The politics of being Norman in the reign of Richard the Fearless, Duke of Normandy (r. 942–996)
In 966, by the end of the reign of its third duke, Richard I, Normandy had overcome the crises that had beset it in the middle of the century. Much of this success came from the coherence of its ruling group, which expressed itself partly in terms of ‘Norman’ identity. This article uses Dudo's history of the dukes and Richard's charters to argue that ‘Norman’ as a political identity was a deliberate creation of the court of Richard I in the 960s, following the perceived failure of his and his father's policies of assimilation into Frankish culture.
Scandinavian Origins through Christian Eyes: A Comparative Study of the History of the Normans and the Russian Primary Chronicle
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Bishop Ermenfrid of Sion and the Penitential Ordinance following the Battle of Hastings
Bishop Ermenfrid of Sion is chiefly familiar to English historians on account of his brief but important intervention in the Anglo-Norman kingdom in the year 1070. However, he occupied his see for more than thirty years during a momentous period of ecclesiastical and political history. Little evidence about him survives, and it has never been fully assembled and discussed; yet it is enough to give more than passing interest to the course of his career and to the details of his activities. This is especially true of Anglo-Norman affairs, Ermenfrid's part in which needs to be explained and subjected to a detailed examination. But, more generally, the wider evidence about him deserves to be brought into the picture, for it sheds light on some of the factors which governed men's minds and loyalties in the second half of the eleventh century.