Normans

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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

Normans designation for the Northmen, or Norsemen , who conquered Normandy in the 10th cent. and adopted Christianity and the customs and language of France. Abandoning piracy and raiding, they adopted regular commerce and gave much impetus to European trade. They soon lost all connection with their original Scandinavian homeland, but they retained their craving for adventure, expansion, and enrichment. In 1066 the Norman Conquest of England made the duke of Normandy king of England as William I (William the Conqueror). The Norman nobility displaced the Anglo-Saxon nobility of England. The Normans readily adapted to the feudalism of N France and are believed either to have introduced feudalism to England or to have strengthened a pre-existing feudal system there.

Early in the 11th cent. bands of Norman adventurers appeared in S Italy, where at first they aided the local nobles in their rebellion against Byzantine rule. A steady stream of land-hungry Norman nobles, under the pretext of expelling the Greeks, proceeded to take over the land. Most remarkable among these adventurers were the numerous sons of Tancred de Hauteville. One of these, William Iron Arm, became lord of Apulia in 1043; he was succeeded by his brother Drogo and by another brother, Humphrey, who defeated (1053) Pope Leo IX when the pope attempted to enforce papal rights in S Italy. In 1059, Humphrey's brother and successor Robert Guiscard was invested by Pope Nicholas II with duchies of Apulia and Calabria and the island of Sicily, which was yet to be conquered. He completed the Norman conquest of S Italy; another brother, Roger I , conquered Sicily, and in 1130 Roger's son, Roger II , set up the kingdom of Sicily , which included the island and the Norman possessions in S Italy.

The Normans soon adopted Italian speech and customs. Their ambitious plans against the Byzantine Empire were a factor in bringing about the Crusades , in which they at first played an important part. The medieval Normans were notable for the great authority given their dukes; for their enthusiasm for conquest; and for their economic and social penetration of conquered areas. Wherever the Normans went, Norman architecture left its traces.

Bibliography: See E. Curtis, Roger of Sicily and the Normans in Lower Italy (1912); C. H. Haskins, The Normans in European History (1915, repr. 1966) and Norman Institutions (1918, repr. 1960); J. J. C. Norwich, The Normans in the South, 1016–1130 (1967) and The Kingdom in the Sun, 1130–1194 (1970); E. Searle, Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power (1988).

Normans Descendants of Vikings who settled in nw France in the 9th–10th centuries. They created a powerful state, with a strongly centralized feudal society and warlike aristocracy. In the 11th century, under Robert Guiscard and Robert II, they defeated the Muslims to create an independent kingdom in Sicily. In 1066 Duke William of Normandy conquered England and became William I.

Norman.
1. A short wooden bar which was thrust into one of the holes of a windlass or capstan and used to veer a rope or to secure the anchor cable if there was very little strain on it.

2. A preventer pin through the head of the rudder to secure it against loss.

3. A metal pin placed in the bitt cross-piece to prevent the cable falling off.