and cathedrals nothing could serve better than an examination of
the contents of their libraries, where we might judge for ourselves
what books they acquired and copied and read. This unfortunately we
can no longer make. The library of Bec, partly destroyed by fire in
the seventeenth century, was scattered to the four winds of heaven
in the eighteenth, and while the legislation of 1791 provided for
the transfer of such collections to the public depositories of the
neighboring towns, the libraries of Avranches, Alençon, and Rouen,
reënforced by the Bibliothèque Nationale, have garnered but a small
part of the ancient treasures of Mont-Saint-Michel, Saint-Évroul,
and the establishments of the lower Seine. Works of importance as
well as curiosities still survive--autograph corrections of Lanfranc,
the originals of the great histories of Robert of Torigni and
Ordericus Vitalis, service-books throwing light on the origins of the
liturgical drama, cartularies of churches and abbeys,--but for a more
comprehensive view of the resources of the twelfth century we must turn
to the contemporary catalogues which have come down to us from the
cloisters of Saint-Évroul, Bec, Lire, and Fécamp, and the cathedral of
Rouen. After all, as that delightful academician _Silvestre Bonnard_
has reminded us, there is no reading so easy, so restful, or so
seductive as a catalogue of manuscripts; and there is no better guide
to the silence and the peace of the monastic library, as one may
still taste them in the quiet of the Escorial or Monte Cassino. Let
us take the most specific example, the collection of one hundred and
forty volumes bequeathed to Bec by Philip, bishop of Bayeux, at his
death in 1164, or rather the one hundred and thirteen which reached
the monastery, twenty-seven having fallen by the way and being hence
omitted from the catalogue. Like the other libraries of the time,
this consisted chiefly of theology--the writings of the Fathers and
of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian commentators and theologians,
ending with Philip’s contemporaries, St. Bernard, Gilbert de la Porrée,
Hildebert of Tours, and Hugh of St. Victor, and his metropolitan, Hugh
of Amiens. Wise in the wisdom of this world, the bishop possessed the
whole _Corpus Juris Civilis_ in five volumes, as well as the leading
authorities on canon law, Burchard, St. Ives, and the _Decretum_ of
Gratian. He had none of the Roman poets, although they were not unknown
to Norman writers of his age, but a fair selection of prose works
of a literary and philosophical character--Cicero and Quintilian,
Seneca and the Younger Pliny, besides the mediæval version of Plato’s
_Timæus_. There is a goodly sprinkling of the Roman historians most in
vogue in the Middle Ages, Cæsar, Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Florus,
Eutropius, and the Latin version of Josephus, besides such of their
mediæval successors as came nearest to Anglo-Norman affairs. Science
was confined to Pliny’s _Natural History_ and two anonymous treatises
on mathematics and astronomy, while the practical arts were represented
by Palladius on agriculture and Vegetius on tactics. On the whole a
typically Norman library, deficient on the imaginative side, but strong
in orthodox theology, in law, and in history; not in all respects an
up-to-date collection, since it contained none of those logical works
of Aristotle which were transforming European thought, and, save for
a treatise of Adelard of Bath, showed no recognizable trace of the
new science which was beginning to come in through Spain; strikingly
lacking also, save for a volume on Norman history, in products
of Normandy itself, even in the field of theology and scriptural
interpretation, where, for example, Richard abbot of Préaux had written
marvellous commentaries upon Genesis, Deuteronomy, Ecclesiastes,
the Song of Songs, and the Proverbs of Solomon, and had “discoursed
allegorically or tropologically in many treatises upon obscure problems
of the Prophets.”[55]
After all, works on the history of Normandy were the most Norman thing
a Norman could produce, and it was in this field that the duchy made
its chief contribution to mediæval literature and learning. All the
usual types appear, local annals, lists of bishops and abbots, lives
of saints, biographies of princes, but the most characteristic are
the works in which the history of Normandy is grasped as a whole: the
half-legendary account of the early dukes by Dudo of Saint-Quentin, the
confused but valuable _Gesta_ of William of Jumièges, at last restored
to us in a critical edition,[56] the _Chronicle_ of Robert of Torigni,
and especially the great _Historia Ecclesiastica_ of Ordericus Vitalis,
the _chef-d’œuvre_ of Norman historiography and the most important
historical work written in France in the twelfth century.
