The peoples have become so mingled that no-one can tell...who is of English and who of Norman descent.

National identity

Writers in England in the twelfth century displayed national prejudices with no sign of shame. For the mid-twelfth-century author of the Deeds of King Stephen, Scotland was a potentially wealthy land, but its inhabitants were brutal, barbaric, and 'filthy'. The English could be equally unpopular with others, and were also criticised by their own: 'the English are noted among foreigners for their persistent drinking' wrote the learned John of Salisbury. Such a capacity to identify and contrast peoples by distinguishing characteristics is a feature of a sense of national identity.

Yet such developing views are the more striking because England had been conquered twice in half a century, in 1016 by the Scandinavian Cnut, in 1066 by the Norman William the Conqueror. For much of the next century and a half England, and to a lesser extent the rest of the British Isles, would remain part of an assemblage of lands spanning the English Channel. And if the assemblage had a centre, that centre was Rouen, in Normandy.

the peoples have become so mingled that no-one can tell...who is of English and who of Norman descent.

How, then, did the identity of the English emerge, given the imposition in 1066 of a continental governing class? Some, such as William the Conqueror's archbishop of Canterbury, said they hoped to learn to be Englishmen. However, such immediate and deliberate adoption of a culture - even if it was whole-hearted - appears uncommon. Rather the assimilation was more gradual, and had many causes of which the following are just three. In part, assimilation resulted from aristocratic families dividing their lands between different branches, with separate English and Continental branches developing. In part it stemmed from inter-marriage with the English. In the late 1170s the royal treasurer could write that 'with the English and Normans living side-by-side and intermarrying, the peoples have become so mingled that no-one can tell - as far as free men are concerned - who is of English and who of Norman descent.' And in part it derived from process whereby the inhabitants of England distinguished themselves from those in less economically developed parts of the British Isles, who were condemned as ecclesiastically, socially, and culturally backward.

At the same time, other elements we might suppose to be characteristic of national identity were absent. Land-holding crossed borders, not just between England and Normandy but also between England and Scotland - the contenders for the Scottish throne the 1290s were descendants of major Anglo-Scottish families. Language was still less an indicator of identity. The supposedly barbarous twelfth-century Welsh lord might display feats of multilingualism which few today could rival - with knowledge of Welsh, French, English, and perhaps Latin. French indeed unified the aristocracies from the Capetian realm of France to southern Scotland. It was in French that much of their entertainment literature was written, for example the great epic The Song of Roland, the earliest manuscript of which has an English origin.

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Date: 2016-01-14; view: 841