Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- List of Illustrations
- Editor’s Preface
- The Participation of Aquitanians in the Conquest of England 1066-1100
- Stereotype Normans in Old French Vernacular Literature
- Byzantine Marginalia to the Norman Conquest
- Appendix: The Latin-Greek Wordlist in Ms. 236 of the Municipal Library of Avranches, fol. 97v
- The Effect of the Conquest on Norman Architectural Patronage
- Domesday Book and the Tenurial Revol
- Henry of Huntingdon and the Manuscripts of his Historia Anglorum
- ‘No Register of Title’: The Domesday Inquest and Land Adjudication
- The Abbey of Cava, its Property and Benefactors in the Norman Era
- Condigna Veneratio: Post-Conquest Attitudes to the Saints of the Anglo-Saxons
- The Danish Geometrical Viking Fortresses and their Context
- The Holy Face of Lucca
Stereotype Normans in Old French Vernacular Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- List of Illustrations
- Editor’s Preface
- The Participation of Aquitanians in the Conquest of England 1066-1100
- Stereotype Normans in Old French Vernacular Literature
- Byzantine Marginalia to the Norman Conquest
- Appendix: The Latin-Greek Wordlist in Ms. 236 of the Municipal Library of Avranches, fol. 97v
- The Effect of the Conquest on Norman Architectural Patronage
- Domesday Book and the Tenurial Revol
- Henry of Huntingdon and the Manuscripts of his Historia Anglorum
- ‘No Register of Title’: The Domesday Inquest and Land Adjudication
- The Abbey of Cava, its Property and Benefactors in the Norman Era
- Condigna Veneratio: Post-Conquest Attitudes to the Saints of the Anglo-Saxons
- The Danish Geometrical Viking Fortresses and their Context
- The Holy Face of Lucca
Summary
EN Normandie a gent mult fiere,
jo ne sai gent de tel maniere,
chevaliers sunt proz e vaillant
par totes terres conquerant.
Se Normant ont bon chevetaigne
mult fait a entendre lor compaigne
se il nen ont de siegnor crieme
que les destreigne e aprieme
tost en avra nialvas servise,
Normant ne sunt proz saint justise
foler e plaisier les covient
se reis soz piez toz tens les tient,
e qui bien les defolt e palgne,
d’els povra faire sa besoigne.
Orgueillos sent Normant e fier
e vanter e boubancier,
toz tens les devreit Fen plaisier,
ker mult sunt fort a justisier
mult a a faire e a penser
Robert, qui deit tel gent garder,
Wace, Le Roman de Rou, III, 9114—35
If this image of the Normans as proud, restless warriors seems familiar, this should not surprise us, Wace was an unashamed propagandist drawing on, a wide range of Norman and Anglo-Norman sources which chronicled the establishment of Normandy and the expeditions of expansion. By synthesising these views in the vernacular, did he intend to popularise them, to make them more accessible to a wider audience? For how far were the inhabitants of Normandy, or their descendants in their far-flung conquests, seen as possessing special virtues by observers in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries?
R. H. C, Davis has suggested that Nortnanitas, a sense of racial and cultural self-identity, producing a group with a mission of conquest, was a myth, He identifies a process of justification after the event and image creation at its height in the middle of the twelfth century. This interpretation has been challenged by G, A, Loud, here at Battle, who cites examples of a self-conscious gens Normannorumf especially amongst the conquerors of Italy, well before the compilatory works of Orderic Vitalis, Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury, Both he and M. Chibnall stress the oral nature of many of the legends that made up Norman history recorded by the chroniclers. Two detailed stories in Orderic: Bohemond’s adventure with a Muslim princess, and the description of the battle Fraga (1134), bear all the hallmarks of having been transmitted in romance form.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Anglo-Norman Studies IXProceedings of the Battle Conference 1986, pp. 25 - 42Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 1987