At home and abroad the history of Normandy is a record of rich and varied achievement—of war and conquest and feats of arms, but also of law and government and religion, of agriculture, industry, trade, and exploration, of literature and science and art. It takes us back to Rollo and William of the Long Sword, to the Vikings and the Crusaders, to the conquerors of England and Sicily, to masterful prelates of the feudal age like Odo of Bayeux and Thomas Becket; it brings us down to the admirals and men of art and letters of the Grand Siècle,—Tourville and DuQuesne, Poussin, Malherbe, and the great Corneille,—to Charlotte Corday and the days of the Terror, and to the painters and scholars and men of letters of the nineteenth century,—Géricault and Millet, Laplace and Léopold Delisle, Flaubert and Maupassant and Albert Sorel. It traces the laborious clearing of ancient forests, the rude processes of primitive agriculture, the making of Norman cider and the breeding of the Norman horse, the vicissitudes of trade in fish and marten-skins, in pottery, cheap cottons, and strong waters, the development of a centre of fashion like Trouville or centres of war and commerce like Cherbourg and Havre. It describes the slow building of monasteries and cathedrals and the patient labors of priests and monks, as well as the conquest of the Canaries, the colonization of Canada, and the exploration of the Great West. A thousand years of such history are well worth a week of commemoration and retrospect.
To the American traveller who wends his way toward Paris from Cherbourg, Havre, or Dieppe, the first impression of Normandy is that of a country strikingly like England. There are the same high chalk cliffs, the same “little grey church on the windy shore,” often the same orchards and hedges, poppies and roses. There are trees and wide stretches of forest as in few other parts of France, placid, full-brimmed rivers and quiet countrysides, and everywhere the rich green of meadow and park and pasture, that vivid green of the north which made Alphonse Daudet at Oxford shudder, “Green rheumatism,” as he thought of the sun-browned plains and sharp, bare hills of his own Provence. Normandy is brighter than England, with a dash more of color in the landscape, but its skies are not sunny and its air breathes the mists of the sea and the chill of the north. There is a grey tone also, of grey towns and grey sea, matched by an austere and sombre element in the Norman character, which, if it does not take its pleasures sadly after the manner of Taine’s Englishmen, is prone to take them soberly, and by an element of melancholy, a sense of le glas des choses mortes, which Flaubert called the melancholy of the northern barbarians. The Norman landscape also gives us the feeling of finish and repose and the sentiment of a rich past, not merely in the obvious externals of crumbling wall and ivied tower, but in that deeper sense of a people bound from immemorial antiquity to the soil, adapted to every local difference through long generations of use and wont, in an intimate union of man and nature which makes the Norman inseparable from his land. All this, too, is English, but English with a difference. Just as, in Henry James’s phrase, the English landscape is a landlord’s landscape, and the French a peasant’s, so the mairie and the préfecture, the public garden and the public band, the café and the ever-open church, the workman’s blouse and the grandam’s bonnet, remind us continually that we are in a Latin country and on our way to Paris.
Now the history of Normandy reflects this twofold impression of the traveller: it faces toward England and the sea, but it belongs to France and the land. Open to the outer world by the great valley of the Seine and the bays and inlets of its long coast-line, Normandy was never drawn to the sea in the same degree as its neighbor Brittany, nor isolated in any such measure from the life of the Continent. Where the shore is low, meadow and field run to the water’s edge; where it is high, its line is relatively little broken, so that the streams generally rush to the sea down short, steep valleys, up which wheeze the trains which connect the little seaside ports and watering-places with the modern world within. In spite of the trade of its rivers and its ports, in spite of the growth of industry along its streams, Normandy is still primarily an agricultural country, rooted deep in the rich soil of an ancient past, a country of horses and cattle, of butter and cheese and cider and the kindly fruits of the earth; and the continuity of its history rests upon the land itself. “Behind the shore and even upon it,” says Vidal de la Blache, “the ancient cumulative force of the interior has reacted against the sea. There an old and rich civilization has subsisted in its entirety, founded on the soil, through whose power have resisted and endured the speech, the traditions, and the peoples of ancient times.”[1] Conquered and colonized by the sea-rovers of the north, the land of Normandy was able to absorb its conquerors into the law, the language, the religion, and the culture of France, where, as Sorel says, their descendants now preserve “their attachment to their native soil, the love of their ancestors, the respect for the ruins of the past, and the indestructible veneration for its tombs.”[2]
If the character of Normandy is thus in considerable measure determined by geography, its boundaries and even its internal unity are chiefly the result of history. For good and ill, Normandy has, on the land side, no natural frontiers. The hills of the west continue those of Brittany, the plains of the east merge in those of Picardy. The watershed of the south marks no clear-cut boundary from Maine and Perche; the valleys of the Seine and the Eure lead straight to the Ile-de-France, separated from Normandy only by those border fortresses of the Avre and the Vexin which are the perpetual battle-ground of Norman history—Normandy’s Alsace-Lorraine! Within these limits lie two distinct physiographic areas, one the lower portion of the Paris basin, the other a western region which belongs with Brittany and the west of France. These districts are commonly distinguished as Upper and Lower Normandy, terms consecrated by long use and representing two contrasted regions and types, but there is no general agreement as to their exact limits or the limits of the region of Middle Normandy which some have placed between them. Even the attempt to define these areas in terms of cheese—as the land respectively of the creamy Neufchâtel, the resilient Pont-l’Évêque, and the flowing Camembert—is defective from the point of view of geographical accuracy!
