Norman yoke

The Norman yoke is a term denoting the oppressive aspects of feudalism in England, attributed to the impositions of William the Conqueror, the first Norman king of England, his retainers and their descendants. The term was used in English nationalist and democratic discourse from the mid-17th century. The medieval chronicler Orderic Vitalis wrote in his Ecclesiastical History that the Normans had imposed a yoke on the English: "And so the English groaned aloud for their lost liberty and plotted ceaselessly to find some way of shaking off a yoke that was so intolerable and unaccustomed." His later work, written in light of Henry I's reign and fifty years after the Conquest, took a more positive view of the situation of England, writing, "King Henry governed the realm ... prudently and well through prosperity and adversity. ... He treated the magnates with honour and generosity. He helped his humbler subjects by giving just laws, and protecting them from unjust extortions and robbers." The culturally freighted term of a "Norman yoke" first appears in an apocryphal work published in 1642 during the English Civil War, under the title The Mirror of Justices; the book was a translation of Mireur a justices, a collection of 13th century political, legal, and moral fables, written in Anglo-Norman French, thought to have been compiled and edited in the early 14th century by renowned legal scholar Andrew Horn. Even though it would have been obvious to anyone living in the fourteenth century that the book was a work of fiction, at the time of its publication in 1642, The Mirror of Justices was presented and accepted as historical fact. Frequently, critics following the Norman yoke model would claim Alfred the Great or Edward the Confessor as models of justice. In this context, Magna Carta is seen as an attempt to restore pre-Conquest English rights, if only for the gentry. When Sir Edward Coke reorganised the English legal system, he was keen to claim that the grounds of English common law were beyond the memory or register of any beginning and pre-existed the Norman conquest, although he did not use the phrase "Norman yoke".