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Covering more than a millennium of the history of the book in Britain, this book deals with a longer period than do all the rest of this series put together. Extending from Roman Britain to the first generation of the Anglo-Norman realm, it embraces both of the two memorable dates in English history. Stretching in bibliographical terms from the Vindolanda Tablets through the Lindisfarne Gospels to the Domesday Book, it includes some of the most famous and fascinating artefacts of written culture ever produced in these isles. The book establishes comparison and contrast between the worlds of books in the main periods such as Roman, pre-Viking, post-Viking, early Norman. The Christian missions from Rome and from Ireland defined the earliest channels for the importation of books to Anglo-Saxon England. Many of the books used in Roman Britain are likely to have been imported from elsewhere in the Roman Empire, arriving via well-organised routes of communication.
The century after Edward the Confessor returned from exile in Normandy to be crowned king of England in 1042 might be called the century of the Norman Conquest, which led to the formation of a short-lived Anglo-Norman realm. Normandy under Duke William was in the process of becoming the most powerful principality in the French kingdom. By 1047 the troubles of the duke's minority were over, and a victory over rebels at Val-fes-Dunes left him in a commanding position, strong enough to meet any new rebellion. The 1050s were a time of consolidation, when the frontiers of the duchy were strengthened, the authority of the king of France though acknowledged in principle was virtually excluded and a slow military expansion was begun. This prepared the way for the external conquests and triumphs of the 1060s. Bishops were liable to come under the same jurisdiction as the lay magnates. Their position in both England and Normandy was similar.
The extant royal charters and the historiography of St-Denis offer a perspective on the Capetians that was highly configured by ecclesiastical concerns. From their Robertian origins the Capetians proclaimed their dynastic rights to the crown. The charters of Louis VI and Louis VII announced a new policy towards the commercial groups who converged upon towns in northern France spurred by the revival of trade at the turn of the eleventh century. Except for new attention to townspeople and Suger's ideological formulations Louis VI and Louis VII introduced few governmental innovations. Overshadowed by the might of the Anglo-Norman-Angevins, Philip Augustus was reluctant to respond to the call for the Third Crusade. As an aftermath of Bouvines, the last decade of Philip's reign may be characterized by the expected fruits of victory: peace, prosperity and the re-expression of ideology. Bouvines represented a victory of a Capetian king of the Franks over a Roman emperor.
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