Chapter IV: Introduction: I (1)

Since the current of barbarian immigration which overthrew the civilisation of Rome in the West, probably no national movement of the kind has more profoundly affected the general course of history than the expansion of Scandinavia which fills the ninth and tenth centuries. Alike in their constructive and destructive work, in the foundation of new communities on conquered soil, as in the changes produced by reaction in the states with which they came in contact, the Northmen were calling into being the most characteristic features of the political system of medieval Europe. Their raids, an ever-present danger to those who dwelt near the shores of the narrow seas, wrecked the incipient centralisation of the Carolingian Empire, and gave fresh impetus to the forces which were already making for that organisation of society which we describe as feudalism; and yet in other lands the Northmen were to preserve their own archaic law and social custom longer than any other people of Germanic stock. The Northmen were to bring a new racial element into the life of Western Europe, but whether that element should adapt itself to the conditions of its new environment, or whether it should develop new forms of political association for itself, was a question determined by the pre-existing facts of history and geography.

For the geographical extent of Scandinavian enterprise is as remarkable as its political influence. At the close of the third quarter of the tenth century it seemed likely that the future destinies of northern Europe would be controlled by a great confederation of Scandinavian peoples. In the parent lands of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden three strong kingdoms had been created by Harold Fair Hair, Gorm the Old, and Eric of Upsala; the Orkneys and Shetlands formed a Norwegian earldom, and a number of vigorous Norse principalities had been planted along the east coast of Ireland. In the extreme north Scandinavian adventurers were already settling the inhospitable shores of Greenland, and lawless chieftains from Norway had created the strange republic of Iceland, whose stormy life was to leave an imperishable memorial in the wonderful literature of its sagas. Normandy was still the “pirates’ land” to the ecclesiastical writers of France, and the designation was correct in so far that the duchy still maintained frequent relations with the Scandinavian homeland and had as yet received no more than a superficial tincture of Latin Christianity. England, at the date we have chosen, was enjoying a brief respite between two spasms of the northern peril, but the wealthiest portion of the land was Scandinavian in the blood of its inhabitants, and within twenty years of the close of the century the whole country was to be united politically to the Scandinavian world.

The comparative failure of this great association of kindred peoples to control the subsequent history of northern Europe was due in the main to three causes. In the first place, over a great part of this vast area the Scandinavian element was too weak in mere numbers permanently to withstand the dead weight of the native population into which it had intruded itself. It was only in lands such as Iceland, where an autochthonous population did not exist, or where it was reduced to utter subjugation at the outset, as in the Orkneys, that the Scandinavian element permanently impressed its character upon the political life of the community. And in connection with this there is certainly to be noted a distinct decline in the energy of Scandinavian enterprise from about the middle of the eleventh century onward. For fully a hundred years after this time the Northern lands continued to send out sporadic bodies of men who raided more peaceful countries after the manner of the older Vikings, but Scandinavia produced no hero of more than local importance between Harold Hardrada and Gustavus Vasa. The old spirit was still alive in the North, as the stories of the kings of Norway in the _Heimskringla_ show; but the exploits of Magnus Bareleg and Sigurd the Jerusalem-farer are of far less significance in general history than the exploits of Swegen Forkbeard and Olaf Tryggvasson, and trade and exploration more and more diverted the energy which in older times would have sought its vent in warlike adventure. And of equal importance with either of the causes which have just been described must be reckoned the attraction of Normandy within the political system of France. By this process Normandy was finally detached from its parent states; it participated ever more intimately in the national life of France, and the greatest achievement of the Norman race was performed when, under the leadership of William the Conqueror, it finally drew England from its Scandinavian connections, and united it to the richer world of western Europe. It was the loss of England which definitely compelled Scandinavia to relapse into isolation and comparative political insignificance.

But the Norman Conquest of England was a many-sided event, and its influence on the political destiny of Scandinavia is not its most important aspect. The events of 1066 derive their peculiar interest from the fact that they supply a final answer to the great problem which underlies the whole history of England in the eleventh century—the problem whether England should spend the most critical period of the Middle Ages in political association with Scandinavia or with France. The mere fact that the question at issue can be stated in this simple form is of itself a matter of much significance; for it implies that the continuance of the independent life of England had already in 1000 become, if not an impossibility, at least a very remote contingency. To explain why this was so will be the object of the following pages, for it was the weakness of the Anglo-Saxon polity which permitted the success of William of Normandy, as it gave occasion of conquest to Cnut of Denmark before him, and the ill governance on which their triumph was founded takes its main origin from events which happened a hundred years before the elder of them was born.

