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Title: The Normans in European history
Author: Charles Homer Haskins
Release date: December 26, 2023 [eBook #72514]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915
Credits: Brian Wilson, Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
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Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Superscripts
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THE NORMANS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY
THE NORMANS IN
EUROPEAN HISTORY
BY
CHARLES HOMER HASKINS
GURNEY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY CHARLES HOMER HASKINS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE
THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM
_Published October 1915_
TO MY WIFE
PREFACE
The eight lectures which are here published were delivered before the
Lowell Institute in February, 1915, and at the University of California
the following July, and it has seemed best to print them in the form
in which they were prepared for a general audience. Their purpose is
not so much to furnish an outline of the annals of Norman history as
to place the Normans in relation to their time and to indicate the
larger features of their work as founders and organizers of states and
contributors to European culture. Biographical and narrative detail
has accordingly been subordinated in the effort to give a general view
of Norman achievement in France, in England, and in Italy. Various
aspects of Norman history have been treated with considerable fullness
by historians, but, so far as I am aware, no connected account of the
whole subject has yet been attempted from this point of view. This
fact, it is hoped, may justify the publication of these lectures, as
well as explain the omission of many topics which would naturally be
treated in an extended narrative.
This book rests partly upon the writings of the various scholars
enumerated in the bibliographical note at the end of each chapter,
partly upon prolonged personal investigations, the results of which
have appeared in various special periodicals and will, in part, soon be
collected into a volume of _Studies in Norman Institutions_. When it
seemed appropriate in the text, I have felt at liberty to draw freely
upon the more general portions of these articles, leaving more special
and critical problems for discussion elsewhere.
I wish to thank the authorities of the Lowell Institute and the
University of California, and to acknowledge helpful criticism from
my colleague Professor William S. Ferguson and from Mr. George W.
Robinson, Secretary of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of
Harvard University. My indebtedness to Norman scholars and Norman
scholarship is deeper and more personal than any list of their names
and writings can indicate.
CHARLES H. HASKINS.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
_August, 1915._
CONTENTS
I. NORMANDY AND ITS PLACE IN HISTORY 1
II. THE COMING OF THE NORTHMEN 26
III. NORMANDY AND ENGLAND 52
IV. THE NORMAN EMPIRE 85
V. NORMANDY AND FRANCE 116
VI. NORMAN LIFE AND CULTURE 148
VII. THE NORMANS IN THE SOUTH 192
VIII. THE NORMAN KINGDOM OF SICILY 218
INDEX 251
THE NORMANS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY
I
NORMANDY AND ITS PLACE IN HISTORY
In June, 1911, at Rouen, Normandy celebrated the one-thousandth
anniversary of its existence. Decorated with the grace and simplicity
of which only a French city is capable, the Norman capital received
with equal cordiality the descendants of the conquerors and the
conquered--Norwegians and Swedes, Danes of Denmark and Danes of
Iceland, Normans of Normandy and of England, of Sicily and of Canada.
Four Norwegian students accomplished the journey from their native
fjords in an open Viking boat, having set ashore early in the voyage a
comrade who had so far fallen away from the customs of his ancestors as
to sleep under a blanket. From the United States bold Scandinavians,
aided by the American Express Company, brought from Minnesota the
Kensington rune stone, which purports to prove the presence of Norse
explorers in the northwest one hundred and thirty years before the
landfall of Columbus. A congress of Norman history listened for nearly
a week in five simultaneous sections to communications on every phase
of the Norman past. There was Norman music in the streets, there
were Norman plays at the theatres, Norman mysteries in the cathedral
close. Banquet followed banquet and toast followed toast, till the
cider of Normandy paled before the champagne of France. Finally a great
pageant, starting, like the city, from the river-bank, unrolled the
vast panorama of Norman history through streets whose very names reëcho
its great figures--Rollo and his Norse companions arriving in their
Viking ships, the dukes his successors, William Longsword, Richard the
Fearless, Robert the Magnificent, William the Conqueror, the sons of
Tancred of Hauteville who drove the paynim from Sicily, and that other
Tancred who planted the banner of the cross on the walls of Jerusalem,
all with their knights and heralds and men at arms, followed by another
pageant of the achievements of Normandy in the arts of peace. And on
the last evening the great abbey-church of Saint-Ouen burnt red fire
for the first time in its history till the whole mass glowed and every
statue and storied niche stood out with some clear, sharp bit of the
Norman past, while its lantern-tower, “the crown of Normandy,” shone
out over the city and the river which are the centre of Norman history
and where this day the dukes wore again their crown.
In this transitory world the thousandth anniversary of anything is
sufficiently rare to challenge attention, even in an age which is
rapidly becoming hardened to celebrations. Of the events commemorated
in 1915 the discovery of the Pacific is only four hundred years
old, the signing of the Great Charter but seven hundred. The oldest
American university has celebrated only its two hundred and fiftieth
anniversary, the oldest European only its eight-hundredth. Even those
infrequent commemorations which carry us back a thousand years or
more, like the millenary of King Alfred or the sixteen-hundredth
Constantinian jubilee of 1913, are usually reminders of great men or
great events rather than, as in the case of Normandy, the completion of
a millennium of continuous historical development. So far as I can now
recollect, the only parallel is that of Iceland, which rounded out its
thousand years with the dignity of a new constitution in 1874. Of about
the same age, Iceland also resembles Normandy in being the creation
of the Norse sea-rovers, an outpost of the Vikings in the west, as
Normandy was an outpost in the south. Of the two, Iceland is perhaps
the more individual, as it certainly has been the more faithful to its
Scandinavian traditions, but the conditions which have enabled it to
retain its early characteristics have also isolated it from the broader
currents of the world’s history. Normandy, on the other hand, was drawn
at once into the full tide of European politics and became itself a
founder of new states, an imperial power, a colonizer of lands beyond
the seas, the mother of a greater Normandy in England, in Sicily, and
in America.
At home and abroad the history of Normandy is a record of rich and
varied achievement--of war and conquest and feats of arms, but also
of law and government and religion, of agriculture, industry, trade,
and exploration, of literature and science and art. It takes us
back to Rollo and William of the Long Sword, to the Vikings and the
Crusaders, to the conquerors of England and Sicily, to masterful
prelates of the feudal age like Odo of Bayeux and Thomas Becket; it
brings us down to the admirals and men of art and letters of the
_Grand Siècle_,--Tourville and DuQuesne, Poussin, Malherbe, and the
great Corneille,--to Charlotte Corday and the days of the Terror, and
to the painters and scholars and men of letters of the nineteenth
century,--Géricault and Millet, Laplace and Léopold Delisle, Flaubert
and Maupassant and Albert Sorel. It traces the laborious clearing of
ancient forests, the rude processes of primitive agriculture, the
making of Norman cider and the breeding of the Norman horse, the
vicissitudes of trade in fish and marten-skins, in pottery, cheap
cottons, and strong waters, the development of a centre of fashion like
Trouville or centres of war and commerce like Cherbourg and Havre.
It describes the slow building of monasteries and cathedrals and the
patient labors of priests and monks, as well as the conquest of the
Canaries, the colonization of Canada, and the exploration of the
Great West. A thousand years of such history are well worth a week of
commemoration and retrospect.
To the American traveller who wends his way toward Paris from
Cherbourg, Havre, or Dieppe, the first impression of Normandy is that
of a country strikingly like England. There are the same high chalk
cliffs, the same “little grey church on the windy shore,” often the
same orchards and hedges, poppies and roses. There are trees and
wide stretches of forest as in few other parts of France, placid,
full-brimmed rivers and quiet countrysides, and everywhere the rich
green of meadow and park and pasture, that vivid green of the north
which made Alphonse Daudet at Oxford shudder, “Green rheumatism,” as
he thought of the sun-browned plains and sharp, bare hills of his
own Provence. Normandy is brighter than England, with a dash more
of color in the landscape, but its skies are not sunny and its air
breathes the mists of the sea and the chill of the north. There is a
grey tone also, of grey towns and grey sea, matched by an austere and
sombre element in the Norman character, which, if it does not take
its pleasures sadly after the manner of Taine’s Englishmen, is prone
to take them soberly, and by an element of melancholy, a sense of _le
glas des choses mortes_, which Flaubert called the melancholy of the
northern barbarians. The Norman landscape also gives us the feeling
of finish and repose and the sentiment of a rich past, not merely in
the obvious externals of crumbling wall and ivied tower, but in that
deeper sense of a people bound from immemorial antiquity to the soil,
adapted to every local difference through long generations of use and
wont, in an intimate union of man and nature which makes the Norman
inseparable from his land. All this, too, is English, but English with
a difference. Just as, in Henry James’s phrase, the English landscape
is a landlord’s landscape, and the French a peasant’s, so the _mairie_
and the _préfecture_, the public garden and the public band, the café
and the ever-open church, the workman’s _blouse_ and the grandam’s
_bonnet_, remind us continually that we are in a Latin country and on
our way to Paris.
Now the history of Normandy reflects this twofold impression of the
traveller: it faces toward England and the sea, but it belongs to
France and the land. Open to the outer world by the great valley of
the Seine and the bays and inlets of its long coast-line, Normandy was
never drawn to the sea in the same degree as its neighbor Brittany,
nor isolated in any such measure from the life of the Continent. Where
the shore is low, meadow and field run to the water’s edge; where it
is high, its line is relatively little broken, so that the streams
generally rush to the sea down short, steep valleys, up which wheeze
the trains which connect the little seaside ports and watering-places
with the modern world within. In spite of the trade of its rivers
and its ports, in spite of the growth of industry along its streams,
Normandy is still primarily an agricultural country, rooted deep in
the rich soil of an ancient past, a country of horses and cattle,
of butter and cheese and cider and the kindly fruits of the earth;
and the continuity of its history rests upon the land itself. “Behind
the shore and even upon it,” says Vidal de la Blache, “the ancient
cumulative force of the interior has reacted against the sea. There an
old and rich civilization has subsisted in its entirety, founded on
the soil, through whose power have resisted and endured the speech,
the traditions, and the peoples of ancient times.”[1] Conquered and
colonized by the sea-rovers of the north, the land of Normandy was able
to absorb its conquerors into the law, the language, the religion,
and the culture of France, where, as Sorel says, their descendants
now preserve “their attachment to their native soil, the love of
their ancestors, the respect for the ruins of the past, and the
indestructible veneration for its tombs.”[2]
If the character of Normandy is thus in considerable measure determined
by geography, its boundaries and even its internal unity are chiefly
the result of history. For good and ill, Normandy has, on the land
side, no natural frontiers. The hills of the west continue those
of Brittany, the plains of the east merge in those of Picardy. The
watershed of the south marks no clear-cut boundary from Maine and
Perche; the valleys of the Seine and the Eure lead straight to the
Ile-de-France, separated from Normandy only by those border fortresses
of the Avre and the Vexin which are the perpetual battle-ground of
Norman history--Normandy’s Alsace-Lorraine! Within these limits lie two
distinct physiographic areas, one the lower portion of the Paris basin,
the other a western region which belongs with Brittany and the west of
France. These districts are commonly distinguished as Upper and Lower
Normandy, terms consecrated by long use and representing two contrasted
regions and types, but there is no general agreement as to their exact
limits or the limits of the region of Middle Normandy which some have
placed between them. Even the attempt to define these areas in terms
of cheese--as the land respectively of the creamy Neufchâtel, the
resilient Pont-l’Évêque, and the flowing Camembert--is defective from
the point of view of geographical accuracy!
The most distinctive parts of Upper Normandy are the valley of the
Seine and the region to the north and east, the _pays de Caux_,
fringed by the coast from Havre to the frontier of Picardy. Less
monotonous than the bare plains farther east, the plateau of Caux is
covered by a rich vegetation, broken by scattered farmsteads, where
house and orchard and outbuildings are protected from the wind by
those rectangular earthworks surmounted by trees which are the most
characteristic feature of the region. It is the country of _Madame
Bovary_ and of Maupassant’s peasants. Equally typical is the valley of
the Seine, ample, majestic, slow, cutting its sinuous way through high
banks which grow higher as we approach the sea, winding around ancient
strongholds like Château Gaillard and Tancarville or ruined abbeys like
Jumièges and Saint-Wandrille,--where Maeterlinck’s bees still hum in
the garden,--catching the tide soon after it enters Normandy, reaching
deep water at Rouen, and meeting the “longed-for dash of waves” in the
great estuary at its mouth. Halfway from the Norman frontier to the
river’s end stands Rouen, mistress of the Seine and capital, not only
of Upper Normandy, but of the whole Norman land. Celtic in name and
origin, like most French cities, chief town of the Roman province of
_Lugdunensis Secunda_ and of the ecclesiastical province to which this
gave rise, the political and commercial importance of Rouen have made
it also the principal city of mediæval and modern Normandy and the seat
of the changing political authority to which the land has bowed. As
early as the twelfth century it is one of the famous cities of Europe,
likened to Rome by local poets and celebrated even by sober historians
for its murmuring streams and pleasant meadows, its hill-girt site
and strong defences, its beautiful churches and private dwellings,
its well-stocked markets, and its extensive foreign trade. In spite
of all modern changes, Rouen is still a city full of history, in the
parchments of its archives and the stones of its walls, in its stately
cathedral with the ancient tombs of the Norman dukes, in the glorious
nave of its great abbey-church, the florid Gothic of Saint-Maclou, the
richly carved perpendicular of its Palace of Justice, and its splendid
façades of the French Renaissance; historic also in those unbuilt spots
which mark the landing of the Northmen and the burning of Joan of Arc.
Lower Normandy shows greater variety, comprising the hilly country of
the Bocage,--the so-called Norman Switzerland,--the plain of Caen and
the pasture-lands of the Bessin, and the wide sweep of the Atlantic
coast-line, from the promontory of La Hague to the shifting sands of
the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel. It is a country of green fields and
orchards and sunken lanes, of dank parks and mouldering châteaux, of
deserted mills and ancient parish churches, of quaint timbered houses
and long village streets, of silent streams, small ports, and pebbly
beaches, the whole merging ultimately in the neighboring lands of
Brittany and Maine. Its typical places are Falaise, Vire, and Argentan,
with their ancient castles of the Norman dukes; Bayeux and Coutances,
the foundations of whose soaring cathedrals carry us back to the
princely prelates of the Conquest; provincial capitals of the Old
Régime, like Valognes, or the new, like Saint-Lô; and best of all, the
crowning glories of the marvel of Mont-Saint-Michel. Its chief town is
Caen, stern and grey, the heart of Normandy as Rouen is its head, an
old poet tells us; no ancient Roman capital, but the creation of the
mediæval dukes, who reared its great abbey-churches to commemorate the
marriage and the piety of William the Conqueror and Matilda, and who
established their exchequer in its castle; an intellectual centre also,
the seat of the only Norman university, of an academy, and of a society
of antiquaries which has recovered for us great portions of the Norman
past.
Fashioned and enriched by the hand of man, the land of Normandy has in
turn profoundly influenced the character of its inhabitants. First and
foremost, the Norman is a peasant, industrious, tenacious, cautious,
secretive, distrustful of strangers, close-fisted, shrewd, even to
the point of cunning, a hard man at a bargain, eager for gain, but
with the genius for small affairs rather than for great, for labor and
economy rather than enterprise and daring. Suspicious of novelty, he
is a conservative in politics with a high regard for vested interests.
The possession of property, especially landed property, is his great
ambition; and since, as St. Francis long ago reminded us, property is
the sower of strife and suits at law, he is by nature litigious and
lawyerly. There is a well-known passage of Michelet which describes
the Norman peasant on his return from the fields explaining the Civil
Code to his attentive children; Racine, who immortalized Chicaneau in
his _Plaideurs_, laid the scene in a town of Lower Normandy. Even in
his time this was no new trait, for the fondness for legal form and
chicane can be traced in the early days of the _Coutume de Normandie_,
while the _Burnt Njal Saga_ shows us the love of lawsuits and fine
points of procedure full-blown among the Northmen of primitive
Iceland. If Normandy is the _pays de gain_, it is also the _pays de
sapience_. Hard-headed and practical, the Norman is not an idealist or
a mystic; even his religion has a practical flavor, and the Bretons
are wont to assert that there has never been a Norman saint. With
the verse of Corneille and the splendid monuments of Romanesque and
Gothic architecture before us, no one can accuse the Normans of lack
of artistic sense, yet here, too, the Norman imagination is inclined
to be restrained and severe, realistic rather than romantic. Its
typical modern writers are Flaubert and Maupassant; its typical
painter is Millet, choosing his scenes from Barbizon, but loyal to
the peasant types of his native Normandy. Indeed Henry Adams insists
that Flaubert’s style, exact, impersonal, austere, is singularly like
that of those great works of Norman Romanesque, the old tower of Rouen
cathedral and St. Stephen’s abbey at Caen, and shows us “how an old art
transmutes itself into a new one, without changing its methods.”[3]
In history, a field in which the Norman attachment to the past has
produced notable results, the distinguishing qualities of Norman work
have been acute criticism and great erudition rather than brilliant
imagination. In science, when a great Norman like Laplace discovered
the nebular hypothesis, he relegated it to a note in the appendix to
his ordered and systematic treatise on the motions of the heavenly
bodies. The Norman mind is neither nebular nor hypothetical!
The land is not the whole of nature’s gift to Normandy; we must also
take account of the sea, of those who came by sea and those who went
down to the sea in ships; and history tells us of another type of
Norman, those giants of an elder day who, as one of their descendants
has said, “found the seas too narrow and the land too tame.” The
men who subdued England and Sicily, who discovered the Canaries and
penetrated to the Mississippi, who colonized Quebec and ruled the Isle
of France, were no stay-at-homes, no cautious landsmen interested in
boundaries and inheritances and vain strivings about the law. Warriors
and adventurers in untamed lands and upon uncharted seas, they were
organizers of states and rulers of peoples, and it is their work which
gives Normandy its chief claim upon the attention of the student of
general history. These are the Normans of history and the Normans
of romance. Listen to the earliest characterizations of them which
have reached us from the south, as a monk of the eleventh century,
Aimé of Monte Cassino, sets out to recount the deeds of the southern
Normans, _fortissime gent_ who have spread themselves over the earth,
ever leaving small things to acquire greater, unwilling to serve, but
seeking to have every one in subjection;[4] or as his contemporary,
Geoffrey Malaterra, himself very likely of Norman origin, describes
this cunning and revengeful race, despising their own inheritance in
the hope of winning a greater elsewhere, eager for gain and eager for
power, quick to imitate whatever they see, at once lavish and greedy;
given to hunting and hawking and delighting in horses and accoutrements
and fine clothing, yet ready when occasion demands to bear labor and
hunger and cold; skilful in flattery and the use of fine words, but
unbridled unless held down firmly by the yoke of justice.[5] Turn
then to the northern writers of the following century: William of
Malmesbury, who describes the fierce onslaughts of the Normans, inured
to war and scarcely able to live without it, their stratagems and
breaches of faith and their envy of both equals and superiors;[6] or
the English monk Ordericus, who spent his life among them in Normandy
and who says:--
The race of the Normans is unconquered and ready for any wild deed
unless restrained by a strong ruler. In whatever gathering they
find themselves they always seek to dominate, and in the heat of
their ambition they are often led to violate their obligations. All
this the French and Bretons and Flemings and other neighbors have
frequently felt; this the Italians and the Lombards, the Angles and
Saxons, have also learned to their undoing.[7]
A little later it is the Norman poet Wace who tells, through the mouth
of the dying William the Conqueror, of these same Normans--brave and
valiant and conquering, proud and boastful and fond of good cheer,
hard to control and needing to be kept under foot by their rulers.[8]
Through all these accounts runs the same story of a high-spirited,
masterful, unscrupulous race, eager for danger and ready for every
adventure, and needing always the bit and bridle rather than the spur.
The contrast is not merely between the eleventh century and the
twentieth, between a lawless race of pioneers and a race subdued and
softened by generations of order and peace; the two types are present
in the early days of Norman history. Among the conquerors of England
a recent historian distinguishes “the great soldiers of the invading
host ... equally remarkable for foresight in council and for headlong
courage in the hour of action, whose wits are sharpened by danger and
whose resolution is only stimulated by obstacles; incapable of peaceful
industry but willing to prepare themselves for war and rapine by the
most laborious apprenticeship”; and over against them “the politicians
... cautious, plausible, deliberate, with an immense capacity for
detail, and an innate liking for routine; conscious in a manner of
their moral obligations, but mainly concerned with small economies
and gains; limited in their horizon, but quick to recognise superior
powers and to use them for their own objects; indifferent for their
own part to high ideals, and yet respectful to idealists; altogether a
hard-headed, heavy-handed, laborious and tenacious type of men.”[9]
These contrasting types of life and character it is tempting to refer
to the respective influences of land and water, to the differences
between the peasant and the rider to the sea. One might even attempt a
philosophy of Norman history somewhat on this wise. In its normal and
undisturbed state Normandy is a part of France, in its life as in its
geography, and as such it shows only the ordinary local differences
from the rest of the French lands. So it was under the Romans, so
under the Franks. At the beginning of the tenth century the coming
of the Northmen introduces a new element which develops relations
with the sea and the countries beyond the sea, with Scandinavia and
later with the British Isles. Normandy ceases to be provincial, it
almost ceases to be French; it even becomes the centre of an Atlantic
empire which stretches from Scotland to the Pyrenees. It sends its
pilgrims to Compostela, its chivalry to Jerusalem, its younger sons
to Sicily and southern Italy. Its relations with the sea do not cease
with its political separation from the lands across the Channel in
1204. The English come back for a time in the fifteenth century; the
Normans cross the Atlantic in the sixteenth and settle Canada in the
seventeenth. But the overmastering influence of the soil prevails and
draws its children back to itself. The sea-faring impulse declines;
activity turns inward; the province is finally absorbed in the
nation; Normandy is again a part of France, and the originality and
distinctness of its history fade away in the life of the whole.
Philosophy or no philosophy, the history of Normandy falls for our
purposes into three convenient periods. The first of these extends from
the earliest times to the coming of the Northmen in 911, the event
which created Normandy as a distinct entity. The second is the history
of the independent Norman duchy from 911 to the French conquest in
1204, the three splendid centuries of Norman independence and Norman
greatness. The third period of seven hundred years deals with Normandy
as a part of France.
* * * * *
The interest and importance of these several periods vary with the
point of view. Many people are of the opinion that the only history
which matters is modern history, and the more modern the better because
the nearer to ourselves and our time. To such everything is meaningless
before the French Revolution or the Franco-Prussian War--or perhaps
the War of 1914. To those who care only for their own time the past
has no perspective; as a distinguished maker and writer of history
has said, James Buchanan and Tiglath-Pileser become contemporaries.
This foreshortened interest in the immediate past starts from a
sound principle, namely, that it is an important function of history
to explain the present in the light of the past from which it has
come. By a natural reaction from the study which stopped with Marcus
Aurelius or the American colonies or the Congress of Vienna, the demand
naturally arose for the history of the day before yesterday, which
was once declared to be the least known period in human annals. This
is quite legitimate if it does not stop here and does not accept the
easy assumption that what is nearest us is necessarily most important,
even to ourselves. Modern Germany owes more to Martin Luther than to
Nietzsche, more to Charles the Great, who eleven hundred years ago
conquered and civilized the Saxons and began the subjugation of the
Slavs, than to many a more modern figure in the Sieges-allee at Berlin.
Our method of reckoning time and latitude by sixtieths owes less to the
contemporaries of James Buchanan than to those of Tiglath-Pileser. If
we must apply material standards to history, we must consider the mass
as well as the square of the distance.
Obviously, too, we must consider distance in space as well as in time.
The Boston fire of 1872 did not rouse Paris, and our hearts do not
thrill at the mention of the Socialist mayors and Conservative deputies
whose names become household words when the streets of French towns
are rechristened in their memory. The perspective of Norman history
is different for a Norman than for other Frenchmen, different for a
Frenchman than for an American.
Now there can be no question that for the average Norman the recent
period bulks larger than the earlier. His life is directly and
constantly affected by the bureaucratic traditions of the Old Régime,
by the new freedom and the land-distribution of the Revolution, by the
coming of the railroad, the steamship, and the primary school. William
the Conqueror, Philip Augustus, Joan of Arc, their deeds and their
times, have become mere traditions to him, if indeed they are that.
In all these changes, however, there is nothing distinctive, nothing
peculiar, nothing that cannot be studied just as well in some other
part of France. Their local and specifically Norman aspects are of
absorbing interest to Normandy, but they are meaningless to the world
at large. With the union with France in 1204 Norman history becomes
local history, and whatever possesses more than local interest it
shares with the rest of France. From the point of view of the world at
large, the history of Normandy runs parallel with that of the other
regions of France. Normandy will contribute its quota of great names to
the world, in art and music and literature, in learning and industry
and politics; it will take its part in the great movements of French
history, the Reformation, the Revolution, the new republic; but it
will be only a part of a larger whole and derive its interest for the
general student from its membership in the body of France.
Much the same is true of the period before the coming of the Northmen.
Under the Celts, the Romans, and the Franks, the region which was
to become Normandy is not distinguished in any notable way from the
rest of Gaul, and it has the further disadvantage of being one of the
regions concerning which our knowledge is particularly scanty. A few
names of tribes in Cæsar’s _Gallic War_ and in the Roman geographers,
a few scattered inscriptions from the days of the empire, a few lives
of saints and now and then a rare document of Frankish times, this
with the results of archæological research constitutes the basis of
early Norman history. After all, Normandy was remote from Rome and
lay apart also from the main currents of Frankish life and politics,
so that we should not look here for much light on general conditions.
Nevertheless it is in this obscure age that the foundations of Normandy
were laid. First of all, the population, Gallo-Roman at bottom,
receiving a Germanic admixture of Saxons and Franks long before the
coming of the Northmen, but still preponderantly non-Germanic in its
racial type. Next, language, determined by the process of Romanization
and persisting as a Romance speech in spite of Saxon and Frank and
Northman, until in the earliest monuments of the eleventh century we
can recognize the beginnings of modern French. Then law, the Frankish
law which the Northmen were to absorb, perpetuate, and carry to
England. Fourth, religion, the Christian faith, triumphing only with
difficulty in a land largely rural and open to barbarian invasion,
but established firmly by the sixth century and already reënforced by
monastic foundations which were to be the centres of faith and culture
to a later age. Finally, the framework of political geography, resting
on the Roman cities which with some modifications were perpetuated as
the dioceses of the mediæval church, and connected by Roman roads which
remained until modern times the great highways of local communication.
A beginning was also made in the direction of separate organization
when, toward the close of the fourth century, these districts of
the northwest are for the first time set off by themselves as an
administrative area, the province of _Lugdunensis Secunda_, which
coincides with later Normandy. Then, as regularly throughout Gaul, the
civil province becomes the ecclesiastical province, centring about
its oldest church, Rouen, and the province of the archbishop of Rouen
perpetuates the boundaries of the political area after the political
authority passed away, and carries over to the Middle Ages the outline
of the Roman organization. In all this process there is nothing
particularly different from what took place throughout the greater part
of northern Gaul, but the results were fundamental for Normandy and for
the whole of Norman history.
A new epoch begins with the coming of the Northmen in the early tenth
century, as a result of which Normandy was differentiated from the rest
of France and carried into the broader currents of European history.
At first an outpost of the Scandinavian north, its relations soon
shifted as it bred the conquerors of England and Sicily. The Normans of
the eleventh century, Henry Adams maintains, stood more fully in the
centre of the world’s history than their English descendants ever did.
They “were a part, and a great part, of the Church, of France, and of
Europe.” The Popes leaned on them, at times heavily. By the conquest of
England the “Norman dukes cast the kings of France into the shade....
Normans were everywhere in 1066, and everywhere in the lead of their
age.”[10] A century later Normans ruled half of Italy, two thirds of
France, and the whole of England; and they had made a beginning on
Ireland and Scotland. No one can write of European affairs throughout
this whole period without giving a large place to the Normans and their
doings; while events like the conquests of England and Ireland changed
the course of history.
Normandy has also its place in the history of European institutions,
for the Normans were organizers as well as conquerors, and their
political creations were the most efficient states of their time.
Masterful, yet legally minded and businesslike, with a sense for
detail and routine, the Norman princes had a sure instinct for
state-building, at home and abroad. The Norman duchy was a compact
and powerful state before its duke crossed the Channel, and the
central government which the Normans created in England showed the
same characteristics on a larger scale. The Anglo-Norman empire of the
twelfth century was the marvel of its day, while the history of the
Norman kingdom of Sicily showed that the Norman genius for assimilation
and political organization was not confined to the dukes of Rouen.
Highly significant during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Norman
institutions remained of permanent importance, affecting the central
administration of France in ways which are still obscure, and exerting
a decisive influence upon the law and government of England. Normandy
was the connecting link between the Frankish law of the Continent and
the English common law, and thus claims a share in the jurisprudence
of the wide-flung lands to which the common law has spread. The
institution of trial by jury, for example, is of Norman origin, or
rather of Frankish origin and Norman development.
By virtue, then, of its large part in the events of its time, by virtue
of the decisive character of the events in which the Normans took part,
and by virtue of the permanent influence of its institutions, the
Normandy of the dukes can claim an important position in the general
history of the world. In seeking to describe the place of the Normans
in European history we shall accordingly pass over those periods, the
earlier and the later, which are primarily of local interest, and
concentrate ourselves upon the heroic age of the tenth, eleventh, and
twelfth centuries. We shall begin with the coming of the Northmen and
the creation of the Norman state. The third lecture will consider the
Norman conquest of England; the fourth, the Norman empire to which this
gave rise. We shall then trace the events which led to the separation
of Normandy from England and its ultimate union in 1204 with the
French monarchy under Philip Augustus, concluding our survey of the
Normans of the north by a sketch of Norman life and culture in this
period. The two concluding lectures will trace the establishment of the
Norman kingdom of southern Italy and Sicily, and examine the brilliant
composite civilization of the southern Normans from the reign of the
great King Roger to the accession of his still more famous grandson,
the Emperor Frederick II.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
There is no substantial general history of Normandy. For a
review of the materials, the literature, and the problems, see
the excellent résumé of H. Prentout, _La Normandie_ (Paris,
1910, reprinted from the _Revue de synthèse historique_). For
bibliographical purposes this should be supplemented by the
_Catalogue des ouvrages normands de la Bibliothèque municipale
de Caen_ (Caen, 1910–12). For the general features of Norman
geography, see the brief account by Vidal de la Blache, in the
_Histoire de France_ of Lavisse, republished with illustrations
under the title of _La France_ (Paris, 1908). The subject can
best be followed out in J. Sion, _Les paysans de la Normandie
orientale_ (Paris, 1908), and R. de Félice, _La Basse-Normandie_
(Paris, 1907). Various aspects of Norman genius and character
are delightfully treated by Albert Sorel, _Pages normandes_
(Paris, 1907). The proceedings of the historical congress held
in conjunction with the millénaire of 1911 were to have been
printed in full, but so far only various reprints of individual
communications have appeared. J. Touflet, _Le millénaire de
Normandie_ (Rouen, 1913), is not an account of the commemoration,
but an illustrated collection of popular papers. One of the more
notable pamphlets published on this occasion is that of Gabriel
Monod, _Le rôle de la Normandie dans l’histoire de France_ (Paris,
1911).
II
THE COMING OF THE NORTHMEN
The central fact of Norman history and the starting-point for its
study is the event so brilliantly commemorated by the millenary of
1911, the grant of Normandy to Rollo and his northern followers in the
year 911. The history of Normandy, of course, began long before that
year. The land was there, and likewise in large measure the people,
that is to say, probably the greater part of the elements which went
to make the population of the country at a later day; and the history
of the region can be traced back several centuries. But after all,
neither the Celtic _civitates_ nor the Roman province of _Lugdunensis
Secunda_ nor the ecclesiastical province of Rouen which took its place
nor the northwestern _pagi_ of the Frankish empire were Normandy. They
lacked the name--that is obvious; they lacked also individuality of
character, which is more. They were a part, and not a distinctive part,
of something else, whereas later Normandy was a separate entity with a
life and a history of its own. And the dividing line must be drawn when
the Northmen first established themselves permanently in the land and
gave it a new name and a new history.
It must be said that the date 911, like most exact dates in history,
is somewhat arbitrary. The Northmen first invaded Normandy in 841, and
their inroads did not cease until about 966, so that the year 911 falls
near the middle of a century and a quarter of invasion and settlement,
and marks neither the beginning nor the end of an epoch. It is also
true that this date, like many another which appears in heavy-faced
type in our histories, is not known with entire certainty, for some
historians have placed in 912 or even later the events commonly
assigned to that year. On the whole, however, there is good reason for
maintaining 911--and a thousandth anniversary must have some definite
date to commemorate!
For the actual occurrences of that year, we have only the account of
a romancing historian of a hundred years later, reënforced here and
there by the exceedingly scanty records of the time. The main fact is
clear, namely that the Frankish king, Charles the Simple, granted Rollo
as a fief a considerable part, the eastern part, of later Normandy.
Apparently Rollo did homage for his fief in feudal fashion by placing
his hands between the hands of the king, something, we are told, which
“neither his father, nor his grandfather, nor his great-grandfather
before him had ever done for any man.” Legend goes on to relate,
however, that Rollo refused to kneel and kiss the king’s foot, crying
out in his own speech, “No, by God!” and that the companion to whom he
delegated the unwelcome obligation performed it so clumsily that he
overturned the king, to the great merriment of the assembled Northmen.
Rollo did not receive the whole of the later duchy, but only the
region on either side of the Seine which came to be known as Upper
Normandy, and it was not till 924 that the Northmen acquired also
middle Normandy, or the Bessin, while the west, the Cotentin and the
Avranchin, fell to them only in 933.
As to Rollo’s personality, we have only the evidence of later Norman
historians of doubtful authority and the Norse saga of Harold Fairhair.
If, as seems likely, their accounts relate to the same person, he was
known in the north as Hrolf the Ganger, because he was so huge that no
horse could carry him and he must needs gang afoot. A pirate at home,
he was driven into exile by the anger of King Harold, whereupon he
followed his trade in the Western Isles and in Gaul, and rose to be a
great Jarl among his people. The saga makes him a Norwegian, but Danish
scholars have sought to prove him a Dane, and more recently the cudgels
have been taken up for his Swedish origin. To me the Norwegian theory
seems on the whole the most probable, being based on a trustworthy saga
and corroborated by other incidental evidence. Yet, however significant
of Rollo’s importance it may be that three great countries should each
claim him as its own, like the seven cities that strove for the honor
of Homer’s birthplace, the question of his nationality is historically
of subordinate interest, and at a time when national lines were not
yet drawn, it is futile to fit the inadequate evidence into one or
another theory. The important fact is that Norway, Denmark, and even
more distant Sweden, all contributed to the colonists who settled in
Normandy under Rollo and his successors, and the achievements of the
Normans thus become the common heritage of the Scandinavian race.
The colonization of Normandy was, of course, only a small part of
the work of this heroic age of Scandinavian expansion. The great
emigration from the North in the ninth and tenth centuries has been
explained in part by the growth of centralized government and the
consequent departure of the independent, the turbulent, and the untamed
for new fields of adventure; but its chief cause was doubtless that
which lies back of colonizing movements in all ages, the growth of
population and the need of more room. Five centuries earlier this
land-hunger had pushed the Germanic tribes across the Rhine and Danube
and produced the great wandering of the peoples which destroyed the
Roman empire; and the Viking raids were simply a later aspect of this
same _Völkerwanderung_, retarded by the outlying position of the
Scandinavian lands and by the greater difficulty of migration by sea.
For, unlike the Goths who swept across the map of Europe in vast curves
of marching men, or the Franks who moved forward by slow stages of
gradual settlement in their occupation of Roman Gaul, the Scandinavian
invaders were men of the sea and migrated in ships. The deep fjords
of Norway and the indented coast of the North Sea and the Baltic made
them perforce sailors and fishermen and taught them the mastery of the
wider ocean. In their dragon ships--shallow, clinker-built, half-decked
craft, pointed at either end, low in the middle, where the gunwale was
protected by a row of shields--they could cross the sea, explore creeks
and inlets, and follow the course of rivers far above their mouth. The
greater ships might reach the length of seventy-five feet and carry as
many as one hundred and twenty men, but these were the largest, and
even these offered but a slow means of migration. We must think of the
whole movement at first as one of small and scattered bands, terrible
more for their fierce, sudden, and skilful methods of attack, than for
force of superior numbers or organization. The truth is that sea-power,
whose strategic significance in modern warfare Admiral Mahan did so
much to make us appreciate, was in the ninth and tenth centuries, so
far as western Europe was concerned, a Scandinavian monopoly. Masters
of the seas, the Northmen harried the coasts and river-valleys as they
would, and there was none to drive them back.