Born in 1075 near Shrewsbury, Ordericus was early devoted to the
monastic life, and lest family affection might interfere with his
vocation and the sure hope of Paradise held out to the sobbing boy,
his sorrowing parents sent him forever from their sight to spend his
days at Saint-Évroul near the southern border of Normandy. Tonsured
at ten, ordained a deacon at eighteen and a priest at thirty-two,
he bore the burden and heat of the day under six successive abbots,
until as an old man of sixty-six he laid down his pen with a touching
peroration of prayer and thanksgiving to Him who had disposed these
years according to His good pleasure. During this half century of
poverty and obedience Ordericus had little opportunity to leave the
precincts of the monastery, although on rare occasions we can trace
him in England and at Cambrai, Rheims, and Cluni, and the materials
of his history had to be gathered almost wholly from the well-stocked
library of the abbey and from conversation with those who passed his
way. These facilities were, however, considerable, for, remote as
Saint-Évroul may seem in its corner of the _pays d’Ouche_, it was in
constant relations with England, where it possessed lands, and with
southern Italy, whither it had sent its members to found new convents;
and like all such establishments it was a place of entertainment for
travellers of all classes, priests and monks, knights and _jongleurs_,
even a king like Henry I, who brought with them accounts of their
journeys about the world and tales of great deeds in distant Spain,
Sicily, and Jerusalem. There were few better places to collect
materials for the writing of history, and there was no one who could
make better use of them than Ordericus. He was fully launched in his
great work by 1123, and he kept at it throughout the remaining eighteen
years of his life, putting it aside in the winter when his fingers
grew numb with the cold, but resuming it each spring in the clear
round hand which meets us in many a manuscript of Saint-Évroul, and
offering it at the end to future generations, a monument more lasting
than the granite obelisk erected to his memory in 1912. His original
purpose was limited to a history of his monastery, but the plan soon
widened to include the principal movements of his time and finally
grew to the idea of a universal history, beginning, indeed, with the
Christian era instead of with the more usual starting-point of the
Creation. Nevertheless, even in its final form the work of Ordericus
is not a general history of the Christian centuries, for the general
portion is chiefly introductory and comparatively brief; his real
theme is Norman history, centring, of course, round the vicissitudes
of his convent and the adjacent territory, but also giving a large
place to the deeds of the Normans in that greater Normandy which they
had created beyond the sea, in England, in Italy, and in Palestine.
He is thus not only Norman but pan-Norman. The plan, or rather lack
of plan, of his thirteen books reflects the changes of design and the
interruptions which the work underwent; there is some repetition, much
confusion, and a distinct absence of architectonic art. These defects,
however, do not diminish the prime merit of the work, which lies in its
replacement of the jejune annals of the older type by a full and ample
historical narrative, rich in detail, vivid in presentation, giving
space to literary history and everyday life as well as to the affairs
of church and state, and constituting as a whole the most faithful
and living picture which has reached us of the European society of
his age. Neither in the world nor of the world, this monk had a ripe
knowledge of men and affairs, independence of judgment, a feeling for
personality, and a sure touch in characterization. He had also a Latin
style of his own, labored at times rather than affected, ready to show
its skill in well-turned verse or in well-rounded speeches after the
fashion of the classical historians, but direct and vigorous and not
unworthy of the flexible and sonorous language which he had made his
own.
