Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [257]
Spreading the Anglo-Norman package
Such social dynamics as did occur in these centuries were more horizontal than vertical, and due to the unmatched prowess of the Normans in fighting wars against their neighbours. Normans were fine cavalrymen, in fact the first invaders to bring their mounts with them across the Channel.* Once won on the battlefield, however, their power was cemented by the building of castles, fortified strongholds so permanent that many of them stand to this day. These were their main innovation. The Normans rapidly unified the somewhat loosely coordinated state of the Saxons, and proceeded to push back its borders. Beyond them lay Celtic-speaking regions, the north and west of the British Isles. Cornwall had already been part of the Anglo-Saxon weal, but in each of Cumbria, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the Normans now made serious inroads.
Cumbria was the scene of a struggle that lasted from 1092 to 1157. Wales took longer; G went in the south-east was taken by 1087, but although ‘Marcher Lordships’, dependent on the Norman king, were soon established across the whole of southern Wales, resistance did not die away. In the twelfth century, most of the country aside from the southern coast and western borders had reasserted its independence, and there was a period of de facto acceptance of an indigenous Pura Wallia, surrounded by a Norman Marchia Wallie. Only in 1283 did the Angevin king Edward I complete the conquest. Even then, there were two more Welsh rebellions, a decade and then a century later.*
The penetration of Scotland, hitherto largely Gaelic-speaking, was less warlike. Lothian, in the south-east, had already been English-speaking since the Angles had taken Edinburgh in 638. King Malcolm III,† on the throne at the time of the Norman conquest of England, had been exceptionally Anglophile; he had spent some of his youth in England, ‘knew the English language quite as well as his own’, and had married an English princess, Margaret, who opened the Scottish court (then still at Perth) as a market for luxury goods from England. No natural ally for the advancing Norman power, then, Malcolm actually spent much of his reign on aggressive raids into Northumbria. Nevertheless, his successors, particularly David I (1124-53), were highly partial to Norman influence: Anglo-Norman became the language of the court, so that in the thirteenth century the Englishman Walter of Coventry remarked: ‘The more recent kings of Scots profess themselves to be rather Frenchmen, both in race and in manners, language and culture; and after reducing the Scots [i.e. Gaels] to utter servitude, they admit only Frenchmen to their friendship and service.’3
But French-speaking nobles brought English-speaking attendants. And to sustain their way of life, they were joined by communities of burgesses, English-speaking, who profited from cross-border trade. Cross-border influence swelled, and people began to refer to their language as ‘Inglis’, and later (equivalently—for this was a very distinctive kind of English) as ‘Scottis’. It hardly mattered that the Scottish and English crowns remained intermittently at war through the late thirteenth century and into the fourteenth.
In Ireland, the Normans had accepted an invitation around 1166 from Diarmait Mac Murchada, newly deposed king of Leinster, to intervene on his behalf against the Irish High King. It was an act of opportunism on the part of the English king Henry II—neatly backed by a papal bull, Laudabiliter—but enabled him to channel some of the animal spirits of Marcher Lords looking for new conquests beyond Wales. The result was a settlement of Normans around Dublin, soon spreading out northward