Normans and the Norman Conquest by R. Allen Brown

Normans and the Norman Conquest Reviews

• 
  Mike Stone,

  Interesting but incredibly Opinionated
  
  I read this book in my twenties, several decades back, so apologies if I’ve misremembered anything. But despite the passage of time it still sticks in my mind – unfortunately, mostly for the wrong reasons. I found it thought-provoking enough to give it three stars, yet at the same time feel a sense of guilt at doing so.
  
  This book is about as impartial as Shakespeare’s Richard III. Brown is an enthusiast for the Normans and it doesn’t half show. He twice quotes Carlyle (himself hardly the nicest of advocates) when he dismisses excoriation of the Norman and Plantagenet kings of England, because “Without them what had it ever been?”
  
  Yet, jumping on to 1485, when the last of them bit the dust, could one not equally well ask what had England ever been *with* them? On the eve of Bosworth, what did Richard III rule that Harold Godwinsson hadn’t possessed on the eve of Hastings? It is quite a short list.
  
  Easily the biggest gain is the conquest of Wales. Yet this had taken over two *centuries* to accomplish, hardly impressive against such a small nation. One suspects that an Anglo-Saxon England, not distracted by the pointless French wars which the Normans et seq were continually drawing her into, could probably have done it in half the time. After all, this process had already been begun by Earl Harold (as he then was) in 1063. Much the same could be said for the scrap of Cumberland which William Rufus would acquire.
  
  That aside the list is as follows
  
  1) The town of Berwick – last remaining legacy of a failed attempt to conquer Scotland.
  
  2) A small strip of land between Dublin and Dundalk, last vestige of a similarly failed attempt to conquer Ireland.
  
  3) Calais and the Channel Islands – the pathetic result of over 400 years of marching and counter-marching up and down France – a country with which England had no particular quarrel until those Normans came along. And even the first of *those* gains would be lost a few decades later. Big deaL
  
  Brown also argues that the Danish invasions and their aftermath had been “divisive”, and that the Normans were somehow a unifying influence. Yet the Old English ruling class had managed to settle crises peacefully in both 1050-1 and 1065 – more than can be said for the partisans of Stephen and Matilda, of Henry II and his sons, of John and Henry III and their barons, or of Lancaster and York. Edward III and Henry V kept the peace at home, but only by exporting the strife across the Channel, which given the disparity in size between France and England, was bound to end in disaster.
  
  In short, the Anglo-Norman ruling class was an incubus, and the Tudors – brutal though they sometimes were – did England a service by the hatchet job which they performed.
  
  Brown also makes a big thing about Harold’s “usurpation” of the crown. Yet the same thing happened on the Continent – the current rulers of Germany and France were not Carolingians – and the English weren’t exactly spoilt for choice. With two foreign invasions looming up, a fourteen-year-old without military experience would hardly do. They needed an army commander who could see the invaders off, and whom could they have picked that was any better than Harold? He saw off the Norwegians and came close to defeating the Normans as well. There was no obvious alternative.
  
  Brown goes on at some length about whether pre-Norman England had feudalism or not, or whether its architecture was Carolingian or Romanesque, but what of it? Both feudalism and Romanesque architecture came to Scotland in due time without “benefit” of a Norman invasion. And getting them a few generations earlier seems a paltry compensation for the dispossession of an entire native ruling class, and such atrocities as the Harrying of the North, much of which was still “waste” twenty years later.
  
  Nor would any of this seem to be adequately justified by the removal of a scandalous Archbishop two whole years before death would have removed him anyway.
  
  However, Brown never does show much concern for the human side of things. He shrugs off the interminable French wars because war should best be seen as “the catalyst of change”. By the same reasoning, presumably the San Francisco earthquake and the 2004 tsunami were also good things, because many buildings erected afterward were better than those which had stood there before.
  
  Well, I’ll leave it there. As I remember it the book was readable enough, but if you think like me you won’t care for some of the views expressed.