Chapter VIII: The Norman Kingdom of Sicily 218 (2)

This love of the north for luxury of adornment is amply seen in chronicle and saga. When the Irish drove the Vikings out of Limerick in 968 they took from them “their jewels and their best property, and their saddles beautiful and foreign, their gold and their silver, their beautifully woven cloth of all kinds and colors--satin and silk, pleasing and variegated, both scarlet and green, and all sorts of cloth in like manner.” “How,” asks the Valkyrie in the _Lay of the Raven_, “does the generous Prince Harold deal with the men of feats of renown that guard his land?” The Raven answers:--

They are well cared for, the warriors that cast dice in Harold’s
court. They are endowed with wealth and with fair swords, with
the ore of the Huns, and with maids from the East. They are glad
when they have hopes of a battle, they will leap up in hot haste
and ply the oars, snapping the oar-thongs and cracking the tholes.
Fiercely, I ween, do they churn the water with their oars at the
king’s bidding.

_Quoth the Walkyrie_: I will ask thee, for thou knowest the truth
of all these things, of the meed of the Poets, since thou must know
clearly the state of the minstrels that live with Harold.

_Quoth the Raven_: It is easily seen by their cheer, and their gold
rings, that they are among the friends of the king. They have red
cloaks right fairly fringed, silver-mounted swords, and ring-woven
sarks, gilt trappings, and graven helmets, wrist-fitting rings, the
gifts of Harold.[12]

As regards social organization, Viking society shows the Germanic division into three classes, thrall, churl, and noble. Their respective characters and occupations are thus described in the _Rigsmal_:--

Thrall was of swarthy skin, his hands wrinkled, his knuckles
bent, his fingers thick, his face ugly, his back broad, his heels
long. He began to put forth his strength, binding bast, making
loads, and bearing home faggots the weary long day. His children
busied themselves with building fences, dunging plowland, tending
swine, herding goats, and digging peat. Their names were Sooty and
Cowherd, Clumsy and Lout and Laggard, etc. Carl, or churl, was red
and ruddy, with rolling eyes, and took to breaking oxen, building
plows, timbering houses, and making carts. Earl, the noble, had
yellow hair, his cheeks were rosy, his eyes were keen as a young
serpent’s. His occupation was shaping the shield, bending the bow,
hurling the javelin, shaking the lance, riding horses, throwing
dice, fencing, and swimming. He began to waken war, to redden the
field, and to fell the doomed.[13]

Both churl and earl were largely represented in those who went to sea, but the nobility naturally preponderated, and it is particularly their exploits which the sagas and poems celebrate. Viking warfare was no mere clash of swords; they conducted their military operations with skill and foresight, and showed great power of adapting themselves to new conditions, whether that meant the invasion of an open country or the siege of a fortified town. Much, however, must be credited to their _furor Teutonicus_, to that exuberance of military spirit which they had inherited from far-off ancestors. Not all were wolf-coated Bearsarks, but all seemed to have that delight in war and conflict for their own sakes which breathes through their poetry:--

The sword in the king’s hand bit through the weeds of Woden [mail]
as if it were whisked through water, the spear-points clashed,
the shields were shattered, the axes rattled on the heads of the
warriors. Targets and skulls were trodden under the Northmen’s
shield-fires [weapons] and the hard heels of their hilts. There was
a din in the island, the kings dyed the shining rows of shields
in the blood of men. The wound-fires [blades] burnt in the bloody
wounds, the halberds bowed down to take the life of men, the ocean
of gore dashed upon the swords’-ness, the flood of the shafts fell
upon the beach of Stord. Halos of war mixed under the vault of the
bucklers; the battle-tempest blew underneath the clouds of the
targets, the lees of the sword-edges [blood] pattered in the gale
of Woden. Many a man fell into the stream of the brand.[14]

Again:--

Brands broke against the black targets, wounds waxed when the
princes met. The blades hammered against the helm-crests, the
wound-gravers, the sword’s point, bit. I heard that there fell
in the iron-play Woden’s oak [heroes] before the swords [the
sword-belt’s ice].