At the beginning of the third quarter of the ninth century, England was in a state of utter chaos under the terrible strain of the Danish wars. Up to the present it has not been possible to distinguish with any certainty between the various branches of the great Scandinavian race which co-operated in the attack on England, nor is the question of great importance for our immediate purpose. The same may be said of the details of the war, the essential results of which were that the midland kingdom of Mercia was overrun and divided in 874 into an English and a Danish portion; that England, north of the Humber, became a Danish kingdom in or about 875; and that Wessex, after having been brought to the brink of ruin by that portion of the Northern host which had not founded a permanent settlement in the north, was saved by its King Alfred in a victory which he won over the invaders at Edington in Wiltshire, in 878. As a result of this battle, and of some further successes which he gained at a later date, Alfred was enabled to add to his dominions that half of the old kingdom of Mercia which the Danes had not already appropriated[4]; a district which included London and the shires west of Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, and Derbyshire. For the first half of the tenth century, the main interest of English history centres round the relations between the rulers of Wessex and its Mercian dependency, and the people of the Danelaw.

As the final result of twenty years of incessant warfare, the Danes had succeeded in establishing three independent states on English soil. Guthrum, the leader with whom Alfred had fought at Edington, founded in East Anglia and the eastern midlands a short-lived kingdom which had been reconquered by Edward the Elder before his death in or about 924. To the north of Guthrum’s kingdom came the singular association of the Five Boroughs of Derby, Nottingham, Lincoln, Leicester, and Stamford, whose territory most probably comprised the shires to which the first four of them have given name, together with Rutland and north-east Northamptonshire. Apart from its anomalous government, of which nothing is really known, this district is distinguished from Guthrum’s kingdom by the fact that the Danish invaders settled there in great numbers, founded many new villages, and left their impress upon the administrative and fiscal arrangements of the country. The Five Boroughs were occupied by Edward the Elder and conquered by his son Edmund, but their association was remembered in common speech as late as the time of the wars of Ethelred and Swegen, and the district, as surveyed in _Domesday Book_, is distinguished very sharply from the shires to its south and west.[5]

Beyond the Humber the Northmen had founded the kingdom of York, which maintained its independent existence down to Athelstan’s time and which was only connected with the south of England by the slackest of political ties when William the Conqueror landed at Pevensey. In this kingdom, whose history is very imperfectly known, but of which abundant numismatic memorials remain, the Norwegian element appears to have predominated over the Danish and its kings were closely connected with the rulers of the Norse settlements in Ireland. But the peculiar importance of this Northumbrian kingdom lies in the persistent particularism which it continued to display long after it had been nominally merged in the kingdom of the English. Its inhabitants were barbarous beyond the ordinary savagery of the Anglo-Saxons, and bitterly resented any attempt to make them conform to the low standard of order which obtained elsewhere in the land. Among so anarchical a people, it would be useless to look for any definite political ideas, and the situation was complicated by the union of Scandinavian Yorkshire with English Bernicia in one earldom, so that it is difficult to say how far the separatist spirit of Northumbria was due to the racial differences which distinguished it from the rest of the land, how far to surviving memories of the old kingdom which had existed before the wars of the ninth century, and how far to simple impatience of ordered rule by whomsoever administered. But the existence of such a spirit is beyond all doubt; it manifested itself in 957 when Northumbria joined with Mercia in rejecting King Edwy of Wessex; it is strikingly illustrated in the northern legend which represents the sons of Ethelred the Unready as offering Northumbria to Olaf of Norway as the price of his assistance in their struggle with Cnut; it came to the front in 1065, when the northern men rebelled against their southern earl, Tostig Godwinsson; it culminated in the resistance which they offered to William of Normandy, and was finally suppressed in the harrying to which he subjected their province in the winter of 1069. For a century and a half the men of Northumbria had persisted in sullen antagonism to the political supremacy of Wessex.

But the fact remained that within fifty years of Alfred’s death the house of Wessex had succeeded in extending its sway, in name at least, over all the Scandinavian settlers within the limits of England. The “Rex Westsaxonum” had become the “Rex Anglorum,” and Edmund and Edgar ruled over a kingdom which to all appearance was far more coherent than the France of Louis d’Outremer and Hugh Capet. But the appearance was very deceptive, and the failure of the kings of Wessex was so intimately connected with the success of William the Conqueror that its causes demand attention here.

In the first place, the assimilation of the Scandinavian settlers into the body of the English nation should not hide from us the fact that a new and disturbing element had in effect been intruded into the native population. This amalgamation was very far from resulting in a homogeneous compound. The creation of the “Danelaw” in its legal sense—that is, a district whose inhabitants obeyed a new law perfectly distinct from that of any native kingdom—was an event of the greatest consequence. It imposed a tangible obstacle to the unification of the country which was never overcome until the entire system of old English law had become obsolete. The very fact that the geographical area of the Danelaw did not correspond with that of any English kingdom or group of kingdoms makes its legal individuality all the more remarkable. The differences of customary practice which distinguished the east from the west and south were a permanent witness to the success of the Danes in England and they applied to just those matters which concerned most deeply the ordinary life of the common people. A man of Warwickshire would realise the fact that his limbs were valued at a higher or lower rate than those of his neighbour of Leicestershire, when he would be profoundly indifferent to the actions of the ruler of both counties in the palace at Winchester.

