Normans on the edge and an edgy Normanist.

Earlier this year, I wrote about a new project at Lancaster called ‘The Norman Edge‘ and briefly commented on its first symposium. Unfortunately, I missed the second one in the summer due to a combination of circumstances, but did make it to the third one on ‘Colonial mentalities’ last week. Not only was this a very interesting collection of high quality papers, but it left me feeling reinvigorated after a long term. There are very few occasions as an historian when you feel part of something much bigger than your own research, but the Norman Edge is really fostering an idea of scholarly community, and what is more, inclusive of people at all stages of their careers from MA students right the way through to distinguished professorial types.

Colonial mentalities were broadly defined throughout the day, encompassing the main areas of Norman settlement (excluding the Welsh and Scottish marches). This took me from the more familiar (eleventh-century England) to the less-familiar-but-I-hope-to-know-better southern Italy and the Holy Land and the completely alien Ireland. The papers discussed such diverse matters as inter-marriage (there was less of it than we might have supposed), office and identity, law and governmental systems, urban communities and assimilation. The approaches thus also ranged from the familiar to unfamiliar. Marriage and chronicles are definitely in my comfort zone; hardcore administrative history is way beyond my normal existence.

What I found most interesting about the day was just how cutting edge our subject can be, especially for those working on the Mediterranean edges. There was a real sense of demolishing some old interpretations of the Norman settlement of southern Italy from Paul Oldfield for example. Likewise, Andrew Jotischky led us through the treacherous fields of crusade historiography. This feeling was borne out in conversation with the indefatigable organiser who is an old friend from grad student days. He once taught a special subject on Norman Italy in which students by the end could know just about everything there was to know about the subject without doing significant archival research. Even in areas we thought we knew very well and subjects that are thought of as being well understood, careful analysis questions received wisdom as Elisabeth van Houts showed in her consideration of the role of exogamous marriage in conquest. Ok, historians revise and reinterpret all the time and I’ve heard stonking papers at both Leeds and Battle that have left me in awe in the wake of a beautifully crafted and elucidated argument, but this symposium was exciting in a way the bigger conferences aren’t.

So much for the Normans on the edge. What about the edgy Normanist? That is, of course, me. Good conferences, workshops or symposia, as well as being exciting, should also be unsettling. One reason for this was that more people than I realised are reading this blog and know who I am and the other, more important reason is to do with research and how we go about it. Excellent research and writing is produced by close reading, analysis, scrutiny, revision, more research, more editing etc.  Attending conference, listening to others and presenting one’s own work is all part of that process. My current project on landscape and uses of outdoor space is still in its early stages, and for various reasons, it is largely chronicle based. Some brief comments in Hugh Doherty’s paper about ideas of imperial mentality in administration and various conversations did get my wondering about the value of documentary evidence for this project. On finishing my thesis, I very much wanted to continue a similar approach in the new project and look at lived experience of space. Now, lived experience is mediated through all kinds of different influences, but, due to a lack of, or rather, very few, boundary clauses in charters from Normandy, I never thought that charters were particularly useful in determining people’s relationship with and use of space. I was somewhat surprised then  when a couple of people, notably Alex Metcalfe who works on Sicily and southern Italy, asked me about such things and how topography is used in charters. I felt a bit of an idiot when I couldn’t really given a satisfactory answer.

The most detailed work relating to land and charters in Normandy is Emily Zack Tabuteau’s Transfer of Property in Eleventh-century Norman Law (Chapel Hill, 1988) in which she notes that a few early charters contain descriptions of the land and of that small group of documents, only two suggest that the land and its boundaries were publicly viewed through perambulation. Of those two documents, only one describes the perambulation itself, rather than its results and then only briefly. In contrast, it seems from what Alex was saying that there are many more boundary clauses or descriptions in the southern Italian material that use the local topography. Some of these clauses refer to features that we might consider rather temporary, like a local smithy or a particular tree, which raise fascinating questions about how people relate to their landscape and how they understand it. Also, why do the Normans adopt these customs in Italy which are so different from what is going on in Normandy? Perhaps it is just a question of assimilation, I don’t know, but it is interesting and has got me thinking I should engage with the charters in more detail.

This fact troubles me. I fear if I immerse myself in the charters, I may never be seen again, and more to the point, I will never complete this project, or at least not for about 25 years, by which point I would be homeless and jobless. Also, there are many more people out there who are better qualified to deal with charters than I am, even if they aren’t particularly interested in how conceptions of space work. At the moment, I have a nicely defined project that is managable and coherent. I feel I could write a decent proposal and be in with a shout of getting some funding to have  sustained period of writing time. I can also use the perspectives I’ve developed working along side colleagues in Archaeology and English, which I think is the really original and useful part of my research. The question that faces me here is whether or not what I can offer in terms of approach and interpretation outweighs not trawling through every single charter produced for Normandy and I honestly don’t know the answer, unless it is to put together a huge funding bid with charter scholars, post-docs and a Ph.D. student.

I’m not complaining here, but what I do want to highlight is how research life should be unsettling if we are to produce anything worthwhile. All of us need thoughts to ponder, like these, which make us question the basis of our research and way of working. Yes, it’s troubling, but also exciting and energising.