_Second Burden_: There was a linking of points and a gnashing of
edges: Eric got renown there.

_Second Stave_: The prince reddened the brand, there was a meal
for the ravens; the javelin sought out the life of man, the gory
spears flew, the destroyer of the Scots fed the steed of the witch
[wolves], the sister of Nari [Hell] trampled on the supper of the
eagles [corses]. The cranes of battle [shafts] flew against the
walls of the sword [bucklers], the wound-mew’s lips [the arrows’
barbs] were not left thirsty for gore. The wolf tore the wounds,
and the wave of the sword [blood] plashed against the beak of the
raven.

_Third Burden_: The lees of the din of war [blood] fell upon
Gialf’s steed [ship]: Eric gave the wolves carrion by the sea.

_Third Stave_: The flying javelin bit, peace was belied there,
the wolf was glad, and the bow was drawn, the bolts clattered,
the spear-points bit, the flaxen-bowstring bore the arrows out
of the bow. He brandished the buckler on his arm, the rouser of
the play of blades--he is a mighty hero. The fray grew greater
everywhere about the king. It was famed east over the sea, Eric’s
war-faring.[15]

Or listen to the weird sisters as they weave the web of Ireland’s fate under Brian Boru:--

Wide-stretched is the warp presaging the slaughter, the hanging
cloud of the beam; it is raining blood. The gray web of the hosts
is raised up on the spears, the web which we the friends of Woden
are filling with red weft.

This web is warped with the guts of men, and heavily weighted with
human heads; blood-stained darts are the shafts, iron-bound are the
stays; it is shuttled with arrows. Let us strike with our swords
this web of victory!

War and Sword-clasher, Sangrid and Swipple, are weaving with drawn
swords. The shaft shall sing, the shield shall ring, the helm-hound
[axe] shall fall on the target.[16]

And those who met their death in battle had reserved for them a similar existence in the life to come, not doomed like the ‘straw-dead’ to tread wet and chill and dusky ways to the land of Hel, but--I am quoting Gummere[17]--as weapon-dead faring “straightway to Odin, unwasted by sickness, in the full strength of manhood,” to spend their days in glorious battle and their nights in equally glorious feasting in the courts of Valhalla.

In his cradle the young Viking was lulled by such songs as this:--

My mother said they should buy me a boat and fair oars, and that I
should go abroad with the Vikings, should stand forward in the bows
and steer a dear bark, and so wend to the haven and cut down man
after man there.

When he grows up the earl’s daughter scorns him as a boy who “has never given a warm meal to the wolf,” “seen the raven in autumn scream over the carrion draft,” or “been where the shell-thin edges” of the blades crossed; whereupon he wins a place by her side by replying:--

I have walked with bloody brand and with whistling spear, with
the wound-bird following me. The Vikings made a fierce attack; we
raised a furious storm, the flame ran over the dwellings of men, we
laid the bleeding corses to rest in the gates of the city.[18]

And at the end, like Ragnar Lodbrok captured and dying in the pit of serpents, he can tell his tale of feeding the eagle and the she-wolf since he first reddened the sword at the age of twenty, and end his life undaunted to the ever-recurring refrain, “We hewed with the sword”:

Death has no terrors. I am willing to depart. They are calling me
home, the Fays whom Woden the Lord of Hosts has sent me from his
hall. Merrily shall I drink ale in my high-seat with the Anses. My
life days are done. Laughing will I die.[19]

Politically, Viking society was aristocratic, but an aristocracy in which all the nobles were equal. “We have no lord, we are all equal,” said Rollo’s men when asked who was their lord; and men thus minded were not likely to spend their time casting dice in King Harold’s court, even if their independence meant the wolf’s lot of exile. What kind of a political organization they were likely to form can be seen from two examples of the Viking age. One is Iceland, described by Lord Bryce[20] as “an almost unique instance of a community whose culture and creative power flourished independently of any favoring material conditions,”--that curiously decentralized and democratic commonwealth where the necessities of life created a government with judicial and legislative duties, while the feeling of equality and local independence prevented the government from acquiring any administrative or executive functions,--a community with “a great deal of law and no central executive, a great many courts and no authority to carry out their judgments.” The other example is Jomburg, that strange body of Jomvikings established in Pomerania, at the mouth of the Oder, and held by a military gild under the strictest discipline. Only men of undoubted bravery between the ages of eighteen and fifty were admitted to membership; no women were allowed in the castle, and no man could be absent from it for more than three days at a time. Members assumed the duty of mutual support and revenge, and plunder was to be distributed by lot.

