Chapter VIII: The Norman Kingdom of Sicily 218 (5)

There was, it is true, a period when Normandy was once more united to England, this time as a conquered country. Between 1417 and 1419 Henry V subdued Normandy in a series of well-conducted campaigns, and he and his son remained in possession of the duchy until 1450. During this period of English rule no effort seems to have been made to restore earlier conditions which had now been outgrown: law, local government, fiscal organization continued unchanged. English officials were, of course, appointed, and English immigration was encouraged at the expense of the lands of the Normans who had left the province. The first Norman university was founded at Caen in the reign of Henry VI. In the face, however, of all efforts at conciliation and fair treatment the population remained hostile. The idea that the Englishman was a foreigner had grown up during two centuries of absence; it was to crystallize definitely as the conception of French nationality took form through the work of Joan of Arc. Lavisse has reminded us[47] that this war “was not a conflict between one nation and another, between the genius of one people and that of another; nevertheless it continued, and was fierce as well as long. From year to year the hatred against the English increased. In contact with the foreigner France began to know herself, like the _ego_ in contact with the _non-ego_. Vanquished she felt the disgrace of defeat. Acts of municipal and local patriotism preceded and heralded French patriotism, which finally blossomed out in Joan of Arc, and sanctified itself with the perfume of a miracle. Out of France with the English! They left France, and France came into existence.” In this rapid growth of French national consciousness Normandy had its full share, and some of its great scenes are set on Norman soil. It was at Rouen that Joan of Arc was tried and condemned by the Inquisition; it was in the old market-place of this same city that the English soldiers discovered too late that they had burned a saint.

And so it came about that twenty years later the Normans welcomed the troops of Charles VII and passed finally under French sway. Proud of its past, proud also of its provincialisms and local peculiarities, Normandy was nevertheless French in feeling and interests, and grew more French with time under the unifying force of the absolute monarchy, the Revolution, and the modern republic. It ceased to be a duchy in 1467; it ceased to be even a political division with the creation of the modern departments in 1790. Its last survival as an area recognized by the government, the ecclesiastical province of Rouen, disappeared with the final separation of church and state in 1905. The only unity which its five departments now retain is that of the history and tradition of a common past--of a _petite patrie_ now swallowed up in the nation.

Only at one point did the old Normandy really maintain itself against the forces of centralization, namely in the Channel Islands, those “bits of France fallen into the sea and picked up by England,” as Victor Hugo calls them. These were not conquered by Philip or his successors, and have remained from that day to this attached to the English crown. They still have their _baillis_ and _vicomtes_, their knights’ fees and feudal modes of tenure. The Norman dialect is still their language; the _Coutume de Normandie_ is still the basis of their law; and one may still hear, in disputes concerning property in Jersey and Guernsey, the old cry of _haro_ which preserves one of the most archaic features of Norman procedure.

* * * * *

After all is said, it is in England that the most permanent work of the Normans survives. They created the English central government and impressed upon it their conceptions of order and of law. Their feudalism permeated English society; their customs shaped much of English jurisprudence; their kings and nobles were the dominant class in English government. Freeman could never understand those who claimed that, as he declared, “we English are not ourselves but somebody else.” The fact, however, remains that in a mixed race--and all races are to some extent mixed--there is no such thing as ‘ourselves’; and if the numerical preponderance in the English people is largely that of pre-Norman elements, the Norman strain has exerted an influence out of all proportion to its numerical strength. Without William the Conqueror and Henry II the English would not be ‘themselves,’ whatever else they might have become.

