David Georgi - Language Made Visible - The Invention of French in England After The Norman Conquest (PHD Thesis) - New York University (2008)

Language Made Visible:
The Invention of French in England after the Norman Conquest
by
David Georgi
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Comparative Literature
New York University
January, 2008
______________________________
Nancy Freeman Regalado

3307998
Copyright 2008 by
Georgi, David
All rights reserved
3307998
2008
© David Georgi
All Rights Reserved, 2008

“A fundamental question is whether the Norman Conquest helped develop
French as a written language.”
– Michael Clanchy From Memory to Written Record:

England 1066-1307, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 215
Socrates: But let me next ask you this. What power do names have for us?
What’s the good of them?
– Plato, Cratylus
DEDICATION
To the memory of Sean Michael Collins
(1965-2002)
who did tell us, after all, that he would go first
when somebody had to put his head on the block.
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For their early gift of inspiring a love for words and history, for their
endless generosity, and for their unfaltering presence as wise companions in my
life, my first thanks are to my parents, Roger and Angela Georgi. My sisters, Mara
and Karen, read long swaths of draft pages with their keen teachers’ eyes, and
offered advice as welcome and sustaining as their perennial encouragement. My
uncle, Michael Puglisi, allowed me displace him from the house in Vermont for
more seasons than I like to admit, and that quiet space was a great help. In the
matter of good working conditions, I also thank Lois Winnifred Georgi and
Maruzza Accetta, though they are not with us in any easily explicable sense.
Richard Sieburth first opened my eyes to the complexities and implications
of translation, and over the years has offered sage counsel on a truly broad sweep of
topics. If a dissertation were allowed to have a tutelary spirit or patron saint, this
one’s is without doubt Nancy Freeman Regalado. When I came to her with this
project, which was in a number of respects quite outside her usual sphere of
expertise, she was willing to take it in, and she nurtured it from start to finish with
inexhaustible patience and encouragement. Generous mentor and expert navigator,
she permitted me an extraordinary degree of freedom, allowing the project to find
its own direction; I mean it more than most when I say that the flaws and
shortcomings of this dissertation are strictly my own.
v
Finally, last only because she arrived latest on the scene, Karmenlara
Seidman breezed in from whatever enchanted land she is from, bringing insights
and wisdom which made finishing this dissertation a harvest with bounties far
greater and far different from the expected lessons in research, scholarship, and
perseverance.
vi
ABSTRACT
French literature, we now know, began in England not in France. The
transformation of Old French from an oral vernacular to a language of written
literature was perhaps the most momentous result of the collision of languages and
cultures in England after the Norman Conquest. This paper seeks to add to our
understanding of the event by tracing and analyzing changes in the way the
Normans talked about, and conceived of, their vernacular tongue. At the same
time, this medieval case study exposes crucial differences between medieval and
modern ideas about the triangular relationship of language, nation, and state.
The men who stepped off their boats in 1066 were Normans who spoke
romanz; two generations later, when Norman men and women in England became
the pioneers of Romance vernacular literature, it was as franceis who called their
language franceis. The language itself had not changed appreciably, but their
metalinguistic construct had. Back on the Continent romanz had been understood
as a sprawling not-quite-Latin, spoken everywhere and associated with no
particular group. The Anglo-Normans conceived of franceis as a distinct language,
proper to their natio.
Two methodological premises animate this study: dedication to explaining
metalinguistic changes on the basis of textual evidence rather than vague notions
such as ‘changing perspective’ or ‘English influence’; and recognition that
vii
medieval discourse on language and identity – even terms whose meanings we
presume to be obvious, such as romanz, franceis and France – must be translated
astutely across time if we are to avoid imposing anachronistic assumptions. A
comparative approach, examining Old English evidence alongside Latin and
French, reveals that the Normans’ shift in the way they defined themselves and
their language involved directly translating English concepts and English words.
The French language – not just the writing of it, but the very awareness of it as a
language – was formed by contact and conflict, not in any center or capitol but out
on the border, where confrontation with the Other leads to self-definition and
invention.
viii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication iv
Acknowledgements v
Abstract vii
List of Abbreviated References xii
Prologue 1
Introduction 3
1. Normans Identity and the Conquest of England 28
Norman identity before 1066 36

Norman identity after the Conquest: problems and positions 50
Reassessing the evidence 59
2. Writing a New Identity: Anglo-Norman Historiographical Texts

after 1066 80
Franci in post-Conquest Anglo-Norman history writing 83

Franceis in the Anglo-Normans’ vernacular history writing 115
Conclusions from historiographical texts, c. 800-1135 124
ix
3. How the Normanni became Franci:
Translating the English Conception of the Normans 138
Writing England’s Franci into existence 138

Using the writs to understand how the group called Franci 145
was delimited
The practice of calling the Normans Franci spreads 164
Franci in the vernacular:
Franceis in the Anglo-Normans’ own language 167
English origins of identifying the Normans as Franci 170
Borrowing the English language 177
4. What Frencisc Meant in English 193
How the Conquest-era English identified the Normans:

the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 194
In England, the Normans were not Norðmenn 198
In English, the Normans were Frenciscan 206
The meaning of Frenciscan 211
Old English sources outside the Chronicles 225
Francan and Frenciscan: two words for two gentes 227
Old English ‘Frenciscan’ as the key to understanding the 235
refashioning of Norman identity after the Conquest
Challenging one model of Anglo-Norman identity 238
In what ways were the Frenciscan ‘French-ish’? 241
A land of two languages 246
Representing the language divide in vernacular histories 255
The English name for the French language 266
x
Appendix: Franci and Normanni before the Conquest 277
Historical background 277
Historiographical texts before 1066 286
Bibliography 343
xi
ABBREVIATED REFERENCES
AND William Rothwell, Louise Stone and T.B.W. Reid, eds. Anglo-
Norman Dictionary. London: Modern Humanities Research
Association and the Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1977-1992.
ASC A Janet Bately, ed. Vol. 3 (MS A) of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

A Collaborative Edition, ed. David Dumville and Simon Keynes
(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1986).
ASC C Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, ed., Vol. 5 (MS C) of The Anglo-

Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, ed. David Dumville
and Simon Keynes (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001).
ASC D G.P. Cubbin, ed., Vol. 6 (MS D) of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

ASC E Susan Irvine, ed., Vol. 7 (MS E) of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

ASC F Peter S. Baker, ed., Vol. 8 (MS F) of The Anglo-Saxon Chroni-

cle: A Collaborative Edition, ed. David Dumville and Simon
Keynes (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000.
Bestiare Philippe de Thaön, Le Bestiaire de Philippe de Thaün, ed.

Emmanuel Walberg (Lund: H.J. Möller, 1900).
Brut Wace, Le Roman de Brut de Wace, ed. Ivor Arnold, 2 vols.

(Paris: Société des Anciens Textes Français, 1938, 1940).
Carmen Guy of Amiens, The Carmen de Hastingae proelio of Guy,

Bishop of Amiens, ed. and trans. Frank Barlow (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1999).
xii
Companion A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, ed. Christopher
Harper-Brill and Elisabeth van Houts (Woodbridge: Boydell
Press, 2003).
Cumpot Philippe de Thaön, Comput (MS BL Cotton Nero A.V), ed. Ian
Short, Anglo-Norman Text Society, Plain Text Series 2 (London:
Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1984).
Dean, Guide Ruth J. Dean, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and

Manuscripts (London: Anglo-Norman Texts Society, 1999).
Dudo Dudo of St. Quentin, De moribus et actis primorum Normanniae

ducum, ed. Jules Lair, Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de
Normandie 3rd ser., vol. 3, part 2 (Sept 1865), 5-317.
E.E.T.S Early English Text Society
Etym. IX Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, Book IX, ed. Marc Reydellet,

Auteurs Latins du Moyen Âge (Paris: Société d’Éditions “Les
Belles Lettres,” 1984).
Gaimar, Bell Geffrei Gaimar, L’Estoire des Engleis, ed. Alexander Bell,
Anglo-Norman Texts 14-16 (Oxford: Anglo-Norman Text
Society, 1960).
Gaimar, HM Geffrei Gaimar, L’Estorie des Engles, ed. and trans. Sir Thomas
Duffus Hardy and Charles Trice Martin, 2 vols., Rolls Series 91
(London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1888).
HH Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum: The History of the

English People, ed. and trans. Diana Greenway (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996).
Hist.Reg.Brit Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Historia Regum Britannie of

Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. Neil Wright, 5 vols. (Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, 1984).
OED J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, The Oxford English Dictionary,
2nd ed., 20 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
xiii
Ord.Vit. Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed.
and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols., Oxford Medieval Texts
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969-1980).
Regesta David Bates, ed., Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum: The

Acta of William I (1066-1087) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
Rou Wace, Le Roman de Rou de Wace, ed. A.J. Holden, 3 vols.,

Société des Anciens Textes Français (Paris: A.&J. Picard, 1970).
V.St.Ed Denis Piramus, La Vie Seint Edmund le Rei, ed. Hilding

Kjellman, (Göteborg: Royal Society of Sciences and Letters,
1935; Reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1974).
Weiss Wace, Wace’s Roman de Brut, A History of the British, trans.

Judith Weiss (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999).
xiv
Prologue
The Romans came and their empire dissolved away; various Germanic
groups whom we used to call ‘barbarians’ came and went, or else came and settled,
and the Latin in different regions diverged into local variations. Very few people
went to school, very few could read or write. Lacking the steadying counterweight
of the norms reinforced by grammar lessons and written practice, the spoken
dialects diverged increasingly from written Latin.
Around about A.D. 800, Latin texts begin to register an awareness of a
spoken “romana lingua” different enough from the Latin of the liturgy and the
Bible that priests were instructed to translate their homilies from Latin into this
romana lingua in order for their congregations to understand. Such an instruction
was among the canons issued by the bishops gathered at the Council of Tours in
813. “The act of birth,” one recent scholar describes the document, “the baptismal
certificate of the French language, which for the first time is given a name.”1 Old
1
Bernard Cerquiglini, La Naissance du français (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1991), 42: “acte de naissance, certificat de baptême en l’occurrence de la langue
française, qui pour la premiere fois est nommée.” This is very much the standard take,
sometimes repeated almost verbatim. Cf. Mario Pei, The Story of Ltin and the Romance
Languages (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 87, quoted by Paul M. Lloyd, “On the
Names of Languages (and Other Things),” in Latin and the Romance Languages in the
Early Middle Ages, ed. Roger Wright (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1991), 9; Gianfranco Folena, “‘Volgarizzare’ e ‘tradurre’: idea e terminologia della
traduzione dal medio evo italiano e romanzo all’umanesimo europeo,” in La Traduzione:
1
French is generally said to have begun at this point, on its way toward its
inexorable development into our familiar Modern French.
The first written French appears in 842 when a Frankish historian named
Nithard interrupts the Latin of his text to record verbatim the oaths exchanged in
“romana lingua” when two of Charlemagne’s grandsons gathered their armies at
Strasbourg to confirm their alliance. With one other composition over the course
of the 9th century (a 29-line chant in praise of St. Eulalia) and two more surviving
from the 10th century, French literature admittedly had a slow start, but was
nonetheless ahead of the other Romance languages.
That is one way of telling the story.
Here is another:
saggi e studi, (Trieste: Lint, 1973), 64; Cf. Michel Zink, Littérature française du Moyen
Âge (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 28.
2
Introduction
Around the year 1100, the cultural landscape of Western Europe was
transformed by a momentous event: the Romance vernaculars, the spoken
languages of the vast majority of the population, began to be reinvented as written
languages. French and Occitan were the first two; Italian, Spanish, and Catalan
would follow at different points and along disparate paths of development.
The event, for all its magnitude, produced surprisingly little explicit
commentary and left behind a number of questions that remain unanswered to this
day. Given the gap which had opened up between Latin and the spoken Romance
languages, and was recognized, by the early 9th century, why did Romance speakers
not write their languages for another three hundred years? What happened around
1100, and not until then? Taking Old French as the focus of this project, the
question, more specifically, is: How did a community of French-speakers come to
reinvent their vernacular as a language viable and valid for use in learned
discourses, in translation, in writing?
The answer that I would like to propose – the thesis of this project – is that
one particular group of French speakers, the Normans in the wake of the Conquest,
came to think of their vernacular speech as a decisive marker of ethnic identity.
3
It is nothing new to suppose that language must have been the most
conspicuous marker of difference between the Normans and the English after the
invasion and for some time afterward. What I am suggesting is that the Normans’
new practice of identifying themselves by what they spoke was the innovation
which triggered a crucial change in how they conceptualized their vernacular. By
positioning their vernacular as the defining criterion of Norman identity, they
reinvented it as a distinct language corresponding to a particular people, and this
was the pivotal conceptual shift which allowed them to reimagine it as a written
medium.
In support of this contention, I will recover, or uncover, a chain of evidence
which we can actually follow through texts of the period. The evidence clusters
around modes of identifying – to put it simply, the names the Normans used when
identifying themselves and their language. The men who stepped off their boats in
1066 were Normans who spoke romanz; when, two generations later, Norman men
and women became the pioneers of Romance vernacular literature, it was as
Franceis whose language was franceis. The language itself had not changed
appreciably, but the metalinguistic construct had.
In this dissertation I mean to demonstrate that the French language itself did
not exist as a concept in the minds of its speakers until it was recognized by the
French-speaking Normans after their invasion of England. Before 1100 the
Romance languages didn’t exist. That is not to say that nobody spoke them, but
4
that nobody was aware of speaking French or Italian or Spanish. The idea simply
wasn’t there.
To be sure, regional vernaculars had developed from Latin long before
1100, and had morphological rules and territorial ranges which modern linguists
have worked out with a fair degree of precision. One might say that Old French
and the other Romance languages had an ‘objective’ reality before 1100: looking
back from a modern perspective, they are definite, quantifiable objects of study.
But they did not exist in the minds of their speakers. To the people alive in that
period, there was no such thing as French. There was no entity called French, no
language that answered to the name français, indeed no entity of any name
whatever which matched the language we call Old French or langue d’oïl; no
recognized thing with those borders or that association with a French nation or
French state.2 If you asked a Parisian in the year 820 or 1020 what he spoke, he
2
In this dissertation, the terms ‘nation’ and ‘state’ are never used interchangeably.
The former refers to an ethnically-conceived grouping of people who consider themselves
to share a common ancestry and history, and would have been quite familiar to medieval
people, for whom the Latin terms natio and gens represented very much this same concept.
The distinction between an ethnically-defined nation and a politically-defined state is
important to maintain because the modern ideological construct of the ‘nation-state’ did
not exist as such in the Middle Ages. It was not considered unusual or undesirable for a
state to accommodate more than one nation. England after 1066 is a fine example: the
English and the Normans coexisted as two nations in a single kingdom, and the Norman
rulers, as we will see, were in no hurry to eliminate or disguise the ethnic disunity. For this
project, there are important implications to the medieval lack of an ideological expectation
that nation and state should be coextensive: the Normans in England could position French
as the language of their nation even though it certainly was not the only, or even the
primary, language of the kingdom. On nation and state in the Middle Ages: Kathleen
Davis, “National Writing in the Ninth Century: A Reminder for Postcolonial Thinking
about the Nation,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 no.3 (fall 1998), 611-
5
would answer romanz. Romanz is not the same thing as français, is not just an
older name for the same conceptual object, though it is very regularly translated
that way by current scholars. If, on your linguistic inquest in 820 or 1020, you then
traveled south from Paris and asked the same question of a woman in Toulouse or
Montpelier you would get the same answer: romanz. You would get the same
answer again, with very minor variations in pronunciation of course, from a person
in Barcelona, or one in Burgos, or Salerno. The man in Salerno might tell you
“volgare” instead of “romanzo,” but by no means would he say “italiano.” That
name did not exist yet, any more than français, provençal, occitan, català, or
español. There is no evidence that any of those language-names existed before the
12th century. Before that, they were all just romanz.
This dissertation is about the way things (languages and ethnic groups in
this case) are conceptualized and represented, rather than what they ‘really are’, and
this is a crucial distinction. Accordingly, the investigation is not concerned with
the sorts of facts generally established by linguists, such as rates of phonetic
change, the accumulation of morphological mutations that pulled the Romance
vernacular(s) measurably further from Classical Latin, the collapse of case systems,
637; Lesley Johnson, “Imagining Communities: Medieval and Modern,” in Concepts of

National Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. Simon Forde, et al. (Leeds: Leeds Studies in
English, 1995); Stephen Francis Noreiko, “The Expression of ‘Nation’ and ‘Nationality’ in
Old French” (M.Phil thesis, University of Southampton, 1977); Susan Reynolds,
“Medieval origines gentium and the Community of the Realm,” History 68, no.224
(October 1983), 375-390; Pierre Riché, “Expression du sentiment national dans la
correspondance de Gerbert d’Aurillac et dans l’Histoire de Richer de Reims,” in Peuples
du Moyen Âge: Problèmes d’identification, ed. Claude Carozzi and Huguette Taviani-
Carozzi (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1996), 131-143.
6
the wild success of prepositions, and the triumph of the SVO word order. This
dissertation is about metalinguistic change: the changes in the ways a group of
people talk about their language; how they represent it and identify it.
Linguistic change and metalinguistic change do not necessarily have much
to do with one another. They can progress at very different rates and are knowable
through very different epistemological means. Metalinguistic developments may
or may not accurately reflect linguistic realities. Tore Janson gives the example of
English, which has undergone more linguistic change in the last thousand years
than French has, but was at no point rechristened with a different name.3 During
that period the modern Romance languages left off being called ‘Latin’ (or lingua
romana) and took on names such as français and italiano, while English, change as
it did, kept the same name. Medieval French-speakers’ move away from the
designation romanz presses forward certain implications and claims. It tells a
particular story. English-speakers’ insistence on retaining the language-name
‘English’ (englisc, Englysshe, etc.) tells a different story, one of continuity and the
capacity to swallow foreign influence rather than being transformed by it. Other
metalinguistic narratives are more concerned with positing continuities or breaks
along the axis of geopolitical space. The name ‘Arabic’ declares a continuum of
diverse forms to be dialects of a single language, though the amount of variation
between them is very great – much greater, for example, than the variation
3
Tore Janson, “Language Change and Metalinguistic Change: Latin to Romance
and Other Cases,” in Latin and the Romance Languages, ed. Roger Wright, 19.
7
separating the Germanic forms which present themselves as separate languages
under names such as Flemish, Dutch, German, Yiddish, and Afrikaans. People in
Morocco and Iraq can say that they share the language brought from the Prophet’s
homeland in the early centuries of Islam; a skinhead in Cape Town can say with
equal conviction that he does not share the same tongue with a Lithuanian-
descended Hasidic Jew in Israel.
These examples reveal the problematic nature of linguistic ‘realities’ and
the ideal of nailing down positive objective knowledge of the way things ‘really
are’. Are the Arabic speakers right or wrong? Is the South African skinhead right
or wrong? The man-made lines imposed upon continuums of related speech
practices are arbitrary. Once a line has been inked on a map or on a time-line, and
a continuum thereby divided into two distinct entities, the decision whether to label
these entities ‘languages’ or ‘dialects’ is even more arbitrary.
It would be naïve to expect that a language-name provides reliable
information about the language; but a name can tell us a great deal about what its
speakers think about their language. A community’s metalinguistic beliefs and
vocabulary have little to do with factual information about their language, but
everything to do with how they represent their languages to themselves and others.
How a people name their tongue reflects – and in turn shapes – how they conceive
of their language, how they position it with regard to other languages and
communities, what attributes they hold to be definitive, or what they wish to project
8
with regard to these matters. This is the fundamental methodological precept of
this investigation. The name given to a language is the single most loaded, public,
unavoidable representation of beliefs or ideologies about that language.
Metalinguistic attitudes are precisely what we most need to know more
about if we wish to piece together a better understanding of how Romance
vernacular speakers came to make the conceptual leap of reinventing their
vernacular as a written language. The inquest has tended to run aground on the
medieval period’s distinct lack of explicit metalinguistic discourse. As far as we
know, no headlines trumpeted Literary World Turned Upside Down!, no monastic
author offered a tract called How I Came to Write in the Vernacular. The closest
we have is Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, which was written around 1304, by
which time French literature had been thriving for almost two hundred years.
Language names are the deep vein of hidden, high-grade evidence which I
propose to mine in order open a new channel in the investigation of how the
Romance vernaculars came to be written. Until now their modern names have gone
almost entirely unnoticed and unexamined. They are used without reflection, as if
they are as simple, self-evident, and reliable as pavement underfoot and equally
unneeding of inspection. The existence of the entities which these names name is
likewise assumed. That is to say, modern scholarship takes it for granted that, well
before any of them were written, French, Italian, and the others each existed as
distinct languages, defined and understood more or less as we define them today.
9
The unquestioning use of the names reflects an unchallenged belief in the existence
of distinct entities to match those names.
The observation that those language-names did not exist prior to the 12th
century strikes me as an extraordinarily significant piece of metalinguistic
evidence. It indicates, first of all, that the period during which the Romance
vernaculars were all just romanz lasted longer than scholars generally imagine.
Next, if this one name romanz endured as virtually the only way the vernaculars
were referred to, throughout the entire period in which the vernaculars were
unwritten, then we should not be asking what prevented people from writing
French or Italian, we should ask what kept people from writing romanz – and we
need to recognize that this is indeed a different question. Important answers will
come from knowing what conceptual features (or lacks) prevented romanz-speakers
from the possibility of writing their vernacular.
Romanz named a conceptual entity whose shape, borders, historical
narrative, and criteria of definition were very different from what we have in mind
when we speak of ‘Old French,’ ‘Old Occitan,’ or ‘the earliest Italian.’ Derived
from lingua romana or, to be more precise, from the vernacular way to pronounce
the adverb romanice, romanz simply means ‘Roman’. To speak romanz was to
speak ‘in the Roman way’; to speak ‘Romanly’. But the Romans’ language was, of
course, Latin. The name romanz fails to draw any sharp distinction from Latin, the
very language which we would expect the vernacular should most need to be
10
distinguished from. Insofar as the elementary function of a proper name is to single
out an individual specimen from others of its category, romanz, properly speaking,
is no sort of name at all. It does not distinguish any regional form from its
neighbors. It does not identify the language with any existing nation (gens or natio
to use the medieval Latin terms) or territory. Its reference is back toward the
Roman Empire, that vanished state which medieval Christian Europe revered as the
ideal geopolitical order. The name romanz reflects a mentality which conceived of
the vernacular as a manner of speaking, a usage or practice which is essentially a
late and diminished form of Latin. Romanz was simply the ubiquitous, uneducated,
decayed not-quite-Latin. With no normative standards ruling over its sprawl of
disparate forms, no boundaries to define it, nothing to identify it with a specific
group of speakers, it was, conceptually, invisible.
It was invisible too, of course, in the very literal sense that it was not made
physically present as ink on a page. To wonder why the vernacular remained
unwritten for so long, or to posit reasons such as low prestige, suppression by the
Church, or lack of patronage, is to misunderstand the way it was structured in the
minds of its users. With the exception of a few scattered experiments which led to
nothing, it did not occur to anyone to write it. Conceptually, it was not something
that one could write. If this formulation sounds a bit cryptic, one might resolve it
into more solid articulations which nevertheless pull in different directions. First,
how should one imagine making a written language out of something that is not
11
even a language to begin with? Second, romanz already did have a written form; it
was called Latin.4
This state of affairs, I contend, prevailed not just in the 9th and 10th centuries
but right on up until 1066 or not long after, when the Normans’ invasion of
England led them to see their vernacular in a new light. In England, language
became a defining component of the Normans’ identity, and this had a
transformative impact on the way the post-Conquest Normans conceptualized both
their group and their language.
Though the Normans had a strong sense of themselves as a distinct people
before the Conquest, their language – the fact that they spoke romanz – had played
no part in their identity as a nation. The Normans spoke romanz but so did the
French, their enemies to the east; so did the Flemings, the Angevins to the south,
and the Aquitanians beyond. Speaking romanz was an endemic condition; no
particular ethnic or political group was identified by being romanz-speakers. In
England, the Normans’ language moved to the center of their construct of group
identity. The reconfiguration of language and national identity was a reciprocal
process: as the Normans came to be a gens defined by its vernacular, their
vernacular came to be understood as the language of a particular gens. This was a
4
On the idea that the Latin and the vernacular were understood as written and
spoken forms of the same language, see Roger Wright, “Late Latin and Early Romance:
Alcuin’s De Orthographia and the Council of Tours (A.D. 813),” in Papers of the
Liverpool Latin Seminar vol. 3, ed. Francis Carirns (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1981) and
idem, Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France (Liverpool:
Francis Cairns, 1982).
12
role no romance vernacular had occupied before. More than their vernacular’s
rising prestige as the language of a small elite, it was this redefinition of their
romanz as a gens-language which allowed the Normans to conceive of their
vernacular as a written language.
In the following chapters I trace the intersection of language and national
identity using concrete textual evidence whose implications and importance have
not been perceived before. The evidence is in the new names the Normans began
to use to identify their nation and for their language. In England after the
Conquest, the Normans began to refer to themselves as ‘French’ (Franci in their
Latin texts, Franceis in their own vernacular). This was an innovation for them
and a strange one: back home on the Continent, they had always been called
‘Normans’ (Latin Normanni), and the gens-name Franci had denoted the people of
the Kingdom of France, the neighboring and usually hostile state across the Eure.
Normandy was not part of France, and the written record (all Latin, perforce)
indicates that the Normans were not classed as a sort of subspecies of the Franci.
For the Normans to identify themselves as Franci or Franceis was a conspicuous
and meaningful departure. The new language-name, which they used in some of
the very earliest texts of the fledgling Anglo-Norman literature, was franceis.
Appropriating a gens-name which had previously been used to designate a
rival people, and simultaneously pioneering the use of what would seem to be the
first ‘modern’ language-name for a Romance vernacular, the post-Conquest
13
Normans became Franceis who spoke franceis. They had succeeded in positioning
themselves as a people with a corresponding language of their own.
By representing it as the language of a specific gens, the Normans assigned
their vernacular borders and a finite set of speakers. The language itself was not
immediately changed by being carried across the Channel and transplanted
alongside English, but its speakers’ ideas about it were transformed. As franceis,
the language of the Franceis, it was positioned as a distinct entity, separate from
the neighboring forms of romanz. Marked off by the newly-drawn boundary of
national ‘ownership’, franceis was recognized as the closed and sufficient system,
the natural and correct way for its people to speak rather than a shabby version of
Latin. It was congruent to the other well-defined languages of other nations, such
as English. Its boundaries made it visible to its own speakers as a language.
As a powerful, expanding nation with a language of their own, the post-
Conquest Normans ventured the conceptual move of claiming a place in the
ongoing march of translatio studii, the process by which, according to medieval
thought, the accumulated knowledge of nations is passed along from old to new,
vanquished to victor, east to west. Translatio studii was an established and
respected part of the medieval understanding of history and textual culture, a
paradigm anchored in models as enormous and unchallengeable as the Roman
appropriation of Greek knowledge and the translation of the Bible itself.
14
Conceptualized as the language of a gens, the Normans’ own language
could be imagined as a vessel able to receive the knowledge which Latin had in its
own turn collected from still earlier repositories. The appropriation of cultural
capital through translation was a known and accepted move. It was by positioning
themselves and their franceis as the latest link in the chain that the Normans were
able to take the step of using their vernacular as a written language. The project of
writing was inscribed within the established space of translatio studii.
In England, the Normans encountered additional impetus for the daring
move. In addition to tapping Latin for the chief treasures of the Christian West, the
Normans, who were not merely passing through England as a pillaging army but
grafting themselves in permanently as part of the body politic, had the cultural
capital of England to translate too. At the same time, the English language
presented the Normans with the example of a vernacular which had successfully
claimed for itself a place in the chain of translatio studii several centuries
previously, with the translation of canonical patristic texts from Latin. It was this
English success in translatio studii that the Normans took as a model, not simply
the general fact that there was written matter in English.
That written French got its start as a language of translation is not
conjecture or hypothesis: it is a clearly demonstrable fact. That it began in
England rather than France is also difficult to dispute. If French literature was the
success story that served as precedent and example for the other Romance
15
vernaculars as many believe, then the invention of written French in England can
be seen as the spark that set off the vernacular revolution which transformed the
intellectual and cultural landscape of Europe in the later Middle Ages.
What’s new and what’s not: antecedents and contributions
The notion that French literature began in England has been around a long
time within the hospitable confines of the field of Anglo-Norman language and
literature. Mildred K. Pope, the authority in the field in the 1930s and 1940s, set
forth the fundamentals of the matter in a paper entitled “The Precocity of Anglo-
Norman Literature.”5 Even while succeeding Pope as the leading voice in Anglo-
Norman studies, Mary Dominica Legge had reservations about accepting that the
Normans in England were responsible for launching French literature: in places
accepting Anglo-Norman ‘precocity’ as “undoubted,” her work nevertheless
expresses residual doubt. She accords the Anglo-Normans the qualified distinction
of being “amongst the pioneers of French literature,” and in spite of the evidence is
reluctant to give up the supposition that there might perhaps have been a tradition
of written literature in France first.6 The thesis that French literature began in
England came to be stated with more certainty in the 1990s, by Ian Short and
5
The contents of this unpublished paper are described in detail by Mary Dominica
Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1963), 362-364.
6
Ibid., 3, 7 (emphasis is mine); idem, “La Precocité de la littérature Anglo-
Normande,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médévale 8 no. 3-4 (July-Dec 1965), 327-349.
16
Michael Clanchy among others.7 In 1996 David Howlett published a book entitled
The English Origins of Old French Literature which states that basic claim
strongly, although it then, in spite of the title, turns out to be about something else
instead (namely the preservation and persistence in Anglo-Norman literature of
what Howlett calls Biblical Style, characterized by the use of certain forms of
parallelism, symmetry, and chiasmus).8
The English origin of French literature remains something of an open
secret, backed by impressive evidence but known to a relatively small audience. In
1992 Ian Short lamented that “standard histories of Medieval French literature
persist in ignoring the fact that French literature begins, to all intents and purposes,
in twelfth-century Anglo-Norman England.”9 Many years later, this fact is still not
universally recognized, even among Anglo-Norman specialists. A recent book
devoted entirely to post-Conquest England remarks: “in the twelfth century
England seems to have been a key region for the production of French writing, in
some ways ahead of French-speaking areas on the Continent.”10 As late as 2005,
the team of eminent scholars who prepared the chapter on “Vernacular Literary
Consciousness” in the Middle Ages volume of the Cambridge History of Literary
7
Ian Short, “Patrons and Polyglots: French Literature in Twelfth-Century England,”
Anglo-Norman Studies 14 (1992), 229; M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record:
England 1066-1307, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 18.
8
David Howlett, The English Origins of Old French Literature (Dublin: Four
Courts Press, 1996), vii, 18, 150, 162-165.
9
Short “Patrons and Polyglots,” 229.
10
Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation,
and Identity 1066-c.1220 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 380.
17
Criticism call the development of French literature in England “curiously
precocious,” and don’t seem to know what to make of it.11
The question of why French was transformed into a written language in
England rather then France has not been ignored, but scholarly work has focused
mostly on sociocultural explanations rather than linguistic or metalinguistic ones.
The Normans’ ‘national character’ – the idea that Norman barons and kings were
enterprising, adventurous, and “greedy for knowledge” – has ceased to be cited as a
decisive factor, but not as long ago as one might suppose.12 Legge concentrates on
the availability of patronage, noting the conspicuous role of female patrons, starting
with Maud and Adelaide of Louvain, the two wives (consecutive not simultaneous,
of course) of Henry I.13 Legge also discusses the role of the favorable position of
clerics in post-Conquest England. The process of conquest involved a sudden rush
to replace bishops, abbots and other high-ranking clergymen, presenting Norman
churchmen with a booming job market, as it were. Clerics were almost exclusively
11
Kevin Brownlee, Tony Hunt, Ian Johnson, Alastair Minnis, and Nigel F. Palmer,
“Vernacular Literary Consciousness c.1100-c.1500: French, German and English
Evidence,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, The Middle Ages, ed.
Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 422.
12
Pope, “The Precocity of Anglo-Norman Literature” [unpublished], as cited by
Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature, 363; cf. Legge, “La Precocité de la littérature Anglo-
Normande,” 348; and R. Allen Brown, The Normans (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1984), passim.
13
Legge, “La Precocité,” 347 ff. See also Susan Crane, “Anglo-Norman Cultures in
England, 1066-1460,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David
Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 35-60. For a dissenting opinion
which questions the importance of patronage, see C. Stephen Jaeger, “Patrons and the
Beginnings of Courtly Romance,” in The Medieval Opus: Imitation, Rewriting, and
Transmission in the French Tradition, ed. Douglas Kelly (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 45-
58.
18
responsible for writing Latin and were therefore the only ones who could have
started writing in French,14 and in post-Conquest England the clerics had an
unusually close relationship with the people positioned to commission texts and
fund scriptoria. The new aristocrats who recruited and appointed clerics were often
their relatives. The result, Legge explains, was an active clergy with good access to
patronage and possibly a keen responsiveness to the needs or preferences of the
aristocrats who paid for the production of writing.15
In his work on patronage, Ian Short turns attention to language contact as a
defining feature of Anglo-Norman England and nominates it as one of the top
reasons that the Normans there came to use their vernacular as a medium for
literature.16 French was not only the language of a cohesive ruling class but also
conspicuous in clerical culture. As a shared vehicle for these linked spheres,
French and Latin enjoyed an unusually productive coexistence in Norman
England.17 “The passage from one to the other was, in bureaucratic circles, natural
and effortless,” he says.18 In monasteries in England, French was used extensively
14
When vernacular writing did start, the clerics were indeed the ones who did all the
writing (John Frankis, “The Social Context of Vernacular Writing in Thirteenth Century
England: the Evidence of the Manuscripts.” Thirteenth Century England 1 [1986], 176;
Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 215).
15
Legge, “La Precocité,” 347 ff.
16
Short, “On Bilingualism in Anglo-Norman England,” Romance Philology 33 no.4
(May 1980), 467-479. “Patrons and Polyglots,”
17
“Patrons and Polyglots,” 233, 237.
18
Ibid., 242.
19
as a language of instruction and conversation, and was therefore valued as a valid
didactic medium, and this might have promoted the move to use it in written texts.19
Short’s suggestion that the Anglo-Normans effected a “conscious
decompartmentalization in the use of Latin and the socially dominant Latin-based
vernacular of French,” is not intended as a theory about the metalinguistic change
that allowed the reinvention of French as a written language.20 Short’s main
interest is in the high status of French in post-Conquest England, and this is the
context in which he envisions a porous border between Latin and French. Far from
my contention that the Conquest and the experience of England created a ruptural
awareness of linguistic difference, Short suggests that in 12th century England Latin
and French might have had a high degree of continuity and relatively little
distinctness for their speakers: “Indeed, with the two languages being so closely
related, it is not impossible that they could, in certain circumstances, have been
thought of as forming a single linguistic spectrum of varying registers and levels of
appropriateness.”21 This is precisely the mentality which, I contend, the Anglo-
Norman pioneers of vernacular writing had abandoned and left behind.
The elevated social and cultural status of French in Norman England is
invariably cited as a factor in the early appearance of French literature there. As
the language of the Norman elite, French enjoyed a high status in England. Back
19
Ibid., 232-236.
20
Ibid., 244.
21
Ibid., 242.
20
on the Continent, it was the way everyone spoke, from kings to the lowest peasant.
Understood in contradistinction to Latin – the language of education, of books and
writing, of the Bible and liturgy – it was decidedly the lower item in a clear
hierarchy. In England, by contrast, French was no longer the low man on the
polyglot totem-pole. Juxtaposed with English, the language of the conquered
people, it was the more prestigious of two vernaculars. (If we recall the presence of
Welsh, Scots Gaelic, and perhaps Danish, French was perched at the top of quite a
substantial stack of vernaculars.) French had moved into a position of high prestige
in its own right and its redefinition as a language of the elite presumably had an
impact on its positioning vis-à-vis Latin as well.
While this narrative of rising status is sound and very important, it fails to
provide a sufficient explanation for the emergence of written vernacular literature.
Inductive reasoning, no matter how reasonable, is still just that: speculation as to
what seems very likely to have happened. While there is plenty of evidence that
French was the language of the elite in England, it is much more difficult to find
solid evidence that this higher status led to the production of literature, or evidence
explaining the mechanics of such a causal relationship. Our certainty that a greatly
elevated status must have been a factor in the Normans’ decision to produce written
French texts does not bring us any closer to an informed understanding of how such
a signal change came to pass.
21
Little of the scholarly work on the status of the languages – and indeed little
of the research, more broadly, on the French language in post-Conquest England –
has been aimed at investigating exactly how Norman thinkers accomplished the
first daring intellectual step of imagining their vernacular as written words on the
page; as a language of books. Work of a more strictly linguistic nature has centered
around the questions of whether Anglo-Norman French was a distinct dialect, or
when it became one; and when (or if) it degenerated to the status of an inferior
regional form.22 Many studies concentrate on the sociopolitical dynamics of the
language situation in multilingual post-Conquest England, investigating who spoke
French and for how long; how far French-speaking penetrated down into the less
exalted strata of English society; the range and extent of its geographical spread;
22
Louis Emil Menger, The Anglo-Norman Dialect (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1904; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1966), 2-4; Mildred K. Pope,
From Latin to Modern French with Especial Consideration of Anglo-Norman (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1934), esp. 242; Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature, passim;
Short, “Bilingualism,” 468-473; William Rothwell, “Language and Government in
Medieval England,” Zeitschrift für Französisce Sprache und Literatur 93 no.3 (1983), 258-
278; idem., “Stratford atte Bowe and Paris,” Modern Language Review 80 no.1 (Jan
1985), 39-54; idem, “The ‘faus français d’Angleterre’: Later Anglo-Norman,” in Anglo-
Norman Anniversary Essays, ed. Ian Short (London: Anglo-Norman Texts Society, 1993),
309-326; idem., “Playing ‘follow my leader’ in Anglo-Norman Studies,” Journal of
French Language Studies 6 no.2 (Sept 1996), 177-210; idem, “The Trial Scene in Lanval
and the Development of the Legal Register in Anglo-Norman,” Neuphilologische
Mitteilungen 101 no.1 (2000), 17-36; David Trotter, “‘Mossenhor, fet metre acquesta letra
en bon francés’: Anglo-French in Gascony,” in De mot en mot: Aspects of Medieval
Linguistics. Essays in Honour of William Rothwell, ed. Stewart Gregory and D.A. Trotter
(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), 199-222; Tony Hunt, “Anglo-Norman: Past
and Future,” in The Dawn of the Written Vernacular in Western Europe, ed. Michèle
Goyens and Werner Verbeke (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003), 382-385.
22
the patterns and timing of its waning.23 For others, interest in the Anglo-Normans’
French is in the service of researching the timing and details of the process by
which the heirs of the Conquerors relinquished the elements and markers of
Norman identity and came to see themselves instead as Englishmen.24
In terms of finding information about the initial step from oral to written,
the most promising line of thinking is the one which combines the factors of the
French language’s higher status, and its steady disappearance of as a spoken first
language among England’s Normans, to produce the picture of a vernacular which
was, in a very real sense, ceasing to be a vernacular. As far back as 1934, Mildred
Pope observed that French in England gradually became a language “that had
ceased to be the mother-tongue of anybody and had always to be taught.”25 She
identifies this as a milestone both linguistically (for the development –
23
Johan Vising, Anglo-Norman Language and Literature (London: Oxford
University Press, 1923); V.H. Galbraith, “The Literacy of the Medieval English Kings,”
Proceedings of the British Academy 21 (1935), 201-238; R.M. Wilson, “English and
French in England 1100-1300,” History 28 (March 1943), 37-60. Among more recent
scholars, William Rothwell and Ian Short are the leading authorities; see note 22, above
and 24 and 25, below. See also Douglas A. Kibbee, For to Speke Frenche Trewely: The
French Language in England, 1000-1600; Its Status, Description, and Instruction.
(Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991); and R.A. Lodge, “Language Attitudes and Linguistic
Norms in France and England in the Thirteenth Century,” in Thirteenth Century England 4,
ed. P.R. Cross and S.D. Lloyd (Woodbridge, England: Boydell Press, 1992).
24
V.H. Galbraith, “Nationality and Language in Medieval England,” Transactions of
the Royal Historical Society 4th series, 23 (1941), 113-128; Ian Short, “Tam Angli quam
Franci: Self-Definition in Anglo-Norman England,” Anglo-Norman Studies 18 (1996),
153-175; John Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National
Identity and Political Values (2000), esp. xviii-xx; Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the
Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity 1066-c.1220 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003); Nick Webber, The Evolution of Norman Identity, 911-1154
(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005).
25
Pope, From Latin to Modern French, 424.
23
degeneration as she sees it – of the Anglo-Norman dialect) and for the usage of the
language (literature flourished, spoken use retreated to the royal court, law courts,
university education, and other specialized contexts). She dates the process to
around 1230 to 1260, when, she figures, the effects had finally sunk in from the
1204 loss of Normandy and the severance of English Normans from their
Continental interests, possessions, and loyalties.
The idea was taken up by R.M. Wilson, who is unwilling to rule out the
survival of French as a genuine spoken vernacular any time up to 1300.26 William
Rothwell recognized the importance of realizing that French was at a certain point
no longer the native first-language of anyone born and raised in England, and
became instead an acquired language, learned for social or professional reasons.
The central figure in the more recent scholarship on the phenomenon, Rothwell
articulated it in a number of works over the years, dating the process to
progressively earlier decades as his thinking on the matter developed. In a 1968
article, he considered it a phenomenon of the 13th century; later he felt that the shift
happened in the later part of the 12th century.27 Ian Short likewise revised his
thinking on the chronology of the process, initially favoring the later 12th century
26
“English and French in England 1100-1300,” History 28 (March 1943), 37-60.
27
William Rothwell, “The Teaching of French in Medieval England,” The Modern
Language Review 63 no.1 (Jan. 1968), 37-46; “The Role of French in Thirteenth-Century
England,”Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 58 no.2 (Spring
1976), 454-462; “A quelle époque a-t-on cessé de parler français en Angleterre?” in
Mélanges de philologie romane offerets à Charles Camproux, 2 vols. (Montpellier:
Université Paul-Valéry, 1978), vol. 2, 1075-1089.
24
then later suggesting that even in the middle of the century the status of French as a
first language in England is in doubt.28 The shift may have taken place as early as
the 1160s according to Susan Crane.29
Again, it is worthwhile to point out that the aim of these scholars’ work has
not been to investigate how the Normans’ changing attitudes about their vernacular
might have led to their ‘invention’ of French literature. Their chief
accomplishment has been to work out details of the bilingual situation in England,
the shifting balance between French and English, and to make sense of the
phenomenon, strange at first glance, that French literature burgeoned in range and
quantity as its spoken use contracted.
Nevertheless, if applied to the problem of the initial transformation of
French into a written language, the awareness of its drift away from being a natural
mother-tongue produces the provocative idea that a Romance vernacular gets
written only as it ceases to be a genuine vernacular. One implication is the
possibility that what medieval society wanted out of a language of writing and
textuality is that it not be their normal language. Such was the case, of course with
Latin: it was remote, archaic, and bore more than a little redolence of the sacred. If
we allow ourselves to be reminded of the earliest writing systems – the occult
28
Short, “Bilingualism,” 467-8; and idem, “Tam Angli quam Franci: Self-definition
in Anglo-Norman England,” Anglo-Norman Studies 18 (1996), 156.
29
Susan Crane, Insular Romance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986),
4-6; and idem, “Anglo-Norman Cultures in England, 1066-1460,” in The Cambridge
History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 37, 44-48.
25
nature of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the use of Sumerian for certain classes of text (the
learned, the magical, medical, and cultic) by the Akkadians, for whom it was
already, in the 2nd millennium B.C., an ancient, exotic, and foreign language – it is
tempting to wonder if there is not perhaps some deep-buried structure of wanting
written language to be alien and removed from the ordinary.30
To return, though, from the realm of speculation, the fact that French
became an acquired language of status and culture in England does not work as an
explanation for the English invention of French literature, for the simple reason that
the timing is wrong. The phenomenon I am trying to account for – the initial
crossing-over of romanz into writing – occurred at the very beginning of the 12th
century – a period when, everyone agrees, French was still a native language in
England. The French Voyage of St. Brendan, the oldest complete text of the 12th
century Anglo-Norman vernacular awakening, was written between 1100 and 1118,
probably in 1106. Philippe de Thaön’s Comput was written in 1113 and the rest of
his works before 1135. The late 1130s saw the realization of the first history text in
French, L’Estoire des Engleis [The History of the English], written in Lincolnshire
by Geffrei Gaimar, and the 1140s, Sanson de Nantuil’s exegetical Proverbes de
Salemon. The 1130s and 1140s also saw the first French works produced in
30
Christopher Woods, “Bilingualism, Scribal Learning, and the Death of Sumerian,”
in Margins of Writing, Origins of Culture, ed. Seth L. Sanders, Oriental Institute Seminars
2 (Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2006).
26
Normandy, two or three saints’ lives written at Caen by Wace.31 Nobody has
suggested that the process of French ceasing to be a genuine mother-tongue in
England was underway before 1160 at the earliest.
31
Benedeit, The Anglo-Norman Voyage of Saint Brendan, ed. Ian Short and Brian
Merrilees (Manchester: Manchester University Press: 1979); Philippe de Thaön, Comput
(MS BL Cotton Nero A.V), ed. Ian Short (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society), 1984;
Geffrei Gaimar, L’Estoire des Engleis, ed. Alexander Bell (Oxford: Anglo-Norman Text
Society, 1960); Sanson de Nantuil, Les Proverbes de Salemon by Sanson de Nantuil, ed. C.
Claire Isoz, 3 vols. (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1988).
27
1.
Norman Identity and the Conquest of England
1066 was a busy year. It began with the death of Edward the Confessor on
January 5. The next day the king’s funeral Mass was held in Westminster Abbey,
followed immediately by the coronation of Harold, the son of Edward’s tormentor,
Earl Godwine. Harold was not in line for the throne by blood but was
unquestionably the most powerful man in England. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
and other English sources report that King Edward himself had nominated Harold
his successor – a claim that gains much credibility in that it was also reported
without challenge in the 1070s by William’s own court historian.1 The duke of
Normandy spent the summer of 1066 drumming up support for his rival claim to
the throne, putting his case to his counts, the neighboring powers, and the pope,
who publicly gave his blessing to the undertaking. By September the Normans had
1
Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative
Edition, Vol. 5 (MS C) (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), hereafter abbreviated ‘ASC C’.
Other English sources: Vita Ædwardi Regis, The Life of King Edward who Rests at
Westminster, ed. and trans. Frank Barlow, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); and
The Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. R.R. Darlington and P. McGurk, trans. J. Bray and
P. McGurk, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), vol. 2, 600. William’s own historian:
William of Poitiers, Gesta Gullielmi, ed. and trans. R.H.C. Davis and Marjorie Chibnall
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 114.
28
marshaled their allies and amassed an invasion fleet. The Normans were not the
only ones invading England in 1066, however: the king of Norway, Harald
Hardraada got there first, landing in Yorkshire in mid-September and joining forces
with Harold Godwineson’s disaffected brother Tostig. King Harold raced north
with an army, met the invaders at Stamford Bridge on September 25. Harald
Hardraada and Earl Tostig were killed and their forces utterly crushed. On
September 28, William and his flotilla landed on the Kentish coast. Harold turned
his army around and raced back to the south. The English faced the Normans on a
hilltop outside the village of Hastings on October 14. Details of the battle were
preserved in a number of contemporary accounts, including the pictorial history-
writing of the Bayeux Tapestry: the English on the high ground with their axes and
massed infantry, William’s line drawn up with his Breton and French contingents
to the left and right of the main Norman center, the uphill cavalry charges, the
reversals, the death of the king’s two brothers and finally of Harold himself, the
pursuit and slaughter that lasted until nightfall.
Modern accounts of the Norman Conquest habitually emphasize its
uniqueness by pointing out that history offers very few such instances in which the
fate of a kingdom is decided in a single day’s fighting. Indeed, the changes that the
Norman invasion brought to England were drastic and astonishingly abrupt. The
Conquest itself – the invaders’ progress in ranging over the geographical space of
the state and enforcing their dominance in varying degrees – followed very swiftly
29
after the initial Norman victory. After Hastings, it took William a few months to
receive the submission of the southeast and finally of London. On Christmas day
1066 Duke William II of Normandy was crowned king of the English in
Westminster Abbey. English resistance to the invaders was fiercer in the North.
The Normans entered York in the summer of 1068 and finished subduing the
North, at least for the time being, by means of battle, massacres, and scorched-earth
devastation, by the summer of 1070.2 The forcible appropriation of the institutions
of production and control was not literally instantaneous but, relative to the time
that such processes usually took in the Middle Ages, was nearly so. The English
body politic was simply decapitated. Most of the ruling military-economic elite,
the English earls, were killed or dispossessed in the first few years. Within twenty-
five years of the Battle of Hastings, less than six percent of England’s land was in
the hands of the pre-Conquest holders or their heirs. Of the country’s 180 principal
land-holders and tenants-in-chief, only a half-dozen were English. Fifteen of the
sixteen bishops of England were men who were born in Normandy or had spent the
formative years of their careers there; only one was a native Englishman.3
2
For an unusually well-documented account of William’s actions in the years
immediately following the Conquest see David Bates, Regesta Regum Anglo-
Normannorum: The Acta of William I (1066-1087) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998),
75-84.
3
R.H.C. Davis, The Normans and their Myth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976),
103; Susan Crane, “Anglo-Norman Cultures in England, 1066-1460,” in The Cambridge
History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1999), 36-38.
30
The drastic impact of the Conquest on English society can be readily
appreciated, but the Normans – at least the ones actively involved in the
appropriation of the new kingdom – also found themselves in a changed world.
Those who stayed and found all or some of their property, time, and feudal
loyalties invested in England found themselves a tiny foreign minority in an alien
land with unfamiliar language and customs.4 As a condition of daily existence,
they were surrounded by a language that they did not know or were just learning.
A man who arrived to fight in 1066 or one who arrived afterward might well have
an English wife and children who were growing up bilingual. Whatever the
domestic situation inside one’s own home, the conduct of any official capacity
would have brought the members of the new elite into contact with the English-
speaking population. For all but the loftiest, who might have been insulated by
layers of officials and intermediaries, the Normans had to adjust to moving in a
world where their language was the foreign one. Language contact was almost
certainly a fact of daily life for any abbot overseeing a houseful of monks who
spoke English, for a bishop presiding over English parishes devoted to English
4
There is no medieval tally of how many Normans settled in England within the
Conqueror’s reign but scholars have offered cautious estimates based on the census-like
data compiled in the Domesday Book in 1086: “the newcomers were probably much less
numerous than the 25,000 slaves at the other end of the social scale,” says Marjorie
Chibnall, Anglo-Norman England, 1066-1166 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000), 208. Ian
Short, “Language and Literature,” in A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, ed.
Christopher Harper-Bill and Elisabeth van Houts (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), 205,
prefers a lower figure: around 15,000 by the start of the 12th century; about twice the
number of people in the original 1066 invasion force, but still less than one percent of the
total population of England.
31
saints, or for an officer conducting a shire court which required that he speak
English or find somebody who could.
The Normans who settled in England were not passing through as travelers,
traders, or soldiers on campaign; they were there as people whose position and
economic status were as subjects of the king of England. Those who were swept
along on the coattails of their duke’s success were still William’s fideles but held
their power in England not as the men of the duke of Normandy but as vassals of
the king of England, for all that it happened to be the same individual. The
Englishness of their new positions or properties was not limited to this one high-
level and, presumably for most people, distant loyalty to the new king but was also
present in more local and immediate ways. The holdings and titles the Normans
moved into in the years and decades after the invasion were to a large extent
appropriated wholesale from English occupants; that is to say, they retained their
existing forms and institutional structures, in such details as land boundaries,
hierarchies of tenancy, customary privileges and dues, or the protocol establishing
which episcopal see a particular abbey reported to.5
5
The medieval histories which are our sources, and other classes of texts too, pay a
disproportionate amount of attention to the ruling elite, to the neglect of the rest of the
population. The production of texts was executed by the only people who could write –
that is, educated churchmen and churchwomen, for the only people who had the money
and influence to demand the production of written texts. Texts produced under these
circumstances catered to the concerns, interests, and ideological biases of princes and
abbots. To make matters worse, the group whose identity constructs we are examining in
this study, the Normans, were a small minority which had lodged itself at the top of the
power structures in England. That is to say, to study the Normans in England in the first
decades after 1066 is almost by definition to study the privileged elite. There is, however,
32
The project of extending and maintaining their power over England drew
the invaders into a web of preoccupations, investments, and relationships which
was new to them and was distinctly shaped by English practices and precedents.
Thus, long before the Normans of England can be said to have assimilated, they
were in numerous ways integrated into England. As ‘citizens’ of England – or if
this word is too anachronistic, as subjects of the king of England – they were alien
but they were not foreigners. These Normans of the first generations after the
Conquest (the period, that is, that saw the emergence of French literature in
England) occupied a new and untried position. These English Normans or Norman
Englishmen had to negotiate between (at least) two identities, establishing some
allegiance to their new homeland and perhaps experiencing an altered relationship
to their original one. For a person who had come across the Channel and become
an English ‘citizen’ or for one born in England of an English mother with English
as his native language, there was, inevitably, a new construct of what it meant to be
Norman.
The experience of settling in England after the Conquest did indeed produce
broad changes in Norman group identity. This is evident from the process’
observable endpoint: the Normans of England ended up considering themselves
one significant bright spot in the bleakly elitist demographics of the cadre under
examination here: if the producers and consumers of written literature in the Middle Ages
made up an exclusive club at least it was not a men’s club. As we will see, women figure
very prominently among the writers and patrons who developed French literature in Anglo-
Norman England.
33
English. By the end of the 12th century there was no elite whose members routinely
identified themselves as Normans rather than Englishmen. The past eight years
have seen the publication of several book-length studies of Norman identity,
building upon the flourishing dialogue which has been underway since the mid-
1970s. While these studies disagree in some of their conclusions, none doubts that
the Conquest produced changes in the ways the Norman people defined itself. The
considerable literature of the topic is characterized by a tendency – or to be more
fair, an obligation – to revisit the same finite patch of evidence. “There were no
explicit discussions of why individuals shifted to an English identity,” Hugh
Thomas observes. “Because intellectuals of the time did not think systematically
about ethnicity, moreover, one will find no discourse on the attractions of
Englishness or the nature of Normanitas.”6 Thomas is interested in how the
Normans became English and this present study is concerned with the ways in
which they remained Normans, but whichever of the two national identities one
chooses to trace, the main body of evidence is the corpus of 11th- and 12th-century
Norman and Anglo-Norman historiography.
Both before and after the conquest of England, the Normans had a particular
penchant for history-writing. Qualitatively different from the sparse annals and
chronicles sometimes kept at monasteries, Dudo of St. Quentin’s De moribus et
actis primorum Normanniae ducum [On the Customs and Deeds of the First Dukes
6
34
of Normandy] (c. 996-1020) made the Normans the first people in the Western
European Middle Ages to produce a narrative history of the their secular rulers and
their state.7 The Normans’ place within their world was changing rapidly and they
seem to have been eager to narrate, to themselves and others, accounts of their
expansion. With these texts they staked out positions relative to rival groups and to
their own earlier past.
Historical writings are not merely records which passively reflect the beliefs
of their time, they are participants involved in shaping those beliefs, ideologies, and
identity constructs. The texts that turn their attention to the subject of the Norman
nation turn the Norman nation into a subject – an active agent in history, center and
instigator of events; a singular, self-consistent entity standing as the protagonist of
a coherent narrative. They write the Norman nation into being. Though “discourse
of national identity” would have been a foreign and incomprehensible concept to a
writer at the beginning of the 12th century, medieval Norman historiographers were
nevertheless engaged in constructing ways of talking about the gens Normannorum.
They developed a vocabulary and topoi of Normanness. The history texts are
therefore an excellent site for watching the Normans defining the Normans.
7
Dudo of St. Quentin, De moribus et actis primorum Normanniae ducum, ed. Jules
Lair, Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de Normandie 3rd ser., vol. 3, part 2 (Sept
1865), Ch. II, lines 11-31. This ed. hereafter abbreviated ‘Dudo’. Eric Christansen, trans.,
History of the Normans (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998). Elisabeth van Houts, The
Normans in Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 3. Van Houts
points out that this sort of history as “serial biography” had appeared previously, but only
for abbots or bishops.
35
Furthermore, the texts are numerous enough and can be dated reliably enough that
we can trace how constructs of Norman identity changed over time. By comparing
how the Normans defined their group before 1066 and after, we can isolate the
changes that came about as the Normans negotiated their new position as an alien
minority in England.
Norman identity before 1066
There is consensus among scholars in the field that the Normans, by the
time of the Conquest, considered themselves a gens or natio – a nation or race of
people – and were so seen by outsiders. Their status as a distinct gens was
important to them and was deliberately fostered in their historiography. The
foundational text of Norman history writing, the precedent and source for many
that followed, is conspicuously a history of a people and its leaders. Dudo’s De
moribus et actis skillfully did what any classical or medieval historian was
expected to do when writing the history of a people: it provided an origin myth, a
prehistory, a founding figure, and a narrative of the group’s ethnic composition.
Contemporary scholars’ understanding that the Norman nation, the gens
Normannorum, was a construct, shaped by ideological considerations using the
medium of historiography, owes much to R.H.C. Davis’s milestone study, The
Normans and their Myth.8 With this understanding, the study of Norman identity
was freed from the tendency to think of the Norman people as an objective fact, a
8
R.H.C. Davis, The Normans and their Myth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976).
36
race of people with distinctive strengths (energetic, innovative, excelling in war),
progressing toward the goal of building themselves a larger and better state.9 This
older model envisioned Normandy as a nation-state, founded in 911 and thereafter
enjoying a history characterized by a triumphal series of annexations and
expansions. The Norman people, tautologically, were the nation corresponding to
that state. This vision of the Norman nation, obviously, was created in the image of
modern nationalism. A historian addressing the British Academy in 1938 could
write: “it was taken for granted that any family might have a relative settled in the
Sicilian kingdom, just as a girl to-day might speak casually of an uncle in India or a
sister at the Cape. The kinship of Normans all the world over was accepted in the
same sense that the kinship of British people is thought of in the Empire to-day, as
an underlying, ever-present fact, but without making a song about it.”10
Davis rejects the assumption that the early Normans were, from the start, an
entity with a strong racial or national self-consciousness. Normanness, instead,
was built up gradually, in stages, responding to the needs of different periods. At
the start of the 11th century, Davis says, Dudo’s history was eager to insist that the
9
Charles Homer Haskins, The Normans in European History (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1915), D.C. Douglas, The Norman Achievement, 1050-1100 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1969); R. Allen Brown, The Normans (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1984).
10
Evelyn Jamison, “The Sicilian Norman Kingdom in the Mind of Anglo-Norman
Contemporaries,” 237-285 in Proceedings of the British Academy 24 (1938), 276.
37
first dukes were good Christians and good Frenchmen, not savage vikings.11 Later
there was a reaction to this assimilationist agenda and the histories of the 12th
century fostered a myth of Normanness to assert their distinct identity. “The more
French the Normans were becoming in Normandy, and the more English in
England, the more they insisted on their Danishry and their descent from Rollo.”12
The Normans in England, Davis says, positioned themselves as Englishmen in
response to a practical need to appear the legitimate successors to English lands and
titles. In the course of this necessary process, they erased the difference between
Normans and Englishmen. By the 1130s they realized that their group identity was
dissolving or already had, and it is then that the Normans’ historians rewrote
history to represent the gens Normannorum as a sharply distinct and essentially
ethnically-defined nation whose members were Norman regardless of location or
politics.
The constructedness of national identity is now widely accepted in the field
and without, but many in Anglo-Norman studies have disagreed with important
particulars of Davis’ picture of the invention of Normanness.13 Countering Davis’
11
The Old English word wicenga, derived from a word in the vikings’ own
language, Old Norse víkingr, meant ‘raider, pirate’ (see Gwyn Jones, A History of the
Vikings. 2nd ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984], 76 n.1). In modern U.S.
English, it is generally capitalized as if it were a proper name but this is ill-conceived, as it
does not denote any specific national group, and did not do so in the Middle Ages either.
12
Davis, The Normans and their Myth, 124.
13
Eg. Nick Webber, The Evolution of Norman Identity, 911-1154 (Woodbridge:
Boydell Press, 2005) 67-68; G.A. Loud, “The ‘Gens Normannorum’ – Myth or Reality?,”
Anglo-Norman Studies 4 (1982), 104-116. Others have added substantially, either refuting
or elaborating, but with most of the topics that the specialist visits, Davis got there first.
38
contention that the uniqueness and unity of the gens Normannorum was an
ideological construct invented in the 12th century, G.A. Loud argues that insistence
on the group’s status as a gens was a central preoccupation of Norman history-
writing from its inception at the start of the 11th century.14 Loud notes that the
principal strategy of marking the Normans as a distinct gens in these texts is the
promulgation of a myth of innate national character. Norman histories of the 11th
century established the commonplace of reiterating a set of characteristic Norman
qualities: ambition, cunning, prowess in warfare, and disdain for authority.15 These
are the most heroic or endearing of qualities; insisting on them as innate traits of
the Normans does not foreground the achievements of the gens or its excellence,
but its uniqueness. They are qualities that make Normans different from other
peoples. The function or effect of the strategy is pure demarcation of difference.
Inasmuch as the prevailing medieval ideas about gentes shaped the
Normans’ belief in a gens Normannorum and their understanding of it, their
construct of group identity was, in theory, essentially ethnic.16 The Normans were
joined together as a people because they shared common ancestry and blood
relation. As an ideological construct, this is simple and sturdy, but in practice it is,
14
G.A. Loud, “The ‘Gens Normannorum’ – Myth or Reality?,” Anglo-Norman
Studies 4 (1982): 104-116; idem, “La ‘gens normannorum’: nascita di un mito lettarario,”
in I Normanni: Popola d’Europa, 1030-1200, ed. Mario D’Onofrio (Venice: Marsilio/
Centro Europeo di Studi Normanni, 1994), 161-163.
15
Loud, “The ‘Gens Normannorum’,” 111; idem, “Nascita di un mito,” 163.
16
Loud, “The ‘Gens Normannorum’,” 112; Cf. Claude Carozzi, “Des Daces aux
Normands: Le mythe et l’identification d’un peuple chez Dudon de Saint-Quentin,” in
Peuples du Moyen Âge: Problèmes d’identifi-cation, ed. Claude Carozzi and Huguette
Taviani-Carozzi (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1996), 7-25.
39
of course, problematical. In the case of the Normans, as for most “peoples” or
nations, ethnic purity was a myth. If a group joined together by believing or
insisting that they are all blood relations are, in actuality, nothing of the sort, then
there must be other motivations at work. Loyalty to a political status quo, or sense
of belonging, willingness to fight or pay taxes, how one declares oneself in foreign
company – these, in practice, have to come from somewhere else. Studies of
Norman identity in the last decade or so have investigated other non-ethnic forces
of cohesion which may have been at work drawing boundaries of inclusion and
exclusion around the Normans.
Cassandra Potts envisions a Scandinavian elite promoting a coherent
Norman identity to help them win acceptance and consolidate their control of an
ethnically-mixed Normandy. Normans in the 10th and early 11th century viewed
themselves as a successful marriage of Frankish and Scandinavian traditions.
Accordingly, they formulated an unusual gens ideology in which they were indeed
a single people, but a hybrid people. Again, Dudo’s De moribus et actis is singled
out as the locus in which this identity construct was articulated. Departing from
received ideas of gentes, Dudo’s text foregrounds mixing and assimilation rather
than defining the Norman people as a pure-bred group descended from a founding
ancestor.17 The legendary ancestor is there, sure enough, but much more space is
devoted to more recent, more historically-plausible events. The Normans are
17
Cassandra Potts “Atque unum ex diversis gentibus populum effecit: Historical
Tradition and the Norman Identity,” Anglo-Norman Studies 18 (1996): 139-152.
40
Normans by dint of leaving their Danish homeland in exile, remaining a distinct
band under Rollo, settling in Normandy, converting to Christianity, and merging
with the indigenous Franks. This narrative constructs a gens Normannorum that is
not drawn on purely ethnic lines; political and territorial elements are involved. (In
this construct, a gens-based identity with a difference, the relationship between
ethnic group and polity – that is, between nation and state – is altered but still very
strong. The usual ideological narrative starts with the nation as a given – a simple,
prior fact – and represents the state as their native, original territory or an area that
they expand into and overrun. In De moribus et actis, the state, the Normandy of
the dukes, contains a gens that is made there on site. The state produces the gens.
Emily Albu’s analysis of Norman historiography likewise tracks “an
inclusive vision of Normanness that transcends constraints of racial purity or
bloodline.”18 National identity is not built from a single measure or criterion; there
are always a number of vectors at play. Marjorie Chibnall develops the thesis that
loyalty to a political leader was the non-ethnic reality that welded a group of
individuals together as Normans.19 Nick Webber is also convinced that Norman
historiography both before and after the Conquest, and indeed Norman identity,
was strongly centered on the person of the leader.20
18
Emily Albu, The Normans and their Histories: Propaganda, Myth and Subver-
sion, (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001), 17.
19
Marjorie Chibnall, The Normans (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
20
Nick Webber, The Evolution of Norman Identity, 911-1154 (Woodbridge:
Boydell Press, 2005).
41
Webber’s Evolution of Norman Identity is the most recent and systematic
analysis of the corpus of Norman history writing. Webber’s analysis covers both
internal and external identity, maintaining a careful distinction between the way
Norman sources talk about the Normans as opposed to how outsiders talk about
Normans. His interest is principally in tracking the formation of a Norman identity
and the changes over time in how the group was viewed by itself and others. In the
service of this project, medieval history texts are sources rather than themselves the
object of study, and Webber is sometimes inclined to take them at face value, as
testimony of the views of a particular time or society, rather than interrogating the
texts as constructed artifacts with their own strategies, uses, and rhetorical tropes.
That said, Webber touches, with greater or lesser attention, on most of the issues of
interest to a study of Norman identity, including this present one. A significant
contribution is his attention to the territorial element of Norman identity. By the
early 11th century, he says, the neighbors to the east and south seemed to have
slipped easily into a territorial definition of the Normans. Frankish histories do not
talk as if the Norman-held area contains two different ethnic gentes, Normanni and
Franci. They recognize the territory as a unit under the count or duke of the
Normans, and their attitude seems to be that a person dwelling in that leader’s
territory is a Norman.21 Within Normandy too, a territorially-defined group identity
21
Ibid., 20-21, 40-41.
42
developed early: “inhabitants of the areas under Norman control became Norman
by default.”22
The shift toward a territorially-defined identity was accelerated by the
Conquest and settlement in England, Webber believes. Identity came to involve
primarily where you lived and to whom you were loyal. Ethnicity was out and
political affiliation was in. This is not to say that gens ceased to matter. Rather,
there was a shift in the way people selected or defined which gens they felt they
belonged to. Webber adduces a range of mid-12th-century Anglo-Norman texts in
which Normans in England identified themselves as Angli not Normanni. “If
someone lived in England, was at home in England, and obeyed the king of
England, then they are likely to have considered themselves English.”23
Focusing almost exclusively on post-Conquest England, Hugh Thomas’ The
English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity 1066-c.1220
is a detailed study of how the Normans assimilated and came to identify themselves
as Englishmen. In his efforts to piece together chronologies of assimilation and
identification, Thomas recognizes that these are two separate processes, related but
nonetheless distinct. The process of integrating into English society – of becoming
an Englishman in a variety of substantial ways – and the process of identifying
oneself as English could happen at different rates. Thomas’s study aims for a
22
Ibid., 70.
23
Ibid., 173. Webber does not pay much attention to how language affected the way
people identify themselves.
43
greater degree of theoretical awareness than is common in the field. Keen
awareness of the constructedness of ethnic groupings is balanced by the recognition
that the construction of identities does not occur independently of ‘actual’ factors in
the ‘real world’: observable cultural similarities or differences play a part in how
lines are drawn between ethnic groups and how individuals come to identify with
one group rather than another.24 Thomas has no doubt that the two groups were
conceived of as gentes: “English society in the late eleventh century was
permeated by an awareness of ethnic difference, and of the contrast between
English and Normans.”25 Notably, for the purposes of this present investigation,
Thomas pays more attention than most to the role of language in ethnic identity.
The scholarly studies of the last thirty years, not limited to the selection of
important and recent ones mentioned here, agree that Norman identity was
organized around the Normans’ conviction that they were a distinct people. “These
works,” as Hugh Thomas puts it, “leave no doubt that both before and after 1066 a
strong sense of ethnic identity existed in Normandy, at least among the elites.”26
Current studies have added to the understanding of how the gens Normannorum
was constituted, disagreed as to the stages and timing of its development and
recognition, and differed in their interpretations of the historical texts that are our
primary source of information on the subject, but concur that the Normans
24
Thomas, The English and the Normans, 9-14.
25
Ibid., 46.
26
Ibid., 32.
44
developed a strong group identity and that the ‘group’ was identified as a gens.
There is agreement on another important point: in Normandy before the conquest
of England, language was not a factor in Norman identity. Though this point is not
one that scholars frequently observe, I do not know of a single book or article that
takes a contrary position.
Historiographical texts from both inside and outside Normandy indicate that
the Normans’ group identity was not defined by the language that they spoke. In
the first hundred years or so of the existence of the Rouen settlement, one
apparently could be a Norman regardless of whether one spoke Danish, Norse, or
French.
Dudo’s De moribus et actis pays some attention to the interplay of
languages in and around Normandy, but in no case presents language as a criterion
in the constitution of a Norman ethnic or political identity. On the contrary, this
influential pre-Context history indicates that language was not a consideration in
defining the Norman nation.
Early on, in book II, there seems to be an assumption that language and
gens have a natural connection. When Rollo’s band of vikings (Danes or Dacians,
as Dudo calls them) arrive at the mouth of the Seine, the Franks send an earlier
viking arrival, Alstignus, out to parley with them because he is “born of that same
nation [ista gente procreatus]” and his people “speak the Dacian language
[Daciscae lingua peritos]” (II.13). One sentence does not constitute a position on
45
the matter, though, and elsewhere a person’s language is not a function of his
nationality. In III.53, William Longsword understands the sarcastic insults
muttered by emissaries of the hostile Lotharingians and Saxons “through [his
knowledge of] the Danish tongue.”27 Rather than corresponding to a particular
gens, language in this case sprawls across ethnic and political borders. The episode
as represented by Dudo may or may not imply that the Germanic envoys have an
expectation that the Norman duke would be a romanz speaker. The text presents
no very clear stance on the connection between gens and language in any general or
theoretical sense. These two brief mentions of language do provide valuable
information, though: they show that this official history does not shy away from
representing the early Normans speaking their ‘native’ Germanic tongue rather than
the Romance vernacular.
The scene of Rollo’s band’s arrival registers the language barrier between
the first Normans [Daci/Dani/Northmanni] and the Franks [Franci]. In showing
William Longsword’s use of “the Danish tongue” in book III, Dudo is not relating
conditions of a distant past: Longsword was the grandfather of Dudo’s patron,
Duke Richard II. Linguistically, the Normans shifted camps, leaving the ‘Danes’
and joining the Franks, but Dudo does not represent this event as any sort of
milestone in the formation of Normandy. Rollo’s conversion to Christianity is an
27
For this line from III.53, translation, and parenthetical interpolation are
Christiensen’s. In III.54, Longsword comments that the Saxons do not use “the Dacian
language,” suggesting that the Normans’ language and the Saxons’ are related but not
identical.
46
important event in these pages, the ethnic absorption of the Franks into a new gens
Normannorum is emphasized, and titles and territorial borders are formational, but
the language shift is not represented as a defining event. The Normans’
abandonment of their original language and their adoption of the Franks’ tongue is
neither commented on directly nor suppressed.
In the passage which most registers the Normans’ relationship to their two
languages, De moribus depicts a situation in which both languages are present
simultaneously. In book IV, William Longsword grooms his son, the future
Richard I, for rule. He tells his barons:
“Quoniam quidem Rotomagensis civitas Romana

potius quam Dacisca utitur eloquentia, et
Bajocacensis fruiter frequentius Dacisca lingua quam
Romana; volo igitur ut ad Bajocensia deferatur...et
educetur cum magna diligentia, fruens loquacitate
Dacisca, eamque discens tenaci memoria, ut queat
sermocinari profusius olim contra Dacigenas”28
[“Now, since Roman eloquence rather than Dacian is

used in the city of Rouen, while in Bayeux the
Dacian language is used more than the Roman, I wish
therefore that he be taken to Bayeux...and educated
there with great diligence, using the flowing speech
of the Dacians and studying it with tenacious
memory so that in the future he will be able to speak
more fluently to the Dacian-born.”]
The way this text portrays it, language does not function as a defining
feature of the Norman gens or the Norman state. Dudo represents Normannia as a
28
Dudo, De moribus et actis, Lair, IV.68: Translation is my own.
47
bilingual country (Dudo uses the term patria frequently) in which Scandinavian
and Romance vernaculars coexisted and were both valued – so much so that there
was an expectation that their leader ought to be bilingual. There are Normans who
speak ‘Dacian’ and Normans who speak Romana lingua. Neither one nor the other
is positioned as the proper language for Normans to speak, and neither is linked by
name to the Norman people or land. Calling the Scandinavian vernacular “the
Dacian language [Dacisca lingua]” associates it with Rollo and the first settlers,
whose origin in, and departure from, Dacia is narrated in detail in books I and II.
The Normans’ other language – the one we call Old French – is referred to here as
“Roman eloquence [Romana...eloquentia],” a terminology which does not associate
it with the gens Normannorum nor with the Franci who formed one rootstock of
their hybrid nation.
A second brief account of the pre-Conquest Normans’ linguistic situation
survives in a history of the Franks written in Aquitaine some 35 or 40 years before
the Normans invaded England, and here too the Normans are not a people defined
by the language that they speak. Adhemar of Chabannes’ Chronicon (c. 1026-
1033) identifies the reign of William Longsword as the time when the Norman
nation was converted to Christianity and, “giving up its pagan tongue, accustomed
itself to Latin speech” [gentilem linguam obmittens, latino sermone assuefacta
48
est].”29 For Adhemar, as for his near contemporary Dudo, language was not a
defining characteristic of the Normans. Their linguistic conversion is an adjunct to
their religious conversion. The language they gave up was a “pagan language
[gentilem linguam]” and that is all we need to know about it. Naturally enough, the
language which they acquire along with Christianity is not represented as a
language associated especially with the Normans. It is not even presented as being
the Franks’ language, or as marking a triumph of Frankish culture over Norse. As
latino sermone, it is the language of Christianity.30
It is not surprising that the Normans’ Romance vernacular is never
identified as Norman (or as French for that matter) in any of our extant sources of
the pre-Conquest period: no Romance vernacular was named for or associated with
any particular gens. Before the 12th century, the sources are devoid of any lingua
Normanna or lingua Normannorum, Latinate or Scandinavian. In fact, there are
very few references of any sort involving Normans and languages. Until their
invasion and settlement of England, nobody, Norman or otherwise, seems very
interested in what the Normans spoke.
29
Adhemar of Chabannes, Ademari Cabannensis Chronicon, ed. P. Bourgain,
Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis 129 (Turnout: Brepols, 2003), III.27.
30
This passage provides us with an uncommon and illuminating instance of a
Romance-speaker, c. 1030, choosing a designator to refer to the language we know as Old
French. Not only does Adhemar not identify it as the language of the Franks/French, he
does not mark it is an entity distinct from Latin. Perhaps in a context where his point was
to distinguish educated discourse from common, or clerical language from lay, or written
from spoken, an 11th-century Aquitainian would have opted to identify the vernacular as
lingua romana. In this case, however, the only distinction implied is between civilized,
familiar, Christian speech and pagan, viking language – and the entity we think of as
French is identified as “Latin speech.”
49
In England after the Conquest, by contrast, Norman authors not only
mention their language with greater frequency, they go ahead and write texts in it.
This, of course, is the really momentous development – but it was, I believe, a
development made possible by processes that came before. The writing of
vernacular (Old French) literature seems to be the product of the second generation
of Norman rule in England. It was not undertaken, as far as we know, before 1100.
Before we can interrogate the connection between the Normans’ identity constructs
and their vernacular writing, we first need to investigate the effect of the Conquest
on Norman identity in the years preceding the appearance of their first French texts.
Norman identity after the Conquest: problems and positions
In spite of the disappointing medieval reticence on the topics of identity and
language, the transformations in Norman identity after 1066 are reflected in a
substantial textual trail recording the Normans’ adoption of the gens-name Franci
(or, in their vernacular texts, Franceis). In a period when the discourse of national
identity seems to have been so limited or so ill-recorded that we can often recover
little more than what is implied in the way they categorize and name groups of
people, the appearance of a different name for a well-established gens is big news.
The Norman adoption of the name Franci was an extraordinary move: it
entailed the appropriation of a very familiar, existing gens-name which, up until
that point had denoted a neighboring people, the Normans’ defining Other and
familiar enemy. For the Normanni to claim (or admit) that they are Franci meant
50
scrapping existing borders and drawing new ones. It would seem that they were
reversing their policy of representing themselves as a distinct people – or perhaps
crafting new definitions of their group to allow for the notion that one can belong to
the gens Normannorum and yet also be in some sense a Francus. If Franci, as the
Normans used it after the Conquest, meant something different from what it had
previously – if the word was assigned a function other than naming the same
Franks or French that it had designated for centuries – then the Normans were
constructing a new group, some alternative or additional Franci, composed and
defined differently from the existing, ‘original’ Franci. Either way, unless we are
prepared to accept that the Norman use of the gens-name Franci was not new and
not indicative of anything, we are led to a number of questions. Who was included
in the group they were referring to when they used the name Franci? How did they
arrive at this change in nomenclature? In what ways were they defining their own
group differently when they identified it as Franci, as opposed to when they called
it Normanni?
It may not be exaggeration to say that what one makes of the Norman use of
the name Franci is largely what one thinks on the whole topic of an altered post-
Conquest Norman identity. Although the Normans’ practice of calling themselves
Franci has been recognized as a provocative problem, the phenomenon merits
greater emphasis and more detailed analysis than it has received. Some specialists
in the field make no mention of it at all and others brush over it with minimal
51
explanation or investigation. In some cases, scholars have failed to notice that the
Norman appropriation of the name Franci was related to their invasion of England,
or even that it coincided temporally with the events of 1066.
Once again, R.H.C. Davis’ 1976 study is a good place to start.31 Operating
with the premise that what the Normans called themselves is a telling indicator of
how they staked out their position vis-à-vis their neighbors, Davis enlists the names
Franci and Normanni as an important part of his tracking of Norman self-definition
and assimilation. This is the sequence Davis worked out: in the 11th century the
people of Normandy referred to themselves as Franci and Normanni indifferently;
it is only later, after the Conquest, that they begin to reject the gens-name Franci,
as they try to distinguish themselves from the French.
Davis’ masterful book presents transformations in Norman identity as a
cogent linear narrative and does it with such insight and lucidity that one only
reluctantly disagrees with his conclusions regarding the Normans’ use of gens-
names. At the beginning of the 11th century, Davis reminds us, Dudo’s history was
eager to insist that the first dukes were good Christians and good Frenchmen, not
barbarian raiders. Assimilation to the Frankish mainstream succeeded so well that
“until the end of the eleventh century most Normans were indifferent to whether
they called themselves Norman or French, using the words Galli or Franci as
synonyms for Normanni. But in the course of time there was a reaction against this
31
Davis, The Normans and their Myth.
52
assimilation. It is first found in William of Jumièges [1070], but in general it
belongs to the twelfth century rather than the eleventh, and it is obvious from the
way in which writers use Franci and Normanni as antonyms....The more French
they became, the more desperate they were to establish their identity.”32 After the
conquest of England, Davis explains, the Normans continued to become more
French in their culture, but now they had a kingdom of their own. Equal in this
regard to the kingdom of France, in whose shadow they had been, the Normans no
longer wanted to be seen as a subspecies of Frenchmen. By 1100 or a little after,
the Normans had stopped calling themselves Franci and had gone back to using
that name to denote the ‘real’ French whom it had denoted before the Normans
borrowed it.33
This accounting of the advent and decline of the Normans’ use of the gens-
name Franci over time is, to a large extent, reversed. Davis says that the forty
years immediately following the conquest of England was the transitional period in
which the Normans stopped calling their own people Franci,34 but the opposite is
the case. The practice of adopting the gens-name Franci began with the Conquest.
Before that time, far from calling themselves Normanni and Franci
interchangeably, the Normans did not refer to their people as Franci at all. (For a
text by text analysis of the available pre-Conquest source material, the interested
32
Ibid., 54; date in brackets and elision are my own additions.
33
Ibid., 54, 104-105
34
Ibid., 105.
53
reader may refer to the Appendix.) Now, it is true that Davis assigns his period of
promiscuous use of the term Franci to the 11th century, and not specifically to the
pre-Conquest period. In doing so, he has failed to observe that it is the Conquest –
not the turn of the century, but the process of digesting England – which marks the
change in the Norman use of the two terms. Furthermore, the texts that he cites as
evidence of common Norman use of Franci in the 11th century are all texts written
after the Conquest.35 Davis produces no evidence at all of the Normans calling
themselves Franci before 1066.
My point here is not to indulge in a prolonged rebuke of Davis’ 1976
position, rather to illustrate a problem that is by no means limited to Davis – to
show, that is, the consequences of trying to use gens-names as evidence without
paying scrupulous attention to the date and context of the sources in which one
finds them. This is the most basic way in which in investigations of Norman
adoption of the term Franci fall short. Yet it is an important one: without pinning
down which sources do what and when, it is easy to underestimate or miss
altogether an observation as fundamental and significant as the fact that the
Normans began to call themselves Franci immediately after the Conquest, but had
not done so before.
35
Davis, 136 n.4, cites the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio (written 1067 or 1068);
William of Poitiers’ Gesta Guillielmi (c. 1070-1077); the Bayeux Tapestry (c. 1077-1082);
and “the monk of Caen” (i.e. Redaction B of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum, c. 1097-
1125).
54
Whatever its idiosyncrasies, Davis’ example brought attention to the
technique of examining Norman national identity through the study of gens-names.
The approach was then applied in the investigation of a variety of specialized
issues: G.A. Loud was interested in determining if the Norman conquest of
southern Italy was indeed a largely Norman venture (he answered in the
affirmative), and C.P. Lewis aimed to find if the Gallic protégés of King Edward in
pre-Conquest England were as overwhelmingly Norman as has generally been
assumed (he decided they were not). George Garnett turned his attention to post-
Conquest England, with the specialized mission of assessing the extent to which
Norman ethnic identity was recognized in the laws of the land.36 Broadening the
scope in the mid-1990s, John Gillingham and Ian Short used gens-names as a
central line of evidence in plotting the chronology of Norman assimilation in
England.37 More recently, this same project has been reprised in greater detail in
the book-length works of Thomas and Webber, which we have already encountered
in this chapter.
Among the works of the last thirty years, the paper Ian Short gave at the
Battle Conference in 1995, “Tam Angli quam Franci: Self-Definition in Anglo-