Latin, however, was an exclusive possession of the clergy,--and not
of all of them, if we can argue from the examinations held by Eudes
Rigaud,--and by the middle of the twelfth century the Norman baronage
began to demand from the clerks an account of the Anglo-Norman past in
a language which they too could understand. History in the vernacular
develops in France earlier than elsewhere, and in France earliest in
Normandy and in the English lands which shared the Norman speech and
produced the oldest surviving example of such a work, the _Histoire
des Engles_ of Gaimar, written between 1147 and 1151. The chief centre
for the production of vernacular history was the court of that patron
of ecclesiastical and secular learning, Henry II, and his Aquitanian
queen, to one or both of whom are dedicated the histories of Wace
and Benoît de Sainte-More. Wace, the most interesting of this group
of writers, was a native of Jersey and a clerk of Caen who turned an
honest penny by his compositions and won a canonry at Bayeux by the
most important of them, his _Roman de Rou_. Beginning with Rollo, from
whom it takes its name, this follows the course of Norman history to
the victory of Henry I in 1106, in simple and agreeable French verse
based upon the Latin chroniclers but incorporating something from
popular tradition. Such a compilation adds little to our knowledge, but
by the time of the Third Crusade we find a contemporary narrative in
French verse prepared by a _jongleur_ of Évreux who accompanied Richard
on the expedition. If we ignore the line, at best very faint, which in
works of this sort separates history from romance and from works of
edification, we must carry the Norman pioneers still further back, to
the _Vie de Saint Alexis_ which we owe probably to a canon of Rouen
in the eleventh century, and to the great national epic of mediæval
France, the _Chanson de Roland_, pre-Norman in origin but Norman in
its early form, which has recently been ascribed to Turold, bishop
of Bayeux after the death of the more famous Odo and later for many
years a monk of Bec. There is, one may object, nothing monastic in this
wonderful pæan of mediæval knighthood, whose religion is that of the
God of battles who has never lied, and whose hero meets death with his
face toward Spain and his imperishable sword beneath him; but knights
and monks had more in common than was once supposed, and we are coming
to see that the monasteries, especially the monasteries of the great
highways, had a large share in the making, if not in the final writing,
of the mediæval epic as well as the mediæval chronicles.
When we reach works like these, the literary history of Normandy
merges in that of France, as well as in that of England, which,
thanks to the Norman Conquest and the Norman empire, long remained
a literary province of France. We must not, however, leave this
vernacular literature, as yet almost wholly the work of clerks, with
the impression that its dominant quality is romantic or poetical.
Its versified form was merely the habit of an age which found verse
easy to remember; the literature itself, as Gaston Paris has well
observed,[57] was “essentially a literature of instruction for the
use of laymen,” fit material for prose and not for poetry. It is thus
characteristically Norman in subject as well as in speech--simple and
severe in form, devout and edifying rather than mystical, given to
history rather than to speculation, and seeking through the moralized
science of lapidaries and bestiaries and astronomical manuals to aid
the everyday life of a serious and practical people.
* * * * *
Normandy had also something to say to the world in that most mediæval
of arts, architecture, and especially in that Romanesque form of
building which flourished in the eleventh century and the first half
of the twelfth. The great Norman churches of this epoch were the
natural outgrowth of its life--the wealth of the abbeys, the splendor
of princely prelates like Odo of Bayeux and Geoffrey of Coutances, the
piety and penance of William the Conqueror and Matilda, expiating by
two abbeys their marriage within the prohibited degrees, the religious
devotion of the people as illustrated by the processions of 1145. The
biographer of Geoffrey de Mowbray, for example, tells[58] us how the
bishop labored day and night for the enlargement and beautification of
his church at Coutances (dedicated in 1056), buying the better half
of the city from the duke to get space for the cathedral and palace,
travelling as far as Apulia to secure gold and gems and vestments
from Robert Guiscard and his fellow Normans, and maintaining from
his rents a force of sculptors, masons, goldsmiths, and workers in
glass. Nearly forty years later, when the church had been damaged by
earthquake and tempest, he brought a plumber from England to restore
the leaden roof and the fallen stones of the towers and to replace the
gilded cock which crowned the whole; and when he saw the cock once more
