How and why have historians disagreed about the Norman Conquest? Student: Grace Simpson, History & English Literature
In this essay, I will discuss the roots of the historiographical debate surrounding the Norman
Conquest, exploring the potential sources of disagreements, both within the academic field
and in society. Specifically, I will focus on the so-called F-word: feudalism. In this regard, I
will explore how disagreements stem from a lack of a unified definition of the term, with
many defining it in constricting boundaries only relevant to their specific research interest,
as well as the evolving nature of the academic field resulting from a century of social
change. Historians of the Norman Conquest disagree most often on the role it played in
feudalism's development in England, arguing whether elements had existed before 1066,
with the origins of the opposing beliefs found in two nineteenth-century historians. Since
then, changes to the world order resulting from two World Wars have led to a new
academic focus on relationships between specific groups and a growing recognition of the
need for interdisciplinary research.
The debate surrounding the application of the term feudalism, the definition of
which we will see later is a source of confusion itself, begins in the nineteenth-century with
historians Edward Augustus Freeman and J. Horace Round. Their interpretations of the
Norman Conquest are opposites: Freeman argues that it destroyed the English identity that
had formed during the time of the Anglo-Saxons, and Round, the reverse, that the Conquest
brought forth the beginning of a strong monarchy, the central point of English identity and
history. As society and the academic world have developed since, a middle ground is
typically taken by modern historians, recognising that historical development was rarely so
straightforward, likely influenced by the upheaval of two World Wars and the growth and
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