Part 4

Not until the eleventh century also does the history of Normandy emerge from the uncertain period of legend and tradition and reach an assured basis of contemporary evidence. Throughout Europe, the tenth century is one of the most uncertain and obscure of all the Christian centuries. To the critic, as an Oxford don distinguished for knowledge of this epoch once remarked, its delightful obscurity makes it all the more interesting, but there are limits to the delights of obscurity, and a French scholar who has tried to reconstruct the history of this period in Spain finds that all surviving documentary sources of information are fabrications! Matters are not so bad as that for Normandy, for the forgers there chose other periods in which to place their products, but there are for the tenth century practically no contemporary documents or contemporary Norman chronicles. The earliest Norman historian, Dudo, dean of Saint-Quentin, wrote after the year 1000 and had no personal knowledge of the beginnings of the Norman state. Diffuse, rhetorical, credulous, and ready to distort events in order to glorify the ancestors of the Norman dukes who were his patrons, Dudo is anything but a trustworthy writer, and only the most circumspect criticism can glean a few facts from his confused and turgid rhetoric. Yet he was copied by his Norman successors, in prose and in verse, and has found his defenders among patriotic Normans of a more modern time. Not until quite recent years has his fundamental untrustworthiness been fully established, and with it has vanished all hope of any detailed knowledge of early Norman history. Only with the eleventh century do we reach a solid foundation of annals and charters in the reigns of the princes whom Dudo seeks to glorify in the person of their predecessors. And when we reach this period, the heroic age of conquest and settlement is over, and the Normans have become much as other Frenchmen.

At this point the fundamental question forces itself upon us, how far was Normandy affected by Scandinavian influences? What in race and language, in law and custom, was the contribution of the north to Normandy? And the answer must be that in most respects the tangible contribution was slight. Whatever may have been the state of affairs in the age of colonization and settlement, by the century which followed the Normans had become to a surprising degree absorbed by their environment.

It is now generally admitted, says Professor Maitland,[21] that for at least half a century before the battle of Hastings, the Normans were Frenchmen, French in their language, French in their law, proud indeed of their past history, very ready to fight against other Frenchmen if Norman home-rule was endangered, but still Frenchmen, who regarded Normandy as a member of the state or congeries of states that owed service, we can hardly say obedience, to the king at Paris. Their spoken language was French, their written language was Latin, but the Latin of France; the style of their legal documents was the style of the French chancery; very few of the technical terms of their law were of Scandinavian origin. When at length the ‘custom’ of Normandy appears in writing, it takes its place among other French customs, and this although for a long time past Normandy has formed one of the dominions of a prince, between whom and the king of the French there has been little love and frequent war; and the peculiar characteristics which mark off the custom of Normandy from other French customs seem due much rather to the legislation of Henry of Anjou than to any Scandinavian tradition.

The law of Normandy was by this time Frankish, and its speech was French. Even the second duke, William Longsword, found it necessary to send his son to Bayeux to learn Norse, for it was no longer spoken at Rouen. And in the French of Normandy, the Norman dialect, the Scandinavian element is astonishingly small, as careful students of the local _patois_ tell us. Only in one department of life, the life of the sea, is any considerable Scandinavian influence discernible, and the historian of the French navy, Bourel de la Roncière, has some striking pages on the survivals of the language of the Norse Vikings in the daily speech of the French sailor and fisherman.

The question of race is more difficult, and is of course quite independent of the question of language, for language, as has been well said, is not a test of race but a test of social contact, and the fundamental physical characteristics of race are independent of speech. “Skulls,” says Rhys, “are harder than consonants, and races lurk behind when languages slip away.” On this point again scientific examination is unfavorable to extended Scandinavian influence. Pronounced northern types, of course, occur,--I remember, on my first journey through Normandy, seeing at a wayside station a peasant who might have walked that moment out of a Wisconsin lumber-camp or a Minnesota wheat-field,--but the statistics of anthropometry show a steady preponderance of the round-headed type which prevails in other parts of France. Only in two regions does the Teutonic type assert itself strongly, in the lower valley of the Seine and in the Cotentin, and it is in these regions and at points along the shore that place-names of Scandinavian origin are most frequent. The terminations _bec_ and _fleur_, _beuf_ and _ham_ and _dalle_ and _tot_--Bolbec, Harfleur, Quillebeuf, Ouistreham, Dieppedalle, Yvetot--tell the same story as the terms used in navigation, namely that the Northmen were men of the sea and settled in the estuaries and along the coast. The earlier population, however, though reduced by war and pillage and famine, was not extinguished. It survived in sufficient numbers to impose its language on its conquerors, to preserve throughout the greater part of the country its fundamental racial type, and to make these Northmen of the sea into Normans of the land.

