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incomplete picture of the material available to modern historians. Documentary sources such as charters, lawcodes and a variety of other administrative records (such as Domesday Book for England) provide supplementary information that is of crucial importance where questions to do with ethnicity, colonisation, settlement, language, legal custom, taxation and justice are under discussion. Consider, for example, what
had thought to have hardly stretched beyond the seventh century. 11 But this apparently strong argument looks much weaker in the light of modern opinion, which tends to see ‘Roman’ identity surviving as a form of political consciousness well into the ninth century and even beyond. 12 Furthermore, the other ethnic designation found in the Acta may actually indicate composition later than the
appear to have made him more magnanimous, especially towards anyone he considered a threat or merely inferior. 15 He paints brutal portraits of the Ottonians’ enemies and indulges in a particularly virulent brand of ethnic stereotyping. 16 The supernatural occupied a prominent place on Thietmar’s mental landscape, as it did for most of his contemporaries. He shifts effortlessly from prosaic accounts of military
comparing himself to historians of ‘other peoples’ like the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. His assertion that there was an absence of writings about ‘our times’ rings true to the extent that the Carolingian period did not produce many new Frankish ‘ethnic’ histories, and in this respect too Regino was an unusual author. More surprisingly, for someone whose career was spent in major political and cultural
Normans constituted the largest ethnic group. L. R. Ménager and Graham Loud estimate that as many as two-thirds or three-quarters of the immigrants came from Normandy. 26 Among them, men were by far the most numerous, although Rodulfus Glaber explicitly mentions women and children among the Norman migrants [69] . This fact offers another parallel with the Scandinavian settlement in Normandy. In both
(and those of even earlier cultures) than in digging for early medieval material. Recently more attention has been paid to all aspects of Merovingian archaeology, and there have been challenges to traditional interpretations of grave finds, which were based on the assumption that there were distinct patterns of ethnicity to which material culture conformed. 75 We can now profit from several much more
: 206–20. Although Wulfstan’s attitude towards Thurkil remains unknown, the possible influence of his career on Wulfstan’s work has been discussed in Keynes 1991 : 75–6. 4 The complicated ethnic makeup of Cnut’s realm is indicated by his use of both Scandinavian
Vikings who settled in Russia and the Ukraine from the ninth century onwards, some of whom fought as mercenaries for Byzantium: Blöndal (1978) , pp. 1–14, 122–66. 70 Imperial auxiliary cavalry, probably originally ethnic Turks: Savvides (1993) , pp. 122
of multiple laws for different ethnic groups. 160 The validity of all these laws, however, rested on their consonance with Christian teachings. 161 Such laws were authoritative because emperors and kings had been given authority by God to repress evildoers, as represented by their anointing. 162 Clerics might demand that rulers promulgate laws on Church matters, but for the
was probably understandable considering the fact that many pre-conquest bishops had been continental appointees of King Edward anyway. William, bishop of London (1051–75), for example, was a Norman. The ethnic diversity of the Anglo-Saxon Church’s hierarchy may unintentionally have prepared the bishops for such collaboration. 18 Bishop Giso of Wells (1061–88) had been one of Edward’s appointees and