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

* * * * *

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

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

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

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

VI

NORMAN LIFE AND CULTURE

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

With these episodes of Norman feudalism it is interesting to compare the picture of Anglo-Norman society a hundred years later which we find in that unique piece of feudal biography, the _History of William the Marshal_. Companion to the Young King and witness of the final shame of Henry II, pilgrim to Jerusalem and Cologne, advanced to positions of trust under Richard and John, earl of Striguil and Pembroke and regent of England under Henry III, the Earl Marshal stood in close relations to the chief men and movements of his day. His biographer, however, does not let himself wander to tell of others’ deeds, and while his work contains material of much importance for the general history of the time, its chief value lies in its reflection of the life of the age and its faithful portrait of the man himself--soldier of fortune, gentleman-adventurer if you will, but always loyal, honorable, straightforward, and true, by the standards of his time a man without fear and without reproach. Brought up in the Norman castle of Tancarville, the Marshal, like the Young King his master, became passionately addicted to tournaments, _par éminence_ the knightly sport of the Middle Ages, which made hunting and other pastimes seem tame and furnished the best preparation for real war, since, as an English chronicler tells us, in order to shine in war a knight “must have seen his own blood flow, have had his jaw crack under the blow of his adversary, have been dashed to the earth with such force as to feel the weight of his foe, and unhorsed twenty times he must twenty times have retrieved his failures, more set than ever on the combat.” Unknown to England before the reign of Richard, these manly sports flourished most of all in France, the country of chivalry and feats of arms, and for several years we follow the Marshal from combat to combat through Normandy and Maine, Champagne and the Ile-de-France, so that his renown spread from Poitou to the Rhine. At one period in his life he tourneyed every fortnight. The tournaments of his day, however, were not the elegant and fashionable affairs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which the word is apt to call to our minds, assemblages of beauty as well as of prowess, held in special enclosures before crowded galleries, with elaborate rules respecting armor and weapons and the conditions of conflict. On the contrary, they were fought like battles, in the open, with all the arms and methods of war and all its manœuvres and ferocity of attack; indeed they differed from war mainly in being voluntary and limited to a single day. After one series of such thunderous encounters the Marshal was found in a smithy, his head on the anvil and the smith working with hammer and pincers to remove his battered helmet. In a great tournament at Lagni three thousand knights are said to have been engaged, of which the Young King furnished eighty. Knights fought for honor and fame and for sheer joy of combat; they fought also, we must remember, for the horses and armor and ransoms of the captives. In a Norman tournament the Marshal captured ten knights and twelve horses. Between Pentecost and Lent of one year their clerks calculated that he and his companion had taken prisoners three hundred knights, without counting horses and harness; yet he seems to have preserved the golden mean between the careless _largesse_ of the Young King and the merely mercenary motives of the large number who frequented tournaments for the sake of gain.

* * * * *

Concerning the great agricultural class upon which the whole social system rested, our information is of a scattered and uneven sort. The man with the hoe did not interest the mediæval chronicler, and he did not gain a voice of his own in the period which we have under review. The annals of the time are indeed careful to record the drouths and floods, the seasons of plague, pestilence, and famine of which Normandy seems to have had its share, but they tell us nothing of the effects of these evils upon the class which they most directly concerned; while the charters, leases, and manorial records from which our knowledge of the peasants must be built up give us in this period isolated and unrelated facts. Moreover our information is confined almost entirely to the lands of churches and monasteries, where agriculture was likely to be more progressive because of their closer relations to the world outside. Normandy was a fertile country, and, so far as we can judge, its agricultural population fared well as compared with that of other regions. Certainly there is here, after the eleventh century, no trace of serfdom or the freeing of serfs, and the free position of its farming class distinguished the duchy from most of the lands of northern France. In other respects it is hard to discern important differences between the Norman peasants and those of other regions. After the suppression of an insurrection at the beginning of this century, we do not hear of any general rising of the Norman peasants, parallel to those risings which make a sad and futile chapter in the annals of many parts of Europe in the Middle Ages. It was, however, a local revolt of the thirteenth century on the lands of the monks of Mont-Saint-Michel that brought out one of the best descriptions of life on a Norman manor, the _Conte des Vilains de Verson_,[51] and, while it is a bit late for our purpose, it is confirmed by documentary evidence, and may well serve as an illustration of the obligations of the agricultural class:--

