The Colonial History of the Norman

Conquest?

FRANCIS JAMES WEST

Churchill College, Cambridge

Abstract

Among Anglo-Norman historians there has always been argument about the e€ects of

the Conquest: was there continuity or change? Although most have used the term

`colonization' of England and of the Welsh and Irish frontier lands and of settlements

within the kingdom of Scotland, since 1966 some have speci®cally compared the

Conquest to imperial and colonial rule. England has been described as a Norman

colony, part of a Norman, later Angevin or Plantagenet empire. Apart from loose usage

of the technical terms `analogy' and `model', where `empire' and `colony', and their

abstracts `imperialism' and `colonialism', have been de®ned at all, these medieval

historians have been neither consistent with each other nor familiar with modern

imperial and colonial historians' discussion of the terms which they have borrowed.

Assuming that what is common both to medieval and to modern conquest and colon-

ization is expansion, Anglo-Norman historians have accepted inadequate explanations

of expansion ± shortage of land, greed for pro®ts ± and equated it with oppression and

exploitation. These are inadequate explanations of imperialism and colonialism, not

least because these `isms' are themselves models, not realities. Nevertheless, there are

theories of colonial administration, notably those of indirect rule and of modernization,

which might suggest new questions, especially about legitimacy and land tenure, and

thus provide fresh insights into the surviving evidence of Norman rule in England.

A

nglo-Norman historians di€er about the e€ects of the Norman

Conquest in England.

1

Was there signi®cant continuity with

Anglo-Saxon England, concealed by records of Norman

provenance and myth, or profound change with the discontinuity

resulting from conquest? Historians of the continuity tendency use the

*

c

The Historical Association 1999. Published by

Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK

and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

This article was originally read to the Cambridge University Medieval Group in October 1996.

1

Among historians, as distinct from antiquarians, the modern argument began between

E. A. Freeman and J. H. Round in the late nineteenth century. The more recent argument has

been generally summarized by M. T. Clanchy, England and its Rulers 1066±1272 (Oxford, 1983),

pp. 47±52; and on speci®c issues by J. O. Prestwich, `Anglo-Norman Feudalism and the Problem of

Continuity', Past and Present, 26 (1963), 39±57, and David Ro€e, `From Thegnage to Barony',

Anglo-Norman Studies, xii (1989), 157±76. The argument continues between e.g. Robin Fleming,

Kings and Lords in Conquest England (Cambridge, 1991) [hereafter Fleming, Kings and Lords ],

pp. 107±44, and Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford,

1994) [hereafter Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals], pp. 342±95.

word `colonization' of Norman settlement in England, and both it and

the words `colony' and `colonist' of the subsequent Norman presence in

Wales, Scotland and Ireland, in the classical Greek or Roman sense of

enclaves or settlements of intruders who dominate and cultivate the

surrounding land or at least in¯uence their immediate neighbourhood.

Historians of the discontinuity tendency, however, have, especially since

the 900th anniversary of the battle of Hastings, described England as a

whole as a Norman colony, part of a Norman, later an Angevin or

Plantagenet, empire.

Earlier scholars such as D. C. Douglas and F. M. Stenton never did so,

nor have more recent ones such as G. W. S. Barrow, R. R. Davies, Robin

Fleming and Susan Reynolds, but other descriptions of what happened

in and after 1066, having used the common terms `conquest' and

`colonization', have then followed with the words `colony' and `empire',

and with their abstract forms, `colonialism' and `imperialism'. Unfortun-

ately, in this analogy from modern history (as distinct from classical), the

question of de®nition is seldom satisfactorily addressed, but etymology

and semantics are less important for historians than the reality that the

words are supposed to describe. For, whether Anglo-Norman historians

stress continuity or discontinuity in England, whatever their disagree-

ments on points of detail and in their interpretations of dicult evidence,

they seem to be agreed that the Norman Conquest, like other movements

both in northern Europe and on the Welsh, Scottish and Irish frontiers

of Norman England, was expansion. And with the word `expansion'

comes analogy. `The expansion of Europe in the High Middle Ages',

wrote Robert Bartlett in 1993, `clearly shared many characteristics with

overseas expansion of post-medieval times.'

2

Since this post-medieval

expansion is described by its own historians in terms of empires and

colonies, these words are naturally borrowed by medieval historians to

describe what they assume to be similar things; and some of them have

been tempted then to write of `models' of colonization, of colonialism

and of imperialism.

Terms such as `analogy' and `model' are technical ones in disciplines

other than history; in logic and natural sciences they have meanings

di€erent from ordinary usage. Analogy, a form of inductive logic, in

common speech may simply mean some similarity.

3

Model, which in

natural or mathematical sciences may be isometric, a one-to-one corres-

pondence, in common speech may indicate a rough copy or some

similarities.

4

This range of meanings leads to imprecision which in any

2

Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950±1350

(1993) [hereafter Bartlett, Making of Europe], p. 306.

3

In logic, analogy is inductive inference which takes the form: x has characteristics Ci-Cn and D,

thus if y has characteristics Ci-Cn then y also has D.

4

J. A. Barnes, Models and Interpretations (Cambridge, 1990), p. 373; M. Brodbeck, `Models,

Meaning and Theories', in Symposium on Sociological Theory, ed. L. Gross (New York, 1959)

[hereafter Brodbeck, `Models'], p. 381; M. Hesse, `Models versus Paradigms in the Natural

Sciences', in The Uses of Models in the Social Sciences, ed. L. Collins (1976), pp. 1±15.

*

c

The Historical Association 1999

220 COLONIAL HISTORY OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST?

comparisons can mean that like is not being compared with like; and if

unlikes are being compared, comparative study becomes pointless, as

indeed it did with the comparative method of J. G. Frazer in The Golden

Bough and A. J. Toynbee in A Study of History. Given these diculties,

why draw the analogy between the Norman Conquest and imperial and

colonial expansion? No doubt analogy with familiar phenomena is a

useful device to capture the attention and interest of students, general

readers, radio listeners and television viewers; and perhaps even of those

who fund the teaching and research of medieval historians. No doubt in

some it satis®es a taste for identifying patterns which seem to recur in

human history. The professional reason for medieval historians is that

the study of the better documented recent imperial and colonial past may

suggest new questions to be asked of, and fresh insights provided into,

the study of fragmentary, less easily understood surviving evidence of the

remoter past. But has analogy, with its entailed comparison, actually

achieved that?

