unable to hold aloof from the crusade which fired the military ardor
of his chief vassal and rival. Large sums of money were raised by
every means, and the two kings made an agreement to divide equally all
the spoil of their expedition. They also arranged to go by sea to the
East after they had assembled their ships and followers at Messina,
thus avoiding the usual complications with the Eastern Empire and the
fatal march through the barren and hostile interior of Asia Minor
which now claimed another victim in the gallant German emperor. At the
best, however, a crusade was not an organized campaign under efficient
direction, but merely a number of independent expeditions which found
it convenient to go at the same time and by the same route. There
was no supreme command, and there was constant jealousy and friction
between feudal lords who were ever impatient of restraint and careful
of points of dignity and precedence. The presence of a king was of
some help, the presence of two only made matters worse. If the causes
of rivalry at home and the slighting of Philip’s sister could have
been forgotten, there was still the fact that Richard was Philip’s
vassal as well as his equal, and Richard was not of the type to spare
Philip’s susceptibilities. Rich, open-handed, fond of display,
Lion-Heart “loved the lime-light,” and his overbearing nature and
lack of tact made it impossible for him to coöperate with others. He
characteristically went his own way, paying scant attention to Philip
and acting as if the leadership of the expedition belonged to himself
as a matter of course. Relations became strained during the sojourn at
Messina and grew worse in Palestine, where the affairs of the Latin
kingdom and the rivalries of lesser princes added fuel to the flame.
“The two kings and peoples,” says an English chronicler, “did less
together than they would have done separately, and each set but light
store by the other.” Sick of the whole enterprise, after four months in
the East, Philip seized the first excuse to return home, departing in
August, 1191.
Richard stayed a year longer in Palestine, yet he never entered
Jerusalem and had finally to retire with a disappointing truce and to
spend another year, and more, languishing in German prisons. The events
of these months do not concern the history of Normandy, but if we would
behold Richard in his fairest light we must see him as he rushed to
the relief of Joppa on the first of August, 1192, wading ashore from
his red galley with the cry, “Perish the man who would hang back,”
covering the landing of his followers with his crossbow, making his
way by a winding stair to the house of the Templars on the town wall,
and then, sword in hand, clearing the town of three thousand Turks and
pursuing them into the plain with but three horsemen; or, four days
later, repelling a Mameluke attack in force by a most skilful tactical
arrangement of his meagre army, directing the battle on the beach
while he also kept the town clear, “slaying innumerable Turks with his
gleaming sword, here cleaving a man from the crown of his head to his
teeth,” there cutting off with one blow the head, shoulder, and right
arm of a Saracen emir, his coat of mail and his horse bristling with
javelins and arrows like a hedgehog, yet “remaining unconquerable and
unwounded in accordance with the divine decree.”[43]
* * * * *
What most concerned the Norman empire was the king’s absence since the
summer of 1190, prolonged by his captivity in Germany until the spring
of 1194. Although Philip had taken an oath before leaving Palestine to
respect Richard’s men and possessions during his absence, and even to
protect them like his own city of Paris, he sought release from this
engagement as soon as he reached Rome on his homeward journey, and
once back in France he soon began active preparations for an attack on
the Plantagenet territories. With Richard safe in a German dungeon, he
seized a large part of the Norman border and made a secret treaty with
John which secured the surrender of all the lands east of the Seine
and important fortresses in Anjou and Touraine. He offered huge sums
of money to secure Richard’s custody or even his continued detention
in Germany, and when early in 1194 he warned John that “the Devil
was loose” at last, he was besieging the great fortress of Verneuil
on the Norman frontier. When Richard landed at Barfleur in May, amid
the ringing of bells and processions singing “God has come again in
his strength,” it is small wonder that he came breathing vengeance
and slaughter, and that the rest of his life is a record of scarcely
interrupted war against the king of France. For many years he is said
to have refused the sacrament lest he might have to forgive his enemy.