In June the peasants must cut and pile the hay and carry it to the
manor house. In August they must reap and carry in the convent’s
grain; their own grain lies exposed to wind and rain while they
hunt out the assessor of the _champart_ and carry his share to his
barn. On the Nativity of the Virgin the villain owes the pork-due,
one pig in eight; at St. Denis’ day the _cens_; at Christmas
the fowl, fine and good, and thereafter the grain-due of two
_sétiers_ of barley and three quarters of wheat; on Palm Sunday
the sheep-due; at Easter he must plow, sow and harrow. When there
is building the tenant must bring stone and serve the masons; he
must also haul the convent’s wood for two _deniers_ a day. If he
sells his land, he owes the lord a thirteenth of its value; if he
marries his daughter outside the seigniory, he pays a fine. He must
grind his grain at the seigniorial mill and bake his bread at the
seigniorial oven, where the customary charges do not satisfy the
attendants, who grumble and threaten to leave his bread unbaked.

So long as mediæval society remained almost entirely agricultural there was no need of adapting its organization to other classes than those which have just been described. In course of time, however, the growth of industry and commerce, very slow before the eleventh century, but rapid and constant in the period during and after the Crusades, as may be seen by the large number of markets and fairs in Normandy, created a new class of dwellers in towns who demanded recognition of their peculiar character and status. By reason of the nature of their occupations they sought release from the seigniorial system, with its forced labor, its frequent payments, and its vexatious restrictions upon freedom of movement and freedom of buying and selling; and as their economic needs drew them together into industrial and commercial centres of population, they developed a collective feeling and demanded collective treatment. They asked, not, as has sometimes been said, for the overthrow of the feudal system, but for a place within it which should recognize their peculiar economic and political interests; and the result of their efforts, when fully successful, was to form what has been called a collective seigniory, standing as a body in the relation of vassal to lord or king, and owing the obligations of homage, fealty, and communal military service. But while not anti-feudal in theory, this movement was often anti-feudal in practice, so far at least as the rights and privileges of the immediate overlord were concerned, and it led to friction and often to armed contests with bishop, baron, or king. In Normandy, significantly, we find none of those communal revolts which meet us throughout the north of France and even as near as LeMans; the towns are always subject to the ultimate authority of the duke, whose domanial rights were considerable even in the episcopal cities and who favored those forms of urban development which strengthened the military resources of the duchy. The early history of the Norman towns is one of the most obscure chapters in Norman history, but it indicates a variety of influences which do not fit into any one of the many theories of municipal origins which have been the subject of so much learned controversy. Some towns were originally fortified places, like the baronial stronghold of Breteuil or Henry I’s fortresses of Verneuil, Nonancourt, and Pontorson on the southern border. Some took advantage of the protection of a monastery, as in the case of Fécamp or the _bourgs_ of the abbot and abbess of Caen. The great ports, like Barfleur and Dieppe, obviously owed their importance to trade, and it was trade which created the prosperity of the chief towns of the duchy, Rouen and Caen. However developed, the Norman municipal type exerted no small influence upon urban organization: the laws of Breteuil became the model for Norman foundations on the Welsh border and in Ireland; the _Établissements_ of Rouen were copied in the principal towns of western France,--Tours and Poitiers, Angoulême and La Rochelle, even to Gascon Bayonne on the Spanish frontier.

If we take as an illustration of this development the principal Norman town, Rouen, we find no evidence regarding its institutions before the twelfth century, while its organization as a commune dates from the reign of Henry II and probably from the year 1171. The fundamental law, or _Établissements_, which Rouen then received and which became the model for communal government elsewhere in Normandy, constitutes a body of one hundred peers who meet once a fortnight for judicial and other business and who choose from their number each year the twelve _échevins_, or magistrates, and the twelve councillors who sit with the _échevins_ to form the council of _jurés_. Besides these boards, which are typical of mediæval town constitutions, the peers also nominate three candidates for the office of mayor, but the choice among these is made by the king, and the greater authority of the mayor in this system is evidently designed to secure more effective royal control. It is the mayor who leads the communal militia, receives the revenues, supervises the execution of sentences, and presides over all meetings of magistrates and boards. The administration of justice through its own magistrates is perhaps the most valued privilege of the commune, but the gravest crimes are reserved for the cognizance of royal officers, and the presence of the king or a session of his assize is sufficient to suspend all communal powers of justice. In a state like the Norman the limits of municipal self-government are clear.