Expansion plainly includes contact between in-coming people and

existing inhabitants, contact between people of di€erent cultures, for

which modern expansion o€ers an analogy for Anglo-Norman, even if

the imperial/colonial relationship is not explicitly drawn. Indeed, those

historians, for example Barrow and Davies, who have not drawn the

speci®c analogy of empire and colony have nevertheless studied `culture-

contact' (even when they have not used the precise term for the phenom-

enon professionally studied by social anthropologists within modern

colonies) between Normans and Anglo-Saxons within England, and

between Anglo-Normans and the inhabitants of the Welsh marches, of

Ireland and in the di€erent circumstances of the Scottish kingdom.

5

In so

doing, their work has drawn on social anthropological studies without

the need to invoke the relationship between an empire and its colonies;

6

it

is enough to assume that one of the cultures is dominant within a

particular territorial area and that the other responds to it, in order to

study their interaction. Other Anglo-Norman historians, looking at the

Conquest as part of a general Norman expansion in Europe, and that

expansion as itself a part of a more general northern European one, have

drawn a more precise analogy with imperial and colonial rule than the

localized phenomenon of culture-contact in a particular region.

Although description of post-Conquest England as a Norman colony

has become commonplace since 1966, Sir James Ramsey entitled his

book of 1903 The Angevin Empire, and in 1915, in The Normans in

European History, the American scholar Charles Homer Haskins

entitled one of his chapters `The Norman Empire'. Neither writer

5

R. R. Davies, Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales 1100±

1300 (Cambridge, 1990) [hereafter Davies, Domination and Conquest], pp. x, 1±3, 16 and n. 47;

G. W. S. Barrow, The Anglo-Norman Era in Scottish History (Oxford, 1980) [hereafter Barrow,

Anglo-Norman Era], pp. 5±9.

6

Davies, Domination and Conquest, p. 16 and n. 47.

*

c

The Historical Association 1999

FRANCIS JAMES WEST 221

meant more than an accumulation of lands. In 1954, at a meeting of the

history section of the Australia and New Zealand Association for the

Advancement of Science, in a session devoted to `The Study of Multi-

cultural Situations', England after the Conquest was used to illuminate

some of the issues arising in bringing the central highlands of Papua New

Guinea under Australian government control, especially in relation to

strong points from which law and order, government in¯uence and

control were extended, although the analogy was drawn from the

medieval past to the present, not the reverse.

7

In October 1966 the

Societe Jean Bodin (dedicated, as the name of the French jurist and

political philosopher it bears suggests, to the comparative history of

institutions) held its meeting at Rennes in Brittany. The theme was

Les grands empires, the title of the volume of its proceedings which was

published in 1973.

8

One among the score of speakers who talked on their

own areas of expertise from China to Peru, from ancient to contem-

porary periods, was J. H. Le Patourel who spoke on `The Feudal

Empires: Norman and Plantagenet'.

9

A Belgian scholar, John Gilissen,

under the title `Le Notion d'Empire dans l'Histoire Universelle',

provided a de®nition of empire for the meeting.

10

An empire, he said,

was a great power which had a clear centre of power within itself, which

acknowledged no higher secular power outside itself. It was a complex

composite of several ethnic, political and quasi-political groups of

people. It strove for hegemony and showed ambitions to expand. It

covered a large stretch of territory and lasted a relatively long period of

time. Le Patourel accepted this de®nition almost word for word when he

came to write on the Norman empire in his book of 1976.

Recognizing that the Norman dukes/English kings never styled them-

selves emperors, nor their dominions an empire, Le Patourel nevertheless

held that `there was much to be said for retrospectively applying the

term to the Norman and Angevin lands.'

11

He also applied the term

`imperialism' or empire building because the Normans in England

passed from hegemony to exploitation. Le Patourel, however, never used

the term `colony' of England as a whole; like Stenton writing of the

Danish boroughs in England, he reserved it for enclaves of Norman

merchants in English towns. But he called the Norman settlement in

England `colonization', although he used the word casually, without

emphasis, of the changes which followed the Conquest in military, social

and ecclesiastical life.

7

F. J. West, The Study of Multi-cultural Situations (Department of Paci®c History, Canberra,

1954); F. J. West, `An Australian Moving Frontier in New Guinea', in The Changing Paci®c, ed.

W. N. Gunson (Melbourne, 1978), pp. 215±16, 221.

8

Les grands empires: recueil de la Societe Jean Bodin, xxxi (Brussels, 1973) [hereafter Les grands

empires].

9

J. H. Le Patourel, `The Feudal Empires: Norman and Plantagenet', in Les grands empires

[hereafter Le Patourel, `Feudal Empires'], pp. 282€.

10

J. Gilissen `Le Notion d'Empire dans L'Histoire Universale', in Les grands empires, p. 863.

11

J. H. Le Patourel, The Norman Empire (Oxford, 1976), p. 325.

*

c

The Historical Association 1999

222 COLONIAL HISTORY OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST?

In 1982 J. C. Holt, delivering the ®rst of his presidential addresses to

the Royal Historical Society on changes in the family structure after

1066, changes to which he applied the adjective `revolutionary',

described England as a colonial country.

12

He expanded the point for

an American audience in his Hinkley lecture at The Johns Hopkins

University in the following year, saying that it had ` always astonished'

him that American scholars of medieval England had never really

emphasized that England was a colonial country: somehow they, like

English historians, had found it dicult to escape the tradition which

centred the Norman and Angevin realms on London rather than Rouen,

Caen, Le Mans or Tours.

