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File Size: 4749 KB
Print Length: 468 pages
Publisher: Pegasus Books; 1 edition (July 2, 2013)
Publication Date: July 2, 2013
Language: English
ASIN: B00DBLRFQC
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This is a good, solid book on the Norman Conquest, covering both the pre- and post-Battle of Hastings periods and concluding with the death of William the Conqueror. The author does an admirable job of making use of the scant, often contradictory source material (which pretty much boils down to the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, the Bayeux Tapestry, and a small handful of near-contemporary observers and writers) to tell a balanced, well-considered story about what happened and why.He leans pro-Norman here and there, but, hey, that's cool. It's a useful counterpoint to the throng of books that take the "Saxon-culture-as-pre feudal-Garden-of-Eden-until-the-Feudal Bad People-showed-up" perspective, a sort of syrupy 19th century Romanticism with which pop historians have been slow to dispense over the last 150 years, despite its preposterousness. As an American of non-English or French heritage, I have no emotional dog in the hunt, and at the risk of costing the author a few book sales, he too has what you might almost call an American perspective on the Conquest: neutral, dispassionate, curious, but ultimately distant: the viewpoint of an observer, not an heir. Most of the book is spent trying to suss out what really happened before and after the Battle of Hastings by assessing, comparing, and reading between the lines of the original sources. This is definitely a core strength of the book, more useful and probably closer to the real history than you'll find in some of the less-well-sourced, more speculative Conquest books out there, of which there are many.It isn't a ground-breaking book. Morris presents no new theory on, say, whether cavalry or a Papal blessing or the previous month's Norwegian invasion was the decisive game-changer at the Battle of Hastings. His discussion of what went wrong with Tostig's reign in Northumbria gets closer to something original but is still within the boundaries of conventional thinking. In short, he doesn't attempt to overhaul our understanding of the Conquest with radically new ideas. What he does do is perform a solid, detailed exploration of what "probably" happened on the basis of a thoughtful comparative assessment of the original source materials. And he does it with investigative rigor, robust insight into the process of studying history, and fine writing skills. There is no question that he is a talented historian with good analytical chops.Though I am not a Saxon-phile, I've always tended to take a slightly pro-Saxon and skeptical view of the Conquest history as handed down to us by the victors. The entire "case" for the Norman invasion has always boiled down to unproven, and quite possibly fictitious, assertions by one or two contemporaries that William visited King Edward of England in 1051 and was told to expect the English throne on Edward's death. It's kind of a bizarre assertion for many reasons, like "Why would Edward do that?" and "What did he get in return for such an astoundingly huge gift, because there is no record or even assertion that he received anything for it, even by the Normans" and "Oh, by the way, English kings were mainly chosen by a committee of high-ranking nobles, not by the previous king." In addition, in hindsight we see William as the towering figure of 11th century English politics; in 1051 he was a 23-ish year old upstart with a very uncertain future -- it's just comically ridiculous to imagine that the King of England would have chosen him as successor. I've always assumed that the whole story was a later invention to justify the invasion. My view is basically that England was a big, rich, populous, fertile country with good coinage and monasteries packed to the gills with gold and silver -- it was simply an irresistible target for the avaricious, ambitious Great Men of the age (William, Hardrada, etc). With Edward the Confessor dead and the country temporarily vulnerable, it was like "wow! Let's go for it!" Morris, however, lays out a pretty compelling case, based on careful reading of sources, that something like the 1051 visit might have taken place and might have at least led to a misunderstanding over what Edward had said. And indeed, Edward had played coy and been suggestive with a number of foreigners as to what they might be able to expect after he died, as part of his generally manipulative scheming. So perhaps William was justifiably expectant, and then furious when Harold was voted/appointed/approved as King. This gets to the key moral, and sadly unanswerable, question of the Conquest: was there some sort of justification for what William did, or was he just the head of a big band of conquering thugs looking for new land, gold, women, etc. Though Morris doesn't cover brand new ground, he does turn over enough rocks and compare enough original sources to make you take another look at what to many, including myself, has always seemed like ex-post-facto propaganda.One area Morris does cover rather nicely across the pages is that, put simply, they were all pretty much thugs back then. There was no stereotypical Saxon Garden Of Eden of womens' rights and happy-go-lucky small independent farmers, later crushed by the Feudalism-imposing Norman overlords. Though Anglo-Saxon culture might have had a tad more individual autonomy, particularly at the mid-thegn (noble) level as Morris points out (although, curiously omitted by Morris, it was probably the higher-status peasants who really got the shaft and lost the most autonomy after 1066), both cultures were hierarchical and, in modern terms, thuggish and cruel and bad places to be unless you were connected at the highest levels. Even the most sympathetic character in the whole Conquest story, Harold Godwinson, Earl and later King of England, harried the English coasts (which means burning houses and killing people and destroying towns) and took slaves, not to mention engaging in an aggressive, brutal war in Wales that resulted in the decapitation of its leader. Back then, blinding and maiming or killing or enslaving enemies, prisoners, and occasionally unlucky peasants as you