Women and the Norman Conquest

IN 1779 William Alexander published what is probably the first history of women in English. The work is in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment tradition of Montesquieu or the Scot Millar in its wide comparative reference; it ranges over ancient and modern societies, civilised and savage. Alexander was interested, like Millar, in the historical changes which had produced change for women; and convinced, like so many eighteenth-century thinkers, that change was a western phenomenon. In his story, the first great change after Rome came with the arrival of the Germans, who gave ‘law and custom to all Europe’ and who brought with them a new view of women. ‘Their women were in many respects of equal and sometimes even greater consideration and consequence than their men’. His sentiments echo those of the French writer Thomas, whom he had certainly read. In 1772 Thomas had begun his essay on the character, manners and spirit of women in different centuries by dividing the world into savages, who oppress as tyrants, orientals, who are driven to oppress due to an excess of love, and the denizens of temperate climates, where less passion allows greater freedom. It was thus from the cold ‘shores of the Baltic and forests of the North’ that the primitive Germans brought to Europe their spirit of gallantry and great respect for women. Both Thomas and Alexander echoed and adapted Tacitus’ classic picture of Germanic women. Tacitus had long since written of the high regard in which the German women were held: of the mothers and wives who urged their sons and husbands to valour, of their inspirational chastity, of the austere frugality of Germanic marriage, of wives whose controlled passions loved the married state itself rather than their husbands.