This chapter examines elements of French-language culture in Britain between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries which reveal the cross-Channel ties fostered by a shared language. It focuses on the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut (ANPB), part of a medieval historiographical tradition charting British history from its origins to the contemporary era, considering it alongside related texts such as Wace’s Brut and the Roman des Franceis of André de Coutances. Surviving in over fifty manuscripts, along with more than 200 copies in English translation, the ANPB influenced the development of English historical consciousness up to and beyond the time of John Milton. The shifting of borders throughout the Middle Ages means that the terms ’England’ and ’France’ need to be understood as more mobile than the modern nation states they designate. From the Norman Conquest in particular, the Channel became as much a conduit as a barrier to cultural and political cohesion. Through the French-language Brut tradition, the chapter considers how Britain’s history was contextualized for literate English society within the wider cross-Channel environment of Anglo-French cultural and political entanglements.

From the first century AD, Cambridge was raided, invaded and settled by different groups of people from overseas, for about a thousand years. The author charts how Cambridge changed, grew and shifted geographically: from Roman fort on Castle Hill to Anglo-Saxon town trading on Market Hill; from Viking port by Quayside to Norman stronghold with a motte and bailey castle on Castle Mound, occupied by the much-loathed Sheriff Picot. Local resistance fighters Boudicca and Hereward the Wake are included. Stephanie Boyd draws on evidence ranging from landmarks such as Devil’s Dyke, to local place-names and a rare bed burial at Trumpington Meadows, to piece together a picture of life in the local area more than a thousand years ago.

This chapter explores the effect of the Norman Conquest as well as looking at the developments during the Norman period as a whole during the reigns of William I (1066–87), William II (1087–1100), Henry I (1100–35) and Stephen (1135–54). It falls into three sections. The first provides an overview of the main effects of 1066 in terms of law and order. The second and main section then discusses in detail what is often considered to be the most significant development under the Normans, the feudal system, and how this impacted upon law and order. Feudalism actually undermined the development of a common law by feudal lords presiding over their own feudal courts for their tenants. The king’s law and protection was only afforded to his own personal tenants. The third section then focuses upon two aspects that are often overlooked in accounts of the effect of the Conquest: the effect of the Norman era upon the position of slaves and women. The importance of the later Norman kings will be the focus of the conclusion.

William I’s ‘Harrying of the North’ was a military expedition against local rebels and a Danish invasion force in the winter of 1069–70. It has been regarded since the 1870s as a uniquely savage treatment of the English inhabitants of northern England, wantonly destructive of life and the means of sustenance, and tantamount to genocide. Such views derive from the two fullest medieval accounts, by the early twelfth-century historians Symeon of Durham and Orderic Vitalis. However, neither was an eye-witness, both were at work two generations later, and both had their own agenda in describing the destruction of the North and William I’s cruelty. The Harrying should instead be seen as a routine military operation which took place, unusually, in the depths of winter, and so had unusually severe consequences. More strictly contemporary accounts from Evesham and Beverley reveal a regional but probably localized famine and a refugee crisis. Further, the record in Domesday Book (1086) of many Yorkshire villages as ‘waste’ should be read as referring not to physical destruction but to the absence of surplus values accruing to landlords, and not caused by the Harrying alone. The Harrying of the North was no genocide.

The book’s final chapter argues that the various elements of fairy belief as we might recognise it, including belief in an underground otherworld inhabited by sometimes pygmy-sized otherworlders, the connection between fairies and fate, and the sexual aspects of fairy activity, were brought together as a direct result of the Norman Conquest. The key role played in the Conquest by Breton nobles who felt a cultural affinity with the Cornish and Welsh, combined with the Normans’ desire to escape the English past, resulted in the crafting of a new ‘British’ identity for the whole island of Great Britain by authors with a Brittonic cultural background such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gerald of Wales and Walter Map. These authors united elements of English and Brittonic folklore to fashion a new fairy world that was subsequently adopted as the setting for literary romances and became the background to late medieval popular belief.