passed through town, was pretty routine behavior, and they all did it: Normans, Vikings, and Saxons. We are so removed from that world of casual cruelty and injustice that it's hard to get our heads around it and pick a team to root for. We are left to wonder whether the Anglo-Danish administration of (half Danish) Harold Godwinson had some fundamentally better claim to rule England than the Anglo-Norman rulers who replaced them. After all, Anglo-Danish King Harold didn't have a drop of royal, old-school English blood; the old Anglo-Saxon aristocracy who we tend to feel a little sorry for ... for disappearing ... had already been swept into oblivion by the conquest of the Danish warlord Cnut, fifty years before Hastings. Thus, a difficult philosophical question: what gives someone legitimacy in conquering a country - and why would the Normans have had less of it than the Danes before them, from whence Harold Godwinson's power and position originated? All of the protagonists and antagonists of 1066 were varying degrees of upstarts, interlopers, adventurers, and gold and power seekers.I should note that battle coverage is quite weak for a Conquest book: a paragraph or two on Fulford and Stamford Bridge, and a few pages on Hastings. Battle lovers will not love this book. The obligatory arrow-in-the-eye story is about all you're going to get, fight-wise. This book is more of a "sweep of history" work that tries to explain what the Conquest was all about in a strategic, geographic, historical, and moral-dimension sense.I would recommend this book strongly to people who are into the Conquest or new to it. It's less rigidly sourced and argued than an academic paper, but more soundly constructed than a typical pop history book -- it's kind of in between, offering the amateur enthusiast some analytical rigor while not boring him with pointless self-referential PhD-speak. It's comparable in quality and readability to the Frank McLynn book, "1066: Year of Three Battles", which in my opinion is the quintessential one-stop-shop learn-about-1066 book. One book I would (strongly) recommend as a companion volume to Morris' is "1066" by Peter Marren. Marren's book provides the detailed drill-down on battles, weapons, warfare, maps, diagrams, and so forth that this book is missing; Marren's and Morris' books together would be a powerful combination. Finally, an indispensable (but occasionally hard to acquire) companion book would be "The Battle of Hastings" by Stephen Morillo. Morillo's book provides direct translations of all of the contemporary source material about Hastings (like, every word written at or near the time, about the battle), from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to William of Jumieges and William of Poiters, and Florence of Worchester, and super-helpfully, to The Carmen De Hastingae Proelio. Translations of these documents are hugely expensive and exceedingly difficult to get, and yet here they all are, in one place, for the cost of a paperback. If you are interested enough in source-based 1066 study to read Morris' book, Morillo's will blow your mind.5 stars. Very solid.
As a complete novice regarding English history (especially around the time of the Norman Conquest) I thought I would give The Norman Conquest a shot. I was not at all disappointed.Norris, like most good historians, does a great job getting the reader up to speed. He describes the pre-norman population structure of England of slaves, peasants, thegns, and earls. He charts a fairly thorough history of the early kings of England form Aethelred the Unready to Canute the Great to Edward the Confessor and ultimately William the Conqueror. What struck me (as someone completely new to English history) was just how incredibly unstable these Kingdoms were. Rulers would employ by necessity any and every means necessary to ensure that their reign was secure. But peasant uprisings, intrigue from jealous nobles or family, inconvenient raids from Norse warriors--made ruling during the time of the 1000s a most challenging affair. It was a cut-throat world of blinding and maiming your opponents and back stabbing your "friends".William the Conqueror was not immune to such savage tactics (quite the contrary), and ultimately he had to result to "the harrying" to quell the frequent uprisings of the conquered English several years after the battle of Hastings.Norris does well to get us acquainted with the times and figures of tumultuous turn of the millennium. What he does even better is he presents the often contradictory source material of the period and allows the reader to partake in his own internal evaluation of the accuracy of the accounts. He tells the reader why one chronicle may be more accurate in a particular instance and why another may be more accurate in another instance. In all of this however, Norris leaves room for a conversation--always allowing the reader to come to his own conclusions based on the evidence--which is great historical writing. There is nothing worse than a historian who props up his opinions and hunches as fact, and leaves it at that.All in all, this is an enjoyable book of a time I previously knew little about. I might have preferred more battle details--tactics, maneuvers, fighting styles--while Norris focuses by and large on the political aspect of the period. But still, good book. Good historian.
I'm glad I read this book. In reading a sample of it, I knew I was not going to find a 'page turning' read, but I had a deep desire to learn more about the history of England, and the Norman conquest by William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 is legendary in that domain. Their usurpation of rule over England marked landmark changes in the course of England's destiny as they initiated the building of castles, instituted feudalism and class structure, and cemented the concept of inherited monarchy. The book goes into amazing detail on the endless battles, invasions, dramas, intrigues, and dreary and dangerous life in the middle ages. Every name - and there are many - is cited throughout. Admittedly, it's a bit of work to get through this, but at the end you will be glad you read it and the knowledge of history gained. Don't be put off by the page count; about one-third of the book at the end is footnotes and references.
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