“A single battle settled the fate of England.” There was still grim work to be done—the humbling of Exeter, the harrying of Northumberland, the subjection of the earls, but these were only local episodes. There was no one but William who could effectively take Harold’s place, and when on Christmas Day he had been crowned at London, he could reduce opposition at his leisure. The chronicle of these later years belongs to English rather than to Norman history.

The results of the Conquest, too, are of chief significance for the conquered. For the Normans the immediate effect was a great opportunity for expansion in every department of life. There was work for the warrior in completing the subjugation of the land, for the organizer and statesman in the new adjustments of central and local government, for the prelate in bringing his new diocese into line with the practice of the church on the Continent, for the monks to found new priories and administer the new lands which their monasteries now received beyond the Channel. The Norman townsman and the Norman merchant followed hard upon the Norman armies, in the Norman colony in London, in the traders of the ports, in the boroughs of the western border. In part, of course, the change was simply the replacing of one set of persons by another, putting a Norman archbishop in place of Stigand at Canterbury, spreading over the map the Montgomeries and Percies, the Mowbrays and the Mortimers and scores of other household names of English history; but it was also a work of readjustment and reorganization which required all the Norman gift for constructive work. A certain élan passes through Norman life and reflects itself in Norman literature, as the Normans become more conscious of the glory of their achievements and the greatness of their new empire. England had become an appendage to Normandy, and men did not yet see that the relation would soon be reversed.

For England, the Norman Conquest determined permanently the orientation of English politics and English culture. Geographically belonging, with the Scandinavian countries, to the outlying lands of Europe, the British Isles had been in serious danger of sharing their remoteness from the general movements of European life and drifting into the back waters of history. The union with Normandy turned England southward and brought it at once into the full current of European affairs—political entanglements, ecclesiastical connections, cultural influences. England became a part of France and thus entered fully into the life of the world to which France belonged. It received the speech of France, the literature of France, and the art of France; its law became in large measure Frankish, its institutions more completely feudal. Yet the connection with France ran through Normandy, and the French influence took on Norman forms. Most of all was this true in the field in which the Norman excelled, that of government: English feudalism was Norman feudalism, in which the barons were weak and the central power strong, and it was the heavy hand of Norman kingship that turned the loose and disintegrating Anglo-Saxon state into the English nation. England was Europeanized only at the price of being Normanized.

From the point of view both of immediate achievement and of ultimate results, the conquest of England was the crowning act of Norman history. Something doubtless was due to good fortune,—to the absence of an English fleet, to the favorable opportunity in French politics, to the mistakes of the English. But the fundamental facts, without which these would have meant nothing, were the strength and discipline of Normandy and the personality of her leader. Diplomat, warrior, leader of men, William was preëminently a statesman, and it was his organizing genius which “turned the defeat of English arms into the making of the English nation.” This talent for political organization was, however, no isolated endowment of the Norman duke, but was shared in large measure by the Norman barons, as is abundantly shown by the history of Norman rule in Italy and Sicily. For William and for his followers the conquest of England only gave a wider field for qualities of state-building which had already shown themselves in Normandy.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

A detailed narrative of the relations between Normandy and England in the eleventh century is given by E. A. Freeman in his History of the Norman Conquest (Oxford, 1870–79), but large portions of this work need to be rewritten in the light of later studies, especially those of Round. There is a brief biography of William the Conqueror by Freeman in the series of “Twelve English Statesmen” (London, 1888), and a fuller one by F. M. Stenton in the “Heroes of the Nations” (1908). For the institutions of Normandy see my articles on “Knight Service in Normandy in the Eleventh Century,” in English Historical Review, XXII, pp. 636–49; “The Norman ‘Consuetudines et Iusticie’ of William the Conqueror,” ibid. XXIII, pp. 502–08; and “Normandy under William the Conqueror,” in American Historical Review, XIV, pp. 453–76 (1909); also L. Valin, Le duc de Normandie et sa cour, 912–1204 (Paris, 1910). For church and state, see H. Böhmer, Kirche und Staat in England und in der Normandie (Leipzig, 1899). The dealings of the Norman dukes with their continental neighbors are narrated by A. Fliche, Le règne de Philippe Ier roi de France (Paris, 1912); L. Halphen, Le comté d’Anjou au XIe siècle (Paris, 1906); R. Latouche, Histoire du comté du Maine pendant le Xe et le XIe siècle (Paris, 1910); F. Lot, Fidèles ou vassaux (Paris, 1904), ch. 6 (on the feudal relations of the Norman dukes and the French kings). There is a good sketch of France in the eleventh century by Luchaire in the Histoire de France of Lavisse, II, part 2; a fuller work on this period is expected from Maurice Prou. For the literature of the battle of Hastings, see Gross, Sources and Literature, nos. 707a, 2812, 2998–3000; the most important works are those of Round, Spatz, and Delbrück, Geschichte der Kriegskunst, III, pp. 147–62 (1907). The Bayeux Tapestry is most conveniently accessible in the small edition of F. R. Fowke (reprinted, London, 1913); see also Gross, no. 2139, and Ph. Lauer, in Mélanges Charles Bémont (Paris, 1913), pp. 43–58. Freeman discusses the results of the Conquest in his fifth volume; see also Gaston Paris, L’esprit normand en Angleterre, in La poésie du moyen âge, second series (Paris, 1895), pp. 45–74.

IV
THE NORMAN EMPIRE

The lecture upon Normandy and England sought to place in their Norman perspective the events leading to the Norman Conquest and to show how that decisive triumph of Norman strength and daring was made possible by the development of an exceptional ducal authority in Normandy and Maine and by the personal greatness of William the Conqueror. We now come to follow still further this process of expansion, to the Scotch border, to Ireland, to the Pyrenees, until the empire of the Plantagenet kings became the chief political fact in western Europe. The Norman empire is the outstanding feature of the twelfth century, as the conquest of England was of the eleventh.

* * * * *

This great imperial state is commonly known, not as the Norman, but as the Angevin, empire, because its rulers, Henry II, Richard, and John, were descended in the male line from the counts of Anjou. The phrase is, however, a misnomer, since it leads one to suppose that the Angevin counts were its creators, which is in no sense the case. The centre of the empire was Normandy, its founders were the Norman dukes. The marriage of the Princess Matilda to Count Geoffrey Plantagenet added Anjou to Normandy rather than Normandy to Anjou, and it was as duke of Normandy that their son Henry II began his political career. The extension of his domains southward by marriage only gave Normandy the central position in his realm, and it was the loss of Normandy under John which led to the empire’s collapse.