13

`Perhaps', he added, `it all has to do with

those maps in which these dominions are all coloured the traditional red.

Yet England was a colony, and that fact accounted for a lot. It gave the

Normans something of a tabula rasa for governmental, tenurial and legal

experiment.' Twelve years later, addressing a conference of Anglo-

Japanese historians, Holt returned to the theme of `Colonial England

1066±1232', having looked up Frederick Jackson Turner's book on the

frontier in American history.

14

English frontier studies which had begun

with T. F. Tout and continued with G. W. S. Barrow, Robert Bartlett

and R. R. Davies, he noted, dealt with Anglo-Norman expansion into

Celtic land, not with the colonial settlement of England. Selecting

building, language and common law as his themes, Holt accepted

Turner's idea of a settlers' frontier which created a new political species.

England was a land of enterprise for the Normans where invading

parasites excoriated the host.

The use of the word `empire' by Le Patourel and of `colony' by Holt

attracted the attention of David Bates in 1989. He criticized the former

because his de®nition of empire was too speci®c and also inadequate

because it left out economic and cultural relations; indeed, it was an

actual barrier to historical understanding.

15

He also attributed to

Le Patourel a `model of colonization' which was `excessively simpli®ed

and one-dimensional', although Le Patourel nowhere used the word

`model'. To Holt, Bates attributed `positive acceptance of modern

theories of colonialism',

16

words which nowhere appear in Holt's works

of the 1980s, while in the 1990s, Turner's frontier thesis is hardly a

modern theory of colonialism. Bates's own `more complex' model of

Norman expansion and colonization was one which placed the Conquest

in the context of a broader northern French movement, the mechanics

and methods of which the Normans simply replicated when they, as a

12

J. C. Holt, `Feudal Society and the Family in Early Medieval England: the Revolution of 1066',

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, xxxii (1982), 193±212.

13

J. C. Holt, Magna Carta and Medieval Government (1985), pp. 21±2.

14

J. C. Holt, Colonial England 1066±1232 (1997) [hereafter Holt, Colonial England ], p. 2.

15

David Bates, `Normandy and England after 1066', English Historical Review, civ (1989), 852.

16

Ibid., 861.

*

c

The Historical Association 1999

FRANCIS JAMES WEST 223

relatively small military group, came to dominate the much larger

English and British population.

17

Neither Le Patourel nor Bates, according to Brian Golding in 1994,

really addressed the problems of de®nition involved in discussing the

imperial characteristics of Normandy and the `colonial venture' in

England; this did not surprise him, for he quoted a colonial archae-

ologist, B. Bartel, to the e€ect that `there are so many de®nitions of

colonialism and imperialism as to make the terms almost useless.'

18

Golding pointed out that the two words, although often used inter-

changeably, were not synonymous, and then proceeded to o€er a

`minimal' de®nition of empire: the extended exercise of power by one

state over another. He spelled out the `connotations' of empire as

`oppression and exploitation', which meant control over foreign a€airs,

interference in political and judicial processes at local level, demands for

military service, con®scation of land, often accompanied by the removal

or the slaughter of the indigenous population and the introduction of

settlers from the imperial power, the exaction of tribute and other forms

of economic exploitation. These criteria, wrote Golding, were very

broad, concealing a spectrum of di€ering practices, as, for example,

between colonial Canada, India and Africa, but they should be tested

against the English experience after 1066.

19

Golding did not mention the

e€ect on the Normans of their experience as colonial rulers of England,

but in 1989 Eleanor Searle had already taken it for granted that `the

necessities of maintaining a colonial administration in conquered

England brought about profound changes in the duchy.'

20

One last example of the use of the colonial analogy for Norman rule is

provided by B. R. O'Brien's article on the pre-Conquest origin of the

murdrum ®ne, an example of continuity and adaptation in Anglo-

Norman England. He found help in viewing his sources against the

model of colonialism for which, he believed, Le Patourel, Michael

Clanchy and R. R. Davies had argued. Their work, he wrote, had done

much `to map the complex, unpredictable and rarely stable political,

economic, legal and social relationships' of this Anglo-Norman world by

seeing it in colonial terms.

21

None of the scholars cited speci®cally used a

model of colonialism, although all employed the word `colonization' and

examined the interaction of in-comers and existing inhabitants, in

Davies's case using the concept of acculturation, although not precisely

17

Ibid.

18

Brian Golding, Conquest and Colonisation: The Normans in Britain 1066±1100 (1994) [hereafter

Golding, Conquest and Colonisation], p. 178; B. Bartel, `Comparative Historical Archaeology and

Archaeological Theory', Comparative Studies in the Archaeology of Colonialism, ed. S. L. Dyson

(1985), p. 9.

19

Golding, Conquest and Colonisation, p. 179.

20

Eleanor Searle, Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power (Berkeley, CA, 1988)

[hereafter Searle, Predatory Kinship], p. 2.

21

B. R. O'Brien, `From Mordor to Murdrum: the Pre-Conquest Origin and Norman Revival of the

Murder Fine', Speculum, lxxi (1996), 321.

*

c

The Historical Association 1999

224 COLONIAL HISTORY OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST?

that of culture-contact, the concept used by social anthropologists in

studying the colonial situation.

Such a de®nition is not colonialism in Bartlett's sense. Looking at

the expansion of Europe, not just Norman expansion, he examined in

1989 colonial aristocracies which established plantations in conquered

territory, but he explicitly avoided the word `colony' because it implied a

political dependency of a foreign state. Although conquest and colon-

ization often involved the extension of existing lordships or the creation

of new ones, as Davies had shown in Wales, its outcome was very rarely

permanent subordination of one political entity to another, `the usual

colonial relationship', he wrote, `of modern times'.

22

Medieval colonial-

ism, Bartlett concluded in 1993, was quite di€erent from modern.

Medieval colonialism reproduced home units, not colonies of depend-

ence, a similar conclusion to Davies's view of the Norman castle in Wales

as a focus of settlement for peasants and merchants.

