Norman London
William Fitz Stephen
109 pages including index
published in 1990

Now here's an interesting little booklet. The meat of it consists on a treatise on Norman London, originally written by one William Fitz Stephen for his Life of Thomas Beckett, sometime before 1183. It's therefore as close an eyewitness account of Norman London as we could ever get. Though interesting, this in itself is not enough to make a book of course. It is therefore partnered by another, more modern essay on the city, written in 1934 by Frank M. Stenton, a renowned historian of Anglo-Saxon England. These two pieces combined from the basis for what's perhaps the most useful feature of the book, the maps of Norman London at the back of it.

There's not really much more to say about Norman London. It's an informative little booklet, but nothing more than that. What's more, as the Stenton essay is more than seventy years old, it can't help but be outdated, as new insights, more archaeological research and new theories will have altered our views of the period. I don't think this would give a good picture of what we thought the Norman city looked like anymore. But this doesn't make it worthless, if only because it still includes that eyewitness account of London, one of the few if not the only one we have of London at that particular point in time. The Stenton essay on the other hand is more of interest now for its own inherent historical value than for its accuracy.

Fitz Stephen's depiction of London is that of the civic booster, the Londoner proud of his city, painting a rosy picture of the daily life of its inhabitants. It's written with a naive enthusiasm, which is tempered by Stenton's much more business-like summing up of what the city of London was like around 1100. His picture is based on not just Fitz Stephen's account of course, but other sources as well, combined with archaeological research. So yeah, I bought this for a couple of euro on a book fair and read it in about an hour. An interesting curiosity, great to get a quick picture of Norman London, if not perhaps the most up to date picture.