Outside of the Baltic, where the Danes ravaged the southern coast and
the Swedes moved eastward to lay the foundations of the Russian state
and to penetrate as far as Constantinople, two main routes lay open
to the masters of the northern seas. One led west to the Orkneys, the
Shetlands, and the coast of Scotland, and then either south to the
shores of Ireland, or further west to Iceland, Greenland, and America.
The other led through the North Sea to England, the Low Countries, and
the coast of Gaul. Both were used, and used freely, by the Vikings, and
in both directions they accomplished enduring results:--Iceland and the
kingdoms of the isles in the north, the beginnings of town life and
commerce in Ireland, the Danelaw in England, and the duchy of Normandy.
When the great northern invasions began at the close of the eighth
century, Charles the Great ruled all the Christian lands of the western
Continent. By fire and sword he converted the heathen Saxons of the
north to Christianity and civilization and advanced his frontier to
the Danish border, so that the pious monk of St. Gall laments that
he did not conquer the Danes also--“be it that Divine Providence was
not then on our side, or that our sins rose up against us.” And this
same gossiping chronicler--not the best of authorities it is true--has
left us a striking picture of Charlemagne’s first experience with the
Scandinavian invaders:--
Once Charles arrived by chance at a certain maritime town of
Gallia Narbonensis. While he was sitting at dinner, and had not
been recognized by the townspeople, some northern pirates came to
carry on their depredations in that very port. When the ships were
perceived some thought they were Jewish merchants, some that they
were Africans, some Bretons. But the wise king, knowing from the
shape and swiftness of the vessels what sort of crews they carried,
said to those about him, “These ships bear no merchandize, but
cruel foes.” At these words all the Franks rivalled each other in
the speed with which they rushed to attack the boats. But it was
useless. The Northmen hearing that there stood the man whom they
were wont to call Charles the Hammer, were afraid lest all their
fleet should be taken in the port, and should be broken in pieces;
and their flight was so rapid, that they withdrew themselves not
only from the swords, but even from the eyes of those who wished
to catch them. The religious Charles, however, seized by a holy
fear, rose from the table, and looked out of the window towards the
East, remaining long in that position, his face bathed in tears.
No one ventured to question him: but turning to his followers he
said, “Know ye why I weep? Truly I fear not that these will injure
_me_. But I am deeply grieved that in my lifetime they should have
been so near landing on these shores, and I am overwhelmed with
sorrow as I look forward and see what evils they will bring upon my
offspring and their people.”[11]
From the actuality of such an invasion the great Charles was spared,
but in the British Isles it had already begun. In 787 the Anglo-Saxon
_Chronicle_ tells us there “first came three ships of Northmen out
of Haeretha-land” [Denmark?], whereupon the reeve of the Dorset port
“rode down to the place and would have driven them to the king’s town,
because he knew not who they were; and they there slew him. These were
the first ships of Danishmen which sought the land of the English
nation.” Six years later they fell upon the holy isle of Lindisfarne,
pillaged the church sacred with the memories of Northumbrian
Christianity, and slew the monks or drove them into the sea. In 807
they first landed in Ireland, and “after this there came great sea-cast
floods of foreigners into Erin, so that there was not a point thereof
without a fleet.” Then came the turn of the Continent, first along the
coast of Frisia and Flanders, and then in what is now France. In 841,
when the grandsons of Charlemagne were quarrelling over the fragments
of his empire at Fontenay, the first fleet of Northmen entered the
Seine; in 843 when they were making their treaty of partition at
Verdun, the Vikings entered Nantes on St. John’s Day and slew the
bishop before the high altar as he intoned the _Sursum corda_ of the
mass. Within two years they sacked Hamburg and Paris. Wherever possible
they established themselves at the mouths of the great rivers, often
on an island like Walcheren, Noirmoutier, or the Ile de Rhé, whence
the rivers opened the whole country to them--Elbe and Weser, Rhine and
Meuse, Scheldt, Seine, Loire, and Garonne, even to the Guadalquivir,
by which the Arabic chronicler tells us the “dark red sea-birds”
penetrated to Seville. One band more venturesome than the rest, entered
the Mediterranean and reached Marseilles, whence under their leader
Hastings they sacked the Italian town of Luna, apparently in the belief
that it was Rome.
About the middle of the ninth century the number of the Norse pirates
greatly increased and their ravages became more regular and constant,
leading in many cases to permanent settlements. In 855 the Old English
_Chronicle_ tells us “the heathen men, for the first time, remained
over winter in Sheppey,” at the mouth of the Thames, and thereafter,
year by year, it recounts the deeds of the Viking band which wintered
in England and is called simply _here_, the army. It is no longer
a matter of summer raids but of unbroken occupation. In 878 during
midwinter “the army stole away to Chippenham and overran the land of
the West-Saxons and sat down there; and many of the people they drove
beyond sea, and of the remainder the greater part they subdued and
forced to obey them except King Alfred, and he, with a small band, with
difficulty retreated to the woods and to the fastnesses of the moors.”
The following year a similar band, now swollen into “the great army”
made its appearance on the Continent and for fourteen years ravaged the
territory between the Rhine and the Loire. Year after year “the steel
of the heathen glistened”; in 886 they laid siege to Paris, which was
relieved not by the king’s valor but by his offering them Burgundy to
plunder instead. A century later the English began to buy them off with
Danegeld. “All men,” laments a chronicler, “give themselves to flight.
No one cries out, Stand and fight for your country, your church, your
countrymen. What they ought to defend with arms, they shamefully
redeem by payments.” There was nothing to do but add a new petition to
the litany, “From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord, deliver us.”
* * * * *
To the writers of the time, who could not see the permanent results
of Viking settlement, the Northmen were barbarian pirates, without
piety or pity, “who wept neither for their sins nor for their dead,”
and their expeditions were mere wanton pillage and destruction.
Moreover, these writers were regularly monks or priests, and it was
the church that suffered most severely. A walled town or castle
might often successfully resist, but the monasteries, protected from
Christian freebooters by their sacred character, were simply so many
opportunities for plunder to the heathen of the north. Sometimes the
monks perished with their monastery, often they escaped only with their
lives and a few precious title-deeds, to find on their return merely
a heap of blackened ruins and a desolate countryside. Many religious
establishments utterly disappeared in the course of the invasions. In
Normandy scarcely a church survives anterior to the tenth century.
As the monasteries were at this time the chief centres of learning
and culture throughout western Europe, their losses were the losses
of civilization, and in this respect the verdict of the monastic
chroniclers is justified. There is, however, another side to the story,
which Scandinavian scholars have not been slow to emphasize. Heathen
still and from one point of view barbarian, the Northmen had yet a
culture of their own, well advanced on its material side, notable in
its artistic skill, and rich in its treasures of poetry and story.
Its material treasures have been in part recovered by the labors of
northern archæologists, while its literary wealth is now in large
measure accessible in English in the numerous translations of sagas and
Eddic poems.
After all barbarism, like culture, is a relative thing, and judged
by contemporary standards, the Vikings were not barbarians.
They rather show a strange combination of the primitive and the
civilized--elemental passions expressing themselves with a high degree
of literary art, barbaric adornment wrought with skilled craftsmanship,
Berserker rage supplemented by clever strategy, pitiless savagery
combined with a strong sense of public order, constant feuds and
murders coexistent with a most elaborate system of law and legal
procedure. Young from our point of view, the civilization of the
Vikings had behind it a history of perhaps fifteen centuries.
On its material side Viking civilization is characterized by a
considerable degree of wealth and luxury. Much of this, naturally,
was gained by pillage, but much also came by trade. The northern
warriors do not seem to have had that contempt for traffic which has
characterized many military societies, and they turned readily enough
from war to commerce. In a Viking tomb recently discovered in the
Hebrides there were found beside the sword and spear and battle-axe
of all warriors, a pair of scales, fit emblem of the double life the
chief had led on earth and may have hoped to continue hereafter! Of
trade, and especially trade with the Orient, there is abundant evidence
in the great treasures of gold and silver coin found in many regions
of the north. The finely wrought objects of gold and silver and
encrusted metal, which were once supposed to have been imported from
the south and east, are now known to have been in large part of native
workmanship, influenced, of course, by the imitation of foreign models,
but also carrying out traditions of ornamentation, such as the use of
animal forms, which can be traced back continuously to the earliest
ages of Scandinavian history. Shields and damascened swords, arm-rings
and neck-rings, pins and brooches--especially brooches, if you find an
unknown object, says Montelius, call it a brooch and you will generally
be right--all testify, both in their abundance and their beauty of
workmanship, to an advanced stage of art and handicraft.
This love of the north for luxury of adornment is amply seen in
chronicle and saga. When the Irish drove the Vikings out of Limerick
in 968 they took from them “their jewels and their best property, and
their saddles beautiful and foreign, their gold and their silver, their
beautifully woven cloth of all kinds and colors--satin and silk,
pleasing and variegated, both scarlet and green, and all sorts of cloth
in like manner.” “How,” asks the Valkyrie in the _Lay of the Raven_,
“does the generous Prince Harold deal with the men of feats of renown
that guard his land?” The Raven answers:--
They are well cared for, the warriors that cast dice in Harold’s
court. They are endowed with wealth and with fair swords, with
the ore of the Huns, and with maids from the East. They are glad
when they have hopes of a battle, they will leap up in hot haste
and ply the oars, snapping the oar-thongs and cracking the tholes.
Fiercely, I ween, do they churn the water with their oars at the
king’s bidding.
_Quoth the Walkyrie_: I will ask thee, for thou knowest the truth
of all these things, of the meed of the Poets, since thou must know
clearly the state of the minstrels that live with Harold.
_Quoth the Raven_: It is easily seen by their cheer, and their gold
rings, that they are among the friends of the king. They have red
cloaks right fairly fringed, silver-mounted swords, and ring-woven
sarks, gilt trappings, and graven helmets, wrist-fitting rings, the
gifts of Harold.[12]
As regards social organization, Viking society shows the Germanic
division into three classes, thrall, churl, and noble. Their respective
characters and occupations are thus described in the _Rigsmal_:--
Thrall was of swarthy skin, his hands wrinkled, his knuckles
bent, his fingers thick, his face ugly, his back broad, his heels
long. He began to put forth his strength, binding bast, making
loads, and bearing home faggots the weary long day. His children
busied themselves with building fences, dunging plowland, tending
swine, herding goats, and digging peat. Their names were Sooty and
Cowherd, Clumsy and Lout and Laggard, etc. Carl, or churl, was red
and ruddy, with rolling eyes, and took to breaking oxen, building
plows, timbering houses, and making carts. Earl, the noble, had
yellow hair, his cheeks were rosy, his eyes were keen as a young
serpent’s. His occupation was shaping the shield, bending the bow,
hurling the javelin, shaking the lance, riding horses, throwing
dice, fencing, and swimming. He began to waken war, to redden the
field, and to fell the doomed.[13]
Both churl and earl were largely represented in those who went to sea,
but the nobility naturally preponderated, and it is particularly their
exploits which the sagas and poems celebrate. Viking warfare was no
mere clash of swords; they conducted their military operations with
skill and foresight, and showed great power of adapting themselves to
new conditions, whether that meant the invasion of an open country
or the siege of a fortified town. Much, however, must be credited to
their _furor Teutonicus_, to that exuberance of military spirit which
they had inherited from far-off ancestors. Not all were wolf-coated
Bearsarks, but all seemed to have that delight in war and conflict for
their own sakes which breathes through their poetry:--
The sword in the king’s hand bit through the weeds of Woden [mail]
as if it were whisked through water, the spear-points clashed,
the shields were shattered, the axes rattled on the heads of the
warriors. Targets and skulls were trodden under the Northmen’s
shield-fires [weapons] and the hard heels of their hilts. There was
a din in the island, the kings dyed the shining rows of shields
in the blood of men. The wound-fires [blades] burnt in the bloody
wounds, the halberds bowed down to take the life of men, the ocean
of gore dashed upon the swords’-ness, the flood of the shafts fell
upon the beach of Stord. Halos of war mixed under the vault of the
bucklers; the battle-tempest blew underneath the clouds of the
targets, the lees of the sword-edges [blood] pattered in the gale
of Woden. Many a man fell into the stream of the brand.[14]
Again:--
Brands broke against the black targets, wounds waxed when the
princes met. The blades hammered against the helm-crests, the
wound-gravers, the sword’s point, bit. I heard that there fell
in the iron-play Woden’s oak [heroes] before the swords [the
sword-belt’s ice].
_Second Burden_: There was a linking of points and a gnashing of
edges: Eric got renown there.
_Second Stave_: The prince reddened the brand, there was a meal
for the ravens; the javelin sought out the life of man, the gory
spears flew, the destroyer of the Scots fed the steed of the witch
[wolves], the sister of Nari [Hell] trampled on the supper of the
eagles [corses]. The cranes of battle [shafts] flew against the
walls of the sword [bucklers], the wound-mew’s lips [the arrows’
barbs] were not left thirsty for gore. The wolf tore the wounds,
and the wave of the sword [blood] plashed against the beak of the
raven.
_Third Burden_: The lees of the din of war [blood] fell upon
Gialf’s steed [ship]: Eric gave the wolves carrion by the sea.
_Third Stave_: The flying javelin bit, peace was belied there,
the wolf was glad, and the bow was drawn, the bolts clattered,
the spear-points bit, the flaxen-bowstring bore the arrows out
of the bow. He brandished the buckler on his arm, the rouser of
the play of blades--he is a mighty hero. The fray grew greater
everywhere about the king. It was famed east over the sea, Eric’s
war-faring.[15]
Or listen to the weird sisters as they weave the web of Ireland’s fate
under Brian Boru:--
Wide-stretched is the warp presaging the slaughter, the hanging
cloud of the beam; it is raining blood. The gray web of the hosts
is raised up on the spears, the web which we the friends of Woden
are filling with red weft.
This web is warped with the guts of men, and heavily weighted with
human heads; blood-stained darts are the shafts, iron-bound are the
stays; it is shuttled with arrows. Let us strike with our swords
this web of victory!
War and Sword-clasher, Sangrid and Swipple, are weaving with drawn
swords. The shaft shall sing, the shield shall ring, the helm-hound
[axe] shall fall on the target.[16]
And those who met their death in battle had reserved for them a similar
existence in the life to come, not doomed like the ‘straw-dead’ to
tread wet and chill and dusky ways to the land of Hel, but--I am
quoting Gummere[17]--as weapon-dead faring “straightway to Odin,
unwasted by sickness, in the full strength of manhood,” to spend their
days in glorious battle and their nights in equally glorious feasting
in the courts of Valhalla.
In his cradle the young Viking was lulled by such songs as this:--
My mother said they should buy me a boat and fair oars, and that I
should go abroad with the Vikings, should stand forward in the bows
and steer a dear bark, and so wend to the haven and cut down man
after man there.
When he grows up the earl’s daughter scorns him as a boy who “has never
given a warm meal to the wolf,” “seen the raven in autumn scream over
the carrion draft,” or “been where the shell-thin edges” of the blades
crossed; whereupon he wins a place by her side by replying:--
I have walked with bloody brand and with whistling spear, with
the wound-bird following me. The Vikings made a fierce attack; we
raised a furious storm, the flame ran over the dwellings of men, we
laid the bleeding corses to rest in the gates of the city.[18]
And at the end, like Ragnar Lodbrok captured and dying in the pit of
serpents, he can tell his tale of feeding the eagle and the she-wolf
since he first reddened the sword at the age of twenty, and end his
life undaunted to the ever-recurring refrain, “We hewed with the sword”:
Death has no terrors. I am willing to depart. They are calling me
home, the Fays whom Woden the Lord of Hosts has sent me from his
hall. Merrily shall I drink ale in my high-seat with the Anses. My
life days are done. Laughing will I die.[19]
Politically, Viking society was aristocratic, but an aristocracy in
which all the nobles were equal. “We have no lord, we are all equal,”
said Rollo’s men when asked who was their lord; and men thus minded
were not likely to spend their time casting dice in King Harold’s
court, even if their independence meant the wolf’s lot of exile. What
kind of a political organization they were likely to form can be seen
from two examples of the Viking age. One is Iceland, described by Lord
Bryce[20] as “an almost unique instance of a community whose culture
and creative power flourished independently of any favoring material
conditions,”--that curiously decentralized and democratic commonwealth
where the necessities of life created a government with judicial
and legislative duties, while the feeling of equality and local
independence prevented the government from acquiring any administrative
or executive functions,--a community with “a great deal of law and no
central executive, a great many courts and no authority to carry out
their judgments.” The other example is Jomburg, that strange body of
Jomvikings established in Pomerania, at the mouth of the Oder, and
held by a military gild under the strictest discipline. Only men of
undoubted bravery between the ages of eighteen and fifty were admitted
to membership; no women were allowed in the castle, and no man could be
absent from it for more than three days at a time. Members assumed the
duty of mutual support and revenge, and plunder was to be distributed
by lot.
Neither of these types of Viking community was to be reproduced in
Normandy, for both were the outgrowth of peculiar local conditions, and
the Northmen were too adaptable to found states with a rubber-stamp.
A loose half-state like Iceland could exist only where the absence of
neighbors or previous inhabitants removed all danger of complications,
whether domestic or foreign. A strict warrior gild like that of Jomburg
could arise only in a fortress. Whatever form Viking society would take
in Normandy was certain to be determined in large measure by local
conditions; yet it might well contain elements found in the other
societies--the Icelandic sense of equality and independence, and the
military discipline of the Jomvikings set in the midst of their Wendish
foes. And both of these elements are characteristic of the Norman state.
Such, very briefly sketched, were the Northmen who came to Normandy. We
have now to follow them in their new home.
We must note in the first place that the relations between Normandy
and the north were not ended with the grant of 911. We must think of
the new Norman state, not as a planet sent off into space to move
separate and apart in a new orbit, but as a colony, an outpost of the
Scandinavian peoples in the south, fed by new bands of colonists from
the northern home and only gradually drawn away from its connections
with the north and brought into the political system of Frankish Gaul
and its neighbors. For something like a hundred years after the coming
of Rollo the key to Norman history is found in this fact and in the
resulting interplay of Scandinavian and Frankish influences. The very
grant of 911 was susceptible of being differently regarded from the
point of view of the two parties. Charles the Simple probably thought
he was creating a new fief with the Norman chief as his vassal, bound
to him by feudal ties, while to Rollo, innocent of feudal ideas, the
grant may well have seemed a gift outright to be held by himself
and his companions as land was held at home. From one point of view
a feudal holding, from another an independent Scandinavian state,
the contradiction in Normandy’s position explains much of its early
history. The new colony was saved from absorption in its surroundings
by continued migration from the north; before it became Frankish and
feudal it thus had time to establish itself firmly and draw tightly the
lines which separated it from its neighbors. At once a Frankish county
and a Danish colony, it slowly formed itself into the semi-independent
duchy which is the historic Normandy of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries.
Although Rollo was baptized in 912 and signalized his conversion by
extensive grants of land to the great churches and monasteries of his
new territories, his Christianity sat lightly upon him and left him a
Norse sea-rover at heart till the end, when he sought to appease the
powers of the other world, not only by gifts of gold to the church,
but by human sacrifices to the northern gods. His legislation, so
far as it can be reconstructed from the shadowy accounts of later
historians, was fundamentally Scandinavian in character, and his
followers guarded jealously the northern traditions of equality
and independence. His son, William Longsword, was a more Christian
and Frankish type, but his death, celebrated in a Latin poem which
represents the earliest known example of popular epic in Normandy, was
the signal for a Scandinavian and pagan reaction. We hear of fresh
arrivals on the Seine, Vikings who worshipped Thor and Odin, of an
independent band at Bayeux under a certain Haigrold or Harold, and even
of appeals for reënforcements from the Normans to the Northmen beyond
the sea. The dukes of Rouen, says the _Saga of St. Olaf_, “remember
well their kinship with the chiefs of Norway; they hold them in such
honor that they have always been the best friends of the Norwegians,
and all the Norwegians who wish find refuge in Normandy.” Not till the
beginning of the eleventh century does the Scandinavian immigration
come to an end and Normandy stand fully on its own feet.
Not until the eleventh century also does the history of Normandy emerge
from the uncertain period of legend and tradition and reach an assured
basis of contemporary evidence. Throughout Europe, the tenth century is
one of the most uncertain and obscure of all the Christian centuries.
To the critic, as an Oxford don distinguished for knowledge of this
epoch once remarked, its delightful obscurity makes it all the more
interesting, but there are limits to the delights of obscurity, and a
French scholar who has tried to reconstruct the history of this period
in Spain finds that all surviving documentary sources of information
are fabrications! Matters are not so bad as that for Normandy, for the
forgers there chose other periods in which to place their products, but
there are for the tenth century practically no contemporary documents
or contemporary Norman chronicles. The earliest Norman historian, Dudo,
dean of Saint-Quentin, wrote after the year 1000 and had no personal
knowledge of the beginnings of the Norman state. Diffuse, rhetorical,
credulous, and ready to distort events in order to glorify the
ancestors of the Norman dukes who were his patrons, Dudo is anything
but a trustworthy writer, and only the most circumspect criticism
can glean a few facts from his confused and turgid rhetoric. Yet he
was copied by his Norman successors, in prose and in verse, and has
found his defenders among patriotic Normans of a more modern time. Not
until quite recent years has his fundamental untrustworthiness been
fully established, and with it has vanished all hope of any detailed
knowledge of early Norman history. Only with the eleventh century do we
reach a solid foundation of annals and charters in the reigns of the
princes whom Dudo seeks to glorify in the person of their predecessors.
And when we reach this period, the heroic age of conquest and
settlement is over, and the Normans have become much as other Frenchmen.
At this point the fundamental question forces itself upon us, how far
was Normandy affected by Scandinavian influences? What in race and
language, in law and custom, was the contribution of the north to
Normandy? And the answer must be that in most respects the tangible
contribution was slight. Whatever may have been the state of affairs in
the age of colonization and settlement, by the century which followed
the Normans had become to a surprising degree absorbed by their
environment.
It is now generally admitted, says Professor Maitland,[21] that
for at least half a century before the battle of Hastings, the
Normans were Frenchmen, French in their language, French in their
law, proud indeed of their past history, very ready to fight
against other Frenchmen if Norman home-rule was endangered, but
still Frenchmen, who regarded Normandy as a member of the state or
congeries of states that owed service, we can hardly say obedience,
to the king at Paris. Their spoken language was French, their
written language was Latin, but the Latin of France; the style
of their legal documents was the style of the French chancery;
very few of the technical terms of their law were of Scandinavian
origin. When at length the ‘custom’ of Normandy appears in writing,
it takes its place among other French customs, and this although
for a long time past Normandy has formed one of the dominions of
a prince, between whom and the king of the French there has been
little love and frequent war; and the peculiar characteristics
which mark off the custom of Normandy from other French customs
seem due much rather to the legislation of Henry of Anjou than to
any Scandinavian tradition.
The law of Normandy was by this time Frankish, and its speech was
French. Even the second duke, William Longsword, found it necessary
to send his son to Bayeux to learn Norse, for it was no longer spoken
at Rouen. And in the French of Normandy, the Norman dialect, the
Scandinavian element is astonishingly small, as careful students of the
local _patois_ tell us. Only in one department of life, the life of the
sea, is any considerable Scandinavian influence discernible, and the
historian of the French navy, Bourel de la Roncière, has some striking
pages on the survivals of the language of the Norse Vikings in the
daily speech of the French sailor and fisherman.
The question of race is more difficult, and is of course quite
independent of the question of language, for language, as has been
well said, is not a test of race but a test of social contact, and the
fundamental physical characteristics of race are independent of speech.
“Skulls,” says Rhys, “are harder than consonants, and races lurk behind
when languages slip away.” On this point again scientific examination
is unfavorable to extended Scandinavian influence. Pronounced northern
types, of course, occur,--I remember, on my first journey through
Normandy, seeing at a wayside station a peasant who might have
walked that moment out of a Wisconsin lumber-camp or a Minnesota
wheat-field,--but the statistics of anthropometry show a steady
preponderance of the round-headed type which prevails in other parts
of France. Only in two regions does the Teutonic type assert itself
strongly, in the lower valley of the Seine and in the Cotentin, and
it is in these regions and at points along the shore that place-names
of Scandinavian origin are most frequent. The terminations _bec_ and
_fleur_, _beuf_ and _ham_ and _dalle_ and _tot_--Bolbec, Harfleur,
Quillebeuf, Ouistreham, Dieppedalle, Yvetot--tell the same story as
the terms used in navigation, namely that the Northmen were men of
the sea and settled in the estuaries and along the coast. The earlier
population, however, though reduced by war and pillage and famine,
was not extinguished. It survived in sufficient numbers to impose its
language on its conquerors, to preserve throughout the greater part of
the country its fundamental racial type, and to make these Northmen of
the sea into Normans of the land.
What, then, was the Scandinavian contribution to the making of Normandy
if it was neither law nor speech nor race? First and foremost, it was
Normandy itself, created as a distinct entity by the Norman occupation
and the grant to Rollo and his followers, without whom it would have
remained an undifferentiated part of northern France. Next, a new
element in the population, numerically small in proportion to the
mass, but a leaven to the whole--quick to absorb Frankish law and
Christian culture but retaining its northern qualities of enterprise,
of daring, and of leadership. It is no accident that the names of the
leaders in early Norman movements are largely Norse. And finally a race
of princes, high-handed and masterful but with a talent for political
organization, state-builders at home and abroad, who made Normandy the
strongest and most centralized principality in France and joined to it
a kingdom beyond the seas which became the strongest state in western
Europe.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The best outline of the beginnings of Normandy is H. Prentout,
_Essai sur les origines et la fondation du duché de Normandie_
(Paris, 1911). For the Frankish side of the Norse expeditions see
W. Vogel, _Die Normannen und das fränkische Reich_ (Heidelberg,
1906), supplemented by F. Lot, in the _Bibliothèque de l’École des
Chartes_, LXIX (1908). Their devastation of Normandy is illustrated
by the fate of the monastery of Saint-Wandrille: F. Lot, _Études
critiques sur l’abbaye de Saint-Wandrille_ (Paris, 1913), ch. 3.
There is a vast literature in the Scandinavian languages; for the
titles of fundamental works by Steenstrup, Munch, Worsaae, and
Alexander Bugge, see Charles Gross, _Sources and Literature of
English History_ (London, 1915), § 42. Considerable material in
English has been published in the _Saga-Book_ of the Viking Society
(London, since 1895). On the material culture of the north see
Sophus Müller, _Nordische Altertumskunde_ (Strassburg, 1897–98),
and the various works of Montelius. The early poetry is collected
and translated by Vigfusson and Powell, _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_
(Oxford, 1883). Convenient summaries in English are C. F. Keary,
_The Vikings in Western Christendom_ (London, 1891); A. Mawer, _The
Vikings_ (Cambridge, 1913); and L. M. Larson, _Canute the Great_
(New York, 1912).
III
NORMANDY AND ENGLAND
After the coming of the Northmen the chief event in Norman history is
the conquest of England, and just as relations with the north are the
chief feature of the tenth century, so relations with England dominate
the eleventh century, and the central point is the conquest of 1066.
In this series of events the central figure is, of course, William the
Conqueror, by descent duke of Normandy and by conquest king of England.
* * * * *
Of William’s antecedents we have no time to speak at length. Grandson
of the fourth Norman duke, Richard the Good, William was the son of
Duke Robert, who met his death in Asia Minor in 1035 while returning
from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. To distinguish him from the later duke
of the same name he is called Robert I or Robert the Magnificent,
sometimes and quite incorrectly, Robert the Devil, by an unwarranted
confusion with this hero, or rather villain, of romance and grand
opera. A contemporary of the great English king Canute, Robert was a
man of renown in the Europe of the early eleventh century, and if our
sources of information permitted us to know the history of his brief
reign, we should probably find that much that was distinctive of the
Normandy of his son’s day can be traced back to his time. More than
once in history has a great father been eclipsed by a greater son. The
fact should be added, which William’s contemporaries never allowed him
to forget, that he was an illegitimate son. His mother Arlette was the
daughter of a tanner of Falaise, and while it is not clear that Duke
Robert was ever married to any one else, his union with Arlette had no
higher sanction than the Danish custom of his forefathers. Their son
was generally known in his day as William the Bastard, and only the
great achievements of his reign succeeded in replacing this, first by
William the Great and later by William the Conqueror.
Were it not for the resulting confusion with other great Williams,--one
of whom has recently been raised by admiring subjects to the rank of
William the Greatest!--there would be a certain advantage in retaining
the title of great, in order to remind ourselves that William was not
only a conqueror but a great ruler. The greatest secular figure in
the Europe of his day, he is also one of the greatest in the line of
English sovereigns, whether we judge him by capacity for rule or by
the results of his reign, and none has had a more profound effect on
the whole current of English history. The late Edward A. Freeman, who
devoted five stout volumes to the history of the Norman Conquest and of
William, and who never shrank from superlatives, goes still further:--
No man that ever trod this earth was ever endowed with greater
natural gifts; to no man was it ever granted to accomplish greater
things. If we look only to the scale of a man’s acts without
regard to their moral character, we must hail in the victor of
Val-ès-dunes, of Varaville, and of Senlac, in the restorer of
Normandy, the Conqueror of England, one who may fairly claim his
place in the first rank of the world’s greatest men. No man ever
did his work more thoroughly at the moment; no man ever left
his work behind him as more truly an abiding possession for all
time.... If we cannot give him a niche among pure patriots and
heroes, he is quite as little entitled to a place among mere
tyrants and destroyers. William of Normandy has no claim to a
share in the pure glory of Timoleon, Ælfred, and Washington; he
cannot even claim the more mingled fame of Alexander, Charles,
and Cnut; but he has still less in common with the mere enemies
of their species, with the Nabuchodonosors, the Swegens, and the
Buonapartes, whom God has sent from time to time as simple scourges
of a guilty world.... He never wholly cast away the thoughts of
justice and mercy, and in his darkest hours had still somewhat of
the fear of God before his eyes.[22]
I have quoted the essence of Freeman’s characterization, not because
it seems to me wholly just or even historical, but in order to set
forth vividly the importance of William and his work. It is not
the historian’s business to award niches in a hall of fame. He is
no Rhadamanthus, to separate the Alfreds of this world from the
Nebuchadnezzars, the Washingtons from the Napoleons. So far as he
deals with individuals, his business is to explain to us each man in
the light of his time and its conditions, not to compare him with
men of far distant times and places in order to arrange all in a
final scale of values. It was once the fashion in debating societies
to discuss whether Demosthenes was a greater orator than Cicero,
and whether either was the equal of Daniel Webster. It is even more
futile to consider whether William the Conqueror was a greater man
than Alexander or a less than George Washington, for the quantities
are incommensurable. So far as comparisons of this sort are at all
legitimate, they must be instituted between similar things, between
contemporaries or between men in quick sequence. When they deal with
wide intervals of time and circumstance, they wrest each man from his
true setting and become fundamentally unhistorical.
An able general, strong in battle and still stronger in strategy and
craft, a skilful diplomat, a born ruler of men, William was yet greater
in the combination of vision, patience, and masterful will which make
the statesman, and the results of his statesmanship are writ large on
the page of English history. To his contemporaries his most striking
characteristic was his pitiless strength and inflexible will, and if
they had been familiar with Nietzsche’s theory of the ‘overman,’ they
would certainly have placed him in that class. Stark and stern and
wrathful, the author of the Anglo-Saxon _Chronicle_ approaches him, as
Freeman well says,[23] “with downcast eyes and bated breath, as if he
were hardly dealing with a man of like passions with himself but were
rather drawing the portrait of a being of another nature.” This, the
most adequate characterization of the _Uebermensch_ of the eleventh
century, runs as follows:[24]
If any would know what manner of man king William was, the glory
that he obtained, and of how many lands he was lord; then will we
describe him as we have known him, we, who have looked upon him
and who once lived in his court. This king William, of whom we are
speaking, was a very wise and a great man, and more honoured and
more powerful than any of his predecessors. He was mild to those
good men who loved God, but severe beyond measure towards those who
withstood his will. He founded a noble monastery on the spot where
God permitted him to conquer England, and he established monks in
it, and he made it very rich. In his days the great monastery at
Canterbury was built, and many others also throughout England;
moreover this land was filled with monks who lived after the
rule of St. Benedict; and such was the state of religion in his
days that all that would might observe that which was prescribed
by their respective orders. King William was also held in much
reverence: he wore his crown three times every year when he was
in England: at Easter he wore it at Winchester, at Pentecost at
Westminster, and at Christmas at Gloucester. And at these times,
all the men of England were with him, archbishops, bishops, abbots,
and earls, thanes, and knights. So also, was he a very stern and
a wrathful man, so that none durst do anything against his will,
and he kept in prison those earls who acted against his pleasure.
He removed bishops from their sees, and abbots from their offices,
and he imprisoned thanes, and at length he spared not his own
brother Odo. This Odo was a very powerful bishop in Normandy, his
see was that of Bayeux, and he was foremost to serve the king. He
had an earldom in England, and when William was in Normandy he was
the first man in this country, and him did he cast into prison.
Amongst other things the good order that William established is
not to be forgotten; it was such that any man, who was himself
aught, might travel over the kingdom with a bosom-full of gold
unmolested; and no man durst kill another, however great the injury
he might have received from him. He reigned over England, and
being sharp-sighted to his own interest, he surveyed the kingdom
so thoroughly that there was not a single hide of land throughout
the whole of which he knew not the possessor, and how much it was
worth, and this he afterwards entered in his register. The land
of the Britons was under his sway, and he built castles therein;
moreover he had full dominion over the Isle of Man [Anglesey]:
Scotland also was subject to him from his great strength; the land
of Normandy was his by inheritance, and he possessed the earldom
of Maine; and had he lived two years longer he would have subdued
Ireland by his prowess, and that without a battle. Truly there was
much trouble in these times, and very great distress; he caused
castles to be built, and oppressed the poor. The king was also of
great sternness, and he took from his subjects many marks of gold,
and many hundred pounds of silver, and this, either with or without
right, and with little need. He was given to avarice, and greedily
loved gain. He made large forests for the deer, and enacted laws
therewith, so that whoever killed a hart or a hind should be
blinded. As he forbade killing the deer, so also the boars; and he
loved the tall stags as if he were their father. He also appointed
concerning the hares, that they should go free. The rich complained
and the poor murmured, but he was so sturdy that he recked nought
of them; they must will all that the king willed, if they would
live; or would keep their lands; or would hold their possessions;
or would be maintained in their rights. Alas! that any man should
so exalt himself, and carry himself in his pride over all! May
Almighty God show mercy to his soul, and grant him the forgiveness
of his sins! We have written concerning him these things, both good
and bad, that virtuous men might follow after the good, and wholly
avoid the evil, and might go in the way that leadeth to the kingdom
of heaven.
This _Requiescat_ of the monk of Peterborough has carried us forward
half a century, till the Conqueror, in the full maturity of his
power and strength, rode to his death down the steep street of the
burning town of Mantes and was buried in his own great abbey-church
at Caen. And the good peace that he gave the land at the end came,
both in Normandy and in England, only after many stormy years of
war, rebellion, and strife. William was but sixty when he died; when
his father was laid away in the basilica of far-off Nicæa, he was
only seven or at most eight. The conquest of England was made in his
fortieth year, when he had already reigned thirty-one years as duke.
Or, if we deduct the years of his youth, the conquest of England falls
just halfway between his coming of age and his death. I give these
figures to adjust the perspective. William’s place in the line of
English kings is so prominent and his achievements in England are so
important that they always tend to overshadow in our minds his earlier
years as duke. Yet without these formative years there could have been
no conquest of England, and without some study of them that conquest
cannot be understood.
If we pass over rapidly, as for lack of information we must needs
do, the dozen years of William’s minority, we find his reign in
Normandy chiefly occupied with his struggles with his vassals, his
neighbors, and the king of France, all a necessary consequence of his
feudal position as duke. The Norman vassals, always turbulent and
rebellious, seem to have broken forth anew upon the death of Robert the
Magnificent, and such accounts as have reached us of the events of the
next twelve years reveal a constant state of anarchy and disorder. The
revolt of the barons came to a head in 1047, when the whole of Lower
Normandy rose under the leadership of the two chief _vicomtes_ of the
region, Ranulf of Bayeux and Néel of Saint-Sauveur, the ruins of whose
family castle of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte still greet the traveller
who leaves Cherbourg for Paris. William, who was hunting in the
neighborhood of Valognes, was obliged to flee half-clad in the night
and to pick his way alone by devious paths across the enemy’s country
to his castle of Falaise. With the assistance of the French king he was
able to collect an army from Upper Normandy and meet the rebels on the
great plain of Val-des-Dunes, near Caen, where the _Mont-joie_ of the
French and the _Dex aie_ of the duke’s followers answered the barons’
appeals to their local saints of St. Sauveur, St. Sever, and St. Amand.
