Log in or Sign up
Coin Talk
Home
Forums
>
Coin Forums
>
Ancient Coins
>
Medieval - Some Thoughts on the Normans and their Coins
>
Reply to Thread
Message:
<p>[QUOTE="EWC3, post: 3732427, member: 93416"]Many thanks for reviving this thread. Below is a piece I wrote a few years back. Since it bears upon English links to Norman Sicily, and thence North Africa, I thought to "reprint" it here. If some parts seem obscure, I am happy to clarify.</p><p><b><br /></b></p><p><b><br /></b></p><p><b> [ATTACH=full]1000800[/ATTACH] </b></p><p><b><br /></b></p><p><b><br /></b></p><p><b> A Day Out in Selby</b></p><p><br /></p><p>Rambling around the web a little while ago I came across a thought provoking idea: A paper written by John Makdisi suggesting that English common law had, in large part, been adopted directly from Islamic models by Henry II in the 12th century. Reading on, I found that political connections within the Norman states gave Henry ready access to personnel, and thus ideas, from Norman Sicily, a state on the front line of Christendom deriving many cultural influences from Islam. Specifically, he mentioned a Thomas Brown, an Englishman who had worked in Sicily under its Chancellor, an Englishman, Robert of Selby. Brown later transferred from the Sicily to Henry’s court in London.</p><p><br /></p><p>Makdisi adds a further philosophical dimension to his argument, drawing a distinction between active political measures, which attempt to direct the activities of subjects, and reactive political measures, which have a more restrictive purpose of assisting subjects in organising their own affairs. That the Anglo American world by tradition purports to impose less controls upon the activities of its citizens is, at least, a well enough known claim, which does seems in line with the Anglo American preference for common law rather than a civil legal systems. Note that I refer merely to well known aspirations, or perhaps, propaganda concerning such aspirations, as the details of practice are of course much more complex and controversial.</p><p><br /></p><p> The matter caught my own attention because the claim seemed congruent to the history of English politics in general and the history of weight standards in particular. Regarding politics in general, controversy concerning British payments to the EU today is almost as prevalent as that concerning Papal revenues was in Henry II’s day. And the same can be said about the extent of the jurisdiction of the modern European Court and its counterpart, in the medieval church courts. 900 years on, at root, the fundamentals seem just the same.</p><p><br /></p><p>We see the same pattern repeated in the microcosm of weight standards. In my own lifetime the imposition in Britain of European standards of metrology, SI, and a backlash against that imposition. The legal imposition of SI has been popularly represented as not merely activist but as outright authoritarian. And back in the 14th century, the imposition of Roman weight standards (avoirdupois) seems to have come amongst a raft of centralising changes to the English economy, overseen by Florentine bankers, which triggered the most violent public reaction London has ever seen staged, in 1381. Investigations of the reforms to Islamic weight standards brought in by ‘Abd al Malik around 700 AD seem to hint they were quite deliberately developed as an alternative to Roman standards, intentionally contradicting the latter. Thus England’s preference for this apparently intentionally non-Roman Islamic system, for the last millennium or so, is intriguing.</p><p><br /></p><p>Such thoughts in mind, on a wintry Sunday we drove over to the small Yorkshire town of Selby, curious to check for any remembrances of Robert of Selby, the 12th century chancellor of Sicily. Selby is a friendly little place, too small to attract chain stores, its streets still lined with independent local shops. At the inapltly named ‘New Inn’ an enormous Sunday roast dinner, with a big bowl of fresh vegetables on the side, was £5, and in the Abbey church the verger made us coffee for 80p a cup, apologising that the chinaware was not available on Sundays. Of Robert of Selby we found no sign. The abbey held a dusty memorial of a chain mail clad crusader type of fellow, but as so often is the case, no one seems to remember who he was. However, the whole building proved a memorial to a more general matter, England’s fickle relationship with Central European power.</p><p><br /></p><p> Selby Abbey Church is dedicated to St Germain. Now, around 430 AD this was the St Germain who was sent to England to defend Papal, Augustinian, orthodoxy against the British Pelegian heresy. However, Selby, a small town on the navigable Ouse, only came to prominence much later than this, just after 1066, and Hastings. Henry I was reputedly born at Selby in 1068, just two years after the conquest. The Abbey was founded there the next year, 1069, with its dedication to St Germain. A finger bone relic was transported from his tomb at Auxerre for the purpose. This, even then, ancient remembrance seems to be clear evidence that the mission of William I was in part to bring centralising European Papal authority to bear in England. So it is possibly interesting to remember that when William’s great grandson, Henry II, fell into argument over legal matters with his Papal representative, Becket, that the said Becket got much of his training in canon law at Auxerre.