The Normans in European history

by Charles Homer Haskins

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.

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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.