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INDEX 251

THE NORMANS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY

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 re?cho 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.

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." 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."

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 Neufch?tel, the resilient Pont-l'?v?que, and the flowing Camembert--is defective from the point of view of geographical accuracy!

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 ch?teaux, 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 R?gime, like Valognes, or the new, like Saint-L?; 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 mediaeval 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.

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.

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. 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."

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.

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 R?gime, 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.

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.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

THE COMING OF THE NORTHMEN

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, re?nforced 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.

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.

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 archaeologists, 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.

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.

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.

The sword in the king's hand bit through the weeds of Woden 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 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 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 pattered in the gale of Woden. Many a man fell into the stream of the brand.

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 before the swords .

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 shall fall on the target.

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--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.

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.

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 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.

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, 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.

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

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