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TheNorman yoke is a term denoting the oppressive aspects offeudalism in England, attributed to the impositions ofWilliam the Conqueror, the firstNormanking of England, his retainers and their descendants. The term was used inEnglish nationalist anddemocratic discourse from the mid-17th century.
The medieval chroniclerOrderic Vitalis wrote in hisEcclesiastical History that theNormans had imposed ayoke on the English: "And so the English groaned aloud for their lost liberty and plotted ceaselessly to find some way of shaking off a yoke that was so intolerable and unaccustomed."[1] His later work, written in light ofHenry I's reign and fifty years after the Conquest, took a more positive view of the situation of England, writing, "King Henry governed the realm ... prudently and well through prosperity and adversity. ... He treated the magnates with honour and generosity. He helped his humbler subjects by giving just laws, and protecting them from unjust extortions and robbers."[2] The culturally freighted term of a "Norman yoke" first appears in an apocryphal work published in 1642 during theEnglish Civil War, under the titleThe Mirror of Justices; the book was a translation ofMireur a justices, a collection of 13th century political, legal, and moral fables, written inAnglo-Norman French, thought to have been compiled and edited in the early 14th century by renowned legal scholarAndrew Horn.[3] Even though it would have been obvious to anyone living in the fourteenth century that the book was a work of fiction, at the time of its publication in 1642,The Mirror of Justices was presented and accepted as historical fact.
Frequently, critics following the Norman yoke model would claimAlfred the Great orEdward the Confessor as models of justice. In this context,Magna Carta is seen as an attempt to restore pre-Conquest English rights, if only for the gentry. When SirEdward Coke reorganised the English legal system, he was keen to claim that the grounds of Englishcommon law were beyond the memory or register of any beginning and pre-existed theNorman Conquest, although he did not use the phrase "Norman yoke".
The idea of the Norman yoke characterized the nobility and gentry of England as the descendants of foreign usurpers who had destroyed an Anglo-Saxongolden age. Such a reading was extremely powerful for the poorer classes of England. Whereas Coke,John Pym,Lucy Hutchinson, andSir Henry Vane saw Magna Carta rights as being primarily those of the propertied classes, during the prolonged 17th-century constitutional crisis in England andScotland, the arguments were also taken up in a more radical way. Those espousing the more radical arguments include the likes ofFrancis Trigge, John Hare,John Lilburne, John Warr, andGerrard Winstanley of the radicalDiggers, the latter of whom even called for an end toprimogeniture and for the cultivation of the soil in common. "Seeing the common people of England by joynt consent of person and purse have caste outCharles our Norman oppressor, wee have by this victory recovered ourselves from under his Norman yoake", wrote Winstanley on behalf of the Diggers, in December 1649. InThe True Levellers Standard Advanced Winstanley begins:
O what mighty Delusion, do you, who are the powers of England live in! That while you pretend to throw down that Norman yoke, and Babylonish power, and have promised to make the groaning people of England a Free People; yet you still lift up that Norman yoke, and slavish Tyranny, and holds the People as much in bondage, as the Bastard Conquerour himself, and his Councel of War.
Interest in the idea of the Norman yoke revived in the eighteenth century; it appeared in such texts as theHistorical Essay on the English Constitution (1771) and inJohn Cartwright'sTake Your Choice (1777), and featured in the debate betweenThomas Paine andEdmund Burke.Thomas Jefferson also championed the idea.[4]
By the 19th century the Norman yoke lost whatever historical significance it may have had and was no longer a "red flag" in political debate, but it still carried its popular-history usefulness, conjuring up an imagined Anglo-Saxongolden-age England - SirWalter Scott in his novelIvanhoe (1819) puts a "Saxon proverb" into the mouth of Wamba (Ch. xxvii):
Norman saw on English oak.
On English neck a Norman yoke;
Norman spoon to English dish,
And England ruled as Normans wish;
Blithe world in England never will be more,
Till England's rid of all the four.
Victorian Protestants sometimes linked the idea of the "Norman Yoke" withanti-Catholicism, with claims that the EnglishAnglo-Saxon Church was freer of Papal influence than the Norman one.[5] They cited events such asPope Alexander II supportingWilliam the Conqueror and the homages of variousPlantagenet kings to thePapacy as proof of this idea.[5] This linking of "Anglo-Saxon"English nationalism and anti-Catholicism influencedCharles Kingsley's novelHereward the Wake (1866), which, likeIvanhoe, helped popularize the image of a romantic Anglo-Saxon England destroyed by the Normans.[5][6] On the other hand,Thomas Carlyle rejected the idea of the "Norman Yoke"; in hisHistory of Friedrich II of Prussia (1858) Carlyle portrayed the Norman conquest as beneficial because it had helped unify England.[7]
According to historianMarjorie Chibnall,
Every age has found in [the Norman Conquest] something relevant to the constitutional, social and cultural issues of its own day, ranging from the political and parliamentary struggles of the seventeenth century through the romantic and scientific interpretations of history in the nineteenth to the debates on colonialism, races, and women's history in the twentieth.[8]
Fantasy authorJ. R. R. Tolkien, who was also a professor of Anglo-Saxon studies, is thought to have been influenced by the theory, especially in his "lost rural idyll" depiction of the Hobbits inThe Lord of the Rings.[9][10]
In the twenty-first century,Michael Wood touched upon the Norman Yoke concept in the context of highly mythologised so-called "comic-book history" for the BBC History seriesIn Search of England.[11]
Every age has found in [the Norman Conquest] something relevant to the constitutional, social and cultural issues of its own day, ranging from the political and parliamentary struggles of the seventeenth century through the romantic and scientific interpretations of history in the nineteenth to the debates on colonialism, races, and women's history in the twentieth.