intervening county of Maine, whence the Angevins had gained possession
of the Norman fortresses of Domfront and Alençon, and it was not till
after Geoffrey’s death, in 1063, that the capture of its chief city,
LeMans, completed that union of Normandy and Maine which was to last
through the greater part of Norman history. The conquest of Maine was
the first fruit of William’s work as conqueror.
With William’s suzerain, the king of France, relations were more
complicated. Legally there could be no question that the duke of
Normandy was the feudal vassal of the French king and as such bound to
the obligations of loyalty and service which flowed from his oath of
homage and fealty. Actually, in the society of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, such bonds were freely and frequently broken, yet they were
not thrown off. Here, as in many other phases of mediæval life, we
meet that persistent contradiction between theory and practice which
shocks our more consistent minds. Just as the men of the Middle Ages
tolerated a Holy Roman Empire which claimed universal dominion and
often exercised only the most local and rudimentary authority, so they
accepted a monarchy like that of the early Capetians, which claimed to
rule over the whole of France and was limited in its actual government
to a few farms and castles in the neighborhood of Paris. And just
as they maintained ideals of lofty chivalry and rigorous asceticism
far beyond the sordid reality of ordinary knighthood or monkhood,
so the constant violation of feudal obligations did not change the
feudal bond or destroy the nexus of feudal relations. In this age of
unrestraint, ferocious savagery alternated with knightly generosity,
and ungovernable rage with self-abasing penance.
At such times the relations of the king and his great feudatories would
depend very largely upon personal temperament, political situations,
and even the impulse of the moment, and we must not expect to find
such purpose and continuity in policies as prevail in more settled
periods. Nevertheless, with due allowance for momentary variations,
the relations of Normandy with the Capetian kings follow comparatively
simple lines. The position of Normandy in the Seine valley and its
proximity to the royal domain offered endless opportunity for friction,
yet for about a century strained relations were avoided by alliance
and friendship based upon common interest. Hugh Capet came to the
throne with the support of the Norman duke, and his successors often
found their mainstay in Norman arms. Robert the Magnificent on his
departure for the East commended his young son to King Henry, and the
heir seems to have grown up under the king’s guardianship. It was Henry
who saved William from his barons in 1047, and it was William that
furnished over half the king’s soldiers on the campaign against Anjou
in the following year. Then, about the middle of the eleventh century,
comes a change, for which the growing power and influence of Normandy
furnish a sufficient explanation. Henry supported the revolt of William
of Arques in 1053 and attempted a great invasion of Normandy in the
same year, while in 1058 he burnt and pillaged his way into the heart
of the Norman territory. A waiting game and well-timed attacks defeated
these efforts at Mortemer and at Varaville, but William refused to
follow up his advantage by a direct attack upon his king, whom he
continued to treat with personal consideration as his feudal lord. Even
after William himself became king, he seems to have continued to render
the military service which he owed as duke. By this time, however, the
subjection had become only nominal; merely as duke, William was now a
more powerful ruler than the king of France, and the Capetian monarchy
had to bide its time for more than a century longer.
Before we can leave the purely Norman period of William’s reign and
turn to the conquest of England, it is important to examine the
internal condition of Normandy under his rule. Even the most thorough
study possible of this subject would need to be brief, for lack of
available evidence. Time has not dealt kindly with Norman records, and
over against the large body of Anglo-Saxon charters and the unique
account of Anglo-Saxon England preserved in the Domesday survey,
contemporary Normandy can set only a few scattered documents and a
curious statement of the duke’s rights and privileges under William,
drawn up four years after his death and only recently recovered as an
authority for his reign. The sources of Norman history were probably
never so abundant as those of England; certainly there is now nothing
on the Continent, outside of the Vatican, that can compare with the
extraordinarily full and continuous series of the English public
records. The great gaps in the Norman records, often supposed to be due
to the Revolution, really appear much earlier. Undoubtedly there was
in many places wanton destruction of documents in the revolutionary
uprisings, and there were many losses under the primitive organization
of local archives in this period, as there undoubtedly were during
the carelessness and corruption of the Restoration. Nevertheless, an
examination of the copies and extracts made from monastic and cathedral
archives by the scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
shows that, with a few significant exceptions, the materials for early
Norman history were little richer then than now, so that the great
losses must have occurred before this time, that is to say, during
the Middle Ages and in the devastation of the English invasion and of
the Protestant wars of the sixteenth century. The cathedral library
at Bayeux, for example, possesses three volumes of a huge cartulary
charred by the fire into which it was thrown when the town was sacked
by the Protestants. On the other hand, it should be noted that the
French Revolution accomplished one beneficent result for local records
in the secularization of ecclesiastical archives and their collection
into the great repositories of the Archives Départementales, whose
organization is still the envy of historical scholars across the
Channel. One who has enjoyed for many months access to these admirable
collections of records will be permitted to express his gratitude to
those who created them, as well as to those by whom they are now so
courteously administered.