36
G.A. Loud, “How ‘Norman’ was the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy?,”
Nottingham Medieval Studies 25 (1981), 13-34; C.P. Lewis, “The French in England
before the Norman Conquest,” Anglo-Norman Studies 17 (1995), 122-144; George
Garnett, “‘Franci et Angli’: the Legal Distinctions Between Peoples after the Conquest,”
Anglo-Norman Studies 8 (1986), 109-137.
37
John Gillingham, “Henry of Huntingdon and the Twelfth-Century Revival of the
English Nation,” in Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. Simon Forde et
al. (Leeds: Leeds Studies in English, 1995); Ian Short, “Tam Angli quam Franci: Self-
Definition in Anglo-Norman England,” Anglo-Norman Studies 18 (1996), 153-175.
55
Norman England,” is a touchstone. Though the article has the broad goal of
charting the progress of Anglo-Norman assimilation throughout the 12th century,
and Norman use of the name Franci is just one item in the range of textual
evidence which Short reviews, he nevertheless identifies all of the major questions
which the naming shift opens up. Most of them are touched on, at least in passing,
in one conveniently concentrated passage:
The incomers’ preference for the label Franci over that of Normanni
is, I suspect, to be explained in the first place in purely practical
terms; whether or not they were actually Norman rather than natives
of Picardy, Flanders or Brittany, all could identify themselves
primarily as speaking the language of the French. Franci, in other
words, designated those French-speaking incomers originating from
the geographic area known as Francia. By defining themselves
collectively as Romance-speaking Franci as opposed (in binary
opposition) to Germanic-speaking Angli, the early Anglo-Normans
were able to distinguish themselves as members of a specific
cultural community within a broader political entity.38
First off, Short wastes no time in correctly locating the Norman practice of
using the name Franci in broad historical context: while he does not observe that it
was absent in Normandy before the Conquest, he does associate the phenomenon
with the “Insular Normans.” His conclusions as to why it developed and what it
means all have to do with the Normans’ needs or goals in England. It is
noteworthy that Short assumes that the use of Franci was the Normans’ own
preference, “a consciously selected expression of self-identity.”39 He does not
connect the practice in any way with the English. Consequently, he does not
38
Short, “Tam Angli,” 163-164.
39
Ibid, 163.
56
expect it to reflect and transmit English ways of thinking about and referring to the
Normans. Thomas and Webber make an important contribution in this regard.
They both recognize that using the term Franci was fundamentally an English way
of defining the Normans.40 They note that the English already called the Normans
‘French’ before 1066. One of the reasons for this, Thomas offers, is that the word
normenn already existed in Old English, where it was used mostly to refer to the
vikings or Norse. For referring to the people of Normandy, then, ‘French’ was a
better term for the English to use “because ‘Norman’ was particularly ambiguous
and confusing in their language.”41 Furthermore, the English were either ignorant
or indifferent when it came to distinguishing the Normans from other Gallic gentes.
The English “saw all their conquerors as part of the Franci,” Webber believes.
“Such a blanket term was chosen and used because the exact specifics of the gentes
did not matter to the English.”42
More than earlier researchers, Webber and Thomas recognize that the
practice of applying the name Franci to the Normans was an English usage which
the Normans adopted.43 As they understand it, the conspicuous feature of this
40
Thomas, The English and the Normans, 32-34; Webber, Norman Identity, 131-
133. The English origins of the practice are also apparent to Clanchy, From Memory to
Written Record (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 217.
41
Thomas, The English and the Normans, 33-34; cf. Webber, Norman Identity, 118,
132.
42
Webber, Norman Identity, 131, 132. Perhaps the strongest proponant of the view
that the pre-Conquest English made no distinction between Normans and other French
because they were blind or indifferent to any such difference is Lewis, “The French in
England.”
43
Thomas, The English and the Normans, 38; Webber, Norman Identity, 132-133.
57
English manner of defining the Normans was that it represented them as part of a
broader, more inclusive group. Even among scholars who do not see Franci as a
specifically English way to refer to the Normans, there is broad agreement that the
non-specific nature of the term Franci is what made it useful or appealing to the
Normans in England.44 The Norman Conquest was not conducted entirely by
Normans, they note: people from Brittany, Maine, Flanders, and the kingdom of
France also took part. As the invaders settled, these people, Gallic but not Norman,
made up a measurable minority within England’s new ruling elite, probably around
twenty percent before the end of William’s reign.45 The heterogeneous nature of
the invaders necessitated “an umbrella term” which would encompass the whole
group, without regard to their specific Continental origins. As Webber puts it, “the
Normans accepted the name Franci as a method of expressing unity with their
allies.”46
The adoption of the name Franci, it is agreed, indicates that the Normans in
England were redrawing the borders around their group, defining themselves by a
changed set of criteria or characteristics. If Franci was accepted, by the invaders
44
Garnett, “‘Franci et Angli’,” 114; Short, “‘Tam Angli’,” 163; Chibnall, The
Normans, 21.
45
Susan Crane, “Anglo-Norman Cultures in England, 1066-1460,” in The
Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 36. Among the Franci listed as tenants-in-chief in the
Domesday Book a little over 20% were not Norman, according to Katherine Keats-Rohan,
“The Bretons and Normans of England, 1066-1154: The Family, the Fief and the Feudal
Monarchy,” Nottingham Medeival Studies 36 (1992), 75 n.117, cited by Thomas, English
and Normans, 33 n.6.
46
Webber, Norman Identity, 133.
58
themselves and by the English, as an acceptable way to define them, our process of
interrogating the new post-Conquest identity construct moves forward by asking, In
what way or ways were the invaders considered French? In Short’s concise
statement, above, we can see the outlines of three basic answers which researchers
in the last seven years have elaborated somewhat but not fundamentally added to.
The Normans were considered French in some or all of the following ways: as a
sort of subspecies within a broader category of Franci; in geographical origin; in
language and culture.
Reassessing the evidence
That is where we stand as to current thinking on the Norman use of the
gens-name Franci. Some of the established hypotheses are valid; others can be
corrected, clarified, or pressed further to tell us more about post-Conquest Norman
identity. The analysis of gens-name usage in Norman historiography has not been
done with the systematic rigor needed, and this has prevented the evidence from
being used to its full potential, and has sometimes led to outright confusion. As we
saw, Davis supposed that the Normans regularly called themselves Franci before
the Conquest, whereas a careful survey of the texts (see the Appendix regarding
texts written before 1066, and Chapter Two for post-1066 works) indicates that it
was decidedly a post-Conquest innovation. Garnett’s statement that the Conquest-
era historians William of Jumièges and William of Poitiers often use Normanni
instead of Franci is not flatly incorrect but is certainly misleading: these two
59
important sources always call their protagonists Normanni, never Franci.47
Similarly, when Short notes an Anglo-Norman “preference” for the name Franci,
or when he observes that Franci was a term “which Anglo-Norman chroniclers
seem rarely to have used, outside formulae, to describe themselves” these
observations are each true – but they are true numerically.48
Determining that instances of Franci are outnumbered by instances of
Normanni without looking at specifically where, how, and why the term Franci is
used tells only half the story. Keeping a tally of which texts call the Normans
Franci and which do not may allow researchers such as Short and Thomas to assess
the relative popularity of the terms at different points in time, but it does not reveal
anything about what the two terms meant to the Normans, or the ways in which
they correspond to two different ways of conceptualizing the group. For this it is
necessary to go a step beyond tabulation and pay close attention to the contexts in
which the two terms are used.
To be fair, scholars have looked at the Norman use of Franci in the course
of pursuing other projects. Garnett is interested in the law. Gillingham, Short, and
Thomas aim to track the progress of assimilation. They (and to a lesser extent,
Webber too) focus on the increasing Englishness of the Anglo-Normans, whereas I
am interested in their Normanness; in what it meant to be a Norman in England.
For scholars who are investigating the process by which the descendents of the
47
Garnett, “‘Franci et Angli’” 1985, 114.
48
Short, “Tam Franci,” 163, 165.
60
foreign ruling class came to identify themselves as English, things really get
interesting when assimilation had progressed far enough that the Normans were
beginning to call themselves ‘English’ [Angli] rather than ‘Normans’ [Normanni]
in some of their texts, a point which they place somewhere around 1135. By that
time, the Normans had already been in England for sixty years. For investigating
the role of their language within their construct of ethnic identity and the changes
brought about by settling in England, we must look to an earlier period. We need
to determine what nomenclature of national identity the Normans were using before
1066, and how they constructed their group identity immediately after the
Conquest, in the decades which witnessed their response to their drastically new
English context – and which were also the decades preceding their foray into
vernacular writing.
Accordingly, we need to proceed from a firm grounding in pre-Conquest
descriptions of the Norman nation (the texts analyzed in the Appendix go back as
far as c. 820), and in Chapter Two while considering historiographical texts from
after the Conquest, I will pay particular attention to context. What matters is not
just whether a text calls the Normans Franci, nor how often, but in what
circumstances. When Franci is used to name the Normans is it any way denoting a
different set of people from the grouping indicated by Normanni, or is it just calling
the same set by a different name? If Franci is just another name, is there any
detectable logic to the choice of one term over the other? As it turns out, when the
61
corpus of Norman historiography is subjected to a comprehensive, analytical,
context-sensitive interrogation, a pattern emerges. The distribution of the terms
Normanni and Franci is, in fact, much more precise and meaningful than
researchers have thought, conforming to a pattern within individual texts and also
from one text to the next, at the larger level of the whole historiographical
discourse.
The Anglo-Normans, it turns out, did not have a “preference” for the name
Franci, as Short perceived it; they deployed Franci as an alternative which could
be used in certain contexts only. Once the pattern of usage and the specificity of
the term is perceived, it becomes clear that the Norman practice of identifying their
own group as Franci was an innovation directly related to the invasion of England.
The most significant limitation in current scholarship’s understanding of
post-Conquest Norman identity is the idea that Franci was used by the Normans
and the English as an ‘umbrella term’ embracing all of the various Gallic peoples in
the ruling elite. Modern scholars reason that the name Franci, by embracing the
non-Normans, would have been more accurate and would have had a salubrious
unifying effect within the elite. This notion seems to be universal among the
scholars in the field, whether they think that the Normans adopted Franci as an
umbrella term on their own initiative or that they were simply borrowing the
English manner of classifying and naming the Normans. Franci, they agree, is a
62
broader category.49 To call England’s new predominantly-Norman elite Franci
was to represent them as a sort of subspecies within a large, inclusive body of
French people. Calling them Franci asserts their Frenchness rather than their
Normanness. This supposition that Franci was an umbrella term has a necessary
corollary. If the mostly-Norman elite adopted the practice of calling themselves
‘French’ because it had the effect of repackaging the Normans into a broader, less-
specific grouping, then it follows that these Normans in England were voluntarily
relinquishing their identity as a distinct ethnic gens.
Webber envisions the Normans accepting, in some circumstances, an
essentially English tendency to think of them merely as ‘Frenchmen’: being
classified as Franci rather than Normanni was something they could accept with
“typical Norman pragmatism.” On the face of it, as Clanchy points out, the
recurring instances of Franci in the Anglo-Normans’ own administrative and
historical texts “raise doubts about the cohesion of Norman identity.”50 If the
Normans in England were willing to be identified as Franci, they must have been
less adamant about being Normans. If you accept the premise that Franci was an
umbrella term, the conclusion of the syllogism is very hard to resist.
49
Eg. Garnett, “‘Franci et Angli’,” 114, looking at the Anglo-Norman regime’s own
official discourse: “in diplomatic and legal records Normans are almost always subsumed
in the category of Frenchmen.”
50
Webber, Norman Identity 2005, 132. Clanchy, England and Its Rulers 1998, 21.
Cf. Thomas, 32.
63
However, I believe it can be demonstrated that the Normans in England did
not stop defining themselves as a distinct gens, and did not accept an identity which
positioned them as a species of Frenchmen. There are good reasons to reject both
parts of the proposition that the Anglo-Normans called themselves ‘French’
because they wanted an umbrella term: that is to say, we ought to question the
notion that the conquerors felt a need for a broader term which would embrace their
Gallic allies, and reject the premise that the gens-name Franci – when used to refer
to the Normans in England – was necessarily an umbrella term that took in a broad
sweep of Gallic peoples.
The theory that the Norman invaders wanted an umbrella term has its
origins in modern historians’ observation that the conquerors’ earliest histories of
the Conquest deliberately acknowledge the participation of non-Norman troops.
“The French attacked the left and the Bretons the right, while the duke with his
Normans fight in the center,” says the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio [Song of the
Battle of Hastings], a verse celebration of the Conquest written in 1067 or 1068.51
Or again, in William of Poitiers’ Gesta Guillelmi (c. 1071-1077): “Pressing home
the attack were men of Maine, Frenchmen, Bretons, Aquitainians, above all
Normans, whose valour was outstanding.”52 But recording the line of battle is
51
Guy, bishop of Amiens, The Carmen de Hastingae proelio of Guy, Bishop of
Amiens, ed. and trans. Frank Barlow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), vv. 413-
414: “Set levam Galli, dextram peciere Britanni; / Dux cum Normannis dimicat in medio.”
52
William of Poitiers, The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers, ed. and trans.
R.H.C. Davis and Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), II.18: “Institerunt
64
different from feeling a need to consistently recognize diversity within the ranks. It
is conjecture – and I think an anachronistic one – to imagine that the Normans
(their historiographers, the king, his chancery officials, etc.) would have been so
sensitive to the finer feelings of the handful of small minority groups that they
deliberately embraced a tactfully inclusive term. Such motivations and measures
are plausible enough in 21st-century England but much less likely to have been
present in the 11th century.
However, we do not need to rely on conjecture one way or the other to
challenge the idea that the early Anglo-Normans sought an umbrella term, because
there is very good reason to think that Franci was not an umbrella term for them in
the first place. The idea that the Normans were seen as a species of Frenchmen is
conditioned by an anachronistic modern tendency to overestimate the size and
importance of France. Scholars of the Conquest period often proceed as if the
kingdom of France was the dominant power in all of Gaul, as it would in fact
become the end of the 12th century. The notion that the 11th-century English and
Normans conceived of the Norman people as a subspecies of French people is a
modern assumption based on modern ideas about France, Normandy, and the
eis Cenomanici, Francigenae, Britanni, Aquitanni, sed cum praecipua virtute Normanni.”
Similar passages are also in Orderic Vitalis’ redaction (c.1095-1113) of the Gesta
Normannorum Ducum, VII.14 (Elisabeth M.C. van Houts, ed. and trans., The Gesta
Normannorum Ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Robert of Torigni, 2
vols. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992]) and his Historia Ecclesiastica III (Marjorie
Chibnall, ed. and trans., The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, 6 vols. [Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1969-1980], vol. 2, 164-167.
65
relationship between the two. Normandy’s status as a part of a powerful,
centralized France dates back only as far as 1204, when King Philip Augustus of
France wrested Normandy from its duke, England’s King John, and annexed it. It
was only then that Normandy became part of France. In the period relevant to our
investigation, before the expansionist reign of Philip Augustus (1180-1223), France
was a smallish kingdom centered on the Île de France (though the name was not yet
in use at that time) and Normandy was a separate entity.
The geographical explanation – the assertion that the Normans in England
counted as Franci because they came from Francia – can be set aside after careful
analysis of the textual evidence. To writers of the 11th and 12th centuries, Francia
referred to the territory under direct control of the king of France. (There are
exceptions but this is overwhelmingly the case.) The rex Francorum was only
occasionally and feebly able to implement the titular overlordship which, as heir of
the Carolingians, he theoretically held over the great counties that occupied the rest
of the area of the modern hexagone. The persistence of the geographical
explanation would seem to be due to the difficulty that modern scholars have in
stepping away from the idea that Normandy was a part of France. Even Webber,
who makes a point to recognize that Francia normally denoted a small France
which did not include Normandy, is nevertheless prone to slip into this
anachronism, speaking of Normandy as a place within France and referring to the
66
Normans as a “French sub-group.”53 If we heed the French and Norman texts of
the period, however, it becomes difficult to maintain that the Norman invaders’
adoption of the gens–name Franci indicates that geographical origin was entering
into their self-definition: as far as they were concerned, Normandy (along with
Flanders, Brittany, Burgundy, and Aquitaine) was not in France.
When a recent study says that the Franks/French of the 10th and 11th
centuries considered the Normans “a provincial group,”54 a kind of double-
anachronism is at work: the historical error of assuming political conditions which
were not yet present at that time is further refracted through vocabulary and
categories determined by European modernity’s investment in the model of center
and periphery (and informed too by our own moment’s acuity in theorizing and
critiquing such models). It would not have been conceptually available to the
French in 1000 or 1050 to represent the Normans as Frenchmen.
For the Normans, the French were a foreign power with whom they
contested frontiers, traded envoys, and made treaties. They were sometimes allies
but more often enemies. As late as 1057, just nine years before the Conquest, they
were an invading army. The understatement in Thomas’ reference to “a streak of
anti-French feeling in Normandy both before and after the Conquest” reflects a
tendency to forget that in the 11th and 12th centuries Normandy and France were
53
54
67
two separate political and territorial entities.55 To envision them as kindred nations
or as part and whole, with Normandy as a province of France, is to project modern
historical conditions backwards upon a time before they were in place.
The texts of the period allow us to dispel this error conclusively. Analysis
of historiographical texts, both French and Norman, from the 9th century through
the first third of the 12th century provide ample evidence that the Normanni were
not understood, or spoken of, as part of a larger Franci. The earlier texts show that
before the Conquest – and indeed all the way back to the ‘beginning,’ the time
when Rollo’s Rouen-based band began to be mentioned, named, and given
conceptual shape in annals and documents – the Normans were not called Franci.56
In texts written in France and the neighboring territories (Aquitaine, Burgundy,
Flanders), the Normans are not conflated with the Franks/French. Regardless of
the assimilation and intermixing which evidently erased any real genetic divide
between the Scandinavian invaders and the pre-existing population, the Normans
were defined as a distinct gens and a separate polity. They were not considered, by
themselves or others, a subset of a larger group called Franci. The terms Normanni
and Franci mark difference.
After 1066, when England’s conquerors began, in certain texts, to refer to
themselves as Franci, they used the term to denote the Normans only in the very
specialized contexts of their invasion of England or their presence there in post-
55
Thomas, The English and the Normans, 35.
56
Again, the textual evidence from this period is presented in detail in the Appendix.
68
Conquest England. In these contexts, the term Franci circumscribes and names a
specific group, the collection of William’s followers who invaded and took
possession of England. William’s non-Norman allies in the venture are either
named separately or are folded in, unmentioned, under the banner Normanni. In
the passages concerning the mixed nature of William’s invading army, as we saw
earlier in the chapter, the Normans, the French, and the others are distinct groups.
That is to say, in the very texts which have led modern historians to suppose that
the Normans were diligent in acknowledging their allies and used the umbrella
term Franci for that reason, Franci is not in fact functioning as an umbrella term.
In passages where a single term is used to cover all the Conquerors in England,
these history writers use Normanni far more often than Franci. If the Normans’
historians were mindful of the mixed nature of the Gallic elite in England, it must
be admitted that the umbrella term – the gens-name which lumps together the
specific Continental gentes rather than distinguishing them – is Normanni not
Franci.
In these same texts there are plenty of instances in which the gens-name
Franci is used in its older, ‘normal,’ non-specialized way, to refer to the people of
the kingdom of France. Where these texts narrate events on the Contintent,
whether before the Conquest or after, the term Franci refers to the subjects of the
French king. In these cases, Franci does not include the Normans. In any given
69
passage, if the French of the kingdom of France (or any other specific Gallic group)
are anywhere nearby, the Normans are called Normanni.
Put simply, the distinction between the Normans and the French was
rigorously maintained throughout the entire period we’re interested in, both before
and after the Conquest. The evidence does not suggest that the Normans were
prepared to accept an identity construct which subsumed them as part of the French
people whom they had always considered an Other, or one which defined them as
part of some more broadly-conceived gens Francorum; indeed it suggests that such
a move would have been unprecedented and unacceptable. This casts serious, if
not fatal, doubt on the common supposition that the Normans accepted Franci as an
umbrella term. Their adoption of the name Franci, then, does not indicate that the
Normans were ceasing to define themselves as their own distinct gens, but that the
process of adding England to the lands controlled by their nation led them to define
their gens differently.
If, as careful reading of the textual evidence seems to insist, the Normans at
the time of the Conquest were not willing – probably not even conceptually able –
to see themselves as French politically, or in terms of ethic nationality (gens), or
even geographically, then we are still left looking for the ways in which they were
able to identify themselves as Franci. Eliminating some of the standard answers
does not close the question down but only sharpens it, demanding a more vigorous
investigation in the two directions that have not been eliminated. The hypothesis
70
that the Anglo-Normans were identified as ‘French’ because of their language still
needs to be examined. At the same time, the confirmation that the practice of
calling the Normans French in English contexts is not something they brought with
them from any past or contemporary usage back home on the Continent makes it all
the more apparent that, if we want to figure out what Franci meant when applied to
the post-Conquest Normans, we have to look to the English.
Though some recent scholarship has recognized that the practice of defining
Normans as Franci probably began with the English rather than the Normans
themselves, the importance of the English origins of the name has not been
appreciated. Two standard hypotheses, or suppositions, are cited: the English
called the Normans ‘French’ because they were not in the habit of distinguishing
Normans from any other sort of Frenchman, and because the word “Norman” was
already in use as a generic term for the vikings.57 We shouldn’t make too much of
“the common use of the term ‘French’ in English documents,” Thomas suggests, as
it “may ultimately say more about the English perceptions than the self-identity of
the invaders.”58 Tracing the Normans’ use of the name back to the English is
valuable for that very reason, however. The pre-existing English perceptions tell us
what ideas the Normans were accepting and circulating when they adopted the
English nomenclature.
57
Thomas, The English and the Normans, 33-34; Clanchy, England and Its Rulers,
21; Webber, Norman Identity, 131-132.
58
Thomas, The English and the Normans, 34.
71
When current studies of Anglo-Norman identity trace the Norman use of
Franci to the English use of Franci, they do not go on to explore what the English
had in mind when they identified the Normans as French. This is most apparent in
the fact that they do not consider the implications of (or even mention) the word
which the English actually used in their own language to denote the Normans.
When these scholars discuss why the English called the Normans French they use
the Latin word Franci or the modern English words ‘French’ or ‘Frenchmen’.59
But the English in 1050 or 1080 did not speak Modern English nor think in it.
They did not call the Normans ‘French’ or ‘Frenchmen’, they called them frencisce
or þa frenciscan, and their terms did not mean the same thing as our term. This is
worth saying again: it is not just that the English at the time of the Conquest named
the Normans with a word whose spelling and pronunciation varies from its Modern
English counterpart; their word corresponded to a different conceptual signified
than our word ‘French’. To suppose otherwise is to ignore the fact that language
changes a lot in a thousand years.60
59
Thomas, The English and the Normans, 32-34; Webber, Norman Identity, 118,
129-134; Lewis, The French in England,” 129-130; Clanchy, Memory to Written Record,
217. One exception that I know of is Clanchy, England and its Rulers, 21, where at least
the Old English word is mentioned once.
60
Frenciscan is the noun ‘Frenchmen’ (as we’ll render it for now, subject to serious
revision in Chapter Four as we get a fuller picture of the meaning and usage of the Old
English word), in nominative and accusative plural. This form is therefore the closest
direct equivalent for Latin nominative plural Franci and Old French franceis. In point of
fact, in 11th- and 12th-century English texts such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the
kings’ writs, the Old English word usually appears as frencisce. This is the adjective
‘French’ (again, to use the most simple translation here, for convenience), in masculine
plural form for nominative and accusative cases, in the strong declension. This is the form
72
Everyone knows that language changes over time, on the lexical level as
well as in syntax, morphology, and pronunciation. Words change. A word can be
added to the language, dropped, altered, stretched to function in a different part of
speech, and so forth. A word can be redefined, which means that it is used in
different occasions than it was before, to denote a different referent (if one uses a
simple semiotic model in which words correspond to objectively-existing ‘real
things’), or to attempt to communicate a parcel of conceptual information
(Saussure’s signified, roughly, whether one envisions it as nonverbal or as
irreducibly inextricable from language, from other words) different from what
some other speaker might have had in mind when using the same word at a
different point. Over enough time, the idea of ‘the same word’ is invalid. The
phonetic or graphic body of the word – its sound in the mouth, its look on the page
– may be remain unchanged, but two speakers separated by one thousand years or
one hundred will not mean the same thing when they use that ‘same’ word. Even
barring the more extreme position that no two speakers ever mean the same thing,
our two hypothetical speakers do not live in the same world. Their contexts are all
different.
The hermeneutical work of crossing over the gap between two speakers’
difference is translation. But which acts of comprehension constitute translation?
most often encountered, in phrases such as “ealle mine þegnas frencisce et englisce [all my
thegns, French and English]” or “ealle þa burhwaru binnan Londone frencisce 7 englisce
[all the burghers of London, French and English].” (David Bates, Regesta # 80, 180. )
73
Or, more to the point, what doesn’t? We can probably agree that reading a
thousand-year-old text is a labor of translation. We accept that translation from a
foreign language is an endlessly complicated hermeneutic project, involving
attempts (by some measures impossible) to recognize and bring across cultural
contexts and linguistic context. The translation even of any single word in an
utterance, if one worked toward the unattainable and perhaps even indefinable ideal
of completeness, becomes an inquest into the word’s function and relationships
within the system of its own language, its history perhaps, the concatenation of
allusions it trails after it, what it did not mean, and so forth. But what constitutes
foreign? How far away, in distance or time, does a speaker or writer have to be to
be met with as an alien?
These theoretical considerations have immediate, concrete applications.
Old English is not “our” language, it is a foreign language from an alien and only
partly comprehensible world. The Modern English word ‘French’ is not the same
as the Old English word frencisc. The gap or difference between them is not
nugatory. To be unaware of this thousand-year gap, this internal difference within
the ‘same’ word, constitutes a severe limitation to understanding the constituents
and implications of the national identity construct indicated by the gens-names
frenciscan and Franci. Identity, whether stridently asserted or quietly presumed as
a background fact, is a construct. It is a system of beliefs which the group has
deliberately or unconsciously agreed to share, reiterate, and perpetuate. That is to
74
say, identity is a construct made of language, words. When the Normans in
England bought into the practice of calling themselves Franci, it was a transaction
done in the currency of actual, specific words. The Latin word Franci, when they
used it to refer to their own group, and the word Franceis in their own vernacular
were literally translating the Old English word Frenciscan.
By focusing on an actual Old English word rather than making do with
vague notions such as “English perspective” or “influence” we can locate the
practice of defining Normans as Frenciscan or Franci in particular texts and
moreover in specific discourses. Chapter Three is devoted to charting an actual
channel of transmission through which the practice migrated from English use to
Norman, from the English language to Latin and later French. The English gens-
name Frenciscan allows us a better understanding of what it meant for the
Normans to call themselves Frenciscan/Franci/Franceis. Once we know what the
11th-century English meant when they called the invaders Frenciscan, we have an
inventory of the ideas the Normans imported when they borrowed the English
word. This goes a long way toward isolating what was new and different in the
identity construct the post-Conquest Normans formed in England.
In Chapter Four we will see that our modern word ‘French’ is not, in fact,
an accurate translation of Old English Frencisc. The term þa Frenciscan framed a
group different from what we mean when we say “the French,” and different too
from what pre-Conquest Normans or Flemish or French back on the Continent
75
meant when they used the word Franci. The English, we will see, were not
indifferent or non-specific when it came to identifying different Gallic gentes. The
term Frenciscan was not a generic term which swept the invaders into a broad
category. That is to say, it was not used as an umbrella term by the English any
more than Franci was by the Normans. Accordingly, the Norman adoption of the
name frenciscan or franci, even as a borrowing from the English, cannot have
meant that the Normans in England had consented to class themselves as merely
part of a large grouping which also included all their old Continental neighbors and
enemies.
With the umbrella-term theory finally laid to rest and the idea of the
Normans as geographical Franci also shown to be unconvincing, we can say with
confidence that we have a pretty good idea how the group was not constituted.
This leaves language – the Normans’ vernacular speech – as the thing that made it
possible to be conceived of as some sort of ‘French’ people. Indeed, the Old
English evidence suggests that the Normans’ language was the determining feature
of the English manner of identifying the Normans. Again, it had not been a part of
how the Normans saw themselves before they conquered England. It became a
conspicuous and defining feature only when they were transplanted in England, as
an ethnolinguistic minority in control of an alien polyglot kingdom where the use
76
of vernacular romance speech(es) was not the ubiquitous norm.61 For the English,
the Norman’s foreign tongue was already, instantly, a defining feature that could
not be overlooked. This immediate shift has long been recognized.62
To the English, the Normans were a group defined by language. When the
invaders accepted an essentially English definition of their group, they were taking
onboard the foreign idea that they, the Normans, were, by definition, a people who
speak frencisc. This is where the English origins of the Norman use of the name
Franci have not been appreciated.63 The foreignness of this view of the Normans
and their language – the radical newness of it to the Normans, and the ramifications
that followed upon their sudden adoption of this new notion – was
transformational.
Scholars in the field have not stepped outside of the modern assumption that
the Normans of the 1060s thought of themselves as French-speakers. In a passage
we looked at earlier, for example, Ian Short writes that the invaders “all could
identify themselves primarily as speaking the language of the French. Franci, in
other words designated those French-speaking incomers originating from the
geographic region known as Francia.” Short does not see an awareness of the
invaders’ common language as an English perception, an outsider’s way of
61
“Ethnolinguistic minority” is the term used by Ian Short, “Language and
Literature,” in A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, ed. Christopher Harper-Brill and
Elisabeth van Houts (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, (2003), 205.
62
Eg. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 217.
63
Clanchy, ibid, constitutes a noteworthy exception.
77
categorizing and labeling them. In his understanding, it was the invaders
themselves who drew a new boundary around their mixed group by “defining
themselves collectively as Romance-speaking Franci.”64 This version of events
requires that the arriving Gallic invaders already recognized a French language.
Webber credits the English with the practice of categorizing the Normans as
Franci, but assumes that it was unremarkable if not automatic for the Normans,
French, and Bretons to think of themselves as French-speakers. “The English were,
apparently, already calling them Franci anyway and there was nothing to stop the
Normans and their allies from accepting the title on the basis of common
language.”65 The unexamined assumption is that the different gentes who made up
William’s army recognized that they spoke a language common to a broadly-
conceived Franci from all over a greater Francia but distinct from other non-
French Romance languages farther south. The assumption, in other words, is that
they were cognizant of the language we call langue d’oïl or Old French; that these
citizens of the mid-11th century had an understanding of their linguistic situation
which was essentially no different from our own modern linguistic mapping of
medieval France.
64
Short, “Tam Angli quam Franci,” 163. With much respect for Ian Short’s article,
which has been an important influence in the study of Anglo-Norman identity and on this
present paper, my intent here is to use Short’s formulation of the problem as a point of
departure, not to suggest that his article ought to have somehow covered every possible
line of investigation.
65
78
For Thomas, it is the English not the Normans themselves who “perceived
them as culturally and linguistically French” and for Gillingham, English sources
which identify them “by the language they spoke and the culture to which they
belonged.”66 These formulations too operate as if French were a self-evident
category. They assume that the French language was a well-recognized entity; that
it was, in the 11th century as it was in the 19th or 14th centuries, associated with a
clearly-marked territorial range and with a population of speakers reckoned as an
ethnic nation, and that it was delimited from other Romance languages. This model
has the Normans arriving from the Continent armed with a robust sense of their
own language and prepared to use it as a decisive constituent of Normanness. My
contention is that it happened the other way around: the concept of French as a
distinct language – and the name to identify it – did not exist prior to 1066, but
were conjured into being in England.
66
Short, “‘Tam Angli’,” 163; Thomas, The English and the Normans, 34;
Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, xix.
79
2.
Writing a New Identity:

Anglo-Norman Historiographical Texts after 1066
“Hic ceciderunt simul Angli et Franci in prelio,” reads one of the tituli in
the Bayeux Tapestry, over a scene of tumbled horses and broken men; “Here the
English and the French fell together in battle.”1 In this early account of the events
of 1066, Duke William and his men are Franci rather than Normanni. This
intriguing instance of historiography in linen and wool is not the earliest text in
which the invaders are called Franci, but it is one of the first, and none illustrates
more dramatically the most salient feature of the Normans’ usage of the name
Franci: it appears in post-Conquest texts, in places where the text is narrating the
Conquest itself or exploits of the Normans in England subsequent to the invasion.
This is the point that has not been appreciated in work done on Norman
identity. Norman use of the gens-name Franci was confined to texts written after
the Conquest and, moreover, was confined, within those texts, to contexts narrating
1
Lucien Musset, The Bayeux Tapestry, 2nd ed., trans. Richard Rex (Woodbridge:
Boydell Press, 2005), 242-244.
80
the Conquest. Post-Conquest texts do not apply the term to pre-Conquest
Normans.
The Bayeux Tapestry conforms to this pattern of usage even though it is
not, in some ways, an ideal specimen on which to test the pattern, since it covers
little before or outside of the Conquest. Its narrative begins with events pertinent to
the English succession, namely the purported 1064 Norman sojourn of Harold
Godwineson, during which he was induced to swear that he would back William’s
claim to the throne. In addition, since its mimetic representation of events is
performed chiefly in images not in words, the Tapestry contains relatively little
verbal text. Nevertheless the pattern holds: in its pre-Conquest scenes the Tapestry
does not call the Normans Franci. The Norman people are named once in this
early part of the story, indirectly, through the title of their leader, “Wilgelmum
Normannorum ducem.” William’s men are called Franci only when the text gets
to the invasion itself – to the Channel crossing or the battle – and not a moment
sooner.
The Tapestry (it is embroidery, actually; thread sewn on cloth, not a design
executed in woven yarn) was made not long after the successful invasion of
England. The consensus is that it was commissioned by William’s half-brother
Odo, the bishop of Bayeux, perhaps for the new cathedral begun there in 1077. It
was almost certainly underway, if not completed, by 1082 when Odo fell out with
the king and was imprisoned. The Tapestry is thought to have been designed by an
81
English artisan, quite possibly an artist from St. Augustine’s abbey in Canterbury.2
The work of an English-speaker is evident in the conspicuously English forms of
some proper names (the Old English letter ð in the name Gyrð [Garth, King
Harold’s brother], the initial diphthong in Eadwardus rex, the uncompromisingly
Anglo-Saxon name Ælfgyva, complete with the letter ash [Æ]); in the intrusion of
the English word “at” in place of Latin ad in the caption describing William’s
construction of “a castle at Hastings [castellum at Hestinga];” and the distinctively
insular use of the abbreviation 7 for the word “and [et].”3 The English provenance
or workmanship of this text is an early hint that it is an English innovation to call
the Normans Franci. Indeed, a tempting contrast is found in a French work of the
same period, which also presents its narrative of the Battle of Hastings as a pictorial
tapestry – albeit one woven of words only.
Adelae Comitissae [To Countess Adela] is a Latin poem written between
1080 and 1102 by Baudri, abbot of Bourgueil, for William the Conqueror’s
daughter Adela, after her marriage to Count Stephen of Blois.4 The narrator admits
that he has only met the famous countess once, and the poem is cleverly
2
Sir Frank Stenton et al., The Bayeux Tapestry, 2nd ed. (New York: Phaidon Press/
New York Graphic Society, 1965), 11; Musset, Bayeux Tapestry, 16-17.
3
Francis Wormald, “Style and Design,” in Stenton et al, The Bayeux Tapestry, 29;
R. Lepelly, “Contibution à l’étude des inscriptions de la tapisserie de Bayeux,” Annales de
Normandie 45 (1964), 321, as cited by David M. Wilson, The Bayeux Tapestry (New
York: Knopf, 1985), 204.
4
Modern editions, with no translation, and apparatus respectively in German (quite
minimal) and French, are: Karlheinz Hilbert, ed., Baldricus Burgulianus Carmina,
Editiones Heidelbergenses 19 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1979) poem # 134; and Phyllis
Abrahams, ed., Les Oeuvres poétiques de Baudri de Bourueil (1046-1130) (Paris:
Champion, 1926; Reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1974).
82
constructed as an awed encomium not of Adela but of her wondrously appointed
room. The four walls bear four tapestries, depicting, on the first, the Creation,
Paradise and the Fall; then, respectively, key scenes from Biblical history, from
Greek and Roman history, and finally, brighter than the others, “recent history
[historia nova]” (v. 234). Her father’s victory at the Battle of Hastings is narrated
in the course of a long ekphrasis of this fourth tapestry. The event responsible for
Adela’s status as the daughter of a king, William’s triumph occupies a quarter of
the composition (vv. 235-572 of the poem’s 1368 verses). In contrast to the
Bayeux Tapestry, this text written by a Frenchman (Baudri of Bourgueil was born
near Orléans) never calls the Norman Franci. They are always Normanni (thirteen
times, counting both adjectival and substantive uses).
Franci in post-Conquest Anglo-Norman history writing
The first historiographical text in which we find the Normans referred to as
Franci is the earliest surviving account of the Conquest, the Carmen de Hastingae
Proelio [Song of the Battle of Hastings]. The authorship of Guy bishop of Amiens
is now much accepted and the text’s modern editor convincingly argues that it was
written between 1067 and 1070.5 Guy was French rather than Norman, the son of
Count Enguerrand I of Ponthieu, and a cousin of King Philip I of France. Though
the prolific Anglo-Norman historian Orderic Vitalis, writing in the 1120s, places
5
Frank Barlow, ed. and trans., The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio of Guy Bishop of
Amiens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), xl-xli.
83
Guy in the retinue of William the Conqueror’s wife Matilda, there is evidence that
he was more associated with Philip I’s court than William’s.6 The text’s French
connections are further indicated by the extensive and laudatory attention paid to
Count Eustace II of Boulogne, who fought beside William at Hastings (and was
also Guy’s nephew). It might be argued that when this particular text calls the
Normans Franci or Galli (it uses both terms) there is some intention to claim
William’s accomplishment as a Gallic triumph. In this regard, the Carmen de
Hastingae Proelio is not a perfect fit with the thesis that the practice of calling the
Normans Franci is the result of English influence. Even so, the use of Franci in
the Carmen does fit the patterns I have been laying out here. It is a post-Conquest
text, needless to say, and the term Franci is used in place of Normanni only in
passages describing William’s people as they confront the English.
The terms Franci or Galli are needed to serve the ‘old’ purpose of denoting
people from the kingdom of France wherever such individuals are juxtaposed with
Normans, Bretons, Flemings, etc. For example, in William’s speech before battle,
he addresses his gathered army with four separate apostrophes marking distinct
components: “You whom France bred [Francia quos genuit],” “and you people of
Brittany [gensque Britannorum];” “illustrious men of Maine [viribus illustres
Cenomanni];” and “you Normans accustomed to outstanding deeds [Normanni
6
Ibid., xli-xlii, xvii-xviii; E.M.C. van Houts, “Latin Poetry and the Anglo-Norman
Court 1066-1135: The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio” in idem, History and Family
Traditions in England and the Continent, 1000-1200 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 56.
84
faciles actibus egregis].”7 The different ‘nationalities’ within the army are itemized
again in the Carmen’s description of William’s order of battle, with Galli, Britanni,
and Normanni making up the left, right, and center of his line (vv.413-4). In these
instances, the Franci or Galli are specifically the people from the kingdom of
France. When the same terms are used instead to denote William’s entire force, it
is in verses in which they are paired with the English. In the first instance, the two
sides are drawn up for battle and a minstrel named Taillefer [‘Ironcutter’] rides out
alone between the two lines, jeering and juggling his sword, and “with his words,
exhorts the Gauls and discomfits the English [hortatur Gallos verbis et territat
Anglos ]” (v. 393). In battle, the “English throng [Anglica turba]” falls to the
French [Francigenis] (v. 467). The poem ends with William crowned king of
England before his own men and his new English subjects: the latter are asked “in
the language of the English [lingua...Angligena]” to accept their new king, after
which “a Norman bishop mounted the pulpit and addressed the illustrious Gauls
[Normannus quidam presul mox pulpita scandens, / Famosis Gallis talia verba
dedit]” (vv. 818, 811-812).
In the same way, the Normans in post-Conquest England are referred to as
Galli (but not Franci) in the Gesta Guillelmi. The Gesta Guillelmi [Deeds of
William] was the Normans’ third major historical work, after Dudo’s De moribus
and William of Jumièges’ Gesta Normannorum Ducum. It is a prose history,
7
Ibid, vv. 25-260. Here and elsewhere, I am using Barlow’s edition but the
translations are my own.
85
written probably between 1070 and 1077 by William of Poitiers, a Norman-born
cleric (the “Poitiers” refers to where he was educated) who served as a chaplain to
Duke William in Normandy and seems to have ended his career in England.8
Unlike its two predecessors, the Gesta Guillelmi does not seem to have enjoyed a
wide circulation. It was well known among the Anglo-Norman historiographers,
however, and was an important source for such 12th-century authorities as Orderic
Vitalis, William of Malmesbury, Robert of Torigni, and the vernacular historian
Benoît de Sainte-Maure.9 The beginning and ending of the work are lost, but the
remaining part covers William’s career from the time he became duke of
Normandy in 1035 until early in 1067. It is therefore more useful than the works
which cover only the Battle of Hastings for showing how the text’s naming practice
changes as it moves through time from the pre-Conquest period (the Gesta
Guillelmi’s Part I) to its narration of the invasion and its immediate aftermath (Part
II).
The first observation to be made about this text’s policy for naming its
protagonists as a nation is that it hardly ever departs from calling them Normanni.
Whereas many medieval historical texts shy away from gens-names, placing
individual leaders rather than states or nations as the instigators and movers of
historical events, the Gesta Guillelmi uses the gens-name Normanni in great
8
William of Poitiers, The Gesta Guillellmi of William of Poitiers, ed. and trans.
R.H.C. Davis and Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), xv-xvii. The
English translations are from this edition unless otherwise noted.
9
Ibid., xxxv, xliii.
86
abundance. The “Norman land [tellus Normanniae]” is itself a prominent
‘character’ in William of Poitiers’ account, repeatedly invoked by name
(Normannia, and even “the land of William the Norman [Guillelmi Normanni
terram]” (I.34)). Of all the Norman (or Anglo-Norman) histories of the 11th and
early 12th centuries, this is the most unabashedly pro-Norman. It is a heroic
biography of William the Conqueror and a legitimation of his ascent to the throne
of England.
In the course of narrating Duke William’s thirty-year reign on the
Continent, the Gesta Guillelmi never calls the Normans Franci or Galli. In Part I,
Francia might, at least in one instance, refer to a larger region that includes
Normandy (I.15); and Gallia can refer to either the circumscribed territory directly
under the king of France (as in I.22) or, occasionally, the more inclusive
geographical expanse (I.6);10 but the gens-names do not share this loose, or double,
reference. Unlike Dudo and Guy of Amiens, William of Poitiers avoids the archaic
gens-name Galli, but when he does use it, he is referring to Franks or the people
10
Charles Martel, the aggressive count of Anjou, is said to have “disturbed the
whole of Francia [vexavit idem Franciam universam].” Since his depredations directly
affected Aquitaine and Normandy it is reasonable to conclude that in this case Francia
denotes the whole region, not just the kingdom of France. Chibanall and Davis, 22 n.4,
think so, adding a footnote to point out that “Francia here included Normandy.”
Otherwise, however, in the Gesta Guillelmi as in other texts of the period Francia does not
include Normandy, as when the news that young William had assumed power in
Normandy “spread fear throughout Francia [metum Franciae detulit omni]” (I.6), or in I.30
where Normandy finds itself alone against the emnity of Burgundy, Auvergne, and
Gascony, and “France and Brittany, since they are nearer to us, are that much more
ardently hostile [Franciam tamen et Britanniam quanto nobis viciniores, tanto ardientus
infestas].” As the editors note, “France is here used in the sense of the royal demesne”
(ibid, 46 n.1).
87
within the kingdom of France. The adjective “Gallic” refers to the Frankish/French
subjects of King Charles the Simple when they confront “Rollo the first duke of the
Normans [Rollone primo duce Normannorum]” and find themselves “unable to
successfully fend off the Danish axe with the Gallic sword” (I.44).11 Robert II of
France is referred to as “the king of Gaul [regem Galliae Rodbertum]” in I.22. The
“certain Gallic peoples [Galliarum quasdam nationes]” derided for kidnapping in
I.41 are men of Ponthieu. The gens-name Franci is used with much more
frequency. The term refers to Franks or French exclusive of the Normans and, in
almost all instances, explicitly arrayed against the Normanni in hostile conflict.12
In sum, in the text’s narration of events prior to 1066, the Normans are not called
Franci or Galli, and neither of these terms functions to posit a grouping which
includes Normanni along with others.
In its narration of the conquest of England in Part II, however, the text does
apply the name Galli to the Normans in the context of their efforts to govern
11
In this instance I have departed from the translation of Davis and Chibnall, in
favor of a more literal rendering (eg. translating Normannorum literally, as “of the
Normans” in place of their use of the toponym “Normandy”).
12
Eg. in William of Poitiers, I. 11, 26, 27, 28, 30, 32, the Franci or Francigenae are
the hostile soldiers of Henry I of France, in the long section devoted to recounting that
king’s campaigns against the Normans. Francigenae, literally ‘French-born,’ or ‘of
Frankish race,’ appears as a synonym for Franci from at least the 9th century (see Albert
Blaise, Dictionnaire latin-français des auteurs du moyen-âge, Corpus Christianorum,
Continuatio Mediaevalis [Turnhout: Brepols, 1975], 400; cf. Charles du Fresne du Cange,
Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis [Graz: Akademischen Druck, 1954], vol.3, 591).
I have not been able to detect any discernable difference in meaning or usage between the
two terms.
88
England.13 In II.35, William the Conqueror is lauded for his evenhandedness in
dealing with the two gentes of his new kingdom: “nothing was given to any
Frenchman which had been taken unjustly from any Englishman [Nulli tamen
Gallo datum est quod Anglo cuiquam iniuste fuerit ablatum].” The other instance
is in the text’s account of the unsuccessful attack on Dover by Count Eustace II of
Boulogne. King William confiscates the extensive English landholdings that he
had granted this erstwhile ally, the Gesta Guillelmi reports, “nor was the sentence,
pronounced with the consent of the English and French [dicta consensu Anglorum
et Gallorum], by which he was convicted of serious crimes, unjust” (II.47). Here
again the Galli and Angli are the subjects of King William’s England.
Two paragraphs later the text breaks off in midsentence, its narrative of
post-Conquest events having progressed only as far as March 1067. Yet even with
its limited instances of calling the Normans ‘French,’ this text of the 1070s
exemplifies another important trait of the contextual pattern that governs the
Normans’ use of Franci (or in this case Galli) as ways to designate their own
people. To the circumstances or criteria which we have already noted – the pattern
that Franci/Galli is applied to Normans only in the context of narrating post-
13
and Identity 1066-c.1220 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 34 n.15, says William
of Poitiers “refers to some or all of the invaders twice as French.” In one of Thomas’ two
instances, Franci (Francigenae actually) clearly denotes the non-Norman French
participants in the invasion, in a passage – by now familiar – detailing the Conqueror’s line
of battle. Francigenae are listed along with the Normanni, Cenomanici, Aquitani, and
Britanni (II.19). I have not been able to find any second instance of Franci in William of
Jumièges’ portions of the GND.
89
Conquest times, and only when referring to Normans in England (or headed to
England; in short in the context of English goings-on) – to these ‘requirements’ this
text adds another. The ‘new’ name(s) are used when the invaders are spoken of
specifically as one of the two gentes of the new Norman England. It is a shift in
nomenclature specifically associated with moments when the text has occasion to
conceptualize the Norman invaders as a people now fundamentally paired with a
new ‘other’ – a new partner/enemy/ally – the English. Indeed, in both of these
instances in the Gesta Guillelemi the Norman ‘French’ [Galli] are paired with the
English not only in the action being narrated but also lexically, in the verbal fabric
of the text. Each time the text represents the Normans as Galli, it is when they are
paired with the Angli so closely that the word “Angli” is present within the same
sentence.
This pattern of usage – with all of the criteria in place – prevails with
remarkable consistency throughout the Latin historical writing of the Normans and
Anglo-Normans in the century following the Conquest. If a text participates at all
in the new practice of identifying the Normans as Franci, it most often does so
under the narrative circumstances I have described (i.e., in passages describing the
invasion or events in post-Conquest England, with the invaders interacting with the
English, and the gens-name Angli present). This holds true for the 12th century’s
three most important historians of Conquest-era Norman and English affairs,
William of Malmesbury, Orderic Vitalis, and Robert de Torigni (in his capacity as
90
the author of the widely-circulated ‘revised edition’ of the Gesta Normannorum
Ducum). In illustrating with the specific passages, below, I feel sure that the reader
will not need or want me to repeatedly point out, in each instance, the shared –
almost mandatory, it seems – features which accompany the historians’ use of
Franci for the Normans in England.
In the case of William of Malmesbury, the text we need to look to is the
Gesta Pontificum Anglorum14 (c.1120-1125) not his better-known Gesta Regum
Anglorum. The author, who spent his entire adult life in the monastery at
Malmesbury (not far from Gloucester and Bath), was probably the child of a
Norman father and an English mother. In his works, the English and the Normans
in England are consistently represented as two distinct gentes. In a famous passage
in the Gesta Regum Anglorum (c. 1125), William cites his mixed parentage as a
qualification for avoiding the partisan excesses of Norman and English chroniclers:
“for my part, having the blood of both nations in my veins, I propose in my
narrative to keep a middle path.”15 Indeed, William was an astute observer of
14
The modern edition is: N.E.S.A. Hamilton, De Gestis Pontificum Anglorum libri
quinque Rolls Series (London, Her Majesty’s Stationer’s Office, 1887). The text of this
edition is the basis for David Preest, trans., The Deeds of the Bishops of England
(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002). .
15
William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum: The History of the English
Kings, ed. and trans. R.A.B. Mynors, R.M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), III.Preface: “Ego autem, quia utriusque gentis
sanguinem traho, dicendi tale temperamentum servabo.” The English translation in the
text above is theirs. Nick Webber, Norman Identity, 911-1154 (Woodbridge: Boydell
Press, 2oo5), 147-151 offers a sensitive treatment of William’s Anglo-Norman identity,
concluding that he considered himself an Englishman with regard to his patria, but
Norman with regard to gens (ethnicity).
91
events and a skillful historiographer, and his texts are far more balanced than the
polemical works which we have encountered up to this point. (Early in the Gesta
Pontificum Anglorum, for example, he shows a bracing skepticism with regard to
the legitimacy of William’s invasion: rather than rehearsing the usual
justifications, he remarks that the duke “had collected various pretexts which he
personally regarded as valid.”)16
Usually ignored in studies of Anglo-Norman identity, the Gesta Pontificum
is not a political or national history but an account of the Church in England, from
Augustine’s mission in 597 to the 1120s. Not surprisingly, the text does not bristle
with references to various gentes. When it does refer to the most recent invaders of
England, the term used is generally Normanni. The gens-name Franci appears
when the text recounts how Ealdred, the native-English archbishop of York, “in the
presence of the whole people got William to swear that he would treat his subjects
with moderation and dispense the same laws to both English and French.”17
In contrast to William of Malmesbury, the anonymous author of the Brevis
Relatio de Guillelmo nobilisissimo comite Normannorum [Brief Account of
William, Most Noble Count of the Normans] shows no sign of identifying himself
16
Preest, trans., The Deeds of the Bishops of England, ch. 23, p. 25 (Preest’s chapter
numbers are continuous, without regard to the Latin text’s division into five books).
17
Ibid, c.115, p.168. Savile, De gestis Pontificum Anglorum, 154: “exacto prius
coram omni populo iureiurando, quod se modeste erga subiectos agaret, & aequo iure
Anglos, quo Francos, tractaret.”
92
as an Englishman.18 Though resident at Battle Abbey near Hastings, he displays so
little interest in the English side of his hero’s domain that the work’s modern editor
believes he must have been born in Normandy.19 Written c. 1114-1120, the text
survives in an autograph copy produced in the 1120s. The period covered extends
from the start of William’s career as duke of Normandy in 1035 to 1106, when the
quarrel between the Conqueror’s two surviving sons ends with King Henry I of
England seizing the duchy of Normandy from Robert Curthose. Systematic in its
terminology for identifying the nations involved and perfectly consistent with the
pattern we’ve seen, the Brevis Relatio calls William’s Normans Normanni (or
Northmanni) and the subjects of the hostile king of France Franci, until the context
is post-Conquest England, at which point its Norman author participates in the
name-shift and calls the Normans Franci.
In its accounts of events leading up to the invasion, of the Channel crossing
and of the Battle of Hastings, the two nations are still Normanni and Angli (ch. 5-
6). The moment when this text crosses over and identifies the Normans as Franci
is when the narrative arrives at William’s coronation in London. “Finally, at
Christmas when the French and the English had gathered together [convenientibus
18
Elisabeth van Houts, ed. and trans., “The Brevis Relatio de Guillelmo
nobilisissimo comite Normannorum,” in idem, History and Family Traditions in England
and the Continent, 1000-1200 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 17. Translation above is van
Houts’. Though not heavily consulted today, the Brevis Relatio was not unimportant in its
own day. It was used as a source by William of Malmesbury, Robert de Torigni, and the
vernacular historian Wace (ibid., 23).
19
Ibid., 14.
93
Francis et Anglis] in London, having yielded to him in everything, he received the
crown and the dominion of all of England” (ch. 7). The second instance occurs as
the Brevis Relatio reports the death of the Conqueror and the succession of his
second son. In Normandy at the time of the king’s death, William Rufus sailed to
England, “where he was received by the English and the French [ab Anglis et
Francis] and where in London at Westminster in the church of St. Peter the Apostle
he was consecrated as king of England by Archbishop Lanfranc” (ch. 9). The text’s
third and last instance of calling the Normans of England Franci is in context of yet
another coronation, that of Henry I in 1100: “Henry came to London and at
Westminster received the crown of the kingdom of England with the consent of all
the French and English [annuentibus cunctis Francis et Anglis]” (ch. 10).
Probably it is not a coincidence that the three occasions on which this short
text identifies its protagonists as Franci rather than Normanni are the coronation
ceremonies of the first three Norman kings of England. As we are continuing to
see, historians of the Normans call the Normans Franci only in the course of
representing the historical circumstance of the Normans being paired with the
English and defined by interaction with the English. The tighter they are pressed
together with Angli the more likely it is that they might be thought of as Franci.
The pairing could hardly be any tighter than in these coronation scenes, as staged
by this text and others. A medieval coronation was a ritual loaded with symbolism,
and the depiction of one can likewise be made to bear a concentrated ideological
94
load. The coronation legitimates the invader’s rule, converting him in an instant
from a claimant to a king. Joining to acclaim the king, the Normans and the
English are defined as the two people of a single realm; two people, moreover,
united in harmony and unanimity. At the coronation of the king of England, the
Normans are, symbolically, at their farthest from Normandy. The group designated
by the term Franci is in this context necessarily the Normans who live in England,
on an occasion when they are acting specifically in their role as subjects of the king
of England.
Orderic Vitalis’ Historia Ecclesiastica is generally considered the most
complete medieval history of the Normans. This massive work was begun at the
request of Abbot Roger of St. Évroul in Normandy, initially as a history of that
monastery. That first intent is honored in the work’s title, borrowed, of course,
from the Venerable Bede’s revered 8th-century history of the Church in England.
Orderic worked at his magnum opus for thirty years. In the end, he produced a
sprawling compendium which includes, among other things, a life of Christ, long
hagiographical legends, a history of the popes, and a great deal on the First Crusade
cribbed from other writers.20 The most relevant parts, where political history edges
20
Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans.
Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969-1980), vol. 2, xv-xvi.
Hereafter abbreviated in notes as Ord.Vit. On its mixed contents, see vol. 1, 45-48.
Within several of the work’s 13 books there are no internal divisions (chapters or
numbered paragraphs); my parenthetical citations therefore include the volume and page
number in Chibnall’s edition. Unless otherwise noted, the translations are my own. It is
important to render Latin words more literally than did Chibnall, who was concerned after
95
out ecclesiastical, is the section Orderic wrote first, around 1114-1125, and which
eventually became books III and IV. Book III covers the early history of the abbey
of St. Évroul but also includes an account of the Norman conquest of England.
Book IV, probably written in 1125, covers the history of England and Normandy
from 1066 to 1075. Though Orderic’s text occupies a prominent place in the work
of modern scholars, it was not influential among contemporaries. Only two
manuscripts are known, and there is no evidence that it was known at all in
England.21 Its value as a text genuinely of its identified date, however, is
incontestable: much of the Ecclesiastical History, including books III and IV,
survives in Orderic’s autograph manuscript.22
Like William of Malmesbury, Orderic was of mixed parentage; unlike
William he produced his works in Normandy. His father was a French-educated
but probably Norman-born cleric in the household of Roger of Montgomery, the
earl of Shrewsbury. Orderic was born near Shrewsbury, in 1075. His mother was
apparently English.23 At age ten he was sent to the prominent abbey of St. Évroul,
and there he spent his life. Orderic nevertheless retained a sense of some personal
affiliation with England; he refers to himself toward the end of book IV as “the
all with making a voluminous work readable and was not attentive to the text’s use of
different gens-names. When there has been no need to depart from Chibnall’s translation,
the passage is cited in a footnote, rather than parenthetically.
21
G.A. Loud, “The ‘Gens Normannorum’ – Myth or Reality?,” Anglo-Norman
Studies 4 (1982), 105-107. Marjorie Chibnall, The Normans (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000),
117 concurs.
22
Ord.Vit., vol. 2, xxxix.
23
Ibid., vol. 1, p.2.
96
Englishman Vitalis [Vitali Angligenae]” (vol. 2, p.350). He would seem to be
another one who was English by birth and loyalty, Norman by race and culture.24
Such figures as Orderic in Normandy and William of Malmesbury in England
justify the modern practice of talking about “Anglo-Norman writers” and “Anglo-
Norman literature,” as if there were, for a time, a single, fluid cultural and political
continuum spanning both sides of the Channel. There was.
Resembling William of Malmesbury in another regard, Orderic was a
skillful, reflective, and diligent historian. Unlike many medieval historians who
narrate events in terms of heroic individuals rather than collectivities or political
units, Orderic uses specific gens-names with great frequency. His policy for
deploying the names in question conforms to the pattern we have been observing in
other Anglo-Norman histories. In sections of the text treating Norman history prior
to 1066, the Normans are Normanni, not Franci or Galli. Franci, Francigenae,
and Galli are used inter-changeably for the people of the King of France. For
example, all three are used in the account of Louis IV’s machinations against Duke
Richard I and the Normanni in the 940s (VI.10; vol. 3, 306-309). In the deathbed
speech Orderic provides for William the Conqueror, when the king recalls his pre-
Conquest victories over the kingdom of France he calls the enemy people both
Franci and Galli (VII; vol. 4, 86).
24
Orderic gives the impression that ‘politically’ he identifies with England more
than Normandy in bk. IX, where his account of the strife between King Henry I of England
and Duke Robert II of Normandy (Robert Curthose) is consistently, and at times
energetically, sympathetic to Henry.
97
In its section on the Conquest, the Historia Ecclesiastica continues to call
the protagonists Normanni (III; vol. 2, 168-185). The term is used with great
frequency, and exclusively. William’s coronation scene, for example, expresses the
usual idea that the English and the Normans are joined in their enthusiastic
approval, but the wording is different. Orderic’s account is longer and does not
compress the unanimity of the victors and vanquished into a single sentence which
names both gentes side by side. William’s people are identified as Normanni rather
than Franci (III; vol. 2, 182-185).25
Somewhat later though, in the course of narrating events in post-Conquest
England, the text does start to deploy Franci and Galli occasionally for the
Normans in England. The first instance I have located occurs in book IV. Having
been in away in Normandy for much of 1067, William has returned and is holding
court in London. He is conspicuously gracious and generous to the English bishops
and lords, but secretly warns the Galli to remain vigilant.26 The Normans of
England are Galli again in the next paragraph, which describes the rebellious
25
Orderic’s cursory accounts of the coronations of William Rufus and Henry I
(VIII.1; vol.4 p.110 and X.16; vol.5, p.294 respectively) do not include the pairing of the
two peoples in joint approval; they do not have a ‘Franci et Angli’ phrase, and Franci does
not make an appearance as a name for the Normans.
26
Ord.Vit., IV; vol. 2, 210-211: “Pari sedulitate et sollertia Gallos nunc instruebat
nunc ut contra omnes dolos et insidias singulorum semper ubiqui parati forent clam Anglis
commonebat.” Chibnall’s translation agrees that the Galli here are William’s Normans:
“As for the Normans, sometimes he would school them to behave with the same artful
attention, sometimes he would warn them, behind the backs of the English, never to relax
for a moment.”
98
citizens of Exeter “seething with anger against the Gallic race [Gallici generis]”
(IV; vol. 2, 210-211).
It is evident that when the text uses Galli or Franci for the Normans in
England, the two terms are synonymous, marking no semantic difference. (The
same is true when the text uses both terms instead for the French of France. If the
text is calling a given group Franci, it can also call them Galli. I have not found
any passage in which the Franci are one people and the Galli are another.) The
interchangeability of the two names is apparent when they are used in close
proximity, as in this vignette of harmonious assimilation, circa 1070: “English and
Normans [Angli cum Normannis] were living peacefully together in boroughs,
towns, and cities, and were intermarrying with each other. You could see many
villages or town markets filled with displays of French wares and merchandise
[Gallicis mercibus et mangonibus], and observe the English, who had previously
seemed contemptible to the French [Francis] in their native dress, completely
transformed by foreign fashions.”27
In other instances, Orderic uses Franci and Normanni interchangeably to
denote the Normans in England. When King Magnus of Norway raids the Isle of
Man in 1098, the Anglo-Norman earls (Hugh of Montgomery, the earl of
Shrewsbury, and Earl Hugh of Chester) “sent messengers through all the land and
commanded armed contingents of French and English [armatos quosque Francos
27
Ord.Vit., IV; vol. 2, 256-7; Chibnall’s translation (bracketed words or phrases in
the original Latin are my addition, of course).
99
et Anglos...phalanges] to come at once to the defense of the country against the
invaders.” When Hugh of Montgomery is killed “the Normans and English sought
Hugh’s body for a long time [Normanni tandem et Angli cadaver Hugonis diu
quaesierunt].”28 The text is indicating that the French and the English subjects of
England are working in harmony and facing a common enemy. For this purpose,
Franci or Normanni serve equally well. To say that the terms are interchangeable –
that in the context of England the conquerors could be called Franci or Normanni
without implying any semantic distinction – is not, however, to say that the name
Franci is sprinkled in at random. In the Historia Ecclesiastica as in the other texts
we have been examining, Franci is used in passages in which the Normans of
England are paired with the ‘native’ English, both in the action which is being
narrated and lexically, in the sentence which the text constructs to narrate that
action.
Of course, there are also passages within the text’s treatment of post-
Conquest England where the name Franci is needed to perform its other, earlier
function of denoting people specifically from the kingdom of France. In the course
of commenting on the death of one of the last uncooperative Anglo-Saxon earls, for
instance, the Historia Ecclesiastica says, “when news of Edwin’s death was heard
throughout England, vast lamentation arose from not only the English, but also
from both the Normans and French [non solum Anglis sed et Normannis et
28
Ord.Vit., X.6; vol. 5, 222-223 and 224-225. Chibnall’s translations.
100
Francis]” (IV; vol. 2, 258-9). In this case Franci refers to the non-Normans among
William’s people, the men who joined the adventure from homes in the kingdom of
France.29 This is in a passage which pays attention to subsets within the two gross
divisions of indigenous and invaders: earlier, rebellious earls Morcar and Edwin
seek support “among the Scots and Welsh as well as the English [a Scottis et
Gualis vel Anglis].”
The older sense of Franci is transportable across the chronological and
geographical divide created by the settlement of Normans in England. It us still the
gens-name one uses to denote Frenchmen, even if they are in England and loyal to
King William I of England. The Normans’ newer, specialized use of Franci,
however, is not transportable across the contextual frontier. In referring to Anglo-
Normans who cross from England back to Normandy these texts do not use the
term Franci, because, obviously, the term would not differentiate them from the
French. Accordingly, when the Historia Ecclesiastica follows William back to the
29
Other possible interpretations are not convincing. The wording “both the
Normans and the French [et Normannis et Francis]” (my emphasis) rules out the
possibility that Orderic is referring to a single non-English group but mentions both names
in a rhetorical redoubling of no semantic significance. Since the events being discussed
here are very soon after the Conquest (Edwin was killed in 1070) Orderic can’t very well
be making a distinction between English-born Normanni, and Franci newly arrived from
the continent – the distinction John Gillingham thinks was made in some texts of the 1130s
(idem., “Henry of Huntingdon and the Twelfth-Century Revival of the English Nation,” in
Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson, and
Alan V. Murray [Leeds: Leeds Studies in English, 1995]). As a third alternative, it is
theoretically possible that Orderic could be saying that along with the English and the
Normans, France mourns too in a sort of international sympathy at the death of the courtly
young prince. None of these seem likely.
101
Continent and describes, for instance, his war with the count of Anjou over Maine,
the text refers to the king’s dual army as Normanni et Angli not Franci et Angli.30
With Robert of Torigni, we return to a full-blooded Norman working in
Normandy. Robert had a successful monastic career, rising to the rank of prior at
the important Norman abbey of Le Bec and finally serving as the abbot of Mont-
St.-Michel. In the 1130s, while he was at Le Bec, he undertook his major revision
of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum. Rather than working directly from William of
Jumièges’ text, Robert based his redaction on the considerably-expanded version
that Orderic Vitalis had produced.31 Whereas Orderic’s interpolations were
confined mostly to the later portion of the Gesta, Robert added material throughout.
He augmented the text’s earlier portion with hefty additions borrowed from Dudo,
and lengthened the work very considerably with the addition of a whole eighth
book, ending with the deaths, in 1135 of Henry I of England and, in 1137 of Louis
VI of France and Lothar III “emperor of the Romans and the Germans [imperator
Romanorum et Alemannorum] (VIII.42). He finished his work in 1139. Over the
next twenty years he made other updates and revisions, but it is the version of 1139
that was best known. Indeed Robert de Torigni’s 1139 ‘edition’ is the form in
30
Ord.Vit. IV; vol. 2, 306-307: “by royal command he speedily brought together a
great force of Norman and English soldiers [regali iussu Normannos et Anglos celeriter
asciuit].” Cf., above, the “contingents of French and English [armatos quosque Francos et
Anglos...phalanges]” mustered in the west of England to fight the Norwegians (X.6; vol. 5,
222-223).
31
GND, vol.1, lxxx. Robert of Torigni’s personal copy of Orderic’s version is
extant. It is a copy he had made for him from Orderic’s final corrected text, with blank
spaces kept open for the additions he planned to make (ibid. cxxvi).
102
which the Gesta Normannorum Ducum was known to most of its medieval readers.
Even now there are 22 extant copies, far more than of any of the other redactions.
Robert of Torigni’s redaction is the only version of the Gesta
Normannorum Ducum to ever identify the Normans as Franci. William of
Jumièges’ own revision does not. When William came back to his text in 1070 to
update it with an account of the momentous recent events, he did not depart from
the nomenclature he had used throughout the work. He never refers to the
Normans as Franci – not when recounting the clash at Hastings, nor the day on
which William “was elected king by all the magnates, both of the Normans and of
the English [ab omnibus tam Normannorum quam Anglorum proceribus rex
electus]” (VII.16), nor while describing other, less harmonious interactions
between the two peoples, as when William marched north with his “throngs of
Normans [Normannorum copiis]” in 1069 to put down a rebellion in York (VII.19).32
Orderic Vitalis’ expanded version of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum (c. 1095-
1109) conforms to William of Jumièges’ naming practice, invariably using the
name Normanni to designate the invaders. In Robert de Torigni’s version the
practice of applying the name Franci to the Normans in England finally enters the
Gesta Normannorum Ducum, albeit modestly. There are two instances. There is
32
William of Jumièges’ entire addition is very modest in length, it should be noted.
In addition to qualifying as the earliest prose account of the Conquest, William’s must also
hold the distinction of being the shortest narrative of the famous battle. He dispenses of
the entire event, from the duke’s vigilance on the eve of combat to nightfall after the
bloodletting, in five sentences (VII.15). The Angli are called by their gens-name but Duke
William’s side is not.
103
no need to quote them here, because they are already familiar enough: the text calls
the Normans Franci as they stand alongside the Angli in the passages narrating the
coronation of William Rufus (VIII.2) and the coronation of Henry I (VIII.10).33
Three more early Anglo-Norman historiographical texts provide three more
instances in which the gens-name Franci is used to denote the Norman conquerors
within passages that narrate the Conquest itself (directly or obliquely). Also
included here for the sake of full disclosure are three exceptions which do not fit
the pattern that the other texts have followed with such consistency. The ‘oblique’
reference to the conquering Franci is found in Simeon of Durham’s Libellus de
exordio atque procursu istius, hoc est Dunhelmensis ecclesie [Tract on the Origins
and Progress of this the Church of Durham].34 This text, written between 1104 and
1115 by a cleric from Normandy (or perhaps a neighboring region in northwestern
France) has been called “our major source for the post-Conquest history of northern
England.”35 This is a bit misleading. The Libellus de exordio is a parochial history
concerned almost exclusively with Northumbria and, more particularly with the
episcopal see of Durham and the miracles of St. Cuthbert. It was not designed to
be a record of political events. Even the Conquest rates only a brief mention, in the
33
In using Franci in these two instances, Robert of Torigny’s text mimics the
Relatio de Standardo, which was one of Robert’s important sources. The pertinent
sentences in the two coronation scenes are borrowed almost verbatim. Cf. GND, 202 n.3
and 216 n.4.
34
Simeon of Durham, Libellus de exordio atque procursu istius, hoc est
Dunhelmensis ecclesie [Tract on the Origins and Progress of this the Church of Durham] ,
ed. and trans. David Rollason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
35
Elisabeth van Houts, “Historical Writing,” in Companion, 111.
104
course of which the two opposing sides are named only once (King Harold faces
“the very powerful count of the Normans [potentissimum Normannorum comitem]”
and is killed along with “almost the whole English army [toto pene Anglorum
exercitu]” (III.15). Though the English resistance in the North is treated at much
greater length, the invaders are almost never referred to by a gens-name. Even the
name Angli very rarely appears. In keeping with the text’s very local focus of
interest, the group most often named is the Northumbrians [Northanymbri]. In one
passage the invaders are referred to by name, and the name used is Franci. The
time, in the narrative, is the mid-1090s. A certain Boso, a knight in the household
of William bishop of Durham, has a near-death vision, which provides a thinly-
veiled warning for the bishop to mend his ways. Among other things, Boso’s
vision reveals “the native inhabitants of this province [huius provincie indigenas]”
massed on a wide plain as arrogant warriors, who then vanish like smoke only to be
replaced by “the Frenchmen [Francigene (sic)],” who are even more splendid,
arrogant and noisy but vanish just like their predecessors ( IV.9).
The less dreamy and allegorical (but almost equally brief) treatment of the
Battle of Hastings in Eadmer’s Historia Novorum in Anglia [History of Recent
Events in England] contains that text’s one instance of calling the Normans
Franci.36 Like Simeon of Durham’s work, but less frank in its title, the Historia
36
Eadmer, Historia Novorum in Anglia, ed. Martin Rule, Rolls Series 81 (London:
Longman & Co., 1884). Geoffrey Bosanquet, trans., Eadmer’s History of Recent Events in
England (London: Cresset Press, 1964).
105
Novorum is essentially a chronicle of ecclesiastical matters. Written mostly in
1109 or shortly thereafter by an English monk of Christ Church in Canterbury, the
lengthy work is mainly concerned with about Archbishop Anselm’s ongoing
campaign against William Rufus’s and Henry I’s insistence on royal investiture of
bishops (1093-1109).37 Though his hero was not English (Anselm was the Italian-
born abbot of Le Bec before being tapped to serve as England’s highest primate)
Eadmer wrote with a pronounced pro-English bias. The Historia Novorum defends
traditional English ecclesiastical privileges and portrays William I as an interloper
who brought Norman customs to England and introduced the un-English practice of
making bishops and abbots thoroughly subject to the king’s will (eg. I.9). This is
another text which rarely mentions whole nationes by name, but when the
conquerors are referred to as a collective group Eadmer prefers Normanni. In the
instance where they are identified as Franci, within the short narration of Hastings,
they are called both Franci and Normanni in the space of a single sentence (I.9).
(The sentence, incidentally, is shaped into a sly anti-Norman barb. Eadmer
comments that the victorious Franci deem their triumph a divinely ordained
judgment in favor of William over Harold. Their line of reasoning, he explains
dryly, is that so many of their own people were slain in the battle or put to flight
37
The work was started in the 1090s (according to Webber, Norman Identity, 137);
books I-IV were completed shortly after Anselm’s death in 1109 and books V and VI were
added around 1119 or later, according to Southern, in his forward to Bosanquet, trans.,
History of Recent Events, xi. Rule, ed., Historia Novorum, xlix, feels that this much later
portion ought properly to be considered a separate work.
106
that their eventual victory was nothing short of a miracle.) Though the kingdom of
France is mentioned a few times, in the context of Anselm’s travels in France, this
text provides no instances in which the French are referred to as a gens, and no
occasions in which Normans and French are juxtaposed. The only element of
usage for which it provides us any data, then, is its conformity to the pattern of
calling the Normans Franci only in context of their occupation of England.38
Henry of Huntingdon, a canon of Lincoln cathedral, was another historian
of mixed parentage, like William of Malmesbury and Orderic Vitalis, born of an
English mother and a Norman father.39 That arrangement was evidently not
uncommon among people in the educated classes in that generation, for obvious
reasons. The text of his Historia Anglorum [History of the English] contains
several clues that Henry was a native English-speaker. Greenway cites his careful
translation of the Old English poem on the Battle of Brunanburh and his handling
of English personal names.40 English place-names often are not Latinized in his
text, escaping without a phoney Latin suffix like –us or –anum.
38
In this English monk’s text, as in the others, Normandy and France are clearly
considered two separate places: in I.23 for example, Anselm is “well-known, beloved, and
welcomed throughout the whole of Normandy and France [toti Normanniae atque
Franciae].”
39
Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum: The History of the English People, ed.
and trans. Diana Greenway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), xxiv-xxvi, clxvi. Hereafter
abbreviated ‘HH’ in notes. All my quotations of the Historia Anglorum in English are
from Greenway’s translation.
40
Ibid., xxvi, also cited by Webber, Norman Identity, 155. The verses of “the English
writers [Anglici scriptores],” Henry says (V.18), “must be given faithful translation,
rendering their eloquence almost word for word [translatione fida donandi sunt. Ut pene
de verbo in verbum eorum interpretandes eloquium].” Henry even attempts to capture the
107
The Historia Anglorum was conceived and constructed as a history of the
English, as declared by its title, which is demonstrably Henry’s own.41 As much as
65 percent of the text, according to Greenway’s rough estimate, is a reworking of
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People and the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicles.42 In the Prologue addressed to his patron, Alexander bishop of
Lincoln, Henry identifies his subject matter as “the history of this kingdom and the
origins of our people [huius regni gesta et nostre gentis origines].” “Our people”
refers to the English people, not the Normans and the “origins” he narrates are the
Roman invasion of Britain and the arrival of the Angles and Saxon. This is a
significant reversal from earlier, and decidedly Norman, histories such as the Brevis
Relatio and Robert of Torigni’s expanded Gesta Normannorum Ducum, narratives
for which events in England are a continuation of Norman history. Henry thought
of himself as an Englishman writing a history of his homeland.
Written around 1130, the Historia Anglorum was popular and influential in
its own era.43 Representing history in terms of the movements, triumphs, and
alliteration of the Old English, Greenway notes (311 n.141), and was pleased enough with
the success of his efforts that he refers to his rendering as an “inspiring interpolation
[recreandi inerpositis].”
41
English Nation,” in Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. Simon Forde,
Lesley Johnson, and Alan V. Murray (Leeds: Leeds Studies in English, 1995), 78.
42
HH, lxxxv.
43
Some 45 medieval manuscripts of it have survived. Gillingham, “Henry of
Huntigdon,” 76-77, points out that its popularity is often underrated by modern historians
who have preferred the works of Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmesbury. Dating is
complicated because Henry continuously revised and updated. The first version was
completed in 1130 or 1131 and Henry’s final version was written in 1154 (HH, lxvi-
108
failures of nations rather than as a story of heroic individuals, this text frequently
refers to collective gentes or nationes and makes liberal use of gens-names. The
Conquest is framed as God’s punishment of the gens Anglorum, using the gens
Normannorum as agent of destruction (VI.27, VI.38). The history of England is the
story of successive waves of peoples who have played out their divinely-ordained
role on the island. At the beginning of the book, Henry lists the five invasions of
Britain [Britannia] – by the Romans, then by Picts and Scots, the English, the
Danes, and “fifthly by the Normans, who conquered it and have dominion over the
English people at the present time [quintam per Normannos, qui eam devicerunt et
Anglis inpresentiarum dominantur]” (I.4). Normanni is the term he almost always
uses for the Normans, who, under the circumstances, occupy an ambiguous
position, neither the protagonists of the tale nor the villains but something of both.44
As a history of England, the Historia Anglorum is not much concerned with
the pre-Conquest history of the Normans and the French on the Continent. The
Normans become relevant when their history intersects with the English. When
they do appear, they are recognized specifically as Normans [Normanni] not as
Franks/French [Franci]. The Norman duke’s sister, Emma, who married Æthelred
lxxvii).
44
For a discussion of gens-naming in HH, see John Gillingham, “Henry of
Huntingdon.” Gillingham argues that Henry’s use of the name Normanni changed over
time, finally in his third revision becoming his designation for newly-arrived Normans of
the very highest nobility who gathered as a faction at King Stephen’s court and, in Henry’s
opinion, were a foreign and malicious presence. This idea is taken up by Webber, Norman
Identity, 154-161.
109
the Ill-Advised and became queen of England in 1002, is described repeatedly as
Norman (rather than French) (VI.1-2, VI.15-16, VI. 20, 22). Emma’s meddlesome
foreign officers and the armed backers of her half-Norman (VI.20) sons Alfred and
Edward are likewise identified as Normans (VI.2, VI.20). Nevertheless, there are
also two instances in which these Normans involved in pre-Conquest events are
called Franci. The two passages actually involve a single event, reported once and
alluded to later. The event is the clash between King Edward’s Norman court
circle and his ‘native’ English nemesis, Earl Godwine. In 1052 when Godwine and
his sons were in the ascendancy, “all the Frenchmen [omnes Franci], on whose
advice the king had exiled Godwine, were now sent into exile” (VI.22). Later in
the account of the events of 1066, this banishment of “all the Frenchmen [omnes
Francos]” is mentioned as one of the grievances which impelled Duke William to
dethrone Harold Godwineson (VI.27). The identification of these Franci as
Edward the Confessor’s advisors and, later, Duke William’s protective ire make it
abundantly clear that the people referred to as Franci in these two passages are
Normans. These instances are therefore counterexamples, exceptions to the
observed pattern of the term Franci being applied to Normans only in the narration
of post-Conquest times. Yet even as they violate the chronological element of the
pattern, they are in conformity with the spatial element: these are contexts in which
the action narrated is in England and the Normans in question are Normans
110
physically in England, confronting the English in a clash which is part of the back-
story of the Conquest.
These instances do not suggest that Henry of Huntingdon, alone among the
major historians, confused the Normans and the French, or believed that the
Normans can be considered just another sort of Frenchmen. On the contrary, when
the Historia Anglorum is narrating pre-Conquest events back on the Continent, the
distinction between the Normanni and Franci is maintained according to the
prevailing pattern.
When the Historia Anglorum comes to narrate post-Conquest events its use
of the name Franci for Normans again includes instances which conform to the
pattern and one which does not. The disparate instances are clustered closely
together. The context is Henry’s account of the uprising at York, one of the most
violent episodes in the Norman subjugation of England in the years immediately
following their arrival. In the summer of 1069 the English resistance in the North
was joined by an invasion fleet, hundreds of ships strong, led by the sons of King
Sweyn of Denmark. “Danes and English in alliance [Iunctique simul Daci et Angli]
captured the castle of York. They killed many Frenchmen [multosque Francorum
perimentes], and binding their leaders, they took them off, with treasure, to their
ships, and spent the winter between the Ouse and the Trent. When the king arrived
he drove the Danes away, and destroyed the English of that province [et Anglos
illius provincie destruxit]” (VI.32). Just two sentences later, the action shifts
111
abruptly to dynastic alliances back on the Continent and Franci once again denotes
the people of the kingdom of France (Count Baldwin VI of Flanders dies and is
succeeded by his son Arnulf, “with the support of William, the English king, and
Philip, the French king [rex Willelmus Anglorum et Philippus rex Francorum
manutenebant].”)
These two uses of the gens-name Franci fit comfortably with the pattern but
call attention to the problematic nature of the term in historiographical texts which
are obliged to narrate events on both sides of the Channel, often shuttling rapidly
(as the Anglo-Norman king/dukes themselves did) from English concerns to
Continental ones. A scant seven lines later, the text’s Franci are again William’s
Normans – but this time, contrary to the historiographical corpus’ pattern, in a
passage relating to events on the Continent. “In the next year, the king led an army
of Englishmen and Frenchmen to Maine. The English destroyed that land, burning
villages, and cutting down vineyards, and they made it subject to the king.”45 For
Henry of Huntingdon, writing a History of the English some 64 years after the
Conquest, William is first and foremost the king of the English. This is evident in
the account of the York battles, where some of the English are his enemies: even
while William’s men are represented as belonging to a foreign ethnic nation
(Franci in this case rather than Normanni) William is nevertheless referred to as the
45
“Anno sequenti, rex duxit exercitum Anglorum et Francorum in Cennomanniam.
Angli vero terram illam destruxerunt, villas comburendo, vineas cedendo, et eam regi
subdiderunt.”
112
king not an invader. In the passage concerning his reconquest of Maine, the
Historia Anglorum registers the mixed nature of the army William brings to bear on
the Manceau and again calls the Norman contingent Franci. It is left to the reader’s
grasp of the context to understand that the Franci in this case are William’s own
Normans rather than soldiers recruited, somehow, from France. This might even be
a rare instance where the term Franci has the function of signaling that these are
ethnic Normans whom William brought over from England as opposed to ‘real’
local Normans. In any case, in this passage the dominant national identity assigned
to William’s side in the conflict is English. He is identified as king not duke, and
after that initial remark on the mixed nature of the king’s forces, William’s army is
represented as “the English [Angli]” winning a territory over for their king.
On the Norman side of the Channel, Orderic Vitalis continued to work on
his Historia Ecclesiastica until 1141, but otherwise the production of Latin
histories of Normandy and/or England seems to fall off. In England, the reign of
Stephen witnessed two noteworthy developments in Latin history writing, and both
of these have the effect, for the present project, of signaling an end to the period
whose historiographical production can tell us about the way the Conquest changed
the vocabulary of Norman identity.
First, Latin history-writers of the period concentrated their energies on the
new project of recounting contemporary events instead of producing more long
113
dynastic histories.46 There was, of course, the publication around 1136-1138 of
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, the runaway bestseller
among medieval histories, but its coverage of exclusively ancient and legendary
times (it ends with the collapse of British resistance against the Saxons in 689) and
its devotion to such fanciful material as the Arthurian legends which it made so
famous, make it irrelevant to the project at hand.47 Otherwise, historiography in
England was caught up to a remarkable degree in a trend toward documenting
recent events. In the space of a few decades no fewer than four major texts
addressed the events of Stephen’s turbulent reign.48
A second trend visible in these mid-century Latin works directly concerns
their use of the gens-name Franci for the Norman rulers of England. They don’t do
46
See Peter Damien-Grint, The New Historians of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance.
(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999), Chapter 3.
47
Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britannie [sic], ed. Neil Wright, 5 vols.
48
Richard of Hexham’s chronicle, De gestis regis Stephani et de bello standardii
[Concerning the Deeds of King Stephen and the Battle of the Standard], written c. 1140
and covering events of the previous five years; the Historia Novella (c. 1143), written by
William of Malmesbury for Robert earl of Gloucester, illegitimate son of Henry I and chief
partisan of his half-sister Matilda in her battles against Stephen; the Gesta Stephani [The
Deeds of Stephen] (1148, with a post-1153 continuation); and the Relatio de Standardo
[Story of the Standard] (1150s or 1160s) by the English monk Ælred of Rievaulx and
devoted strictly to England’s victory over the Scots in 1138.
Modern editions: Richard of Hexham, De Gestis Regis Stephani, ed. Richard
Howlett, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II,and Richard I, 4 vols., Rolls
Series 82 (London: Longman and Co., for Her Majesty’s Treasury, 1885), v.3, 137-178;
William of Malmesbury, Historia Novella, ed. Edmund King, trans. K.R. Potter (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1998); Gesta Stephani, ed. and trans. K.R. Potter (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1976); Ælred of Rievaulx, Aelredi Rievallensis Relatio de Standardo, ed. R.
Howlett, in Chronicles of the reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, vol. 3, lviii-lx,
179-199.
114
it. As we have now observed at length, the appropriation of the term Franci in
Anglo-Norman texts is very markedly context-dependent. These narratives of
Stephen’s reign simply do not contain the contexts which trigger the decision to
call Normans Franci: they do not cover the invasion of England or the post-
Conquest strife between the two gentes of the newly conquered kingdom.
Right around 1135, a third change came about in Anglo-Norman history
writing, one more momentous than these other two, and one which happened on
both sides of the Channel: Anglo-Norman authors began writing history in the
vernacular.
Franceis in the Anglo-Normans’ vernacular history writing
Since there was no writing of any sort in French at the time, there are no
vernacular history texts from the first decades immediately after the Conquest, let
alone from the period before it. When Old French histories do appear, a number of
them introduce the term Franceis as a name for the Norman invaders of England,
and do so in the same contextual pattern we have identified in the Normans’ Latin
histories.
The first of these Anglo-Norman histories – indeed the earliest extent
historical writing of any sort in French – is Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis,
written in England between 1136 and 1140.49 Written for a woman of the Anglo-
49
Geffrei Gaimar, L’Estoire des Engleis, ed. Alexander Bell (Oxford: Anglo-
115
Norman landed class in Lincolnshire (“Dame Custance la gentil,” Gaimar calls her
[v. 6430]) this text is an excellent example of the process of translating English
history for the Normans’ consumption. The title, which mirrors a line in the
epilogue (“L’estoire des Engleis ci finist [Here ends the History of the English]”
aptly communicates that the work is designed to follow the events of the English
people’s past not the Normans’.50 Gaimar omits tales of Rollo and the Norman
dukes and instead begins with the ancient history of England and the deeds of
English heroes such as Havelock the Dane and Hereward the Wake51. The earlier
portion of the text is a direct translation of the English of the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle.52 The Normans enter the picture when they begin to impinge on English
history, and thereafter the history of the English is largely a history of its Norman
kings. Programmatically, the Norman invaders are positioned as a part of
England’s history.
In Gaimar’s narration of centuries before the Norman Conquest, the gens-
name refers to the Franks, translating Old English Francan, as when the Franceis
cross the Channel from Saxony [Saisune] to fight the Saxiens of Wessex in an
episode which Gaimar invented by misreading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s entry
Norman Text Society, 1960), hereafter abbreviated ‘Gaimar, Bell’.