Again and again he had Philip on the run. Once Philip lost all his
baggage and saved himself by turning aside to hear mass while Richard
rode by; on another occasion Richard drove the French into Gisors so
that the bridge broke under them “and the king of France drank of the
river, and twenty of his knights were drowned.”
Such scenes, however, are only the striking episodes in a series of
campaigns which are confused and complicated and do not lend themselves
to clear narration. Decisive engagements were rare, each side seeking
rather to wear out the other. Money was spent freely for allies and
mercenaries--a contemporary called the struggle one between the pound
sterling and the pound of Tours, and the advantage was on the side
of the pounds sterling by reason of their greater number. There was
usually a campaign in the spring and summer, ending in a truce in the
autumn which the church tried to prolong into a lasting peace but
which soon broke down in a new war. The wars were for the most part
border forays, in which the country was burned and wasted far and wide,
to the injury chiefly of the peasants, upon whom the burden of mediæval
warfare mainly fell. “First destroy the land, then the enemy,” was
the watchword. Booty and ransom were the object as well as military
advantages, so that even the contests between knights had their sordid
side, so definitely were they directed toward taking profitable
prisoners; while feudal notions of honor might cause Richard to put
out the eyes of fifteen prisoners and send them to Philip under the
guidance of one of their number who had been left one eye, whereupon
Philip blinded an equal number of knights and sent them to Richard
under the guidance of the wife of one of them, “in order,” says his
eulogist,[44] “that no one should think he was afraid of Richard or
inferior to him in force and courage.”
The brunt of the war fell on Normandy and ultimately on the castles
which supplied the duchy’s lack of natural frontiers. To supplement the
great interior fortresses of Caen, Falaise, Argentan, Montfort, and
Rouen, Henry I began the organization of a series of fortifications
on the southern and eastern borders. Henry II, we are told, improved
or renewed nearly all these strongholds, and especially Gisors, the
frontier gateway toward France, on which fortress the exchequer
roll shows him expending 2650 pounds Angevin in a single year. These
castles, remains of many of which are still standing, were typical of
the best military architecture of their age, but they were inferior
in strength and scientific construction to the great fortresses of
Christian Syria, such as Krak or Margat, which seem to have gone back
to Byzantine and even Persian models. A keen warrior like Richard
had not spent his two years in Palestine without gaining an expert
knowledge of eastern methods in the art of war, and we are not
surprised to find that he had Saracen soldiers and Syrian artillerymen
with him in his Norman campaigns, and that he made large use of
oriental experience in strengthening his defences. His masterpiece, of
course, was Château Gaillard, the saucy castle on the Seine controlling
the passage of the river and its tributaries in that region of the
Norman Vexin which was the great bone of contention between the
Plantagenets and the French kings. Having first expropriated at great
expense the lord of the region, the archbishop of Rouen, he fortified
the adjacent island of Andeli and laid out a new town on the bank. This
he surrounded with water and reënforced with towers and battlements,
protecting the whole with a stockade across the river and outlying
works farther up. Then on the great rock above he built the fortress,
with its triangular advance work, its elliptical citadel, and its
circular keep surrounded by a “_fossé_ cut almost vertically out of
the rock.” There was no dead angle, such as permitted sappers to
reach the base of rectilinear walls, but instead a sloping base down
which projectiles might ricochet; nor was there, as at the corners of
square towers, any part of the surrounding area which could not be
reached by direct fire from within. “The approaches and the _fossé_,”
says Dieulafoy,[45] “were covered by the fire of the garrison right
up to the foot of the scarp, and no sapper could touch any point in
towers or walls, provided that the fortress was under the direction
of an experienced commander.” This qualification is important, for
the new type of fortification was designed for an active defence, one
might almost say an offensive defence, and not for the mere passive
resistance with which the older strategy had been content. The works at
Andeli, carried on largely under Richard’s personal direction, occupied
more than a year of labor and cost nearly 50,000 pounds Angevin, which
we find distributed in the royal accounts over lumber and stone and
hardware, and among masons and carpenters and stone-cutters and lesser
laborers.
