Introduction: The Pre-Conquest Past in Post-Conquest England

The events of October 1066, rightly or wrongly, demarcate a conceptual border in England’s history that looms large in English cultural memory to this day. With the Norman Conquest came new lords, a new language, differing customs, innovations in architecture, among other changes. The proponents of these new societal structures did not, however, advocate for some sort of damnatio memoriae of England’s pre-Conquest past. Even as it passed from living memory, its vestiges threatened by the passage of time, the history of pre-Norman England remained of abiding interest to its heirs. The Anglo-Norman intellectual culture of the century following the Conquest produced an extensive historiographical corpus recording the stories of the people and events of the pre-Norman past. The size and scope of this body of historical literature was unprecedented to that point in English history. One of the underlying reasons for this interest in the past was an awareness within the elite circles of a conquest society of the uses to which it could be turned. Political leaders were alive to the legitimacy that could be afforded by connections to the legacies of leading figures of the English past. Ecclesiastical foundations were conscious of institutional continuities that stretched across the Conquest that ratified claims to the spiritual and temporal inheritances. This was a cultural milieu that encouraged the investigation of the past, and England’s pre-eminent twelfth-century historians, men such as Eadmer of Canterbury, William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, Geffrei Gaimar, Geoffrey of Monmouth and William of Newburgh, to name but a few, were keenly aware of an English history that stretched back to sub-Roman Britain. Their historical works were foundational to the writings of English historians over subsequent centuries, and so England’s pre-Conquest past was recapitulated and transmitted from generation to generation. These evolving representations of English history offer great insight into the processes that shaped and continue to shape our understanding of it. This is the central topic of this volume, which brings together a collection of studies that shed new light on how England’s pre-Norman history was constructed by its heirs across the length of the later Middle Ages.