Gallia Narbonensis. While he was sitting at dinner, and had not
been recognized by the townspeople, some northern pirates came to
carry on their depredations in that very port. When the ships were
perceived some thought they were Jewish merchants, some that they
were Africans, some Bretons. But the wise king, knowing from the
shape and swiftness of the vessels what sort of crews they carried,
said to those about him, “These ships bear no merchandize, but
cruel foes.” At these words all the Franks rivalled each other in
the speed with which they rushed to attack the boats. But it was
useless. The Northmen hearing that there stood the man whom they
were wont to call Charles the Hammer, were afraid lest all their
fleet should be taken in the port, and should be broken in pieces;
and their flight was so rapid, that they withdrew themselves not
only from the swords, but even from the eyes of those who wished
to catch them. The religious Charles, however, seized by a holy
fear, rose from the table, and looked out of the window towards the
East, remaining long in that position, his face bathed in tears.
No one ventured to question him: but turning to his followers he
said, “Know ye why I weep? Truly I fear not that these will injure
_me_. But I am deeply grieved that in my lifetime they should have
been so near landing on these shores, and I am overwhelmed with
sorrow as I look forward and see what evils they will bring upon my
offspring and their people.”[11]
From the actuality of such an invasion the great Charles was spared,
but in the British Isles it had already begun. In 787 the Anglo-Saxon
_Chronicle_ tells us there “first came three ships of Northmen out
of Haeretha-land” [Denmark?], whereupon the reeve of the Dorset port
“rode down to the place and would have driven them to the king’s town,
because he knew not who they were; and they there slew him. These were
the first ships of Danishmen which sought the land of the English
nation.” Six years later they fell upon the holy isle of Lindisfarne,
pillaged the church sacred with the memories of Northumbrian
Christianity, and slew the monks or drove them into the sea. In 807
they first landed in Ireland, and “after this there came great sea-cast
floods of foreigners into Erin, so that there was not a point thereof
without a fleet.” Then came the turn of the Continent, first along the
coast of Frisia and Flanders, and then in what is now France. In 841,
when the grandsons of Charlemagne were quarrelling over the fragments
of his empire at Fontenay, the first fleet of Northmen entered the
Seine; in 843 when they were making their treaty of partition at
Verdun, the Vikings entered Nantes on St. John’s Day and slew the
bishop before the high altar as he intoned the _Sursum corda_ of the
mass. Within two years they sacked Hamburg and Paris. Wherever possible
they established themselves at the mouths of the great rivers, often
on an island like Walcheren, Noirmoutier, or the Ile de Rhé, whence
the rivers opened the whole country to them--Elbe and Weser, Rhine and
Meuse, Scheldt, Seine, Loire, and Garonne, even to the Guadalquivir,
by which the Arabic chronicler tells us the “dark red sea-birds”
penetrated to Seville. One band more venturesome than the rest, entered
the Mediterranean and reached Marseilles, whence under their leader
Hastings they sacked the Italian town of Luna, apparently in the belief
that it was Rome.
About the middle of the ninth century the number of the Norse pirates
greatly increased and their ravages became more regular and constant,
leading in many cases to permanent settlements. In 855 the Old English
_Chronicle_ tells us “the heathen men, for the first time, remained
over winter in Sheppey,” at the mouth of the Thames, and thereafter,
year by year, it recounts the deeds of the Viking band which wintered
in England and is called simply _here_, the army. It is no longer
a matter of summer raids but of unbroken occupation. In 878 during
midwinter “the army stole away to Chippenham and overran the land of
the West-Saxons and sat down there; and many of the people they drove
beyond sea, and of the remainder the greater part they subdued and
forced to obey them except King Alfred, and he, with a small band, with
difficulty retreated to the woods and to the fastnesses of the moors.”
The following year a similar band, now swollen into “the great army”
made its appearance on the Continent and for fourteen years ravaged the
territory between the Rhine and the Loire. Year after year “the steel
of the heathen glistened”; in 886 they laid siege to Paris, which was
relieved not by the king’s valor but by his offering them Burgundy to
plunder instead. A century later the English began to buy them off with
Danegeld. “All men,” laments a chronicler, “give themselves to flight.
No one cries out, Stand and fight for your country, your church, your
countrymen. What they ought to defend with arms, they shamefully
redeem by payments.” There was nothing to do but add a new petition to
the litany, “From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord, deliver us.”
