The Earl, the Kings, and the Chronicler

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Full Length ◽  
English History ◽  
Cultural Revival ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Merchant Class ◽  
History Of ◽  
William The Conqueror

This book is the first full length biography of Robert (c.1088 × 90–1147), grandson of William the Conqueror and eldest son of King Henry I of England (1100–35). He could not succeed his father because he was a bastard. Instead, as the earl of Gloucester, Robert helped change the course of English history by keeping alive the prospects for an Angevin succession through his leadership of its supporters in the civil war known as the Anarchy against his father’s successor, King Stephen (1135–54). The earl is one of the great figures of Anglo-Norman History (1066–1154). He was one of only three landed super-magnates of his day, a model post-Conquest great baron, Marcher lord, borough developer, and patron of the rising merchant class. His trans-Channel barony stretched from western Lower Normandy across England to South Wales. He was both product as well as agent of the contemporary cultural revival known as the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, bilingual, well educated, and a significant literary patron. In this last role, he is especially notable for commissioning the greatest English historian since Bede, William of Malmesbury, to produce a history of their times which justified the Empress Matilda’s claim to the English throne and Earl Robert’s support of it.

The Anglo-Norman Card of Adela of Blois

1990 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 569-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly A. LoPrete
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Real Power ◽  
Family Ties ◽  
Family Politics ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
William The Conqueror

Down through the twelfth century, politics were as much, if not more, the affairs of personalities and families as the affairs of state. One corollary of this premise is that certain women, as creators of family ties and managers of households, can be shown to have exercised more effective real power than traditional legal and institutional approaches to the medieval period have brought to light. As an instrument of long-term policy, marriage politics were fraught with uncertainties, but when dominant and powerful personages were able to capitalize on opportunities, the resultant alliances could prove effective in the realization of precise political aims. A re-examination of the available evidence for the career of Adela, daughter of William the Conqueror and countess of Blois, Chartres, and Meaux, from the perspective of family politics reveals that the Anglo-Norman – Thibaudian alliance, confirmed in her marriage to the eldest son of count Thibaud of Blois-Chartres, was actualized by Adela as an effective determinant of political action in the nearly twenty years she acted as the acknowledged head of the Thibaudian family.

Anglo-Norman Canonists of the Twelfth Century: An Introductory Study

Traditio ◽  
1951 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 279-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Kuttner ◽  
Eleanor Rathbone
Keyword(s):  
Early Development ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Country Of Origin ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
History Of ◽  
Established Fact ◽  
The Common

Among the various aspects of the operation of canon law in medieval England, the history of the Anglo-Norman school of canonists which flourished in the late twelfth and the early thirteenth centuries remains largely unexplored. Modern historians have frequently emphasized, to be sure, the eager interest which English churchmen of the twelfth century took in problems and issues of canon law; and it can now be considered an established fact that the English Church throughout this period was well abreast of the developments which everywhere resulted from the growing centralization of ecclesiastical procedure, from the work of Gratian and his school, and from the ever-increasing number of authoritative responses and appellate decisions rendered by the popes in their decretal letters. The importance of the system of delegate jurisdiction in the cases referred back by Rome to the country of origin has been noted, and so has the conspicuous number of twelfth-century English collections of decretals, which testifies to a particular zeal and tradition, among Anglo-Norman canonists, in supplementing Gratian's work by records of the new papal law. The problem, also, of the influence exercised by Roman and canon law on the early development of the Common Law is being discussed with growing interest among students of English legal and constitutional history.

Historical Outline and the Geography of ‘Anarchy’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver H. Creighton ◽  
Duncan W. Wright ◽  
Michael Fradley ◽  
Steven Trick
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Characteristic Feature ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
English Channel ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Asymmetric Warfare ◽  
Historical Outline ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
English Society

This chapter covers two areas: it provides a sketch of English society and landscape in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, and presents a year-by-year chronology of Stephen’s reign. At the point of Stephen’s accession to the throne in 1135, the longer-term impacts of the Norman Conquest on English society and landscape were still being played out. Ethnicity and identity in the period were fluid, and so mid-twelfth-century England was a developing Anglo-Norman state rather that a subjugated dominion. While ‘the Anarchy’ of Stephens reign is frequently styled as a civil war, the conflict was unusually complex and protracted, and involved more than two opposing sides. The period saw persistent asymmetric warfare on the borderlands of Wales, a succession of incursions from Scotland and Angevin invasions from across the English Channel, while a struggle for control of Normandy dominated the wider strategic landscape. The most characteristic feature of conflict during the period was an unprecedented series of internal rebellions, led by disloyal, disenfranchised or marginalised magnates and underlain by regional grievances.

The Audiences for English History in the Early Twelfth Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-103
Author(s):  
George Garnett
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
English History ◽  
Extensive Discussion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lay Experience ◽  
Vernacular History

Chapter 2 attempts to establish who the audience was for the sudden spate of books on the history of England, and about English saints, which appeared from the beginning of the twelfth century. The audience is shown to have been mainly but not exclusively monastic and clerical. There is extensive discussion of the circumstances in which books were read and listened to. Suggestions are made about lay audiences, particularly in the case of Gaimar’s (French) vernacular history of the English, and also about the influence of the lay experience on clerical authors. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s parody of the new genre of historical writing is considered in depth.

