ABSTRACT
A traveller’s guide to what is here termed the ‘Norman Edge’, as we might envisage it in c.1100, would have to cover swathes of moorland and dale as far north as the Cheviots, a large part of Wales, all southern Italy including Sicily (conquered piecemeal from the 1040s onwards), and much of the Palestine–Syria region (conquered in 1098–9). 1 By the 1130s, the papacy had recognised the Italian territories and the province of Jerusalem as new Latin Christian kingdoms; by this stage, too, Norman lords were deployed in strength beyond the Tweed and the Solway, albeit under the leadership of the native king of Scots; and from the 1170s they were toppling Irish kinglets and princelings. Since the classic work of Charles Homer Haskins, The Normans in European History (1915), the concept of a medieval ‘Norman world’ has gone in and out of fashion, and recent scholarly re-evaluations have transformed our understanding of this ‘world’ – or, in fact, of how far it should be seen as a world evolving sooner or later into multiple worlds apart. 2 This is another way of saying that Norman history is more than just the history of the Normans. Whether the primary focus is conquest, settlement, institutions or the cultural and religious dimensions of society, the Normans and their exploits have to be studied and understood in relation to the diverse peoples and places with which they came into contact. This, however, is far from stating that there is no room for fresh analyses that seek to integrate (or re-integrate) the Normans into their wider transregional or ‘transnational’ contexts. There is still a real need to supplement narrower historical approaches by looking more broadly, and comparatively, across the cultural and political boundaries that the Normans themselves ignored (or helped to shape), the better to appreciate, assess and explain typical or unique features and shared or divergent developments. 3