glistening at the summit, he gave thanks to God and shortly passed
away, pronouncing eternal maledictions upon those who should injure his
church. Of this famous structure nothing now remains above the ground,
for the noble towers which look from the hill of Coutances toward the
western sea are Gothic, like the rest of the church; and for surviving
monuments of cathedrals of the eleventh and twelfth centuries we must
go to the naves of Bayeux and Évreux and the St. Romain’s tower of
Rouen. Even here the impression will be fragmentary, broken by Gothic
choirs and by towers and spires of a still later age, just as the
simple lines of the early church of Mont-Saint-Michel are swallowed up
in the ornate Gothic of the loftier parts of the great pile. Edifices
wholly of the Romanesque period must be sought in the parish churches
in which Normandy is so rich, or in the larger abbey-churches which
meet us at Lessay, Cerisy, Caen, Jumièges, and Bocherville. Jumièges,
though in ruins, preserves the full outline of the style of the middle
of the eleventh century; Caen presents in the Abbaye aux Hommes and
the Abbaye aux Dames two perfect though contrasted types of a few
years later, the one simple and austere, the other richer and less
grand. Freeman may seem fanciful when he suggests that these sister
churches express the spirit of their respective founders, “the imperial
will of the conquering duke” and the milder temper of his “loving and
faithful duchess,”[59] but in any event they are Norman and typical
of their age and country. There are elements in the ornamentation of
Norman churches in this period which have been explained by reference
to the distant influence of the Scandinavian north or the Farther
East, there are perhaps traces of Lombard architecture in their
plan, but their structure as a whole is as Norman as the stone of
which they are built, distinguished by local traits from the other
varieties of French Romanesque to which this period gave rise. Not
the least Norman feature of these buildings is the persistent common
sense of design and execution; the Norman architects did not attempt
the architecturally impossible or undertake tasks, like the cathedral
of Beauvais, which they were unable to finish in their own time and
style. “What they began, they completed,” writes the Nestor of American
historians in his sympathetic interpretation of the art and the spirit
of _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_. In Norman art, as in other phases
of Norman achievement, the last word cannot be said till we have
followed it far beyond the borders of the duchy, northward to Durham,
“half house of God, half castle ’gainst the Scot,” and the other
massive monuments which made ‘Norman’ synonymous with a whole style
and period of English architecture, and southward to those more ornate
structures which Norman princes reared at Bari and Cefalù, Palermo and
Monreale. “No art--either Greek or Byzantine, Italian, or Arab--” says
Henry Adams,[60] “has ever created two religious types so beautiful,
so serious, so impressive, and yet so different, as Mont-Saint-Michel
watching over its northern ocean, and Monreale, looking down over its
forests of orange and lemon, on Palermo and the Sicilian seas.”
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
There is no general account of Norman life and culture in any
period of the Middle Ages, and no general study of Norman
feudalism. For conditions in France generally, see Luchaire, _La
société française au temps de Philippe-Auguste_ (Paris, 1909),
translated by Krehbiel (New York, 1912); for England, Miss M.
Bateson, _Mediæval England_ (New York and London, 1904). On
castles, see C. Enlart, _Manuel d’archéologie française_, II
(Paris, 1904, with bibliography), and Mrs. E. S. Armitage, _The
Early Norman Castles of the British Isles_ (London, 1912). For
William the Marshal, see Paul Meyer’s introduction to his edition
of the _Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal_ (Paris, 1891–1901); the
poem has been utilized by Jusserand for his account of tournaments,
_Les sports et jeux d’exercice dans l’ancienne France_ (Paris,
1901), ch. 2.
* * * * *
The work of Delisle, _Études sur la condition de la classe agricole
et l’état de l’agriculture en Normandie au moyen âge_ (Évreux,
1851), is a classic.
The best studies of Norman municipal institutions are A. Chéruel,
_Histoire de Rouen pendant l’époque communale_ (Rouen, 1843); A.
Giry, _Les Établissements de Rouen_ (Paris, 1883–85), supplemented
by Valin, _Recherches sur les origines de la commune de Rouen_
(_Précis_ of the Rouen Academy, 1911); Charles de Beaurepaire, _La
Vicomté de l’Eau de Rouen_ (Évreux, 1856); E. de Fréville, _Mémoire
sur le commerce maritime de Rouen_ (Rouen, 1857); Miss Bateson,
_The Laws of Breteuil_, in _English Historical Review_, XV, XVI;
R. Génestal, _La tenure en bourgage_ (Paris, 1900); Legras, _Le
bourgage de Caen_ (Paris, 1911).
