'Bastard Normans! Norman Bastards!' 

Article by Gem Wheeler. Edited by Rose Colville. Additional Research by Robyn Hall. 

The Duke of Bourbon’s immortal outburst in Henry V was intended to depict French aristocratic disdain towards the ‘barbarian’ English invader of 1415. To modern readers, however, it is perhaps of more significance in relation to the attitudes of Shakespeare and his contemporaries towards their own fearsome ancestors. Within the complex web of ethnic relationships at the heart of medieval English cultural identity, the Normans and their appropriation of power remain mysterious. A major reason behind the strange invisibility of the ‘victors’ of 1066 is, no doubt, the dismissive and even contemptuous approach to Anglo Norman historiography taken by many modern writers on the subject. In contrast with the Latin histories of the period, the earliest vernacular historical writing is pushed aside as entertaining fiction, a blend of worthless, romance-influenced fable and confusing half-truth. Even Anglo-Norman itself, committed to writing well before its continental French relation, has often been described as an ‘inferior’ form of the language. How did these people – Scandinavian in origin, influenced by France in their culture and language, and destined to find their home in England – view themselves? 

Writers who have sidelined Anglo-Norman historiography for its inaccuracies and ‘derivative’ nature have tended to ignore the overwhelming significance of translatio studii. This ‘art of rewriting’ was the pivot on which medieval historiography turned, reliant on the decomposition of source materials and their restructuring as a ‘new’ work. Medieval notions of plagiarism and emulation were wholly different from modern viewpoints. Historiographers were influenced by writers such as Macrobius and Jerome, who advocated such methods of composition as the ideal means of achieving a work that was greater than the sum of its parts. A framework would be constructed by extracting relevant information from a source text, before clothing the bare bones in an intricate covering of new material – some of it original, some of it derived from other, related sources. Modern scholars such as Peter Damian-Grint and Ian Short have made much of the Old French term estoire, which can mean either ‘history’ or ‘story’. It is essential to remember that the lines of demarcation between history and fiction are so blurred as to be almost non-existent; an appropriately hybrid literary form for a people finding their own identity in a world turned upside down by conquest. 

All this was of great value to Norman historiographers. Writers chose to work in Anglo-Norman to appeal to a wider, court-based audience, but the use of that language also enabled them to recast their source material to fit their narrative aims. We might look in vain, however, for direct discussion of the Normans and their relationship with the vanquished Saxons in verse histories such as Wace’s Roman de Brut (History of the British). The Normans were evidently curious about the history of their adopted land, and, perhaps more importantly, in their own place within its story. Wace, a Jersey-born cleric working on his history in the early 1150s, had every reason to craft his history of the Britons in the heady days immediately following the accession of Henry II. His source, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s immensely popular – and, with its many dubious ‘facts’, immensely controversial – Historia Regum Britanniae had captured the imagination with tales of Arthur and his knights, King Lear and his daughters, and the wicked Vortigern, among others. Wace shifted Geoffrey’s perspective to depict the British as a people moving from pagan barbarism to Christianised civilisation, only to finally lose control of their land as they bred with an enemy – the Saxons, here depicted as rapacious and duplicitous pagans who, after their adoption of the new faith, begin their own cycle of cultural development, running parallel with the British descent into moral degeneracy. Using the technique of rewriting, Wace incorporated covert references to contemporary events in his long poem. Arthur and Guinevere provide obvious parallels with Henry II and his glamorous consort, the already legendary Eleanor of Aquitaine; however, the wicked Mordret who steals the queen and the kingdom is a thinly-veiled depiction of Stephen of Blois, the ‘usurper’ who had taken Henry’s mother’s crown for himself. No one-to-one correspondence between fictional character and real historical figure is ever established. Yet, for those ‘in the know’, such references provided an almost conspiratorial relationship with the poet, and lent a certain dreamlike quality to the narrative. Reading the Brut now, we feel as if we are swimming on a tide of uncertain, half-formed references. Now and again, our feet touch the bedrock of fact, only for it to dissipate beneath us once more as Wace throws yet another curveball. The overall message, however, is clear; the king of legend will return to lead his people to salvation in a new utopia. Henry had large shoes to fill. 

The Roman de Brut is a remarkable work; faction of the highest order, providing an optimistic look at a new Plantagenet future under a ruler with both Norman and Saxon blood in his veins. This ‘bastard’ people made a virtue of their hybrid status, rewriting and recrafting their history to fit a new narrative. Kingdoms fall, pledges are broken, yet the land itself remains eternal as the cycle of loss and renewal continues forever. The Normans could justify their appropriation of England by casting the Saxons in the role of the ‘degenerate’ Britons, yet Wace was careful to point out the pitfalls that could have seen them, too, overwhelmed by another invader more favoured by God. As we read the vernacular histories of this time, it is difficult not to draw parallels with a later era. Edward Said located the origins of Anglophone imperialism in Henry II’s expansion into Ireland, but the imperial mentality common to most European peoples must surely have begun even earlier, as they neutralised resistance within their new territories. The victors saw themselves as winners in a divine lottery, judged worthy to seize a kingdom by force. Within a mindset that facilitated the justification of conquest and the imposition of the successful culture, the echoes in Wace’s work are not just of a mythical past, but of a very real imperial future. Behind every victorious people depicted in twelfth-century historiography, the apparently invisible Normans cast a long shadow.

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