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Writing 2 Books on Pre-Christian Scandinavia

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
Quite right. I was merely curious as to what coeurdevrai saw as the relevance.

I bravely avoid making a point of asserting there was never such a thing as a "feudal system" ... doh! But leaving that aside, I've never seen the English kings as having almost unlimited power. Not in theory, because there was as yet (as of King John, let's say) only a barely nascent body of precedent and law that defined the limits of royal power. And not in fact, because of the practical limits of exerting such power. There were effective kings (William, Henry and Henry) and ineffective kings (William Rufus, Stephen, and Richard though I'm sure I'll get arguments there). The effective ones were the ones who managed also to extend the limits. But if their power was already almost unlimited, what were they extending?

Trying hard to be an author not a historian, I'll say that one irksome aspect of many fantasy novels is that they assume kings had unlimited power, both in theory and in practice. In itself it's not a Bad Thing, so long as the book is not posing as adhering closely to actual history (looking at you, Dan Brown). It's irksome because there are so many genuinely interesting and complex examples of kingship on which to draw, that would make for far more interesting stories. That this author or that one misses the boat is one thing, but the docks and beaches are lined with whole genres of fantasy writers who didn't even know there was a boat. They just jump in and start swimming.

Oh, and now I've worn out my metaphors. Sad and weary, sad and weary....
 

Gurkhal

Auror
It is relevant skip.knox, but probably not in the way coeurdevrai thinks.

In many respects Henry II judicial reforms and the slightly later Magna Carta (along with John's equally important administrative reforms in England) mark the beginning of the end of feudalism in England.

It's important to understand that the Magna Carta is a response to the almost unlimited power that kings had in the feudal system. That feudal system (along with the king and the nobles) came to England with the Norman conquest, it did not exist in Anglo-Saxon England and never existed in the Nordic countries.

In Normandy it was William the Conqueror's grandfather Richard the Fearless (the first recognised Duke of Normandy) who imposed feudalism in Normandy and in doing so he was adopting a system developed in the Carolingian empire and the later Frankish kingdoms in western Europe. Richard had been brought up in the Frankish county of Flanders so he was familiar with the the feudal system. Richard himself was the grandsaon of Rollo (the first norse ruler of Normandy) and Poppa, daughter of Berengar the Breton Count of Rennes. Richard's ancestry and upbringing illustrates an important point, which is that there were never many norseman is what is now Normandy and that they very quickly intermarried with the local Frankish and Breton nobility.

While true that the Norsemen didn't maintain a separate cultural identity in Normandy to my knowledge they did impart a cultural footprint on the area, at least in linguistic terms. So while we should not overestimate their impact, they did have an impact.


 

Karlin

Sage
I was surprised to learn of the Norman involvement in Southern Italy. That's what happens when you listen to too many history podcasts.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
I was surprised to learn of the Norman involvement in Southern Italy. That's what happens when you listen to too many history podcasts.
Oh those Hauteville boys!
 
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