* * * * *
To the writers of the time, who could not see the permanent results
of Viking settlement, the Northmen were barbarian pirates, without
piety or pity, “who wept neither for their sins nor for their dead,”
and their expeditions were mere wanton pillage and destruction.
Moreover, these writers were regularly monks or priests, and it was
the church that suffered most severely. A walled town or castle
might often successfully resist, but the monasteries, protected from
Christian freebooters by their sacred character, were simply so many
opportunities for plunder to the heathen of the north. Sometimes the
monks perished with their monastery, often they escaped only with their
lives and a few precious title-deeds, to find on their return merely
a heap of blackened ruins and a desolate countryside. Many religious
establishments utterly disappeared in the course of the invasions. In
Normandy scarcely a church survives anterior to the tenth century.
As the monasteries were at this time the chief centres of learning
and culture throughout western Europe, their losses were the losses
of civilization, and in this respect the verdict of the monastic
chroniclers is justified. There is, however, another side to the story,
which Scandinavian scholars have not been slow to emphasize. Heathen
still and from one point of view barbarian, the Northmen had yet a
culture of their own, well advanced on its material side, notable in
its artistic skill, and rich in its treasures of poetry and story.
Its material treasures have been in part recovered by the labors of
northern archæologists, while its literary wealth is now in large
measure accessible in English in the numerous translations of sagas and
Eddic poems.
After all barbarism, like culture, is a relative thing, and judged
by contemporary standards, the Vikings were not barbarians.
They rather show a strange combination of the primitive and the
civilized--elemental passions expressing themselves with a high degree
of literary art, barbaric adornment wrought with skilled craftsmanship,
Berserker rage supplemented by clever strategy, pitiless savagery
combined with a strong sense of public order, constant feuds and
murders coexistent with a most elaborate system of law and legal
procedure. Young from our point of view, the civilization of the
Vikings had behind it a history of perhaps fifteen centuries.
On its material side Viking civilization is characterized by a
considerable degree of wealth and luxury. Much of this, naturally,
was gained by pillage, but much also came by trade. The northern
warriors do not seem to have had that contempt for traffic which has
characterized many military societies, and they turned readily enough
from war to commerce. In a Viking tomb recently discovered in the
Hebrides there were found beside the sword and spear and battle-axe
of all warriors, a pair of scales, fit emblem of the double life the
chief had led on earth and may have hoped to continue hereafter! Of
trade, and especially trade with the Orient, there is abundant evidence
in the great treasures of gold and silver coin found in many regions
of the north. The finely wrought objects of gold and silver and
encrusted metal, which were once supposed to have been imported from
the south and east, are now known to have been in large part of native
workmanship, influenced, of course, by the imitation of foreign models,
but also carrying out traditions of ornamentation, such as the use of
animal forms, which can be traced back continuously to the earliest
ages of Scandinavian history. Shields and damascened swords, arm-rings
and neck-rings, pins and brooches--especially brooches, if you find an
unknown object, says Montelius, call it a brooch and you will generally
be right--all testify, both in their abundance and their beauty of
workmanship, to an advanced stage of art and handicraft.
This love of the north for luxury of adornment is amply seen in
chronicle and saga. When the Irish drove the Vikings out of Limerick
in 968 they took from them “their jewels and their best property, and
their saddles beautiful and foreign, their gold and their silver, their
beautifully woven cloth of all kinds and colors--satin and silk,
pleasing and variegated, both scarlet and green, and all sorts of cloth
in like manner.” “How,” asks the Valkyrie in the _Lay of the Raven_,
“does the generous Prince Harold deal with the men of feats of renown
that guard his land?” The Raven answers:--
They are well cared for, the warriors that cast dice in Harold’s
court. They are endowed with wealth and with fair swords, with
the ore of the Huns, and with maids from the East. They are glad
when they have hopes of a battle, they will leap up in hot haste
and ply the oars, snapping the oar-thongs and cracking the tholes.
Fiercely, I ween, do they churn the water with their oars at the
king’s bidding.
_Quoth the Walkyrie_: I will ask thee, for thou knowest the truth
of all these things, of the meed of the Poets, since thou must know
clearly the state of the minstrels that live with Harold.
