Part 7

We must pass over the long list of petty wars between Louis and Hugh. Richard's reign was stormy to begin with, but for some years before his death Normandy appears to have been tolerably quiet. Louis had seen his darkest times when Normandy shook herself free from French rule, and from that hour his fortunes bettered. There was one disagreement between Otto of Germany and Louis, aided by the king of Burgundy, against the two dukes, Hugh and Richard, and before Louis died he won back again the greater part of his possessions at Laon. Duke Hugh's glories were somewhat eclipsed for a time, and he was excommunicated by the Archbishop of Rheims and took no notice of that, but by and by when the Pope of Rome himself put him under a ban, he came to terms. The Normans were his constant allies, but there is not much to learn about their own military enterprises. The enthusiastic Norman writers give a glowing account of the failure of the confederate kings to capture Rouen, but say less about their marauding tour through the duchies of Normandy and Hugh's dominions. Rouen was a powerful city by this time, and a famous history belonged to her already. There are some fragments left still of the Rouen of that day, which is very surprising when we remember how battered and beleaguered the old town was through century after century.

Every thing was apparently prospering with the king of France when he suddenly died, only thirty-three years of age, in spite of his tempestuous reign and always changing career. He must have felt like a [Pg087] very old man, one would think, and somehow one imagines him and Gerberga, his wife, as old people in their Castle of Laon. Lothair was the next king, and Richard, who so lately was a child too, became the elder ruler of his time. Hugh of Paris died two years later, and the old enemy of Normandy, Arnulf of Flanders, soon followed him. The king of Germany, Otto, outlived all these, but Richard lived longer than he or his son.

[Pg088]

The duchy of France, Hugh's dominion, passed to his young son, Hugh Capet, a boy of thirteen. When this Hugh grew up he did homage to Lothair, but Richard gave his loyalty to Hugh of Paris's son. The wars went on, and before many years went over Hugh Capet extinguished the succession of Charlemagne's heirs to the throne of France, and was crowned king himself, so beginning the reign of France proper; as powerful and renowned a kingdom as Europe saw through many generations. By throwing off the rule of German princes, and achieving independence of the former French dynasty, an order of things began that was not overthrown until our own day. Little by little the French crown annexed the dominions of all its vassals, even the duchy of Normandy, but that was not to be for many years yet. I hope we have succeeded in getting at least a hint of the history of France from the time it was the Gaul of the Roman empire; and the empire of Charlemagne, and later, of the fragments of that empire, each a province or kingdom under a ruler of its own, which were reunited in one confederation under one king of France. All this time Europe is under the religious rule of Rome, and in Richard the Fearless's later years we find him the benefactor of the Church, living close by the Minster of Fécamp and buried in its shadow at last. There was a deep stone chest which was placed by Duke Richard's order near one of the minster doors, where the rain might fall upon it that dropped from the holy roof above. For many years, on Saturday evenings, the chest was filled to the brim with [Pg089] wheat, a luxury in those days, and the poor came and filled their measures and held out their hands afterward for five shining pennies, while the lame and sick people were visited in their homes by the almoner of the great church. There was much talk about this hollowed block of stone, but when Richard died in 996 at the end of his fifty-five years' reign, after a long, lingering illness, his last command was that he should be buried in the chest and lie "there where the foot should tread, and the dew and the waters of heaven should fall." Beside this church of the Holy Trinity at Fécamp he built the abbey of St. Wandville, the Rouen cathedral, and the great church of the Benedictines at St. Ouen. New structures have risen upon the old foundations, but Richard's name is still connected with the places of worship that he cared for.

"Richard Sans-peur has long been our favorite hero," says Sir Francis Palgrave, who has written perhaps the fullest account of the Third Duke; "we have admired the fine boy, nursed on his father's knee whilst the three old Danish warriors knelt and rendered their fealty. During Richard's youth, adolescence, and age our interest in his varied, active, energetic character has never flagged, and we go with him in court and camp till the day of his death."

[Pg090]

V.

DUKE RICHARD THE GOOD.

"Then would he sing achievements high And circumstance of chivalry."—SCOTT.

Richard the Fearless had several sons, and when he lay dying his nobles asked him to say who should be his successor. "He who bears my name," whispered the old duke, and added a moment later: "Let the others take the oaths of fealty, acknowledge Richard as their superior; and put their hands in his, and receive from him those lands which I will name to you."

So Richard the Good came to his dukedom, with a rich inheritance in every way from the father who had reigned so successfully, and his brothers Geoffry, Mauger, William, and Robert, accepted their portions of the dukedom, to which Richard added more lands of his own accord.