23

Medieval

colonialism, in Bartlett's view, proceeded by cellular multiplication, its

agents being consortia, entrepreneurial associations of Frankish knights,

Latin priests, merchants, townsmen and, as `non-voting members',

peasants.

24

Medieval expansion was freelance, not centrally directed.

Kingly involvement was minimal: `not, we might be tempted to say, the

state', a similar conclusion to that of Davies for Wales. Bartlett, having

begun by stating that the medieval expansion of Europe shared many

characteristics with modern, ended by saying that medieval colonialism

was di€erent from modern imperialism `for structural reasons'; and he

did not include the Norman Conquest in medieval colonialism at all,

although he made a partial exception of the Normans in Ireland. There,

although an alien aristocracy was intruded upon the Irish, the country

was `beyond the sea' so that the number of non-aristocratic immigrants

was limited, and so, in consequence, was the extent of colonization

compared with that in the contiguous land areas of eastern Europe.

25

Since modern empires and colonies were d'outre mer, they were struc-

turally di€erent from medieval colonialism.

Clearly, the medieval historians who have used the colonial analogy

have not been consistent, either in the meaning or in the models of

empire and imperialism, colony and colonialism. Where Le Patourel

borrowed a juridical de®nition from political science, and Holt one from

sociology, Bates, Golding and O'Brien employ the terms of current

political usage, while Bartlett, although he does not name it, uses the

concept of informal empire which was ®rst introduced by C. R. Fay in

22

Robert Bartlett, `Colonial Aristocracies', in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and

Angus Mackay (Oxford, 1989) [hereafter Bartlett, `Colonial Aristocracies'], p. 24.

23

Bartlett, Making of Europe, p. 306; Davies, Domination and Conquest (pp. 42±3) uses the word

`colonization' to describe this, not the word `colonialism', and stresses individual enterprise, not

kingly policy (pp. 38±9, 66€.).

24

Bartlett, Making of Europe, p. 307.

25

Bartlett, `Colonial Aristocracies', pp. 29, 46.

*

c

The Historical Association 1999

FRANCIS JAMES WEST 225

1940.

26

None of them discusses analogy as a valid type of explanation,

nor the extensive literature on the meaning and use of models in the

social sciences. None of them agrees on the meaning of the terms

used: May Brodbeck's point, made in 1959, is salutary: one word, one

thing is still a good idea.

27

Some of the confusion among medieval

historians is self-in¯icted, but some of it derives from the usages of

imperial and colonial historians who have assumed that the words

`empire' and `colony' are concrete, self-evident terms, while discussing at

length the variant meanings of their abstract forms, `imperialism' and

`colonialism'.

28

Those with a taste for irony may marvel that medieval

historians, who are wary of the term `feudalism', should so readily

import imperialism and colonialism into their discourse.

`Empire' is an apparently precise term denoting sovereignty in inter-

national relations, but the reality it represents is not always the same. Le

Patourel used it, although Normans and Plantagenets themselves did

not. His critic Golding used it to mean the exercise of power by one state

over another, although the concept of the state (a term coined by

Machiavelli in the sixteenth century) is anachronistic in the Anglo-

Norman period, while maintaining that empires `cannot exist without

colonies'.

29

In fact, the German empire in 1871 and the Russian empire

as it expanded eastwards to the Paci®c ocean had no colonies. Despite its

own formal title, the latter is ruled out as a modern empire on Bartlett's

de®nition because it was not d'outre mer, although the methods of its

expansion had much in common with medieval consortia into con-

tiguous land according to Bartlett's criteria. They also had much in

common with the westward-moving American frontier which Holt found

a useful concept in looking at the Norman expansion into its English

colony, although England, unlike the land frontier which moved across

the United States, was for Normandy d'outre mer. The expansion, which

is the common phenomenon to be explained, may or may not be called

empire by medieval historians, who in any case have not explicitly used

the formal/informal empire distinction which has been commonplace in

imperial history since the Second World War.

The term `colony' is an equal source of diculty. W. K. Hancock,

delivering the Marshall lectures in Cambridge in 1950, pointed out that

within his own lifetime the word had changed its meaning.

30

As a young

man, it had meant to him any political dependency; nowadays, he said, it

meant indigenous populations within the tropics, not settlements of

European stock. A similar distinction had long been drawn in French

26

C. R. Fay, `Moves Towards Free Trade', Cambridge History of the British Empire, ed. J. H. Rose

et al. (7 vols., Cambridge, 1929±40), ii. 399, 404.

27

Brodbeck, `Models', p. 373.

28

D. K. Fieldhouse, Colonialism 1870±1945 (1981) [hereafter Fieldhouse, Colonialism] surveys

some of this discussion.

29

Golding, Conquest and Colonisation, p. 178.

30

W. K. Hancock, The Wealth of Colonies (Cambridge, 1950) [hereafter Hancock, Wealth of

Colonies], p. 8.

*

c

The Historical Association 1999

226 COLONIAL HISTORY OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST?

writing on colonies, for at the turn of the century P. Leroy-Beaulieu had

classi®ed colonies as those of settlement and those of exploitation.

31

The

former were colonies where permanent settlers intended to reproduce the

society of their homeland, displacing indigenous people to do so, while

the latter were colonies where a transient minority, working among a

much larger indigenous population, regarded the colony simply as a

place of work before they returned to the homeland. Neither model ®ts

the Norman Conquest, in which a small, alien, conquering minority, in

Bates's de®nition, nevertheless settled among an indigenous majority,

and worked, in Holt's view, a governmental, tenurial and legal revolu-

tion, creating a new, a unique frontier society, such as Turner's thesis

described. Such a new society is not `cellular multiplication' in Bartlett's

sense, for it is not a collection of individual consortia but a general

settlement under kingly control. Nor is it transitory exploitation, in

Leroy-Beaulieu's and Hancock's sense. But if Anglo-Norman society

was unique, the creation of an alien minority which transformed but also

assimilated to the conquered majority, is a model of any other colony of

very much use?