Neither of these types of Viking community was to be reproduced in Normandy, for both were the outgrowth of peculiar local conditions, and the Northmen were too adaptable to found states with a rubber-stamp. A loose half-state like Iceland could exist only where the absence of neighbors or previous inhabitants removed all danger of complications, whether domestic or foreign. A strict warrior gild like that of Jomburg could arise only in a fortress. Whatever form Viking society would take in Normandy was certain to be determined in large measure by local conditions; yet it might well contain elements found in the other societies--the Icelandic sense of equality and independence, and the military discipline of the Jomvikings set in the midst of their Wendish foes. And both of these elements are characteristic of the Norman state.

Such, very briefly sketched, were the Northmen who came to Normandy. We have now to follow them in their new home.

We must note in the first place that the relations between Normandy and the north were not ended with the grant of 911. We must think of the new Norman state, not as a planet sent off into space to move separate and apart in a new orbit, but as a colony, an outpost of the Scandinavian peoples in the south, fed by new bands of colonists from the northern home and only gradually drawn away from its connections with the north and brought into the political system of Frankish Gaul and its neighbors. For something like a hundred years after the coming of Rollo the key to Norman history is found in this fact and in the resulting interplay of Scandinavian and Frankish influences. The very grant of 911 was susceptible of being differently regarded from the point of view of the two parties. Charles the Simple probably thought he was creating a new fief with the Norman chief as his vassal, bound to him by feudal ties, while to Rollo, innocent of feudal ideas, the grant may well have seemed a gift outright to be held by himself and his companions as land was held at home. From one point of view a feudal holding, from another an independent Scandinavian state, the contradiction in Normandy’s position explains much of its early history. The new colony was saved from absorption in its surroundings by continued migration from the north; before it became Frankish and feudal it thus had time to establish itself firmly and draw tightly the lines which separated it from its neighbors. At once a Frankish county and a Danish colony, it slowly formed itself into the semi-independent duchy which is the historic Normandy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Although Rollo was baptized in 912 and signalized his conversion by extensive grants of land to the great churches and monasteries of his new territories, his Christianity sat lightly upon him and left him a Norse sea-rover at heart till the end, when he sought to appease the powers of the other world, not only by gifts of gold to the church, but by human sacrifices to the northern gods. His legislation, so far as it can be reconstructed from the shadowy accounts of later historians, was fundamentally Scandinavian in character, and his followers guarded jealously the northern traditions of equality and independence. His son, William Longsword, was a more Christian and Frankish type, but his death, celebrated in a Latin poem which represents the earliest known example of popular epic in Normandy, was the signal for a Scandinavian and pagan reaction. We hear of fresh arrivals on the Seine, Vikings who worshipped Thor and Odin, of an independent band at Bayeux under a certain Haigrold or Harold, and even of appeals for reënforcements from the Normans to the Northmen beyond the sea. The dukes of Rouen, says the _Saga of St. Olaf_, “remember well their kinship with the chiefs of Norway; they hold them in such honor that they have always been the best friends of the Norwegians, and all the Norwegians who wish find refuge in Normandy.” Not till the beginning of the eleventh century does the Scandinavian immigration come to an end and Normandy stand fully on its own feet.

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.

