THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

where king, nobleman, and peasant spoke English and where an educated English clergy employed Latin in both their
worship and their study. He left England trilingual, with a literate clergy still refined by Latin, but with Norman
French defining the new ruling class and with English now largely confined to the ruled. Although William, at the
age of 43, endeavoured to learn the language of his new subjects he did not persevere. No English king would speak
English as his native language for some three hundred years and although the Norman aristocracy and administration
were gradually, and of necessity, obliged to become bilingual, it was only in the mid-fourteenth century that English
was permitted to be used in petitions to Parliament, in legal procedure, and in legal documents such as wills and
deeds.
The Conquest resulted in the supplanting of an English-speaking upper class by a French-speaking one. It
otherwise did little to alter the existing social structure of the kingdom. Old place-names were retained, if occasionally
distorted by French tongues and Latinate scribes, and the only Norman names to take permanent hold were those of
newly built castles and newly founded abbeys (Belvoir, Richmond, and Montgomery; Rievaulx, Fountains, Jervaulx
and, above all, Battle) or of estates that passed into Norman hands and took the
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family names of their owners. The new King was generally inclined to respect established English institutions and
customs and his French knights were conspicuously elevated to the title of earl rather than to the continental dignity
of ‘count’. Although senior churchmen of European extraction and European education had been prominent in
Edward the Confessor’s reign, William accelerated the introduction of a new clerical élite into England. Within ten
years of the Conquest only one English bishop, Wulfstan of Worcester, remained in his see and only two major
monasteries, Bath and Ramsey, remained under the control of English abbots. The errant Stigand was deprived and
replaced as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1070 by Lanfranc (c. 1015-89), the Italian-born scholar-prior of the great
Norman abbey of Bec. When a vacancy occurred in York in 1069 on the death of Archbishop Ealdred a further
eminent Norman, Thomas of Bayeux, was appointed to the see. The temporal wealth of the Church which these
imported prelates now controlled was recorded in Domesday Book, the great survey of English landownership
commissioned by the King in 1086. This same Domesday Book also exactly catalogued the material and territorial
possessions of a newly imported secular aristocracy. Immediately after the Conquest the Norman, French, and
Flemish adventurers who had brought about the success of William’s invasion were rewarded with estates confiscated
from those English landowners who had taken up arms against the new King or who had refused to acknowledge his
suzerainty. The process of confiscation and acquisition continued as all gestures of armed English resistance to the
new order were vigorously suppressed.
In terms of its long-term effect on English culture, William’s achievement was fourfold. He and his Norman,
Angevin, and Plantagenet successors forced the English language into a subservient position from which it only
gradually re-emerged as a tongue simplified in structure and with its spelling, vocabulary, and literary expression
strongly influenced by the impact of Norman French. The political, economic, and geographical importance of
London, and not Winchester, as the administrative centre of the kingdom also helped to determine the future written
and spoken forms of ‘standard’ English. Thirdly, an exclusive aristocratic taste for the forms, tropes, and subjects of
contemporary French literature shifted the subjects of writing in English away from its old Germanic insularity
towards a broader, shared Western European pattern. Fourthly, there is a somewhat more tendentious claim,
periodically voiced by those wedded to a conspiratorial theory of cultural history, that the Norman Conquest fixed a
social and cultural gulf between a privileged ruling caste and the alienated mass of the population. The theory,
sometimes linked to the idea of a ‘Norman Yoke’ or to popular stories of Robin Hood’s merry outlaws, had a
particular impact in subsequent periods of social change or upheaval (notably during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, in
the years following the trial and execution of Charles I in 1648/9 and, with the help of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, in
the period of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and early nine-
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teenth centuries). Reinterpreted in terms of class-consciousness, this eleventh-century gulf between ‘them’ and ‘us’
has been seen as beginning the process by which an imported, feudal nobility, which spoke a different language and
which responded to alien literary forms, steadily transformed itself into a self perpetuating ruling class which
continued to use elitist cultural values as a means of enforcing its influence. Whatever the truth of such claims, it can
be demonstrated that the Conquest effectively eliminated upper-class patronage of Old English secular poetry and
prose and gradually supplanted it with a new literary culture, responsive to wider influences, international in outlook,
and truly European in its authority.
The invasion of England by the Normans forced the island of Britain into the orbit of an aggressive, confident,
militaristic culture, one which controlled a loose empire which stretched from Sicily and Apulia in the south to the