More important for our purpose than these general legal peculiarities were the manifold anomalies of the Old English land law. Were it not for the existence of Domesday Book we should be in great part ignorant of the main features of this system; as it is we need have no hesitation in carrying back the tenurial customs which obtained in 1066 well beyond the beginning of the century. So far as the evidence before us at present goes, it suggests that for an indefinite period before the Norman Conquest the social structure of the English people had remained in a condition of unstable equilibrium; in a state intermediate between the primitive organisation of Anglo-Saxon society and the feudalism, though rudimentary, of contemporary France. However strong the tie of kindred may have been in drawing men together into agrarian communities in former days, by the eleventh century at latest its influence had been replaced by seignorial pressure and the growth of a manorial economy. Of itself this was a natural and healthy process, but in England, from a variety of causes it had been arrested at an early stage. The relationship between lord and man was the basis of the English social order, but this relationship over a great part of the country was still essentially a personal matter; its stability had not universally acquired that tenurial guarantee which was the rule in the Frankish kingdom. The ordinary free man of inferior rank was expected to have over him a lord who would be responsible for his good behaviour, but the evidence which proves this proves also that in numberless cases the relationship was dissoluble at the will of the inferior party. In the Domesday survey of the eastern counties, for example, no formula occurs with more striking frequency than that which asserts that such and such a free man “could depart with his land whither it pleased him”; a formula implying clearly enough that the man in question could withdraw himself and his land from the control of his temporary lord, and seek, apparently at any time, another patron according to the dictate of his own fancy. In such a system there is room for few only of the ideas characteristic of continental feudalism; it is clear that the man in no effective sense holds his land of his lord, nor is the former’s tenure conditional upon the rendering of service to the latter. The tie between lord and man was that of patronage rather than vassalage; and its essential instability meant that the whole of the English social order was correspondingly weak and unstable. The Old English state had accepted the principle that a man must needs look for protection to someone stronger than himself, but it had not advanced to the further idea that, for the mere sake of social cohesion, the relationship thus created must be made certain, permanent, and, so far as might be, uniform throughout the whole land.

On the whole it is probable that this result was mainly due to the peculiar settlement which the Danish question had received in the early tenth century. Had the Danes conquered Wessex in Alfred’s time, so that the whole of England had been parcelled out among four or five independent Scandinavian states, the growth of seignorial control over free men and their land might have been indefinitely postponed. Had Alfred’s successors been able to effect the incorporation of the Danelaw with the kingdom of Wessex, the incipient manorialism of the south might have been extended to the east and a rough uniformity of custom in this way secured, giving scope for the gradual development of feudalism according to the continental model. But the actual course of history decided that the native kingdom of Wessex should survive, assert its superiority over the Scandinavian portion of the land, and yet be unable to achieve the conformity of its alien subjects to its own social organisation. Such at least is the conclusion suggested to us by the evidence of Domesday Book. Broadly speaking, Wessex and its border shires had presented in 1066 social phenomena which Norman lawyers were able to co-ordinate with the prevailing conditions of their native land. In Wessex each village would probably belong to a single lord, its land would fall into the familiar divisions of demesne and “terra villanorum,” its men would owe labour service to their master. But beyond the Warwick Avon and the Watling Street, the Normans encountered agrarian conditions which were evidently unfamiliar to them, and to which they could not easily apply the descriptive formula which so admirably suited the social arrangements of the south. They had no previous knowledge of wide tracts of land whose inhabitants knew no lord of lower rank than king, earl, or bishop; of villages which furnished a meagre subsistence to five, eight, or ten manorial lords; of estates whose owner could claim service from men whose dwellings were scattered over half a county. In twenty years the Normans, by conscious alterations, had done more to unify the social custom of England than had been accomplished by the gradual processes of internal development in the previous century; but it was the social division, underlying the obvious political decentralisation of the country, which had sent down the Old English state with a crash before the first attack of the Normans themselves.

But social evils of this kind do their work beneath the surface of a nation’s history, and it is the complete decentralisation of the Old English commonwealth which first occurs to our minds when we wish to explain the double conquest which the land sustained in the eleventh century; a decentralisation expressed in the creation of the vast earldoms which controlled the politics of England in the last years of its independence. The growth of these earldoms is in many respects obscure; to a limited extent they represent old kingdoms which had lost their independence, but in the main they are fortuitous agglomerations of territory, continually changing their shape as the intrigues of their holders or the political sense of the king of Wessex might from time to time determine. From the narrative of the Danish war presented by the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, it seems certain that each county south of Thames possessed an earl of its own in the ninth century; but this arrangement appears to have been modified by Edward the Elder, and it has been estimated that from the accession of Edward to the close of the tenth century Wessex and English Mercia were divided into a group of earldoms whose number never exceeded eight, a change which inevitably magnified the importance of the individual earl. In the meantime, Northumbria and the territory of the Five Boroughs were being ruled by men of Scandinavian blood, who claimed the title of earl but are very rarely found in attendance at the courts of the King of Wessex.[6] In the wars of Ethelred II. and Edmund Ironside with Swegen and Cnut, the issue of each campaign is decided by the attitude of such men as Aelfric, ealdorman of Hampshire, or Eadric of Mercia, to whom it belonged of right to lead the forces of their respected earldoms, and who seem to have carried their troops from one side to the other without being influenced in the smallest degree by any tie of allegiance which would bind them permanently to either the English or the Danish king. To Cnut himself is commonly attributed a reorganisation of the earldoms, in which their number was temporarily reduced to four, and in which for the first time Wessex as a whole was placed on an equality with the other provincial governments. The simplicity of this arrangement was soon distorted by the occasional dismemberment of the West Saxon and Mercian earldoms, and by the creation of subordinate governments within their limits; but throughout the reign of Edward the Confessor it is the earls of Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, and Northumbria who direct the policy of the kingdom.