If the words `empire' and `colony' are the source of ambiguity and

confusion when they are imported into medieval history, the diculties

are compounded by their abstracts, `imperialism' and `colonialism'. The

former has been a word in the vocabulary of political abuse since liberals

hurled it against the Napoleonic empire in the nineteenth century.

32

J. A.

Hobson used it in his polemic against the British government at the time

of the Boer War to denounce both the British government and British

capitalists.

33

Lenin ®xed its meaning in his revolutionary pamphlet of

1916, on imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, which was also its

®nal stage before the overthrow of capitalism.

34

Hancock, in 1950, said

that `imperialism' was no word for scholars: it was a pseudo-concept

which set out to make everything clear and ended by making everything

muddled; it was a word for the illiterates of social science.

35

The word

`colonialism' was similarly denounced by Herbert LuÈthy, a Swiss

scholar, in 1961; it came, he wrote, from international rostrums where

diplomats and propagandists waged the psychological wars of today,

and it had the Basic English quality of a word ready-made for simul-

taneous translation where the `suggestive power of words is in inverse

relation to their accuracy'.

36

His point had been made for him by

President Sukarno of Indonesia at Bandung in 1955, who had used it to

mean the condition of subjection, political, economic and intellectual,

31

P. Leroy-Beaulieu, De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes (6th edn., Paris, 1908).

32

Hancock, Wealth of Colonies, p. 9.

33

J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1902).

34

V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1920).

35

Hancock, Wealth of Colonies, p. 17.

36

Herbert LuÈthy, `Colonization and the Making of Mankind', Journal of Economic History,

suppl. xxi, no. 4 (1961), 483.

*

c

The Historical Association 1999

FRANCIS JAMES WEST 227

which imperialism caused.

37

Some modern historians have thereafter

used it to mean imperialism seen from the colonial point of view, the

reverse side of a coin stamped, in President Harry Truman's words,

`exploitation for foreign pro®t'.

38

Fluidity of meaning in concepts used by historians plainly does not

help discussion, but there is the further risk that politically charged terms

smuggle in their entailed value judgements. Imperialism and colonialism,

if they are applied to medieval expansion, attract the same emotive

adjectives: brutal, ruthless, violent aggression, exploitation and oppres-

sion; these are the adjectives which appear in accounts of the Norman

Conquest and settlement. Imperialism, according to Hobson's and

Lenin's attacks upon it, had evil consequences. The former blamed

under-consumption at home, the result of low wages, which caused

capitalists to invest abroad to obtain higher rates of interest rather than

to raise wages. The latter asserted that monopoly capitalism, facing

falling pro®ts at home, invested abroad, dividing the world up into rival

empires in order to safeguard its monopoly of markets and raw

materials; political control was necessary to protect pro®ts, and govern-

ments were the puppets which ensured this. The main di€erence between

Hobson and Lenin was that the former believed that this was a matter of

choice, the latter that it was inevitable. Neither theory has survived

scholarly scrutiny, but there has been little agreement between imperial

historians' explanations of expansion.

39

In 1919 J. A. Schumpeter

explained imperial expansion as the `atavistic' urge of pre-industrial

aristocrats, whose domestic position was being threatened by social

change, to seek land and glory overseas. In 1961 Jack Gallagher and

Ronald Robinson attributed it to the `ocial mind' seeking to defend

national interests which were as much strategic as economic.

40

J. S.

Galbraith in 1960 and D. K. Fieldhouse in 1973 explained imperial rule

by the unexpected collapse of indigenous authority on a turbulent

frontier of contact with European adventurers.

41

In 1993, P. J. Cain and

A. G. Hopkins ascribed it to `gentlemanly' capitalists, as distinct from

manufacturers, whose ®nancial interests were threatened at home by

industrial change seeking to protect their ®nancial interests by overseas

investment.

42

What all of these explanations have in common, according

37

Quoted in Fieldhouse, Colonialism, p. 6.

38

Ibid., p. 9; see also Imperialism and Colonialism, ed. G. H. Nadel and P. Curtis (New York, 1964),

p. 8.

39

A useful summary of di€ering explanations may be found in David Cannadine's review article

`The Empire Strikes Back', Past and Present, 147 (1995), 181€. Cannadine's summary holds all of

these explanations to be `mono-causal', but see n. 43 below and the discussion in the text above.

40

Jack Gallagher and Ronald Robinson (with Alice Denny), Africa and the Victorians: The Ocial

Mind of Imperialism (Basingstoke, 1961).

41

J. S. Galbraith, `The ``Turbulent Frontier'' as a Factor in British Expansion', Comparative

Studies in Society and History, ii (1960); D. K. Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire 1830±1914

(Ithaca, 1973).

42

P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism (2 vols., Cambridge, 1993).

*

c

The Historical Association 1999

228 COLONIAL HISTORY OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST?

to David Cannadine, is their mono-causal character, but it would be

fairer to say that they stress only one necessary condition, without

completely ignoring the sucient conditions, while nevertheless not

taking them into full consideration, which are required for a good

explanation. Necessary conditions in logic are those without which an

event cannot occur; sucient conditions are those which explain why it

actually occurred, given the necessary condition.

43

In using the imperial and colonial analogy for medieval expansion,

historians should be careful not to take over its confusions. Expansion

can be studied without employing the imperialism/colonialism analogy,

but expansion still invites explanation. Davies, discussing Anglo-

Norman expansion into Wales, Ireland and Scotland, explains that it

was as often by invitation as conquest, and he identi®es `congenital

restlessness' in Anglo-Norman lords, `men of instinct, impetuousness

and action, men of high emotion and proudly violent passions' as a

necessary condition.

44

The historians who have employed imperialism

and colonialism as a model of expansion, however, should also realize

that imperialism is itself a model, `a reconstruction of nature' or

`a simpli®ed structuring of reality for the purpose of study', so that in

studying imperialism they are studying a model, not the reality. The

point is important because, in using the concepts of imperialism and

colonialism, those medieval historians have accepted the need to explain

expansion in terms of forces, not choices of the kind entailed in Davies's

characterization of individual lords. Le Patourel explained Norman

expansion by the `inherent need' to expand in feudal society.

