Part 10

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.

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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.

For a more specific illustration let us come back once more to the jury. If the jury died out in Normandy, it survived in England, where it flourished in the fertile soil of the popular local courts. It spread to the British colonies and to the United States; it has in recent times been reintroduced on the Continent. But it is still the same fundamental institution, bound by direct continuity with the old Frankish procedure through the Norman inquests of the twelfth century. Wherever the twelve good men and true are gathered together, we can see the juries of Henry II behind them. In such matters the Norman influence is thus as wide as the common law; we are all heirs of the early Normans. As Freeman well says: “We can never be as if the Norman had never come among us. We ever bear about us the signs of his presence. Our colonists have carried those signs with them into distant lands, to remind men that settlers in America and Australia came from a land which the Norman once entered as a conqueror.”[48]

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Our survey of Norman history might perhaps stop here; but it needs to be rounded out in two directions. We have been so busy with the external history of the Norman empire and with the constitutional developments to which it gave rise, that we have had no time to examine the society and culture of Normandy in its flourishing period of imperialism. And we have been concentrating our attention so exclusively on the dominions of the Plantagenets that we have left out of view that greater Normandy to the south which constitutes one of the most brilliant chapters of Norman achievement and one of the most fascinating subjects of European history. These topics will be the themes of the three remaining lectures.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The best account of the downfall of the Norman empire is Powicke, _The Loss of Normandy_, where abundant references will be found to further material. The general narratives of Adams, Davis, and Ramsay may also be consulted, as well as Miss Norgate, _John Lackland_ (London, 1902). For the French side see Luchaire, in Lavisse, _Histoire de France_, III, 1. The fullest treatment of relations between the Plantagenets and France, down to 1199, is A. Cartellieri, _Philipp II. August_ (Leipzig, 1899–1910), supplemented by his _Richard Löwenherz im heiligen Lande_, in _Historische Zeitschrift_, CI, pp. 1–27 (1908), and _Philipp II. August und der Zusammenbruch des angiovinischen Reiches_ (Leipzig, 1913). For the controversy concerning John’s condemnation by the court of Philip, see Gross, _Sources and Literature_, nos. 2829, 2833. Characterizations of Richard and John by Stubbs will be found in his _Historical Introductions_, pp. 315 _ff._, 439 _ff._ J. Lehmann, _Johann ohne Land_ (Berlin, 1904), is more favorable to John. The biography of the Young King is traced by P. C. E. Hodgson, _Jung Heinrich, König von England_ (Jena, 1906).

There is no general work on the English occupation of Normandy in the fifteenth century; the scattered monographs are mentioned in Prentout, _La Normandie_, pp. 71–76. Something may be expected from the continuation of the late J. H. Wylie’s work on the reign of Henry V.

VI

NORMAN LIFE AND CULTURE

In turning from the general course of Norman history in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to examine Norman life and culture in this period, we encounter the difficulties inherent in any attempt to cut a cross-section of human society in an age which was not conscious of being a society and has left us for the description of itself only raw materials of a fragmentary and uneven sort. The chroniclers confine themselves almost entirely to external events, the charters deal chiefly with land and boundaries and rights over the land, much of the literature is theological commentary or rhetorical commonplace which reflects nothing of the age in which it was written; what is lacking in all is the concrete detail of daily life from which alone social and economic conditions and even government itself can be understood. And when we have pieced together as best we may some notions of Normandy in this period, our knowledge of the parallel conditions in other regions is often so inadequate that we cannot be certain how far our results are characteristic of Normandy, how far typical of the time, or, because of the scattered nature of our material, how far they may be merely individual and isolated. Much of the social history of the Middle Ages is still unwritten; for lack of evidence much can never be written. Until the available sources have been more fully explored, nothing beyond a provisional sketch can be attempted.

Fortunately for our purposes, the fundamental structure of society in the earlier Middle Ages was exceedingly simple. There were three classes, those who fought, those who labored, and those who prayed, corresponding respectively to the nobles, the peasants, and the clergy. Created by the simple needs of the feudal age, this primitive division of labor was even declared an institution of divine origin and necessary to the harmonious life of man. It seemed right and natural that the nobles should defend the country and maintain order, the clergy lead men to salvation, the peasants support by their labor these two beneficent classes, as well as themselves. As an ideal of social organization, this system of classes is open to obvious objections, not the least of which is the persistent killing and plundering of the peasants by the class whose function it was to protect and defend them; but as a description of actual conditions, it expresses very well the facts of the case.

