Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Superscripts
are indicated by caret symbols, such as ^e or ^{er}. Additional notes
will be found near the end of this ebook.
THE NORMANS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY
THE NORMANS IN
EUROPEAN HISTORY
BY
CHARLES HOMER HASKINS
GURNEY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY CHARLES HOMER HASKINS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE
THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM
_Published October 1915_
TO MY WIFE
PREFACE
The eight lectures which are here published were delivered before the
Lowell Institute in February, 1915, and at the University of California
the following July, and it has seemed best to print them in the form
in which they were prepared for a general audience. Their purpose is
not so much to furnish an outline of the annals of Norman history as
to place the Normans in relation to their time and to indicate the
larger features of their work as founders and organizers of states and
contributors to European culture. Biographical and narrative detail
has accordingly been subordinated in the effort to give a general view
of Norman achievement in France, in England, and in Italy. Various
aspects of Norman history have been treated with considerable fullness
by historians, but, so far as I am aware, no connected account of the
whole subject has yet been attempted from this point of view. This
fact, it is hoped, may justify the publication of these lectures, as
well as explain the omission of many topics which would naturally be
treated in an extended narrative.
This book rests partly upon the writings of the various scholars
enumerated in the bibliographical note at the end of each chapter,
partly upon prolonged personal investigations, the results of which
have appeared in various special periodicals and will, in part, soon be
collected into a volume of _Studies in Norman Institutions_. When it
seemed appropriate in the text, I have felt at liberty to draw freely
upon the more general portions of these articles, leaving more special
and critical problems for discussion elsewhere.
I wish to thank the authorities of the Lowell Institute and the
University of California, and to acknowledge helpful criticism from
my colleague Professor William S. Ferguson and from Mr. George W.
Robinson, Secretary of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of
Harvard University. My indebtedness to Norman scholars and Norman
scholarship is deeper and more personal than any list of their names
and writings can indicate.
CHARLES H. HASKINS.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
_August, 1915._
CONTENTS
I. NORMANDY AND ITS PLACE IN HISTORY 1
II. THE COMING OF THE NORTHMEN 26
III. NORMANDY AND ENGLAND 52
IV. THE NORMAN EMPIRE 85
V. NORMANDY AND FRANCE 116
VI. NORMAN LIFE AND CULTURE 148
VII. THE NORMANS IN THE SOUTH 192
VIII. THE NORMAN KINGDOM OF SICILY 218
INDEX 251
THE NORMANS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY
I
NORMANDY AND ITS PLACE IN HISTORY
In June, 1911, at Rouen, Normandy celebrated the one-thousandth
anniversary of its existence. Decorated with the grace and simplicity
of which only a French city is capable, the Norman capital received
with equal cordiality the descendants of the conquerors and the
conquered--Norwegians and Swedes, Danes of Denmark and Danes of
Iceland, Normans of Normandy and of England, of Sicily and of Canada.
Four Norwegian students accomplished the journey from their native
fjords in an open Viking boat, having set ashore early in the voyage a
comrade who had so far fallen away from the customs of his ancestors as
to sleep under a blanket. From the United States bold Scandinavians,
aided by the American Express Company, brought from Minnesota the
Kensington rune stone, which purports to prove the presence of Norse
explorers in the northwest one hundred and thirty years before the
landfall of Columbus. A congress of Norman history listened for nearly
a week in five simultaneous sections to communications on every phase
of the Norman past. There was Norman music in the streets, there
were Norman plays at the theatres, Norman mysteries in the cathedral
close. Banquet followed banquet and toast followed toast, till the
cider of Normandy paled before the champagne of France. Finally a great
pageant, starting, like the city, from the river-bank, unrolled the
vast panorama of Norman history through streets whose very names reëcho
its great figures--Rollo and his Norse companions arriving in their
Viking ships, the dukes his successors, William Longsword, Richard the
Fearless, Robert the Magnificent, William the Conqueror, the sons of
Tancred of Hauteville who drove the paynim from Sicily, and that other
Tancred who planted the banner of the cross on the walls of Jerusalem,
all with their knights and heralds and men at arms, followed by another
pageant of the achievements of Normandy in the arts of peace. And on
the last evening the great abbey-church of Saint-Ouen burnt red fire
for the first time in its history till the whole mass glowed and every
statue and storied niche stood out with some clear, sharp bit of the
Norman past, while its lantern-tower, “the crown of Normandy,” shone
out over the city and the river which are the centre of Norman history
and where this day the dukes wore again their crown.