The importance of Rouen as a commercial and industrial centre was not, however, dependent upon its form of government. Its ancient gild of cordwainers had been recognized by Henry I and Stephen, its trading privileges were confirmed in one of the earliest charters of Henry II. Save for a single ship yearly from Cherbourg, the merchants of Rouen had a monopoly of trade with Ireland; in England they could go through all the markets of the land; in London they were quit of all payments save for wine and great fish and had exclusive rights in their special wharf of Dowgate. Later in Henry’s reign they were even freed of all dues throughout his dominions. Only a citizen might take a shipload of merchandise past Rouen or bring wine to a cellar in the town. Besides the great trade in wine we hear of dealings in leather, cloth, grain, and especially salt and salt fish. Under Henry II the ducal rights over the town were worth annually more than 3,000 _livres_. Apart from their share in this general prosperity, the citizens had special exemptions in the matter of duties and tolls on goods which they brought in, while the freedom from feudal restraints which characterized all burgage tenures put a premium upon their holding of property. Besides the privileged areas belonging to the cathedral and the neighboring abbeys, a foothold in the city was valued by others: the bishop of Bayeux had a town house; the abbot of Caen prized a cellar and an exemption from wine-dues which he owed to the generosity of William the Conqueror; the clerks and chaplains of the king’s household took advantage of their opportunities to acquire rents and houses at Rouen, as well as at London and Winchester.

Unfortunately no one has left us in this period a description of the busy life of Rouen such as Fitz Stephen has given of contemporary London, and it is only with the imagination that we can bring before our eyes the ships at their wharves with their bales of marten-skins from Ireland and casks of wine from Burgundy and the south, the fullers and dyers, millers and tanners plying their trades along the Eau de Robec, the burgesses trafficking in the streets and the cathedral close, the royal clerks and serjeants hastening on their master’s business. Still more to be regretted is the disappearance of those material remains of its ancient splendor which until the last century retained the form and flavor, if not the actual wood and stone, of the mediæval city. To-day scarcely anything survives above ground of the Rouen of the dukes--of its walls and gates, destroyed by Philip Augustus, of the castle by the river, with the tower from which Henry I threw the traitor Conan and the great hall and rooms renewed by his grandson, of the stone bridge of the Empress Matilda, of the royal park and palace across the Seine at Quevilly. Only the great St. Romain’s tower of the cathedral and an early bit of the abbey-church of Saint-Ouen still body forth the unbroken continuity of the Norman past.

