I certify that I have read this thesis and have ... - Bilkent University

ecclesiastical institutions were interested in exploiting the wealth of England
alongside whatever higher motives they had. After 1066, as on the Continent,
monasteries and monks became more numerous and the monastic life of England
was given more importance. New monastic orders were introduced into England.
However, it was a phenomenon of the early twelfth century and may have happened
anyway without the Norman Conquest, though not perhaps without immigration
from the Continent. Eastern Suffolk provided us with examples of all these changes.
If we were to imagine that there was no Norman Conquest of England in
1066, would this mean that we would see no Europeanization process at all in
England or, indeed, in eastern Suffolk? Certainly not. As I have shown, there was
such a process already under way before the Conquest. On the other hand, some of
the changes that took place after the Conquest were just practical solutions to allow
the newcomers to cope with a conquered England. England was already part of the
Europeanization process, and sooner or later, England, with or without the Normans,
would to some extent have developed a common culture with the Continent.
Conquest was not the only way for cultural homogenisation to take place. What the
Normans did was to accelerate the process of the “Making of Europe”.
Yet perhaps one problem with Bartlett’s thesis is the differing nature of the
countries to which his “European” culture spread. While England was an island,
with many special features of its own, it was, in terms of European or Carolingian
culture, an old country. In local administration and at least in some respects in
military organisation, as we saw in eastern Suffolk, the Normans found a country, as
sophisticated if not more so, than their own. This would not be the case in all the
areas to which Bartlett’s European expansion spread.
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