THE NORMAN EMPIRE by JOHN LE PATOUREL HC 9780198225256 ** NEW SEALED ** RARE OXFORD
This book is about the political structure which the Normans created in Britain and northern France. The first part defines its chronology from the early tenth century, when the Normans broke out of the lands around Rouen on which the king of the Western Franks had been trying to settle them, to the collapse of their 'empire' in the middle of the twelfth century. The second part describes how the Xorman kings organized their government, ruling Normandy and England directly and exercising varying degrees of authority over the kings of Scots, the Welsh princes, and marcher lords, the counts of Flanders, Boulogne, Pontieu, and Maine, the dukes of Brittany, and seigneurs who held lands both in 'France' and in Normandy. The conquest of England is regarded as but one event, though the most important, in the activity of the Normans in this part of Europe, and as something they did for their own purposes rather than in the traditional way as something that happened to England. Likewise the government of the Norman kings is seen not simply as an episode in English history, however much or little it may have affected that history, but as a complex though unitary organization covering all the Norman lands and overlordships in Britain and France.
ISBN 9780198225256