II
On turning from the history of England between 950 and 1050 to that of Normandy during the same period, one is conscious at once of passing from decadence to growth; and this although the growth of the Norman state was accompanied by an infinity of disorder and oppression, and the decadence of England was relieved by occasional manifestations of the older and more heroic spirit of the race. Nothing is more wonderful in Norman history than the rapidity with which the pirates’ land became transformed into a foremost member of the feudal world of France, and the extraordinary rapidity of the process seems all the more remarkable from the sparseness of our information with regard to it. The story of the making of Normandy, as told by the Norman historians, is so infected with myth that its barest outlines can scarcely now be recovered. We can, however, see that during the ninth century the north and west coasts of France had been subjected to an incessant Scandinavian attack similar in character to the contemporary descents which the Northmen were making upon England. It is also certain that the settlement of what is now Normandy did not begin until thirty or forty years after the conquest of the English Danelaw, and that for a considerable, if indefinite, term of years new swarms of Northmen were continually streaming up the valleys which debouch on the Channel seaboard. Of Rollo, the traditional founder of the Norman state, nothing is definitely known. The country from which he derives his origin is quite uncertain. Norwegian sagamen claimed him for one of their own race, the Normans considered him to be a Dane, and a plausible case has been made out for referring him to Sweden.[[12]] His followers were no doubt recruited from the whole of the Scandinavian north, but it is probable that the great mass of the original[original] settlers of Normandy were of Danish origin, and therefore closely akin to the men who in the previous century had found a home in the valleys of the Yorkshire Ouse and Trent. As in the case of Guthrum in East Anglia the conquests of Rollo were defined by a treaty made between the invading chief and the native potentate of greatest consequence; and the agreement known in history as the treaty of Claire sur Epte is the beginning of Norman history. Great obscurity overhangs the terms of this settlement, and we cannot define with any approach to certainty the extent of territory ceded by it to the Northmen.[[13]] On the east it is probable that the boundary line ran up the Epte, thence to the Bresle, and so down that stream to the port of Eu; but the extension of the original Normandy towards the west is very uncertain, and with regard to its southern frontier there was still room in the eleventh century for border disputes in which William the Conqueror became engaged at an early date. The succeeding history, however, proves clearly enough that the Bessin, Cotentin, and Avranchin formed no parts of Normandy as delimited at Claire sur Epte, and it was in this last quarter, peopled by an influx of later immigrants, that the Scandinavian element in the duchy presented the most obstinate resistance to Romance influences.
The prince with whom Rollo had concluded this memorable treaty was Charles III., king of the West Franks, and the reputed descendant of Charlemagne. The importance of the settlement of Claire sur Epte lay in the future, and in its immediate significance it was little more than an episode in a struggle which had been carried on for nearly half a century between the Carolingian sovereign and the powerful house of the counts of Paris, of which the head at this time was Robert, the grandfather of Hugh Capet. The conquests of Rollo had been made at the expense of Count Robert, and Charles III. in his session of Normandy, like Alfred in the treaty of Wedmore, was abandoning to an invading host a district which had never been under his immediate rule. It was certain that the counts of Paris would sooner or later attempt to recover the valley of the lower Seine, and this fact produced an alliance between the first two dukes of Normandy and their Carolingian overlords which lasted for twenty years. The exact nature of the legal tie which united the earliest dukes of Normandy to the king of France is a disputed question, but we may well doubt whether Rollo had done more than commend himself personally to Charles III., and it is not even certain that the Viking leader had received baptism at the time when he performed the act of homage. As a final question which still awaits settlement, we may note that the date of the treaty of Claire sur Epte is itself uncertain, but that 921 seems the year to which with most probability it may be referred.
