believed that it was enchanted and accursed, and that evil spirits
flew about among the trees on dark and stormy nights. There was a
superstition that it was a fated place to those who belonged to the
Conqueror's line. Another prince had been killed there, named Richard,
too—the son of Duke Robert of Normandy.
The last year of the Red King's reign had been peaceful. The Witan
gathered to meet him at Westminster and Winchester and Gloucester, and
he reigned unchallenged from Scotland to Maine, and there was truce
with the French king at Paris. One August morning he went out to the
chase after a jolly night at one of the royal hunting-lodges. The
party scattered in different directions, and the king and Sir Walter
Tyrrel, a famous sportsman, were seen riding away together, and their
dogs after them. That night a poor forester, a lime-burner, was going
[Pg354] through the forest with his clumsy cart, and stumbled over
the king's body, which lay among the ferns with an arrow deep in the
breast. He lifted it into the cart and carried it to Winchester, where
it was buried next day with little sorrow. There were few bells tolled
and few prayers said, for the priests owed little to any friendliness
of William Rufus.
There were many stories told about his death. Tyrrel said that the
arrow was shot by an unknown hand, and that he had run away for fear
that people should accuse him of the murder, which they certainly did!
Others said that Tyrrel shot at a stag and the arrow glanced aside
from an oak, but nobody knows now, and in those days too many people
were glad that the king was dead, to ask many questions or to try to
punish any one.
Robert might have claimed the kingdom now because of the old
agreement, but he was still in the East fighting for Jerusalem.
Henry Beauclerc had been one of the huntsmen that fatal morning, so
he hurried to Winchester and claimed the crown. He made more good
promises than any of his predecessors, and the people liked him
because he was English-born, and so they made another Norman king.
Henry Beauclerc reigned over England thirty-five years, and won
himself another name of the Lion of Justice. He did not treat his
brother Robert justly, however he may have deserved his title in other
ways; but he had a zoölogical garden and brought wild beasts from
different quarters of the earth, and he fostered a famous love of
learning, [Pg355] and put Ralph Flambard in the Tower as soon as he
possibly could, and more than all, chose an excellent woman for his
wife, Maud, the good daughter of the Scottish King Malcolm. He was an
untruthful man, but a great man for all that, and made a better king
than some that England had already endured. In many ways his reign was
a gain to England. There was a distinct advance in national life, and
while the English groaned under his tyranny they could not help seeing
that he sought for quietness and order and was their best champion
against the worse tyranny of the nobles. Mr. Freeman believes that
the Saxon element was the permanent one in English history, and that
the Norman conquest simply modified it somewhat and was a temporary
influence brought to bear for its improvement. It is useless to argue
the question with such odds of learning and thought as his against
one, but the second invasion of Northmen by the roundabout way of
Normandy, seems as marked a change as the succession of the Celts to
the Britons, or the Saxons to the Danes. The Normans had so distinctly
made a great gain in ideas and civilization, that they were as much
foreigners as any Europeans could have been to the Anglo-Saxons of
that eleventh century, and their coming had a permanent effect,
besides a most compelling power. It seems to me that England would
have disintegrated without them, not solidified, and a warring handful
of petty states have been the result.
Yet undoubtedly through many centuries of history writing the English
of the Conqueror's day have been made to take too low a place in the
scale of [Pg356] civilization. As a nation, they surely responded
readily to the Norman stimulus, but the Normans had never found so
good a chance to work out their own ideas of life and achievement as
on English soil in the first hundred years after the Conquest. In many
respects the Saxon race possesses greater and more reliable qualities
than any other race; stability, perseverance, self-government,
industry are all theirs. Yet the Normans excelled them in their genius
for great enterprises and their love of fitness and elegance in social
life and in the arts. Indeed we cannot do better than to repeat here
what has been quoted once already. "Without them England would have
been mechanical, not artistic; brave, not chivalrous; the home of
learning, not of thought."
It has also been the fashion to ignore the influence of five hundred
years' contact between Roman civilization and the Saxon inhabitants
of Great Britain. Surely great influences have been brought to bear
upon the Anglo-Saxon race. That the making of England was more
significant to the world and more valuable than any manifestation
of Norman ability, is in one way true, but let us never forget that
much that has been best in English national life has come from the
Norman elements of it rather than the Saxon. England the colonizer,
England the country of intellectual and social progress, England the
fosterer of ideas and chivalrous humanity, is Norman England, and the
Saxon influence has oftener held her back in dogged satisfaction and
stubbornness than urged her forward to higher levels. The power of
holding back is necessary to [Pg357] the stability, of a kingdom, but
not so necessary as the
"Glory of going on and still to be——"
The conjunction of Norman and Saxon elements has made England the
great nation that she is.
