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If the impulse toward religious reform in Normandy was of Burgundian origin, intellectual stimulus came chiefly from Italy. The two principal figures in the intellectual life of the duchy in the eleventh century, Lanfranc and Anselm, were Italians: Lanfranc distinguished for his mastery of law, Lombard, Roman, and canon, for the great school which he founded at Bec, and for his labors in the field of ecclesiastical statesmanship; Anselm his pupil and his successor as prior of Bec and as archbishop of Canterbury, remarkable as a teacher, still more remarkable as one of the foremost theologians of the Western Church. “Under the first six dukes,” we are told, “there was hardly any one in Normandy who gave himself to liberal studies, and there was no master till God, who provides for all, sent Lanfranc to these shores.” Teaching first at Avranches, Lanfranc established himself at Bec in 1042, and his school soon drew students from the remotest parts of France and sent them out in all directions to positions of honor and influence. Abbots like Gilbert Crispin of Westminster, bishops like St. Ives of Chartres, primates of Rouen and Canterbury, even a pope in the person of Alexander II, figure on the long honor-roll of Lanfranc’s pupils at Bec. For an institution of such renown, however, we know singularly little concerning the actual course and methods of study at Bec, and its historian is compelled to fall back upon a general description of the trivium and quadrivium which made up the ordinary monastic curriculum. We do not even know whether Lanfranc actually taught the subject of law of which he was past master, though we can be sure that theology and philosophy had a large place under Anselm, and that the school must have felt the influence of the large part which its leaders took in the theological discussions of their time. An important form of activity in the monasteries of the period was the copying of manuscripts, a sure safeguard against that idleness which St. Benedict declared the enemy of the soul. Lanfranc sat up a good part of the night correcting the daily copies of the monks of Bec; the first abbot of Saint-Évroul had an edifying tale of an erring brother who had secured his salvation by voluntarily copying a holy book of such dimensions that the angels who produced it on his behalf at the judgment were able to check it off letter by letter against his sins and leave at the end a single letter in his favor! The monks of Saint-Évroul prided themselves on their Latin style, especially their Latin verse, and on their chants which were sung even in distant Calabria; yet the best example of their training, the historian Ordericus, freely admits the literary supremacy of Bec, “where almost every one seems to be a philosopher and even the unlearned have something to teach the frothy grammarians.”
In the course of the twelfth century the leadership in learning passes from the regular to the secular clergy, and the monastic schools decline before the cathedral schools of Laon, Tours, Chartres, Orleans, and Paris, two of which, Paris and Orleans, soon break the bounds of the older curriculum and develop into universities. As the current of scholars sets toward these new centres, Normandy is left at one side; no longer a leader, its students must learn their theology and philosophy at Paris, their law at Orleans and Bologna, their medicine at Salerno and Montpellier. The principal Norman philosopher of the new age, William of Conches, the tutor of Henry II, is associated with Paris rather than with the schools of Normandy. Perhaps the most original work of the pioneer of the new science, the Questiones naturales of Adelard of Bath, is dedicated to a Norman bishop, Richard of Bayeux, but its author was not a Norman, nor do we find Norman names among those who drank deep at the new founts of Spain and Sicily.
