5 - Gentry Lives in Three Realms: A View from the Anglo-Scottish Borders and Upper Normandy (c. 1170–c. 1350)

Summary

THIS chapter has its origin in a study published in connection with the AHRC-funded research project ‘The Norman Edge: Identity and State-Formation on the Frontiers of Europe, c. 1050–c. 1200’. Taking as its focus a sample of settler families in the Anglo-Scottish marches, it explored the survival of some sense of Norman identity over the generations, or rather the centuries. As might have been expected, the arguments depended heavily on the records available for the higher nobility and among medievalists it is, indeed, something of a truism that ‘the range of possible identities [increases] further up the social hierarchy’. But one dynasty of the gentry or knightly class, the Normanvilles, did receive brief consideration and what follows aims to give this family the fuller coverage it merits. The Normanvilles’ role as lords of Maxton in Roxburghshire had previously earned some attention from Scottish historians, just as their lordship of Stamfordham in Northumberland had not escaped the notice of English historians. In each case, however, there was no acknowledgement that the Normanvilles had more than just local concerns within a single polity, so that even their connections across the border gained no recognition. Less surprisingly, no historian – not even Geoffrey Barrow in his work on Scotland's ‘Norman’ families – had realised that the Normanvilles were also landowners in the Pays de Caux of Upper Normandy, because much of the documentation in question remained unpublished and was (and still is) virtually uncatalogued. The chief sources survive in the collections of the Archives départementales de Seine- Maritime at Rouen, particularly among the muniments of the abbeys of Fécamp (fonds 7H), Saint-Wandrille (16H) and Valmont (19HP). Nowadays it is reasonably well understood that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Anglo-Scottish border was no barrier to the creation of gentry as well as magnate estates; the Normanvilles’ cross-Channel landholding before and, indeed, after the Capetian conquest of Normandy in 1204 gives them a wider significance for British and French history alike. By the same token, their activities allow us to explore a universe that may well be as revealing as the trans-frontier worlds inhabited by those great nobles on whom other studies have concentrated.