In this transitory world the thousandth anniversary of anything is
sufficiently rare to challenge attention, even in an age which is
rapidly becoming hardened to celebrations. Of the events commemorated
in 1915 the discovery of the Pacific is only four hundred years
old, the signing of the Great Charter but seven hundred. The oldest
American university has celebrated only its two hundred and fiftieth
anniversary, the oldest European only its eight-hundredth. Even those
infrequent commemorations which carry us back a thousand years or
more, like the millenary of King Alfred or the sixteen-hundredth
Constantinian jubilee of 1913, are usually reminders of great men or
great events rather than, as in the case of Normandy, the completion of
a millennium of continuous historical development. So far as I can now
recollect, the only parallel is that of Iceland, which rounded out its
thousand years with the dignity of a new constitution in 1874. Of about
the same age, Iceland also resembles Normandy in being the creation
of the Norse sea-rovers, an outpost of the Vikings in the west, as
Normandy was an outpost in the south. Of the two, Iceland is perhaps
the more individual, as it certainly has been the more faithful to its
Scandinavian traditions, but the conditions which have enabled it to
retain its early characteristics have also isolated it from the broader
currents of the world’s history. Normandy, on the other hand, was drawn
at once into the full tide of European politics and became itself a
founder of new states, an imperial power, a colonizer of lands beyond
the seas, the mother of a greater Normandy in England, in Sicily, and
in America.
At home and abroad the history of Normandy is a record of rich and
varied achievement--of war and conquest and feats of arms, but also
of law and government and religion, of agriculture, industry, trade,
and exploration, of literature and science and art. It takes us
back to Rollo and William of the Long Sword, to the Vikings and the
Crusaders, to the conquerors of England and Sicily, to masterful
prelates of the feudal age like Odo of Bayeux and Thomas Becket; it
brings us down to the admirals and men of art and letters of the
_Grand Siècle_,--Tourville and DuQuesne, Poussin, Malherbe, and the
great Corneille,--to Charlotte Corday and the days of the Terror, and
to the painters and scholars and men of letters of the nineteenth
century,--Géricault and Millet, Laplace and Léopold Delisle, Flaubert
and Maupassant and Albert Sorel. It traces the laborious clearing of
ancient forests, the rude processes of primitive agriculture, the
making of Norman cider and the breeding of the Norman horse, the
vicissitudes of trade in fish and marten-skins, in pottery, cheap
cottons, and strong waters, the development of a centre of fashion like
Trouville or centres of war and commerce like Cherbourg and Havre.
It describes the slow building of monasteries and cathedrals and the
patient labors of priests and monks, as well as the conquest of the
Canaries, the colonization of Canada, and the exploration of the
Great West. A thousand years of such history are well worth a week of
commemoration and retrospect.
To the American traveller who wends his way toward Paris from
Cherbourg, Havre, or Dieppe, the first impression of Normandy is that
of a country strikingly like England. There are the same high chalk
cliffs, the same “little grey church on the windy shore,” often the
same orchards and hedges, poppies and roses. There are trees and
wide stretches of forest as in few other parts of France, placid,
full-brimmed rivers and quiet countrysides, and everywhere the rich
green of meadow and park and pasture, that vivid green of the north
which made Alphonse Daudet at Oxford shudder, “Green rheumatism,” as
he thought of the sun-browned plains and sharp, bare hills of his
own Provence. Normandy is brighter than England, with a dash more
of color in the landscape, but its skies are not sunny and its air
breathes the mists of the sea and the chill of the north. There is a
grey tone also, of grey towns and grey sea, matched by an austere and
sombre element in the Norman character, which, if it does not take
its pleasures sadly after the manner of Taine’s Englishmen, is prone
to take them soberly, and by an element of melancholy, a sense of _le
glas des choses mortes_, which Flaubert called the melancholy of the
northern barbarians. The Norman landscape also gives us the feeling
of finish and repose and the sentiment of a rich past, not merely in
the obvious externals of crumbling wall and ivied tower, but in that
deeper sense of a people bound from immemorial antiquity to the soil,
adapted to every local difference through long generations of use and
wont, in an intimate union of man and nature which makes the Norman
inseparable from his land. All this, too, is English, but English with
a difference. Just as, in Henry James’s phrase, the English landscape
is a landlord’s landscape, and the French a peasant’s, so the _mairie_
and the _préfecture_, the public garden and the public band, the café
and the ever-open church, the workman’s _blouse_ and the grandam’s
_bonnet_, remind us continually that we are in a Latin country and on
our way to Paris.
