Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgement
- Abbreviations
- Map
- Introduction: These Englands: Regional Identities and Cultural Contact
- 1 Coping with Conquest: Local Identity and the Gesta Herwardi
- 2 The View from Lincolnshire: Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis as Regional History
- 3 Locating a Border: Fouke le Fitz Waryn and the March of Wales
- 4 Englishness Outside England: Embracing Alterity in Medieval Romance
- 5 England at the Edge of the World
- Envoi
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Coping with Conquest: Local Identity and the Gesta Herwardi
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgement
- Abbreviations
- Map
- Introduction: These Englands: Regional Identities and Cultural Contact
- 1 Coping with Conquest: Local Identity and the Gesta Herwardi
- 2 The View from Lincolnshire: Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis as Regional History
- 3 Locating a Border: Fouke le Fitz Waryn and the March of Wales
- 4 Englishness Outside England: Embracing Alterity in Medieval Romance
- 5 England at the Edge of the World
- Envoi
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The decades following the Norman Conquest of England are often regarded as a time of intense national trauma. Within months of the Battle of Hastings, the crown was firmly in Norman hands and the lands previously held by the English were redistributed amongst William the Conqueror's followers. The twelfth-century historian Orderic Vitalis describes the humiliation suffered by the English after their defeat:
Normannico fastu Angli opprimuntur; et prasidibus superbis qui regis monitus spernebant admodum iniuriabantur. Prafecti minores qui munitiones custodiebant; nobiles et mediocres indigenas iniustis exactionibus multisque contumeliis aggrauabant.
[The English were groaning under the Norman yoke, and suffering oppressions from the proud lords who ignored the king's injunctions. The petty lords who were guarding the castles oppressed all the native inhabitants of high and low degree, and heaped shameful burdens on them.]
Elisabeth van Houts argues that English writers suffered from the ‘traumatic effects of shock’ in response to the events that had recently befallen their country and they were too ‘stunned’ to write about the Conquest until well into the twelfth century. The Gesta Herwardi, written between 1109 and 1131 by a monk or clerk probably called Richard of Ely, is an exception to this assertion. It manifests an ‘attempt to cope with the trauma of defeat’ by means of epic narrative and through the depiction of heroic behaviour and ‘honourable surrender’. In addition to displaying England's post-Conquest coping mechanisms through the repetition and remodelling of traumatic events, the Gesta also explores how individuals and communities adjust to political upheaval by recalibrating their identities, and asserting the importance of local, rather than national, histories, communities, and heroes. The text depicts a hero and community retreating to a local sense of identity as a way of mitigating greater political changes sweeping over England.
The Gesta reveals the fragility of the eleventh-century English ‘nation’ by presenting regions on the margins of England splintering off from the heartland after the Conquest, providing alternative, community-oriented nodal points around which the English people could construct their identities. Literary accounts of English resistance to the Norman Conquest, the Gesta chief among them, draw models of England that diverge from those of a unified country.
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- Writing Regional Identities in Medieval EnglandFrom the Gesta Herwardi to Richard Coer de Lyon, pp. 32 - 63Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020