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With respect to the fighting class, it is characteristic of the Norman habit of order and organization that the military service of the nobles was early defined with more system and exactness in Normandy than in the neighboring countries of northern France. We have already seen that at a period well before 1066 the amount of service due from the great lords to the duke had been fixed in rough units of five or multiples of five, and these again subdivided among their vassals and attached to specific pieces of land which were hence called knights’ fees, an arrangement which the Normans carried to England and probably to Sicily as well. By 1172, when a comprehensive list was first drawn up, subinfeudation had produced about 1500 knights’ fees in Normandy, the largest holders being the bishop of Bayeux and the earl of Leicester with 120, the count of Ponthieu with 111, and Earl Giffard with 103. From these the class of fully armed knights reached down to the holders of small fractions of a knight’s fee, all however serving with the full armor which in course of time came to mark them off as nobles from the vavassors, or free soldiers, whose equipment was less complete and whose service tended to take the form of castle guard and similar duties. Quite early also custom had defined other characteristic features of the feudal service in Normandy, such as the period of forty days, the limitation of the obligation to the frontiers of the duchy, and the incidents of wardship and marriage, deductions from feudal principles which were here carried to their logical conclusions.

The symbol of the authority of the military class, the outward and visible sign of feudalism, was the castle, where the lord resided and from which he exercised his authority over his fief. Originating in the period of anarchy which accompanied the dissolution of the Frankish empire and the invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries, the castle spread over northern France as feudalism spread, and was introduced into England by the Normans when they here established their feudal state. The earliest castles of Normandy and of England were not, however, the massive stone donjons which Freeman peopled with devils and evil men. With some exceptions, of which the Tower of London is the most noteworthy, these ‘hateful structures’ were built of wood and surrounded by a stockade, surmounting an artificial mound, or _motte_, thrown up from the deep moat at its base. A great drawbridge, cleated so that horses should not slip on the steep incline, led from the farther side of the moat directly to the second story of the tower, of which the ground floor, used only for stores and the custody of prisoners, had no entrance from without. Fortresses of this type have naturally left nothing behind them save the outlines of their mounds and moats, but they are well known from contemporary descriptions and are clearly discernible in the Bayeux Tapestry, which gives rude pictures of the strongholds of Dol, Rennes, Dinan, and Bayeux, and shows a stockaded mound in actual process of construction at Hastings. The heavy timbers of these lofty block-houses offered stout resistance to battering rams, but they were always in great danger from fire, and wood was replaced by stone in the course of the twelfth century, to which belong the ‘stern square towers’ which still survive in Normandy and England, as well as the earliest examples of the more defensible round keeps and square keeps flanked with round towers. Whether of wood or stone, the donjon was a stern place, built for strength rather than for comfort, and bending the life of those within it to the imperious necessities of defence. Space was at a premium, windows were few and small,--sometimes only a single window and a single room to each story,--trap-doors and ladders often did the work of stairways, and from the wooden castles fires were usually excluded. Nevertheless the donjons were not, as was once supposed, mere “towers of refuge used only in time of war,” but “were the permanent residences of the nobles of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.”[49] Only toward the close of this period do the outer buildings develop, so as to give something of the room and convenience demanded by the rising standard of comfort; only in the thirteenth century do the more spacious castles without keeps begin to make their appearance.

It is significant of the progress made by the ducal authority in Normandy that by the time of William the Conqueror definite restrictions had been placed upon the creation of these strongholds of local power and resistance. Except with the duke’s license no one could build a castle, or erect a fortress on a rock or an island, or even dig a fosse in the open country so deep that the earth could not be thrown out from the bottom without artificial aid, while palisades were required to be built in a simple line and without alures or special works of defence. When the duke desired, he might also place garrisons in his barons’ castles and demand hostages for their loyalty. These principles, which were applied also in England, were of course often difficult to enforce, and they were supplemented in the twelfth century by the development of a great system of ducal castles, secured partly by enlarging and strengthening the older fortresses of Rouen, Caen, Falaise, and Argentan, partly, as we have already seen, by new strongholds on the frontiers. Powicke has shown us how these castles became the chief administrative centres in the reigns of Henry II and Richard, and how the royal letters and accounts reveal their many-sided activity in the busy days of peace as well as in the more strenuous times of war.[50] Under _châtelains_ who were royal officers rather than feudal vassals, with garrisons of mercenaries and retinues of knights and serjeants, clerks and chaplains and personal servants, they foreshadow the ultimate replacement of baronial donjons by a royal bureaucracy.

It is doubtless because of the dominant position of the duke that Normandy is less rich than some other parts of France in picturesque types of feudal lords or vivid episodes of feudal conflicts. When they go beyond the affairs of the church, the Norman chroniclers are prone to concentrate their attention upon the deeds of the ducal house, and their accounts of the great vassals tend to be dry and genealogical. The chief exception is Ordericus Vitalis, whose theme and geographical position lead him to treat at length the long anarchy under Robert Curthose and the incessant conflicts of the great lords his neighbors on the southern border, the houses of Bellême, Grentemaisnil, Conches, and Breteuil. In the main it is a dreary tale of surprises and sieges, of treachery and captivity and sudden death, relieved from time to time by brighter episodes--the lady Isabel of Conches sitting in the great hall as the young men of the castle tell their dreams; the daily battle for bread around the oven at the siege of Courcy; the table spread and the pots seething on the coals for the lord and lady of Saint-Céneri who never came back; the man of Saint-Évroul who, by the saint’s aid, walks unharmed out of custody at Domfront; the marvellous vision of the army of knights and ladies in torment which appeared to the priest of Bonneval.