Now the history of Normandy reflects this twofold impression of the
traveller: it faces toward England and the sea, but it belongs to
France and the land. Open to the outer world by the great valley of
the Seine and the bays and inlets of its long coast-line, Normandy was
never drawn to the sea in the same degree as its neighbor Brittany,
nor isolated in any such measure from the life of the Continent. Where
the shore is low, meadow and field run to the water’s edge; where it
is high, its line is relatively little broken, so that the streams
generally rush to the sea down short, steep valleys, up which wheeze
the trains which connect the little seaside ports and watering-places
with the modern world within. In spite of the trade of its rivers
and its ports, in spite of the growth of industry along its streams,
Normandy is still primarily an agricultural country, rooted deep in
the rich soil of an ancient past, a country of horses and cattle,
of butter and cheese and cider and the kindly fruits of the earth;
and the continuity of its history rests upon the land itself. “Behind
the shore and even upon it,” says Vidal de la Blache, “the ancient
cumulative force of the interior has reacted against the sea. There an
old and rich civilization has subsisted in its entirety, founded on
the soil, through whose power have resisted and endured the speech,
the traditions, and the peoples of ancient times.”[1] Conquered and
colonized by the sea-rovers of the north, the land of Normandy was able
to absorb its conquerors into the law, the language, the religion,
and the culture of France, where, as Sorel says, their descendants
now preserve “their attachment to their native soil, the love of
their ancestors, the respect for the ruins of the past, and the
indestructible veneration for its tombs.”[2]
If the character of Normandy is thus in considerable measure determined
by geography, its boundaries and even its internal unity are chiefly
the result of history. For good and ill, Normandy has, on the land
side, no natural frontiers. The hills of the west continue those
of Brittany, the plains of the east merge in those of Picardy. The
watershed of the south marks no clear-cut boundary from Maine and
Perche; the valleys of the Seine and the Eure lead straight to the
Ile-de-France, separated from Normandy only by those border fortresses
of the Avre and the Vexin which are the perpetual battle-ground of
Norman history--Normandy’s Alsace-Lorraine! Within these limits lie two
distinct physiographic areas, one the lower portion of the Paris basin,
the other a western region which belongs with Brittany and the west of
France. These districts are commonly distinguished as Upper and Lower
Normandy, terms consecrated by long use and representing two contrasted
regions and types, but there is no general agreement as to their exact
limits or the limits of the region of Middle Normandy which some have
placed between them. Even the attempt to define these areas in terms
of cheese--as the land respectively of the creamy Neufchâtel, the
resilient Pont-l’Évêque, and the flowing Camembert--is defective from
the point of view of geographical accuracy!
The most distinctive parts of Upper Normandy are the valley of the
Seine and the region to the north and east, the _pays de Caux_,
fringed by the coast from Havre to the frontier of Picardy. Less
monotonous than the bare plains farther east, the plateau of Caux is
covered by a rich vegetation, broken by scattered farmsteads, where
house and orchard and outbuildings are protected from the wind by
those rectangular earthworks surmounted by trees which are the most
characteristic feature of the region. It is the country of _Madame
Bovary_ and of Maupassant’s peasants. Equally typical is the valley of
the Seine, ample, majestic, slow, cutting its sinuous way through high
banks which grow higher as we approach the sea, winding around ancient
strongholds like Château Gaillard and Tancarville or ruined abbeys like
Jumièges and Saint-Wandrille,--where Maeterlinck’s bees still hum in
the garden,--catching the tide soon after it enters Normandy, reaching
deep water at Rouen, and meeting the “longed-for dash of waves” in the
great estuary at its mouth. Halfway from the Norman frontier to the
river’s end stands Rouen, mistress of the Seine and capital, not only
of Upper Normandy, but of the whole Norman land. Celtic in name and
origin, like most French cities, chief town of the Roman province of
_Lugdunensis Secunda_ and of the ecclesiastical province to which this
gave rise, the political and commercial importance of Rouen have made
it also the principal city of mediæval and modern Normandy and the seat
of the changing political authority to which the land has bowed. As
early as the twelfth century it is one of the famous cities of Europe,
likened to Rome by local poets and celebrated even by sober historians
for its murmuring streams and pleasant meadows, its hill-girt site
and strong defences, its beautiful churches and private dwellings,
its well-stocked markets, and its extensive foreign trade. In spite
of all modern changes, Rouen is still a city full of history, in the
parchments of its archives and the stones of its walls, in its stately
cathedral with the ancient tombs of the Norman dukes, in the glorious
nave of its great abbey-church, the florid Gothic of Saint-Maclou, the
richly carved perpendicular of its Palace of Justice, and its splendid
façades of the French Renaissance; historic also in those unbuilt spots
which mark the landing of the Northmen and the burning of Joan of Arc.
Lower Normandy shows greater variety, comprising the hilly country of
the Bocage,--the so-called Norman Switzerland,--the plain of Caen and
the pasture-lands of the Bessin, and the wide sweep of the Atlantic
coast-line, from the promontory of La Hague to the shifting sands of
the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel. It is a country of green fields and
orchards and sunken lanes, of dank parks and mouldering châteaux, of
deserted mills and ancient parish churches, of quaint timbered houses
and long village streets, of silent streams, small ports, and pebbly
beaches, the whole merging ultimately in the neighboring lands of
Brittany and Maine. Its typical places are Falaise, Vire, and Argentan,
with their ancient castles of the Norman dukes; Bayeux and Coutances,
the foundations of whose soaring cathedrals carry us back to the
princely prelates of the Conquest; provincial capitals of the Old
Régime, like Valognes, or the new, like Saint-Lô; and best of all, the
crowning glories of the marvel of Mont-Saint-Michel. Its chief town is
Caen, stern and grey, the heart of Normandy as Rouen is its head, an
old poet tells us; no ancient Roman capital, but the creation of the
mediæval dukes, who reared its great abbey-churches to commemorate the
marriage and the piety of William the Conqueror and Matilda, and who
established their exchequer in its castle; an intellectual centre also,
the seat of the only Norman university, of an academy, and of a society
of antiquaries which has recovered for us great portions of the Norman
past.
