Norman yoke

"[2] The culturally freighted term of a "Norman yoke" first appears in an apocryphal work published in 1642 during the English Civil War, 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.

[3] Even though it would have been obvious to anyone living in the fourteenth century that the book was a work of fiction, at the time of its publication in 1642, The Mirror of Justices was presented and accepted as historical fact.

The idea of the Norman yoke characterized the nobility and gentry of England as the descendants of foreign usurpers who had destroyed an Anglo-Saxon golden age.

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.

[4] By the 19th century the Norman yoke lost whatever historical significance it may have had and was no longer a "red flag" in political debate, but it still carried its popular-history usefulness, conjuring up an imagined Anglo-Saxon golden-age England - Sir Walter Scott in his novel Ivanhoe (1819) puts a "Saxon proverb" into the mouth of Wamba (Ch.

[8]Fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien, who was also a professor of Anglo-Saxon studies, is thought to have been influenced by the theory, especially in his "lost rural idyll" depiction of the Hobbits in the Lord of the Rings.