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The Norman yoke refers to the oppressive aspects of feudalism in England attributed to the impositions of William the Conqueror, his retainers and their descendants. The term was used in English nationalist discourse in the mid-17th century. == History == The medieval chronicler Orderic Vitalis believed that the Normans had imposed a yoke on the English: "And so the English groaned aloud for their lost liberty and plotted ceaselessly to find some way of shaking off a yoke that was so intolerable and unaccustomed".〔((BBC) Mike Ibeji, "The Conquest and its Aftermath" )〕 The culturally freighted term of a "Norman yoke" first appears in an apocryphal work published in 1642 during the English Revolution, under the title ''The Mirror of Justices''; the book was a translation of ''Mireur a justices'', a collection of 13th century political, legal, and moral fables, written in Anglo-Norman French, thought to have been compiled and edited in the early 14th century by renowned legal scholar Andrew Horn.〔"... that apocryphal work ''The Mirror of Justices,'' which, mainly through the influence of Coke, was long regarded as a serious authority on law" ((''Cambridge History of English and American Literature'', vol. VIII, section xiii.8 )). The ''Mirror of Justices'' was republished by the Selden Society, vol. 7, 1893, W.J. Whittaker, editor; it is one of the sources for Anglo-Norman Law French that was used to compile (''The Anglo-Norman Dictionary'' ), using a (manuscript of the first third of the fourteenth century ) at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The ''Mireur a justices'' introduced the anecdote of King Alfred absent-mindedly burning the cakes.〕 Even though the book was obviously a work of fiction—obvious to anyone living in the fourteenth century—at the time of its publication in 1642 it was presented, and accepted, as historical fact. ''The Norman Yoke'' had enough truth in it to be useful. Frequently, critics following the Norman Yoke model would claim Alfred the Great or Edward the Confessor as models of justice. In this context, Magna Carta is seen as an attempt to restore pre-conquest English rights, if only for the gentry. When Sir Edward Coke reorganized the English legal system, he was keen to claim that the grounds of English common law were beyond the memory or register of any beginning and pre-existed the Norman conquest, although he did not use the phrase "Norman Yoke". The idea of the Norman Yoke characterized the nobility and gentry of England as the descendants of foreign usurpers who had destroyed a Saxon golden age. Such a reading was an extremely powerful myth for the poor and excluded classes of England. Whereas Coke, John Pym, Lucy Hutchinson and Sir Henry Vane saw Magna Carta rights as being primarily those of the propertied classes, during the prolonged 17th-century constitutional crisis in England and Scotland, the arguments were also taken up in a more radical way by the likes of Francis Trigge, John Hare, John Lilburne, John Warr and Gerrard Winstanley of the radical Diggers even calling for an end to primogeniture and for the cultivation of the soil in common. "Seeing the common people of England by joynt consent of person and purse have caste out Charles our Norman oppressour, wee have by this victory recovered ourselves from under his Norman yoake." wrote Winstanley on behalf of the Diggers, in December 1649. In ''The True Levellers Standard Advanced'' Winstanley begins: :O what mighty Delusion, do you, who are the powers of England live in! That while you pretend to throw down that Norman yoke, and Babylonish power, and have promised to make the groaning people of England a Free People; yet you still lift up that Norman yoke, and slavish Tyranny, and holds the People as much in bondage, as the Bastard Conquerour himself, and his Councel of War. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Norman yoke」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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