Fashioned and enriched by the hand of man, the land of Normandy has in
turn profoundly influenced the character of its inhabitants. First and
foremost, the Norman is a peasant, industrious, tenacious, cautious,
secretive, distrustful of strangers, close-fisted, shrewd, even to
the point of cunning, a hard man at a bargain, eager for gain, but
with the genius for small affairs rather than for great, for labor and
economy rather than enterprise and daring. Suspicious of novelty, he
is a conservative in politics with a high regard for vested interests.
The possession of property, especially landed property, is his great
ambition; and since, as St. Francis long ago reminded us, property is
the sower of strife and suits at law, he is by nature litigious and
lawyerly. There is a well-known passage of Michelet which describes
the Norman peasant on his return from the fields explaining the Civil
Code to his attentive children; Racine, who immortalized Chicaneau in
his _Plaideurs_, laid the scene in a town of Lower Normandy. Even in
his time this was no new trait, for the fondness for legal form and
chicane can be traced in the early days of the _Coutume de Normandie_,
while the _Burnt Njal Saga_ shows us the love of lawsuits and fine
points of procedure full-blown among the Northmen of primitive
Iceland. If Normandy is the _pays de gain_, it is also the _pays de
sapience_. Hard-headed and practical, the Norman is not an idealist or
a mystic; even his religion has a practical flavor, and the Bretons
are wont to assert that there has never been a Norman saint. With
the verse of Corneille and the splendid monuments of Romanesque and
Gothic architecture before us, no one can accuse the Normans of lack
of artistic sense, yet here, too, the Norman imagination is inclined
to be restrained and severe, realistic rather than romantic. Its
typical modern writers are Flaubert and Maupassant; its typical
painter is Millet, choosing his scenes from Barbizon, but loyal to
the peasant types of his native Normandy. Indeed Henry Adams insists
that Flaubert’s style, exact, impersonal, austere, is singularly like
that of those great works of Norman Romanesque, the old tower of Rouen
cathedral and St. Stephen’s abbey at Caen, and shows us “how an old art
transmutes itself into a new one, without changing its methods.”[3]
In history, a field in which the Norman attachment to the past has
produced notable results, the distinguishing qualities of Norman work
have been acute criticism and great erudition rather than brilliant
imagination. In science, when a great Norman like Laplace discovered
the nebular hypothesis, he relegated it to a note in the appendix to
his ordered and systematic treatise on the motions of the heavenly
bodies. The Norman mind is neither nebular nor hypothetical!
The land is not the whole of nature’s gift to Normandy; we must also
take account of the sea, of those who came by sea and those who went
down to the sea in ships; and history tells us of another type of
Norman, those giants of an elder day who, as one of their descendants
has said, “found the seas too narrow and the land too tame.” The
men who subdued England and Sicily, who discovered the Canaries and
penetrated to the Mississippi, who colonized Quebec and ruled the Isle
of France, were no stay-at-homes, no cautious landsmen interested in
boundaries and inheritances and vain strivings about the law. Warriors
and adventurers in untamed lands and upon uncharted seas, they were
organizers of states and rulers of peoples, and it is their work which
gives Normandy its chief claim upon the attention of the student of
general history. These are the Normans of history and the Normans
of romance. Listen to the earliest characterizations of them which
have reached us from the south, as a monk of the eleventh century,
Aimé of Monte Cassino, sets out to recount the deeds of the southern
Normans, _fortissime gent_ who have spread themselves over the earth,
ever leaving small things to acquire greater, unwilling to serve, but
seeking to have every one in subjection;[4] or as his contemporary,
Geoffrey Malaterra, himself very likely of Norman origin, describes
this cunning and revengeful race, despising their own inheritance in
the hope of winning a greater elsewhere, eager for gain and eager for
power, quick to imitate whatever they see, at once lavish and greedy;
given to hunting and hawking and delighting in horses and accoutrements
and fine clothing, yet ready when occasion demands to bear labor and
hunger and cold; skilful in flattery and the use of fine words, but
unbridled unless held down firmly by the yoke of justice.[5] Turn
then to the northern writers of the following century: William of
Malmesbury, who describes the fierce onslaughts of the Normans, inured
to war and scarcely able to live without it, their stratagems and
breaches of faith and their envy of both equals and superiors;[6] or
the English monk Ordericus, who spent his life among them in Normandy
and who says:--
The race of the Normans is unconquered and ready for any wild deed
unless restrained by a strong ruler. In whatever gathering they
find themselves they always seek to dominate, and in the heat of
their ambition they are often led to violate their obligations. All
this the French and Bretons and Flemings and other neighbors have
frequently felt; this the Italians and the Lombards, the Angles and
Saxons, have also learned to their undoing.[7]
A little later it is the Norman poet Wace who tells, through the mouth
of the dying William the Conqueror, of these same Normans--brave and
valiant and conquering, proud and boastful and fond of good cheer,
hard to control and needing to be kept under foot by their rulers.[8]
Through all these accounts runs the same story of a high-spirited,
masterful, unscrupulous race, eager for danger and ready for every
adventure, and needing always the bit and bridle rather than the spur.