If this is so, the conclusion of this settlement must have been the last event of importance in the reign of Charles III., for in 922 he was overthrown by his enemy Robert of Paris, and spent the remaining eight years of his life in prison. Robert thereupon assumed the title of king, but was killed in 923; and the crown passed to Rudolph of Burgundy, who held it until 936. On his death the royal title was offered to Hugh, surnamed the Great, count of Paris, but he preferred to restore the Carolingian line, rather than to draw upon himself the enemity[enemity] of all his fellow-nobles by accepting the precarious throne himself. Charles III. had married Eadgifu, one of the many daughters of Edward the Elder of Wessex, and Louis the Carolingian heir was residing at Athelstan’s court when Hugh of Paris called on him to accept his inheritance. The refusal of Hugh the Great to accept the crown did not materially improve the relations existing between the Carolingian house and the Parisian county, and Louis “from beyond the sea” found it expedient to maintain the alliance which his father had founded with the Norman lords of Rouen. But, long before the accession of Louis d’Outremer, Rollo the old pirate had died, and William Longsword, his son, felt himself less vitally dependent on the support of the king of the Franks. In the confused politics of the period William was able to assert a freedom in making and breaking treaties and in levying external war no less complete than that which was enjoyed by the other princes of France. In general he remained true to the Carolingian friendship; and at the close of his reign Normandy and the French monarchy were jointly opposed to the Robertian house, leagued with the counties of Vermandois and Flanders. The latter county, in particular, was directly threatened by the growth of a powerful state within striking distance of her southern borders; and in 943 William Longsword was murdered by Arnulf of Flanders, the grandson of Alfred of England.
We should naturally wish to know in what way the foundation of Normandy was regarded by the contemporary rulers of England. It is generally assumed, and the assumption is reasonable enough, that Athelstan feared the assistance which the Normans might give to the men of the Danelaw, and that he endeavoured to anticipate any movement on the part of the former by forming a series of marriage alliances with powers capable of forcing Normandy to remain on the defensive. It is probable that Athelstan’s sister Eadhild married Hugh the Great,[[14]] the natural enemy of William Longsword, and we know that Athelstan lent his support to Alan Barbetorte, who at this time was struggling with indifferent success to preserve Brittany from being overrun by Norman invaders. On the other hand, it would be easy to exaggerate the solidarity of feeling which existed between the Northmen in Normandy and in England; nor do our authorities countenance the belief that the various continental marriages of Athelstan’s sisters formed part of any consistent scheme of policy. There is no evidence that direct political intercourse existed at any time between Athelstan and William Longsword; although we know that the Englishmen who were appointed by the king to negotiate for the reception of Louis d’Outremer in France paid a visit to the court of Rouen.
The murder of William Longsword was followed by the first of the two minorities which occur in Norman history, for Richard the illegitimate heir of the late duke was only a child of ten on his father’s death. The opportunity was too good to be missed, and Louis d’Outremer succeeded for a brief period in making himself master of Normandy, not improbably asserting as a pretext for his intervention a claim to the guardianship of the young duke. Whatever its legal foundation Louis’s action outraged the political individuality of the duchy, and when Richard came to years of discretion he abandoned the traditional Carolingian friendship and attached himself to the Robertian house. He commended himself to Hugh the Great, and thus began a friendship between the lords of Paris and their Norman neighbours which continued for nearly a century and was not the least among the causes which enabled the Robertian house in 987 to crown its existing pre-eminence with the royal title. The reign of Richard I. lasted for more than fifty years, and the history of Normandy during this period is extremely obscure, but there can be no question that it witnessed the gradual consolidation of the duchy, and its no less gradual absorption into the political system of France.
The seventh year of the reign of Richard II. was marked by an event of the first importance for the history of both England and Normandy—the marriage of Ethelred II. and Emma the duke’s sister. England was at the time in the very centre of the great Danish war which marks the close of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh century, and it is distinctly possible that the match may have been prompted by a desire on Ethelred’s part to close the Norman harbours to his enemies’ ships. But, apart from all dubious attributions of political motive, the importance of the marriage lies in the fact that Normandy remains thenceforward a permanent factor in English politics. The marriage must have produced an immediate immigration of Normans into England; so early as 1003 we find a French reeve of Queen Emma in charge of the city of Exeter. The mere union of the dynasties—the marriage of the representative of the ancient and decadent royal house of Wessex to the great-granddaughter of the pirate chief Rollo—was alone a sufficiently striking event. But by chance it happened that the strain of Norman blood in the offspring of the marriage came of itself to produce political results of the gravest consequence. No one in 1002 could foresee that the new queen would bear a son whose early life would be passed in exile in his mother’s land, and who would return thence to his father’s inheritance saturated with Norman ideas of the art of government; still less could anyone foresee that in virtue of this marriage a Norman duke would one day claim the throne of England by right of inheritance. But less striking results of the new alliance would soon enough become apparent. The ubiquitous Norman trader would become a more frequent visitor to the English ports, and Normandy would at once become a friendly land to Englishmen crossing the Channel for purposes of trade or pilgrimage. Nor should the marriage be considered exclusively from the English standpoint. The reception of a Norman princess as queen of England proved at least that the Norman duke was no longer a barbarian intruder among the higher nobility of France; he might not be a sovereign prince as yet, but he was certainly a ruler of greater consequence beyond the borders of the French kingdom than were any of his fellow-vassals of the French crown. It is true that the alliance of 1002 marks no immediate change in the French relations of the duke of Normandy; his energies were still confined to the petty struggles which he, like his father and grandfather, carried on with varying success against this neighbour or that. But events were soon to prove how strong a state had really been created in Normandy by the obscure dukes of the tenth century, and the marriage of Ethelred and Emma pointed to the quarter in which the strength of Normandy would find its field at last.