* * * * *

The Norman church throughout the period of our study stands in the closest relation to the general conditions of Norman society. The monasteries and churches of the region had been almost completely wiped out by the northern invasions, and while the Northmen soon adopted the religion of their new neighbors, it was many years before ecclesiastical life and discipline again reached the level of the other dioceses of France. As late as the year 1001 a Burgundian monk reported that there was hardly a priest in Normandy who could read the lessons or say his psalms correctly. The prelates led the life of the great feudal families of which they were members, distributing the property of the church as fiefs to their friends or gifts to their numerous progeny; and the lower clergy, for the most part married, sought to pass on their benefices to their children. In the course of the eleventh century, however, more canonical standards began to prevail, largely through the influence of the monks of Cluny. Older foundations like Fécamp were renewed, and the Norman lords soon began to vie with one another in the endowment of new monastic establishments. To the half-century which preceded the Conquest of England we can trace the beginnings of twenty important monasteries and six nunneries, not counting priories and smaller foundations, a movement for which contemporaries could find no parallel short of the palmy days of monasticism in Roman Egypt. In course of time the monastic ideal reacted upon the secular clergy, and the monastic schools raised the level of learning throughout the duchy, until provincial councils succeeded in establishing the celibacy of the priesthood and the stricter discipline of Rome. In all this movement for reform the dukes took a leading part, inviting the reformers to their courts, aiding in the foundation and restoration of cloisters, and lending their strong support to the efforts for moral improvement in the secular clergy. They also asserted their supremacy over the Norman church, presiding in its councils, revising the judgments of its courts, appointing and investing its bishops and abbots. Moreover, while ready to coöperate with the moral ideas of the Papacy, they resisted all attempts at papal interference in Norman affairs. When Alexander II sought to restore an abbot whom William the Conqueror had deposed, the duke replied that he would gladly receive papal legates in matters of faith and doctrine, but would hang to the tallest oak of the nearest forest any monk who dared to resist his authority in his own land. William’s resistance was equally firm in the case of Gregory VII, who failed completely in his efforts at direct action in William’s dominions. Nowhere on the Continent, concludes Böhmer,[52] was there at this time a country where the prince and his bishops were so energetic in the suppression of simony and violations of clerical vows; nowhere was the church so completely subject to the secular government.

The most prominent figure in the Norman church of the eleventh century, Odo, for nearly fifty years bishop of Bayeux, was far from fulfilling the stricter ideal of a prelate’s life. Half-brother of the Conqueror through their mother Arlette, he received the bishopric as a family gift at the tender age of fourteen and became thereby one of the greatest princes of Normandy. His hundred and twenty knights’ fees furnished him a body of powerful vassals; his demesne gave him manors and forests for the support of his household, fuel for his fires and reeds and rushes for his hall, rents and tithes at Caen and the monopoly of the mill at Bayeux, tolls and fines and market rights which produced a considerable income in ready money. For the invasion of England he is said to have offered a hundred ships, and he took an active part in the battle of Hastings, swinging a huge mace in place of spear and sword, since the shedding of blood was forbidden to an ecclesiastic. In the distribution which followed, Odo received large estates in the southeast, as well as the earldom of Kent and the custody of Dover Castle, and he seems to have ruled his lands with a heavy hand both as earl and as regent in William’s absence. It even became his ambition to succeed the mighty Hildebrand as Pope, and he had already spent considerable sums at Rome when William, accusing him of tyranny and oppression, put him in prison, answering his assertion of ecclesiastical privilege with the statement that he imprisoned, not the bishop of Bayeux, but the earl of Kent. There he languished for five years till William on his death-bed, against his better judgment, released him for ten years more of rule in Normandy. Yet, though Odo’s eulogists admit that he was given overmuch to worldly ambition, the lusts of the flesh and the pride of life, they tell us of his vigorous defence of his clergy by arms as well as by eloquence, of the young men of promise whom he supported in the schools of Lorraine and other centres of foreign learning, of the journey to Jerusalem on which he met his death, of the great cathedral which he built in honor of the Mother of God and adorned with gold and silver and probably with the very Bayeux Tapestry which is the chief surviving monument of his magnificence.

With the twelfth century the type changes. To the monastic historian a bishop like Philip d’Harcourt, likewise of the see of Bayeux, may appear wise in the wisdom of this world which is foolishness with God,[53] but his wisdom shows itself in frequent journeys to Rome and persistent litigation in the duke’s courts, not in battles and sieges, and he owes his appointment to his influence as Stephen’s chancellor and not to blood relationship. Arnulf of Lisieux is another royal officer, versatile, insinuating, shifty, anything but truthful if we may believe his fellow-bishops, but proud of his Latin style and his knowledge of law and prodigal of letters to the Pope. Their contemporaries continue to owe their promotion to service as chaplains or chancellors to the king, but they also have an eye toward Rome and must be canonists as well as secular officials. The contrast between Becket the king’s chancellor and Becket the archbishop of Canterbury is symptomatic of the new age, although the conflict to which it led affected Normandy but indirectly. Relations with the lay power which once rested on local Norman custom come to be formulated in the sharper terms of the canon law of the universal church; appeals to Rome and instructions from Rome increase rapidly in volume and importance; the Norman clergy attend assemblies of the clergy of neighboring lands; and by the end of the Plantagenet period the Norman church is ready to be absorbed into the church of France.

