The Norman Conquest in English History

The Norman Conquest in English History, Volume 1: A Broken Chain? pursues a central theme in English historical thinking over seven centuries. Covering more than half a millennium, this first volume explains how and why the experience of the Norman Conquest prompted both an unprecedented campaign in the early 12th century to write (or create) the history of England, and to excavate (and fabricate) pre-Conquest English law.

George Garnett traces the treatment of the Conquest in English historiography, legal theory and practice, and political argument through the middle ages and early modern period, examining the dispersal of these materials from libraries after the dissolution of the monasteries, and the attempts made to rescue, edit, and print many of them in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. These preservation efforts enabled the Conquest to become still more contested in the constitutional cataclysms of the 17th century than it had been in the 11th and 12th. The 17th-century resurrection of the Conquest will be the subject of a second volume.