William was victorious; the leaders of the revolt were sent into
exile, but one of them, Grimoud of Plessis, the traitor, apparently he
who had sought William’s death in the night at Valognes, was put in
prison at Rouen in irons which he wore until his death.
With the collapse of the great revolt and the razing of the castles
of the revolting barons, Normandy began to enjoy a period of internal
peace and order. Externally, however, difficulties rather increased
with the growing power of the young duke. In discussions of feudal
society it is too often assumed that if the feudal obligations are
observed between lords and vassals, all will go well, and that the
anarchy of which the Middle Ages are full was the result of violations
of these feudal ties. Now, while undoubtedly a heavy account must be
laid at the door of direct breaches of the feudal bond, it must also be
remembered that there was a fundamental defect in the very structure
of feudal society. We may express this defect by saying that the
feudal ties were only vertical and not lateral. The lord was bound to
his vassal and the vassal to his lord, and so far as these relations
went they provided a nexus of social and legal relations which might
hold society together. But there was no tie between two vassals of the
same lord, nothing whatever which bound one of them to live in peace
and amity with the other. Quite the contrary. War being the normal
state of European society in the feudal period, the right to carry
on private war was one of the cherished rights of the feudal baron,
and it extended wherever it was not restricted by the bonds of fealty
and vassalage. The duke of Normandy and the count of Anjou were both
vassals of the king of France, but their relations to each other were
those of complete independence, and, save for some special agreement or
friendship, were normally relations of hostility.
And so an important part of Norman history has to treat of the
struggles with the duchy’s neighbors, Flanders on the north, the royal
domain on the east, Maine and Anjou to the southward, and Brittany
on the west. Fortunately for Normandy, the Bretons were but loosely
organized, while the Flemings, compacted into one of the strongest of
the French fiefs, were generally friendly, and the friendship was in
this period cemented by William’s marriage to Matilda, daughter of
the count of Flanders, one of the few princely marriages of the time
which was founded upon affection and observed with fidelity. With Anjou
the case was different. Beginning as a border county over against
the Bretons of the lower Loire, with the black rock of Angers as its
centre and fortress, Anjou, though still comparatively small in area,
had grown into one of the strongest states of western France. Under a
remarkable line of counts, Geoffrey Greygown, Fulk the Red, and Fulk
the Black, ancestors of the Plantagenet kings of England, it had become
the dominant power on the Loire, and now under their successor Geoffrey
the Hammer it threatened further expansion by hammering its frontiers
still further to the north and east. Geoffrey, William’s contemporary
and rival, is known to us by a striking characterization written by his
nephew and successor and forming a typical bit of feudal biography:[25]
My uncle Geoffrey became a knight in his father’s lifetime and
began his knighthood by wars against his neighbors, one against
the Poitevins, whose count he captured at Mont Couër, and another
against the people of Maine, whose count, named Herbert Bacon,
he likewise took. He also carried on war against his own father,
in the course of which he committed many evil deeds of which he
afterward bitterly repented. After his father died on his return
from Jerusalem, Geoffrey possessed his lands and the city of
Angers, and fought Count Thibaud of Blois, son of Count Odo, and
by gift of King Henry received the city of Tours, which led to
another war with Count Thibaud, in the course of which, at a battle
between Tours and Amboise, Thibaud was captured with a thousand of
his knights. And so, besides the part of Touraine inherited from
his father, he acquired Tours and the castles round about--Chinon,
L’Ile-Bouchard, Châteaurenault, and Saint-Aignan. After this he had
a war with William, count of the Normans, who later acquired the
kingdom of England and was a magnificent king, and with the people
of France and of Bourges, and with William count of Poitou and
Aimeri viscount of Thouars and Hoel count of Nantes and the Breton
counts of Rennes and with Hugh count of Maine, who had thrown off
his fealty. Because of all these wars and the prowess he showed
therein he was rightly called the Hammer, as one who hammered down
his enemies.
In the last year of his life he made me his nephew a knight at the
age of seventeen in the city of Angers, at the feast of Pentecost,
in the year of the Incarnation 1060, and granted me Saintonge and
the city of Saintes because of a quarrel he had with Peter of
Didonne. In this same year King Henry died on the nativity of St.
John, and my uncle Geoffrey on the third day after Martinmas came
to a good end. For in the night which preceded his death, laying
aside all care of knighthood and secular things, he became a monk
in the monastery of St. Nicholas, which his father and he had built
with much devotion and endowed with their goods.
The great source of conflict between William and Geoffrey was the
intervening county of Maine, whence the Angevins had gained possession
of the Norman fortresses of Domfront and Alençon, and it was not till
after Geoffrey’s death, in 1063, that the capture of its chief city,
LeMans, completed that union of Normandy and Maine which was to last
through the greater part of Norman history. The conquest of Maine was
the first fruit of William’s work as conqueror.
With William’s suzerain, the king of France, relations were more
complicated. Legally there could be no question that the duke of
Normandy was the feudal vassal of the French king and as such bound to
the obligations of loyalty and service which flowed from his oath of
homage and fealty. Actually, in the society of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, such bonds were freely and frequently broken, yet they were
not thrown off. Here, as in many other phases of mediæval life, we
meet that persistent contradiction between theory and practice which
shocks our more consistent minds. Just as the men of the Middle Ages
tolerated a Holy Roman Empire which claimed universal dominion and
often exercised only the most local and rudimentary authority, so they
accepted a monarchy like that of the early Capetians, which claimed to
rule over the whole of France and was limited in its actual government
to a few farms and castles in the neighborhood of Paris. And just
as they maintained ideals of lofty chivalry and rigorous asceticism
far beyond the sordid reality of ordinary knighthood or monkhood,
so the constant violation of feudal obligations did not change the
feudal bond or destroy the nexus of feudal relations. In this age of
unrestraint, ferocious savagery alternated with knightly generosity,
and ungovernable rage with self-abasing penance.
At such times the relations of the king and his great feudatories would
depend very largely upon personal temperament, political situations,
and even the impulse of the moment, and we must not expect to find
such purpose and continuity in policies as prevail in more settled
periods. Nevertheless, with due allowance for momentary variations,
the relations of Normandy with the Capetian kings follow comparatively
simple lines. The position of Normandy in the Seine valley and its
proximity to the royal domain offered endless opportunity for friction,
yet for about a century strained relations were avoided by alliance
and friendship based upon common interest. Hugh Capet came to the
throne with the support of the Norman duke, and his successors often
found their mainstay in Norman arms. Robert the Magnificent on his
departure for the East commended his young son to King Henry, and the
heir seems to have grown up under the king’s guardianship. It was Henry
who saved William from his barons in 1047, and it was William that
furnished over half the king’s soldiers on the campaign against Anjou
in the following year. Then, about the middle of the eleventh century,
comes a change, for which the growing power and influence of Normandy
furnish a sufficient explanation. Henry supported the revolt of William
of Arques in 1053 and attempted a great invasion of Normandy in the
same year, while in 1058 he burnt and pillaged his way into the heart
of the Norman territory. A waiting game and well-timed attacks defeated
these efforts at Mortemer and at Varaville, but William refused to
follow up his advantage by a direct attack upon his king, whom he
continued to treat with personal consideration as his feudal lord. Even
after William himself became king, he seems to have continued to render
the military service which he owed as duke. By this time, however, the
subjection had become only nominal; merely as duke, William was now a
more powerful ruler than the king of France, and the Capetian monarchy
had to bide its time for more than a century longer.
Before we can leave the purely Norman period of William’s reign and
turn to the conquest of England, it is important to examine the
internal condition of Normandy under his rule. Even the most thorough
study possible of this subject would need to be brief, for lack of
available evidence. Time has not dealt kindly with Norman records, and
over against the large body of Anglo-Saxon charters and the unique
account of Anglo-Saxon England preserved in the Domesday survey,
contemporary Normandy can set only a few scattered documents and a
curious statement of the duke’s rights and privileges under William,
drawn up four years after his death and only recently recovered as an
authority for his reign. The sources of Norman history were probably
never so abundant as those of England; certainly there is now nothing
on the Continent, outside of the Vatican, that can compare with the
extraordinarily full and continuous series of the English public
records. The great gaps in the Norman records, often supposed to be due
to the Revolution, really appear much earlier. Undoubtedly there was
in many places wanton destruction of documents in the revolutionary
uprisings, and there were many losses under the primitive organization
of local archives in this period, as there undoubtedly were during
the carelessness and corruption of the Restoration. Nevertheless, an
examination of the copies and extracts made from monastic and cathedral
archives by the scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
shows that, with a few significant exceptions, the materials for early
Norman history were little richer then than now, so that the great
losses must have occurred before this time, that is to say, during
the Middle Ages and in the devastation of the English invasion and of
the Protestant wars of the sixteenth century. The cathedral library
at Bayeux, for example, possesses three volumes of a huge cartulary
charred by the fire into which it was thrown when the town was sacked
by the Protestants. On the other hand, it should be noted that the
French Revolution accomplished one beneficent result for local records
in the secularization of ecclesiastical archives and their collection
into the great repositories of the Archives Départementales, whose
organization is still the envy of historical scholars across the
Channel. One who has enjoyed for many months access to these admirable
collections of records will be permitted to express his gratitude to
those who created them, as well as to those by whom they are now so
courteously administered.
Piecing together our scattered information regarding the Normandy
of the eleventh century, we note at the outset that it was a feudal
society, that is to say, land was for the most part held of a lord by
hereditary tenure on condition of military service. Indeed feudal ideas
had spread so far that they even penetrated the church, so that in some
instances the revenues of the clergy had been granted to laymen and
archdeaconries and prebends had been turned into hereditary fiefs.
With feudal service went the various incidents of feudal tenure and a
well-developed feudal jurisdiction of the lord over his tenants and
of the greater barons over the less. In all this there is nothing to
distinguish Normandy from the neighboring countries of northern France,
and as a feudal society is normally a decentralized society, we should
expect to find the powers of government chiefly in the hands of the
local lords. A closer study, however, shows certain peculiarities which
are of the utmost importance, both for Norman and for English history.
First of all, the military service owing to the duke had been
systematically assessed in rough units of five or ten knights, and this
service, or its subdivisions, had become attached to certain pieces of
land, or knights’ fees. The amounts of service were fixed by custom and
were regularly enforced. Still more significant are the restrictions
placed upon the military power of the barons. The symbol and the
foundation of feudal authority was the castle, wherefore the duke
forbade the building of castles and strongholds without his license
and required them to be handed over to him on demand. Private war and
the blood feud could not yet be prohibited entirely, but they were
closely limited. No one was allowed to go out to seek his enemy with
hauberk and standard and sounding horn. Assaults and ambushes were not
permitted in the duke’s forests; captives were not to be taken in a
feud, nor could arms, horses, or property be carried off from a combat.
Burning, plunder, and waste were forbidden in pursuing claims to land,
and except for open crime, no one could be condemned to loss of limb
unless by judgment of the proper ducal or baronial court. Coinage,
generally a valued privilege of the greater lords, was in Normandy a
monopoly of the duke. What the absence of such restrictions might mean
is well illustrated in England in the reign of Stephen, when private
war, unlicensed castles, and baronial coinage appeared as the chief
evils of an unbridled feudal anarchy.
In the administration of justice, in spite of the great franchises
of the barons, the duke has a large reserved jurisdiction. Certain
places are under his special protection, certain crimes put the
offender at his mercy. The administrative machinery, though in many
respects still primitive, has kept pace with the duke’s authority.
Whereas the Capetian king has as his local representatives only the
semi-feudal agents on his farms, the Norman duke has for purposes of
local government a real public officer, the _vicomte_, commanding his
troops, guarding his castles, maintaining order, administering justice,
and collecting the ducal revenues. Nowhere is the superiority of the
Norman dukes over their royal overlords more clear than in the matter
of finance. The housekeeping of the Capetian king of the eleventh
century was still what the Germans call a _Naturalwirthschaft_, an
economic organization based upon payment in produce and labor rather
than in money. “Less powerful than certain of his great vassals,” as he
is described by his principal historian, Luchaire,[26] “the king lives
like them from the income from his farms and tolls, the payments of his
peasants, the labor of his serfs, the taxes disguised as gifts which he
levies from the bishops and abbots of the neighborhood. His granaries
of Gonesse, Janville, Mantes, Étampes, furnish his grain; his cellars
of Orleans and Argenteuil, his wine; his forests of Rouvrai (now the
Bois de Boulogne), Saint-Germain, Fontainebleau, Iveline, Compiègne,
his game. He passes his time in hunting, for amusement or to supply
his table, and travels constantly from estate to estate, from abbey
to abbey, obliged to make full use of his rights of entertainment and
to move frequently from place to place in order not to exhaust the
resources of his subjects.”
In other words, under existing methods of communication, it was easier
to transport the king and his household than it was to transport
food, and the king literally ‘boarded round’ from farm to farm. Such
conditions were typical of the age, and they could only be changed
by the development of a revenue in money, enabling the king to buy
where he would and to pay whom he would for service, whether personal
or political or military. Only by hard cash could the mediæval ruler
become independent of the limitations which feudalism placed upon him.
Now, while the Norman duke derived much of his income from his farms
and forests, his mills and fishing rights and local monopolies and
tolls, he had also a considerable revenue in money. Each _vicomté_ was
farmed for a fixed amount, and there was probably a regular method of
collection and accounting. If the king wished to bestow revenue upon
a monastery he would grant so many measures of grain at the mills of
Bourges or so many measures of wine in the vineyards of Joui; while
in a similar position the Norman duke would give money--twelve pounds
in the farm of Argentan, sixty shillings and tenpence in the toll of
Exmes, or one hundred shillings in the _prévôté_ of Caen. Nothing could
show more clearly the superiority of Normandy in fiscal and hence in
political organization, where under the forms of feudalism we can
already discern the beginnings of the modern state.
To William’s authority in the state we must add his control over the
Norman church. Profoundly secularized and almost absorbed into the lay
society about it as a result of the Norse invasion, the Norman church
had been renewed and refreshed by the wave of monastic reform which
swept over western Europe in the first half of the eleventh century,
and now occupied both spiritually and intellectually a position of
honor and of strength. But it was not supreme. The duke appointed its
bishops and most of its abbots, sat in its provincial councils, and
revised the judgments of its courts. Liberal in gifts to the church and
punctilious in his religious observances, William left no doubt who was
master, and his respectful but independent attitude toward the Papacy
already foreshadowed the conflict in which he forced even the mighty
Hildebrand to yield.
* * * * *
I have dwelt at some length upon these matters of internal
organization, not only because they are fundamental to an understanding
of many institutions of the Norman empire, but because they also
serve to explain how there came to be a Norman empire. The conquest
of England has been so uniformly approached from the English point of
view that it is often made to appear as more or less of an accident
arising from a casual invasion of freebooters. Viewed in its proper
perspective, which I venture to think is the Norman perspective, it
appears as a natural outgrowth of Norman discipline and of Norman
expansion. Only because the duke was strong at home could he hope to
be strong abroad, only because he was master of an extraordinarily
vigorous, coherent, and well-organized state in Normandy could he
attempt the at first sight impossible task of conquering a kingdom and
the still greater task of organizing it under a firm government. We
must take account, not only of the weakness of England, but also of the
strength of Normandy, stronger than any of its continental neighbors,
stronger even than royalty itself.
That the expansion of Normandy should be directed toward England was
the result, not only of the special conditions of the year 1066, but of
a steady _rapprochement_ between the two countries, in which the active
effort was exerted from the Norman side. By geographical position, by
the Scandinavian settlement of both countries, and by the commercial
enterprise of the merchants of Rouen, the history of Normandy and
England had in various ways been brought together in the tenth century,
till in 1002 the marriage of the English king Ethelred with Emma,
sister of Duke Richard the Good, created dynastic connections of
far-reaching importance. Their son Edward the Confessor was brought
up at the Norman court, so that his habits and sympathies became
Norman rather than English, and his accession to the English throne in
1042 opened the way to a rapid development of Norman influence both
in church and in state, which Freeman, with his strong anti-foreign
feelings, considered the real beginning of the Norman Conquest. As
Edward’s childless reign drew near its end, there were two principal
claimants for the succession, Harold, son of Godwin, the most powerful
earl of England, and Duke William. Harold could make no hereditary
claim to the throne, nor until the eve of Edward’s death does he
seem to have had the king’s support, but he was a man of strength
and force and was clearly the leading man of the kingdom. William,
as the great-nephew of Ethelred and Emma, was cousin (first cousin
once removed) of Edward, a claim which he strengthened by an early
expression of Edward in his favor and by an oath which he had exacted
from Harold to support his candidacy. The exact facts are not known
regarding Harold’s oath, made during an involuntary visit to Normandy
two or three years before, but it enabled William to pose as the
defender of a broken obligation and gave him the great moral advantage
of the support of Pope Alexander II, to whom he had the question
submitted. At Edward’s death Harold had himself chosen by the _witan_,
or national council, and crowned, so that he had on his side whatever
could come from such legal forms and from the support which lay behind
them. We must not, however, commit the anachronism of thinking that he
was a national hero or even the candidate of a national party. There
was in the eleventh century no such thing as a nation in the sense that
the term is understood in the modern world, and the word could least
of all be applied to England, broken, divided, and harried by Danish
invasions and by internal disunion. Even the notion of the foreigner
was still dim and inchoate, and the reign of Canute, to cite no others,
had shown England that she had nothing to fear from a king of foreign
birth. The contest between Harold, who was half-Danish in blood, and
William, big as it was in national consequences, cannot be elevated to
the rank of a national struggle.
From the death of Edward the Confessor and the coronation of Harold,
in January, 1066, until the crossing of the Channel in September,
William was busy with preparations for the invasion of England. Such
an expedition transcended the obligation of military service which
could be demanded from his feudal vassals, and William was obliged to
make a strong appeal to the Norman love of adventure and feats of arms
and to promise wide lands and rich booty from his future conquests.
He also found it necessary to enlist knights from other parts of
France--Brittany, Flanders, Poitou, even adventurers from distant Spain
and Sicily. And then there was the question of transport, for Normandy
had no fleet and it was no small matter to create in six months the
seven hundred boats which William’s kinsmen and vassals obligated
themselves to provide. All were ready by the end of August at the mouth
of the Dives,--as the quaint Hôtel Guillaume-le-Conquérant reminds
the American visitor,--but mediæval sailors could not tack against
the wind, and six weeks were passed in waiting for a favoring breeze.
Finally it was decided to take advantage of a west wind as far as the
mouth of the Somme, and here at Saint-Valéry the fleet assembled for
the final crossing. Late in September the Normans landed on the beach
at Pevensey and marched to Hastings, where, October 15, they met the
troops of Harold, fresh from their great victory over the men of Norway
at Stamfordbridge.
Few battles of the Middle Ages were of importance equal to that of
Hastings, and few are better known. Besides the prose accounts of the
Latin chroniclers, we have the contemporary elegiacs of Guy of Amiens
and Baudri of Bourgueil, the spirited verse of the _Roman de Rou_ of
Master Wace, the most detailed narrative but written, unfortunately,
a century after the event, and the unique and vivid portrayal of the
Bayeux Tapestry. This remarkable monument, which is accessible to all
in a variety of editions, consists of a roll of cloth two hundred and
thirty feet long and twenty inches in breadth, embroidered in colors
with a series of seventy-nine scenes which narrate the history of
the Conquest from the departure of Harold on the ill-fated journey
which led him to William’s court down to the final discomfiture of
the English army on the field of Hastings. The episodes, which are
designated by brief titles, are well chosen and are executed with a
realism of detail which is of the greatest importance for the life
and culture of the age. Preserved in the cathedral and later in the
municipal Museum of Bayeux--save for a notable interval in 1804,
when Napoleon had it exhibited in Paris to arouse enthusiasm for a
new French conquest of England,--the tapestry appears from internal
evidence to have been originally executed as an ornament for this
cathedral by English workmen at the command of Bishop Odo, half-brother
of the Conqueror. There is no basis for the common belief that it
was the work of Queen Matilda or her ladies, but efforts to place it
one or even two centuries later have proved unavailing against the
evidence of armor and costume, and the general opinion of scholars now
regards it as belonging to the eleventh century and thus substantially
contemporary with the events which it depicts.
The modern literature of the battle is also commensurate with its
importance. The classic account is found in the third volume of
Freeman’s majestic _History of the Norman Conquest_, where the
story is told with a rare combination of minute detail and spirited
narrative which reminds us, it has been said, of a battle of the
_Iliad_ or a Norse saga. Splendid as this narrative is, its enthusiasm
often carries it beyond the evidence of the sources, and in several
fundamental points it can no longer be accepted as historically sound.
The theory of the palisade upon which Freeman’s conception of the
English tactics rested has been destroyed by the trenchant criticism
of that profound student of Anglo-Norman history, J. Horace Round,
and his whole treatment has been vigorously attacked from the point
of view of the scientific study of military history by Wilhelm Spatz
and his distinguished master, Hans Delbrück, of Berlin. Unfortunately
the Berlin critics are influenced too much by certain theories of
military organization; they do not call the English soldier of the
period a degenerate, but they consider him, and the Norman knight
as well, incapable of the disciplined and united action required
by all real strategy, incapable even of forming the shield-wall and
executing the feigned flight described by the contemporary chroniclers
of the battle. While it is true that mediæval fighting was far more
individualistic than that of ancient or modern armies and lacked also
the flexible conditions which lie at the basis of modern tactics,
there is the best of contemporary evidence for a certain amount of
strategical movement at Hastings. On one point, however, the modern
military critics have compelled us to modify our ideas of the battles
of earlier times, namely, with respect to the numbers engaged. Against
the constant tendency to magnify the size of the military forces, a
tendency accentuated in the Middle Ages by the complete recklessness
of chroniclers when dealing with large figures, modern criticism has
pointed out the limitations of battle-space, transportation, and
commissariat. The five millions with which Xerxes is said to have
invaded Greece are a physical impossibility, for Delbrück has shown
that, with this number moving under normal conditions, the rear-guard
could not have crossed the Tigris when the first Persians reached
Thermopylæ. Similarly the fifty or sixty thousand knights attributed
to William the Conqueror shrink to one-tenth the number when brought
to face with the official lists of English and Norman knights’ fees.
If William’s army did not exceed five or six thousand, that of Harold
could not have been much greater and may well have been less; though
William’s panegyrist places the number of English at 1,200,000, not
more than 12,000 could have stood, in the closest formation, on the
hill which they occupied at Hastings. Small skirmishes these, to those
who have followed the battles of the Marne, the Aisne, the Vistula, and
the San, yet none the less important in the world’s history!
In spite of all the controversy, the main lines of the battle seem
fairly clear. The troops of Harold occupied a well-defended hill eight
miles inland from Hastings on the London road, the professional guard
of housecarles in front, protected by the solid wall of their shields
and supported by the thegns and other fully armed troops, the levies
of the countryside behind or at the sides, armed with javelins, stone
clubs, and farmers’ weapons. They had few archers and no cavalry, but
the steep hill was well protected from the assaults of the Norman
horse and favored the firm defence which the English tactics dictated.
The Norman lines consisted first of archers, then of heavy-armed
foot-soldiers, and finally of the mailed horsemen, their centre grouped
about William and the standard which he had received from the Pope.
After a preliminary attack by the archers and foot, the knights came
forward, preceded by the minstrel Taillefer, “a jongleur whom a very
brave heart ennobled,” _qui mult bien chantout_, throwing his sword in
the air and catching it as he sang--
De Karlemaigne e de Rollant Of Roland and of Charlemagne,
E d’Oliver e des vassals Oliver and the vassals all
Qui morurent en Rencevals. Who fell in fight at Roncevals.
But the horses recoiled from the hill, pursued by many of the English,
and only the sight of William, his head bared of its helmet so as to
be seen by his men, rallied the knights again. The mass of the English
stood firm behind their shield-wall and their line could be broken
only by the ruse of a feigned flight, from which the Normans turned to
surround and cut to pieces their pursuers. Even then the housecarles
were unmoved, until the arrows of the high-shooting Norman bowmen
finally opened up the gaps in their ranks into which William’s horsemen
pressed against the battle-axes of the king’s guard. And then, as
darkness began to fall, Harold was mortally wounded by an arrow, the
guard was cut to pieces, and the remnant fled. “Here Harold was killed
and the English turned to flight” is the final heading in the Bayeux
Tapestry, while in the margin the spoilers strip the coats of mail from
the dead and drive off the horses of the slain knights.
* * * * *
“A single battle settled the fate of England.” There was still
grim work to be done--the humbling of Exeter, the harrying of
Northumberland, the subjection of the earls, but these were only local
episodes. There was no one but William who could effectively take
Harold’s place, and when on Christmas Day he had been crowned at
London, he could reduce opposition at his leisure. The chronicle of
these later years belongs to English rather than to Norman history.
The results of the Conquest, too, are of chief significance for the
conquered. For the Normans the immediate effect was a great opportunity
for expansion in every department of life. There was work for the
warrior in completing the subjugation of the land, for the organizer
and statesman in the new adjustments of central and local government,
for the prelate in bringing his new diocese into line with the practice
of the church on the Continent, for the monks to found new priories and
administer the new lands which their monasteries now received beyond
the Channel. The Norman townsman and the Norman merchant followed
hard upon the Norman armies, in the Norman colony in London, in the
traders of the ports, in the boroughs of the western border. In part,
of course, the change was simply the replacing of one set of persons by
another, putting a Norman archbishop in place of Stigand at Canterbury,
spreading over the map the Montgomeries and Percies, the Mowbrays and
the Mortimers and scores of other household names of English history;
but it was also a work of readjustment and reorganization which
required all the Norman gift for constructive work. A certain _élan_
passes through Norman life and reflects itself in Norman literature, as
the Normans become more conscious of the glory of their achievements
and the greatness of their new empire. England had become an appendage
to Normandy, and men did not yet see that the relation would soon be
reversed.
For England, the Norman Conquest determined permanently the orientation
of English politics and English culture. Geographically belonging,
with the Scandinavian countries, to the outlying lands of Europe, the
British Isles had been in serious danger of sharing their remoteness
from the general movements of European life and drifting into the back
waters of history. The union with Normandy turned England southward and
brought it at once into the full current of European affairs--political
entanglements, ecclesiastical connections, cultural influences. England
became a part of France and thus entered fully into the life of the
world to which France belonged. It received the speech of France, the
literature of France, and the art of France; its law became in large
measure Frankish, its institutions more completely feudal. Yet the
connection with France ran through Normandy, and the French influence
took on Norman forms. Most of all was this true in the field in which
the Norman excelled, that of government: English feudalism was Norman
feudalism, in which the barons were weak and the central power strong,
and it was the heavy hand of Norman kingship that turned the loose and
disintegrating Anglo-Saxon state into the English nation. England was
Europeanized only at the price of being Normanized.
From the point of view both of immediate achievement and of ultimate
results, the conquest of England was the crowning act of Norman
history. Something doubtless was due to good fortune,--to the absence
of an English fleet, to the favorable opportunity in French politics,
to the mistakes of the English. But the fundamental facts, without
which these would have meant nothing, were the strength and discipline
of Normandy and the personality of her leader. Diplomat, warrior,
leader of men, William was preëminently a statesman, and it was his
organizing genius which “turned the defeat of English arms into the
making of the English nation.” This talent for political organization
was, however, no isolated endowment of the Norman duke, but was shared
in large measure by the Norman barons, as is abundantly shown by the
history of Norman rule in Italy and Sicily. For William and for his
followers the conquest of England only gave a wider field for qualities
of state-building which had already shown themselves in Normandy.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
A detailed narrative of the relations between Normandy and
England in the eleventh century is given by E. A. Freeman in his
_History of the Norman Conquest_ (Oxford, 1870–79), but large
portions of this work need to be rewritten in the light of later
studies, especially those of Round. There is a brief biography of
William the Conqueror by Freeman in the series of “Twelve English
Statesmen” (London, 1888), and a fuller one by F. M. Stenton
in the “Heroes of the Nations” (1908). For the institutions of
Normandy see my articles on “Knight Service in Normandy in the
Eleventh Century,” in _English Historical Review_, XXII, pp.
636–49; “The Norman ‘Consuetudines et Iusticie’ of William the
Conqueror,” _ibid._ XXIII, pp. 502–08; and “Normandy under William
the Conqueror,” in _American Historical Review_, XIV, pp. 453–76
(1909); also L. Valin, _Le duc de Normandie et sa cour, 912–1204_
(Paris, 1910). For church and state, see H. Böhmer, _Kirche und
Staat in England und in der Normandie_ (Leipzig, 1899). The
dealings of the Norman dukes with their continental neighbors are
narrated by A. Fliche, _Le règne de Philippe I^{er} roi de France_
(Paris, 1912); L. Halphen, _Le comté d’Anjou au XI^{e} siècle_
(Paris, 1906); R. Latouche, _Histoire du comté du Maine pendant
le X^{e} et le XI^{e} siècle_ (Paris, 1910); F. Lot, _Fidèles ou
vassaux_ (Paris, 1904), ch. 6 (on the feudal relations of the
Norman dukes and the French kings). There is a good sketch of
France in the eleventh century by Luchaire in the _Histoire de
France_ of Lavisse, II, part 2; a fuller work on this period is
expected from Maurice Prou. For the literature of the battle of
Hastings, see Gross, _Sources and Literature_, nos. 707a, 2812,
2998–3000; the most important works are those of Round, Spatz, and
Delbrück, _Geschichte der Kriegskunst_, III, pp. 147–62 (1907).
The Bayeux Tapestry is most conveniently accessible in the small
edition of F. R. Fowke (reprinted, London, 1913); see also Gross,
no. 2139, and Ph. Lauer, in _Mélanges Charles Bémont_ (Paris,
1913), pp. 43–58. Freeman discusses the results of the Conquest
in his fifth volume; see also Gaston Paris, _L’esprit normand en
Angleterre_, in _La poésie du moyen âge_, second series (Paris,
1895), pp. 45–74.
IV
THE NORMAN EMPIRE
The lecture upon Normandy and England sought to place in their Norman
perspective the events leading to the Norman Conquest and to show how
that decisive triumph of Norman strength and daring was made possible
by the development of an exceptional ducal authority in Normandy and
Maine and by the personal greatness of William the Conqueror. We
now come to follow still further this process of expansion, to the
Scotch border, to Ireland, to the Pyrenees, until the empire of the
Plantagenet kings became the chief political fact in western Europe.
The Norman empire is the outstanding feature of the twelfth century, as
the conquest of England was of the eleventh.
* * * * *
This great imperial state is commonly known, not as the Norman, but as
the Angevin, empire, because its rulers, Henry II, Richard, and John,
were descended in the male line from the counts of Anjou. The phrase
is, however, a misnomer, since it leads one to suppose that the Angevin
counts were its creators, which is in no sense the case. The centre
of the empire was Normandy, its founders were the Norman dukes. The
marriage of the Princess Matilda to Count Geoffrey Plantagenet added
Anjou to Normandy rather than Normandy to Anjou, and it was as duke
of Normandy that their son Henry II began his political career. The
extension of his domains southward by marriage only gave Normandy the
central position in his realm, and it was the loss of Normandy under
John which led to the empire’s collapse.
Against the application of the term ‘empire’ to the dominion of Henry
II more cogent reasons may be urged. It rests, so far as I know, upon
no contemporary authority, and even if the phrase could be found by
some chance in a writer of the twelfth century, it would carry with it
no weight. Western Europe in the Middle Ages knew but one empire, the
Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation--from one point of view neither
holy nor Roman nor an empire, as Voltaire long afterward remarked,
yet, as revived by Charlemagne and Otto the Great, representing to
the mind of the Middle Ages the idea of universal monarchy which they
had inherited from ancient Rome. To the men of the twelfth century
the emperor was Frederick Barbarossa; he could not be Henry II. Nor
will the government of the Norman-Angevin ruler square with the modern
definition of an empire as “a state formed by the rule of one state
over other states.”[27] His various dominions, if we except Ireland,
were not dependencies of England, or Anjou, or Normandy. King in
England, duke in Normandy, count in Anjou and Maine, duke again in
Aquitaine, Henry ruled each of his dominions as its feudal lord--very
much as if the German Emperor to-day combined in himself the titles
of king of Prussia and of Bavaria, grand duke of Baden, duke of
Brunswick, prince of Waldeck, and so on throughout the members of
the German confederation. Such a government is not an empire in the
sense of the ancient Roman or the modern British empires, for it has
no dependencies. It is an empire only in the broader and looser sense
of the word, a great composite state, larger than a mere kingdom and
imperial in extent if not in organization.
That Henry’s realm was in extent imperial can easily be seen from
the map. It extended from Scotland to the frontier of Spain, as the
empire of his contemporary Frederick I extended from the Baltic and the
North Sea to central Italy. And if the kingdoms of Germany, Italy, and
Burgundy which made up Frederick’s empire covered in the aggregate more
territory, the actual authority of the ruler, whether in army, justice,
or finance, was decidedly less than in the Anglo-Norman state. Henry
had a stronger army, a larger revenue, a more centralized government.
Moreover, the Norman empire was less artificial than it seems to us at
first sight, accustomed as we are to the associations of the modern
map. There was, especially with mediæval methods of communication,
nothing anomalous in a state which straddled the English Channel:
Normandy was nearer England than was Ireland; it was quite as easy
to go from London to Rouen as from London to York. The geographical
bonds were also strong between Henry’s continental dominions, for the
roads of the twelfth century did not radiate from Paris, but followed
mainly the old Roman lines, and from Rouen there was direct and easy
connection with LeMans, Tours, Poitiers, and Bordeaux. In the matter
of race, too, we must beware of being misled by our modern ideas. The
English nation was at most only the vaguest sort of a conception, the
French nation did not exist till the fifteenth century, and personal
loyalty to the lord of many different lands was a natural expression
of the conditions of the age. It is contrary to our prejudices that a
single state should be formed out of the hard-headed Norman, the Celtic
fisherman of the Breton coast,--the ‘Pêcheur d’Islande’ of a later
day,--the Angevin, Tourangeau, Poitevin, the troubadour of Aquitaine,
and the Gascon of the far south, with his alien blood and non-Aryan
language, already a well-marked type whose swaggering gasconades
foreshadow the d’Artagnan of the _Three Musketeers_ and the ‘cadets de
Gascogne’ of _Cyrano de Bergerac_. But it was little harder to rule
these diverse lands from London or Rouen than from Paris; it was for
the time being as easy to make them part of a Norman empire as of a
French kingdom. Over the various languages and dialects ran the Latin
of law and government and the French of the court and of affairs; while
in political matters these countries were, as we shall see, quite
capable of united action.
Let us call to mind how the empire of Henry II was formed. At the
death of the Conqueror in 1087 the lands which he had brought together
and ruled with such good peace were divided between his two eldest
sons, Robert receiving Normandy and William the Red, England. Save for
William’s regency over Normandy during his brother’s absence on the
Crusade, the two countries remained separate during his reign, and were
united once more only in 1106 when William’s successor, his younger
brother Henry I, after defeating and deposing Robert at Tinchebrai,
ruled as duke of Normandy and king of England. This was the inheritance
which, after the death of Prince William in the White Ship, Henry
sought to hand down to his daughter Matilda, but which passed for the
most part to his nephew Stephen of Blois. Stephen, however, never
gained a firm hold in England and soon lost Normandy to Matilda’s
husband, Count Geoffrey of Anjou, by whom it was conquered and ruled
in the name of his son Henry, later Henry II. Crowned duke of Normandy
in 1150, Henry succeeded his father as count of Anjou in the following
year, and at Stephen’s death in 1154 became king of England. Meanwhile,
in 1152, he had contracted a marriage of the greatest political
importance with Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine, whose union with the
French king Louis VII had just been annulled by the Pope; an alliance
which made him master of Poitou, Aquitaine, and Gascony and therewith
of two-thirds of France. Apart from certain adjustments in central
France, the only addition to these territories made during Henry’s
reign was the conquest of eastern Ireland in the years following 1169.
Into these Irish campaigns and their consequences for the whole later
history of the island we cannot attempt to go. Let me only point out
that the leading spirits were Norman, except so far as they were Irish
exiles, and that the names which now make their appearance in Irish
annals are Norman names--the Lacys and the Clares, the Fitzgeralds and
the de Courcys, as Irish before long as the Irish themselves.
