Laura Ashe reconsiders the question of how the Norman invaders of England became English; she takes a fresh look at "histories in the broad sense familiar to students of literature," exploring how "ideologies might in fact have functioned to accelerate and solidify the Norman sense of themselves as English," and she argues that the key moment is in the late 1170s. The literary perspective adds to our understanding of the long century after the Conquest. She opens with modern vernacular vocabulary, calling the early years of William of Normandy's rule "regime change," the first century "trauma," and the histories written about his success "propaganda." By the time she comes to her conclusion, she is ready to make some bold statements about the ineluctable trajectory of nationalism in history: from consolidation to identification to conquest. Because the eleventh-century experience now looks like the most important of a series of disruptions through economic migration, immigration, civilisation, and new conquest, her parallels with more modern forms of colonialism are both suggestive and deceptive. In the last fifty years or more, the "Norman Yoke" of an older historiography has given way to a more upbeat understanding of how assimilation works, how conquerors marry in to local elites, and how both old and new elites manipulate their rulers to acquire what they can. Even, for historians at least, the unreflecting snobberies and masculine insistence on war and epic have ceded before a more nuanced understanding of the many levels of contention after 1066, including hidden histories of marriage and the influence of women. In many ways the story she tells offers possibilities of what is never quite subaltern history--given that what was written was written by minority witnesses in the service of aristocrats and religious foundations ardent about preserving the status of their saints as well as their donor-families.
In Patrick Wormald's 1994 "Engla Lond: the Making of an Allegiance," a now-classic article published in The Journal of Historical Sociology, he asked how it was that "England became and remained an accepted entity, when other European polities were princely rather than unified under a king?" He argued that unusual structural factors were the key, and that, by contrast, ideology was secondary. In Anglo-Saxon England there were factions and competitions, but from the time of Athelstan there were kings "of the English, and the oath-swearing to a king remained part of aristocratic life." Loyalty to the sovereign paralleled aristocratic lordship over widely scattered possession (as Shakespeare's John of Gaunt threatens Richard II). The key moment of potential dissolution, then, was the death of Edward the Confessor, which brought Alfred's line to an end. Wormald argued, further, that the greatest risk after 1066 was the northern magnates, who maintained their own provincial courts. If, by the eleventh century, people had the idea that their language was "Englisc" and that they lived in Engla-Lond, how were the Normans absorbed? Wormald wrote, "One way in which new ethnicities were developed was by the manufacture of common history, above all, Bede's." And he reached back to the common European fiction of shared Greek or Trojan descent as well as outwards to non-Christian external enemies, particularly Islam.
When in 1997 J. C. Holt collected his essays, they revealed a complex and comprehensive vision of the consolidation period. His was an early and powerful voice insisting that historians think of the Norman Conquest as imperial expansion into a colonized England, suffering major changes in social, political, and legal arrangements, but increasingly unified. He was particularly acute on the legal and structural clash of inheritance and acquisition, which made each generational change a moment of division and competition for property both insular and continental. Titling his collected essays Colonial England: 1066-1215 was not irony. It was a gauntlet thrown down to his contemporaries, whom he saw as all too prone to read English history backwards and anachronistically. He insisted that the past cannot simply be assimilated to all-conquering ideas about the universality of modern colonisation. So, as historians have long observed, in the course of the 150 years after the Norman Conquest the French-dialect-speaking incomers aquired a strong sense not simply that they had acquired new territories, but that they were English, if of superior descent. Whether, how, and when they came to think of themselves as "English," and what "English" might have meant, is a complex story, not least because as Norse settlers in Normandy their ancestors had already made a transition from North Men to Normans. Such stories are part and parcel of what we now label the Age of Migrations, with its complex histories of settlement and assimilation. Other Norse settlers had already established themselves in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, where their dialects inflected aspects of the local language, still visible in place names. Marrying-in always helped, and the etymology of names reveals loyalties and languages. Each wave of new arrivals changed forever the language and social structures of the British Isles, individually and collectively. Anglo-Saxon England's unity was forged and consolidated in the ninth and tenth centuries despite dialect, religion, or place of origin. The Normans could and did take advantage of that.
