太田述正コラム#15342（2025.11.29）
＜Morris, Marc『The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England』を読む（その29）＞（2026.2.23公開）

　「・・・Of the thousand or so individuals who held their lands directly from the king in 1086, only thirteen were English. All the rest were foreign newcomers.・・・

⇒その家族も含めて、ノルマン人ウン万人がイギリスの新しい上澄みなったということですね。（太田）

　・・・during his reign the unfree population fell by a quarter, and by the mid-twelfth century it had dwindled to almost nothing.
‘In this respect,’ wrote one chronicler in the 1130s, ‘the English found foreigners treated them better than they had treated themselves.’

⇒ノルマン人達がイギリスで奴隷解放をやったというのは面白い。（太田）

　In a similar fashion, the Normans ended the culture of political killing that had prevailed in England prior to the Conquest. For all their savagery in warfare, William and his followers were chivalrous in their treatment of defeated enemies, preferring to imprison them, and sometimes to release them in exchange for ransom. Bloody purges of the kind carried out at the courts of Æthelred and Cnut were not repeated after 1066, and were not heard of again until the fourteenth century.

⇒この観点から14世紀に何があったかは、恐らく、その前半のエドワード２世
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_II_of_England
の治世中の話なのでしょうが、将来、究明することにしましょう。（太田）

　As these more benign aspects of the Conquest suggest, the Normans had to a large extent transcended their viking roots. When their distant ancestors had attacked and invaded England in earlier centuries, they had spared nothing, torching churches and rounding up slaves in their lust for blood and plunder. The Normans were equally avaricious, and had the same aptitude for violence, but their appetite for destruction was less wanton.・・・
　The claim that they invented representative government because their kings held large assemblies ignores the fact that other rulers in contemporary Europe did the same. The belief that they were pioneering in their love of freedom requires us to forget that their nearest continental neighbours called themselves the Franks – that is, the free people.・・・

⇒このあたりは、イギリス人らしい韜晦である、と、言うべきでしょう。
　「議会」は、ヴァイキングを含むゲルマン人諸部族共通にその萌芽が見られたところ、その権限が着実に増えて行ったのはイギリスにおいてだけ（典拠省略）である以上、アングロサクソン時代にその礎が築かれた、と、見るべきですし、仮にフランク人が自由人を意味したというのが本当のことだったとしても（注46）、実態がどうであったのかが問題なわけであり、恐らく「自由」な実態などなかったと思われます。（太田）

　（注46）franque/francの意味は多岐にわたるが、少なくとも、現在では、libre（free）が中心的な意味では全くなく、
https://translate.google.co.jp/details?sl=auto&tl=en&text=Franque&op=translate&hl=ja
従ってフランク王国時代においてもそうであったとは考えにくい。

　The head of the English Church is still based at Canterbury because it was the principal city of King Æthelberht when he welcomed St Augustine over 1,400 years ago. Westminster is the political heart of the kingdom because Edward the Confessor added a royal palace when he rebuilt its ancient abbey. The shires of England, although tinkered with in the late twentieth century, are essentially the same as they were at the time of their creation more than 1,000 years ago. Most English villages can boast that they are first mentioned in Domesday Book, but their names often indicate a history that began centuries earlier. Woodnesborough in Kent, near to the fifth-century burial ground at Finglesham, preserves the memory of the pagan god Woden, and hence a story that stretches all the way back to the pre-Christian past. The fact that so much of this is unchanged is remarkable. Roman Britannia, despite the grandeur of its ruins, lasted barely 400 years, and was over by the mid-fifth century. England is still a work in progress.・・・」（404～407）

（完）