Norman Culture and Arts
Norman cultural production took different forms in Normandy, England after 1066, and the kingdom of Sicily established by Roger II in 1130. Rulers, bishops and monasteries commissioned buildings, images and books, but patrons relied on skilled workers and inherited local practices. A Durham cathedral vault, an embroidered account of the English conquest and a multilingual Sicilian record each show how materials and writing served a particular institution and audience.
Architecture and building methods
Major churches required quarrying, transport, masonry, carpentry and sustained support. That work joined a patron’s resources to coordinated effort by quarrymen, carpenters and masons. At Durham in northern England, Bishop William of Saint-Calais ordered a new cathedral in 1093. The monk Symeon recorded that foundations were dug on 29 July and the first stones set on 11 August. The bishop paid for the cathedral, while the monks financed their own monastery buildings. This division of support tied the new church to the bishop’s authority while maintaining the monastic community that served it.
Durham’s builders also developed a way to roof the wide central nave with a rib vault. Crossing stone ribs frame the curved sections of masonry between them; the ribs carry much of the roof’s weight down to the piers, the heavy supports between bays. The thinner infill between ribs could span the spaces without making the whole vault equally massive. Pointed arches helped builders cover bays of different widths at similar heights. Durham is an early surviving example of this design, which became influential in later western church building.
In Palermo, Sicily, Roger II placed the Palatine Chapel inside the Royal Palace. The chapel is a long church with a central nave and side aisles, a basilica plan; Byzantine-style mosaics cover major interior surfaces. Above the nave, artisans made a painted wooden ceiling from stepped, honeycomb-like forms called muqarnas. The chapel was consecrated in 1143, and its architecture and decoration bring together western church planning with Byzantine mosaic and Islamic artistic practices. UNESCO dates nine Arab-Norman buildings across Sicily to 1130–1194, linking the chapel to a wider program of royal and religious construction.
Art, textiles and images
The Bayeux embroidery narrates the events surrounding 1066 through wool on linen. Its linen ground is made from nine panels sewn end to end, extending for about 68 metres. Embroiderers used wool dyed with plants such as woad for blue, madder for red and weld for yellow. Outlines and captions could be worked in stem, chain or split stitch; couching, which fastens laid threads to the cloth with small stitches, filled larger areas. These choices made a long visual sequence that viewers could follow alongside its Latin words. The hanging presents a particular story of the events before and during the conquest. Bishop Odo of Bayeux is a likely commissioner, but the makers are unknown.
A royal textile from Palermo shows how an object could later move between dynasties. Made in 1133–34, the mantle combines silk, gold embroidery and pearls with an Arabic inscription that records its date and royal workshop context. It later entered the treasury of the Hohenstaufen, a German dynasty, and was used in Holy Roman imperial coronations. Its documented later use shows how an object created in the Sicilian court could acquire a new ceremonial role after changing hands.
Writing, chronicles and learning
Books and documents served different purposes. A manuscript began with prepared animal skin, called parchment, cut and ruled to guide the lines. A scribe copied a text from an exemplar, or model manuscript, using ink and a quill; an illuminator could then add colored pictures or gold, and a binder secured the folded sheets. Monasteries kept books for worship and study, while courts and other institutions commissioned histories and practical records.
A request from the 1070s shows bookmaking as a cross-Channel collaboration. Anselm, then prior of Bec in Normandy, asked Maurice, a monk visiting Canterbury in England, to copy Hippocrates’ Aphorisms and its commentary. Anselm also asked to borrow the exemplar from which Maurice would work. Copying therefore depended not only on a trained scribe but on access to a source text and a person able to carry it between religious houses. At Bury St Edmunds in eastern England, a scribe copied the Passionarius, a medical compilation from Salerno in southern Italy, between the late 1110s and 1130s. Twelfth-century readers added notes and medical diagrams in its margins, evidence of continued engagement with the book.
Writers in England used earlier histories to explain the kingdom they inhabited. William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon composed Latin histories in the first half of the twelfth century and drew on Bede’s earlier account of English history. William described his project as repairing a broken chain of historical writing; Henry also reshaped inherited material for his own narrative. Their books preserved earlier accounts while organizing them for readers living under Norman kings. Earlier, at the request of Duke Richard I, Dudo of Saint-Quentin wrote a four-book history around 996–1010. Its second book described Rollo’s negotiations of the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte in 911; later books treated the first Norman dukes.
Writing also served practical administration in Sicily. Arabic documents from Norman and later Hohenstaufen Sicily include estate boundaries, household registers and agreements about property, irrigation and tax obligations. Jeremy Johns describes Greek as the primary administrative language before Roger II’s coronation in 1130; officials used it to register dependent cultivators and describe estate boundaries. Arabic and bilingual documents then reappeared, while Latin gained ground especially after Roger’s death in 1154. The records show clerks and local parties recording specific rights and duties in more than one language, alongside the court’s churches, books and textiles.