Piecing together our scattered information regarding the Normandy
of the eleventh century, we note at the outset that it was a feudal
society, that is to say, land was for the most part held of a lord by
hereditary tenure on condition of military service. Indeed feudal ideas
had spread so far that they even penetrated the church, so that in some
instances the revenues of the clergy had been granted to laymen and
archdeaconries and prebends had been turned into hereditary fiefs.
With feudal service went the various incidents of feudal tenure and a
well-developed feudal jurisdiction of the lord over his tenants and
of the greater barons over the less. In all this there is nothing to
distinguish Normandy from the neighboring countries of northern France,
and as a feudal society is normally a decentralized society, we should
expect to find the powers of government chiefly in the hands of the
local lords. A closer study, however, shows certain peculiarities which
are of the utmost importance, both for Norman and for English history.
First of all, the military service owing to the duke had been
systematically assessed in rough units of five or ten knights, and this
service, or its subdivisions, had become attached to certain pieces of
land, or knights’ fees. The amounts of service were fixed by custom and
were regularly enforced. Still more significant are the restrictions
placed upon the military power of the barons. The symbol and the
foundation of feudal authority was the castle, wherefore the duke
forbade the building of castles and strongholds without his license
and required them to be handed over to him on demand. Private war and
the blood feud could not yet be prohibited entirely, but they were
closely limited. No one was allowed to go out to seek his enemy with
hauberk and standard and sounding horn. Assaults and ambushes were not
permitted in the duke’s forests; captives were not to be taken in a
feud, nor could arms, horses, or property be carried off from a combat.
Burning, plunder, and waste were forbidden in pursuing claims to land,
and except for open crime, no one could be condemned to loss of limb
unless by judgment of the proper ducal or baronial court. Coinage,
generally a valued privilege of the greater lords, was in Normandy a
monopoly of the duke. What the absence of such restrictions might mean
is well illustrated in England in the reign of Stephen, when private
war, unlicensed castles, and baronial coinage appeared as the chief
evils of an unbridled feudal anarchy.
In the administration of justice, in spite of the great franchises
of the barons, the duke has a large reserved jurisdiction. Certain
places are under his special protection, certain crimes put the
offender at his mercy. The administrative machinery, though in many
respects still primitive, has kept pace with the duke’s authority.
Whereas the Capetian king has as his local representatives only the
semi-feudal agents on his farms, the Norman duke has for purposes of
local government a real public officer, the _vicomte_, commanding his
troops, guarding his castles, maintaining order, administering justice,
and collecting the ducal revenues. Nowhere is the superiority of the
Norman dukes over their royal overlords more clear than in the matter
of finance. The housekeeping of the Capetian king of the eleventh
century was still what the Germans call a _Naturalwirthschaft_, an
economic organization based upon payment in produce and labor rather
than in money. “Less powerful than certain of his great vassals,” as he
is described by his principal historian, Luchaire,[26] “the king lives
like them from the income from his farms and tolls, the payments of his
peasants, the labor of his serfs, the taxes disguised as gifts which he
levies from the bishops and abbots of the neighborhood. His granaries
of Gonesse, Janville, Mantes, Étampes, furnish his grain; his cellars
of Orleans and Argenteuil, his wine; his forests of Rouvrai (now the
Bois de Boulogne), Saint-Germain, Fontainebleau, Iveline, Compiègne,
his game. He passes his time in hunting, for amusement or to supply
his table, and travels constantly from estate to estate, from abbey
to abbey, obliged to make full use of his rights of entertainment and
to move frequently from place to place in order not to exhaust the
resources of his subjects.”
In other words, under existing methods of communication, it was easier
to transport the king and his household than it was to transport
food, and the king literally ‘boarded round’ from farm to farm. Such
conditions were typical of the age, and they could only be changed
by the development of a revenue in money, enabling the king to buy
where he would and to pay whom he would for service, whether personal
or political or military. Only by hard cash could the mediæval ruler
become independent of the limitations which feudalism placed upon him.
Now, while the Norman duke derived much of his income from his farms
and forests, his mills and fishing rights and local monopolies and
tolls, he had also a considerable revenue in money. Each _vicomté_ was
farmed for a fixed amount, and there was probably a regular method of
collection and accounting. If the king wished to bestow revenue upon
a monastery he would grant so many measures of grain at the mills of
Bourges or so many measures of wine in the vineyards of Joui; while
in a similar position the Norman duke would give money--twelve pounds
in the farm of Argentan, sixty shillings and tenpence in the toll of
Exmes, or one hundred shillings in the _prévôté_ of Caen. Nothing could
show more clearly the superiority of Normandy in fiscal and hence in
political organization, where under the forms of feudalism we can
already discern the beginnings of the modern state.