</p><p><br /></p><p>Getting back to the Selby Abbey Church now, having discovered that it was built as part of a unifying project, we found that the fact it survived the reformation at all, under Henry VIII, was due to another centralising matter. The Abbot (around 1530) had switched sides, disobeyed the Pope, and signed Henry’s divorce papers. Had he not, the Abbey Church site would likely now be a car park, or some such, royal connection or no.</p><p><br /></p><p> But at the time of the reformation Selby Abbey still had two great medieval stained glass windows. Installed in the 14th century, one a Jesse window, devoted to old testament genealogy and the like, the other commemorating life and doings of its patron, St Germain. When Parliamentary troops occupied the town around 1644, the Jesse window went untouched, but the window to St Germain was completely destroyed. Fascinating, since philosophically, the puritan concept of predestination was much in line with that of St Germain, and rather contrary to that of Pelagius. So it seems that the insular, antiPapal alliance, against St Germain, trumped more abstruse philosophical considerations.</p><p><br /></p><p> Getting now to my penultimate point – I wonder how many visitors to Selby Church today understand the implications of all these matters, even as well as Cromwell’s foot soldiers did? UNESCO had a plan, back in 1950, to stamp out nationalist sentiment by cleansing our history text books of matters pertaining to nationalism. A mistake, I judge, since, as been said many times, those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. But I do seem to see traces of such a plan everywhere I look today. A century of state control of the teaching of history has changed but not improved our understanding of history.</p><p><br /></p><p> And my ultimate point gets us back to the history of metrology. For it seems to me modern metrology has lost its way, and we have to back track 50 years, to Skinner, to begin to find it again. For I think we must understand the philosophical, economic and geo-political associations of metrological choices, and if we do not understand them, we hardly understand this matter it at all.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1000812[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>
[QUOTE="EWC3, post: 3732427, member: 93416"]Many thanks for reviving this thread. Below is a piece I wrote a few years back. Since it bears upon English links to Norman Sicily, and thence North Africa, I thought to "reprint" it here. If some parts seem obscure, I am happy to clarify. [B] [ATTACH=full]1000800[/ATTACH] A Day Out in Selby[/B] Rambling around the web a little while ago I came across a thought provoking idea: A paper written by John Makdisi suggesting that English common law had, in large part, been adopted directly from Islamic models by Henry II in the 12th century. Reading on, I found that political connections within the Norman states gave Henry ready access to personnel, and thus ideas, from Norman Sicily, a state on the front line of Christendom deriving many cultural influences from Islam. Specifically, he mentioned a Thomas Brown, an Englishman who had worked in Sicily under its Chancellor, an Englishman, Robert of Selby. Brown later transferred from the Sicily to Henry’s court in London. Makdisi adds a further philosophical dimension to his argument, drawing a distinction between active political measures, which attempt to direct the activities of subjects, and reactive political measures, which have a more restrictive purpose of assisting subjects in organising their own affairs. That the Anglo American world by tradition purports to impose less controls upon the activities of its citizens is, at least, a well enough known claim, which does seems in line with the Anglo American preference for common law rather than a civil legal systems. Note that I refer merely to well known aspirations, or perhaps, propaganda concerning such aspirations, as the details of practice are of course much more complex and controversial. The matter caught my own attention because the claim seemed congruent to the history of English politics in general and the history of weight standards in particular. Regarding politics in general, controversy concerning British payments to the EU today is almost as prevalent as that concerning Papal revenues was in Henry II’s day. And the same can be said about the extent of the jurisdiction of the modern European Court and its counterpart, in the medieval church courts. 