ABSTRACT
In 1966 the ninth centenary of the Norman Conquest of England brought a kind of apotheosis of the Norman image. The Normans might inspire a wide variety of feelings; might be viewed as creative or brutal according to one’s tastes or attitudes; but they were ‘politically . . . the masters of their world’ in Sir Frank Stenton’s famous phrase, and few doubted that they had laid an indelible mark on many lands from England and France, to Sicily and the eastern Mediterranean.1 The striking coincidence that the Norman conquest of Sicily took place at much the same time as the conquest of England underlined the unity of their world; and the heady mood of the 1960s was summed up in David Douglas’s eloquent book The Norman Achievement, published in 1969.
