The 'Lands of the Normans' in England (1204-44)

The "Lands of the Normans" in England (1204-44) project aimed to assess the historical consequences of the end of the Anglo-Norman realm, for England and for France, and to investigate the potential for IT to contribute to historical study. In 1204 King Philip Augustus of France conquered Normandy, thus breaking up the 'Anglo-Norman realm' created after the 1066 Norman conquest. The severing of connections between the two countries had profound implications for French and English identity and politics. This project is based on the study of a sample of Anglo-Norman landowners, based on the 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 surviving records, English and French, royal and private, before and after 1204. These records were entered into an online database, which contains details of over 2,000 individual documents collected from over 100 historical sources. Nearly 3,000 different people and places appear, and there are over 13,500 links describing their relationships. The "Lands of the Normans" database thus provides an introduction to a number of important Anglo-Norman families and access to automated reconstructions of the genealogies of each family and maps of landholding.