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Normans Archive
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Conquest, Contact, and Convention: Simulating the Norman Invasion’s Impact on Linguistic Usage
Posted on March 11, 2013 | No CommentsHow do conventions arise? Lewis adressed this in his work Convention via signaling games, a mathematical model of communication where a sender sends a message to a receiver who then interprets it. When we say conventions, we mean by that a system of coor- dinated behavior pairing information states with actions -
The earls in Henry the Second’s reign
Posted on March 10, 2013 | No CommentsThe earldoms of Henry Ills reign can only be understood in the context of their history. The roots of the nature of earldoms in Henry II's reign stretch back beyond the Norman Conquest to England and the Continent before 1066. It was the combination of these two traditions that shaped many of the features of the earldom under the Norman and early Angevin kings of England. -
Widows in Anglo-Saxon England
Posted on March 3, 2013 | No CommentsOwing to a fairly large number of mainly vernacular codes of law that have survived, we are in a position to see at least how in legislation the position of women in general, but also of widows in particular, was defined. -
“The Wrath of the Northmen”: The Vikings and their Memory
Posted on March 2, 2013 | No CommentsThese raiding peoples emerge out of all three Scandinavian homelands--Norway, Sweden, and Denmark--sending off their young men all over the known world in search of wealth and prestige. -
The Papal Bulls for the Invasions of England and Ireland
Posted on January 13, 2013 | No CommentsJohn has represented his master's enterprise in the very best light, making him out as an enthusiast for the reformation of the lax moral and ecclesiastical condition of Ireland. -
Matrimonial politics and core-periphery interactions in twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Scotland
Posted on December 31, 2012 | No CommentsThe medieval kingdom of Scotland was a rich amalgam of diverse ethnic elements which reflected the turbulent history of the first millennium of its development. -
Aspects of the English royal succession, 1066-1199: the death of the king
Posted on December 28, 2012 | No CommentsThe death of any ruler in the twelfth century, even if it were expected, caused a considerable amount of shock and disquiet amongst those who were left behind. -
England: One Country, Two Courts
Posted on December 26, 2012 | No CommentsThe tension created by the two-court system is an integral part of England’s administrative and constitutional history. Exactly how integral has generated a considerable amount of scholarly work, from explanations of the sources of the conflict, to how the disagreement over jurisdiction was addressed throughout the Middle Ages, to what impact the issue had in shaping England’s overall political development. -
King and magnate in medieval Ireland: Walter de Lacy, King Richard and King John
Posted on December 17, 2012 | No CommentsPerhaps the best way to capture the essence of the relationship between Richard, John and their magnates is to focus on one such relationship and to analyse the changes it underwent over the twenty-seven years the two brothers ruled England. The career of Walter de Lacy provides an excellent opportunity for such an analysis. -
Trickster, Convert, Martyr, Saint: Four Ways of Dying in Dudo of St. Quentin’s History of the Normans
Posted on December 16, 2012 | No CommentsI want to push this a bit further here and argue that Dudo was aiming to produce something that we might term sacramentary history, to show the three-fold interaction of the linear time experienced by fallen humanity, the cyclical time in which events are continually re-enacted and foreshadowed in the sacraments, and the unchanging eternity of time as experienced by God. -
“At the Tip of a Sword”: A Study of the Introduction of the Knight into Anglo-Saxon England
Posted on November 21, 2012 | No CommentsNevertheless the introduction of the knight into England still remains a controversial topic of discussion among military historians, since the people who inhabited England prior to 1066 were part of warrior culture as well: the Anglo-Saxons. -
Threads of resistance to the post-conquest Kings of Norman Descent
Posted on November 20, 2012 | No CommentsProduced almost 250 years after first contact with the Norman colonizer, the exclusive use of Middle English was a subversive choice that challenged the Norman claim to power and criticized the post-Conquest kings of Norman descent while working to re-make and re-claim an 'English' identity. -
The Knighting of Henry, son of William the Conqueror, in 1086