45

`Perhaps

the main source of this dynamic', he wrote, `was the pressure created by

feudalism in its early stages of development by the demand of vassals for

®efs and the desire of lords for more ®ghting men', a circular process

by which, the more land available, the more knights enfeo€ed and thus

the greater a lord's capacity to acquire more land. Bates, in looking at

Normandy before 1066, o€ered a di€erent explanation. Changes in

social structure, he maintained, led to a breakdown of authority in

northern France and to expansionist schemes by territorial princes which

pressed upon Norman frontiers, Normandy itself being an organized

territorial principality.

46

The in¯ux of French immigrants caused an

explosion in Norman society which led to conquest and colonization

elsewhere. Searle, who also looked at pre-Conquest Normandy, at

Norman `state-building' within the duchy, explained the conquest of

England by internal Scandinavian factors. In the mid-tenth century, she

43

On the nature of explanation, see L. S. Stebbing, A Modern Introduction to Logic (1930), pp. 271,

275; and R. R. Brown, Explanation in Social Science (1963), pp. 134€.; F. J. West, The Justiciarship

in England 1066±1232 (Cambridge, 1966) used necessary and sucient conditions to discuss the

origins of the oce of justiciar in Anglo-Norman England, p. 1.

44

Davies, Domination and Conquest, p. 28.

45

Le Patourel, `Feudal Empires', p. 303.

46

David Bates, Normandy Before 1066 (1982), p. 240.

*

c

The Historical Association 1999

FRANCIS JAMES WEST 229

held, new Scandinavian immigrants, in part from the Scandinavian

settlements in England, caused changes in kinship and family struc-

tures.

47

Kinship narrowed in the ruling family of Rouen to the

descendants of Gunnor `of the noblest house of the Danes', wife to

Duke Richard I, because resources were inadequate to provide for the

many heirs who must inherit equally. Predatory kinship, the dynamic of

state-building in Searle's view, meant that a strong war leader, who must

provide for his own and his kinsmen's heirs, had to expand in order to

survive. England, long the preferred rich prey of Vikings, o€ered the

opportunity.

Like imperialism, these are all explanations of expansion that stress

one necessary condition, whatever sucient conditions, not identi®ed as

such, are mentioned. But Bartlett, looking wider than the Normans to a

more general European expansion, described an `aristocratic diaspora',

in part owing to changes in family structure, accentuated by the scramble

for vassals and ®efs by younger, landless sons when a single male line of

descent became the norm, while at the same time the lower ranks of the

gentry began to include peasant tenants whose numbers overloaded the

system. Nevertheless, in his view, the key factor was neither the dynamics

of the warband nor the structure of kinship but `the fateful combination

of the two'.

48

Bartlett thus added a second necessary condition to an

explanation of expansion, but identi®ed no sucient conditions to

explain why, when and where any particular expansion actually

happened. To the Norman Conquest he attached the words `so-called'

since it was an `eclectic repertoire of participants', and he did not include

it in medieval imperialism and colonialism. At root, Bartlett's explana-

tion of medieval expansion is, like those of Le Patourel, Bates and Searle,

the need for more land and resources to sustain a particular social

system; in short, exploitation. In this, although they may be unaware of

it, they echo Hobson and Lenin, not only in their belief that impersonal,

domestic forces drove expansion but, in particular, Lenin's view that

these forces were inevitable; hence the appearance of such words as `had

to', `must' and `needed to'. Expansion, such phraseology assumes, is

inevitable and inescapable.

If imperialism entails a theory of expansion, colonialism entails

subjection. When, therefore, Bartlett asserted that medieval colonialism

was di€erent from modern imperialism, he blurred the distinction. In his

view modern imperialism intensi®ed the large-scale di€erentiation of the

globe because industrial areas were `greedy for raw materials and

markets' and so became enmeshed in a pattern of systematic inter-

dependence with regions which both supplied raw materials and helped

to purchase the products of the industrial zones.

49

By contrast, medieval

47

Searle, Predatory Kinship, p. 96.

48

Bartlett, Making of Europe, pp. 50±1.

49

Ibid., p. 306.

*

c

The Historical Association 1999

230 COLONIAL HISTORY OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST?

colonialism, he held, was not di€erentiation but replication. Replication

does not in itself exclude subjection, but Bartlett was emphatic that

medieval colonization did not involve political subordination. Bates, by

contrast, agreed with Holt's view of post-Conquest England as a colony

dominated by the Normans, a view he glossed to mean Holt's acceptance

of modern theories of colonialism which, by implication (given Holt's

view of England as a `land of enterprise' for the Normans where they

had a tabula rasa for economic experiment), means exploitation. While,

however, the condition of subjection may be the modern sense of

colonialism, there are in fact no theories of colonialism, other than

imperialism seen from below. To explain imperialism is to explain

colonialism.

Nevertheless, there are theories of colonial rule. These are not about

expansion and exploitation, but are concerned with government and

administration of people of another culture from that of the rulers. In

modern colonial government such theories were developed by the light of

social anthropological ®eld-study of culture-contact from the First

World War onwards, beginning with the work of B. M. Malinowski

in Papua in 1915.

50

Medieval historians using the imperial/colonial

analogy, while duly discussing the interactions between Normans and

English, have tended to ignore these, even while accepting the notion of

colonial exploitation. Indeed, the idea of culture-contact appears of

limited use if, as Golding put it, England and Normandy largely shared a

common culture, unlike Europeans and Africans, Asians, Indians and,

one might add, Melanesians and Polynesians. Holt made the same point

in 1994: `between English and Normans there was no great cultural

contrast, certainly nothing comparable to that created by the European

in Africa or America.'

