Normans

duke of Normandy, who became king of England upon the success of what is now known as the Norman Conquest. Early in the 11th century Norman adventurers also began a somewhat more prolonged and haphazard migration to southern Italy and Sicily, where they served the local nobility as mercenaries fighting the Arabs and the Byzantines. As more Normans arrived, they carved out small principalities for themselves from their former employers.

History of Norman

of Tancred de Hauteville, who established their rule over the southern Italian regions of Calabria and Puglia (Apulia) in the 1050s and over Sicily in the following decades. Their possessions were amalgamated by Roger II, a grandson of Tancred, in the early 12th century as the kingdom of Sicily, whose rulers retained a basically Norman character until the last decades of that century.

History of Norman

Europe and the Near East. The Normans were famed for their martial spirit and eventually for their Catholic piety becoming exponents of the Catholic orthodoxy of the Romance community into which they assimilated. They adopted the Gallo-Romance language of the Frankish land they settled, their dialect becoming known as Norman, Normaund or Norman French, an important literary language which is still spoken today in parts of Normandy and the nearby Channel Islands. The Duchy of Normandy, which they formed by treaty with the French crown, was a great fief of medieval France, and under Richard I of Normandy was forged into a cohesive and formidable principality in feudal tenure. By the end of the reign of Richard I of Normandy in 996 (aka Richard the Fearless / Richard sans Peur), all descendants of Vikings became, according to Cambridge Medieval History 'not only Christians but in all essentials Frenchmen.

History of Norman

dead, Romanticized, Piety

The Norman dynasty

Normans became masters in the use of the simple yet enormously effective motte-and-bailey castle-a mound (motte) topped by a timber palisade and tower, surrounded by a ditched and palisaded enclosure (bailey). These little fortifications, which were complementary to the warfare conducted in open country by small units of cavalry, became the hallmark of Norman penetration and conquest. Again, although the Normans were at first novices and imitators in the practice of fighting on horseback, they soon became masters of cavalry warfare as it was then practiced in continental Europe.

Motte-and-bailey castle in Norman