The contrast is not merely between the eleventh century and the
twentieth, between a lawless race of pioneers and a race subdued and
softened by generations of order and peace; the two types are present
in the early days of Norman history. Among the conquerors of England
a recent historian distinguishes “the great soldiers of the invading
host ... equally remarkable for foresight in council and for headlong
courage in the hour of action, whose wits are sharpened by danger and
whose resolution is only stimulated by obstacles; incapable of peaceful
industry but willing to prepare themselves for war and rapine by the
most laborious apprenticeship”; and over against them “the politicians
... cautious, plausible, deliberate, with an immense capacity for
detail, and an innate liking for routine; conscious in a manner of
their moral obligations, but mainly concerned with small economies
and gains; limited in their horizon, but quick to recognise superior
powers and to use them for their own objects; indifferent for their
own part to high ideals, and yet respectful to idealists; altogether a
hard-headed, heavy-handed, laborious and tenacious type of men.”[9]
These contrasting types of life and character it is tempting to refer
to the respective influences of land and water, to the differences
between the peasant and the rider to the sea. One might even attempt a
philosophy of Norman history somewhat on this wise. In its normal and
undisturbed state Normandy is a part of France, in its life as in its
geography, and as such it shows only the ordinary local differences
from the rest of the French lands. So it was under the Romans, so
under the Franks. At the beginning of the tenth century the coming
of the Northmen introduces a new element which develops relations
with the sea and the countries beyond the sea, with Scandinavia and
later with the British Isles. Normandy ceases to be provincial, it
almost ceases to be French; it even becomes the centre of an Atlantic
empire which stretches from Scotland to the Pyrenees. It sends its
pilgrims to Compostela, its chivalry to Jerusalem, its younger sons
to Sicily and southern Italy. Its relations with the sea do not cease
with its political separation from the lands across the Channel in
1204. The English come back for a time in the fifteenth century; the
Normans cross the Atlantic in the sixteenth and settle Canada in the
seventeenth. But the overmastering influence of the soil prevails and
draws its children back to itself. The sea-faring impulse declines;
activity turns inward; the province is finally absorbed in the
nation; Normandy is again a part of France, and the originality and
distinctness of its history fade away in the life of the whole.
Philosophy or no philosophy, the history of Normandy falls for our
purposes into three convenient periods. The first of these extends from
the earliest times to the coming of the Northmen in 911, the event
which created Normandy as a distinct entity. The second is the history
of the independent Norman duchy from 911 to the French conquest in
1204, the three splendid centuries of Norman independence and Norman
greatness. The third period of seven hundred years deals with Normandy
as a part of France.
* * * * *
The interest and importance of these several periods vary with the
point of view. Many people are of the opinion that the only history
which matters is modern history, and the more modern the better because
the nearer to ourselves and our time. To such everything is meaningless
before the French Revolution or the Franco-Prussian War--or perhaps
the War of 1914. To those who care only for their own time the past
has no perspective; as a distinguished maker and writer of history
has said, James Buchanan and Tiglath-Pileser become contemporaries.
This foreshortened interest in the immediate past starts from a
sound principle, namely, that it is an important function of history
to explain the present in the light of the past from which it has
come. By a natural reaction from the study which stopped with Marcus
Aurelius or the American colonies or the Congress of Vienna, the demand
naturally arose for the history of the day before yesterday, which
was once declared to be the least known period in human annals. This
is quite legitimate if it does not stop here and does not accept the
easy assumption that what is nearest us is necessarily most important,
even to ourselves. Modern Germany owes more to Martin Luther than to
Nietzsche, more to Charles the Great, who eleven hundred years ago
conquered and civilized the Saxons and began the subjugation of the
Slavs, than to many a more modern figure in the Sieges-allee at Berlin.
Our method of reckoning time and latitude by sixtieths owes less to the
contemporaries of James Buchanan than to those of Tiglath-Pileser. If
we must apply material standards to history, we must consider the mass
as well as the square of the distance.
Obviously, too, we must consider distance in space as well as in time.
The Boston fire of 1872 did not rouse Paris, and our hearts do not
thrill at the mention of the Socialist mayors and Conservative deputies
whose names become household words when the streets of French towns
are rechristened in their memory. The perspective of Norman history
is different for a Norman than for other Frenchmen, different for a
Frenchman than for an American.
