Earlier this year a town near me had a weekend festival with a French theme – French food, music, dancing and family games. There was no particular historical angle, but among the entertainment on offer was a group of medieval re-enactors, and appropriately for the theme they were representing Normans. Alongside Norman knights, there were priests, scribes and craftspeople giving demonstrations throughout the day.

Part of what they chose to re-enact, for the amusement of a casual festival audience, was a 12th-century Norman law court. This struck me as a novel and rather bold choice. Are vignettes from the Anglo-Norman legal system really a lively enough topic to entertain a family crowd on a Saturday afternoon?

In fact, it worked very well. Wisely – if anachronistically – the disputes were conducted entirely in English. A sprinkling of legal Anglo-Norman might have been a bit much for even the keenest audience, though to this day it is technically one of Britain’s official languages of government, still heard in Parliament on ceremonial occasions. A substantial amount of English legal vocabulary – such as judge, jury, court, evidence, plea – is a legacy of Norman French influence, so it is a significant part of our history.

As might have been expected, on this occasion the formal proceedings of pleading and judgment quickly devolved into more crowd-pleasing spectacles, such as a raucous trial by combat. The audience wanted to see justice done, so the surly and corrupt overlords were outsmarted by the tenants they had wronged, and everyone went away happy. (Tenant – there’s another word from legal Norman French.)

I enjoyed the novelty of this, not just because a medieval law court made an original subject for a dramatic re-enactment, but also because it felt unusual to see Normans presented so sympathetically. The 12th century does not really form part of the standard fare for festivals and public events with a historical flavour; you regularly meet Roman re-enactors, Anglo-Saxons, Tudors, Roundheads and Cavaliers, but not friendly Normans.

The Normans can be a difficult sell. The blunt truth is that people might find them interesting, but not many people really like them. (Try a Google search: ‘I love the Romans’ returns many pages of results; ‘I love the Normans’ gets one.) There’s a long tradition of casting the Normans as the bad guys of British history – powerful and impressive, maybe, but not sympathetic. Most of us like to identify with the underdog, and in British history that usually means the non-Norman. From Guy of Gisbourne to Draco Malfoy, a Norman name is a marker of an aristocratic villain.

Of course this is the lingering effect of the popular idea of the ‘Norman yoke’, which (with some justice) frames them as an oppressive social elite, imposing their power on unwilling lower-class subjects. Historians may talk about the Normans’ military tactics, their sophisticated art and literature, or their architectural legacy – but the one thing anyone in Britain knows about the Normans, if nothing else, is that they were conquerors, and that’s not a good look. But then, so were the Vikings and the Romans – just as ruthless, violent and foreign as the Normans from a British perspective – and people seem to like them just fine.

So these re-enactors were doing something interesting, intentionally or not, by presenting the Normans on their own terms rather than as the villains of the story. I was expecting a plucky Saxon to be the one to challenge the Norman baron in court, as the usual narrative goes, but it was Normans on both sides – sympathetic and unsympathetic, just like in real life.

Varying these established scripts is a challenge in many periods of history, not only the 12th century. Historians and heritage professionals are constantly trying to offer new and more nuanced versions of familiar narratives about the past, bringing overlooked and marginalised perspectives into the light, rather than just telling the same stories which have always been told. It can feel like rowing against the tide: you will get pushback if you deviate too far from historical interpretations which have been common knowledge for centuries, or try to reverse well-established legends of heroes and villains.

Still, it is much more fun and interesting to flip the script and to find ways of extending sympathy to historical figures, groups or periods outside of the norm. If you can get a festival crowd in Britain cheering along for Norman barons, anything seems worth trying.

Eleanor Parker is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford and the author of Conquered: The Last Children of Anglo-Saxon England (Bloomsbury, 2022).