For a measure of the intellectual activity of the Norman monasteries and cathedrals nothing could serve better than an examination of the contents of their libraries, where we might judge for ourselves what books they acquired and copied and read. This unfortunately we can no longer make. The library of Bec, partly destroyed by fire in the seventeenth century, was scattered to the four winds of heaven in the eighteenth, and while the legislation of 1791 provided for the transfer of such collections to the public depositories of the neighboring towns, the libraries of Avranches, Alençon, and Rouen, reënforced by the Bibliothèque Nationale, have garnered but a small part of the ancient treasures of Mont-Saint-Michel, Saint-Évroul, and the establishments of the lower Seine. Works of importance as well as curiosities still survive—autograph corrections of Lanfranc, the originals of the great histories of Robert of Torigni and Ordericus Vitalis, service-books throwing light on the origins of the liturgical drama, cartularies of churches and abbeys,—but for a more comprehensive view of the resources of the twelfth century we must turn to the contemporary catalogues which have come down to us from the cloisters of Saint-Évroul, Bec, Lire, and Fécamp, and the cathedral of Rouen. After all, as that delightful academician Silvestre Bonnard has reminded us, there is no reading so easy, so restful, or so seductive as a catalogue of manuscripts; and there is no better guide to the silence and the peace of the monastic library, as one may still taste them in the quiet of the Escorial or Monte Cassino. Let us take the most specific example, the collection of one hundred and forty volumes bequeathed to Bec by Philip, bishop of Bayeux, at his death in 1164, or rather the one hundred and thirteen which reached the monastery, twenty-seven having fallen by the way and being hence omitted from the catalogue. Like the other libraries of the time, this consisted chiefly of theology—the writings of the Fathers and of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian commentators and theologians, ending with Philip’s contemporaries, St. Bernard, Gilbert de la Porrée, Hildebert of Tours, and Hugh of St. Victor, and his metropolitan, Hugh of Amiens. Wise in the wisdom of this world, the bishop possessed the whole Corpus Juris Civilis in five volumes, as well as the leading authorities on canon law, Burchard, St. Ives, and the Decretum of Gratian. He had none of the Roman poets, although they were not unknown to Norman writers of his age, but a fair selection of prose works of a literary and philosophical character—Cicero and Quintilian, Seneca and the Younger Pliny, besides the mediæval version of Plato’s Timæus. There is a goodly sprinkling of the Roman historians most in vogue in the Middle Ages, Cæsar, Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Florus, Eutropius, and the Latin version of Josephus, besides such of their mediæval successors as came nearest to Anglo-Norman affairs. Science was confined to Pliny’s Natural History and two anonymous treatises on mathematics and astronomy, while the practical arts were represented by Palladius on agriculture and Vegetius on tactics. On the whole a typically Norman library, deficient on the imaginative side, but strong in orthodox theology, in law, and in history; not in all respects an up-to-date collection, since it contained none of those logical works of Aristotle which were transforming European thought, and, save for a treatise of Adelard of Bath, showed no recognizable trace of the new science which was beginning to come in through Spain; strikingly lacking also, save for a volume on Norman history, in products of Normandy itself, even in the field of theology and scriptural interpretation, where, for example, Richard abbot of Préaux had written marvellous commentaries upon Genesis, Deuteronomy, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and the Proverbs of Solomon, and had “discoursed allegorically or tropologically in many treatises upon obscure problems of the Prophets.”[55]
After all, works on the history of Normandy were the most Norman thing a Norman could produce, and it was in this field that the duchy made its chief contribution to mediæval literature and learning. All the usual types appear, local annals, lists of bishops and abbots, lives of saints, biographies of princes, but the most characteristic are the works in which the history of Normandy is grasped as a whole: the half-legendary account of the early dukes by Dudo of Saint-Quentin, the confused but valuable Gesta of William of Jumièges, at last restored to us in a critical edition,[56] the Chronicle of Robert of Torigni, and especially the great Historia Ecclesiastica of Ordericus Vitalis, the chef-d’œuvre of Norman historiography and the most important historical work written in France in the twelfth century.
