The idea of the ‘dynasty’ was already important at the time of the early Normans, even before they developed ambitions to conquer England. Early medieval people had a powerful sense of the past, a sense they applied to families, kings and kingdoms, and this sense of history created family identities. They began doing this in western Europe, according to some recent work, around the beginning of the seventh century, when established and powerful families began to take up names for themselves. Where great families and their areas of political power became linked in people’s minds, the idea of the dynasty eventually appeared, although ‘dynasty’ was not a word they used: Latin writers trawled the Bible and the Classics for terms like stirps (stock), genus or domus (family) and origo (descent). But when it came to ennumerating the generations of a dynasty they were able to use the Greek loan-word word ‘genealogy’, which was there to be borrowed from St Jerome’s chapter headings for the Latin Gospels.
‘Dynasty’ and ‘family’ are not quite the same concepts. A dynasty is a type of family, an exalted family which wields hereditary power over a realm. But in some ways a dynasty is no different from any other family: it has a structure of generations and a network of kinship which is comprehended by the medieval term ‘lineage’. Indeed the medieval French word lignage can be translated into English as ‘family’. But ‘lineage’ as it is used today is interpreted as the vertical dimension of family looked at through time, down the generations. The idea of the structure of a family at any one point in time was conveyed by a different medieval French word, parage. When we deal with the Norman ducal and English royal family that we call the ‘Normans’ all these aspects of family need to be borne in mind. But for the most part, the principal concern in this book have been its dynastic and lineal elements.
World History