It is too easy as we draw near the end of this story of the Normans
to wander into talk about the lessons of Norman history and to fall
into endless generalizations. Let us look a little longer at Henry
Beauclerc's time while Robert, under the shadow of his name of duke,
spends enough dreary blinded years in prison to give him space to
remember again and again the misspent years of his youth and his
freedom; while Henry plots and plans carefully for the continuance
of his family upon the throne of England and Normandy, only to be
disappointed at every turn. His son is coming from France with a gay
company and is lost in the White Ship with all his lords and ladies,
and the people who hear the news do not dare to tell the king, and at
last send a weeping little lad into the royal presence to falter out
the story of the shipwreck. What a touch of humanity is there! The
king never smiled afterward, but he plotted on and went his kingly
ways, "the last of those great Norman kings who, with all their vices,
their cruelty, and their lust, displayed great talents of organization
and adaptation, guided England with a wise, if a strong, hand through
the days of her youth, and by their instinctive, though selfish, love
of order paved the way for the ultimate rise of a more stable, yet a
freer government."
The last Norman Duke of Normandy was really [Pg358] that young Prince
William, who was drowned in the White Ship off the port of Barfleur,
whom Henry had invested with the duchy and to whom the nobility had
just done homage. After his death, the son of Robert made claim to
the succession, and the greater proportion of the Normans upheld his
claim, and the king of France openly favored him, but he died of a
wound received in battle, and again Henry, rid of this competitor,
built an elaborate scheme upon the succession of his daughter Matilda,
whom he married to Geoffrey Plantagenet, son of the Count of Anjou.
But for all this, after the king's death, the law of succession was
too unsettled to give his daughter an unquestioned claim. Hereditary
title was not independent yet of election by the nobles, and Matilda's
claims were by many people set aside. There were wars and disorders
too intricate and dreary to repeat. Stephen, Count of Boulogne, son
of that Count Stephen of Blois who married the Conqueror's daughter
Adela, usurped the throne of England, and there was a miserable time
of anarchy in both England and Normandy. And as the government passed
away in this apparently profitless interregnum to the houses of Blois
and of Anjou, so Normandy seems like Normandy no longer. Her vitality
is turned into different channels, and it is in the history of England
and of France and of the Low Countries that we must trace the further
effect of Norman influence. [Pg359]
[Illustration]
XVIII.
CONCLUSION.
"I looked: aside the dust-cloud rolled,——
The Waster seemed the Builder too;
Upspringing from the ruined Old
I saw the New."
—WHITTIER.
It will be clearly seen that there is great apparent disproportion
between certain parts of this sketch of the rise and growth of the
Norman people. I have not set aside the truth that Normandy was not
reunited to France until 1204, and I do not forget that many years lie
between that date and the time when I close my account of the famous
duchy. But the story of the growth of the Normans gives one the key
to any later part of their history, and I have contented myself with
describing the characters of the first seven dukes and Eadward the
Confessor, who were men typical of their time and representative of
the various types of national character. Of the complex questions in
civic and legal history I am not competent to speak, nor does it seem
to me that they properly enter into such a book as this. With Mr.
Freeman's learned and exhaustive work at hand as a book of reference,
the readers of this story of Normandy will find all their puzzles
solved. [Pg360]
But I hope that I have made others see the Normans as I have seen
them, and grow as interested in their fortunes as I have been. They
were the foremost people of their time, being most thoroughly alive
and quickest to see where advances might be made in government, in
architecture, in social life. They were gifted with sentiment and with
good taste, together with fine physical strength and intellectual
cleverness. In the first hundred years of the duchy they made
perhaps as rapid progress in every way, and had as signal influence
among their contemporaries, as any people of any age,—unless it is
ourselves, the people of the young republic of the United States, who
might be called the Normans of modern times. For with many of the
gifts and many of the weaknesses (and dangers, too) of our viking
ancestry, we have repeated the rapid increase of power which was a
characteristic of our Norman kindred; we have conquered in many fights
with the natural forces of the universe where they fought, humanity
against humanity. Much of what marked the Northman and the Norman
marks us still.