And so an important part of Norman history has to treat of the struggles with the duchy’s neighbors, Flanders on the north, the royal domain on the east, Maine and Anjou to the southward, and Brittany on the west. Fortunately for Normandy, the Bretons were but loosely organized, while the Flemings, compacted into one of the strongest of the French fiefs, were generally friendly, and the friendship was in this period cemented by William’s marriage to Matilda, daughter of the count of Flanders, one of the few princely marriages of the time which was founded upon affection and observed with fidelity. With Anjou the case was different. Beginning as a border county over against the Bretons of the lower Loire, with the black rock of Angers as its centre and fortress, Anjou, though still comparatively small in area, had grown into one of the strongest states of western France. Under a remarkable line of counts, Geoffrey Greygown, Fulk the Red, and Fulk the Black, ancestors of the Plantagenet kings of England, it had become the dominant power on the Loire, and now under their successor Geoffrey the Hammer it threatened further expansion by hammering its frontiers still further to the north and east. Geoffrey, William’s contemporary and rival, is known to us by a striking characterization written by his nephew and successor and forming a typical bit of feudal biography:[25]

My uncle Geoffrey became a knight in his father’s lifetime and
began his knighthood by wars against his neighbors, one against
the Poitevins, whose count he captured at Mont Couër, and another
against the people of Maine, whose count, named Herbert Bacon,
he likewise took. He also carried on war against his own father,
in the course of which he committed many evil deeds of which he
afterward bitterly repented. After his father died on his return
from Jerusalem, Geoffrey possessed his lands and the city of
Angers, and fought Count Thibaud of Blois, son of Count Odo, and
by gift of King Henry received the city of Tours, which led to
another war with Count Thibaud, in the course of which, at a battle
between Tours and Amboise, Thibaud was captured with a thousand of
his knights. And so, besides the part of Touraine inherited from
his father, he acquired Tours and the castles round about--Chinon,
L’Ile-Bouchard, Châteaurenault, and Saint-Aignan. After this he had
a war with William, count of the Normans, who later acquired the
kingdom of England and was a magnificent king, and with the people
of France and of Bourges, and with William count of Poitou and
Aimeri viscount of Thouars and Hoel count of Nantes and the Breton
counts of Rennes and with Hugh count of Maine, who had thrown off
his fealty. Because of all these wars and the prowess he showed
therein he was rightly called the Hammer, as one who hammered down
his enemies.

In the last year of his life he made me his nephew a knight at the
age of seventeen in the city of Angers, at the feast of Pentecost,
in the year of the Incarnation 1060, and granted me Saintonge and
the city of Saintes because of a quarrel he had with Peter of
Didonne. In this same year King Henry died on the nativity of St.
John, and my uncle Geoffrey on the third day after Martinmas came
to a good end. For in the night which preceded his death, laying
aside all care of knighthood and secular things, he became a monk
in the monastery of St. Nicholas, which his father and he had built
with much devotion and endowed with their goods.

The great source of conflict between William and Geoffrey was the intervening county of Maine, whence the Angevins had gained possession of the Norman fortresses of Domfront and Alençon, and it was not till after Geoffrey’s death, in 1063, that the capture of its chief city, LeMans, completed that union of Normandy and Maine which was to last through the greater part of Norman history. The conquest of Maine was the first fruit of William’s work as conqueror.

With William’s suzerain, the king of France, relations were more complicated. Legally there could be no question that the duke of Normandy was the feudal vassal of the French king and as such bound to the obligations of loyalty and service which flowed from his oath of homage and fealty. Actually, in the society of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such bonds were freely and frequently broken, yet they were not thrown off. Here, as in many other phases of mediæval life, we meet that persistent contradiction between theory and practice which shocks our more consistent minds. Just as the men of the Middle Ages tolerated a Holy Roman Empire which claimed universal dominion and often exercised only the most local and rudimentary authority, so they accepted a monarchy like that of the early Capetians, which claimed to rule over the whole of France and was limited in its actual government to a few farms and castles in the neighborhood of Paris. And just as they maintained ideals of lofty chivalry and rigorous asceticism far beyond the sordid reality of ordinary knighthood or monkhood, so the constant violation of feudal obligations did not change the feudal bond or destroy the nexus of feudal relations. In this age of unrestraint, ferocious savagery alternated with knightly generosity, and ungovernable rage with self-abasing penance.