By the year 1199 Richard had recovered his Norman possessions save
Gisors and certain castles on the border, where Philip never lost his
foothold, and he had raised an effective barrier to French advance
in the valley of the Seine. Strong allies were on his side, and the
diplomatic situation was decidedly in his favor. Never had Philip been
so hard pressed, and even the friendly legate of the Pope could secure
for him nothing better than the retention of Gisors in the truce which
was then drawn up. And then a second stroke of fortune, greater even
than the captivity of 1192, came to Philip’s aid. Richard, impetuous
and headstrong as ever, spoiled all by a raid on an Aquitanian rebel in
which he lost his life. His energy, his military skill, and his vivid
personality had concealed the fundamental weakness of his position
against France; his removal meant the swift fall of the Norman empire.
* * * * *
At Richard’s death there were two possible successors, his younger
brother John, whom he had designated heir, and his nephew Arthur, son
of his elder brother Geoffrey and duke of Brittany. There was enough
uncertainty in feudal law to admit of a plausible case for either one,
but Arthur was only twelve and John quickly took possession, being
crowned at Rouen in April and at Westminster in May. Arthur, however,
had the following of his Bretons and, what was more important, the
support of Philip Augustus, who used Arthur against John as he had used
John against Richard and Richard against his father. Philip confirmed
Arthur as count of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine, and soon brought him
to Paris, where he was betrothed to Philip’s daughter. Nevertheless
the course of events at first favored John. Philip was in the midst
of the great struggle with Pope Innocent III over the divorce of his
queen Ingeborg, and a treaty was signed in 1200, by which, on giving up
territory in the Norman border and in central France and paying a large
relief of 20,000 marks for his lands, John was confirmed in his control
of Anjou and Brittany, while a visit to Paris, where he was splendidly
received, seemed to crown the reconciliation. In a position, however,
where all possible strength and resourcefulness were required, John’s
defects of character proved fatal. No one could depend upon him for
loyalty, judgment, or even persistence, and he quickly earned his name
of “Soft-Sword.”
Meanwhile the legally-minded Philip, while spending money freely on
John’s followers and abating nothing of his diplomatic and military
efforts, brought to bear the weapons of law. The revival of legal
studies in the twelfth century had given rise in western Europe to a
body of professional lawyers, skilled in the Roman and the canon law,
and quick to turn their learning to the advantage of the princes whom
they served. Philip had a number of such advisers at his court, and
they doubtless contributed to the more lawyerlike methods of doing
things which make their appearance in his reign; but it was feudal
custom, and not Roman law, that he used against John. In law John was
Philip’s vassal,--indeed, he had just confessed as much in the treaty
of 1200,--and as such was held to attend Philip’s feudal court and
subject himself to its decision in disputes with other vassals. It
might be urged that the king of England was too great a man to submit
to such jurisdiction, and that the duke of Normandy had been in the
habit of satisfying his feudal obligations by a formal ceremony at the
Norman frontier; still the technical law was on the side of the king
of France, and a suzerain had at last come who was able to translate
theory into fact. In the course of a series of adventures in Poitou
John carried off the fiancée of one of his barons of the house of
Lusignan, who appealed to his superior lord, the king of France. All
this was in due form, but Philip was no lion of justice eager to
redress injuries for justice’ sake. He waited nearly two years, John’s
visit to Paris falling in the interval, and then, when he was ready to
execute sentence, promptly summoned John before the feudal court of
peers. John neither came nor appeared through a representative, and the
court in April, 1202, declared him deprived of all his lands for having
refused to obey his lord’s commands or render the services due from him
as vassal. The capture of Arthur temporarily checked Philip; the boy’s
murder by John in the course of 1203 simply recoiled on the murderer.