The secret of Normandy's success was energetic self-development and
apprehension of truth; the secret of Normandy's failures was the
secret of all failures—blindness to the inevitable effects of certain
causes, and unwillingness to listen to her best and most far-seeing
teachers. Carlyle said once to a friend: "There has never been a
nation yet that did any thing great that was not deeply religious."
The things that are easy and near are chosen, instead of [Pg361]
the things that make for righteousness. When luxury becomes not the
means, but the end of life, humanity's best weapons grow rusty, and
humanity's best intelligence is dulled and threatens to disappear.
The church forgets her purpose and invites worshippers of the church
instead of worshippers of God. The state is no longer an impersonated
administrator of justice and order, but a reservoir from which to
plunder and by which to serve private ends.
I am not able to speak of the influence of the Normans upon the later
kingdom of France, the France of our day, as I confess the writer of
such a book as this should have been, but there is one point which has
been of great interest as the southward course of the Northmen has
been eagerly followed.
It has been the common impression that there was a marked growth of
refinement and courtliness, of dignified bearing and imaginative
literature connected with the development of the French men and women
of early times, to the gradual widening of which the modern world had
been indebted for much of its best social attainment.
I think that a single glance at the France of the ninth and tenth
centuries will do away with any belief in its having been the
sole inspirer or benefactor. The Franks were products of German
development, and were not at that time pre-eminent for social culture.
They were a ruder people by far than the Italians or even the people
of Spain, less developed spiritually, and wanting in the finer
attributes of human instinct or perception. Great as they already
[Pg362] were, no one can claim that quickness of tact or special
intolerance of ill-breeding came from their direction. Dante speaks, a
little later than this, of the "guzzling Germans," and though we must
make allowance for considerable race prejudice, there was truth, too,
in his phrase. Not from the Franks, therefore, but from among the very
rocks and chasms of the viking nature, sprang a growth of delicate
refinement that made the yellow-haired jarls and the "sea-kings'
daughters" bring a true, poetical, and lovely spirit to Normandy,
where they gave a soul to the body of art and letters that awaited
them. Each nation had something to give to the other, it is true, but
it was the Northern spirit that made the gifts of both available and
fruitful to humanity.
It may rightly be suggested that the standard of behavior was low
everywhere in the tenth century, according to our present standards,
but it is true that there was a re-kindling of light in the North,
which may be traced in its continued reflections through Norway to
Normandy, and thence to France and England and the world. We have
only to remind ourselves of the development of literature in Iceland
and the building of governmental and social strength and dignified
individuality, to see that the Northmen by no means owed every thing
to the influence of French superiority and precedence. We have only to
compare the tenth century with the eleventh, to see what an impulse
had been given. The saga-lovers and the clear-eyed people of the North
were gifted with a spark of grace peculiarly their own. [Pg363]
There is a pretty story told by an English traveller in Norway, who
met a young woman leading an old blind beggar through the street of a
poor, plain village. She was descended from one of the noble families
of ancient times; it was her pleasure and duty to serve the friendless
old man. But the traveller insists that never, among the best people
he has met, has he found such dignity and grace as this provincial
woman wore, who knew nothing of courts or the world's elegance. There
was a natural nobility in her speech and manner which the courtliest
might envy, and which might adorn the noblest palace and be its most
charming decoration. It is easy to write these words with sympathy,
and perhaps the traveller's half-forgotten story has been embellished
unconsciously with the memory in my mind of kindred experiences in
that country of the North. Plainness and poverty make gentle blood
seem more gracious still, and the green mountain-sides and fresh air
of old Norway have not yet ceased to inspire simple, unperverted
souls, from whose life a better and higher generation seems more than
possible.
The impulses that make toward social development are intermittent.
There is the succession of growing time and brooding time, of summer
and winter, in the great ages of the world. If we look at the
Normans as creatures of a famous spring where Europe made a bold and
profitable advance in every way, I think that we shall not be far from
right.
In telling their story in this imperfect way I have not been unmindful
of the dark side of their [Pg364] character, but what they were is
permanent, while what they were not was temporary. The gaps they left
were to be filled up by other means—by the slow processes by which
God in nature and humanity evolves the best that is possible for the
present with something that forestalls the future. The stones that
make part of a cathedral wall are shaped also with relation to the
very dome.
