Normans

Normans, the term applied to the men from Normandy and surrounding parts of northern France who conquered England under Duke William in 1066, and by extension to those from England and Wales who invaded Ireland a century later. G. H. Orpen, writing in the early 20th century, included the whole period 1169–1333 in his four seminal volumes entitled Ireland under the Normans. A. J. Otway‐Ruthven wrote in 1965 of ‘Norman’ settlement in Ireland. ‘Normans’ are even to be found in the pages of authors concerned with the 14th and 15th centuries; indeed R. Dudley Edwards placed the collapse of something he christened ‘Hiberno‐Norman civilization’ in the 16th century. Yet the identity of the settlers in Ireland is far more complicated than this extension suggests: some had Welsh, Flemish, or Breton forebears, and many had English; few came to Ireland directly from the Continent, let alone from Normandy; and the epithet favoured by contemporary writers on both sides of the Irish Sea was, quite simply, ‘English’. Nevertheless, the usage is firmly established among Irish historians and archaeologists, though some prefer hybrids, unknown to contemporaries, such as ‘Anglo‐Norman’ or ‘Anglo‐French’.

These historiographical conventions partly reflect the sheer conservatism of Irish scholarship: many Victorian historians of England, echoing Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819), imagined a far more enduring distinction between Anglo‐Saxons and Normans than is envisaged by their modern successors, who have shown that the descendants of the conquerors of 1066 adopted the English past and manufactured their own version of Englishness during the 12th century. It may also reflect other influences: on the one hand, the snobbery that led late medieval Gaelic poets to stress the French ancestry of the settler nobility; on the other, the reluctance of Irish medievalists to use the term ‘English’, because it had been hijacked by those who sought to reduce Irish history after 1170 to an undifferentiated tale of English oppression. Orpen in particular—as the descendant of long‐established Irish Protestant gentry, and as a linguist whose first major venture as a medievalist was to edit and translate from the original Anglo‐Norman French the verse chronicle known as the Song of Dermot and the Earl—would not have found it natural or agreeable to see the lordship of Ireland as merely ‘English’. Ironically, the Song itself calls the 12th‐century invaders les engleis (‘the English’).

In so far as the term ‘Norman’ helped historians to set medieval Ireland in the European context of its own time, and to achieve distance from crude English imperialist or Irish nationalist interpretations of the past, it may have served a useful purpose. As a description of contemporary realities, however, it is profoundly misleading. For historians studying language and elite culture, ‘Anglo‐Norman’ or ‘Anglo‐French’ is a defensible alternative; for those concerned with politics, government, and national consciousness, ‘English’ is probably the least inaccurate way of describing those involved in the invasions of 1167–71 and the colonization that followed. It is unlikely, never‐theless, that such a well‐rooted usage will be readily expelled from the Irish historian's vocabulary.

Bibliography

Thomas, H. M. , The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation and Identity 1066–c.1220 (2003)
Frame, R. , ‘ “Les Engleys nées en Irlande”: The English Political Identity in Medieval Ireland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser. 3 (1993)
Gillingham, J. , ‘The English Conquest of Ireland’, in B. Bradshaw, A. Hadfield, and W. Maley (eds.), Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict (1993)

Robin Frame