Whether this crime led to a second condemnation by the court of peers,
as was alleged by the French at the time of the abortive invasion of
England in 1216, is a question which has been sharply discussed among
scholars. What has now become the orthodox view holds that there was
no second condemnation, but a clever case has recently been made by
Powicke, who, minimizing the importance of the accepted argument from
the silence of immediate contemporaries, argues, on the basis of the
_Annals of Margam_, that there probably was a second condemnation
in 1204. After all, the question is of subordinate importance, for
Philip’s effective action was based on the trial of 1202, and by 1204
John’s fate was already sealed.
The decisive point in the campaign against Normandy was the capture of
Château Gaillard, the key to the Seine valley, in May, 1204, after a
siege of six months which seems to have justified its designer, save
for a stone bridge which sheltered the engineers who undermined the
outer wall. Western Normandy fell before an attack from the side of
Brittany; the great fortresses of the centre, Argentan, Falaise, and
Caen, opened their gates to Philip; and with the surrender of Rouen,
24 June, 1204, Philip was master of Normandy. John had lingered in
England, doing nothing to support the defense, and when he crossed
at last in 1206 he was obliged to sign a final surrender of all the
territories north of the Loire, retaining only southern Poitou and
Gascony. Gascony and England were united for two centuries longer, but
the only connection was by sea. The control of the Seine and the Loire
had been lost, and with that passed away the Plantagenet empire.
* * * * *
The results of the separation of Normandy from England have been
a favorite subject with historians, and especially with those who
approach the Middle Ages from the point of view of modern politics and
modern ideas of nationality. It all seems so natural that Normandy
should belong with France and not with England. Nationality, however,
is an elusive thing, and many forces besides geography have made the
modern map. England in the Middle Ages had much more in common with
Normandy than she had with Wales or Scotland, while in feeling, as well
as in space, the Irish Sea was wider than the Channel. From the English
point of view there was nothing inevitable in the loss of Normandy.
On the French side the matter is more obvious. If Paris was to be the
capital, it must control the Seine and the Loire, and when it gained
control of them, its position in France was assured. The possession
of Normandy meant far more to France than to England. Moreover the
conquest of Normandy cut England and France loose from each other.
The Anglo-Norman barons must decide whether they would serve the king
of England or the king of France, and they were quickly absorbed into
the country with which they threw in their lot. It was no longer
possible to play one set of interests against another; turned back on
themselves, the English barons met John on their own ground and won the
Great Charter, so that the loss of Normandy has a direct bearing on the
growth of English liberty. “When the Normans became French,” concludes
Powicke, “they did a great deal more than bring their national epic to
a close. They permitted the English once more to become a nation, and
they established the French state for all time.”[46]
Viewed in this way, the end of Normandy almost seems more glorious
than Normandy itself; as was said of Samson, “the dead which he slew
at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.” But of
course in the larger sense the work of the Norman empire was not ended
in 1204. For one thing, the administrative organization of the Norman
duchy could not fail to exert an influence upon the French monarchy. In
spite of the great progress made by the Capetian kings of the twelfth
century, the Norman government still maintained its marked superiority
as a system of judicial and fiscal administration, and Philip Augustus
was not the man to neglect the lessons it might have for him. The
nature and extent of Norman influence upon French institutions is a
subject which is still dark to us and for lack of evidence may always
remain dark; but there can be little doubt that Norman precedents were
followed at various points in the development of the Parlement of Paris
and in the elaboration of the French financial system. In the main,
however, the influence was inevitably in the other direction, from
France upon Normandy, not from Normandy upon France. There was, it is
true, no sudden change. Philip respected vested interests, both in the
church and among the barons, and preserved Norman customs, so that the
duchy long retained its individuality of law, of local organization,
and of character, and secured its rights from Louis X in a document of
1315, the _Charte aux Normands_, which has sometimes been compared in a
small way to the Great Charter. The _Coutume de Normandie_ persisted,
like the customs of the other great provinces, until the French
Revolution, but it was a body of custom worked out under the influence
of the central government and gradually absorbing the jurisprudence of
the king’s court. If the Norman exchequer continued to sit at Rouen, it
was presided over by commissioners sent out from Paris. Even that most
characteristic of Norman institutions, trial by jury, was insensibly
modified by the new inquisitorial procedure of the thirteenth century
and silently disappeared from the practice of the Continent. As in
law and government, so in culture and social life, the forces of
centralization did their work none the less effectively because they
were gradual, and Normandy became a part of France.