At such times the relations of the king and his great feudatories would depend very largely upon personal temperament, political situations, and even the impulse of the moment, and we must not expect to find such purpose and continuity in policies as prevail in more settled periods. Nevertheless, with due allowance for momentary variations, the relations of Normandy with the Capetian kings follow comparatively simple lines. The position of Normandy in the Seine valley and its proximity to the royal domain offered endless opportunity for friction, yet for about a century strained relations were avoided by alliance and friendship based upon common interest. Hugh Capet came to the throne with the support of the Norman duke, and his successors often found their mainstay in Norman arms. Robert the Magnificent on his departure for the East commended his young son to King Henry, and the heir seems to have grown up under the king’s guardianship. It was Henry who saved William from his barons in 1047, and it was William that furnished over half the king’s soldiers on the campaign against Anjou in the following year. Then, about the middle of the eleventh century, comes a change, for which the growing power and influence of Normandy furnish a sufficient explanation. Henry supported the revolt of William of Arques in 1053 and attempted a great invasion of Normandy in the same year, while in 1058 he burnt and pillaged his way into the heart of the Norman territory. A waiting game and well-timed attacks defeated these efforts at Mortemer and at Varaville, but William refused to follow up his advantage by a direct attack upon his king, whom he continued to treat with personal consideration as his feudal lord. Even after William himself became king, he seems to have continued to render the military service which he owed as duke. By this time, however, the subjection had become only nominal; merely as duke, William was now a more powerful ruler than the king of France, and the Capetian monarchy had to bide its time for more than a century longer.

Before we can leave the purely Norman period of William’s reign and turn to the conquest of England, it is important to examine the internal condition of Normandy under his rule. Even the most thorough study possible of this subject would need to be brief, for lack of available evidence. Time has not dealt kindly with Norman records, and over against the large body of Anglo-Saxon charters and the unique account of Anglo-Saxon England preserved in the Domesday survey, contemporary Normandy can set only a few scattered documents and a curious statement of the duke’s rights and privileges under William, drawn up four years after his death and only recently recovered as an authority for his reign. The sources of Norman history were probably never so abundant as those of England; certainly there is now nothing on the Continent, outside of the Vatican, that can compare with the extraordinarily full and continuous series of the English public records. The great gaps in the Norman records, often supposed to be due to the Revolution, really appear much earlier. Undoubtedly there was in many places wanton destruction of documents in the revolutionary uprisings, and there were many losses under the primitive organization of local archives in this period, as there undoubtedly were during the carelessness and corruption of the Restoration. Nevertheless, an examination of the copies and extracts made from monastic and cathedral archives by the scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shows that, with a few significant exceptions, the materials for early Norman history were little richer then than now, so that the great losses must have occurred before this time, that is to say, during the Middle Ages and in the devastation of the English invasion and of the Protestant wars of the sixteenth century. The cathedral library at Bayeux, for example, possesses three volumes of a huge cartulary charred by the fire into which it was thrown when the town was sacked by the Protestants. On the other hand, it should be noted that the French Revolution accomplished one beneficent result for local records in the secularization of ecclesiastical archives and their collection into the great repositories of the Archives Départementales, whose organization is still the envy of historical scholars across the Channel. One who has enjoyed for many months access to these admirable collections of records will be permitted to express his gratitude to those who created them, as well as to those by whom they are now so courteously administered.

Piecing together our scattered information regarding the Normandy of the eleventh century, we note at the outset that it was a feudal society, that is to say, land was for the most part held of a lord by hereditary tenure on condition of military service. Indeed feudal ideas had spread so far that they even penetrated the church, so that in some instances the revenues of the clergy had been granted to laymen and archdeaconries and prebends had been turned into hereditary fiefs. With feudal service went the various incidents of feudal tenure and a well-developed feudal jurisdiction of the lord over his tenants and of the greater barons over the less. In all this there is nothing to distinguish Normandy from the neighboring countries of northern France, and as a feudal society is normally a decentralized society, we should expect to find the powers of government chiefly in the hands of the local lords. A closer study, however, shows certain peculiarities which are of the utmost importance, both for Norman and for English history.