Respecting the daily life and conversation of the cathedral and parish clergy the twelfth century is silent, save for the condemnations of particular evils in the councils of the province. From the middle of the thirteenth century, however, Normandy furnishes us, in the diary of visitations kept by the archbishop of Rouen, Eudes Rigaud, a picture of manners and morals which for authenticity and fulness of detail has probably no parallel in mediæval Europe; and one is tempted to carry back two or three generations his description of the canons of Rouen wandering about the cathedral and chatting with women during service, the nuns of Saint-Sauveur with their pet dogs and squirrels, and those of other convents celebrating the festival of the Innocents with dance and song and unseemly mirth, the monks of Bocherville without a Bible among them to read. It is hard to believe that there was anything new in the disorders which this upright archbishop chronicles place by place and year by year--ignorance, drunkenness, and incontinence among the parish and cathedral clergy, lax discipline, loose administration, and neglect of learning in the monasteries and nunneries. What was old in the time of Rabelais was probably old in the thirteenth century, and there is abundant evidence of abuses in the mediæval church, in Normandy and elsewhere. What we want most to know is how general these abuses were and how many there were to counteract them like Chaucer’s ‘povre persoun of a toun,’ who taught “Cristes lore and his apostles twelve,” but first “folwed it himselve.” Data of this sort are always lacking in sufficient amount for any moral statistics, and they must be supplemented and interpreted by the evidence which has reached us of popular piety and devotion. Such are the processions of priest and people throughout the diocese to the cathedrals at Whitsuntide, the miraculous cures of disease by Our Lady of Coutances, and the extraordinary burst of contrition, religious enthusiasm, and zeal for good works which broke forth at the building of the spires of Chartres in 1145 and spread throughout the length and breadth of Normandy. Forming associations of those who confessed their sins, received penance, and reconciled themselves with their enemies, the faithful harnessed themselves to carts filled with stone, timber, food, and whatever might help the churches which they sought to serve, and drew them long miles until they seemed to fulfill the saying of the prophet, “the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.” The abbot of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives, to whom we owe our fullest account of the movement, tells us of these processions:[54]

When they halt on the road, nothing is heard but the confession
of sins and pure and suppliant prayer to God to obtain pardon.
At the voice of the priests preaching peace hatred is forgotten,
discord thrown aside, debts are remitted, the unity of hearts is
established. But if any one is so far advanced in evil as to be
unwilling to pardon an offender or obey the pious admonition of
the priest, his offering is instantly thrown from the wagon as
impure, and he himself is ignominiously and shamefully excluded
from the society of the holy. There, as a result of the prayers
of the faithful, one may see the sick and infirm rise whole from
their wagons, the dumb open their mouths to the praise of God,
the possessed recover a sane mind. The priests who preside over
each wagon are seen exhorting all to repentance, confession,
lamentations, and the resolution of a better life, while old and
young and even little children, prostrate on the ground, call
on the Mother of God and utter to her, from the depth of their
hearts, sobs and sighs, with words of confession and praise....
After the faithful resume their march to the sound of trumpets and
the display of banners, the journey is so easy that no obstacle
can retard it.... When they have reached the church, they arrange
the wagons about it like a spiritual camp, and during the whole of
the following night the army of the Lord keeps watch with psalms
and canticles, tapers and lamps are lighted on each wagon, and
the relics of the saints are brought for the relief of the sick
and the weak, for whom priests and people in procession implore
the clemency of the Lord and his Blessed Mother. If healing does
not follow at once, they cast aside their garments, men and women
alike, and drag themselves from altar to altar ... begging the
priests to scourge them for their sins.