During this reign there were many changes, some very gradual and natural ones, for Normandy was growing more French and less Scandinavian all the time, and the relationship grew stronger and stronger between vigorous young Normandy and troubled, failing England. Later we shall see how our [Pg091] Normans gave a new impulse to England, but already there are signs and forebodings of what must come to pass in the days of Richard the Good's grandson, William the Conqueror.

We first hear now of many names which are great names in Normandy and England to this day. "It seems as if there were never any region more peopled with men of known deeds, known names, known passions and known crimes," says Palgrave; and the Norman annals abound with historical titles "rendered illustrious by the illusions of time and blazonry which imagination imparts." It is very strange how few records there are, among the state papers in France, of all this period. Every important public matter in England was carefully recorded long before this, but with all the proverbial love of going to law, and all the well-ordered priesthood, and good education of the upper classes, there are only a few scattered charters until Normandy is really merged in France. This almost corresponds to the absence, in the literary world, of papers relating to Shakespeare, which is such a puzzle to antiquarians. Here was a man well-known and beloved both in his native village and the world of London, a man who must have covered thousands of pages with writing, and written letters and signed his name times without number, and yet not one of his manuscripts and very few signatures can be found. Only the references to him in contemporary literature remain to give us any facts at all about the greatest of English writers. Of far less noteworthy men, of his time and before that, we can make up [Pg092] reasonably full biographies. And Normandy is known only through the records of other nations, and the traditions and reports of romancing chroniclers. There are no long lists of men and money, and no treasurer or general of Rolf's, or Longsword's time has left us his accounts. Rolf's brother, who went to Iceland while Rolf came to Normandy, in the tyrannical reign of Harold Haarfager, established in that storm-bound little country a nation of scholars and record-makers. Perhaps it was easier to write there where the only enemies were ice and snow and darkness and the fury of the sea and wind.

Yet we can guess at a great deal about the condition of Normandy. There was so much going to and fro, such a lively commerce and transportation of goods, that we know the old Roman roads had been kept in good repair, and that many others must have been built as the population increased. The famous fairs which were held make us certain that there was a large business carried on, and besides the maintenance and constant use of a large army, in some years there was also a thrifty devotion to mercantile matters and agriculture. Foreign artisans and manufacturers were welcomed to the Norman provinces, and soon formed busy communities like the Flemish craftsmen, weavers and leather-makers, at Falaise. The Normans had an instinctive liking for pomp and splendor; so their tradesmen flourished, and their houses became more and more elegant, and must be carved and gilded like the dragon ships.

A merry, liberal duke was this Richard; fond of his court, and always ready to uphold Normandy's [Pg093] honor and his own when there was any fighting to be done. He had a great regard for his nobles, and we begin to find a great deal said about gentlemen; the duke would have only gentlemen for his chosen followers, and the aristocrats make themselves felt more distinctly than before. The rule of the best is a hard thing to manage, it sinks already into a rule of the lucky, the pushing, or the favored in the Rouen court. The power and reign of chivalry begins to blossom now far and wide.

We begin to hear rumors too on the other side that there were wrong distinctions between man and man, and tyranny that grew hard to bear, and one Norman resents the truth that his neighbor is a better and richer man than he, and moreover has the right to make him a servant, and to make laws for him. The Norman citizens were equal in civil rights—that is to say, they were not taxed without their own consent, need pay no tolls, and might hunt and fish; all could do these things except the villeins[2] and peasants, who really composed the mass of the native population, the descendants of those who lived in Normandy before Rolf came there. Even the higher clergy did not form part of the nobility and gentry at first, and in later years there was still a difference in rank and privileges between the priests of Norwegian and Danish race and the other ecclesiastics.

[2] Farm laborers; countrymen.

Before Richard the Good had been long on his throne there was a great revolt and uprising of the peasantry, who evidently did not think that their new [Pg094] duke deserved his surname at all. These people conceived the idea of destroying the inequality of races, so that Normandy should hold only one nation, as it already held one name. We cannot help being surprised at the careful political organization of the peasantry, and at finding that they established a regular parliament with two representatives from every district. In all the villages and hamlets, after the day's work was over, they came together to talk over their wrongs or to listen to some speaker more eloquent than his fellows. They "made a commune," which anticipates later events in the history of France in a surprising way. Freeman says that "such a constitution could hardly have been extemporized by mere peasants," and believes that the disturbance was founded in a loyalty to the local customs and rights which were fast being trampled under foot, and that the rebels were only trying to defend their time-honored inheritance. The liberty which they were eager to grasp might have been a great good, scattered as it would have been over a great extent of country, instead of being won by separate cities. The ancient Norman constitutions of the Channel Islands, Jersey and Guernsey and the rest, antiquated as they seem, breathe to-day a spirit of freedom worthy of the air of England or Switzerland or Norway.