_Quoth the Raven_: It is easily seen by their cheer, and their gold
rings, that they are among the friends of the king. They have red
cloaks right fairly fringed, silver-mounted swords, and ring-woven
sarks, gilt trappings, and graven helmets, wrist-fitting rings, the
gifts of Harold.[12]
As regards social organization, Viking society shows the Germanic
division into three classes, thrall, churl, and noble. Their respective
characters and occupations are thus described in the _Rigsmal_:--
Thrall was of swarthy skin, his hands wrinkled, his knuckles
bent, his fingers thick, his face ugly, his back broad, his heels
long. He began to put forth his strength, binding bast, making
loads, and bearing home faggots the weary long day. His children
busied themselves with building fences, dunging plowland, tending
swine, herding goats, and digging peat. Their names were Sooty and
Cowherd, Clumsy and Lout and Laggard, etc. Carl, or churl, was red
and ruddy, with rolling eyes, and took to breaking oxen, building
plows, timbering houses, and making carts. Earl, the noble, had
yellow hair, his cheeks were rosy, his eyes were keen as a young
serpent’s. His occupation was shaping the shield, bending the bow,
hurling the javelin, shaking the lance, riding horses, throwing
dice, fencing, and swimming. He began to waken war, to redden the
field, and to fell the doomed.[13]
Both churl and earl were largely represented in those who went to sea,
but the nobility naturally preponderated, and it is particularly their
exploits which the sagas and poems celebrate. Viking warfare was no
mere clash of swords; they conducted their military operations with
skill and foresight, and showed great power of adapting themselves to
new conditions, whether that meant the invasion of an open country
or the siege of a fortified town. Much, however, must be credited to
their _furor Teutonicus_, to that exuberance of military spirit which
they had inherited from far-off ancestors. Not all were wolf-coated
Bearsarks, but all seemed to have that delight in war and conflict for
their own sakes which breathes through their poetry:--
The sword in the king’s hand bit through the weeds of Woden [mail]
as if it were whisked through water, the spear-points clashed,
the shields were shattered, the axes rattled on the heads of the
warriors. Targets and skulls were trodden under the Northmen’s
shield-fires [weapons] and the hard heels of their hilts. There was
a din in the island, the kings dyed the shining rows of shields
in the blood of men. The wound-fires [blades] burnt in the bloody
wounds, the halberds bowed down to take the life of men, the ocean
of gore dashed upon the swords’-ness, the flood of the shafts fell
upon the beach of Stord. Halos of war mixed under the vault of the
bucklers; the battle-tempest blew underneath the clouds of the
targets, the lees of the sword-edges [blood] pattered in the gale
of Woden. Many a man fell into the stream of the brand.[14]
Again:--
Brands broke against the black targets, wounds waxed when the
princes met. The blades hammered against the helm-crests, the
wound-gravers, the sword’s point, bit. I heard that there fell
in the iron-play Woden’s oak [heroes] before the swords [the
sword-belt’s ice].
_Second Burden_: There was a linking of points and a gnashing of
edges: Eric got renown there.
_Second Stave_: The prince reddened the brand, there was a meal
for the ravens; the javelin sought out the life of man, the gory
spears flew, the destroyer of the Scots fed the steed of the witch
[wolves], the sister of Nari [Hell] trampled on the supper of the
eagles [corses]. The cranes of battle [shafts] flew against the
walls of the sword [bucklers], the wound-mew’s lips [the arrows’
barbs] were not left thirsty for gore. The wolf tore the wounds,
and the wave of the sword [blood] plashed against the beak of the
raven.
_Third Burden_: The lees of the din of war [blood] fell upon
Gialf’s steed [ship]: Eric gave the wolves carrion by the sea.
_Third Stave_: The flying javelin bit, peace was belied there,
the wolf was glad, and the bow was drawn, the bolts clattered,
the spear-points bit, the flaxen-bowstring bore the arrows out
of the bow. He brandished the buckler on his arm, the rouser of
the play of blades--he is a mighty hero. The fray grew greater
everywhere about the king. It was famed east over the sea, Eric’s
war-faring.[15]
Or listen to the weird sisters as they weave the web of Ireland’s fate
under Brian Boru:--
Wide-stretched is the warp presaging the slaughter, the hanging
cloud of the beam; it is raining blood. The gray web of the hosts
is raised up on the spears, the web which we the friends of Woden
are filling with red weft.
