Timothy Baker (2)

This compact tome is subtitled "The Men Who Made the English-Speaking World," which clues one in as to the time in which this book was published. In 1966, it was still just possible to use this kind of title without causing a firestorm of protest and debate. The book was published in the 900th anniversary year of the Norman Conquest, and is even now a hard-to-beat analysis of the consequences of the gigantic event that is the Conquest.

Paradoxically, the titanic changes that came from the Conquest are shown, by and large, to come from the continuation and/or acceleration of trends already extant in pre-Conquest England, and many of those trends are the very ones we're indebted to today: eg, the furtherance and standardization of common law being a notable example, and the existence of our own English language as it now is being a side effect of the nasty, negative colonialist policies of the Conqueror himself after a nasty rebellion was put down in 1069-1070.

This isn't exactly news to me, as I've read quite a bit on the subject of medieval history; but this book's brief is to pull together whatever was known in 1960s Britain and France about the Normans as a group and present it in a comprehensive yet readable overview. Successful on these grounds, the book still leaves a bit to be desired in the realms of scintillating prose. I think it's readable, though I found chapter 11, "The New Architecture," to be an agonizing slog through a subject I have no desire whatsoever to learn about; but Baker's thoroughness cannot be faulted! He says he wants to show the impact of the Normans on England, and by gum that is what he does.

Being an overview, Baker's book doesn't delve into personalities that much. He has strong opinions about the nastiness of England's first known and openly homosexual king, William II Rufus, and they are negative (unsurprising); he's admiring of the Conqueror, while admitting he wouldn't necessarily invite him home to tea; he's contemptuous of Edward the Confessor, though he tries to hide it, and he's sneakily fond of Harold Godwinsson while snarkily sarcastic about Tostig, Harold's brother.

In a cast of characters that runs into the hundreds, that's pretty restrained stuff. And everywhere he allows himself an editorial opinion, Baker marks it as such. Can't ask for fairer than that.

What makes this book useful even today is its breadth of field. It's so easy to get bogged down in one small area when writing history, there is so much to say about any time. It helps, in a funny way, that the period in question is so distant from us that actual records are pretty sparse and sources from later times bear such obvious parti pris that it's clear there were two strongly opposed sides to the questions they address (eg, William of Malmesbury). It leaves a lot to the researcher's imagination as to what the other side was all about, of course. But it means that it's possible to wrap one's mental arms around the bulk of the known documentation and records, and develop meaningful and helpful hypotheses about the effects of events on each other...something not always possible in later, better documented epochs.

Would I recommend this book to you? Not unless you're very, very interested in the subject already. If so, well...it's the quick and dirty version of historiography, but it's useful to have all the threads gathered in one spot.… (mehr)