The Normans in European history

by Charles Homer Haskins

For a more specific illustration let us come back once more to the jury. If the jury died out in Normandy, it survived in England, where it flourished in the fertile soil of the popular local courts. It spread to the British colonies and to the United States; it has in recent times been reintroduced on the Continent. But it is still the same fundamental institution, bound by direct continuity with the old Frankish procedure through the Norman inquests of the twelfth century. Wherever the twelve good men and true are gathered together, we can see the juries of Henry II behind them. In such matters the Norman influence is thus as wide as the common law; we are all heirs of the early Normans. As Freeman well says: “We can never be as if the Norman had never come among us. We ever bear about us the signs of his presence. Our colonists have carried those signs with them into distant lands, to remind men that settlers in America and Australia came from a land which the Norman once entered as a conqueror.”[48]

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Our survey of Norman history might perhaps stop here; but it needs to be rounded out in two directions. We have been so busy with the external history of the Norman empire and with the constitutional developments to which it gave rise, that we have had no time to examine the society and culture of Normandy in its flourishing period of imperialism. And we have been concentrating our attention so exclusively on the dominions of the Plantagenets that we have left out of view that greater Normandy to the south which constitutes one of the most brilliant chapters of Norman achievement and one of the most fascinating subjects of European history. These topics will be the themes of the three remaining lectures.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The best account of the downfall of the Norman empire is Powicke, The Loss of Normandy, where abundant references will be found to further material. The general narratives of Adams, Davis, and Ramsay may also be consulted, as well as Miss Norgate, John Lackland (London, 1902). For the French side see Luchaire, in Lavisse, Histoire de France, III, 1. The fullest treatment of relations between the Plantagenets and France, down to 1199, is A. Cartellieri, Philipp II. August (Leipzig, 1899–1910), supplemented by his Richard Löwenherz im heiligen Lande, in Historische Zeitschrift, CI, pp. 1–27 (1908), and Philipp II. August und der Zusammenbruch des angiovinischen Reiches (Leipzig, 1913). For the controversy concerning John’s condemnation by the court of Philip, see Gross, Sources and Literature, nos. 2829, 2833. Characterizations of Richard and John by Stubbs will be found in his Historical Introductions, pp. 315 ff., 439 ff. J. Lehmann, Johann ohne Land (Berlin, 1904), is more favorable to John. The biography of the Young King is traced by P. C. E. Hodgson, Jung Heinrich, König von England (Jena, 1906).

There is no general work on the English occupation of Normandy in the fifteenth century; the scattered monographs are mentioned in Prentout, La Normandie, pp. 71–76. Something may be expected from the continuation of the late J. H. Wylie’s work on the reign of Henry V.

VI
NORMAN LIFE AND CULTURE

In turning from the general course of Norman history in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to examine Norman life and culture in this period, we encounter the difficulties inherent in any attempt to cut a cross-section of human society in an age which was not conscious of being a society and has left us for the description of itself only raw materials of a fragmentary and uneven sort. The chroniclers confine themselves almost entirely to external events, the charters deal chiefly with land and boundaries and rights over the land, much of the literature is theological commentary or rhetorical commonplace which reflects nothing of the age in which it was written; what is lacking in all is the concrete detail of daily life from which alone social and economic conditions and even government itself can be understood. And when we have pieced together as best we may some notions of Normandy in this period, our knowledge of the parallel conditions in other regions is often so inadequate that we cannot be certain how far our results are characteristic of Normandy, how far typical of the time, or, because of the scattered nature of our material, how far they may be merely individual and isolated. Much of the social history of the Middle Ages is still unwritten; for lack of evidence much can never be written. Until the available sources have been more fully explored, nothing beyond a provisional sketch can be attempted.

Fortunately for our purposes, the fundamental structure of society in the earlier Middle Ages was exceedingly simple. There were three classes, those who fought, those who labored, and those who prayed, corresponding respectively to the nobles, the peasants, and the clergy. Created by the simple needs of the feudal age, this primitive division of labor was even declared an institution of divine origin and necessary to the harmonious life of man. It seemed right and natural that the nobles should defend the country and maintain order, the clergy lead men to salvation, the peasants support by their labor these two beneficent classes, as well as themselves. As an ideal of social organization, this system of classes is open to obvious objections, not the least of which is the persistent killing and plundering of the peasants by the class whose function it was to protect and defend them; but as a description of actual conditions, it expresses very well the facts of the case.

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