The peasants clamored for their right to be equal with their neighbors, and no doubt many a small landholder joined them, who did not wish to swear fealty to his over-lord. In the /Roman de Rou/, an old chronicle which keeps together many traditions about early [Pg095] Normandy that else might have been forgotten, we find one of these piteous harangues. Perhaps it is not authentic, but it gives the spirit of the times so well that it ought to have a place here:

"The lords do nothing but evil; we cannot obtain either reason or justice from them; they have all, they take all, eat all, and make us live in poverty and suffering. Every day with us is a day of pain; we gain nought by our labors, there are so many dues and services. Why do we allow ourselves to be thus treated? Let us place ourselves beyond their power; we too are men, we have the same limbs, the same height, the same power of endurance, and we are a hundred to one. Let us swear to defend each other; let us be firmly knit together, and no man shall be lord over us; we shall be free from tolls and taxes, free to fell trees, to take game and fish, and do as we will in all things, in the wood, in the meadow, on the water!"

At this time the larger portion of Normandy was what used to be called forest. That word meant something more than woodland; it belonged then to tracts of wild country, woodland and moorland and marshes, and these were the possession of the crown. The peasants had in the old days a right, or a custom at any rate, of behaving as if the forests were their own, but more and more they had been restricted, and the unaccustomed yoke galled them bitterly. Besides their being forbidden to hunt and fish in the forests, the water-ways were closed from them, taxes imposed, and their time and labor demanded on the duke's lands. There had been grants [Pg096] of these free tracts of country to the new nobility, and with the lands the new lords claimed also the service of the peasantry.

The people do not appear to have risen against the duke himself, so much as against their immediate oppressors, and it was one of these who was to be their punisher. You remember that Richard the Fearless' mother, Espriota, married, in the troublous times of his boyhood, a rich countryman called Sperling. They had a son called Raoul of Ivry, who seems to have been high in power and favor with the second Richard, his half-brother, and who now entered upon his cruel task with evident liking. He had been brought up among the country-folk, although he stood at this time next to the duke in office.

He was very crafty, and sent spies all through Normandy to find out when the Assembly or Parliament was to be held, and then dispersed his troops according to the spies' report, and seized upon all the deputies and these peasants who were giving oaths of allegiance to their new commanders. Whether from design or from anger and prejudice Raoul next treated his poor prisoners with terrible cruelty. He maimed them in every way, putting out their eyes, cutting off their hands or feet; he impaled them alive, and tortured them with melted lead. Those who lived through their sufferings were sent home to be paraded through the streets as a warning. So fear prevailed over even the love of liberty in their brave hearts, for the association of Norman peasants was broken up, and a sad resignation took the place, for [Pg097] hundreds of years, of the ardor and courage which had been lighted only to go out again so quickly.

There was another rebellion besides this, of which we have some account, and one man instead of a whole class was the offender. One of Richard's brothers, or half-brothers, the son of an unknown mother, had received as his inheritance the county of Exmes, which held three very rich and thriving towns. These were Exmes, Argentan, and Falaise in which we have already learned that there was a colony of Flemings settled, skilful, industrious weavers and leather-makers and workers in cloth and metals. Falaise itself was already very old indeed, and there remain yet the ruins of an old Roman camp, claimed to belong to the time of Julius Cæsar, beside the earliest specimen of that square gray tower which is really of earlier date though always associated with Norman feudalism. The Falaise Fair, which was of such renown in the days of the first dukes, is supposed to be the survival of some pagan festival of vast antiquity. The name of Guibray, the suburb of Falaise which gave its name to the Fair, is said to be derived from the Gaulish word for mistletoe, and wherever we hear of mistletoe in ancient history it reminds us, not of merry-makings and Christmas holidays, but of the grim rites and customs of the Druids.

William, Duke Richard's brother, does not seem to have been grateful for these rich possessions, and before long there is a complaint that he fails to respond to the royal summons, and that he will not render service or do homage in return for his holding. [Pg098] Raoul of Ivry promptly counselled the Duke to take arms against the offender.