First of all, the military service owing to the duke had been systematically assessed in rough units of five or ten knights, and this service, or its subdivisions, had become attached to certain pieces of land, or knights’ fees. The amounts of service were fixed by custom and were regularly enforced. Still more significant are the restrictions placed upon the military power of the barons. The symbol and the foundation of feudal authority was the castle, wherefore the duke forbade the building of castles and strongholds without his license and required them to be handed over to him on demand. Private war and the blood feud could not yet be prohibited entirely, but they were closely limited. No one was allowed to go out to seek his enemy with hauberk and standard and sounding horn. Assaults and ambushes were not permitted in the duke’s forests; captives were not to be taken in a feud, nor could arms, horses, or property be carried off from a combat. Burning, plunder, and waste were forbidden in pursuing claims to land, and except for open crime, no one could be condemned to loss of limb unless by judgment of the proper ducal or baronial court. Coinage, generally a valued privilege of the greater lords, was in Normandy a monopoly of the duke. What the absence of such restrictions might mean is well illustrated in England in the reign of Stephen, when private war, unlicensed castles, and baronial coinage appeared as the chief evils of an unbridled feudal anarchy.

In the administration of justice, in spite of the great franchises of the barons, the duke has a large reserved jurisdiction. Certain places are under his special protection, certain crimes put the offender at his mercy. The administrative machinery, though in many respects still primitive, has kept pace with the duke’s authority. Whereas the Capetian king has as his local representatives only the semi-feudal agents on his farms, the Norman duke has for purposes of local government a real public officer, the _vicomte_, commanding his troops, guarding his castles, maintaining order, administering justice, and collecting the ducal revenues. Nowhere is the superiority of the Norman dukes over their royal overlords more clear than in the matter of finance. The housekeeping of the Capetian king of the eleventh century was still what the Germans call a _Naturalwirthschaft_, an economic organization based upon payment in produce and labor rather than in money. “Less powerful than certain of his great vassals,” as he is described by his principal historian, Luchaire,[26] “the king lives like them from the income from his farms and tolls, the payments of his peasants, the labor of his serfs, the taxes disguised as gifts which he levies from the bishops and abbots of the neighborhood. His granaries of Gonesse, Janville, Mantes, Étampes, furnish his grain; his cellars of Orleans and Argenteuil, his wine; his forests of Rouvrai (now the Bois de Boulogne), Saint-Germain, Fontainebleau, Iveline, Compiègne, his game. He passes his time in hunting, for amusement or to supply his table, and travels constantly from estate to estate, from abbey to abbey, obliged to make full use of his rights of entertainment and to move frequently from place to place in order not to exhaust the resources of his subjects.”

In other words, under existing methods of communication, it was easier to transport the king and his household than it was to transport food, and the king literally ‘boarded round’ from farm to farm. Such conditions were typical of the age, and they could only be changed by the development of a revenue in money, enabling the king to buy where he would and to pay whom he would for service, whether personal or political or military. Only by hard cash could the mediæval ruler become independent of the limitations which feudalism placed upon him. Now, while the Norman duke derived much of his income from his farms and forests, his mills and fishing rights and local monopolies and tolls, he had also a considerable revenue in money. Each _vicomté_ was farmed for a fixed amount, and there was probably a regular method of collection and accounting. If the king wished to bestow revenue upon a monastery he would grant so many measures of grain at the mills of Bourges or so many measures of wine in the vineyards of Joui; while in a similar position the Norman duke would give money--twelve pounds in the farm of Argentan, sixty shillings and tenpence in the toll of Exmes, or one hundred shillings in the _prévôté_ of Caen. Nothing could show more clearly the superiority of Normandy in fiscal and hence in political organization, where under the forms of feudalism we can already discern the beginnings of the modern state.