What, then, was the Scandinavian contribution to the making of Normandy if it was neither law nor speech nor race? First and foremost, it was Normandy itself, created as a distinct entity by the Norman occupation and the grant to Rollo and his followers, without whom it would have remained an undifferentiated part of northern France. Next, a new element in the population, numerically small in proportion to the mass, but a leaven to the whole--quick to absorb Frankish law and Christian culture but retaining its northern qualities of enterprise, of daring, and of leadership. It is no accident that the names of the leaders in early Norman movements are largely Norse. And finally a race of princes, high-handed and masterful but with a talent for political organization, state-builders at home and abroad, who made Normandy the strongest and most centralized principality in France and joined to it a kingdom beyond the seas which became the strongest state in western Europe.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The best outline of the beginnings of Normandy is H. Prentout, _Essai sur les origines et la fondation du duché de Normandie_ (Paris, 1911). For the Frankish side of the Norse expeditions see W. Vogel, _Die Normannen und das fränkische Reich_ (Heidelberg, 1906), supplemented by F. Lot, in the _Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes_, LXIX (1908). Their devastation of Normandy is illustrated by the fate of the monastery of Saint-Wandrille: F. Lot, _Études critiques sur l’abbaye de Saint-Wandrille_ (Paris, 1913), ch. 3. There is a vast literature in the Scandinavian languages; for the titles of fundamental works by Steenstrup, Munch, Worsaae, and Alexander Bugge, see Charles Gross, _Sources and Literature of English History_ (London, 1915), § 42. Considerable material in English has been published in the _Saga-Book_ of the Viking Society (London, since 1895). On the material culture of the north see Sophus Müller, _Nordische Altertumskunde_ (Strassburg, 1897–98), and the various works of Montelius. The early poetry is collected and translated by Vigfusson and Powell, _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_ (Oxford, 1883). Convenient summaries in English are C. F. Keary, _The Vikings in Western Christendom_ (London, 1891); A. Mawer, _The Vikings_ (Cambridge, 1913); and L. M. Larson, _Canute the Great_ (New York, 1912).

III

NORMANDY AND ENGLAND

After the coming of the Northmen the chief event in Norman history is the conquest of England, and just as relations with the north are the chief feature of the tenth century, so relations with England dominate the eleventh century, and the central point is the conquest of 1066. In this series of events the central figure is, of course, William the Conqueror, by descent duke of Normandy and by conquest king of England.

* * * * *

Of William’s antecedents we have no time to speak at length. Grandson of the fourth Norman duke, Richard the Good, William was the son of Duke Robert, who met his death in Asia Minor in 1035 while returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. To distinguish him from the later duke of the same name he is called Robert I or Robert the Magnificent, sometimes and quite incorrectly, Robert the Devil, by an unwarranted confusion with this hero, or rather villain, of romance and grand opera. A contemporary of the great English king Canute, Robert was a man of renown in the Europe of the early eleventh century, and if our sources of information permitted us to know the history of his brief reign, we should probably find that much that was distinctive of the Normandy of his son’s day can be traced back to his time. More than once in history has a great father been eclipsed by a greater son. The fact should be added, which William’s contemporaries never allowed him to forget, that he was an illegitimate son. His mother Arlette was the daughter of a tanner of Falaise, and while it is not clear that Duke Robert was ever married to any one else, his union with Arlette had no higher sanction than the Danish custom of his forefathers. Their son was generally known in his day as William the Bastard, and only the great achievements of his reign succeeded in replacing this, first by William the Great and later by William the Conqueror.

Were it not for the resulting confusion with other great Williams,--one of whom has recently been raised by admiring subjects to the rank of William the Greatest!--there would be a certain advantage in retaining the title of great, in order to remind ourselves that William was not only a conqueror but a great ruler. The greatest secular figure in the Europe of his day, he is also one of the greatest in the line of English sovereigns, whether we judge him by capacity for rule or by the results of his reign, and none has had a more profound effect on the whole current of English history. The late Edward A. Freeman, who devoted five stout volumes to the history of the Norman Conquest and of William, and who never shrank from superlatives, goes still further:--

