The Normans in European history

by Charles Homer Haskins

With respect to the fighting class, it is characteristic of the Norman habit of order and organization that the military service of the nobles was early defined with more system and exactness in Normandy than in the neighboring countries of northern France. We have already seen that at a period well before 1066 the amount of service due from the great lords to the duke had been fixed in rough units of five or multiples of five, and these again subdivided among their vassals and attached to specific pieces of land which were hence called knights’ fees, an arrangement which the Normans carried to England and probably to Sicily as well. By 1172, when a comprehensive list was first drawn up, subinfeudation had produced about 1500 knights’ fees in Normandy, the largest holders being the bishop of Bayeux and the earl of Leicester with 120, the count of Ponthieu with 111, and Earl Giffard with 103. From these the class of fully armed knights reached down to the holders of small fractions of a knight’s fee, all however serving with the full armor which in course of time came to mark them off as nobles from the vavassors, or free soldiers, whose equipment was less complete and whose service tended to take the form of castle guard and similar duties. Quite early also custom had defined other characteristic features of the feudal service in Normandy, such as the period of forty days, the limitation of the obligation to the frontiers of the duchy, and the incidents of wardship and marriage, deductions from feudal principles which were here carried to their logical conclusions.

The symbol of the authority of the military class, the outward and visible sign of feudalism, was the castle, where the lord resided and from which he exercised his authority over his fief. Originating in the period of anarchy which accompanied the dissolution of the Frankish empire and the invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries, the castle spread over northern France as feudalism spread, and was introduced into England by the Normans when they here established their feudal state. The earliest castles of Normandy and of England were not, however, the massive stone donjons which Freeman peopled with devils and evil men. With some exceptions, of which the Tower of London is the most noteworthy, these ‘hateful structures’ were built of wood and surrounded by a stockade, surmounting an artificial mound, or motte, thrown up from the deep moat at its base. A great drawbridge, cleated so that horses should not slip on the steep incline, led from the farther side of the moat directly to the second story of the tower, of which the ground floor, used only for stores and the custody of prisoners, had no entrance from without. Fortresses of this type have naturally left nothing behind them save the outlines of their mounds and moats, but they are well known from contemporary descriptions and are clearly discernible in the Bayeux Tapestry, which gives rude pictures of the strongholds of Dol, Rennes, Dinan, and Bayeux, and shows a stockaded mound in actual process of construction at Hastings. The heavy timbers of these lofty block-houses offered stout resistance to battering rams, but they were always in great danger from fire, and wood was replaced by stone in the course of the twelfth century, to which belong the ‘stern square towers’ which still survive in Normandy and England, as well as the earliest examples of the more defensible round keeps and square keeps flanked with round towers. Whether of wood or stone, the donjon was a stern place, built for strength rather than for comfort, and bending the life of those within it to the imperious necessities of defence. Space was at a premium, windows were few and small,—sometimes only a single window and a single room to each story,—trap-doors and ladders often did the work of stairways, and from the wooden castles fires were usually excluded. Nevertheless the donjons were not, as was once supposed, mere “towers of refuge used only in time of war,” but “were the permanent residences of the nobles of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.”[49] Only toward the close of this period do the outer buildings develop, so as to give something of the room and convenience demanded by the rising standard of comfort; only in the thirteenth century do the more spacious castles without keeps begin to make their appearance.

It is significant of the progress made by the ducal authority in Normandy that by the time of William the Conqueror definite restrictions had been placed upon the creation of these strongholds of local power and resistance. Except with the duke’s license no one could build a castle, or erect a fortress on a rock or an island, or even dig a fosse in the open country so deep that the earth could not be thrown out from the bottom without artificial aid, while palisades were required to be built in a simple line and without alures or special works of defence. When the duke desired, he might also place garrisons in his barons’ castles and demand hostages for their loyalty. These principles, which were applied also in England, were of course often difficult to enforce, and they were supplemented in the twelfth century by the development of a great system of ducal castles, secured partly by enlarging and strengthening the older fortresses of Rouen, Caen, Falaise, and Argentan, partly, as we have already seen, by new strongholds on the frontiers. Powicke has shown us how these castles became the chief administrative centres in the reigns of Henry II and Richard, and how the royal letters and accounts reveal their many-sided activity in the busy days of peace as well as in the more strenuous times of war.[50] Under châtelains who were royal officers rather than feudal vassals, with garrisons of mercenaries and retinues of knights and serjeants, clerks and chaplains and personal servants, they foreshadow the ultimate replacement of baronial donjons by a royal bureaucracy.