50
Ibid., v. 7 of the ‘short epilogue,’ which Bell accepts as Gaimar’s own work but
prints in an appendix.
51
Marjorie Chibnall, The Normans, 113.
52
Gaimar, Bell, lxvii-lxviii; cf. Ian Short, “Gaimar et les debuts de l’historiographie
en langue française,” in Chroniques nationales et chroniques universelles (Göppingen:
Kümmerle, 1990), 156.
116
for 779: “Her Ealdseaxne and Francan gefuhton.”53 Likewise, Franceis and
France are the people and land of King Loewis [Louis III], attacked by Danes
raiding from East Anglia in the 880s (v. 3273). The Normans, who first appear in
the text when Æthelred the Ill-Advised marries the Norman duke’s sister Emma (v.
4213) are Normanz until Gaimar begins his account of the Battle of Hastings. The
invaders confronting the Engleis are Franceis (e.g. vv. 5242, 5265, 5301). In the
context of events in England after the Conquest, Gaimar identifies the Normans as
both Normanz and Franceis, sometimes using the two terms interchangeably within
the same episode, as when William the Conqueror puts down a rebellion (vv. 5506
and 5523; 5566 and 5571). The king musters loyal subjects both Franceis and
Engleis to fight the rebels, whom Gaimar brands with the English word “outlaws
[utlages]”; later when his army tallies its own casualties, the Normanz and the
Engleis among them are counted separately.54
When the action switches to the Continent, Franceis once again denotes the
French, as in this example, which is also interesting for representing the whole of
William Rufus’ Anglo-Norman army as Englishmen rather than Normans (vv.
6296-6298):
De male mort [pussent] murir A bad death these Burgundians
53
Gaimar, Bell, vv. 2020-2021. As Bell, 230, remarks in his note, the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle entry (“Here the Old Saxons and the Franks fought”) clearly refers to an incident
on the Continent.
54
Gaimar, Bell, vv. 5477-5478: “Sun ost sumunst, mandat guerriers:/ franceis,
engleis, e chevaliers” [‘He summoned an army, he sent warriors, franceis, Englishmen, and
horsemen’]. Utlages: v.5458.
117
Li Burguinun e li Franceis and French shall suffer
Si ja [suzes sunt] as Engleis. if they are ever subject to the English.
As with the Latin texts we have been looking at, Gaimar’s use of the gens-
name Franceis is governed by context: on the Continent, at any historical period,
Franceis denotes the Franks/French; when the Normans confront the English, or
stand beside them as countrymen in England, Franceis joins Normanz as a term
used to designate the Normans.55
The pattern also holds in the works of Wace. If William of Malmesbury
and Orderic Vitalis are true Anglo-Normans by virtue of their mixed parentage,
Wace is a model Anglo-Norman by geography. He was born literally between
Normandy and England, in the Channel Islands, as he records in an unusually
detailed autobiographical aside in the middle of his Roman de Rou [Story of Rollo]
(c. 1170-1175).
Longue est la geste des Normanz The chronicle of the Normans is long
E a metre grieve en romanz. and hard to set down in romanz.
Se l’on demande qui ço dist, If one asks who is telling it,
Qui cest estoire en romanz fist, who wrote this history in romanz,
Jo di e dirai que jo sui I say and will say again that I am
Wace de l’isle de Gersui, Wace, from the isle of Jersey,
Qui est en mer vers l’occident, which is in the sea, to the West,
Al fieu de Normandie apent. and belongs to the fief of Normandy.
En l’isle de Gersui fui nez, On the isle of Jersey I was born,
A Chaem fui petiz portez, I was taken, still little, to Caen.
Illoques fui a letres mis, There I was taught to read and write,
Pois fui longues en France apris; then educated in France, a long time.
55
As with the Latin histories, this meaningfully patterned distribution of the name
franceis has escaped the notice of current scholars. For example, Webber, Norman
Identity, 165-167 remarks, “throughout his work Gaimar appears to use the terms
‘Norman’ and ‘French’ interchangeably.”
118
Quant jo de France repairai When I came back home from France
A Chaem longues conversai, I lived in Caen for a long time
De romanz faire m’entremis and set myself to making romanzes;
Mult en escris e mult en fis.56 I wrote and made many of them.
Accidents of birth aside, all three of these historians are Anglo-Norman in
their interests. They spent their lives writing histories which spanned the Channel,
and lived in a politically and culturally unified realm. Apart from brief periods, the
duchy and the kingdom shared a single sovereign who traveled back and forth,
shared many of the same leading families and church dignitaries, went to war as a
unit, shared the same texts, and presumably were united by plentiful travel and
trade.
In the Roman de Rou, Wace splices Norman history onto English using a
tactic different from Geffrei Gaimar’s.57 Wace starts with Rollo’s wanderings and
final settlement in Rouen, like many Latin-language Norman historians before him.
56
Wace, Le Roman de Rou de Wace, A.J. Holden, ed., 3 vols. (Paris: Société des
Anciens Textes Français, 1970-1973), vv. 5297-5318. The Holden text is reprinted with
English translation by Glynn S. Burgess, The Roman de Rou (St. Helier: Société Jersiaise,
2002). Unless otherwise indicated, the translations here are my own.
57
Wace wrote the Roman de Rou in two parts. In the 1160s he told the story of the
Norman dynasty from the early wanderings of Rollo (Rou) and his Danes [danoiz] into the
reign of Duke Richard I in some 4,400 lines of 12-syllable Alexandrine verse, arranged in
rhyming laisses of irregular length. In the early 1170s, he resumed the narrative, this time
composing in the octosyllabic couplets so characteristic of Old French works. This much
longer section (11,440 verses) covers Norman and Anglo-Norman history up to the Battle
of Tinchebray in 1106, when Henry I of England took the duchy of Normandy away from
his older brother, Robert Curthose. These two sections are known to modern scholars as
“Part Two” and “Part Three” respectively. (Part One is very short version written in 1160.
There is also a fragment, which I will refer to as Rou 0, which appears to be an aborted
draft for an octosyllabic version of Rou II.) Unless otherwise specified, all quotations here
are from Rou III.
119
He follows the progress of Normandy’s dukes, then adds England to Norman
history when William invades in 1066. The Rou is the first vernacular text to
represent Norman history as a story which moves across the Channel to be
continued in England. The Norman adoption of the gens-name Franceis is
reproduced or enacted in this text perhaps more than in any other. Until the
narrative reaches the Conquest, the Normans are always called Normanz. Until the
Conquest, the Franceis never include Normans. Whether the time-setting be
Carolingian or the pre-conquest career of William the Conqueror, France never
includes Normandy, Brittany, or Aquitaine. More unusually, this text has a passage
in which Maine is also specified as a territory outside of Carolingian France.58
As is usual, Wace uses the gens-name Franceis without marking the
distinction made in modern French and English between the Franks and the French.
In his Roman de Brut (1155), the Gauls encountered by Julius Caesar are also
Franceis (vv. 4171, 4163) and the country they live in is France (v. 4219). The
Normans, however, are never called Franceis at any point before their invasion of
England. For most of the Rou – all of Rou I and II, and for the first 8,100 verses of
Rou II – the Normanz and the Franceis are enemies, and there is no onomastic
overlap. At the beginning of Rou I (vv. 43-96) the hostility between the two groups
is presented as a main theme of Norman history. Still going strong in Rou III,
Wace marks it as a more or less permanent fact of geopolitical life (vv. 4753-4766):
58
Rou 0, 293-297.
120
Mult a duré e mult dura, The discord and the great envy
Ne ja, ço crei, fin ne prendra that the French harbor against Normandy
La discorde e la grant envie lasted – and has lasted – a long time;
Que Franceis ont vers Normendie. nor will it, I believe, ever come to an end.
Mult ont Franceis Normans laidiz The French have abused the Normans
E de mesfaiz e des misdiz, with bad deeds and bad words alike.
The history of the Normans is represented as a story in large part about their
perennial struggle against the antagonism of the French. It is not surprising
therefore that the Normans are not considered French and not called Franceis! On
the contrary, it is surprising that there could ever be a condition in which the
Normans would consent to identify their own nation with the name of their
inveterate rival. Yet once the Normans and the narrative reach Hastings and are
pitted against the English, Franceis appears in its new role as a name for the
invaders, a synonym rather than a defining opposite. It makes its debut in a trench
filling with dying Normans (vv. 8093-8102):
En tot le jor n’out mie tanz By no means as many Normans

En la bataille ocis Normanz were killed in the whole day of battle
Com el fossé dedanz perirent, as perished down in that ditch;
Ço distrent cil que mort virent. so say those who saw the dead.
Vaslez qui al harneis esteient The squires, who were back with the gear,
E le herneis gargder deveient, and were charged with guarding the gear,
Voldrent guerpir tot le harneis wanted to abandon it all
Por le damage des Franceis because of the loss of those Frenchmen
Qu’el fossé virent trebuchier, who went tumbling into the ditch
Qui ne poeient redrecier and could not get back up again.
There is nothing in the text to hint that this lot who fell into the ditch are not
regular Normans but a contingency of genuine Île-de-France Frenchmen. What
occurs in these lines is the onomastic switch, with the name Franceis suddenly
121
becoming a viable way to refer to the Normans, as they are fighting the English on
English soil. Scores of times throughout the text Wace refers to the Normans and
up until this point he never calls them anything but Normanz. Now that the text has
come around to calling them Franceis, it happens a number of times in close
succession, within the account of the battle of Hastings (vv. 8170, 8197, 8289).
When France and its king reenter the picture, upon William’s first trip back to the
Continent after Hastings, the term Franceis once again means the antagonistic
French, not the Normans. Here, for example, Wace explains that King Philippe I
demanded that the Norman duke hold England, like Normandy, as a possession
under the feudal overlordship of the rex Francorum. William rebuffed the request
out of hand, and the hostilities between the two nations continued as before (vv.
9045-9050):
Li reis de France plus n’i fist The king of France did nothing more
Ne Guilleme plus ne lis dist. nor did William say more to him.
Franceis sovent le guerreioent The French often waged war on him
E mult sovent le laidengoent; and very often wronged him.
Guilleme bien se deffendi, William defended himself well
Cels de France sovent laidi and often damaged the men of France.
The gens-name Franceis is applied to the Normans only in the context of
their invasion and occupation of England. Without going into detail, the same
pattern is found yet again, if less pronouncedly, in Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s
massive Chronique des ducs de Normandie (1170s).59 From their introduction at
59
Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Chronique des ducs de Normandie, ed. Carin Fahlin, 4
vols. (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1951-1979). This text is not Anglo-Norman by
122
the beginning of the text, the ancestral Normans are called Normanz (v. 664). (In a
more unusual move, the term normant is also used to refer to the local (presumably
Frankish) victims of the Danes’ onslaught (v. 1150), which projects a distinction
between Franceis and Normanz even in those distant Frankish, pre-Rollo times.)
Once Rollo and his people settle, the name daneis is dropped and the text’s
protagonists are Normanz at all points until the text narrates their occupation of
England. That whole time Franceis are the Franks or French, and their France is
the smallish kingdom centered on Paris.60 After their conquest of England,
Normanz continues to be the text’s usual way to denote the invaders (vv. 40160,
40643, etc.), but there are occasional instances where the conquerors are referred to
as Franceis (vv. 40836, 40783) or Franceis e Normanz (vv. 40177, 40795; it is
difficult to tell whether this is an intentional reference to separate nationalities
within William’s forces or a meaningless rhetorical doubling of two words serving,
for the moment, as approximate synonyms).
virtue of its author’s nationality (he was from the small town of Sainte-Maure near Tours
and probably spent his career in Tours, Angers or Chartres) nor dialectal features (which
also point to the area around Tours), but it was commisioned by Henry II after success of
Benoît’s Roman de Troie. The Chronique des ducs is a product of the Anglo-Norman
court even if its author’s contact with that court was in Anjou or Normandy not in England.
Peter Damien-Grint, New Historians of the Twelfth-Century (Woodbridge: Boydell Press,
1999), 59; Dean, Guide, 4.
60
Even when narrating Carolingian times, “at that time [when] the Franks stood
much above other nations in great honor” (vv. 783-4), the franceis are but one of many
separate nations in the region: “the French, the Flemands, those of the Vermandois, and
those of Anjou and of Aquitaine – Hasting didn’t think them worth a little tuft of wool” vv.
841-844. In later times too, as we have come to expect, France does not include Normandy
(vv. 40309-40311, 42153, 42560, etc.), Aquitaine, or Burgandy (eg. vv. 40116-40118).
123
Conclusions from historiographical texts, c. 800-1135
After looking at 60 years of post-Conquest historiography and about 260
years of pre-Conquest texts, we are in a position to draw some conclusions about
the Normans’ adoption of the gens-name Franci. First, the texts do not conflate,
confuse, or combine the Normans and the Franks/French. This is true of Frankish
texts and Norman; of pre-Conquest texts from the first arrival of people the texts
label Northmanni and post-Conquest texts that participate in the new practice of
sometimes calling the Norman invaders Franci. There is no evidence or precedent
to support the hypothesis that Franci served the Norman conquerors as an umbrella
term. On the contrary the evidence establishes that, throughout the whole period,
the Normans and the French were understood as two separate, discrete, and often
mutually-hostile nations.
The conception of the normanni and franci as two separate nations is
expressed throughout the history texts in the way they speak of the two gentes, but
also in the way they represent the political and geographical territories of France
and Normandy. The textual evidence refutes the hypothesis that the Normans
understood themselves as franci in territorial terms, as a people who lived in part of
a large geographical Francia.
Confusion over this point is understandable in light of the fact that Francia
(and its more archaic sometime-synonym Gallia) was indeed sometimes used in
124
these texts to denote a large geographical region stretching from the Mediterranean
to the Channel. Much as the Normans’ post-Conquest appropriation of the gens-
name Franci resulted in a semantic doubling, the place-name Francia also carried
multiple meanings. The ‘doubling’ of Francia happened much earlier, as a result
of a quite different historical process (the disintegration of a large unified Frank-
land and the re-application of the name Francia to one of the fragments), but the
semantic extension, and the resulting potential for ambiguity, was much the same.
Four helpful and pertinent observations can be made with regard to the two
Francias. The first is simply that, in and Norman and Frankish/French texts of the
11th and 12th centuries, the ‘normal’ – that is, the far more common – referent of the
word Francia is the smallish kingdom of France not the large landmass
encompassing the full extent of Roman Gaul or the western third of Charlemagne’s
empire.
Second, I would suggest provisionally that the use of Francia and Gallia
synonymously to denote a large geographical region is characteristic of (though not
limited to) texts whose Latin has a deliberately classicizing bent. The worst
offender is easily the Historia Francorum of Richer of Saint-Rémi de Reims (991-
996). Dividing all of Gaul into three parts (Gallia Belgica, Celtica, and
Aquitanica) in imitation (almost verbatim) of Caesar’s Gallic War, Richer uses
these obsolete place-names throughout his text.61 Accordingly, rather than
61
Pierre Riché, “Expression du sentiment national dans la correspondance de
125
designating the Norman territory as Normandy or part of France, Richer
unhelpfully describes it as “a part of Celtic Gaul [Celticae Galliae pars].”62 Robert
the Strong is “Rotbertus Celticae Galliae dux” (I.28); King Raoul I musters a big
army from Gallia Celtica along with many Belgae to fight the pyratae in Aquitania
(I.57). The author’s penchant for imitating Roman models leads him to use terms
which ignore one thousand years of intervening historical events and have no
relevance to the world he is describing. Richer’s Gallia Belgica (or rather,
Caesar’s) matches no actual 10th-century territory; the term Belgae refers
sometimes to the Flemish and sometimes to the people of the duchy of Lorraine
(II.8, II.17). In places in the text Aquitaine is called “Goth-land [Gothia]” (I.7).
Though Richer is a Frenchman close to the heart of the kingdom of France his
geographical nomenclature favors anachronistic Roman terms at the expense of
accurately recognizing the kingdom’s real territorial borders. William of Poitier’s
Gesta Gullielmi is another text in which Francia sometimes denotes a large zone
that includes Normandy – and which is also characterized by allusion to classical
models (again including Caesar’s De bello gallica).
A third observation on the matter is that, in at least some texts of the period,
the geographical concept of a large Gallic region was represented with the more
Gerbert d’Aurillac et dans l’Histoire de Richer de Reims,” in Peuples du Moyen-Âge:

problèmes d’identification, ed. Claude Carozzzi and Huguette Taviani-Carozzi, 131-143
(Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1996), 139-140.
62
Richer, Historia Francorum, ed. and trans. Robert Latouche, as Richer, Histoire
de France, 888-995 (Paris, H. Champion, 1930), vol. 1, 12.
126
archaic Roman name Gallia, while Francia was reserved for the contemporary,
politically-defined kingdom of France as it then existed. Gallia included
Normandy, Brittany, Aquitaine, Burgundy and Provence; Francia included none
of these.63 Texts that employ this lexical division also understand Franci as the
king’s subjects, a politically-defined group which cannot, by definition, include the
Normans.
Finally, texts which do posit a Francia capacious (or anachronistic) enough
to include Normandy, tend to also use the term in its other, more ‘normal’ and
historically apt, sense. In the Gesta Guillelmi, Francia can denote the large Gallic
region in which Normandy, Anjou, and the kingdom of France play out their
rivalries (I.29) and then in the very next chapter denote specifically the French
king’s own turf. Geoffrey Malaterra’s 1098 history of the Norman conquest of
Sicily contains an unusually explicit definition of Francia as a large unit which
includes Normandy: “The land of Normandy is in a part of Gaul, so to speak; and
indeed was not always called Normannia, but formerly was in the royal holdings of
the king of the Franks/French along with the rest of his landholdings, of which it
63
Webber, Norman Identity, takes this observation further: he operates with the
belief that the distinction between a large geographical Gaul and a small political France
was generally accepted and widely shared in the 11th and 12th centuries. (See, for example,
116-117.) Some 19th-century philologists drew the same conclusion concerning Gallia and
Francia: “La différence entre eux fut que le mot Gaule était surtout une expression
géographique, tandis que le mot France avait plutôt une signification politique.” Fustel de
Coulanges, [title and publication information not given], 532, as quoted and cited by Pio
Rajna, Le Origini dell’epopea francese (Florence: G.C. Sansoni, 1884), 370.
127
was a part, named in general Francia and called thus” (I.1).64 Yet elsewhere in this
same text and not many pages later, the Francigeni and the Normanni are shown
fighting each other “on the border of France and Normandy [in confini Franciae et
Normanniae]” (I.39). We are back to the definitions familiar from texts of this
period: Normandy is not part of France, and the Normans and French are two
opposing peoples.
As Geoffrey Malaterra’s statement that Normandy was once part of the
French king’s demesnes suggests, some 11th century writers’ ambivalence with the
term Francia reflects their awareness that the meaning of the term had changed
over time. They knew that Francia once referred to a larger region but that the
name’s primary, firmest referent in their own historical moment was a kingdom of
France felt to be the direct political heir of the old Carolingian Francia but in fact
much smaller. The Francia of their own time did not encompass the same area as
Charlemagne’s; its political reality was that it excluded a number of territories that
were within the old Francia but had since broken off. Describing the French attack
on Normandy that was foiled at Mortemer in 1054, William of Poitiers remarks that
the French king, Henry I “considered it an affront very greatly to be avenged,
that...while he presided over many powerful provinces of which the lords and rulers
64
Geoffrey Malaterra, De rebus gestis Rogerii Calabriae et Siciliae comitis et
Roberti Guiscardi ducis fratris eius, ed. Ernesto Pontieris, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores
vol.5, Part 1 (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli: 1925-1928), 7: “Normannia patria quaedam est
in partibus Galliae, quae quidem non semper Normannia dicta fuit; sed regalis quondam
regum Francorum fiscus cum toto suo tenimento, cuius pars erat, generali nomine Francia
et sic vocabantur.”
128
commanded troops in his army, Count William [i.e. Duke William II of Normandy]
was neither his friend nor his vassal but his enemy; and that Normandy, which had
been under the kings of the Franks from the earliest times [Normanniam quae sub
regibus Francorum egit ex antiquo], had now been raised almost to a kingdom”
(I.29).
The historians were aware that the reges Francorum had once ruled a much
larger Francia, but in the texts of the 11th and 12th century Francia usually denotes
the diminished French kingdom of their own period. We saw this in pre-Conquest
texts such as Adhemar of Chabannes’ Chronicle, describing Rollo’s settlement as
“right next to France [juxta Francia ]” (III.27); Dudo’s De moribus et actis
primorum Normanniae ducum, referring to “the river Epte, which passes between
the kingdoms of France and Normandy as a separating boundary”; Norman
charters; and the Gesta Normannorum Ducum of William of Jumièges. It is
overwhelmingly the rule in post-Conquest histories as well. Normandy and France
are clearly two separate places in Eadmer’s Historia Novorum in Anglia: as abbot
of Bec, we read, Anselm was “renowned, well-loved, and sought after throughout
the whole of Normandy and France [toti Normanniae atque Franciae].” The news
that Anselm had nearly excommunicated Henry I spreads “throughout many places,
through England, France, and Normandy [multis in locis, per Angliam, Franciam,
atque Normanniam].”65 Similar passages abound in Orderic Vitalis’ Ecclesiastical
65
Eadmer, Historia Novorum, 23, 166.
129
History. Writing of another abbot of Bec, this time Lanfranc, in book IV, Orderic
says that many scholars came to Normandy “from France, Gascony, Brittany, and
Flanders to sit at his feet.” With an admirable refusal to whitewash, he explains in
book IX that the gens Normannorum are driven to dominate even when it requires
treachery and wrongdoing; “this the French and Bretons and Flemings and their
other neighbors have frequently experienced [hoc Franci et Britones atque
Flandrenses aliique collimitanei crebro senserunt].”66
The weight of evidence from the period establishes that when modern
historians reason that the Normans were liable to be considered French because
Normandy was a province of France, they are mistaken. The corpus of
historiographical texts refutes the conception and the vocabulary. The relationship
between France and Normandy was not one of center and periphery, genus and
species, or nation and province. Indeed, it is possible to find instances, like this
one, where, in the perspective of a medieval Norman historian France is one of the
“neighboring provinces [confinium provinciarum]”67 and in that In fact there is an
instance in which , in the perspective of a Norman historian France is one of the
“neighboring provinces [confinium provinciarum]”
66
Ord.Vit., vol.2, 250-251; vol. 5, 24-25.
67
Robert of Torigni’s version of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum lists the names of
the castles Henry I built “in Normandy on the frontier of the duchy and the neighboring
provinces [illorum autem, que in Normannia construxit, in margine sui ducatus et
confinium provinciarum]” (GND VIII.31).
130
The abundant evidence of the historiographical texts makes it clear that the
pre-Conquest Normans did not identify themselves as Frankish/French people, and
that after the Conquest, the Norman adoption of the term did not amount to an
admission that they were a part of a large gens Francorum. It should not be
surprising that the Normans and the Franks firmly maintained a distinction between
the two peoples, given the formative role that it played in the early definition and
bordering of the gens Normannorum, and the enmity that often simmered between
the two states. However it is not particularly surprising either that the separateness
of the two peoples has been overlooked by modern historians, with their centuries-
long habit of thinking of Normandy as a part of France. As long as one proceeds
from the assumption that the mid-11th-century Normans were capable of thinking of
themselves as Frenchmen, it is natural enough to assume that the Normans’ use of
Franci meant they were relaxing their practice of identifying themselves as a
distinct gens. This interpretation, however, is based on anachronistic ideas about
the political, ethnic, and territorial borders of the period in question. The challenge,
once again, is to determine what the Normans did mean when they adopted the
gens-name Franci.
The historical texts also leave no doubt that this new development in the
way the Normans named their people happened at the time of the Conquest. In the
historical and administrative texts predating the Conquest, one would be hard
131
pressed to find an instance of the term Franci denoting the Normans. I have not
found one yet. 1066 was the starting point.
After 1066, however the use of Franci as a self-identifier in the Normans’
Latin-language history texts is not easily periodizable. It drops off around 1135,
but between 1066 and 1135, there is no clearly discernable pattern of distribution
over time. Nor does it divide according to the text’s or the author’s origin –
Continental Norman texts, English, mixed, Flemish – we can find it in use among
any of these, and also find other instances of each which decline to use the ‘new’
name. The one striking pattern that does emerge in these texts’ use of Franci is the
way the term is distributed within the texts that use it. Plenty of texts after 1066 do
not call the Normans Franci, we should remember, and those that do generally use
the term only a few times. The preferred term, by a very broad margin, is still
Normanni, and Franci remains relatively rare. It is important to remember that the
practice of calling Normans Franci was not only new to the French and the
Normans, it was strange, counter to long usage, a departure. For this reason it is all
the more significant that this new articulation of Norman national identity is
deployed in accordance with a pattern.
The pattern, as we have now seen, is repeated, with minimal variation, in all
of the texts that identify the Normans as Franci. The post-Conquest text does not
call the Normans Franci when narrating anything before 1066. In recounting any
and all events before that point, from the arrival of Rollo’s raiding band at the
132
mouth of the Seine through Duke William’s victories over France and Anjou, the
Normans are not identified as Franci. When the text crosses over and calls the
Normans Franci, it happens in the course of narrating the invasion, the Battle of
Hastings, William’s coronation at Westminster, or the new rulers’ subsequent
battles in England. It is in passages in which the Normans are confronting the
English; where they have turned their attention away from the French, the
Angevins, and all their other neighbors in Continental politics and toward their new
kingdom. Often it is in a passage in which the Normans are represented
specifically as one of the two gentes of the kingdom. In a number of instances,
furthermore, the term Franci is literally, verbally paired with the word Angli, in the
same sentence. Franci is not simply as an available synonym for Normanni, to be
dropped in interchangeably in any spot regardless of what’s being narrated. The
appropriation of the name Franci obeys a logic of historical context.
The sudden emergence in or about 1066 of Franci as a viable way to
identify Normans is not a development that is self-consciously discussed in texts of
the period. Nevertheless, the texts do register the development. Because the new
usage of Franci is so rigorously context-specific, it unfolds alongside certain with
historical events and comes across as a partner – a consequence as it were – of
those events. In using the new term only when narrating the Conquest and
subsequent English events, the texts stage the name change in the course of their
own staging of historical events. They recapitulate the development of the new
133
identity construct, performing it in their own lines and paragraphs. The texts start
to call Normans Franci at the point when their narrative reaches 1066 and the
invasion and England because the Normans started to call themselves Franci at the
point that they reached 1066, the invasion, and England. In other words, the texts’
naming-policy within the unfolding historical storyline that they narrate does
indeed match, mimic, reproduce what ‘actually happened.’
It seems like a risky jump to assert that narrative time could keep in step
with historical time – or, rather, that the language used in constructing a
representation of unfolding historical time can sometimes itself unfold and change
across the space of its paragraphs and pages in faithful mimicry of linguistic (in this
case merely lexical) changes which occurred over the course of the period being
narrated. The words used in constructing a narrative of the past are necessarily the
words of the author’s present, not the vocabulary of the time narrated. To say that
history-writing is by nature prone to anachronism is an understatement. It is
anachronism. Any recounting of past events – indeed any utterance in the past
tense or the future – is an almost magical trick of language, a distortion by which
other times are brought present to the listener, the speaker.68 To speak in one’s
present of the past or of a future is to artificially construct a past or future phrased
in terms of the speaker’s present, and made of his own present linguistic resources.
Its only physical presence is words and its only words are those of the text’s
68
George Steiner, After Babel (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 130-146.
134
available present. It is dangerous to presume that there is anything that is not
anachronistic in a historiographical text.
When I observe that, in the early histories of the Normans, the texts’
contextual deployment of the name Franci mirrors an historical reality of the
situation, and does so with a consistency and precision which makes these texts
valid as a source of historical information about Norman identity constructs, I am
not proposing a widely-applicable historical method. I am saying nothing more
than that, deliberately or otherwise, some early Norman historiographers escape
anachronism with regard to naming their protagonists.69 They use the name Franci
when narrating events in which the people involved, the Normans or the English
enemies (and later, subjects) could have called them Franci and where the
historian’s own choice to do so does not create any confusion for the reader. They
avoid it in places where it would be meaningless to think of Normanni as Franci—
confusing to the present readers and probably inconceivable to the participants, the
‘characters’ being portrayed.
Tracing these texts’ distribution of gens-names is a tool, stemming from
very local, very specific observation. Tracking the absence or presence of Franci
as a way to identify the Normans, and then analyzing how and where it appears in
the texts that do use it, a pattern emerges. Furthermore, the pattern does not
69
Not all the early Norman historiographers avoid anachronism in naming. Dudo,
for instance, indulges in it enthusiastically. It would be a mistake to take Dudo’s word for
it that 9th-century Normans claimed Trojan ancestry, called themselves Dacians, and
preserved a lively collective memory of a homeland on the Danube.
135
emerge faintly; it is an insistent pattern, so consistent as to be almost a rule. The
strength and consistency of the pattern makes it hard not to conclude that the texts’
handling of the vocabulary of group-identity is governed by something other than
whim or random chance or whim. The pattern itself is the evidence, which
demands or at very least invites interpretation. The Normans are Franci in contexts
where they are defined by their relationship, violent or harmonious, with the
English.
Looking back for a moment to situate ourselves within the argument as a
whole, it might be helpful to summarize the observations which we can embrace
with some confidence, and the points to be considered next. The practice of
identifying Normans as Franci began at the time of the Norman Conquest of
England. It was not merely coeval with the Conquest but was a response to the
Normans’ new position as a people defined by their new relationship with England
and the English. The use of the term Franci in certain contexts marked a change:
the Normans – or at least those directly involved in the Conquest – were now
defining themselves as against the English, not against the French and other
Continental rivals or neighbors. Though the name Franci may not have the
purpose of designating a subset of Normans – namely, the ones in England – it did
have that effect: as a designation that was not applied to Normans present and
active in Normandy or elsewhere on the Continent, it articulated two separate
categories which had not existed previously. Finally, when applied to the invaders
136
of England, Franci does not seem to have functioned as a broad umbrella term; it
did not create or reflect a larger category of which the Normans were only a subset.
A number of questions remain to be addressed. If Franci was not an
umbrella term, what did it mean? From the patterned use it is clear that it was not
simply a synonym for Normanni. In contexts where Franci is used for the
Normans the two terms could indeed be used interchangeably; but Franci could
only be used limited contexts. In many contexts Normanni could not be called
Franci; Franci was not merely an alternative to be dropped in interchangeably.
Furthermore, the very same individuals who could be called Franci in the context
of their activities in England were referred to as Normanni as soon as discussion
turned to activities on the Continent. The two names marked the same people
according to different traits or criteria. What redefinitions, alterations, border-
redrawing was entailed in this new way to identify the Normans? To continue on
in the investigation of these questions we need to turn from the conquerors’
histories to the administrative and legal texts they produced as they began to
impose their power upon England.
137
3.
How the Normanni became Franci:

Translating the English Conception of the Normans
Writing England’s Franci into existence
The writs and charters of William the Conqueror constitute a written
discourse in which the Normans were actively engaged in the project of defining
themselves as the new ruling elite of England. They are an indispensable body of
evidence as we attempt to gauge how these Normans’ new role caused them to
revise the ways they defined and discussed their group. As in the histories, the
principal symptom of an altered identity construct is the practice of identifying the
post-Conquest Normans as Franci. The administrative texts use Franci early,
overwhelmingly, and in contexts which allow us to interrogate the term for
additional information on how the group was delineated.
“As has frequently been pointed out,” Ian Short writes, the early Normans
in England “were in the habit of referring to themselves more frequently as Franci
than as Normanni, a practice that was rapidly institutionalized by the Chancery
formulae ‘Franci et Angli’ or ‘tam Franci quam Angli’, which were to remain a
138
constant feature of royal, baronial, and ecclesiastical charter addresses throughout
the twelfth century.”1 Short seems to suggest that the Normans in England (or
“Insular Normans” as he calls them in this passage) had a predisposition to call
themselves Franci rather than Normanni, and afterward recorded and formalized
this practice in their administrative writing. The evidence, however, indicates that
the actual sequence of events unfolded the other way around. There is hardly a
trace of a prior Norman “habit” of co-opting the name Franci before its frequent
appearances in the Franci et Angli formula in Anglo-Norman writs. As the king of
England, William began issuing writs in 1066 or 1067.2 Only three of the
Normans’ historiographical texts were written within the first decade of William’s
reign: the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio (1067-1068), William of Jumièges’ own
version of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum (revised before 1071), and William of
Poitiers’ Gesta Gullielmi (c. 1071-1077) – and the last two of these three do not
call the Normans Franci at all. Even if we consider the other histories, the ones
written after writs had already been produced and circulated for ten or twenty years
or more, the Normans’ historical discourse does not indicate a preference for
Franci over Normanni. The term Franci is used less than Normanni, and only (as
we have seen) in specific contexts. Indeed, if we stick to the evidence that is
actually available to us, “the incomers’ preference for the label Franci over that of
1
Short, “Tam Angli quam Franci: Self-definition in Anglo-Norman England,”
Anglo-Norman Studies18 (1996), 163.
2
David Bates, ed. Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum: The Acta of William I
(1066-1087) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
139
Normanni,” as Short calls it, is a preference which exists only in their
administrative discourse.
With regard to Anglo-Norman identity, there is no body of evidence which
predates their earliest legal and administrative writing. This means that instead of
treating writs and charters as records of a naming practice already in existence, we
have to remember that they are themselves an active participant in a process of
identity-making. The nation-building enterprise was not being passively recorded
in texts but was developed, thought through, and promulgated in texts which were
very publicly issued by the king. The Norman invaders’ policy of identifying
themselves as Franci was not institutionalized by chancery practice, it was
disseminated – if not indeed brought into being – by chancery practice. Rather than
recording a preference, the administrative documents were themselves the early
instances of the practice, the incubation ground of a new nomenclature which then
spread outward from there.
The writs record that the practice of deploying the term Franci to identify
the Norman people in post-Conquest England was present almost from the moment
the mixed Anglo-Norman polity came into existence. The use of Franci was not
only early in the administrative and legal discourse, it was also insistent.
Consistent, even pervasive, the choice of the Franci rather than Normanni in these
texts comes across not as a preference but a policy. The Franci et Angli formula
140
occurs in at least 68 acta from the reign of William the Conqueror alone.3 Indeed
the administrative documents of William’s reign use Franci to the complete
exclusion of Normanni. Almost all of the extant writs and charters of William the
Conqueror – and absolutely all the ones that are indisputably genuine – use Franci
or Francigenae, never Normanni. The same is true in the Domesday Book, the
Norman regime’s vast survey of the assets and landowners of England.4
Preferring the historiography to the corpus of writs as almost all scholars
do, Short offers the opinion that “administrative and legal differentiations between
the Normans and the English offer, by their very nature, a less productive avenue of
enquiry than do the various, if often nebulous, efforts at self-identification which
happen to have come down to us.”5 On the contrary, I find the writs unusually
valuable texts because they allow us to see a conspicuous shift in self-identification
develop within a clearly identifiable context. The Normans’ appropriation of the
gens-name Franci is inscribed in both its historical and its textual setting. First, as
3
Ibid.
4
Never Normanni in writs: F. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 3 vols.
(Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1903-1916), vol.3, 278; in Domesday: E.A Freeman, The Norman
Conquest (Oxford, 1876), Note E, “The Use of the Words ‘Franci’ and ‘Angli’ in
Domesday,” vol.5, 766-769; both cited by George Garnett, “‘Franci et Angli’: The Legal
Distinctions between Peoples after the Conquest,” Anglo-Norman Studies 8 (1986), 130
and n.163. Though outside the scope of this dissertation, the Domesday Book is a very
considerable piece of evidence because it is such a massive archive of names and persons.
The extant books comprise some two million words on nearly 900 leaves of sheepskin
parchment (Elizabeth M. Hallam, Domesday Book through Nine Centuries [New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1986], 8).
5
Short, “Tam Angli quam Franci,” 163. Even while considering the writs only in
passing, Short’s article stands as one of the most useful explorations of the implications of
the Normans’ use of Franci in their writs. Garnett, “‘Franci et Angli’” is another important
exception to the “almost all” who prefer narrative sources.
141
we will see, the evidence of the writs confirms that the Normans’ appropriation of
the gens-name Franci occurred in England, immediately after the Conquest. The
use of ‘French’ as a term for the Normans can be traced to the context of being in
England, away from the French and their other neighbors and paired instead with
the English. By their historical context the Anglo-Norman administrative texts
confirm that Franci functioned to denote specifically the Normans in England.
More surely than the historiographical writings, in which it is a matter of
interpreting textual context (the pattern of the word’s deployment within the texts),
the writs indicate that Franci was used to define specifically the Anglo-Normans.
Within the writs, the textual circumstances which accompany the use of the
‘new’ term are equally identifiable and equally revealing. The conquering elite’s
widespread use of the name Frenciscan/Franci/Franceis is inscribed within
administrative discourse – and this suggests that it was a legal or administrative
expedient to label their group this way. Franci – not just the name but also the
conceptual category, Anglo-Normans – was used in official discourse; it had a role
to play in the political ideology and propaganda of the Norman regime. Provoked
by, or useful in, talking about the new circumstances of post-1066 England, the
term (and concept) was deployed in an effort to construct a unified polity in which
the Norman elite are accepted as legitimate rulers of England.
Finally, the administrative discourse, as the locus where the Norman use of
the name Franci appears to enter the written record, is a place to trace back from.
142
As I will demonstrate, the Normans’ practice of calling Normans Franci was a
practice they borrowed from the English. The official discourse of governance is
the ground on which the borrowing unfolded, a textual land-bridge across which
the English use of the term Franci crossed over to the Normans’ use of it their in
Latin documents.
It may be helpful to describe and define, briefly, the documents we will
encounter in this stage of the investigation. The administrative records of the early
Anglo-Norman kingdom consist mostly of writs and charters.6 These were
originally separate small slips of parchment, which were often copied, for the sake
of preservation, into bound books or long rolls. Over the long run that effort was
6
A researcher who needs access to administrative records of medieval England but
is not aiming to undertake archival research of her or his own is fortunate in the availability
of material in modern editions. All the writs of William the Conqueror are gathered
together in David Bates, ed. Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum: The Acta of William I
(1066-1087) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). For the documents of the succeeding
Anglo-Norman kings, through the reign of Stephen, see H.W.C. Davis, Charles Johnson,
H.A. Cronne and R.W.C. Davis, Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, 1066-1154
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913-1969). These exhautive collections supply concise and
informative explanations of each document but no translations. R.C. van Caenegem, Royal
Writs in England from the Conquest to Glanvill, Selden Society 80 (1958) provides a good
selection of writs, in their original languages with modern English translations, and also
furnishes a wealth of information about writs, administrative writing etc. For pre-
Conquest legal texts, the standard modern edition is F. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der
Angelsachsen, 3 vols. (Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1903-1916). The English-language docu-
ments of the Anglo-Norman realm are also listed in David A.E. Peleteret, Catalogue of
English Post-Conquest Vernacular Documents (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1990), which
does not contain the texts or translations but explains the contents and import of each.
143
relatively effective: most of the extant writs and charters survive in this secondary
form, in the cartularies of monasteries or the rolls of the royal chancery.7
In the Middle Ages, all types of official records had fixed formal
characteristics or conventions governing the way they were written up, and the
differences between writs, charters, and other categories are largely a matter of
these formal features. In England, the writ (breve or brevis in Latin) was the most
common. R.C. van Caenegem gives this definition: “A royal writ is, generally
speaking, a sealed governmental document, drafted in a crisp businesslike manner,
by which the king conveys notifications or orders.”8 Functional and ephemeral, the
writ is nevertheless dignified by certain formal features. It begins with a salutation
(or protocol) which names the person issuing the writ and the parties to whom it is
addressed, and conveys a simple greeting. Often the issuer expresses his good
wishes (the eschatocol), but this too is concise, and the whole business of address
and greeting (both protocol and eschatocol) is dispensed with in a single sentence.
After stating its business, the writ ends abruptly, with no further comment, no date,
and no list of witnesses. Writs do, however, bear the seal of the king (or of the earl
or the bishop, or whoever is issuing it). A charter, in its usual form, is more
restricted in purpose than the versatile writ. Simply defined, a charter is a public
7
Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 84.
Some are extant in the original and, as with autograph manuscripts of historical texts, these
provide the most secure witnesses of the practices and lexicon of an identifiable moment.
Accordingly I give them preference here.
8
R.C. van Caenegem, Royal Writs , Preface, 1.
144
letter from a donor recording a grant of property, usually land, to a beneficiary. It
is an open document, handed over to the beneficiary at the time it is made. More
formal and lengthy than a writ, the charter has a longer invocation and preamble in
place of the writ’s one-sentence address, and it is dated and is witnessed by a list of
signatories. Some scholars consider the absence of a seal as a necessary feature of
the charter proper, but this criterion is not universally agreed upon.9 In Anglo-
Norman England, a hybrid form emerged. Charters had been in use back in
Normandy and the Normans introduced some charter traits to their writs,
presumably to confer upon them more solemnity and permanence than had been
associated with writs.10 The documents of most interest here the acta produced by
the new Norman regime under William I (1066-1089), and these are almost all
writs. It is in the greeting clause of these writs that the phrase Franci et Angli
occurs with such frequency.
Using the writs to understand how the group called Franci was delimited
Although the phrase Franci et Angli encompasses a mass of addressees who
are not specified by name, a writ is almost always addressed to a limited group of
people who are affected by its pronouncement; therefore the Franci mentioned in
any given writ, though collective and nameless, are nevertheless a limited group
9
Ibid, 117-128; Clanchy Memory to Written Record, 81-92 details a larger number
of categories but with less attention to formal features. Clanchy includes as charters many
documents that do have a seal.
10
Van Caenegem, Royal Writs, 128-129.
145
with more or less explicitly defined borders. We can therefore examine the writs to
see how a group is defined when the term Franci is used, who is in it and who is
excluded. Here, to start with, is a typical writ of William the Conqueror:
Will(el)mus rex Angl(orum) Ailmaro episcopo et

R(adulfo) comiti et omnibus baronibus et
vicecomitibus francis et anglis ubiumque sanctus
Ædmundus terram habet salutem. Mando et precipio
ut dominia sancti Ædmundi sint quieta ab omnibus
scottis et geldis sicuti melius fuerunt tempore regis
Ædwardi11
[William king of the English, to bishop Æthelmær

and earl Ralph and all the barons and sheriffs, French
and English, wherever St. Edmund has lands,
greetings. I order and command that the domains of
St. Edmunds be free from all scots and gelds just as
completely as they were in the time of King Edward].
This writ can be securely dated to the earliest years of William I, since it
necessarily predates April 1070 when Æthelmær was replaced as bishop of
Elmham. It is perhaps the earliest surviving Latin writ of the new realm.12 The
beneficiary is the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. The addressees are interested
parties: the bishop of nearby Elmham; the earl of East Anglia, the secular lord of
the region where the abbey is located; and the barons and sheriffs in the places
where the abbey owns land, who would be charged with enforcement of the king’s
policy. The function of the phrase “francis et anglis” seems modest and
11
Bates, Regesta, #35. Translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. Scots
and gelds are types of taxes.
12
Ibid, 48.
146
straightforward: the text asserts that it is binding upon all parties that might be
concerned with the taxation of the abbey’s lands, whether the individuals in
question are Normans or native Englishmen.
Specifically referring to officials in locales where the abbey of Bury St.
Edmunds holds property, the term Franci necessarily denotes people within
England. This is invariably and necessarily the case in the English writs of William
and his successors. In Anglo-Norman administrative documents, Franci refers to
the ‘French’ in England – that is, the Norman conquerors – not the Anglo-Norman
king’s Continental subjects back in Normandy. Strictly speaking, the Norman
kings of England had no subjects back in Normandy. The people of Normandy
owed their allegiance to the duke of Normandy but not to the king of England. The
king’s writs and charters were not addressed to them. For most of the period from
the Conquest through the end of the 12th century, of course, the English king and
Norman duke were one and the same person; for the population of Normandy,
however, that man was their duke but not their king.13 People in Normandy who
13
William the Conqueror evidently did not expect the lordship of both Normandy
and England to remain in one person’s hands after his own death: modern historians and
medieval ones (such as Orderic Vitalis, Historia Ecclesiastica, c. 1123-1137) generally
accept that William wanted the duchy to pass to his eldest son, Robert Curthose, and the
kingdom to go to his second son, William Rufus. In any event, that is how it turned out
when William died in 1087. From 1096 to 1100, the king, William Rufus, once again had
control of Normandy too (in fact though not in title) while his brother Robert was off
crusading. When William Rufus died in 1100, Robert resumed control of Normandy while
the Conqueror’s third son became Henry I of England. In 1106, Henry I defeated Robert at
the Battle of Tinchebrai and became duke of Normandy. The kingdom and duchy had a
single leader again. This situation prevailed until the last decade of King Stephen’s reign,
when Normandy was lost (1144-1150) to Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou, and
147
had no business with their duke’s new land did indeed have a king, but theirs was
the one in Paris not the one in Winchester. In practice, the situation was
complicated by the fact that a great many of the new Norman lords in England also
had land holdings back in Normandy. These cross-channel Norman barons and
knights were subjects of the English king with respect to their English holdings, but
were subject to the duke of Normandy and the king of France for their lands and
titles in Normandy.
It has occasionally been argued that there was no definite separation of titles
and powers. During the reign of William I, George Garnett says, “it remained
unclear whether his power over them there [i.e. William’s Norman subjects in
England] was in some way theoretically distinct from that he enjoyed, often over
the same men, in Normandy.”14 Garnett, however, finds the evidence for a merging
of powers or titles ultimately unsatisfying. Though we have to wait until the reign
of William Rufus to find a clear attempt to define the powers which attach
respectively to the king and to the duke, it is significant that neither William I nor
any of his successors ever styled himself “rex Normannorum.”15 Conversely, no
passed (1150-1154) to his son Henry. In 1154, Henry of Anjou became Henry II of
England, and the split was closed once again. To summarize, in the 138 years from the
time of the Norman conquest of England in 1066 until 1204 when King John lost
Normandy irrevocably to Philip Augustus of France, the kings of England were also the
dukes of Normandy for all but 25 years (1087-96, 1100-06, 1144-1154).
14
Garnett, “‘Franci et Angli’,” 111-112.
15
Ibid.
148
authentic writ of William I uses title “rex Anglorum et dux Normannorum”;16 in
England, he downplays the Norman title and addresses his people, Franci and
Angli alike, as their king.
In charters produced in Normandy for Continental barons and churches,
William is often styled “Guillelmi Anglorum regis.” Garnett believes the use of the
royal title is not meant to imply that William is king over the Normans, but merely
reveals a preference for using the loftiest and most impressive of his titles. Cases
where a number of William’s titles are used in the address clause reflect that each
of his various dignities exist in their own right, rather than all collapsing into the
highest. A fine example of this is a document in which William grants a parcel of
midtown real estate to the church of St.-Pierre-de-la-Cour in Le Mans. Here, where
the beneficiary is neither English nor Norman but in the county of Maine, William
is styled “Wielmus illust(ris) rex Anglorum et dux Normannorum atque
Cenom(annorum) comes” [‘William, illustrious king of the English and duke of the
Normans and also count of the Manceau’].17 As with William’s English and
Norman documents, Bates notes, his acta for Manceau beneficiaries – of which
nine survive – are drawn up in a style characteristic of that particular region;18 in
this case, the salutation too is tailored to fit the recipient, naming William as count
of Maine because it is in this particular capacity that he has the right to dispose of
16
Bates, Regesta, p.982
17
Bates, Regesta, #171.
18
Ibid., 9-11.
149
land in Le Mans. Being “illustrious king of the English” may add prestige to
William’s pronouncements, but he is not pronouncing as their king. In fact, in
administrative documents dealing with strictly Continental matters, there is
frequently occasion to mention that other king, whose royal authority is directly
relevant there – namely, Philip the king of France. In January of 1079, for
example, William affirms and seals a diploma by which “Philippus, Dei gratia
Francorum rex” consolidates the bishop of Beauvais’ control over the church of St.-
Quentin in that town.19 In acta pertaining to the Continent, the Franci are the
subjects of the kingdom of France. The term is not used for William’s own people
on the Continent, and accordingly the formula embracing Franci et Angli is absent.
Normans are Franci only when they are in England. The only case, I believe, in
which a writ for a Continental beneficiary does include an address to “omnibus
thegnis suis francis et anglis” turns out to be no exception to this rule. It is a writ
transferring ownership of two churches in England to the great abbey of Jumièges
in Normandy, and though the beneficiary of the cross-Channel transaction is
Continental, the addressees – both the named individuals and the unnamed “francis
et anglis” – are interested local parties in England.20
19
Bates, Regesta, # 28. For similar cases, see also # 26, 62, 172, 212, and 217.
20
Ibid., #160. The addressees specified by name are the bishops of Salisbury and
Wells, and officials in Somerset and Wiltshire. The use of the distinctively English title
thegn (a minor titled landholder, roughly at the same social level as a knight) is another
indicator that this writ is targeted to people in England.
150
The body of writs in England and charters or diplomas drawn up in
Normandy as a whole effectively confirms that a theoretical separation of powers
existed even in the time of William I: notwithstanding the numerous Normans who
were the duke’s men on one side of the Channel and the king’s men on the other,
the official discourse maintains a distinction between Normans in Normandy and
Normans in England. When the royal writs of William I and his Anglo-Norman
successors are addressed to Franci et Angli, it is never the case that Angli means
‘the people in England’ and Franci means ‘the people in Normandy’.
In many writs this is abundantly clear from context. For the most part, writs
deal with local business and specific concrete cases, and this usually means that the
people involved are clearly linked to a particular place, as in the protocol of this
writ of William I in which the French and English mentioned are specifically those
in the county of Kent:
W(illelmus) Dei gratia rex Anglorum Odoni episcopo