Posted on November 19, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper was part of SESSION VIII: Power & Politics in the Long Twelfth Century, at the Haskins Conference at Boston College. -
Comital Authority, Accountability and the Personnel of Comital Administration in Greater Anjou, 1129-51
Posted on November 19, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper was part of SESSION VIII:Power & Politics in the Long Twelfth Century. It examined the charters of Geoffrey of -
The Archaeology of Colonialism in Medieval Ireland: Shifting Patterns of Domination and Acculturation
Posted on November 19, 2012 | No CommentsThis project seeks to identify the processes at work in Scandinavian and Anglo- Norman colonialism in Ireland, and their interaction with the landscape, by examining the impact of each phase of activity on the settlement pattern in two representative case-study regions. The successes, failures, similarities and differences of Scandinavian and Anglo-Norman settlement and society in Ireland are examined and compared in this project in terms of three sub-phases of the overall process, namely expansion, consolidation and domination, within an overall developmental diachronic framework. -
Medieval Book History Week Lecture: “Practical Latin and Formal English in the 14th-15th Centuries”
Posted on November 13, 2012 | No CommentsThis lecture is part of Medieval Book History Week. Renown Professor Jeremy Catto spoke about literacy and language in England during the later Middle Ages at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto. -
The Lands and ‘Sisterlands’ of Aberdour, c.1100-1650
Posted on October 13, 2012 | No CommentsOf the lands in Aberdour, we begin in very uncertain time long before the Sisterlands became such and a period from which few documents are available. It is thought that shortly after 1100 some of the lands in what was later to become the burgh of Aberdour came to be held by a Norman-French family, the Viponts. -
The Librarius and Libraire as Witnesses to the Evolving Book Trade in Ducal Brittany
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsIn monasteries and cathedrals of the medieval West, the « custos librariae » functioned primarily as a custodian or keeper of bound codices, and we see a similar role emerge from extant medieval registers from Breton cathedral chapters. -
The Fall of the Angevin Empire
Posted on October 5, 2012 | No CommentsA damned inheritance, hopelessly over-extended and out-resourced by the kings of France? Or an effective empire thrown away by incompetence and harshness? John Gillingham weighs the blame for John's loss of the Angevin dominions. -
A Historiography of Chastity in the Marriage of Edith of Wessex and Edward the Confessor
Posted on October 4, 2012 | No CommentsWhile records of Edith's life and her marriage to Edward are poor, the historiography of those who narrated her life after her death is rich. In some ways, the historiography of her life was directly related to that of her husband's. -
BOOK REVIEW: Edric the Wild
Posted on October 2, 2012 | No CommentsA book review of the new release "Edric the Wild", by Jayden Woods -
God, Gold, or Glory: Norman Piety and the First Crusade
Posted on September 18, 2012 | No CommentsThe Normans remain as the standard bearer of the pre-revisionist interpretation of crusader motives - for gold and glory, but not for God. However, examination of the evidence does not bear this distinction out. -
Anglo-Norman defence strategy in selected English border and maritime counties, 1066-1087
Posted on August 22, 2012 | No CommentsElla Armitage's analysisof early Norman castles in 1912 provides a clear espousalof this view, in particular her statement that in England the reasonsfor the erection of mottes seem to have been manorial rather than military; that is, the Norman landholder desired a safe residence for himself amidst a hostile peasantry, rather than a strong military position which could hold out against skilful and well-armed foes. -
Many Motives: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Reasons For His Falsification of History
Posted on August 19, 2012 | No CommentsIt is clear to most modern historians who have studied Geoffrey’s Historia that its contents bear little to no resemblance to real events. Even in Geoffrey’s own lifetime many historians condemned the work. -
A Companion and Guide to the Norman Conquest
Posted on August 19, 2012 | No CommentsPeter Bramley’s beautifully illustrated field guide and companion to the Norman Conquest gives full details of both the events and the personalities associated with each of these sites, together with the historical background and the reasons for the end of Anglo-Saxon rule.