Born in 1075 near Shrewsbury, Ordericus was early devoted to the monastic life, and lest family affection might interfere with his vocation and the sure hope of Paradise held out to the sobbing boy, his sorrowing parents sent him forever from their sight to spend his days at Saint-Évroul near the southern border of Normandy. Tonsured at ten, ordained a deacon at eighteen and a priest at thirty-two, he bore the burden and heat of the day under six successive abbots, until as an old man of sixty-six he laid down his pen with a touching peroration of prayer and thanksgiving to Him who had disposed these years according to His good pleasure. During this half century of poverty and obedience Ordericus had little opportunity to leave the precincts of the monastery, although on rare occasions we can trace him in England and at Cambrai, Rheims, and Cluni, and the materials of his history had to be gathered almost wholly from the well-stocked library of the abbey and from conversation with those who passed his way. These facilities were, however, considerable, for, remote as Saint-Évroul may seem in its corner of the pays d’Ouche, it was in constant relations with England, where it possessed lands, and with southern Italy, whither it had sent its members to found new convents; and like all such establishments it was a place of entertainment for travellers of all classes, priests and monks, knights and jongleurs, even a king like Henry I, who brought with them accounts of their journeys about the world and tales of great deeds in distant Spain, Sicily, and Jerusalem. There were few better places to collect materials for the writing of history, and there was no one who could make better use of them than Ordericus. He was fully launched in his great work by 1123, and he kept at it throughout the remaining eighteen years of his life, putting it aside in the winter when his fingers grew numb with the cold, but resuming it each spring in the clear round hand which meets us in many a manuscript of Saint-Évroul, and offering it at the end to future generations, a monument more lasting than the granite obelisk erected to his memory in 1912. His original purpose was limited to a history of his monastery, but the plan soon widened to include the principal movements of his time and finally grew to the idea of a universal history, beginning, indeed, with the Christian era instead of with the more usual starting-point of the Creation. Nevertheless, even in its final form the work of Ordericus is not a general history of the Christian centuries, for the general portion is chiefly introductory and comparatively brief; his real theme is Norman history, centring, of course, round the vicissitudes of his convent and the adjacent territory, but also giving a large place to the deeds of the Normans in that greater Normandy which they had created beyond the sea, in England, in Italy, and in Palestine. He is thus not only Norman but pan-Norman. The plan, or rather lack of plan, of his thirteen books reflects the changes of design and the interruptions which the work underwent; there is some repetition, much confusion, and a distinct absence of architectonic art. These defects, however, do not diminish the prime merit of the work, which lies in its replacement of the jejune annals of the older type by a full and ample historical narrative, rich in detail, vivid in presentation, giving space to literary history and everyday life as well as to the affairs of church and state, and constituting as a whole the most faithful and living picture which has reached us of the European society of his age. Neither in the world nor of the world, this monk had a ripe knowledge of men and affairs, independence of judgment, a feeling for personality, and a sure touch in characterization. He had also a Latin style of his own, labored at times rather than affected, ready to show its skill in well-turned verse or in well-rounded speeches after the fashion of the classical historians, but direct and vigorous and not unworthy of the flexible and sonorous language which he had made his own.
Latin, however, was an exclusive possession of the clergy,—and not of all of them, if we can argue from the examinations held by Eudes Rigaud,—and by the middle of the twelfth century the Norman baronage began to demand from the clerks an account of the Anglo-Norman past in a language which they too could understand. History in the vernacular develops in France earlier than elsewhere, and in France earliest in Normandy and in the English lands which shared the Norman speech and produced the oldest surviving example of such a work, the Histoire des Engles of Gaimar, written between 1147 and 1151. The chief centre for the production of vernacular history was the court of that patron of ecclesiastical and secular learning, Henry II, and his Aquitanian queen, to one or both of whom are dedicated the histories of Wace and Benoît de Sainte-More. Wace, the most interesting of this group of writers, was a native of Jersey and a clerk of Caen who turned an honest penny by his compositions and won a canonry at Bayeux by the most important of them, his Roman de Rou. Beginning with Rollo, from whom it takes its name, this follows the course of Norman history to the victory of Henry I in 1106, in simple and agreeable French verse based upon the Latin chroniclers but incorporating something from popular tradition. Such a compilation adds little to our knowledge, but by the time of the Third Crusade we find a contemporary narrative in French verse prepared by a jongleur of Évreux who accompanied Richard on the expedition. If we ignore the line, at best very faint, which in works of this sort separates history from romance and from works of edification, we must carry the Norman pioneers still further back, to the Vie de Saint Alexis which we owe probably to a canon of Rouen in the eleventh century, and to the great national epic of mediæval France, the Chanson de Roland, pre-Norman in origin but Norman in its early form, which has recently been ascribed to Turold, bishop of Bayeux after the death of the more famous Odo and later for many years a monk of Bec. There is, one may object, nothing monastic in this wonderful pæan of mediæval knighthood, whose religion is that of the God of battles who has never lied, and whose hero meets death with his face toward Spain and his imperishable sword beneath him; but knights and monks had more in common than was once supposed, and we are coming to see that the monasteries, especially the monasteries of the great highways, had a large share in the making, if not in the final writing, of the mediæval epic as well as the mediæval chronicles.