Baiocensi et Haimoni dapifero et omnibus thennis
francigenis et anglicis de Cantuariensi comitatu
saltuem 21
21
Bates, Regesta, # 70. Francigeni, used here in place of franci, is a variant which
we have already encountered in historiographical texts. In the writs of William I they are
used interchangeably, with francigeni occurring almost as frequently as Franci. Some
scholars translate francigena as“French-born,” and while this accurately reflects the
etymology of the word, it is not the most accurate rendering of what the word actually
meant in the 11th and 12th century. Francigenus or francigena was applied to people who
born in England, and also to objects, of which it is ridiculous to say they are born at all. A
better rendering is “French or “French-race.”
151
[William, by the grace of God king of the English, to
Odo bishop of Bayeux and Haimo the steward and all
the French and English thegns of the county of Kent,
greetings].
The purpose of this writ, which dates to the 1070s, was to advise the king’s
half-brother Odo, bishop of Bayeux and at this time also the earl of Kent, that a
property called Saltwood is to be restored to the cathedral church of Canterbury.
There is no mistaking that all the parties addressed, Franci and Angli alike, are
people within England. This continues to be true in the writs of William’s
successors, early and late. Here in a writ of William Rufus from 1095, the king
addresses a specific circumscribed audience of unlucky vassals to warn them that
their land will revert to him when their current landlord dies:
W. rex Anglorum omnibus Francis et Anglis qui

francas terras tenent de episcopatu de Wireceastra
salutem 22
[W{illiam} king of the English, to all French and

English who have land in free-hold from the
bishopric of Worcester, greetings].
Some fifty years later, a writ of King Stephen from c. 1135-1148 reassures a
monastic landlord that the abbey will be free from secular molestation; the address,
as usual, encompasses that set of local officials who could conceivably become
involved:
22
William Stubbs, Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional
History, from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward I, 9th ed. revised by H.W.C. Davis
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), p.109.
152
Stephenus rex Anglorum episcopo Lund’ et iustic’ et
vicecomitibus et baronibus et ministris et omnibus
fidelibus suis francis et anglis de Essexa salutem
[Stephen, king of the English, to the bishop of

London and the justices and sheriffs and barons and
ministers and all his lieges, French and English, of
Essex, greeting].23
Sometimes the business of a writ necessitates an address to officials all over
England, as in the writ Henry I provided, c.1100-1107, for the abbey of Abingdon,
to notify royal officials everywhere that Abbot Faritius is to be allowed to reclaim
all his men who abandoned Wallingford, wherever they may be now:
Henricus, rex Angliae, omnibus vicecomitibus et

ministris et fidelibus suis, Francis et Anglis, totius
Angliae salutem
[Henry, king of England, to all his sheriffs, ministers

and lieges, French and English, of all England,
greeting]. 24
On this occasion it was practical to address officials all over the country,
whose help the abbot might need to enlist as he goes about trying to corral his
errant tenants and laborers. Here again though, in a writ addressing a general
collective of all French and English officials at large in the whole realm, as in the
writs sent to people within a specified English locale, the Franci and Angli are
quite evidently people in England. In the writs of post-Conquest England, then, the
23
R.C. van Caenegem, Royal Writs in England, # 167. Translation is van
Caenegem’s.
24
Van Caenegem, op.cit., #110. Translation is van Caenegem’s.
153
term franci denotes specifically those Normans who are also, by dint of residence
or landownership, subjects of the king of England.
“As acts of current governmental routine,” R.C. van Caenegem says of
writs in general, “they tend to be businesslike, crisp, and devoid of rhetoric.”25
Plainly van Caenegem means to say that writs are free of ornament and, as far as it
goes, this observation is sound enough. But if any text, any utterance at all, can
safely be said to be devoid of rhetoric, the official texts of a ruling government
hardly fit the bill. Curt and quotidian as most of them are, the writs are
nevertheless part of the discourse of the ruling power – in this case a foreign power
which had just newly imposed itself through violent means – and they necessarily
participate in the rhetoric and ideology of the regime. Writs seldom served the
purpose of issuing statutes or announcing broad policy intentions, but they were the
vehicles through which all manner of administrative decisions penetrated society.
Through them lands are confiscated or are restored to the previous owners, disputes
are settled in favor of one or the other party, tax exemptions are renewed or
retracted, trade privileges are reviewed, property is reassigned, economic roles and
relationships are set into place. Writs are not the discourse of power in an abstract
sense, they are the written form in which the new king’s authority is exerted over
the land and people, and the dominance of the invading power is literally written
over the kingdom in texts. It is not insignificant that the choice to identify the
25
Ibid., p.110.
154
invading group as Franci takes place in writs and other administrative documents,
nor that it starts almost immediately after the Conquest, as soon as William
becomes king and begins to assert power by issuing decisions and adjudicating
conflicts. In the context of the writs, and in the still more specific context of the
phrase (or formula, as both Garnett and Short call it) Francis et Anglis in which it
invariably appears, the conquering group’s new practice of identifying itself as
Franci is answering to a specific purpose: designating the people of William’s
team, as against the native people of England.
As a nugget of ideological rhetoric, the Franci et Angli formula is
deceptively compact, remarkably tight and layered. It has a dense internal logic to
it. The wording of it, the simple form, that is, of naming the two separate gentes –
or perhaps, to put it better, the very insistence (repeated and multiplied in so many
writs) that the two groups should be separately named at all – seems an
unequivocal acknowledgment of division in the kingdom. But the formula – and
again, this is almost without exception the only way the two peoples/gentes are
mentioned in these administrative documents – inflexibly consists of the two names
yoked in tandem with an “and.” And the formula is always installed in just the
same context, always binding the Franci and Angli together in the reminder that
both groups are bound by the king’s word on the given matter at hand. When
William the Conqueror or one of his successors addresses “meis fidelibus francis et
155
anglis,” he is acknowledging that the realm contains two peoples but at the same
time asserting that the two are alike subject to a single government and king.26
In this way, it would seem that the primary function of the formula is to
lock the two groups together in a single state, promoting unity by insisting that the
conquered English and the Norman elite are united in their rights and obligations.
The discourse of ethnic separateness was thus located within a formal device which
enumerates and names the two gentes of the realm as separate, identifiable entities
only to bind them back together in a pair. Difference is simultaneously asserted
and denied, division is no sooner opened than shut.
Yet the proposition that the Franci et Angli formula seeks to reinforce the
strength of the state by forwarding an optimistic doctrine of ethnic unity, may be
too simple – and too modern. For a start, it is easy, but perhaps anachronistic, to
assume that the Norman rulers’ rhetoric of unity, such as it was, would have been
aimed mainly at inviting and coercing the conquered English to accept Norman
rule. There is no evidence to suggest that the rhetorical gesture of naming the two
groups targeted the Angli any more than the Franci. Structurally it does not. In the
context of the documents in which it is situated, the reverse in fact holds true: the
writs are mostly addressed to officials and people in privileged positions – earls,
barons, bishops, and sheriffs – of whom the majority were Franci rather than Angli.
The formula, wherever it is inserted, insists that new king is king over the
26
Garnett, “‘Franci et Angli’,” 113-114.
156
conquered Anglo-Saxons – but also king over all those who accompanied and aided
him in the Conquest.27 It is a reminder to the new Anglo-Norman ruling class, the
Franci of England, that they are subject to the king’s will and whatever decisions
he imposes on the native English apply to them too.
A steady pressure of such reminders was evidently considered desirable by
the royal government, perhaps because some of the kingdom’s usages were new
and unwelcome to the king’s Normans, imposing upon them constraints and
obligations that were not part of the familiar dispensation back in the dukedom.
Similarly, the potential ambiguity of the Norman subjects’ position with regard to
their duke-king may have fed the state’s propensity for larding official discourse
with a rhetoric of inclusion. Seen in this light, the conspicuous presence of the
Franci et Angli formula may not be principally about unity, but about getting the
triumphant Norman subjects to knuckle under. For them it reads as a reminder:
though they set sail from Normandy as the duke’s men, this is England and they are
the king’s men now.
Unity and cohesion – however utilitarian, and whether concerned with
courting the recalcitrant English or with keeping wealthy, armed Norman vassals
under the king’s thumb – was not the only ideological end served by the practice of
repeatedly insisting on the presence of two distinct gentes in the polity.28 At its
27
Garnett, “‘Franci et Angli’,” 113.
28
Of course, there were more than two ethnic nations in England. Significant
populations of Welsh, Scots, and Danes lived within the kingdom’s borders. There may
157
inception the Anglo-Norman state existed, as George Garnett points out, in the
tension between two contrary necessities: the need to maintain a level of unity
within the realm, and the insistence on enforcing a discriminatory difference.29
Garnett explains that the distinction between the two gentes was substantive in the
eyes of the law. The labels Franci and Angli had concrete legal consequences in
the early years of William the Conqueror’s reign.30 While the new king pledged, as
one of the foremost principles of his rule, to maintain “peace and security between
the English and the Normans [pacem et securitatem inter Anglos et Normannos],”31
his laws made it abundantly clear that the safety of the Normans had priority. The
outstanding example of unequal treatment under the law is William’s murdrum
also have been Scandinavian communities which identified themselves as Norse rather
than Danish. The official discourse of the Norman kings conveniently effaces these other
groups. “As far as the Anglo-Norman chancery was concerned, William’s subjects
consisted of two and only two ‘races’ – French and English,” writes Garnett, loc.cit., 114.
By focusing only on the Normans and ‘English’, I become complicit, I’m afraid, with this
centuries-old program of marginalizing the Celtic people of Britain. However, since the
topic of this study is the ethnic discourse as propagated by England’s 11th and 12th century
ruling elite, we have no choice but to take their biases and their propaganda as we find it.
29
Garnett, “‘Franci et Angli’”1985, 113-114.
30
Ibid., passim.
31
The Articuli Willelmi, ed. William Stubbs, in Select Charters and Other
Illustrations of English Constitutional History, from the Earliest Times to the Reign of
Edward I, 9th ed. revised by H.W.C. Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), 97-99. The
Articuli Willelmi [Statutes of William the Conqueror] is the oldest extant record, in Latin,
of William’s laws. No such text is survives from William’s reign (1066-1087); the earliest
copy, preserved in the Textus Roffensis manuscript (a cartulary of Rochester Cathedral),
dates to the reigns of Henry I or Stephen (ie., 1100-1152). It is nevertheless accepted,
though sometimes with reservations, by modern historians as a reliable record of William’s
laws (eg. David C. Douglas and George W. Greenaway’s English Historical Documents,
vol 2, 1042-1189, 2nd ed. [London: Eyre Methuen, 1981], 431). Though the term
Normanni is used here in the first provision of the proclamation, this text soon switches to
Francigena, using it in each of the other four instances in which the ‘French’ of England
are designated.
158
statute, through which preferential treatment for the Conqueror’s own people was
extended even beyond the grave:
Volo autem ut omnes homines quos mecum adduxi aut post me

venerunt sint in pace mea et quiete. Et si quis de illis occisus fuerit,
dominus ejus habeat infra quinque dies homicidam ejus si potuerit;
sin autem, incipiat persolvere mihi xlvi. marcas argenti quamdiu
substantia illius domini perduraverit. Ubi vero substantia defecerit,
totus hundredus in quo occisio facta est communiter persolvat quod
remanet.32
[Furthermore I desire that all the men whom I brought over with me
or who came after me should enjoy my peace and tranquility. And
if one of these should be killed, his lord shall have his killer in hand
within five days if it is at all possible; if not, he shall undertake to
pay to me 46 marks of silver, insofar as the wealth of this lord
should hold out. In cases where his wealth falls short, the entire
hundred in which the killing was done shall pay the remainder
communally.]
The law attempts to provide an extra measure of security for the elite
minority by pressuring the local powers, under threat of an extraordinarily heavy
fine, to swiftly investigate and punish the murder of a Norman. By stipulating that
the entire hundred may well have to share in the burden of the fine, the law insures
that a dead Norman is a problem which nobody in the community can afford to
ignore.
The same is not true – or at least not to the same costly extent – for a
murdered Englishman. Nor is it true, it turns out, for all the Franci in the kingdom
of England. As Garnett points out, William’s law makes a distinction between the
32
Stubbs, Select Charters, 98. My translation. The “hundred,” an Anglo-Saxon
administrative unit which the Normans borrowed and retained, was a subdivision of the
shire. Each hundred had a local court meant to be convened regularly.
159
people who came over (whether in 1066 or afterward) as part of his endeavor, and
other Franci who were already settled in England prior to the Conquest.33 This is
specified in the very next article of the Articuli Willelmi:
Et omnis Francigena qui tempore regis Eadwardi propinqui mei fuit

in Anglia particeps consuetudinum Anglorum, quod ipsi dicunt on
hlote et an scote, persolvatur secundum legem Anglorum34
[And every French-race person who was in England in the time of

my kinsman King Edward, sharing the customs of the English – the
very ones who are said to be in lot and in scot – shall be paid for
according to the law of the English.]
If the deceased is a Francigena who had already been living in England
under English law, the special fine does not apply. Garnett’s conclusion is that “the
distinction between different categories of royal subject was not according to place
of origin.”35 Our concern, however, is not with the legislation per se, but with what
it tells us about the constitution of the group that was answering to the label Franci
in Anglo-Norman England, and for this goal, the different acts of boundary-
marking in the two clauses of the murdrum statute still have a bit more to tell us.
The less-cherished early-bird Francigena is an ambivalent creature. As a
crime victim entitled to the redress of inquest and law, he lies with the native
33
34
Stubbs, Select Charters, 98. “Scot and lot,” Stubbs explains (p. 524), is “a
traditional phrase to denote the rights and duties of a citizen. Scot may denote an
assessment on a local community, lot the dues paid by the individual member.” A
Francigena who is “in lot and in scot” is therefore one who was already, in the eyes of the
English state, integrated into an English community as a tax-paying member of a particular
administrative unit.
35
160
English, but in the terminology used to describe his ethnicity – that is, when it
comes to identifying the nation or gens that he belongs to – he is grouped with the
invaders. Faced with a particular task of establishing gradations of legal privilege,
the text of the murdrum law delineates a category of ambiguous persons. It is often
the exception which allows the rule to be seen clearly; as the text stretches to define
and contain this uncomfortable category, it exposes something about the way its
categories and borders are drawn. The less-privileged pre-Conquest Francigena is
identified by specifying the time of his immigration and his status as a person who
had already placed himself under English law and therefore has no claim upon the
new laws. Because of these contingencies he is not included in the elite group
which enjoys the special protection of the discriminatory law. But he is
nonetheless a Francigena. After this one instance in which the Francigena in
question is a pre-Conquest resident of England (article 4), the term is used three
more times in the Articuli Willelmi, in contexts where it once again denotes the
Conqueror’s most-favored category of recent arrivals. The same term is used for
both legal classes. This tells us something about the constitution of the group
called Franci: it was not first and foremost a legal category.
Before long, in fact, the distinction between Franci and Angli lost whatever
legally meaningful component it once had. Privileged status before the law was
instituted by the Franci for their own protection when they were few, scattered, and
conspicuously foreign; but the legal distinctions were soon leveled. Garnett
161
believes this happened quite quickly, perhaps in the early part of William I’s reign.
At any rate, by 1100, when Henry I issued his own charter of laws and liberties, the
murdrum statute no longer included disparate fines for the two different gentes.36
Nevertheless, the phrase Franci et Angli continued to be commonly used in the
addresses of writs. If, as it would seem, the distinction between the two peoples
had only a specialized and short life as a legal classification, it survived far into the
12th century as an ethnic distinction.37
Up to this point then, analysis of the term Franci in early Anglo-Norman
administrative and legal discourse has told us a number of things about the way the
Normans in England were delineating their group: first, it confirms that Franci
was not a pure synonym for Normanni but served a more specialized function of
denoting specifically the Normans in England; it was term that functioned to draw a
line around a new grouping, to speak it or write it into being. Our analysis also
confirms that the group was conceived of as an ethnic unit: the Franci of England
were represented as a gens. This is not to say that they were declaring themselves a
separate new gens, distinct from the Normandy Normans. This is important to
emphasize. The articulation of a new category of Normans did not mean that the
36
Garnett, “‘Franci et Angli’,” 135-137. For text of the Coronation Charter, see
Richard of Hexham, De Gestis Regis Stephani [probably 1140]., ed. Richard Howlett, in
Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II,and Richard I, Rolls Series 82 (London:
Longman and Co., for Her Majesty’s Treasury, 1885), 143.
37
Agreeing that the Franci et Angli formula came to be legally meaningless but
persisted nonetheless, van Caenegem, Royal Writs, 146, and Short, “Tam Angli quam
Franci,” 163, assign a later date to the change and consider actual ethnic assimilation to be
a deciding factor in its eventual disappearance. the reasoning that it was only
162
Normans in England positioned themselves as ethnically separate from any other
Normans. The new grouping, while bordered by their status as subjects of the king
of England, was still notionally defined by ethnicity (blood relationship, common
origin, a shared history). It was represented as a gens, rather than some other sort
of category, such as a class or a political faction.
The Norman kings’ attention to addressing their decrees to franci and angli
alike reveals a significant pattern in the ideology of the Anglo-Norman state. There
is in fact an ideology of unity, but it is decidedly not in conformity with the modern
model of a state coextensive with a single ethnic nation and one language. The
Franci et Angli formula in the written instruments of governance joins the two
gentes horizontally, placing them side by side in the present moment as sharers of
the space of the kingdom, while maintaining a distinction between them.
In the context of post-Conquest England, perhaps it should not be at all
surprising that the relationships and boundaries between the invaders and the
invaded should be defined in terms of ethnicity. Perhaps it could not have been
otherwise in a culture where gens was such a fundamental concept, and in a
specific situation entailing the arrival of an invading army of foreigners who spoke
a different language. In any case it was not only acceptable, it was politically
useful for the Normans to represent themselves and their English subjects as two
separate races. While Anglo-Norman ideology sought to unify the state politically
it did not shy away from recognizing Normans and English as two separate gentes.
163
Indeed, it is not too much to say that the Normans, in articulating their relationship
to England and the English, programmatically defined their group as a gens and
deliberately perpetuated the notion that the divide between the conquerors and the
conquered was an ethnic one. The overriding drive of early Anglo-Norman official
discourse was to disguise or efface the understanding that the Normans were an
alien political power which had invaded and forcibly seized the kingdom.
Accordingly, its rhetorical strategy was to position the Normans as an ethnic people
within England rather than as a foreign state; a gens or natio rather than a regnum.
The practice of calling the Normans Franci spreads
As sources of information on the Norman appropriation of the term Franci
and the implications underlying the use of the new name, the other particular
strength of the writs and legal texts is that they are the oldest extant textual
witnesses of the phenomenon. If, as it would seem, its earliest habitat is in the
formulaic greeting (the ‘protocol’) of writs and charters, the practice soon spread
out from there, extending in time, space, and in its permeation of society.
Even within administrative writing, this very early and datable source, we
can detect a modest beginning of an expansion into different discursive occasions.
By the latter part of the reign of William the Conqueror, the Franci et Angli phrase
can be found spreading out of writs, and out of the address clause. For example,
the official record of a royally-sponsored inquiry held on April 2, 1080 to decide
164
how to rescue and administer the troubled abbey of Ely uses the formula twice in
its listing of the participants: among the men who gathered to find a solution there
are “four abbots with their French and English men [quattuor abbates cum suis
francigenis et anglis],” and “many other tried and true French and English soldiers
[ceterique plurimi milites probati francigene et angli].”38 In taking these modest
steps from writs to other, less formally-determined sorts of records, and from the
address clause into the main body of a document, the practice of representing post-
Conquest English society as a two-race joint-venture of Franci and Angli breaks
out of the confines of a specialized, formulaic, almost ritually-repeated gesture and
enters instead into the workaday syntax of prose narrative.
Before long the practice had also disseminated along another axis,
downward from the royal court into private usage. Private charters begin to appear
in substantial numbers in the 12th century. Predictably, the private documents
imitate royal ones, copying formal features and wording. Thus, for example, in a
charter written between 1103 and 1118, Robert Count of Meulan addresses “all his
barons, French as well as English, in all his English lands [omnibus baronibus suis
Francigenis atque Anglicis totius sue terre anglie]”.39 When the two gentes of
38
Bates, Regesta, #118. See also #225.
39
Mary Bateson, Records of the Borough of Leicester, 2 vols (London: C.J. Clay,
1899), v. 1, p.1 #1; cited by William Rothwell, “Playing ‘follow my leader’ in Anglo-
Norman Studies,” Journal of French Language Studies 6 no.2 (September 1996), 197.
True to pattern, the Franci in this private charter are men in England: Robert of Meulan, a
Norman magnate with extensive holdings on both sides of the Channel, is addressing his
officers and vassals “in all his English lands,” and the beneficiaries of the charter are the
165
Anglo-Norman England are mentioned in private charters, as in the king’s writs,
the conquering people are called Franci rather than Normanni. 40 The practice, first
observed in documents proposing to transmit and record the one authoritative voice
of the king, has spread to the many-voiced, uncentered private sphere. It penetrated
to occasions of considerably lesser pomp, as in this passage from a testimonial
issued by the earl of Hereford, probably shortly before his death in 1143:
Miles earl of Hereford to all his friends, French and

English, of England and of Wales, greeting. You are
to know that this Folebarba is my jester and my man.
So I entreat all my friends that they look after him,
lest harm happen to him. And if anyone does him
good for love of me, I will know how to thank him.41
With this text, written in impeccable writ format, for the benefit of a jester
called Sillybeard, we have come a long way from the Conqueror’s acta and
ideologically-loaded texts which undertook to write a new elite into power. The
phrase Franci et Angli may have become conventional within writs, an obligatory,
official-sounding feature of the format; formulaic or not, however, the practice of
referring to ‘the French and English people of England’ demonstrably came to
achieve wider usage beyond the limits of the royal chancery. The term Franci
merchants of the borough of Leicester. This is the same Anglo-Norman usage of the term
Franci that we have seen repeatedly now, but it is perhaps not without interest that this
document was written in Breteuil, Normandy.
40
F.M. Stenton, The First Century of English Feudalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1932), p.28, cited in Garnett, “‘Franci et Angli’,” 1985 114.
41
D. Walker, “Earldom of Hereford Charters,” Camden Miscellany, 4th series, 22
(1964), p.15 no.7, quoted in Clanchy, Written Record, 89.
166
spread, in written usage, and gained currency as an accepted term for the Normans
of England.
Franci in the vernacular:
Franceis in the Anglo-Normans’ own language
So far, all the evidence of writs and legal texts has involved records written
in Latin. If the habit of thinking of the conquering Normans as Franci spread,
within these documents and eventually to a broadening range of written records,
can we then trace this expansion into the vernacular, to find the Normans labeling
their own group not just with the Latin word Franci but with the Old French word
Franceis? There is no doubt that a word – or in this case, an onomastic practice
involving the specialized retooling and application of an existing word – could
have jumped from Latin to the vernacular. In fact, perhaps a gentle drift is a more
apposite image for the linguistic movement involved here. Leading Anglo-Norman
scholars such as William Rothwell and Ian Short have recently emphasized the
continuity between Latin and the written vernacular, the plentiful two-way
commerce between them, and the apparent ease and abundance with which
borrowings passed back and forth.42 The first vernacular writers were all, first,
42
Ian Short, “Patrons and Polyglots: French Literature in Twelfth-Century
England,” Anglo-Norman Studies 14 (1992): 229-249. Of William Rothwell’s writings,
three are most pertinent: “Language and Government in Medieval England,” Zeitschrift
für Französisce Sprache und Literatur 93 no.3 (1983), 258-278; “The Trial Scene in
Lanval and the Development of the Legal Register in Anglo-Norman,” Neuphilologische
167
writers of Latin; they were churchmen trained to read and write Latin before they
ever attempted putting their vernacular in writing.43 The converse is also true: the
authors and scribes who produced the Normans’ Latin texts were Latin-writers who
had been French-speakers first.44
The hypothesis that the Normans’ practice of calling themselves Franci in
their Latin writings then spread into their own vernacular is plausible enough.
Unfortunately, official documents and government records do not give us what we
need to test such a hypothesis. There are no administrative and legal documents in
French extant from the early years – or even decades – after the Conquest. This is
not believed to be an accident of preservation. French simply was not used as a
language of written record in the first decades after the Conquest. When the
Normans settled in as the rulers of England, Latin, not French, supplanted English
as the language of written administration.45 William the Conqueror had some
documents written in English in the first few years after the Conquest, but after that
brief period, he and his successors did all their official writing in Latin, just as they
had done back home in Normandy. At the highest level of Norman power, this
Mitteilungen 101 no.1 (2000), 17-36; and “Aspects of Lexical and Morphosyntactical
Mixing in the Languages of Medieval England,” in Multilingualism in Later Medieval
Britain, ed. D.A. Trotter, 213-233 ( Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000).
43
Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 214; Serge Lusignan, Parler
vulgairement: les intellectuels et la langue française aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles (Montreal:
Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1986), 9.
44
Taking the Domesday Book as a case study, Rothwell scrutinizes lexical and
orthographical details to arrive at a profile of linguistic practice in a bilingual context.
“Although writing in Latin,” he concludes, “the compilers were thinking in French.”
(Rothwell, “Language and Government,” 262.)
45
Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 215-223.
168
situation prevailed for close to a century and a half: no royal administrative
documents were produced in French until the early 13th century. The first charters
in French do appear in England rather than in France or Normandy, but they are
private ones rather than royal, and they do not begin to show up until some seventy
years after the Conquest.
That said, when French-language charters do begin to appear in Anglo-
Norman England, the practice of naming the two separate peoples of the realm, and
calling the Normans ‘French,’ is present from the first. The oldest known charter
in the French language dates to around 1140.46 It records the donation of a village
or manor to the Knights of St. John:
“Cunue chose seit a Franceis et a Engleis et as veisins

que Raul filius Walt[er]i et Will[eme] sun fiz al
ospital de Ierusalem unt laissed le Stoker Alvriz et vi
acres.”47
[Let it be known to the French and the English and all

hereabout that Ralph Fitz Walter, and William his
son, have left Stoke Alfred and six acres to the
Hospital of Jerusalem.]
With this we have a witness to Normans identifying themselves in their own
language with the word Franceis. Given the borrowing and imitation of formal and
46
D.R. Howlett, The English Origins of Old French Literature (Dublin: Four Courts
Press, 1996), 22. Short, “Patrons and Polyglots,” 243, calls it the first administrative
document in French since the Strasbourg Oaths of 842.
47
M. Gervers, ed., The Cartulary of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem in England,
Seconda Camera, Essex, Records of Social and Economic History, New Series 6 (Oxford:
The British Academy / Oxford Univeristy Press, 1982), no.272, pp.169-170, quoted in
Howlett, English Origins (1996), 22. My translation.
169
lexical features which so strongly marks diplomatic writing as a genre, it is difficult
not to conclude that the phrase “a Franceis et a Engleis” is a direct translation into
vernacular of the Franci et Angli of the Latin-language writs. Does this mean that
we can identify the Latin writs and charters of the early Anglo-Norman government
as the direct, proximal source of the Anglo-Normans’ practice, in their own
vernacular, of calling themselves Franceis? The evidence, though it looks
appealing, is admittedly circumstantial. Legal texts in Old French are, as a body,
too scanty and too late to provide a clear trail for establishing the spread of the
Norman use of the ethnic term Franci out from Latin into vernacular. The
testimony of vernacular charters does demonstrate, however, that the term Franceis
appeared in early Anglo-Norman texts where it was used in the same way that
Franci was used in the Anglo-Normans’ Latin-language documents: as a gens-
name denoting the conquering people and defining them as an ethnically-conceived
group alongside, comparable to, and defined in contradistinction to, the Engleis.
English origins of identifying the Normans as Franci
In tracing the emergence of the Normans’ use of the ethnic term Franci, the
early Anglo-Norman administrative texts establish a possible trajectory, suggesting
how the practice may have spread, from the seat of government power outward,
and eventually, from Latin into the vernacular. The greater value of the early legal
discourse, however – the writs’ more important revelation – is not in showing
170
where the new naming practice might have spread to, but where it might have come
from. Where it came from, the writs suggest, was the English. Read with a
comparatist’s eye – not between the lines so much as across the language borders –
the writs provide evidence (considerably more detailed and concrete than has been
offered heretofore) that the practice of identifying the Norman invaders as Franci
or Franceis was something the Normans borrowed directly from the English people
and the English language. The trail starts with the observation that, before the
Franci et Angli formula appears in King William’s Latin writs, it first appears in
his English-language writs, as Frencisce and Englisce.
Writs played a significant role in articulating the border between the
English and the Normans. They were texts involved in shaping group identity for
the Norman ‘citizens’ of England, and at the same time lay in especially tight
contact with the text-culture of the English. The official discourse of royal
administration (concerning, in particular, the disposition of property) was a verbal,
textual sphere of activity in which the Normans borrowed heavily from the English.
In England, Norman government discourse looked a lot like English government
discourse. This was not accidental.
The use of English for the first written acts of the Anglo-Norman state
should be understood in context of the state’s ideological needs. For the new
Norman power in England, the central pillar of ideology and propaganda was Duke
William’s claim to be the rightful successor of Edward the Confessor. Before the
171
Conquest, in the summer of 1066, William had taken pains to very publicly air his
case that he was the rightful heir. According to the Anglo-Normans’ own histories,
which remain the chief sources of near-contemporary information on the Conquest
and the events leading up to it, William had been officially designated years earlier
by King Edward himself and subsequently acknowledged by his chief English
rival, Harold Godwineson.48 Obviously, this version of events had enormous
propaganda value as William prepared his invasion and planned ahead for securing
recognition from the other rulers of Western Europe. It might even be true.49
Edward the Confessor was childless and had no wish to have the kingdom fall into
the hands of Earl Godwine and sons, his longtime tormentors. Edward certainly
had a very close personal association with Normandy and its ducal family: his
mother, Emma, was the sister of Normandy’s duke Richard II, and Edward himself
had spent half his life at the Norman court after his own father, King Æthelred the
Ill-Advised, was dethroned by the Danish invasion. The Norman dukes who had
been Edward’s hosts and protectors during his long exile were his grandfather and
48
The earliest narration of these events is in William of Jumièges’ Gesta
Normannorum Ducum VII.13, followed by William of Poitiers, Gesta Guillelmi I.14 and
I.41-46. In the Bayeux Tapestry, a surprisingly long span of the ‘text’ is devoted to the
events surrounding Harold’s acceptance, by sworn oath, of William’s right to succeed
Edward as the next king of the English. Harold’s capture and amicable captivity in
Normandy, his heroic contribution to William’s 1064 campaign against Brittany, and his
oath-taking, take up more of the narrative, measured in ‘scenes’ or simply in yards of
cloth, than is devoted to the Battle of Hastings!
49
David C. Douglas, William the Conqueror (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1964), was a staunch proponant of this position, eg., 169: “there can be no
reasonable doubt that before the end of 1051 he [Edward] had nominated William of
Normandy as his heir.” “In recent years the Norman version of events leading up to the
conquest of England...has been rehabilitated,” writes van Houts, GND, vol.1, xlvii.
172
uncle. They were also William’s grandfather and father, respectively. William had
a persuasive case, and well before the first ships were launched it had been
accepted by the pope, who publicly gave his blessing to the invasion.50
The narrative of Edwardian succession – however great its propaganda
value may have been to the Duke of Normandy as he prepared to seize the kingdom
of England – was even more indispensable to the Normans after the Conquest. It
was the one slice of contested history which could mean, for William the
Conqueror, the whole difference between being the legitimate king or a regicidal
foreign usurper. Not only the king’s personal legitimacy was at stake of course, but
that of the entire Anglo-Norman regime. Norman rule, accomplished by battle and
the wholesale seizure of property and positions of power, was, at least in some
quarters, a hated occupation, opposed by bloody rebellions which were then
crushed with still more violent reprisals. If there was to be any hope of establishing
an orderly and profitable control over England, it required that the Normans, who
now controlled the manors and villages, the episcopal sees and abbeys, succeed in
positioning themselves as rightful holders of English titles and English lands. The
doctrine of Edwardian succession was enshrined not only in the Normans’
historiography, but also in the administrative and legal texts through which their
power was written over the state. Histories might do very well for convincing
future generations that everything has turned out just as it should, but ephemeral
50
Douglas, William the Conqueror, 187. Records of Alexander II’s proclamation
survive independent of Norman historical sources.
173
administrative texts were perhaps more effective at disseminating ideology in the
short run. Writs and charters were issued in large numbers, and for immediate
consumption. Drafted for specific missions, as we have seen, most of them
targeted particular locales and local officials and addressed concrete issues of local
interest; collectively they blanketed the kingdom, shire by shire, more effectively
than the Normans’ early history texts could have.51
The writs insisted on continuity with the pre-Conquest English kings by
their very presence as a part of the foreign king’s method of governing the land.
They stood as (and stood for) a continuation of Anglo-Saxon practice. Writs had
been used by England’s kings from at least the reign of Æthelred the Ill-Advised
(978-1016).52 By his son Edward’s time, they had grown in importance and were
an established feature of royal administration. William the Conqueror began
issuing his own writs in England very soon after the Conquest: the earliest were
written between 1066 and 1070. Charters and diplomas had been in use back in
Normandy, but when the Norman duke began producing writs as the king of
England, English practice provided the model. In pattern of usage and in terms of
overall quantity, William’s production of writs and charters was comparable to

51
The local – but also pointedly plural, collective – address of English writs and the
Anglo-Norman writs which emulate them, suggests a deliberate desire to reach a relatively
large number of people, in a public forum. According to R.C. van Caenegem, Royal Writs
in England, 144, “this habit of addressing the counties, hundreds and boroughs, was
certainly associated with that of having the writ read aloud in the county, borough or
hundred courts. The old-English writ was in fact addressed to a community.”
52
R.C. van Caenegem, Royal Writs, 114. The argument, advanced by some
scholars, that the writs were in use in England as far back as the time of Alfred (871-899)
are succinctly outlined by Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 31-32.
174
King Edward’s.53 William was a Norman duke, formed by thirty eventful and very
successful years of ruling Normandy, but in England he was “doing all he could to
look like an Old English king,” to use David Bates’ phrase.54 The writs that he
issued in England helped him look like an Old English king.
Williams’s writs were English in form as well as function. As noted
previously, formal characteristics were by no means a secondary consideration in
medieval documents; in the later 11th century and the 12th, a period when the role of
written records in government, law, and historical discourse was undergoing a
drastic expansion, the adherence to an acknowledged ‘right’ form was a decisive
determinant in the very efficacy of the document – its validity, prestige, and
credibility. In details of form “William’s English charters conform to a pattern
which is demonstrably a continuation of English practice from before 1066.”55
This is evident on first inspection. Here, for example, is a typical writ from the
reign of Edward the Confessor, drafted between 1044 and 1047:
Eadward kyng gret Stigand bisscop and Harold erl

and alle mine þeynes on Estangle frendlike. And ic
kithe ou þat ic habbe unnen Seynt Edmund mine
meye þat lond at Pakenham so ful and so forth so it
Osgote on honde stod. 56
53
David Bates, “The Conqueror’s Charters,” in England in the Eleventh Century, ed.
Carola Hicks (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1992), 12-13.
54
Ibid., 10.
55
Ibid., 10. (Cf. Bates, Regesta, 44; and Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record,
31-32.) Likewise, William’s Norman charters after 1066 continue just as they were before
the duke’s English adventure (see Bates, Regesta, 11).
56
F.E. Harmer, Anglo-Saxon Writs (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1952), #14, p.158.
175
[King Edward greets Bishop Stigand and Earl Harold
and all my thegns in East Anglia in friendly spirit.
And I inform you that I have granted to St. Edmund
my kinsman the land at Pakenham as fully and
completely as Osgood held it.]
Here is one of William’s, a very early one, from the spring of 1070 at the
latest. It is a text we’ve already encountered a few pages back:
Will(el)mus rex Angl(orum) Ailmaro episcopo et

R(adulfo) comiti et omnibus baronibus et
vicecomitibus francis et anglis ubiumque sanctus
Ædmundus terram habet salutem. Mando et precipio
ut dominia sancti Ædmundi sint quieta ab omnibus
scottis et geldis sicuti melius fuerunt tempore regis
Ædwardi.57
[William king of the English, to bishop Æthelmær

and earl Raalph and all the barons and sheriffs,
French and English, wherever St. Edmund has lands,
greetings. I order and command that the demesnes of
St. Edmunds be free from all scots and gelds just as
completely as they were in the time of king Edward.]
In addition to a general formal resemblance (brevity, absence of flourishes
such as flowery titles or descriptives for the individuals involved, absence of
religious allusions) the Anglo-Norman writ mimics its Anglo-Saxon antecedents in
a number of specific features. The first two are the use of a protocol and eschatocol
(greeting and good wish). A third is the “fully and completely” clause (“so ful and
so forth” in Old English; usually rendered with the Latin melius [‘better’ or ‘as well
57
176
as’] but sometimes with the adverb pleniter [fully]). The writs of English kings
were marked with a seal, and the Anglo-Norman writs adopted this practice too.58
With the deliberate borrowing of formal features and formulaic wording,
the production of writs was a textual activity in which the Normans can be clearly
seen to copy existing English practices. Discursive practices were flowing directly
from English documents to Norman ones.
Borrowing the English language
If the borrowing went on at a number of levels – the phenomenon of
extensive use and distribution of written acta, the formal traits of the ‘genre’, and
particular words or locutions – the most surprising and important was the
borrowing of the English language itself. When William the Conqueror began
issuing charters at the start of his reign as king of England, they were not written in
Latin, as they were back home in Normandy; they were written in English.
Conducting the written business of government in English represented a deliberate
and quite extraordinary policy decision. For the Normans, Latin had been the only
language of legal or administrative writing. It had never been their practice to
produce any documents in their vernacular – let alone, obviously, in a foreign
vernacular which they didn’t speak or understand. Yet English had been the
58
Harmer, Anglo-Saxon Writs , 1.
177
language of writs for King Edward, and in the early years of his reign William was
willing to follow his English predecessors even this far.
The Norman regime’s imitation of pre-Conquest English writ practice, and
indeed the first writs of Anglo-Norman England, are not best exemplified by the
Latin writ for the abbey of Bury St. Edmund, quoted above. More representative is
this one, probably from the first few months of William’s reign, in which the new
king shows his favor to the city and promises to uphold the laws of King Edward’s
day:
Willelm kyng gret Willelm bisceop 7 Gosfregð

portirefan 7 ealle þa burhwaru binnan Londone
frencisce 7 englisce freondlice. 7 ic kyðe eow þæt ic
wylle þæt get beon eallra þæra laga weorðe þe gyt
wæran on Eadwerdes dæge kynges. 7 ic wylle þæt
ælc cyld beo his fæder yrfnume æfter his fæder dæge.
7 ic nelle geþolian þæt ænig man eow ænig wrang
beode. God eow gehealde.” 59
[King William greets Bishop William and Gosfrith

the port-reeve and all the burghers of London, French
and English, in friendly spirit. And I inform you that
I would have you be in possession now of all the laws
which already stood in King Edward’s time. And I
wish that each child shall be his father’s heir after his
father’s time is done. And I will not allow any man
to do you any wrong. God keep you.]
The production of writs in English was not an occasional or desultory
business for the Norman regime. It was practiced on the scale of a policy or
59
Ibid, #180. I have expanded the abbreviations used in the O.E. text for the name
William and the word þæt [that]. This is perhaps the first writ of William’s reign (among
extant ones). The original document survives, three lines on a narrow scrap, with the
authentic seal of William the Conqueror in white wax (ibid., 593).
178
institution. Counting the writs whose authenticity is almost certain and which
relate to business in England (rather than in Normandy, Anjou, or elsewhere), 110
survive from the reign of William I; of these 78 are in Latin and 32 are in English.60
Indeed, it seems that, during the first few years after the invasion, all royal writs
were written in English. Around 1070, there was an abrupt shift in policy: the
Norman government in England stopped producing writs in Old English and began
to use Latin instead.61 The shift may have come about as the Normans supplanted
Englishmen in all the high secular and ecclesiastical offices, Bates suggests. “As
the upper reaches of Church and society were taken over by French newcomers, the
demand for writs written in the more immediately comprehensible Latin must have
become overwhelming.”62 It would not have been terribly practical to conduct
business in a language foreign to the parties involved, as Clanchy points out.
(Considering a writ sent by Odo bishop of Bayeux, in his capacity as the new earl
of Kent, to William’s first non-English archbishop of Canterbury, Clanchy
60
Bates, Regesta, 44-50, 52.
61
Of William’s Latin writs, only one can be dated with certainty to the period before
1070 (Bates, Regesta, 48). “It is as good as certain that the large-scale production of Old
English writs ended abruptly. 1070 seems to be the likely year” (ibid., 50). Cf. van
Caenegem, Royal Writs, 141-2; Garnett, “‘Franci et Angli’,” 130-131. The production of
English-language writs and charters became very rare but did not stop altogether. From the
reign of William II, there is one extant English writ (and another two of uncertain
authenticity); from the long, text-rich reign of Henry I, seven; from King Stephen, one; and
as late as Henry II, five. (My count is based on the listings given by David A.E. Pelteret,
Catalogue of English Post-Conquest Vernacular Documents (Woodbridge: Boydell Press,
1990).
62
Bates, Regesta, 50.
179
surmises, “perhaps Odo wanted Latin used because it seemed absurd to address
Lanfranc in a language which neither of them knew.”)63
The Norman regime’s intensive use and rapid discontinuation of written
English may have involved other factors too. It may well be that there was an early
and short-lived period during which the Normans had hopes for peaceful
acceptance, and that the occupiers’ use of written English was part of a conciliatory
policy of communicating with the English on their own terms. With the sharp
increase of violent resistance in the north in 1069-1070, the Norman regime may
have lost interest in assimilationist gestures. In addition it is likely that the new
Norman government simply did not have the organization and manpower initially
to install a Norman bureaucracy which spoke in romanz and wrote in Latin. To all
appearances, they kept and utilized whatever pre-Conquest bureaucracy was
available to them.64 They used officials and procedures that were already in place.
For purely pragmatic reasons then, as well as ideological, the invaders
continued in the first few years to conduct the written business of administration
much as it had always been done. With this in mind it is easy to see that
administrative writing was a discourse which brought the Normans into very close
contact with English practices and the English language – that is to say with
English words, English manners of naming things, describing relationships, setting
down categories. The invaders and the conquered people were bound together in
63
Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 211.
64
Bates, Regesta, 49.
180
all manner of transactions and contexts, surely, but the production of government
documents was a business that specifically involved texts, writing, and language.
Arranging for a blacksmith to repair a stirrup involved contact too, but the result of
such a transaction was a repaired stirrup; the production of writs was a verbal
collaboration. It resulted in texts. Norman decrees (notionally, but also very
literally, oral; participating in the ancient connection between absolute power and
dictation) issued forth in English writing. Reenacting spoken commands or
reassurances – and again, quite literally performed aloud in shire courts or before
assembled witnesses – the writs put English words into Norman mouths.
The Norman ingestion of English words was anything but abstract. The
extant texts let us follow the process in workaday detail. Analyzing an English-
language writ by which William confirms the many land rights and privileges of
the monastery of St. Augustine in Canterbury, Bates notes that it reproduces almost
word-for-word a writ issued by Edward the Confessor. The monks of St.
Augustine’s probably approached William early in his reign, showed the writ they
had been granted by King Edward, and asked the new king to protect their existing
property by issuing a writ of his own. The new writ was produced by simply
copying the old one.65 This supplies one picture of the mechanics of how the
Anglo-Normans’ English-language writs actually got written. This is not a case of
influence or imitating a model in some general way, this is appropriation by out-
65
Ibid, #80, commentary on pp. 341-342.
181
and-out copying. This particular writ, and the document Odo produced for
Lanfranc, are both preserved in copies where the Old English text appears side by
side with a Latin version. Odo’s writ seems to have been written in Latin and
provided with an English translation for the benefit of parties other than the
principles.66 William’s writ for Augustine on the other hand was written in
English. The Latin translation probably dates to the 13th or 14th century. Such is
the case with almost all the early Anglo-Norman writs that survive in both English
and Latin copies: the Latin translations were added later, as copyists in succeeding
centuries found it necessary to preserve the records in Latin.67 In addition to that
writ of Odo’s, three other genuine bilingual writs survive from the reign of William
I – that is to say, documents which were originally written and issued in both
English and Latin.68
Now that we have established that the Norman invaders’ practice of
identifying themselves as Franci in their Latin texts follows – and sometimes
literally translates – their use of the term Frenciscan in their Old English texts,
what of the translation of the practice and the word directly into their Old French
texts? As we saw earlier when considering evidence that Franceis in the Normans’
French-language writs was in its turn a translation of their Latin Franci, legal
documents simply were not written in Old French until somewhat later than the
66
Ibid., #74, commentary on p.51.
67
Ibid, 50-52, 342. Cf. writs # 1, 31, 80, 288; probably also the case with # 130 and
185.
68
Ibid., 50-52, # 74, 78, 226, 128.
182
immediate post-Conquest period. That said, there is indeed some hint that just such
a process may have taken place.
The earliest extant Anglo-Norman legal text identifies the conquerors as
Franceis, and it is a text which is believed to draw on or translate a prior Old
English version of the same document. The Leis Willelme [Laws of William] is the
oldest known legal text in French; it has no precedent on the other side of the
Channel. It was probably written in the time of Henry I, that is 1100-1135.69 As
the title suggests, it is a record of laws issued by William the Conqueror. In spite
of its late date, it is considered reliable by modern scholars, who treat is as an
authentic source of information regarding the Conqueror’s legislation. It does not
include the formulaic Franceis et Engleis but it does have occasion to refer to the
conquerors as Franceis. Not surprisingly perhaps, article 22, where the term
appears, is the murdrum law:
Ki Franceis ocist, e les humes del hundred nel

prengent e meinent a la justise dedanz les VIII jurs,
69
Oldest law text in French: Ruth J. Dean, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to
Texts and Manuscripts (London: Anglo-Norman Texts Society, 1999), 23; William
Rothwell, “Language and Government in Medieval England,” Zeitschrift für Französische
Sprache und Literatur 93 no.3 (1983), 262. Brian Woledge and H.P. Clive, Répertoire des
plus anciens textes en prose française depuis 842 jusqu’au premières anées du XIIIe siècle
(Geneva: Droz, 1964), 83. Woledge & Clive, citing four earlier scholars, date it to 1100-
1135; Dean, loc.cit., and Rothwell, loc.cit., extend the date range to the middle of the 12th
century. Rothwell, “Playing ‘follow my leader’,” mentions a possibly earlier legal
document, De plaiz de corune [Concerning Crown Pleas]: citing Mary Bateson, ed.,
Borough Customs, 2 vols. (London: Selden Society, 1904), vol.1, 37, Rothwell gives a
date of 1131-1135. But this is an error: the date Bateson gives is 1131-1155. The text
belongs to the last years of Henry I’s reign or to Stephen’s, Bateson explains in “A London
Collection of the Reign of John (Part II),” English Historical Review 17 no.68 (October
1902), 707.
183
pur mustrer ki l’ait fet, si renderunt le murdre XLVI
mars.70
If somebody kills a Frenchman, and the men of the

hundred do not take him and bring him to justice
within 8 days in order to show who did it, they will
pay 46 marks for the murder.
The French-language text of the Leis Willelme, which predates an extant
Latin version, was itself “for the most part translated from the Anglo-Saxon.”71 As
with the first French-language writ, with its “Franceis et Engleis” looking very
much like a translation of the Franci et Angli formula, the evidence is not
conclusive but is certainly consistent with the proposition that the Anglo-Normans’
use of Franceis as a self-identifier was a translation of their acceptance of the Old
English gens-name Frenciscan.
One explanation that has been offered for the Anglo-Norman precocity in
the development of romance vernacular writing is that the invaders ‘learned from
the English.’72 This is plausible, intuitively appealing, and perfectly sound as far as
it goes, but it has been presented in unsatisfyingly general terms. In the production
of writs, though, we have hard textual evidence and can glimpse a mechanism at
work. Starting immediately after the Conquest, the writs saw Normans actively
70
Yorio Otaka ed., in idem, “Sur la langue des Leis Willelme,” in Anlgo-Norman
Anniversary Essays, ed. Ian Short, 293-308 (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1993),
299.
71
Woledge and Clive, Répertoire des plus anciens textes, 83. Cf. Rothwell,
“Language and Government,” 262; Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 218-219.
72
Mary Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature , Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1963. Ian Short “Bilingualism” and/or “Patrons and Polyglots” Also Crane in
Wallace ed 1999 ]
184
involved in production of vernacular English text. Their recognition of English as
a written vernacular and a rival for Latin was not merely a matter of passive
observation, it was a living practice in which they had come to participate.73 Their
involvement was more direct and intimate even than requisitioning these English
texts and overseeing their manufacture. They gave dictation, having their
instructions or compositions translated from Latin or Old French into English.
Probably some learned English and wrote or dictated directly in that language.
Working in English and Latin, using both languages side by side, Norman clerics
and officials placed themselves in the novel position of using a vernacular for
written discourse rather than strictly Latin. It was not their own vernacular, but it
was a vernacular. It was not Latin – not the ancient, universal book-language,
nationless and international, Church-language, Scripture-language – it was a
modern language of a current living people.
The Normans who were actively involved in using the language of the
English as a vehicle capable of translating directly from written or spoken Latin
were aware of it in precisely those terms. This is nicely illustrated in a legislative
of 1071-1085, in which William I reaffirms bishops’ jurisdiction over offenses
against episcopal law. The act was written out in Latin, followed by English
73
On the extent and ramifications of bilingual and trilingual clerical culture in
Anglo-Norman England: Ian Short, “Social Aspects of Bilingualism in the Thirteenth
Century,” in Thirteenth Century England VI, ed. Michael Prestwich et al. (Woodbridge:
Boydell Press, 1997), 103-115.
185
translation.74 The Latin text announces the translation: “In the case of this same
charter, these same words are set down in the English language, word for word [In
hac eadem carta ponuntur eadem verba Anglico sermone verbo ad verbum].” This
one-line introduction frames the English as a translation of the Latin: the same
words put into a different language. This is different from positioning the English
as useful but ancillary gloss or an alternate version appended in order to reach an
unlettered audience. The English is not presented as an explanatory paraphrase but
as an equally authoritative text; it is not said to approximate the same thought but to
deliver the same words. The claim is expressed, moreover, using the archetypal
Hieronomian medieval phrase for literal word-for-word translation [verbo ad
verbum], the phrase famously used by St. Jerome when talking about translating the
Holy Scripture into Latin. The early Anglo-Normans accepted English as a
vernacular authoritative enough to represent the king’s will, and to supplant Latin
for the serious purpose of written legal documents. They conceptualized English as
an entity capable of translating Latin.
My point in identifying Anglo-Norman administrative discourse as a locus
of early and direct textual and linguistic contact is not merely to locate an actual
mechanism of influence to bolster the widely accepted idea that vernacular writing
was in part a trick the Normans picked up from the English. That is a worthy
74
Bates, Regesta, #128. Bates, 51, accepts this text as a writ that was originally
issued in bilingual form. It is not counted among the four unquestionably genuine
bilingual writs of William I’s reign because the Old English text does not survive in any
more than one scant fragment (one line, in only one of the five medieval MS copies).
186
undertaking, but not my main concern. The point more narrowly germane to the
project at hand is that the writs are demonstrably a locus of textual practice and
linguistic activity in which the Normans took on and repeated the English practice
of referring to Normans as Franci or Frenciscan. In the course of pursuing the
origins and implications of the Anglo-Norman adoption of the gens-name Franci,
we seized on the Franci et Angli formula in King William’s royal writs because the
writs are a body of texts predating almost all of the post-Conquest historiography.
Going back in turn to the starting-point of the Anglo-Norman written
administrative discourse, we now see that the earliest writs were in Old English,
and the formula representing England as a single state of two gentes was not at first
Franci et Angli but Frencisce and Eenglisce.
The phrase is conspicuous in William’s Old English writs as it is in his
Latin ones. It appears in 10 of the 32 extant English-language writs from the
Conqueror’s reign. As in the Latin writs, the two gentes are named most often in
the greeting clause. So it is in the writ, quoted above, in which “King William
greets Bishop William and Gosfrith the port-reeve and all the burghers of London,
French and English, in friendly spirit [Willelm kyng gret Willelm bisceop 7
Gosfregð portirefan 7 ealle þa burhwaru binnan Londone frencisce 7 englisce
freondlice].” Likewise in the writ drafted to reassure the Benedictines of St.
Augustine’s abbey in Canterbury, the king’s greeting is extended to “all my thegns,
French and English, in those shires where St. Augustine has land [ealle mine
187
þegnas frencisce et englisce on þan scyran þær sanctus Augustinus hefð land].”75
Such cases where the phrase appears in the protocol account for seven of the ten
instances; in the other three writs the Frencisce and Englisce formula is in a
prohibition clause,76 as in this unusual specimen of a royal writ concerning the
private property of a single layman:
Will(el)m kyng gret Will(el)m b(isceop) 7 Swegn

scyrgerefan 7 ealle mine þegnas on Eastseaxan
freondlice. 7 ic kyðe eow þæt ic habbe geunnen
Deormanne minan man þa hide landes æt
Gyddesdune þe hi of geryden wæs. 7 ic nelle
geþolian frenciscan ne engliscan þæt him æt ænigan
þingan misbeode.77
King William greets Bishop William and Sheriff

Swein and all my thegns in Essex in friendly spirit.
And I would have you know that I have given my
man Deorman the hide of land at Gyddesdune which
had been taken from him. And I will not tolerate any
Frenchman or Englishman to wrong him in any way.
When proposing that the Norman practice of identifying themselves as
‘French’ can be traced back to their English writs, I would like to be clear that I am
not suggesting that the pre-Conquest English writs had a habit of calling the
Normans Frencisce. The conquerors’ deliberate and attentive borrowing of Old
English writ usage, form, and language is important because it establishes,
75
Bates, Regesta, # 180, 80.
76
Seven of ten in the protocol: Ibid., # 31, 66, 80, 180, 189, 276, 338; three more in
a prohibition clause: # 38, 107, 351. The prohibition clause, a feature common in the writs
of pre-Conquest England, is a clause admonishing the king’s subjects not to disobey the
royal command set forth in the writ.
77
Ibid., #107. This brief writ is extant in the original (ibid., 386). The parenthetical
editorial expansions are Bates’. I have expanded the abbreviation for þæt [‘that’].
188
concretely and beyond doubt, that the Normans in England had close contact with
English practice, terminology, and language. The writs provide that body of texts
in which we can see the Normans borrowing the Old English word Frencisc as a
term to identify their own people. Obviously, the Anglo-Saxon writs of pre-
Conquest England did not use the Frencisce and Englisce formula in their address
clauses: the realm did not yet have any appreciable population of ‘French’ subjects
alongside the English. (To establish that it was indeed the standard practice of the
English people and the English language to call the Normans Frenciscan, we have
to turn to other Old English texts, and that will be the next order of business.)
There is however one more hint that the Anglo-Normans’ new practice of calling
themselves ‘French’ was shaped by their borrowings from pre-Conquest English
writs. Though the phrase Frencisce and Englisce did not itself come from the pre-
Conquest royal writs, the formal occasion which prompted the Anglo-Norman writ-
writers to ‘invent’ or deploy the formula may have. The gesture or strategy of
specifying the disparate ethnic nations of the kingdom and sweeping them together
under the rule of royal law has an antecedent in the pre-Conquest writs of England.
In a charter which was preserved at York in a Gospel codex issued by King Cnut,
the Danish conqueror of England, in or around 1020, the king threatens his
displeasure “if any be so bold, clerk or lay, Dane or English, as to go against God’s
law and against my royal authority”78 Here we see the analogous move of
78
Stubbs, Select Charters, 91.
189
enumerating the peoples of the realm, and it is situated in the writ’s prohibition
clause, as the Frencisce and Englisce formula repeatedly is in William’s writs.
(The writ for Deorman, just above, is one such. In another, a writ William I
granted to the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds between 1066 and 1070, the Danes
appear too:
[...] 7 ic cyðe eou þæt ic wille þæt þa socne þes

nigeðan healf hundredes ligan in to þam halgan
mynstre æt sancte Ædmundes Byrig nu swa ful 7 swa
forð swa hi Ælfric Wichtgares sune bewiste 7 Orðgar
siððan Ymme þere cwene to hande Ædwardes moder
cynges minne mæges.... nu forbeode ic alean men þa
socne him to hande teonne aðer ge engliscan ge
frenkiscan ge denniscan buttan sancte Ædmunde 7
þan abbode.79
[And I inform you that I wish that the soke of those

nine80 and a half hundreds should stay with the holy
monastary at Bury St. Edmunds as fully and
completely now as Ælfric, the son of Wihtgar, and
Ordgar had it, after Queen Emma, the mother of my
kinsman King Edward, held it in hand....Now I forbid
any man, whether English or French or Danish, to
take the soke in hand, but only St. Edmund and the
abbot.]
It is not immediately clear why this writ should be phrased as if there was a
considerable population of Danes in Suffolk in the 1060s. Perhaps the writer was
repeating a phrase he had seen in an earlier writ, such as Cnut’s 1020 charter or
another dating back to that period when Danes were indeed a large and visible
79
80
To have the soke of a territory was to have the right to profit from the
administration of justice there; to be able to summon people to court and to keep fines
assessed against the people of that territory.
190
population in England. Long before the Norman Conquest or even Cnut’s era for
that matter, the Danish invasions of the 9th century had created a situation which led
legal documents to sometimes speak of the Danes and English as the two distinct
peoples in the land. The treaty between King Alfred of Wessex and the Danish
leader Guthrum in 886 is a conspicuous example.81 Before the Normans’ unequal
murdrum statute, Æthelred the Ill-Advised had passed certain laws (c. 990) which
specified a stiffer murder fine when the killer and victim were of different nationes,
as if to especially discourage violence between the English and the Danes.82 The
recognition of two distinct races in writs and laws thus had precedent in pre-
Conquest English legal and administrative texts, even if the ‘other’ gens paired
with the English at earlier points was the Danes and not the Normans. The Norman
regime was not the first in England to find that writs and legal documents created
textual occasions which prompted them to name the two gentes of the kingdom,
and their use of the English phrase Frencisce and Englisce had precedent in
Denisce and Englisce.
As part of a policy of maintaining, or pretending, continuity with England’s
pre-Conquest governance, William the Conqueror’s administration deliberately
imitated Anglo-Saxon writ-making practice. The Norman invaders adopted the
usage, form, and language of Old English writs. The result was an administrative
and legal discourse which was deeply involved in the activity of defining and
81
Stubbs, Select Charters, 72.
82
191
redefining their group (the gens Normannorum; but also a new category or
conception, the Normans in England) – and which was at the same time shaped
itself by its contact with English texts. It was a discourse in which the Normans
of England presented themselves (more frequently, more insistently than in their
historiographical texts) as a group paired with or against the English, as the two
gentes of the kingdom. And it was a discourse whose project of rebordering and
redefining the Normans was carried out in the English language and informed by
existing English ideas.
192
4.
What Frencisc Meant in English
As we have now seen at some length, current study of how Norman identity
was reconfigured after the seizure of England has focused, appropriately, on the
Normans’ adoption of the gens-name Franci. The investigation has, however, been
shaped (indeed limited) by the universal assumption that Franci meant ‘Franks;
French’ as it always had. With this reasonable and unexamined assumption in
mind, scholars have directed the investigation of post-Conquest Norman identity to
inquiring why the Normans should want to call themselves French. As one current
authority put it, as recently as 2003, “It raises the question whether the invaders
considered themselves Norman or French.”1 The most recent scholars, having
proposed that the Normans’ use of the name Franci reflected English influence,
have moved on to consider why the English called the Normans ‘French’. This is
the wrong question. The English did not identify the Normans as French, they
identified them as Frenciscan, and Frenciscan was not the same as French.
1
193
Frenciscan functioned in Old English to denote specifically the Normans; it did
not, as we will see, conflate them with the people of the kingdom of France.
This chapter scrutinizes the Old English noun Frenciscan (and adjective
Frencisc) in order to establish how the 11th-century English defined the group
which that signifier ‘named’ – that is, how they conceptualized the group they
classed under that name, who was included, and what attributes defined the group
as far as the English were concerned.2
How the Conquest-era English identified the Normans:
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
Our best – almost sole – source for information on the use and meaning of
the word Frenciscan, and on Conquest-era English identity constructs and
2
In this section, the reader will encounter many forms of the Old English word
Frenciscan. Many forms were in use in Old English. This is due to two reasons. First,
unlike Modern English, O.E. was an inflected language, with nouns and adjectives taking
on different forms according to their case, gender, number, and a few other syntactic
considerations. Second, within the relevant period (more than 200 years, c.900-1125), Old
English underwent much change. In handling the term Frencisc, the mid-11th-century
scribes of D adhered faithfully and competently to the inflectional paradigms of ‘correct’
written O.E. (the standardized written koine based on the usage of Wessex). In version E,
copied mostly in 1121, the word is hardly declined at all; a single favorite form, Frencisce,
is used for almost all occasions. For these reasons, various forms appear in the passages
quoted in these pages. When not quoting directly, I use only three forms, as appropriate to
context. Frencisc is the basic form (masculine nominative singular) of the adjective. For
the noun the pertinent form is Frenciscan, since the medieval texts and my own are almost
always referring to a plural group that is overwhelmingly masculine. Frencisce, in
practice, seems to replace Frenciscan in the early 12th century. Between them, these same
two forms, Frencisce and Frenciscan, also cover the correct inflections for the adjective in
masculine plural nominative and accusative cases, strong and weak declensions. In
supplying this information my intention is not to encourage the reader to consider the
grammatical minutia, but to pass over it without obstruction.
194
terminology, are the texts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Taken together, the
versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are the principle body of English history
writing in the whole span of three centuries between Bede and the Norman
Conquest, and taken together they give us a body of English from before and after
the Conquest. As historiographical texts, they are necessarily concerned with the
recognition of various groups, with articulating them as subjects or objects of
action, and are therefore involved in reflecting and shaping constructs of national
identity. Accordingly, they are the best place to look for an understanding of how
the English classified the Normans and the French, and how they defined them in
the English language.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has an exceedingly complicated textual
historiy. To start off, there are a few things that the reader, if unfamiliar with this
remarkable body of medieval historiography, will want to know. First, it is
important not to be misled by the modern title. Even more perhaps than with most
medieval texts, it is problematic to talk about the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as if it
were a single text. In reality it is a set of closely-related texts preserved in six
manuscripts that are so different as to be more correctly thought of as versions
rather than copies.3 Accordingly (preferring heterodxy to error, like Origen), I will
3
The authoritative edition of the whole Anglo-Saxon Chronicle corpus is the
multivolume The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, David Dumville and
Simon Keynes, general eds. (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983). Individual volumes are
cited in abbreviated form in my notes below. (See List of Abbreviated References, xii.)
For the non-specialist, the most useful modern English translation is Dorothy Whitelock,
195
refer to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, in plural, from here on out. The six contain a
substantial amount of material shared in common, overlapping and diverging in a
complicated braidwork of borrowings, tangled and ramified over generations of
collating, copying, and editing. The relationship between the versions is at its
simplest in the early years of the history they cover. For entries from A.D. 1
through the late 9th century, they all derive ultimately from an original, lost
“common stock,” which was perhaps compiled in the 890s at the court of King
Alfred. Afterward, copies circulated and were re-copied and added onto
independently. Each of the surviving manuscripts (which are referred to by current
scholars, mercifully, as A through F) has its own unique contributions and
omissions. They differ greatly as to how much English history they cover. One
very early manuscript (B) ends neatly at the year 977, while the latest copy (E)
continues with sporadic entries all the way to 1154.
All six are in chronicle or annal form, with an entry, usually short, for each
year (and a fair number of skipped years for which there are no entries). This
misleading formal aspect represents the sharpest danger to the reader who would
use the Chronicles as datable historical source material. It is crucial that we not
think of them – any of them – as the product of steady annual record-keeping. If
the Chronicle survived as a genuine annal book, to which an entry was added every
trans., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Revised Translation (New Brunswick: Rutgers