Substantially, then, the empire of Henry II remained in extent as
he found it at his accession to the English throne at the age of
twenty-one; it was not created by him but inherited or annexed by
marriage. Accordingly it is not as a conqueror but as a ruler that
he can lay claim to greatness. But although Henry attempted little
in the way of acquiring new territory, he did much to consolidate
his possessions and to extend his European power and influence. His
daughters were married to the greatest princes of their time, Henry
the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria, King Alphonso VIII of Castile,
King William II of Sicily. He made an alliance with the ruler of
Provence and planned a marriage with the house of Savoy that would have
given him control of the passes into Italy. He took his part in the
struggle of Pope and anti-Pope, of Pope and Emperor; he corresponded
with the emperor of Constantinople, refused the crown of the kingdom of
Jerusalem, and died on the eve of his departure on a crusade. No one
could lay claim to greater influence upon the international affairs of
his time.
Occupying this international position, Henry must not be viewed, as
he generally is, merely as an English king. He was born and educated
on the Continent, began to reign on the Continent, and spent a large
part of his life in his continental dominions. He ruled more territory
outside of England than in, and his continental lands had at least
as large a place as England in his policy. It is perhaps too much to
say, in modern phrase, that he ‘thought imperially,’ but he certainly
did not think nationally; and when his latest biographer speaks of
Henry’s continental campaigns as “foreign affairs,”[28] he is thinking
insularly, for Normandy, Anjou, Gascony even, were no more foreign
than England itself. Henry is not a national figure, either English or
French; he is international, if not cosmopolitan. Only from the point
of view of later times can we associate him peculiarly with English
history, when after the collapse of the Norman empire under his sons,
the permanent influence of his work continued to be felt most fully in
England.
Both as a man and as a ruler, the figure of Henry II has come down to
us distorted by the loves and hates of an age of the most violent and
bitter controversy. Brilliant though scarcely heroic to his friends,
to his enemies he was a veritable demon of tyranny and crime, whose
lurid end pointed many a moral respecting the sins of princes and
the vengeance of the Most High. Eminently a strong man, he was not
regarded as in any sense superhuman, but rather as an intensely human
figure, tempted in all points like as other men and yielding where
they yielded. Heavy, bull-necked, sensual, with a square jaw, freckled
face, reddish hair, and fiery eyes that blazed in sudden paroxysms
of anger, he must, in Bishop Stubbs’s phrase, “have looked generally
like a rough, passionate, uneasy man.”[29] The dominant impression
is one of exhaustless energy accompanied by a physical restlessness
which kept him whispering and scribbling during mass, hunting and
hawking from morning to night, and riding constantly from place to
place throughout his vast dominions with a rapidity that always took
his enemies by surprise. On one occasion he covered one hundred and
seventy miles in two days. Well-educated for a prince of his time and
able to hold his own in ready converse with the clerks of his court,
his tastes were neither speculative nor romantic, but were early
turned toward practical life. He was primarily “an able, plausible,
astute, cautious, unprincipled man of business,”[30] fond of work
and delighting in detail, with a distinct gift for organization and
a mastery of diplomacy, wise in the selection of his subordinates,
skilful in evasion, but quick and sure in action. Strong, clear-headed,
and tenacious, Henry represents the type of the man of large affairs,
and in another age might have amassed a large private fortune as a
successful business man. In the twelfth century the chief opportunity
for talent of this sort was in public life, where the king’s household
was also the government of the state, the strengthening of royal
authority was the surest means of attaining national unity and
security, and the interest of the king coincided with the interest of
the state. To the present day, with its cry for business men in public
office, this seems natural enough; but we must remember that feudalism
meant exactly the opposite of business efficiency, and that the problem
of creating an effective government in the midst of a feudal society
turned largely on the maintenance of a businesslike administration of
justice, finance, and the army. By his success in these fields Henry
went a long way toward creating a modern state, and did, as a matter of
fact, establish the most highly organized and effective government of
its time in western Europe.
Our conceptions of the nature of Henry II’s public work have been in
certain respects modified as the result of modern research. It has
become clear, in the first place, that he was an administrator rather
than a legislator, and that such of his legislation as has reached us
belongs in the category of instructions to his officers rather than
in that of general enactments. These measures lack the permanence of
statutes; they are supplemented, modified, withdrawn, in accordance
with the will of a sovereign whose restless temper showed itself in a
constant series of legal and administrative experiments. Many of his
changes seem to have been effected through oral command rather than
written instructions. In the second place, Henry’s originality has
been somewhat diminished by a more careful study of the work of his
predecessors, notably of Henry I, in whose reign it is now possible to
trace at work some of the elements that were once supposed to have been
innovations of his grandson. As a whole, however, the work of Henry
II stands the test of analysis and gives him an eminent place in the
number of mediæval statesmen.
* * * * *
Precocious in many ways as was the political organization of Henry’s
dominions, it was conditioned by the circumstances of its time, and
we must be careful to conceive it in terms of the twelfth century and
not of the fifteenth or the twentieth. The Norman sovereign had at his
disposal none of the legal or bureaucratic traditions which were still
maintained at Constantinople and were not without their influence upon
the Norman kingdom of Sicily. Nor was the time ripe for the creation
out of hand of a strong central government for his various territories,
such as became possible in the Burgundian state of the fifteenth
century and in the Austrian state which was modelled upon it. Henry was
in the midst of a feudal society and had to make the best of it. He had
to reckon with the particularistic traditions of his several dominions
as well as with the feudal opposition to strong government, and western
Europe was still a long way from the economic conditions which lie at
the basis of modern bureaucracies.
When we speak of the Anglo-Norman or the Angevin empire, we must
accordingly dismiss from our minds at the outset any notion of a
government with a capital, a central treasury and judicature, and a
common assembly. A fixed central treasury existed only in the most
advanced of the individual states, and it was many years before the
courts established themselves permanently at Westminster and Rouen.
Government was still something personal, centring in the person of the
sovereign, and the ministers of the state were still his household
servants. The king had no fixed residence, and as he moved from place
to place, his household and its officers moved with him. Indeed kings
were just beginning to learn that it was safer to leave their treasure
in some strong castle than to carry it about in their wanderings; it
was not till 1194 that the capture of his baggage train by Richard the
Lion-Hearted taught the French king Philip Augustus to leave his money
and his title-deeds at Paris when he went on a military expedition.
We must not be surprised to find that the principal common element in
Henry’s empire was Henry himself, supplemented by his most immediate
household officers, and that many of these officers, such as the
seneschals and the justiciars, were limited in their functions to
England or Normandy or Anjou, and usually remained in their particular
country to look after affairs in the king’s absence. There was,
however, one notable exception, the chancellor, or royal secretary.
Regularly an ecclesiastic, so that there was no chance of his turning
the office into an hereditary fief, the nature of the chancellor’s
duties attached him continuously to the person of the sovereign and
made him the natural companion of the royal journeys. He was far,
however, from being a mere private secretary or amanuensis, but stood
at the head of a regular secretarial bureau, which had its clerks and
chaplains and its well-organized system of looking after the king’s
business. The study of the history of institutions goes to show that,
on the whole, there is no better test of the strength or weakness of a
mediæval government than its chancery. If it had no chancery, as was
the case under the early Norman dukes, or if its methods, as seen in
its formal acts, were irregular and unbusinesslike, as under Robert
Curthose, there was sure to be a lack of organization and continuity
in its general conduct of affairs. If, on the other hand, the chancery
was well organized, its rules and practices regularly observed, its
documents clear and sharp and to the point, this meant normally that an
efficient government stood behind it.
Now, judged by the most exacting standards, the chancery of Henry II
had reached a high degree of perfection. It has quite recently been
the subject of an elaborate study by the most eminent mediævalist of
our time, the late Léopold Delisle, who cannot restrain his admiration
for its regularity, its accuracy and finish, and the extraordinary
range and rapidity of its work. The documents issued in the name of
Henry II during his long reign of thirty-five years, says Delisle,[31]
“both for his English and his continental possessions, are all
drawn up on the same plan in identical formulæ and expressed with
irreproachable precision in a simple, clear, and correct style, which
is also remarkably uniform save for a small number of pieces which
show the hand of others than the royal officers.” If the judgment of
this master required support, I should be glad to confirm it from the
personal examination of some hundreds of Henry’s charters and writs.
Such uniformity, it should be observed, is evidence not only of the
extent and technical attainments of the chancery but of substantially
similar administrative conditions throughout the various dominions to
which these documents are addressed: officers, functions, legal and
administrative procedure are everywhere very much alike. Moreover,
a study of these charters reveals another fact of fundamental
importance. Even more significant than uniformity of procedure in a
chancery is the type of document issued, for since the strength of
government lies not in legislation but in administration, a sure index
of a state’s efficiency will be found in the extent and character of
its administrative correspondence. This test places the Norman empire
far in advance of any of its contemporaries. Every payment from the
treasury, every allowance of an account, every summons to the army,
every executive command or prohibition, was made by formal royal
writ--_per breve regis_, as we read page after page in the account
rolls. Of the many thousands of such writs issued in Henry’s reign,
exceedingly few have come down to us, but no one can read these, terse,
direct, trained down to bone and muscle, without realizing the keen
minds and the clear-cut administrative methods which they represent.
Take an example:[32]
H. Dei gratia rex Anglorum et dux Normannorum et Aquitanorum et
comes Andegavorum R. thesaurario et Willelmo Malduit et Warino
filio Giroldi camerariis suis salutem.
Liberate de thesauro meo XXV marcas fratribus Cartusie de illis L
marcis quas do eis annuatim per cartam meam.
Teste Willelmo de Sancte Marie Ecclesia. Apud Westmoster.
The purpose of these writs might, of course, vary--seize A of this
land; do right to B for that tenement; secure C in his possession;
bring your knights to such a place at such a time; summon twelve men to
decide D’s right;--but each has its appropriate form, which is always
crisp and exact. All speak the language of a strong, businesslike
administration which expected as a matter of course prompt and implicit
obedience throughout its broad dominions.
If such a system be given enough time, it will inevitably exert
a strong and persistent influence in favor of centralization and
uniformity, and it would be interesting to know just what was
accomplished in these directions during the half century of the Norman
empire’s existence. The parting advice which Henry had received
from his father Geoffrey was to avoid the transfer of customs and
institutions from one part of his realm to another, and the wisdom
of the warning was obvious under feudal conditions, if not in all
imperial governments. But there is a difference between the field of
local custom and the institutions of administration, and while even
in matters of feudal law there is some evidence of a generalization
of certain reforms in the rules of succession, in the conduct of
government it was impossible to keep the different parts of the
empire in water-tight compartments so long as there was a common
administration and frequent interchange of officials between different
regions. We must remember that Henry was a constant experimenter, and
that if a thing worked well in one place it was likely to be tried in
another. Thus the Assize of Arms and the ordinance for the crusading
tithe were first promulgated for his continental dominions, while the
great English inquest of knights’ fees in 1166 preceded by six years
the parallel Norman measure. The great struggle with Becket over the
church courts seems to have had a Norman prologue. The chronological
order in any given case might well be a matter of chance; but in
administrative matters the influence is likely to have travelled from
the older and better organized to the newer and more loosely knit
dominions, from England, Normandy, and Anjou on the one hand to Poitou,
Aquitaine, and Gascony on the other.
* * * * *
Of Henry’s hereditary territories, Anjou seems the least important from
the point of view of constitutional influence. Much smaller in area
than either Normandy or England, it was a compact and comparatively
centralized state long before Henry’s accession, but the opportunity
for immediate action on the count’s part simplified its government to
a point where its experience was of no great value under Anglo-Norman
conditions. Certainly no Angevin influence is traceable in the field
of finance, and none seems probable in the administration of justice.
In the case of Normandy and England the resemblance of institutions is
closest, and a host of interesting problems present themselves which
carry us back to the effects of the Norman Conquest and even further.
It is, of course, one of the fundamental problems of English history
how far the government of England was Normanized in the century
following the Conquest. To a French scholar like Boutmy everything
begins anew in 1066, when “the line which the whole history of
political institutions has subsequently followed was traced and
defined.”[33] To Freeman, on the other hand, the changes then
introduced were temporary and not fundamental. He is never tired of
repeating that the old English are the real English; progress comes
by going back to the principles of the Anglo-Saxon period and casting
aside innovations which have crept in in modern and evil times; “we
have advanced by falling back on a more ancient state of things, we
have reformed by calling to life again the institutions of earlier and
ruder times, by setting ourselves free from the slavish subtleties of
Norman lawyers, by casting aside as an accursed thing the innovations
of Tudor tyranny and Stewart usurpation.”[34] The trend of present
scholarly opinion lies between these extremes. It refuses to throw away
the Anglo-Saxon period, whose institutions we are just beginning to
read aright; but it rejects its idealization at Freeman’s hands, who,
it has been said, saw all things “through a mist of moots and witans”
and not as they really were, and it finds more truth in Carlyle’s
remark that the pot-bellied equanimity of the Anglo-Saxon needed the
drilling and discipline of a century of Norman tyranny.[35]
Whether he was needed much or little, the Norman drill-master came
and did his work, and when he had finished the two countries were in
many respects alike. He left his mark on the English language and on
English literature, which were submerged for three centuries under
the French of the court, the castle, and the town, and in the process
were permanently modified into a mixed speech. He left his mark on
architecture in the great cathedrals of the Norman bishops and the
massive castles with their Norman keeps. He made England a feudal
society, however far it may have gone in that direction before, and its
law, from that day to this, a feudal law. And he remade the central
government under the strong hand of a masterful dynasty which compelled
its subjects to will what the king willed. Whatever permanence we may
assign to Anglo-Saxon local institutions,--and we cannot help granting
them this in considerable measure,--it is not now held that there was
any notable Anglo-Saxon influence upon the central administration. At
best England before the Conquest was a loose aggregation of tribal
commonwealths divided by local feeling and by the jealousies of the
great earls, and its kingship did not grow stronger with process of
time. The national assembly of wise men, whose persistence Freeman
labored in vain to prove, became the feudal council of the Norman
barons, and this council, the _curia regis_, and the royal household
which was its permanent nucleus, became the starting-point of a new
constitutional development which produced the House of Lords, the
courts of law, and the great departments of the central administration.
* * * * *
Yet in a vigorous state central and local are never wholly separable,
and it is where they touch that recent study has been able to show some
continuity of development between the two periods, namely in the fiscal
system which culminated in the exchequer of the English kings. Of all
the institutions of the Anglo-Norman state, none is more important
and none more characteristic than the exchequer, illustrating as it
does at the same time the comparative wealth of the sovereigns and the
efficient conduct of their government. Nowhere in western Europe did a
king receive so large a revenue as here; nowhere was it collected and
administered in so regular and businesslike a fashion; nowhere do the
accounts afford so complete a view of “the whole framework of society.”
The main features of this system are simple and striking.
In every administrative district of Normandy and England the king
had an agent--in England the sheriff, in Normandy the _vicomte_ or
_bailli_--to collect his revenues, which consisted chiefly of the
income from lands and forests, the fees and fines in the royal courts,
the proceeds of the various feudal incidents, and the various payments
which there were from time to time levied under the name of Danegeld,
scutage, aid, or gift. Twice a year, at Easter and Michaelmas, these
agents were required to come to the treasury and render their accounts
to the king’s officers. At Easter the sheriff was expected to pay in
half of his receipts, receiving therefor down to 1826 a receipt in the
form of a notched stick or tally, split down the middle so that there
was exact agreement between the portion retained at the exchequer
and the portion carried off by the sheriff to be produced when the
accounts of the year were settled at Michaelmas. The great session
of the exchequer at Michaelmas was a very important occasion and is
described for us in detail in a most interesting contemporary treatise,
the _Dialogue on the Exchequer_, written by Richard the King’s
Treasurer, in 1178–79. There the sheriff met the great officials of the
king’s household who were also the great officers of the Anglo-Norman
state--the justiciar, chancellor, constable, treasurer, chamberlains,
and marshal, reënforced by clerks, tally-cutters, calculators, and
other assistants. The place and the institution took their names from
a chequered table or chess-board--the Latin name _scaccarium_ means a
chess-board--in size and shape not unlike a billiard table, covered
with cloth which was ruled off into columns for pence, shillings,
pounds, hundreds and thousands of pounds. On one side were set forth
in this graphic manner the sums which the sheriff was required to
pay, on the other he and his clerk tried to offset these with tallies,
receipts, warrants, and counters representing actual cash. Played with
skill and care on each side, for the stakes were high, this great match
was likened to a game of chess between the sheriff and the king’s
officers. Its results were recorded each year, district by district and
item by item, on a great roll, called the pipe roll from the pipes,
or skins of parchment sewed end to end, of which it was made up. For
England we have an unbroken series of these rolls from the second year
of Henry II, as well as an odd roll of Henry I, constituting a record
of finance and government quite unique in contemporary Europe. The
series was doubtless as complete for Normandy, but there survive from
Henry’s reign only the roll of 1180 and fragments of that of 1184. For
the other Plantagenet lands nothing remains.
This remarkable fiscal system comprised accordingly a regular method
of collecting revenue, a central treasury and board of account, and
a distinctive and careful mode of auditing the accounts. There was
nothing like it north of Sicily, and contemporaries admired it both for
its administrative efficiency and for the wealth and resources which it
implied. Although something of the sort seems to have existed in all
the territories of the Plantagenet empire and the different bodies seem
to have maintained a certain amount of coöperation, all our records
come from England and Normandy, and there can be no question that it
is distinctively an Anglo-Norman institution. Whether, however, it is
English or Norman in origin and how it came into existence, are still
in many respects obscure questions. The exchequer is not an innovation
of Henry II, for the surviving roll of Henry I and certain incidental
evidence show that it existed on both sides of the Channel in the reign
of his grandfather. In the time of the author of the _Dialogue_ there
was a tradition that it had been imported from Normandy by William
the Conqueror, but this must be discounted by the fact that certain
elements of the system can be traced in Anglo-Saxon England. The truth
is that the exchequer is a complicated institution, some parts of which
may be quite ancient and the results of parallel development on both
sides of the Channel; at least the problem of priority has reached
no certain solution. Its most characteristic feature, however, its
peculiar method of reckoning, does not seem either of Norman or English
origin, but derived from the abacus of the ancient Romans, as used and
taught in the continental schools of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
One who tries to perform with Roman numerals a simple problem
in addition or subtraction--or better yet, in multiplication or
division--will have no difficulty in understanding why people
unacquainted with the Arabic system of notation have had recourse
to a counting-machine or abacus. The difficulty, of course, lies
not so much in the clumsy form of the individual Roman numbers as in
the absence of the zero and the reckoning by position which it makes
possible. This defect the abacus supplied. By means of a sanded board
or a cloth-covered table or a string of counters it provided a row
of columns each of which represented a decimal group--units, tens,
hundreds, etc.--by which numerical operations could be rapidly and
accurately performed. Employed by the ancient Romans, as by the modern
Chinese, the arithmetic of the abacus became a regular subject of
instruction in the schools of the Middle Ages, whence its reckoning was
introduced into the operations of the Anglo-Norman treasury. The most
recent student of the subject, Reginald Lane Poole, connects the change
with the Englishmen who studied at the cathedral school of Laon early
in the twelfth century. To me it seems somewhat earlier, brought by
abacists who came to England in the eleventh century from the schools
of Lorraine.[36] In either case its introduction was much more than a
change of bookkeeping. Convenient as such reckoning was in general, it
was the only possible method for men who could neither read nor write,
like the Anglo-Norman sheriffs and many of the royal officers, and
its use made it possible to carry on the fiscal business of the state
on a large scale, in an open and public fashion, with full justice
to all parties, and with accuracy, certainty, and dispatch. It was a
businesslike system for busy and businesslike men.
* * * * *
In the history of judicial administration the personal initiative of
Henry II is more evident than in finance. The king had an especial
fondness for legal questions and often participated in their decision,
yet his influence was exerted particularly to develop a system of
courts and judges which could work in his absence and without his
intervention. Although the institution is found previously both in
England and Normandy, it is in Henry’s reign that the system of
itinerant justices is fully organized with regular circuits and a
rapidly extending jurisdiction which broke down local privileges and
exemptions and by its decisions created the common law. Hitherto
chiefly a feudal assembly concerned with the causes of the king and
his barons, after Henry’s time the king’s court is a permanent body
of professional judges and a tribunal for the whole realm. It is
no accident that his reign produced in the treatise of Glanvill on
_The Laws and Customs of England_ the first of the great series of
textbooks which are the landmarks of English legal development. Henry’s
reign is also an important period in the growth of Norman law, the
earliest formulation of which reaches us ten years after his death in
the _Très Ancien Coutumier de Normandie_, and the reduction of local
custom to writing is a process which went on in his other continental
possessions; yet, as in finance, England and Normandy plainly took
the lead in legal literature and in legal development. Indeed, the
distinction between justice and finance is less sharp than we might at
first suppose, for the growth of jurisdiction meant increased profit
from fees and fines, and heavy payments were necessary to secure the
intervention of the royal judges. In this sense Henry has often been
called, and rightly, a seller of justice, but his latest biographer
has pointed out that “if the commodity was expensive it was at least
the best of its kind, and there is a profound gulf between the selling
of justice and of injustice. A bribe might be required to set the
machine of the law in motion, but it would be unavailing to divert its
course when once started.”[37] The wheels of government are turned by
self-interest as well as by unselfish statesmanship.
Of the many judicial reforms of Henry’s reign none is more significant
than the measures which he took for extending the use of the jury as
a method of trial in the royal courts, and none illustrates better
the relation of Norman to English institutions. Characteristic as the
jury is in the history of English government and of English law, as at
once the palladium of personal liberty and the basis of representative
institutions in Parliament, it is a striking fact that originally
it was “not popular but royal,” not English but Norman, or rather
Frankish through the intermediary of Normandy.[38] Although it has a
history which can be traced for more than a thousand years, the jury
does not definitely make its appearance in England until after the
Norman Conquest, and the decisive steps in its further development were
taken during the union of England and Normandy and probably as a result
of Norman experience. It is now the general opinion of scholars that
the modern jury is an outgrowth of the sworn inquests of neighbors held
by command of the Norman and Angevin kings, and that the procedure in
these inquests is in all essential respects the same as that employed
by the Frankish rulers three centuries before. It is also generally
agreed that while such inquests appear in England immediately after the
Norman Conquest,--the returns of the Domesday survey are a striking
example,--their employment in lawsuits remains exceptional until the
time of Henry II, when they become in certain cases a matter of right
and a part of the settled law of the land. What had been heretofore
a special privilege of the king and of those to whom he granted it,
became under Henry a right of his subjects and a part of the regular
system of justice. Accomplished doubtless gradually, first for one
class of cases and then for another, this extension of the king’s
prerogative procedure to his subjects seems to have been formulated in
a definite royal act or series of acts, probably by royal ordinances
or assizes, whence the procedure is often called the assize. In
England the earliest of these assizes known to us appears in 1164
in the Constitutions of Clarendon, followed shortly by applications
of this mode of trial to other kinds of cases. In Normandy repeated
references to similar assizes occur some years earlier, between 1156
and 1159, so that as far as present evidence goes, the priority of
Normandy in this respect is clear. Moreover, Normandy offers two
pieces of evidence that are still earlier. In the oldest cartulary of
Bayeux cathedral, called the _Black Book_ and still preserved high up
in one of its ancient towers, are two writs of the duke ordering his
justices to have determined by sworn inquest, in accordance with the
duke’s assize, the facts in dispute between the bishop of Bayeux and
certain of his tenants. The ducal initial was left blank when these
writs were copied into the cartulary, in order that it might later be
inserted in colors by an illuminator who never came; and those who
first studied these documents drew the hasty conclusion that they were
issued by Henry as duke of Normandy before he became king. It was not,
however, usual for the mediæval scribe to leave the rubricator entirely
without guidance when he came to insert his initials, but to mark the
proper letter lightly in the place itself or on the margin, and an
attentive examination of the well-thumbed margins of the Bayeux _Black
Book_ shows that this was no exception to the rule, and that in both
the cases in question the initial G had been carefully indicated. G
can, of course, stand only for Henry’s father Geoffrey, so that some
general use of the assize as a method of trial in the ducal courts can
be proved for his reign. As no such documents have reached us for his
predecessors, it would be tempting to assume the influence of Angevin
precedents; but this runs counter to what we know of the judicial
institutions of Anjou in this period, as well as of the policy of
Geoffrey in Normandy, which was to follow in all respects the system of
Henry I. Although the first general use of the sworn inquest as a mode
of trial thus antedates Henry II, it is still a Norman institution.
* * * * *
It would carry us too far to discuss the many problems connected with
the use of the jury in Henry’s reign or to follow the many changes
still needed to convert the sworn inquest into the modern jury. It is
sufficient for our present purpose to mark its Norman character, first
as being carried to England by the Normans in its older form, and then
as being developed into its newer form on Norman soil. It should,
however, be remembered that its later history belongs to England
rather than to Normandy. With the rise of new forms of procedure
in the thirteenth century, the jury on the Continent declines and
finally disappears; “but for the conquest of England,” says Maitland,
“it would have perished and long ago have become a matter for the
antiquary.”[39] In England, however, it was early brought into
relations with the local courts of the hundred and the county, where
it struck root and developed into a popular method of trial which was
later to become a defence against the king’s officers who had first
introduced it. A bulwark of individual liberty, the jury also holds an
important place in the establishment of representative government, for
it was through representative juries that the voice of the countryside
first asserted itself in the local courts, for the assessment of taxes
as well as for the decision of cases, and it was in the negotiations of
royal officers with the local juries that we can trace the beginnings
of the House of Commons. It is no accident that the first employment
of local juries for the assessment of military and fiscal obligations
belongs to the later years of Henry II.
It may seem a far cry from the Frankish inquests of the ninth century
to the juries and the representative assemblies of the twentieth, but
the development is continuous, and it leads through Normandy. In this
sense the English-speaking countries are all heirs of the early Normans
and of the Norman kings who, all unconsciously, provided for the
extension and the perpetuation of the Norman methods of trial. At such
points Norman history merges in that of England, the British Empire,
and the United States.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The chief events in the history of the Norman empire are treated in
the general works of Miss K. L. Norgate, _England under the Angevin
Kings_ (London, 1887); Sir J. H. Ramsay, _The Angevin Empire_
(London, 1903); G. B. Adams, _History of England from the Norman
Conquest to the Death of John_ (London, 1905); H. W. C. Davis,
_England under the Normans and Angevins_ (London, 1905). There is a
brief biography of _Henry the Second_ by Mrs. J. R. Green (London,
1888; reprinted, 1903); and a more recent one by L. F. Salzmann
(Boston, etc., 1914). A notable characterization of Henry and his
work is given by William Stubbs, in the introduction to his edition
of _Benedict of Peterborough_, II (London, 1867), reprinted in
his _Historical Introductions_ (London, 1902), pp. 89–172. For
the continental aspects of the reign see F. M. Powicke, _The Loss
of Normandy_ (Manchester, 1913); and his articles in the _English
Historical Review_, XXI, XXII (1906–07). Cf. A. Cartellieri, _Die
Machtstellung Heinrichs II. von England_, in _Neue Heidelberger
Jahrbücher_, VIII, pp. 269–83 (1898); F. Hardegen, _Imperialpolitik
König Heinrichs II. von England_ (Heidelberg, 1905). The fullest
account of Irish affairs is G. H. Orpen, _Ireland under the
Normans_ (Oxford, 1911).
* * * * *
The best general accounts of constitutional and legal matters are
those of Stubbs, _Constitutional History of England_, I (last
edition, Oxford, 1903), corrected by various special studies of
J. H. Round, to be found chiefly in his _Feudal England_ (London,
1895; reprinted, 1909) and _Commune of London_ (Westminster, 1899);
and by Pollock and Maitland, _History of English Law_ (second
edition, London, 1898). The results of recent investigation are
incorporated in the studies and notes appended to the French
translation of Stubbs by Petit-Dutaillis (Paris, 1907); this
supplementary material is translated into English by W. E. Rhodes
(Manchester, 1911). There are admirable studies of the chancery
in L. Delisle. _Recueil des actes de Henri II concernant les
provinces françaises et les affaires de France_, introduction
(Paris, 1909); and of the exchequer in R. L. Poole, _The Exchequer
in the Twelfth Century_ (Oxford, 1912). See also Hubert Hall,
_Court Life under the Plantagenets_ (London, 1890; reprinted,
1902). For the more distinctively Norman side of the government
see Haskins, “The Government of Normandy under Henry II,” in
_American Historical Review_, XX, pp. 24–42, 277–91 (1914–15);
and earlier papers on “The Early Norman Jury,” _ibid._, VIII, pp.
613–40 (1903); “The Administration of Normandy under Henry I,” in
_English Historical Review_, XXIV, pp. 209–31 (1909); “Normandy
under Geoffrey Plantagenet,” _ibid._, XXVII, pp. 417–44 (1912);
Delisle, _Des revenus publics en Normandie au XII^e siècle_, in
_Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes_, X-XIII (1848–52); Valin,
_Le duc de Normandie et sa cour_, supplemented by R. de Fréville,
“Étude sur l’organisation judiciaire en Normandie aux XII^e et
XIII^e siècles,” in _Nouvelle Revue historique de droit_, 1912, pp.
681–736. The best general account of Norman law is still that of H.
Brunner, _Die Entstehung der Schwurgerichte_ (Berlin, 1872).
V
NORMANDY AND FRANCE
In July, 1189, Henry II lay dying in his castle at Chinon. Abandoned
and attacked by his sons, driven from LeMans and Tours by Philip of
France and forced to a humiliating peace, sick in body and broken in
spirit, the aged king made his way to the old stronghold of the Angevin
counts in the valley of the Vienne. Cursing the faithless Richard as he
gave him the enforced kiss of peace at Colombières, he had fixed his
hopes on his youngest son John till the schedule was brought him of
those who had thrown off their allegiance. “Sire,” said the clerk who
read the document to the fever-tossed king, “may Christ help me, the
first here written is Count John, your son.” “What,” cried the king,
starting up from his bed, “John, my very heart, my best beloved, for
whose advancement I have brought upon me all this misery? Now let all
things go as they will; I care no more for myself nor for anything in
this world.” Two days later he died, cursing his sons, cursing the day
he had been born, repeating constantly, “Shame on a conquered king.”
Deserted by all save his illegitimate son Geoffrey, who received his
father’s blessing and his signet ring marked with the leopard of
England, Henry was plundered by his attendants of gold and furnishings
and apparel, just as William the Conqueror had been despoiled in the
hour of his death at Rouen, till some one in pity threw over the royal
corpse the short cloak, or ‘curt mantle,’ by which men called him. Two
days later he was laid away quietly in the nunnery of Fontevrault,
where a later age was to rob his tomb of all save the noble recumbent
figure by which it is still marked. Thus passed away the greatest ruler
of his age; thus began the collapse of the Norman empire.
* * * * *
Strikingly dramatic both in its public and private aspects, the end of
Henry II offers material fit for a Greek tragedy, and we may, if we
choose, imagine an Æschylus or a Sophocles painting the rapidity of
his rise, the _hybris_ of his splendor, and the crushing _nemesis_ of
his fall. Even the Promethean touch is not lacking in the withdrawal
of Henry’s unconquered soul from God, as he looked back in flight at
the burning city of Le Mans: “My God, since to crown my confusion
and increase my disgrace, thou hast taken from me so vilely the town
which on earth I have loved best, where I was born and bred, and
where my father lies buried and the body of St. Julian too, I will
have my revenge on thee also; I will of a surety withdraw from thee
that thing that thou lovest best in me.”[40] Henry’s life needs no
blasphemous closing in order to furnish inexhaustible material for
moralizing, and in a period like the Middle Ages, given over as none
other to moral lessons, it served to point many a tale of the crimes
and fate of evil-doers. That vain and entertaining Welshman, Gerald de
Barri, or Giraldus Cambrensis, in whom a recent writer thinks he has
discovered the proto-journalist,[41] found in Henry’s career the basis
for a considerable book devoted to the _Instruction of Princes_. But
whereas the ways of the gods are dark and unsearchable to the Greek
tragedians, they have no mystery for Gerald. Henry’s punishment was due
to his violations of religion, first in his marriage with Eleanor, the
divorced wife of his feudal lord Louis VII, second in his quarrel with
Archbishop Becket and the oppression of the church which followed, and
third and worst of all, in his failure to take part in a crusade. The
hammer of the church, Henry was born for destruction. The modern world
is more cautious in the matter of explaining the inexplicable, and more
prone to seek human causes when they can be found, yet the collapse of
the Plantagenet empire is not the hardest of the historian’s problems.
Something he will ascribe to larger forces of development, something he
can hardly fail to attribute to the character of Henry’s sons and to
his policy in dealing with them.
Henry II is not the only case in history of a king who could rule
every house but his own, of a father who was shrewd and stern in
his dealings with the world but swayed by unrequited affection and
ill-timed weakness in dealing with his children. Knowing other men,
he did not know his sons, and his grave errors in dealing with them
were errors of public policy, since they concerned the government of
his dominions and the succession to the throne. Even those who had
no sympathy for Henry had little to say to excuse the character and
the unfilial conduct of his sons. “From the Devil we come, and to the
Devil we return,” Richard was reported to have said; and none cared
to contradict him. Of the four lawful sons who grew to maturity,
the eldest was Henry, crowned king by his father in 1170, and hence
generally known as the Young King. Handsome and agreeable, prodigal
in _largesse_, a patron of knightly sports and especially of the
tournaments which were then coming into fashion, the Young King enjoyed
great popularity in his lifetime and after his early death was mourned
as a peer of Hector and Achilles and enshrined as a hero of courtly
romance. Yet for all this there was no substantial foundation. He was
faithless, ungrateful, utterly selfish, a thorn in his father’s side
and a constant source of weakness to the empire. Married at the age
of five to the daughter of Louis VII, he became the instrument of the
French king in his intrigues against Henry II and the rallying point of
feudal reaction and personal jealousy. King in name though not in fact,
having been crowned merely as a means of securing the succession,
Prince Henry craved at least an under-kingdom of his own, and on two
occasions, in 1173 and again in 1183, led serious and widespread
revolts against his father, the evil results of which were not undone
by his death-bed repentance in the midst of the second uprising. In
this revolt of 1183 he had with him his younger brother Geoffrey, duke
of Brittany, ‘the son of perdition,’ equally false and treacherous,
without even the redeeming virtue of popularity. Fortunately Geoffrey
also died before his father.
The death of the Young King left as Henry’s eldest heir Richard,
known to the modern world as the Lion-Hearted. With much of his
father’s energy, Richard seems to have inherited more than any of
his brothers the tastes and temperament of his mother, Eleanor of
Aquitaine. Adventurous and high-spirited, fond of pomp and splendor,
a lover of poetry and music, be it the songs of Provençal minstrels
or the solemn chants of the church, he belonged on this side of his
nature to the dukes of Aquitaine and the country of the troubadours.
He loved war and danger, in which he showed great personal courage,
and in the conduct of military enterprises gave evidence of marked
ability as a strategist; but his gifts as a ruler stopped there. The
glamour of his personal exploits and the romance of his crusading
adventures might dazzle the imagination of contemporaries more than
the prosaic achievements of his father, and his gifts to religious
houses might even predispose monastic historians in his favor, but for
all this splendor his subjects paid the bills. In spite of his great
income, he was always in need of money for his extravagances; and for
his fiscal exactions there was never the excuse of large measures of
public policy. Indeed, so far as we can see, Richard had no public
policy. “His ambition,” says Stubbs, “was that of a mere warrior: he
would fight for anything whatever, but he would sell everything that
was worth fighting for.”[42] Self-willed and self-centred, he followed
wherever his desires led, with no sense of loyalty to his obligations
or of responsibility as a ruler. Made duke of Aquitaine at seventeen,
he sought to ride down every obstacle and bring immediate order and
unity into a region which had never enjoyed either of these benefits;
and he quickly had by the ears the land which he should have best
understood. He was soon in revolt against his father and also at war
with the Young King; for his own purposes he later went over to the
king of France, and jested with his boon companions over his father’s
discomfiture and downfall. Even as king at the age of thirty-two,
Richard remained an impetuous youth; he never really grew up. Haughty
and overbearing, he alienated friends and allies; inheriting the
rule of the vast Plantagenet empire, he showed no realization of
imperial duty or opportunity. Thus he visited England but twice in
the course of his reign of ten years and valued it solely as a land
from which revenue might be wrung by his ministers, nor did his
continental dominions derive advantage from his presence. Impetuous and
short-sighted, Richard Yea-and-Nay had to meet the greatest statesman
of his day in deadly rivalry; and though panegyrists placed him above
Alexander, Charlemagne, and King Arthur, he went down ignominiously
before Philip Augustus.