Making Waves in Lonely Parallel: Evelyn Scott and Virginia Woolf

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joyce E. Kelley
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
English History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Evelyn Scott ◽  
American Author ◽  
Point To Point ◽  
The Waves

This essay concerns the parallel careers of English author Virginia Woolf and American author Evelyn Scott, focusing primarily on Woolf’s novel The Waves (1931) and on Scott’s The Wave (1929), a historical novel about the American Civil War. Despite their strikingly similar titles, these modernist novels have never been compared, likely due to their very different subject matter. This essay posits that both authors felt that history should be told through accounts of ordinary people; though Woolf’s planned book project of telling English history through obscure lives was never completed, Scott’s The Wave tells the history of the Civil War by shifting through the perspectives of numerous characters as the war transfers energy from point to point, person to person. Woolf’s The Waves is similarly composed as a series of “soliloquies” of six individuals; both texts focus on the wave as a transfer of energy from character to character. Both authors further use the concept of the wave to demonstrate individuals as both alienated and part of a collective, focusing on the theme of subjective experience amid a larger tide of human history. While these women writers shared such points of tangency throughout their careers, they never met or corresponded.

The Twelfth-Century Civil War in Context: Assessment and Reassessment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver H. Creighton ◽  
Duncan W. Wright ◽  
Michael Fradley ◽  
Steven Trick
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Event Horizon ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Research Themes ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Distinct Event ◽  
Material Evidence ◽  
Material Record

This final chapter presents a self-contained overview of what the material evidence tells us about the twelfth-century civil war and its consequences. Issues with dating archaeological evidence to the period in question mean that conclusions must be cautious, but it seems clear that the Anarchy is not obviously identifiable in the material record as a distinct ‘event horizon’. Archaeology has much more to offer us in terms of illuminating the conduct and psychology of Anglo-Norman warfare and in showing how lordly identity was being transformed through the period, and how it was expressed through castle-building and ecclesiastical patronage. Consideration of these research themes and others can help extricate studies of the twelfth-civil war from the ‘anarchy or not?’ debate. In conclusion: the mid-twelfth century is best regarded not as an age of anarchy but as an age of transition.

Royal Responsibility in Anglo-Norman Historical Writing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily A. Winkler
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Individual Responsibility ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Perspective

It has long been established that the crisis of 1066 generated a florescence of historical writing in the first half of the twelfth century. This book presents a new perspective on previously unqueried matters: it investigates how historians’ individual motivations and assumptions produced changes in the kind of history written across the Conquest. It argues that responses to the Danish Conquest of 1016 and Norman Conquest of 1066 changed dramatically within two generations of the latter conquest. Repeated conquest could signal repeated failures and sin across the orders of society, yet early twelfth-century historians in England not only extract English kings and people from a history of failure, but also establish English kingship as a worthy office on a European scale. The book illuminates the consistent historical agendas of four historians: William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, John of Worcester, and Geffrei Gaimar. In their narratives of England’s eleventh-century history, these twelfth-century historians expanded their approach to historical explanation to include individual responsibility and accountability within a framework of providential history, making substantial departures from their sources. These historians share a view of royal responsibility independent both of their sources (primarily the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) and any political agenda that placed English and Norman allegiances in opposition. Although the accounts diverge widely in the interpretation of character, all four are concerned more with the effectiveness of England’s kings than with the legitimacy of their origins. Their new, shared view of royal responsibility represents a distinct phenomenon in England’s twelfth-century historiography.

III.—The Crowns of England

Archaeologia ◽  
1937 ◽  
Vol 86 ◽  
pp. 73-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. R. Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
English History ◽  
Popular Belief ◽  
History Of ◽  
Edward The Confessor ◽  
William The Conqueror

At only one period in English history was it thought that the country had no further use for crowns, and that brief seventeenth-century heresy led to an act which has since been deplored for nearly three hundred years—the destruction of the Regalia. The significance of this destruction is worth emphasizing at the outset, as it meant a real break in the history of the development of the crowns themselves. A general popular belief is that, up to this time, all the sovereigns from William the Conqueror onwards had been crowned with the crown of St. Edward the Confessor, and all those after the Rebellion used the new St. Edward's Crown made at the Restoration. But the matter is hardly as simple as that. Not only do we find references to, and pictures of, various other crowns, but the coronation crown in some descriptions sounds very unlike a Saxon diadem, and we find, besides, that the present St. Edward's Crown has by no means been used at every coronation since it was made.

Praising Mary

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kati Ihnat
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Virgin Birth ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Active Contribution

This chapter examines the monastic means of addressing Mary in prayer and song in order to highlight the active contribution made by monks in the Anglo-Norman sphere to her devotion as mother of mercy. It begins with a discussion of the various feasts that were celebrated in England in honor of Mary, including the feast of the Purification and the Byzantine feasts of Mary's Conception and Presentation in the Temple. It then considers how devotion to Mary was manifested in the liturgy through masses and offices that both replaced and supplemented the regular hours of the day. It also looks at how the liturgical celebration of Mary as a saint became supplemented in the twelfth century by new forms of prayer. Finally, it explains how the unbelief of Jews was exploited to emphasize the folly of refusing the virgin birth and Mary's redemptive role in the history of salvation.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 208-212
Author(s):  
John Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Full Length ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
English History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Made In

The conclusion brings together the arguments made in the book’s four central chapters, in order to show the unique contribution the book makes. As the first full-length book on the topic, it opens up a number of questions for future research, and the conclusion points towards rich areas of work which can build on the findings of the book and further enrich our understanding of a multilingual English history. It asks how the polyglot perspective might enrich and challenge areas of English history in this period: given the pervasiveness of multilingualism in the urban, diplomatic, religious, and mercantile spheres—and considering the existence of many individuals whose multilingualism left little written record—how can we write a history of this transformative period that is alive to the polyglot forces that shaped both England and English?

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