University press, 1961). It contains no O.E. text, but its parallel-column layout makes it
easy to follow a single version or to compare the contents of various versions.
196
year in December to summarize the year’s events, then each entry would constitute
a contemporaneous record of events and would preserve a sample of the opinions,
historical sensibilities, language, and terminology of the year it is recounting.
Unfortunately this is not at all the case. In the six extant copies there are very few
sections or entries that reliably represent this sort of contemporaneous record-
keeping. Instead what we have are six derivative copies, each shaped by its own
particular processes of growth.
The venerable B was copied out by a single scribe writing not long after the
latest year covered by his chronicle. Two others – the latest two, E and F – were
also produced more or less at a single go, by a single principal scribe or two, but
they are late copies, each written in the early 1100s by writers working with two or
more older manuscripts of the Chronicle on the desk in front of them. They freely
make additions and emendations of their own; F even adds a Latin translation of
each Old English entry. They impose, to some extent, the spelling practices of their
own day. These three manuscripts are, at least on the surface, the simplest of the
lot. Each of the other three is a patchwork accumulation of sections of unequal
length copied down by different scribes (sometimes as many as 34 in a single
manuscript!) working at widely separated times, from a shifting collage of source
material. Version D, for instance, is a compilation which combined material from
at least two older (now lost) versions, one of which was also a shared ancestor of B
197
and C; the other, an antecedent of E.4 The oldest manuscript (A) contains late
additions and “corrections” penned in by the scribe who wrote the second-to-latest
copy (F); this F-scribe, as his modern editor calls him, was an industrious meddler,
and some of his annotations and additions also found their way into E.
In spite of their tangled textual histories, the six manuscripts together
provide a considerable body of source material on the terminology used by English
history writers when talking about contact and conflict between different peoples in
northwestern Europe. By recognizing the differences within and between
manuscripts, and focusing on the sections of each which are the most firmly-
datable and/or most nearly contemporaneous, we can isolate consistent information
on how English chroniclers at different time periods conceptualized and identified
the various national groups.
In England, the Normans were not Norðmenn
In borrowing English terminology, the reasoning goes, the Normans were
consenting to define their group in a way that did not represent it as a distinct gens–
a conclusion which rests on the supposition that the English did not recognize the
Normans as a separate people. This latter notion is in turn based in large part on
the observation that the English referred to the Normans with a word that seems to
label them ‘French’ rather than a using the word which seems the readily
4
ASC D, xvii-lxxix.
198
recognizable Old English form of the name “Normans” [i.e. Old English Norðmenn
or Normen].
In Old English, it is true, the Normans were invariably identified as þa
Frenciscan or Frencisce rather than Norðmenn. In the 11th century when, even
before the Conquest, the Normans began to have a conspicuous role in English
political events, the English could not designate them using the English version of
their Latin or French gens-name (Normanni, Normanz), because the word was
already taken. In Old English Norðmenn meant ‘Norsemen’ not ‘Normans’.5 Of
course Old English Norðmenn is the same etymological construction as Latin
Normanni and Old French Normanz. They are all derived from the Germanic
words meaning ‘north man’. Early on, there seems to have been little difference in
meaning. At roughly the same time as Scandinavian raiders were hitting the coasts
of Frankish Europe and getting called Nordman in Frankish and Normanni in Latin,
they were breaking in waves over the coasts of England too. But on the two sides
of the Channel the term developed in different directions. On the Continent, as
analysis of 10th- and 11th-century sources indicate (see Appendix), Frankish
*Nortmenn and Latin Normanni came to be increasingly attached to the group we
know as the Normans, the people of the polity founded at Rouen by Rollo, as they
grew more important and outlasted the other Normanni. It stayed with them after
5
This has been recognized by M.T. Clanchy, England and its Rulers, 1066-1272,
2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 21-22; Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the
Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity, 1066-c.1220 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 33-34.
199
they ceased to be aliens from the north and even after they ceased to be noticeably
Scandinavian. In England – or perhaps it is more to the point to say in English – it
stayed closer to the etymological meaning ‘men of the North.’ The Alfredian
translation (c. 900) of Orosius’ Historia adversus paganos provides a good
example. Adding items of local interest to the 5th-century polemic, the English
translator/redactor inserted a travel story in which one Ohthere, a Norseman from
Halgoland (in Norway), recounts his journey to the White Sea. Explaining his own
origins, Ohthere “told his lord, King Alfred, that he lived northmost of all the
Norsemen [he ealra Norðmonna norþmest bude].”6
Modern studies of Anglo-Norman identity have assumed a certain bluntness
and imprecision in the medieval English peoples’ ability or desire to distinguish
various foreign peoples around them. Just as the name Frenciscan is assumed to
represent a large, undifferentiated genus of Gallic people, Norðmenn is understood
as an indiscriminate label for vikings. In point of fact, Norðmenn was not a generic
term in Old English. It denoted specifically the Norwegians. The modern
misconception is essentially an error of translation. The mistake is to suppose that
the Old English word is transparent; that it is knowable and known to modern
English-speakers without the mediation of translation.
6
Quoted in Sealy Gilles, “Territorial Interpolations in the Old English Orosius,” 76-
96 in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed.
Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1998), 85.
200
Part of the confusion has no doubt been that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles do
use some generic terms for the Scandinavian invaders. Regardless of their actual
place of origin, they are often labeled ‘Danes’ or ‘the Danish’ [þa Denicsan],
occasionally ‘vikings’ [wicenga], but much more often they are simply ‘heathen
men’ [hæþene men] or, most frequently of all, ‘the army’ [se here].7 Norðmenn,
however, is not a generic name. The name ‘Danes’ is sometimes used loosely in
the Chronicles (and other medieval texts) but the word ‘Norsemen’ is not.8 In all
contexts where the name appears, the Norðmenn are distinguished from other
Scandinavian groups or associated with a specific territory. The Norðmenn enter
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles with the first arrival of Scandinavian raiders in
England. The event is recorded in slightly different form in all six copies of the
Chronicle, but in versions D and E this passage is somewhat longer and identifies
Norðmenn specifically with Norway. In 787, they record, “there came for the first
time three ships of Norsemen, from Hordaland [comon ærest .iii. scypu Norðmanna
7
See, for example, in MS A, ‘Danes’ in annals 833, 835, etc; ‘vikings’ 879, 885,
917; “heathens” for this section of the annals. After A peters out, CDE go on to cover later
years and continue to favor se here [the army] (eg. 997, 998, 999, 1001, 1004, 1006, etc.)
or se flota [the fleet] (eg. 1002, 1005, etc.). The Old English word wicenga, ‘raider,
pirate’, was borrowed from the Norse raiders’ own language and was not used in other
lands plagued by the Scandinavians (Gwyn Jones, A History of the Vikings, 2nd ed.
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984], 76 n.1.)
8
Alfred P. Smyth believes that the term ‘Danes’ is only occasionally used loosely in
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, and agrees that Norðmen invariably refers to Norsemen from
Norway or Norwegain settlements. Smyth, “The Emergence of English Identity, 700-
1000,” in Medieval Europeans: Studies in Ethnic Identity and National Perspectives in
Medieval Europe, ed. idem (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1998), 34-39. The mistaken notion
that O.E. Norðmen was a generic term for Scandinavians persists even in the most recent
scholarship, eg. H. Thomas, English and Normans (2003), 33-34.
201
of Hæreðalande].”9 Hordaland, or Hörthaland, is a region on the coast of Norway.
In the entry for 920, to cite another example, King Edward of Wessex is accepted
as overlord by “all who live in Northumbria; both the English and the Danish; the
Norsemen and the others [ealle þa þe on Norþhymbrum bugeaþ, ægþer ge Englisce
ge Denisce ge Norþmen ge oþre].”10 In this case, where the Denisce and the
Norþmen are named individually, and where the context is Northumbria where the
Danish and the Norwegians occupied fairly clearly-defined, settled territories, it is
clear that the Norþmenn is the gens-name for the people from Norway, not a broad
term for ‘vikings’. In the long alliterative verse entry for 937 we encounter
Norðmenn whom we can match even more securely to an identifiable historical
group. The Chronicle is recounting the victory of King Athelstan of Wessex at the
Battle of Brunanburh. The Wesseaxe [West-Saxons] confront a combined army of
two allied enemies: the Sceotta [Irish] under Costontinus [Constantiín mac Aeda]
and the men of Anlaf [Olaf] “Norðmanna bregu [prince of the Norsemen],” who are
referred to as scipflotan [shipmen; pirates], guma norþernha [northern men], and
Norðmenn. Defeated, the Norsemen flee to Dublin; this detail, and their
identification as Olaf’s men, make it clear that the Norðmenn are the Norwegians
under Olaf Guthfrithsson, king of Dublin and York.11
9
ASC D 787.
10
ASC A 920. This entry for 920 appears in version A only.
11
The entry is present in A, B, C, and D; ASC A 937 is quoted here. For historical
details of Brunanburh, Barbara E. Crawford, “The Vikings,” in Companion, 63-64.
202
Given the tortuous textual histories of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, it takes
a bit of sorting out to establish what periods’ usage of the term Norðmenn is
reflected in these three passages. With the entry for 787 we are interested
specifically in the form in versions D and E, where the entry is harder to date than
the text of A, B, and C. The statement tracing the Norðmenn to Hordaland
probably reflects an addition made to the Chronicle in the 9th century.12 The entry
for 920 was probably copied down in manuscript A within the 920s, the entry for
937 in the 950s.13 These passages, then, give evidence of Old English practice
ranging from as early as shortly after 800, to around 960. In later entries, the term
appears in a more familiar form, Normen, but its meaning has not changed. Thus
even when the chroniclers are recounting the Conquest itself, Normen does not
refer to the Normans. Versions C and D are the oldest of the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicles to record the events of 1066, A and B having been already written and
discontinued by that time. In C and D, three times each in their respective entries
for that tumultuous year of two invasions, the Normen are the Norwegians under
“Harold cyning of Norwegan.” The other invaders, the ones who defeat English at
Hastings under “Wyllelm eorl of Normandige,” are the þa Frenciscan: “There
12
Again, it is presumably a detail derived from the Northern material incorporated
only in D and E. Northern material entered these versions in different sections at different
times; in this early section, the Northern details end with the entry for 806, per ASC D, lvi
ff., and therefore might well reflect scribal or editorial work of the early 9th century.
13
ASC A, xxxiii-xxxvi.
203
King Harold was killed and Earl Leofwine his brother, and Earl Gyrth his brother,
and many good men, and the Frencyscan prevailed on the slaughter-field.”14
Early and late, in any part of all six of the versions of the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicles, Norðmenn or Normen are Norsemen from Norway. There are no
instances in which the Normans from Normandy are called by that name. While
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles provide far and away the best body of texts for
observing Old English terminology for the Normans (and for the Norwegians,
Franks, and other gentes, for that matter),15 other texts also confirm that the word
Norðmenn denoted Norwegians not Normans. An apparent exception in a writ of
William I dissolves upon closer inspection.16 The passage from the Old English
Orosius can be placed beside the A and B manuscripts of the Chronicles to
illustrate that even at an early date the gens-name Norðmenn was not a catch-all
used loosely to refer to any and all Scandinavians. The Ohthere episode
immediately follows a treatment of the geography and peoples of Scandinavia, in
14
ASC D 1066. C’s account of Hastings does not survive: the manuscript breaks off
in the middle of 1066, at the end of a page, with the English victory at Stamford Bridge.
The entry for 1066 in A is a late addition, penned in perhaps as late as 1150.
15
In the corpus of surviving Old English texts, the gens-name Norðman appears in
only very few instances outside of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. A search of the corpus of
extant O.E. texts for Norðman / Norman (in all spelling variations) using the University of
Toronto’s formidable database, the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, produces 158
instances. Of these, 137 are in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. Of the 21 instances outside
the Chronicles, 8 turn out to be personal names or place-names (eg. Norman’s Cross
[Normannes Cros]), leaving only 13 extant instances of the gens-name outside the Anglo-
Saxon Chronicles. Dictionary of Old English Corpus on the World Wide Web (University
of Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project, 2003). http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/
about.html .
16
204
which the Norþmenn are situated in the coastal region corresponding to modern
Norway and distinguished from the Swedes [Sweon].
A more detailed understanding of the way the Conquest-era English
recognized and defined the Normans should take into account this revised
understanding of how they did not identify them. Thomas reasons that an
important factor behind the English practice of calling the Normans ‘French’ was
that the other option, Norðmenn, involved too much confusion: Norðmenn, he
says, was an ambivalent term that usually denoted Scandinavians.17 As we now
see, in the centuries before the Conquest and at least the first decades after, there
was no ambivalence in the term Norðmenn, and no ‘usually.’ There is no sign that
it was a flexible term, with variable uses or an elastic referent. The extant evidence
indicates that it was a gens-name applied invariably and specifically to
Norwegians. In supposing that Norðmenn was a broad generic designation,
scholars have underestimated the ability and/or interest of the English in identifying
the peoples who shared their region and shaped their history. The failure to see
that the medieval English were knowledgeable and specific when it came to
identifying their North Sea neighbors has contributed to that same belief in generic
nomenclature which has allowed scholars to presume that the English did not
distinguish the Normans from the French.
17
Thomas, The Normans and the English, 33-34.
205
In English, the Normans were Frenciscan
Frenciscan was not a generic term for the Normans, and it was not one
among other possible alternatives, and it was not idiosyncratic. It was simply the
proper gens name which Old English used to denote the group we refer to in
Modern English as ‘the Normans’. Long before the Conquest, from the time of the
first dynastic link between the kingdom of England and the duchy of Normandy,
Frenciscan is the Chroniclers’ regular – and only – name for the Normans. The
Anglo Saxon Chronicles record the marriage alliance that marked Normandy’s
entrance into English politics: in 1002 Æthelred II of England married Emma,
daughter of Richard I of Normandy: “in Lenten-time of this same year the Lady,
Richard’s daughter came here to this land [on ðam ilcan Lenctene com seo
hlafædige Ricardes dohtor hider to lande].”18 Normandy is not named here, nor are
the members of the ducal family referred to as Normans, but the gens-name appears
in the entry for the next year, when Emma’s arrival had its first troubling sequel.
The introduction of Normans into high offices in England prompted violent
clashes. The entry for 1003 records, “Here Exeter was sacked by the French officer
Hugh [þone frenciscan ceorl Hugan], whom the Lady had set up as reeve.”19 This
instance leaves little room to doubt that the Conquest-era chroniclers were using
the term frenciscan to refer to a person they thought of as specifically Norman, not
18
AND C 1002. Also thus in D and E. The two oldest manuscripts, A and B, were
finished well before 1002.
19
AND C 1003. The entry is almost identical in D, E, and F.
206
merely French: two early 12th-century historiographical texts confirm that this
bellicose Hugh was a Norman. The Chronicle of John of Worcester (c. 1120-1140)
identifies the Frenciscan ceorl as a “Norman count [Nortmannici comitis]”20 and
Henry of Huntingdon (c.1130) refers to him as “Hugh the Norman [Hugonem vero
Normannum].”21
Version C, the oldest 11th-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle text, contains
three instances of the adjective Frencisc; in each case, in context of pre-Conquest
strife between the English and the Gallic favorites of Æthelred, Emma, and their
half-Norman son Edward the Confessor. The pre-Conquest practice of calling
Normans Frencisce is even better documented in D, with more numerous instances,
referring to individuals and groups that can be securely matched to specific
historical referents. “Robert the Frenchman” [Rotbearde þan Freoncyscan], whose
appointment by King Edward to serve as Archbishop of Canterbury is recorded in
D’s entry for 1051, is Robert of Jumièges, a Norman, at that time abbot of one the
favorite religious establishments of the dukes Normandy.22 The long entry for 1052
(recte 1051) records a dangerous escalation of the ongoing friction between English
20
Cited by Whitelock, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 86 n.8. See the recent edition by
R.R. Darlington and P. McGurk, The Chronicle of John of Worcester, trans. J. Bray and P.
McGurk, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), vol.2, 454-455.
21
Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum VI.2, ed. and trans. Diane Greenway,
342-343: “Hugonem vero Normannum, quem ibi iam regina Emma vicecomitem statuerat
[Hugh the Norman, whom Queen Emma had appointed sheriff].” These Latin texts, both
John of Worcester’s and Henry of Huntingdon’s, drew heavily on the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicles and are nearly contemporary with version E. They therefore provide a reliable
translation of the OE Frenciscan, and one not likely to be distorted by the usage (or
historical information) of a different period.
22
ASC D 1051; cf. Douglas, William the Conqueror, 167, 105.
207
earls and the Frencisc favorites and relations of King Edward. Eustace count of
Boulogne, the husband of Edward’s sister Gode, arrives with his retinue in Dover
and immediately offends Earl Godwine by murdering some townsmen there.
Eustace and his band flee west and hole up in the castle at Gloucester, where they
are soon surrounded. Godwine’s party demands the surrender of Eustace and his
men, along with “the Frenciscan who were in the castle [þa Frencyscan þe on þam
castelle wæron]” – that is, the Normans who had settled in the area under Ralph the
Timid, a Norman who had come to England with Edward back in 1041 and later
become the Earl of Herefordshire.23 Exiled for their defiance, Godwine and sons
returned from overseas the following year with armies raised against Edward but,
the Chronicles tell us, the king’s men were loathe to fight against “men of their
own race [heora agenes cynnes mannum]” in a confrontation comprised of
“Englishmen on either side [Englisce on ægþer healfe].”24 It was a victory for
Godwine’s faction, with humiliating consequences for King Edward. Among the
earls’ terms for peace, “they outlawed all the Frenciscan [ealle þa frenciscean]
who had committed injustices and made unjust judgments and given bad council in
this land.”
It is worth noting again that manuscript C, containing the oldest copies of
these entries for 1003 and 1052, is a witness genuinely of the early 11th century; the
23
ASC D 1052; Whitelock, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 119 n.2; Douglas, William
the Conqueror, 167.
24
In manuscript D, this sequel is again labeled 1052, this time correctly. This entry
also appears almost verbatim in C.
208
entry for 1052 is not easy to date but the one for 1003 could not have been written
after the 1040s. The bulk of manuscript D, including all entries up through the year
1054, is also a pre-Conquest text, having been copied from older Chronicle
manuscripts around 1060.25 These passages thus constitute evidence not only of
what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles call the Normans at points when they are
narrating pre-Conquest events, they are themselves genuine pre-Conquest texts,
reflecting the terminology and perspective of ‘native’ English historiography.
In the post-Conquest period, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles continued to refer
to the Normans in England as Frencisce. In manuscripts D and E, the only ones
with surviving coverage of years after the Conquest, the annals represent the realm
as a place of two gentes, acting sometimes as enemies, sometimes in unity under
the Norman king. The entry for 1068 in D records the bitter English resistance to
Norman rule in the north, reporting that “many hundred of the French men [fela
hund manna frenciscra]” were massacred at York by the English earls and thanes
and their allies newly arrived from Denmark. The entry for 1074 (recte 1073)
shows the Conqueror enlisting English warriors along with his own Frencisce for
his overseas endeavors: “On þisan gere Willelm cyngc lædde englisce fyrde 7
frencisce ofer sæ, 7 gewann þæt land Mans [In this year King William led an
English and French army over the sea and won the land of Maine].”26 Sometimes,
the two groups are played off against each other, across the expected lines of
25
ASC D, xvii-lxxix.
26
ASC D 1068, 1074.
209
loyalty. According to version E, in 1087 (recte 1088) “the foremost French men
[þa riceste frencisce men] in this land” revolted against William Rufus in favor of
his brother Robert, Duke of Normandy, and William II responded by sending an
army of Englishmen against them. When the rebellious Norman barons received
reinforcements from Normandy, William was forced to scrape together a larger
force, mustering all loyal men “French and English, from port-town and
countryside [frencisce 7 englisce, of porte 7 of uppelande].”27 As late as 1127,
some sixty years after the Conquest, the Chronicle continues to speak of two
separate gentes, “Frencisc 7 Englisc.” In E there are fifteen such instances of the
term Frencisce denoting the conquering elite in England after the Conquest.
Frencisce (or Frenciscan) was the normal word for Normans in 11th-century
English. Its abundant use after the Conquest in English-language texts to denote
the Normans who took power in 1066 was simply a continuation of established
practice. When the Normans referred to themselves as Frenciscan in their own
documents (or Franci in their Latin documents) they were adopting the current,
correct English way of referring to Normans.
27
ASC E, 99, 101. Again there can be no doubt that these “frencisce men” are the
Normans, as E identifies the ring-leaders by name: they include Odo of Bayeux, the
Conqueror’s half-brother; Geoffrey of Coutances, another Norman bishop with vast land
holdings in England; and Roger of Montgomery, a Norman viscount whom William I
made earl of Shrewsbury.
210
The meaning of Frenciscan
It is essential to examine the implications of the English practice of calling
the Normans Frenciscan. Did the English use of Frenciscan and Franci for the
Normans mean principally that the English did not distinguish Normans from the
French or any other Gallic peoples? The first obvious thing that leaps out
regarding the name the English used for the Normans is that, while the name
Frenciscan very clearly distinguished Normans from Norsemen, it certainly seems
at first glance, to make no such careful division between Normans and the French
from the kingdom of France. Is it safe to follow the words into the easy conclusion
that, for the 11th-century English, the Normans were closer to being Franks/French
than Norsemen? Probably it is. Does it mean that the English made no distinction
between the Normans and the French of France? Though this is very widely
accepted by current scholars, this turns out not to be the case. It is not true that
calling the Normans Frenciscan amounted to calling them French.
The modern perpetuation of the error stems in large part from the
anachronistic idea that France was the larger, more important entity, of which
Normandy was merely a portion. Yet judging by their historiography, the English
had relatively little interest in the Franks/French until after the Conquest. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles suggest that the French, or Franks, were not of any great
interest to the English. France is simply not an important presence in the
Chronicles prior to the Norman Conquest. The Franks and their land come up
211
infrequently, and only when there is some particular connection to Anglo-Saxon
interests. In its first mention of what we would call France and the (Merovingian)
Franks, manuscript A does not call them any such thing: the entry for 660 records
that a West Saxon bishop, “Ægelbryht received the bishopric of the Parisians, in
Gaul by the Seine” [Ægelbryht onfeng Persa biscepdomes on Galwalum bi Signe].
The Franks are first called by name in the brief entry for 780: “Her Aldseaxe 7
Francan gefuhtun [Here the Old Saxons and the Franks fought].” The land of the
Franks figures as a recognizable territorial unit in the entry for 836 [recte 839],
which reports the death of Egbert, king of Wessex, and recalls that he had once
been driven “from the English people’s land to the Franks’ land [of Angelcynnes
lande on Fronclond].” Similarly, the Franks appear in the annal for 855 because an
English king, Æthelwulf of Wessex marries the daughter of a Frankish king. The
other mentions of the Francan or Franclond, clustered in the dozen years between
880 and 891, record the years in which the powerful, organized army of Danish
invaders going off to harass the Franks instead.28
The death of “Carl Francna cyning” [Carloman, who died in December 884]
and the succession of Charles the Fat to “the western kingdom [þam westrice]” are
recorded in the entry for 885. There follows a short genealogy tracing back to “that
earlier Charles” [þæs aldan Carl] – that is, Charlemagne. Meager as it is, this
passage constitutes the Chronicles’ most detailed pre-Conquest reference to the
28
ASC A 780, 855, 881, 885, 887, 890. The six annals that mention the Franks by
name are also present in B, C, D, and E. Version F contains four of them.
212
Frankish lands or kings. It is the only entry, apart from a curt notice of his death in
814 (“Her Carl cyning forþferde”), to mention Charlemagne.29 This is surprising in
an age which we think of as being something near obsessed with Charlemagne.
The scant attention paid to the Franks or French in the pre-Conquest period
stands out when compared to the substantial interest the English historiographers
have in their Germanic neighbors around the shores of the North Sea. During the
same early period which sees seven mentions of the Franks in A, other groups who
occupy a much smaller place in the attention of modern Anglo-Normanists merit as
much attention in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. The Saxons or “Old Saxons” back
on the Continent [Seaxan, Ealdseaxa] are mentioned five times, and the Frisians
twice. When we come to the 9th, 10th and early 11th centuries, the annals are
positively dominated by the Scandinavian invaders: during some stretches within
this period the Chronicles are little more than a grim running account of the
incursions and advances of the Danes and Norsemen. As a result of the vikings’
success, the north of England became a multi-ethnic patchwork, home to the
‘native’ English and to Scandinavian settlers of different origins. This is ably
registered by the chroniclers. In this period, England’s political fortunes and
prosperity were linked to the North Sea powers, and though these groups – the
Scandinavian raiders, the Danes, the Flemish, the Normans – themselves had
29
A, B, C, D, and F contain this mention of Charlemagne’s death (incorrectly
assigned to 812 in all but B and F; D and F do not mention him in the 885 entry, and E
contains no mention of him at all.
213
extensive involvements with France, the island English and the inland French had
considerably less direct contact. This seems to be true with regard to commerce
also. A roll of import tolls from the reign of Æthelred II (978-1016), for example,
shows that the bulk of London’s trade was with Flanders, Normandy, and the
German towns of the Meuse and Rhine.30 Farther away and centered inland from
the coast, the French were, to all appearances, less relevant and less important to
the English than the Normans were.
Later, at the height of the second great Danish wave, when Cnut reigned as
king of both England and Denmark, England was more than ever integrated into a
Scandinavian political sphere. Accordingly, Scandinavian peoples and places
appear frequently and are identified with clarity and specificity. In the short space
of the entries for the years 1025 through 1030, for example, the Chonicles record
events involving Denmark [Denemearcan], the Swedes [þa Sweon, Swaðeode], and
Norway [Norwegum].
Meanwhile, in the whole period between 890 and 1071, the Chronicles do
not contain a single mention of the Francan. For the 11th-century English who
started the practice of calling the Normans Frenciscan, the kingdom of France did
not loom large on their horizon and the Francan were not a privileged, preeminent
30
David Griffiths, “Exchange, Trade, and Urbanization,” in From the Vikings to the
Normans, ed. Wendy Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 99. Cf. De
moribus et actis primorum Normannorum ducum IV.81, where Dudo has Bernard of Senlis
represent the Normans as indispensible coastal intermediaries for the French, reminding
King Louis IV (r. 936-954) that the city of Rouen is “famous for its Frankish and English
trade [Francisco Angliscoque in portu eminentem]” (Dudo, 237; Christiensen, trans., 112).
214
gens, of which the Normans were merely a subpecies. To call the Normans
Frenciscan or Franci was not to deny them a distinct identity or conflate them
carelessly with the French. From the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles it is hard not to
conclude that the history-keepers of England are not much interested in France
until after the Conquest when their Norman kings embroiled them in Continental
events – Norman quarrels and ambitions. 31
The Franks/French were not identified as Frenciscan
In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, as we have seen, Normans first entered
English history around the year 1000 as favored partisans of Æthelred the Ill-
Advised and Emma, his Norman queen. They became more prominent in the reign
of Edward, as their presence in England became a more virulent irritant and they
were drawn into the factional maneuvers of the rebellious English earls. From their
first appearance in the Chronicles the Normans, and consistently throughout, the
Normans are called Frenciscan. The scholarly consensus has been that, as far as
the English were concerned, the Normans, when they appeared on the scene, were
31
It might be interesting for historians of later periods, looking at any time from the
reign of Henry II, say, through the Napoleonic wars, to note that the “traditional enmity”
between England and France is in fact rooted in the 11th-century enmity between
Normandy and France. Before the Norman Conquest, the English had no quarrel with the
kingdom of France. They had relatively little to do, one way or the other, with the
kingdom of France. But the dukes of Normandy did have a quarrel with France, their
nominal overlord and rival. By 1066, the feud was some 150 years old, and when the
Normans came to England, one of the things they brought with them, as solid and
consequential as stone-work castles and tall cathedrals, was a flourishing enmity with
France.
215
French. “It was as if the definition of a Norman at this date was a Frenchman from
Normandy,” says R.H.C. Davis.32 C.P. Lewis doubts if the Normans were
recognized as a group separate from the French at all. In his view, the evidence of
gens-names in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and elsewhere indicates that the
Normans were subsumed within a broad category, “the French,” and the differences
within this group were unclear, unknown, or “uninteresting” to the English.33
The crucial thing that Lewis and others have failed to notice is that the 11th-
and early 12th-century English did not have one word which covered the two groups
we call Normans and French. They had two different words. Lewis cannot be
singled out for reproach. The use and distribution of two separate words seems to
have gone unnoticed by everyone else too, and the implications entirely lost upon a
field of excellent modern lexicographers.
Strange as it may seem, it has not previously been noted that the term
Frenciscan, the term that supposedly makes Normans into Frenchmen, is not the
same term that the Chronicles use for the Carolingian Franks and the later French.
The term used for the Franks/French is Francan. In entries written before the
Norman Conquest (or written later, but recounting events of the pre-Conquest
32
R.H.C. Davis, The Normans and their Myth (London: Thames and Hudson,
1976), 12. The “date” which Davis means to encompass is extraordinarily broad,
extending from 1066 well into the 12th century without distinction. Furthermore, he
recognizes no difference between how the English named and conceptualized the Normans
and how the Normans themselves did.
33
C.P. Lewis, “The French in England before the Norman Conquest,” Anglo-
Norman Studies 17 (1995), 130-136.
216
period), such as those quoted in the preceeding pages just now, the Franks/French
are called Francan, and the same is true of later entries and later copies of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. There is a simple distinction between Francan and
Frenciscan, and it is maintained systematically, consistently, and almost entirely
without exception.
Because this is, to the best of my knowledge, a new observation and should
therefore be laid wide open to challenge and dispute, it might be useful to
summarize in some detail the use of these two distinct gens-names in the respective
manuscripts of the Chronicles. (In preceding pages, discussion centered on how
the Normans were always called Frenciscan in Old English, and in fact were called
by no other name; at this point the aim is to show that Frenciscan and Francan
were mutually exclusive terms which delimited the Normans and the French as two
separate and distinct gentes.) The simplest approach may be to review the six texts
concisely, and in chronological order.
• A and B: The Franks are mentioned by name in six entries ranging

from 780 to 890; Francan is the term used in each instance. (East
Franks [Eastfrancan] appear once too, in 891, when it is their turn to
replace the English as the prime target for the Danish army.) In these
manuscripts written in the 10th century, the group that we think of as the
Normans never makes an appearance.34 There is no trace of the term
34
B ends at 977. A has a scattering of entries for the 11th c. but they are
interpolations, later and derivative. Even so, they do not identify the Normans as a group:
the brief entry for 1066 dispenses with the Norman Conquest in seven words: “her com
217
Frenciscan.
• C, the manuscript which is cut off in September 1066, before the
Conquest, contains three instances of the gens-name Frenciscan (1003,
twice in 1052). These are passages we have examined above (the first
of these refers to Hugh, Queen Emma’s Norman favorite who is blamed
for the violence in Exeter; the other two instances refer to Edward’s
Norman protégés, driven into exile by earl Godwine’s faction). Though
it is of course impossible to establish whether the king’s foreign
favorites were Norman to a man, it is evident that Normans at least
predominated.35 In the 1052 entry, “þam frenciscum mannum” are
people we can securely identify as Normans, Robert of Jumièges and
Bishop William, King Edward’s appointees to the sees of Canterbury
and London.36 The Franks appear in the same six entries found in A and
B and are called Francan.
• D: as in A, B, and C, Francan are Franks, in the same six entries. This
manuscript extends to 1079 and contains one later reference to the
people we call the French – that is, the western Franks, living in the
kingdom of France, under Capetian kings centered in Paris. In the entry
for 1071 (recte 1070), the king of the Franks [Francena kyning] (that is,
Philip I) is among the monarchs blamed for failing to protect Arnulf III,
Willelm 7 gewann Ængla land” [‘Here William came and conquered the land of the
English’].
35
Lewis “The French in England,” though specifically trying to show that the pre-
Conquest Frencisce were not necessarily all or mostly Normans, only succeeds in spite of
himself to confirm that they in fact were.
36
ASC C 1052. Robert we have encountered above. The appointment of
“Wyllelme preoste [William the priest]” as bishop of London in place of the Englishman
Spearhafoc [Sparrowhawk] is reported in D 1052 (r. 1051); Whitelock, Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, 121 n.1 confirms that this William was a Norman. The third individual whom
C names as accompanying this band of Frencisce men in their narrow escape is Ulf, bishop
of Rochester, who was not Norman or French but, like the two disgraced Norman bishops,
was a creature of King Edward, and much despised (see C 1049 and D 1050).
218
the young count of Flanders. In the Old English of the Chronicle, there
is no change in name: these later Franks/French too are called Francan.
In D, the term Frenciscan appears more frequently than in C. D
contains the same three pre-Conquest instances of the term as in C
(1003, 1052), and adds four more, including a claim, absent in other
versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, that in 1051 “Count William
came from beyond the sea with a great force of Frenchmen [Willelm
eorl fram geondan sæ mid mycclum werode frencis[c]ra manna].”37
While we cannot take this entry at face value as a historically accurate
record that the Conqueror (whom D later refers to as “Wyllelm eorl of
Normandige”) made an early expedition to England in 1051, it
represents an early instance of Frencisc being applied to exactly the
group it denotes in the aftermath of 1066: Normans come to England
under William the Conqueror.38 D is the oldest manuscript that extends
far enough to include a number of post-Conquest references to the þa
Frenciscan; in all cases – on the battlefield at Hastings (in the entry for
1066), or massacred at York by the rebel English and their Danish allies
(1068), or intercepting English resisters loyal to Edgar Ætheling (1075)
– the Frenciscan are soldiers or officials of William’s conquest, in
England.
• F, the bilingual Latin and OE version of the Chronicle, was written c.
37
ASC D 1052 (r. 1051); the editorial addition of the ‘c’ in frenciscra is mine not
Cubbin’s; since D is otherwise faultless with the inflection of this word, I think it is safe to
assume that the regular genitive plural form was intended and the missing ‘c’ was an
inadvertant slip. The four additional pre-Conquest instances in D are in 1051, twice in
1052 (r. 1051), another in 1052.
38
D’s unique and unsubstantiated assertion that William was in England as
Edward’s guest in 1051, the year the king enjoyed a short-lived ascendancy over
Godwine’s faction, looks like the sort of pro-William propaganda likely to have been
written shortly after the Conquest. Yet these lines are not a later interpolation to D; they
are in the hand of the main writer of this portion of the manuscript, and D’s modern editor,
G.P. Cubbin, thinks D’s entries through 1053 were written by c. 1060.
219
1100-1110, but in its extant form breaks off at 1058. Here too the same
distinction between the two gens names prevails: the 9th-century Franks
are Francan (in four of those same six entries seen in A, B, C, D) and
the Frencisce men are William’s Normans in England (1003, 1051 recte
1052). Here, though, there is also one exception to the pattern. It is in
the entry for 650, where it seems that the editor/translator of F (and
again, there is good evidence that a single author gathered sources,
revised, and wrote out this copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, and
composed the Latin translations) lost track of his work for a moment.
Instead of an English entry followed by a Latin translation, there is a
single sentence that mixes English and Latin, text and gloss:
Her forðferdeobiit Birinus se biscopepiscopus 7
Ægebertus francigenase Frencisca ordinatus.was gehado[ð]. 39
[This year Birinus the bishop died and Ægelbryht the

Frenchman was ordained.]
It looks very much as if the F-scribe started to copy the Old English
entry, was interrupted or distracted mid-sentence, finished the entry in
Latin, and then added the gloss to compensate. The end result is a
bilingual sentence with the symmetry of an inverting mirror: half
English with Latin gloss, half Latin with English gloss. Compared to
the text’s usual alternation of English annal and Latin translation, this
odd formal arrangement, if anything, places greater emphasis on
translation and translatability, on the one-for-one interchangeability of
English words and Latin words. It would therefore be hard to claim that
the F-scribe is being less attentive than usual to his choice of words.
This is one case then, where the Old English word Frenciscan is used to
39
ASC E 650. The arrangement of the gloss is explained in Baker’s footnotes, but
see also David Dumville, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition,
Vol.1, Facsimile of MS F, the Domitian Bilingual (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995) pl. 42r.
220
refer to an early Frank, on the Continent, and not a Norman in England.
• E, which was very probably produced by a monk at Peterborough in
1121, uses the term Francan, in the same six entries as A, B, C, and D,
to denote Franks. E (like D) continues to use Francan in the context of
later years to denote the French of the kingdom of France (eg. 1070,
1077, 1090). There is also, however, one exception to this usage of the
term. In E’s entry for 1107, the Normans in England are called
Francan. In this year, Henry I of England held court at Westminster
and made appointments to fill numerous vacant bishoprics and abbacies;
this was “seven years after king Henry got the kingship and was the
forty-first year after the Franks took control of this land [þet an and
fowertigeðe gear þæs þe Francan þises landes weoldan].”40 This usage
of the term Francan is an anomaly; it violates a uniformity of practice
that otherwise holds within manuscript E and, as we have seen,
throughout all the manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. It is not
altogether surprising then, that when E has occasion, in very close
proximity, to mention the other French, the group which otherwise has a
monopoly on the term Francan, the text is in the position of having to
recognize, or respond to, the anomaly: in the entry for 1108, where the
French king’s death is reported, E calls him “se cyng of France
Phillipus” instead of the usual “Philippe Francena cyng.” Having just
given the Old English gens-name Francan to the Norman rulers of
England, the chronicler can’t very well call the king of the
Franks/French Francena cyng, and so takes recourse to the geographical
name France instead.
Though version E contains this unique exception in the usage of
Francan, it makes no exceptions when it comes to the term Frenciscan.
40
ASC E 1107 p. 115.
221
Together, the noun Frenciscan and the adjective Frencisc appear 18
times (the same three pre-Conquest instances as in C, and 15 more times
in the annals after 1066) and in every case refer to the ‘French’ of
Anglo-Norman England. In the pages of E we find, for example, “an
frencisce abbot Turolde,” who had come to England some years before
from Fécamp in Normandy, rushing to Peterborough with 120 well-
armed “frencisce men mid him” to rescue the abbey from Scandinavian
raiders (1070); “þa frencisce men” who are the household knights of
Norman abbot Thurstan and help him oppress the monks at Glastonbury
(1083); and bishop Walchere of Durham killed along with one hundred
of his men, “frencisce 7 flemisce” (1080). In this last-mentioned entry,
it is worth noting that the Flemish men in the bishop’s retinue are
designated separately from the Frencisce: as we would expect,
Frencisce does not cover people from Flanders.
As everywhere else throughout the several manuscripts of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, Frenciscan is never used in E to denote the
French of France or Normans back in Normandy. This is handily
illustrated in the annal for 1094. In a long entry devoted mostly to the
ongoing power struggle between William II of England and his brother,
Robert Curthose, the duke of Normandy, and the shifty involvement of
the king of France, þa Frencisce are not the people of Philip I’s
kingdom nor Duke Robert’s continental Normans but the Anglo-
Normans in the Welsh marches who were, that same year, attacked by
the Welsh.41
41
ASC E 1094. For the annals cited in the preceeding paragraph: ibid., 88-89, 92-
93.
222
To sum up, the body of Anglo-Saxon Chronicles texts witnesses an almost
invariable consistency in the Old English usage of the terms Francan and
Frenciscan. All told, there are only the two exceptions: one of Francan being
used for the Anglo-Normans in version E, and one of Frencisca used to denote a
Frank in the gloss in manuscript F. Both of these are found in text written in the
first two decades of the 12th century.42 It may or may not be significant that the two
exceptions are both late. What is certain is that they are indeed exceptions, and far
outnumbered by attestations which establish a very clear pattern. The other cases,
throughout the various manuscripts of the Chronicles, represent entries composed
and copied throughout the 11th century, from beginning to end, and on into the first
quarter of the 12th century. If we include A and B’s evidence on the use of
Francan and the absence of Frenciscan, we are presented with a consistent pattern
of usage extending through more than 200 years of Old English historiographical
writing, from A’s text of c. 900 to E in the 1120s.43
The meaning and function of the term Frenciscan in the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicles is also illuminated by the Latin text of John of Worcester’s Chronicle.44
42
The latter instance, almost certainly the wording of the F-scribe rather than copied
from his older exemplars, can be confidently dated to c. 1100-1110. The former, ASC E
1107, cannot have been written any earlier than 1107 or any later than 1121.
43
In C we see work of the very early- and mid-11th century; D is mostly a product of
the mid-11th century. In E, the term is present, and used the same way, in both the main
bulk of the work, which was copied from a chain of earlier exemplars, and in the
interpolations added at Peterborough in or about 1121. (E’s unique entry for 1070, cited
above, is one of these.)
44
John of Worcester, The Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. R.R. Darlington and
P. McGurk, trans. Jennifer Bray and P. McGurk, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
223
This work is commonly described as a Latin translation of the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicles,45 and though this description is somewhat oversimplified, the
Worcester Chronicle was indeed written in Latin by English writers working from
Old English texts, and it contains numerous instances in which it renders the
Chronicles’ Old English word Frenciscan into Latin. In every passage where the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles identify an individual or group as Frencisc, the Worcester
annalist uses Latin Normannus. This is strong confirmation, obviously, that
Frenciscan specifically denoted Normans.46 It maintains, or translates, the Old
English writers’ strictness and clarity with regard to gens names. The followers of
William the Conqueror, the people from Nortmannia (the place-name appears
plentifully), are called exclusively Normanni. Frenciscan is never translated
Franci in this text. Franci is reserved for the people the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
calls Francan, the Franks and the French of France. It does in Latin what the
45
Elisabeth van Houts, “Historical Writing,” in Companion, 112-113. The text
contains many revisions, erasures, and additions from other historical sources, much of
which are the work of one careful translator/editor, the monk John, from whom the text
gets its modern name.
46
The bilingual Latin and English version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
(manuscript F, written c.1100) would likewise be of great value in helping us triangulate
toward a sure understanding of the Old English term, but it survives only as a mutilated
manuscript, cut off at the entry for 1058. It should be noted that John of Worcester’s
Chronicle, though undeniably at the late end of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles tradition, does
not belong to an entirely posterior moment. It is almost exactly contemporary with Anglo-
Saxon Chronicle version E. Version E was written, for the most part, in 1121. The
Worcester Chronicle was perhaps begun as early as c. 1095 but the extant text is a revised
recension of c. 1120-1140, with the pertinent segment, the entries prior to 1102, very
probably completed in the first years of the 1130s. (See P. McGurk’s Introduction in John
of Worcester, Chronicle, xvii-xxxv; lxvi-lxli.)
224
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles do in English: it keeps a strict distinction between the
French (Francan in O.E.; Franci in Latin) and the Normans (Frenciscan;
Normanni).47
Old English Sources outside the Chronicles
It would not be responsible to generalize my observations into a rule and
propose a sharp revision of our understanding of these Old English gens-names
without first looking beyond the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle texts. Ideally, one would
conduct an exhaustive survey of all known Old English texts. Fortunately this is
now practicable, thanks to the availability of the complete body of extant Old
English writing in a searchable electronic database. The University of Toronto’s
Dictionary of Old English Corpus is an astonishingly powerful philological
resource which includes “at least one copy of each text surviving in Old English.”48
This all-inclusive storehouse of the written record encompasses the Alfredian
translations, saints’ lives, heroic and historical poems such as Beowulf and The
Battle of Maldon, the extensive late-10th century didactic prose of Ælfric, sermons,
47
Likewise there is no question of onomastic overlap or confusion between the
Normans and the Norðmenn. The Norðmenn of the Old English texts [Norwegians] are
Norregani in John of Worcester’s Chronicle. Not surprisingly for a text of this date and
particularly an Insular one, it never uses Latin Normanni as a general term for viking
‘Northmen.’ Scandinavian raiders and settlers are Dani and Noruuegenensi (eg. entries for
980, 982). The Norwegians under Harald Hardraada at Stamford Bridge are Norregani;
the entry for 1066 uses this name for them four times.
48
Dictionary of Old English Corpus on the World Wide Web (University of Toronto:
Dictionary of Old English Project, 2003) <http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/about.html>. The
digitized Corpus is in place, but the dictionary itself is still a work in progress. As of this
writing, the letters A-F are complete, and G and Y currently underway.
225
writs, glossaries, tracts on herbs and medicine – everything. Moreover, since the
Old English period as defined by the D.O.E. Project does not end with 1066 but
goes right up to 1150, nearly a century of post-Conquest texts are included too.
Of the 47 instances of Frencisca, Frencisc rounded up by electronic
searches of the D.O.E. Corpus (including variant spellings and all inflections), all
but two appear in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and the legal documents of William
I and his successors. This confirms, first of all, that these two bodies of text are the
right sources upon which to base our understanding of how the medieval English
defined the Normans and what they meant by Frenciscan. The search turns up only
one instance of the word Frencisc prior to its appearance in the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicles entries. This is in Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion, a little-known and
intriguingly idiosyncratic text of the early 11th century, which we will soon have
occasion to examine. Apart from this one exception, I have been able to find no
instances of the word Frenciscan before it appears in 11th-century entries of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, referring to the new Norman favorites of Æthelred,
Emma, and Edward. As we have seen, once the term does appear in the
Chronicles and in the Normans’ own English-language writs, Frencisce and
Frenciscan are used consistently and exclusively to refer to the Normans, while the
French of France continue to be called Francan.
226
Francan and Frenciscan: two words for two gentes
To put it simply, from the evidence of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and the
writs – which, again, comprises very nearly all surviving evidence on these gens-
names in Old English – we are presented with the discovery that the word
Frenciscan did not equal ‘French’. Francan, the old word that had been used for
the Franks, continued to be used for the French of France. Frenciscan was not a
synonym for Francan; in the 11th century and early 12th, it did not denote the
people of France. There were two separate words and they were never mixed. If,
for the sake of brevity in a dictionary entry, a simplified definition were required,
we should say that Francan = ‘the French’ and Frenciscan = ‘the Normans.’
Yet these definitions and the distinction they recognize are not found in any
dictionary of Old English. Even while relying on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles as
their source of citations for Frencisca, Frencisc lexicographers have persisted in
misunderstanding Frenciscan as a general term taking in French, Normans and
others indifferently. This is true even of the authoritative reference, the electronic
Dictionary of Old English, which repeats the well-established oversight with some
emphasis, giving this definition for þa Frencisce/Frenciscan: “‘the French’,
without explicit distinction between French and Norman.”
This persistent misunderstanding may well be due to an assumption that,
because the Old English word Frenciscan (probably in the adjective and
227
substantive form Frencisc) is the very same word that became the modern English
word “French,” the two words have the same meaning and the same referent. The
underlying expectation in this case is that the single signifier, though changed
through time, continued to refer to the same conceptual signified. Francan, of
course, is the older form of our modern “Franks.” It is natural enough to assume
that, if there were any difference between Francan and Frenciscan, these two Old
English words marked the same distinction as their modern descendants, “Franks”
and “French.” The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles must convince us, once and for all,
that this is not the case. Each pair of words, the modern pair and the 11th-century
pair, marks a difference within its own language, but it is not the same difference.
The differential distinction which Old English constructed with the terms Francan
and Frenciscan in the period between 1000 and 1150 is not the same as the
difference marked by the modern words “Franks” and “French.”
Our modern historical division between the Franks and the French is
essentially a chronological division, an artificial line drawn across the continuum of
time and events in order to create discrete historical periods. Medieval Latin made
no such distinction between Franks and French. The Latin language did not posit a
rupture between the Carolingian kingdom(s) and the Capetian kingdom. And
neither did medieval English. The English retention of the gens-name Francan for
the people of France is nothing unusual. Old English was simply in accord with the
standard usage in the Latin West.
228
The gens-name Francan, not surprisingly, has a long history in the English
language. It appears in the Old English translation of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica
and in Ælfric’s copious writings. The Francan make a cameo appearance in
Beowulf.49 The gens-name Frenciscan appears to have been a later development,
based originally on Francan. The noun Francan spun off the adjective Frencisc. 50
The new adjective came to be used substantively and thus became a separate noun.
One no longer needed to say Frencisce men but just þa Frencisce or þa Frenciscan,
analogous to þa Englisce or þa Daniscan. Its relatively late appearance and its
subsequent expansion from adjective to noun are attested in the same evidence we
have been looking at from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. As we have seen, Frencisc
is absent from the oldest versions (A and B); it appears in C, but only as an
adjective preceding a noun (eg. “þone frenciscan ceorl Hugan,” “ealle frencisce
men”); and then is used much more in D, where it is a free-standing noun as often
as an adjective (7 times as an adjective, 6 times as noun). It is especially useful,
under the circumstances, to have this evidence about the development and syntax of
the word in the same Old English texts which also show that Frenciscan was not
used interchangeably with Francan. This confirms that the new word was not, at
any point that we can know about, simply a variant of Francan.
49
Bede, The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English
People, ed. and trans. Thomas Miller, Early English Text Society 95 (London: Oxford
University Press, 1890; reprint, Millwood: Kraus Reprint Co., 1978), I.25, III.6, V.10.
50
This initial step of the new term’s development is well accepted by linguists and
lexicographers. The OED, for example confirms: O.E. adj. Frencisc < Franc [‘Frank’]
+ -isc [‘-ish’]. (OED, vol. 6, 173.)
229
In the pages of manuscript C, where Frencisc is restricted to adjectival
usage, it is already semantically distinct from Francan. Rather than simply
functioning as the adjectival form of Francan, the word Frencisc was, at the start,
an adjective meaning something other than “Frankish/French.” From these early
attestations in C, Frencisc was used to mean very much the same thing as we mean
by the modern English adjective “Norman.” At very least it meant, not
“French/Frankish” but something along the lines of “Frank-like; French-ish.”
Version D shows us that the newer word is regularly a noun by 1053 or
shortly thereafter.51 We can therefore state unequivocally that, already at that time,
before the Conquest, the function of Frencisc was not to supply a different part of
speech for Francan. What it supplied, I believe, was a new word for a new thing
that needed naming.
The new ‘thing’ was a new category of people, a foreign group asserting
itself, first in small numbers and then very decisively, in England. The distinction
between Francan and Frenciscan was not periodizing and historical; it was a
current response to contemporary events. Sticking very strictly with attested
instances of the word, the Old English word Frenciscan may not precisely equal
“Normans,” since it denotes a group which in some cases included individuals of
others Gallic origins (Bretons, Flemish, the French of France). At the same time,
51
D’s entries through 1053 were written soon after that year or at least by c. 1060
(see ASC D, xvii-lxxix, esp. lxxix, liv, lv). In that portion of the text of D, Frenciscan
appears as a noun four times (and a fifth time where it is probably correct to construe it as a
noun rather than an adjective).
230
though, a definition reconstructed very strictly from known attestations includes a
dimension of specificity not present in “Normans” or “French-ish people.”
Frencisc in no instances refers to Frenchmen or Normans over on the Continent.
Only people in England are called Frencisc.52 Our strict definition, then, should be
revised: Frenciscan denoted the group of ‘French-ish people over here in England.’
Identifiable individuals and groupings to whom the term is applied were for the
most part, in practice, Normans. The group, usually portrayed as a cohesive entity
(or, as we see much more clearly in the writs, a gens), was in any case undeniably
dominated and led by Normans. Without forgetting the theoretical proposition that
the conceptual signified of a sign wrenched from a distant time or culture can never
be translated with perfect accuracy, there is compelling reason to accept that
Frenciscan stood in for a concept very similar to what we mean by “Anglo-
Normans.”
This is what Frenciscan continued to mean throughout the 11th century and
deep into the 12th. Over time, usage changed. The changes in morphology and
pronunciation which transformed Francan into “Franks” and Frenciscan into
“French” are not pertinent here. It is the change in their semantic content or
function, the change in what they meant, that needs to be taken into account. In
time, the increasingly assimilated elite ceased to seem foreign, and French-speaking
52
There are instance in which the Frenciscan being referred to are physically
located in Normandy or in France, but in these cases the Frenciscan are the forces of
William I, William II or Henry I who have come back over to the Continent to fight his
battles in Anjou, Maine, Normandy, or France.
231
among the heirs of the conquering group diminished and retreated into specialized
contexts. England’s Anglo-Norman (and Angevin) kings continued to speak
French, but from quite soon after the Conquest they enjoyed extensive loyalty and
were not considered foreigners. At some point in the 12th century, as early as the
1130s or as late as the 1180s, the elite, who had been represented as heirs of the
conquerors and designated Frenciscan were now just English. In an England
which had once been positioned as a society of “Frencisce and Englisce,” there
was, for all practical purposes, nobody left to call Frencisc. The word lost its
original referent and was freed up for a different use.
Moreover, during the two centuries in which French maintained a powerful
presence in England as a written and spoken language, the meaning of the English
word Frencisc was doubtless influenced and changed by what Franceis meant in
Continental French. Though the Normans in England created a new meaning for
their vernacular word Franceis when they applied it, as they did with Frenciscan or
Franci, to refer to their own gens, this was an additional meaning, an alternative,
specialized, contextual meaning, alongside which Franceis continued to be used to
denote the French of France. As the group which chose to define itself as
descendants of the Norman invaders increasingly defined themselves as
Englishmen, England’s specialized use of Frencisce/Franci/Franceis became less
and less common, until it was rarely used outside of the tradition-bound Franci et
Angli formula of legal documents. The English word Frencisc (Frenchis,
232
Frennssce, Frenysch, French, etc) came to be applied to the French of the kingdom
of France. Francan, having thus been pushed out of its job, was on its way to
being relegated to an historian’s term for the Carolingians. Frenciscan took over
Francan’s role, while Francan underwent semantic narrowing and became more
specialized. Thus, though each of the two words remained largely unchanged and
readily recognizable in speech or writing, their semantic function or ‘content’
shifted. It is tempting to think of this sort of change as a subterranean process that
happens within each word, hidden from the visual surface of the written letters or
the aural surface of its sound. It is more accurate though, to say that it happens
without the word, as a function of reference and referents, of its semantic role
within the matrix of the language as whole. The change is in what the word means
in the minds of its users.53
Our modern use of “Franks” and “French” is the end result of this semantic
shell-game. But the effect of the diachronic change has gone unremarked even by
scholars. Because Francan and Frencisce in Old English look so much like their
Modern English descendents, it is a natural enough mistake to assume that the
pair’s respective roles and referents are perfectly transparent to us. The
53
Over a century ago, Saussure recognized that the process of language change
inevitably involves the meaning of words and not just their more material aspects
(inflections, pronunciation, or spelling). A change in the signifier necessarily involves a
change in the signified, he declares, and to suppose otherwise is to cling to the ancient
names-and-things model of language, with its presumption of objective ‘real-world’
referents. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, ed. Tullio de Mauro
(Paris: Payot, 1972).
233
unexamined assumption that Frencisc meant the same thing as Modern English
“French” has had an unfortunate impact on the current study of Anglo-Norman
identity. Most conspicuously, this mistaken assumption imposes dangerous
limitations on the interpretation of the English-language evidence. Differing
interpretations of the gens-name can produce nearly opposite understandings of the
way the Normans were perceived and delimited as a group. To offer one stark
example, the assumption that Frencisc meant the same thing in the 11th century as
“French” does today leads C.P. Lewis to contend that the pre-Conquest English did
not recognize the Normans as a distinct group at all. “It is a striking fact that the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle did not once use the word ‘Norman’ or ‘the Normans’, in
any of the manuscripts, either before or after 1066,” Lewis writes. “It occasionally
took particular note of Flemings and Bretons, but never of Normans.”54 With a
revised ‘translation’ of the Old English term, we can now say with confidence that
the Normans were indeed recognized as a distinct group and were not conflated
indifferently with other Gallic sorts. Lewis and other scholars have missed this
pivotal fact for the simple reason that they have not recognized the name being
used. There was a specific gens-name to designate the Normans in 11th-century
English. It happened to be Frenciscan.
54
Lewis, “The French in England,” 129-130.
234
Old English ‘Frenciscan’ as the key to understanding the refashioning of
Norman identity after the Conquest
Redressing misconceptions about the term Frenciscan produces substantial
consequences for our understanding of Norman identity in England. The existence
of a proper name for the Normans in Old English is significant above all because
the Normans’ borrowing of that name, Frenciscan, seems so directly implicated in
the Norman appropriation of the gens-names Franci and Franceis. (Indeed looking
back for a moment to the Norman use of Old English terminology in the first writs
of William the Conqueror, we can now see that the Normans adopted the English
naming-practices faithfully and accurately. They did not make the mistake of using
the English cognate Norðmenn/Normen as a term for their own group.55 They did
not refer to their group as Francan, only Frencisc: in their English-language texts
55
In all the acta of William I there is only one instance in which the English word
norðman seems to be used with reference to the Norman people. Closer examination
shows that this is not the case, however. The text in question is a writ addressed generally
to all who read it or hear it “throughout all of England [ofer eall Englaland],” mandating
disparate judicial treatment in cases between Norman and English parties. (Bates, Regesta,
# 130.) Rather than having only the two unsavory options of trial by combat or by ordeal of
the hot iron, as an Englishman has when faced with a Norman accuser, the Norman who is
accused by an Englishman [þe Frencisca þe se Englisca beclypað] can clear himself by
swearing an oath supported by witnesses of his choice, “in accordance with Norman law
[æfter Norðmandiscere laga].” The adjective Norðmandiscere is not derived from the
English gens-name Norðmenn. That is, it is not, as it first looks, “Northmannish,” formed
from the noun Norðmenn in the genitive or from an adjectival derivative of Norðmenn. It
is formed from the place-name ‘Normandy’ [Normandige]. The writ establishes that the
Frenciscan have the right to their own people’s practices, “the law of Normandy,” or very
literally, “Normandy-ish law.” (The toponym Normandige is, of course, a borrowing from
Latin Normannia and/or the Normans’ Old French Normandie, not an Old English word
derived from Norðmenn.) This writ is not, then, an instance of the Old English gens-name
Norðmenn referring to Normans. (In fact, it provides a fine illustration that the Frenciscan
in Old English texts are the people of Normandy.
235
they fully maintained the distinction between the two terms.) If the English
practice of calling the Normans Frenciscan is, as it seems to be, the template for
the post-Conquest Normans’ adoption of their corresponding signifiers Franci and
Franceis, the Old English word Frenciscan and its conceptual signified can
reasonably be supposed to have shaped what the Normans had in mind when they
reinvented the Latin and Old French terms as names for their own people.
As I have documented, the post-Conquest change in the Normans’ self-
identification was a trilingual process, involving three linguistic signs – not fully
equivalent or perfectly coextensive, but corresponding and inter-translatable – in
each of the three main languages that the invaders used in their new kingdom. Of
the three, the English word stands out as the best source of information concerning
the new construct of (Anglo-)Normanness. In Latin and French, the Anglo-
Normans appropriated an existing gens-name; though Normans had not used these
terms before to denote their own kind, the words Franci and Franceis each had a
prior existence, a history, and were in common current use.56 Their refashioning by
the Normans of England as “official” names for their own group was a quite drastic
semantic expansion and multiplication of referents. But because the ‘new’ Latin
56
Strictly speaking, the common use – and indeed the very existence – of the word
Franceis or Frances in Old French by the time of the Norman Conquest of England can
only be conjecture, as it is not recorded in extant texts at any time prior to its appearance in
the first French texts produced by the Normans in England at the beginning of the 12th
century. It is hard to picture that it was not in use in the vernacular as a gens-name and a
common adjective pertaining to the Franks/French/France by the 11th century; however if it
were by chance wholly invented by the post-Conquest Normans, that would only
strengthen my overall thesis regarding the Anglo-Norman metalinguistic ‘invention’ of the
French language.
236
and Old French gens-names were already old words, formed in some indefinite past
time for other purposes and according to the contours of other conceptual signifieds
and other ‘real-world’ referents, it is harder to isolate the implications active in the
Anglo-Normans’ new use of them. In Latin and in French the new practice of
applying an existing word to two distinct gentes, the Franks/French and the
Normans-in-England, opened an internal difference within the lexeme Franci and
within the lexeme Franceis. In post-Conquest Norman usage the Latin term Franci
was made different from itself. It was still used to denote the Franks/French but it
accommodated, in addition, another signified which it had not had before. The
addition of a new conceptual signified in the mind of the speaker and listener was
outwardly registered only by context. Likewise, in the speech or writing of the
Anglo-Normans, Franceis no longer signified (or did not only, did not always
signifiy) “the French, the people of France.” The word no longer meant what it had
meant on the continent.
The English word Frenciscan underwent no such semantic doubling. In
English the distinction between the Normans and their French neighbors was
registered clearly by the difference between two lexemes, Francan and Frenciscan.
Frencisc was used by the English and by the Normans only to refer specifically and
exclusively to Normans in England. Indeed, it appears to have been a relatively
new word produced by the very period and the historical developments which
generated ‘the-Normans-in-England’. The English-language name for the Anglo-
237
Normans, therefore, more readily than the corresponding Latin or French ones, is a
promising site to isolate elements of the construct the English and the Anglo-
Normans had in mind when recognizing this newly formed grouping, the Normans
in England.
Borrowing from the English, the Normans in England forged a group
identity whose parameters included precisely that: that they are Normans here in
England. This understanding and more particularly the evidence that this group
did indeed have a proper name, challenge the notion, put forth by some scholars,
that there was no period at which the conquering elite or their descendents
conceived of themselves as Anglo-Normans – that is, as a group somehow distinct
from their kin and countrymen in Normandy, but also quite distinct from the
‘native’ English population of their new kingdom.57 According to that model, an
English subject of Norman birth or descent could recognize herself or himself as
either Norman or English, or even both at the same time, feeling Norman in some
regards and English in others – but there was no mixed or hybrid identity which
recognized the particular condition of being a mix between Norman and English, a
third thing that hadn’t been present before. The strongest evidence in support of
this model is that the written record of extant medieval texts contains no word or
name such as Anglo-Normanni, to suggest the existence of any hybrid identity. Our
57
English Nation” in Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National
Identity and Political Values (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), 123-144. Thomas, The
English and the Normans, 71-73.
238
familiar hyphenated term “Anglo-Norman” was invented in the early 1700s.58
Apart from the single example of the anonymous author of the Hyde Chronicle
(c.1130), who uses Normanangli, apparently his own neologism, with great relish,
John Gillingham points out, “there is no extant evidence that anyone in the eleventh
or twelfth centuries ever used the term ‘Anglo-Norman’. In the absence of some
such term, it is clearly not easy to argue for the existence of an Anglo-Norman
nationality.”59 This point is picked up by Hugh Thomas in his study of Norman
assimilation in England. Thomas envisions that the Normans identified themselves
as English relatively rapidly and willingly, with no “transitional or mediating group
identity.”60 Like Gillingham, Thomas reasons that, if a hybrid identity had existed
in concept, and if there were some individuals who actually identified themselves
that way, there would have been a name to correspond to the concept and describe
the people. The theoretical assumption is reasonable enough. The evaluation of
the evidence, however, is shaped by the standard misconception that the Normans
58
Short, “Tam Angli quam Franci,” 174.
59
Gillingham, “Henry of Huntingdon and the Revival of the English Nation” (2000),
124. Even the single exception of the Hyde Chronicle author would be eliminated if Diana
Greenway is correct in her assertion that Norman’angli is a contraction made by the 13th-
century copyist who penned the unique extant MS of the Hyde text, and cannot be held to
reflect a name in use in the 12th c. (Garnett, “‘Franci et Angli’,” 112, citing Elisabeth van
Houts’ unpublished work on a new edition of the Hyde Chronicle, which in turn cites
unpublished work of Greenway).
60
Thomas, The English and the Normans, 71-73. Thomas is of the opinion that such
hybrid identities in general were absent in the Middle Ages. As evidence to the contrary,
note that John of Worcester’s Chronicle (c.1120-1140) contains an instance of calling the
English Anglosaxoni: the entry for 1066 begins with a lament for the death of the
“peaceable King Edward, son of King Æthelred, after governing the Anglo-Saxons
[Anglisaxonibus] for twenty-three years” (John of Worcester, Chronicle, ed. P. McGurk et
al., vol. 2, 598-601).
239
new name simply classified them as Frenchmen. The English word Frenciscan and
the naming practice that the Normans borrowed from the English, as we now see,
did nothing of the sort. Frenciscan – and its Latin and French translations, Franci
and Franceis, used only in context of Normans in England – did indeed delimit the
specific grouping of Normans in England. By the very act of calling their group
Franci and Franceis – names that could not be applied to Normans back on the
Continent – the Anglo-Normans and those who wrote for them set themselves apart
from their compatriots in Normandy. For that matter, so did choosing to articulate
their identity by using the English language and an English term. At the same time,
by defining themselves in England as Frenciscan/Franci/Franceis, they were
insisting on their identity as Normans, as a foreign gens – and thereby resolutely
declaring their difference from the ‘regular’ or ‘native’ English of the kingdom.
Their new manner of identifying their group did, in effect, declare an intermediate
identity, neither here nor there. The Frenciscan/Franci/Franceis were not English,
yet no longer defined by the same criteria, boundaries, and attributes which had
constituted what it meant to be a Norman in Normandy. Normans who could
define their group as Franci or Franceis were, in essence, declaring themselves
Norman Englanders or English Normans or, if one will allow the thoroughly
modern-looking and hyphenated form, Anglo-Normans.
240
In what ways were the Frenciscan ‘French-ish’?
It may be difficult to settle on a precise modern English equivalent or
translation, but it is clear enough that Frencisc did not mean “French.”
Nevertheless, the term undeniably suggests that the conquering group was
perceived to be, in some way or another, “French-like.” What the English
nomenclature was evidently doing from the first, and what the Normans seem to
have accepted when they adopted it, was to identify the Normans by one or more
characteristics that made them seem, in some conspicuous, defining way, akin to
the French. What were these French-like characteristics of the Normans? With the
umbrella-term theory eliminated, geographical origin and language are the other
plausible candidates for what made the English define the Normans as a Frank-like
or French-ish people.
The geographical explanation, the proposition that the Normans could
perceive themselves as Franci or Frencisc because they came from France, runs
aground on the simple reason that, in the view of a Norman or French person of the
11th century, the Normans did not in fact come from France. Francia, as we have
now seen in Latin texts of the period (and often as far back as the 10th century as
well), denoted the kingdom of France, the circumscribed area centered on Paris and
the middle Loire. Normandy was not part of France. If, however, it was the
English who were responsible for launching the revised understanding of what it
meant to be a Norman, and for determining the name that would denote this new
241
identity construct (the signifier that went with the new signified) it is now
necessary to ask whether perhaps the English considered the Normans [Frenciscan]
to be a people who come from France.
We have established that the English did distinguish between the Normans
and the French, and that France seems not to have been an important presence to
the English. If English monitors of past and current events, unlike their Continental
counterparts, thought of the Normans’ region as part of a larger, more generalized
France, it might be said that geographical origins played an important part in
defining the Frenciscan. But the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles suggest that in 11th and
12th century England, as in Normandy and France, France was usually understood
to denote the immediate Kingdom of France, without Normandy or the other
territories of Gallia.
In Chronicle entries referring to the pre-Conquest years and in other Old
English texts written in that period there is no entity answering to the name France.
The land of the Franks was called Froncland or Francrice. (Both names appear in
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. Franclande is the term used in the Old English
translation (c. 890-1000) of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica. Ælfric frequently refers
to Francena rice [‘the kingdom of the Franks’] and occasionally to Franclande in
his late-10th-century homilies and saints’ lives.)61 As the names indicate in their
61
Bede, The Old English Version, ed. and trans. Thomas Miller; Ælfric, Ælfric’s
Catholic Homilies: The First Series, ed. Peter Clemoes, Early English Texts Society,
242
very obvious etymology, the territory was conceived of as the land of the Francan.
Whatever ideas English authors may have had of its precise extent and location, the
notional space was defined by its correspondence to a gens of the same name.
For the debut of the toponym France in the Chronicles we have to wait for
version E, which is a product of around 1120.62 Even there, not surprisingly, all
instances of the word France are in post-Conquest entries. After the Conquest, the
Chronicles devoted much more discussion to affairs in France and Normandy. The
Norman kings spent a great deal of time and resources in Normandy, trying to
maintain their control within the duchy and extend or defend it along its frontiers.
The Normans’ wars were now England’s wars too. Accordingly, in post-Conquest
entries the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles register a considerably more refined idea of
what’s over there. The later Chronicles’ coverage of the cross-Channel reigns of
the first three Anglo-Norman kings contain many events and places which, by our
lights, belong within the duchy of Normandy – and indeed the Chronicles do locate
these in Normandige and not in France or Francrice.63 Normandy is recognized
and spoken of as a place apart from France. France or Francrice in the Chronicles
Supplementary ser. 17 (Oxford: E.E.T.S., 1997), eg. 497-506; idem, Ælfric’s Lives of
Saints, vol.1, ed. W.W. Skeat, E.E.T.S. 76 (London: E.E.T.S., 1881).
62
France does not appear at all in A, B, C, D, or F. C extends to September 1066,
just before Hastings, but after the 9th-c. allusions to the Franks, Francland is never
mentioned again. F’s manuscript is cut off at 1058. D has occasion to refer to France just
before and after the Conquest (1060, 1075, 1077) but sticks with the name Francrice.
63
Only D and E cover the years after the Conquest. In E alone, Normandige is
mentioned by name 72 times.
243
often clearly denote a small-France, the kingdom, exclusive of Normandy, Brittany,
and Aquitaine. This is the case in both of the versions that extend beyond 1066.
In E’s entry for 1086 (where the toponym France first appears), “King
William went from Normandy into France with an army and raided against his own
lord, King Philip [for Willelm cyng of Normandige into France mid fyrde 7 hergode
uppan his agenne hlaford Philippe þam cynge].”64 Normandy and France are two
separate and comparable states, each under control of a king. The hierarchical
relationship between William, in his role as duke of Normandy, and the king of
France is not forgotten, but these are ties of feudal loyalty between individuals; the
two territories denoted by Normandige and France are two adjacent regions, not a
smaller unit within a larger. In much the same way, Brittany and Flanders are not
part of France either. In 1077 (recte 1076), D reports, “King William went
overseas and led an army to Brittany and beset the castle at Dol, but the Bretons
held it until the king came from France, and then King William went away
[Wyllelm cyngc for ofer sæ, 7 lædde fyrde to Brytelande, 7 besæt þone castel æt
Dol, ac þa Bryttas hine hældon oð þæt se cyngc com of Francrice, 7 Willelm cyngc
þa þanon for].”65 Normandige, Brytlande, France (and Flandran too, in E’s
account of the events of 1075-76) are all separate places; passing between France
64
ASC E 1086. The words “cyng of Normandige” may look at first glance like the
title “king of Normandy” but in this sentence the O.E. word of is, as it very regularly is, a
preposition equivalent to Mod.Eng. ‘from’; not the possessive ‘of’.
65
ASC E 1077.
244
and any of the other territories involves leaving France or going back to it, not
visiting a region within a larger unit.
Whether it is called by the English language’s older, Germanic names
Francland and Francrice or the more Latinate name France, in these medieval
texts France is definitionally the land of the Francan, the territory controlled by the
king of the Franks/French [rex francorum or Francena cyng] and occupied by the
Frankish/French people. This manner of looking at things, with its impeccably
circular logic, provides virtually no real information about geography, frontiers,
and so forth. What it does do is insist upon a notional link between a people and a
state.
The Chronicles indicate that France, before and after the Conquest, was a
place that corresponded to the Francan not the Frenciscan. The land with which
the Frenciscan are associated is Normandige. This is true in the 11th century text of
versions C and D as well as in the later E. In their entry for 1066, for example, C
and D relate that þa Engliscan under “Harolde Engla cynge” [Harold, king of the
English] defeat þa Normen under “Harold cyng of Norwegon” [ie. the Norwegians
under Harald Hardraada], only to learn that “Wyllelm eorl of Normandige” and þa
Frencyscan are coming ashore at Pevensey.66 For the Conquest-era English,
Norman territory [Normandige] was not in France and the Norman people
[Frenciscan] were not from France. When the English articulated a set of ideas
66
ASC D, 1066.
245
about the new foreign elite, the name Frenciscan and the idea that they are
somehow French-like was not a geographical notion.
A land of two languages
The invaders, and their offspring and heirs for at least two generations
afterward, spoke a different language from their English subjects, and this was an
evident divide that could not have gone unnoticed. Language – the audible fact of
the Normans’ foreign tongue – inevitably set the conquering group apart from the
English. For the English, and indeed for the invaders themselves, language would
not have had the effect of subdividing the conquerors into smaller separately-
identified nationes: the English recognized the Normans, French, and Flemish as
distinct gentes and independent states but would have been very unlikely to have
perceived differences in language between these groups, and as I have argued, the
romanz-speakers themselves would have been able to hear regional differences but
regarded all forms of romanz as variations within a single unruly continuum.67
Although there is a strong scholarly consensus that language was indeed the
most salient determining factor in the construction of Norman group identity in
England, this is essentially an inference, documented by very little textual
67
Lewis, “The French in England,” 130, emphasizes that the various Romance
dialects distinguished by modern linguistic historians would have been all the same to the
medieval English. In the 11th century, the county of Flanders and much of Brittany were
predominantly romanz-speaking areas.
246
evidence.68 If we were not already used to running into the medieval disinclination
to reflect explicitly on languages, it might be surprising to find that there is
virtually no direct contemporary commentary about language and identity in post-
Conquest England.
Like other texts of the period, the victors’ histories lack explicit comment
on the language divide. But histories are literature too – they are manufactured
rhetorical performances subject to the same laws and lawlessness of other texts –
and therefore the overt, explicit statement is by no means the only site or manner of
meaningful information-exchange. Just as the Normans’ Latin histories can be
interrogated for indirect and perhaps unintended information on how the Conquest
changed the Normans’ constructs and nomenclature of group identity, as we did
earlier in the chapter by mapping their context-specific usage of the term Franci,
the history texts also yield up traces of the preeminent role of language in defining
Normanness after the Conquest. It is not part of the program, but it does make an
appearance.
The Normans’ own histories do register that the Conquest very quickly
effected a decisive change in what it meant to be a Norman. We have already
68
Consensus: Lewis, loc.cit.; Susan Crane, “Anglo-Norman Cultures in
England, 1066-1460,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature,
ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 36; Gillingham,
The English in the Twelfth Century, xviii-xx; Thomas, The English and the Normans, 32-
48, among others. Evidence is scant and ambiguous: R.M. Wilson, “English and French in
England, 1100-1300,” History 28 (March 1943), 57 and Mary Dominica Legge, “Anglo-
Norman as a Spoken Language, ” [Anglo-Norman Studies 2] Proceedings of the Battle
Conference, 1979, 111, among many others.
247
encountered the way some texts, within their unfolding narrative of historical
events, inadvertently reproduce the Normans’ adoption of the name Franci. The
sudden importance of the victors’ language in setting them apart as a distinct nation
is another unsettling change which the history texts stage, accidentally as it were, in
the course of their narration of events. The similarity in the way these two
innovations are rendered in the texts is not merely general in nature; it is structural.
In each case, the subsurface acknowledgment of the particular identity-shift is
located within the text mimetically, centered around the event responsible for the
change. The Normans, as we have seen, are not called Franci just anywhere in
these post-Conquest texts, but starting at the point where the text narrates the
Normans’ invasion of the English kingdom. In much the same way, it is at the very
point of narrating the symbolic and legal moment in which England is remade as a
state of two gentes, that the texts acknowledge – encode, if you like – their
recognition that the line of demarcation between the indigenous and the invaders is
chiefly linguistic.
For the way they witness the defining nature of the language divide in the
new realm, I would like to briefly consider three history texts, two of which are
among the very earliest historical productions after the Conquest. In these texts,
the event which constitutes the precise moment in which England becomes a
kingdom uniting, for better or for worse, the gens Anglorum and the gens
Normannorum under a single Norman king is the coronation of William at
248
Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day of 1066. This event, not the beach landing
or the Battle of Hastings, is the moment of foundation, both symbolically and
legally. In the two and a half months between the Norman victory at Hastings and
the coronation, England is still the kingdom of the English, albeit kingless and
under foreign occupation. When William is publicly annointed by the archbishop
in London, the Normans cease to be an alien army and become Englishmen of
some sort. It is not surprising therefore that the coronation scene is a loaded, over-
determined, moment in early historical narratives; a highly charged locus for
projecting ideals and anxieties about the nature of the new united-yet-split poltical
body. In the narratives they construct of William’s coronation, the
historiographical texts allow (or suffer) a semantic spill-over with regard to both
the unity and the division of the state, and with regard to the ways in which the
Normans are, and are not, Englishmen.
Starting with the earliest written account of the Norman Conquest, the
coronation scene represents the English and the Normans as two peoples defined by
their two languages. The Carmen de Hastingae proelio [“Song of the Battle of
Hastings”] was probably composed in 1067 or 1068 by Guy, bishop of Amiens, the
chaplain of William’s wife, Matilda.69 A short celebratory poem in 835 lines of
69
Guy of Amiens, The Carmen de Hastingae proelio of Guy, Bishop of Amiens, ed.
and trans. Frank Barlow, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). The dating and authorship of
the work are discussed in detail in Barlow, xxiv-liii. The very early date, with fall of 1067
as a terminus ante quem, is seconded by Elizabeth van Houts, “Latin Poetry and the Anglo-
Norman Court, 1066-1135,” Journal of Medieval History 15 (March 1989): 39-62.
249
polished Latin verse, it opens with the Norman fleet held up by contrary winds and
ends with William’s coronation. Described in detail and positioned as the final,
culminating episode in the triumph of this “second Caesar [Iulius alter],” the
coronation, in the Carmen, is a scene of bilingualism. After a Norman bishop
[Normannus quidam presul] addresses the famosis Gallis, asking if they consent
freely and accept William as king, an English archbishop speaks up: “Sermo
peroratur post illum metropolite; / Hec eadem lingua protulit Angligena” [‘the
metropolitan follows with an identical speech in English’].70 The uniting of the
Normans and English is not presented as a fusing of two peoples into one, but as
the sequential and separate consent of “both parties [utraque manus].”71 The
doubled performance of the public acclamation emphasizes that the two peoples
remain separate in the moment of their putative uniting. Each gens has its own
tongue and, as the need for the two speeches makes clear, they are unable to
understand each other. The Normans and the English remain two distinct groups,
and their difference is figured as one of language.
In the Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers (c. 1070-77), language is
assigned an even more conspicuous role in dividing the Normans from the English.
The Gesta Guillelmi repeats the scene of the two bishops addressing the two
70
Carmen, vv. 817-818.
71
Carmen, v. 819. In his text, Barlow gives “spirat utraque manus” [‘both parties
assent’], but in his translation he follows the emendation proposed by Morton and Munz’s
1972 edition, “spirat utroque manus” [‘the party assents to both (speeches)’]. Barlow’s
apparatus allows the reader to unravel the inconsistency but does not explain why he
should have chosen to accept in his translatation an emendation he rejects in his text.
250
peoples, each in their own tongue. The English prelate speaks first in this account,
and the English “all shouted their joyful assent, with no hesitation, as if heaven had
granted them one mind and one voice. The Normans added their voice most
readily to the wish of the English, after the bishop of Coutances had addressed
them.”72 This account places even stronger emphasis on unity and unanimity. The
acceptance of the new dispensation is portrayed as a oneness of voice on the
English side, joined by the harmonious addition of the Normans’ collective voice,
once they have the proposition put to them in their own tongue. But as the two
peoples raise their voices together, something happens in this version that is absent
in the Carmen de Hastigae proelio. The shouts of the English are misunderstood
by the Normans. “The men who, armed and mounted, had been placed as a guard
round the minster, on hearing the loud clamour in an unknown tongue [ignotae
linguae], thought that some treachery was afoot and rashly set fire to houses near to
the city.”
After this one-sentence remark, the Gesta Guillielmi resumes its description
of the consecration. William of Poitiers is a relentless apologist and, apart from the
sudden flaring of hostility and destruction, his coronation scene is an occasion for
legitimating the Norman seizure of England. Lest we miss the point, the narrator
calls our attention back to the consent [consensu] and even the eager wish
72
William of Poitiers, Gesta Guillelmi, ed. and trans. R.H.C. Davis and Marjorie
Chibnall, II.30: “Protestati sunt hilarem consensum universi minime haesitantes, ac si
caelitus una mente data unaque voce. Anglorum voluntati quam facillime Normanni
consonuerunt, sermocinato ad eos ac sententiam percunctato Constantiniensi praesule.”
251
[appetitu] of the English, William’s confirmation “by the sworn oath of the English
[sacramentis Anglorum firmata],” his blood relationship to King Edward and his
“hereditary designation [hereditaria delegatione],” and offers the cheerful
prediction that William’s “children and grandchildren will rule by lawful
succession over the English land.” Indeed, given that the Gesta Guillelmi (unlike
the Carmen) is enthusiastic one-sided in its exaltation of William and the Normans,
it is a bit surprising that the coronation scene contains this little detail about the
Normans torching London. Events may have happened that way of course, but that
does not compel the historiographer to write them that way. (The Gesta
Normannorum Ducum, for instance, has only the briefest account of the coronation,
with no mention of the bilingual acclamations or the misguided arson.) Certainly it
does not suit the purposes of this text to introduce an incident that makes the
Normans look bad and casts doubt on the supposed harmony of the two peoples. In
the rapid switch from the quick, matter-of-fact mention of the fire to the detailed
justification of the Norman take-over, the text registers the powerful dividing effect
of language as a scandal. As a reality that punctures the ideology of unity, the
language divide is inconvenient to acknowledge, but too conspicuous and forceful
to ignore.
Its status within the Gesta as an anomaly and an embarrassment makes the
incident of incendiary incomprehension a more potent commentary. The program
to conceive of, or talk about, the new England as a united entity is given the lie by
252
language. The apologist can pretend to unity and unanimity but the Normans and
the English are two gentes with two languages. For all the insistence on harmony
in the Gesta Guillelmi, the state is not univocal. With language defining the two
groups, the foundational moment of consensus and joining is characterized by
incomprehension and misunderstanding. Suspicion and hostility erupt. The
treacherous effect of language instantaneously turns the gathering of would-be
compatriots back into two enemy camps.
When the coronation scene is retold in Orderic Vitalis’ Historia
Ecclesiastica, the consequences of the language divide are amplified, from distrust
and alienation to violent, persistant rupture within the state. Orderic repeats the
details of the two bishops, the joyful acclamation, the Normans’ blunder, the firing
of houses. To this he adds the rapid spreading of the conflagration, a terrified
stampede, pandemonium, and looting. The mishap at the bilingual coronation
becomes the first ethnic riot of the new reign. Going further, the Historia makes
this event the smoldering ember that is ultimately behind the English rebellions of
the 1060s and 1070s: “The English, after hearing of the perpetration of such
misdeeds, never again trusted the Normans who seemed to have betrayed them, but
nursed their anger and bided their time to take revenge.”73
The conflagration at the consecration ritual is a miniature of the violent
division within the state. What is intimated, if stifled, in the Gesta Guillelmi is
73
Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans.
Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford: Oxford University Press), vol. 2, 184-185.
253
explicit here: the language divide is the divide between the English and the
Normans. The last event narrated in the original installment of the Historia
Ecclesiastica, the coronation scene caps the Norman invasion and sets the stage for
the following scenes of Orderic’s representation of England’s history.74 Orderic
makes it a Fall of sorts, the originary disaster that ruins the new dispensation from
the very beginning. The acclamation, says the Historia, was made “with one voice
if not in one language [una voce non unius linguae];” internal division is built into
it. At the moment of creation of the new state, the performative speech act which
marks the legal beginning of Norman rule over England and should launch it on an
auspicious note of harmony, is the very same utterance that enunciates the
difference between the two peoples and insures that no unification will be achieved
without violence.
All Anglo-Norman historiography registers – or constructs, perpetuates –
the presence of two distinct groups in post-Conquest England in the first
generations after the invasion. In these three representations of the coronation of
William the Conqueror, language assumes a decisive role in an overdetermined,
symbolic scene. In these texts, the moment of political fusion entails linguistic
confusion. The marker of the division between two distinct gentes is the presence
74
The account of the Conquest, ending with the coronation, was what Orderic first
wrote (1114-1124) when he began work on the Historia. Eventually it became Book III of
a massive work which ran to thirteen books by the time Orderic left off in 1141. See
Ord.Vit., vol. 1, 45-48.
254
of their two languages. Language is figured as the defining difference between the
Angli and the Normanni or Franci.
Representing the language divide in vernacular histories
Moving from Latin historiography to vernacular, Wace’s Roman de Rou
contains a similar representation of language as an immediate and undeniable gulf
between the two groups. Written substantially later than the Latin histories we’ve
been looking at (the events of 1066 appear in a section of the Rou written in the
early 1170s), Wace’s account of the Conquest is nevertheless only the second one
in French.75 Again, the pressured role of language is inscribed in the climactic
scene of the Norman seizure of England, only in this text the culminating event is
the battle not the coronation. Wace does not do anything with the coronation
scene. There is no acclamation in two languages, no riot, no descriptive detail at all
for that matter, just a bare statement occupying twelve lines of verse.76 The Battle
of Hastings, by contrast, expands in importance and becomes the dramatic focal
point in the history of the Norman dukes. From the fruitless parleys between Duke
William and King Harold to nightfall on the day of battle, the confrontation
75
The first is in Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis (1136-1140), which contains an
account of the battle but no mention of the coronation and no reflection, long or short, on
the event of England coming under Norman rule.
76
Wace, Le Roman de Rou de Wace, ed. A.J. Holden, 3 vols., Société des Anciens
Textes Français (Paris: A.&J. Picard, 1970), vol. 2, vv. 8973-8984. Wace did use
William of Poitiers’ Gesta Guillelmi as a source text in writing his dynastic history of the
Normans from Rollo (the Rou of the title) through the triumph of King Henry I of England,
but evidently made very little use of it when constructing his version of the Norman
victory.
255
occupies 2,232 lines of verse in Wace’s final version of the Roman de Rou. In a
narrative spanning 193 years, very nearly one-fifth of the total length of the text is
devoted to the Normans’ forcible capture of England.77
With the battle installed as the gravitational center of the text, the defining
moment of contact between the two gentes is not the voluntary submission of the
English at the official commencement of Norman kingship but the clash of the
English and Normans as enemies on the battlefield. Just as the emphasis on
language within the coronation scene is sigificant in the Latin histories that make
much of the coronation, in the Roman de Rou it is telling to find language
difference surfacing conspicuously in the account of the battle. In Wace’s narration
of the battle, the English and the Normans are contrasted in many ways –
differences in their weaponry, battlefield tactics, morals and habits are noted – but
more than any other aspect of the two gentes, language is repeatedly thrust into the
foreground. Within the battle sequence, the French text contains a very rare
concentration of English words and phrases. Apart from place names there are
almost none anywhere else in the Roman de Rou. Here, there is a repeated,
strategical juxtaposition of French and English.
Cultural differences – divergences in values and comportment – are
translated into, and rendered by means of, language difference. This sceme or
77
Rou, vol. 2, vv. 6741-8972. 193 years: Though earlier events are alluded to, Rou
III picks up in earnest with the assassination of Duke William I in 942; the latest event
mentioned is the death of Henry I in 1135.
256
strategy is quite elaborately carried out in the account of the eve of battle. The
night before the bloodletting, the Normans devote themselves to fasting, penance,
and prayer. The English stay up all night drinking.
Tote noit maingierent e burent, All night long they ate and drank;
Onques la noit el lit ne jurent, that night they never went to bed.
Mult les veïssiez demener, You would have seen them carrying on,
Treper e saillir e chanter. dancing and leaping and singing.
Bublie crient e weisseil “Be blithe!” they cry, and “Wassail!”
E laticome e drincheheil, and “Let it come round!” and “Drink hale!”
Drinc hindrewart e drintome, “Drink up and pass back” and “Drink to me!”
Drinc helf e drinc tome. “Drink down half and drink to me!”
Issi se contindrent Engleis; This is how the English behaved.
E li Normant e li Franceis And the Normans and the Frenchmen?
Tote noit firent oreisons All night long they said their prayers.78
Englishness is represented by English speech. The corresponding
arrangement, using franceis to describe the finer behavior and speech of the
Franceis, would be invisable (or inaudible) against the background of a text
entirely in French, and so Wace devises an ingenious alternative. Where uncouth
English words are invoked to represent the intemperate and irreligious Anglo-
Saxon comportment, the solmnity of the Normans is represented in liturgical Latin,
as Norman priests lead the warriors in accesses of piety (vv. 7369-7337):
Junes font e afflictions They perform fasts and penitence,