When we reach works like these, the literary history of Normandy merges in that of France, as well as in that of England, which, thanks to the Norman Conquest and the Norman empire, long remained a literary province of France. We must not, however, leave this vernacular literature, as yet almost wholly the work of clerks, with the impression that its dominant quality is romantic or poetical. Its versified form was merely the habit of an age which found verse easy to remember; the literature itself, as Gaston Paris has well observed,[57] was “essentially a literature of instruction for the use of laymen,” fit material for prose and not for poetry. It is thus characteristically Norman in subject as well as in speech—simple and severe in form, devout and edifying rather than mystical, given to history rather than to speculation, and seeking through the moralized science of lapidaries and bestiaries and astronomical manuals to aid the everyday life of a serious and practical people.
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Normandy had also something to say to the world in that most mediæval of arts, architecture, and especially in that Romanesque form of building which flourished in the eleventh century and the first half of the twelfth. The great Norman churches of this epoch were the natural outgrowth of its life—the wealth of the abbeys, the splendor of princely prelates like Odo of Bayeux and Geoffrey of Coutances, the piety and penance of William the Conqueror and Matilda, expiating by two abbeys their marriage within the prohibited degrees, the religious devotion of the people as illustrated by the processions of 1145. The biographer of Geoffrey de Mowbray, for example, tells[58] us how the bishop labored day and night for the enlargement and beautification of his church at Coutances (dedicated in 1056), buying the better half of the city from the duke to get space for the cathedral and palace, travelling as far as Apulia to secure gold and gems and vestments from Robert Guiscard and his fellow Normans, and maintaining from his rents a force of sculptors, masons, goldsmiths, and workers in glass. Nearly forty years later, when the church had been damaged by earthquake and tempest, he brought a plumber from England to restore the leaden roof and the fallen stones of the towers and to replace the gilded cock which crowned the whole; and when he saw the cock once more glistening at the summit, he gave thanks to God and shortly passed away, pronouncing eternal maledictions upon those who should injure his church. Of this famous structure nothing now remains above the ground, for the noble towers which look from the hill of Coutances toward the western sea are Gothic, like the rest of the church; and for surviving monuments of cathedrals of the eleventh and twelfth centuries we must go to the naves of Bayeux and Évreux and the St. Romain’s tower of Rouen. Even here the impression will be fragmentary, broken by Gothic choirs and by towers and spires of a still later age, just as the simple lines of the early church of Mont-Saint-Michel are swallowed up in the ornate Gothic of the loftier parts of the great pile. Edifices wholly of the Romanesque period must be sought in the parish churches in which Normandy is so rich, or in the larger abbey-churches which meet us at Lessay, Cerisy, Caen, Jumièges, and Bocherville. Jumièges, though in ruins, preserves the full outline of the style of the middle of the eleventh century; Caen presents in the Abbaye aux Hommes and the Abbaye aux Dames two perfect though contrasted types of a few years later, the one simple and austere, the other richer and less grand. Freeman may seem fanciful when he suggests that these sister churches express the spirit of their respective founders, “the imperial will of the conquering duke” and the milder temper of his “loving and faithful duchess,”[59] but in any event they are Norman and typical of their age and country. There are elements in the ornamentation of Norman churches in this period which have been explained by reference to the distant influence of the Scandinavian north or the Farther East, there are perhaps traces of Lombard architecture in their plan, but their structure as a whole is as Norman as the stone of which they are built, distinguished by local traits from the other varieties of French Romanesque to which this period gave rise. Not the least Norman feature of these buildings is the persistent common sense of design and execution; the Norman architects did not attempt the architecturally impossible or undertake tasks, like the cathedral of Beauvais, which they were unable to finish in their own time and style. “What they began, they completed,” writes the Nestor of American historians in his sympathetic interpretation of the art and the spirit of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. In Norman art, as in other phases of Norman achievement, the last word cannot be said till we have followed it far beyond the borders of the duchy, northward to Durham, “half house of God, half castle ’gainst the Scot,” and the other massive monuments which made ‘Norman’ synonymous with a whole style and period of English architecture, and southward to those more ornate structures which Norman princes reared at Bari and Cefalù, Palermo and Monreale. “No art—either Greek or Byzantine, Italian, or Arab—” says Henry Adams,[60] “has ever created two religious types so beautiful, so serious, so impressive, and yet so different, as Mont-Saint-Michel watching over its northern ocean, and Monreale, looking down over its forests of orange and lemon, on Palermo and the Sicilian seas.”