51

The point might have been made even more

strongly if, instead of speaking of the English, Golding and Holt had

distinguished the Anglo-Danish of the Danelaw from which Normandy

had drawn immigrants. (No such common culture is assumed between

Anglo-Normans and Celts.) A cross-cultural index of similarities and

dissimilarities is notoriously dicult to make. It is far from easy to

measure the lack of di€erence, the sense of commonality, between

Norman invaders and the population of England; they were after all

separated by vernacular language at the very least. Unless medieval

historians assume skin colour to be the great contrast in modern

colonies, it is impossible to know the extent of the di€erence between

themselves and their invaders perceived by the inhabitants of England,

or indeed di€erences perceived among themselves. Nor is it altogether

clear what historians mean by `culture'. Golding used the word to mean

the ideological, intellectual and artistic aspects of society, as did Bates in

50

F. J. West, Hubert Murray: The Australian Pro-Consul (Melbourne, 1968) [hereafter West,

Hubert Murray], pp. 204, 216.

51

Holt, Colonial England, pp. 2±3.

*

c

The Historical Association 1999

FRANCIS JAMES WEST 231

criticizing Le Patourel for leaving out cultural relations; they were clearly

not using culture, as would a social anthropologist, to mean the total of

social institutions, attitudes and values, in examining the culture-contact

of modern colonial administration in which aliens rule people of another

culture.

52

Even Davies, with the obvious di€erence between Anglo-

Norman and Welsh culture, used the word uncertainly, occasionally in

something like its anthropological sense but more often distinguishing it

from social and economic organization to mean chivalry or literary

culture.

53

Theories of colonial administration were developed in two main areas.

The ®rst, associated with the establishment of colonial administration,

was that of indirect rule.

54

Enunciated by Sir Frederick (later Lord)

Lugard in northern Nigeria in the ®rst decade of this century ± although

some imperial historians have detected a forerunner in Sir Arthur

Gordon (later Lord Stanmore) in Fiji in the mid-1870s

55

± the idea was

to incorporate traditional indigenous authority into colonial government

for administrative purposes.

56

Underpinned by the work of social

anthropologists who, after Malinowski and A. R. Radcli€e-Brown in the

1920s, saw indigenous societies as integrated, functioning ones, indirect

rule was exported to other colonies and even used, as by Sir Donald

Cameron in Tanganyika and Sir Hubert Murray in Papua, where there

were no obvious chie¯y rulers to be incorporated into what were called

native authorities or native administration.

57

The second area of colonial

theory, which followed upon the Colonial Welfare and Development

Acts of the Second World War, was modernization,

58

under the banner

of political, social and economic development unfurled by a United

Nations trusteeship system still concerned to eliminate practices `repug-

nant to natural justice', as the preceding League of Nations mandates

system put it, to enable peoples who could not yet do so to `stand on their

own feet under the strenuous conditions of the modern world'. Such were

British theories of colonial rule, but the French proclaimed a di€erent

52

There is an extensive social anthropological literature on culture and culture-contact or clash; see

Jack Goody, The Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain, and Africa 1918±1970 (Cambridge,

1995), pp. 36, 166: `Tradition, culture and society mean the same thing, so stick to culture.'

53

Davies, Domination and Conquest, pp. 16, 20±2.

54

A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, The Principles of Native Administration in Nigeria: Selected Documents

1900±1947 (1965).

55

J. D. Legge, Britain in Fiji 1858±1880 (1958), pp. 223±4, 227±8.

56

Margery Perham, Lugard: The Years of Authority (1960), p. 141. Lugard himself cited the

princely states in India as an example of indirect, as opposed to direct, rule in British India (the

latter comprising two-thirds of the country and three-quarters of the population), but the princely

states had a treaty relationship with Britain±they were not part of British administration: F. D.

Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (2nd edn., 1923), pp. 226±7.

57

West, Hubert Murray, pp. 265±9.

58

There is an extensive literature on modernization in particular colonies; see David Apter, Some

Conceptual Approaches to the Study of Modernisation (New Jersey, 1968) for Africa; and F. J. West,

Political Advancement in the South Paci®c (Melbourne, 1961) [hereafter West, Political Advance-

ment], pp. 177€.

*

c

The Historical Association 1999

232 COLONIAL HISTORY OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST?

set: `We conceive the Empire in the Roman sense of the word, not the

Anglo-Saxon', the rapporteur of the Brazzaville conference said in

1944.

59

Although not consistently pursued, the dominant French

approach was `assimilation' to metropolitan institutions, attitudes and

values, although Gallieni in Madagascar and Indo-China, and Lyautey

in Morocco, held that administration should be in rapport with the

country and its inhabitants, that aboriginals, carefully watched and

directed, should develop in their own way.

60

Nevertheless, in practice

both British and French administration expected modernization of

indigenous societies.

French colonial theories of assimilation might seem a better model for

historians of Norman rule in England than British theories of associa-

tion, but of Anglo-Norman historians who have seen it as a colonial

administration, only Searle attempted properly to understand what a

model might be. `A model', she wrote, `is a simpli®ed structuring of

reality which presents supposedly signi®cant relationships . . . models do

not include all associated observations and measurements, but are

valuable in allowing fundamental aspects of reality to appear.'

61

Searle

was accepting a de®nition o€ered by the ancient historian, M. I. Finley,

who had borrowed it from social and economic geographers to apply to

classical Greece.

62

Finley advocated the use of non-mathematical models

because the lack of statistical information made it impossible for an

ancient historian to be a `clio-metrician'. Searle used a non-mathematical

model of predatory kinship to replace what she called a `continuity

model' of early Normandy with one of `discontinuity'. Unfortunately,

having used a model in a way natural scientists and philosophers would

recognize, she then equated a model with a theory. Forty years ago, the

philosopher Brodbeck pointed out to social scientists that a model is not

the same thing as an untested hypothesis; it is simply a device to study

nature or reality

63

± which for an historian means the surviving evidence

from the past ±by selecting variables he or she wishes to study. Finley

called this `a second best procedure' because he held such selection to be

subjective.