E lor privees oreisons, and prayers of private devotion;
Salmes dient e misereles they sing psalms and the Miserere,
Letanies e kirieles litanies and the Kyrie;
Deu requerent e merci crient, they call on God and cry for mercy,
78
Ibid., vol. 2, vv. 7327-7337. Translations are my own. I have taken the liberty of
italicizing the Old English words in the Old French text though Holden does not. I have
also introduced a capital letter at the beginning of each line of O.Fr. verse, to be consistent
with the practice used by most other editors.
257
Paternotres e messes dient, they say Paternosters and Masses;
Li uns Spritus domini, one sings Spritus domini,
Li altre Salus populi, another Salus populi,
Plusors Salve sancta parens. and several Salve sancta parens.
The next day, battle is joined, and the confrontation is represented as one of
clashing languages. Instead of the clamor of arms and cries of agony which
provide the usual soundtrack in medieval battle narratives, Wace’s description of
Hastings is a bilingual melee of human speech, full of taunts and battle cries in the
two tongues (vv. 8057-8058):
Normant escrient “Deus aïe!” The Normans cry, “With the help of God!”
La gent englesche “Ut!” escrie. and the English people cry “Get out!”
Battle cries are a peculiarly loaded form of speech. Meaning and reference
are reduced to non-essentials; luxuries as it were, in a wartime verbal exchange
whose stakes are death. In place of semantic content, a war cry is overcharged with
illocutionary and perlocutionary function; it is a speech act in which the sounding
of the word is the goal and meaning of the utterance, and one whose effect on the
hearer is to provoke emotion rather than to convey information. It is a short,
concentrated burst at once wish, weapon, and flag. The Normans shout “Deus aïe!”
with the hope that it will be no sooner said than God will indeed aid and favor them
in battle. The English bawl “Ut!” with the intention that that syllable will begin to
fling the invaders back toward the beachhead and out of England. The war cry’s
perlocutionary functions are to terrify and demoralize the enemy, and to fire up
courage on one’s own side. In addition to these performative functions, the battle
258
cry is a powerful sign and several-purposed expression of group identity. It is an
insignia that identifies the individual members to each other and to the antagonists.
A shared act shouted in unison, it functions to tighten the unity that it proclaims.
Signalling the group’s agreed aggressive intention toward those outside the group,
it contributes to turning non-members into antagonists, enmies. Scholarly
discussion of group identity abounds with talk of borders and frontiers, of drawing
boundaries and discriminating between insider and outsider. These locutions are
all essentially figural. A war cry has the express purpose of establishing lines of
battle in the most literal way. Its dividing function is so literal and violent as to be
lethal. If used effectively, your interlocutor will end up dead.
The battle cry, in short, is a verbal identity marker of the most potent sort.
This is the context in which Wace’s Rou sites its representation of the Normans and
English as two people defined by their languages. Unlike many Old French texts
which seem to relish repeating their French heroes’ war cries (the Chanson de
Roland comes strongly to mind), in the Rou the battle cries of the English sound
more loudly and persistently than those of the Normans.79 They provide additional
79
Cf. also Rou II, vv. 3925-3927: in his account of a Norman victory over France
and its allies, Wace takes a moment to list the battle cries of the French (“Monjoie!”), the
Normans (“Deus aïe!”), the Flemish (“Arras!”), the Angevins (“Valie!”), and the count of
Chartres (“Chartres!”). The last three make a battle cry out of the name of an important
place within the army’s home territory, adding another level of identification between the
nation, their state/territory, and their war cry. Note, though, that none of these battle cries
is given nearly the amount of attention that Wace devotes to the war cries of the English,
and none of these others involves Wace in translating foreign words.
259
occasion for English words to break into the lines of French text, and for English
language to stand as the banner and totem of the English people.
Alierot sovent crioent “Holy Rood!” they often cried,

E Godemite reclamoent and called out “God Almighty!”
Alierot est en engleis Holy Rood is in English
Que Sainte Croiz est en franceis, what “Sainte Croiz” is in French,
E Godamite est altretant and likewise God Almighty is
Com en franceis Deu tot poissant. the same as “Deu tot poissant” in French.80
The reader, or listener, is not allowed to forget that the Norman annexation
of England involves a collision of two people with different tongues. Giving literal
French equivalents side by side with the alien words, the text locks the two
languages in tight alternation. The juxtaposition highlights confrontation and
alterity, but also calls attention to congruence: what engleis is for the English,
franceis is for the Normans. The two language-names, with their adjectival
endings, rhyme and are yoked in a couplet: this gently reinforces their parallel
function and points out their complementarity. The two halves of the couplet, the
two sides of a functional equivalency, engleis and franceis are the two sides of the
battle, and the two gentes of the Anglo-Norman state which results from the battle.
The narrator mediates between the two languages, bringing them onstage
side by side and also conspicuously providing translation between engleis and
franceis. This is more than a practical concession to the expectation that his
audience will not understand the English words. (Wace’s immediate audience was
80
Ibid., vol. 2, vv. 7983-7988.
260
expected to be the royal court of Henry II, which in the 1170s was predominantly
French-speaking.) Translation – or rather, the need for it, the failure of the two
people to meet on common ground – is very much part of the linguistic drama that
has been constructed within the battle scene. As in the three versions of the
coronation scene, incomprehension is the point. The two languages, at the
inauguration of the Norman controlled England, are strangers to each other, a
division with no bridge. In the battle, the two peoples are perfectly able to kill each
other but they cannot understand each other.
Quant Normant chient Engleis crient, When Normans fall the English call out;
De paroles se contralient, they swap insulting words
E mult sovent s’entredefient, and defy each other, back and forth,
Mais ne sevent qu’entredient; but neither knows what the other says.
Hardi fierent, coart s’esmaient, The brave strike hard, the cowards quail.
Normant dient qu’Engleis abaient The Normans say that the English bark,
Por la parole qu’il ne n’entendent. in a speech they can’t make sense of.81
Two languages are present, but the text is also representing
incomprehension and foreignness. The contending forces are two strong princes,
two armies of massed men, but also, the text emphasizes, two gentes with their two
different languages. By staging language contact and language difference within
the context of the climactic battle scene that is the dramatic center of its entire
historiographical performance – and pointedly, within that scene, in the form of the
battle cries of the two colliding peoples – the Roman de Rou constructs a
81
Ibid., vol. 2, vv. 8063-8069.
261
representation of the Norman capture of England in which the decisive identifiers
of the English and the Normans are their respective languages.
The Normans’ Latin and vernacular histories provide narrative testimony to
the perceived importance of the language divide in England after the Conquest.
Indirect and oblique as their commentary may seem to us, it is more than we get
from English sources. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, virtually our sole source for
English-language historiography until the 13th century, have nothing to say on the
matter. A, B, C, and F all end, discontinued or partly lost, before the Norman
invasion. Manuscript D has a relatively full account of the battle and William’s
consecration by Bishop Ealdred, but no mention of languages in these scenes, or
anywhere else. Version E has a much shorter account; in fact, its interpolation
concerning some trouble between William and the abbot of Peterborough occupies
more lines of its entry for 1066 than the narration of the Norman conquest of
England!
This leaves us with histories written in Latin by ‘native’ Englishmen.
Eadmer’s Historia Novorum in Anglia (relevant portion c.1109) is silent on the
matter of language. Its Canterbury author is less interested in the Conquest than in
Archbishop Anselm’s struggles with the Norman kings over the royal investiture of
bishops. Although the Historia Anglorum (c.1130) was conceived and constructed
as a history of the English, as declared by the title chosen by its author, it can only
with reservations be considered a native English source. Henry of Huntingdon was
262
of mixed Norman and English parentage and was raised in a clerical milieu
dominated by Anglo-Normans rather than Englishmen.82 In any case, his narration
of the conquest and coronation passes without any mention that the two armies
speak different languages. This is about all there is for historiographical sources
that can be considered to represent an indigenous English point of view.83
An informative trace of a ‘native’ English perspective comes from an
unexpected quarter: from Odense, where in 1122 or thereabouts an Anglo-Saxon
exile, one Ælnoth of Canterbury, wrote a biography of Danish kings Svein
Estrithsson and Cnut IV. In at least two instances, he calls the oppressors of the
English “the Romans or Frenchmen [Romani ceu Francigeni].” In another passage
he drops the Francigeni and refers to them as as “eisdem Romanis.”84 His unusual
choice of gens-name indicates that Ælnoth defined the invaders by their language.
In what other sense could the Normans and their other Gallic allies possibly have
82
Gillingham, “Revival of the English Nation” (2000), 128.
83
With its Northumbrian preoccupations, the Libellus de exordio atque procursu
istius, hoc est Dunhelmensis ecclesie [Tract on the Origins and Progress of this the Curch
of Durham] (1104-1115) is a valuable source of specialized local information on northern
England, but its author, Simeon of Durham, was a Norman or French cleric. The same is
likely true of the anonymous author of The Hyde Chronicle (1120s or 1130s) despite its
likely connection with the earls of Surrey. (See Gillingham, op.cit., 142-144.) The
Miraculi sancti Eadmundi is an early source (late 11th c.) but it too is now thought to have
been written by a Continental cleric, in spite of its attribution to Hermann of Bury St.
Edmunds (A. Gransden, “The Composition and Authorship of the ‘De miraculis sancti
Eadmundi’ Attributed to ‘Hermann the Archdeacon’,” Journal of Medieval Latin 5 (1995)
1-52, cited by van Houts, The Normans in Europe, 171).
84
Gesta Swenomagni regis et filiorum eius et passio gloriosissimi Canuti regis et
martyris. [The Deeds of Svein the Great and his Sons, and the Glorious Passion of Cnut,
King and Martyr], ed. M.C. Gertz (Copenhagen, 1908), cited in E.M.C. van Houts, “The
Norman Conquest through European Eyes” 1999, 837.
263
been considered romani? It is not hard to see how the Normans’ language was the
one characteristic that led Ælnoth to label them romani: though they were certainly
not in the habit of calling themselves romani, the Normans (like the French and
everyone else in the romance-vernacular regions on both sides of the Pyrenees)
called their language romanz, and it is perfectly plausible that Ælnoth knew this
and thought of them as romanz-speakers. From their language this Englishman
derived his sense of who these foreign people were, and from their own
longstanding language-name he improvised an otherwise-meaningless gens-name
for them.
Ælnoth’s move of calling the Norman romani is an example in action of the
expectation, in the medieval mind, that each language belongs to a corresponding
gens. This fundamental assumption about languages and peoples usually worked in
the other direction, with a language named after the people who speak it. (Hence
the Saxons have their lingua Saxonum in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, and the
sarrazin speak lengua sarrazinesca in the 11th-century Occitan Canso de Sancta
Fides.)85 In England, in Latin texts (but not Old English ones) this paradigm
sometimes had the result that the language spoken by the Normans was identified
as “Norman.” The Normans’ Old French was so firmly associated with the
Normans that Latin texts in post-Conquest England occasionally refer to it as
85
Marc Reydellet, ed., Étymologies, livre IX (Paris: Société d’Éditions “Les Belles
Lettres,” 1984); Ord.Vit., III.7, III.22; Robert Lafont, ed., La Chanson de Sainte Foi
(Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1998), v. 17.
264
lingua normannica instead of using older tags such as lingua romana or sermo
vulgaris.86 In William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum (c.1135), when
Wulfstan, the bishop of Worcester and a native Englishman, goes before a council
of England’s prelates he has to speak through a translator, a monk “who was far
from being a skilled speaker but had some knowledge of the Norman tongue
[minimae facundiae viro sed Normannicae linguae sciolo].”87 John of Worcester’s
Chronicle (c. 1120-1140) furnishes a second example, in its entry for 1101, a time
when England was ruled by the Conqueror’s third son, King Henry I, and
Normandy ruled by the eldest, Robert Curthose. Preparing to attack his brother,
“Duke Robert of Normandy raised a large force of horsemen, archers, and
footsoldiers in the place which is called in the Norman tongue [Nortmannica
lingua] Ultresport.”88
These instances of Latin texts advancing Normannica lingua as a name for
the Normans’ Old French demonstrate that the Normans and their language were
particularly closely associated in post-Conquest England. That “the Norman
language” should be thus named in England but not on the Continent, and in Latin
86
The 12th century saw the rise of other gens-specific designators such as lingua
gallica and francigena lingua. These, I believe, gained currency only after the Anglo-
Norman metalinguistic shift had taken place and disseminated the recognition of Old
French (franceis) as a language distinct from other forms of romanz.
87
William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed. and trans. R.A.B. Mynors et
al., III. 303.
88
“Comes Nortmannorum Rotbertus, equitum, sagittariorum, et peditum, non
parvum congregans multitudinem in loco, qui Nortmannica lingua dicitur Ultresport.”
John of Worcester, Chronicle, ed. and trans. P. McGurk, vol.3, 96. Cf. also the Mappa
Mundi attributed to Gervase of Canterbury (c.1185-1200): the linguam Normannicam is
listed one of the four languages of England.
265
texts but not English, also complies with the hypothesis offered in this chapter. It is
not that the English or the Anglo-Normans thought that the language of the
Normans was distinct from the language of the French, only that in the context of
England in the first few generations after the Conquest, it was firmly associated
with Normans. That the French also spoke it too was irrelevant. As for the
language itself, whatever else it might also be, it was conspicuously the language of
the Normanni.
This process of marking the language and the people with the same name –
the expected norm according to medieval thinking about languages and language
diversity, but so significant in this case because Romance vernacular(s) had never
enjoyed this ‘normal’ relationship with a national identity – was what was going on
when the post-Conquest Normans arrived at the pass of identifying their own gens
as Franceis and identifying their vernacular as franceis.
The English name for the French language
I have been arguing that the practice of identifying their nation by its
language and vice-versa was a practice the Normans borrowed from the English.
Both the conceptual position and the vocabulary with which it was articulated were
a result of contact with the English. So far we have excellent evidence, I believe,
that the practice of identifying the Normans as ‘French’ [Franci, Franceis] was
directly related to – or in linguistic terminology, motivated by – the identity shift
resulting from the Conquest of England. In the new circumstance of being a people
266
defined by their relationship with the English caused the Normans to refashion their
construct of national identity.
We have found pretty fair evidence that the terminology of this new manner
of identifying the Norman nation was the result of the language contact with the
English. Ample documentation shows that language contact was active within the
very discourses implicated in constructing Anglo-Norman identity. Moreover, we
have been able to trace the adoption of Franci, Franceis as a linguistic event,
namely the direct translation of the 11th-century English gens-name Frenciscan.
Following the investigation over into Old English, we have progressed to
examining evidence concerning what it meant to define the Normans as
Frenciscan, seeking to make out the shape of the signified that can be deduced
from the word, the constructs implied in the English terminology for the Normans
(and for the other groups – Frankish/French, Scandinavian – the not-Normans
against whom the Norman nation, in contradistinction, took its definitional
borderlines). Operating partly by elimination, we have progressed to an answer to
the question, What was it about the Normans that made the English define them as
French-like? It was not because they were thought of as Frenchmen, and not
because the place they came from was part of France, but because the English
perceived them as French-like in language. Narrative texts have lent some
worthwhile, if circumstantial, evidence that language difference was the decisive
thing when it came to defining the Normans in England. To this I believe we can
267
now add some linguistic evidence in support of the notion that the English manner
of conceptualizing the Normans as a group was focused on what they spoke.
It may well be that Old English Frenciscan, like Ælnoth’s Romani, was a
gens-name derived from an existing language-name. Before Frenciscan was
formed as a gens-name for the Normans, before the English had much occasion to
recognize or write about the people of Normandy, it is possible that Old English
already had the substantive frencisc to denote the language spoken by the Francan,
who had been part of the English peoples’ world since Merovingian and
Carolingian times.89 Later, when the Normans entered the consciousness, politics,
and affairs of the English, and the English enlisted the word Frencisc to designate
these new arrivals, whom they recognized as French-like but not French, they were
defining them by the language they spoke. The nation-to-language relationship
implied in the Old English usage was that the Franks/French [Francan] spoke
frencisc. This is a good occasion to repeat that it is no part of my hypothesis to
suggest that the English ever thought of frencisc as a thing spoken only by the
Frenciscan [Normans] and not by the Francan [Franks/French]. The English felt
that the Frenciscan (the Normans), though distinguished from the Francan as a
89
Cf. brittisc, englisc, grecisc, pyhtisc [Pictish], scyttisc [Scottish]. My conjecture
that frencisc could have denoted Old French as noun – ie., as a language-name – rather
than as an adjective (eg. in a phrase such as frencisc spræc [‘Frankish speech’] or frencisc
gereord [‘Frankish language’]) early on, and thus been available to transfer from one noun
to another (language-name to gens-name) is supported by the case of the word englisc, the
oldest known language-name in Old English, which lexicographers believe was used as a
substantive without the intervening step of being a modifying adjective in phrases (eg.
englisc spræc) from which the noun was gradually omitted. See OED, 2nd ed., vol.5, 254.
268
group or gens, spoke the same thing as the Francan. The ‘choice’ – if a term
implying deliberate volition can be applied to the anonymous workings of a
language – to describe or define the Normans using the signifier that already
denoted the language, would indeed be a strong indicator that the English found the
Normans French-like in language. To call the Normans Frenciscan was to identify
them, above all else, by the language they spoke.
Did it happen like this? Was there indeed a causal connection between the
English people’s observation that the Normans spoke frencisc and their practice of
calling them Frencisc? It is not impossible that there was nothing more at work
than a sort of lexical coincidence. It might have been a purely accidental
convergence, due to a shortage of available words, perhaps, or a poverty of
invention. The reconstruction offered just now is, like all reconstructions,
conjectural. The hypothesis that the English identified the Normans primarily,
centrally, by the language they spoke requires that frencisc existed as a language-
name in Old English before, or at the same time as, it was enlisted as the English
gens-name for the Normans.
As it happens, frencisc is in fact attested early, as a language-name and at
just the ‘right’ time. As we saw earlier in the chapter, the term Frenciscan is first
witnessed in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, where it designates identifiably Norman
individuals and groups, namely the unwanted foreign favorites in the time of
Æthelred the Ill-Advised and Edward the Confessor. The oldest attestation is C’s
269
entry regarding the trouble stirred up by “the Norman officer Hugh [þone
frenciscan ceorl Hugan]” in 1003.90 The earliest attested occurrence in the English
language of the language-name frencisc seems to be in Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion,
which was written between 1010 and 1012.91 A monk and school master at
Ramsey Abbey in Cambridgeshire, Byrhtferth was active as a hagiographer,
chronicler, and author of a Computus, a guide to the mathematics and astronomy of
the Christian calendar. Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion is a compendious and eccentric
text: it is primarily an English version, with commentary, of his Latin Computus,
but also contains excurses on such diverse topics as numerology, accent marks, and
weights and measures. The language-name frencisc appears once in the text, in a
digression on rhetorical figures available to writers and pitfalls to be avoided.
Giving an example of one of the latter, Byrhtferth sets up a hypothetical situation
involving a person who “speaks in French but does not know how to speak rightly
[sprycð on Frencisc and þæt ne can ariht gecweðan].”92
Byrhtferth’s mention of French is valuable for a number of reasons. First, it
confirms beyond doubt that the language-name frencisc was in use in English by
1012 at the latest. As far as the scanty textual evidence allows us to determine,
90
ASC C 1003. This instance of frencisc can be dated to the period between 1003
(the earliest possible date that the entry for 1003 could have been composed) and c.1040,
the latest estimated point at which this portion of manuscript C could have been
manufactured.
91
Byrhtferth, Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion, ed. and trans. Peter S. Baker and Michael
Lapidge (Oxford: Early English Text Society, 1995), xxvi-xxviii.
92
Ibid., II.i.452; pp. 88, 90.
270
then, the language-name and the gens-name appear at almost exactly the same time.
By the beginning of the 11th century, the term Frencisc was used for the Norman
people and for the romanz they spoke. At this early date, and long before the post-
Conquest Normans began to borrow the English practice of identifying their group
as Frenciscan/Franci/Franceis, the gens-name already coincided with the
language-name.
The passage from Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion is still more revealing in the way
it captures an English thinker treating frencisc like a language. The Byrhtferth text
represents frencisc as a language with rules of normative correctness. He uses it,
without any fanfare, in an example of grammatical and lexical gaffes, just as
centuries of Latin grammars and Latin rhetorical treatises bristle with illustrative
examples in Latin and Greek. Discussion of a lexical error in French – the very
idea of poor usage – absolutely presumes that French has rules and standards,
correct forms and solecisms. Using a French sentence in an exemplum just as he
uses Latin and English elsewhere also positions frencisc (matter-of-factly, as if it
were perfectly ordinary) as a language parallel to these other two – not as an equal
necessarily, but congruent, a bird of the same feather, another of the world’s
languages. This is the metalinguistic view of their romanz that the Normans
encountered in England. After several centuries’ habit of considering their way of
speaking to be the late-lingering, decrepit, illiterate version of what their Roman
271
forebears spoke, it represented a radically different understanding of the Old French
language.
The English habit of ‘treating the Normans’ vernacular as a language’ is
easier to understand when seen in practice. To see an English writer thinking of
frencisc as a language on a par with English, we need go no further than the second
recorded instance of the language-name frencisc in Old English, in a text of c.
1100. The text is manuscript F of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, and the word’s
position as a gloss rather than in the text proper adds somewhat to its interest.93
Among the events recorded for the year 1017, the F version mentions the marriage
of King Cnut: “in this same year the king had Æthelred’s widow, Richard’s
daughter, brought over to be his queen [on þysum ylcan geare het se cing feccan
Æðelredes lave Ricardes dohter him to cwene].” The entry also appears in versions
C, D, and E, and all three are very similar to F in wording. In C, D, and E,
however, the entry for 1017 ends right there: the once and future queen, brought
back from Normandy where she was living in exile as a guest of her brother, Duke
Richard II, is not called by name. The F-scribe remedies that lack, continuing the
sentence with these words of explanation:
93
The fact that it is in a gloss probably explains why this second attestation of the
language-name frencisc does not appear in the digital Dictionary of Old English Corpus.
For the text of F, the DOE Corpus uses the authoritative Baker edition (ASC F), in which
these gloss words appear in the apparatus but not in the body of the text. See ASC F, 110,
notes 1 and 2.
272
þæt was Ælfgiue on englisc Ymma.on frencisc
[this was Ælfgifu in English, Emma. in French].94
The addition of the language-names seems like the afterthought to an
afterthought. The F-scribe apparently decided on his own initiative to add
information lacking in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle manuscripts he was copying
from – a liberty he, and many medieval redactors, take quite often. He provided the
queen’s two names, the Anglo-Saxon name she had taken as Æthelred’s bride and
the birth-name she had brought with her from her native Normandy. But then
having added the proper names, he went back and added “on englisc” and “on
frencisc” above the finished line, as if he thought it best to explain why he gives
two different names for the queen.
With this gloss, the F-Scribe provides us with an English text in which the
Normans are called Frencisce and a Norman person’s native language is called
frencisc.95 This is one of the very few instances, at this early date of the language-
94
ASC F, 110; for layout, see David Dumville, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A
Collaborative Edition vol.1, Facsimile of Manuscript F, the Domitian Bilingual
(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995), fo. 66r. Baker does not comment on these two words of
gloss, perhaps finding no reason to doubt that they were written by the the project’s main
hand, the F-scribe as Baker calls him, who was responsible for nearly every bit of script on
the folios of MS F, including additions made in the top and bottom margins and sometimes
between the lines. In the facsimile (ibid.) it is readily seen that the glosses are in the same
hand as the main text, or else one even more similar to it than that of the other 12th century
scribes who made minor contributions to the manuscript.
95
Frencisce as a gens term does not appear in this same passage but is used with
reference to Normans elsewhere in F, as it is in C, D, and E. In F, see entries for 1003 and
1051 (in which latter, interestingly, the word was erased by an editor [the F-Scribe, Irvine
supposes] who did not then decide what to replace it with [see Irvine ed., Collab.Ed., 125
n.5].
273
name frencisc, and here` the implied speakers (the people who call the Duke’s
daughter Emma) are clearly Normans. In addition, this text is exactly
contemporary with the advent of the language-name franceis in the first texts of the
Old French literature launched in Anglo-Norman England. (The F-scribe produced
his redaction of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles c. 1100 to 1110; the first recorded
instance of the language-name franceis in Old French is in Philippe de Thaon’s
Computus, written in England in 1113.)
The passage pairs frencisc and englisc in parallel: the referent in question
(in this case it happens to be a person) has a name in frencisc and another in
englisc. The two peoples of the state each have their respective language. To the
English writer of c.1100 the Normans frencisc is a language like English. As we
will see again and again in the next chapter, this immediate juxtaposition of the two
languages of England is an arrangement very characteristic of 12th century Anglo-
Norman vernacular writers’ usage of the ‘new’ language-name franceis.
The fact that 11th century English had a language-name for Old French is
quite significant. Or, to be more precise, the important thing was not the name itself
but the complex of metalinguistic assumptions which were presupposed in the
English approach to denoting the Normans’ speech. The thesis that a post-
Conquest change in the Normans’ identity construct was instrumental in their
innovation of writing of Old French is built around the evidence that the Normans
shifted to a new metalinguistic position in which they saw their vernacular as a
274
language. Coming to recognize their romanz as a language, as proposed in Chapter
Two, involved framing it as a thing separate from Latin, as the perfectly correct and
appropriate way for their people to communicate. Informed by medieval
theoretical assumptions about languages and meaning, seeing their vernacular as a
language included understanding it as a complete, consistent system, with their
word for each thing as valid as another language’s word; understanding it as a
medium of exchange capable of receiving and expressing meaning that had been
clothed in the words of another language. With those qualities, their romanz – or
franceis as they also began to call it in England – was competent for translation, for
the transmission and preservation of knowledge, and for the making of books.
When the Normans arrived in England in the 11th century, they found their
romanz was already labeled with a term which positioned it a distinct language
rather than a generic ‘way of speaking.’ It was, definitionally, constructed as
belonging to a specific, finite set of speakers, the Francan and Frenciscan. A
language-name in a way that romanz never was, it associated the language with a
particular people within the larger romance area, at a time when such a
differentiation did not exist within the romance-speaking area and all the
vernaculars were conceived of as romanz or volgare. As the Normans (or a subset
of them) became a people defined by and against the English, paired with the
English as the two ethnic nationes of the drastically new polity, and as they adopted
English ways of identifying their gens, language moved to the core of what defined
275
them. They were defined as the group that spoke frencisc rather than englisc,
franceis rather than engleis. Presumably they did not especially think that they
spoke a thing any different from what the French spoke.96 But they did, for the first
time, think of their vernacular as a language which, whatever it was doing
elsewhere, in England set them apart, corresponded to their group, belonged to
them, and was a language matching a gens. In England, by contact and contrast,
the Normans’ French acquired a nationality, borderlines, an outside and an inside.
96
For frencisc/franceis to take its place in the roll of the world’s languages, but as
language corresponding to two gentes, was not actually in violation of the theoretical
proposition that a language defines a nation and a nation has its language. As Isidore of
Seville sets forth in the beginning of book IX of his Etymologiae, “On the Languages of
Nations [De linguis gentium]”: “In the beginning there were as many languages created as
nations, but afterward more nations than languages, since many nations are spring up from
a single language” [“Initio autem quot gentes tot linguae ferunt, deinde plures gentes quam
linguae, quia ex una lingua multae sunt gentes exortae”] (Etym. IX.1.1). This same idea is
found flourishing in the 11th century in Goscelin of St.-Bertin’s Liber Confortatorius
(1082-1083): “Indeed, we know that sometimes many gentes are subsumed under one
language, so that the Greeks comprise Athenians, Mycenaeans, Thebans…and the Gauls
[include/embrace] the Franks, the Allobroges, Auvergnates, Beturici, Normans, Mainers,
Angevins, Poitevins, Gascons, and Barcelonans.” A language may count two nationes
among its speakers, and yet be recognized as a single language, but there can be no
language without some recognizable nation of speakers. Latin and romanz were, as
discussed in Ch. 2, exceptions (or rather, a single exception). C.H. Talbot, ed., The Liber
Confortatorius of Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Studia Anselmiana 38 (1955), 86.
276
Appendix
Franci and Normanni before the Conquest
Historical background and
Historiographical Texts before 1066
Historical background
The Normans were the product of the invasion and settlement of a particular
strip of the Frankish coast by Scandinavian invaders in the 9th and 10th centuries.
The first of the Norman’s own histories tells it like this: in 876, after a peaceable
lay-over in England and a fierce conquest of the Frisian coast, a band of Danes
under their leader Rollo landed in the Franks’ land [Francia], at the mouth of the
Seine. For more than a year they pillaged and raided, sacking towns and
sometimes meeting the Franks in pitched battle. In 911, at St. Claire on the River
Epte, Rollo met with Charles III (Charles the Simple), the king of the west Franks,
to make a treaty of peace between the two peoples. Rollo became the king’s man,
performing the ceremonial gesture of placing his folded hands between the kings’
two hands, and in return was given the whole land west of the Epte as his private
277
and hereditary property. Rollo accepted Christian baptism from the archbishop of
Rouen, took the Frankish name Robert, and married King Charles’ daughter Gisla.1
Exalted with an official-sounding name, the Treaty of St.-Claire-sur-Epte
has been enshrined by modern historians as the event that clearly inaugurates the
duchy of Normandy. The year 911, like 1066 or 1776, provides a gratifyingly
precise birth date, a crisp dividing line for when we can stop thinking of this group
as marauding Vikings and begin thinking of them as the Normans we associate
with cathedrals, castles, and Conquests. This is approximately what Dudo of St.
Quentin may have had in mind when he crafted this story for the official history
commissioned from him by the dukes of Normandy. The scene painted by Dudo
asserts a number of important ideological claims in compact narrative form. The
scene establishes that the Normans enjoy legitimate lordship over territory formally
cession by the king of the Franks. The dukes of Normandy formally recognize the
overlordship of France, yet hold their land as an outright grant and remain
autonomous.2 Also present are the crucial elements of the Scandinavian raiders’
1
Lair, Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de Normandie 3rd ser., vol. 3, part 2 (Sept
1865), Ch. II, lines 11-31. This ed. hereafter abbreviated ‘Dudo’. Eric Christansen, trans.,
History of the Normans (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998). Dudo offers no date for the
Treaty of St. Claire. The year 911 is the date assigned to the Treaty by modern scholars,
because the event which evidently brought the invaders to the bargaining table, their defeat
outside of Chartres, took place in that year.
2
Dudo II.28 specifes that the king gives Rollo the land “for himself and for his
successors, as if it were his private and allodial land, in perpetuity [ut teneat ipse et
successores ejus...quasi fundum et allodum, in sempiternum]” (Christiansen, trans., 49).
278
peaceful assimilation to Frankish ways: intermixing, in the person of Rollo’s
marriage to the Charles’ daughter Gisla, and conversion to Christianity.
This representation of the Norman state at its moment of inception is more
useful as a statement of the ideology of the Norman dukes in the text’s own time (c.
996-1020) than as a reliable account of an historical event. The formation of the
Norman state and people was a considerably more gradual process. The future
founders of Normandy were just one (or more) among many Scandinavian war
bands which had been terrorizing, and sometimes occupying, the Franks’ northwest
coast since the beginning of the ninth century. In this period the area that was to
become Normandy was a relatively neglected province at the westward extremity
of a fractured, decentralized Frankish kingdom. For the Carolingian kings it was
little more than a buffer zone against the Bretons. Its principal city, Rouen, was
still the functioning seat of a bishopric throughout the declining years of the tenth
century, but it is not certain there was a count governing there. When the Viking
ships came ashore, the Seine region had no powerful Frankish noble with the self-
interest and power to fight off the invaders.3 The Church too soon ceased to
function as a governing force: most of the bishops fled and the rich land-owning
monasteries were abandoned.
Though 876 is the year assigned to Rollo’s arrival by Dudo and the Norman
history-writers who followed him, modern historians suppose it would have been
3
Eleanor Searle, Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power (Berkeley:
University of California Press), 34-35.
279
around 900.4 Dudo’s embroidery notwithstanding, Rollo actually existed and is
attested in other contemporary sources, including a charter of Charles the Simple
written in 918, which establishes that by that date Rollo and his band had already
been granted land around Rouen. Rollo – or more properly Hrolf, as he was called
in his own language – probably was from Norway himself, but Normandy’s
Scandinavian settlers included both Norwegians and Danes, with the latter perhaps
predominating.5
If the Scandinavians of Rollo’s settlement at Rouen were at first no
different from other Viking war bands, they were soon distinguished by their
staying power, expansion, and their success in organizing a territory with
substantial governance and administration. The expansion happened rapidly, under
the groups’ first two leaders, Rollo (r. c.900?-928) and his son William Longsword
(r. 928-942), bringing Normandy to very nearly the size it would still have in 1066.6
The Normans’ power soon attracted the hostility of their neighbors. In 925 Rollo’s
army was battered by the pooled forces of the counts of Flanders and the
Vermandois, with the blessing of France’s King Raoul.7 In December of 942
William Longsword, who seems to have earnestly tried to be a faithful vassal of the
4
Elisabeth van Houts, The Normans in Europe (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2000),14.
5
Hrolf might have become Rol in the Old French of the local Franks, whence the
Latinized form Rollo and the Rou of the 12th-century Anglo-Norman history writers (see
Christiansen, 187 n.116). Re. original ‘nationality’ of Rollo and the settlers: van Houts,
The Normans in Europe, 1, 15-18, 54-55.
6
David Bates, Normandy Before 1066 (New York: Longman, 1982), 9-11.
7
Ibid., 10.
280
rex Francorum, was assassinated at a parley on an island in the Somme by order of
the count of Flanders. Less than two years later, hoping to capitalize on the shaky
rule of Longsword’s young son Duke Richard I, the Franks under King Louis IV
attempted a large-scale reconquest of Normandy and nearly succeeded.
The long reign of Richard I (942-996) was devoted to consolidation rather
than expansion. From the beginning, Rollo and his successors tried to maintain
organized government in their territory, using existing Frankish institutions.8 By
the end of the 10th century Normandy was a full-fledged state and, by medieval
standards, a solid and cohesive one, with well-defined borders, relatively strong
central control, and a good degree of internal peace.
The 10th century was also the period of assimilation in Normandy, the time
in which the Normans, politically and culturally, moved further and further from
their Scandinavian roots and became part of the Frankish world. The process of
acculturation included linguistic assimilation. Obviously, the original invaders,
reinforcements and immigrants who followed, and presumably the first one or two
generations of their descendents, spoke the languages of their Scandinavian
homelands. They brought with them at least two languages or dialects, which
shared a large degree of mutual intelligibility.9 Scandinavians of whatever origin
8
Ibid., 11.
9
The consensus among current linguists is that the common North Germanic
ancestor or array from which all the Scandinavian languages descend divided into two
groups in the 9th century. The Norwegian contingent among the Normans would have
spoken Old Norse (or West Scandinavian) and those from Denmark Old Danish (East
281
were never more than a small minority, however, and the Scandinavian languages
were eventually edged out by the romance vernacular of the Frankish majority.10
As to the timing of the language shift, we have the testimony of two early-
11th century history texts. Adhemar of Chabannes’ Chronicon (c. 1026-1033)
represents it as a sudden conversion which occurred during the childhood of
Rollo’s son, William Longsword.11 Dudo’s De moribus et actis praises William
Longsword’s diligence in sending his own son Richard from Rouen to Bayeux to
learn the ancestral language of their people.12 Taken at face value, this would mean
that when Richard was of school age and William Longsword still alive – that is,
around 940 – French had effectively replaced Danish and Norse in some places but
not all, and Normandy was a bilingual realm, split geographically.
These two medieval sources simplify the process of linguistic assimilation
and may exaggerate its promptness, but the Normans’ adoption of French must
have started through the process of intermarriage soon after their arrival, and
accelerated in the second half of the 10th century when the influx of new
Scandinavian immigrants dwindled. In the mid-10th century, the process of
linguistic assimilation was underway but was probably far from complete. As
Scandianvian). T. Eythórsson, “Norse and Icelandic” in Encyclopedia of Languages and

Linguistics, 2nd ed., ed. K. Brown (Boston: Elsevier, 2006), vol. 8, 703; M. Durrell,
“Germanic Languages,” loc.cit., vol. 5, 53.
10
Small minority: Cassandra Potts, “Normandy, 911-1144,” in A Companion to the
Anglo-Norman World, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Elisabeth van Houts (Woodbridge:
Boydell Press, 2003), 22.
11
Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis 129 (Turnout: Brepols, 2003), III.27.
12
Dudo, IV.68.
282
David Bates points out, in 940 or thereabouts some of the first generation of
Rollo’s settlers could have still been alive. By the end of the century however, the
Scandinavian languages had essentially disappeared.13
The trends that shaped Normandy in the 10th century continued into the
early part of the 11th century under Richard II, whose long reign of peace and
prosperity (996-1026) saw the continued revival of monasteries and episcopal
administration, the growth of towns, and the furtherance of the duke’s power and
prestige within his territory. Richard II was the first of the Norman rulers to use the
title of duke [dux].14 At this time the western kingdom of the Franks was a tattered
relic of what it had been in its ninth-century Carolingian heyday. By the end of the
10th century, the Carolingian family had been supplanted, and the France of the
Capetian kings – the entity which writers of the time are usually talking about when
they use the name Francia – was a modest territory centered around Paris. In the
vacuum created by the collapse of central control, territories nominally subject to
the rex Francorum became largely independent. In the 11th century, Flanders,
Aquitaine, Blois-Chartres, and Anjou rivaled France in size and resources, and their
powerful counts acted less like vassals at the king’s command than neighboring
sovereigns in a shifting network of alliances and enmities. By Richard II’s time
Normandy had taken its place among these formidable states.
13
Bates, Normandy Before 1066, 15, 20, 21.
14
Ibid., 149.
283
The reign of Richard II also saw the beginning – and the tightening – of the
ties between Normandy and England, the back-story in light of which the conquest
of England in 1066 is revealed as a family drama. In 1002 Richard’s sister Emma
married the king of England, Æthelred II. When the Danish conquest of England
under Sweyn Forkbeard and his son Cnut swept Æthelred Unræd (as he came to be
called; Ethelred the Ill-advised) from the throne in 1013, Emma and her sons
Edward and Alfred took refuge in Normandy, under the protection of her brother
the duke.15 Æthelred’s bid to drive the invaders out, with Norman help, ended with
his death. In 1016 Cnut took up Æthelred’s kingship and, the following year, his
wife. While Emma bore Cnut a son, Harthacnut, and Cnut juggled the crowns of
Denmark, England, and Norway, Edward and Alfred grew to adulthood in
Normandy.
In 1042, after two years on the throne Harthacnut died suddenly, at age 23.
Edward succeeded him with the support of a strong faction of English earls. Not
all of the earls welcomed the reinstatement of the English dynasty, however.
Edward’s particular nemesis was Godwine, earl of Wessex. Godwine and his cadre
of sons and brothers presented an overwhelming threat to the king’s authority,
eventually coming to control every earldom in England except for Mercia. Much
15
Æthelred II is better known as Ethelred the Unready, a form that persists even in
recent scholarship (eg. Wendy Davies, ed., From the Vikings to the Normans, 800-1100
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003]). The familiar sobriquet, catchy as it is, is a
mistranslation: O.E. unræd only looks like “unready”; it is a noun, strictly speaking, and
means ‘bad counsel; foolish advice.’
284
of Edward the Confessor’s reign was spent battling Godwine’s endless rebellions
and conspiracies. Even Edward’s own wife was Godwine’s creature – a sister
whom he had forced on the king. This was the same Godwine who captured
Edward’s brother Alfred, who was subsequently blinded and killed, back in 1036.
With earls such as these in England, it is not surprising that Edward turned to
Normandy once again for support. He had spent some 25 years of his life in
Normandy. The Norman ducal family was his family. When it was in his power to
appoint bishops, advisers, landholders, and new earls, Edward often imported
Normans to fill the posts. It was a logical extension of this policy or preference
that, in 1051, he designated his cousin William, duke of Normandy, to succeed him
as king of England.16
At that time Duke William II was surrounded by enemies at home and could
hardly have expected to claim that inheritance one day. William the Bastard (he
was an illegitimate son of Duke Robert I) had become duke of Normandy in 1035
at the age 7 or 8, and did not overcome the power struggles of his minority until
1047, when he defeated rebellious Norman nobles in battle at Val-ès-Dunes with
the decisive assistance of Henry I of France. True to a pattern already well-
established in Norman history, though, the duke’s French overlord was more often
rival than ally, and Henry I soon became one of William’s fiercest enemies, allying
16
Edward’s nomination of William was, of course, emphasized by medieval
Norman historians, but many modern historians have found the evidence convincing.
Douglas, William the Conqueror (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 169
claims that “there can be no reasonable doubt.”
285
with Geoffrey Martel, the count of Anjou, to invade Normandy in 1053 and again
in 1057. The Normans succeeded in repelling the invaders on both occasions. In
1060 Henry I and Geoffrey Martel both died. William went on the offensive.
Within a few years he brought the large county of Maine under his control and
neutralized the threat of a united and anti-Norman Brittany. By 1066, Normandy
had emerged as the largest and most powerful of the principalities in what is now
northern France. Within his borders, Duke William II enjoyed a degree of central
control rare in medieval states and greater even than what any of his predecessors
in Normandy had achieved.17
This brings us up to the period of the Norman Conquest of England, the
event which, this study contends, is behind the metalinguistic shift whose biggest
symptom was the advent of French literature and, more broadly, written use of the
romance vernaculars.
Historiographical texts before 1066
For this project, the value of looking at these texts is to find if the Normans
ever used the gens-name Franci to identify their own nation before the invasion of
England in 1066 and what role, if any, language played in their definition of the
Norman nation.
17
Bates, Normandy Before 1066, 245; R. Allen Brown, The Normans (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 44-45; Potts, “Normandy, 911-1144,” 32.
286
If the Normans were never called ‘Franks’ or ‘French’ until their invasion
of England, what were they called? In the case of the Normans we are fortunate to
have written records dating back to the beginning, that is from when the
Scandinavian invaders settled at Rouen. What we find is that they were not known
by any gens-name other than Normanni. This is not to say they were not called
anything else; they were also called heathens [pagani] and pirates [pirati], and
perhaps some other choice epithets which have not survived. But as far as gens
names, there is only Normanni.
The earliest sources: Frankish texts
It is not known what the incipient ‘Normans’ at Rouen called themselves.
If Rollo’s band had a name for their group in particular we do not know what it
was. The oldest extant Norman texts date from the mid-900s.18 The earliest
sources of any information on the group that would become the Normans are, not
surprisingly, in Latin. The word Nortmanni or Normanni in these Latin texts is
clearly a borrowing from a Germanic language, but it is not certain which one: it
may have entered Latin from the Scandinavians themselves or from the Franks.19
18
The Lament on the Death of William Longsword, a short Latin planctus mourning
the Norman count’s murder, dates to c. 943-963. There is no evidence that the
counts/dukes produced any written records before the 960s. Norman monastic annals, if
indeed any were produced early on, survive only in later texts which cannot be relied on to
reflect the practices or vocabulary of periods before the mid-11th century. Lament:
Philippe Lauer, ed. La Règne de Louis IV d’Outre-mer (Paris: Émile Bouillon, 1900), 319-
323. Charters: Marie Fauroux, Recueil des actes des ducs de Normandie, 911 à 1066
(Caen: Société des antiquaires de Normandie, 1961), 19.
19
OED, vol.10, 517, does not commit beyond tracing the Old French normant back
to “a reduced form of the Teutonic or Scandinavian Northmann.” French etymological
287
Evidence favors the latter. Norðmenn, literally “Northmen,” but usually denoting
Norwegians, is attested in Old Norse in the 12th century but this does not mean that
it was used by Norwegian raiders in the 9th century, let alone by Danes. These Old
Norse sources, the closest written analogue to the languages of Rollo’s people, are
several centuries too late to be of any use in the matter.20 It is more likely that the
name ‘Northmen’ was bestowed on the raiders from without, by the people who
experienced them as unwelcome attackers from the north. Nordmanni appears
briefly in the Latin of Frankish writers as far back as the 6th century, referring to the
Danes who attacked over their northern border, but then disappears from Latin texts
for more than 200 years.21 The Franks’ use of the term nordman in their own
Germanic language is attested in one of the very few Frankish-language texts
surviving from the period, the Ludwigslied, which was probably written in 882.22
dictionaries are not in agreement on the matter: eg. Jacqueline Picoche, Dictionnaire
etymologique du français (Paris: Le Robert, 1979, 460 derives Old French normand (“mot
servant a designer les evahisseurs scandinaves”) from Frankish *nortman, but Alain Rey
and Tristan Hordél, Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, rev. ed. (Paris:
Dictionnaires le Robert, 1998), vol.2, 2393, traces it instead to Old Norse nord man (an
assertion not strengthened by Rey’s loose handling of the Old Norse). Confusion over
exact lines of descent is understandable, since the Germanic languages of the North Sea
were closely related and the words for “north” and “man” were the same all over the area,
with minimal variations.
20
Old Norse norðmaðr (plu. norðmenn) is attested in early Norse/Icelandic sources
such as the Grágás, a Norse law code preserved in 12th c. manuscripts, and the sagas of the
Norwegian kings as preserved by the 13th c. Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson. Richard
Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfussen, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, 2nd ed. revised by
William A. Craigie, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957, p.457.
21
Rosamund McKitterick, Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians, 751-987
(London: Longman, 1983), 228.
22
Gerhard Köbler, Wörterbuch des Althochdeutschen Sprachschatzes (Paderborn:
Ferdinand Schöningh, 1993), 832.
288
In the Franks’ Latin texts, the name Nordmanni appears as a broadly inclusive term
for Scandinavians, long before Rollo’s band appears on the scene. Einhard’s Vita
Karoli Magni (c. 820-830) provides one of the earliest instances, in a context which
obligingly explains who is meant: among the nationes who live around the Baltic
Sea are “indeed the Danes and the Swedes, whom we call Nordmanni [Dani
siquidem ac Suenos, quos Nordmannos vocamus].”23 Einhard seems to claim
Nordmanni as a Frankish name. Oftentimes when medieval Latin texts go out of
their way to translate terms from or into another language, ‘we’ means ‘we Latin-
users,’ but in this case Dani and Suenos occupy the position of the Latin terms and
Nordmanni is presented as the synonym which ‘we’ Franks use in Frankish. A
contemporary text leaves even less room for doubt. In his Carmen in honorem
Hludovici Caesaris (826-828) Ermold the Black writes,
Hi populi porro veteri cognomine Deni

Ante vocabantur et vociantur adhuc;
Nort – quoque Francisco dicuntur nomine – Manni
Veloces, agiles, armigerique nimis24
[This ancient people have borne the name Danes

(they were called that before and they are called that today
but are also called by their Frankish name Nortmanni);
they are swift, agile, and warlike].
23
Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, ed. G. Waitz and G.H. Pertz, 6th ed., Monumenta
Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum, Separatim Editi
(Hannover: Hahn, 1911; reprinted 1965), § 12, p.15.
24
Edmond Faral, ed., Poème sur Louis le Pieux et épîtres au roi Pépin (Paris:
Champion, 1932; repr 1964), vv. 1892-1895.
289
Here, Nortmanni is presented explicitly as a “Frankish name.”25 Using the
uncommon trope of tmesis, the verse in Ermold saws the word in half, as if the
Latin line rejects the intrusion of the Germanic word. Severed, it stands out (the
tmesis is more effective for this than even our modern convention of setting foreign
words in italics) and attention is drawn to the two separate Frankish words that
make up the compound. The comment identifying the word as a Frankish name is
stuffed between the two severed halves. It is interesting to note that both Einhard
and Ermold – two of the earliest instances I can find of the term Nortmanni – make
a point of identifying it as a Frankish term.
In the early 9th century, of course, the arrival of Rollo’s invaders and their
grant from Charles the Simple are in the future. Throughout the century preceding
the existence of the group we refer to as the Normans, the Franks used Normanni to
refer to any and all of the independent warbands of Scandinavian raiders who
terrorized, pillaged, and sometimes settled the Frankish coast from Frisia to
Bordeaux and penetrated far up the Seine and the Loire. When Ermold refers to the
“Norman realm” and the “Norman lands” [Nortmannica regnum (v. 2028),
Nortmannica rus (v. 2198)], he is referring to the land on the Frisian coast which
Danish king Harald Klakk received from Louis the Pious in 826. In Bella
25
It would be tempting to think that Francisco nomine could be a very early
reference to French (and, incidentally, evidence that the gens-name normanz was already in
use in Old French in some form) but in this text, as in others of the period, Franciscus is
the normal adjective for “Frankish” and when applied to language denotes the Franks’
‘original’ Germanic language rather than their adopted romance vernacular.
290
Parisiacae urbis [Wars of the City of Paris], a verse account of the 885-886 seige
of Paris by Scandinavians operating on the Seine prior to the ascendency of Rollo’s
army, Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Pres refers to the enemy as Dani and Normanni
interchangeably.26 When the same event is recorded by a Frankish chronicler from
the eastern kingdom, the credit is given to the East Franks rather than to Odo count
of Paris, but the foreign invaders are again called Nordmanni.27
In view of the fact that the Franks called all Scandinavian invaders
Normanni, it is not surprising to find that Rollo and his tribe are called Normanni
from the first. Their arrival (probably some time between 890 and 915) happened
to fall in a period for which documentary evidence and Frankish history writings
are particularly scarce. We do have one valuable source, however, in the
administrative records of Charles the Simple, the Frankish king supposed to have
ceded the land that would become Normandy at the Treaty of St.-Clair-sur-Epte.
The first extant record of the future Normans is a charter of Charles the Simple
dated March 14, 918 and extant in the original. This document is of great interest
to modern historians because it confirms that, however much fiction there may be
in Dudo’s account of the founding of Normandy, Charles had indeed made a formal
26
Henri Waquet, ed., Le Siège de Paris par les Normands (Paris: Les Belles Lettres,
1942). The Bella Parisiacae urbis was written between 888 and 897.
27
Entry for 886 in the Annals of Fulda: “Mense februario exercitus Orientalum
Francorum missus est contra Nordmannos in Galliam juxt Parisios consistentes.” [‘In the
month of February an army of the East Franks was sent into Gaul against the Northmen,
stopping them before Paris.’] Quoted in Pio Rajna, Le Origini dell’epopea francese
(Florence: C.G. Sansoni, 1884), p.372 n.2.
291
cession of land to Rollo by that time.28 The charter deals with the lands of an abbey
whose property along the River Eure was cut in two by the treaty. Charles grants
the defunct abbey’s remaining lands to the abbey of St.-Germain-des-Prés,
excluding the part already ceded “to the Northmen of the Seine, that is, to Rollo
and his men, for the protection of the kingdom [Normannis Sequanensibus,
videlicet Rolloni suisque comitibus, pro tutela regni].”29
This is the first surviving instance of the name Normanni being assigned to
the people we think of as the Normans, but it by no means indicates that that
association was formal, exclusive, or permanent. In another charter of Charles the
Simple the same Normans are referred to simply as pagani [heathens], in the sort of
derogatory language typical of 9th and 10th century accounts of the Scandinavians’
depredations.30 In still others the term Northmanni continues to be used to refer to
other raiders who are not part of Rollo’s enterprise in the Rouennais. For example,
in a charter of June 14, 910 or 911, the king confirms the rights and priveleges of
the abbey of St.-Martin-de-Tours, including those recorded in “all the charters that
the Northmen burned [omnium cartarum que incendio Nortmannorum].”31
Even as the Normanni entrenched in the city of Rouen under Rollo and his
direct male heirs became increasingly important in the regional balance of power,
28
McKitterick, Frankish Kingdoms, 237; Elisabeth van Houts, The Normans in
Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 25.
29
Ferdinand Lot and Philippe Lauer, eds., Recuil des actes de Charles III le Simple,
roi de France (893-923) (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1949), # 92, p.211.
30
Ibid, # 53, p.114.
31
Ibid., # 63, p.143.
292
the older, loose, inclusive use of the term continued in common use throughout the
10th century. Even into the early 11th century, the Frankish texts which make clear
reference to the group we recognize as the Normandy Normans also use the term
Normanni to denote other groups. This is the case, for instance, in the Annals
compiled by Flodoard at the cathedral of Reims from about 925 to 966 and just
about the only surviving narrative historical source for that period.32 Recording
raids far eastward into Frankish territory at Beauvais and Amiens, the entry for 925
complains that “the Northmen of Rouen broke the agreement they had formerly
sworn [Nortmanni de Rodomo foedus quod olim pepigerant irrumpentes].”33
These are our Normans but Flodoard also uses the term Nortmanni for a number of
other different raider bands, such as the army that roved the Loire valley under
“Ragenoldus princeps Nortmannorum [Ragnold, prince of the Northmen]” in 923.34
A similar breadth of usage is found in a text produced in the same period by a
Saxon writer working within Frankish territory. The Rerum Gestarum
Saxonicarum [The History of the Saxons] written around 967 by Widukind, a monk
at Corvey in Westphalia, begins with a discussion of the origins of the Saxon
people. There is disagreement on the matter, the text reports, but “some judge the
Saxons to have their origins from the Danes and the Northmanni [aliis
arbitrantibus de Danis Northmannisque originem duxisse Saxones].” In this
32
Van Houts, The Normans in Europe, 42.
33
J.-P. Migne ed., Patrologia Latina (Paris: Garnier Fratres, 1884-1905), vol. 135,
col. 434c.
34
Ibid, col. 429c.
293
context, Northmanni refers to early Scandinavians in the setting of their own
northern land. This is much the way Einhard used the term a hundred years earlier,
but Widukind, unlike Einhard and Ermold, maintains a distinction between the
Danes and the Northmanni.35 When our Normans appear (and this text pays scant
attention to them), they are identified as Northmanni, with nothing but context to
distinguish them from the other Northmanni.36
The Normans as defined by their neighbors, c.1000
Elsewhere the Normans come to center stage as one of the main concerns
for a Frankish history-writer chronicling his own era. The Historia Francorum of
Richer of Saint-Rémi de Reims is a valuable locus for investigating the way that
Norman and Frankish identity were represented in historiograhpical discourse at a
time midway between St.-Claire-sur-Epte and Hastings.37 The text was written
between 991 and 996 by an erudite monk working in Reims. It picks up with
events in the 880s and is one of modern historians’ principal sources for the latter
part of the period it covers, 970 to 995.38 Richer’s history is one of those very rare
medieval texts surviving in a manuscript written by the author’s own hand;
35
G. Waitz and K.A. Kehr, eds. 5th ed. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores
Rerum Germanicarum in Usum Scholarum, Separatim Editi 60 (Hanover: Hahnsche,
1935), I.2.
36
Ibid., II.39.
37
Richer, Historia Francorum, ed. and trans. Robert Latouche, as Richer, Histoire
de France, 888-995 (Paris, H. Champion, 1930).
38
McKitterick, Frankish Kingdoms, 6, 306.
294
needless to say, this invites extra confidence in its value as an authentic witness of
the rhetorical strategies and terminology of its time. Considering its historical
moment, and that is was produced in intimate proximity with the center of power of
the kingdom of France, the text has much to say about relationships between the
Normans and the Franks (or the French, as we normally say when we get to the
Capetian period). It is a rich if confusing text for observing the constuction of
identity, the (re)writing of history, and the deployment of nomenclature.
When it comes to representing the Normans, Richer’s text is at cross-
purposes: it registers them as an important presence and has them onstage
frequently, but undercuts their importance and their political legitimacy by labeling
the group with derogatory terms. The reader can identify the group securely and
follow its progress because Richer names their leaders or associates them with
Rouen. That is, the text does constuct the Normans as an entity having cohesion,
continuity, and a gravitational center. Yet, in spite of their conspicuous presence in
French politics, they are rarely identified as Normanni. From their first violent
appearance, through their conversion, their development into a substantial political
power under William Longsword and Richard I, in this text the Normans almost
always identified as pirati.
The Normans make their appearance very early in the text, and they are
described at length. Richer relates the departure of this gens from “the ocean’s
remotest northern islands,” their landfall on the distant edges of Gaul, their
295
numerous incursions and battles there, the Gauls’ decision to cede that province
[haec provincia] to them “by royal grant [ut dono regum]” on the condition that
they submit faithfully to Christianity “and no less faithfully to the kings of the
Gauls [regibus Galliarum].”39 Richer tells us that their capital is at Rouen, lists the
six principal cities in their power, and identifies their leader (one Catillus,
identified in I.28 as father of Rollo). With all this though, he does not use any
proper name for the group; nothing better than “the pirates who inhabit the region
of Rouen, which is a part of Celtic Gaul [piratae qui Rhodomensem provinciam
incolebant, quae est Celticae Galliae pars].” As the Historia moves on to narrate
later times and the Normans appear as a major force in French politics, the text
continues to position them as “the pirates,” a nameless band of outsiders with no
legal status.
In the course of describing the succession of Duke Richard I and the French
king’s invasion of Normandy, the text begins to refer to the Nortmanni (II.34, II.42,
II.44) and “the Northmen’s land [terram Nortmannorum]” but it would be a
mistake to think that Richer’s naming policy evolves as his text procedes and the
Normans’ territory gains in power and permanence. It may be that the
concentration of proper names rather than epithets here has to do with the events
being narrated. At this moment in the narrative the Normandy becomes an object
of the French king’s active aggression. An invasion requires some kind of frontier
39
Richer, I.4.
296
to cross or border to violate, and an annexation presumes a people to subjugate or a
territory to engulf. Under these circumstances the Normans are not simply
represented as foreigners to the Franci; as the object of the Franks’ aggression they
are resolved into an object indeed, with some borders and a name. When this
narrative circumstance passes the text reverts to referring to them by dismissive
generalities. Even when covering much later times, indeed contemporary events in
Richer’s own period, Richer calls the Normans pirati.
Richer is frequently cited as example of a Frankish author who disdains the
Normans and even at this late date thinks of them as an uncouth and alien race.40
But the Normans whom Richer is still calling pirati in 996 were not wild Teutonic
raiders, they were the people of the large, relatively stable, Christian polity next
door, and Richer knew this perfectly well. Student at one of Europe’s most
advanced schools and protégé of the archbishop who had aided in the election of
Hugh Capet, Richer was far too well informed to sincerely believe that Duke
Richard could be acccurately described as the chieftain of a roving pirate band.
There is something more going on.
At close examination, Richer does not toss the Normans into a catch-all
category with a lot of other Scandinavian attackers. Even while using the generic
40
Eg. R.H.C. Douglas, The Normans and their Myth (London: Thames and Hudson,
1976), 21; Pierre Riché, “Expression du sentiment national dans la correspondance de
Gerbert d’Aurillac et dans l’Histoire de Richer de Reims,” in Peuples du Moyen Âge:
Problèmes d’identification, ed. Claude Carozzi and Huguette Taviani-Carozzi (Aix-en-
Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1996); Nick Webber, Norman
Identity, 911-1154 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), 41.
297
label pirati, Richer distinguishes them from other groups of ‘pirates,’ and does so
even when narrating events back in the early years when Rollo’s community might
have been little different from others. For example, in a section of book I in which
Rollo’s pirati are locked in a large-scale war with France’s King Raoul (I.48-53),
unrelated coastal raids in the Artois are attributed to “other pirates [piratis aliis]
(I.51).
It is difficult to maintain that the Normans are not important to the historical
story that Richer constructs, or that he does not recognize them as a power. There
is reason to question the opinion that the Historia Francorum suggests that the
Normans were still somewhat inchoate or inconsequential as late as the 990s.
Where Nortmanni does appear in Richer’s text it almost never refers to any group
other than our Normans: it is not merely a generic descriptive as it was to Franks
one hundred years previously. What it is, however, is a name that is passed over in
preference to others, as part of a consistent onomastic strategy of positioning the
Normans as lawless usurpers of a territory which should be under the control of the
French king. The Historia Francorum, we should remember, is essentially a
production of the court of the French kings. The utterly generic common noun
pirati is not a careless label it is intentional libel. In other passages the Normans
are called pagani and even barbari (eg. I.8, I.14). By continually representing
them as seaborne raiders the text freezes them at an earlier historical point when
they were heathen foreigners with no legitimate claim to power and possession,
298
disowning the less convenient contemporary reality of a politically organized
Christian state under counts who write charters, make treaties, and belong to a
dynasty which, with four in an unbroken male line thusfar, had a better record of
legitimate succession than the Capetian kings of France!
With its poorly-concealed nationalistic bias, the Historia Francorum is an
instructive case in the politics of onomastics. For the purpose of the present
argument, two points stand out from these Frankish texts. First, although the term
can be applied to groups of disparate constitution, Normanni is a designation
expressing enmity and alterity. Second, the Normanni in Rouen are an enemy to
the Kingdom of France; they can be called a lot of things, but they are never called
Franci.
Whereas Richer and most of the other 10th and 11th texts which discuss the
Normans are from the kingdom of France, Adhemar of Chabannes’ Chronicle
(c.1026-1033) is from Aquitaine.41 Aquitaine retained a great measure of
independence from the kings of the French. It had been a separate Frankish
kingdom in the 9th century and since then a collection of counties, later a duchy.
Adhemar spent his life in Aquitaine, at monasteries in Angoulême and Limoges
and he began his work as a prose history of Aquitaine before expanding it into a
general history of the Franks. It is, scholars agree, “an important testimony of how
41
Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis 129 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), ix, ci.
This edition has been translated into modern French by Yves Chauvin and Georges Pon,
Chronique (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003).
299
people in Aquitaine viewed the settlement of the vikings in Normandy under the
leadership of Rollo.”42 Neither Norman nor French, neither too close nor too far,
Adhemar provides the perspective of an outsider but hardly a distinterested one. In
Adhemar’s own day the dukes of Normandy (or the counts of Rouen, in his terms)
were important players in regional politics, while the Scandinavian invasions of
earlier periods also figure prominantly in Aquitaine’s history. The Chronicle’s
modern translators note that Normandy is the only state north of the Loire about
which Adehmar is knowledgeable.43 The text registers Normanni as both pagan
raiders and Christian statesmen, and wrestles, in some rhetorically interesting ways,
with the distinction and connection between the two.
In the earlier portion of Adhemar’s history, the term Normanni is applied
indiscriminately to Scandinavian groups, drawing no distinctions between them. In
book II, the Normanni are usually Danes (eg. II.5-6, II.24), and Normannia (also
written Nortmannia and Normandia) is Denmark (eg. II.5, 6, 22; III.1, 12, 14). The
gens-name Dani is used too, as a synonym. In II.24, for example, Normanni and
Dani are interchangeable names for same people within a few lines describing a
peace mission sent by Charlemagne: “then the emperor sent the chief men of the
Franks and of Saxony across the White River [the Elbe] to the frontier of the
42
Van Houts, The Normans in Europe, 51.
43
Chauvin and Pons, trans., 38. The kingdom of France is fairly important, but
Adhemar’s text is singularly without detail and seems ignorant even of basic geography;
the counts of Flanders, Anjou, and Champagne are barely mentioned, and the Bretons not
at all.
300
Normanni to make peace with them....Here they met sixteen of the chief Danes and,
with promises made on both sides, peace was established.”44 That same chapter
also records the viking raids on the Irish coast in 812 and uses the name Normanni
to designate people we would identify as Norwegians. It it probably did not occur
to Adhemar that there may have been distinct groups of Northmen in this early
period.45
By the middle of the 9th century, no place on the coastline from Frisia to
Gascony was safe from the various Scandinavian war bands, and in Adhemar’s
narration of the mid-800s and 900s mentions of the Normanni generally pertain to
attacks in Aquitaine. Normanni also continues to be used when the Danes in
Jutland are discussed. There is no indication, either onomastic or narrative, that
Adhemar distinguishes the numerous independent invasion parties from each other
or from the Jutland Danes with their quarreling kings and land armies. This is well
illustrated in the account of the events of 828 to 830 in Adhemar’s book III. In
III.12 “the sons of Godfrid king of the Danes [regis Danorum]” eject their rival,
Harald Klakk, “from the kingdom and from the confines of Normannia [de regno
ejecerunt et de Normannia finibus].” In III.14, Harald and his Saxon backers loot
and torch “many of the Normannis’ manors [villis plurimis Normannorum]; since
44
Adhemar, Chronicon, II.24: “Deinde imperator misit primores Francorum et
Saxonum trans Albiam fluviam ad confinia Normannorum qui pacem cum eis
facerent....Occurrerunt ibi sedecim de primoribus Danorum, et juramentis factis ex utraque
parte, pax confirmata...est.”
45
Ibid., II.24: “The fleet of the Normanni attacked Hibernia, the island of the Scots
[Tunc classis Normannorum Hiberniam Scotorum insulam aggressa].”
301
the Saxons are at this time reluctant allies of the Franks, this constitutes breaking
the peace between the Danes and the Franks [pace inter Normannos et Francos].
III.15 reports that the Franks’ emperor, Louis the Pious hears that the Normanni
intend to proceed across the Elbe into Frankish-dominated Saxony. The next
chapter begins with the Normanni burning all the monasteries on the island of
Herio at the mouth of the Loire. Hereafter, for many chapters, the Chronicle
follows events in Aquitaine. The narrative’s sudden leap from the Elbe to the Loire
is made without explanation. There is nothing to suggest to the reader that the
Normanni who unleash havoc at the Loire mouth and rage unapposed all over
Aquitaine in III.16-20 are any different from the Normanni [ie. Danes] in the
immediately preceeding paragraphs (III.12-15). In fact, when Adhemar produced
his second, expanded version of his Chronicle a few years later, that opening
sentence of III.16 is rewritten to state explicitly that the Normanni who sacked
Herio in 830 are the same ones who menaced Saxony the previous year: “The
Normanni, the following year, having feared to cross into Saxony, turned their
ships toward the Aquitannian sea and came ashore and burned the island of Herio
in the month of June.”
Adhemar seems to have some uncertainty as to whether the Normanni who
plagued Aquitaine for decades were the same as the ones who settled so
successfully in Rouen. In his final recension of the Chronicle, he states that they
were a separate group as he turns from Aquitaine to Rouen (III.20):
302
Then another multitude of Normanni, finding the city
of Rouen and its neighboring towns deserted,
succeeded in resettling there under their dukes. They
elected from among their people a king, named Roso,
who established his seat in Rouen. Having been
made Christian by Frankish priests, he veered into
madness as his death drew near, and had a hundred
Christian captives beheaded before him in honor of
the idols he had revered, and also distributed one
hundred pounds of gold to Christian churches in
honor of the true God in whose name he had accepted
baptism.”46
In this passage, for the first time, Adhemar’s Chronicle introduces the idea
that there are “different bands of Normanni” rather than a single gens parading
from one bellicose adventure to the next. The text does not specify that the groups
of Normanni represent separate gentes, but it is clear on the point that there are
independent political units, with their own theaters of operation. The distinct
groups of Normanni go their own ways; they raid or settle, thrive or parish separate
from other groups.
The Rouen Normanni flourished, of course, and the Chronicle follows their
progress. Other Normanni continue to appear in the text as the perpetrators of an
occasional invasion or abduction, but Rollo’s group come to occupy a very
different position. They are present as participants in the dynastic politics of the
region. Rollo’s family has moved so far up in the world that his daughter is a
46
III.20, γ version: “Et Nortmannorum alie cohortes...” The Chronicon survives in
three recensions, all of which were the work of Adhemar, according to the text’s modern
editor. The third (known as version γ ) was completed before 1034 and represents the
fullest development of Adhemar’s program of revision and expansion, according to
Bourgain, xiii-xxxi, xxxix, xlix-c.
303
suitable match for the duke of Aquitaine (III.23). Almost all of III.27 is devoted to
narrating the ‘civilizing’ of the Rouen Normanni:
Then with the death of Count Roso of Rouen, his son

