English Literature from the Norman Conquest till the XIV c.

The Norman conquest of England, from a literary point of view, did not begin on the autumn day that saw Harold’s levies defeated by Norman archers on the slopes of Senlac. It began with the years which, from his early youth onwards, Edward the Confessor, the grandson of a Norman duke, had spent in exile in Normandy; and with his intimacy with “foreigners” and its inevitable consequences. The invasion of Norman favourites, which preceded and accompanied his accession to the throne, and their appointments, for a time, to the chief places in church and state, led to the tightening of the bonds that bound England to the Roman church, and paved the way for the period of Latin influence that followed the coming of William, Lanfranc and Anselm. The development of the old vernacular literature was arrested for nearly 150 years after Hastings; and, as the preservation of letters depended on ecclesiastics, professed scholars and monastic chroniclers of foreign extraction, the literature of England for practically a couple of centuries is to be found mainly in Latin.

The Norman conquest of England differed altogether from the English conquest of Britain. The earlier conquest was a process of colonisation and gave the land an almost entirely new population, with entirely new thoughts and ways of looking at things, save in the borderlands of the “Celtic fringe”; the later brought a new governing, and then a new trading, class, and added a fresh strain to the national blood without supplanting the mass of the people. Intermarriage, that would begin, naturally enough, among Norman servingmen and English women, spread from rank to rank, receiving its ultimate sanction when Anselm crowned Matilda as Henry’s queen. Sooner or later the Norman, whether of higher or of lower degree, adopted England as his country, spoke and acted as an Englishman and, before the great Charter, 150 years after the battle of Hastings, when the French homes of Normandy and Anjou had been lost, the mixture of the invading race and the conquered people was approaching completion. The gain to English literature that accrued from the Norman conquest in three directions is so great as to be obvious to the most superficial observer. The language was enriched by the naturalisation of a Romanic vocabulary; methods of expression and ideas to be expressed were greatly multiplied by the incursion of Norman methods and ideas; and the cause of scholarship and learning was strengthened by the coming of scholars whose reputation was, or was to be, European, and by the links that were to bind Paris and Oxford.

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