Module Identifier HY12520  
Module Title THE NORMANS IN BRITAIN 1042-1154  
Academic Year 2000/2001  
Co-ordinator Dr Lesley Abrams  
Semester Intended For Use In Future Years  
Next year offered N/A  
Next semester offered N/A  
Course delivery Lecture   18 Hours  
  Seminar   6 Hours  
Assessment Exam   2 Hours   60%  
  Essay   2 x 2,500 word essays   40%  

Brief description
When William the Bastard, duke of Normandy, defeated and slew Harold Godwinson, king of England, on Senlac Hill at Hastings in the late afternoon of October 14, 1066, he began the process which took England out of the Scandinavian world of the Viking North and into the romance culture of Latin Europe at the height of its literary and artistic 'renaissance' of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. A Norman-French culture was imposed by the Norman kings and their feudal barons upon their Anglo-Scandinavian subjects and the native vernacular tradition suppressed. This course is concerned with this process of conquest. The Celtic regions of Wales and Scotland were also decisively affected, directly or indirectly, as Norman military or diplomatic pressure, and the force of new ecclesiastical reform movements, began to transform or shatter indigenous patterns. The Normans have been described as 'angels of death and destruction', and the Norman period ended, if not in anarchy, then in civil war. On the other hand, though native development had been disrupted, the Norman period witnessed tremendous advances in royal administration, in the vitality of ecclesiastical life and in scholarship and the arts.