Now there can be no question that for the average Norman the recent
period bulks larger than the earlier. His life is directly and
constantly affected by the bureaucratic traditions of the Old Régime,
by the new freedom and the land-distribution of the Revolution, by the
coming of the railroad, the steamship, and the primary school. William
the Conqueror, Philip Augustus, Joan of Arc, their deeds and their
times, have become mere traditions to him, if indeed they are that.
In all these changes, however, there is nothing distinctive, nothing
peculiar, nothing that cannot be studied just as well in some other
part of France. Their local and specifically Norman aspects are of
absorbing interest to Normandy, but they are meaningless to the world
at large. With the union with France in 1204 Norman history becomes
local history, and whatever possesses more than local interest it
shares with the rest of France. From the point of view of the world at
large, the history of Normandy runs parallel with that of the other
regions of France. Normandy will contribute its quota of great names to
the world, in art and music and literature, in learning and industry
and politics; it will take its part in the great movements of French
history, the Reformation, the Revolution, the new republic; but it
will be only a part of a larger whole and derive its interest for the
general student from its membership in the body of France.
Much the same is true of the period before the coming of the Northmen.
Under the Celts, the Romans, and the Franks, the region which was
to become Normandy is not distinguished in any notable way from the
rest of Gaul, and it has the further disadvantage of being one of the
regions concerning which our knowledge is particularly scanty. A few
names of tribes in Cæsar’s _Gallic War_ and in the Roman geographers,
a few scattered inscriptions from the days of the empire, a few lives
of saints and now and then a rare document of Frankish times, this
with the results of archæological research constitutes the basis of
early Norman history. After all, Normandy was remote from Rome and
lay apart also from the main currents of Frankish life and politics,
so that we should not look here for much light on general conditions.
Nevertheless it is in this obscure age that the foundations of Normandy
were laid. First of all, the population, Gallo-Roman at bottom,
receiving a Germanic admixture of Saxons and Franks long before the
coming of the Northmen, but still preponderantly non-Germanic in its
racial type. Next, language, determined by the process of Romanization
and persisting as a Romance speech in spite of Saxon and Frank and
Northman, until in the earliest monuments of the eleventh century we
can recognize the beginnings of modern French. Then law, the Frankish
law which the Northmen were to absorb, perpetuate, and carry to
England. Fourth, religion, the Christian faith, triumphing only with
difficulty in a land largely rural and open to barbarian invasion,
but established firmly by the sixth century and already reënforced by
monastic foundations which were to be the centres of faith and culture
to a later age. Finally, the framework of political geography, resting
on the Roman cities which with some modifications were perpetuated as
the dioceses of the mediæval church, and connected by Roman roads which
remained until modern times the great highways of local communication.
A beginning was also made in the direction of separate organization
when, toward the close of the fourth century, these districts of
the northwest are for the first time set off by themselves as an
administrative area, the province of _Lugdunensis Secunda_, which
coincides with later Normandy. Then, as regularly throughout Gaul, the
civil province becomes the ecclesiastical province, centring about
its oldest church, Rouen, and the province of the archbishop of Rouen
perpetuates the boundaries of the political area after the political
authority passed away, and carries over to the Middle Ages the outline
of the Roman organization. In all this process there is nothing
particularly different from what took place throughout the greater part
of northern Gaul, but the results were fundamental for Normandy and for
the whole of Norman history.
A new epoch begins with the coming of the Northmen in the early tenth
century, as a result of which Normandy was differentiated from the rest
of France and carried into the broader currents of European history.
At first an outpost of the Scandinavian north, its relations soon
shifted as it bred the conquerors of England and Sicily. The Normans of
the eleventh century, Henry Adams maintains, stood more fully in the
centre of the world’s history than their English descendants ever did.
They “were a part, and a great part, of the Church, of France, and of
Europe.” The Popes leaned on them, at times heavily. By the conquest of
England the “Norman dukes cast the kings of France into the shade....
Normans were everywhere in 1066, and everywhere in the lead of their
age.”[10] A century later Normans ruled half of Italy, two thirds of
France, and the whole of England; and they had made a beginning on
Ireland and Scotland. No one can write of European affairs throughout
this whole period without giving a large place to the Normans and their
doings; while events like the conquests of England and Ireland changed
the course of history.
Normandy has also its place in the history of European institutions,
for the Normans were organizers as well as conquerors, and their
political creations were the most efficient states of their time.
Masterful, yet legally minded and businesslike, with a sense for
detail and routine, the Norman princes had a sure instinct for
state-building, at home and abroad. The Norman duchy was a compact
and powerful state before its duke crossed the Channel, and the
central government which the Normans created in England showed the
same characteristics on a larger scale. The Anglo-Norman empire of the
twelfth century was the marvel of its day, while the history of the
Norman kingdom of Sicily showed that the Norman genius for assimilation
and political organization was not confined to the dukes of Rouen.
