandy during the tenth and eleventh centuries, and in part the indigenous Franks and Bretons who had come under the sway of the Norman dukes and their supporters. In other words, although we speak and write about ‘the Normans’ they did not all have a common origin. Instead, they simply all lived within the territory that recognized the rule of the Norman duke. Indeed, Normandy itself only appears from about 1020, and had yet to achieve its final form by the time the Normans conquered England. That would only occur round about 1120 under Henry I, third of the Norman kings and ruler of Normandy from 1106.[1]
The Normans were not a single people, but rather a recently concocted mix. The Normans were in part the Christianized descendants of the Vikings who had been settled at Rouen around 911 by King Charles the Simple, in part the Scandinavian settlers who had made their home in the north west of what would become Normandy during the tenth and eleventh centuries, and in part the indigenous Franks and Bretons who had come under the sway of the Norman dukes and their supporters. In other words, although we speak and write about ‘the Normans’ they did not all have a common origin. Instead, they simply all lived within the territory that recognized the rule of the Norman duke. Indeed, Normandy itself only appears from about 1020, and had yet to achieve its final form by the time the Normans conquered England. That would only occur round about 1120 under Henry I, third of the Norman kings and ruler of Normandy from 1106.[1]
