The 2010 Ford Lectures I: The Normans and empire

This year the Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford are being given by Prof. David Bates (UEA and Caen-Basse-Normandie) on the subject of ‘The Normans and Empire’. This series is named after James Ford who left a legacy to endow a lectureship in British history. Thankfully, the rules are flexible enough to encompass a large slice of European history courtesy of David Bates and the Normans. I hope to be able to attend all six and blog about them in due course.

Friday 22 January saw the great and good of the Anglo-Norman historical world (as in the Anglophone section) assemble in Oxford to hear Prof. Bates speak. There was also a significant number of the new generation of Norman historians from all over the country (a mini-bus up from Cardiff for example), plus, one supposes, members of the Oxford history faculty. The lectures are taking place in the Examination schools in a large imposing room decorated with portraits of dead men and with a clock of doom: the passing of every minute is marked by a loud clunk.

In the first lecture of the series, Prof. Bates essentially set out his programme for the series, rather than discussing any one aspect in detail. The Normans and Empire is a large topic and a controversial one. In contrast to Charles Homer Haskins and John Le Patourel, Bates, and other historians like Brian Golding, Judith Green and David Crouch, have all questioned the notion of empire when applied to what the Normans were doing in the eleventh century, particularly with regard to the conquest of England and Maine. Southern Italy doesn’t really come into the equation as links with Normandy were weak. In contrast, it is a term that art and architectural historians are more willing to employ. Empire, it would seem, is fashionable again with a discourse shaped by the events of the past twenty years – the collapse of the Soviet Union and the consequent growth in power of the US.

If that is the contemporary context against which Prof. Bates is speaking, the actual content of the lectures is more familiar ground to medievalists. Issues of power, identity, networks, centre and periphery all got a mention as themes to explore over the next five weeks, as did another catch word – ‘interdisciplinarity’. Certainly art and architecture were referenced, and I suspect literature might be in the offing. Interdisciplinary in this case also refers to the approaches used: it is not everyday one hears Niall Ferguson (an historian that makes me, with my defiantly left-leaning views, uneasy) referenced in a lecture on the Normans.

By means of examples from charters, architecture (Norwich and anything in Caen stone especially), administration (Domesday – what else?) and the introduction of chronicles, Prof. Bates introduced us to a ‘framework for discussion of rulers and ruled that goes beyond the ethnic’. He wants to elucidate the personal experience of empire. In other words, how important were ties like gender (and here Elisabeth van Houts got a nod) or family? What was the psychology of empire? How does identity in all its various guises fit into this framework? In amongst the examples, there were, of course, lots of references to power and its different forms.

It took a long time for Prof. Bates to reference my favourite chronicler, Orderic Vitalis, but he used the epilogue to the Ecclesiastical History to give us a glimpse of what is to come. It is a particularly moving passage in which Orderic recounts being sent off to Normandy to the monastery of St-Evroul at the age of ten. He describes is situation with a biblical parallel: ‘Like Joseph in a foreign land’ he was sent off where he knew neither the language or the people. In thinking about the personal experience of empire, Bates asked ‘Why Normandy and not England? Why St-Evroul’? To be continued…

The titles of the remaining lectures are:

The Experience of Empire

William the Conqueror as Maker of Empire

Hegemony

Core, Periphery and Networks

Empire: From Beginning to End

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