In around 911, the Viking adventurer Rollo was granted the city of Rouen and its surrounding district by the Frankish King Charles the Simple. Two further grants of territory followed in 924 and 933. But while Frankish kings might grant this land to Rollo and his son, William Longsword, these two Norman dukes and their successors had to fight and negotiate with rival lords, hostile neighbours, kings, and popes in order to establish and maintain their authority over it. This book explores the geographical and political development of what would become the duchy of Normandy, and the relations between the dukes and these rivals for their lands and their subjects' fidelity. It looks, too, at the administrative machinery the dukes built to support their regime, from their toll-collectors and vicomtes (an official similar to the English sheriff) to the political theatre of their courts and the buildings in which they were staged. At the heart of this exercise are the narratives that purport to tell us about what the dukes did, and the surviving body of the dukes' diplomas. Neither can be taken at face value, and both tell us as much about the concerns and criticisms of the dukes' subjects as they do about the strength of the dukes' authority. The diplomas, in particular, because most of them were not written by scribes attached to the dukes' households but rather by their beneficiaries, can be used to recover something of how the dukes' subjects saw their rulers, as well as something of what they wanted or needed from them. Ducal power was the result of a dialogue, and this volume enables both sides to speak. Mark Hagger is a senior lecturer in medieval history at Bangor University.

Normandy transformed from military power base of pagan Norse invaders to Christian political entity.

This book provides a selection from the abundant source material generated by the Normans and the peoples they conquered. As this study demonstrates, few other medieval peoples generated historical writing of such quantity and quality. Van Houts takes a wide European perspective on the Normans, assessing and explaining their origin, the Norman expansion and their political and social organisation in the period between c. 900 to c. 1150. The Normans in Europe explores such areas as: the process of assimilation between Scandinavians and Franks and the emergence of Normandy; the internal organisation of the prinicpality with a variety of source materials from chronicles, miracle stories and charters; the roles of women and children in Norman society; the main chronicle sources for the history of the Norman invasion and settlement in Britain; the contacts between the Norman dukes and the territorial princes of France, and the progress of the Normans amongst the settlers in Southern Italy and elsewhere in the Mediterranean.

This book provides the most comprehensive examination of the Normans available, examining the emergence of the Normans, their characteristics as a group, and their various achievements in war, culture and civilization.

The articles in this volume focus on aspects of the history of the duchy of Normandy. Their topics include arguments for a new approach to the history of early Normandy, Norman abbesses, and the proposition that Robert Curthose was effectively written out of the duchy's history.

New insights into interpretive problems in the history of England and Europe between the eighth and thirteenth centuries.

The Normans have long been recognised as one of the most dynamic forces within medieval western Europe. With a reputation for aggression and conquest, they rapidly expanded their powerbase from Normandy, and by the end of the twelfth century had established themselves in positions of strength from England to Sicily, Antioch to Dublin. Yet, despite this success recent scholarship has begun to question the ’Norman Achievement’ and look again at the degree to which a single Norman cultural identity existed across so diverse a territory. To explore this idea further, all the essays in this volume look at questions of Norman traditions in some of the peripheral Norman dominions. In response to recent developments in cultural studies the volume uses the concepts of ’tradition’ and ’heritage’ to question the notion of a stable pan-European Norman culture or identity, and instead reveals the degrees to which Normans adopted and adapted to local conditions, customs and requirements in order to form their own localised cultural heritage. Divided into two sections, the volume begins with eight chapters focusing on Norman Sicily. These essays demonstrate both the degree of cultural intermingling that made this kingdom an extraordinary paradigm in this regard, and how the Normans began to develop their own distinct origin myths that diverged from those of Norman France and England. The second section of the volume provides four essays that explore Norman ethnicity and identity more broadly, including two looking at Norman communities on the opposite side of Europe to the Kingdom of Sicily: Ireland and the Scandinavian settlements in the Kievan Rus. Taken as a whole the volume provides a fascinating assessment of the construction and malleability of Norman identities in transcultural settings. By exploring these issues through the tradition and heritage of the Norman’s ’peripheral’ dominions, a much more sophisticated understanding can be gained, not only of th