The Norman Conquest in English History, Volume 1: A Broken Chain? pursues a central theme in English historical thinking over seven centuries. Covering more than half a millennium, this first volume explains how and why the experience of the Norman Conquest prompted both an unprecedented campaign in the early twelfth century to write (or create) the history of England, and to excavate (and fabricate) pre-Conquest English law. Garnett traces the treatment of the Conquest in English historiography, legal theory and practice, and political argument through the middle ages and early modern period, examining the dispersal of these materials from libraries afer the dissolution of the monasteries, and the attempts made to rescue, edit, and print many of them in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These preservation efforts enabled the Conquest to become still more contested in the constitutional cataclysms of the seventeenth century than it had been in the eleventh and twelfth. The seventeenth-century resurrection of the Conquest will be the subject of a second volume.
Author(s): George Garnett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 496
City: New York
Cover
Series page
The Norman Conquest in English History: Volume I: A Broken Chain?
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Plates
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Early Twelfth-Century Perspective in English Historical Writing
A Broken Chain
The Stimulus to Mend the Chain
The Role of Precentor
Initial Attempts to Mend the Chain
The Conqueror’s Claim
Norman Counterpoint: Orderic Vitalis
The Chain Mended
Chapter 2: The Audiences for English History in the Early Twelfth Century
Chapter 3: The Excavation, Reconstruction, and Fabrication of Old English Law in the Twelfth Century
Chapter 4: Edward the Confessor: From Critical Standard to Patron Saint
The Royalist Re-appropriation of Edward the Confessor
The Estoire and the Final Flowering of the Silver Age in English Historical Writing
Subsequent Royalist Promotion of St Edward’s Cult
Chapter 5: The Conquest in Historical Writing from the Late Thirteenth Century
Pseudo-Ingulf’s Historia Croylandensis
Alan of Ashbourn’s Lichfield Chronicle
Later Medieval Universal History
Later Medieval Histories of the Kingdom of England
Chapter 6: The Conquest in Later Medieval English Law I: Jurisprudence and Forensic Practice in the Thirteenth Century
Jurisprudence in the Thirteenth Century
Forensic Practice
Quo warranto and Limitation
Ancient Demesne, the Crown, and Inalienability
Chapter 7: The Conquest in Later Medieval English Law II: Edward II’s Reign and After
The Second Flowering of the London Collection
The London Collection and the Politics of Edward II’s Reign
Jurisprudence after Edward II’s Reign
Chapter 8: The Preservation of the Sources for English Medieval History in the Sixteenth Century
The Precedents for Parker’s Commission: John Leland and John Bale
The Appropriation of Monastic Books
The Preservation of Monastic Books
John Prise, Commissioner and Bibliophile
John Joscelyn and Matthew Parker
Matthew Parker as Editor
Chapter 9: Elizabethan Study of Old English Law and Its Post-Conquest Endorsement
ΑΡΧΑΙΟΝΟΜΙΑ
Medievalism in Late Elizabethan Jurisprudence
Chapter 10: The Printing of Twelfth-Century English Historiography, and the Integration of Law with History
Selden’s Edition of Eadmer’s Historia novorum
Conclusion
Manuscripts
Printed Sources
Modern Literature
Index
