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Recent Trends In Anglo-Norman Scholarship: The New Political History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

C. Warren Hollister
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Extract

The articles that follow employ quantitative and prosopographical approaches that, although not new to historical investigation, are new to the field of royal-baronial relations in Norman England. Traditionally, English medieval politics have been treated with a strongly constitutional emphasis. Barons have been viewed as a largely undifferentiated group whose relations with the monarchy were seen as a reaction against the advance of rational central government, or as a defense of traditional liberties against oppressive kings.

The better historians, over the past century and more, have resisted such simplifications. John Horace Round, for example, attacked and ridiculed the anachronistic constitutional generalizations of some of his predecessors by producing a mass of detailed information on individual Anglo-Norman aristocratic families. Sir Frank Stenton, in a tribute to Round written soon after Round's death in 1928, summarized his contribution in these apt words:

Round's work forms an essential part of the very remarkable movement which rather more than thirty years ago created the modern study of feudal institutions.… No one had yet expressed, as Round was to express, the truth that the fabric of feudal history is composed of genealogical detail, that innumerable events which are unintelligible as realted by contemporary writers presuppose an elaborate nexus of family alliances and rivalries.

Stenton, too, was an expert in aristocratic genealogy and family history; and with the sources of Saxon and Norman England at his fingertips, he was a master of the apt illustration.

Type
Symposium: Anglo-Norman Elites
Information
Albion , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , Winter 1982 , pp. 254 - 257
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1982

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References

1 SirStenton, Frank, The First Century of English Feudalism, 1066-1166 (2nd ed.; Oxford, 1961), p. 2Google Scholar. The book was first published in 1932 as a slightly revised version of Stenton's Ford Lectures of 1929.

2 Southern, R.W., Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (Oxford, 1970), p. 231, 232.Google Scholar

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5 Green, Judith A., “William Rufus, Henry I and the Royal Demesne,” History 64(1979):337–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem., “The Last Century of Danegeld,” English Historical Review 96 (1981): 241-58; and idem., “Praeclarum at Magnificum Antiquitas Monumentum: The Earliest Surviving Pipe Roll,” Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research 55 (1982): 1-17.

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8 In addition to the papers published here, see Mooers, Stephanie L., “‘Backers and Slabbers’: Problems of Loyalty in Robert Curthose's Entourage,” Journal of British Studies 21,1 (Fall, 1981): 1–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and DeAragon, RaGena, “The Growth of Secure Inheritance in Norman England,” Journal of Medieval History 8, 4 (December, 1982): 381–391.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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