There was, it is true, a period when Normandy was once more united
to England, this time as a conquered country. Between 1417 and 1419
Henry V subdued Normandy in a series of well-conducted campaigns,
and he and his son remained in possession of the duchy until 1450.
During this period of English rule no effort seems to have been made
to restore earlier conditions which had now been outgrown: law, local
government, fiscal organization continued unchanged. English officials
were, of course, appointed, and English immigration was encouraged at
the expense of the lands of the Normans who had left the province. The
first Norman university was founded at Caen in the reign of Henry VI.
In the face, however, of all efforts at conciliation and fair treatment
the population remained hostile. The idea that the Englishman was a
foreigner had grown up during two centuries of absence; it was to
crystallize definitely as the conception of French nationality took
form through the work of Joan of Arc. Lavisse has reminded us[47]
that this war “was not a conflict between one nation and another,
between the genius of one people and that of another; nevertheless it
continued, and was fierce as well as long. From year to year the hatred
against the English increased. In contact with the foreigner France
began to know herself, like the _ego_ in contact with the _non-ego_.
Vanquished she felt the disgrace of defeat. Acts of municipal and local
patriotism preceded and heralded French patriotism, which finally
blossomed out in Joan of Arc, and sanctified itself with the perfume
of a miracle. Out of France with the English! They left France, and
France came into existence.” In this rapid growth of French national
consciousness Normandy had its full share, and some of its great scenes
are set on Norman soil. It was at Rouen that Joan of Arc was tried and
condemned by the Inquisition; it was in the old market-place of this
same city that the English soldiers discovered too late that they had
burned a saint.
And so it came about that twenty years later the Normans welcomed the
troops of Charles VII and passed finally under French sway. Proud of
its past, proud also of its provincialisms and local peculiarities,
Normandy was nevertheless French in feeling and interests, and grew
more French with time under the unifying force of the absolute
monarchy, the Revolution, and the modern republic. It ceased to be
a duchy in 1467; it ceased to be even a political division with the
creation of the modern departments in 1790. Its last survival as an
area recognized by the government, the ecclesiastical province of
Rouen, disappeared with the final separation of church and state in
1905. The only unity which its five departments now retain is that of
the history and tradition of a common past--of a _petite patrie_ now
swallowed up in the nation.
Only at one point did the old Normandy really maintain itself against
the forces of centralization, namely in the Channel Islands, those
“bits of France fallen into the sea and picked up by England,” as
Victor Hugo calls them. These were not conquered by Philip or his
successors, and have remained from that day to this attached to the
English crown. They still have their _baillis_ and _vicomtes_, their
knights’ fees and feudal modes of tenure. The Norman dialect is still
their language; the _Coutume de Normandie_ is still the basis of their
law; and one may still hear, in disputes concerning property in Jersey
and Guernsey, the old cry of _haro_ which preserves one of the most
archaic features of Norman procedure.
* * * * *
After all is said, it is in England that the most permanent work of
the Normans survives. They created the English central government
and impressed upon it their conceptions of order and of law. Their
feudalism permeated English society; their customs shaped much of
English jurisprudence; their kings and nobles were the dominant class
in English government. Freeman could never understand those who claimed
that, as he declared, “we English are not ourselves but somebody else.”
The fact, however, remains that in a mixed race--and all races are
to some extent mixed--there is no such thing as ‘ourselves’; and if
the numerical preponderance in the English people is largely that of
pre-Norman elements, the Norman strain has exerted an influence out of
all proportion to its numerical strength. Without William the Conqueror
and Henry II the English would not be ‘themselves,’ whatever else they
might have become.