The Debate on the Norman Conquest (review)

Reviews 219 Gudridr's powers of lactation (smuggling in the theme of milk again) is linked to a contemporary social mission to foster a virile younger generation (witness the 'Karitane' movement in N e w Zealand). The book is rounded off with an Epilogue, glancing at postcolonial treatments of the story in late twentieth-century British and American literature. Here Vinland is shown evolving from a robustly physical to a metaphorical location. The schema ofnecessity excludes Canadian contributions, such as Farley Mowat's The curse of the Viking grave, not to mention his insouciant 'historical' reconstruction Westviking: the ancient Norse in Greenland and North America. That is perhaps a pity considering that the only known N e w World Viking site is on Canadian territory. At all stages Barnes's discussion is elaborately documented, drawing on a great mass of material, but thanks to an diverting prose style and a series of well-chosen and often entertaining quotations it never sinks under its own weight. The book is handsomely produced, with attractive readable fonts, high-quality paper, and elegant binding. Very few misprints appear. One might harbour niggling doubts as to how far the literature dissected in this monograph deserves such dedicated scholarly attention, but there is no doubting Barnes's verve in communicating it to us. Russell Poole School ofEnglish and Media Studies Massey University Chibnall, Marjorie, The Debate on the Norman Conquest (Issues in Historiography), Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999; cloth; pp. viii, 168; R R P £45.00; ISBN 0719049121. The Norman Conquest of 1066 has been a fecund source of historical interpretations for a 1000 years, each generation seeing it through eyes of their own constitutional, social and cultural preoccupations. 'Few subjects', writes Marjorie Chibnall in this collection of historiographical summaries and reflections, 'provide a more significant touchstone ofthe way historians in every generation have interpreted the world in which they live.' Chibnall's elegant, but regrettably short, chapter on the medieval historians surveys their chronicles which were accumulated accounts of dispossession and legal restraints, the sufferings ofthe poor, and debasement ofthe native language 220 Reviews because 'children in their schools...are compelled since the coming of the Normans to abandon their own tongue.' The priest Robert Mannyng's Chronicle (1338) alleged that William 'sette the Inglis to be thralle.' These historians, lacing their chronicles with accusations that the Normans were guilty of 'unbearable tyranny, injustice and oppression' in England and Wales, saw the Conquest as a 'Norman Yoke' imposed upon freeborn English people. Seventeenth-century historians picked up the subversive implications of these medieval chronicles in the decades before the Civil War, when historical precedents were so politically explosive that even London's venerable Society ofAntiquaries was closed by the government. Contemporary academic lawyers made several penetrating studies, especially Matthew Hale, whose History ofthe Common Law argued that because William had formally claimed the English throne his conquest secured him only thoserightshis predecessor had enjoyed, implying that any changes were illicit. Thus, Henry Spelman's argument that the Normans had introduced tenurial feuds formed the basis of legal challenges during the 1630s, and tenurial abolition by the Long Parliament. Equally explosive was the view that oppressive Norman 'feudalism' had subverted ancient Saxon liberties, the 'Norman yoke' so hated by Civil War radicals. Hale's work also implied that the conquest was not entirely imposition, but involved some adaptation of existing Anglo-Saxon law. A century later Wright developed the idea, arguing that post-Conquest feudal tenures were merely an adaptation of existing English law: the crucial implication was that England was not the monarch's demesne, which in turn implied the freedom and consent of the commune consilium - the underlying premise of the protest of Magna Carta. These highly significant historical questions encouraged the systematic publication of official records, .notably Rymer's Foedera, Madox's Formulare Anglicanum, Abraham Farley's Domesday volumes and the Rolls Series, which in turn stimulated nineteenth-century constitutional and institutional scholarship, as well as the popular historical novels of Kingsley, Scott and Disraeli. As Maitland observed, the word 'feudalism covers a multitude of ignorances', and it became clear to those w h o worked in archives that the term required...