The 2010 Ford lectures II: the experience of empire

In the second of this year’s Ford lectures, David Bates started where he’d left off in the first one: Orderic Vitalis as a ten-year-old boy being packed off to St-Evroul to begin a new life in that monastery on the southern border of Normandy. Certainly Orderic experience uncertainly in leaving England – he did not know the French dialect spoken by the Normans – but he found kindness within the community. Bates thus cast Orderic as a ‘child of empire’ and a good person with which to begin a lecture focusing on the personal experience of empire and how this might form the basis for the exercise of power.

David was keen to stress that by considering personal experience of empire, historians are able to move beyond a narrow conception of identity. Particularly important from a Norman perspective is the fact that this takes us back to Normandy and moves us away from a historiography that talks about ‘the triumph of Englishness’ or ‘the end of Normannitas’ (ever a slippery concept). By the end, he had to some extent succeeded in his aim, expressed in the first lecture of stepping back from a consideration of ethnicity, arguing that other social and cultural norms are more important. The problem was from my perspective that David didn’t always explain fully what these other norms were, but economics seemed to play a big role.

In contrast to the modern sociological theories and historians that David talked about in the first lecture, the great chroniclers of the twelfth century were given far more prominence: Orderic (naturally), Henry of Huntingdon, William of Malmesbury, Robert of Torigni and Wace. St-Evroul was, of course, at the centre of networks connecting Normans across all the lands they settled. Many of the initial settlers in Normandy came from the abbey’s benefactors, the Grandmesnil family. Following the conquest of England, their neighbours and, at times, bitter enemies the Montgomerys acquired great estates. Henry and William were based in England, considering the effects of the conquest and what this meant in terms of the history of England and its people. Within these writers, constructions of identity are malleable (Hugh Thomas). Wace was writing very much on the edges of patronage and power, while Robert considered the relationship between Normandy and England in the context of a universal chronicle. David was very much arguing that the experiences of these men helped create ideas of identity through personal experience, whether their own or others, and thus go some way to explanging the exercise of power and empire. One of the key examples was the ‘Battle of the Standard’ speech included by Henry (and also Ailred of Rievaulx), in which an Anglo-Norman army is described as ‘renowned sons of Normandy’: not only were the Normans, but also the English contingent, were credited with victories all over Europe.

The sea also figured largely in this lecture. John Le Patourel, of course, had stressed that the sea was not a barrier to the successful governance of England and Normandy in the middle ages. The sea  provided opportunities, but it also brought fear. David used the example of the survivor of the White Ship disaster in which Henry I lost his only legitimate male heir to illustrate this. The survivor was a butcher. In other words ‘a tradesman with an investment in empire’, who was crossing the sea to call in debts. Vitalis of Canterbury, the Caen stone entrepreneur who was unknown in Normandy before 1066, also took advantage of the opportunities presented by the conquest and we can trace his dynasty in Canterbury after his death. To that extent then, the economics of empire are more important in terms of exercising power than ideas of ethnicity.

In more social contexts we head about the importance of intermarriage, though that is debated by Elisabeth van Houts as demonstrated by Nest of Deheubarth, described as the ‘ultimate peaceweaver’ in the Welsh marches and the family of Christina of Markyate, whose English aunt was the mistress of Ranulf Flambard, bishop of Wales. The importance of individuals should not be underestimated in other areas of life. David cited Jay Rubenstein’s work on to bring in the case of Osbern a monk of Canterbury, who was sent by Lanfranc to Bec (Lanfranc’s home monastery) to reform his life under the tutelage of Anselm. Empire facilitated contacts. Returning to the sociology of the previous lecture, this was much more an exercise in explaining soft power if I understand all of this correctly.

Some experiences and aspects of empire are forever lost to us. To borrow a phrase from the French women’s historian, Arlette Farge, people like Orderic are ‘accidentally exceptional’ and that is why they are interesting. We know something about how he understood relations between England and Normandy, what he thought about being packed off to St-Evroul and how he experienced empire because his abbot instructed him to write a history of the community which broadened out to a much larger universal chronicle. As David pointed out, we have no idea what happened to Orderic’s siblings left behind on the outskirts of Shrewsbury. We can extrapolate and speculate from other evidence, notably archaeological, but the circumstances that took their brother away from them, contrived to keep him away and to limit any news being passed back and forth.

This lecture set up nicely the consideration of William the Conqueror and empire which followed in no. 3, which I hope to write up shortly. Unfortunately, I missed no. 4 (hegemony) due to plumbing and heating, so no report on that one.  Thankfully, even if these lectures are sometimes a little hard to follow, they do remind me why we all do this job at that, at least somewhere in these benighted times for the academy, someone as the time and space to think.

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