It must be owned that we can only describe the internal condition of Normandy, as it existed at the beginning of the eleventh century, in very general terms. Normandy, like the rest of the French kingdom, was passing through a phase in which the legislative power of the sovereign was in abeyance; and in default of written laws we can only rely upon the incidental information afforded by legal documents or by the casual expressions of later chroniclers.[[15]] But the main features of Norman feudalism at this time are fairly certain, and sufficient to point a contrast with the contemporary constitution of England in almost every particular in which the details of the two systems are known to us.[[15]]
In the first place, vassalage had become localised in Normandy. The relationship between lord and man would in most cases imply that the latter held his land of the former. So far as we can tell, the course of Norman feudalism started from a point of departure different from that with which the English system takes its origin. The history of the terms employed to designate dependent tenure seems to make this clear. At an early date a great man’s vassal will hold of him a precarium; he will be a tenant at will, his tenure will be revocable at his lord’s instance. To the precarium succeeds the beneficium; a term which sufficiently expresses the fact that the tenant’s rights over his land are derivable from his lord, although it does not, like the older word, imply their temporary character. In the meantime, the hereditary principle in regard to dependent tenure is continually securing a wider extension, and the feudum, the fee, the term which ultimately supplanted the precarium and beneficium, denotes an estate which will in the normal course of things descend to a tenant’s heir. Some such succession of ideas can distinctly be traced in the Frankish kingdom, and the Anglo-Saxon land books here and there contain words and phrases which suggest that the English land law would have followed a similar development, had it not been arrested by the general dislocation of society occasioned by the wars of the ninth century. The wide estates with which the newly converted kings of Wessex, the Hwicce and the Middle Angles, endowed the churches founded in their dominions afforded an excellent field for the growth of dependent tenure, which was not neglected by thegn and free man, anxious to participate in the wealth of the saints by virtue of discharging military obligations which monks and clerks could not perform in person. But the Danish wars stripped the eastern churches of their possessions and peopled the eastern counties with settlers of approximately equal rank; and when in the century before the Norman Conquest the land loan reproduces many of the features of the continental precarium, it appears as an exotic institution rather than as a normal development of previous tenurial custom. It would be very easy to exaggerate the distinction which exists between England and Normandy in this matter; the mass of our contemporary information about Old English land tenure relates to ecclesiastical estates; but with Domesday Book before us we cannot doubt that the distinction was very real and of deep importance in connection with the other divergent features of the Anglo-Saxon social organisation.
Everything, then, seems to show that, for at least a hundred years before 1086, dependent tenure and the hereditary descent of fiefs had been recognised features of the land system of Normandy. We also know that these principles had, long before the conquest of England, produced their corollaries in the rights of wardship, marriage, and relief, which a lord would enjoy upon occasion with reference to his vassals.[[16]] Women were capable of inheriting land and Norman custom allowed at least to the duke the privilege of choosing a husband for his female vassal. The rights of assuming the guardianship of a minor’s land, and of receiving a money payment upon the succession of a new heir, were obvious developments of the originally precarious character of the fief, and we shall see that King Henry of France exercised the former right over Normandy itself upon the death of Duke Robert in 1035. There does not seem to be any direct evidence for the existence of the relief as a Norman custom before 1066, but its appearance in England immediately after the Conquest is sufficient proof of its previous recognition by the feudal law of Normandy. None of these customs, so far as we can tell, had found a place in the social system of independent England.
Private jurisdiction was undoubtedly an essential feature of Norman feudalism, though we may well doubt whether the principles on which it was based had ever been defined by Norman lawyers. It is also clear that the duke possessed upon occasion the power of overruling the judgment of his barons, and that his exercise of this power was applauded by all who were interested in the welfare of the humbler classes of society. The military character of feudalism made it imperative that there should be some power in the land capable of vindicating right by force, and the stronger dukes of Normandy were not slow in the assertion of their judicial supremacy. How far the ubiquitous manorial court of Norman England represents an imitation of continental practice, and how far it is referable to the “sake and soke” possessed by Anglo-Saxon thegns, is a difficult question, and the explanation given by the legal writers of the generation succeeding the Conquest must be reserved for a later chapter.