Last of all comes the youngest son John, “my heart, my best beloved.”
Never did father lavish his affection on a more unworthy child. False
to his father, false to his brother Richard, John proved false to
all, man or woman, who ever trusted him. He had none of the dash and
courage of Richard, none of his large and splendid way, and none of
his popularity and gift of leadership. Men saw him as he was, no
Charlemagne or Arthur, but petty, mean, and cowardly, small even in
his blasphemies, swearing by the feet or the teeth of God, when Henry
II had habitually sworn by his eyes, and William the Conqueror by his
splendor--_par la resplendor De!_ Always devious in his ways, John’s
cunning sometimes got him the reputation for cleverness, and John
Richard Green went so far as to call him “the ablest and most ruthless
of the Angevins.” But his ability, particularly in military matters
not inconsiderable, was of the kind which wasted itself in temporary
expedients and small successes; it was incapable of continuous policy
or sustained efforts; and it everywhere ended in failure. Gerald
the Welshman, the friend of his youth, at the end can only pronounce
him the worst of history’s tyrants. John’s whole career offers the
most convincing evidence of the futility of talent when divorced from
character, by which is here meant, not so much private virtue,--for
John’s private vices were shared with others of his family and his
time,--but merely common honor, trustworthiness, and steadfastness.
Even in his wickedness John was shifty and false, and his loss of his
empire was due, not to any single blunder or series of blunders, but to
the supreme sin of lack of character.
It is thus possible to see how largely the collapse of the Norman
empire was bound up with the family history of Henry II--the foolish
indulgence of the father, the ambitions and intrigues of the mother,
the jealousies, treachery, and political incapacity of the sons. A
personal creation, the Plantagenet state fell in large measure for
personal reasons. If it was Henry’s misfortune to have such sons,
one may say it was also his misfortune to have more than one son of
any sort, since each became the nucleus of a separatist movement in
some particular territory. The kings of France, it has often been
pointed out, had for generations the great advantage of having a son
to succeed, but only a single son. The crowning of the French heir in
his father’s lifetime assured an undisputed succession; the crowning of
the Young King left him dissatisfied and stirred up the rivalry of his
younger brothers.
But this is not the whole of the story. The very strength and
efficiency of Henry’s government were sure to produce a reaction in
favor of feudal liberties in which his sons serve simply as convenient
centres of crystallization. Only time could unify each of these
dominions internally, while far more time was required to consolidate
them into a permanent kingdom, and these processes were interrupted
when they had barely begun. Such a solution of the ultimate problem of
consolidation was, we have seen, entirely possible and even natural;
but another was possible and also natural, namely the union of these
territories under the king of France. Geography, as well as history,
favored the second alternative.
* * * * *
The geographical unity of France is one of the most obvious facts on
the map of Europe. The Alps and the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean and
the Atlantic, are its natural frontiers; only on the northeast are
the lines blurred by nature and left to history to determine. Within
these limits there are of course many clearly marked subdivisions--the
valleys of the Rhone, Garonne, Loire, and Seine, Gascony, Brittany,
Normandy, Flanders, and the rest--which formed the great fiefs of the
Middle Ages and the great provinces of later times. Sooner or later,
however, as population increased, as trade and commerce developed, and
as the means of communication were strengthened, these divisions were
certain to draw together into a single great state. Where the centre of
the new state would lie was not a matter of accident but was largely
determined by the great lines of communication, and especially by the
commercial axis which runs from the Mediterranean to Flanders and the
English Channel. On this line are situated the Roman capital of the
Gauls, Lyons, and the modern capital, Paris. This fact, combined with
the central and dominant position of the Paris basin in relation to
the great valleys of the Seine, the Loire, and the Meuse, established
the region about Paris, the Ile-de-France of history, as the natural
centre of this future nation. Such a state might grow from without
toward its centre, as the modern kingdom of Italy closed in on Rome,
but the more natural process was from the centre outward, as England
grew about Wessex or Brandenburg about the region near Berlin. In the
great contest between Capetian and Plantagenet the Capetian “held the
inner lines.” Shut off from the sea on the side of the Loire as well
as on the side of the Seine, he was in a position to concentrate all
his efforts to break through the iron ring, while the Norman rulers
had to hold together the whole of their far-spread territories against
reaction and rebellion at home as well as against the French at Tours
and LeMans and in the Vexin. Meanwhile up and down these valleys the
influences of trade, commerce, and travel were at work breaking down
the political barriers and drawing the remoter regions toward the
geographical centre. The rivers in their courses fought against the
Plantagenets.
The personal element in the struggle was weighted against the
Anglo-Norman empire even more strongly than the physiographic, for the
weak links in the Plantagenet succession ran parallel to the strongest
portion of the Capetian line. Against a knight-errant like Richard and
a trifler like John, stood a great European statesman in the person of
Philip Augustus, king of France during forty-four years, and more than
any single man the creator of the French monarchy.
* * * * *
Philip Augustus was not an heroic figure, and to the men of his age he
was probably less sympathetic than his adversary Richard. Vigorous and
enduring, a generous liver, quick-tempered but slow to cherish hatred,
Philip was preëminently the cautious, shrewd, unscrupulous, far-sighted
statesman. He could fight when necessary, but he had no great personal
courage and excelled in strategy and prevision rather than in tactics
or leadership in the field, and he preferred to gain his ends by the
arts of diplomacy. The quality upon which all his contemporaries dwell
is his wisdom. Throughout his long reign he kept before him as his one
aim the increase of the royal power, and by his patient and fortunate
efforts he broke down the Plantagenet empire, doubled the royal revenue
and more than doubled the royal domain, and made France the leading
international power in western Europe.
As we have already seen, Philip had made substantial headway even
during the lifetime of Henry II. Crowned in 1179 at the age of
fourteen, a year before the death of his paralytic father Louis VII,
Philip was naturally treated as a boy by Henry, who seems, however,
to have acted throughout with due regard to Philip’s position as king
and his feudal suzerain. In the complications of those early years
we find Henry constantly arranging disputes with the king’s vassals
and more than once saving him from a tight place. But as time went on
this relation became impossible. Philip openly abetted the revolts of
the Young King and of Richard, and in the war which broke out at the
end Richard fought openly on his side. As soon, however, as Richard
succeeded to the throne, Philip began hostilities with him, and he soon
used John against Richard as he had used Richard against his father.
“Divide and rule,” was clearly Philip’s policy, and he always had on
his side the fact that he was king in France and the Plantagenets on
the Continent were his vassals.
The first phase of the contest between Richard and Philip comes as a
welcome interlude in the tale of border disputes and family rivalries
which make up the greater part of the tangled story of Philip’s
dealings with the Norman empire. It takes us over the sea to the fair
land of Sicily and on to the very gates of the Holy City. In 1187
the capture of Jerusalem had crowned the long efforts of the great
Saladin, and where a century before Christian knights had ridden “up to
their bridles” in the blood of the slaughtered Moslem, a procession of
knights and priests and poorer folk passed out of the gate of David and
left the Holy Sepulchre to the infidel. To the Saracens a certain sign
that they were the only people “whose doctrine was agreeable to God,”
the fall of Jerusalem killed the aged Pope, plunged Europe into prayer
and fasting, and brought on the Third Crusade, under the leadership
of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Philip of France, and Richard of
England. Richard, then merely count of Poitou, was the first western
prince to take the cross in this holy war; his father and Philip soon
sealed their crusading vows with a public reconciliation under a great
elm on the borders of Normandy and France, and the chroniclers tell
us that every man made peace with his neighbor, thinking no more of
tournaments and fine raiment, the lust of the flesh and the pride of
the eye, but only of the recovery of the Holy City. Such great waves
of renunciation and religious enthusiasm are peculiarly characteristic
of the Middle Ages, but their force was soon spent. Then, as in other
times, there were few who could live as on a mountain-top. In spite of
all that the church could do, Henry and Philip soon came to open war,
and the cause of Jerusalem was swallowed up in a struggle for the Loire
and for Aquitanian fortresses. Richard, as we have seen, was a central
point in these conflicts, and his accession to the throne simply
continued the struggle in another form.
Nevertheless a peace was patched up, and the unwilling Philip was
unable to hold aloof from the crusade which fired the military ardor
of his chief vassal and rival. Large sums of money were raised by
every means, and the two kings made an agreement to divide equally all
the spoil of their expedition. They also arranged to go by sea to the
East after they had assembled their ships and followers at Messina,
thus avoiding the usual complications with the Eastern Empire and the
fatal march through the barren and hostile interior of Asia Minor
which now claimed another victim in the gallant German emperor. At the
best, however, a crusade was not an organized campaign under efficient
direction, but merely a number of independent expeditions which found
it convenient to go at the same time and by the same route. There
was no supreme command, and there was constant jealousy and friction
between feudal lords who were ever impatient of restraint and careful
of points of dignity and precedence. The presence of a king was of
some help, the presence of two only made matters worse. If the causes
of rivalry at home and the slighting of Philip’s sister could have
been forgotten, there was still the fact that Richard was Philip’s
vassal as well as his equal, and Richard was not of the type to spare
Philip’s susceptibilities. Rich, open-handed, fond of display,
Lion-Heart “loved the lime-light,” and his overbearing nature and
lack of tact made it impossible for him to coöperate with others. He
characteristically went his own way, paying scant attention to Philip
and acting as if the leadership of the expedition belonged to himself
as a matter of course. Relations became strained during the sojourn at
Messina and grew worse in Palestine, where the affairs of the Latin
kingdom and the rivalries of lesser princes added fuel to the flame.
“The two kings and peoples,” says an English chronicler, “did less
together than they would have done separately, and each set but light
store by the other.” Sick of the whole enterprise, after four months in
the East, Philip seized the first excuse to return home, departing in
August, 1191.
Richard stayed a year longer in Palestine, yet he never entered
Jerusalem and had finally to retire with a disappointing truce and to
spend another year, and more, languishing in German prisons. The events
of these months do not concern the history of Normandy, but if we would
behold Richard in his fairest light we must see him as he rushed to
the relief of Joppa on the first of August, 1192, wading ashore from
his red galley with the cry, “Perish the man who would hang back,”
covering the landing of his followers with his crossbow, making his
way by a winding stair to the house of the Templars on the town wall,
and then, sword in hand, clearing the town of three thousand Turks and
pursuing them into the plain with but three horsemen; or, four days
later, repelling a Mameluke attack in force by a most skilful tactical
arrangement of his meagre army, directing the battle on the beach
while he also kept the town clear, “slaying innumerable Turks with his
gleaming sword, here cleaving a man from the crown of his head to his
teeth,” there cutting off with one blow the head, shoulder, and right
arm of a Saracen emir, his coat of mail and his horse bristling with
javelins and arrows like a hedgehog, yet “remaining unconquerable and
unwounded in accordance with the divine decree.”[43]
* * * * *
What most concerned the Norman empire was the king’s absence since the
summer of 1190, prolonged by his captivity in Germany until the spring
of 1194. Although Philip had taken an oath before leaving Palestine to
respect Richard’s men and possessions during his absence, and even to
protect them like his own city of Paris, he sought release from this
engagement as soon as he reached Rome on his homeward journey, and
once back in France he soon began active preparations for an attack on
the Plantagenet territories. With Richard safe in a German dungeon, he
seized a large part of the Norman border and made a secret treaty with
John which secured the surrender of all the lands east of the Seine
and important fortresses in Anjou and Touraine. He offered huge sums
of money to secure Richard’s custody or even his continued detention
in Germany, and when early in 1194 he warned John that “the Devil
was loose” at last, he was besieging the great fortress of Verneuil
on the Norman frontier. When Richard landed at Barfleur in May, amid
the ringing of bells and processions singing “God has come again in
his strength,” it is small wonder that he came breathing vengeance
and slaughter, and that the rest of his life is a record of scarcely
interrupted war against the king of France. For many years he is said
to have refused the sacrament lest he might have to forgive his enemy.
Again and again he had Philip on the run. Once Philip lost all his
baggage and saved himself by turning aside to hear mass while Richard
rode by; on another occasion Richard drove the French into Gisors so
that the bridge broke under them “and the king of France drank of the
river, and twenty of his knights were drowned.”
Such scenes, however, are only the striking episodes in a series of
campaigns which are confused and complicated and do not lend themselves
to clear narration. Decisive engagements were rare, each side seeking
rather to wear out the other. Money was spent freely for allies and
mercenaries--a contemporary called the struggle one between the pound
sterling and the pound of Tours, and the advantage was on the side
of the pounds sterling by reason of their greater number. There was
usually a campaign in the spring and summer, ending in a truce in the
autumn which the church tried to prolong into a lasting peace but
which soon broke down in a new war. The wars were for the most part
border forays, in which the country was burned and wasted far and wide,
to the injury chiefly of the peasants, upon whom the burden of mediæval
warfare mainly fell. “First destroy the land, then the enemy,” was
the watchword. Booty and ransom were the object as well as military
advantages, so that even the contests between knights had their sordid
side, so definitely were they directed toward taking profitable
prisoners; while feudal notions of honor might cause Richard to put
out the eyes of fifteen prisoners and send them to Philip under the
guidance of one of their number who had been left one eye, whereupon
Philip blinded an equal number of knights and sent them to Richard
under the guidance of the wife of one of them, “in order,” says his
eulogist,[44] “that no one should think he was afraid of Richard or
inferior to him in force and courage.”
The brunt of the war fell on Normandy and ultimately on the castles
which supplied the duchy’s lack of natural frontiers. To supplement the
great interior fortresses of Caen, Falaise, Argentan, Montfort, and
Rouen, Henry I began the organization of a series of fortifications
on the southern and eastern borders. Henry II, we are told, improved
or renewed nearly all these strongholds, and especially Gisors, the
frontier gateway toward France, on which fortress the exchequer
roll shows him expending 2650 pounds Angevin in a single year. These
castles, remains of many of which are still standing, were typical of
the best military architecture of their age, but they were inferior
in strength and scientific construction to the great fortresses of
Christian Syria, such as Krak or Margat, which seem to have gone back
to Byzantine and even Persian models. A keen warrior like Richard
had not spent his two years in Palestine without gaining an expert
knowledge of eastern methods in the art of war, and we are not
surprised to find that he had Saracen soldiers and Syrian artillerymen
with him in his Norman campaigns, and that he made large use of
oriental experience in strengthening his defences. His masterpiece, of
course, was Château Gaillard, the saucy castle on the Seine controlling
the passage of the river and its tributaries in that region of the
Norman Vexin which was the great bone of contention between the
Plantagenets and the French kings. Having first expropriated at great
expense the lord of the region, the archbishop of Rouen, he fortified
the adjacent island of Andeli and laid out a new town on the bank. This
he surrounded with water and reënforced with towers and battlements,
protecting the whole with a stockade across the river and outlying
works farther up. Then on the great rock above he built the fortress,
with its triangular advance work, its elliptical citadel, and its
circular keep surrounded by a “_fossé_ cut almost vertically out of
the rock.” There was no dead angle, such as permitted sappers to
reach the base of rectilinear walls, but instead a sloping base down
which projectiles might ricochet; nor was there, as at the corners of
square towers, any part of the surrounding area which could not be
reached by direct fire from within. “The approaches and the _fossé_,”
says Dieulafoy,[45] “were covered by the fire of the garrison right
up to the foot of the scarp, and no sapper could touch any point in
towers or walls, provided that the fortress was under the direction
of an experienced commander.” This qualification is important, for
the new type of fortification was designed for an active defence, one
might almost say an offensive defence, and not for the mere passive
resistance with which the older strategy had been content. The works at
Andeli, carried on largely under Richard’s personal direction, occupied
more than a year of labor and cost nearly 50,000 pounds Angevin, which
we find distributed in the royal accounts over lumber and stone and
hardware, and among masons and carpenters and stone-cutters and lesser
laborers.
By the year 1199 Richard had recovered his Norman possessions save
Gisors and certain castles on the border, where Philip never lost his
foothold, and he had raised an effective barrier to French advance
in the valley of the Seine. Strong allies were on his side, and the
diplomatic situation was decidedly in his favor. Never had Philip been
so hard pressed, and even the friendly legate of the Pope could secure
for him nothing better than the retention of Gisors in the truce which
was then drawn up. And then a second stroke of fortune, greater even
than the captivity of 1192, came to Philip’s aid. Richard, impetuous
and headstrong as ever, spoiled all by a raid on an Aquitanian rebel in
which he lost his life. His energy, his military skill, and his vivid
personality had concealed the fundamental weakness of his position
against France; his removal meant the swift fall of the Norman empire.
* * * * *
At Richard’s death there were two possible successors, his younger
brother John, whom he had designated heir, and his nephew Arthur, son
of his elder brother Geoffrey and duke of Brittany. There was enough
uncertainty in feudal law to admit of a plausible case for either one,
but Arthur was only twelve and John quickly took possession, being
crowned at Rouen in April and at Westminster in May. Arthur, however,
had the following of his Bretons and, what was more important, the
support of Philip Augustus, who used Arthur against John as he had used
John against Richard and Richard against his father. Philip confirmed
Arthur as count of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine, and soon brought him
to Paris, where he was betrothed to Philip’s daughter. Nevertheless
the course of events at first favored John. Philip was in the midst
of the great struggle with Pope Innocent III over the divorce of his
queen Ingeborg, and a treaty was signed in 1200, by which, on giving up
territory in the Norman border and in central France and paying a large
relief of 20,000 marks for his lands, John was confirmed in his control
of Anjou and Brittany, while a visit to Paris, where he was splendidly
received, seemed to crown the reconciliation. In a position, however,
where all possible strength and resourcefulness were required, John’s
defects of character proved fatal. No one could depend upon him for
loyalty, judgment, or even persistence, and he quickly earned his name
of “Soft-Sword.”
Meanwhile the legally-minded Philip, while spending money freely on
John’s followers and abating nothing of his diplomatic and military
efforts, brought to bear the weapons of law. The revival of legal
studies in the twelfth century had given rise in western Europe to a
body of professional lawyers, skilled in the Roman and the canon law,
and quick to turn their learning to the advantage of the princes whom
they served. Philip had a number of such advisers at his court, and
they doubtless contributed to the more lawyerlike methods of doing
things which make their appearance in his reign; but it was feudal
custom, and not Roman law, that he used against John. In law John was
Philip’s vassal,--indeed, he had just confessed as much in the treaty
of 1200,--and as such was held to attend Philip’s feudal court and
subject himself to its decision in disputes with other vassals. It
might be urged that the king of England was too great a man to submit
to such jurisdiction, and that the duke of Normandy had been in the
habit of satisfying his feudal obligations by a formal ceremony at the
Norman frontier; still the technical law was on the side of the king
of France, and a suzerain had at last come who was able to translate
theory into fact. In the course of a series of adventures in Poitou
John carried off the fiancée of one of his barons of the house of
Lusignan, who appealed to his superior lord, the king of France. All
this was in due form, but Philip was no lion of justice eager to
redress injuries for justice’ sake. He waited nearly two years, John’s
visit to Paris falling in the interval, and then, when he was ready to
execute sentence, promptly summoned John before the feudal court of
peers. John neither came nor appeared through a representative, and the
court in April, 1202, declared him deprived of all his lands for having
refused to obey his lord’s commands or render the services due from him
as vassal. The capture of Arthur temporarily checked Philip; the boy’s
murder by John in the course of 1203 simply recoiled on the murderer.
Whether this crime led to a second condemnation by the court of peers,
as was alleged by the French at the time of the abortive invasion of
England in 1216, is a question which has been sharply discussed among
scholars. What has now become the orthodox view holds that there was
no second condemnation, but a clever case has recently been made by
Powicke, who, minimizing the importance of the accepted argument from
the silence of immediate contemporaries, argues, on the basis of the
_Annals of Margam_, that there probably was a second condemnation
in 1204. After all, the question is of subordinate importance, for
Philip’s effective action was based on the trial of 1202, and by 1204
John’s fate was already sealed.
The decisive point in the campaign against Normandy was the capture of
Château Gaillard, the key to the Seine valley, in May, 1204, after a
siege of six months which seems to have justified its designer, save
for a stone bridge which sheltered the engineers who undermined the
outer wall. Western Normandy fell before an attack from the side of
Brittany; the great fortresses of the centre, Argentan, Falaise, and
Caen, opened their gates to Philip; and with the surrender of Rouen,
24 June, 1204, Philip was master of Normandy. John had lingered in
England, doing nothing to support the defense, and when he crossed
at last in 1206 he was obliged to sign a final surrender of all the
territories north of the Loire, retaining only southern Poitou and
Gascony. Gascony and England were united for two centuries longer, but
the only connection was by sea. The control of the Seine and the Loire
had been lost, and with that passed away the Plantagenet empire.
* * * * *
The results of the separation of Normandy from England have been
a favorite subject with historians, and especially with those who
approach the Middle Ages from the point of view of modern politics and
modern ideas of nationality. It all seems so natural that Normandy
should belong with France and not with England. Nationality, however,
is an elusive thing, and many forces besides geography have made the
modern map. England in the Middle Ages had much more in common with
Normandy than she had with Wales or Scotland, while in feeling, as well
as in space, the Irish Sea was wider than the Channel. From the English
point of view there was nothing inevitable in the loss of Normandy.
On the French side the matter is more obvious. If Paris was to be the
capital, it must control the Seine and the Loire, and when it gained
control of them, its position in France was assured. The possession
of Normandy meant far more to France than to England. Moreover the
conquest of Normandy cut England and France loose from each other.
The Anglo-Norman barons must decide whether they would serve the king
of England or the king of France, and they were quickly absorbed into
the country with which they threw in their lot. It was no longer
possible to play one set of interests against another; turned back on
themselves, the English barons met John on their own ground and won the
Great Charter, so that the loss of Normandy has a direct bearing on the
growth of English liberty. “When the Normans became French,” concludes
Powicke, “they did a great deal more than bring their national epic to
a close. They permitted the English once more to become a nation, and
they established the French state for all time.”[46]
Viewed in this way, the end of Normandy almost seems more glorious
than Normandy itself; as was said of Samson, “the dead which he slew
at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.” But of
course in the larger sense the work of the Norman empire was not ended
in 1204. For one thing, the administrative organization of the Norman
duchy could not fail to exert an influence upon the French monarchy. In
spite of the great progress made by the Capetian kings of the twelfth
century, the Norman government still maintained its marked superiority
as a system of judicial and fiscal administration, and Philip Augustus
was not the man to neglect the lessons it might have for him. The
nature and extent of Norman influence upon French institutions is a
subject which is still dark to us and for lack of evidence may always
remain dark; but there can be little doubt that Norman precedents were
followed at various points in the development of the Parlement of Paris
and in the elaboration of the French financial system. In the main,
however, the influence was inevitably in the other direction, from
France upon Normandy, not from Normandy upon France. There was, it is
true, no sudden change. Philip respected vested interests, both in the
church and among the barons, and preserved Norman customs, so that the
duchy long retained its individuality of law, of local organization,
and of character, and secured its rights from Louis X in a document of
1315, the _Charte aux Normands_, which has sometimes been compared in a
small way to the Great Charter. The _Coutume de Normandie_ persisted,
like the customs of the other great provinces, until the French
Revolution, but it was a body of custom worked out under the influence
of the central government and gradually absorbing the jurisprudence of
the king’s court. If the Norman exchequer continued to sit at Rouen, it
was presided over by commissioners sent out from Paris. Even that most
characteristic of Norman institutions, trial by jury, was insensibly
modified by the new inquisitorial procedure of the thirteenth century
and silently disappeared from the practice of the Continent. As in
law and government, so in culture and social life, the forces of
centralization did their work none the less effectively because they
were gradual, and Normandy became a part of France.
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.
For a measure of the intellectual activity of the Norman monasteries
and cathedrals nothing could serve better than an examination of
the contents of their libraries, where we might judge for ourselves
what books they acquired and copied and read. This unfortunately we
can no longer make. The library of Bec, partly destroyed by fire in
the seventeenth century, was scattered to the four winds of heaven
in the eighteenth, and while the legislation of 1791 provided for
the transfer of such collections to the public depositories of the
neighboring towns, the libraries of Avranches, Alençon, and Rouen,
reënforced by the Bibliothèque Nationale, have garnered but a small
part of the ancient treasures of Mont-Saint-Michel, Saint-Évroul,
and the establishments of the lower Seine. Works of importance as
well as curiosities still survive--autograph corrections of Lanfranc,
the originals of the great histories of Robert of Torigni and
Ordericus Vitalis, service-books throwing light on the origins of the
liturgical drama, cartularies of churches and abbeys,--but for a more
comprehensive view of the resources of the twelfth century we must turn
to the contemporary catalogues which have come down to us from the
cloisters of Saint-Évroul, Bec, Lire, and Fécamp, and the cathedral of
Rouen. After all, as that delightful academician _Silvestre Bonnard_
has reminded us, there is no reading so easy, so restful, or so
seductive as a catalogue of manuscripts; and there is no better guide
to the silence and the peace of the monastic library, as one may
still taste them in the quiet of the Escorial or Monte Cassino. Let
us take the most specific example, the collection of one hundred and
forty volumes bequeathed to Bec by Philip, bishop of Bayeux, at his
death in 1164, or rather the one hundred and thirteen which reached
the monastery, twenty-seven having fallen by the way and being hence
omitted from the catalogue. Like the other libraries of the time,
this consisted chiefly of theology--the writings of the Fathers and
of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian commentators and theologians,
ending with Philip’s contemporaries, St. Bernard, Gilbert de la Porrée,
Hildebert of Tours, and Hugh of St. Victor, and his metropolitan, Hugh
of Amiens. Wise in the wisdom of this world, the bishop possessed the
whole _Corpus Juris Civilis_ in five volumes, as well as the leading
authorities on canon law, Burchard, St. Ives, and the _Decretum_ of
Gratian. He had none of the Roman poets, although they were not unknown
to Norman writers of his age, but a fair selection of prose works
of a literary and philosophical character--Cicero and Quintilian,
Seneca and the Younger Pliny, besides the mediæval version of Plato’s
_Timæus_. There is a goodly sprinkling of the Roman historians most in
vogue in the Middle Ages, Cæsar, Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Florus,
Eutropius, and the Latin version of Josephus, besides such of their
mediæval successors as came nearest to Anglo-Norman affairs. Science
was confined to Pliny’s _Natural History_ and two anonymous treatises
on mathematics and astronomy, while the practical arts were represented
by Palladius on agriculture and Vegetius on tactics. On the whole a
typically Norman library, deficient on the imaginative side, but strong
in orthodox theology, in law, and in history; not in all respects an
up-to-date collection, since it contained none of those logical works
of Aristotle which were transforming European thought, and, save for
a treatise of Adelard of Bath, showed no recognizable trace of the
new science which was beginning to come in through Spain; strikingly
lacking also, save for a volume on Norman history, in products
of Normandy itself, even in the field of theology and scriptural
interpretation, where, for example, Richard abbot of Préaux had written
marvellous commentaries upon Genesis, Deuteronomy, Ecclesiastes,
the Song of Songs, and the Proverbs of Solomon, and had “discoursed
allegorically or tropologically in many treatises upon obscure problems
of the Prophets.”[55]
After all, works on the history of Normandy were the most Norman thing
a Norman could produce, and it was in this field that the duchy made
its chief contribution to mediæval literature and learning. All the
usual types appear, local annals, lists of bishops and abbots, lives
of saints, biographies of princes, but the most characteristic are
the works in which the history of Normandy is grasped as a whole: the
half-legendary account of the early dukes by Dudo of Saint-Quentin, the
confused but valuable _Gesta_ of William of Jumièges, at last restored
to us in a critical edition,[56] the _Chronicle_ of Robert of Torigni,
and especially the great _Historia Ecclesiastica_ of Ordericus Vitalis,
the _chef-d’œuvre_ of Norman historiography and the most important
historical work written in France in the twelfth century.
Born in 1075 near Shrewsbury, Ordericus was early devoted to the
monastic life, and lest family affection might interfere with his
vocation and the sure hope of Paradise held out to the sobbing boy,
his sorrowing parents sent him forever from their sight to spend his
days at Saint-Évroul near the southern border of Normandy. Tonsured
at ten, ordained a deacon at eighteen and a priest at thirty-two,
he bore the burden and heat of the day under six successive abbots,
until as an old man of sixty-six he laid down his pen with a touching
peroration of prayer and thanksgiving to Him who had disposed these
years according to His good pleasure. During this half century of
poverty and obedience Ordericus had little opportunity to leave the
precincts of the monastery, although on rare occasions we can trace
him in England and at Cambrai, Rheims, and Cluni, and the materials
of his history had to be gathered almost wholly from the well-stocked
library of the abbey and from conversation with those who passed his
way. These facilities were, however, considerable, for, remote as
Saint-Évroul may seem in its corner of the _pays d’Ouche_, it was in
constant relations with England, where it possessed lands, and with
southern Italy, whither it had sent its members to found new convents;
and like all such establishments it was a place of entertainment for
travellers of all classes, priests and monks, knights and _jongleurs_,
even a king like Henry I, who brought with them accounts of their
journeys about the world and tales of great deeds in distant Spain,
Sicily, and Jerusalem. There were few better places to collect
materials for the writing of history, and there was no one who could
make better use of them than Ordericus. He was fully launched in his
great work by 1123, and he kept at it throughout the remaining eighteen
years of his life, putting it aside in the winter when his fingers
grew numb with the cold, but resuming it each spring in the clear
round hand which meets us in many a manuscript of Saint-Évroul, and
offering it at the end to future generations, a monument more lasting
than the granite obelisk erected to his memory in 1912. His original
purpose was limited to a history of his monastery, but the plan soon
widened to include the principal movements of his time and finally
grew to the idea of a universal history, beginning, indeed, with the
Christian era instead of with the more usual starting-point of the
Creation. Nevertheless, even in its final form the work of Ordericus
is not a general history of the Christian centuries, for the general
portion is chiefly introductory and comparatively brief; his real
theme is Norman history, centring, of course, round the vicissitudes
of his convent and the adjacent territory, but also giving a large
place to the deeds of the Normans in that greater Normandy which they
had created beyond the sea, in England, in Italy, and in Palestine.
He is thus not only Norman but pan-Norman. The plan, or rather lack
of plan, of his thirteen books reflects the changes of design and the
interruptions which the work underwent; there is some repetition, much
confusion, and a distinct absence of architectonic art. These defects,
however, do not diminish the prime merit of the work, which lies in its
replacement of the jejune annals of the older type by a full and ample
historical narrative, rich in detail, vivid in presentation, giving
space to literary history and everyday life as well as to the affairs
of church and state, and constituting as a whole the most faithful
and living picture which has reached us of the European society of
his age. Neither in the world nor of the world, this monk had a ripe
knowledge of men and affairs, independence of judgment, a feeling for
personality, and a sure touch in characterization. He had also a Latin
style of his own, labored at times rather than affected, ready to show
its skill in well-turned verse or in well-rounded speeches after the
fashion of the classical historians, but direct and vigorous and not
unworthy of the flexible and sonorous language which he had made his
own.
Latin, however, was an exclusive possession of the clergy,--and not
of all of them, if we can argue from the examinations held by Eudes
Rigaud,--and by the middle of the twelfth century the Norman baronage
began to demand from the clerks an account of the Anglo-Norman past in
a language which they too could understand. History in the vernacular
develops in France earlier than elsewhere, and in France earliest in
Normandy and in the English lands which shared the Norman speech and
produced the oldest surviving example of such a work, the _Histoire
des Engles_ of Gaimar, written between 1147 and 1151. The chief centre
for the production of vernacular history was the court of that patron
of ecclesiastical and secular learning, Henry II, and his Aquitanian
queen, to one or both of whom are dedicated the histories of Wace
and Benoît de Sainte-More. Wace, the most interesting of this group
of writers, was a native of Jersey and a clerk of Caen who turned an
honest penny by his compositions and won a canonry at Bayeux by the
most important of them, his _Roman de Rou_. Beginning with Rollo, from
whom it takes its name, this follows the course of Norman history to
the victory of Henry I in 1106, in simple and agreeable French verse
based upon the Latin chroniclers but incorporating something from
popular tradition. Such a compilation adds little to our knowledge, but
by the time of the Third Crusade we find a contemporary narrative in
French verse prepared by a _jongleur_ of Évreux who accompanied Richard
on the expedition. If we ignore the line, at best very faint, which in
works of this sort separates history from romance and from works of
edification, we must carry the Norman pioneers still further back, to
the _Vie de Saint Alexis_ which we owe probably to a canon of Rouen
in the eleventh century, and to the great national epic of mediæval
France, the _Chanson de Roland_, pre-Norman in origin but Norman in
its early form, which has recently been ascribed to Turold, bishop
of Bayeux after the death of the more famous Odo and later for many
years a monk of Bec. There is, one may object, nothing monastic in this
wonderful pæan of mediæval knighthood, whose religion is that of the
God of battles who has never lied, and whose hero meets death with his
face toward Spain and his imperishable sword beneath him; but knights
and monks had more in common than was once supposed, and we are coming
to see that the monasteries, especially the monasteries of the great
highways, had a large share in the making, if not in the final writing,
of the mediæval epic as well as the mediæval chronicles.
When we reach works like these, the literary history of Normandy
merges in that of France, as well as in that of England, which,
thanks to the Norman Conquest and the Norman empire, long remained
a literary province of France. We must not, however, leave this
vernacular literature, as yet almost wholly the work of clerks, with
the impression that its dominant quality is romantic or poetical.
Its versified form was merely the habit of an age which found verse
easy to remember; the literature itself, as Gaston Paris has well
observed,[57] was “essentially a literature of instruction for the
use of laymen,” fit material for prose and not for poetry. It is thus
characteristically Norman in subject as well as in speech--simple and
severe in form, devout and edifying rather than mystical, given to
history rather than to speculation, and seeking through the moralized
science of lapidaries and bestiaries and astronomical manuals to aid
the everyday life of a serious and practical people.
* * * * *
Normandy had also something to say to the world in that most mediæval
of arts, architecture, and especially in that Romanesque form of
building which flourished in the eleventh century and the first half
of the twelfth. The great Norman churches of this epoch were the
natural outgrowth of its life--the wealth of the abbeys, the splendor
of princely prelates like Odo of Bayeux and Geoffrey of Coutances, the
piety and penance of William the Conqueror and Matilda, expiating by
two abbeys their marriage within the prohibited degrees, the religious
devotion of the people as illustrated by the processions of 1145. The
biographer of Geoffrey de Mowbray, for example, tells[58] us how the
bishop labored day and night for the enlargement and beautification of
his church at Coutances (dedicated in 1056), buying the better half
of the city from the duke to get space for the cathedral and palace,
travelling as far as Apulia to secure gold and gems and vestments
from Robert Guiscard and his fellow Normans, and maintaining from
his rents a force of sculptors, masons, goldsmiths, and workers in
glass. Nearly forty years later, when the church had been damaged by
earthquake and tempest, he brought a plumber from England to restore
the leaden roof and the fallen stones of the towers and to replace the
gilded cock which crowned the whole; and when he saw the cock once more
glistening at the summit, he gave thanks to God and shortly passed
away, pronouncing eternal maledictions upon those who should injure his
church. Of this famous structure nothing now remains above the ground,
for the noble towers which look from the hill of Coutances toward the
western sea are Gothic, like the rest of the church; and for surviving
monuments of cathedrals of the eleventh and twelfth centuries we must
go to the naves of Bayeux and Évreux and the St. Romain’s tower of
Rouen. Even here the impression will be fragmentary, broken by Gothic
choirs and by towers and spires of a still later age, just as the
simple lines of the early church of Mont-Saint-Michel are swallowed up
in the ornate Gothic of the loftier parts of the great pile. Edifices
wholly of the Romanesque period must be sought in the parish churches
in which Normandy is so rich, or in the larger abbey-churches which
meet us at Lessay, Cerisy, Caen, Jumièges, and Bocherville. Jumièges,
though in ruins, preserves the full outline of the style of the middle
of the eleventh century; Caen presents in the Abbaye aux Hommes and
the Abbaye aux Dames two perfect though contrasted types of a few
years later, the one simple and austere, the other richer and less
grand. Freeman may seem fanciful when he suggests that these sister
churches express the spirit of their respective founders, “the imperial
will of the conquering duke” and the milder temper of his “loving and
faithful duchess,”[59] but in any event they are Norman and typical
of their age and country. There are elements in the ornamentation of
Norman churches in this period which have been explained by reference
to the distant influence of the Scandinavian north or the Farther
East, there are perhaps traces of Lombard architecture in their
plan, but their structure as a whole is as Norman as the stone of
which they are built, distinguished by local traits from the other
varieties of French Romanesque to which this period gave rise. Not
the least Norman feature of these buildings is the persistent common
sense of design and execution; the Norman architects did not attempt
the architecturally impossible or undertake tasks, like the cathedral
of Beauvais, which they were unable to finish in their own time and
style. “What they began, they completed,” writes the Nestor of American
historians in his sympathetic interpretation of the art and the spirit
of _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_. In Norman art, as in other phases
of Norman achievement, the last word cannot be said till we have
followed it far beyond the borders of the duchy, northward to Durham,
“half house of God, half castle ’gainst the Scot,” and the other
massive monuments which made ‘Norman’ synonymous with a whole style
and period of English architecture, and southward to those more ornate
structures which Norman princes reared at Bari and Cefalù, Palermo and
Monreale. “No art--either Greek or Byzantine, Italian, or Arab--” says
Henry Adams,[60] “has ever created two religious types so beautiful,
so serious, so impressive, and yet so different, as Mont-Saint-Michel
watching over its northern ocean, and Monreale, looking down over its
forests of orange and lemon, on Palermo and the Sicilian seas.”