This web is warped with the guts of men, and heavily weighted with
human heads; blood-stained darts are the shafts, iron-bound are the
stays; it is shuttled with arrows. Let us strike with our swords
this web of victory!
War and Sword-clasher, Sangrid and Swipple, are weaving with drawn
swords. The shaft shall sing, the shield shall ring, the helm-hound
[axe] shall fall on the target.[16]
And those who met their death in battle had reserved for them a similar
existence in the life to come, not doomed like the ‘straw-dead’ to
tread wet and chill and dusky ways to the land of Hel, but--I am
quoting Gummere[17]--as weapon-dead faring “straightway to Odin,
unwasted by sickness, in the full strength of manhood,” to spend their
days in glorious battle and their nights in equally glorious feasting
in the courts of Valhalla.
In his cradle the young Viking was lulled by such songs as this:--
My mother said they should buy me a boat and fair oars, and that I
should go abroad with the Vikings, should stand forward in the bows
and steer a dear bark, and so wend to the haven and cut down man
after man there.
When he grows up the earl’s daughter scorns him as a boy who “has never
given a warm meal to the wolf,” “seen the raven in autumn scream over
the carrion draft,” or “been where the shell-thin edges” of the blades
crossed; whereupon he wins a place by her side by replying:--
I have walked with bloody brand and with whistling spear, with
the wound-bird following me. The Vikings made a fierce attack; we
raised a furious storm, the flame ran over the dwellings of men, we
laid the bleeding corses to rest in the gates of the city.[18]
And at the end, like Ragnar Lodbrok captured and dying in the pit of
serpents, he can tell his tale of feeding the eagle and the she-wolf
since he first reddened the sword at the age of twenty, and end his
life undaunted to the ever-recurring refrain, “We hewed with the sword”:
Death has no terrors. I am willing to depart. They are calling me
home, the Fays whom Woden the Lord of Hosts has sent me from his
hall. Merrily shall I drink ale in my high-seat with the Anses. My
life days are done. Laughing will I die.[19]
Politically, Viking society was aristocratic, but an aristocracy in
which all the nobles were equal. “We have no lord, we are all equal,”
said Rollo’s men when asked who was their lord; and men thus minded
were not likely to spend their time casting dice in King Harold’s
court, even if their independence meant the wolf’s lot of exile. What
kind of a political organization they were likely to form can be seen
from two examples of the Viking age. One is Iceland, described by Lord
Bryce[20] as “an almost unique instance of a community whose culture
and creative power flourished independently of any favoring material
conditions,”--that curiously decentralized and democratic commonwealth
where the necessities of life created a government with judicial
and legislative duties, while the feeling of equality and local
independence prevented the government from acquiring any administrative
or executive functions,--a community with “a great deal of law and no
central executive, a great many courts and no authority to carry out
their judgments.” The other example is Jomburg, that strange body of
Jomvikings established in Pomerania, at the mouth of the Oder, and
held by a military gild under the strictest discipline. Only men of
undoubted bravery between the ages of eighteen and fifty were admitted
to membership; no women were allowed in the castle, and no man could be
absent from it for more than three days at a time. Members assumed the
duty of mutual support and revenge, and plunder was to be distributed
by lot.
Neither of these types of Viking community was to be reproduced in
Normandy, for both were the outgrowth of peculiar local conditions, and
the Northmen were too adaptable to found states with a rubber-stamp.
A loose half-state like Iceland could exist only where the absence of
neighbors or previous inhabitants removed all danger of complications,
whether domestic or foreign. A strict warrior gild like that of Jomburg
could arise only in a fortress. Whatever form Viking society would take
in Normandy was certain to be determined in large measure by local
conditions; yet it might well contain elements found in the other
societies--the Icelandic sense of equality and independence, and the
military discipline of the Jomvikings set in the midst of their Wendish
foes. And both of these elements are characteristic of the Norman state.
Such, very briefly sketched, were the Northmen who came to Normandy. We
have now to follow them in their new home.
We must note in the first place that the relations between Normandy
and the north were not ended with the grant of 911. We must think of
the new Norman state, not as a planet sent off into space to move
separate and apart in a new orbit, but as a colony, an outpost of the
Scandinavian peoples in the south, fed by new bands of colonists from
the northern home and only gradually drawn away from its connections
with the north and brought into the political system of Frankish Gaul
and its neighbors. For something like a hundred years after the coming
of Rollo the key to Norman history is found in this fact and in the
resulting interplay of Scandinavian and Frankish influences. The very
grant of 911 was susceptible of being differently regarded from the
point of view of the two parties. Charles the Simple probably thought
he was creating a new fief with the Norman chief as his vassal, bound
to him by feudal ties, while to Rollo, innocent of feudal ideas, the
grant may well have seemed a gift outright to be held by himself
and his companions as land was held at home. From one point of view
a feudal holding, from another an independent Scandinavian state,
the contradiction in Normandy’s position explains much of its early
history. The new colony was saved from absorption in its surroundings
by continued migration from the north; before it became Frankish and
feudal it thus had time to establish itself firmly and draw tightly the
lines which separated it from its neighbors. At once a Frankish county
and a Danish colony, it slowly formed itself into the semi-independent
duchy which is the historic Normandy of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries.
Although Rollo was baptized in 912 and signalized his conversion by
extensive grants of land to the great churches and monasteries of his
new territories, his Christianity sat lightly upon him and left him a
Norse sea-rover at heart till the end, when he sought to appease the
powers of the other world, not only by gifts of gold to the church,
but by human sacrifices to the northern gods. His legislation, so
far as it can be reconstructed from the shadowy accounts of later
historians, was fundamentally Scandinavian in character, and his
followers guarded jealously the northern traditions of equality
and independence. His son, William Longsword, was a more Christian
and Frankish type, but his death, celebrated in a Latin poem which
represents the earliest known example of popular epic in Normandy, was
the signal for a Scandinavian and pagan reaction. We hear of fresh
arrivals on the Seine, Vikings who worshipped Thor and Odin, of an
independent band at Bayeux under a certain Haigrold or Harold, and even
of appeals for reënforcements from the Normans to the Northmen beyond
the sea. The dukes of Rouen, says the _Saga of St. Olaf_, “remember
well their kinship with the chiefs of Norway; they hold them in such
honor that they have always been the best friends of the Norwegians,
and all the Norwegians who wish find refuge in Normandy.” Not till the
beginning of the eleventh century does the Scandinavian immigration
come to an end and Normandy stand fully on its own feet.
Not until the eleventh century also does the history of Normandy emerge
from the uncertain period of legend and tradition and reach an assured
basis of contemporary evidence. Throughout Europe, the tenth century is
one of the most uncertain and obscure of all the Christian centuries.
To the critic, as an Oxford don distinguished for knowledge of this
epoch once remarked, its delightful obscurity makes it all the more
interesting, but there are limits to the delights of obscurity, and a
French scholar who has tried to reconstruct the history of this period
in Spain finds that all surviving documentary sources of information
are fabrications! Matters are not so bad as that for Normandy, for the
forgers there chose other periods in which to place their products, but
there are for the tenth century practically no contemporary documents
or contemporary Norman chronicles. The earliest Norman historian, Dudo,
dean of Saint-Quentin, wrote after the year 1000 and had no personal
knowledge of the beginnings of the Norman state. Diffuse, rhetorical,
credulous, and ready to distort events in order to glorify the
ancestors of the Norman dukes who were his patrons, Dudo is anything
but a trustworthy writer, and only the most circumspect criticism
can glean a few facts from his confused and turgid rhetoric. Yet he
was copied by his Norman successors, in prose and in verse, and has
found his defenders among patriotic Normans of a more modern time. Not
until quite recent years has his fundamental untrustworthiness been
fully established, and with it has vanished all hope of any detailed
knowledge of early Norman history. Only with the eleventh century do we
reach a solid foundation of annals and charters in the reigns of the
princes whom Dudo seeks to glorify in the person of their predecessors.
And when we reach this period, the heroic age of conquest and
settlement is over, and the Normans have become much as other Frenchmen.
At this point the fundamental question forces itself upon us, how far
was Normandy affected by Scandinavian influences? What in race and
language, in law and custom, was the contribution of the north to
Normandy? And the answer must be that in most respects the tangible
contribution was slight. Whatever may have been the state of affairs in
the age of colonization and settlement, by the century which followed
the Normans had become to a surprising degree absorbed by their
environment.