The privileges and powers inherent in the dignity of an earl were very considerable. We have already referred to his military authority, but he also seems to have enjoyed a judicial prerogative overriding the competence of the local assemblies of the hundred. His wergild was seemingly fixed at a higher rate than that of the ordinary noble, and the fine paid to him for a breach of his peace was half the amount which would be paid to the king, and double the amount paid to the thegn on account of a similar offence.[7] More important from the standpoint of politics was the fact that in every shire certain lands seem to have been appurtenant to the comital office,[8] and these lands formed a territorial nucleus around which an unscrupulous man like Godwine could gather the vast estates of which _Domesday_ reveals him to have been in possession. In practice, too, it was the earls who seem to have gained more than any other men of rank by the growth of that system of patronage which has been described in a preceding paragraph; the natural influence of their position attracted to them the unattached free men of their spheres of government, and they became possessed of a body of personal retainers who might be expected to fight for them at any crisis in their fortunes and who would not be unduly scrupulous as to the causes of a quarrel in which they might be called upon to take part. Fortified by such advantages, the earls were able at an early date to make their dignities hereditary under all normal circumstances, and the attempt of Ethelred to nominate an earl of his own choice to Mercia in the person of Eadric Streona, and of Edward the Confessor to displace the house of Godwine in Wessex in 1051, led to disaster in each case, though the occasion of the respective disasters was somewhat different.

Just as the power of the great earls limited the executive freedom of the monarchy, so in general matters of policy the king’s will was circumscribed by the opinion of the body of his counsellors, his Witanagemot. Now and then a strong king might perhaps enforce the conformity of his witan to his personal wishes; but the majority of the later Anglo-Saxon kings were not strong, and when, on rare occasions, we obtain a glimpse into the deliberations of the king and the wise men, it is the latter who decide the course of action which shall be pursued.[9] That this was a serious evil cannot possibly be disputed. The political supremacy of the Witanagemot bears no analogy to constitutional government in the modern sense of the term: the witan were not responsible to the nation; they were not, in fact, responsible to anybody, for a king who tried to insist on their obedience to his will might find himself, like Ethelred II., deserted by his leading nobles at some critical moment. Also, if we estimate the merit of a course of policy by its results, we shall not be disposed to rate the wisdom of the wise men very highly. In 1066 England was found with an obsolete army, a financial system out of all relation to the facts on which it was nominally based, and a social order lacking the prerequisites of stability and consistency; that the country had recently received a comprehensive restatement of its ancient laws was due not to its wise men, but to its Danish conqueror Cnut. The composition of the Witanagemot—a haphazard collection of earls, bishops, royal officials, and wealthy thegns—afforded no security that its leading spirits would be men of integrity and intelligence; if it gave influence to men like Dunstan and Earl Leofric of Mercia, men who were honestly anxious to further the national welfare, it gave equal influence to unscrupulous politicians like Eadric Streona and Godwine of Wessex. The results of twenty-five years of government by the Witanagemot would supply a justification, if one were needed, for the single-minded autocracy of the Anglo-Norman kings.