It is, however, clear, that one custom which to modern ideas would be ruinous to any social order distinguishes Norman life from that of England in the eleventh century. Private war was a recognised custom in Normandy. For obvious reasons this custom was fenced round with stringent regulations; the duke’s license was necessary before a campaign could be opened and its conduct was subject to his general supervision. But private war is separated by no certain barrier from anarchy, and under a weak duke or during a minority the barons of Normandy would take the law into their own hands. Herein lay the real cause of the disorders which prevailed during the minority of William the Conqueror; and in the abeyance of state intervention the church endeavoured with considerable success to confine the practice within reasonable limits. The Truce of God, in the limitations which it enforced upon the operations of war, made life more tolerable for peasant and burgess, but it was at best an inefficient substitute for the hand of a strong ruler. William the Conqueror made good peace in Normandy, as well as in England, and we may well doubt whether even private war, so long as its legal sanctions were respected, was not less harmful to the well-being of a community than were the savage outbreaks of internal strife which from time to time occurred under the helpless government of Edward the Confessor.
The exact nature of the feudal tie which bound the duke of Normandy to the king of France is a very difficult question.[[17]] It undoubtedly comprised all those obligations which were implied in the performance of the act of homage, but these would vary indefinitely in stringency according to the status of the parties concerned. An oath of fealty and service was certain to be kept only so long as the man to whom the oath was sworn could compel its observance by the threat of confiscation. When made between two parties who were for effective purposes equal in power, there was no certainty that the oath would imply more than an assertion of dependence on the part of the man who swore. On the other hand, it would be an error to regard the homage which a duke of Normandy paid to his overlord merely as a ceremonial form. Even in the early feudal times the sense of personal honour would generally serve to prevent a man from wantonly attacking his lord. William the Conqueror, whenever possible, refrained from violating the fealty which he had sworn to King Henry; and if put on his defence for his conduct at Varaville, he would probably have pleaded that the necessity of self-preservation outweighed all other considerations. But in earlier times the maintenance of feudal relations between Normandy and France was less dependent upon the personal loyalty of the reigning duke. Occasionally, the king of France will confirm the grants of land with which the duke of Normandy endowed some religious house; he may, as we have seen, claim the right of wardship over a duchy during a minority. Also, it should not be forgotten that in the case of the dukes between Richard I. and Robert I. the traditional alliance between Normandy and the Capetian dynasty disguised the practical autonomy of the former. So long as the knights of Normandy were at the disposal of the king of France for an attack upon Flanders or Blois, the king would not be concerned to argue the question whether they were furnished to him in obedience to his claim to feudal service, or merely in pursuance of the territorial interests of his vassal.
Within the limits of his territory, the duke of the Normans enjoyed an almost absolute sovereignty. The external limitation of his authority—the suzerainty of the king of France—was at its strongest very ineffectual, and within the duchy the barons were to an exceptional degree subject to the ducal power. All the members of the Norman baronage stood very much on a level in regard to the extent of their fiefs, and the political influence which any individual baron might from time to time exercise depended mainly on his personal favour with the duke. Here and there among the mass of the Norman nobility we meet with a family claiming a more ancient origin and a purer descent than that of the ducal house, and disposed towards insurrection thereby; but such cases are highly exceptional, and the names which are of most significance in the history of William the Conqueror are those of men who held official positions at his court, or were personally related to his line. In Normandy there were no baronies of the first rank, and the number of counties was small; also most of them, by the policy of dukes Richard I. and II., had been granted on appanages to junior members of the reigning family. One striking exception to the territorial significance of the Norman baronage existed in the great fief of Bellême, which lay on the border between Normandy and Maine, and was regarded as dependent on the French crown.[[18]] The lords of Bellême in early times are certainly found behaving as sovereign princes, but it fortunately happened that the male line of the family became extinct during William’s reign, and a standing obstacle to the centralisation of the duchy was removed when Mabel, the heiress of this formidable house, carried its vast possessions to her husband, the duke’s loyal friend, Roger de Montgomery.
