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.
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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.
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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.