Here, at the beginning of the Norman absorption into England, I
shall end my story of the founding and growth of the Norman people.
The mingling of their brighter, fiercer, more enthusiastic, and
visionary nature with the stolid, dogged, prudent, and resolute
Anglo-Saxons belongs more properly to the history of England. Indeed,
the difficulty would lie in not knowing where to stop, for one may
tell the two races apart even now, after centuries of association and
affiliation. There are Saxon landholders, and farmers, and statesmen
in England yet—unconquered, unpersuaded, and un-Normanized. But the
effect on civilization of the welding of the two great natures cannot
be told fairly in this or any other book—we are too close to it and
we ourselves make too intimate a part of it to judge impartially. If
we are of English descent we are pretty sure to be members of one
party or the other. Saxon yet or Norman yet, and even the confusion
of the two forces renders us not more able to judge of either, but
less so. We must sometimes look at England as a later Normandy; and
yet, none the less, as the great leader and personified power that
she is and has been these many hundred years, drawing her strength
[Pg365] from the best of the Northern races, and presenting the world
with great men and women as typical of these races and as grandly
endowed to stand for the representatives of their time in days to
come, as the men and women of Greece were typical, and live yet in our
literature and song. In the courts and stately halls of England, in
the market-places, and among followers of the sea or of the drum, we
have seen the best triumphs and glories of modern humanity, no less
than the degradations, the treacheries, and the mistakes. In the great
pageant of history we can see a nation rise, and greaten, and dwindle,
and disappear like the varying lifetime of a single man, but the force
of our mother England is not yet spent, though great changes threaten
her, and the process of growth needs winter as well as summer. Her
life is not the life of a harborless country, her fortunes are the
fortunes of her generosity. But whether the Norman spirit leads her to
be self-confident or headstrong and wilful, or the Saxon spirit holds
her back into slowness and dulness, and lack of proper perception
in emergencies or epochs of necessary change, still she follows the
right direction and leads the way. It is the Norman graft upon the
sturdy old Saxon tree that has borne best fruit among the nations—that
has made the England of history, the England of great scholars and
soldiers and sailors, the England of great men and women, of books and
ships and gardens and pictures and songs! There is many a gray old
English house standing among its trees and fields, that has sheltered
and nurtured many a generation of loyal and [Pg366] tender and brave
and gentle souls. We shall find there men and women who, in their
cleverness and courtliness, their grace and true pride and beauty,
make us understand the old Norman beauty and grace, and seem to make
the days of chivalry alive again.
But we may go back farther still, and discover in the lonely mountain
valleys and fiord-sides of Norway even a simpler, courtlier, and
nobler dignity. In the country of the sagamen and the rough sea-kings,
beside the steep-shored harbors of the viking dragon-ships, linger
the constantly repeated types of an earlier ancestry, and the flower
of the sagas blooms as fair as ever. Among the red roofs and gray
walls of the Norman towns, or the faint, bright colors of its country
landscapes, among the green hedgerows and golden wheat-fields of
England, the same flowers grow in more luxuriant fashion, but old
Norway and Denmark sent out the seed that has flourished in richer
soil. To-day the Northman, the Norman, and the Englishman, and a young
nation on this western shore of the Atlantic are all kindred who,
possessing a rich inheritance, should own the closest of kindred ties.
[Illustration]
[Pg367]
[Illustration]
INDEX.
