From Sicily to Sussex: What the Normans did for us
A trip to Sicily prompted Pamela Goodman to detour to Durham, a few weeks later: 'an unlikely pairing of cities sharing an unlikely historical overlap.'
We had time to kill the other day on the long drive north from London to Edinburgh, so we detoured via Durham to revisit the cathedral there. I am neither a great churchgoer, nor a great architectural historian, but, as I suspect many do, I experience a humbling sense of awe in the religious bastions of our blessed isle.
Once, on a day-long walk in the company of Dr Guy Hayward of the British Pilgrimage Trust, I found myself marvelling at the exquisite medieval stained-glass windows in Great Malvern Priory, prostrating my body in submission against the north wall of the pretty country church in Powick and holding back the tears as Guy sang an ancient Anglo-Saxon chant to St Wulfstan in the crypt of Worcester Cathedral. It was strange and stirring stuff — particularly for an agnostic such as me — falling only just short of the same profound wonder that always envelops me on entering Durham Cathedral. This monumental building, started in 1093, six years after the death of William the Conqueror, is perhaps the greatest of all Norman architectural legacies in England, the scale and solidity of its massive structure (quite apart from the detail within) a formidable message of control from the country’s new dynasty.
The conquering Normans sent out a monumental message in the form of buildings such as Durham Cathedral.
My detour to Durham, however, had also been prompted by a trip a few weeks before to Sicily’s great capital, Palermo — an unlikely pairing of cities sharing an unlikely historical overlap. As William was busy flinging arrows around in Hastings and beyond, another Norman conquest was taking place in Sicily, this one at the hands of Roger, a distant cousin of William’s from the same Norman lineage.
After battling away for 30 years between 1061 and 1091, Roger finally defeated Sicily’s Muslim rulers and was declared the island’s first Grand Count, passing this mantle on in due course to his son, Roger number two, who, in 1130, was finally crowned King of Sicily. A couple of years later, as work on Durham Cathedral was nearing completion, Roger II gave the go-ahead for the construction of the Capella Palatina, a private chapel within Palermo’s aptly named Palazzo dei Normanni, the oldest royal residence in Europe.
The Norman conquerors could not have presided over two more different kingdoms or ruled in more different ways. William took the brute-force route, establishing himself as a ruthless commander, flexing his military might at every opportunity and cutting no slack for the poor Anglo-Saxons he had conquered. Roger II, meanwhile, aesthete and intellectual, embraced Sicily’s multicultural population and promoted religious tolerance among his predominantly Muslim, Christian and Jewish subjects. Certainly, standing within the Chapel’s glittering, gold interior, it is hard to imagine that, as the Crusades were raging the length and breadth of the Levant, here in Sicily Christians and Muslims were living and working together in harmony.
Like the men, so, too, their architectural legacies: Durham’s Norman masterpiece and Palermo’s Arab-Norman extravaganza could not encapsulate the gulf between these two strands of the same family more precisely. On the one hand, a majestic, Romanesque behemoth, its mighty, chevron-striped columns and ribbed stone vaulting pioneering the best of north European engineering; on the other, an intimate, Mediterranean jewel box elaborately fusing three great civilisations under one roof in the gold mosaics of Byzantium, the Arabic carvings of Islam and the storytelling of Christianity. Stylistically worlds apart yet both, in their own way, symbols of the power of their Norman conquerors.
This feature originally appeared in the January 7, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