Highly significant during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Norman
institutions remained of permanent importance, affecting the central
administration of France in ways which are still obscure, and exerting
a decisive influence upon the law and government of England. Normandy
was the connecting link between the Frankish law of the Continent and
the English common law, and thus claims a share in the jurisprudence
of the wide-flung lands to which the common law has spread. The
institution of trial by jury, for example, is of Norman origin, or
rather of Frankish origin and Norman development.
By virtue, then, of its large part in the events of its time, by virtue
of the decisive character of the events in which the Normans took part,
and by virtue of the permanent influence of its institutions, the
Normandy of the dukes can claim an important position in the general
history of the world. In seeking to describe the place of the Normans
in European history we shall accordingly pass over those periods, the
earlier and the later, which are primarily of local interest, and
concentrate ourselves upon the heroic age of the tenth, eleventh, and
twelfth centuries. We shall begin with the coming of the Northmen and
the creation of the Norman state. The third lecture will consider the
Norman conquest of England; the fourth, the Norman empire to which this
gave rise. We shall then trace the events which led to the separation
of Normandy from England and its ultimate union in 1204 with the
French monarchy under Philip Augustus, concluding our survey of the
Normans of the north by a sketch of Norman life and culture in this
period. The two concluding lectures will trace the establishment of the
Norman kingdom of southern Italy and Sicily, and examine the brilliant
composite civilization of the southern Normans from the reign of the
great King Roger to the accession of his still more famous grandson,
the Emperor Frederick II.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
There is no substantial general history of Normandy. For a
review of the materials, the literature, and the problems, see
the excellent résumé of H. Prentout, _La Normandie_ (Paris,
1910, reprinted from the _Revue de synthèse historique_). For
bibliographical purposes this should be supplemented by the
_Catalogue des ouvrages normands de la Bibliothèque municipale
de Caen_ (Caen, 1910–12). For the general features of Norman
geography, see the brief account by Vidal de la Blache, in the
_Histoire de France_ of Lavisse, republished with illustrations
under the title of _La France_ (Paris, 1908). The subject can
best be followed out in J. Sion, _Les paysans de la Normandie
orientale_ (Paris, 1908), and R. de Félice, _La Basse-Normandie_
(Paris, 1907). Various aspects of Norman genius and character
are delightfully treated by Albert Sorel, _Pages normandes_
(Paris, 1907). The proceedings of the historical congress held
in conjunction with the millénaire of 1911 were to have been
printed in full, but so far only various reprints of individual
communications have appeared. J. Touflet, _Le millénaire de
Normandie_ (Rouen, 1913), is not an account of the commemoration,
but an illustrated collection of popular papers. One of the more
notable pamphlets published on this occasion is that of Gabriel
Monod, _Le rôle de la Normandie dans l’histoire de France_ (Paris,
1911).
II
THE COMING OF THE NORTHMEN
The central fact of Norman history and the starting-point for its
study is the event so brilliantly commemorated by the millenary of
1911, the grant of Normandy to Rollo and his northern followers in the
year 911. The history of Normandy, of course, began long before that
year. The land was there, and likewise in large measure the people,
that is to say, probably the greater part of the elements which went
to make the population of the country at a later day; and the history
of the region can be traced back several centuries. But after all,
neither the Celtic _civitates_ nor the Roman province of _Lugdunensis
Secunda_ nor the ecclesiastical province of Rouen which took its place
nor the northwestern _pagi_ of the Frankish empire were Normandy. They
lacked the name--that is obvious; they lacked also individuality of
character, which is more. They were a part, and not a distinctive part,
of something else, whereas later Normandy was a separate entity with a
life and a history of its own. And the dividing line must be drawn when
the Northmen first established themselves permanently in the land and
gave it a new name and a new history.
It must be said that the date 911, like most exact dates in history,
is somewhat arbitrary. The Northmen first invaded Normandy in 841, and
their inroads did not cease until about 966, so that the year 911 falls
near the middle of a century and a quarter of invasion and settlement,
and marks neither the beginning nor the end of an epoch. It is also
true that this date, like many another which appears in heavy-faced
type in our histories, is not known with entire certainty, for some
historians have placed in 912 or even later the events commonly
assigned to that year. On the whole, however, there is good reason for
maintaining 911--and a thousandth anniversary must have some definite
date to commemorate!
For the actual occurrences of that year, we have only the account of
a romancing historian of a hundred years later, reënforced here and
there by the exceedingly scanty records of the time. The main fact is
clear, namely that the Frankish king, Charles the Simple, granted Rollo
as a fief a considerable part, the eastern part, of later Normandy.