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
There is no general account of Norman life and culture in any
period of the Middle Ages, and no general study of Norman
feudalism. For conditions in France generally, see Luchaire, _La
société française au temps de Philippe-Auguste_ (Paris, 1909),
translated by Krehbiel (New York, 1912); for England, Miss M.
Bateson, _Mediæval England_ (New York and London, 1904). On
castles, see C. Enlart, _Manuel d’archéologie française_, II
(Paris, 1904, with bibliography), and Mrs. E. S. Armitage, _The
Early Norman Castles of the British Isles_ (London, 1912). For
William the Marshal, see Paul Meyer’s introduction to his edition
of the _Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal_ (Paris, 1891–1901); the
poem has been utilized by Jusserand for his account of tournaments,
_Les sports et jeux d’exercice dans l’ancienne France_ (Paris,
1901), ch. 2.
* * * * *
The work of Delisle, _Études sur la condition de la classe agricole
et l’état de l’agriculture en Normandie au moyen âge_ (Évreux,
1851), is a classic.
The best studies of Norman municipal institutions are A. Chéruel,
_Histoire de Rouen pendant l’époque communale_ (Rouen, 1843); A.
Giry, _Les Établissements de Rouen_ (Paris, 1883–85), supplemented
by Valin, _Recherches sur les origines de la commune de Rouen_
(_Précis_ of the Rouen Academy, 1911); Charles de Beaurepaire, _La
Vicomté de l’Eau de Rouen_ (Évreux, 1856); E. de Fréville, _Mémoire
sur le commerce maritime de Rouen_ (Rouen, 1857); Miss Bateson,
_The Laws of Breteuil_, in _English Historical Review_, XV, XVI;
R. Génestal, _La tenure en bourgage_ (Paris, 1900); Legras, _Le
bourgage de Caen_ (Paris, 1911).
* * * * *
The excellent account of the Norman church in H. Böhmer, _Kirche
und Staat in England und in der Normandie_ (Leipzig, 1899), stops
with 1154. On Odo and on Philip d’Harcourt see V. Bourrienne’s
articles in the _Revue Catholique de Normandie_, VII-X,
XVIII-XXIII. The register of Eudes Rigaud (ed. Bonnin, Rouen, 1852)
is analyzed by Delisle, in _Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes_,
VIII, pp. 479–99; the _Miracula Ecclesie Constantiensis_ and the
letter of Abbot Haimo are discussed by him, _ibid._, IX, pp.
339–52; XXI, pp. 113–39. For the mortuary rolls, see his facsimile
edition of the _Rouleau mortuaire du B. Vital_ (Paris, 1909). The
best monograph on a Norman monastery is that of R. N. Sauvage,
_L’abbaye de S. Martin de Troarn_ (Caen, 1911), where other such
studies are listed. See also Génestal, _Rôle des monastères comme
établissements de crédit étudié en Normandie_ (Paris, 1901), and
Delisle’s edition of Robert of Torigni.
The schools of Bec are described by A. Porée, _Histoire de l’abbaye
du Bec_ (Évreux, 1901). Notices of the various Norman historians
are given by A. Molinier, _Les sources de l’histoire de France_
(Paris, 1901–06), especially II, chs. 25, 33. For Ordericus and
St. Évroul see Delisle’s introduction to the edition of the
_Historia Ecclesiastica_ published by the Société de l’Histoire
de France, and the volumes issued by the Société historique et
archéologique de l’Orne on the occasion of the Fêtes of 1912
(Alençon, 1912). Other early catalogues of libraries, including
that of Philip of Bayeux, are in the first two volumes of the
_Catalogue général des MSS. des départements_ (Paris, 1886–88).
For the vernacular literature, see Gaston Paris, _La littérature
normande avant l’annexion_ (Paris, 1899); and L. E. Menger, _The
Anglo-Norman Dialect_ (New York, 1904). For the latest discussions
of the _Chanson de Roland_ see J. Bédier, _Les légendes épiques_,
III (Paris, 1912); and W. Tavernier’s studies in the _Zeitschrift
für französische Sprache und Litteratur_, XXXVI-XLII (1910–14),
and the _Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie_, XXXVIII (1914).
Enlart, _Manuel d’archéologie française_, I, mentions the principal
works on Norman ecclesiastical architecture. See also R. de
Lasteyrie, _L’architecture religieuse en France à l’époque romane_
(Paris, 1912), ch. 15; Enlart, _Rouen_ (Paris, 1904); H. Prentout,
_Caen et Bayeux_ (Paris, 1900); Henry Adams, _Mont-Saint-Michel and
Chartres_ (Boston, 1913).
VII
THE NORMANS IN THE SOUTH
Of all the achievements of the heroic age of Norman history, none
were more daring in execution or more brilliant in results than the
exploits of Norman barons in the lands of the Mediterranean. Battling
against the infidel in Spain, in Sicily, and in Syria, scattering the
papal army and becoming the humble vassals of the Holy See, overcoming
Lombard princes and Byzantine generals, the Normans were the glorious
adventurers of the Mediterranean world throughout that eleventh
century which constituted the great period of Norman expansion. Then,
masters of southern Italy and Sicily, they put to work their powers of
assimilation and organization and created a strong, well-governed state
and a rich, composite civilization which were the wonder of Europe. If
one were tempted to ascribe the successes of the Normans in England to
happy accident or to the unique personality of William the Conqueror,
the story of Norman achievement in the south, the work of scattered
bands of simple barons without any assistance from the reigning dukes,
would be conclusive proof of the creative power of the Norman genius
for conquest and administration.
The earliest relations of the Normans with the countries of the
Mediterranean were the outgrowth of those pilgrimages to holy places
which play so important a part in mediæval life and literature.
Originating in the early veneration for the shrines associated with
the beginnings of Christianity and the sufferings and death of the
Christian martyrs, pilgrimages were in course of time reënforced by
the more practical motives of healing and penance, until the crowds of
pilgrims who haunted the roads in the later Middle Ages included many a
hoary offender who sought to expiate his sins by this particular form
of good works. Sometimes these penitents would be sent to wander about
the earth for a definite time, more frequently they would be assigned
a journey to a neighboring shrine or to some more famous fountain of
healing grace, such as Compostela, Rome, or Jerusalem. Compostela,
hiding among the Galician hills the bones of no less an apostle than
St. James the Greater, who became in time the patron saint of Spain and
spread the name of Santiago over two continents, was early a centre of
pilgrimage from France, and claimed as one of its devotees the mighty
Charlemagne, the footsteps of whose paladins men traced through the
dark defiles of the Pyrenees in the _Song of Roland_, as well as in
the special itinerary prepared for the use of French pilgrims to the
tomb of the saint. Rome was of course more important, for it claimed
two apostles, as well as their living successor on the pontifical
throne. It needed no pious invention to prove that Charlemagne had
been in Rome and had received the imperial crown as he knelt in St.
Peter’s, and men told how in their own time the great king Canute had
betaken himself thither with staff and scrip and many horses laden with
gold and silver. Already the number of strangers in Rome was so great
that guide-books were compiled indicating its principal sights and
marvels--“seeing Rome,” we might call them--; and as the processions
wound into sight of the Eternal City, they burst into its praise in
that wonderful pilgrim’s chorus:--
O Roma nobilis, orbis et domina,
Cunctarum urbium excellentissima,
Roseo martyrum sanguine rubea,
Albis et virginum liliis candida;
Salutem dicimus tibi per omnia,
Te benedicimus: salve per secula.
Jerusalem was most precious of all, by reason both of its sacred
associations and of the difficulty of the journey. No Charlemagne was
needed to justify resort to the Holy Sepulchre, where the mother of the
great emperor Constantine had built the first shrine; but the great
Charles had a hostel constructed there for Frankish pilgrims, and soon
legend makes him, too, follow the road to Constantinople and Jerusalem,
as we are reminded in the great Charlemagne window at Chartres. There
were manuals for the pilgrim to Jerusalem also, but these were chiefly
occupied with how to reach the heavenly city, though one of them
contents itself with advising the traveller to keep his face always to
the east and ask God’s help.
In all this life of the road the Normans took their full share.
Michelet would have it that their motive was the Norman spirit of gain,
no longer able to plunder neighbors at home, but glad of the chance of
making something on the way and the certainty of gaining a hundred per
cent by assuring the soul’s salvation at the journey’s end. Certainly
they were not afraid to travel nor averse to taking advantage of
the opportunities which travel might bring. We find them, sometimes
singly and sometimes in armed bands, on the road to Spain, to Rome,
and to the Holy City. At one time it may be the duke himself, Robert
the Magnificent, who wends his way with a goodly company to the Holy
Sepulchre, only to die at Nicæa on his return; or a holy abbot, like
Thierry of Saint-Évroul, denied the sight of the earthly Jerusalem
which he sought, but turning his thoughts to the city not made with
hands as he composed himself for his last sleep before a lonely altar
on the shores of Cyprus. In other cases we find the military element
preponderating, as with Roger of Toeni, who led an army against the
Saracens of Spain in the time of Duke Richard the Good, or Robert
Crispin half a century later, fighting in Spain, sojourning in Italy,
and finally passing into the service of the emperor at Constantinople,
where he had “much triumph and much victory.” In this stirring world
the line between pilgrim and adventurer was not easy to draw, and
the Normans did not always draw it. Often “their penitent’s garb
covered a coat of mail,” and they carried a great sword along with
their pilgrim’s staff and wallet.[61] We must remember that Normandy
exported in this period a considerable supply of younger sons, bred to
a life of warfare and fed upon the rich nourishment of the _chansons de
gestes_, but turned loose upon the world to seek elsewhere the lands
and booty and deeds of renown which they could no longer expect to find
at home. The conquest of England gave an outlet to this movement in one
direction; the conquest of southern Italy absorbed it in another.
* * * * *
In the eleventh century, as in the early nineteenth, Italy was merely
a geographical expression. The unity of law and government which it
had enjoyed under the Romans had been long since broken by the Lombard
invasion and the Frankish conquest, which drew the centre and north
of the peninsula into the currents of western politics, while the
south continued to look upon Constantinople as its capital and Sicily
passed under the dominion of the Prophet and the Fatimite caliphs of
Cairo. Separated from the rest of Italy by the lofty barrier of the
Abruzzi and the wedge of territory which the Papacy had driven through
the lines of communication to the west, the southern half followed
a different course of historical development from the days of the
Lombards to those of Garibaldi. Nature had thrust it into the central
place in the Mediterranean world, to which the gulfs and bays of its
long coast-line opened the rich hinterland of Campania and Apulia and
the natural highways beyond. Here had sprung up those cities of Magna
Graæcia which were the cradle of Italian civilization; here the Romans
had their chief harbors at Pozzuoli and Brindisi and their great naval
base at Cape Miseno; here the ports of Gaeta, Naples, Amalfi, and Bari
kept intercourse with the East open during the Middle Ages. And if the
genius of Hamilcar and Hannibal had once sought to tear the south and
its islands from Italy to unite them with a Carthaginian empire, their
close relations with Africa had again been asserted by the raids and
conquests of the Saracens, while their connection with the East made
them the last stronghold of Byzantine power beyond the Adriatic. In
the long run, however, it has been pointed out that, if the culture
of this region came from the south, its masters have come from the
north;[62] and its new masters of the eleventh century were to unify
and consolidate it at the very time when the rest of the peninsula was
breaking up into warring communes and principalities. In the year 1000
the unity of the south was largely formal. The Eastern Empire still
claimed authority, but the northern region was entirely independent
under the Lombard princes of Capua, Benevento, and Salerno, while the
maritime republics of Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi owed at best only a
nominal subjection. The effective power of Byzantium was limited to the
extreme south, where its governors and tax-collectors ruled in both
Apulia and Calabria. Of the two districts Calabria, now the toe of
the boot, was the more Greek, in religion and language as well as in
political allegiance, but its scattered cities were unable to defend
themselves against a vigorous attack. The large Lombard population of
Apulia retained its speech and its law and showed no attachment to its
Greek rulers, whose exactions in taxes and military service brought
neither peace and security within nor protection from the raids of the
Saracens. There was abundant material for a revolt, and the Normans
furnished the occasion.
The first definite trace of the Normans in Italy appears in or about
the year 1016, when a band returning from Jerusalem is found at Monte
Gargano on the eastern coast. There was here an ancient shrine of St.
Michael, older even than the famous monastery of St. Michael of the
Peril on the confines of Normandy with which it had shared the red
cloak of its patron, and a natural object of veneration on the part
of Norman pilgrims, who well understood the militant virtues of the
archangel of the flaming sword. Here the Normans fell into conversation
with a Lombard named Meles, who had recently led an unsuccessful revolt
in Apulia and who told them that with a few soldiers like themselves
he could easily overcome the Greeks, whereupon they promised to return
with their countrymen and assist him. Another story of the same year
tells of a body of forty valiant Normans, also on their way home from
the Holy Sepulchre, who found a Saracen army besieging Salerno and,
securing arms and horses from the natives, defeated and drove off the
infidel host. Besought by the inhabitants to stay, they replied that
they had acted only for the love of God, but consented to carry home
lemons, almonds, rich vestments, and other products of the south as
a means of attracting other Normans to make their homes in this land
of milk and honey. Legend doubtless has its part in these tales,--the
good Orderic makes the twenty thousand Saracens in front of Salerno
flee before a hundred Normans!--but the general account of the occasion
of the Norman expeditions seems correct. Possibly a Lombard emissary
accompanied the pilgrims home to help in the recruiting; certainly in
1017 the Normans are back in force and ready for business. There was,
however, nothing sensational or decisive in the early exploits of the
Normans on Italian soil. The results of the first campaigns with Meles
in northern Apulia were lost in a serious defeat at Canne, and for
many years the Normans, few in number but brave and skilful, sought
their individual advantage in the service of the various parties in
the game of Italian politics, passing from one prince to another as
advantage seemed to offer, and careful not to give to any so decisive
a preponderance that he might dispense with them. The first Norman
principality was established about 1030 at Aversa, just north of
Naples, where the money of Rouen continued to circulate more than a
century afterward; but such definite points of crystallization make
their appearance but slowly, and the body of the Normans, constantly
recruited from home, lived as mercenaries on pay and pillage. Their
reputation was, however, established, and when the prince of Salerno
was asked by the Pope to disband his Norman troop, he replied that it
had cost him much time and money to collect this precious treasure,
for whom the soldiers of the enemy were “as meat before the devouring
lions.”[63]
Among the Norman leaders the house of Hauteville stands out
preëminently, both as the dominant force in this formative period and
as the ancestor of the later princes of southern Italy and Sicily. The
head of the family, Tancred, held the barony of Hauteville, in the
neighborhood of Coutances, but his patrimony was quite insufficient to
provide for his twelve sons, most of whom went to seek their fortune
in the south, an elder group consisting of William of the Iron Arm,
Drogo, and Humphrey, and a younger set of half-brothers, of whom the
most important are Robert Guiscard and Roger. At the outset scarcely
distinguishable from their fellow-warriors, _li fortissime Normant_ of
their historian Aimé, the exploits of these brothers are celebrated by
the later chroniclers in a way which reminds us less of sober history
than of the heroes of the sagas or the _chansons de gestes_. William
of the Iron Arm and Drogo seem to have arrived in the south about 1036
and soon signalized themselves in the first invasion of Sicily and
in the conquest of northern Apulia, where William was chosen leader,
or count, by the other Normans and at his death in 1046 succeeded by
Drogo, who was soon afterward invested with the county by the Emperor
Henry III. It was apparently in this year that Robert Guiscard first
came to Italy. Refused assistance by his brothers, he hired himself
out to various barons until he was left by Drogo in charge of a small
garrison in the mountains of Calabria. Here he lived like a brigand,
carrying off the cattle and sheep of the inhabitants and holding the
people themselves for ransom. On one occasion he laid an ambush for the
Greek commandant of Bisignano whom he had invited to a conference, and
compelled him to pay twenty thousand golden _solidi_ for his freedom.
Brigand as he was, Robert was more than a mere bandit. His shrewdness
and resourcefulness early gained him the name of Guiscard, or the wary,
and his Byzantine contemporary, the princess Anna Comnena, has left
a portrait of him in which his towering stature, flashing eye, and
bellowing strength are matched by his overleaping ambition and desire
to dominate, his skill in organization, and his unconquerable will.
Allied by marriage to a powerful baron of the south, he soon began
to make headway in the conquest of Calabria, and while Drogo and his
brother Humphrey were jealous of Robert’s advancement, at Humphrey’s
death in 1057 he was chosen to succeed as count and leader of the
Normans. Leaving to the youngest brother Roger, just arrived from
Hauteville, the conquest of Calabria and the first attempts on Sicily,
Guiscard gave his attention particularly to the affairs of Apulia,
and after a series of campaigns and revolts completed the subjugation
of the mainland by the capture of Bari in 1071. Five years after
the battle of Hastings the whole of southern Italy had passed under
Norman rule. The south had been conquered, but for whom? Robert was no
king, and a mere count must have, for form’s sake at least, a feudal
superior. And this part, strangely enough, was taken by the Pope.
The relations of the Normans with the Papacy form not the least
remarkable chapter in the extraordinary history of their dominion in
the south. This period of expansion coincided with the great movement
of revival and reform in the church which was taken up with vigor by
the German Popes of the middle of the century and culminated some
years later in the great pontificate of Gregory VII. So far as the
Italian policy of the Papacy was concerned, the movement seems to have
had two aspects, an effort to put an end to the disorders produced
by simony and by the marriage of the clergy, evils aggravated in the
south by the conflicting authority of the Greek and Latin bishops, and
a desire to extend the temporal power and influence of the Pope in the
peninsula. In both of these directions the conquests of the Normans
seemed to threaten the papal interests, and we are not surprised to
find the first of this vigorous series of Popes, Leo IX, interfering
actively in the ecclesiastical affairs of the region and acting as
the defender of the native population, which appealed to him and, in
the case of Benevento, formally placed itself under his protection.
Finally, with a body of troops collected in Germany and in other parts
of Italy, he met the Normans in battle at Civitate, in 1053, and
suffered an overwhelming defeat which clearly established the Norman
supremacy in Italy. The Normans could not, however, follow up their
victory as if it had been won over an ordinary enemy; indeed they
seem to have felt a certain embarrassment in the situation, and after
humbling themselves before the Pope, they treated him with respect and
deference which did not prevent their keeping him for some months in
honorable detention at Benevento. Plainly the Normans were not to be
subdued by force of arms, and it soon became evident to the reforming
party that they would be useful allies against the Roman nobles and the
unreformed clergy, as well as against the dangerous authority of the
German emperor. Accordingly in 1059, the year in which the college of
cardinals received its first definite constitution as the electors of
the Pope, Nicholas II held a council at the Norman hill-fortress of
Melfi, attended by the higher clergy of the south and also by the two
chief Norman princes, Richard of Aversa and Robert Guiscard. In return
for the Pope’s investiture of their lands, these princes took an oath
of allegiance and fealty to the Holy See and agreed to pay an annual
rent to the Pope for their domains; in Robert’s oath, which has been
preserved, he styles himself “by the grace of God and St. Peter duke of
Apulia and Calabria and, with their help, hereafter of Sicily.” As duke
and vassal of the Pope, the cattle-thief of the Calabrian mountains had
henceforth a recognized position in feudal society.
Guiscard, however, was not the man to rest content with the position he
had won, or to interpret his obligation of vassalage as an obligation
of obedience. He was soon in the field again, pushing up the west
coast to Amalfi and up the east into the Abruzzi, taking no great
pains as he went to distinguish the lands of St. Peter from the lands
of others. The Pope began to ask himself what he had secured by the
alliance, and a definite break was soon followed by the excommunication
of the Norman leader. By this time the papal see was occupied by
Gregory VII, who as Hildebrand had long been the power behind the
throne under his predecessors, the greatest, the most intense, and the
most uncompromising of the Popes of the eleventh century; yet even
he failed to bend the Norman to his will. Fearing a combination with
his bitterest enemy, the Emperor Henry IV, he finally made peace with
Guiscard, and in the renewal of fealty and investiture which followed,
the recent conquests of the Normans were expressly excepted. No great
time elapsed before the Pope was forced to make a desperate appeal for
Norman aid. After repeated attempts Henry IV got control of Rome, shut
up Gregory in the Castle of Sant’ Angelo, and installed another Pope
in his place, who crowned Henry emperor in St. Peter’s. Then, in May,
1084, Guiscard’s army came. The emperor made what might be called ‘a
strategic retreat’ to the north, the siege of Sant’ Angelo was raised,
and Rome was given over to butchery and pillage by the Normans and
their Saracen troops. Fire followed the sword, till the greater part
of the city had been burned. Ancient remains and Christian churches
such as San Clemente were ruined by the flames, and quarters like the
Cælian Hill have never recovered from the destruction. The monuments
of ancient Rome suffered more from the Normans than from the Vandals.
Unable to maintain himself in Rome without a protector, Gregory
accompanied his Norman allies southward as far as Salerno, now a Norman
city, where he died the following year, protesting to the last that
he died in exile because he had “loved justice and hated iniquity.”
The year 1085 also saw the end of Robert Guiscard. Sought as an ally
alike by the emperors of the East and of the West, he had begun three
years earlier a series of campaigns against the Greek empire, seizing
the ports of Avlona and Durazzo which were then as now the keys to the
Adriatic, and battling with the Venetians by sea and the Greeks by land
until his troops penetrated as far as Thessaly. He finally succumbed
to illness on the island of Cephalonia at the age of seventy, and was
buried in his Apulian monastery of Venosa, where Norman monks sang
the chants of Saint-Évroul over a tomb which commemorated him as “the
terror of the world”:--
Hic terror mundi Guiscardus; hic expulit Urbe
Quem Ligures regem, Roma, Lemannus habent.
Parthus, Arabs, Macedumque phalanx non texit Alexin.
At fuga; sed Venetum nec fuga nec pelagus.[64]
With the passing of Robert Guiscard the half-century of Norman conquest
is practically at an end, to be followed by another half-century
of rivalry and consolidation, until Roger II united all the Norman
conquests under a single ruler and took the title of king in 1130, just
a hundred years after the foundation of the first Norman principality
at Aversa. Guiscard’s lands and title of duke passed to his son Roger,
generally called Roger Borsa to distinguish him from his uncle and
cousin of the same name. The Norman possessions in Calabria and the
recent acquisitions in Sicily remained in the hands of Guiscard’s
brother Count Roger, nominally a vassal of the duke of Apulia,
while the northern principality of Capua kept its independence, to
be subsequently exchanged for feudal vassalage. Roger of Apulia,
however, was a weak ruler, in spite of the good will of the church and
his uncle’s support, and the revolt of his brother Bohemond and the
Apulian barons threatened the land with feudal disintegration. Want of
governance was likewise writ large over the reign of his son William,
who succeeded as duke in 1111 and ruled till 1127. Guiscard’s real
successor as a political and military leader was his brother Roger,
conqueror and organizer of Sicily and founder of a state which his more
famous son turned into a kingdom.
Once master of Calabria, Count Roger had begun to cast longing eyes
beyond the Straits of Messina at the rich island which has in all
ages proved a temptation to the rulers of the south. No member of the
house of Hauteville, their panegyrist tells us, ever saw a neighbor’s
lands without wanting them for himself, and in this case there was
profit for the soul as well as for the body if the count could “win
back to the worship of the true God a land given over to infidelity,
and administer temporally for the divine service the fruits and
rents usurped by a race unmindful of God.”[65] The language is that
of Geoffrey Malaterra; the excuse meets us throughout the world’s
history--six centuries earlier when Clovis bore it ill that the Arian
Visigoths should possess a fair portion of Gaul which might become
his, six centuries later when Emmanuel Downing thought it sin to
tolerate the devil-worship of the Narragansetts “if upon a Just warre
the Lord should deliver them” to be exchanged for the “gaynefull
pilladge” of negro slaves;[66] nor is the doctrine without advocates
in our own day. We may think of the conquest of Sicily as a sort of
crusade before the Crusades, decreed by no church council and spread
abroad by no preaching or privileges, but conceived and executed by
Norman enterprise and daring. Like the greater crusades in the East,
it profited by the disunion of the Moslem; like them, too, it did not
scruple to make alliances with the infidel and to leave him in peaceful
cultivation of his lands when all was over.
The conquest of Sicily began with the capture of Messina in 1061
and occupied thirty years. It was chiefly the work of Roger, though
Guiscard aided him throughout the earlier years and claimed a share in
the results for himself, as well as vassalage for Roger’s portion. The
decisive turning-point was a joint enterprise, the siege and capture
of Palermo in 1072, which gave the Normans control of the Saracen
capital, the largest city in Sicily, with an all-anchoring harbor from
which it took its name. The Saracens, however, still held the chief
places of the island: the ancient Carthaginian strongholds of the
west and centre, Eryx and ‘inexpugnable Enna,’ known since mediæval
times as Castrogiovanni; Girgenti, “most beautiful city of mortals,”
with its ancient temples and olive groves rising from the shores of
the African Sea; Taormina, looking up at the snows and fires of Etna
and forth over Ionian waters to the bold headlands of Calabria; and
Syracuse, sheltering a Saracen fleet in that great harbor which had
witnessed the downfall of Athenian greatness. To subdue all these and
what lay between required nineteen years of hard fighting, varied,
of course, by frequent visits to Roger’s possessions on the mainland
and frequent expeditions in aid of his nephew, but requiring, even
when the great count was present in person, military and diplomatic
skill of a high order. When, however, the work was done and the last
Saracen stronghold, Noto, surrendered in 1091, Count Roger had under
his dominion a strong and consolidated principality, where Greeks and
Mohammedans enjoyed tolerance for their speech and their faith, where a
Norman fortress had been constructed in every important town, and where
the barons, holding in general small and scattered fiefs, owed loyal
obedience to the count who had made their fortunes, a sharp contrast
to the turbulent feudalism of Apulia, which looked upon the house of
Hauteville as leaders but not as masters. Roger was also in a position
to treat with a free hand the problems of the church, reorganizing
at his pleasure the dioceses which had disappeared under Mohammedan
rule, and receiving from Pope Urban II in 1098 for himself and his
heirs the dignity of apostolic legate in Sicily, so that other legates
were excluded and the Pope could treat with the Sicilian church only
through the count. This extraordinary privilege, the foundation of
the so-called ‘Sicilian monarchy’ in ecclesiastical matters, was the
occasion of ever-recurring disputes in later times, but the success of
Roger’s crusade against the infidel seemed at the moment to justify so
unusual a concession.
At his death in 1101 Roger I left behind him two sons, Simon and Roger,
under the regency of their mother Adelaide. Four years later Simon
died, leaving as the undisputed heir of the Sicilian and Calabrian
dominions the ten-year-old Roger II, who at the age of sixteen took
personal control of the government. During the regency the capital had
crossed the Straits of Messina from the old Norman headquarters in the
Calabrian hills at Mileto, where Roger I lay buried; henceforth it was
fixed at Palermo, fit centre for a Mediterranean state. When his cousin
William died, Roger II was quick to seize the Apulian inheritance,
which he had to vindicate in the field not only against the revolted
barons but against the Pope, anxious to prevent at all cost the
consolidation of the Norman possessions in the hands of a single
ruler. Securing his investiture with Apulia from Pope Honorius II in
1128, Roger two years later took advantage of the disputed election to
the Papacy to obtain from Anacletus II the dignity of king; and on
Christmas Day, 1130, he was crowned and anointed at Palermo, taking
henceforth the title “by the grace of God king of Sicily, Apulia, and
Calabria, help and shield of the Christians, heir and son of the great
Count Roger.” What this kingdom was to mean in the history and culture
of Europe we shall consider in the next lecture.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, in order to complete our survey of the deeds of the Normans
in the south, we must take some notice of the part they played in the
Crusades and in the Latin East. A movement which comprised the whole
of western Europe, and even made Jerusalem-farers out of their kinsmen
of the Scandinavian north, could not help affecting a people such as
the Normans, who had already served a long apprenticeship as pilgrims
to distant shrines and as soldiers of the cross in Spain and Sicily.
Three Norman prelates were present at Clermont in 1095 when Pope Urban
fired the Latin world with the cry _Dieu le veut_, and they carried
back to Normandy the council’s decrees and the news of the holy war.
The crusade does not, however, seem to have had any special preachers
in Normandy, where we hear of no such scenes as accompanied the fiery
progress of Peter the Hermit through Lorraine and the Rhineland, and
of none of the popular movements which sent men to their death under
Peter’s leadership in the Danube valley and beyond the Bosporus.
Pioneers and men-at-arms rather than enthusiasts and martyrs, the
Normans kept their heads when Europe was seething with the new
adventure, and the combined band of Normans, Bretons, and English which
set forth in September, 1096, does not appear to have been very large.
At its head, however, rode the duke of Normandy, Robert Curthose,
called by his contemporaries ‘the soft duke,’ knightly, kind-hearted,
and easy-going, incapable of refusing a favor to any one, under whom
the good peace of the Conqueror’s time had given way to general
disorder and confusion. Impecunious as always, he had been obliged to
pawn the duchy to his brother William Rufus in order to raise the funds
for the expedition. With him went his fighting uncle, Odo of Bayeux,
and the duke’s chaplain Arnulf, more famous in due time as patriarch
of Jerusalem. It does not appear that Robert was an element of special
strength in the crusading host, although he fought by the side of the
other leaders at Nicæa and Antioch and at the taking of Jerusalem. He
spent the winter pleasantly in the south of Italy on his way to the
East, so that he reached Constantinople after most of the others had
gone ahead, and he slipped away from the hardships of the siege of
Antioch to take his ease amidst the pleasant fare and Cyprian wines of
Laodicea[67]--Robert was always something of a Laodicean! When his vows
as a crusader had been fulfilled at the Holy Sepulchre, he withdrew
from the stern work of the new kingdom of Jerusalem and started
home, bringing back a Norman bride of the south for the blessing of
St. Michael of the Peril, and hanging up his standard in his mother’s
abbey-church at Caen. Legend, however, was kind to Robert: before long
he had killed a giant Saracen in single combat and refused the crown of
the Latin kingdom because he felt himself unworthy, until he became the
hero of a whole long-forgotten cycle of romance.
The real Norman heroes of the First Crusade must be sought elsewhere,
again among the descendants of Tancred of Hauteville. When Robert
Curthose and his companions reached the south on their outward journey,
they found the Norman armies engaged in the siege of Amalfi under the
great Count Roger and Guiscard’s eldest son Bohemond, a fair-haired,
deep-chested son of the north, “so tall in stature that he stood above
the tallest men by nearly a cubit.” The fresh enterprise caught the
imagination of Bohemond, who had lost the greater part of his father’s
heritage to his brother Roger Borsa and saw the possibility of a new
realm in the East; and, cutting a great cloak into crosses for himself
and his followers, he withdrew from the siege and began preparations
for the expedition to Palestine. Among those who bound themselves to
the great undertaking were five grandsons and two great-grandsons of
Tancred of Hauteville, chief among them Bohemond’s nephew Tancred,
whose loyalty and prowess were to be proved on many a desperate
battle-field of Syria. Commanding what was perhaps the strongest
contingent in the crusading army and profiting by the experience of his
campaigns in the Balkans in his father’s reign, Bohemond proved the
most vigorous and resourceful leader of the First Crusade. His object,
however, had little connection with the relief of the Eastern Empire or
the liberation of the Holy City, but was directed toward the formation
of a great Syrian principality for himself, such as the other members
of his family had created in Italy and Sicily. As the centre for such a
dominion Antioch was far better suited than Jerusalem both commercially
and strategically, and Bohemond took good care to secure the control of
this city for himself before obtaining the entrance of the crusading
forces. He showed the Norman talent of conciliating the native
elements--Greek, Syrian, and Armenian--in his new state, and for a time
seemed in a fair way to build up a real Norman kingdom in the East. In
the end, however, the Eastern Empire and the Turks proved too strong
for him; he lost precious months in captivity among the Mussulmans,
and when he had raised another great army in France and Italy some
years later, he committed the folly of a land expedition against
Constantinople which ended in disaster. Bohemond did not return to the
East, and his bones are still shown to visitors beneath an Oriental
mausoleum at Canosa, where Latin verses lament his loss to the cause
of the Holy Land. Tancred struggled gallantly to maintain the position
in Syria during his uncle’s absence, but he fought a losing fight, and
the principality of Antioch dwindled into an outlying dependency of the
kingdom of Jerusalem, in which relation it maintained its existence
until the line became extinct with Bohemond VII in 1287.
Two other Norman princes appear as leaders in the course of the later
Crusades, Richard the Lion-Hearted, whose participation in the Third
Crusade we have already had occasion to notice, and Frederick II,
who succeeded to the power and the policy of his Norman ancestors
of the south. For each of these rulers, however, the crusade was
merely an episode in the midst of other undertakings; the day of
permanent Frankish states in Syria had gone by, and neither made any
attempt at founding a Syrian kingdom. The Fourth Crusade was in no
sense a Norman movement, so that the Normans did not contribute to
the new France which the partition of the Eastern empire created on
the Greek mainland, where Frankish castles rose to perpetuate the
memory of Burgundian dukes of Athens and Lombard wardens of the pass
of Thermopylæ. In the Frankish states of Syria we find a certain
number of Norman names but no considerable Norman element in the
Latin population. The fact is that the share of the Normans in the
First Crusade was out of all proportion to their contribution to the
permanent occupation of the East. The principality of Antioch was the
only Norman state in the eastern Mediterranean, and its distinctively
Norman character largely disappeared with the passing of Bohemond I
and Tancred. Unlike their fellow-Christians of France and Italy, the
Normans were not drawn by the commercial and colonizing side of the
crusading movement. The Norman lands in England and Italy offered a
sufficient field for colonial enterprise, and the results were more
substantial and more lasting than the romantic but ephemeral creations
of Frankish power in the East, while the position of the Syrian
principalities as intermediaries in Mediterranean civilization was
matched by the free intermixture of eastern and western culture in the
kingdom of Sicily.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The annals of the Norman conquest of southern Italy and Sicily are
best given by F. Chalandon, _Histoire de la domination normande en
Italie et en Sicile_ (Paris, 1907), I. O. Delarc, _Les Normands
en Italie_ (Paris, 1883), is fuller on the period before 1073,
but less critical. The Byzantine side of the story is given by J.
Gay, _L’Italie méridionale et l’empire byzantin_ (Paris, 1904);
the Saracen, by Michele Amari, _Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia_
(Florence, 1854–72), III. There is nothing in English fuller
than the introductory chapters of E. Curtis, _Roger of Sicily_
(New York, 1912). Interesting historical sketches of particular
localities will be found in F. Lenormant, _La Grande-Grèce_ (Paris,
1881–84); and F. Gregorovius, _Apulische Landschaften_ (Leipzig,
1877). On the sanctuary of St. Michael on Monte Gargano, see E.
Gothein, _Die Culturentwickelung Süd-Italiens_ (Breslau, 1886), pp.
41–111.
* * * * *
No study has been made of the Normans in Spain; for the
pilgrimages to Compostela, see Bédier, _Les légendes épiques_,
III. For the Normans in the Byzantine empire see G. Schlumberger,
“Deux chefs normands des armées byzantines,” in _Revue historique_,
XVI, pp. 289–303 (1881).
