Norman Mania

Desmond Clifford

A story did the rounds at my school. An exam question asked: who was the first Norman king? Someone is supposed to have answered, “Norman I”. It’s just about plausible but could have been a joke – I never really found out.

The Bayeaux Tapestry exhibition in London has driven the UK media into a Norman frenzy. The tapestry is back in England after nearly a thousand years.

It was embroidered by nuns in Canterbury and then taken to Normandy where it has remained ever since. It is propaganda rather than history and shows the story of the invasion from the Norman point of view.

The most famous tableau, the one that appears in all the history books, showing King Harold with an arrow in his eye, was, apparently, added later to provide a fittingly dramatic denouement to the battle. Many historians are now doubtful about the arrow-in-the-eye; there’s seemingly little solid evidence for it.

I imagine tickets for the tapestry will be hard to get. Anyway, you can count me out. I saw it around 20 years ago in its normal location, a provincial museum in sleepy Bayeux. It was a Saturday morning, and I had the tapestry practically to myself. There was scarcely a single other visitor.

Amazing. It won’t be like that at the British Museum; expect hoopla-galore, if you’re going. I saw the tapestry at eye level; the British Museum is required to show it flat. It’s massive, about 70 metres long. Tickets cost £33, so that’s around 50p per metre, if it helps to think of it that way. Not cheap, but a football match costs about the same.

The Normans are a big deal here, but the French don’t seem to care too much about them. They see it all as Britain’s story, not theirs, even though William the Conqueror is buried in France, at Caen.

His grave is unremarkable but accounts of his death by fever are horrifying. Like Everyman in the morality play, he was deserted at the end by all his retainers. Then his putrefying body was held ransom and couldn’t be buried until his family handed over cash. A tough end, although William dished it out while he lived.

In his favour, the Conqueror was devoted to his wife, Matilda of Flanders, and had eyes for no one else – almost unheard of among medieval monarchs.

1066 is the seminal date in English history. I’ve never understood why lists of English kings and queens only count back until then. The English crown was unified under Athelstan in 927, and England was a united country, more or less, from then on.

The Saxons were soundly beaten by the Normans and written out of history into the bargain. It’s true what they say about history being written by the winners (which reminds me of my favourite Churchill attribution, “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it”. He did, too).

If the UK media has gone overboard, in Wales there is a surprising dearth of interest. Surprising because, ultimately, it was the Normans who succeeded where the Saxons failed. The Saxons couldn’t seriously penetrate Wales and ended up building Offa’s Dyke to keep them out.

The Normans, on the other hand, cut a swathe across the country. William FitzOsbern began work on Chepstow castle as early as 1067. Within a couple of decades, the Normans had run riot through Wales, taking land, building castles, colonising, demanding tribute.

Prince Llewelyn

Classic Welsh history hangs an awful lot on 1282 and the defeat of Prince Llewelyn. In reality Welsh power, such as it was, had been broken long before. The Normans occupied the lands they thought were worth taking, the Marcher territories of Glamorgan and the borders. Welsh rulers were confined to hill fortresses and lands the Normans scarcely thought worth the cost of conquest in blood and treasure.

For the most part, Wales lacked central authority. Its lords were as likely to fight and betray each other as they were to fight the invaders. There were some exceptions. Lord Rhys, based at Dinefwr and Cardigan, emerged as a remarkable figure combining military prowess with diplomatic and political skills.

The basis of his power was his clear insight that the Normans couldn’t be defeated militarily and that the way to preserve freedom was to treat with the king, which Rhys did with great skill and success.

There was intermingling between the Norman and Welsh aristocracies. Gerald of Wales, born at Manorbier Castle, was of mixed Norman and Welsh descent. He was a cousin of Lord Rhys but spent much of his life as a trusted court advisor to the Norman king.

When Henry II ventured to Ireland for England’s first invasion, at the invitation of the Pope of all people, Gerald joined the mission. As a result, among Gerald’s remarkable achievements were the first books ever written about both Wales and Ireland.

Influence

The Norman influence across Wales is massive. They built castles everywhere. The motte and bailey at Cardiff castle still stands. Had she but realised – perhaps she did – Katy Perry gazed upon the Conqueror’s work during her summer concert in Cardiff.

The Conqueror’s son, Robert Curthose, was imprisoned in Cardiff castle, an episode captured on the décor on the wall of the banquet hall.

The Norman conquest of Britain was complete. Just a few thousand Normans subdued a massively bigger Anglo-Saxon population and codified their new assets in the remarkable Doomsday Book.

When he’d finished in Wales, Edward I, still speaking Norman French, took war to Scotland. His gravestone calls him “Hammer of the Scots”, and he was the first king to unify all of Britain under a single crown, at least for a time.

A massive Norman building programme produced dozens of new cathedrals, churches and castles, and created the character of the country. Eventually Norman French mixed with Anglo-Saxon to form a newly-minted language, English, which from these obscure roots, came to dominate the world.

The Welsh language had already been influenced by Latin and was, in turn, influenced by English, as it continues to be.

Norman French

George Orwell reckoned there was great distinction to be made between words of Saxon origin and those of Norman French origin. He favoured the Saxon. When a UK parliamentary bill becomes law, the Clerk in the House of Lords declares “Le Roy le vault”, the King wills it – one of the last remaining usages of Norman French in official British life. Fortunately, this is one practice that wasn’t transferred to Cardiff with devolution.

The Normans were brilliant, bold, brutish and cultured. Their invasion created an English consciousness and established England’s domination of the British islands. In time that had implications for Wales, as well as Scotland and Ireland. We still live with the consequences.

It pointed England definitively towards the south-east, France and continental Europe. Previously the northern sea lanes traversed by the Anglo-Saxons were at least as important; gradually Britain lost its Scandinavian character.

The Normans began the long integration of Wales into England with those confusions of identity which confuse still.

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