The most distinctive parts of Upper Normandy are the valley of the Seine and the region to the north and east, the pays de Caux, fringed by the coast from Havre to the frontier of Picardy. Less monotonous than the bare plains farther east, the plateau of Caux is covered by a rich vegetation, broken by scattered farmsteads, where house and orchard and outbuildings are protected from the wind by those rectangular earthworks surmounted by trees which are the most characteristic feature of the region. It is the country of Madame Bovary and of Maupassant’s peasants. Equally typical is the valley of the Seine, ample, majestic, slow, cutting its sinuous way through high banks which grow higher as we approach the sea, winding around ancient strongholds like Château Gaillard and Tancarville or ruined abbeys like Jumièges and Saint-Wandrille,—where Maeterlinck’s bees still hum in the garden,—catching the tide soon after it enters Normandy, reaching deep water at Rouen, and meeting the “longed-for dash of waves” in the great estuary at its mouth. Halfway from the Norman frontier to the river’s end stands Rouen, mistress of the Seine and capital, not only of Upper Normandy, but of the whole Norman land. Celtic in name and origin, like most French cities, chief town of the Roman province of Lugdunensis Secunda and of the ecclesiastical province to which this gave rise, the political and commercial importance of Rouen have made it also the principal city of mediæval and modern Normandy and the seat of the changing political authority to which the land has bowed. As early as the twelfth century it is one of the famous cities of Europe, likened to Rome by local poets and celebrated even by sober historians for its murmuring streams and pleasant meadows, its hill-girt site and strong defences, its beautiful churches and private dwellings, its well-stocked markets, and its extensive foreign trade. In spite of all modern changes, Rouen is still a city full of history, in the parchments of its archives and the stones of its walls, in its stately cathedral with the ancient tombs of the Norman dukes, in the glorious nave of its great abbey-church, the florid Gothic of Saint-Maclou, the richly carved perpendicular of its Palace of Justice, and its splendid façades of the French Renaissance; historic also in those unbuilt spots which mark the landing of the Northmen and the burning of Joan of Arc.
Lower Normandy shows greater variety, comprising the hilly country of the Bocage,—the so-called Norman Switzerland,—the plain of Caen and the pasture-lands of the Bessin, and the wide sweep of the Atlantic coast-line, from the promontory of La Hague to the shifting sands of the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel. It is a country of green fields and orchards and sunken lanes, of dank parks and mouldering châteaux, of deserted mills and ancient parish churches, of quaint timbered houses and long village streets, of silent streams, small ports, and pebbly beaches, the whole merging ultimately in the neighboring lands of Brittany and Maine. Its typical places are Falaise, Vire, and Argentan, with their ancient castles of the Norman dukes; Bayeux and Coutances, the foundations of whose soaring cathedrals carry us back to the princely prelates of the Conquest; provincial capitals of the Old Régime, like Valognes, or the new, like Saint-Lô; and best of all, the crowning glories of the marvel of Mont-Saint-Michel. Its chief town is Caen, stern and grey, the heart of Normandy as Rouen is its head, an old poet tells us; no ancient Roman capital, but the creation of the mediæval dukes, who reared its great abbey-churches to commemorate the marriage and the piety of William the Conqueror and Matilda, and who established their exchequer in its castle; an intellectual centre also, the seat of the only Norman university, of an academy, and of a society of antiquaries which has recovered for us great portions of the Norman past.
