2. Essays from the Past

These essays were written over four decades and were rewritten and re-thought as a result on several occasions during that time.  The book begins with an essay on myths and stories that I included as it examines the relationship between different types of narratives and how my own story has both ‘mythic’ and ‘real’ elements. The essay on Ancient Britain looks at how it developed through examining the sites of Skara Brae in the Orkneys and Hengistbury Head on the south coast near Bournemouth.

The following three essays examine the nature of medieval society looking at an economic overview, a series of lectures I gave, a tripartite society looking at society from elitist and peasant perspectives, the role of urban society and the place and importance of the Church in people’s lives.  I have included an essay on the French historian Marc Bloch whose two volume translation of his La Société feodal I have long admired and enjoyed reading and re-reading.  The next three essays focus on Normandy largely in the tenth century through the formation of the duchy under Rollo, William Longsword and Richard I, as the ruling elite adjusted from its Viking origins into a Franco-Norman society and considers the question of when the Vikings became Norman.  This question of identity is of considerable importance in the ways in which Norman minorities initially in Normandy, then Italy and finally in England assimilated into their host communities.  The varied nature of the rural environment in the Norman countryside in the subject of an extended essay as is a discussion of the historiography of Normandy from the ninth to twelfth centuries.

There are five essays on the Normans in Southern Italy and Sicily.  There is an extended discussion of the historiography of the Normans in southern Italy and Sicily and a critique of William of Apulia and Geoffrey Malaterra.  This is followed by a narrative analysis of the Norman conquest of southern Italy and Sicily. The final essays consider governing Norman lands and their impact on lordship and feudalism. The final essays looks at Scandinavia and Rome and the ‘end of the world’, the impact of the year 1000 on society and the Church. Rather like the supposed ‘millennium bug’, the computer glitch that was to impact people’s computers in 2000…I remember sitting looking at my computer that evening just wondering.  It was similar in 1000 with people not knowing whether the millennium marked the end of the world or not and the subsequent debate amongst medievalists on the question.