It was not long before William found himself a prisoner in the old tower of Rolf at Rouen. He was treated with great severity, and only avoided being hanged by making his escape in most romantic fashion. A compassionate lady contrived to supply him with a rope, and he came down from his high tower-window to the ground hand over hand. Luckily he found none of his keepers waiting for him, and succeeded in getting out of the country. Raoul had been hunting his partisans, and now he had the pleasure of hunting William himself, by keeping spies on his track and forcing him from one danger to another until he was tired of his life, and boldly determined to go to his brother the Duke and beg for mercy. He was very fortunate, for Richard not only listened to him, and was not angry at being stopped on a day when he had gone out to amuse himself with hunting, but he pardoned the suppliant and pitied his trials and sufferings, and more than all, though he did not give back the forfeited county of Exmes, he did give him the county of Eu. We hear nothing of what Raoul thought of such a pleasant ending to the troubles after he had shown such zeal himself in pursuing and harassing the Duke's enemy.

We must take a quick look at the relations between Richard the Good and Hugh Capet, Hugh of Paris's successor, and Robert of France, Hugh Capet's son, who was trying to uphold the fading dignities and power of the Carlovingian throne. Truly [Pg099] Charlemagne's glories were almost spent, and the new glories of the great house of the Capets were growing brighter and brighter. Our eyes already turn toward England and the part that the Norman dukes must soon play there, but there is something to say first about France.

Robert and Richard were great friends; they had many common interests, and were bound by solemn oaths and formal covenants of loyalty toward and protection of each other. Robert was a very honorable man; his relation to his father was a most curious one, for they seem to have been partners in royalty and to have reigned together over France. Richard the Fearless had done much to establish the throne of the Capets, and there was a firm bond between the second Richard and young Robert, to whom he did homage. There were several powerful chiefs and tributaries, but Richard the Good outranks them all, and takes his place without question as the first peer of France. The golden lilies of France are already in flower, and though history is almost silent through the later years of Hugh Capet's life, there are signs of great activity within the kingdom and of growing prosperity. There is an old proverb: "Happy is that nation which has no history!" and whenever we come to a time that the historians pass over or describe in a few sentences, we take a long breath and imagine the people busy in their homes and fields and shops, blest in the freedom from war and disorder.

Robert of France was a famous wit and liked to play tricks upon his associates. He was a poet too, [Pg100] and wrote some beautiful Latin rhymes which are still sung in the churches. There is a good story about his being at Rome once at a solemn church festival. When he approached the altar he held a chalice in his hands with great reverence, and everybody could see that it held a roll of parchment.

There could be no doubt that the king meant to bestow a splendid gift upon the church, perhaps, a duchy or even his whole kingdom; but after the service was over, and the pope and cardinals, full of expectation, hurried to see what prize was put into their keeping, behold! only a copy of Robert's famous chant "/Cornelius Centurio!/" It was a sad disappointment indeed when they looked at this unexpected offering!

But Robert was more than a good comrade, he was a remarkably good king, as kings went; he kept order and was brave, decided, and careful. It was true that he had fallen heir to a prosperous and well-governed kingdom, but it takes constant effort and watchfulness and ready strength to keep a kingdom or any lesser responsibilities up to the right level. He had one great trial, for his wife Bertha, being his first cousin, should not have been his wife according to the laws of the Roman Church. For the first time there was a pope of Rome who was from beyond the Alps, a German; and Robert and he were on bad terms, which resulted in the excommunication of the king of France and the queen, and at one time they were put so completely under the ban that even their servants forsook them and the whole kingdom was thrown into confusion. The misery became so [Pg101] great that the poor queen presently had to be separated from her husband, and this was the more grievous as she had no children, and so Robert was obliged to put her away from him and marry again for the sake of having an heir to the throne. Bertha's successor was very handsome, but very cross, and in later years King Robert used to say: "There are plenty of chickens in the nest, but my old hen pecks at me!"

In spite of the new queen's bad temper there are a good many things to be said in her praise. She was much better educated than most women of her day, and she had a great admiration for Robert's poetry, and these things must have gone far to make up for her faults.

Duke Richard's marriage was a very fortunate one. His sister Hawisa, of whom he was guardian, was asked in marriage by Duke Godfrey of Brittany, and this was a very welcome alliance, since it bound the two countries closer together than ever before, and made them forget the rivalries which had sometimes caused serious trouble. Especially this was true when a little later Richard himself married Godfrey's sister Judith, who was distinguished for her wisdom. They had a most splendid wedding at the Abbey of St. Michael's Mount, and in course of time one of their daughters married the Count of Burgundy and one the Count of Flanders.

In spite of much immorality and irregularity in those days, there was enough that was proper and respectable in the alliances of the noble families, and we catch many a glimpse of faithful lovers and [Pg102] gallant love-making. It was often said that Normandy's daughters did as much for the well-being of the country as her sons, and when we read the lists of grand marriages we can understand that the dukes' daughters won as many provinces by their beauty as the sons did by their bravery in war.