Norman Sicily tends to be discussed by historians in terms of regnal years and decades. This chapter broadens the agenda, both chronologically and geographically, aiming to throw light on the people who do not have a written history. An archaeological investigation of Sicily in particular offers an opportunity to study the effects of the Norman regime on the pre-existing population, showing how Muslim and Christian communities co-existed, and incidentally to point up the rewards of integrating bioarchaeological and biomolecular evidence into an historical narrative of the Middle Ages.

As a method of historical inquiry, archaeology has both advantages and disadvantages. One good reason for encouraging an archaeological approach has been voiced by R. Allen Brown: ‘In all the story of Norman achievement across Europe … one scarcely meets a Norman peasant or parish priest, but everywhere an aristocratic free-masonry of lords and knights, bishops and abbots, priors and monks.’ Archaeology investigates the experiences of the people without history, the silent majority, and can do it in arresting detail. However, the encounters are random, and in more ways than one. Importantly, archaeological legibility is variably affected by the particular material culture and its subsequent decay, providing countries today with accounts of their own heritage that are not strictly comparable, perhaps especially between northern and southern Europe. But a self-imposed difference in modern heritage laws has also become significant. The huge and revealing harvest of artefacts retrieved by metal-detectorists in England and Wales, where the practice is legal, is not matched by a similarly intensive mapping elsewhere. The 500 copper and lead-alloy brooches so far collected by metal detecting throughout the Danelaw, and recorded by the UK Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), shows how grass-roots identities could be signalled in Scandinavian England; but the recognition of a culturally Norman diaspora in the rest of Europe remains elusive.

Nevertheless, comparative studies can be helpful in defeating differences in survival and discerning common trends. Thus, for the present book, where the focus is on the degree to which the cultures of Norman Sicily were integrated or not, we thought it might be rewarding to compare the experience of Sicily with that of England using the available archaeological material. Looking at Sicily and England together, at opposite ends of the Norman hegemony, may also throw some light on how far it is possible to discuss a concept of Normanitas.