* * * * *
There is nothing on the share of the Normans in the Crusades
analogous to P. Riant, _Les Scandinaves en Terre Sainte_ (Paris,
1865). The details can be picked out of R. Röhricht, _Geschichte
des Königreichs Jerusalem_ (Innsbruck, 1898), and _Geschichte des
ersten Kreuzzuges_ (Innsbruck, 1901). There is no satisfactory
biography of Robert Curthose; the legends concerning him are
discussed by Gaston Paris in _Comptes-rendus de l’Académie des
inscriptions_, 1890, pp. 207 _ff._ For the Norman princes of
Antioch, see B. Kugler, _Boemund und Tankred_ (Tübingen, 1862);
and G. Rey’s articles in the _Revue de l’Orient latin_, IV, pp.
321–407, VIII, pp. 116–57 (1896, 1900).
VIII
THE NORMAN KINGDOM OF SICILY
Of the widely separated lands which made up the greater Normandy of the
Middle Ages, none have drifted farther apart than Norman England and
Norman Sicily. Founded about the same time and not greatly different
in area, these states have lost all common traditions, until the
history of the southern Normans seems remote, in time as in space,
from their kinsmen of the north. With the widening of the historical
field, southern Italy and Sicily no longer occupy, as in Mediterranean
days, the centre of the historic stage, and the splendor of their early
history has been dimmed by earthquake and fever, by economic distress,
and by the debasing traditions of centuries of misrule. Neither in
language nor race nor political traditions does England recognize
relationship between the country of the Black Hand and the ‘mother of
parliaments.’ Yet if the English world has lost the feeling of kinship
for the people of the south, it has not lost feeling for the land. It
was no mere reminiscence of ‘Vergilian headlands’ and the thunders
of the Odyssey that drew Shelley to the Bay of Naples, Browning to
Sorrento, or, to take a parallel example elsewhere, Goethe to the
glowing orange-groves of Palermo. And it is not alone the poet whose
soul responds to
A castle, precipice-encurled,
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine;
or
A sea-side house to the farther South,
Where the baked cicala dies of drouth,
And one sharp tree--’tis a cypress--stands.
No land of the western Mediterranean has burnt itself so deeply into
the imagination and sentiment of the English-speaking peoples. Twice
has this vivid land of the south played a leading part in the world’s
life and thought, once under the Greeks, of “wind-swift thought and
city-founding mind,” as we may read in the marbles of Pæstum and
Selinus and in the deathless pages of Thucydides; and a second time
under the Norman princes and their Hohenstaufen successors, creators
of an extraordinarily vigorous and precocious state and a brilliant
cosmopolitan culture. If our interest in this brief period of Sicilian
greatness be not Norman, it is at least human, as in one of the
culminating points of Mediterranean civilization.
* * * * *
It must be emphasized at the outset that the history of this Norman
kingdom was brief. It had two rulers of genius, Roger II, 1130–54,
and his grandson Frederick II, 1198–1250, separated by the reigns of
William the Bad and William the Good,--contemporaries of Henry II of
England, and neither so bad nor so good as their names might lead us
to suppose,--Tancred of Lecce and his son William III, and Constance,
Roger’s daughter and Frederick’s mother, wife of the Hohenstaufen
Emperor Henry VI. It is usual to consider the Norman period as closing
with the deposition of William III in 1194 and to class Constance and
Frederick II with the Hohenstaufen. In the case of Constance there
seems to be no possible reason for this, for she was as Norman as any
of her predecessors and issued documents in her own name throughout
the remaining three years of her husband’s life and during the few
months of 1197–98 by which she survived him. With their son Frederick
II, half Norman and half Hohenstaufen, the question is perhaps even,
and the science of genetics has not yet advanced far enough to
enable us to classify and trace to their source the dominant and the
recessive elements in his inheritance. No one, however, can study him
at close range without discovering marked affinities with his Norman
predecessors, notably the second Roger, and the whole trend of recent
investigation goes to show that, in the field of government as in that
of culture, his policy is a continuation of the work of the Norman
kings, from whom much of his legislation is directly derived. Half
Norman by birth, Frederick was preponderantly Norman in his political
heritage. It was in Sicily that he grew up and began to rule, and in
Sicily that he did his really constructive work. To judge him as a
Hohenstaufen is only less misleading than to judge him as a German
king, for the centre and aim of his policy lay in the Mediterranean.
In Frederick’s sons, legitimate and illegitimate, the Norman strain
is still further attenuated, and as they had no real opportunity to
continue their father’s work, it matters little whether we call them
Normans or Hohenstaufen. The coming of Charles of Anjou ends this
epoch, and his victory at Tagliacozzo in 1268 seals the fate of the
dynasty. We may, if we choose, carry the Norman period to this point;
for all real purposes it ends with the death of Frederick in 1250. The
preceding one hundred and twenty years embrace the real life-history
of the Norman kingdom. Brief as this is, it is too long for a single
lecture, and we must limit ourselves to Roger and the two Williams,
touching on the developments of the thirteenth century only in the most
incidental fashion.
Throughout this period the territorial extent of the realm remained
practically unchanged, comprising Sicily, with Malta, and the southern
half of the Italian peninsula as far as Terracina on the western
coast and the river Tronto on the eastern. There were of course
times when the royal authority was disputed within and attacked from
without,--feudal revolts, raids by the Pisans, expeditions of the
German emperor, diplomatic contests with the Pope,--but it was not
permanently limited or shorn of its territories. There were, on the
other hand, moments of expansion, particularly by sea, for Sicily was
of necessity a naval power and early saw the importance of creating a
navy commensurate with its maritime position. The occupation of Tripoli
and Tunis by Roger II seized the Mediterranean by the throat; the
possession of Corfu threatened the freedom of the Adriatic; but neither
conquest was permanent, and in the main the Greek empire and the powers
of northern Africa succeeded in keeping the Sicilian kings within their
natural boundaries.
In area about four-fifths the size of England, the southern kingdom
showed far greater diversity, both in the land and in its inhabitants.
Stretching from the sub-tropical gardens of Sicily into the heart of
the highest Apennines, it was divided by mountain and sea into distinct
natural regions between which communication continues difficult even
to-day--the isolated valleys of the Abruzzi, the great plain of Apulia,
the ‘granite citadel’ of Calabria, the rich fields of Campania, the
commercial cities of the Bay of Naples and Gulf of Salerno, the
contrasted mountains and shore-lands of Sicily itself. The difficulties
of geography were increased by differences of race, religion, and
political traditions. The mass of the continental population was, of
course, of Italian origin, going back in part to the Samnite shepherds
of primitive Italy, and while it had been modified in many places by
the Lombard conquest, it retained its Latin speech and was subject to
the authority of the Latin church. Calabria, however, was now Greek,
in religion as in language, and the Greek element was considerable
in the cities of Apulia and flowed over into Sicily, where the chief
foreign constituent was African and Mohammedan. Politically, there was
a mixed inheritance of Lombard and Roman law, of Greek and Saracen
bureaucracy, of municipal independence, and of Norman feudalism,
entrenched in the mountain-fortresses of upper Apulia and the Abruzzi;
while the diverse origins of the composite state were expressed in the
sovereign’s official title, “king of Sicily, of the duchy of Apulia,
and of the principality of Capua.” The union of these conflicting
elements into a single strong state was the test and the triumph of
Norman statesmanship.
* * * * *
Plainly the terms of this political problem were quite different from
that set the Norman rulers of England. Whatever local divergences
careful study of Anglo-Saxon England may still reveal, there were
no differences of religion or of general political tradition, while
the rapidity of the conquest at the hands of a single ruler made
possible a uniform policy throughout the whole country. The convenient
formula of forfeiture and regrant of all the land, for example,
created at once uniformity of tenure and of social organization.
Moreover, as we have already seen, back of the Norman conquest of
England lay Normandy itself, firmly organized under a strong duke,
who took with him across the Channel his household officers and his
lay and spiritual counsellors to form the nucleus of his new central
government, which was in many respects one with the central government
of Normandy. In the south none of these favoring conditions prevailed.
A country composed of many diverse elements was conquered by different
leaders and at different times, so that there could be no question
of uniformity of system. Indeed there could be no system at all, for
the Normans came as individual adventurers, with no governmental
organization behind them, and the instruments of government which they
used had to be created as they went along. Whatever of Norman tradition
reached the south could come only in the subdivided and attenuated form
of individual influences. Furthermore, the Norman ingredient in the
population continued relatively small. The scattered bands of early
days were of course reënforced as time went on, but there was never
any general migration or any movement that affected the mass of the
population in town and country. If we had any statistics, we should
doubtless find that some hundreds or at most a few thousands would
cover the entire Norman population of Italy and Sicily. These brought
with them their speech, their feudal tenures, probably some elements of
Norman customary law; but, given their small numbers, they could not
hope to Normanize a vast country, where their language soon disappeared
and their identity was ultimately lost in the general mass. Under
such conditions there could be no general transplantation of Norman
institutions. The rulers were Norman, as were the holders of the great
fiefs, but, to speak paradoxically, the most Norman thing about their
government was its non-Norman character, that is to say, its quick
assimilation of alien elements and its statesmanlike treatment of
native customs and institutions. The Norman leaders were too wise to
attempt an impossible Normanization.
The policy of toleration in political and religious matters had its
beginnings in the early days of the Norman occupation, but it received
a broad application only in the course of the conquest of Sicily
by the Great Count, and was first fully and systematically carried
out by his son Roger II. In religion this meant the fullest liberty
for Greeks, Jews, and Mohammedans, and even the maintenance of the
hierarchy of the Greek Church and the encouragement and enrichment of
Basilian monasteries along with the Benedictine foundations which were
marked objects of Norman generosity. In law it meant the preservation
of local rights and customs and of the usages of the several distinct
elements in the population, Latin and Greek, Hebrew and Saracen. In
local administration it involved the retention of the local dignitaries
of the cities and the Byzantine offices of the _strategos_ and the
_catepan_, as well as the fiscal arrangements established by the
Saracens in Sicily. And finally in the central government itself, the
need of dealing wisely and effectively with the various peoples of the
kingdom necessitated the employment of men familiar with each of them,
and the maintenance of a secretarial bureau which issued documents in
Greek and Arabic as well as in Latin.
It was in the central administration that Roger II faced his freshest
problem, which was nothing less than the creation of a strong central
government for a kingdom which had never before been united under a
single resident ruler. His method was frankly eclectic. We are told
that he made a point of inquiring carefully into the practices of other
kings and countries and adopting anything in them which seemed to him
valuable, and that he drew to his court from every land, regardless of
speech and faith, men who were wise in counsel or distinguished in war,
among whom the brilliant admiral George of Antioch is a conspicuous
example. Nevertheless we should err if we thought of him as making a
mere artificial composite. The Calabria of his youth had preserved a
stiff tradition of Byzantine administration, and the Mohammedans of
Sicily had an even stronger bureaucracy at work. Roger’s capital was
at Palermo, and it was natural that the Greek and Saracen institutions
of Sicily and Calabria should prove the formative influences in
his government as it was extended to the newly acquired and less
centralized regions of the mainland. There was free adaptation and
use of experience, but the loose feudal methods of the Normans were
profoundly modified by the bureaucratic traditions of the East.
The central point in the government lay, as in the states beyond the
Alps, in the _curia_ of feudal vassals and particularly in its more
permanent nucleus of household officials and immediate advisers of
the king. But whereas in the other parts of western Europe the feudal
baronage still prevailed exclusively and gave way but slowly before
the growth of specialized training and competence, the professional
element was present in the Sicilian _curia_ from an early period in the
logothetes and emirs which Roger II had taken over from the earlier
organization. The chancery, with its Latin, Greek, and Arabic branches,
was inevitably a more complicated institution than in the other western
kingdoms, and its documents imitated Byzantine and papal usage, even
in externals. At one point, however, it shows close parallelisms with
the Anglo-Norman chancery, namely in the free use of those _mandata_ or
administrative writs which are still rare in the secular states of the
twelfth century; and if we remember that their employment constitutes
the surest index of the efficiency of a mediæval administrative system,
we must conclude, what is evident in other ways, that the most vigorous
governments of the period were the two Norman kingdoms. In judicial
matters the parallel is also instructive. Here a professional class
had existed in the south from the outset as an inheritance from the
Byzantine period, and it early makes its appearance in the _curia_
in the person of a group of justices who in time seem completely to
absorb the judicial functions of the larger body. At the same time the
Norman barons were utilized for the royal justiciars which King Roger
established throughout all parts of his kingdom. Parallel to these
provincial justices ran provincial chamberlains, and over them there
were later established master justices and master chamberlains for the
great districts of Apulia and Capua, all subject to the central _curia_.
The fiscal system was especially characteristic. Roger’s biographer
tells us that the king spent his spare time in close supervision of
the receipts and expenditures of his government, and that everything
relating to the accounts was carefully kept in writing. Beginning with
his reign we have documentary evidence of a branch of the _curia_,
called in Arabic _diwan_, in Greek σέκρετον, and in Latin either
_duana_ or _secretum_, and acting as a central financial body for
the whole kingdom. It kept voluminous registers, called in Arabic
_defêtir_, and as its officers and clerks were largely Saracens, it
seems plainly to go back to Saracenic antecedents. There are, however,
some traces on the mainland of careful descriptions of lands and serfs
like those which it extracted from its records in Sicily under the name
of _plateæ_, so that Byzantine survivals should also be taken into
account in studying the origin of the institution. Indeed this whole
system presupposes elaborate surveys and registers of the land and its
inhabitants such as were made in the Egypt of the Ptolemies and, less
completely, in the Roman empire, and such as meet us, in a ruder and
simpler form, in that unique northern record, the Domesday survey of
1086, itself perhaps suggested by some knowledge of the older system
in Italy. No one can fail to note the striking analogies between the
Sicilian _duana_ and the Anglo-Norman exchequer, but the disappearance
of all records of the southern bureau precludes any comparison of their
actual organization and procedure. The only parallel records which
have reached us are the registers of feudal holdings, which exhibit
noteworthy similarities in the tenures of the two kingdoms.
Such feudal institutions were evidently a matter of common inheritance,
but any connections indicated by similar administrative arrangements
were doubtless due to later imitation from one side or the other. Roger
II in Sicily and Henry I and Henry II in England were at work upon
much the same sort of governmental problem, and Roger was not alone in
looking to other lands for suggestions. Among the foreigners whom Roger
drew into his service we find Englishmen such as his chancellor, Robert
of Selby, and one of his chaplains and fiscal officers, Thomas Brown,
who later returned to his native land to fill an honored place in the
exchequer of Henry II. There was constant intercourse between the two
kingdoms in the twelfth century, and abundant opportunity to keep one
government informed of the administrative experiments of the other.
In general, however, the Sicilian monarchy was of a far more absolute
and Oriental type than is found among the northern Normans or anywhere
else in western Europe. The king’s court, with its harem and eunuchs,
resembled that of the Fatimite caliphs; his ideas of royal power were
modelled upon the empire of Constantinople. The only contemporary
portrait of King Roger which has reached us, the mosaic of the church
of the Martorana at Palermo, represents him clothed in the dalmatic
of the apostolic legate and the imperial costume of Byzantium, and
receiving the crown directly from the hands of Christ; and a similar
portrayal of the coronation of King William II shows that the scene was
meant to be typical of the divine right of the king, responsible to no
earthly authority. Theocratic in principle, the Sicilian monarchy drew
its inspiration from the law-books of Justinian as well as from the
living example on the eastern throne. The series of laws or assizes
issued by King Roger naturally reflects the composite character of the
Norman state. The mass of local custom is not superseded, the feudal
obligations of the vassals are clearly recognized, influences of canon
law and Teutonic custom are clearly traceable, indeed the northern
conception of the king’s peace may have been their starting-point; but
the great body of these decrees flows directly from the Roman law, as
preserved and modified by the Byzantine emperors. The royal power is
everywhere exalted, often in phrases where the king is substituted for
the emperor of the Roman original, and the law of treason is applied
in detail to the protection of royal documents, royal coins, and royal
officers. Even to question the king’s ordinances or decisions is on a
par with sacrilege.
The test of such phrases was the possession of adequate military and
financial resources. Of the strength of King Roger’s army his long and
successful wars offer sufficient evidence; the great register of his
military fiefs, the so-called _Catalogue of the Barons_, indicates
that the feudal service could be increased when necessity demanded,
while contingents of Saracen troops were as valuable to him as they
had been to his father. Much the same can be said of his navy, for
the safety of the Sicilian kingdom and its position in Mediterranean
politics depended in large measure upon sea power, and Roger’s fleet
has a distinguished record in his Italian and African campaigns. Army
and navy and civil service, however, rested ultimately upon the royal
treasury, and among its contemporaries the Sicilian kingdom enjoyed a
deserved reputation for great wealth. Its resources consisted partly
in the products of the soil, such as the grain and cotton and peltry
which were exported from Sicily itself; partly in manufactures, as in
the case of the silk industry which King Roger developed in Palermo;
and partly in the unrivalled facilities for trade which were presented
by its many harbors and its advantageous location with respect to
the great sea routes. Under the Norman kings the commerce of the
southern kingdom was passive, rather than active, that is to say, it
was carried on, not mainly by its own cities, such as Bari and Amalfi,
which had enjoyed great prosperity in the Byzantine period and lost
their local independence under the Normans, but by commercial powers
from without--Pisa, Genoa, and Venice. The relative importance of
each of these varied with the vicissitudes of Italian politics, but
among them they shared the external trade of the kingdom. We find the
Venetians on the eastern coast, the Genoese and Pisans at Salerno
and the chief ports of Sicily, where they had special warehouses and
often considerable colonies; and the earliest commercial records of
Genoa and Pisa, notably the register of the Genoese notary, John the
Scribe, enable us to follow their business from merchant to merchant
and from port to port. Sicily served not only as a place for the
exchange of exports for foreign products, the cloth of northern Italy
and France and the spices and fabrics of the East, but also as a stage
in the trade with the Orient by the great highway of the Straits of
Messina or with Africa and Spain by way of Palermo and the ports of
the western and southern coast. From all this the king took his toll.
Without foregoing any of their feudal or domanial revenues or extensive
monopolies, Roger and his successors tapped this growing commerce by
port dues and by tariffs on exports and imports, thus securing their
ready money from that merchant class upon which the future monarchies
of western Europe were to build. The income from Palermo alone was said
to be greater than that which the king of England derived from his
whole kingdom.
It is evident, even from this brief outline, that the Sicilian state
was not only a skilful blending of political elements of diverse
origin, but also that it stood well in advance of its contemporaries in
all that goes to make a modern type of government. Its kings legislated
at a time when lawmaking was rare; they had a large income in money
when other sovereigns lived from feudal dues and the produce of their
domains; they had a well established bureaucracy when elsewhere both
central and local government had been completely feudalized; they
had a splendid capital when other courts were still ambulatory. Its
only rival in these respects, the Anglo-Norman kingdom of the north,
was inferior in financial resources and had made far less advance in
the development of the class of trained officials through whom the
progress of European administration was to be realized. Judged by
these tests, it is not too much to call the kingdom of Roger and his
successors the first modern state, just as Roger’s non-feudal policy,
far-sightedness, and diplomatic skill have sometimes won for him the
title of the first modern king. This designation, I am well aware, has
more commonly been reserved for the younger of Sicily’s “two baptized
sultans,”[68] Frederick II--_stupor mundi et immutator mirabilis_, “the
wonder of the world and a marvellous innovator.” No one can follow
the career of this most gifted and fascinating figure without feeling
the modern elements in his character and in his administration of the
Sicilian state. His government stands ahead of its contemporaries in
the thirteenth century as does that of Roger in the twelfth, and the
more recent naturally seems the more modern. It is not, however, clear
that the relative superiority was greater, and recent studies have made
plain, what was not at first realized, that considerable portions of
Frederick’s legislation and of his administrative system go back to his
Norman predecessors, some of them to Roger himself. After all it is not
the historian’s business to award prizes for being modern, especially
when it is not always plain in what modernity consists. The main point
is to recognize the striking individuality of the Sicilian state in
directions which other states were in time to follow, and to remember
that this individuality was a continuous thing and not a creation of
the second Frederick. Moreover, as we shall shortly see, what is true
in the field of government is also true in the field of civilization:
the brilliant cosmopolitan culture of the thirteenth century is a
direct development from similar conditions under King Roger.
The culture of the Norman kingdom was even more strikingly composite
than its government. Both historically and geographically Sicily was
the natural meeting-point of Greek, Arabic, and Latin civilization,
and a natural avenue for the transmission of eastern art and learning
to the West. Moreover, in the intellectual field the splendor of the
Sicilian kingdom coincides with that movement which is often called the
renaissance of the twelfth century and which consisted in considerable
measure in the acquisition of new knowledge from the Greeks of the East
and the Saracens of Sicily and Spain. Sicily was not the only channel
through which the wisdom of the East flowed westward, for there were
scholars from northern Italy who visited Constantinople and there was
a steady diffusion of Saracen learning through the schools of Spain.
Nowhere else, however, did Latin, Greek, and Arabic civilization live
side by side in peace and toleration, and nowhere else was the spirit
of the renaissance more clearly expressed in the policy of the rulers.
The older Latin culture of the southern kingdom had its centre and in
large measure its source at Monte Cassino, mother of the Benedictine
monasteries throughout the length and breadth of western Christendom.
Founded by St. Benedict in 529, this establishment still maintains
the unique record of fourteen centuries of monastic history and of
more than forty generations of followers of the Benedictine rule,
keeping age after age their vigils of labor, prayer, and fasting,
but feasting their uncloistered eyes--_per gl’ occhi almeno non v’ è
clausura!_--upon the massive ranges of the central Apennines and the
placid valley of the Garigliano, “the Land of Labor and the Land of
Rest.” Its golden age was the eleventh and early twelfth centuries,
when its relations with the Normans and the Papacy kept it in the
forefront of Italian politics, when two of its abbots sat upon the
throne of St. Peter, and when the greatest of them, Desiderius--as
Pope known as Victor III--built a great basilica which was adorned by
workmen from Constantinople with mosaics and with the great bronze
doors which are the chief surviving evidence of its early splendor. Men
of learning were drawn to the monastery, like the monk Constantine the
African, skilled in the science of the Greek and Arabic physicians,
whose works he translated into Latin. Manuscripts of every sort were
copied in the characteristic south-Italian hand, the Beneventan script,
which serves as a sure index of the intellectual activity throughout
the southern half of the peninsula in this period--sermons and
service-books, theological commentaries and lives of the saints, but
also the law-books of Justinian and the writings of the Latin poets and
historians with their commentators. Indeed without the scribes of Monte
Cassino the world would have lost some of its most precious monuments
of antiquity and the early Middle Ages, including on the mediæval
side the oldest of the papal registers, that of John VIII, and on
the classical, Varro, Apuleius, and the greater part of the works of
Tacitus. Nowhere else is the work of the monasteries as the preservers
of ancient learning more manifest.
The home of Greek learning in Italy was likewise to be found in
monasteries, in those Basilian foundations which had spread over
Calabria and the Basilicata in the ninth and tenth centuries and
now under Norman protection sent out new colonies like the abbey of
San Salvatore at Messina. Enriched with lands and rents and feudal
holdings, they also set themselves to the building up of libraries by
copies and by manuscripts brought from the East; but so far as we can
judge from the ancient catalogues and from the scattered fragments
which survive their dispersion, these collections were almost entirely
biblical and theological in character, including however splendid
examples of calligraphy such as the text of the Gospels, written in
silver letters on purple vellum and adorned with beautiful miniatures,
which is still preserved in the cathedral of Rossano.
Meanwhile, and largely as a result of the constant relations between
southern Italy and the Greek East, learning had spread beyond
monastery walls and ecclesiastical subjects, and had begun to attract
the attention of men from the north. An English scholar, Adelard of
Bath, who visited the south at the beginning of the twelfth century,
found a Latin bishop of Syracuse skilled in all the mathematical
arts, a Greek philosopher of Magna Græcia who discoursed on natural
philosophy, and the greatest medical school of Europe in the old
Lombard capital at Salerno, early famed as the city of Hippocrates and
the seat of the oldest university in the West. A generation later,
another Englishman, the humanist John of Salisbury, studies philosophy
with a Greek interpreter in Apulia and drinks the heavy wines of the
Sicilian chancellor; while still others profit by translations of Greek
philosophical and mathematical works from the Italian libraries. The
distinctive element in southern learning lay, however, not on the Latin
side, but in its immediate contact with Greek and Arabic scholarship,
and the chief meeting-point of these various currents of culture was
the royal court at Palermo, direct heir to the civilization of Saracen
Sicily.
* * * * *
The Sicilian court, like the kingdom, was many-tongued and
cosmopolitan, its praises being sung alike by Arabic travellers and
poets, by grave Byzantine ecclesiastics, and by Latin scholars of Italy
and the north. A Greek archimandrite, Neilos Doxopatrios, produced at
King Roger’s request a _History of the Five Patriarchates_ directed
against the supremacy of the Pope of Rome; a Saracen, Edrisi, prepared
under his direction the greatest treatise of Arabic geography,
celebrated long afterward as “King Roger’s Book.” Under William I the
chief literary figures are likewise connected with the court: Eugene
the Emir, a Greek poet thoroughly conversant with Arabic and deeply
versed in the mathematics and astronomy of the ancients; and Henricus
Aristippus, archdeacon of Catania and for a time chief minister of the
king, a collector of manuscripts, a translator of Plato, Aristotle, and
Diogenes Laertius, and an investigator of the phenomena connected with
the eruption of Etna in a spirit which reminds us less of the age of
the schoolmen than of the death of the younger Pliny. Such a literary
atmosphere was peculiarly favorable, to the production of translations
from the Greek and Arabic into Latin, and we can definitely connect
with Sicily the versions which made known to western Europe the _Meno_
and _Phædo_ of Plato, portions of the _Meteorology_ and of certain
other works of Aristotle, the more advanced writings of Euclid, and
the _Almagest_ of Ptolemy, the greatest of ancient and mediæval
treatises on astronomy. In a very different field we have from Roger’s
reign a Greco-Arabic psalter and an important group of New Testament
manuscripts. “While we Germans were in many respects barbarians,” says
Springer, “the ruling classes in Sicily enjoyed the almost over-ripe
fruits of an ancient culture and combined Norman vigor of youth with
Oriental refinement of life.”[69]
There were lacking in the twelfth century the poetic and imaginative
elements which flourished at the court of Frederick II, but on the
scientific and philosophical sides there is clear continuity in
the intellectual history of the south from Roger II and William to
Frederick II and Manfred. At one point it is even probable that an
actual material connection can be traced, for the collection of Greek
manuscripts upon which Manfred set great store seems to have had its
origin in codices brought from Constantinople to Palermo under the
first Norman kings; and as Manfred’s library probably passed into the
possession of the Popes, it became the basis of the oldest collection
of Greek manuscripts in the Europe of the humanists. Within its limits
the intellectual movement at the court of King Roger and his son had
many of the elements of a renaissance, and like the great revival of
the fourteenth century, it owed much to princely favor. It was at
the kings’ request that translations were undertaken and the works
of Neilos and Edrisi written, and it was no accident that two such
scholars as Aristippus and Eugene of Palermo occupied high places in
the royal administration. In their patronage of learning, as well as
in the enlightened and anti-feudal character of their government, the
Sicilian sovereigns, from Roger to Frederick II, belong to the age of
the new statecraft and the humanistic revival.
The art of the Sicilian kingdom, like its learning and its government,
was the product of many diverse elements, developing on the mainland
into a variety of local and provincial types, but in Sicily combined
and harmonized under the guiding will of the royal court. Traces
of direct Norman influence occur, as in the towers and exterior
decoration of the cathedral of Cefalù or in the plan of that great
resort of Norman pilgrims, the church of St. Nicholas at Bari; but in
the main the Normans, in Bertaux’s phrase, contributed little more
than the cement which bound together the artistic materials furnished
by others.[70] These materials were abundant and various, the Roman
basilica and the Greek cupola, the bronze doors and the brilliant
mosaics of Byzantine craftsmen, the domes, the graceful arches and
ceilings, and the intricate arabesques of Saracen art; yet in the
churches and palaces of Sicily they were fused into a beautiful and
harmonious whole which still dazzles us with its splendor. The chief
examples of this ‘Norman’ style are to be found at Cefalù, King
Roger’s cherished foundation, where he prepared his last resting-place
in the great porphyry sarcophagus later transported to Palermo, and
where Byzantine artists worked in blue and gold wonderful pictures of
Christ and the Virgin and stately figures of archangels and saints
of the Eastern Church; at Monreale, the royal mount of William II,
commanding the inexhaustible wealth of Palermo’s Golden Shell and
serving as the incomparable site of a great cathedral, with storied
mosaics of every color covering its walls and vaulted ceiling like an
illuminated missal, and with cloisters of rare and piercing beauty;
and between them, in space and time, the palaces and churches of
Palermo--the church of the Martorana, built in the Byzantine style and
endowed with a Greek library by Roger’s admiral George of Antioch, the
Saracenic edifices of San Cataldo and San Giovanni degli Eremiti, and
the unsurpassed glories of the Cappella Palatina--all set against the
brilliant background of the Sicilian capital, which owes to the Norman
kings its unique place in the history of art.
Welcoming merchants and strangers of every land and race, containing
within itself organized communities of Greeks, Mohammedans, and Jews,
each with its own churches, mosques, or synagogues, the Palermo of the
twelfth century was a great cosmopolitan city and the natural centre of
a Mediterranean art. Midway between Cordova and Constantinople, between
Africa and Italy, it laid them all under contribution. Travellers
celebrated the luxuriant gardens of the city and its surrounding
plain, with the vast fields of sugar cane and groves of orange, fig,
and lemon, olive and palm and pomegranate, its commodious harbor and
its spacious and busy streets, its gorgeous fabrics and abundance
of foreign wares, its walls and palaces and places of worship. “A
stupendous city,” says the Spanish traveller, Ibn Giobair,[71]
“elegant, graceful, and splendid, rising before one like a temptress”
... and offering its king--“may Allah take them from him!--every
pleasure in the world.” An artist’s city, too, distinguished by the
qualities which Goethe saw in it, “the purity of its light, the
delicacy of its lines and tones, the harmony of earth and sea and sky.”
From the highest point in the capital rose the royal palace, which
still retains, in spite of the transformations of eight centuries,
something of the massiveness and the splendor of its Norman original,
of which it preserves the great Pisan tower,--once the repository
of the royal treasure,--the royal chapel, and one of the state
apartments of King Roger’s time. Its terraces and gardens have long
since disappeared, with their marble lions and plashing fountains
which resembled the Alhambra or the great pleasure-grounds of the
Mohammedan East; but we can easily call them to life with the aid of
the Saracen poets and of the remains of the other royal residences
which surrounded the city “like a necklace of pearls.” Here, amid
his harem and his eunuchs, the officers of his court and his retinue
of Mohammedan servants, the king lived much after the manner of an
Oriental potentate. On state occasions he donned the purple and gold
of the Greek emperors or the sumptuous vestments of red samite,
embroidered with golden tigers and camels and Arabic invocations to
the Christian Redeemer, which are still preserved among the treasures
of the Holy Roman Empire at Vienna. And when, on festivals, he entered
the palace chapel, Latin in its ground-plan, Greek and Arabic in its
ornamentation, the atmosphere was likewise Oriental. As described at
its dedication in 1140, with the starry heavens of its ceiling and the
flowery meadows of its pavement, the chapel preserves its fundamental
features to-day. Dome and choir are dominated by great Byzantine
figures of Christ, accompanied by Byzantine saints and scenes with
Greek inscriptions, all executed with the fullest brilliancy of which
mosaics are capable, while the stalactite ceiling, “dripping with
all the elaborate richness of Saracen art,” seems “to re-create some
forgotten vision of the _Arabian Nights_.” Harmonious in design yet
infinitely varied in detail, rich beyond belief in color and in line,
reflecting alike the dim rays of its pendent lamps or the full light
of the southern sun, the Cappella Palatina is the fullest and most
adequate expression of the many-sided art of the Norman kingdom and the
unifying force of the Norman kings.
* * * * *
Brilliant but ephemeral, precocious but lacking in permanent
results--such are the judgments commonly passed upon the Sicilian
kingdom and its civilization. At best the kingdom seems to reach no
farther than Frederick II, and of him Freeman has said that, though
qualified by genius to start some great movement or begin some new era,
he seemed fated to stand at the end of everything which he touched--the
mediæval empire, the Sicilian kingdom, the Norman-Hohenstaufen
line.[72] In the field of government these statements are in the main
true: the rapid changes of dynasties and the deep political decline
into which the south ultimately fell destroyed the unity of its
political development and nullified the work of Norman state-building,
so that the enduring results of Norman statesmanship and Norman law
must be sought in the north and not in Italy. That, however, is not
the whole of the story, and in the field of culture influences less
palpable, but none the less real, flowed from the Norman stream
into the general currents of European civilization. So long as the
Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was looked upon
as simply the negation of the Middle Ages by a return to classical
antiquity, figures such as King Roger and Frederick II were merely
‘sports,’ isolated flashes of genius and modernity without any relation
to their own times or to the greater movement which followed. Since,
however, we have come to view the Renaissance in its larger aspects
as far more than a classical revival, its relations to the Middle
Ages are seen to have been much more intimate and important than was
once supposed. The evolution is at times rapid, but the _Trecento_
grows out of the centuries which preceded as naturally as it grew
into the _Quattrocento_ which followed. The place of Italy in this
process is universally recognized; the place of southern Italy is
sometimes overlooked. We are too prone to forget that Niccola Pisano
was also called Nicholas of Apulia; that Petrarch owed much to his
sojourn at the Neapolitan court; that Boccaccio learned his Greek from
a Calabrian; that the first notes of a new Italian literature were
sounded at the court of Frederick II. Many phases of the relation
between south and north in this transitional period are still obscure,
but of the significance of the southern contribution there is now
reasonable assurance. Moreover, the continuity between the intellectual
movement under Roger and William I and that under Frederick II and
later can be followed in some detail in the history of individual
manuscripts and authors. When humanists like Petrarch and Salutati read
Plato’s _Phædo_ or Ptolemy’s _Almagest_, their libraries show that they
used the Latin versions of the Sicilian translators of the twelfth
century. The learning of the southern kingdom may have been a faint
light, but it was handed on, not extinguished.
For our general understanding of the Normans and their work, it is well
that we should trace them in the lands where their direct influence
grows faint and dim, as well as in those where their descendants still
rule. Only a formal and mechanical view of history seeks to ticket
off particular races against particular regions as the sole sources
of population and power; only false national pride conceives of any
people as continually in the vanguard of civilization. Races are mixed
things, institutions and civilization are still more complex, and no
people can claim to be a unique and permanent source of light and
strength. Outside of Normandy the Normans were but a small folk, and
sooner or later they inevitably lost their identity. They did their
work pre-eminently not as a people apart, but as a group of leaders
and energizers, the little leaven that leaveneth the whole lump.
Wherever they went, they showed a marvellous power of initiative and
of assimilation; if the initiative is more evident in England, the
assimilation is more manifest in Sicily. The penalty for such activity
is rapid loss of identity; the reward is a large share in the general
development of civilization. If the Normans paid the penalty, they also
reaped the reward, and they were never more Norman than in adopting the
statesmanlike policy of toleration and assimilation which led to their
ultimate extinction. _Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!_
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The best general account of the Norman kingdom is that of
Chalandon, who carries its history to 1194 and gives also a
provisional description of its institutions and an unsatisfactory
chapter on its civilization. E. Caspar, _Roger II_ (Innsbruck,
1904), is the best book on the reign; Curtis, _Roger of Sicily_,
is convenient. G. B. Siragusa, _Il regno di Guglielmo I_ (Palermo,
1885–86), and I. La Lumia, _Storia della Sicilia sotto Guglielmo il
Buono_ (Florence, 1867), need revision. For Constance, T. Toeche,
_Kaiser Heinrich VI_ (Leipzig, 1867), is still useful.
* * * * *
The treatment of Sicilian institutions by E. Mayer, _Italienische
Verfassungsgeschichte_ (Leipzig, 1909), is too juristic. There is
an excellent book on the chancery by K. A. Kehr, _Die Urkunden
der normannisch-sicilischen Könige_ (Innsbruck, 1902); and on the
_duana_ there are important monographs by Amari, in the _Memorie
dei Lincei_, third series, II, pp. 409–38 (1878); and by C. A.
Garufi, in _Archivio storico italiano_, fifth series, XXVII, pp.
225–63 (1901). For local administration see the valuable study of
Miss E. Jamison, _The Norman Administration of Apulia and Capua_,
in _Papers of the British School at Rome_, VI, pp. 211–481 (1913).