To William’s authority in the state we must add his control over the
Norman church. Profoundly secularized and almost absorbed into the lay
society about it as a result of the Norse invasion, the Norman church
had been renewed and refreshed by the wave of monastic reform which
swept over western Europe in the first half of the eleventh century,
and now occupied both spiritually and intellectually a position of
honor and of strength. But it was not supreme. The duke appointed its
bishops and most of its abbots, sat in its provincial councils, and
revised the judgments of its courts. Liberal in gifts to the church and
punctilious in his religious observances, William left no doubt who was
master, and his respectful but independent attitude toward the Papacy
already foreshadowed the conflict in which he forced even the mighty
Hildebrand to yield.
* * * * *
I have dwelt at some length upon these matters of internal
organization, not only because they are fundamental to an understanding
of many institutions of the Norman empire, but because they also
serve to explain how there came to be a Norman empire. The conquest
of England has been so uniformly approached from the English point of
view that it is often made to appear as more or less of an accident
arising from a casual invasion of freebooters. Viewed in its proper
perspective, which I venture to think is the Norman perspective, it
appears as a natural outgrowth of Norman discipline and of Norman
expansion. Only because the duke was strong at home could he hope to
be strong abroad, only because he was master of an extraordinarily
vigorous, coherent, and well-organized state in Normandy could he
attempt the at first sight impossible task of conquering a kingdom and
the still greater task of organizing it under a firm government. We
must take account, not only of the weakness of England, but also of the
strength of Normandy, stronger than any of its continental neighbors,
stronger even than royalty itself.
That the expansion of Normandy should be directed toward England was
the result, not only of the special conditions of the year 1066, but of
a steady _rapprochement_ between the two countries, in which the active
effort was exerted from the Norman side. By geographical position, by
the Scandinavian settlement of both countries, and by the commercial
enterprise of the merchants of Rouen, the history of Normandy and
England had in various ways been brought together in the tenth century,
till in 1002 the marriage of the English king Ethelred with Emma,
sister of Duke Richard the Good, created dynastic connections of
far-reaching importance. Their son Edward the Confessor was brought
up at the Norman court, so that his habits and sympathies became
Norman rather than English, and his accession to the English throne in
1042 opened the way to a rapid development of Norman influence both
in church and in state, which Freeman, with his strong anti-foreign
feelings, considered the real beginning of the Norman Conquest. As
Edward’s childless reign drew near its end, there were two principal
claimants for the succession, Harold, son of Godwin, the most powerful
earl of England, and Duke William. Harold could make no hereditary
claim to the throne, nor until the eve of Edward’s death does he
seem to have had the king’s support, but he was a man of strength
and force and was clearly the leading man of the kingdom. William,
as the great-nephew of Ethelred and Emma, was cousin (first cousin
once removed) of Edward, a claim which he strengthened by an early
expression of Edward in his favor and by an oath which he had exacted
from Harold to support his candidacy. The exact facts are not known
regarding Harold’s oath, made during an involuntary visit to Normandy
two or three years before, but it enabled William to pose as the
defender of a broken obligation and gave him the great moral advantage
of the support of Pope Alexander II, to whom he had the question
submitted. At Edward’s death Harold had himself chosen by the _witan_,
or national council, and crowned, so that he had on his side whatever
could come from such legal forms and from the support which lay behind
them. We must not, however, commit the anachronism of thinking that he
was a national hero or even the candidate of a national party. There
was in the eleventh century no such thing as a nation in the sense that
the term is understood in the modern world, and the word could least
of all be applied to England, broken, divided, and harried by Danish
invasions and by internal disunion. Even the notion of the foreigner
was still dim and inchoate, and the reign of Canute, to cite no others,
had shown England that she had nothing to fear from a king of foreign
birth. The contest between Harold, who was half-Danish in blood, and
William, big as it was in national consequences, cannot be elevated to
the rank of a national struggle.
From the death of Edward the Confessor and the coronation of Harold,
in January, 1066, until the crossing of the Channel in September,
William was busy with preparations for the invasion of England. Such
an expedition transcended the obligation of military service which
could be demanded from his feudal vassals, and William was obliged to
make a strong appeal to the Norman love of adventure and feats of arms
and to promise wide lands and rich booty from his future conquests.
