The 2010 Ford Lectures VI: Empire? From beginning to end

By the time we reached lecture number VI, this series was proving extraordinarily productive, not only from the point of view of listening to what David Bates had to say, but also from the amount of work I seemed to be doing while drinking tea with friends. In a term that was a long, old slog, I was tremendously grateful. Lecture VI had been given a huge build up so we were all eagerly anticipating David’s conclusion.

David began by reiterating a number of key themes: the difficulty in using ‘imperialism’ as a term, the centrality of William the Conqueror and the political science of empire. He talked about the creation of this particular empire as ‘an act of violence and power which differed from everything that preceded it’. Interestingly, he also discussed, briefly, the importance of law, particularly the association between gens and customary law, which linked in to a short discussion of ethnicity and more productive ways of looking at it. I was particularly pleased to see that he cited Ewan Johnson’s work (which I have found very helpful) on the importance of identity and lived experience, thus linking back to some of the earlier lectures on the personal experience of empire.

In general though, David was taking a much longer view of empire than he had done hitherto and there was much looking beyond William the Conqueror and his sons to the reign of Henry II and the loss of Normandy under King John in 1204. He was essentially underlining the fact that cross-channel networks continued to be very dynamic (see the work of Daniel Power, Kathleen Thompson and Nicholas Vincent). Those networks were changing in character, but certainly involved people beyond the elite and the court. They were also flexible.

Having recapped and set the scene, David returned to the writing of history within an imperial framework, looking at shifting ideas about Normandy and Norman identity within the narrative sources. He was especially concerned with how ideas about the character of the Norman gens linked in with how the chroniclers thought about Normandy. Stephen of Rouen, author of the Draco Normannicus, for example, considered the Normans as a superior gens, but was highly critical of Henry II for dividing his territories among his sons. Therein lay the potential for conflict and sorrow, much as we can see earlier in Orderic Vitalis’s writing about the troubles that afflicted Normandy after the death of William the Conqueror. The competing gentes within the Norman empire did not always act in the interests if the centre of that empire, namely Normandy.

David then considered the difference between empire and diaspora. He was quite explicit in the first lecture that his focus was going to be primarily on the cross-channel empire of England and the Norman/Angevin lands and that he did not regard southern Italy and the Norman principality of Antioch as part of this empire. The difference lies in a consideration of power: conquest equates to hard power in its most definite form, whereas diaspora is an expression of weakness. The loss of Normandy in 1204 was thus the failure of hard power and, one assumes, empire. David’s analysis drew here on Niall Ferguson’s (an historian I admit I have problems with) work on the British empire. Ferguson aside, David underlined the need to concentrate our analysis on power, particularly the question of what is hegemonic power and whether the power of rulers and the cross-channel elite was sufficient to sustain it.

At one point during this lecture, David paused. This was a significant pause followed by a clear statement of the problems faced by any historian trying to untangle the history of any empire: ‘Empire is a complicated business: it always has been and always will be”. Certainly, the scope of these lectures and the different approaches and sources David covered underline that. Over the course of the series we heard about chronicles, charters, the economy, Caen stone (a great deal!), ships, architecture, religious patronage, ethnicity, law, politics, society and so on. Talking with a friend and colleague at the station on the way home, the only possible omission we could think of was language. All these aspects of life combine to reveal or obscure how empire functions.

So, to answer the question posed by my last post, what did David reveal about how we should study the Normans in relation to empire? To understand the problems posed above, particularly how the empire could be sustained, David called for a grand prosopography of the Normans, a validation, as if any were needed, of the importance of the Norman Edge project.