No man that ever trod this earth was ever endowed with greater natural gifts; to no man was it ever granted to accomplish greater things. If we look only to the scale of a man’s acts without regard to their moral character, we must hail in the victor of Val-ès-dunes, of Varaville, and of Senlac, in the restorer of Normandy, the Conqueror of England, one who may fairly claim his place in the first rank of the world’s greatest men. No man ever did his work more thoroughly at the moment; no man ever left his work behind him as more truly an abiding possession for all time.... If we cannot give him a niche among pure patriots and heroes, he is quite as little entitled to a place among mere tyrants and destroyers. William of Normandy has no claim to a share in the pure glory of Timoleon, Ælfred, and Washington; he cannot even claim the more mingled fame of Alexander, Charles, and Cnut; but he has still less in common with the mere enemies of their species, with the Nabuchodonosors, the Swegens, and the Buonapartes, whom God has sent from time to time as simple scourges of a guilty world.... He never wholly cast away the thoughts of justice and mercy, and in his darkest hours had still somewhat of the fear of God before his eyes.[22]

I have quoted the essence of Freeman’s characterization, not because it seems to me wholly just or even historical, but in order to set forth vividly the importance of William and his work. It is not the historian’s business to award niches in a hall of fame. He is no Rhadamanthus, to separate the Alfreds of this world from the Nebuchadnezzars, the Washingtons from the Napoleons. So far as he deals with individuals, his business is to explain to us each man in the light of his time and its conditions, not to compare him with men of far distant times and places in order to arrange all in a final scale of values. It was once the fashion in debating societies to discuss whether Demosthenes was a greater orator than Cicero, and whether either was the equal of Daniel Webster. It is even more futile to consider whether William the Conqueror was a greater man than Alexander or a less than George Washington, for the quantities are incommensurable. So far as comparisons of this sort are at all legitimate, they must be instituted between similar things, between contemporaries or between men in quick sequence. When they deal with wide intervals of time and circumstance, they wrest each man from his true setting and become fundamentally unhistorical.

An able general, strong in battle and still stronger in strategy and craft, a skilful diplomat, a born ruler of men, William was yet greater in the combination of vision, patience, and masterful will which make the statesman, and the results of his statesmanship are writ large on the page of English history. To his contemporaries his most striking characteristic was his pitiless strength and inflexible will, and if they had been familiar with Nietzsche’s theory of the ‘overman,’ they would certainly have placed him in that class. Stark and stern and wrathful, the author of the Anglo-Saxon _Chronicle_ approaches him, as Freeman well says,[23] “with downcast eyes and bated breath, as if he were hardly dealing with a man of like passions with himself but were rather drawing the portrait of a being of another nature.” This, the most adequate characterization of the _Uebermensch_ of the eleventh century, runs as follows:[24]

If any would know what manner of man king William was, the glory that he obtained, and of how many lands he was lord; then will we describe him as we have known him, we, who have looked upon him and who once lived in his court. This king William, of whom we are speaking, was a very wise and a great man, and more honoured and more powerful than any of his predecessors. He was mild to those good men who loved God, but severe beyond measure towards those who withstood his will. He founded a noble monastery on the spot where God permitted him to conquer England, and he established monks in it, and he made it very rich. In his days the great monastery at Canterbury was built, and many others also throughout England; moreover this land was filled with monks who lived after the rule of St. Benedict; and such was the state of religion in his days that all that would might observe that which was prescribed by their respective orders. King William was also held in much reverence: he wore his crown three times every year when he was in England: at Easter he wore it at Winchester, at Pentecost at Westminster, and at Christmas at Gloucester. And at these times, all the men of England were with him, archbishops, bishops, abbots, and earls, thanes, and knights. So also, was he a very stern and a wrathful man, so that none durst do anything against his will, and he kept in prison those earls who acted against his pleasure. He removed bishops from their sees, and abbots from their offices, and he imprisoned thanes, and at length he spared not his own brother Odo. This Odo was a very powerful bishop in Normandy, his see was that of Bayeux, and he was foremost to serve the king. He had an earldom in England, and when William was in Normandy he was the first man in this country, and him did he cast into prison. Amongst other things the good order that William established is not to be forgotten; it was such that any man, who was himself aught, might travel over the kingdom with a bosom-full of gold unmolested; and no man durst kill another, however great the injury he might have received from him. He reigned over England, and being sharp-sighted to his own interest, he surveyed the kingdom so thoroughly that there was not a single hide of land throughout the whole of which he knew not the possessor, and how much it was worth, and this he afterwards entered in his register. The land of the Britons was under his sway, and he built castles therein; moreover he had full dominion over the Isle of Man [Anglesey]: Scotland also was subject to him from his great strength; the land of Normandy was his by inheritance, and he possessed the earldom of Maine; and had he lived two years longer he would have subdued Ireland by his prowess, and that without a battle. Truly there was much trouble in these times, and very great distress; he caused castles to be built, and oppressed the poor. The king was also of great sternness, and he took from his subjects many marks of gold, and many hundred pounds of silver, and this, either with or without right, and with little need. He was given to avarice, and greedily loved gain. He made large forests for the deer, and enacted laws therewith, so that whoever killed a hart or a hind should be blinded. As he forbade killing the deer, so also the boars; and he loved the tall stags as if he were their father. He also appointed concerning the hares, that they should go free. The rich complained and the poor murmured, but he was so sturdy that he recked nought of them; they must will all that the king willed, if they would live; or would keep their lands; or would hold their possessions; or would be maintained in their rights. Alas! that any man should so exalt himself, and carry himself in his pride over all! May Almighty God show mercy to his soul, and grant him the forgiveness of his sins! We have written concerning him these things, both good and bad, that virtuous men might follow after the good, and wholly avoid the evil, and might go in the way that leadeth to the kingdom of heaven.