The early history of the Witanagemot, like that of so many departments of the Anglo-Saxon constitution, is beset by frequent difficulties; but it seems certain that the period following the middle of the tenth century witnessed a great extension of its actual influence. In part, no doubt, this is due to the increasing power of its individual members, on which we have already commented in the case of the earls, but we certainly should not fail to take into account the personal character of the kings of England during this time. The last members of the royal house of Wessex are a feeble folk. Their physical weakness is illustrated less by the rapidity with which king succeeded king in the tenth century—for Edmund and Edward the Martyr perished by violence—than by the ominous childlessness of members of the royal house. Of the seven kings whose accession falls within the tenth century, four died without offspring. The average fertility of the royal house is somewhat raised by the enormous family of Ethelred the Unready; but fifty years after his death his male line was solely represented by an old man and a boy, neither of whom was destined to leave issue. Nor do the kings of this period appear in a much more favourable light when judged by their political achievements. Edward the Elder, Athelstan, and Edmund make a creditable group of sovereigns enough, though their success in the work they had in hand, the incorporation of Scandinavian England into the kingdom of Wessex, was, as we have seen, extremely limited. Edred, the next king, crippled as he was by some hopeless disease, made a brave attempt to assert the supremacy of Wessex over the midlands and north, but Edwy his successor was a mere child, and under him the southern kingdom once more becomes bounded by the Thames and Bristol Avon. The reign of Edgar was undoubtedly regarded by the men of the next generation as a season of good law and governance, and the king himself is portrayed as a model prince by the monastic historians of the twelfth century; but on the one hand the long misery of Ethelred’s time of itself made men look back regretfully to Edgar’s twenty years of comparative quiet, and also there can be no doubt that the king’s association with St. Dunstan gave him a specious advantage in the eyes of posterity.[10] Nothing in Edgar’s recorded actions entitles him to be regarded as a ruler of exceptional ability. The short reign of Edward the Martyr is fully occupied by the struggle between the monastic party and its opponents, in which the young king cannot be said to play an independent part at all, and the twenty years during which Ethelred II. misconducted the affairs of England form a period which for sheer wretchedness probably has no equal in the national history. Had Ethelred been a ruler of some political capacity, his title of “the Unready,” in so far as it implies an unwillingness on his part to submit to the dictation of the Witanagemot, would be a most honourable mark of distinction; but the series of inopportune acts[11] and futile expedients which mark the exercise of his royal initiative were the immediate causes of a national overthrow comparable only to the Norman conquest itself. With Edmund Ironside we reach a man who has deservedly won for himself a place in the accepted list of English heroes and we may admit his claim to be reckoned a bright exception to the prevailing decadence of the West Saxon house, while at the same time we realise that the circumstances of his stormy career left him no opportunity of showing how far he was capable of grappling with the social and political evils which were the undoing of his country. And then, after twenty-five years of Danish rule, the mysterious and strangely unattractive figure of Edward the Confessor closes the regnal line of his ancient dynasty. Of Edward we shall have to speak at more length in the sequel, noting here only the fact that under his ineffective rule all the centrifugal tendencies which we have considered received an acceleration which flung the Old English state into fragments before the first impact of the Norman chivalry.

It follows from all this that, according to whatever standard of political value we make our judgment, the England of the tenth and eleventh centuries will be found utterly lacking in all qualities which make a state strong and keep it efficient. The racial differences which existed within the kingdom were stereotyped in its laws. The principles which underlay its social structure were inconsistent and incoherent. It possessed no administrative system worthy of the name and the executive action of its king was fettered by the independence of his counsellors and rendered ineffective by the practical autonomy of the provincial governments into which the land was divided. The ancient stock of its kings had long ceased to produce rulers capable of rectifying the prevailing disorganisation and was shortly to perish through the physical sterility of its members. Nor were these political evils counterbalanced by excellence in other fields of human activity. Great movements were afoot in the rest of Europe. The Normans were revolutionising the art of war. The Spanish kingdoms were trying their young strength in the first battles of the great crusade which fills their medieval history; in Italy the great conception of the church purified, and independent of the feudal world, was slowly drawing towards its realisation. England has nothing of the kind to show; her isolation from the current of continental life was almost complete, and the great Danish struggle of the ninth century had proved to be the last work undertaken by independent England for the cause of European civilisation. In Alfred, the protagonist of that struggle, the royal house of Wessex had given birth to a national hero, but no one had completed the task which he left unfulfilled.

II

On turning from the history of England between 950 and 1050 to that of Normandy during the same period, one is conscious at once of passing from decadence to growth; and this although the growth of the Norman state was accompanied by an infinity of disorder and oppression, and the decadence of England was relieved by occasional manifestations of the older and more heroic spirit of the race. Nothing is more wonderful in Norman history than the rapidity with which the pirates’ land became transformed into a foremost member of the feudal world of France, and the extraordinary rapidity of the process seems all the more remarkable from the sparseness of our information with regard to it. The story of the making of Normandy, as told by the Norman historians, is so infected with myth that its barest outlines can scarcely now be recovered. We can, however, see that during the ninth century the north and west coasts of France had been subjected to an incessant Scandinavian attack similar in character to the contemporary descents which the Northmen were making upon England. It is also certain that the settlement of what is now Normandy did not begin until thirty or forty years after the conquest of the English Danelaw, and that for a considerable, if indefinite, term of years new swarms of Northmen were continually streaming up the valleys which debouch on the Channel seaboard. Of Rollo, the traditional founder of the Norman state, nothing is definitely known. The country from which he derives his origin is quite uncertain. Norwegian sagamen claimed him for one of their own race, the Normans considered him to be a Dane, and a plausible case has been made out for referring him to Sweden.[12] His followers were no doubt recruited from the whole of the Scandinavian north, but it is probable that the great mass of the original settlers of Normandy were of Danish origin, and therefore closely akin to the men who in the previous century had found a home in the valleys of the Yorkshire Ouse and Trent. As in the case of Guthrum in East Anglia the conquests of Rollo were defined by a treaty made between the invading chief and the native potentate of greatest consequence; and the agreement known in history as the treaty of Claire sur Epte is the beginning of Norman history. Great obscurity overhangs the terms of this settlement, and we cannot define with any approach to certainty the extent of territory ceded by it to the Northmen.[13] On the east it is probable that the boundary line ran up the Epte, thence to the Bresle, and so down that stream to the port of Eu; but the extension of the original Normandy towards the west is very uncertain, and with regard to its southern frontier there was still room in the eleventh century for border disputes in which William the Conqueror became engaged at an early date. The succeeding history, however, proves clearly enough that the Bessin, Cotentin, and Avranchin formed no parts of Normandy as delimited at Claire sur Epte, and it was in this last quarter, peopled by an influx of later immigrants, that the Scandinavian element in the duchy presented the most obstinate resistance to Romance influences.

