‘Nancy boys and reluctant warriors’: War, Defeatism and Challenging Masculinity in Anglo-Norman England
Volume 3 | Issue 6 - War & Peace
Article by Liz Goodwin. Edited by Tom Hartley.
Barely months after the catastrophic defeat of King Harold I’s army at the Battle of Hastings, Norman chroniclers seemingly couldn’t resist rubbing salt into the cultural wound. William of Poitiers, providing one of the first accounts, announced that the English warriors ‘(yielded) nothing to the beauty of girls.’ The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio goes one further, describing Harold’s army as ‘nancy-boys… [and] reluctant warriors, …[with] combed and anointed hair.’ After the annihilation of their army and the abject disgrace of defeat and colonisation, the English suffer yet another blow; the storytellers of Norman history would label their humiliation as their inherent ‘girlie-ness.’
They are the first in a series of cuttingly satirical comments to link military defeat, a lack of masculinity and a failing national identity to the inhabitants of a country literally and figuratively emasculated by crushing armed conquest. Complicating the matter, though, and arousing further passions and tensions between conquered and conquerors, was that their masculinities differed almost entirely from each others. Provoking both sides to reiterate, reconfigure and adjust their conceptions of just what made a true man, the questions and anxieties over masculinity ‘reached a new level of intensity in the Anglo-Norman world,’ amidst a ‘context of conquest, victory and defeat.’
So what had the English defined as true masculinity? The answer lies between the submissive, sacrificed Anglo-Saxon king St Edmund and the more recognisable military heroism displayed in Beowulf, ‘the strongest man alive.’ Edmund’s hagiographer Ælfric relates that his subject is a great king, and a great man, through his immovable intention to live like Christ. After refusing to convert from Christianity, Edmund’s head was cut off, but remained able to speak, rendering his death almost entirely useless. In ‘throwing away his weapons wishing to imitate Christ’s example,’ his murder by rampaging Vikings was not simply passive or weak, but instead, through its self-imposition, rendered his pagan persecutors ‘impotent’ in their ability to challenge him. Beowulf, the manuscript of which dates to the eleventh century, furthermore, continues this rendered image of Christ triumphant with that of Christ militant as his military heroism merely only responds to Grendel’s aggression, challenging violence that is channelled into the ‘production of death.’ The discovery of Christian symbols and phrasing on Anglo-Saxon weaponry further establishes the mentality that their masculinity was symbolically Christ-like in its militarism; sacred, not powerless.
Across the Channel, Norman masculinity was conceived very differently. It was a complex and contradictory mix of piety, military expansionism and, as the conquering generation would be judged in subsequent years, true national triumphalism. In having the blessing of God and going into England under the banner of the Pope, the Normans embodied the Gregorian Reform ideal of men and maleness. One such ideal was the cropped hair and clean shaven face of a cleric, a physical manifestation not lost of William the Conqueror. William of Malmsebury would later write that an English scout, on seeing the Duke’s invading army, said that ‘almost everyman in William’s army seemed to be a priest.’ Yet their military ambition and self-assertion of themselves as a unique fighting force provided another strand to their masculine culture: Orderic Vitalis points out that everywhere they went, ‘they strove to rule,’ and in the absence of more tangible cultural identification, military success became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy of conquering Christianity.
The Anglo-Saxons of the late eleventh century were, by the accounts of the Normans and by themselves, conquered, subordinated, repressed and absolutely emasculated. In a albeit romanticised account of the conquest, Baudri of Bourgueil gives William a battle speech that not only undermines the military prowess of the defeated English (“a very unwarlike people,” or gens) but also poetically ties in their feminisation with the description (“a womanly type,” or genus). Any resistance to Norman rule we know would fail. Why, then, is an Anglo-Saxon resistance fighter hailed as a hero of their failed masculinity? The Gesta Herewardi’s protagonist is, according to Thomas, ‘the most striking response to the image of Norman superiority in war.’ Hereward the Wake, ‘reckoned the most distinguished of all – a notable warrior among the most noble,’ represents all that is aristocratic, chivalric and militaristically strong, in the face of the Norman’s ‘slapstick’ efforts of armed force, alongside their moral and intellectual inferiority. He is an Anglo-Saxon, yet also the embodiment of the masculine values held by the Normans. The Anglo-Saxon resistance, though it could not fight its emasculation physically, protected English masculinity (and the pride and honour it was so closely related to) against negative and feminine stereotypes through literature.
Yet English masculinity was not without its own critics. It was through religious reasoning that the Anglo-Saxon’s favoured long hair styles came to be blamed for their defeat. Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester is meant to have started cutting men’s hair in a prophetic realisation before 1066 that if the English would ‘grow their hair like women… [they] would be defeated like women.’ The conquest was seen by some as a punishment for the lazy, effete nature of the English, and their feminine, anti-clerical, long hair styles were a clear and tangible representation of their sins and of their failed masculinity.
Unsurprisingly, in their triumphalism, the Norman sources consistently undermined English military skill, comparing themselves and their masculinity favourably by contrast. The Bayeux Tapestry gives a visual example of some of the cruder gender insults handed out, showing marginal sexual scenes in which animals were, quite literally, being screwed. Yet subsequent generations would not continue this proud masculine line. For William of Malmsebury, the moral decay of William II’s court and kingship was represented by the ‘long flowing hair,’ ‘luxurious garments’ and accusations of sodomy, directly related to displaying a ‘softness of the body rivalling the weaker sex.’
To his mind, it was exactly this kind of femininity that had caused the Conquest in the first place. William II would always fall short of the expectations set by the heroics and ideals of his predecessor, and they were expectations addressed and expressed through gender definition.
In 1105, William II’s successor Henry I prepared to defend his Anglo-Norman country against his brother by having his, and his court’s hair shorn. He took the moral high ground by following Bishop Serlo’s advice, recorded by Orderic Vitalis – ‘All of you wear your hair in women’s fashion, which is not seemly for you who are made in the image of God and ought to use your strength like men.’ Christianity, military defence and national pride were bound up and asserted in masculinity, just as it had been for decades previously. Bishop Serlo’s words spoke to every man equally, and in 1105, ‘as sons of their fathers, as courtiers, Normans and men.’ Masculinity, therefore, inspired greater feelings than simply a kind of one-upmanship machismo. Essential to the correctness and assertion of faith, necessary for military success and the subsequent continuation of national identity and way of life, conceptions of masculinity allow an insight into defeatism, triumphalism and cultural mindset of the men for whom such definitions meant everything.