Okay, so in the first place, we should address a major question, to wit, to what degree was there a "Norman" identity at all. R.H.C. Davis's The Normans and Their Myth pointed to some pretty solid evidence that a distinctly "Norman" identity could very well have been something of a literary device, and he does so by pointing to the fact that it's later (i.e., twelfth-, not eleventh-century) chroniclers who write of England's Francophone conquerors as well as the nobility of Naples/Sicily as specifically Norman. Davis might push a bit too far in the opposite direction, but it's a solid point, especially because the conquerors who came over with William were from all over Europe (since of course he'd sent out a call to most of Western Europe's knightly class that he was conquering a kingdom and that this was a chance for new lands). One scholar called it the, "Breton, Lotharingian, Flemish, Picard, Artesian, Cenomanian, Angevin, general-French and Norman Conquest" (Chibnall, 198).

But we absolutely had a sense of a Francophone elite with a sense of its own identity as such. English, which had been one of the first European vernaculars to have its own written literature, nearly vanished as a language of prestige literature, with the last English-language copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle petering out in 1154. You almost count on your fingers the English-language texts written in the twelfth century. Even ambitious people who weren’t native speakers of French would use French as a vernacular in any sort of prestige context, and indeed, the language spoken in monasteries was usually French.

But the other thing that’s happening in the two generations after the conquest is that although the men of the indigenous English nobility are getting rapidly edged out of power – every new uprising caused a few more native English to lose their lands – the new Francophone nobles would usually marry English elites. In addition, your household domestics, wet nurses, etc. would also be English, so by the second generation after the Conquest, it’s likely that England’s nobility was effectively bilingual, although Francophone in the context of anything to do with prestige.

But there’s probably not much of an English identity either among king or nobles, and especially not once Henry II, originally count of Anjou, becomes king. Most of Henry’s holdings were in Continental France, although England was a nice source of revenue. Neither Henry nor his sons, Richard, John, Arthur Geoffrey of Brittany, and Henry the Young King, spoke English. So any sort of English identity was very slight, and this was more true the higher you rose in the ranks of the aristocracy.

UNTIL...

(More to follow.)