At the close of the Angevin period there were in Normandy something like eighty monasteries and convents, not counting the numerous cells and priories, as, for example, the various dependencies of the great abbey of Marmoutier at Tours. These were chiefly Benedictine foundations, though the newer movements of the Cistercians, Premonstratensians, and Augustinians were well represented, the only distinctively Norman order, the Congregation of Savigny, having been early absorbed by the Cistercians. The oldest of these establishments were at the two extremes of the duchy, Mont-Saint-Michel at one end and Jumièges, Saint-Wandrille, Saint-Ouen and Fécamp at the other; but the distribution was speedily equalized, and the great abbeys of the centre, Bec and Caen and Saint-Évroul, were soon known throughout Europe. The conquest of England opened a new field for monastic influence: twenty Norman monasteries had received lands in England by the time of the Domesday survey, and the number was considerably greater when the holdings of alien priories were confiscated at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Mont-Saint-Michel, for example, had a priory in Cornwall as well as one at LeMans, and its lands in Maine, Brittany, and various parts of England did not allay its desire for more whenever opportunity offered. For a period of five years, from 1155 to 1159 inclusive, we have a record of the activity of its abbot, Robert of Torigni, in relation to the monastery’s property, and a very instructive record it is. It takes him to England and the Channel Islands, to the king’s assizes at Gavrai, Domfront, Caen, and Carentan, to the courts of the bishops of Avranches, Coutances, and Bayeux, and to that of the archbishop at Rouen; proving his rights, compromising, exchanging, purchasing, receiving by gift or royal charter; picking up here a bit of land, there a mill, a garden, a vineyard, a tithe, a church, to add to the lands and rents, mills and forests, markets and churches and feudal rights which he already possessed. There are also various examples of loans on mortgage, for the monasteries were the chief source of rural credit in this period, and as the land with its revenues passed at once into the possession of the mortgagee, the security was absolute, the annual return sure, and the chances of ultimate acquisition of the property considerable. With the resources of the monastery during his administration of thirty-two years Abbot Robert was able to increase the number of monks from forty to sixty, to enlarge the conventual buildings, in which he entertained the kings of England and of France, and to add a great façade to the abbey-church, a contribution to the massive pile of the Marvel which we are no longer privileged to behold. He also labored for the intellectual side of the monastery’s life, restoring the library and enlarging it by a hundred and twenty volumes, and composing a variety of works on historical subjects which make him the chief authority for half a century of Norman history.

There is, however, not much concerning monasteries in Robert’s chronicle, and even his special essay on the history of the Norman abbeys is confined to externals. Perhaps he was cumbered about much serving; more probably he saw nothing worthy of the historian’s pen in the inner life of the institution. When the abbot had a new altar dedicated or renewed the reliquaries of St. Aubert and St. Lawrence, that was worth setting down, but the daily routine of observance was the same at Mont-Saint-Michel as in the other Benedictine foundations, and has remained substantially unchanged through the centuries of monastic history. At any rate no monkish Boswell has done for Normandy what Jocelin of Brakelonde did for contemporary England in that vivid picture of life at Bury St. Edmund’s which Carlyle has made familiar in his _Past and Present_. A monk of Saint-Évroul, it is true, did a much greater thing in the _Historia Ecclesiastica_ of Ordericus Vitalis, but he was an historian, not a Boswell, and his experience of half a century of monastic life lies embedded deep in the five solid volumes of this wide-ranging work. One phase of the religious life of mediæval monasteries is admirably illustrated in Normandy, namely the mortuary rolls of the members and heads of religious houses. It early became the custom, not only to say prayers regularly for the departed members and benefactors of such a community, but to seek the suffrages of associated communities or of all the faithful. To that end an encyclical was prepared setting forth the virtues of the deceased and was carried by a special messenger from convent to convent, each establishment indicating the prayers which had there been said and adding the names of the brothers for whom prayers were solicited in return. The two most considerable documents of this sort which have come down to us are of Norman origin, the roll of Matilda, the first abbess of Holy Trinity at Caen, and that of Vitalis, founder of the Congregation of Savigny, which belongs to the year 1122 and is the oldest manuscript of this type extant in its original form, with all the quaint local varieties in execution. Each of these was carried throughout the greater part of England and of northern and central France, reaching in the first case two hundred and fifty-three different monasteries and churches, in the second two hundred and eight, and as the replies were often made at some length in prose or verse, they constitute a curious monument of the condition of culture in the places visited.