* * * * *
The excellent account of the Norman church in H. Böhmer, _Kirche
und Staat in England und in der Normandie_ (Leipzig, 1899), stops
with 1154. On Odo and on Philip d’Harcourt see V. Bourrienne’s
articles in the _Revue Catholique de Normandie_, VII-X,
XVIII-XXIII. The register of Eudes Rigaud (ed. Bonnin, Rouen, 1852)
is analyzed by Delisle, in _Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes_,
VIII, pp. 479–99; the _Miracula Ecclesie Constantiensis_ and the
letter of Abbot Haimo are discussed by him, _ibid._, IX, pp.
339–52; XXI, pp. 113–39. For the mortuary rolls, see his facsimile
edition of the _Rouleau mortuaire du B. Vital_ (Paris, 1909). The
best monograph on a Norman monastery is that of R. N. Sauvage,
_L’abbaye de S. Martin de Troarn_ (Caen, 1911), where other such
studies are listed. See also Génestal, _Rôle des monastères comme
établissements de crédit étudié en Normandie_ (Paris, 1901), and
Delisle’s edition of Robert of Torigni.
The schools of Bec are described by A. Porée, _Histoire de l’abbaye
du Bec_ (Évreux, 1901). Notices of the various Norman historians
are given by A. Molinier, _Les sources de l’histoire de France_
(Paris, 1901–06), especially II, chs. 25, 33. For Ordericus and
St. Évroul see Delisle’s introduction to the edition of the
_Historia Ecclesiastica_ published by the Société de l’Histoire
de France, and the volumes issued by the Société historique et
archéologique de l’Orne on the occasion of the Fêtes of 1912
(Alençon, 1912). Other early catalogues of libraries, including
that of Philip of Bayeux, are in the first two volumes of the
_Catalogue général des MSS. des départements_ (Paris, 1886–88).
For the vernacular literature, see Gaston Paris, _La littérature
normande avant l’annexion_ (Paris, 1899); and L. E. Menger, _The
Anglo-Norman Dialect_ (New York, 1904). For the latest discussions
of the _Chanson de Roland_ see J. Bédier, _Les légendes épiques_,
III (Paris, 1912); and W. Tavernier’s studies in the _Zeitschrift
für französische Sprache und Litteratur_, XXXVI-XLII (1910–14),
and the _Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie_, XXXVIII (1914).
Enlart, _Manuel d’archéologie française_, I, mentions the principal
works on Norman ecclesiastical architecture. See also R. de
Lasteyrie, _L’architecture religieuse en France à l’époque romane_
(Paris, 1912), ch. 15; Enlart, _Rouen_ (Paris, 1904); H. Prentout,
_Caen et Bayeux_ (Paris, 1900); Henry Adams, _Mont-Saint-Michel and
Chartres_ (Boston, 1913).
VII
THE NORMANS IN THE SOUTH
Of all the achievements of the heroic age of Norman history, none
were more daring in execution or more brilliant in results than the
exploits of Norman barons in the lands of the Mediterranean. Battling
against the infidel in Spain, in Sicily, and in Syria, scattering the
papal army and becoming the humble vassals of the Holy See, overcoming
Lombard princes and Byzantine generals, the Normans were the glorious
adventurers of the Mediterranean world throughout that eleventh
century which constituted the great period of Norman expansion. Then,
masters of southern Italy and Sicily, they put to work their powers of
assimilation and organization and created a strong, well-governed state
and a rich, composite civilization which were the wonder of Europe. If
one were tempted to ascribe the successes of the Normans in England to
happy accident or to the unique personality of William the Conqueror,
the story of Norman achievement in the south, the work of scattered
bands of simple barons without any assistance from the reigning dukes,
would be conclusive proof of the creative power of the Norman genius
for conquest and administration.