The ecclesiastical, like the lay, baronage of Normandy had no members fitted by their territorial influence to lead an opposition to the ducal power. The greater abbeys of Normandy, Fécamp, St. Wandrille, Jumièges, had been founded or refounded by the dukes themselves, and the restoration of the western bishoprics had mainly been the pious work of Richard I. The re-establishment of the Norman episcopate after the disorder of the settlement could never have been effected had it not been for the countenance afforded to the movement by successive dukes, and the connection between church and state in Normandy was peculiarly intimate. The rights of patronage, elsewhere jealously guarded by the king of the French, in Normandy belonged to the duke, and his power of nominating the official leaders of the church enabled him to govern the whole ecclesiastical policy of the land. Naturally, there occur from time to time gross instances of nepotism, as when Odo, Duke William’s brother, was thrust into the see of Bayeux at the age of ten; but in general the dukes of Normandy were at pains to select worthy candidates for bishoprics and abbeys, and in 1066 the spiritual quality of the Norman episcopate was extraordinarily high. Over the independent ecclesiastical jurisdiction which had arisen in the duchy under the influence of the great[great] Cluniac movement the duke kept a steady control; when in England the Conqueror is found insisting that no ecclesiastical law shall be introduced into the country without his sanction, he was but asserting a principle which had governed his conduct in regard to those matters in Normandy.
This intimate connection of church and state had, even before the accession of William, produced a powerful indirect result upon the ecclesiastical culture of Normandy. In Normandy, as in England, the Danish wars of the previous century had been fatal to the monastic life of the districts affected, and with monasticism perished such elements of literary culture as the Carolingian age could show. It was nearly a century after the treaty of Claire-sur-Epte before monasticism revived in Normandy, and this revival was due almost entirely to the importation of foreign monks into the duchy under the patronage of Richard II. and his successors. In connection with the newly founded monasteries there arose schools, some of which in a surprisingly short time rivalled the older institutions of Chartres and Tours, and participated to the full in the cosmopolitan culture which underlay the development of medieval scholasticism. Of these schools, the most famous was undoubtedly that of Bec, the rise of which well illustrates the character of the revival of learning in Normandy.[[19]] The abbey of Bec itself was only a recent institution, having been founded in 1034 by an unlettered knight, named Herlwin, who was desirous of living a monastic life in association with a few chosen companions. Nothing in any way distinguished Bec from half a dozen other abbeys founded during the same decade, and the house owes its unique distinction to the circumstance that in 1042 an able young Italian jurist and grammarian, Lanfranc of Pavia, undertook the direction of its school. As a logical and speculative theologian Lanfranc is said to display small original ability, but no one was better fitted than he by nature to superintend the early development of an institution to which we may conveniently, if inaccurately, apply the designation of a university. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the reputation of the individual teacher was a matter of much greater importance than were the traditions of the school which he taught, and the school of Bec, under Lanfranc’s guidance, rapidly became the education centre of eastern Normandy. Its fame was vastly increased by the fact that its leader became involved in a theological controversy in which the whole of the Catholic Church was interested. A famous theologian, Berengar, a teacher in the school of Tours, had taken upon himself the task of controverting the received opinion as to the nature of the Eucharist, and Lanfranc stepped forward as the leading controversialist on the conservative side. In the dialectical struggle which followed, the honours of debate fell to Lanfranc; Berengar’s opinions were condemned both by a provincial synod under Archbishop Maurilius, of Rouen, and also by a general council held at Rome in 1056, and Lanfranc, to the men of his time, appeared to be the foremost theologian in Normandy. But wider duties than the charge of the school of Bec rapidly devolved upon him as the friend and intimate counsellor of the duke, and on his translation to the newly founded abbey of St. Stephen’s, at Caen, his place was taken by a man of greater subtlety of mind if no less administrative capacity. The career of Anselm of Aosta, who succeeded Lanfranc in the priorate of Bec, raises issues which lie beyond the life and reign of William the Conqueror, but reference should certainly be made to the educational work which Anselm performed in the days before his name was famous as the champion of Hildebrandine ideas in the ecclesiastical polity of England. As a teacher, it is probable that Anselm had no rival among the men of his time, and if his educational efforts were solely directed at the production of learned and zealous monks, this does not in the least detract from the greatness of the work to which the prime of his life was devoted. It is under Anselm, rather than under Lanfranc, that the influence of the school of Bec reaches its height, and the gentle character and deep philosophical insight of the monk from Aosta supply a pleasant contrast to the practical and at times unscrupulous activity of his predecessor at Bec and Canterbury.