Chapter 2 explores the reshaping of English history by Latin historiographers writing in the wake of the Norman Conquest. These historians sought to incorporate the Conquest’s political rupture into seamless histories that intimated a longstanding English nation. At the forefront of this movement was William of Malmesbury. In his writing, William, however, must confront the regionalism or “northern-ness” of his chief source and inspiration, Bede, the venerable “Father of English History.” This chapter analyses how William labors to deaden Bede’s northern-ness and, further, how William engages the ruinous North of England, still smouldering from King William I’s “Harrying of the North” in 1069–70. In this destruction of the North, born of its rebelliousness, William of Malmesbury finds a startling microcosm for England. William recalls the North’s glorious Roman past, evident in the wrecked buildings of Roman vintage, that darkly forecast for the Wiltshire monk the potential failures of the larger English nation, such that it will become a ruin itself much like the city of Rome in Hildebert of Lavardin’s poem “par tibi Roma nihil,” which William quotes extensively in his work.

This prologue introduces the volume with some suggestions on how to study the age of William the Conqueror in the light of recent and ongoing developments in higher education.

Cultural relations between Brittany and Wales seem to have grown more distant in the ninth to eleventh centuries. The Norman Conquest, involving Bretons alongside Normans, revitalised these connections and in particular greatly raised the profile of Bretons in Wales. The attempt by the clergy of Dol in Brittany to make their see an archbishopric encouraged similar ambitions on the part of the churches of St Davids and Llandaf in south Wales. Sharing of pseudo-historical information between the clergy of Llancarfan (Wales) and Quimperlé (Brittany) created the conditions for Geoffrey of Monmouth to write (by 1139) his hugely influential ‘History of the Kings of Britain’. Geoffrey encouraged the opinion-formers of his time to see the Britons as a single people – not necessarily to the advantage of the Breton elite, who were part of French chivalric society in political fact, but who could be cast in the literary role of ‘barbarians’. This view of the Bretons reached a climax in the 1160s and 1170s when Breton revolt menaced the ‘Angevin empire’ of King Henry II of England, but became less relevant after 1203 when the Breton nobility transferred their allegiance to the king of France. The paths of Wales and Brittany then diverged, to judge by the comparatively slight role that Brittany played in the Welsh learned and literary tradition in the later Middle Ages.

Eljas Oksanen has recently explored how Flemings dynamized the economy of the English Channel basin in the century after the Norman conquest, acting as traders and settlers in eastern England, linked by its short crossing and its topography to the deep inlets of the Flemish coast. This essay considers the more fragmentary evidence for Flemish activity in south-west Britain in the same period. Urban charters and Domesday evidence attest to Flemish settlers on all three coasts of the peninsula forming the gateway to the Irish Sea trading zone. It argues that the Flemish incumbents who directed western bishoprics in the eleventh century, or the enclave that Henry I famously granted to the Flemings in Rhos, Pembrokeshire, should be understood not in isolation, but as relatively visible manifestations of a wider pattern of population movement, albeit on a more modest scale than its easterly counterpart. The evidence for trade, settlement, integration and exploration in the towns of the Irish Sea zone indicates a dynamism and an energy which repays investigation, not least as a route to understanding the leading role of Flemish adventurers in the later conquests of Wales and Ireland.

This chapter traces foundations for the organizing framework of the modern nation-state to post-Conquest England. Feudalism was essential, as institutionalized in the royal prerogative, administrative kingship, and covenantal social bonds. I focus on the historical factors that made England distinctive, in this period, both in the intensity of its feudal structures and in the strength of royal, prerogative powers. I argue that a unique combination of Anglo-Saxon legal legacies with the Norman Conquest's imposition of powerful rulership facilitated the coalescence of a regime involving new levels of social power. Roman law, canon law, and English common law each played vital roles in this coalescence, with new levels of economic growth fueled by new types of legal privileges. Development of new technologies, for example the windmill, was one result.