Fashioned and enriched by the hand of man, the land of Normandy has in turn profoundly influenced the character of its inhabitants. First and foremost, the Norman is a peasant, industrious, tenacious, cautious, secretive, distrustful of strangers, close-fisted, shrewd, even to the point of cunning, a hard man at a bargain, eager for gain, but with the genius for small affairs rather than for great, for labor and economy rather than enterprise and daring. Suspicious of novelty, he is a conservative in politics with a high regard for vested interests. The possession of property, especially landed property, is his great ambition; and since, as St. Francis long ago reminded us, property is the sower of strife and suits at law, he is by nature litigious and lawyerly. There is a well-known passage of Michelet which describes the Norman peasant on his return from the fields explaining the Civil Code to his attentive children; Racine, who immortalized Chicaneau in his Plaideurs, laid the scene in a town of Lower Normandy. Even in his time this was no new trait, for the fondness for legal form and chicane can be traced in the early days of the Coutume de Normandie, while the Burnt Njal Saga shows us the love of lawsuits and fine points of procedure full-blown among the Northmen of primitive Iceland. If Normandy is the pays de gain, it is also the pays de sapience. Hard-headed and practical, the Norman is not an idealist or a mystic; even his religion has a practical flavor, and the Bretons are wont to assert that there has never been a Norman saint. With the verse of Corneille and the splendid monuments of Romanesque and Gothic architecture before us, no one can accuse the Normans of lack of artistic sense, yet here, too, the Norman imagination is inclined to be restrained and severe, realistic rather than romantic. Its typical modern writers are Flaubert and Maupassant; its typical painter is Millet, choosing his scenes from Barbizon, but loyal to the peasant types of his native Normandy. Indeed Henry Adams insists that Flaubert’s style, exact, impersonal, austere, is singularly like that of those great works of Norman Romanesque, the old tower of Rouen cathedral and St. Stephen’s abbey at Caen, and shows us “how an old art transmutes itself into a new one, without changing its methods.”[3] In history, a field in which the Norman attachment to the past has produced notable results, the distinguishing qualities of Norman work have been acute criticism and great erudition rather than brilliant imagination. In science, when a great Norman like Laplace discovered the nebular hypothesis, he relegated it to a note in the appendix to his ordered and systematic treatise on the motions of the heavenly bodies. The Norman mind is neither nebular nor hypothetical!
The land is not the whole of nature’s gift to Normandy; we must also take account of the sea, of those who came by sea and those who went down to the sea in ships; and history tells us of another type of Norman, those giants of an elder day who, as one of their descendants has said, “found the seas too narrow and the land too tame.” The men who subdued England and Sicily, who discovered the Canaries and penetrated to the Mississippi, who colonized Quebec and ruled the Isle of France, were no stay-at-homes, no cautious landsmen interested in boundaries and inheritances and vain strivings about the law. Warriors and adventurers in untamed lands and upon uncharted seas, they were organizers of states and rulers of peoples, and it is their work which gives Normandy its chief claim upon the attention of the student of general history. These are the Normans of history and the Normans of romance. Listen to the earliest characterizations of them which have reached us from the south, as a monk of the eleventh century, Aimé of Monte Cassino, sets out to recount the deeds of the southern Normans, fortissime gent who have spread themselves over the earth, ever leaving small things to acquire greater, unwilling to serve, but seeking to have every one in subjection;[4] or as his contemporary, Geoffrey Malaterra, himself very likely of Norman origin, describes this cunning and revengeful race, despising their own inheritance in the hope of winning a greater elsewhere, eager for gain and eager for power, quick to imitate whatever they see, at once lavish and greedy; given to hunting and hawking and delighting in horses and accoutrements and fine clothing, yet ready when occasion demands to bear labor and hunger and cold; skilful in flattery and the use of fine words, but unbridled unless held down firmly by the yoke of justice.[5] Turn then to the northern writers of the following century: William of Malmesbury, who describes the fierce onslaughts of the Normans, inured to war and scarcely able to live without it, their stratagems and breaches of faith and their envy of both equals and superiors;[6] or the English monk Ordericus, who spent his life among them in Normandy and who says:—
The race of the Normans is unconquered and ready for any wild deed unless restrained by a strong ruler. In whatever gathering they find themselves they always seek to dominate, and in the heat of their ambition they are often led to violate their obligations. All this the French and Bretons and Flemings and other neighbors have frequently felt; this the Italians and the Lombards, the Angles and Saxons, have also learned to their undoing.[7]
A little later it is the Norman poet Wace who tells, through the mouth of the dying William the Conqueror, of these same Normans—brave and valiant and conquering, proud and boastful and fond of good cheer, hard to control and needing to be kept under foot by their rulers.[8] Through all these accounts runs the same story of a high-spirited, masterful, unscrupulous race, eager for danger and ready for every adventure, and needing always the bit and bridle rather than the spur.