The Aristocracy of Norman England

Rating:
Summary: Excellent treatment of the Anglo-Norman nobility
Review: When Bishop Ralph of the Orkneys was warming up the army which had assembled in Yorkshire in 1138 to face the invading Scots, he addressed them as "nobles of England, Norman by birth." And so, it has been argued, did the imposed aristocracy of England perceive itself -- but another faction of historians insist that the leading Norman families in the first century after the Conquest crossed the Channel frequently and saw themselves as subjects of an itinerant king. This is only one of the issues the author addresses in this generally successful and quite accessible attempt to reconstruct the ruling elite of Anglo-Norman England in many of its aspects. The surprising thing is that with a plethora of works on the Conquest itself, and many studies of individual noble families and specific monarchs, there has been no single work before this on the general development of the aristocracy of Norman England. Even with the limitations necessary in a single-volume monograph, she forms some interesting hypotheses about the relationship between the aristocracy and both the Crown and the Church, how the nobility got its wealth and how they spent it, the function of castle- and hall-building, the evolution of the newly-landed elite into a complete feudal system, and above all the nature of aristocratic power via kinship and marriage. She concentrates on the use of documentary sources rather than the literary evidence, which she feels has been over-used. The footnotes are voluminous and the bibliography is lengthy and very detailed.