The prince with whom Rollo had concluded this memorable treaty was Charles III., king of the West Franks, and the reputed descendant of Charlemagne. The importance of the settlement of Claire sur Epte lay in the future, and in its immediate significance it was little more than an episode in a struggle which had been carried on for nearly half a century between the Carolingian sovereign and the powerful house of the counts of Paris, of which the head at this time was Robert, the grandfather of Hugh Capet. The conquests of Rollo had been made at the expense of Count Robert, and Charles III. in his session of Normandy, like Alfred in the treaty of Wedmore, was abandoning to an invading host a district which had never been under his immediate rule. It was certain that the counts of Paris would sooner or later attempt to recover the valley of the lower Seine, and this fact produced an alliance between the first two dukes of Normandy and their Carolingian overlords which lasted for twenty years. The exact nature of the legal tie which united the earliest dukes of Normandy to the king of France is a disputed question, but we may well doubt whether Rollo had done more than commend himself personally to Charles III., and it is not even certain that the Viking leader had received baptism at the time when he performed the act of homage. As a final question which still awaits settlement, we may note that the date of the treaty of Claire sur Epte is itself uncertain, but that 921 seems the year to which with most probability it may be referred.

If this is so, the conclusion of this settlement must have been the last event of importance in the reign of Charles III., for in 922 he was overthrown by his enemy Robert of Paris, and spent the remaining eight years of his life in prison. Robert thereupon assumed the title of king, but was killed in 923; and the crown passed to Rudolph of Burgundy, who held it until 936. On his death the royal title was offered to Hugh, surnamed the Great, count of Paris, but he preferred to restore the Carolingian line, rather than to draw upon himself the enemity of all his fellow-nobles by accepting the precarious throne himself. Charles III. had married Eadgifu, one of the many daughters of Edward the Elder of Wessex, and Louis the Carolingian heir was residing at Athelstan’s court when Hugh of Paris called on him to accept his inheritance. The refusal of Hugh the Great to accept the crown did not materially improve the relations existing between the Carolingian house and the Parisian county, and Louis “from beyond the sea” found it expedient to maintain the alliance which his father had founded with the Norman lords of Rouen. But, long before the accession of Louis d’Outremer, Rollo the old pirate had died, and William Longsword, his son, felt himself less vitally dependent on the support of the king of the Franks. In the confused politics of the period William was able to assert a freedom in making and breaking treaties and in levying external war no less complete than that which was enjoyed by the other princes of France. In general he remained true to the Carolingian friendship; and at the close of his reign Normandy and the French monarchy were jointly opposed to the Robertian house, leagued with the counties of Vermandois and Flanders. The latter county, in particular, was directly threatened by the growth of a powerful state within striking distance of her southern borders; and in 943 William Longsword was murdered by Arnulf of Flanders, the grandson of Alfred of England.

We should naturally wish to know in what way the foundation of Normandy was regarded by the contemporary rulers of England. It is generally assumed, and the assumption is reasonable enough, that Athelstan feared the assistance which the Normans might give to the men of the Danelaw, and that he endeavoured to anticipate any movement on the part of the former by forming a series of marriage alliances with powers capable of forcing Normandy to remain on the defensive. It is probable that Athelstan’s sister Eadhild married Hugh the Great,[14] the natural enemy of William Longsword, and we know that Athelstan lent his support to Alan Barbetorte, who at this time was struggling with indifferent success to preserve Brittany from being overrun by Norman invaders. On the other hand, it would be easy to exaggerate the solidarity of feeling which existed between the Northmen in Normandy and in England; nor do our authorities countenance the belief that the various continental marriages of Athelstan’s sisters formed part of any consistent scheme of policy. There is no evidence that direct political intercourse existed at any time between Athelstan and William Longsword; although we know that the Englishmen who were appointed by the king to negotiate for the reception of Louis d’Outremer in France paid a visit to the court of Rouen.

