The Normans in European history

by Charles Homer Haskins

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.