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Norman England: Anglo-Norman England
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In 1066, the most famous Norman leader, Duke William II of Normandy, conquered England. The invading Normans and their descendants replaced the Anglo-Saxons as the ruling class of England. After an initial period of resentment and rebellion, the two populations largely intermarried and merged, combining languages and traditions. Normans began to identify themselves as Anglo-Norman.Eventually, even this distinction largely disappeared in the course of the Hundred Years war, with the Anglo-Norman aristocracy increasingly identifying themselves as English. The Anglo-Norman language was considerably distinct from the French language; this was the subject of some humour by Geoffrey Chaucer. The Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Saxon languages eventually merged to form Middle English.
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The Norman conquest of England ... signalled a revolution in military styles and methods. The old Anglo-Saxon military elite began to emigrate, especially the generation next younger to that defeated at Hastings, who had no particular future in a country controlled by the conquerors. William (and his son, William Rufus), encouraged them to leave, as a security measure. The first to leave went mostly to Denmark and many of these moved on to join the Varangian Guard in Constantinople. But the Anglo-Saxons as a whole were not demilitarized; this would have been impractical. Instead, William arranged for the Saxon infantry to be trained up by Norman cavalry in anti-cavalry tactics.
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The Norman conquest of England ... signalled a revolution in military styles and methods. The old Anglo-Saxon military elite began to emigrate, especially the generation next younger to that defeated at Hastings, who had no particular future in a country controlled by the conquerors. William (and his son, William Rufus ), encouraged them to leave, as a security measure. The first to leave went mostly to Denmark and many of these moved on to join the Varangian Guard in Constantinople . But the Anglo-Saxons as a whole were not demilitarized, which would have been impractical. Instead, William arranged for the Saxon infantry to be trained up by Norman cavalry in anti-cavalry tactics. This led quickly to the establishment of an Anglo-Norman army made up of Norman horsemen of noble blood, Saxon infantrymen often of equally noble blood, assimilated English freemen as rank-and-file, and foreign mercenaries and adventurers from other parts of the Continent.
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On Danish-English coexistence, see David Wilson, "Danish Kings and England in the Late 10th and early 11th Centuries-Economic Implications," Proceedings of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies, 3 (1980), pp. 188-96 and A. Williams, "Cockles Among the Wheat: Danes and English in the West Midlands in the First Half of the Eleventh Century," Midland History, 11 (1986), pp. 1-22.
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Conventional accounts of the status of French in later medieval England (henceforth referred to for convenience as ‘Anglo-Norman’, and abbreviated to ‘AN’) represent it as a language in decline, without native speakers, and increasingly felt to be inferior to continental French. A challenge to this view is the burgeoning of text types using AN during the 14th century, ranging from chronicles to petitions, central and regional administrative documents, business correspondence, charters etc. Though the standard of French used in such texts has often been dismissed as poor and non-nativelike, careful examination of their syntactic features shows that in certain specific respects (main constituent order, object pronoun position in non-finite clauses, use of the indefinite aucun in negative clauses) AN between 1250 and 1350 followed changes in continental French syntax. AN was clearly not a fossilised remnant of the language brought over with the Conqueror in 1066, but continued to develop over the subsequent period. This raises the question of how it was transmitted in later medieval England, if it was not a native language.
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The best general survey is Judith A. Green, The aristocracy of Norman England (1997), while David Crouch, The image of aristocracy in Britain, 1000-1300 (1992), is interesting on the broad cultural context. The key monographs are John le Patourel, The Norman Empire (1976); Peter Clarke, The English nobility under Edward the Confessor (1994); and Robin Fleming, Kings and lords of Conquest England (1991), which should be read after Peter H. Sawyer, '1066-1086: a tenurial revolution' in Domesday Book: a reassessment, edited by Peter H. Sawyer (1986), pages 71-85. Robin Fleming, 'Domesday Book and the tenurial revolution' Anglo-Norman Studies 9 (1987), pages 87-102 is not entirely replaced by her book. In addition, Chris P. Lewis, 'The early earls of Norman England', Anglo-Norman studies, vol. 13 (1991), pages 207-23, has some interesting observations on the titled aristocracy before and after the Conquest. F.M. Stenton, The first century of English feudalism (second edition, 1961), is important for the great feudal honors, a subject upon which Sidney Painter, History of the English feudal barony (1943), still has some value.
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