|
The Historical Background
In a single year, 1066,
England witnessed the death of the Anglo-Saxon King Edward and the
coronation of his successor King Harold, the invasion and triumph of the
foreigner William of Normandy, and his own coronation as King William. The
Normans conquered an Anglo-Saxon kingdom troubled by civil strife. The
monastic movement had lost much of its earlier fervor and discipline.
Aristocrats interests had weakened severely the reign of the late King
Edward "the Confessor." On an island that had been repeatedly colonized,
1066 nonetheless represented a climactic change, experienced and registered
all levels of social, religious, and cultural experience.
William the Conqueror was ruthless in his take-over of
England. When he died in 1087, there were only two English landowners left.
The English aristocrats who survived Hastings either emigrated or became
mere farmers. The invading culture was considered superior, things English
were despised. In central areas, at least, there were many English who
learned French and gave their children French names. One quarter of England
was given to the Church with Norman bishops and abbots everywhere. Soon
after the Conquest, William stopped trying to learn English and after 1070
all official documents were written in Latin. The 170 Norman nobles to whom
William gave most of England made little effort to live on their lands or
speak to their tenants.
Under William, the social distinctions in rural society
hardened. At the bottom of the feudal hierarchy were the nations fifty
thousand serfs, who had no rights at all and were attached to the land they
worked. In 1085, William ordered a detailed survey of the rural population
and land-holding of all England, called
the Domesday Book. Land-owners held
manors and were the local lords. The Normans restored the Church in the
north, constructed new cathedrals, founded new monasteries, promoted
education. They also gave new importance to the cities and towns.
When
Peter the Hermit provoked the first Crusade, which led
to the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 and the establishment of a Christian
kingdom in the Holy Land, Normans played an important role. It may well be
the crusades, with their strange mixture of adventurism and religious
idealism that caused the rise of what came to be known as Chivalry. The
great lords of England, usually termed barons had a duty to raise an army
when needed. Fighting required a professionalism, and equipment, that took
money. Therefore there arose a class of landed gentry who were encouraged to
spend much of their time away on campaigns, and to bring some of their sons
with them as squires, too. These gentlemen-warriors were known as knights
and were addressed as Sir, a title received from the king personally, not
inherited. The knight normally went into battle on horse-back, so in French
he was called chevalier from the word for a horse.
The Normans brought with them a new system of government, a
freshly renovated Latin culture, and most important a new language.
Anglo-Saxon sank into relative insignificance at the level of high culture
and central government. Norman French became the language of the courts of
law, of literature, and of most of the nobility. By the time English rose
again to widespread cultural significance, about 250 years later, it was a
hybrid that combined Romance and Germanic elements.
On the other hand, the Norman prelates, like their
kings, brought an urge toward centralized order in the church and a belief
that the church and its public justice should be independent of secular
power. This created frequent conflict with kings and aristocrats, who wanted
to extend their judicial power and expected to exert considerable influence
in the appointment of church officials.
The most explosive moment in this ongoing controversy
occurred in the disagreements between Henry II and Thomas Becket, who was
Henry's Chancellor and then Archbishop of Canterbury. Beckets increasingly
public refusal to confirm to the king, either in the judicial sphere or the
matter of clerical appointments, finally led to his murder by Henry's
henchmen in 1170 at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral and his martyrdom very
soon thereafter. A large body of narrative of his martyrdom and posthumous
miracles swiftly developed, adding to an already rich tradition of writing
about the lives of English saints. As Saint Thomas, Becket became a powerful
focus for ecclesiastical ambition, popular devotion and pilgrimage, and
religious and secular narrative. In fact, the characters of Chaucers
Canterbury Tales tell their stories while making a pilgrimage to his
shrine.
Henry IIs son Richard the Lionheart was one of the most
poetic figures in English royal history. Most of his reign from 1189 until
1199 was spent in wars abroad. He was killed during the Third Crusade, still
childless, and his brother John succeeded him. John lost control of Normandy
and Anjou to the kings of France in 1204. In later literature, the
adventures of Robin Hood and his band of outlaws in Sherwood Forest are set
in the time of Richard and John.
John had to confront the difficult problem of the rights and powers of the
Catholic Church in an independent kingdom. He lost a struggle for control of
the Church and had to submit to Rome. John was most noted for having agreed
to the document called
Magna Carta in 1215. It gave each person the right to
be tried by his peers according to the traditional laws of the land. The
throne became the guarantee of justice for all people, against the
autocratic despotism of the local lords.
For most of the 13th century, the king of England was Henry III , and during
his reign the English Parliament was begun, largely by the efforts of Simon
de Montfort. In 1265 he created the first Parliament dominated by commoners
from the towns of England. The result of all this was a new sense of English
identity.
The French language introduced into England by the Normans,
Anglo-normand, had been a rough rural dialect from the beginning and by this
time it sounded so strange to sophisticated ears that the aristocratic
English refused to speak it. They learned the French of France instead, or
spoke English. In 1272, when Edward I became king while he was fighting in
the Holy Land, he decided that the royal Court would now use the English
language. This effectively eliminated French as an everyday means of social
communication or literary expression in England. From the end of the 13th
century, English and Latin were the two official languages.
|
