Anglo-Norman England

Abstract

Finally, and most fundamentally, how far was Britain Normanised by 1100, and conversely, to what extent was Normandy anglicised? In what is probably the most ranging and influential analysis of the Normans in medieval western Europe, Professor le Patourel presented a ‘Norman Empire’.¹ He argued that notwithstanding the fact that the Norman state was not akin to the Roman Empire of the past, or its eleventh-century reincarnations—though this did not prevent Norman chroniclers comparing Duke William favourably with Julius Caesar—it did possess imperial characteristics. This ‘empire’ had a fundamental though fragile unity, which was fractured, once between 1087 and 1106 and again, for ever, in 1135, to be replaced a generation later by the ‘Angevin Empire’.² The indivisibility of Normandy and England after the Conquest is central to le Patourel’s analysis; these states lay at the empire’s core, but the Anglo-Norman kings also had territorial and perhaps ‘imperial’ ambitions elsewhere on both sides of the Channel, in Maine, Brittany, Wales, Scotland, and even Ireland. In a recent critique of this thesis, Bates has suggested that this model is too simplistic.³