It is doubtless because of the dominant position of the duke that Normandy is less rich than some other parts of France in picturesque types of feudal lords or vivid episodes of feudal conflicts. When they go beyond the affairs of the church, the Norman chroniclers are prone to concentrate their attention upon the deeds of the ducal house, and their accounts of the great vassals tend to be dry and genealogical. The chief exception is Ordericus Vitalis, whose theme and geographical position lead him to treat at length the long anarchy under Robert Curthose and the incessant conflicts of the great lords his neighbors on the southern border, the houses of Bellême, Grentemaisnil, Conches, and Breteuil. In the main it is a dreary tale of surprises and sieges, of treachery and captivity and sudden death, relieved from time to time by brighter episodes—the lady Isabel of Conches sitting in the great hall as the young men of the castle tell their dreams; the daily battle for bread around the oven at the siege of Courcy; the table spread and the pots seething on the coals for the lord and lady of Saint-Céneri who never came back; the man of Saint-Évroul who, by the saint’s aid, walks unharmed out of custody at Domfront; the marvellous vision of the army of knights and ladies in torment which appeared to the priest of Bonneval.

With these episodes of Norman feudalism it is interesting to compare the picture of Anglo-Norman society a hundred years later which we find in that unique piece of feudal biography, the History of William the Marshal. Companion to the Young King and witness of the final shame of Henry II, pilgrim to Jerusalem and Cologne, advanced to positions of trust under Richard and John, earl of Striguil and Pembroke and regent of England under Henry III, the Earl Marshal stood in close relations to the chief men and movements of his day. His biographer, however, does not let himself wander to tell of others’ deeds, and while his work contains material of much importance for the general history of the time, its chief value lies in its reflection of the life of the age and its faithful portrait of the man himself—soldier of fortune, gentleman-adventurer if you will, but always loyal, honorable, straightforward, and true, by the standards of his time a man without fear and without reproach. Brought up in the Norman castle of Tancarville, the Marshal, like the Young King his master, became passionately addicted to tournaments, par éminence the knightly sport of the Middle Ages, which made hunting and other pastimes seem tame and furnished the best preparation for real war, since, as an English chronicler tells us, in order to shine in war a knight “must have seen his own blood flow, have had his jaw crack under the blow of his adversary, have been dashed to the earth with such force as to feel the weight of his foe, and unhorsed twenty times he must twenty times have retrieved his failures, more set than ever on the combat.” Unknown to England before the reign of Richard, these manly sports flourished most of all in France, the country of chivalry and feats of arms, and for several years we follow the Marshal from combat to combat through Normandy and Maine, Champagne and the Ile-de-France, so that his renown spread from Poitou to the Rhine. At one period in his life he tourneyed every fortnight. The tournaments of his day, however, were not the elegant and fashionable affairs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which the word is apt to call to our minds, assemblages of beauty as well as of prowess, held in special enclosures before crowded galleries, with elaborate rules respecting armor and weapons and the conditions of conflict. On the contrary, they were fought like battles, in the open, with all the arms and methods of war and all its manœuvres and ferocity of attack; indeed they differed from war mainly in being voluntary and limited to a single day. After one series of such thunderous encounters the Marshal was found in a smithy, his head on the anvil and the smith working with hammer and pincers to remove his battered helmet. In a great tournament at Lagni three thousand knights are said to have been engaged, of which the Young King furnished eighty. Knights fought for honor and fame and for sheer joy of combat; they fought also, we must remember, for the horses and armor and ransoms of the captives. In a Norman tournament the Marshal captured ten knights and twelve horses. Between Pentecost and Lent of one year their clerks calculated that he and his companion had taken prisoners three hundred knights, without counting horses and harness; yet he seems to have preserved the golden mean between the careless largesse of the Young King and the merely mercenary motives of the large number who frequented tournaments for the sake of gain.

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Concerning the great agricultural class upon which the whole social system rested, our information is of a scattered and uneven sort. The man with the hoe did not interest the mediæval chronicler, and he did not gain a voice of his own in the period which we have under review. The annals of the time are indeed careful to record the drouths and floods, the seasons of plague, pestilence, and famine of which Normandy seems to have had its share, but they tell us nothing of the effects of these evils upon the class which they most directly concerned; while the charters, leases, and manorial records from which our knowledge of the peasants must be built up give us in this period isolated and unrelated facts. Moreover our information is confined almost entirely to the lands of churches and monasteries, where agriculture was likely to be more progressive because of their closer relations to the world outside. Normandy was a fertile country, and, so far as we can judge, its agricultural population fared well as compared with that of other regions. Certainly there is here, after the eleventh century, no trace of serfdom or the freeing of serfs, and the free position of its farming class distinguished the duchy from most of the lands of northern France. In other respects it is hard to discern important differences between the Norman peasants and those of other regions. After the suppression of an insurrection at the beginning of this century, we do not hear of any general rising of the Norman peasants, parallel to those risings which make a sad and futile chapter in the annals of many parts of Europe in the Middle Ages. It was, however, a local revolt of the thirteenth century on the lands of the monks of Mont-Saint-Michel that brought out one of the best descriptions of life on a Norman manor, the Conte des Vilains de Verson,[51] and, while it is a bit late for our purpose, it is confirmed by documentary evidence, and may well serve as an illustration of the obligations of the agricultural class:—