A
Adela, 112
Ælfred, the Confessor's brother, 184, 188
Ælfred the Great, 103, 171; fines, 173
Ælfgifu, see Emma of Normandy
Æthelred the Unready, 102, 171; English contempt for, 175; flees
to Normandy, 177
Alan of Brittany, 70, 126, 137; death of, 151
Alençon, siege of, 213; Lord of, see William de Talvas
Ambrières, 250
Anglo-Saxons, 106, 365
Anjou, 358
Anselm, 238, 338, 349
Apulia, 131, 139; allegiance to Rome, 140
Architecture, 239, 240
Argentan, 97
Arlette, 122
Arnulf of Flanders, 63, 71, 87
Arrows, 252, 307
Ascelin, 340
Aumale, 248
Auxerre, 108
Aversa, 133, 139
Avranches, 248
B
Baldwin of Flanders, 121
Battle, 304
Baudri, 340
Bayeux, Northmen in, 40, 59; Richard the Fearless educated in, 62;
description of, 323
Bayeux tapestry, 238, 299, 323
Beaumont, house of, 152, 198, 282
Bec, abbey of, 219
Benedictines, 222
Berengarius, 230
Berenger, Count of Bayeux, 40
Bergen, 14, 291
Bernard the Dane, 60, 61, 75
Bernard Harcourt, 68
Bernard de Senlis, 59, 61; plot of, 76
Bertha, wife of Robert of France, 100
Bessin, 247
Blaatand Harold, 81
Borbillon, 210
Botho the Dane, 47, 60, 75
Breteuil, castle of, 250
Brionne, 224
Brittany, 58; Danish settlements in, 61; enmity between Normandy
and, 76; tributary to Normandy, 246; William's expedition against,
265; aids William, 285
Bruce, Robert, 233
Burgundy, 54, 246; king of, 86; Henry of, 106
Burneville, 224
C
Caen, 113; William builds Church of St. Stephen in, 237; 298, 321,
322, 340
Canterbury, archbishop of, 176
Carloman, 85
Carlyle, 360
Cathedrals, 219
Celts, 172
Chalons, Hugh, Count of, 108, 110
Charlemagne, 11, 19; empire of, 34, 52, 88
Charles the Fat, 54, 56
Charles the Simple, 34; resists Rolf's invasion, 37; captivity of,
56
Chartres, Count of, 38; siege of, 41, 109
Chivalry, Norman, 93, 116
Civitella, battle of, 140, 141
Cloister life, 215
Cnut the Dane, 106, 119; banishment of English nobles, 120; chosen
king, 177; his improvement and England's, 178; pilgrimage to Rome,
182; letter of, 182; death, 183
Côtentin, 103, 113; castles of, 116; over-population of, 116; home
of the Hautevilles, 134; rebellions, 152, 202; designs of Henry
of France toward, 247; men at Hastings, 306; sold by Robert of
Normandy, 348
Coutances, bishop of, 304
Crusades, 143, 351
Curfew bell, 251
D
Danegelt, the, 173
Danes in Bayeux, 74; in England, 103; inheritance from, in
Northern England, 187; schemes for regaining England, 258
Dante, 362
Dickens' "Child's History of England," 328
Dinan, 266
Dive, river, 297
Dôl, 110, 266
Domesday Book, 328
Douglas, Scottish family of, 233
Drayton, 28
Dreux, county of, 109
Dunstan, 172
Durham, 339
E
Eadgyth (or Edith), the Confessor's wife, 188, 270
Eadgyth the Swan-throated, 310
Eadmund Ironside, 104, 177; poisoned, 178
Eadward the Confessor, 184; pious character of, 186; weakness of,
188, 240; likeness to Æthelred, 189; preference for Normans, 191;
promises the crown to William, 242; also to Harold, 257; illness
and death, 269; love of hunting, 329
Eadward the Outlaw, 257
Eadwine, Earl of Mercia, 320
Eadwy, 180
Emma of Normandy (or Ælfgifu), 102; marriage to Æthelred, 105;
flight to Normandy of, 106; sons of, 118; marries Cnut of England,
180
England, Danes in, 103; low condition of, 106; under misrule of
Æthelred, 173; election of kings in, 179; same king as Denmark and
Scandinavia, 181; under Cnut, 181; behind Norman civilization, 185;
division into earldoms, 187; building of castles in, 193; conquest
of, planned in Normandy, 240; Harold made king, 272; conquest of,
by William, 308; English character, 365
Epte, St. Claire on, 44
Eremburga, 145
Ericson, Leif, 18
Ermenoldus, 113
Espriota, 66; second marriage, 80, 96, 152
Estrith, 121, 123
Eu, 236
Eustace of Boulogne, 285
Evreux, 40
Exeter, siege of, 325
Exmes, 97, 111, 113
F
Falaise, 92; industries of, 97; Robert in, 121; the Conqueror in,
197
Fécamp, 89, 111, 303
Feudal system, 54, 154; in England, 316
Fitz-Osbern; see William Fitz-Osbern.
Flails used as weapons, 76
Flanders, Baldwin of, 121
Flanders, civilization of, 232; aids William, 285
Fleming, Scottish families of, 233