Ashe argues for a steady shift after 1066 from their identification with "normanitas" to one which acknowledged the severance from Normandy and a concomitant identification as "English," and that that new identity was a major shift in ideology which resulted in further conquests, of which the most dramatic was Ireland. There are problems with this thesis, not unlike the myth of "organic community" or the worrying debates among historians on "ethnogenesis." It ignores the power or influence of the English heiresses available for marriage. Ashe's rhetorical assertion that the "failure of historians such as Wace to connect the Norman dukes to the Angevin kings is more significant than has been admitted" ratchets up her insistence that something not unlike a conspiracy fuelled pro-Norman historical propaganda. She finds this sinister, although elite intermarriage followed by divisions of property by both acquisition and inheritance must go a long way to explaining the adoption of new loyalties by those whose lands lay in England. She confidently uses the word "race" throughout to distinguish various groups within the islands, including translations such as "ces dunt sui nez" as "race." Equally confident is the use of "program" in the contemporary sense of a concrete, strategic, large-scale ambition: an "insular cultural program which seizes divine meaning to itself." It might be argued that "Normanitas" is not one thing, and not any thing long. Sometimes Ashe recognizes this, as when she discusses the false etymology of "norman" as a particular placename. The "evanescence to this identity" which she recognizes as the Normans root themselves in the territory we now call "France" is a relatively unexplored parallel to their continental as well as their island story.
Historical texts may have been encomiastic, but history was seldom uninflected, and the slow civilising of some ancestors was part of it. There is no reason to expect a wholly laudatory--or even a seamlessly coherent--account. Some ancestors within any kinship or affinity group may well have been evil, but that does not detract from the power of the family. It is certainly a question how nasty Saxon criminals managed to replace "Britain" with "England," but by the tenth century a series of kings, seated in the south west, achieved the stability and wealth to commission or support prose and poetry in an expressive literary dialect for a sophisticated vernacular culture, both secular and religious. Evidently the Normans disrupted a great deal, but there was abundant precedent, and what we might call a long twelfth century is less evanescent than it is the slow social evolution of perhaps five multi-lingual generations. It is hard to call that continuous trauma. In the continental context more generally, histories of population movement, competition and conquest were regularly rewritten to accommodate writers or readers points of view, as James Fentress and Chris Wickham illustrated so well in their chapters on Gregory of Tours, Charlemagne, and Icelandic saga in their Social Memory of 1992.
Like that book, Fiction and History studies specific instances in detail. In four substantive chapters Ashe argues for the emblematic status of her examples, taken from both fiction and rhetorical historiography, even when the examples are very few in number. Her readings are elegant and complex, driven by her uncovering of the ideologies that underlie both kinds of writing--and she is subtle enough to know that it is of the nature of ideology that writers who believed what they wrote may not have understood that ideology was at work. There are three problems throughout, of which one the most important is the dependence upon readings of a few paired texts. The necessary limits of any book, especially a first book, mean that the energy and thrust of the argument must depend to come extent upon that--relatively--narrow focus. It follows that she cannot place her examples within a broader European perspective, or within professional historians' discussions and disagreements. Historians may find themselves punctuating their reading with a series of "yes, buts." Secondary historical material is sometimes used as if it were all on a par, without an insider's sense of how arguments have fared under the scrutiny of other readers, a point also true about the primary texts under discussion. These are not inevitably major flaws, insofar as her may book stimulate readers' discussions and disagreements. Secondly, though, the vigour of her arguments depends upon terminology about which one can have reservations, and sometimes serious reservations, because the terms require more analysis, and more nuance in their deployment. The clichés of past generations are not best countered with current ones, and "unmasking power" is not always a sudden revelation. Thirdly, because the survival of a text is no guarantee that it was read, or widely read, or read in only one way, the emblematic claims for some of her singular instances must remain in question, promising rather than proven. There is an assurance on her part about how texts functioned which will not always find agreement.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the third chapter, largely on the Romance of Horn, is the book's strongest, but even here some of the argument which surrounds the readings of the text prompts the same niggling doubt. Just because it would be convenient to root this text at "a time of dramatic change" is not a reason for accepting a date of 1171/2 and a court performance for which there is no compelling evidence. Modern historians have been loathe to use Jordan Fantosme as a dependable witness, because his highly embellished and versified rhetoric has seemed suspicious. Juxtaposing Fantosme's work with the Romance of Horn might thus not be thought to offer a major contrast. The similarities of their forms do not necessarily imply profound similarities of other kinds. "I want to suggest that the tendency apparent in the English nationalism of Fantosme's text, by which a shared nationality begins to override class differences, is mirrored in this creation of an insular genre of historical, or historicized, narrative, while French texts in contrast maintain the stricter genre differentiations visible in any comparison of Chrétien de Troyes with contemporary chansons de geste." There are other kinds of texts which purport to tell stories of the past. Generalising from two examples is a parlous activity, as is her characterisation of "an optimistic, self-assertive, and apparently secure ideology, grounded in the experiences of their audience." Where the argument shines is in the references to lyric as part of the inspiration for romance, with its additions of the strange and exotic.
More positively, perhaps the most important feature of this book is one that may seem so obvious to its author that she has not called much attention to it: she shows an exemplary ability to look at texts (and one tapestry) of many different kinds and in three of the languages of the British Isles. One small technical cavil: it is frustrating that the index is limited largely to names and the bibliography so selective.