Apparently Rollo did homage for his fief in feudal fashion by placing
his hands between the hands of the king, something, we are told, which
“neither his father, nor his grandfather, nor his great-grandfather
before him had ever done for any man.” Legend goes on to relate,
however, that Rollo refused to kneel and kiss the king’s foot, crying
out in his own speech, “No, by God!” and that the companion to whom he
delegated the unwelcome obligation performed it so clumsily that he
overturned the king, to the great merriment of the assembled Northmen.
Rollo did not receive the whole of the later duchy, but only the
region on either side of the Seine which came to be known as Upper
Normandy, and it was not till 924 that the Northmen acquired also
middle Normandy, or the Bessin, while the west, the Cotentin and the
Avranchin, fell to them only in 933.
As to Rollo’s personality, we have only the evidence of later Norman
historians of doubtful authority and the Norse saga of Harold Fairhair.
If, as seems likely, their accounts relate to the same person, he was
known in the north as Hrolf the Ganger, because he was so huge that no
horse could carry him and he must needs gang afoot. A pirate at home,
he was driven into exile by the anger of King Harold, whereupon he
followed his trade in the Western Isles and in Gaul, and rose to be a
great Jarl among his people. The saga makes him a Norwegian, but Danish
scholars have sought to prove him a Dane, and more recently the cudgels
have been taken up for his Swedish origin. To me the Norwegian theory
seems on the whole the most probable, being based on a trustworthy saga
and corroborated by other incidental evidence. Yet, however significant
of Rollo’s importance it may be that three great countries should each
claim him as its own, like the seven cities that strove for the honor
of Homer’s birthplace, the question of his nationality is historically
of subordinate interest, and at a time when national lines were not
yet drawn, it is futile to fit the inadequate evidence into one or
another theory. The important fact is that Norway, Denmark, and even
more distant Sweden, all contributed to the colonists who settled in
Normandy under Rollo and his successors, and the achievements of the
Normans thus become the common heritage of the Scandinavian race.
The colonization of Normandy was, of course, only a small part of
the work of this heroic age of Scandinavian expansion. The great
emigration from the North in the ninth and tenth centuries has been
explained in part by the growth of centralized government and the
consequent departure of the independent, the turbulent, and the untamed
for new fields of adventure; but its chief cause was doubtless that
which lies back of colonizing movements in all ages, the growth of
population and the need of more room. Five centuries earlier this
land-hunger had pushed the Germanic tribes across the Rhine and Danube
and produced the great wandering of the peoples which destroyed the
Roman empire; and the Viking raids were simply a later aspect of this
same _Völkerwanderung_, retarded by the outlying position of the
Scandinavian lands and by the greater difficulty of migration by sea.
For, unlike the Goths who swept across the map of Europe in vast curves
of marching men, or the Franks who moved forward by slow stages of
gradual settlement in their occupation of Roman Gaul, the Scandinavian
invaders were men of the sea and migrated in ships. The deep fjords
of Norway and the indented coast of the North Sea and the Baltic made
them perforce sailors and fishermen and taught them the mastery of the
wider ocean. In their dragon ships--shallow, clinker-built, half-decked
craft, pointed at either end, low in the middle, where the gunwale was
protected by a row of shields--they could cross the sea, explore creeks
and inlets, and follow the course of rivers far above their mouth. The
greater ships might reach the length of seventy-five feet and carry as
many as one hundred and twenty men, but these were the largest, and
even these offered but a slow means of migration. We must think of the
whole movement at first as one of small and scattered bands, terrible
more for their fierce, sudden, and skilful methods of attack, than for
force of superior numbers or organization. The truth is that sea-power,
whose strategic significance in modern warfare Admiral Mahan did so
much to make us appreciate, was in the ninth and tenth centuries, so
far as western Europe was concerned, a Scandinavian monopoly. Masters
of the seas, the Northmen harried the coasts and river-valleys as they
would, and there was none to drive them back.
Outside of the Baltic, where the Danes ravaged the southern coast and
the Swedes moved eastward to lay the foundations of the Russian state
and to penetrate as far as Constantinople, two main routes lay open
to the masters of the northern seas. One led west to the Orkneys, the
Shetlands, and the coast of Scotland, and then either south to the
shores of Ireland, or further west to Iceland, Greenland, and America.
The other led through the North Sea to England, the Low Countries, and
the coast of Gaul. Both were used, and used freely, by the Vikings, and
in both directions they accomplished enduring results:--Iceland and the
kingdoms of the isles in the north, the beginnings of town life and
commerce in Ireland, the Danelaw in England, and the duchy of Normandy.
When the great northern invasions began at the close of the eighth
century, Charles the Great ruled all the Christian lands of the western
Continent. By fire and sword he converted the heathen Saxons of the
north to Christianity and civilization and advanced his frontier to
the Danish border, so that the pious monk of St. Gall laments that
he did not conquer the Danes also--“be it that Divine Providence was
not then on our side, or that our sins rose up against us.” And this
same gossiping chronicler--not the best of authorities it is true--has
left us a striking picture of Charlemagne’s first experience with the
Scandinavian invaders:--