The murder of William Longsword was followed by the first of the two minorities which occur in Norman history, for Richard the illegitimate heir of the late duke was only a child of ten on his father’s death. The opportunity was too good to be missed, and Louis d’Outremer succeeded for a brief period in making himself master of Normandy, not improbably asserting as a pretext for his intervention a claim to the guardianship of the young duke. Whatever its legal foundation Louis’s action outraged the political individuality of the duchy, and when Richard came to years of discretion he abandoned the traditional Carolingian friendship and attached himself to the Robertian house. He commended himself to Hugh the Great, and thus began a friendship between the lords of Paris and their Norman neighbours which continued for nearly a century and was not the least among the causes which enabled the Robertian house in 987 to crown its existing pre-eminence with the royal title. The reign of Richard I. lasted for more than fifty years, and the history of Normandy during this period is extremely obscure, but there can be no question that it witnessed the gradual consolidation of the duchy, and its no less gradual absorption into the political system of France.

The seventh year of the reign of Richard II. was marked by an event of the first importance for the history of both England and Normandy—the marriage of Ethelred II. and Emma the duke’s sister. England was at the time in the very centre of the great Danish war which marks the close of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh century, and it is distinctly possible that the match may have been prompted by a desire on Ethelred’s part to close the Norman harbours to his enemies’ ships. But, apart from all dubious attributions of political motive, the importance of the marriage lies in the fact that Normandy remains thenceforward a permanent factor in English politics. The marriage must have produced an immediate immigration of Normans into England; so early as 1003 we find a French reeve of Queen Emma in charge of the city of Exeter. The mere union of the dynasties—the marriage of the representative of the ancient and decadent royal house of Wessex to the great-granddaughter of the pirate chief Rollo—was alone a sufficiently striking event. But by chance it happened that the strain of Norman blood in the offspring of the marriage came of itself to produce political results of the gravest consequence. No one in 1002 could foresee that the new queen would bear a son whose early life would be passed in exile in his mother’s land, and who would return thence to his father’s inheritance saturated with Norman ideas of the art of government; still less could anyone foresee that in virtue of this marriage a Norman duke would one day claim the throne of England by right of inheritance. But less striking results of the new alliance would soon enough become apparent. The ubiquitous Norman trader would become a more frequent visitor to the English ports, and Normandy would at once become a friendly land to Englishmen crossing the Channel for purposes of trade or pilgrimage. Nor should the marriage be considered exclusively from the English standpoint. The reception of a Norman princess as queen of England proved at least that the Norman duke was no longer a barbarian intruder among the higher nobility of France; he might not be a sovereign prince as yet, but he was certainly a ruler of greater consequence beyond the borders of the French kingdom than were any of his fellow-vassals of the French crown. It is true that the alliance of 1002 marks no immediate change in the French relations of the duke of Normandy; his energies were still confined to the petty struggles which he, like his father and grandfather, carried on with varying success against this neighbour or that. But events were soon to prove how strong a state had really been created in Normandy by the obscure dukes of the tenth century, and the marriage of Ethelred and Emma pointed to the quarter in which the strength of Normandy would find its field at last.

It must be owned that we can only describe the internal condition of Normandy, as it existed at the beginning of the eleventh century, in very general terms. Normandy, like the rest of the French kingdom, was passing through a phase in which the legislative power of the sovereign was in abeyance; and in default of written laws we can only rely upon the incidental information afforded by legal documents or by the casual expressions of later chroniclers.[15] But the main features of Norman feudalism at this time are fairly certain, and sufficient to point a contrast with the contemporary constitution of England in almost every particular in which the details of the two systems are known to us.[15]

In the first place, vassalage had become localised in Normandy. The relationship between lord and man would in most cases imply that the latter held his land of the former. So far as we can tell, the course of Norman feudalism started from a point of departure different from that with which the English system takes its origin. The history of the terms employed to designate dependent tenure seems to make this clear. At an early date a great man’s vassal will hold of him a _precarium_; he will be a tenant at will, his tenure will be revocable at his lord’s instance. To the _precarium_ succeeds the _beneficium_; a term which sufficiently expresses the fact that the tenant’s rights over his land are derivable from his lord, although it does not, like the older word, imply their temporary character. In the meantime, the hereditary principle in regard to dependent tenure is continually securing a wider extension, and the _feudum_, the fee, the term which ultimately supplanted the _precarium_ and _beneficium_, denotes an estate which will in the normal course of things descend to a tenant’s heir. Some such succession of ideas can distinctly be traced in the Frankish kingdom, and the Anglo-Saxon land books here and there contain words and phrases which suggest that the English land law would have followed a similar development, had it not been arrested by the general dislocation of society occasioned by the wars of the ninth century. The wide estates with which the newly converted kings of Wessex, the Hwicce and the Middle Angles, endowed the churches founded in their dominions afforded an excellent field for the growth of dependent tenure, which was not neglected by thegn and free man, anxious to participate in the wealth of the saints by virtue of discharging military obligations which monks and clerks could not perform in person. But the Danish wars stripped the eastern churches of their possessions and peopled the eastern counties with settlers of approximately equal rank; and when in the century before the Norman Conquest the land loan reproduces many of the features of the continental _precarium_, it appears as an exotic institution rather than as a normal development of previous tenurial custom. It would be very easy to exaggerate the distinction which exists between England and Normandy in this matter; the mass of our contemporary information about Old English land tenure relates to ecclesiastical estates; but with _Domesday Book_ before us we cannot doubt that the distinction was very real and of deep importance in connection with the other divergent features of the Anglo-Saxon social organisation.