William ruled in his place. This man had been
baptized in his childhood, and the whole multitude of
Normanni who were living there right next to France
took up faith in Christ and, giving up their pagan
language, accustomed themselves to Latin speech.
This William was sadly cut down by Arnulf count of
Flanders and was succeeded by his son Richard who
was most Christian and built there in this
Nortmannia, which before had been called the
marchland between France and Brittany, the
monastery of Mont-Saint-Michel, where he installed
monks, and Fécamp, in honor of the Holy Trinity,
where he himself is buried and where, too, he
installed monks. Meanwhile Louis king of the
French departed this life and Lothair, the eldest son
he had with Queen Gerberga, reigned in his stead.
Summing up events ranging from 927 to 996, this thumbnail sketch of the
Normanni emphasizes progress and continuity. It reports their conversion,
assimilation in language, orderly succession, the building of monasteries. Two of
their counts are presented in an approving and sympathetic manner. Their territory
is called by a proper name derived from the gens-name of the Normanni. Its
previous status, as a frontier zone at the edge of France, is accepted as a thing of the
past now. (To Adhemar as to others, France [Francia] does not include Normandy.
The Normanni “live next to France [juxta Franciam inhabitaverant]” not in
France.) The death and succession of the Norman counts is reported in the same
304
way as the death and successions of French kings; in this entry Adhemar takes care
of both of these northern neighbors at the same time.
Yet, though the Normandy Normans are increasingly in possession of the
name Normanni in this text, it continues to be used for Scandinavian raiders too,
whenever they appear. In III.53 “a countless multitude of Normanni from
Denmark and the Irish regions [infinita multitudo Nortmannorum ex Danamarcha
et Iresca regione]” swarm ashore at Port-Aquitaine to attempt a large-scale
conquest. What is noteworthy in these instances is that the text now, since setting
the Rouen Normanni apart in III.20, provides clear cues to mark the Scandinavian
Normanni. In the account of the Port-Aquitaine invasion, after their initial
identification as Normanni the antagonists are referred to throughout the rest of the
episode as “the heathens [pagani].” This distinguishes them from the Christian
people of Normandy, and leaves these latter, as I’ve said, more firmly in possession
of the gens-name. Similarly, the toponym Nortmannia is no longer used for their
Scandinavian homeland at this point, as it was earlier in the text. Denmark is now
Danamarcha. Chapter III.55 devotes a few sentences to the successful Danish
conquest of England, and here the invaders are not called Normanni at all. Cnut is
“the pagan king of Denmark [rex vero Canotus de Danamarca paganus]” and his
people identified as the pagans of Denmark [paganis de Danamarca].
It is also noteworthy that the group in Normandy is the only subdivision of
Normanni in the text to be singled out from the others and followed separately.
305
Other Normanni are bands which appear, do their damage or get defeated, and are
mentioned no more. Even in cases where the Chronicle provides a few details to
identify a group – their geographical provenance or the name of their leader – they
are not treated as an entity which the text tracks through time. The Rouen
Normanni are the only Normanni given that distinction. The text does not divide
its early, undifferentiated Normanni into several nationes. Rather, a single
bisection produces two groups: there are the Rouen Normanni; and then there all
the others.
Adhemar’s Chronicle is an important witness of how the Normans were
discussed by non-Norman neighbors on the Continent about thirty years before the
Conquest; how they were positioned in the discourse of peoples and polities. Even
in a text which displays the assimilation of the Rouen Normanni, portraying a
transformation from heathen intruders into a Christian church-building polity, the
Norman people do not ‘outgrow’ the name Normanni. They do not become Franci,
and they are not considered a part of Francia either politically or geographically.
They break away from the continuum of alien Normanni and have an identity of
their own, but Normanni is the proper name for them, even if it applies to the others
too. They have not undergone a name change. But the name has undergone a
change. In its use to denote the people of the county of Rouen, the semantic range
of Normanni is narrowed from the inclusive to the specific, from a term used to
denote a broad and undefined category to a gens-name for a clearly defined group.
306
In effect, the name is doubled: there are two disparate uses or ‘meanings’ of the
word. It continues to be used as it was formerly and it also functions to designate
the more recently defined gens.
This semantic doubling opened up a new problem of ambiguity in the term
Normanni. There was a lack of onomastic distinction to match the conceptual
distinction that had been made between hostile Scandinavians and the romanz-
speaking Christians of the county of Normandy. There was, however, no
onomastic overlap of Normanni and Franci. Later, semantic doubling of this same
sort is precisely what happened with the name Franci when the post-Conquest
Normans coopted it as a term they used to refer to themselves.47 But in these non-
Norman, pre-Conquest texts, ranging from about 830 to 1030, from France,
Saxony, and Aquitaine, the Normans are not called Franci.
Norman identity from within: pre-Conquest Norman charters
47
Short, “‘Tam Angli’” 166 perceives the importance of “semantic extension” in the
use of an existing name to cover a new group, but pertaining to the Anglo-Norman elite
including themselves as Angli starting in the 1130s. There is a conceptual difference too:
Short envisions a process of expansion, in which it is not really the word (the signifier) that
is stretched, but the signified. The term names a group and the group is stretched to
include more and different people. The Anglo-Normans do not set themselves apart as a
new and separate group of Angli, they expand the idea of Angli and soften the boundaries
of exclusivity around their own group, producing a larger, more-inclusive gens Anglorum,
of which they too are a part. The linguistic process that I see in the case of the gens-names
Normanni and later Franci is a splitting and multiplication, with the an existing term given
an additional use or definition so as to designate an additional non-overlapping group.
When the earliest Anglo-Normans called themselves Franci they were positing a new
group; not a larger ‘umbrella’ Franci, as we have seen, but the set of Normans transplanted
to England. The existing word, forced to perform a new function in a new context
(England; post-Conquest Anglo-Norman texts), now denotes two separate, non-
overlapping groups, the Norman elite in England and the people of the kingdom of France.
307
A charter of Richard II’s from around 1025 states, with a measure of self-
reflexiveness, that the practice of writing charters was unknown to Rollo and
William Longsword.48 The modern editor of the Norman charters confirms that
there is no good reason to think that the Normans produced any written acts before
960.49 “For almost the first century of its existence, the government of the Norman
rulers was illiterate,” comments another authority.50 When they do appear, these
documents are a valuable witness of the vocabulary of the Norman state. They
constitute a political discourse which did not merely record or reflect the state’s
centralized power, it participated in the creation and extension of that power. This
is a discourse controlled by the party most invested in defining the Norman state:
the ducal government itself. 51
Controlling what the state and its people can or should be called is part of
the project of marking borders around the state and asserting its existence as a
48
Marie Fauroux, ed., Recueil des actes des ducs de Normandie, 911 à 1066 (Caen:
Société des Antiquaires de Normandie, 1961), #53, cited in David Bates, Normandy Before
1066 (New York: Longman, 1982), xiii.
49
Fauroux, Actes des ducs, 19.
50
Bates, Normandy Before 1066, xiii.
51
The Norman dukes do not seem to have had a chancery, in the sense of a
permanent, organized office or institution. Almost all of the charters were grants or
guarantees given to one or another monastic foundation, with the most important abbeys,
such as Jumièges, Fécamp, Mont-Saint-Michel, and St. Ouen in Rouen, very heavily
represented (Fauroux, Actes des ducs, 35-36). Though the charters were produced by the
abbeys themselves, they were signed and confirmed by the duke, so they had to be worded
in language which the ducal administration approved. These documents represented the
official voice of the state in matters concerning church property and rights – and church
matters, as far as we can tell from what survives, were the only ones which were recorded
in written documents.
308
discrete entity. Even in these short texts we can look to nomenclature for
information on whether the pre-Conquest Normans sometimes classed themselves
as Franci. The nomenclature that defines the political unit comes in three
categories: what the leader is called, what the people under his power is called, and
what ‘his’ territory is called. In all three categories it is Normanni all the way, with
Franci denoting the people across the border, not the state’s own people.
In texts so centered around the person of the leader and the speech acts by
which he governs, it is no surprise that the ruler’s title is the location where the
identification of a politically-defined state or people is expressed earliest and most
often. Adhemar, as we have seen, preferred to style the Norman leaders “count of
Rouen,” but in their own charters the successors of Rollo identify themselves with
the Norman people or with Normandy rather than the city of Rouen. In the oldest
Norman charters extant in the original Richard II is designated “Richard, duke of
the Normans [Richardus Norhtmannorum dux]” or even “Richard, by the grace of
God, duke of the Norman people [Normannorum gentium dux gratia Dei].”52 In
the Middle Ages the title was not fixed or ‘official.’ In other early charters the
same ruler is “marquis of Normandy [marchio Normanniae].”53 Covering both
titles, Dudo (of historiographical fame) concluded a document of September 1011
52
Fauroux ed., Actes des ducs, #9 (written in 1006) and #42 (c.1015-1026). Except
where otherwise indicated I allude to charters which are extant in the original, in order to
be confident that we are the nomenclature of the text is authentically that of the date
claimed.
53
Ibid., #15 (1014), etc.
309
with the words “Dudo, chaplain of Richard, duke and marquis of the Normans,
composed and wrote out this charter.”54 With a similar welter of titles, a charter
written in 1035 styles a young William the Conqueror “duke of the Normans
[Willelmi Nortmannorum ducis]” and “William, monarch of the realm of the
Normans, son of count Robert [monarchiam regni Nortmannorum Vuillelmus,
Rotberti comitis filius ].”55
Though the titles vary, there is uniformity in their reference: the people
over whom these leaders claim control are the Normanni. Franci is not used in
their titles, nor as a term for their people. When the term Franci appears in these
documents, it occurs within the title of the king of France, as when the current
king’s regnal year is invoked for the purpose of dating. A charter of 1014, for
example, is represented as the first-person testament of Duke Richard II (“I,
Richard, marquis of Normandy,” it begins) but is dated to “the twenty-sixth year of
the reign of Robert, king of the French [regni Rotberti regis Francorum anno
xx.vi].”56 Clarity concerning the rulers’ respective jurisdictions was, as far as I can
tell, a routine matter, and was maintained equally on both sides of the border. In
May of 1048 Duke William II was present at the court of the French king at Senlis
and undersigned an act by which Henry I of France made changes concerning the
control and property of an abbey in Soissons. Here, the principal is “glorious King
54
Ibid., #13: “Dudo capellanus Richardi Northmannorum ducis et marchionis hanc
cartam composuit et scripsit.” .
55
Ibid., #92.
56
Ibid., #15, 95. Cf. #18 (1015); #92 (1038).
310
Henry, acting in authority over the kingdom of the Franks [agente in sceptris regni
Francorum glorioso rege Henrio]” and “William the prince of the Normans
[Willelmi Normannorum principis]” is named as a dignitary seconding the abbot’s
petition.57 The terminology used for identifying the two polities or peoples was the
same in French documents as in Norman.
Within the corpus of charters, there are some instances in which reference
to the two adjacent peoples is not buried inside a title, and these instances illustrate
the point that representing Normanni and Franci as two distinct, non-overlapping
nationes in official documents was merely an extension of the normal 10th- and
11th–century practice.58 The Normanni were understood as a distinct people; they
were not Franks/French. In a charter of 968 (perhaps one of the first issued by a
duke of Normandy) Richard I commands that control over a certain property in the
northern part of the diocese of Rouen be restored to the monastery of Saint-Denis
in Paris. The arrangement directly affects interested parties in both Normandy and
France. “Let it be known therefore by both people, namely the French and the
Norman people,” begin the instructions of Count Richard [Ricardi comitis].59 Two
generations later, as the reign of Duke Robert I (r. 1027-1035) was troubled by both
57
Ibid., #114, 275-6.
58
On the idea of ‘official’ or legal language being an extension of normal
vocabulary rather than a language apart, see William Rothwell, “The Trial Scene in Lanval
and the Development of the Legal Register in Anglo-Norman,” Neuphilologische
Mitteilungen 101 no.1 (2000): 17-36.
59
“Noverit quapropter utrarum gentium Francorum scilicet et Normannorum.”
Fauroux, Actes des ducs, #3, 71-72. This very early specimen, unlike the other charters
quoted here, is not extant in the original. It is nevertheless believed to be genuine.
311
internal dissent and border skirmishes, a charter from Jumièges mentions the
“discord between the French and the Normans [discordie Franci Nortmannique]” –
evidence, says G.A. Loud, that Norman texts of this period had no onomastic
hesitation in distinguishing Normans from non-Norman French people.60 Finally,
from not long before the Conquest, we have a rare case of the leader articulating his
own nationality in a context other than within his title. This pre-Conquest charter
(1051-1066) made at Fécamp records a decision pronounced by William “dux
Normannorum” in the presence of his wife Mathilda and his son Robert Curthose,
who are also signatories to the document. They grant the church and manor of
Flottemanville in the Cotentin to the abbey of Saint-Florent near Saumur in Anjou.
The charter quotes the duke in first person, affirming that the distant abbey’s
rightful ownership has long been known to him and his family, even though Saint-
Florent is in Anjou not in Normandy. Addressing the monks, “he said: ‘Although
we are Normans, nevertheless we knew it well because it is only right that it should
be arranged this way, and accordingly, if it please God, we will make it so.”61
National identity in the Middle Ages was probably never without a strong
ethnic element. Even in these texts where Normanni and Franci are defined,
perhaps in no small part, by territorial boundaries, the two gentes probably
60
J.J. Vernier, ed., Chartes de l’Abbaye de Jumièges, 2 vols. (Rouen, 1916), , vol.1,
#13, quoted by G.A.Loud, “How ‘Norman’ was the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy?”
Nottingham Medieval Studies 25 (1981), 16.
61
Fauroux, Actes des ducs, #199: “Respondit: ‘Licet Normanni simus, bene tamen
novimus quia sic oportet fieri, et ita, si Deo placuerit, faciemus.’”
312
continued to be perceived also as ethnic groupings. The former were heirs of
vikings and the latter were heirs of Charlemagne. That said, the charters belong to
a discourse of territorial and economic control, and the political boundaries around
the group are in the fore. In this regard, the charters differ somewhat from
historiographical texts and quite a lot from the ‘literary’ works we will consider
later. They provide a different corpus on which to test whether the pre-Conquest
Normans considered themselves, in some situations, to be Franks or French.
I can only conclude that they did not. Governmental writing, more than
other discourses, is a locus where we might expect to find the Normans positioned
as a subdivision or subspecies of Franci: the Norman counts/dukes were
technically (and at times in practice) under the overlordship of the French king, and
if that subordinate relationship were to be registered anywhere we might expect to
find it here in legal, administrative texts. At the most, though, a hierarchical
arrangement is only very infrequently and glancingly registered, as when the regnal
years of the French king are used as a ceremonious way to date a charter issued by
a Norman duke. Apart from this ornamental usage, Norman charters contain few
other references to the king of France. We do not see the Norman leaders deferring
to the authority of the king or seeking permission for their judgments.62 These texts
62
The clearest mention, I believe, of vassalage or hierarchy of loyalties in the
charters is an instance in 968 in which the Norman count, Richard I, invokes the assent of
his lord – and it is not the French king whom he names as his lord but Hugh Capet, duke of
the Franks [dux francorum], who at that time was the great regional power in the west of
France and had given Richard crucial support against the French king some years before,
313
do not position Normandy in a hierarchical relationship as a subordinate part of a
larger France. The relationship between the two units is not that of genus and
species or nation and province. In the legal-administrative writing of the Normans,
as in other pre-Conquest texts, Normanni and Franci were contrastive terms,
mutually exclusive, denoting two separate nationes.
Norman narrative history writing: Dudo of St. Quentin
Finally, around the year 1000, we come to the Normans’ first narrative
history, Dudo of St. Quentin’s De moribus et actis primorum Normanniae ducum
[On the Customs and Deeds of the First Dukes of Normandy].63 The historian who
provided the first long, detailed text in the discourse of Norman identity was a
Frenchman not a Norman. Dudo was a canon at the abbey of St. Quentin, about
eighty miles northeast of Paris, about midway between Cambrai and Laon, in the
county of Vermandois. According to his own account, he was sent to the dukes of
Normandy on a number of occasions as an emissary of the counts of the
Vermandois. On one of those trips, Dudo says, Duke Richard I asked him to write
when Louis IV had moved on Rouen. Richard submits his petition “with the assent of my
lord Hugh, prince of the French [cum assensu senioris mei Hugonis Francorum principi].”
Fauroux, Actes des ducs, #3 (March of 968), 70-72.
63
Lair, (Caen: Société Antiquaires de Normandie, 1865). Eric Christiansen, trans., History
of the Normans (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998). Lair’s 1865 edition has not been
replaced. Christiansen’s translation (with copious notes but lacking the Latin text) follows
Lair’s text, making corrections based on Christiansen’s own work with the manuscripts
(see Christiansen, xxxv-xxxvii.) Unless otherwise noted, English renderings quoted here
are Christiansen’s.
314
about “the customs and deeds of the Norman land.” The duke died soon after (in
996) and Dudo reluctantly began the project when Richard’s son and successor
renewed the request. The text, then, was begun some time after 996 and probably
completed by around 1020 at the latest.64 During these years, Dudo was lodged
snugly at the center of Norman state power. By 1011, as we saw above in the
colophon Dudo appended to a charter he wrote, Dudo was Richard II’s chaplain.
Not long afterward he served as the duke’s chief scribe.65 With good reason, Dudo
is considered to have been a propagandist for Normandy’s ruling family, and his
text an ‘authorized’ or ‘officially sanctioned’ history of the Normans.66 It begins
with the genesis of the Norman race and jumps forward in the space of a very brief
Book I, to cover the first ferocious Danish incursions into Francia under a cruel
king, Alstignus. Book II covers Rollo’s voyaging, conquest, and settlement. The
text then devotes one book each to William Longsword and Richard I, and ends
with the death and burial of the latter.
64
Christiansen, 6, ix-xii. Dudo, De moribus et actis, 119: “mores actusque telluris
Normannicae.”
65
He signed off as cancellarius, or head of the writing office, in an autograph
charter of 1015. Fauroux, Actes des ducs, #18, 102; Christainsen, xi.
66
Eg. van Houts, The Normans in Europe, 3. Demurring if not exactly dissenting,
Christiansen, xxiii-xxix, carefully considers Richard II and each of the other high-ranking
personages whom Dudo singled out for praise and thanks in the text, and finds no
conclusive proof that any of these was necessarily the work’s patron. Nevertheless,
Dudo’s statement, in his prefatory letter, that he wrote at Richard II’s request, taken in
combination with the high positions he held for that duke and the favor indicated by the
generous grant Richard II made on Dudo’s behalf in the 1015 charter mentioned above (see
previous note), make it hard to doubt that Dudo was working at the will of the Norman
court.
315
The modern title by which the work is conventionally known, De moribus
et actis primorum Normanniae ducum,67 appropriately reflects the text’s (adoring)
focus on individual leaders, but the work does much more than that. The major text
of pre-Conquest Norman self-definition and ideology, Dudo’s text gives the
Normans a history, in multiple senses. It provides an apologia for the legitimacy of
the state, a foundation myth, and a legendary prehistory of the gens Normannorum.
Perhaps most fundamentally, it made the Normans the subject of a history. It
declared them a people who were weighty and worthy enough to have their deeds
memorialized in a substantial volume of written Latin.
Though he was writing only about a century after Rollo’s band landed with
salt water on their boots and Danish in their mouths, Dudo’s work on the earlier
portions of his narrative was less what we think of as historiography and more an
exercise in skillful myth-making. “Dudo is not a reliable source for the early
history of the Normans; nor did he know of any; nor do we,” Christiansen writes.68
As Vergil’s Aeneid did for the Romans, De moribus et actis supplied something
that was missing. In details both small and large, Dudo’s account of the formation
of the Norman people were repeated again and again by the Normans’ 12th century
historians. For example, the momentous meeting at St.-Clair-sur-Epte is reported
in no other sources, Norman or Frankish; Dudo’s version (or fabrication) of this
67
This title was bestowed by André Duchesne when he published the first printed
edition of the work in 1619. In the Middle Ages it was known as the Gesta, or Historia,
Normannorum (Christiansen, xiii.).
68
Ibid., xv.
316
foundational moment became a staple of the Normans’ ‘national’ narrative. Dudo’s
version of events became the canonical account of the Normans’ past. Because of
its value as a witness of pre-Conquest practice and its influence on later Norman
historiography, we will spend more time with Dudo’s De moribus than with any of
the other texts discussed in this chapter.
Dudo’s great accomplishment was to craft a legendary history which
positioned the assimilated, romanz-speaking Normans as a gens distinct from their
Frankish neighbors but not too closely identified with the pagan Scandinavian
invaders who had taken the region away from Frankish control. This was
accomplished by shaping a complex origo gentium story which represented the
Norman nation as a race formed by simultaneous processes of merging and pulling
away. The dynasty’s viking ancestry is dealt with first, in a narrative which does
not exactly obscure but complicates the invaders’ Scandinavian origins.
From an unidentified source, Dudo picked up the notion of tracing the
Scandinavian Danes to Balkan Dacia, a notion likely to be rooted, originally, in
nothing more than the phonetic resemblance between Danes and Danube [Dani and
Danubius].69 Among the “savage and barbarous peoples [ferae gentes et
barbarae]” (I.1) who live in that region are the Dacians [Daci], who also call
themselves Danes [Danai] (I.3). They claim, Dudo explains without confirming or
denying, that they are descended from the Trojan prince Antenor who, like Aeneas,
69
Christiansen,182 n.64.
317
escaped from the ruined city.70 A short while earlier, though, in I.1, Dudo had said
that the Dacians and the other barbarous people of the region (Goths, Alans, et alia)
came from the island of Scanza. The Dacians or Danes are thus traced in opposite
directions to two different origins. The Vergilian legend of Trojan origins gives
them a past stretching far back in time and anchors them in the classical Greco-
Roman world. Mass migration from the island of Scanza is an idea Dudo copied
from Jordanes’ History of the Goths, where Scanza refers to Scandinavia.71 This
provides a more geographically plausible place of origin. The text does not attempt
to resolve its conflicting versions of history. At once barbarians and Trojans, the
Dacians/Danes are a people with two names and two ancestral homelands.
The story of how the Daci/Dani came to take possession of Normandy, is
doubled too. Book I relates that a faction led by a certain Alstignus is expelled
from Dacia according to the custom of the overpopulated and bellicose Dacians,
ravages Francia, and finally settles there after the Franks buy his peace with a huge
tribute. (Dudo’s Alstignus generally becomes “Hasting” in English translation – a
name which, in light of the later Normans’ greatest victory – is an intriguing
70
Dudo’s association of the name Dani with Trojan origins (rather than with
Denmark or the Danube), and his use on this occasion of the spelling Danai, suggests that
Dudo was thinking of the Homeric gens-name, Danai, and forgetting or ignoring that the
Danaeans were Greeks not Trojans. Cf. Albu, The Normans in their Histories, 14 and
n.30.
71
Christiansen, 182 n.63.
318
onomastic coincidence.)72 Book II tells much the same story in more detail – there
is the infighting in Dacia, the expulsion, raids and wanderings, the landing in
Francia, and eventual peaceable settlement there – but this time around, the
protagonist is Rollo not Alstignus. Alstignus makes an appearance in Book II as a
tamed confederate of the Franks and then vanishes from the story, whereas Rollo
and his people become the protagonists of this history. Alstignus’ invasion is not
so much a presage of Rollo’s, a dress rehearsal, but an antitype. The similarities in
their stories serve to highlight the differences. Dudo describes Alstignus as
“pestilent, hostile, sombre, truculent, given to outrage, / Pestilent and
untrustworthy, insolent, fickle and lawless” (I.3). Rollo is noble, dutiful,
reasonable, and true to his word. Alstignus’ conduct in Francia was characterized
by slaughter, devastation, and rape (I.3). His people butchered clergymen and sold
survivors into slavery. When Rollo comes ashore in Francia he does not attack at
all. He establishes peaceful terms with the archbishop of Rouen (I.11).73 Rollo is
a builder and law-giver. His people embrace Christianity, civilization, and urban
life. The resemblance in the two leaders’ early careers draws attention to how
72
In Old English texts the name is Hæsten or Hæsting. In the Normans’ own
vernacular (ie. Old French) histories the form is Hastainz (in Wace’s Roman de Rou II
(1160s), vv. 5, 13, etc.) or Hastenc (in Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Chronique des ducs de
Normandie (c. 1175), vv. 7, 761, etc.) According to Christiansen, 183 n.76, the ‘original’
name of this figure, whose adventures were also recorded in Frankish annals and the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, was probably Old Danish Hasten or Old Norse Hásteinn.
73
Fighting breaks out only after the Franks, alarmed by news of the Northmen’s
arrival, assemble an army. This is another Vergilian touch: cf. Aeneid VII, where Aeneas
and Latinus share peaceful intentions until one of the Furies, Allecto, deliberately sows
thoughts of war.
319
sharply their paths diverge. Alstignus is the savage that Rollo could have been, and
his warband’s frenzy of uncontrolled destruction is the pattern which Rollo’s
conquest rejects and rises above.
The two parallel invasions emphasize how different Rollo and his people
are from their earlier, wilder compatriots. Dudo’s text, however, does not make a
sharp distinction by means of the name – or rather names – which he uses to
identify Rollo’s Normans. Dudo uses the terms Daci and Dani interchangeably for
the Normans’ pagan ancestors and, quite regularly, for the later Normans too. The
first invaders led by cruel Alstignus are referred to as Daci or Dani, and Rollo’s
people are too. Identifying themselves to the Frankish army that has come out to
challenge them, they declare, “We are Danes, and we have sailed from Dacia. We
come to conquer Francia [Dani sumus, Dacia advecti huc. Franciam expugnare
venimus]” (II.13). The text calls Rollo’s band Normanni too, applying the name to
them from the moment the narrative arrives at their landing in Francia. Recounting
their first interaction with the Franks, Dudo says that the townsmen of Rouen
learned that “a mighty throng of Northmen [copiosam multitudinem Normannorum]
was present at Jumièges” (II.11). From this point onward, Daci and Dani continue
to appear (used interchangeably, as synonyms) but both are edged out in favor of
Normanni (or Northmanni).
Proposing that De moribus provides for an ethnic distinction between Dani
and Normanni, Potts writes, “to Dudo all Danes were descendents of Antenor, but
320
not all Danes were Normans. He even includes the Viking Hasting – that
shameless inciter of evil – in the Trojan line, but Dudo never calls Hasting a
Norman. For Dudo the first ruler of the Normans could only be Rollo.”74 This is
an attractive formulation but it is mistaken. The term Normanni appears in book I,
in the company of Alstignus. He has been roving unapposed throughout Francia,
and everywhere “the terror-stricken people were dreading the arrival of the
Northmen [Northmannorum adventus] like the unpredictable rumblings of a
thunder-clap” (I.8). These Northmanni are Alstignus and his band not Rollo’s
people. In this text Normanni, can be just a third alternative, a synonym for Daci
and Dani. It edges out the other two, and that is significant. When Dudo is
narrating a more familiar time period, when the dukes and events more clearly
belong to the Normans of his own day, he is much more inclined to identify his
protagonists as Normanni. Nonetheless, this text never quite parts with Dani and
even Daci as ways to identify them.
In book II Dani appears fairly commonly, Daci only rarely. In book III
Dani is used rarely if ever and Daci only slightly more, such as when Duke
William’s top men are called “the leaders of the Dacians” (III.41). In book IV
there are complications. Early on in IV the Normans under Duke Richard I are still
called Dacians on occasion. Then the “chief Normans [Northmannorum
optimates]” send envoys to the ancestral homeland to ask “Harold king of Dacia”
74
Potts, “‘Atque unum ex diversis gentibus’,” 142-143.
321
for an army to rescue Duke Richard from the king of Francia (IV.84). At this point
in the text, there are two sets of Dacians running around. The Normans of Richard
I and their imported allies are represented as two distinct groups; the former are
well-governed and Christian, and the latter are ferocious, godless, a barely
containable force. Yet, when Dudo and his characters are not busy calling these
wild warriors “heathens” or “pagans,” they are called Daci or Dani, just like the
settled Normans (IV. 114-118). The newcomers are even at times referred to as
Northmanni (IV.119-124). For example, when we read in IV.119 that Richard
“called all the Northmen [Northmannis omnibus] together, and began to coax and
pacify them” the gens-name denotes not Richard’s Normans but the untamed
warriors who have by then caused such excessive mayhem in neighboring France
that the duke beseeches them to go home. The name is applied to both parties,
even in the space of a few lines: Richard’s land is “the Norman realm
[Northmannicum regnum]”; two sentences later, when the duke is again pleading
with the newcomers, they are “the most fearfully ferocious Normans [Northmannos
immanissimae ferocitatis]” (IV.124).75
By name at least – or rather, names, for all three are in use at this point and
used interchangeably – there is nothing to distinguish Dudo’s protagonists from
their pagan allies. In fact, in this onomastically sticky moment, the gens-names
75
In this instance I have departed slightly from Christiansen’s translation (p.162).
He translates Northmannos as “Northmen” here, which creates a helpful but artificial
distinction between the wild “Northmen” and the “Normans” of Richard’s Normandy.
Dudo’s Latin text does not make any onomastic distinction here.
322
which the text had been using to denote the Normandy Normans are more often
applied to the visiting mercenaries. In these passages the text tends to avoid using
any name for the Normans. The players in these events are the Franci, the pagan
Dacians/Danes/Normans, and Duke Richard. By having the duke in person play
such a conspicuous role in events (at one point the Normandy Normans are called
“Richardians [Ricardidis]” [IV.123]), Dudo gets around the necessity of referring
to the Norman people as a collectivity. If anything, this only emphasizes the fact
that, temporarily, the untamed alien Northmanni have run off with all the proper
names.
With the names Dani, Daci, and Normanni , then, the text seems to have
three synonymous names that can be applied indiscriminately to the Normandy
Normans and any other Scandinavian group. Yet there is a way in which the name
Normanni, the one actually used to designates the Normans in Dudo’s own time, is
set apart in the text and granted some distance from the Scandinavian past. The
names Daci and Dani are explained in the origo gentium stories. They are names
which belong to foreign lands and a pagan past. Daci, more than the other names,
carries the ethnic group’s past – its roots in a distant barbaric land, its migrations,
and its ultimate origins in the island of Scanza (I.1-2). Dani, the reader is told, is
an alternative for Daci, a name used by that fierce nation in order to advertise their
Trojan ancestry (I.3). Normanni, by contrast, is not implicated in these origin
narratives. Among the three names, only Normanni is not explained at all. De
323
moribus does not explain it as a Frankish name, as earlier Frankish historians such
as Einhard and Ermold were wont to do. A Frankish etymology would make the
name foreign to the Normans, a designation bestowed by their Frankish enemies.
De moribus does not supply any etymology for the name Normanni. It is
unusual for a medieval history to fail to provide an etymological history for the
name of its protagonist nation. Withholding an etymology for the name of the gens
at This is peculiar and unusual in the context of medieval historiography, or indeed
any medieval discourse. More particularly, is atypical within the tradition of
Norman historiography. Counting only narrative texts not annals, at least seven
other Norman historians between 1095 and 1195 supply the etymology of the name
Normanni. This includes Latin historians and vernacular; some of Dudo’s
continuators and successors, and largely-independent historians of the Norman
conquests of southern Italy and Sicily.76 With minor variations, these texts tell the
same etymological story. Not surprisingly, they explain that the name Normanni
combines Nort, ‘the north’ or ‘the north wind’ with man, ‘man,’ and means ‘men of
the north.’ When Dudo declines to provide an etymology, this is what he is leaving
out.
76
William of Apulia, Gesta Roberti Guiscardi (1095-1099), I vv. 6-10; Geoffrey
Malaterra, De rebus gestis Rogerii Calabriae et Siciliae comitis et Roberti Guiscardi Ducis
fratris eius (c.1098); Robert de Torigny’s redaction of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum
(late 1130s); Orderic Vitalis Historia Ecclesisastica (book IX probably 1130-1141);
Stephen of Rouen, Draco Normannicus (1169 or 1170), XXI; Wace, Roman de Rou III (c.
1170-1174), vv. 45-74; Benoît de St. Maure, Chronique des ducs de Normandie (c. 1170-
1180), vv. 664-672.
324
Dudo cannot help that the name’s etymological roots are hard to overlook;
in his text at least, Normanni is not traced to a Germanic tongue and it is not
glossed as nort manni. De moribus does not hide the Normans’ foreign origins or
pagan past, but it does employ an onomastic strategy to try to open a distance
between his protagonists and their past. The names Daci and Dani are presented
first, loaded with a convoluted, manifold origin story, and used conspicuously
throughout the narration of the Normans’ earliest times. The past of the gens, their
foreignness, is loaded onto these two terms. Throughout the text, Daci and Dani
remain present, trailing alongside as alternatives, never quite forgotten, just as the
Normans’ relationship to dangerous, alien northerners cannot be credibly removed
from their historical narrative, even when recounting the recent reign of Richard I.
The group’s ‘real’ name, the gens-name by which the group was actually known in
Dudo’s present, is kept clean of these associations.
Yet the text’s strategy of trying to separate the Normans, by the gens-name
Normanni, from their own past and from other Scandinavian groups does not quite
succeed. The problem is not just that this name was, inconveniently, the one whose
all-too-obvious roots most insistently recall the nation’s foreign origins. The
attmept at an onomastic distinction collapses because Dudo does not or cannot
maintain the implictation that Normanni exclusively denotes the people of the
territory which Rollo founded. The collapse is most complete, as we have seen, in
book IV where the name Normanni denotes the newly-arrived Scandinavian
325
warriors. The apparent promiscuity in the use of the name Normanni is a feature
that never goes away in Dudo’s text, just as it is never eliminated in Adhemar’s.
The most likely explanation for this – and certainly the simplest – is that in Dudo
and Adhemar’s time Normanni can still (can also) designate foreign, potentially-
hostile Scandinavians. Dudo and Adhemar’s handling of the name reflects a reality
of usage which they cannot pretend away, no mattter what they think about the
Normandy Normans or how they wish to position them. Later, particularly in
Anglo-Norman texts, Normanni became more clearly and unequivocally the
property of the Normans from Normandy. The later Norman historians, writing at
the end of the 11th century and in the 12th century, did not need to hide the nort man
etymology, because the Normans – and their ideology – had become a great
success. (It also did not hurt that their dreaded Scandinavian cousins had ceased to
be as much of a presence in Western Europe, from England to Italy.) But for Dudo,
a man of the 10th century writing in the first years of the 11th, that time had not yet
arrived. As in the external sources of the same period (indeed, Adhemar is a bit
later), in this ‘official’ Norman history, the internal source par excellence, there is
semantic continuity, a non-rupture, between two categories of Normanni. The two
categories of Normanni, though distinct (different in behavior and religion; acting
as separate political or military units under different rulers) are represented as still
belonging to the same gens.
326
In dealing with the other side of the delicate ethnic-identity balancing act,
the text uses a strategy that is almost the inverse: the Normans are shown merging
with the local Franks of their new land and assimilating in language and religion,
but there is no sharing of gens identity. The Normans are never identified as
Franks. The Normans do not become Franks; the Franks within the Norman
territory become Normans.
In Dudo’s text, this process of ethnic absorption is first allegorized in a
dream. After fleeing Dacia and languishing a while on the island of Scanza, Rollo
and his followers sail to England and give the unwelcoming English a thrashing.
While in England, Rollo has a dream which reveals the great destiny in store for
him. “He seemed to behold himself placed on a mountain, far higher than the
highest, in a Frankish dwelling [Franciscae habitationis]” (II.6). Thousands of
birds of different kinds and colors (but each with the left wing red) gathered at the
mountain, where “they all ate together in a suitable place, without being separated
into genera or species [sine discretione generum et speciarum], and without any
disagreement or dispute.” The gist of the allegory is hard to miss but subtlety is not
Dudo’s strong suit and the dream’s significance is explained overtly by a wise
Christian who happens to be conveniently nearby. The birds that will flock around
Rollo after he has come to his high summit in Francia are men from diverse
regions, all wearing red shields on their arms, “joined together in a countless
multitude” under Rollo’s leadership.
327
With this passage as a telling locus, Cassandra Potts has argued that one of
Dudo’s principal contributions to the Normans’ understanding of their own people
was to acknowledge that “the Normans were from the beginnning a heterogenous
gens” – more specifically, a melding of the Scandinavian ruling minority and a
Frankish populace.77 For the 11th- and 12th-century historians who followed Dudo,
it is does not seem to have been a point of ideological doctrine to represent the
Norman people as a hybrid gens. For them, it was practicable to represent the
Normans as a self-consistent unit. But in the early period to which De moribus
belongs, it may be that recent realities compelled the Norman dukes’ apologist to
acknowledge that the gens Normannorum – if it were to be constructed as a group
that included the majority of the population of the polity – was a mix of Frankish
and Scandinavian origins.78
The blending of the Dacians and Franks is personified in Rollo’s son and
successor, and the text is sure not to let the reader miss the point. William
Longsword “was born of noble stock, with a Dacian father and a Frankish mother”
77
Potts, “‘Atque unum ex diversis gentibus’,” 142; The dream passage is,
understandably, very popular with students of Norman identity; see also Davis, The
Normans and their Myth, 52-53; Carozzi, “Des Daces aux Normands,” 12-15; Albu, The
Normans in their Histories, 16-18. .
78
Webber, Norman Identity, 24-26, adds that “a recognition of the ‘polyethnic’
nature of the gens Normannorum” was not just an ideological choice at Dudo’s time but
also a practical necessity. Cf. Webber, Norman Identity, 25-28. In his analysis of Dudo, as
elsewhere, Webber is perceptive and persuasive with the argument that the Norman ethnic
nationality – the Norman gens – was constructed at first around the political, territorial unit
that Rollo’s dynasty carved out. Cf. also Davis, The Normans and their Myth, 53; as is so
often the case, important insights concerning Norman identity were present in brief form in
this work.
328
(III.36). Within the first few pages of the book devoted to the Normans’ second
ruler, his mixed ethnicity is mentioned three times. The mixed parentage of the
Norman nation is emblemized as a marriage and birthing under whose patrilinear
rule the Frankish ethnicity is the female side, the side which is absorbed and loses
its name.
Every member of the body politic is a Norman, and this is expressed
through the nation’s possession of land that was once Frankish but is no more. In
Dudo’s narration of the beginning of the incipient Normans’ history, the land that
will become Normandy is part of Francia. For example, in the long section devoted
to Rollo’s prophetic dream, the destined land is called Francia. When Rollo’s band
arrives at the mouth of the Seine, the text is geographically specific: they make
their way immediately to Jumièges and Rouen (II.11). The reader is thus left in no
doubt that the land they first occupy is the same territory that will become the
familiar duchy of Normandy. At this point, though, the text identifies the place as
Francia, and the people with whom Rollo fights and negotiates are Franci under
“Charles, king of Francia [Karolus Franciae rex]” (II. 11, 13-17, etc), whether the
action is set in Bayeux, Paris, or outside of Rouen (II.16; II.15; II.12-13). Yet, in
Dudo’s onomastic logic, the Franks who were in Normandy were, in a sense, never
really Franks in the first place. Even in the context of the time before the king of
France cedes the land west of the Epte to Rollo’s people, De moribus implies that
the future Normandy is somehow, already, a land apart from Francia: Dudo has
329
Rollo’s chiefs point out that the rich, well-watered territory which they desire “is
virtually distinct from the kingdom of Francia [quasi Franciae regno
discriminata]” (II.26).
Once Dudo moves into more-familiar historical times (the reigns of the next
two dukes), Francia always denotes the kingdom of France, a politically-defined
state which does not include Normandy. De moribus is perfectly clear in
describing Normandy and France as two separate, adjacent territories. In IV.96,
Louis IV of France and Otto I, allied against Normandy, advance “to the river Epte,
which passes between the kingdoms of Francia and Normandy as a separating
boundary.” Similarly, a passage in III.45 has an advisor of William Longsword tell
him, “We will proceed with you as far as the stream of Epte, but we will not enter
Francia [Tecum usque ad Eptae fluviolum properabimus, verum Franciam non
penetrabimus].” Normandy lies outside the borders of France, as do Brittany,
Aquitaine, and Burgundy. The peoples of these areas are spoken of as separate
peoples, not collectively as Franks or Frenchmen [Franci]. This arises very
commonly throughout the text in all sorts of contexts, as when “the Norman
magnates [Northmannorum vero optimates]” address their Duke Richard as “the
most prudent of all the Franks, Normans, and Burgundians [omnium
Francigenarum, Northmannorumque, et Burgundionem... prudentissimus” (IV.125;
cf. IV.99).
330
Normandy’s political independence from the kingdom of France is a
recurring motif of the dukes’ court historian. Dudo takes pains to suggest that,
from the outset, the dukes were not beholden to the rex Francorum. Dudo’s
famous account of the meeting at St. Clair-sur-Epte does depict Rollo becoming the
king’s fidelis, but balances this with Rollo refusing to kiss the Charles the Simple’s
foot. Instead, one of the Norman warriors seizes the royal foot and overturns the
king in the most literal fashion. In the context of later times, the independence of
the Normans is stated more directly. Dudo has Hugh Capet’s father, Hugh the
Great, observe the Normans’ independence. The Norman duke “holds sole
authority over the Norman lands like a king” the dux Francorum says admiringly,
“nor does he render service to any man” (IV.93).
The investment, in De moribus, in asserting the political independence of
Normandy from France and its territorial separateness aligns with the text’s
onomastic policy. The Normans are never called Franci and are not included in a
larger unbrella group of geographical or vassalic Franci. The gens Normannorum
is represented as a group wholly apart from the gens Francorum. Throughout the
text the Franks remain the enemies across the border. The antagonism which
started when the Franks attacked Rollo’s first encampment (II.14) only grows in
rancor. Dudo describes Louis IV as “much disgusted by the Normans, with a
hearty and malevolent hatred” (IV.84). Immediately adjacent, the Franks are the
331
hostile neighbor, the Other which any entity needs in order to have a boundary and
be understood as an entity.
The point to take from all this is that the gens-name Franci is never applied
to the Normans in this text. Probably more than any other single text, Dudo’s De
moribus is evidence that the pre-Conquest Normans did not call themselves Franci.
Indeed, as these passages illustrate, one might almost venture that the Normans
could not call themselves Franci. It would have made no conceptual sense in a
Norman geopolitical world in which the Franci were the perennial enemy.
Throughout this text of c. 996-1020, the Franks and the Normans are
conceived of as two separate, non-overlapping gentes. The exact nature of the
political relationship between the dux Normannorum and the rex francorum is a
sensitive point, but there is no sign that the distinction between the two gentes is
anything but simple and unequivocal. Furthermore, though the text registers
complications and limitations in the process of distinguishing between its
protagonist Normanni and other or earlier Normanni, the demarcation between
Normanni and Franci brooks no compromise. There is no circumstance in which
the Normans represent themselves as a subspecies of the Franks, and no indication
that such a category-shift could be possible.
William of Jumièges’ Gesta Normannorum Ducum
332
Pre-Conqest Normandy produced a second major narrative history, written
about thirty-five years after Dudo left the Norman court to finish his career as the
dean of St. Quentin. Together, Dudo’s De moribus and the Gesta Normannorum
Ducum of William of Jumièges have been called “the official canon” of medieval
Norman historiography.79 In its various redactions, the Gesta Normannorum
Ducum was the most widely circulated history of the Normans. Some forty
manuscripts survive from before 1200, and there were copies in all of the most
important Norman monasteries in England.80 A more sober and reliable work than
Dudo’s, it is to this day valued as “one of the most important narrative sources for
the history of Normandy and England up to the death of King Henry I.”81
The Gesta Normannorum Ducum, or Deeds of the Norman Dukes, is a text
whose composition spanned the 1066 watershed; it is both a pre- and a post-
Conquest artifact. Though scholarly works commonly discuss the Gesta
Normannorum Ducum as if it were a single text of 1050 or 1070, it is a rolling
historiographical snowball of additions and editions. William of Jumièges wrote
the ‘original’ Gesta Normannorum Ducum in the 1050s, drawing very heavily on
Dudo’s De moribus as both his model for the project and his principal source for
79
Elisabeth van Houts, ed. and trans., “The Brevis Relatio de Guillelmo
nobilisissimo comite Normannorum Written by a Monk of Battle Abbey,” in E.M.C. van
Houts, History and Family Traditions in England and the Continent, 1000-1200.
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 22.
80
G.A. Loud, “The ‘Gens Normannorum’,” 107.
81
Elisabeth M.C van Houts, ed., The Gesta Normannorum Ducum of William of
Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Robert of Torigni, 2 vols., (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1992), vol.1, xxi. Hereafter, this authoratative modern edition will be abbreviated
GND.
333
the events of Norman history from Rollo’s time through the reign of Richard I.
William’s reworking produced substantial changes in style and in substance, adding
some material of his own but much more frequently abridging.82 Bringing the
Normans’ story up to date, he covered the reigns of the next four dukes, ending in
1060 in the reign of Duke William II, who was not yet ‘the Conqueror.’ William of
Jumièges returned to the text in 1070 or 1071, adding a short account of William’s
conquest of England and ending with his capture of Durham and York in 1069.
Between 1095 and 1109 Orderic Vitalis, the Anglo-Norman historian better
known for his massive Historia Ecclesiastica, produced another redaction, making
substantial additions to the sections on Robert I, William II and the conquest of
England. Finally, Orderic’s version was itself the basis for a major revision
undertaken by Robert de Torigny in the 1130s. Robert went back to Dudo’s De
moribus for details and whole scenes which William of Jumièges had omitted, and
added a continuation, book VIII, on King Henry I of England. He completed his
redaction before 1140 but then returned to the work periodically to add updates and
revisions, some as late as 1159. Robert’s is the version most different from
William of Jumieges’ original Gesta Normannorum Ducum.83 Thanks to the
edition published from 1992 to 1995 by Elisabeth van Houts, it is (relatively) easy
82
Ibid., vol.1, xxxii-xxxv.
83
Ibid., vol.1, lxvii, lxxix-lxxx. Orderic Vitalis’ redaction also contains some later
revisions, but none later than 1113 (ibid., lxvii).
334
to track the changes in the text and to know which passages, ideas, and terms
belong to which period.
The shorter text produced by William of Jumièges in the 1050s was not the
version known to most medieval readers of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum but it
is the only redaction that can be relied on as a witness of genuine pre-Conquest
Norman identity discourse.84 Almost nothing is known of the author, except that he
was a monk at Jumièges, one of Normandy’s wealthiest and most prominent
abbeys, and that Orderic Vitalis repeatedly refered to him by the nickname
Calculus, which means either that he was trained in computating the dates of
church holy days or that he had kidney stones.85 We do not know who, if any, his
patrons were, nor anything about the circumstances under which he produced his
text. Nevertheless, the Gesta Normannorum Ducum is the single most important
narrative source to turn to when attempting to establish whether Normans just
before the Conquest used the term Franci as a way to designate the Norman people.
In this text, as in De moribus at the beginning of the century, the answer is
no. The distinction between the French and the Normans is not a porous or
ambiguous one. In the early part of book II, where the Normans-to-be are still
bloodthirsty pagan invaders, William of Jumièges creates few occasions to use any
gens-name for them at all. In part this is accomplished by passing over the long
84
William’s expanded redaction survives in only 3 manuscript copies, out of a total
of 47 for all versions of the GND (ibid, xxi, cxxi).
85
Ibid., xxxi.
335
description of Rollo’s early career which had occupied so much space in book II of
Dudo. When he calls them anything, William calls the viking raiders Dani (eg.
II.2-4). Unlike his source text, William does not persist in calling his protagonists
by archaizing pseudo-historical names. The term Daci vanishes as soon as the text
is done with the ancient times of the origo gentium story.86 The Gesta
Normannorum Ducum attaches the name Normanni to them quickly, and never
looks back. As in De moribus, the term is used proleptically: even in the context of
events prior to the meeting at Saint-Clair-sur-Epte the text calls them Normanni
(II.10-11). After Rollo’s raiders take possession of their new land, “Danes”
disappears as a name for the Normans and the text never calls them anything but
“Normans.”87 The next time we encounter the term, it is used to describe
“Heroldus Danorum rex [Harold king of the Danes],” who is not a Norman but the
king of Denmark (III.9). Throughout book IV, Dani designates King Harold’s
men, allies of the Normanni in their ongoing wars against Louis IV and his Franci.
Where De moribus had used the same set of three names for both the Normans and
their Scandanavian allies, the Gesta demarcates them unambiguously. The dual
meaning which complicated Dudo’s (and Adhemar’s) use of the gens-name

86
Robert of Torigni, using passages from Dudo which William of Jumièges had
omitted, is responsible for almost all of the appearances in the GND of the term Daci
[Dacian]. Eg., restoring Dudo’s detailed account of Rollo’s victory over Frankish leader
Ragnold, Robert of Torigni uses exclusively Daci, whereas William of Jumièges had used
Dani. In book III, where Robert de Torigni inserts no material from Dudo’s De moribus,
there are no instances of the term Daci.
87
The only time the adjective “Dane” is applied to Rollo’s people after their
acquisition of Normandy is in the phrase “according to the Danish custom [Danico more],
describing William Longsword’s unconsecrated union with Sprota in III.2.
336
Normanni is absent here. If the Normandy Normans did not have exclusive
ownership of the name Normanni in history texts of the 1020 and 1030s, they did in
the text of the 1050s.
The gens-name Franci is used consistently throughout the text to refer to a
Frankish/French nation which does not include the text’s Norman protagonists.
From the initial mention of “the Frankish people [Francorum gens]” in the first line
of Gesta, the Franci are the defining Other of Norman history. Intersection with
the Franks’ older, Christian history and collision with the Frankish people are the
events which bring the Normanni into being. (Interestingly, this text names the
Other more often than the self: in most of the seven books of the Gesta
Normannorum Ducum, Franci is by far the most commonly used national/ethnic
term.) In the narrative offered by this text, the enmity between the two groups is
the engine which propels the events of Norman history: “ever since the Normans
had begun to cultivate the lands of Nuestria, the French had made it their custom to
envy them; they incited their kings to turn against them and asserted that the
Normans had taken away by force from their ancestors the lands now in Norman
hands.”88 Throughout William’s narration of the strife between the two peoples,
the alliances and loyalties are not always clear in the murky atmosphere of
rebellion and backstabbing, but conceptually the two opposing teams are always
88
GND VII.10. “Enimvero, ex quo Normanni arua Neustrie ceperunt incolere, mos
fuit Francis semper eis invidere, concitantes reges adversus illos insurgere, terras quas
possidentsuis maioribus violenter eos surripuisse asserentes.”
337
represented as discrete, simple entities – clear and clearly named. Duke William’s
loyal men are Normanni or “the Norman men [viribus Normannorum]” or “troops
of Normans [legionibus Normannorum]” (VII.3). The enemy (at Val-ès-Dunes in
1047 for example) is “Henry king of the French [Heinricum Francorum regem]”
with his “French men [viribus Francorum]” (VII.7). Individual turncoats may
cross over and fight with the wrong side but the distinction in national/ethnic
labelling is still rigorously maintained, as when William of Jumièges describes how
Henry, preparing to lay siege to Tillières, gathered an army of both his own French
and rebellious Normans [“exercitibus tam Francorum quam Normannorum
contractis”] (VII.2).
As with the other texts we have looked at, the Gesta’s representation of
geopolitical space makes Normandy and France two non-overlapping units. In
book I and the early part of II, William of Jumièges relies on the Roman term
Gallia to refer to the large geographical area that extends to the Channel and south
through Aquitaine (I.7-8), and the old Merovingian toponym Neustria when talking
about the northwestern portion of it (I.6). After “the land by the sea, which is now
called Normandy [terra maritima, que nunc vocatur Normannica]” is ceded to
Rollo’s Normanni by King Charles, the gens-name Franci always denotes the
people of a specific and limited Francia which does not include Normandy. The
text reflects this conception of Francia immediately. The pact between Charles
and Rollo is followed, in good medieval fashion, by a mass conversion; after the
338
baptism in Rouen, William tells us, Rollo’s godfather, Robert duke of the Franks
[Robertus Francorum dux], “returned joyfully to France [Frantiam repetit hylaris]”
(II.13). The same phrasing, with its unavoidable consequent that France is a place
outside of Normandy, is repeated when, after visiting to Normandy for a diplomatic
summit, Louis IV “returned to France [Frantiam repetit]” (III.5, p.84). Shortly
afterward, the duke of Normandy is in Laon to act as godfather to the French king’s
son and “when this had been regally done, he and his men quicky withdrew across
the borders of Normandy [Normannicos limites]” (III.6).89 The concept of crossing
between two distinct, non-inclusive territories holds when the crossing goes in the
opposite direction too. Likewise, seen from the perspective of yet another entity
external to both, Normandy and France are separate: in book V, Duke Richard II
goes to help the king of France take possession of Burgundy and afterwards “the
king returned to France and the duke and his men to Normandy [Post hoc rex in
Frantiam et dux regreditur cum suis in Normanniam]” (V.16).90
In the Gesta Normannorum Ducum as it was written in the 1050s,
Normandy is not part of France territorially, and the Normans are not, at any point,
represented as part of a broadly-conceived category of Franks or Frenchmen. In
this regard, William of Jumièges’ text is consistent with every other pre-Conquest
Norman or Frankish/French text I have seen.
89
I have substituted my own more literal translation for van Houts’ rendering which
leaves out the word limites.
90
Cf. GND VI.5, VI.7.
339
Summary of Appendix on Historiographical Texts before 1066
In 1976 R.H.C. Davis declared that, before the 12th century, the Normans
were anxious to distance themselves from their Danish roots but did not mind
calling themselves French.91 After analyzing the documentary and narrative texts
implicated in shaping or expressing Norman identity and ideology in the period
prior to 1066, it is difficult not to disagree. It is true enough that the Norman
people – the notional gens corresponding to the hybrid state that Rollo and his
successors developed – underwent a process of “francization” (Davis’ word), and
that Dudo’s seminal history-writing approvingly emphasized this assimilation. But
it is not true that the Normans had no interest in distinguishing themselves from the
French or that they identified themselves as a subspecies of Frank. On the
contrary, the evidence suggests that the name Normanni, by the 11th century at
least, functioned primarily to mark the people of the county or duchy of Rouen a
group apart from the Franks/French. From the time of their initial settlement at
the edge of the Frankish world in the 9th century, the Franks were the people
against whom the Normanni were defined. Perhaps the first principle of their
identity as a group was that they were not Franks. Even after the Rouen
91
Davis, The Normans and their Myth, 53-54.
340
Nor(th)manni were well-established and no longer alien ‘Men of the North,’ the
name persisted, defining them as ‘not-Franks.’
Perceiving that the adoption of the name Normanni had great importance
for the Normans themselves, Nick Webber remarks, “a new gens had been created,
and its identity was correspondingly new. The adoption of this new ethnonym
marked the ethnogenesis of a new people.”92 The value of having a name of their
own to define their people and their territory is evident in the Normans’
historiographical texts and written administrative documents throughout the 11th
century, on both sides of 1066. But it is not true that the cherished gens-name was
new. The Normans were, in fact, a new group using (or re-using) an old name.
Normanni served admirably to mark their difference from the Franks; what the
name did not do, as we have seen in both Frankish texts and Norman, was to set
down a strong border demarcating the Normanni from other and/or earlier
Northmen. By the early decades of the 11th century, the distinction was made and
we can see it expressed in both Adhemar and Dudo: the Normandy Normans are
positioned as a distinct group – but the distinction is not created or maintained by
the way they are named.
Whether the name Normanni had much potency, in actual spoken practice,
as a reminder of the Normans’ viking roots is impossible to recover from written
records. Over time the people of Normandy increasingly ‘owned’ the name as they
92
Webber, Norman Identity, 21, 43.
341
edged out the ‘other’ Normanni in texts and, undoubtedly, in the consciousness of
French, Flemish, Aquitanians, and so forth. Nevertheless, the name itself was not
new or unique and still allowed for potential confuison, conflation. This is not so
interesting in itself because, in practice, context would presumably have taken care
of the potential confusion. I am not suggesting that anyone in France or Aquitaine
in 1030 really confused the Christian, romanz-speaking Normans with Danes. But
the limit of the name – what it does not do – is significant as a point of contrast. It
is a revealing comment on the non-use of the name Franci to denote the Normans.
The ‘policy’ for identifying the Normans, among Normans and non-Normans alike,
functioned in such a way as to tolerate a linkage or continuity between the
Normandy Normans and Scandinavians but it did not permit the possiblility that the
Normans could be confused with, or blended with, the French.
The name Normanni was indeed an important element in constructing a
group identity for the Normans. It marked their difference and independence from
the French, the once-dominant regional power to which they were still,
theoretically, subordinate. It gave them a presence and a standing in that region,
alongside the French, the Angevins, the Flemings, Bretons, and Aquitainians. This
is the context which we have to keep in mind when considering the articulation of
Norman national identity in the 11th century; and it is a context in which the
Normans, at home on the Continent before being re-paired with their new, English
‘other,’ were not and, it can almost be said, could not be called Franci.
342
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Texts (Arranged by Author)
Abbo of Fleury. Passio sancti Eadmundi. Ed. Michael Winterbottom, in Three

Lives of English Saints, 65-92. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval
Studies, 1972.
————. Questions grammaticales. Ed. Anita Guerreau-Jalabert. Auteurs

Latins du Moyen Âge. Paris: Société d’Édition “Les Belles Lettres, 1982.
Adhemar of Chabannes. Chronicon. Ed. P. Bourgain. Corpus Christianorum,

Continuo Mediavalis 129. Turnhout: Brepols, 1999.
————. Chronique. Trans. Yves Chauvin and Georges Pon. Turnhout:

Brepols, 2003
Adgar. Le Gracial. Ed. Pierre Kunstmann. Ottawa: Éditions de l’Université

d’Ottawa, 1982.
Ælred of Rievaulx. Relatio de Standardo. Ed. Richard Howlett in Chronicles of

the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II,and Richard I, v.3, 179-199. 4 vols. Rolls
Series 82. London: Longman and Co., for Her Majesty’s Treasury, 1885.
Alberic de Pisançon. The Medieval French Roman d’Alexandre. Vol. 3: Version

of Alexandre de Paris: Variants and Notes to Branch I. Ed. Alfred Foulet.
Elliott Monographs 38. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949.
Alexandre de Paris. The Medieval French Roman d’Alexandre. Vol. 2: Version

of Alexandre de Paris. Ed. Edward C. Armstrong et al. Elliott Monographs
37. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1938.
Augustine of Hippo. Teaching Christianity (De Doctrina Christiana). Trans.

Edmund Hill. The Works of Saint Augustine, I, 11. Hyde Park: Augustinian
Heritage Institute/ New City Press, 1996.
343
Bede. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. Bertram Colgrave
and R.A.B. Mynors. Trans. Bertram Colgrave. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1969.
————. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, The Greater

Chronicle, and Bede’s Letter to Egbert. Ed. Judith McClure and Roger
Collins. Trans. Bertram Colgrave. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
Ed. and trans. Thomas Miller. Early English Text Society 95 London: Oxford
University Press, 1890. Reprint, Millwood: Kraus Reprint Co., 1978.
Benedeit. The Anglo-Norman Voyage of Saint Brendan. Ed. Ian Short and Brian
Merrilees. Manchester: Manchester University Press: 1979.
————. Le Voyage de Saint Brendan par Benedeit. Ed. Ian Short. Notes by
Brian Merrilees. Bibliothèque Médiévale. Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions,
1984.
Benoît de Sainte-Maure. Le Roman de Troie. Ed. Emmanuèle Baumgartner and

François Veilliard. Lettres Gothiques. Paris: Librairie Générale
Française/Livre de Poche, 1998.
————. Le Roman de Troie de Benoît de Sainte-Maure publié d’après tous les

manuscrits connus. Edited by Léopold Constans. 6 vols. Société des Anciens
Textes Français. Paris: Firmin-Didot et Cie., 1904-1912.
————. Chronique des ducs de Normandie. Ed. Carin Fahlin. Notes by Sven
Sandqvist and glossary by Östen Södergård. 4 vols. Uppsala: Almqvist &
Wiksells, 1951-1979.
Byrhtferth. Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion. Peter S. Baker and Michael Lapidge, eds.

Oxford: Early English Text Society, 1995.
Chrétien de Troyes. Les romans de Chrétien de Troyes, edités d’après la copie de

Guiot. 5 vols. Ed. Mario Roques, Alexandre Micha, and Félix Lecoy. 5 vols.
Les classiques français du moyen âge. Paris: Champion, 1955-1997.
————. Cligés. Ed. Charles Méla and Olivier Collet. Lettres Gothiques. Paris:
Librairie Générale Française, 1994.
344
————. Chevalier de la charrette, ou le roman de Lancelot. Ed. Charles Méla.
Lettres Gothiques. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1992.
————. Romans. Ed. Charles Méla, Olivier Collet, Jean-Marie Fritz, David F.
Hult, and Marie-Claire Zai. Classiques Modernes. Paris: Le Livre de Poche,
1994.
Clemence of Barking. The Life of Saint Catherine. Ed. William MacBain. Anglo-
Norman Text Society 18. Oxford: Blackwell, 1964.
Dante Alighieri. Vita Nuova. Ed. Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta. Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995.
————. Vita Nova. Ed. Guglielmo Gorni. Turin: Einaudi, 1996.
————. Dante in Hell: The De Vulgari Eloquentia. Ed. and trans. Warman
Welliver. Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1981.
————. Il Convivio. Ed. Maria Simonelli. Bologna: Riccardo Pàtron, 1966.
————. The Banquet. Trans. Christopher Ryan. Saratoga, CA: ANMA Libri,
1989.
Denis Piramus. La Vie Seint Edmund le Rei. Ed. Hilding Kjellman. Göteborg:
Royal Society of Sciences and Letters, 1935. Reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1974.
Dudo of Saint-Quentin. De moribus et actis primorum Normanniae ducum. Ed.

Jules Lair. Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de Normandie 3rd ser.,
vol.3, part 2 (September 1865): 5-317.
————. History of the Normans. Trans. Eric Christiansen. Woodbridge:

Boydell Press, 1998.
Einhard. Vita Karoli Magni. Ed. G. Waitz and G.H. Pertz. 6th ed. Monumenta
Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum,
Separatim editi. Hannover: Hahn, 1911. Reprinted 1965.
Faidit, Uc. The Donatz Proensals of Uc Faidit. Ed. John H. Marshall. London:
Oxford University Press, 1969.
Fantosme, Jordan. Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle. Ed. R.C. Johnston. Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1981.
345
Fitz Nigel, Richard. Dialogus de Scaccario, The Course of the Exchequer, and
Constitutio Domus Regis, The Establishment of the Royal Household. Ed and
trans. Charles Johnson, with corrections by F.E.L. Carter and D.E. Greenway.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.
Flodoard of Reims. Annales. Ed. J.P. Migne. Patrologia Latina, vol. 135, col.
423-489. Paris: Garnier Fratres, 1884-1905.
Flodoard of Reims. The Annals of Flodoard of Reims, 916-966. Trans. Steven

Fanning and Bernard S. Bachrach. Readings in Medieval Civilizations and
Cultures 9. Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 2004.
Gaimar, Geffrei. L’Estoire des Engleis. Ed. Alexander Bell. Anglo-Norman Texts,
14-16. Oxford: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1960.
Gaimar, Geffrei. L’Estorie des Engles. Ed. and trans. Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy
and Charles Trice Martin. 2 vols. Rolls Series, 91. London: Eyre and
Spottiswoode, 1888.
Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Poetria Nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Trans. Margaret F.

Nims. Medieval Sources in Translation, 6. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
Mediaeval Studies, 1967.
Geoffrey of Wells. De infantia Sancti Eadmundi. Ed. and trans. Lord Francis
Hervey, in Corolla Sancti Eadmundi: The Garland of Saint Edmund, King and
Martyr. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1907.
Geoffrey Malaterra. De rebus gestis Rogerii Calabriae et Siciliae comitis et

Roberti Guiscardi Ducis fratris eius. Ed. Ernesto Pontieri. Rerum Italicarum
scriptores. 2nd ed. Vol.5, part 1. Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1928.
Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. Lewis Thorpe.
London: Penguin Books, 1966.
————. The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Ed. Neil

Wright. 5 vols. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1984.
Goscelin of St. Bertin. “The Liber confortatorius of Goscelin of Saint Bertin.” Ed.
C.H. Talbot. Analecta Monastica 3rd ser. 37 (1955): 1-117.
346
————. Goscelin of St. Bertin: The Book of Encouragement and Consolation
[Liber confortatorius]. Trans. Monika Otter. Library of Medieval Women.
Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004.
Guernes de Pont-Saint-Maxence. Vie de Saint Thomas Becket. Ed. Emmanuel

Walberg. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1936.
Gui. “La Vie de Sainte Catherine d’Alexandrie, as Contained in the Paris Manu-
script La Clayette.” Ed. Henry Alfred Todd. PMLA 15 no.1 (1900): 17-73.
Guillem IX. The Poetry of William VII, Count of Poitiers, IX Duke of Aquitaine.
Ed. and trans. Gerald A. Bond. Garland Library of Medieval Literature 4.
New York: Garland, 1982.
Guy, bishop of Amiens. The Carmen de Hastingae proelio of Guy, Bishop of

Amiens. Ed. and trans. Frank Barlow. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999.
Henry of Huntingdon. Historia Anglorum: The History of the English People. Ed.
and trans. Diana Greenway. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1996.
Hermannus the Archdeacon. Liber de Miraculis Sancti Eadmundi. Ed. Thomas

Arnold in Memorials of St. Edmund’s Abbey, vol.1, 26-92. Chronicles and
Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages (Rolls Series),
96. 3 vols. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1890-96.
Hue de Rotelande. Ipomedon. Ed. A.J. Holden. Paris: Klincksieck, 1979.
Isidore of Seville. Isadori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum libri

XX. 2 vols. Ed. by W.M. Lindsay. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911.
————. Etymologies, Book II. Ed. and trans.Peter K. Marshall. Auteurs Latins
du Moyen Âge. Paris: Société d’Éditions “Les Belles Lettres,” 1983.
————. Etymologiae, Book IX. Ed. and trans. Marc Reydellet. Auteurs Latins
du Moyen Âge. Paris: Société d’Éditions “Les Belles Lettres,” 1984.
John of Worcester. The Chronicle of John of Worcester. Ed. R.R. Darlington and
P. McGurk. Trans. Jennifer Bray and P. McGurk. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1995.
347
Marie de France. Les Lais de Marie de France. Ed. Jean Rychner. Paris:
Champion, 1966.
————. Fables. Ed. and trans. Harriet Spiegel. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1987.
————. Saint Patrick’s Purgatory. Trans. Michael J. Curley. Medieval and

Renaissance Texts and Studies, 94. Binghamton: Center for Medieval and
Early Renaissance Studies, 1993.
————. L’Espurgatoire seint Patriz. Ed. Yolande de Pontfarcy. Louvain:

Peeters, 1995.
Nithard. Nithard: Histoire des fils de Louis le Pieux. Ed. Philippe Lauer. Les
Classiques de l’Histoire de France au Moyen Âge. Paris: Champion, 1926.
————. De dissensionibus filiorum Ludovici Pii historiarum libri iiii. Trans.

Bernhard Walter Scholz, in Carolingian Chronicles, 127-174. Ann Arbor:
University of Michegan Press, 1970.
Nun of Barking. La Vie d’Edouard le confesseur, poème anglo-normand du XIIe

siècle. Ed. Östen Södergård. Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksells, 1948.
Orderic Vitalis. The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis. Ed. and trans.
Marjorie Chibnall. 6 vols. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1969-1980.
Petrus Helias. Summa super Priscianium. Ed. Leo Reilly. 2 vols. Toronto:
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1993.
Philippe de Thaön. Comput (MS BL Cotton Nero A.V). Ed. Ian Short. Anglo-
Norman Text Society, Plain Text Series 2. London: Anglo-Norman Text
Society, 1984.
————. Le Bestiaire de Philippe de Thaün. Ed. Emmanuel Walberg. Lund:

H.J. Möller, 1900.
————. Le Livre de Sibile. Ed. Hugh Shields. Anglo-Norman Text Society 37.
London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1979.
Piramus, Denis. La Vie Seint Edmund le Rei. Ed. Hilding Kjellman. Göteborg:
348
Plato. Cratylus. Trans. C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998.
Richard of Hexham. De Gestis Regis Stephani. Ed. Richard Howlett. In

Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II,and Richard I, ed. idem, v.3,
137-178. 4 vols. Rolls Series 82. London: Longman and Co., for Her
Majesty’s Treasury, 1885.
Richer of Saint-Rémy de Reims. Histoire de France (888-995). Ed. and trans.

Robert Latouche. 2 vols. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1930, 1937.
Sanson de Nantuil. Les Proverbes de Salemon by Sanson de Nantuil. Ed. C. Claire

Isoz. 3 vols. London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1988.
Stephen of Rouen. Draco Normannicus. Ed. Richard Howlett. In Chronicles of

the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, ed. idem, vol.2, 585-757. 4
vols. Rolls Series 82. London: Longman and Co., for Her Majesty’s
Treasury, 1885.
Vidal, Raimon. The Razos de trobar of Raimon Vidal and Associated Texts. Ed.
John Marshall. London: Oxford University Press, 1972.
————. Grammaires provençales de Hughes Faidit et de Raymond Vidal de

Besaudun. Ed. F. Guessard. 2nd ed. Paris, 1858. Reprint, Geneva: Slatkine,
1973.
Wace. La Vie de sainte Marguerite. Ed. Elizabeth A. Francis. Paris: Champion,

1932.
————. La Vie de sainte Marguerite. Ed. Hans-Erich Keller. Tübingen: Max

Niemeyer, 1990.
————. The Conception Nostre Dame of Wace. Ed. William Ray Ashford.
Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries, 1933.
————. La Vie de Saint Nicolas par Wace. Ed. Einar Ronsjö. Études Romanes
de Lund. Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1942.
————. Le Roman de Brut de Wace. Ed. Ivor Arnold. 2 vols. Paris: Société
des Anciens Textes Français, 1938, 1940.
349
————. Wace’s Roman de Brut, A History of the British. Trans. Judith Weiss.
Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999.
————. Le Roman de Rou de Wace. Ed. A.J. Holden. 3 vols. Paris: Société des
Anciens Textes Français, 1970-73.
————. The Roman de Rou. Trans. Glyn S. Burgess, Ed. A.J. Holden (St.
Helier: Société Jersiaise, 2002).
Widukind. Rerum Gestarum Saxonicarum. Ed. G. Waitz and K.A. Kehr. 5th ed.
Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum
scholarum. Hanover: Hahnsche, 1935.
William of Apulia. La Geste de Robert Guiscard. Ed. and trans. Marguerite

Mathieu. Palermo: Istituto Siciliano di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici, 1961.
William of Poitiers. The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers. Ed. and trans.
R.H.C. Davis and Marjorie Chibnall. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
William of Malmesbury. Gesta Regum Anglorum. Ed. and trans. R.A.B. Mynors,
completed by R.M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom. 2 vols. Oxford:
350
Primary Texts (Arranged by Modern Editor)
Armstrong, Edward C. et al., eds. The Medieval French Roman d’Alexandre. Vol.
2: Version of Alexandre de Paris. Elliott Monographs 37. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1938.
Arnold, Ivor, ed. Le Roman de Brut de Wace. 2 vols. Paris: Société des Anciens
Textes Français, 1938, 1940
Arnold, Thomas, ed. Memorials of St. Edmund’s Abbey. 3 vols. Chronicles and
Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland During the Middle Ages (Rolls Series),
96. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1890-1896.
Ashford, William Ray, ed. The Conception Nostre Dame of Wace. Chicago:
University of Chicago Libraries, 1933.
Aspin, Isabel S.T., ed. Anglo-Norman Political Songs. Anglo-Norman Text Society
11. Oxford: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1953.
Aspland, C.W., ed. A Medieval French Reader. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.
Baker, Peter S., ed. Vol. 8 (MS F) of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative
Edition, edited by David Dumville and Simon Keynes. Cambridge: D.S.
Brewer, 2000.
Baker, Peter S., and Michael Lapidge, eds. Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion. Oxford: Early
English Text Society, 1995.
Barlow, Frank, ed. and trans. The Carmen de Hastingae proelio of Guy, Bishop of
Amiens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Barron, W.R.J. and Glyn S. Burgess, gen. eds. The Voyage of Saint Brendan:
Representative Versions of the Legend in English Translation. Exeter
Medieval Texts and Studies. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002.
Bately, Janet, ed. Vol. 3 (MS A) of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative

Edition, ed. David Dumville and Simon Keynes. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer,
1986.
351
Bates, David, ed. Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum: The Acta of William I
(1066-1087). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
Bateson, Mary, ed. Records of the Borough of Leicester. 2 vols. London: C.J.
Clay and Sons, 1899 and 1901.
Bateson, Mary, ed. Borough Customs. 2 vols. Publications of the Selden Society
18 and 21. London: Selden Society, 1904 and 1906.
Baumgartner, Emmanuèle and François Veilliard, eds. Le Roman de Troie.

