A Social History of England, 900-1200 by JULIA CRICK & ELISABETH VAN HOUTS

Author:JULIA CRICK & ELISABETH VAN HOUTS
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781139184472
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

Nearer to home emigrants from England settled in neighbouring principalities of the British Isles. The most interesting aspect of the evidence must be that the emigrants from England to Wales and Scotland were frequently recent arrivals in England themselves. Often they were younger sons of first-generation Continental immigrants to England who were lured to more distant pastures. As Robert Bartlett and Geoffrey Barrow have pointed out, the ones who went to Scotland came at the invitation of the kings, keen to install them as landholders in the border areas.36 The royal aim was twofold. These men brought with them practical knowledge of the manorial economy and would provide valuable services to the king such as overseeing the building of castles, recruiting soldiers and serving from time to time in the king’s household. Amongst the earliest emigrants to Scotland were the dynasties of the Brus and Stewart. Robert I de Brus (d. 1141), lord of Brix and Cleveland (North Yorkshire) received Annandale in c. 1124; after his death his English lands went to his eldest son and his Scottish land to the younger, also called Robert. The Stewarts descended from Walter, third son of the Breton Alan fitzFlaad, who in c. 1136 became steward of King David of Scotland. Others were younger sons of Norman families settled in England who benefitted from the patronage of Malcolm IV, such as John of Vaux (near Rouen), who became lord of Dirleton in East Lothian; Robert de Quincy took his name from a place near Béthune in French Flanders, received land in East Lothian and Fife and was responsible for the import of several countrymen. A Flemish colony in the 1150s had established itself in Clydesdale. From William de Lion’s reign dates the arrival along a similar route of Philip de Valognes and Philip de Mowbray. Ultimately of Continental origin, these men came without, it seems, their own peasants, but settled as Englishmen.

The situation in Wales was different, because only the southern and most eastern fringe fell (intermittently) under the control of the kings of the English, from the early eleventh century, who from then on consistently used the marcher areas as a springboard for further inroads into the principality. The primary strategy was to colonize the march from Herefordshire in the south to Cheshire in the north with men whose royal rewards of land (in fact land robbed from the Welsh) would bind them to the English throne. Under Cnut we find several important Danish followers such as Hakon and Hrani in the area, followed under Edward the Confessor by Norman settlers, such as Richard fitzScrob, his son Osbern fitzRichard, Alfred of Marlborough and Earl Ralph, the king’s nephew, in Herefordshire.37 By the time of the Norman Conquest, these men – although legally English (as all pre-Conquest Frenchmen were) – held on to their marcher estates and were joined in the north around Chester by Hugh of Avranches and later Arnulf of Montgomery. By then, however, the landed wealth of these men meant

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.