This _Requiescat_ of the monk of Peterborough has carried us forward half a century, till the Conqueror, in the full maturity of his power and strength, rode to his death down the steep street of the burning town of Mantes and was buried in his own great abbey-church at Caen. And the good peace that he gave the land at the end came, both in Normandy and in England, only after many stormy years of war, rebellion, and strife. William was but sixty when he died; when his father was laid away in the basilica of far-off Nicæa, he was only seven or at most eight. The conquest of England was made in his fortieth year, when he had already reigned thirty-one years as duke. Or, if we deduct the years of his youth, the conquest of England falls just halfway between his coming of age and his death. I give these figures to adjust the perspective. William’s place in the line of English kings is so prominent and his achievements in England are so important that they always tend to overshadow in our minds his earlier years as duke. Yet without these formative years there could have been no conquest of England, and without some study of them that conquest cannot be understood.

If we pass over rapidly, as for lack of information we must needs do, the dozen years of William’s minority, we find his reign in Normandy chiefly occupied with his struggles with his vassals, his neighbors, and the king of France, all a necessary consequence of his feudal position as duke. The Norman vassals, always turbulent and rebellious, seem to have broken forth anew upon the death of Robert the Magnificent, and such accounts as have reached us of the events of the next twelve years reveal a constant state of anarchy and disorder. The revolt of the barons came to a head in 1047, when the whole of Lower Normandy rose under the leadership of the two chief _vicomtes_ of the region, Ranulf of Bayeux and Néel of Saint-Sauveur, the ruins of whose family castle of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte still greet the traveller who leaves Cherbourg for Paris. William, who was hunting in the neighborhood of Valognes, was obliged to flee half-clad in the night and to pick his way alone by devious paths across the enemy’s country to his castle of Falaise. With the assistance of the French king he was able to collect an army from Upper Normandy and meet the rebels on the great plain of Val-des-Dunes, near Caen, where the _Mont-joie_ of the French and the _Dex aie_ of the duke’s followers answered the barons’ appeals to their local saints of St. Sauveur, St. Sever, and St. Amand. William was victorious; the leaders of the revolt were sent into exile, but one of them, Grimoud of Plessis, the traitor, apparently he who had sought William’s death in the night at Valognes, was put in prison at Rouen in irons which he wore until his death.

With the collapse of the great revolt and the razing of the castles of the revolting barons, Normandy began to enjoy a period of internal peace and order. Externally, however, difficulties rather increased with the growing power of the young duke. In discussions of feudal society it is too often assumed that if the feudal obligations are observed between lords and vassals, all will go well, and that the anarchy of which the Middle Ages are full was the result of violations of these feudal ties. Now, while undoubtedly a heavy account must be laid at the door of direct breaches of the feudal bond, it must also be remembered that there was a fundamental defect in the very structure of feudal society. We may express this defect by saying that the feudal ties were only vertical and not lateral. The lord was bound to his vassal and the vassal to his lord, and so far as these relations went they provided a nexus of social and legal relations which might hold society together. But there was no tie between two vassals of the same lord, nothing whatever which bound one of them to live in peace and amity with the other. Quite the contrary. War being the normal state of European society in the feudal period, the right to carry on private war was one of the cherished rights of the feudal baron, and it extended wherever it was not restricted by the bonds of fealty and vassalage. The duke of Normandy and the count of Anjou were both vassals of the king of France, but their relations to each other were those of complete independence, and, save for some special agreement or friendship, were normally relations of hostility.