[Benoît de Sainte-Maure.] Lettres Gothiques. Paris: Librairie Générale
Française/Livre de Poche, 1998.
Bayot, Alphonse, ed. Gormont et Isembart: fragment de chanson de geste de XIIe

siècle. 3rd rev. ed. Paris: Champion, 1969.
Bec, Pierre. La lyrique française au moyen âge (xiie-xiiie siècles). 2 vols. Paris:
A. & J. Picard, 1977.
Bell, Alexander, ed. [Geffrei Gaimar.] L’Estoire des Engleis. Anglo-Norman

Texts, 14-16. Oxford: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1960.
Bond, Gerald A., ed. The Poetry of William VII, Count of Poitiers, IX Duke of
Aquitaine. Garland Library of Medieval Literature, ser. A., vol. 4. New York:
Garland, 1982.
Bosanquet, Geoffrey, trans. Eadmer’s History of Recent Events in England.

London: Cresset Press, 1964.
Bourgain, P., ed. [Adhemar of Chabannes.] Ademari Cabannensis Chronicon.

Corpus Christianorum, Continuo Mediavalis 129. Turnhout: Brepols, 1999.
Brault, Gerald J., ed. The Song of Roland: An Analytical Edition. 2 vols.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978.
Brunel, Clovis, ed. Les plus anciennes chartes en langue provençle. Paris, 1926.
Reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1973.
Burgess, Glyn S., ed. and trans. The Pilgrimage of Charlemagne. Garland Library
of Medieval Literature, ser. A., vol. 47. New York: Garland, 1988.
352
Burgess, Glyn S., trans. [Wace.] The Roman de Rou. St. Helier: Société
Jersiaise, 2002.
Carolus-Barré, Louis. Les plus anciennes chartes en langue française. Paris:

Klincksieck, 1964.
Castellani, Arrigo, ed. I più antichi testi italiani. 2nd ed. Bologna: Pàtron, 1976.
Ceccini, Enzo, ed. and mod. Ital. trans. Epitola a Cangrande. Biblioteca del
Medioevo Latino. Florence: Giunti, 1995.
Cervigni, Dino S. and Edward Vasta, eds. [Dante Alighieri.] Vita Nuova. Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995.
Chauvin, Yves and Georges Pon, trans. [Adhemar of Chabannes.] Chronique.

Turnhout: Brepols, 2003
Chibnall, Marjorie, ed. and trans. The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis. 6
vols. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969-1980.
Christiansen, Eric, trans. [Dudo of Saint-Quentin.] History of the Normans.

Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1998.
Cloetta, Wilhelm. Moniage Guillaume, première rédaction. Paris: Société des

Anciens Textes Français, 1906.
Colgrave, Bertram and R.A.B. Mynors, eds. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the
English People. Bertram Colgrave, trans. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
Constans, Léopold, ed. Le Roman de Troie de Benoît de Sainte-Maure publié

d’après tous les manuscrits connus. 6 vols. Société des Anciens Textes
Français. Paris: Firmin-Didot et Cie., 1904-1912.
Cubbin, G.P., ed. Vol. 6 (MS D) of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative

Edition, edited by David Dumville and Simon Keynes. Cambridge: D.S.
Brewer, 1996.
Curley, Michael J., trans. Saint Patrick’s Purgatory. Binghamton: Medieval and
Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993.
R.R. Darlington and P. McGurk, eds. The Chronicle of John of Worcester. 3 vols.
Trans. Jennifer Bray and P. McGurk. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
353
Dass, Nirmal, trans. The Crowning of Louis. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co.,
2003.
Davis, R.H.C. and Marjorie Chibnall, ed. and trans. The Gesta Guillelmi of
William of Poitiers. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
Dejeanne, Jean-Marie-Lucien, ed. Poésies complètes du troubadour Marcabru.

Toulouse: E. Privat, 1909. Reprint, New York: Johnson, 1971.
Douglas, David C. and George W. Greenaway, eds. English Historical Documents

[Vol.2] 1042-1189. 2nd ed. London: Eyre Methuen, 1981.
Dumville, David and Simon Keynes, general eds. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A
Collaborative Edition. 8 vols. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983.
Fahlin, Carin, ed. Chronique des ducs de Normandie. [Benoît de Sainte-Maure.]

With notes by Sven Sandqvist and glossary by Östen Södergård. 4 vols.
Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1951-1979.
Fanning, Steven and Bernard S. Bachrach, trans. The Annals of Flodoard of Reims,
916-966. Readings in Medieval Civilizations and Cultures 9. Peterborough,
Canada: Broadview Press, 2004.
Fawtier-Jones, E.C. “Les vies de Ste.-Catherine d’Alexandrie.” Romania 56

(1930): 80-104.
Foulet, Alfred, ed. The Medieval French Roman d’Alexandre. Vol. 3: Version of
Alexandre de Paris; Variants and Notes to Branch I. Elliott Monographs 38.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949.
Francis, Elizabeth A., ed. [Wace.] La Vie de sainte Marguerite. Paris: Champion,
1932.
Gorni, Guglielmo, ed. Vita Nova. Turin: Einaudi, 1996.
Gouiran, Gérard and Ronert Lafont, eds. and trans. Le Roland occitan: Roland à
Saragosse; Ronsavals. Bibliothèque Médiévale 10/18. Paris: Christian
Bourgois, 1991.
Guessard, F., ed. Grammaires provençales de Hughes Faidit et de Raymond Vidal

de Besaudun. 2nd ed. Paris, 1858. Reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1973.
354
Greenway Diana, ed. and trans. [Henry of Huntingdon.] Historia Anglorum: The
History of the English People. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1996.
Guerreau-Jalabert, Anita, ed. and trans. Questions grammaticales. Auteurs Latins

du Moyen Âge. Paris: Société d’Édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1982.
Hardy, Sir Thomas Duffus and Charles Trice Martin, eds. and trans. [Geffrei
Gaimar.] L’Estorie des Engles. 2 vols. Rolls Series, 91. London: Her
Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1888-89.
Harf-Lancner, Laurence, trans. and apparatus, with text of Edward C. Armstrong et

al., eds. [Alexandre de Paris.] Le Roman d’Alexandre. Lettres Gothiques.
Paris: Livre de Poche, 1994.
Hervey, Lord Francis, ed. [Geoffrey of Wells.] De infantia Sancti Eadmundi. In

Corolla Sancti Eadmundi: The Garland of Saint Edmund, King and Martyr,
ed. idem. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1907.
Hill, R.T. and T.G. Bergin, eds. Anthology of the Provençal Troubadours. 2 vols.
2nd ed. revised by Thomas G. Bergin with Susan Olson, William D. Paden, Jr.,
and Nathaniel Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973.
Holden, A.J., ed. Le Roman de Rou de Wace. 3 vols. Paris: Société des Anciens
Textes Français, 1970-1973.
Holden, A.J., ed. [Hue de Rotelande.] Ipomedon. Paris: Klincksieck, 1979.
Howlett, Richard, ed. Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard
I. 4 vols. Rolls Series 82. London: Longman and Co., for Her Majesty’s
Treasury, 1885.
Irvine, Susan, ed. Vol. 7 (MS E) of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative

Edition, ed. David Dumville and Simon Keynes. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer,
2004.
Isoz, C. Claire, ed. Les Proverbes de Salemon by Sanson de Nantuil. 3 vols.

London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1988.
————. Questions grammaticales. Ed. by Anita Guerreau-Jalabert. Auteurs

Latins du Moyen Âge. Paris: Société d’Édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1982.
355
Jeffrey, David L. and Brian J. Levy, eds. The Anglo-Norman Lyric: An Anthology.
Studies and Texts 93. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1990.
Johnson, Charles, ed. and trans., with corrections by F.E.L. Carter and D.E.
Greenway. [Richard Fitz Nigel.] Dialogus de Scaccario: The Course of the
Exchequer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.
Johnston, R.C., ed. Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.
Keller, Hans-Erich ed. [Wace.] La Vie de sainte Marguerite. Tübingen: Max

Niemeyer, 1990.
Kibler, William W., ed. and trans. [Chrétien de Troyes.] Arthurian Romances.
London: Penguin, 1991.
Kjellman, Hilding, ed. [Denis Piramus] La Vie Seint Edmund le Rei. Göteborg:
Kunstmann, Pierre, ed. [Adgar] Le Gracial. Ottawa: Éditions de l’Université

d’Ottawa, 1982.
Lafont, Robert, ed. La Chanson de Sainte Foi. Geneva: Droz, 1998.
Lair, J., ed. [Dudo of Saint-Quentin.] De moribus et actis primorum Normanniae

ducum. Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de Normandie, 3rd ser., vol. 3,
part 2 (September 1865): 5-317.
La Du, Milan S., ed. The Medieval French Roman d’Alexandre. Vol. 1: Text of
the Arsenal and Venice Versions. Elliott Monographs 36. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1937.
Langlois, Ernest, ed. Le Couronnement de Louis: chanson de geste de XIIe siècle.

2nd rev. ed. Reprinted Paris: Champion, 1965.
Latouche, Robert, ed. and trans. [Richer of Saint-Rémy de Reims.] Histoire de

France (888-995). 2 vols. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1930, 1937.
Lauer, Philippe, ed. Nithard: Histoire des fils de Louis le Pieux. Les Classiques
de l’Histoire de France au Moyen Âge. Paris: Champion, 1926.
356
Lavaud, R. and G. Machicot, eds. Boecis, poème sur Boèce: le plus ancien texte
littéraire occitan. Toulouse: Institut d’Études Occitanes, 1950.
Lepage, Yvan, ed. Les Rédactions en vers du Couronnement de Louis. Geneva:

Librairie Droz, 1978.
Lindsay, W.M., ed. Isadori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum

libri XX. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911.
Linskill, Joseph, ed. Saint Léger. Étude de la langue du manuscrit de Clermont-

Ferrand, suivie d’une édition critique du texte, avec commentaire et glossaire.
Paris: E. Droz, 1937.
Linskill, Joseph, ed. The Poems of the Troubadour Raimbaut de Vaqueiras. The
Hague: Mouton, 1964.
MacBain, William, ed. [Clemence of Barking.] The Life of Saint Catherine.

Anglo-Norman Text Society 18. Oxford: Blackwell, 1964.
Marshall, John H., ed. The Donatz Proensals of Uc Faidit. London: Oxford
University Press, 1969.
————. The Razos de trobar of Raimon Vidal and Associated Texts. London:
Marshall, Peter K., ed. and trans. [Isidore of Seville.] Etymologies, Book II.
Auteurs Latins du Moyen Âge. Paris: Société d’Éditions “Les Belles Lettres,”
1983.
Mathieu, Marguerite, ed. and trans. La Geste de Robert Guiscard. [William of

Apulia.] Palermo: Istituto Siciliano di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici, 1961.
McClure, Judith and Roger Collins, eds. The Ecclesiastical History of the English
People, the Greater Chronicle, and Bede’s Letter to Egbert. Bertram
Colgrave, trans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Méla, Charles, ed. [Chrétien de Troyes.] Chevalier de la charrette, ou le roman de

Lancelot. Lettres Gothiques. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1992.
Méla, Charles and Olivier Collet, eds. [Chrétien de Troyes.] Cligés. Lettres
Gothiques. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1994.
357
Meyer, Paul, ed. Recueil d’anciens textes bas-latins, provençaux et français.
Paris: Librairie Franck, 1874.
. “Fragment d’une Chanson d’Antioche en provençal.” In Archives de

l’Orient latin, vol.2, 467-509. 2 vols. Paris: Ernst Leroux, 1881.
Micha, Alexandre, ed. Les romans de Chrétien de Troyes, edités d’après la copie
de Guiot. 5 vols. Les classiques français du moyen âge. Vol. 2, Cligés. Paris:
Champion, 1957.
Michel, Francisque. [Ed. of Oxford Psalter Bodley Douce MS.] Libri Psalmorum,
Versio Antiqua Gallica. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1860.
Michel, Francisque. Le Livre des Psaumes: ancienne traduction française publiée

pour la première fois d’après les manuscrits de Cambridge et de Paris.
Collection de Documents Inédits sur l’Histoire de France. Paris: Imprimerie
Nationale, 1886.
Migne, J.P., ed. [Flodoard of Reims.] Annales. Patrologia Latina, vol. 135, col.
423-489. Paris: Garnier Fratres, 1884-1905.
Miller, Thomas, ed. and trans. The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical
History of the English People. Early English Text Society 95. London:
Oxford University Press, 1890. Reprint, Millwood: Kraus Reprint Co., 1978.
Montaverdi, Angelo, ed. Testi volgari italiani dei primi tempi. 2nd ed. Modena:
S.T.E.M.-Mucchi, 1965.
Monaci, Ernesto, ed. Crestomazia italiana dei primi secoli. Città di Castello: S.
Lapi, 1989.
Mora-Lebrun, Francine, ed. Le Roman de Thèbes. Lettres Gothiques. Paris:

Librairie Générale Française, 1995.
Mullally, Evelyn, ed. The Deeds of the Normans in Ireland: La Geste des Engleis
en Yrlande. A New Edition of the Chronicle formerly known as The Song of
Dermot and the Earl. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002.
Mynors, R.A.B., ed. and trans., [William of Malmesbury.] Gesta Regum

Anglorum, ed. completed by R.M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom. 2 vols.
Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
358
Nims, Margaret F., trans. Poetria Nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Medieval Sources
in Translation, 6. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1967.
O’Brien O’Keeffe, Katherine, ed. Vol. 5 (MS C) of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

A Collabora-tive Edition, edited by David Dumville and Simon Keynes.
Odenkirchen, Carl J., ed. The Life of St.Alexius. Brookline, MA: Classical Folia
Editions, 1978.
Otaka, Yorio. “Sur la langue des Leis Willelme.” In Anglo-Norman Anniversary

Essays, ed. Ian Short, 293-308. London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1993.
Otter, Monika, trans. Goscelin of St. Bertin: The Book of Encouragement and
Consolation [Liber confortatorius]. Library of Medieval Women. Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, 2004.
Paris, Gaston, ed. “La Passion du Christ.” Romania 2 (1873): 295-314.
Perman, R.C.D. “Henri d’Arci: the Shorter Works.” In Studies in Medieval

French Presented to Alfred Ewart, 279-321. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1961.
Piffard, Guérard, trans. A Translation of the Cycle of William of Orange, vol. 1.

Ann Arbor: San Diego State University Press/University Microfilms
International, 1977.
Pontieri, Ernesto, ed. [Geoffrey Malaterra.] De rebus gestis Rogerii Calabriae et

Siciliae comitis et Roberti Guiscardi Ducis fratris eius. Rerum Italicarum
Scriptores. 2nd ed. Vol.5, part 1. Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1928.
Pontfarcy, Yolande de, ed. [Marie de France.] L’Espurgatoire seint Patriz.

Louvain: Peeters, 1995.
Pope, Mildred K., ed. The Romance of Horn. Anglo-Norman Text Society 9-10,
12-13. Oxford: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1955.
Potter, K.R., ed. and trans. Gesta Stephani. Rev. ed. with introduction and notes
by R.H.C. Davis. London: Oxford, 1976.
Raynaud de Lage, Guy, ed. Le Roman de Thèbes. 2 vols. Les Classiques Français
du Moyen Âge. Paris: Champion, 1966.
359
Reeve, C.D.C., trans. [Plato.] Cratylus. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998.
Régnier, Claude, ed. Prise d’Orange. 7th ed. Paris: Klincksieck, 1986.
Reilly, Leo, ed. [Petrus Helias.] Summa super Priscianium. 2 vols. Toronto:
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1993.
Reydellet, Marc, ed. and trans. [Isidore of Seville.] Etymologiae, Book IX.
Auteurs Latins du Moyen Âge. Paris: Société d’Éditions “Les Belles Lettres,”
1984.
Ronsjö, Einar, ed. La Vie de Saint Nicolas par Wace. Études Romanes de Lund.
Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1942.
Roques, Mario, ed. Les romans de Chrétien de Troyes, edités d’après la copie de
Guiot. 5 vols. Les classiques français du moyen âge. Vol. 3, Le chevalier de
la charrette. Paris: Champion, 1958.
Ryan, Christopher, trans. [Dante Alighieri.] The Banquet. Saratoga, CA: ANMA
Libri, 1989.
Rychner, Jean, ed. Les Lais de Marie de France. Paris: Champion, 1966.
Sampson, Rodney, ed. Early Romance Texts: An Anthology. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Shields, Hugh, ed. Le Livre de Sibile by Philippe de Thaon. Anglo-Norman Text

Society 37. London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1979.
Short, Ian, ed. Le Voyage de Saint Brendan par Benedeit. Notes by Brian
Merrilees. Bibliothèque Médiévale. Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1984.
————. [Philippe de Thaon.] Comput (MS BL Cotton Nero A.V). Anglo-

Norman Text Society, Plain Text Series 2. London: Anglo-Norman Text
Society, 1984.
Short, Ian and Brian Merrilees, eds. [Benedeit.] The Anglo-Norman Voyage of
Saint Brendan. Manchester: Manchester University Press: 1979.
Scholz, Bernhard Walter, trans. Carolingian Chronicles. Ann Arbor: University

of Michigan Press, 1970.
360
Södergård, Östen. [Nun of Barking.] La Vie d’Edouard le confesseur, poème
anglo-normand du XIIe siècle. Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksells, 1948.
Spiegel, Harriet, ed. and trans. [Marie de France.] Fables. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1987.
Storey, C., ed. La Vie de Saint Alexis. Revised ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968.
Stubbs, William. Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional

History, from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward I. 9th ed. revised by
H.W.C. Davis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921.
Studer, Paul. The Oak Book of Southampton of c. AD 1300. Publications of the

Southampton Record Society. Southampton: Cox and Sharland, 1910-1911.
Studer, Paul and Joan Evans, eds. Anglo-Norman Lapidaries. Paris: Champion,
1924.
Suard, François. La Chanson de Guillaume. Rev. ed. Les Classiques Médiévaux.

Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1999.
Talbot, C.H. “The Liber confortatorius of Goscelin of Saint Bertin.” Analecta

Monastica, 3rd ser., 37 (1955): 1-117.
Thomas, Antoine, ed. La Chanson de Sainte Foi d’Agen. Paris: Champion, 1974.
Thorpe, Lewis, trans. [Geoffrey of Monmouth.] The History of the Kings of

Britain. London: Penguin Books, 1966.
Todd, Henry Alfred, ed. “La Vie de Sainte Catherine d’Alexandrie, as Contained in
the Paris Manuscript La Clayette.” PMLA 15 no.1 (1900): 17-73.
Toynbee, Paget, ed. Specimens of Old French (IX-XV Centuries). Oxford:

Van Emden, Wolfgang. Le Jeu d’Adam. British Rencesvals Publications 1.

Edinburgh: Société Rencesvals British Branch, 1996.
Van Houts, Elisabeth M.C., ed. and trans. “The Brevis Relatio de Guillelmo
nobilisissimo comite Normannorum Written by a Monk of Battle Abbey.” In
361
E.M.C. van Houts, History and Family Traditions in England and the
Continent, 1000-1200. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999.
. Van Houts, Elisabeth M.C., ed. and trans. The Gesta Normannorum
Ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Robert of Torigni. 2 vols.
Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Viscardi, Antonio et al., eds. Le Origini: testi latini, italiani, provenzali e franco-
italiani. Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1956.
Wagner, Robert-Léon, ed. Textes d’étude (ancien et moyen français). Revised by

Olivier Collet. Geneva: Droz, 1995.
Waitz, G. and K.A. Kehr, eds. [Widukind.] Rerum Gestarum Saxonicarum. 5th ed.
Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum
scholarum. Hanover: Hahnsche, 1935.
Walberg, Emmanuel, ed. Le Bestiaire de Philippe de Thaün. Lund: H.J. Möller,

1900.
. [Guernes de Pont-Saint-Maxence.] Vie de saint Thomas Becket.

Reprint, Paris: Champion, 1964.
Weiss, Judith, trans. Wace’s Roman de Brut, A History of the British. Exeter:
University of Exeter Press, 1999.
Waitz, G. and G.H. Pertz, eds. [Einhard.] Vita Karoli Magni. 6th ed. Monumenta
Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum,
Separatim editi. Hannover: Hahn, 1911. Reprinted 1965.
Welliver, Warman, ed. and trans. [Dante.] Dante in Hell: The De Vulgari
Eloquentia. Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1981.
Whitelock, Dorothy, trans. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Revised Translation.

New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1961.
Wilhelm, James J. Medieval Song: An Anthology of Hymns and Lyrics. New

York: Dutton, 1971.
Williams, Ann and G.H. Martin, eds. Domesday Book: A Complete Translation.
London: Penguin, 2002.
362
Winterbottom, Michael, ed. [Abbo of Fleury.] Passio sancti Eadmundi. In Three
Lives of English Saints, ed. idem. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval
Studies, 1972.
Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn and Glyn S. Burgess, transs. Virgin Lives and Holy
Deaths: Two Exemplary Biographies for Anglo-Norman Women. London:
J.M. Dent, 1996.
Wright, Neil, ed. The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth. 5 vols.
363
Critical Studies
Aebischer, Paul. “Le Fragment de La Haye: les problèmes qu’il pose et les
enseignements qu’il donne.” Zietschrift für Romanische Philologie 73
(1957): 20-37.
Akehurst, F.R.P. and Judith M. Davis, eds. A Handbook of the Troubadours.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Albu, Emily. The Normans in their Histories: Propaganda, Myth and Subversion.
Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001.
Alcover, Antoni Maria. Diccionari Català-Valencià-Balear. Rev. ed. Francesc

Moll. Palma de Mallorca: Editorial Moll, 1980-1983.
Amory, Frederic. “The dönsk tunga in Early Medieval Normandy: A Note.” In

American Indian and Indoeuropean Studies: Papers in Honor of Madison
S. Beeler, ed. Kathryn Klar et al., 279-289. The Hague: Mouton, 1980.
Amsler, Mark. Etymology and Grammatical Discourse in Late Antiquity and the
Early Middle Ages. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic
Science, Ser. 3, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 44.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1989.
————. “Commentary and Metalanguage in Early Medieval Latin Grammar.”

In History and Historiography of Linguistics, edited by Hans-Josef Niederehe
and Konrad Koerner, 175-187. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History
of Linguistic Science, Ser. 3, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences
51. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1990.
————. “History of Linguistics, ‘Standard Latin’, and Pedagogy.” In History of

Linguistic Thought in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Vivien Law, 49-66.
Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, Ser.3,
Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 71. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, 1993.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and

Spread of Nationalsim. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 1991.
364
Ashley, Kathleen and Pamela Sheingorn. “The Translations of Foy: Bodies, Texts
and Places.” In The Medieval Translator 5, ed. Roger Ellis and René Tixier,
29-49. Turnhout: Brepols, 1996.
Attridge, Derek. “Language as History / History as Language: Saussure and the

Romance of Etymology.” In Post-structuralism and the Question of History,
ed. Derek Attridge, Geoffrey Bennington, and Robert Young, 183-211.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Auerbach, Erich. Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in
the Middle Ages. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Pantheon, 1965.
Banniard, Michel. “Naissance et conscience de la langue d’oc, VIIIe -IX e siècles.”

In Catalunya i França meridional a l’entorn de l’any mil, ed. Xavier Baral i
Altet et al., 351-361. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1991.
Barnett, F.J. “Some Notes to the Sequence of Saint Eulalia.” In Studies in

Medieval French Presented to Alfred Ewart, 1-25. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1961.
Bates, David. Normandy before 1066. New York: Longman, 1982.
————. “The Conqueror’s Charters.” In England in the Eleventh Century, ed.

Carola Hicks. Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1992.
Bateson, Mary. “A London Municipal Collection of the Reign of John.” English

Historical Review 17 no. 67 (July 1902): 480-511, and no. 68 (October 1902):
707-730.
Baumgartner, Emmanuèle. “Vers, prose et fiction narrative (1150-1240).” In

Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative: A Festschrift for Dr. Elspeth
Kennedy, ed. Karen Pratt, 1-9. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994.
Beaune, Colette. The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late-
Medieval France. Trans. Susan Ross Huston. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991.
Bec, Pierre. “Constitution d’un occitan littéraire et véhiculaire.” In Histoire

d’Occitanie by Pierre Bec. Paris: Hachette, 1979.
365
Beer, Jeanette, ed. Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages. Studies in
Medieval Culture 38. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1997.
Berberoglu, Berch. Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict: Class, State, and Nation in
the Age of Globalization. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
Bezzola, Reto R. Les Origines et la formation de la littérature courtoise en

occident (500-1200). 3 vols. Paris: Champion, 1966.
Bischoff, Bernard. “The Study of Foreign Languages in the Middle Ages.”

Speculum 36 no.2 (April 1961): 209-224.
Blaise, Albert. Dictionnaire latin-français des auteurs du moyen-âge. Corpus

Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis. Turnhout: Brepols, 1975.
Bloch, R. Howard. Etymologies and Genealogies. A Literary Anthropology of the

French Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
————. “842: The First Document and the Birth of Medieval Studies.” In A
New History of French Literature, ed. Dennis Hollier. Cambridge: Harvard
————. “New Philology and Old French.” Speculum 65 no.1 (Jan. 1990): 38-
58.
Bossuat, Robert, Louis Pichard and Guy Raynaud de Lage. Dictionnaire des lettres
françaises: le Moyen Âge. Rev. ed. Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink.
Paris: Fayard, 1992.
Bourgne, Florence. “Translating Saints’ Lives into the Vernacular: Translatio

Studii and Furta Sacra (Translation as Theft).” In The Medieval Translator, 5,
ed. Roger Ellis and René Tixier, 50-63. Turnhout: Brepols, 1996.
Braude, Benjamin. “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and
Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods.” The
William and Mary Quarterly 3rd series, 54 no.1 (January 1997): 103-142.
Brown, R. Allen. The Normans. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.
Brownlee, Kevin, Tony Hunt, Ian Johnson, Alastair Minnis, and Nigel F. Palmer.
“Vernacular Literary Consciousness c.1100-c.1500: French, German and
English Evidence.” In The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol.2,
366
The Middle Ages, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson, 422-471. Cambridge:
Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn. Shaping Romance. Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvani Press, 1993.
Buridant, Claude. “Translatio medievalis: théorie et pratique de la traduction

médiévale.” Travaux de Linguistique et de Littérature 21 no.1 (1983): 81-
136.
Buyssens, Eric. "The Common Name and the Proper Name." In Studies in
General and Oriental Linguistics, edited by Roman Jakobson and Shigeo
Kawamoto, 21-23. Tokyo: TEC, 1970.
Cameron, Kenneth. The Place-Names of Lincolnshire. 5 vols. Nottingham:

English Place-Name Society, 1985-1997.
Camille, Michael. “Philological Iconoclasm: Edition and Image in the Vie de Saint
Alexis.” In Medievalism and the Modernist Temperament, ed. R. Howard
Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, 371-401. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Carozzi, Claude and Huguette Taviani-Carozzi, eds. Peuples du Moyen Âge:

Problèmes d’identification. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de
Provence, 1996.
Carozzi, Claude. “Des Daces aux Normands: Le mythe et l’identification d’un

peuple chez Dudon de Saint-Quentin.” In Peuples du Moyen Âge: Problèmes
d’identification, ed. Claude Carozzi and Huguette Taviani-Carozzi, 7-25. Aix-
en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1996.
Cerquiglini, Bernard. La Naissance du français. Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France, 1991.
Chailley, Jacques. "Les premiers troubadours et les versus de l'école d'Aquitaine."

Romania 76, no.2 (1955): 212-239.
Chamberlin, Edward and Levi Namaseb, “Stories and Songs across Cultures:
Perspectives from Africa and the Americas” Profession 2001 (2001): 24-38.
Chibnall, Marjorie. Anglo-Norman England 1066-1166. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,

1986.
367
————. The Normans. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
Clanchy, M.T. From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307. 2nd ed.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
————. England and its Rulers, 1066-1272. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
Cleasby, Richard and Gudbrand Vigfussen, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, 2nd

ed., revised by William A. Craigie. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957.
Colby-Hall, Alice M. “Epic Traditions in the Land of the Troubadours.” Medieval

Perspectives 3, no.1 (Spring 1988): 1-26.
Colish, Marcia L., “The Stoic Theory of Verbal Signification and the Problem of
Lies and False Statements from Antiquity to St. Anselm.” In Archéologie
du signe, ed. by Lucie Brind’amour and Eugene Vance. Recueils d’études
médiévales 3. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983.
————. Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition 400-1400.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
Contamine, Philippe. “Qu’est-ce qu’un ‘etranger’ pour un Français?” In Peuples

du Moyen Âge: Problèmes d’identification, ed. by Claude Carozzi and
Huguette Taviani-Carozzi, 27-43. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de
l’Université de Provence, 1996.
Copeland, Rita. “The Fortunes of ‘non verbum pro verbo’: or, Why Jerome is not a
Ciceronian.” In The Medieval Translator: The Theory and Practice of
Translation in the Middle Ages, ed. Roger Ellis, 15-35. Cambridge: D.S.
Brewer, 1989.
————. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages:

Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge
Cornish, Alison. “A Lady Asks: The Gender of Vulgarization in Late Medieval

Italy.” PMLA 115 (March 2000): 166-180.
Corominas, Joan. Diccionaris crítico etimólogico de la lengua castellana. 4 vols.

Bern: A. Francke, 1954.
368
Corominas, Joan, with Joseph Gulsoy and Max Cahner. Diccionari etimològic i
complementari de la llengua catalana. 10 vols. Barcelona: Curial Edicions
Catalanes / La Caixa, 1980-2001.
Corradini Bozzi, M.S. Concordanze delle Biografie Trovadoriche. 2 vols.

Biblioteca degli Studi Mediolatini e Volgari, new series, 9. Pisa: Pacini, 1982.
Crane, Susan. Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo- Norman
and Middle English Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1986.
————. “Social Aspects of Bilingualism in the Thirteenth Century.” In

Thirteenth Century England VI, ed. by Michael Prestwich, et al, 103-115.
————. “Anglo-Norman Cultures in England, 1066-1460.” In The Cambridge

History of Medieval English Literature, edited by David Wallace, 35-60.
Crawford, Barbara E. “The Vikings.” In A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World,

ed. Christopher Harper-Brill and Elisabeth van Houts, 41-72. Woodbridge: Boydell
Press, 2003.
Crystal, David. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge

Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.
Translated by Willard R. Trask. Bollingen Series 36. New York: Pantheon,
1953.
Dales, Richard C. The Intellectual Life of Western Europe in the Middle Ages. 2nd
ed. New York: E.J. Brill, 1992.
Damian-Grint, Peter. “Estoire as Word and Genre: Meaning and Literary Usage in
the Twelfth Century.” Medium Aevum 66 no.2 (1997): 189-206.
————. The New Historians of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance. Woodbridge:

Dauzat, Albert, Jean Dubois, and Henri Mitterand. Nouveau dictionnaire

étymologique et historique. 3rd ed. Paris: Larousse, 1973.
369
Davies, Wendy, ed. From the Vikings to the Normans. Oxford : Oxford University
Press, 2003.
Davis, Kathleen. “National Writing in the Ninth Century: A Reminder for

Postcolonial Thinking about the Nation.” Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies 28 no.3 (fall 1998): 611-637.
Davis, R.H.C. “The Norman Conquest.” History 51 (1966): 279-286.
————. The Normans and their Myth. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976.
Dean, Ruth J. Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide in the direction of Texts and

Manuscripts. London: Anglo-Norman Texts Society, 1999.
Derrida, Jacques. “Des Tours de Babel.” In Difference in Translation, ed. by

Joseph F. Graham, 209-248. Trans. by Joseph F. Graham, loc.cit. 165-205.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1985.
————. Sauf le nom. Trans. by John P. Leavey, Jr. In On the Name, ed. by
Thomas Dutoit, 33-85. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Diez, Friedrich. Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Romanischen Sprachen. Bonn:

Adolph Marcus, 1853.
Dodwell in Pacht re St.Albans date
Douglas, David C. William the Conqueror. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1964.
Dronke, Peter. Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love Lyric. Two vols.
————. The Medieval Lyric. 3rd ed. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1996.
Du Cange, Charles du Fresne. Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis. Graz:

Akademischen Druck, 1954.
Dunbabin, Jean. France in the Making, 843-1180. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1985.
370
Durling, Nancy Vine. “Translation and Innovation in the Roman de Brut.” In
Medieval Translators and their Craft, ed. by Jeanette Beer, 9-39. Studies in
Medieval Literature 25. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1989.
Eagleton, Terry. “Nationalism: Irony and Commitment.” In Nationalism,

Colonialism, and Literature, by Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, and Edward
Said, 23-39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
Ebin, Lois, ed. Vernacular Poetics in the Middle Ages. Studies in Medieval
Culture, vol. 16. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1984.
Edson, Evelyn. Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed
Their World. London: British Library, 1997.
Edwards, Robert R. Ratio and Invention: A Study of Medieval Lyric and

Narrative. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1989.
Elcock, W.D. The Romance Languages. London: Faber and Faber, 1960.
Feimer, Joel N. “Jason and Medea in Benot de Sainte-Maure’s Le Roman de Troie:

Classical Theme and Medieval Context.” In Voices in Translation: The
Authority of “Olde Bookes” in Medieval Literature. Ed. Deborah M.
Sinnreich-Levi and Gale Sigal, 35-51. New York: AMS Press, 1992.
Ferguson, Charles A. “Diglossia.” Word 14, no.2-3 (Aug.-Dec. 1958): 325-340.
Ferrante, Joan M. “Was Vernacular Poetic Practice a Response to Latin Language

Theory?” Romance Philology 35, no.4 (May 1982): 586-600.
. “Farai un vers de dreyt nien: The Craft of the Early Trobadors.” In
Vernacular Poetics in the Middle Ages, edited by Lois Ebin. Studies in
Medieval Culture 16. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1984.
Finn, R. Welldon. Domesday Book: A Guide. Chichester: Phillimore, 1975.
Fisher, John H. “A Language Policy for Lancastrian England.” Publications of the

Modern Language Association of America 107, no.5 (Oct. 1992): 1168-1180.
Fleischman, Suzanne. “Philology, Linguistics, and the Discourse of the Medieval

Text.” Speculum 65 no.1 (Jan. 1990): 19-37.
371
Frankis, John. “The Social Context of Vernacular Writing in Thirteenth Century
England: the Evidence of the Manuscripts.” Thirteenth Century England 1
(Proceedings of the Newcastle Upon Tyne Conference, 1985): 175-184.
Folena, Gianfranco. “‘Volgarizzare’ e ‘tradurre’: idea e terminologia della

traduzione dal medio evo italiano e romanzo all’umanesimo europeo.” In La
Traduzione: saggi e studi, [No ed. named], 57-120. Trieste: Lint, 1973.
Forde, Simon, Lesley Johnson, and Alan V. Murray, eds. Concepts of National
Identity in the Middle Ages. Leeds Texts and Monographs, New Series 14.
Leeds: Leeds Studies in English, 1995.
France, John. “The Normans and Crusading.” In The Normans and their
Adversaries at War, edited by Richard P. Abels and Bernard S. Bachrach, 87-
101. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001.
Fredborg, Karin Margareta. “Universal Grammar According to Some 12th-Century

Grammarians.” In Studies in Medieval Linguistic Thought, ed. E.F. Konrad
Koerner, et al., 69-84. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of
Linguistic Science 3; Studies in the History of Linguistics 26. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins, 1980.
Galbraith, V.H. “The Literacy of the Medieval English Kings.” Proceedings of the
British Academy 21 (1935): 201-238.
. “Nationality and Language in Medieval England.” Transactions of the

Royal Historical Society 4th series, 23 (1941): 113-128.
Gameson, Richard. The Manuscripts of Early Norman England (c.1066 – c.1130).

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Gameson, Richard, ed. The Study of the Bayeux Tapestry. Woodbridge: Boydell
Press, 1997.
Garnett, George. “‘Franci et Angli’: The Legal Distinctions Between Peoples after
the Conquest.” Anglo-Norman Studies 8 (1986) : 109-137.
. “Coronation and Propaganda: Some Implications of the Norman Claim

to the Throne of England in 1066.” Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society 5th series, 36 (1986): 91-116.
372
Gaunt, Simon. Troubadours and Irony. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature
3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Gaylord, Alan T. “The Moment of Sir Thopas: Towards a New Look at Chaucer’s
Language.” The Chaucer Review 16, no.4 (spring 1982): 311-329.
Geary, Patrick J. Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation
of the Merovingian World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Georgianna, Linda. “Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae:

Lessons in Self-Fashioning for the Bastards of Britain.” In Crossing
Boundaries: Issues of Cultural and Individual Identity in the Middle Ages and
Renaissance, edited by Sally McKee, 3-25. Tunhout: Brepols, 1999.
Gilles, Sealy. “Territorial Interpolations in the Old English Orosius.” In Text and
Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, edited by
Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles, 79-96. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1998.
Gillingham, John. “Henry of Huntingdon and the Twelfth-Century Revival of the

English Nation.” In Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, edited
by Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson, and Alan V. Murray, 75-101. Leeds Texts
and Monographs, New Series 14. Leeds: Leeds Studies in English, 1995.
. “Kingship, Chivalry and Love: Political and Cultural Values in the
Earliest History Written in French: Geoffrey Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, in
The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and
Political Values, ed. by John Gillingham, 233-257. Woodbridge: Boydell
Press, 2000.
. The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and
Political Values. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000.
Gneuss, Helmut. “The Origin of Standard Old English and Æthelwold’s School at
Winchester.” Anglo-Saxon England 1 (1972): 63-83.
. “Language Contact in Early Medieval England: Latin and Old

English.” In Speaking in our Tongues: Medieval Dialectology and Related
Disciplines, edited by Margaret Laing and Keith Williamson, 149-157.
373
Godefroy, Frédéric. Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française du IXe au XVe
siècle. 10 vols. Paris: 1891-1902. Reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1982.
Graff, E.G. Althochdeutscher Sprachschatz. 6 vols. Berlin: Nikolaischen

Buchhandlung, 1837.
Gransden, Antonia. “Prologues in the Historiography of Twelfth-Century

England.” In England in the Twelfth Century, edited by Daniel Williams, 55-
81. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1990.
Green, D.H. Medieval Listening and Reading: The Primary Reception of German
Literature, 800-1300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Green, Judith A. The Aristocracy of Norman England. Cambridge: Cambridge

Grillo, R.D., ed. “Nation” and “State” in Europe: Anthropological Perspectives.

London: Academic Press, 1980.
Guiraud, Pierre. “Étymologie et ethymologia (motivation et rétromotivation).”

Poétique 11 (1973): 405-413.
Hadfield, Andrew. Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to

Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Hall, Robert A., Jr. External History of the Romance Languages. New York:
American Elsevier, 1974.
Hallam, Elizabeth M. Domesday Book through Nine Centuries. London: Thames

and Hudson, 1986.
Hampton, Timothy. Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century. Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 2001.
Hanna, Ralph, Tony Hunt, R.G. Kneightley, Alastair Minnis, and Nigel F. Palmer.
“Latin Commentary Tradition and Vernacular Literature.” In The Cambridge
History of Literary Criticism, vol.2, The Middle Ages edited by Alastair Minnis
and Ian Johnson, 363-421. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Harmer, F.E. Anglo-Saxon Writs. Manchester: Manchester University Press,

1952.
374
Harper-Bill, Christopher and Elisabeth van Houts, eds. A Companion to the Anglo-
Norman World. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003.
Haug, Walter. Vernacular Literary Theory in the Middle Ages. [1985.] Joanna M.
Catling, trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Hervey, Lord Francis. The History of King Eadmund the Martyr and of the Early
Years of his Abbey. London: Oxford University Press, 1929.
Hindley, Alan and Brian J. Levy. The Old French Epic: An Introduction. Ktemata
8. Louvain: Peeters, 1983.
Hogg, Richard M., ed. The Cambridge History of the English Language. 6 vols.
Holtus, Günter. “Zur Sprach- und Wortegeschichte von ‘latino’ und ‘volgare’ in
Italien.” In Latein und Romanisch, edited by Wolfgang Dahmen et al, 340-
354. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1987.
Hofman, Rijcklof. “The Linguistic Preoccupations of the Glossators of the St. Gall
Priscian.” In History of Linguistic Thought in the Early Middle Ages, edited
by Vivien Law, 111-126. Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 71.
Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1993.
Houck, Margaret. Sources of the Roman de Brut of Wace. University of California

Publications in English, 5 no.2. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1941.
Howlett, D.R. The English Origins of Old French Literature. Dublin: Four Courts
Press, 1996.
————. “A Polyglot Glossary of the Twelfth Century.” In De mot en mot:

Aspects of Medieval Linguistics. Essays in Honour of William Rothwell, edited
by Stewart Gregory and D.A. Trotter, 81-91. Cardiff: University of Wales,
1997.
Huchet, Jean-Charles. Le roman occitan médiéval. Paris: Presses Universitaires

de France, 1991.
375
Hunt, R.W. “Studies on Priscian in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: I. Petrus
Helias and His Predecessors.” Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies 1 no.2
(1941-43): 194-231.
Hunt, R.W. Collected Papers on the History of Grammar in the Middle Ages. G.L.
Bursill-Hall, ed. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic
Science, series 3 (Studies in the History of Linguistics), vol. 5. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins, 1980.
Hunt, Tony. “Code-Switching in Medical Texts.” In Multilingualism in Later

Medieval Britain, edited by D.A. Trotter, 131-147. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer,
2000.
————. “Anglo-Norman: Past and Future.” In The Dawn of the Written

Vernacular in Western Europe, edited by Michèle Goyens and Werner
Verbeke, 379-385. Mediaevalia Lovaniensia series 1 vol.33. Leuven: Leuven
Huot, Sylvia. From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and
Lyrical Narrative Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.
Hussey, Stanley. “Nationalism and Language in England, c.1300-1500.” In

Nations, Nationalism and Patriotism in the European Past, edited by Claus
Bjørn, Alexander Grant, and Keith J. Stringer, 96-108. Copenhagen:
Academic Press, 1994.
Irvine, Martin. “Medieval Grammatical Threory and Chaucer’s House of Fame.”

Speculum 60 no. 4 (October 1985): 850-876.
————. “Interpretation and the Semiotics of Allegory in Clement of Alexandria,

Origen, and Augustine.” Semiotica 63 nos. 1-2 (1987): 33-71.
————. The Making of Textual Culture: ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory,

350-1100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Jaeger, C. Stephen. “Patrons and the Beginnings of Courtly Romance.” In The

Medieval Opus: Imitation, Rewriting, and Transmission in the French
Tradition, edited by Douglas Kelly, 45-58. Etudes de la langue et littérature
françaises 116. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996.
Jamison, Evelyn. “The Sicilian Norman Kingdom in the Mind of Anglo-Norman

Contemporaries.” Proceedings of the British Academy 24 (1938): 237-285.
376
Janson, Tore. “Language Change and Metalinguistic Change: Latin to Romance
and Other Cases.” In Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle
Ages, edited by Roger Wright, 19-28. University Park: Pennsylvania State
Johnson, Ewan. “Normandy and Norman Identity in Southern Italian Chronicles.”

Anglo-Norman Studies 27 (2005): 84-100.
Johnson, Lesley. “Imagining Communities: Medieval and Modern.” In Concepts

of National Identity in the Middle Ages, edited by Simon Forde, et al. Leeds
Texts and Monographs, New Series 14. Leeds: Leeds Studies in English,
1995.
————. “Etymologies, Genealogies, and Nationalities (Again),” In Concepts of

National Identity in the Middle Ages, edited by Simon Forde, et al. Leeds
1995.
Jones, Gwyn. A History of the Vikings. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1984.
Jones, Lowanne E. “Narrative Transformations of Twelfth-Century Troubadour

Lyric.” In The Expansion and Transformation of Courtly Literature, edited by
Nathaniel B. Smith and Joseph T. Snow, . Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1980.
Keen, M.H. England in the Later Middle Ages. London: Methuen, 1973.
Kelly, Douglas, ed. The Medieval Opus: Imitation, Rewriting, and Transmission
in the French Tradition. Études de la langue et littérature françaises 116.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996.
Kelly, Susan. “Anglo-Saxon Lay Society and the Written Word.” In The Uses of
Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe, edited by Rosamund McKitterick, 36-62.
Kendrick, Laura. The Game of Love: Troubadour Wordplay. Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1988.
Keynes, Simon. “Royal Government and the Written Word in Late Anglo-Saxon
England.” In The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe, edited by
377
Rosamund McKitterick, 226-257. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990.
Kibbee, Douglas A. For to Speke Frenche Trewely. The French Language in

England, 1000-1600: Its Status, Description, and Instruction. Amsterdam
Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science; Studies in the History
of the Language Sciences 60. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1991.
Kittay, Jeffrey. “On Octo.” Romanic Review 78, no.3 (May 1987): 291-8.
————. “Utterance Unmoored: The Changing Interpretation of the Act of

Writing in the European Middle Ages.” Language in Society 17 (1988): 209-
230.
Kittay, Jeffrey and Wlad Godzich. The Emergence of Prose. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Köbler, Gerhard. Wörterbuch des althochdeutschen Sprachschatzes. Paderborn:

Ferdinand Schöningh, 1993.
Koch, Peter. “Pour une typologie conceptionelle et mediale des plus anciens
documents/ monuments des langues romanes.” In Le passage à l’écrit des
langues romanes, edited by Maria Selig, Barbara Frank, and Jörg Hartmann,
39-81. ScriptOralia 46. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1993.
Kurath, Hans. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michegan

Press, 1952.
La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Jean-Baptiste de. Dictionnaire historique de l'ancien

langage français, ou Glossaire de la langue française depuis son origine
jusqu'au siècle de Louis XIV. Niort: L. Favre and Paris: H.Champion, 1880.
Langille, Édouard. “‘Mencunge ou folie?’: commentaire sur la mise en ‘romanz’

de Wace.” Dalhousie French Studies 39-40 (1997): 19-32.
Langlois, Ernest. Table de noms propres de toute nature compris dans les
chansons de geste. Paris: Émile Bouillon, 1904.
Latham, R.E., et al. Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Oxford:
British Academy / Oxford University Press, 1975.
378
Law, Vivien, ed. History of Linguistic Thought in the Early Middle Ages. Studies
in the History of the Language Sciences 71. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory
and History of Linguistic Science. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1993.
Legge, Mary Dominica. Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background. Oxford:

————. “Some Notes on Anglo-Norman Vocabulary.” In Studies in Medieval

French Presented to Alfred Ewart, 214-231. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1961.
————. “La précocité de la littérature anglo-normande.” Cahiers de

Civilisation Médiévale 8 no.3-4 (July-December 1965): 327-49.
————. “Anglo-Norman as a Spoken Language.” Anglo-Norman Studies 2

(1980): 108-117.
Le Saux, François H.M. A Companion to Wace. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005)
. Provenzalisches Supplement-Wörterbuch. 8 vols. Leipzig: O.R.

Reisland, 1894-1924.
Lewis, C.P. “The French in England before the Norman Conquest.” Anglo-
Norman Studies 17 (Proceedings of the Battle Conference, 1994): 123-144.
Lloyd, Paul M. “On the Names of Languages (and Other Things).” In Latin and
the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Roger Wright, 9-
18. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991.
Lockhart, James, ed. and trans. We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the
Conquest of Mexico. Repertorium Columbianum vol. 1. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993.
Lodge, R.A. “Language Attitudes and Linguistic Norms in France and England in
the Thirteenth Century.” In Thirteenth Century England 4 (Proceedings of the
Newcastle Upon Tyne Conference, 1991), edited by P.R. Cross and S.D.
Lloyd. Woodbridge, England: Boydell Press, 1992.
Lot, Ferdinand. “A quelle époque a-t-on cessé de parler latin?” Achivium

Latinitatis medii aevi 6 (1931): 97-159.
379
Loud, G.A. “How ‘Norman’ was the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy?”
Nottingham Medieval Studies 25 (1981): 13-34.
———. “The ‘Gens Normannorum’ – Myth or Reality?” Anglo-Norman Studies 4

(1982) : 104-116, 204-209.
———. “La ‘gens Normannorum’: nascita di un mito letterario.” In I Normanni:

popolo d’Europa, 1030-1200, ed. Mario D’Onofrio, 161-163. Venice:
Marsilio/Centro Europeo di Studi Normanni, 1994.
Lusignan, Serge. Parler vulgairement: les intellectuels et la langue française aux

XIIIe et XIVe siècles. Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1986.
. “Closing Statement: Les langues vernaculaires écrites dans le domaine

roman.” In The Dawn of the Written Vernacular in Western Europe, edited by
Michèle Goyens and Werner Verbeke, 1-38. Mediaevalia Lovaniensia, series
1 vol.33. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003.
Lyotard, Jean-François. “The Différand, the Referent, and the Proper Name.”
Trans. by Georges Van Den Abbeele. Diacritics 14 no.3 (Fall 1984), 3-14.
Maddox, Donald and Sara Sturm-Maddox. “Introduction: Alexander the Great in

the French Middle Ages.” In The Medieval French Alexander, edited by
Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2002.
Malkiel, Yakov. “A Linguist’s View of the Standardization of a Dialect.” In The

Emergence of National Languages, edited by Aldo Scaglione, 51-73.
Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1984.
Mallette, Karla. “Poetries of the Norman Courts.” In The Literature of Al-Andalus,

edited by María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin, and Michael Sells,
377-387. The Cabridge History of Arabic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge
Markus, R.A. “St. Augustine on Signs.” Phronesis 2 (1957): 60-83. Reprinted in

Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by R.A. Markus, 61-91.
Modern Studies in Philosophy. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1972.
Mathey-Maille, Laurence. “La pratique de l’étymologie dans le Roman de Brut de

Wace.” In Plaist vos oïr bone cançon vallant?: Mélanges offerts à François
380
Suard, 2 vols., edited by Dominique Boutet, et al., vol.2, 579-586. Lille:
Université Charles-de-Gaulle – Lille 3, 1999.
Matthews, C.M. Place Names of the English-Speaking World. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1972.
McKitterick, Rosamund. The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians, 751-

987. London: Longman, 1983.
————, ed. The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe. Cambridge:

————. “Latin and Romance: An Historian’s Perspective.” In Latin and the

Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Roger Wright, 130-
145. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991.
Menger, Louis Emil. The Anglo-Norman Dialect. New York: Columbia

University Press, 1904. Reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1966.
Meyer-Lübke, W. Romanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. Heidelberg: Carl

Winter, 1968.
Mickel, Emanuel J., Jr. Marie de France. New York: Twayne, 1974.
Minnis, A.J. Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the

Later Middle Ages. London: Scolar Press, 1984.
Minnis, A.J. and A.B. Scott, eds. Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100
– c.1375: the Commentary-Tradition. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1988.
Mölk, Ulrich. “Le poème d’Alexandre du chanoine Albéric.” In Ce nous dist li

escris...Che est la verite. Études de littérature médiévale offertes à André
Moisan, edited by Miren Lacassagne, 207-215. Aix-en-Provence: Centre
universitaire d’études et de recherches médiévales d’Aix / Université de
Provence, 2000.
Muller, H.F. “On the Use of the Expression lingua romana from the First Century
to the Ninth.” Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 43 (1923): 9-19.
Müller, Karl-Ludwig. “Latinus und romanus als Sprachbezeichnungen im frühen

Mittelalter.” In Pragmantax, edited by Armin Burkhardt and Karl-Hermann
381
Körner, 393-406. Linguistischen Arbeiten 171. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer,
1986.
Murdoch, Brian O. Old High German Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1983.
Murphy, James J. “The Teaching of Latin as a Second Language.” In Studies in

Medieval Linguistic Thought, ed. E.F. Konrad Koerner, et al., 159-175.
Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science 3; Studies
in the History of Linguistics 26. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1980.
Murray, Alan V. “Ethnic Identity in the Crusader States: The Frankish Race and
the Settlement of Outremer.” In Concepts of National Identity in the Middle
Ages, edited by Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson, and Alan V. Murray. Leeds
1995
Musset, Lucien. The Bayeux Tapestry. 2nd ed. Trans. Richard Rex. Woodbridge:
Noble, Peter S. “Romance in England and Normandy in the Twelfth Century.” In

England and Normandy in the Middle Ages, edited by David Bates and Anne
Curry. London: Hambledon Press, 1994.
Norberg, Dag. “A quelle époque a-t-on cessé de parler latin en gaule?” Annales
21, no.2 (March-April 1966): 346-356.
Noreiko, Stephen Francis. “The Expression of ‘Nation’ and ‘Nationality’ in Old

French.” M.Phil thesis, University of Southampton, 1977.
Ollier, Marie-Louise. Lexique et concordance de Chrétien de Troyes, d’après la

copie Guiot. Revised ed. Montreal: Institut d’Études Médiévales de
L’université de Montréal, 1989.
Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London:
Methuen, 1982.
Pächt, Otto, C.R. Dodwell, and Francis Wormald. The Saint Albans Psalter
(Albani Psalter). London: Warburg Institute/University of London, 1960.
Paris, Gaston. “Romani, Romania, Lingua Romana, Romancium.” Romania 1

(January 1872): 1-22.
382
Paterson, Linda M. Troubadours and Eloquence. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975.
Patterson, Lee. “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval
Studies.” Speculum 65 no.1 (Jan. 1990): 87-108.
Paul, Jacques. “Pays et peuples dans la correspondance d’Alcuin.” In Peuples du

Moyen Âge: Problèmes d’identification, ed. by Claude Carozzi and Huguette
Taviani-Carozzi, 97-130. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de
Provence, 1996.
Pelteret, David A.E. Catalogue of English Post-Conquest Vernacular Documents.

Pickens, Rupert T. “The Literary Activity of Philippe de Thaün.” Romance Notes

12 (1970): 208-212.
Pickens, Rupert T. “Courtesy and Vasselage in Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte del

Graal.” In Echoes of the Epic: Studies in Honor of Gerard J. Brault, edited
by David P. Schenck and Mary Jane Schenck. Birmingham: Summa, 1998.
Picoche, Jacqueline. Dictionnaire etymologique du français. Paris: Le Robert,

1979.
Pfeffer, Wendy. Proverbs in Medieval Occitan Literature. Gainesville:

University of Florida Press, 1997.
Poe, Elizabeth Wilson. From Poetry to Prose in Old Provençal. Birmingham,

Ala.: Summa, 1984.
Pope, Mildred K. From Latin to Modern French with Especial Consideration of

Anglo-Norman. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1934.
Potts, Cassandra. “Atque unum ex diversis gentibus populum effecit: Historical

Tradition and the Norman Identity.” Anglo-Norman Studies 18 (Proceedings
of the Battle Conference, 1995): 139-152.
————. “Normandy, 911-1144.” In A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World,

edited by Christopher Harper-Brill and Elisabeth van Houts, 19-42.
383
Pullum, Geoffrey K. The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent
Essays on the Study of Language. 1991.
Rajna, Pio. Le Origini dell’epopea francese. Florence: G.C. Sansoni, 1884.
Reynolds, Susan. “Medieval origines gentium and the Community of the Realm.”
History 68, no.224 (October 1983): 375-390.
Raynouard, François-Juste-Marie. Lexique roman, ou Dictionnaire de la langue

des troubadours. 6 vols. Paris: Silvestre, 1836-1844. Reprint, Nîmes:
Lacour, 1996.
Rey, Alain et al. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française. Rev. ed. by Alain
Rey and Tristan Hordé. 3 vols. Paris: Dictionnaires le Robert, 1998.
Riché, Pierre. “Expression du sentiment national dans la correspondance de

Gerbert d’Aurillac et dans l’Histoire de Richer de Reims.” In Peuples du
Moyen Âge: Problèmes d’identification, ed. by Claude Carozzi and Huguette
Taviani-Carozzi, 131-143. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de
Provence, 1996.
Rigg, A.G. A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 1066-1422. Cambridge, 1992.
Robbins, Rossell Hope. “Geoffroi Chaucer, Poète Français, Father of English

Poetry.” The Chaucer Review 13, no.2 (Fall 1978): 93-115.
Rothwell, William. “When Latin could be German in French, or possibly Greek.”

University of Leeds Review 9 (1965): 208-217.
————. “The Teaching of French in Medieval England.” The Modern

Language Review 63 no.1 (Jan. 1968): 37-46.
————. “The Role of French in Thirteenth-Century England.” Bulletin of the

John Rylands University Library of Manchester 58 no.2 (Spring 1976): 445-
466.
————. “The Life and Miracles of St. Edmund: A Recently Discovered

Manuscript.” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 60
no.1 (Fall 1977): 135-180.
384
————. “A quelle époque a-t-on cessé de parler français en Angleterre?” In
Mélanges de philologie romane offerets à Charles Camproux. 2 vols.
Montpellier: Université Paul-Valéry, 1978. Vol. 2, 1075-1089.
————. “Language and Government in Medieval England.” Zeitschrift für

Französisce Sprache und Literatur 93 no.3 (1983): 258-278.
————. “Stratford atte Bowe and Paris.” Modern Language Review 80 no.1
(January 1985): 39-54.
————. “The ‘faus français d’Angleterre’: Later Anglo-Norman.” In Anglo-

Norman Anniversary Essays, edited by Ian Short, 309-326. Anglo-Norman
Texts Society, Occasional Publications series, no. 2. London: Anglo-Norman
Texts Society, 1993.
————. “The Trilingual England of Geoffrey Chaucer.” Studies in the Age of

Chaucer 16 (1994): 45-67.
————. “Playing ‘follow my leader’ in Anglo-Norman Studies.” Journal of

French Language Studies 6 no.2 (September 1996): 177-210.
————. “The Trial Scene in Lanval and the Development of the Legal Register
in Anglo-Norman.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 101 no.1 (2000): 17-36.
————. “Aspects of Lexical and Morphosyntactical Mixing in the Languages of

Medieval England.” In Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, edited by
D.A. Trotter, 213-233. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000.
Rothwell, William, Louise Stone and T.B.W. Reid, eds. Anglo-Norman Dictionary.
London: Modern Humanities Research Association and the Anglo-Norman
Text Society, 1977-1992.
Salter, Elizabeth. Fourteenth-Century English Poetry: Contexts and Readings.

————. English and International: Studies in the Literature, Art, and

Patronage of Medieval England. Edited by Derek Pearsall and Nicolette
Zeeman. Canbridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Sargent-Bauer, Barbara N. “Alexander and the Conte du Graal.” In Arthurian

Literature 14, edited by James P. Carley and Felicity Riddy, 1-18. Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, 1996.
385
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistique générale. Ed..Tullio de Mauro.
Paris: Payot, 1972.
Scarfe, Norman. Suffolk in the Middle Ages: Studies in Places and Place-names,
the Sutton Hoo Ship-burial, Saints, Mummies and Crosses, Domesday Book,
and Chronicles of Bury Abbey. Woodbridge (Suffolk, England): Boydell
Press, 1986.
Schendl, Herbert. “Linguistic Aspects of Code-Switching in Medieval English

Texts.” In Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, edited by D.A. Trotter,
77-92. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000.
Schneidmüller, Bernd. “Constructing Identities of Medieval France.” In France in

the Central Middle Ages, 900-1200, ed. by Marcus Bull. Oxford: Oxford
Schulze-Busacker, Elisabeth. “French Conceptions of Foreigners and Foreign

Languages in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.” Romance Philology 41,
no.1 (August 1987): 24-47.
Searle, Eleanor. Predatory Kinship and the Creation of a Norman Power, 840-
1066. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Selig, Maria, Barbara Frank, and Jörg Hartmann, eds. Le passage à l’écrit des
langues romanes. ScriptOralia 46. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1993.
Shafer, Boyd C. Nationalism: Myth and Reality. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
World, 1955.
Short, Ian. “On Bilingualism in Anglo-Norman England.” Romance Philology 33

no.4 (May 1980): 467-479.
————. “Gaimar et les debuts de l’historiographie en langue française.” In

Chroniques nationales et chroniques universelles, 155-163. Göppingen:
Kümmerle, 1990.
————. “Patrons and Polyglots: French Literature in Twelfth-Century

England.” Anglo-Norman Studies 14 (1992): 229-249.
————. “Tam Angli quam Franci: Self-definition in Anglo-Norman England.”

Anglo-Norman Studies 18 (1996): 153-175.
386
————. “Language and Literature.” In A Companion to the Anglo-Norman
World, edited by Christopher Harper-Bill and Elisabeth van Houts, 191-213.
Sinclair, K.V. “Anglo-Norman Studies: The Last Twenty Years.” Australian

Journal of French Studies 2 no.2 (May-August 1965): 113-155, and 2 no. 3
(September-December 1965): 225-278.
Smyth, Alfred P. “The Emergence of English Identity, 700-1000.” In Medieval

Europeans: Studies in Ethnic Identity and National Perspectives in Medieval
Europe, edited by Alfred P. Smyth, 24-52. Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1998.
Sollers, Werner. “Cooperation between English and Foreign Languages in the

Area of Multilingual Literature.” (A paper from the Conference on the
Relation between English and Foreign Languages in the Academy, March
2002.) Publications of the Modern Language Association 117 no.5 (October
2002): 1287-1294.
Spence, Sarah. Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century. Cambridge Studies in
Medieval Literature 30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Staines, David. “Chrétien de Troyes and his Narrator/s.” In The Centre and its
Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor John Leyerle,
edited by Robert A. Taylor et al. Studies in Medieval Culture 33. Kalamazoo:
Western Michegan University, 1993.
Stansbury, Milton Hammond. Foreign Languages and Interpreters in the

Chansons de Geste. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Department of
Romanic Languages and Literatures, 1926.
Stein, Robert M. “Making History English: Cultural Identity and Historical

Explanation in William of Malmesbury and Lagamon’s Brut.” In Text and
Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, edited by
Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles, 97-115. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1998.
Stenton, Sir Frank, et al. The Bayeux Tapestry: A Comprehensive Survey. 2nd ed.
New York: Phaidon Press/New York Graphic Society, 1965.
387
Stock, Brian. The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of
Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Princeton: Princeton
———. Listening for the Text. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
Strang, Barbara M.H. A History of English. London: Methuen, 1970.
Tagliavini, Carlo. Le origini delle lingue neolatine. 6th edition. Bologna:

Riccardo Pàtron, 1969.
Taylor, F. “Notes and News” [editor’s column]. Bulletin of the John Rylands
University Library of Manchester 58 no.1 (Fall 1975): 1-2.
Terracher, Adolphe. “A propos de la distinction entre le latin et le roman dans la

France du nord avant le IXe siècle.” Modern Language Review 12, no.1
(January 1917): 33-36.
Terry, Arthur. A Literary History of Spain: Catalan Literature. London: Ernest

Benn Ltd., 1972.
Thomas, Hugh M. The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation,
and Identity 1066-c.1220. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Ticknor, George. History of Spanish Literature. 3 vols. 1849. Reprint, New

York: Frederick Ungar, 1965.
Toller, T. Northcote. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1898.
Trotter, D.A. “‘Mossenhor, fet metre acquesta letra en bon francés’: Anglo-French
in Gascony.” In De mot en mot: Aspects of Medieval Linguistics. Essays
in Honour of William Rothwell, edited by Stewart Gregory and D.A.
Trotter, 199-222. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997.
Tymoczko, Maria. “Translation as a Force for Literary Revolution in the Twelfth-

Century Shift from Epic to Romance.” In La traduction dans le
développement des littératures, edited by José Lambert and André Lefevere,
75-92. Actes du XIe Congrès de l’Association Internationale de Littérature
Comparée . Bern: Peter Lang, 1993.
388
Uhl, Patrice. “Farai un vers, pos mi sonelh: la version du chansonnier C (B.N., Fr.
856), la cobla bilingue et la problème du lati.” Cahiers de Civilisation
Médiéval 33, no.1 (1990): 18-42.
Van Caenegem, R.C. Royal Writs in England from the Conquest to Glanvill.
Selden Society 80. London: Selden Society, 1959.
Van der Werf, Hendrik. "Music." In A Handbook of the Troubadours, F.R.P.

Akehurst and Judith B. Davis, eds., Tk-TK. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995.
Van Houts, Elisabeth. “The Norman Conquest through European Eyes.” In

History and Family Traditions in England and the Continent, 1000-1200, by
E.M.C. van Houts, PGS TK. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999.
————. “Latin Poetry and the Anglo-Norman Court 1066-1135: The Carmen
de Hastingae Proelio.” Journal of Medieval History 15 (March 1989): 39-62.
————. “The Adapation of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum by Wace and

Benôit.” In History and Family Traditions in England and the Continent,
1000-1200, by E.M.C. van Houts. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999.
————. The Normans in Europe. Manchester Medieval Sources. Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 2000.
————. “Historical Writing.” In A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World,

edited by Christopher Harper-Brill and Elisabeth van Houts, 103-121.
Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003.
Van Uytfanghe, Marc. “Le latin et les langues vernaculaires au moyen âge: un
aperçu panoramique.” In The Dawn of the Written Vernacular in Western
Europe, edited by Michèle Goyens and Werner Verbeke, 1-38. Mediaevalia
Lovaniensia, series 1 vol.33. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003.
Van Vleck, Amelia E. “The Lyric Texts.” In A Handbook of the Troubadours,

edited by F.R.P. Akehurst and Judith M. Davis. Berkely: University of
California Press, 1995.
Viña Liste, Dario Villanueva. Cronología de la literatura española, vol.1, Edad

Media. 4 vols. Madrid: Catédra, 1991.
389
Vising, Johan. Anglo-Norman Language and Literature. London: Oxford
Vitz, Evelyn Birge. “Rethinking Old French Literature: The Orality of the
Octosyllabic Couplet.” Romanic Review 77, no.4 (November 1986): 307-
321.
————. Orality and Performance in Early French Romance. Cambridge: D.S.

Brewer, 1999.
Wagner, Robert-Léon, ed. Textes d’étude (ancien et moyen français). Revised by

Olivier Collet. Geneva: Droz, 1995.
Wallace, David. “Chaucer’s Continental Inheritance: The Early Poems and

Troilus and Criseyde” In The Cambridge Chaucer Companion, edited by
Piero Boitano and Jill Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986.
Wallace, David, ed. The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature.

Walsh, Thomas J. “Latin and Romance in the Early Middle Ages.” Romance
Philology 40, no.2 (November 1986): 199-214.
Wardhaugh, Ronald. Languages in Competition: Dominance, Diversity, and

Decline. London: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
Warren, W.L. Henry II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
Wartburg, Walther von. Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. 25 vols.

Basle: Zbinden, 1922-1948.
Webber, Nick. The Evolution of Norman Identity, 911-1154. Woodbridge:

Wilson, David M. The Bayeux Tapestry. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.
Wilson, R.M. “English and French in England 1100-1300.” History 28 (March

1943): 37-60.
Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn. “Wreathes of Thyme: the Female Translator in Anglo-

Norman Hagiography.” In The Medieval Translator 4, ed. Roger Ellis and
390
Ruth Evans, 46-65. Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and
Studies, 1994.
Woledge, Brian and H.P. Clive. Répertoire des plus anciens textes en prose
française depuis 842 jusqu’aux premières années du XIIIe siècle. Geneva:
Librairie Droz, 1964.
Woledge, Brian and Ian Short. “Liste provisoire de manuscrits du XIIe siècle
contenant des textes en langue française.” Romania 102 (1981): 1-17.
Woods, Christopher. “Bilingualism, Scribal Learning, and the Death of Sumerian.”

In Margins of Writing, Origins of Culture, ed. Seth L. Sanders. Oriental
Institute Seminars 2. Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago,
2006.
Wormald, C.P. “The Uses of Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England and its Neigh-
bours.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th series, 27 (1977): 95-
114.
Wright, Roger. “Late Latin and Early Romance: Alcuin’s De Orthographia and
the Council of Tours (AD 813).” In Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar,
vol. 3. Francis Carirns, ed. Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1981.
————. Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France.
ARCA Classical and Medieval Texts, Papers and Monographs 8. Liverpool:
Francis Cairns, 1982.
————. “Unity and Diversity among the Romance Languages.” Transactions

of the Philological Society 81 (1983): 1-22.
————. “Translation between Latin and Romance in the Early Middle Ages.”
In Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages, Jeanette Beer, ed.
Studies in Medieval Culture 38. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1997.
————. “A Sociophilological Approach to the Earliest Romance Texts: [-t], -

/t/, and -t in Castile (1206-08).” In The Dawn of the Written Vernacular in
Western Europe, ed. Michèle Goyens and Werner Verbeke, 201-214.
Mediaevalia Lovaniensia, series 1 vol.33. Leuven: Leuven University Press,
2003.
Wright, Roger, ed. Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991.
391
Wüest, Jakob. “Le Rapport entre langue parlée et langue écrite: les scriptae dans
le domaine d’oïl et dans le domaine d’oc.” In The Dawn of the Written
Vernacular in Western Europe, ed. by Michèle Goyens and Werner Verbeke,
215-224. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003.
Zink, Michel. La prédication en langue romane avant 1300. Paris: Champion,

1982.
————. Littérature française du Moyen Âge. Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France, 1992.
Zumthor, Paul. “Une formule gallo-romane du VIIIe siècle.” Zeitschrift für

romanische Philologie 75 no. 3-4 (1959): 211-233.
————. La lettre et la voix: De la “littérature”médiévale. Paris: Seuil, 1987.
————. Toward a Medieval Poetics. Philip Benet, trans. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
392

David Georgi - Language Made Visible - The Invention of French in England After The Norman Conquest (PHD Thesis) - New York University (2008)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

David Georgi - Language Made Visible - The Invention of French in England After The Norman Conquest (PHD Thesis) - New York University (2008)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Language Made Visible:

The Invention of French in England after the Norman Conquest

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

Department of Comparative Literature

New York University

Nancy Freeman Regalado

All rights reserved

All Rights Reserved, 2008

– Michael Clanchy From Memory to Written Record:

To the memory of Sean Michael Collins

who did tell us, after all, that he would go first

when somebody had to put his head on the block.

endless generosity, and for their unfaltering presence as wise companions in my

offered advice as welcome and sustaining as their perennial encouragement. My

Richard Sieburth first opened my eyes to the complexities and implications

inexhaustible patience and encouragement. Generous mentor and expert navigator,

she permitted me an extraordinary degree of freedom, allowing the project to find

shortcomings of this dissertation are strictly my own.

French literature, we now know, began in England not in France. The

transformation of Old French from an oral vernacular to a language of written

as a sprawling not-quite-Latin, spoken everywhere and associated with no

particular group. The Anglo-Normans conceived of franceis as a distinct language,

proper to their natio.

Two methodological premises animate this study: dedication to explaining

such as ‘changing perspective’ or ‘English influence’; and recognition that

presume to be obvious, such as romanz, franceis and France – must be translated

astutely across time if we are to avoid imposing anachronistic assumptions. A

comparative approach, examining Old English evidence alongside Latin and

List of Abbreviated References xii

1. Normans Identity and the Conquest of England 28

Norman identity before 1066 36

2. Writing a New Identity: Anglo-Norman Historiographical Texts

Franci in post-Conquest Anglo-Norman history writing 83

Writing England’s Franci into existence 138

4. What Frencisc Meant in English 193

How the Conquest-era English identified the Normans:

ASC A Janet Bately, ed. Vol. 3 (MS A) of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

ASC C Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, ed., Vol. 5 (MS C) of The Anglo-

ASC D G.P. Cubbin, ed., Vol. 6 (MS D) of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

ASC E Susan Irvine, ed., Vol. 7 (MS E) of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

ASC F Peter S. Baker, ed., Vol. 8 (MS F) of The Anglo-Saxon Chroni-

Bestiare Philippe de Thaön, Le Bestiaire de Philippe de Thaün, ed.

Brut Wace, Le Roman de Brut de Wace, ed. Ivor Arnold, 2 vols.

Carmen Guy of Amiens, The Carmen de Hastingae proelio of Guy,

Dean, Guide Ruth J. Dean, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and

Dudo Dudo of St. Quentin, De moribus et actis primorum Normanniae

E.E.T.S Early English Text Society

Etym. IX Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, Book IX, ed. Marc Reydellet,

HH Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum: The History of the

Hist.Reg.Brit Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Historia Regum Britannie of

Regesta David Bates, ed., Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum: The

Rou Wace, Le Roman de Rou de Wace, ed. A.J. Holden, 3 vols.,

V.St.Ed Denis Piramus, La Vie Seint Edmund le Rei, ed. Hilding

Weiss Wace, Wace’s Roman de Brut, A History of the British, trans.

dialects diverged increasingly from written Latin.

Around about A.D. 800, Latin texts begin to register an awareness of a

romana lingua in order for their congregations to understand. Such an instruction

inexorable development into our familiar Modern French.

“romana lingua” when two of Charlemagne’s grandsons gathered their armies at

nonetheless ahead of the other Romance languages.

That is one way of telling the story.

transformed by a momentous event: the Romance vernaculars, the spoken