In medieval Europe, the Latin word gens meant “race”, “nation” or “people.” The term goes back to the gens togata, the “toga-wearing race,” which was a term used by the Romans to describe themselves. A Roman’s nomen gentilicium (“gentile name”) was an important factor indicating one’s membership in a gens. Medieval Europeans were no exception to this rule. Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica is often credited with the creation of the concept of the gens Anglorum as one people, unified by their Christianity and Alfred the Great with the consolidation of the English community as Angelcynn.
Having been inspired by the great Roman civilisation, medieval Europeans employed the use of Latin in a variety of official written records. The rex Francorum (“king of the Franks”) tradition of the Franks, which was the tradition of royal authority that connected to the Frankish gens, can be traced back to the Merovingian period. By the eighth century, the legitimation for rulership in Gaul along with the rise of the Carolingians allowed for the evolution and establishment of the gens Francorum, the “Frankish race.” Records show us that Pepin the Short (c. 714-768), the father of Charlemagne (748-814), used the traditional Merovingian title “rex Francorum” in his royal diplomas addressing the Frankish aristocracy. Additionally, the monogram of his title, RF, appeared on coins accessible to ordinary everyday Franks.
From the ninth century onwards, the Normans had established themselves as a legitimate cultural and ethnic identity in Normandy following the siege of Chartes in 911 AD. The earliest mention of the Viking leader Rollo (c. 835-933) comes from a charter of Charles III, which mentions “Rollo and his associates” and refers to an earlier grant mentioning “the Normans of the Seine.” Following the establishment of the Norman micro-polity under the leadership of Rollo, the evolution of the gens Normannorum (“Norman race”) begins. Following this, the Norman adventurers quickly expanded across Europe and the Near East, first to Sicily in 1061, followed by England in 1066, and then to the Holy Land during the First Crusade (1096-1099). For French authors, the Normans were seen both as their own separate "gens" as well as part of a larger "gens Francorum."
Normannitas
Throughout the many holdings of the Normans, they still possessed and expressed a certain Normannitas about themselves. Firstly, the original Norse settlers that had established themselves in Francia and intermingled with the local Frankish and Gallo-Roman population were highly adaptive and assimilated fairly quickly into the culture of their surrounding peers. The Fecamp Document is one of the earliest written records mentioning the Normans as a society in France. It was written anonymously in the tenth century and states:
Norman” settlement: “The Normans are given the seven farthest maritime provinces by the gift and concession of Charles, the king of France, which they may improve by a settlement of their labour from abroad, and defend and protect against the invasions of assaulting barbarians.”
Other historians connect this historiographical adaptiveness to many other historiographies that immediately followed the fall of the Roman Empire, in which “barbarian” cultures used dubious methods to connect their societies to both Roman history and their conquered subjects in order to legitimise their authority and identity. By the time of Dudo of Saint-Quentin (c. 965 AD), the first known Norman historiographer, Normans were using the place-names and language of their Latinate-French speaking peasantry for all things except the name of the region itself.
After landing in England, Duke William speaks with a group of monks about his reasons for coming to the island; after Harold usurped his position as king of England, the Norman duke felt that he had the legal right to pursue war regardless of cultural differences between the English and the Normans:
“Harold previously made himself my vassal by giving his hands to me, and gave my surety with his own hand concerning the kingdom of England. I am ready to put my case against him to judgement, by the law of the English or of the Normans as he prefers.”
The Norman identity was largely centred around their religiousness and adherence to law in comparison to their European peers. Various written works spanning the eleventh to twelfth centuries denote the Normans and their rulership as exemplary beacons of religious, law-abiding men that are inherently capable at war. Dudo of Saint-Quentin in his Historia Normannorum chooses to ignore the non-Christian Pagan past of the Normans, and instead exemplifies their castle-building, church-going, law-abiding Normannitas as a means of distinguishing and identifying the Normans as a distinct gens. Writing in the 12th century, the English chronicler and Benedictine monk Orderic Vitalis described the Normans as an “untamed race” who were “innately warlike and bold.” William of Poitiers wrote that “If the Normans are disciplined under a just and firm rule they are men of great valour”; at the same time, “without such rule they tear each other to pieces to destroy themselves.” Because of their love of “rebellion” and “sedition,” Orderic concludes, “the Normans need to be restrained by the severe penalties of law, and forced by the curb of discipline to keep to the path of justice.”
William of Malmesbury (c. 1085 AD) points towards another example of Norman identity and the gens Normannorum tradition being bound with behavioural patterns and character. In his Gesta Regum Anglorum and Historia Novella, William distinguishes the English prior to the coming of the Normans by listing several of sins: monks abusing their rule; gluttonous, lecherous and impious nobles; and the abuse of the common people. In his comparison with the habits of those on the continent we can see several markers of ethnic distinction:
“In small, mean houses they (the Angli) wasted their entire substance, unlike the Franks and the Normans (Franci et Normanni), who in proud great buildings live a life of moderate expense. There followed the vices that keep company with drunkenness, and sap the virility of a man’s spirit. As a result there was more rashness and headlong fury than military skill in their conflict with William, so that in one battle – and a very easy one – they abandoned themselves and their country to servitude. … In brief, the English (Angli) of those days wore garments half way to the knee, which left them unimpeded; hair short, chin shaven, arms loaded with gold bracelets, skin tattooed with coloured patterns, eating till they were sick and drinking till they spewed. These last two habits they have passed on to their conquerors, whose ways in other things they have adopted. But I should not wish these strictures to be understood as aimed at the English (Angli) in general... But as in tranquil times God’s serene kindness often fosters bad and good men equally, so in the hour of captivity His stern judgement sometimes grips good as well as bad.”
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