Everything, then, seems to show that, for at least a hundred years before 1086, dependent tenure and the hereditary descent of fiefs had been recognised features of the land system of Normandy. We also know that these principles had, long before the conquest of England, produced their corollaries in the rights of wardship, marriage, and relief, which a lord would enjoy upon occasion with reference to his vassals.[16] Women were capable of inheriting land and Norman custom allowed at least to the duke the privilege of choosing a husband for his female vassal. The rights of assuming the guardianship of a minor’s land, and of receiving a money payment upon the succession of a new heir, were obvious developments of the originally precarious character of the fief, and we shall see that King Henry of France exercised the former right over Normandy itself upon the death of Duke Robert in 1035. There does not seem to be any direct evidence for the existence of the relief as a Norman custom before 1066, but its appearance in England immediately after the Conquest is sufficient proof of its previous recognition by the feudal law of Normandy. None of these customs, so far as we can tell, had found a place in the social system of independent England.

Private jurisdiction was undoubtedly an essential feature of Norman feudalism, though we may well doubt whether the principles on which it was based had ever been defined by Norman lawyers. It is also clear that the duke possessed upon occasion the power of overruling the judgment of his barons, and that his exercise of this power was applauded by all who were interested in the welfare of the humbler classes of society. The military character of feudalism made it imperative that there should be some power in the land capable of vindicating right by force, and the stronger dukes of Normandy were not slow in the assertion of their judicial supremacy. How far the ubiquitous manorial court of Norman England represents an imitation of continental practice, and how far it is referable to the “sake and soke” possessed by Anglo-Saxon thegns, is a difficult question, and the explanation given by the legal writers of the generation succeeding the Conquest must be reserved for a later chapter.

It is, however, clear, that one custom which to modern ideas would be ruinous to any social order distinguishes Norman life from that of England in the eleventh century. Private war was a recognised custom in Normandy. For obvious reasons this custom was fenced round with stringent regulations; the duke’s license was necessary before a campaign could be opened and its conduct was subject to his general supervision. But private war is separated by no certain barrier from anarchy, and under a weak duke or during a minority the barons of Normandy would take the law into their own hands. Herein lay the real cause of the disorders which prevailed during the minority of William the Conqueror; and in the abeyance of state intervention the church endeavoured with considerable success to confine the practice within reasonable limits. The Truce of God, in the limitations which it enforced upon the operations of war, made life more tolerable for peasant and burgess, but it was at best an inefficient substitute for the hand of a strong ruler. William the Conqueror made good peace in Normandy, as well as in England, and we may well doubt whether even private war, so long as its legal sanctions were respected, was not less harmful to the well-being of a community than were the savage outbreaks of internal strife which from time to time occurred under the helpless government of Edward the Confessor.

The exact nature of the feudal tie which bound the duke of Normandy to the king of France is a very difficult question.[17] It undoubtedly comprised all those obligations which were implied in the performance of the act of homage, but these would vary indefinitely in stringency according to the status of the parties concerned. An oath of fealty and service was certain to be kept only so long as the man to whom the oath was sworn could compel its observance by the threat of confiscation. When made between two parties who were for effective purposes equal in power, there was no certainty that the oath would imply more than an assertion of dependence on the part of the man who swore. On the other hand, it would be an error to regard the homage which a duke of Normandy paid to his overlord merely as a ceremonial form. Even in the early feudal times the sense of personal honour would generally serve to prevent a man from wantonly attacking his lord. William the Conqueror, whenever possible, refrained from violating the fealty which he had sworn to King Henry; and if put on his defence for his conduct at Varaville, he would probably have pleaded that the necessity of self-preservation outweighed all other considerations. But in earlier times the maintenance of feudal relations between Normandy and France was less dependent upon the personal loyalty of the reigning duke. Occasionally, the king of France will confirm the grants of land with which the duke of Normandy endowed some religious house; he may, as we have seen, claim the right of wardship over a duchy during a minority. Also, it should not be forgotten that in the case of the dukes between Richard I. and Robert I. the traditional alliance between Normandy and the Capetian dynasty disguised the practical autonomy of the former. So long as the knights of Normandy were at the disposal of the king of France for an attack upon Flanders or Blois, the king would not be concerned to argue the question whether they were furnished to him in obedience to his claim to feudal service, or merely in pursuance of the territorial interests of his vassal.