See also H. Niese, _Die Gesetzgebung der normannischen Dynastie im
Regnum Siciliae_ (Halle, 1910); Haskins, “England and Sicily in the
Twelfth Century,” in _English Historical Review_, XXVI, pp. 433–47,
641–65 (1911); W. Cohn, _Die Geschichte der normannisch-sicilischen
Flotte_ (Breslau, 1910); R. Straus, _Die Juden im Königreich
Sizilien_ (Heidelberg, 1910); F. Zechbauer, _Das mittelalterliche
Strafrecht Siziliens_ (Berlin, 1908); and various studies in the
_Miscellanea Salinas_ (Palermo, 1907) and the _Centenario Michele
Amari_ (Palermo, 1910). The commerce of the Sicilian kingdom is
described by A. Schaube, _Handelsgeschichte der romanischen Völker_
(Munich, 1906).
* * * * *
For Monte Cassino in this period see E. A. Loew, _The Beneventan
Script_ (Oxford, 1914), with the works there cited; R. Palmarocchi,
_L’abbazia di Montecassino e la conquista normanna_ (Rome, 1913).
On the Greek monasteries, see Gay, _L’Italie méridionale_; P.
Batiffol, _L’abbaye de Rossano_ (Paris, 1891); K. Lake, “The Greek
Monasteries in South Italy,” in _Journal of Theological Studies_,
IV, V (1903–04); and F. LoParco, _Scolario-Saba_, in _Atti_ of the
Naples Academy, new series, I (1910). The best account of Saracen
culture in Sicily is still that of Amari. On the south-Italian and
Sicilian translators, see O. Hartwig, “Die Uebersetzungsliteratur
Unteritaliens in der normannisch-staufischen Epoche,” in
_Centralblatt für Bibliothekswesen_, III, pp. 161–90, 223–25, 505
(1886); Haskins and Lockwood, _The Sicilian Translators of the
Twelfth Century and the First Latin Version of Ptolemy’s Almagest_,
in _Harvard Studies in Classical Philology_, XXI, pp. 75–102
(1910); Haskins, _ibid._, XXIII, pp. 155–166; XXV, pp. 87–105. On
the Sicilian origin of the Greek MSS. of the papal library, see J.
L. Heiberg, in _Oversigt_ of the Danish Academy, 1891, pp. 305–18;
F. Ehrle, in _Festgabe Anton de Waal_ (Rome, 1913), pp. 348–51. The
connection of the intellectual movement of the twelfth century with
the renaissance under Frederick II is well brought out by Niese,
“Zur Geschichte des geistigen Lebens am Hofe Kaiser Friedrichs
II,” in _Historische Zeitschrift_, CVIII, pp. 473–540 (1912). In
general see F. Novati, _Le origini_, in course of publication in
the _Storia letteraria d’Italia_ (Milan, since 1897).
* * * * *
The development of art in the south in this period is treated
by A. Venturi, _Storia dell’ arte italiana_ (Rome, 1901 _ff._),
II, ch. 3; III, ch. 2. See also C. Diehl, _L’art byzantin
dans l’Italie méridionale_ (Paris, 1894). For the continental
territories there is an excellent account in E. Bertaux, _L’art
dans l’Italie méridionale_ (Paris, 1904). There is nothing so good
for Sicily, although there are monographs on particular edifices.
Diehl, _Palerme et Syracuse_ (Paris, 1907), is a good sketch with
illustrations; Miss C. Waern, _Mediæval Sicily_ (London, 1910),
is more popular. Freeman has a readable essay on “The Normans at
Palermo,” in his _Historical Essays_, third series, pp. 437–76.
See also A. Springer, “Die mittelalterliche Kunst in Palermo,”
in his _Bilder aus der neueren Kunstgeschichte_ (Bonn, 1886), I,
pp. 157–208; and A. Goldschmidt, “Die normannischen Königspaläste
in Palermo,” in _Zeitschrift für Bauwesen_, XLVIII, coll. 541–90
(1898). Interesting aspects of twelfth-century Palermo are depicted
in the Bern codex of Peter of Eboli, reproduced by Siragusa for the
Istituto Storico Italiano (1905) and by Rota for the new edition
of Muratori (1904–10). Surviving portions of the royal costume are
reproduced by F. Bock, _Die Kleinodien des heil.-römischen Reiches_
(Vienna, 1864).
THE END
FOOTNOTES
[1] _La France_, p. 161.
[2] _Pages normandes_, dedication.
[3] _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_, p. 55.
[4] _Ystoire de li Normant_ (ed. Delarc), p. 10.
[5] _Historia Sicula_, I, 3.
[6] _Gesta Regum_ (Rolls Series), p. 306.
[7] Ed. LePrévost, III, p. 474; cf. p. 230.
[8] _Roman de Rou_ (ed. Andresen), II, lines 9139–56.
[9] H. W. C. Davis, _England under the Normans and Angevins_, p. 3.
[10] _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_, p. 4.
[11] II, 14, as translated by Keary, _Vikings_, p. 136.
[12] _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_, I, p. 257.
[13] _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_, I, pp. 236–40.
[14] _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_, I, p. 265 _f._
[15] _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_, I, pp. 268–70.
[16] _Ibid._, I, p. 281 _f._
[17] _Germanic Origins_ (New York, 1892), p. 305 _f._
[18] _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_, I, p. 373.
[19] _Ibid._, II, p. 345.
[20] “Primitive Iceland,” in his _Studies in History and Jurisprudence_
(Oxford, 1901), pp. 263 _ff._
[21] Pollock and Maitland, _History of English Law_, I, p. 66.
[22] _History of the Norman Conquest_ (third edition), II, pp. 164–67.
[23] _Norman Conquest_, II, p. 166.
[24] Translated by Giles (London, 1847), pp. 461–63.
[25] Fulk Rechin, in _Chroniques des comtes d’Anjou_ (ed. Marchegay),
p. 378 _f_; (ed. Halphen and Poupardin, Paris, 1913), pp. 235–37.
[26] Luchaire, _Les quatre premiers Capétiens_, in Lavisse, _Histoire
de France_ (Paris, 1901), II, 2, p. 176.
[27] W. S. Ferguson, _Greek Imperialism_, p. 1.
[28] Salzmann, _Henry II_, where the continental aspects of Henry’s
reign are dismissed in a brief chapter on “foreign affairs.” The
heading would be more appropriate to the account of Henry’s campaigns
in Ireland.
[29] _Benedict of Peterborough_, II, p. xxxiii.
[30] _Benedict of Peterborough_, II, p. xxxi.
[31] _Recueil des actes de Henri II_, Introduction, p. 1; cf. p. 151.
[32] Delisle, p. 166, from Madox, _Exchequer_, I, p. 390.
[33] _The English Constitution_, p. 3.
[34] _Origin of the English Constitution_ (London, 1872), p. 20 _f._
[35] Stubbs, _Benedict of Peterborough_, II, p. xxxv.
[36] Poole, _The Exchequer in the Twelfth Century_, pp. 42–57; Haskins,
“The Abacus and the King’s Curia,” in _English Historical Review_,
XXVII, pp. 101–06.
[37] Salzmann, _Henry II_, p. 176.
[38] Pollock and Maitland, _History of English Law_, I, p. 142.
[39] Pollock and Maitland, I, p. 141.
[40] Giraldus Cambrensis (Rolls Series), VIII, p. 283.
[41] Salzmann, _Henry II_, p. 214.
[42] _Constitutional History_, I, p. 551.
[43] See the extracts from the chroniclers translated in T. A. Archer,
_The Crusade of Richard I_ (London, 1888), pp. 285 _ff._
[44] Guillaume le Breton, _Philippide_, V, lines 316–27.
[45] _Le Château-Gaillard_, in _Mémoires de l’Académie des
Inscriptions_, XXXVI, 1, p. 330.
[46] _The Loss of Normandy_, p. 449.
[47] _General View of the Political History of Europe_ (translated by
Charles Gross), p. 64.
[48] _William the Conqueror_, p. 2.
[49] Armitage, _Early Norman Castles of the British Isles_, p. 359.
[50] _The Loss of Normandy_, pp. 298 _ff._
[51] Printed by Delisle, _Études sur la classe agricole_, pp. 668 _ff._
[52] _Kirche und Staat_, p. 41.
[53] Robert of Torigni (ed. Delisle), I, p. 344.
[54] The text is printed in the _Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes_,
XXI, pp. 120 _ff._
[55] Ordericus Vitalis (ed. Le Prévost), III, p. 431.
[56] Guillaume de Jumièges, _Gesta Normannorum Ducum_ (ed. Marx),
Société de l’Histoire de Normandie, 1914.
[57] _La littérature normande avant l’annexion_, p. 22.
[58] _Gallia Christiana_, XI, instr., coll. 219–23; Mortet, _Recueil
de textes relatifs à l’histoire de l’architecture_ (Paris, 1911), pp.
71–75.
[59] _Norman Conquest_, III, p. 109.
[60] _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_, p. 4.
[61] Delarc, _Les Normands en Italie_, p. 35.
[62] Bertaux, _L’art dans l’Italie méridionale_, p. 15.
[63] Aimé, _Ystoire de li Normant_, p. 124.
[64] William of Malmesbury, _Gesta Regum_, p. 322.
[65] Geoffrey Malaterra, II, p. 1.
[66] _Massachusetts Historical Society Collections_, fourth series, VI,
p. 65.
[67] Laodicea ad mare, not the Phrygian Laodicea of the Apocalypse.
[68] The phrase is Amari’s: _Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia_, III, p.
365.
[69] _Bilder aus der neueren Kunstgeschichte_, I, p. 159.
[70] _L’art dans l’Italie méridionale_, p. 344.
[71] His description is translated by Amari, _Biblioteca arabo-sicula_
(Turin, 1888), I, pp. 155 _ff._; and by Schiaparelli, _Ibn Gubayr_
(Rome, 1906), pp. 328 _ff._ Cf. Waern, _Mediæval Sicily_, pp. 64 _ff._
[72] “The Emperor Frederick the Second,” in _Historical Essays_, first
series, p. 291.
INDEX
Abacus, 106 _f._
Abruzzi, 196, 204, 222 _f._
Adams, Henry, quoted, 12, 22, 188 _f._
Adelaide, countess, 210.
Adelard of Bath, 177, 179, 238.
Africa, 196 _f._, 222, 232.
Aimé of Monte Cassino, 13, 200 _f._
Alençon, 63, 178.
Alexander II, Pope, 74, 79, 165, 175.
Alfred, king, 34.
Alphonso VIII, king, 90.
Amalfi, 197 _f._, 204, 213, 232.
Amari, M., 216, 248;
quoted, 234.
Anacletus II, Pope, 210.
Andeli, 134.
Angers, 61–63.
Angoulême, 160.
Anjou, counts of, 61, 85;
relations with Normandy, 61–63, 85, 100, 112, 131, 136 _f._
Anna Comnena, quoted, 201.
Anselm, 175–78.
Antioch, 212;
principality, 214–16.
Apulia, 186, 197–211, 222 _f._, 228, 238, 246.
Aquitaine, 87 _f._, 90, 100, 120 _f._, 136.
Arabic elements in Sicilian state, 226–30, 235, 238–44.
Architecture, Norman, 9–12, 102, 186–89;
Sicilian, 189, 241–44.
Archives, Norman, 9, 66 _f._, 105, 178.
Argentan, 10, 71, 133, 139, 153.
Arlette, mother of William the Conqueror, 53, 166.
Arnulf of Chocques, patriarch, 212.
Arnulf, bishop of Lisieux, 167.
Arthur, duke of Brittany, 136–39.
Assizes, Anglo-Norman, 94, 100, 111 _f._, 161;
Sicilian, 230 _f._, 234.
Aversa, 200, 204, 206.
Avranches, 172, 175, 178.
Avranchin, 28.
Avre, 7.
_Bailli_, 103, 145.
Barfleur, 132, 160.
Bari, 189, 197, 202, 232, 241.
Baudri of Bourgueil, 76.
Bayeux, 10, 46, 49, 67, 76, 150 _f._, 162, 166, 172, 187;
_Black Book_, 111.
See Odo, Turold, Richard, Philip d’Harcourt.
Bayeux Tapestry, 76 _f._, 80, 84, 151, 167.
Bayonne, 161.
Bec, 171, 185;
schools, 175 _f._;
library, 177–80.
Becket, 4, 100, 118, 168.
Bellême, 154.
Benevento, 198, 203.
Benoît de Sainte-More, 184.
Bertaux, E., quoted, 197, 241.
Bessin, 10, 28.
Bibliographical notes, 24 _f._, 51, 83 _f._, 114 _f._, 147, 189–91,
216 _f._, 247–49.
Bisignano, 201.
Bocage, 10.
Boccaccio, 246.
Bocherville, Saint-Georges de, 169, 187.
Bohemond I, prince of Antioch, 207, 213–16.
Böhmer, H., quoted, 165.
Bonneval, 154.
Bordeaux, 88.
Boutmy, E., quoted, 101.
Breteuil, 154, 160.
Brittany, 6–8, 10, 57, 61, 75, 88, 136–39.
Bryce, James, Viscount, quoted, 43.
Buchanan, James, 17 _f._
Bury St. Edmund’s, 173.
Caen, 10 _f._, 71, 133, 139, 143, 153, 160, 166, 172, 184;
abbeys, 12, 58, 160, 163, 171, 174, 186–88, 213.
Calabria, 176, 198, 201–11, 222, 226, 237, 246.
Caliphs, Fatimite, 196, 230.
Campania, 197, 222.
Canada, Normans in, 3 _f._, 13, 16.
Canaries, Normans in, 4, 13.
Canne, 199.
Canosa, 214.
Canterbury, 56, 81, 175.
Canute, king, 52, 54, 74, 194.
Cappella Palatina, 242–44.
Capua, 198, 207, 223, 228.
Carentan, 172.
Carlyle, Thomas, quoted, 101, 173.
Castles, Norman, 68 _f._, 102, 133–35, 139, 150–53, 163, 209.
Castrogiovanni, 209.
Caux, 8.
Cefalù, 189, 241.
Cerisy, 187.
Chancery, of Henry II, 96–99;
of Sicilian kingdom, 226 _f._
Channel Islands, 144 _f._, 172, 184.
Charlemagne, 18, 31 _f._, 80, 86, 193 _f._
Charles VII, king of France, 144.
Charles of Anjou, king of Naples, 221.
Charles the Simple, 27, 45.
_Charte aux Normands_, 142.
Charter, Great, 140, 142.
Chartres, cathedral, 169–71, 186, 194;
school, 177.
Château Gaillard, 9, 134 _f._, 139.
Chaucer, his ‘povre persoun,’ 169.
Cherbourg, 4 _f._, 59, 162.
Chinon, 116.
_Chronicle_, Anglo-Saxon, quoted, 32, 34, 55–58.
Church, Norman, 67, 71 _f._, 81, 100, 164 _ff._;
the Greek, 198, 203, 209, 223, 225, 237, 241.
Civitate, 203.
Classics, Latin, in Norman libraries, 179;
at Monte Cassino, 235–37;
Greek, in Sicily, 239 _f._, 246.
Clermont, 211.
Clovis, 207.
Cluny, 164.
Colombières, 116.
Commerce, Norman, 4, 73, 81, 160–63;
Sicilian, 231–33, 242;
Viking, 37.
Compostela, 16, 193, 217.
Conan, 163.
Conches, 154.
Conquest, Norman, of England, 72–81;
its results, 81–83, 100 _ff._, 145 _f._;
of Italy, 198 _ff._;
the two compared, 223–25.
Constance, empress, 220.
Constantine the African, 236.
Constantinople, 194–96, 212, 214, 235 _f._, 240.
Corneille, 4, 12.
Cotentin, 28, 50.
Courcy, 154.
Coutances, 169, 172, 200;
cathedral, 10, 186 _f._
See Geoffrey de Mowbray.
_Coutume de Normandie_, 11, 48 _f._, 108, 142, 145.
Crusades, Normans in, 2, 89, 91, 100, 127–31, 184, 208, 211–17.
_Curia regis_, 103, 108, 227 _f._
Danegeld, 34, 104.
Danelaw, 31.
Daudet, Alphonse, quoted, 5.
Davis, H. W. C., quoted, 15.
Delarc, O., quoted, 196.
Delbrück, H., quoted, 77 _f._
Delisle, L., 4, 114, 189 _f._;
quoted, 97.
Dieppe, 4 _f._, 160.
Dieulafoy, quoted, 135.
Dives, 75.
Domesday, 66, 110, 172, 229.
Domfront, 63, 154, 172.
Dover, 166.
Downing, E., 208.
Drogo of Hauteville, 200–02.
_Duana_, 228 _f._
Dudo of Saint Quentin, 27, 47, 180.
Durham, 188.
Edrisi, 238–40.
Edward the Confessor, king, 73–75.
Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen, 89, 118, 120, 123, 184.
Emma, queen, 73.
Empire, Angevin, 85;
Eastern, 91, 94, 129, 197–99, 201 _f._, 206, 214–17, 222, 226–31,
243;
German, 87;
Holy Roman, 64, 86, 244;
Norman, 85–113;
its destruction, 116–39.
England, Normandy compared with, 5 _f._;
Northmen in, 32–34;
before the Normans, 101–03, 223;
Norman Conquest, 52, 72–83;
results, 22 _f._, 100–13, 145 _f._, 151 _f._;
loss of Normandy, 139–44.
Enna, 209.
Eryx, 208.
Escorial, 178.
Ethelred, king, 73.
Etna, 209, 239.
Eudes Rigaud, archbishop of Rouen, 168 _f._, 183.
Eugene of Palermo, emir, 239 _f._
Eure, 7.
Évreux, 184, 187.
Exchequer, 11, 103–08, 142, 229.
Exmes, 71.
Falaise, 10, 53, 59, 133, 139, 153.
Fécamp, 160, 164, 171, 178.
Feudalism, 60, 64, 93, 133, 136–38, 233;
Norman, 67–69, 82, 145, 149–57;
in southern Italy, 209, 223–31.
Finance, Anglo-Norman, 69–71, 103–08;
Sicilian, 225, 228 _f._, 232 _f._
Flanders, 61, 75.
Flaubert, G., 4, 8, 12;
quoted, 5.
Fontevrault, 117.
France, Normandy as a part of, 6 _f._, 16, 18–24, 48;
feudal relations with Normandy, 63–66;
government compared with that of Normandy, 64, 69–71;
geographical unity, 124–26;
how it conquered and absorbed Normandy, 126–44;
Norman influence on, 23, 144.
France, Anatole, quoted, 178.
Franks, Normandy under, 16, 20 _f._, 26.
Frederick Barbarossa, emperor, 86 _f._, 128 _f._
Frederick II, king of Sicily and emperor, 24, 215, 219–21, 240, 245
_f._
Freeman, E. A., 83;
on William the Conqueror, 53–56;
on the Norman Conquest, 73, 83, 101, 145 _f._;
on the battle of Hastings, 77;
on Norman castles, 151;
on the abbeys of Caen, 188;
on Frederick II, 245.
Fulk Rechin, quoted, 62 _f._
Gaeta, 197 _f._
Gaimar, 184.
Gascony, 88–91, 100, 139, 161.
Gavrai, 172.
Genoa, 232.
Geoffrey, duke of Brittany, 120.
Geoffrey Malaterra, quoted, 13, 207.
Geoffrey Martel, count of Anjou, 61–63.
Geoffrey de Mowbray, bishop of Coutances, 10, 186 _f._
Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou, 85, 89, 99, 112.
Geoffrey, illegitimate son of Henry II, 116.
George of Antioch, admiral, 226, 242.
Gilbert Crispin, abbot of Westminster, 175.
Giobair, Ibn, quoted, 243.
Giraldus Cambrensis, quoted, 117 _f._, 123.
Girgenti, 209.
Gisors, 132 _f._, 135 _f._
Glanvill, 108.
Goethe, 219, 243.
Greek influences in southern Italy and Sicily, 198, 209, 219, 223,
225–31, 235, 237–46.
Green, J. R., quoted, 122.
Gregory VII Pope, 72, 165 _f._, 202, 204 _f._
Grentemaisnil, 154.
Grimoud, 60.
Guernsey, 144 _f._
Gummere, F. B., quoted, 41.
Guy of Amiens, 76.
Hamburg, 33.
_Haro_, 145.
Harold, king of England, 73–80.
Harold Fairhair, 28, 38.
Hastings, battle of, 75–80, 84, 151, 166, 202.
Hastings, Viking leader, 33.
Hauteville, house of, 2, 200–02, 207, 209, 213. See Robert Guiscard,
Roger.
Havre, Le, 4 _f._
Henricus Aristippus, 239 _f._
Henry I, king of England, 89, 94, 105 _f._, 133, 160, 162 _f._, 181,
184, 229.
Henry II, king of England, 49, 85, 133, 219;
empire, 86–90;
European position, 87, 90 _f._;
character, 92–94, 114, 117 _f._;
government, 93–113, 153, 227–30;
death, 116 _f._, 154;
sons, 118–23;
relations with Philip Augustus, 127 _f._;
privileges to Rouen, 161–63.
Henry V, king of England, 142.
Henry VI, king of England, 143.
Henry the Young King, 119–21, 123, 127, 154–57.
Henry I, king of France, 62 _f._, 65.
Henry III, emperor, 201.
Henry IV, emperor, 205.
Henry VI, emperor, 220.
Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, 90.
Historians, Norman, 47, 154, 180–84.
Hohenstaufen, in Sicily, 220 _f._
Honorius II, Pope, 210.
Hugh Capet, 65.
Hugh of Amiens, archbishop of Rouen, 179.
Hugo, Victor, quoted, 144.
Humphrey of Hauteville, 200–02.
Iceland, 3, 12, 31, 43 _f._
Ile-de-France, 7, 125.
Innocent III, Pope, 137.
Ireland, 22, 31, 33, 57, 85 _f._, 88, 90, 160, 162 _f._
Italy, influence on Normandy, 175;
Normans in, 181 _f._, 192, 198–211, 218–49;
political condition ca. 1000, 196–98;
relation to Renaissance, 246.
James, Henry, quoted, 6.
Jersey, 144 _f._, 184.
Jerusalem, Normans at, 128, 130, 167, 193–95, 198 _f._, 212, 214.
Jews, in Sicily, 225, 242.
Joan of Arc, 10, 19, 143 _f._
Jocelin of Brakelonde, 173.
John, king of England, 85 _f._, 116, 131 _f._, 154;
character, 122 _f._, 126 _f._;
struggle with Philip Augustus, 136–39;
loss of Normandy, 139 _f._
John VIII, Pope, 237.
John of Salisbury, 238.
John the Scribe, 232.
Jomvikings, 43 _f._
Joppa, 130.
Jumièges, 9, 171, 187.
Jury, Anglo-Norman, 23, 109–13, 142, 146.
Justices, Anglo-Norman, 108;
Sicilian, 227 _f._
Kensington rune-stone, 1.
Kent, 166 _f._
Knights’ fees, 68, 78, 100, 145, 150, 229, 231.
Krak, 134.
Lanfranc, 175–78.
Laon, school of, 107, 177.
Laplace, 4, 12.
La Rochelle, 161.
La Roncière, Bourel de, quoted, 49.
Lavisse, E., quoted, 143.
Law, Norman, 11, 20, 23, 48 _f._, 69, 82, 108–13, 145 _f._, 224;
Roman, 137, 175–77, 179, 230 _f._, 236;
canon, 137, 168, 175–77, 179, 230.
LeMans, 63, 88, 116 _f._, 125, 160, 172.
Leo IX, Pope, 203.
Lessay, 187.
Libraries, Norman, 177–81;
south-Italian and Sicilian, 236–40, 242, 246;
papal, 240.
Limerick, 37.
Lindisfarne, 33.
Lire, 178.
Loire, relation to Plantagenet empire, 125, 128, 139 _f._
Lombards, 175, 188, 192, 196–99, 222 _f._, 238.
London, 81, 162 _f._
Lorraine, schools of, 107, 167.
Louis VII, king of France, 89, 118 _f._, 127.
Louis X, king of France, 142.
Luchaire, A., quoted, 70.
Lugdunensis Secunda, 9, 21, 26.
Luna, 33.
Lusignan, 138.
Luther, 18.
Lyons, 125.
Magna Græcia, 197, 238.
Mahan, A. T., 30.
Maine, 7, 10, 57, 62 _f._, 85, 87, 136.
Maitland, F. W., quoted, 48, 110, 113.
Malta, 221.
Manfred, 221, 240.
Mantes, 58.
Margam, _Annals_ of, 139.
Margat, 134.
Marmoutier, 171.
Matilda, abbess of Caen, 174.
Matilda, empress, 85, 89, 163.
Matilda, queen, 11, 61, 77, 186–88.
Maupassant, 4, 8, 12.
Mediterranean, Northmen in, 33;
Normans in, 192 _ff._
Meles, 198 _f._
Melfi, council of, 204.
Messina, 129 _f._, 208, 237;
Straits of, 207, 210, 232.
Michelet, quoted, 11, 195.
Mileto, 210.
Millet, 4, 12.
Monasteries, plundered by Northmen, 35, 164;
Norman, 81, 164 _f._, 171–75;
their lands, 157 _f._, 171 _f._;
schools, 175–77;
libraries, 177–80;
as centres of historical writing, 180–83;
relation to mediæval epic, 185;
their churches, 186–89;
south-Italian, 176, 181, 225, 235–37.
Monreale, 189, 241 _f._
Mont-Saint-Michel, 10, 171;
peasants, 158;
property, 172;
buildings, 158, 173, 187, 189;
library, 173, 178.
See Robert of Torigni.
Monte Cassino, 178, 235–37.
Monte Gargano, 198, 216.
Montelius, O., quoted, 37.
Montfort, 133.
Montpellier, 177.
Mortemer, 65.
Mosaics, in Sicily, 241 _ff._
Nantes, 33.
Naples, 197 _f._, 222, 246.
Napoleon, 76.
Néel of Saint-Sauveur, 59.
Neilos Doxopatrios, 238, 240.
Nicæa, 52, 58, 195, 212.
Niccola Pisano, 246.
Nicholas II, Pope, 204.
Nietzsche, 18, 55.
Normandy, millenary of, 1–4, 25 _f._;
compared with England, 5 _f._;
general features, 6–8;
Upper and Lower, 8–11;
inhabitants, 11–16;
periods in its history, 17–22;
general importance, 22–24;
conquered by Northmen, 26–48;
how far Scandinavian, 48–51;
under William the Conqueror, 59–61, 66–72, 152 _f._;
its archives, 66 _f._;
relations with Anjou and Maine, 61–63;
with France, 63–65;
with England, 73–83;
centre of Plantagenet empire, 85–88;
influence on England, 100–13;
conquered by Philip Augustus, 131–41;
occupied by English in fifteenth century, 142–44;
final union with France, 17, 19, 144;
influence on France, 23, 141;
dialect, 49, 145, 224;
life of lords, 149–57;
of peasants, 157 _f._;
of towns, 159–64;
church, 71 _f._, 81, 164–71;
monasteries, 171–75;
their schools, 175–77;
libraries, 177–80;
historians, 12, 47, 180–84;
vernacular literature, 184–86;
architecture, 186–89;
the ‘greater Normandy,’ 147, 182.
Normans, characteristics, 11–16, 192, 225, 247;
conquest of England, 52, 72–83, 223 _f._;
in southern Italy and Sicily, 2–4, 13 _f._, 16, 22–24, 94, 150,
177, 181, 189, 192, 198–211, 218–49;
in Spain, 16, 181, 192, 195;
as pilgrims, 193–96, 198 _f._, 241;
on the Crusades, 2, 16, 91, 127–31, 182, 184, 211–17;
in Syria, 215 _f._
See Normandy.
Northmen, 12, 16 _f._;
invasion of Normandy, 26 _ff._;
causes and course of migrations, 29–31;
in Frankish empire, 31–35;
in England, 31–34;
their culture and organization, 35–44;
influence on Normandy, 48–51;
as Crusaders, 211.
Noto, 209.
Odo, bishop of Bayeux, 4, 57, 76, 166 _f._, 185 _f._, 212.
Ordericus Vitalis, his _History_, 154, 174, 178, 180–83;
quoted, 14, 176, 180, 199.
Orleans, schools of, 177.
Ouche, 181.
Palermo, Normans at, 189, 208, 210 _f._, 226, 231 _f._, 238 _ff._;
churches, 230, 241 _f._;
palace, 242–44.
Palestine, 128, 130 _f._, 134, 212–16.
Papacy, Normandy and the, 22, 72, 74, 79, 91, 136, 165, 168;
relations with southern Normans, 192, 200, 202–05, 210, 221, 238.
Paris, 33 _f._, 76, 96, 136–38, 140;
basin, 8, 125;
Parlement of, 141 _f._;
university of, 177.
Paris, Gaston, quoted, 185.
Peasants, Norman, 157 _f._
Peers, court of, 138 _f._
Perche, 7.
Peter the Hermit, 211.
Petrarch, 246.
Pevensey, 75.
Philip Augustus, 19, 24, 95, 116, 122;
character, 126;
struggle with Plantagenets, 127–29, 131–39;
on the Third Crusade, 128–30;
policy in Normandy, 142, 163.
Philip d’Harcourt, bishop of Bayeux, 167;
his library, 178–80.
Picardy, 7 _f._
Pilgrims, Normans as, 193–96, 198 _f._, 241.
Pisa, 221, 232.
Plantagenets, origin of, 61, 85, 89. See Henry II, Richard, John.
_Plateæ_, 228.
Poitiers, 88, 160.
Poitou, 62, 75, 88, 90, 100, 128, 138 _f._
Pontorson, 160.
Poole, R. L., 114;
quoted, 107.
Powicke, F. M., 147;
quoted, 139, 141, 153.
Prentout, H., 24, 51, 147.
Provence, 90.
Quevilly, 163.
Rabelais, 169.
Racine, 11.
Ragnar Lodbrok, 42.
Ranulf, _vicomte_, 59.
_Raven, Lay of the_, 38.
Renaissance, of twelfth century, 235–40, 245 _f._
Rhys, J., quoted, 49.
Richard the Lion-Hearted, king, 85, 95, 116, 153–55;
character, 120–22, 126, 129 _f._;
Crusade, 127–31, 215;
struggle with Philip Augustus, 127–29, 131–36;
death, 136.
Richard of Aversa, 204.
Richard, abbot of Préaux, 180.
Richard, bishop of Bayeux, 177.
Richard Fitz-Neal, author of _Dialogus_, 104, 106.
Richard the Good, duke, 52, 73, 195.
_Rigsmal_, quoted, 38.
Robert Crispin, 195.
Robert Curthose, duke, 89, 96, 154, 212 _f._
Robert the Devil, 52.
Robert Guiscard, 186, 200–08.
Robert the Magnificent, 52 _f._, 65, 195.
Robert of Selby, 229.
Robert of Torigni, 167, 172 _f._, 178, 180.
Roger I, the Great Count, 200, 202, 206–11, 225.
Roger II, king of Sicily, 24, 206, 210 _f._, 219–22, 225–34, 238–49.
Roger Borsa, duke of Apulia, 206 _f._, 213.
Roger of Toeni, 195.
Roland, _Song of_, 80, 184 _f._, 193.
Rollo, duke, 26–29, 42, 45 _f._, 184.
Romanesque, Norman, 12, 186–89.
Romans, Normandy under, 16, 20 _f._, 26;
southern Italy under, 197.
Rome, pilgrimages to, 194 _f._;
Normans at, 205.
Rossano, 237.
Rouen, 1 _f._, 9 _f._, 21, 26, 46, 60, 73, 88, 95, 117, 133 _f._,
136, 139, 142, 144, 153, 172, 175, 178, 200;
described, 9, 162 _f._;
churches, 2, 9, 12, 162 _f._, 169, 171, 187;
_Établissements_, 160–62;
commerce, 160, 162;
libraries, 178.
See Eudes Rigaud.
Round, J. H., 77, 83, 114.
Russia, 30.
_Saga, Burnt Njal_, 11;
of Harold Fairhair, 28;
of St. Olaf, 46.
Saint-Céneri, 154.
Saint-Évroul, 154, 171, 173, 176, 178, 181–83, 195, 206. See
Ordericus.
Saint-Lô, 10.
Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives, Abbot Haimo, 170.
Saint-Sauveur, convent, 169.
Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, 59.
Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme, 75.
Saint-Wandrille, 9, 51, 171.
St. Alexis, _Life_ of, 184.
St. Francis, quoted, 11.
St. Gall, Monk of, quoted, 31.
St. Ives, 175, 179.
St. James, 193.
St. Michael, 198. See Mont-Saint-Michel.
Saintonge, 63.
Saladin, 128.
Salerno, 198–200, 205, 222, 232;
university, 177, 238.
Salutati, 246.
Salzmann, L. F., quoted, 91, 109, 118.
Saracens, of Syria, 128–31, 192, 212–14;
of Sicily, 192, 196, 198 _f._, 208 _f._, 223, 225;
of Spain, 192, 195.
Savigny, Congregation of, 171, 174.
Savoy, 90.
Schools, Norman, 175–77.
Seine, 7–9;
relation to Plantagenet empire, 125, 134 _f._, 139 _f._
Seville, 33.
Sheriff, Anglo-Norman, 103–05, 107.
‘Sicilian monarchy,’ 210.
Sicily, Normans in, 2–4, 13 _f._, 16, 22–24, 75, 127, 177, 181, 189,
192, 201 _f._, 204, 206–11;
Norman kingdom of, 94, 105, 150, 210 _f._, 216, 218–49.
Simon, count, 210.
Sorel, A., 4, 25;
quoted, 7.
Spain, 75, 181, 232;
schools of, 177, 180, 235;
Normans in, 192, 195, 211.
Spatz, Wilhelm, 77.
Springer, A., quoted, 239.
Stamfordbridge, 75.
State, beginnings of modern, 93, 233 _f._
Stephen, king, 69, 89, 162, 167.
Stubbs, William, 114;
quoted, 92 _f._, 102, 121.
Syracuse, 209.
Tagliacozzo, 221.
Taillefer, 79 _f._
Tancarville, 9, 155.
Tancred, Crusader, 2, 213–16.
Tancred of Lecce, king of Sicily, 220.
Taormina, 209.
Thibaud, count of Blois, 62.
Thierry, abbot of Saint-Évroul, 195.
Thomas Brown, 229.
Tiglath-Pileser, 17 _f._
Tinchebrai, 89.
Touraine, 62, 88, 131, 136.
Tournaments, 154–57, 189.
Tours, 62, 88, 116, 125, 132, 160, 177.
Towns, Norman, 81, 159–64.
Translators, Sicilian, 238–40, 246.
Trouville, 4.
Turks, 130 _f._
Turold, bishop of Bayeux, 185.
Urban II, Pope, 210 _f._
Val-des-Dunes, 54, 59.
Valognes, 10, 59 _f._
Varaville, 54, 65.
Vavassor, 150.
Venice, 206, 232.
Venosa, 206.
Verneuil, 132, 160.
Verson, _Conte des vilains_, 158.
Vexin, 7, 125, 134.
_Vicomte_, 69, 71, 103, 145.
Victor III, Pope, 236.
Vidal de la Blache, quoted, 7.
Vikings, see Northmen.
Vire, 10.
Vitalis, founder of Savigny, 174.
Voltaire, quoted, 86.
Wace, 76, 184;
quoted, 15.
Warfare, mediæval, 68 _f._, 77–79, 133–35, 152–54.
Westminster, 56, 95, 136.
William the Conqueror, 10, 14, 19, 163, 192;
descent, 52;
character, 53–59, 83, 85, 188;
early years, 59 _f._;
relations with Anjou and Maine, 61–63;
with France, 63–65;
Normandy under, 66–72, 106, 151 _f._;
relations with the church, 71 _f._, 165, 186–88;
invasion of England, 73–75;
battle of Hastings, 76–80;
crowned king, 81;
death, 58, 117.
William Rufus, king of England, 89, 212.
William I, the Bad, king of Sicily, 219, 221, 239 _f._, 246.
William II, the Good, king of Sicily, 90, 219, 221, 230, 241.
William III, king of Sicily, 220.
William, duke of Apulia, 207, 210.
William of Arques, 65.
William of Conches, 177.
William, prince, son of Henry I, 89.
William of the Iron Arm, 200 _f._
William of Jumièges, 180.
William Longsword, duke, 46, 49.
William of Malmesbury, quoted, 14.
William Marshal, 154–57.
Winchester, 56, 163.
Witan, 74, 102.
Writs, of Henry II, 98, 111 _f._;
of Sicilian kings, 227.
Xerxes, size of his army, 78.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs
and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support
hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to
the corresponding illustrations.
Footnotes, originally at the bottoms of pages, have been collected,
sequentially renumbered, and repositioned between the end of the last
chapter and the Index.
The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page
references.
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