* * * * *

If the impulse toward religious reform in Normandy was of Burgundian origin, intellectual stimulus came chiefly from Italy. The two principal figures in the intellectual life of the duchy in the eleventh century, Lanfranc and Anselm, were Italians: Lanfranc distinguished for his mastery of law, Lombard, Roman, and canon, for the great school which he founded at Bec, and for his labors in the field of ecclesiastical statesmanship; Anselm his pupil and his successor as prior of Bec and as archbishop of Canterbury, remarkable as a teacher, still more remarkable as one of the foremost theologians of the Western Church. “Under the first six dukes,” we are told, “there was hardly any one in Normandy who gave himself to liberal studies, and there was no master till God, who provides for all, sent Lanfranc to these shores.” Teaching first at Avranches, Lanfranc established himself at Bec in 1042, and his school soon drew students from the remotest parts of France and sent them out in all directions to positions of honor and influence. Abbots like Gilbert Crispin of Westminster, bishops like St. Ives of Chartres, primates of Rouen and Canterbury, even a pope in the person of Alexander II, figure on the long honor-roll of Lanfranc’s pupils at Bec. For an institution of such renown, however, we know singularly little concerning the actual course and methods of study at Bec, and its historian is compelled to fall back upon a general description of the _trivium_ and _quadrivium_ which made up the ordinary monastic curriculum. We do not even know whether Lanfranc actually taught the subject of law of which he was past master, though we can be sure that theology and philosophy had a large place under Anselm, and that the school must have felt the influence of the large part which its leaders took in the theological discussions of their time. An important form of activity in the monasteries of the period was the copying of manuscripts, a sure safeguard against that idleness which St. Benedict declared the enemy of the soul. Lanfranc sat up a good part of the night correcting the daily copies of the monks of Bec; the first abbot of Saint-Évroul had an edifying tale of an erring brother who had secured his salvation by voluntarily copying a holy book of such dimensions that the angels who produced it on his behalf at the judgment were able to check it off letter by letter against his sins and leave at the end a single letter in his favor! The monks of Saint-Évroul prided themselves on their Latin style, especially their Latin verse, and on their chants which were sung even in distant Calabria; yet the best example of their training, the historian Ordericus, freely admits the literary supremacy of Bec, “where almost every one seems to be a philosopher and even the unlearned have something to teach the frothy grammarians.”

In the course of the twelfth century the leadership in learning passes from the regular to the secular clergy, and the monastic schools decline before the cathedral schools of Laon, Tours, Chartres, Orleans, and Paris, two of which, Paris and Orleans, soon break the bounds of the older curriculum and develop into universities. As the current of scholars sets toward these new centres, Normandy is left at one side; no longer a leader, its students must learn their theology and philosophy at Paris, their law at Orleans and Bologna, their medicine at Salerno and Montpellier. The principal Norman philosopher of the new age, William of Conches, the tutor of Henry II, is associated with Paris rather than with the schools of Normandy. Perhaps the most original work of the pioneer of the new science, the _Questiones naturales_ of Adelard of Bath, is dedicated to a Norman bishop, Richard of Bayeux, but its author was not a Norman, nor do we find Norman names among those who drank deep at the new founts of Spain and Sicily.