900 years on, at root, the fundamentals seem just the same. We see the same pattern repeated in the microcosm of weight standards. In my own lifetime the imposition in Britain of European standards of metrology, SI, and a backlash against that imposition. The legal imposition of SI has been popularly represented as not merely activist but as outright authoritarian. And back in the 14th century, the imposition of Roman weight standards (avoirdupois) seems to have come amongst a raft of centralising changes to the English economy, overseen by Florentine bankers, which triggered the most violent public reaction London has ever seen staged, in 1381. Investigations of the reforms to Islamic weight standards brought in by ‘Abd al Malik around 700 AD seem to hint they were quite deliberately developed as an alternative to Roman standards, intentionally contradicting the latter. Thus England’s preference for this apparently intentionally non-Roman Islamic system, for the last millennium or so, is intriguing. Such thoughts in mind, on a wintry Sunday we drove over to the small Yorkshire town of Selby, curious to check for any remembrances of Robert of Selby, the 12th century chancellor of Sicily. Selby is a friendly little place, too small to attract chain stores, its streets still lined with independent local shops. At the inapltly named ‘New Inn’ an enormous Sunday roast dinner, with a big bowl of fresh vegetables on the side, was £5, and in the Abbey church the verger made us coffee for 80p a cup, apologising that the chinaware was not available on Sundays. Of Robert of Selby we found no sign. The abbey held a dusty memorial of a chain mail clad crusader type of fellow, but as so often is the case, no one seems to remember who he was. However, the whole building proved a memorial to a more general matter, England’s fickle relationship with Central European power. Selby Abbey Church is dedicated to St Germain. Now, around 430 AD this was the St Germain who was sent to England to defend Papal, Augustinian, orthodoxy against the British Pelegian heresy. However, Selby, a small town on the navigable Ouse, only came to prominence much later than this, just after 1066, and Hastings. Henry I was reputedly born at Selby in 1068, just two years after the conquest. The Abbey was founded there the next year, 1069, with its dedication to St Germain. A finger bone relic was transported from his tomb at Auxerre for the purpose. This, even then, ancient remembrance seems to be clear evidence that the mission of William I was in part to bring centralising European Papal authority to bear in England. So it is possibly interesting to remember that when William’s great grandson, Henry II, fell into argument over legal matters with his Papal representative, Becket, that the said Becket got much of his training in canon law at Auxerre. Getting back to the Selby Abbey Church now, having discovered that it was built as part of a unifying project, we found that the fact it survived the reformation at all, under Henry VIII, was due to another centralising matter. The Abbot (around 1530) had switched sides, disobeyed the Pope, and signed Henry’s divorce papers. Had he not, the Abbey Church site would likely now be a car park, or some such, royal connection or no. But at the time of the reformation Selby Abbey still had two great medieval stained glass windows. Installed in the 14th century, one a Jesse window, devoted to old testament genealogy and the like, the other commemorating life and doings of its patron, St Germain. When Parliamentary troops occupied the town around 1644, the Jesse window went untouched, but the window to St Germain was completely destroyed. Fascinating, since philosophically, the puritan concept of predestination was much in line with that of St Germain, and rather contrary to that of Pelagius. So it seems that the insular, antiPapal alliance, against St Germain, trumped more abstruse philosophical considerations. Getting now to my penultimate point – I wonder how many visitors to Selby Church today understand the implications of all these matters, even as well as Cromwell’s foot soldiers did? UNESCO had a plan, back in 1950, to stamp out nationalist sentiment by cleansing our history text books of matters pertaining to nationalism. A mistake, I judge, since, as been said many times, those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. But I do seem to see traces of such a plan everywhere I look today. A century of state control of the teaching of history has changed but not improved our understanding of history. And my ultimate point gets us back to the history of metrology. For it seems to me modern metrology has lost its way, and we have to back track 50 years, to Skinner, to begin to find it again. For I think we must understand the philosophical, economic and geo-political associations of metrological choices, and if we do not understand them, we hardly understand this matter it at all. [ATTACH=full]1000812[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]
Your name or email address:
Do you already have an account?
No, create an account now.
Yes, my password is:
Forgot your password?
Stay logged in
Coin Talk
Home
Forums
>
Coin Forums
>
Ancient Coins
>
Medieval - Some Thoughts on the Normans and their Coins
>
Home
Home
Quick Links
Search Forums
Recent Activity
Recent Posts
Forums
Forums
Quick Links
Search Forums
Recent Posts
Competitions
Competitions
Quick Links
Competition Index
Rules, Terms & Conditions
Gallery
Gallery
Quick Links
Search Media
New Media
Showcase
Showcase
Quick Links
Search Items
Most Active Members
New Items
Directory
Directory
Quick Links
Directory Home
New Listings
Members
Members
Quick Links
Notable Members
Current Visitors
Recent Activity
New Profile Posts
Sponsors
Menu
Search
Search titles only
Posted by Member:
Separate names with a comma.
Newer Than:
Search this thread only
Search this forum only
Display results as threads
Useful Searches
Recent Posts
More...