In June the peasants must cut and pile the hay and carry it to the manor house. In August they must reap and carry in the convent’s grain; their own grain lies exposed to wind and rain while they hunt out the assessor of the champart and carry his share to his barn. On the Nativity of the Virgin the villain owes the pork-due, one pig in eight; at St. Denis’ day the cens; at Christmas the fowl, fine and good, and thereafter the grain-due of two sétiers of barley and three quarters of wheat; on Palm Sunday the sheep-due; at Easter he must plow, sow and harrow. When there is building the tenant must bring stone and serve the masons; he must also haul the convent’s wood for two deniers a day. If he sells his land, he owes the lord a thirteenth of its value; if he marries his daughter outside the seigniory, he pays a fine. He must grind his grain at the seigniorial mill and bake his bread at the seigniorial oven, where the customary charges do not satisfy the attendants, who grumble and threaten to leave his bread unbaked.

So long as mediæval society remained almost entirely agricultural there was no need of adapting its organization to other classes than those which have just been described. In course of time, however, the growth of industry and commerce, very slow before the eleventh century, but rapid and constant in the period during and after the Crusades, as may be seen by the large number of markets and fairs in Normandy, created a new class of dwellers in towns who demanded recognition of their peculiar character and status. By reason of the nature of their occupations they sought release from the seigniorial system, with its forced labor, its frequent payments, and its vexatious restrictions upon freedom of movement and freedom of buying and selling; and as their economic needs drew them together into industrial and commercial centres of population, they developed a collective feeling and demanded collective treatment. They asked, not, as has sometimes been said, for the overthrow of the feudal system, but for a place within it which should recognize their peculiar economic and political interests; and the result of their efforts, when fully successful, was to form what has been called a collective seigniory, standing as a body in the relation of vassal to lord or king, and owing the obligations of homage, fealty, and communal military service. But while not anti-feudal in theory, this movement was often anti-feudal in practice, so far at least as the rights and privileges of the immediate overlord were concerned, and it led to friction and often to armed contests with bishop, baron, or king. In Normandy, significantly, we find none of those communal revolts which meet us throughout the north of France and even as near as LeMans; the towns are always subject to the ultimate authority of the duke, whose domanial rights were considerable even in the episcopal cities and who favored those forms of urban development which strengthened the military resources of the duchy. The early history of the Norman towns is one of the most obscure chapters in Norman history, but it indicates a variety of influences which do not fit into any one of the many theories of municipal origins which have been the subject of so much learned controversy. Some towns were originally fortified places, like the baronial stronghold of Breteuil or Henry I’s fortresses of Verneuil, Nonancourt, and Pontorson on the southern border. Some took advantage of the protection of a monastery, as in the case of Fécamp or the bourgs of the abbot and abbess of Caen. The great ports, like Barfleur and Dieppe, obviously owed their importance to trade, and it was trade which created the prosperity of the chief towns of the duchy, Rouen and Caen. However developed, the Norman municipal type exerted no small influence upon urban organization: the laws of Breteuil became the model for Norman foundations on the Welsh border and in Ireland; the Établissements of Rouen were copied in the principal towns of western France,—Tours and Poitiers, Angoulême and La Rochelle, even to Gascon Bayonne on the Spanish frontier.

If we take as an illustration of this development the principal Norman town, Rouen, we find no evidence regarding its institutions before the twelfth century, while its organization as a commune dates from the reign of Henry II and probably from the year 1171. The fundamental law, or Établissements, which Rouen then received and which became the model for communal government elsewhere in Normandy, constitutes a body of one hundred peers who meet once a fortnight for judicial and other business and who choose from their number each year the twelve échevins, or magistrates, and the twelve councillors who sit with the échevins to form the council of jurés. Besides these boards, which are typical of mediæval town constitutions, the peers also nominate three candidates for the office of mayor, but the choice among these is made by the king, and the greater authority of the mayor in this system is evidently designed to secure more effective royal control. It is the mayor who leads the communal militia, receives the revenues, supervises the execution of sentences, and presides over all meetings of magistrates and boards. The administration of justice through its own magistrates is perhaps the most valued privilege of the commune, but the gravest crimes are reserved for the cognizance of royal officers, and the presence of the king or a session of his assize is sufficient to suspend all communal powers of justice. In a state like the Norman the limits of municipal self-government are clear.