64

If, however, the selection is made by the light of what was

important to those who created the surviving evidence, not what is

important to us, then the selection is not subjective to the historian. For

example, it is not subjective to select Catholic faith as a variable in

studying monastic writers on the Conquest, although it would be

subjective to select greed as the determinant of Duke William's actions

59

West, Political Advancement, pp. 87, 171.

60

R. Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory 1890±1914 (New York, 1961).

61

Searle, Predatory Kinship, p. 2.

62

M. I. Finley, Ancient History: Evidence and Models (1985) [hereafter Finley, Ancient History],

pp. 78±81.

63

Brodbeck, `Models', p. 381.

64

Finley, Ancient History, p. 60.

*

c

The Historical Association 1999

FRANCIS JAMES WEST 233

when we cannot know the character and personal values of a particular

medieval ruler.

Imperialism and colonialism are models for which the variables have

been subjectively selected: economic, social, strategic or frontier ones by

di€erent historians. Medieval historians who use imperialism and

colonialism are thus studying an existing model, not creating for them-

selves a model appropriate to and derived from evidence they study. A

model of colonial administration is di€erent. Indirect rule, for example,

is not a model created by historians, but one created by its practitioners;

it is not therefore a subjective selection of variables by external or later

observers. The main assumption of indirect rule was that in the indigen-

ous society there was a locus of legitimate authority which was generally

accepted, i.e. without coercion. It followed that if this legitimacy could be

incorporated within the alien government, then it too would acquire

legitimacy in the eyes of the governed.

65

In northern Nigeria, when

Lugard established the system, the legitimacy which the ruling Fulani

emirs were perceived to possess could be enshrined in their native

councils, courts and treasuries established as part of colonial govern-

ment.

66

Since, however, the Fulani were relatively recent conquerors of

Hausa people, there was a question as to the latter's acceptance of the

former's legitimacy which, because of the colonial government's ban on

®ghting, could not now be challenged by rebellion. Legitimacy was thus

in one sense an invention of colonial government.

Such a model of a particular aspect of colonial administration may be

of some use to Anglo-Norman historians in suggesting questions to be

asked of surviving evidence. For example, it has been commonly accepted

that at the Conquest the duke of Normandy claimed to be the successor of

the legitimate King Edward. But how legitimate was Edward? Was the

West Saxon kingly line legitimate to the relatively recently conquered

Mercians whose distinctive custom was recognized half a century after the

Conquest, or to the Northumbrians or to the inhabitants of the Danelaw?

The indirect rule model suggests the question: what was it that made an

emir legitimate to those he ruled? The same question can be posed for

Anglo-Saxon kingship: bloodline and kinship? Descent from the gods,

from Adam (or an emir from the Prophet)? Election and religious

consecration? Achievement in war? Reciprocity and generosity with his

people? Or, to put the question as a social anthropologist would, does

leadership come by ascription or achievement? Such questions derive

from a model of culture-contact developed by British social anthropology

in colonial territories where indirect rule was the method of native

administration, and where its compatibility with modernization, when it

came to be a principal objective of colonial policy, was a major issue.

65

West, Political Advancement, pp. 174±5; and F. J. West, `Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna and the Fijian

Administration', Paci®c Historical Review, xxxvi (1967), 95€.

66

West, Hubert Murray, p. 269.

*

c

The Historical Association 1999

234 COLONIAL HISTORY OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST?

If there was indeed no great cultural di€erence between Normans and

English, it is understandable that a model of modernization should be

absent from Anglo-Norman studies, although castle and cathedral

building, military technology and ecclesiastical reform, whether they are

called modern compared to Old English institutions or not, were plainly

newly introduced. Nevertheless, Susan Reynolds can, after writing that

`society can apparently be changed from the top by military conquest

. . . as supposedly happened with the Norman Conquest of England',

then pose the question: `how signi®cantly could the Normans have

changed English society when they could not change its economic base',

sharing as they did the same economy, kinship system, religion, legal

system and values in general?

67

If she is right, then any change ± and

change is not excluded by her view ± is not the result of conquest; it is

not `induced change', in anthropological terms, but part of a con-

tinuous process. This view is not unchallenged. Robin Fleming held

that there was, with the Conquest, a `tenurial revolution' brought

about by `the widespread destruction of Old English lordships and

kindreds'.

68

Rosamond Faith, in a recent book, maintains that con-

temporaries themselves believed that, with the Conquest, a tenurial

revolution had happened, and supports that view by arguing that

Norman building in stone in itself brought about signi®cant change

through the demand for specialized labour, and by the creation of

`seignurial centres' which involved land taken into demesne around the

centre and a separation between domestic and agrarian functions of the

manor.

69

On this view, the Conquest brought change in the sense of

modernization.

As an objective of modern colonial policy one of the major aspects of

modernization and development was land tenure. Either in the form of

community development by indigenous groups or in the form of intro-

ducing individual title in customary-held land, modernization meant

that the European concept of land as an economic value was introduced

to indigenous people for whom its religious and social value was at least

as important. Without taking sides in the argument over conquest and

tenurial revolution, continuity or discontinuity, there seems to be, among

the disputants, a common assumption about land as an economic value,

although it might also mark social position. The questions colonial

modernization and development suggest, which might be useful to

Anglo-Norman historians, relate to the religious and social attitudes to

land in England before the Conquest: what non-economic value was set

upon it? Questions of legitimacy, deriving from indirect rule, and about

land-holding, deriving from modernization and development, are two

obvious ones prompted by the theory and practice of modern colonial

67

Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, pp. 8±9.

68

Fleming, Kings and Lords, p. 145.

69

Rosamond Faith, The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship (1997), pp. 178±80, 193±6.

*

c

The Historical Association 1999

FRANCIS JAMES WEST 235

government and administration. They may be of use to historians

studying the surviving evidence of the Norman Conquest, and more

generally of medieval expansion, even when models of empire and

colony, imperialism and colonialism, are not.

*

c

The Historical Association 1999

236 COLONIAL HISTORY OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST?