for at least half a century before the battle of Hastings, the
Normans were Frenchmen, French in their language, French in their
law, proud indeed of their past history, very ready to fight
against other Frenchmen if Norman home-rule was endangered, but
still Frenchmen, who regarded Normandy as a member of the state or
congeries of states that owed service, we can hardly say obedience,
to the king at Paris. Their spoken language was French, their
written language was Latin, but the Latin of France; the style
of their legal documents was the style of the French chancery;
very few of the technical terms of their law were of Scandinavian
origin. When at length the ‘custom’ of Normandy appears in writing,
it takes its place among other French customs, and this although
for a long time past Normandy has formed one of the dominions of
a prince, between whom and the king of the French there has been
little love and frequent war; and the peculiar characteristics
which mark off the custom of Normandy from other French customs
seem due much rather to the legislation of Henry of Anjou than to
any Scandinavian tradition.
The law of Normandy was by this time Frankish, and its speech was
French. Even the second duke, William Longsword, found it necessary
to send his son to Bayeux to learn Norse, for it was no longer spoken
at Rouen. And in the French of Normandy, the Norman dialect, the
Scandinavian element is astonishingly small, as careful students of the
local _patois_ tell us. Only in one department of life, the life of the
sea, is any considerable Scandinavian influence discernible, and the
historian of the French navy, Bourel de la Roncière, has some striking
pages on the survivals of the language of the Norse Vikings in the
daily speech of the French sailor and fisherman.
The question of race is more difficult, and is of course quite
independent of the question of language, for language, as has been
well said, is not a test of race but a test of social contact, and the
fundamental physical characteristics of race are independent of speech.
“Skulls,” says Rhys, “are harder than consonants, and races lurk behind
when languages slip away.” On this point again scientific examination
is unfavorable to extended Scandinavian influence. Pronounced northern
types, of course, occur,--I remember, on my first journey through
Normandy, seeing at a wayside station a peasant who might have
walked that moment out of a Wisconsin lumber-camp or a Minnesota
wheat-field,--but the statistics of anthropometry show a steady
preponderance of the round-headed type which prevails in other parts
of France. Only in two regions does the Teutonic type assert itself
strongly, in the lower valley of the Seine and in the Cotentin, and
it is in these regions and at points along the shore that place-names
of Scandinavian origin are most frequent. The terminations _bec_ and
_fleur_, _beuf_ and _ham_ and _dalle_ and _tot_--Bolbec, Harfleur,
Quillebeuf, Ouistreham, Dieppedalle, Yvetot--tell the same story as
the terms used in navigation, namely that the Northmen were men of
the sea and settled in the estuaries and along the coast. The earlier
population, however, though reduced by war and pillage and famine,
was not extinguished. It survived in sufficient numbers to impose its
language on its conquerors, to preserve throughout the greater part of
the country its fundamental racial type, and to make these Northmen of
the sea into Normans of the land.
What, then, was the Scandinavian contribution to the making of Normandy
if it was neither law nor speech nor race? First and foremost, it was
Normandy itself, created as a distinct entity by the Norman occupation
and the grant to Rollo and his followers, without whom it would have
remained an undifferentiated part of northern France. Next, a new
element in the population, numerically small in proportion to the
mass, but a leaven to the whole--quick to absorb Frankish law and
Christian culture but retaining its northern qualities of enterprise,
of daring, and of leadership. It is no accident that the names of the
leaders in early Norman movements are largely Norse. And finally a race
of princes, high-handed and masterful but with a talent for political
organization, state-builders at home and abroad, who made Normandy the
strongest and most centralized principality in France and joined to it
a kingdom beyond the seas which became the strongest state in western
Europe.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The best outline of the beginnings of Normandy is H. Prentout,
_Essai sur les origines et la fondation du duché de Normandie_
(Paris, 1911). For the Frankish side of the Norse expeditions see
W. Vogel, _Die Normannen und das fränkische Reich_ (Heidelberg,
1906), supplemented by F. Lot, in the _Bibliothèque de l’École des
Chartes_, LXIX (1908). Their devastation of Normandy is illustrated
by the fate of the monastery of Saint-Wandrille: F. Lot, _Études
critiques sur l’abbaye de Saint-Wandrille_ (Paris, 1913), ch. 3.
There is a vast literature in the Scandinavian languages; for the
titles of fundamental works by Steenstrup, Munch, Worsaae, and
Alexander Bugge, see Charles Gross, _Sources and Literature of
English History_ (London, 1915), § 42. Considerable material in
English has been published in the _Saga-Book_ of the Viking Society
(London, since 1895). On the material culture of the north see
Sophus Müller, _Nordische Altertumskunde_ (Strassburg, 1897–98),
and the various works of Montelius. The early poetry is collected
and translated by Vigfusson and Powell, _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_
(Oxford, 1883). Convenient summaries in English are C. F. Keary,
_The Vikings in Western Christendom_ (London, 1891); A. Mawer, _The
Vikings_ (Cambridge, 1913); and L. M. Larson, _Canute the Great_
(New York, 1912).
III
NORMANDY AND ENGLAND
After the coming of the Northmen the chief event in Norman history is
the conquest of England, and just as relations with the north are the
chief feature of the tenth century, so relations with England dominate
the eleventh century, and the central point is the conquest of 1066.
In this series of events the central figure is, of course, William the
Conqueror, by descent duke of Normandy and by conquest king of England.
* * * * *
Of William’s antecedents we have no time to speak at length. Grandson
of the fourth Norman duke, Richard the Good, William was the son of
Duke Robert, who met his death in Asia Minor in 1035 while returning
from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. To distinguish him from the later duke
of the same name he is called Robert I or Robert the Magnificent,
sometimes and quite incorrectly, Robert the Devil, by an unwarranted
confusion with this hero, or rather villain, of romance and grand
opera. A contemporary of the great English king Canute, Robert was a
man of renown in the Europe of the early eleventh century, and if our
sources of information permitted us to know the history of his brief
reign, we should probably find that much that was distinctive of the
Normandy of his son’s day can be traced back to his time. More than
once in history has a great father been eclipsed by a greater son. The
fact should be added, which William’s contemporaries never allowed him
to forget, that he was an illegitimate son. His mother Arlette was the
daughter of a tanner of Falaise, and while it is not clear that Duke
Robert was ever married to any one else, his union with Arlette had no
higher sanction than the Danish custom of his forefathers. Their son
was generally known in his day as William the Bastard, and only the
great achievements of his reign succeeded in replacing this, first by
William the Great and later by William the Conqueror.
Were it not for the resulting confusion with other great Williams,--one
of whom has recently been raised by admiring subjects to the rank of
William the Greatest!--there would be a certain advantage in retaining
the title of great, in order to remind ourselves that William was not
only a conqueror but a great ruler. The greatest secular figure in
the Europe of his day, he is also one of the greatest in the line of
English sovereigns, whether we judge him by capacity for rule or by
the results of his reign, and none has had a more profound effect on
the whole current of English history. The late Edward A. Freeman, who
devoted five stout volumes to the history of the Norman Conquest and of
William, and who never shrank from superlatives, goes still further:--
No man that ever trod this earth was ever endowed with greater
natural gifts; to no man was it ever granted to accomplish greater
things. If we look only to the scale of a man’s acts without
regard to their moral character, we must hail in the victor of
Val-ès-dunes, of Varaville, and of Senlac, in the restorer of
Normandy, the Conqueror of England, one who may fairly claim his
place in the first rank of the world’s greatest men. No man ever
did his work more thoroughly at the moment; no man ever left
his work behind him as more truly an abiding possession for all
time.... If we cannot give him a niche among pure patriots and
heroes, he is quite as little entitled to a place among mere
tyrants and destroyers. William of Normandy has no claim to a
share in the pure glory of Timoleon, Ælfred, and Washington; he
cannot even claim the more mingled fame of Alexander, Charles,
and Cnut; but he has still less in common with the mere enemies
of their species, with the Nabuchodonosors, the Swegens, and the
Buonapartes, whom God has sent from time to time as simple scourges
of a guilty world.... He never wholly cast away the thoughts of
justice and mercy, and in his darkest hours had still somewhat of
the fear of God before his eyes.[22]
I have quoted the essence of Freeman’s characterization, not because
it seems to me wholly just or even historical, but in order to set
forth vividly the importance of William and his work. It is not
the historian’s business to award niches in a hall of fame. He is
no Rhadamanthus, to separate the Alfreds of this world from the
Nebuchadnezzars, the Washingtons from the Napoleons. So far as he
deals with individuals, his business is to explain to us each man in
the light of his time and its conditions, not to compare him with
men of far distant times and places in order to arrange all in a
final scale of values. It was once the fashion in debating societies
to discuss whether Demosthenes was a greater orator than Cicero,
and whether either was the equal of Daniel Webster. It is even more
futile to consider whether William the Conqueror was a greater man
than Alexander or a less than George Washington, for the quantities
are incommensurable. So far as comparisons of this sort are at all
legitimate, they must be instituted between similar things, between
contemporaries or between men in quick sequence. When they deal with
wide intervals of time and circumstance, they wrest each man from his
true setting and become fundamentally unhistorical.
An able general, strong in battle and still stronger in strategy and
craft, a skilful diplomat, a born ruler of men, William was yet greater
in the combination of vision, patience, and masterful will which make
the statesman, and the results of his statesmanship are writ large on
the page of English history. To his contemporaries his most striking
characteristic was his pitiless strength and inflexible will, and if
they had been familiar with Nietzsche’s theory of the ‘overman,’ they
would certainly have placed him in that class. Stark and stern and
wrathful, the author of the Anglo-Saxon _Chronicle_ approaches him, as
Freeman well says,[23] “with downcast eyes and bated breath, as if he
were hardly dealing with a man of like passions with himself but were
rather drawing the portrait of a being of another nature.” This, the
most adequate characterization of the _Uebermensch_ of the eleventh
century, runs as follows:[24]
If any would know what manner of man king William was, the glory
that he obtained, and of how many lands he was lord; then will we
describe him as we have known him, we, who have looked upon him
and who once lived in his court. This king William, of whom we are
speaking, was a very wise and a great man, and more honoured and
more powerful than any of his predecessors. He was mild to those
good men who loved God, but severe beyond measure towards those who
withstood his will. He founded a noble monastery on the spot where
God permitted him to conquer England, and he established monks in
it, and he made it very rich. In his days the great monastery at
Canterbury was built, and many others also throughout England;
moreover this land was filled with monks who lived after the
rule of St. Benedict; and such was the state of religion in his
days that all that would might observe that which was prescribed
by their respective orders. King William was also held in much
reverence: he wore his crown three times every year when he was
in England: at Easter he wore it at Winchester, at Pentecost at
Westminster, and at Christmas at Gloucester. And at these times,
all the men of England were with him, archbishops, bishops, abbots,
and earls, thanes, and knights. So also, was he a very stern and
a wrathful man, so that none durst do anything against his will,
and he kept in prison those earls who acted against his pleasure.
He removed bishops from their sees, and abbots from their offices,
and he imprisoned thanes, and at length he spared not his own
brother Odo. This Odo was a very powerful bishop in Normandy, his
see was that of Bayeux, and he was foremost to serve the king. He
had an earldom in England, and when William was in Normandy he was
the first man in this country, and him did he cast into prison.
Amongst other things the good order that William established is
not to be forgotten; it was such that any man, who was himself
aught, might travel over the kingdom with a bosom-full of gold
unmolested; and no man durst kill another, however great the injury
he might have received from him. He reigned over England, and
being sharp-sighted to his own interest, he surveyed the kingdom
so thoroughly that there was not a single hide of land throughout
the whole of which he knew not the possessor, and how much it was
worth, and this he afterwards entered in his register. The land
of the Britons was under his sway, and he built castles therein;
moreover he had full dominion over the Isle of Man [Anglesey]:
Scotland also was subject to him from his great strength; the land
of Normandy was his by inheritance, and he possessed the earldom
of Maine; and had he lived two years longer he would have subdued
Ireland by his prowess, and that without a battle. Truly there was
much trouble in these times, and very great distress; he caused
castles to be built, and oppressed the poor. The king was also of
great sternness, and he took from his subjects many marks of gold,
and many hundred pounds of silver, and this, either with or without
right, and with little need. He was given to avarice, and greedily
loved gain. He made large forests for the deer, and enacted laws
therewith, so that whoever killed a hart or a hind should be
blinded. As he forbade killing the deer, so also the boars; and he
loved the tall stags as if he were their father. He also appointed
concerning the hares, that they should go free. The rich complained
and the poor murmured, but he was so sturdy that he recked nought
of them; they must will all that the king willed, if they would
live; or would keep their lands; or would hold their possessions;
or would be maintained in their rights. Alas! that any man should
so exalt himself, and carry himself in his pride over all! May
Almighty God show mercy to his soul, and grant him the forgiveness
of his sins! We have written concerning him these things, both good
and bad, that virtuous men might follow after the good, and wholly
avoid the evil, and might go in the way that leadeth to the kingdom
of heaven.
This _Requiescat_ of the monk of Peterborough has carried us forward
half a century, till the Conqueror, in the full maturity of his
power and strength, rode to his death down the steep street of the
burning town of Mantes and was buried in his own great abbey-church
at Caen. And the good peace that he gave the land at the end came,
both in Normandy and in England, only after many stormy years of
war, rebellion, and strife. William was but sixty when he died; when
his father was laid away in the basilica of far-off Nicæa, he was
only seven or at most eight. The conquest of England was made in his
fortieth year, when he had already reigned thirty-one years as duke.
Or, if we deduct the years of his youth, the conquest of England falls
just halfway between his coming of age and his death. I give these
figures to adjust the perspective. William’s place in the line of
English kings is so prominent and his achievements in England are so
important that they always tend to overshadow in our minds his earlier
years as duke. Yet without these formative years there could have been
no conquest of England, and without some study of them that conquest
cannot be understood.
If we pass over rapidly, as for lack of information we must needs
do, the dozen years of William’s minority, we find his reign in
Normandy chiefly occupied with his struggles with his vassals, his
neighbors, and the king of France, all a necessary consequence of his
feudal position as duke. The Norman vassals, always turbulent and
rebellious, seem to have broken forth anew upon the death of Robert the
Magnificent, and such accounts as have reached us of the events of the
next twelve years reveal a constant state of anarchy and disorder. The
revolt of the barons came to a head in 1047, when the whole of Lower
Normandy rose under the leadership of the two chief _vicomtes_ of the
region, Ranulf of Bayeux and Néel of Saint-Sauveur, the ruins of whose
family castle of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte still greet the traveller
who leaves Cherbourg for Paris. William, who was hunting in the
neighborhood of Valognes, was obliged to flee half-clad in the night
and to pick his way alone by devious paths across the enemy’s country
to his castle of Falaise. With the assistance of the French king he was
able to collect an army from Upper Normandy and meet the rebels on the
great plain of Val-des-Dunes, near Caen, where the _Mont-joie_ of the
French and the _Dex aie_ of the duke’s followers answered the barons’
appeals to their local saints of St. Sauveur, St. Sever, and St. Amand.
William was victorious; the leaders of the revolt were sent into
exile, but one of them, Grimoud of Plessis, the traitor, apparently he
who had sought William’s death in the night at Valognes, was put in
prison at Rouen in irons which he wore until his death.
With the collapse of the great revolt and the razing of the castles
of the revolting barons, Normandy began to enjoy a period of internal
peace and order. Externally, however, difficulties rather increased
with the growing power of the young duke. In discussions of feudal
society it is too often assumed that if the feudal obligations are
observed between lords and vassals, all will go well, and that the
anarchy of which the Middle Ages are full was the result of violations
of these feudal ties. Now, while undoubtedly a heavy account must be
laid at the door of direct breaches of the feudal bond, it must also be
remembered that there was a fundamental defect in the very structure
of feudal society. We may express this defect by saying that the
feudal ties were only vertical and not lateral. The lord was bound to
his vassal and the vassal to his lord, and so far as these relations
went they provided a nexus of social and legal relations which might
hold society together. But there was no tie between two vassals of the
same lord, nothing whatever which bound one of them to live in peace
and amity with the other. Quite the contrary. War being the normal
state of European society in the feudal period, the right to carry
on private war was one of the cherished rights of the feudal baron,
and it extended wherever it was not restricted by the bonds of fealty
and vassalage. The duke of Normandy and the count of Anjou were both
vassals of the king of France, but their relations to each other were
those of complete independence, and, save for some special agreement or
friendship, were normally relations of hostility.
And so an important part of Norman history has to treat of the
struggles with the duchy’s neighbors, Flanders on the north, the royal
domain on the east, Maine and Anjou to the southward, and Brittany
on the west. Fortunately for Normandy, the Bretons were but loosely
organized, while the Flemings, compacted into one of the strongest of
the French fiefs, were generally friendly, and the friendship was in
this period cemented by William’s marriage to Matilda, daughter of
the count of Flanders, one of the few princely marriages of the time
which was founded upon affection and observed with fidelity. With Anjou
the case was different. Beginning as a border county over against
the Bretons of the lower Loire, with the black rock of Angers as its
centre and fortress, Anjou, though still comparatively small in area,
had grown into one of the strongest states of western France. Under a
remarkable line of counts, Geoffrey Greygown, Fulk the Red, and Fulk
the Black, ancestors of the Plantagenet kings of England, it had become
the dominant power on the Loire, and now under their successor Geoffrey
the Hammer it threatened further expansion by hammering its frontiers
still further to the north and east. Geoffrey, William’s contemporary
and rival, is known to us by a striking characterization written by his
nephew and successor and forming a typical bit of feudal biography:[25]
My uncle Geoffrey became a knight in his father’s lifetime and
began his knighthood by wars against his neighbors, one against
the Poitevins, whose count he captured at Mont Couër, and another
against the people of Maine, whose count, named Herbert Bacon,
he likewise took. He also carried on war against his own father,
in the course of which he committed many evil deeds of which he
afterward bitterly repented. After his father died on his return
from Jerusalem, Geoffrey possessed his lands and the city of
Angers, and fought Count Thibaud of Blois, son of Count Odo, and
by gift of King Henry received the city of Tours, which led to
another war with Count Thibaud, in the course of which, at a battle
between Tours and Amboise, Thibaud was captured with a thousand of
his knights. And so, besides the part of Touraine inherited from
his father, he acquired Tours and the castles round about--Chinon,
L’Ile-Bouchard, Châteaurenault, and Saint-Aignan. After this he had
a war with William, count of the Normans, who later acquired the
kingdom of England and was a magnificent king, and with the people
of France and of Bourges, and with William count of Poitou and
Aimeri viscount of Thouars and Hoel count of Nantes and the Breton
counts of Rennes and with Hugh count of Maine, who had thrown off
his fealty. Because of all these wars and the prowess he showed
therein he was rightly called the Hammer, as one who hammered down
his enemies.
In the last year of his life he made me his nephew a knight at the
age of seventeen in the city of Angers, at the feast of Pentecost,
in the year of the Incarnation 1060, and granted me Saintonge and
the city of Saintes because of a quarrel he had with Peter of
Didonne. In this same year King Henry died on the nativity of St.
John, and my uncle Geoffrey on the third day after Martinmas came
to a good end. For in the night which preceded his death, laying
aside all care of knighthood and secular things, he became a monk
in the monastery of St. Nicholas, which his father and he had built
with much devotion and endowed with their goods.