Audacity and Ambition in Early Norman England and the Big Stuff of the Conquest (The R. Allen Brown Memorial Lecture, 2016)

Summary

This chapter is about the size of things in early Norman England. It deals in certain categories that were either new in 1066 or physically much larger after the Conquest than before: abbey and cathedral churches, earthwork castles and stone halls, bridges and watermills, pictorial embroideries and books. My remit is not a comprehensive audit of the material world but rather an attempt to identify the Big Stuff of the Conquest and establish its cultural meaning for the men and women who brought it into being. It might be appropriate at the outset to say a word or two about the genesis of this lecture. My starting point was Domesday Book, in particular grasping the significance of the commonplace observation that it is a very big book by contemporary standards. Although the dimensions of the folios do indeed seem exceptional, the implications of its size have never been thought through. Why was it designed to be so big? An invitation from Robin Fleming and Kit French to participate in a workshop about material culture provided an opportunity to think more deeply about the size of artefacts and buildings as an aspect of materiality in Norman England. Contributions to the workshop were to be co-written and co-presented by colleagues from different disciplines. Thus Carol Davidson Cragoe and I wrote a paper on the best known Big Stuff of the Conquest, its buildings. Beyond books and buildings, the present chapter sets out a preliminary survey of other things where there was a marked change in size after 1066. Bringing all this together in one place will, I hope, guide some new insights into the mentalities of the Normans in England, especially how their experience of conquest changed the way they felt about and shaped the material world. The central question throughout is this: Why was some stuff in early Norman England so big? There are also connections with the immaterial things of the Conquest. I am not the first to think that big ambitions and outsized audacity were characteristic of the inner group that ruled early Norman England. Raising some questions about that aspect of Norman identity is the second thrust of the chapter.