Norman society in the 11th Century

Norman society in the early 11th century

Led by a warrior-nobility which justified its supremacy through its capacity to give protection, a capacity transmitted by birth, and symbolized by the bearing of arms.

The wielding of weapons was a social marker, and having armed force at one’s disposal conferred an instrument of fierce competition for power and prestige: the military obligations owed by free men to the Duke were linked with the nobles’ right to have their own military retinues.

Economy

Primarily agrarian

Limited trade

The little trade that there was largely long-distance luxury trade, in which the west exchanged slaves and raw materials for the luxuries of the east.

Power and Lordship

It was not necessary to be a hero to rule in this world.

A more concrete form of power, something more like ‘force’ (French: puissance) had come to be the qualitative test of nobility: the power to command and punish, to coerce. This was, theoretically and historically, the power of kings, and remained so towards 1100.

Kings (and emperors) topped the hierarchy of powers in Christendom.

But dukes and counts were also ‘powers (potestates)’; so were marquises and (in most regions) viscounts

All these men whose attributes and (as a rule) blood lines perpetuated the social elites of pre-millennial times.

Definition of “power”

Powers judicial, fiscal, coercive, and paternal were all aprt of the powers of lordship.

Power was order.

It was held as axiomatic that all power was from God, that it was justly wielded on earth to remedy sin and wickedness and to protect the church, and that good and valiant deeds merited fidelity and honour.

Kingship and prelacy were ministries or offices of God; good offices, that is, because tyranny was a perversion of the deitas a prince was held to have.

The reality was not simply that power, stress, and violence were experienced personally, palpably, physically.

People celebrated order in processions, assemblies, councils. Still in the 11th century, as in the ancient church, bishops vied with one another for visible precedence.

These were not political disputes; they were concerned with status, not process.

Much the same might be said of the attitude of great lords, lay and spiritual, towards their domains: God-given wealth to be used, described, retained.

Lordship

‘Lordship’ refers to those who held authority (personal command) over dependent people who might be peasants in quasi-servile status or knights or vassals having or seeking elite standing.

The lordship held by nobles accounted for much of the exercise of power around 1100.

Honorial or Ducal Courts

Whatever the terms of individual contracts, feudal obligations were enforceable in honorial courts.

There seems little doubt that such courts existed in ducal Normandy before 1066, though it is not easy to separate formal judicial proceedings from general business.

The court was a place for the meeting of lords and vassals for various activities, including knightly sports and the discussion of matters of common interest.

Witness lists of charters indicate that grants were sometimes made in such assemblies.

As the duke came to have a defined interest in the military obligations of his sub-vassals, the workings of the honorial courts became a matter of direct concern to him.

Feudal courts were a law unto themselves; there was at first no regular procedure of appeal from them to a higher court.

Where nobles remained outside any effective jurisdiction, however, some of them may have found it politic to attend the court of a local magnate or even of several local magnates, and with time their attendance would be likely to create a customary obligation.

Ducal Power over Courts

The ducal power was held in reserve, and the duke might, in the course of time, intervene and guarantee the smooth workings of the honorial courts.

The Importance of Family

For those who ruled medieval society, the family was the crucial social unit, made up of those from whom property and authority were inherited and those to whom it passed.

One's kin could be one's closest political and military allies or one's fiercest enemies.

Kinship and identity in 11th century Normandy

The importance of a man’s relationship with his kinsmen varied over the course of his life and career, and the pool of kinsmen, friends, and allies to whom one could turn in time of need was equally fluid.

This stands in contrast to the assumption that such relationships were secure and stable often found in the vast literature on marriages and kinship ties in the middle ages.’

Land and lordship over men provided the foundation for the power and wealth of the secular élite, and was also often linked with a family’s identity.

“Those of my blood”

The general term used to describe family members was consanguinei mei, "those of my blood,", however, not all of those relations-parents, siblings, children, distant cousins, maternal relatives, paternal ancestors, and so on-counted as true family in any given time, place, or circumstance.

In the early and high Middle Ages, the "family" was a very different group than it is in modern society, and the ways in which medieval men and women conceptualized and structured the family unit changed markedly over time.

There existed various and flexible ways by which individuals were or were not incorporated into the family group.

The male line was key

Great noble families always privileged the male line of descent, even if most did not establish father-son inheritance until the eleventh or twelfth century.

The importance of these relationships seems to have varied over the course of one’s career, and the pool of kinsmen, friends, and allies to whom a man could turn in time of need was equally fluid.

This stands in contrast to the assumption that such relationships were secure and stable often found in the vast literature on marriages and kinship ties in the middle ages.

Land and lordship

Land and lordship over men provided the foundation for the power and wealth of the secular élite, and was also often linked with a family’s identity.

Use of a toponymic

This is, of course, often revealed in the use of a toponymic – the use of a place as part of one’s name.

While it has been shown that toponymics could simply reflect a man’s residence at a particular place, and might change if and when he ceased to live there

Heirs and inheritance

Once lordship and feudal service became so important that the lord's influence on the choice of an heir among the kindred became greater than the influence of the kindred, the benefice and alod could be said to have met in the fief.

There is a twilight period when the process of determining the heir, and the nature of his claim to any particular fief, were matters of custom, not of right.

In early ducal Normandy the kindred of a minor sometimes acted as guardian; only gradually did the lord assume this function.

Over time, families became increasingly organized in lineages around an honor that was now a patrimony, handed on to the next in line.

In the end, the honor ceased to be divided, passing instead to one son, usually the eldest.

It is sometimes said that lords normally required that fiefs should pass to single heirs rather than being divided or shared as alods so often were.

This system thus led to the exclusion from the inheritance of younger sons and also of daughters.

The unity of the descent-group emerged strengthened, however, because all the children played essential roles in the stability of the lineage’s power

The younger sons were endowed with strategic offices, often in the Church, which provided a source of power and prestige but at the same time gave the man concerned a stake in the honor, inside as well as outside it.

Marriage

The marriages of daughters also served to strengthen the lineage’s influence through the creation of alliances, and within it and with selected vassals marrying ‘up’ into the comital family, their fidelity to that family being thus guaranteed.

Daughters’ marriages were arranged more systematically than before, to multiply allies and strengthen the lineage’s security.

The progressive establishment of direct inheritance, and a growing emphasis on an ecclesiastically approved model of conjugal marriage and family, brought about a redefinition of the way in which rights were transmitted, of marriage strategies, and, last but not least, of woman’s place in the family.

The role of women

Even in medieval patriarchal society, women of the aristocracy, who were considered outsiders by their husbands and their husbands' siblings and elders, were never completely marginalized and paradoxically represented the very essence of "family" to their male children.

The role of the noble wife in the bosom of the household was redefined.

She shared more directly in the household’s management, and, above all, she became the chief vector of nobility, the mirror in which the family saw itself reflected.

Kinship structures

Kinship structures remained, nevertheless, fundamentally cognatic.

On the one hand, the transmission of the aristocratic honor was not patrilineal but direct: that is to say, in the absence of sons, daughters could inherit, even if male domination meant that their rights were exercised by their husbands.

Further, the new descent system implied a more intensive use of kin ties.

The lineage had to concentrate its forces in order to strengthen itself, and guarantee its internal and external security.

Counts often entrusted kinsmen with offices which they themselves could not take on, especially ecclesiastical ones.

To this end, they drew on cousinly ties.

The most dynamic lineages were precisely those that managed to bring together a cognatic kindred in a single, hierarchical, group.

Nobles – men and women - became integral parts of extended family networks that remained centered on alliance and hypergamy, and on a large cognatic kindred.

They exploited cousinly links which contributed to their strength and offered security.