He also found it necessary to enlist knights from other parts of
France--Brittany, Flanders, Poitou, even adventurers from distant Spain
and Sicily. And then there was the question of transport, for Normandy
had no fleet and it was no small matter to create in six months the
seven hundred boats which William’s kinsmen and vassals obligated
themselves to provide. All were ready by the end of August at the mouth
of the Dives,--as the quaint Hôtel Guillaume-le-Conquérant reminds
the American visitor,--but mediæval sailors could not tack against
the wind, and six weeks were passed in waiting for a favoring breeze.
Finally it was decided to take advantage of a west wind as far as the
mouth of the Somme, and here at Saint-Valéry the fleet assembled for
the final crossing. Late in September the Normans landed on the beach
at Pevensey and marched to Hastings, where, October 15, they met the
troops of Harold, fresh from their great victory over the men of Norway
at Stamfordbridge.
Few battles of the Middle Ages were of importance equal to that of
Hastings, and few are better known. Besides the prose accounts of the
Latin chroniclers, we have the contemporary elegiacs of Guy of Amiens
and Baudri of Bourgueil, the spirited verse of the _Roman de Rou_ of
Master Wace, the most detailed narrative but written, unfortunately,
a century after the event, and the unique and vivid portrayal of the
Bayeux Tapestry. This remarkable monument, which is accessible to all
in a variety of editions, consists of a roll of cloth two hundred and
thirty feet long and twenty inches in breadth, embroidered in colors
with a series of seventy-nine scenes which narrate the history of
the Conquest from the departure of Harold on the ill-fated journey
which led him to William’s court down to the final discomfiture of
the English army on the field of Hastings. The episodes, which are
designated by brief titles, are well chosen and are executed with a
realism of detail which is of the greatest importance for the life
and culture of the age. Preserved in the cathedral and later in the
municipal Museum of Bayeux--save for a notable interval in 1804,
when Napoleon had it exhibited in Paris to arouse enthusiasm for a
new French conquest of England,--the tapestry appears from internal
evidence to have been originally executed as an ornament for this
cathedral by English workmen at the command of Bishop Odo, half-brother
of the Conqueror. There is no basis for the common belief that it
was the work of Queen Matilda or her ladies, but efforts to place it
one or even two centuries later have proved unavailing against the
evidence of armor and costume, and the general opinion of scholars now
regards it as belonging to the eleventh century and thus substantially
contemporary with the events which it depicts.
The modern literature of the battle is also commensurate with its
importance. The classic account is found in the third volume of
Freeman’s majestic _History of the Norman Conquest_, where the
story is told with a rare combination of minute detail and spirited
narrative which reminds us, it has been said, of a battle of the
_Iliad_ or a Norse saga. Splendid as this narrative is, its enthusiasm
often carries it beyond the evidence of the sources, and in several
fundamental points it can no longer be accepted as historically sound.
The theory of the palisade upon which Freeman’s conception of the
English tactics rested has been destroyed by the trenchant criticism
of that profound student of Anglo-Norman history, J. Horace Round,
and his whole treatment has been vigorously attacked from the point
of view of the scientific study of military history by Wilhelm Spatz
and his distinguished master, Hans Delbrück, of Berlin. Unfortunately
the Berlin critics are influenced too much by certain theories of
military organization; they do not call the English soldier of the
period a degenerate, but they consider him, and the Norman knight
as well, incapable of the disciplined and united action required
by all real strategy, incapable even of forming the shield-wall and
executing the feigned flight described by the contemporary chroniclers
of the battle. While it is true that mediæval fighting was far more
individualistic than that of ancient or modern armies and lacked also
the flexible conditions which lie at the basis of modern tactics,
there is the best of contemporary evidence for a certain amount of
strategical movement at Hastings. On one point, however, the modern
military critics have compelled us to modify our ideas of the battles
of earlier times, namely, with respect to the numbers engaged. Against
the constant tendency to magnify the size of the military forces, a
tendency accentuated in the Middle Ages by the complete recklessness
of chroniclers when dealing with large figures, modern criticism has
pointed out the limitations of battle-space, transportation, and
commissariat. The five millions with which Xerxes is said to have
invaded Greece are a physical impossibility, for Delbrück has shown
that, with this number moving under normal conditions, the rear-guard
could not have crossed the Tigris when the first Persians reached
Thermopylæ. Similarly the fifty or sixty thousand knights attributed
to William the Conqueror shrink to one-tenth the number when brought
to face with the official lists of English and Norman knights’ fees.
If William’s army did not exceed five or six thousand, that of Harold
could not have been much greater and may well have been less; though
William’s panegyrist places the number of English at 1,200,000, not
more than 12,000 could have stood, in the closest formation, on the
hill which they occupied at Hastings. Small skirmishes these, to those
who have followed the battles of the Marne, the Aisne, the Vistula, and
the San, yet none the less important in the world’s history!