THE 'LANDS OF THE NORMANS'
IN ENGLAND (1204 - 1244)


Henry III crossing the sea, with the sail bearing the three lions.
                    Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The "Lands of the Normans" in England (1204-44) was a one-year project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under their Route for Speculative Research. The project was based at the Department of History, University of Sheffield and housed in the university's Humanities Research Institute. The project ran from 1 October 2006 to 30 September 2007 under the direction of Professor Daniel Power. The dual aims of the project were to assess the historical consequences of the end of the Anglo-Norman realm, for England and for France, and to investigate the potential for Information Technology to contribute to historical study.

In 1204 King Philip Augustus of France conquered Normandy, thus breaking up the 'Anglo-Norman realm' created after the Norman conquest of England in 1066. The severing of connections between the two countries had profound implications for French and English identity and politics, but it has not received the detailed study that it merits. The "Lands of the Normans" project is based on the study of a sample of Anglo-Norman landowners, based on the single most important English source for the confiscations of 1204, the Rotulus de valore terrarum Normannorum. The project team traced the history of each of the lay families and estates that appear in this source through the surviving records, English and French, royal and private, before and after 1204. These records were entered into an online database, designed and created by the historical members of the project team in combination with the technical officers at the Humanities Research Institute.

The "Lands of the Normans" project database can be accessed online via this website . The database contains details of over 2,000 individual documents collected from over 100 historical sources. Nearly 3,000 different people and places appear in the database, and there are over 13,500 links describing the relationships between these people and places. The "Lands of the Normans" database thus provides an introduction to a number of important Anglo-Norman families, including their appearances in royal and private records and access to automated reconstructions of the genealogies of each family and maps of landholding. We hope that this may encourage other historians to explore the potential benefits of Information Technology for their own research.

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