The contrast is not merely between the eleventh century and the twentieth, between a lawless race of pioneers and a race subdued and softened by generations of order and peace; the two types are present in the early days of Norman history. Among the conquerors of England a recent historian distinguishes “the great soldiers of the invading host ... equally remarkable for foresight in council and for headlong courage in the hour of action, whose wits are sharpened by danger and whose resolution is only stimulated by obstacles; incapable of peaceful industry but willing to prepare themselves for war and rapine by the most laborious apprenticeship”; and over against them “the politicians ... cautious, plausible, deliberate, with an immense capacity for detail, and an innate liking for routine; conscious in a manner of their moral obligations, but mainly concerned with small economies and gains; limited in their horizon, but quick to recognise superior powers and to use them for their own objects; indifferent for their own part to high ideals, and yet respectful to idealists; altogether a hard-headed, heavy-handed, laborious and tenacious type of men.”[9]
These contrasting types of life and character it is tempting to refer to the respective influences of land and water, to the differences between the peasant and the rider to the sea. One might even attempt a philosophy of Norman history somewhat on this wise. In its normal and undisturbed state Normandy is a part of France, in its life as in its geography, and as such it shows only the ordinary local differences from the rest of the French lands. So it was under the Romans, so under the Franks. At the beginning of the tenth century the coming of the Northmen introduces a new element which develops relations with the sea and the countries beyond the sea, with Scandinavia and later with the British Isles. Normandy ceases to be provincial, it almost ceases to be French; it even becomes the centre of an Atlantic empire which stretches from Scotland to the Pyrenees. It sends its pilgrims to Compostela, its chivalry to Jerusalem, its younger sons to Sicily and southern Italy. Its relations with the sea do not cease with its political separation from the lands across the Channel in 1204. The English come back for a time in the fifteenth century; the Normans cross the Atlantic in the sixteenth and settle Canada in the seventeenth. But the overmastering influence of the soil prevails and draws its children back to itself. The sea-faring impulse declines; activity turns inward; the province is finally absorbed in the nation; Normandy is again a part of France, and the originality and distinctness of its history fade away in the life of the whole.
Philosophy or no philosophy, the history of Normandy falls for our purposes into three convenient periods. The first of these extends from the earliest times to the coming of the Northmen in 911, the event which created Normandy as a distinct entity. The second is the history of the independent Norman duchy from 911 to the French conquest in 1204, the three splendid centuries of Norman independence and Norman greatness. The third period of seven hundred years deals with Normandy as a part of France.
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The interest and importance of these several periods vary with the point of view. Many people are of the opinion that the only history which matters is modern history, and the more modern the better because the nearer to ourselves and our time. To such everything is meaningless before the French Revolution or the Franco-Prussian War—or perhaps the War of 1914. To those who care only for their own time the past has no perspective; as a distinguished maker and writer of history has said, James Buchanan and Tiglath-Pileser become contemporaries. This foreshortened interest in the immediate past starts from a sound principle, namely, that it is an important function of history to explain the present in the light of the past from which it has come. By a natural reaction from the study which stopped with Marcus Aurelius or the American colonies or the Congress of Vienna, the demand naturally arose for the history of the day before yesterday, which was once declared to be the least known period in human annals. This is quite legitimate if it does not stop here and does not accept the easy assumption that what is nearest us is necessarily most important, even to ourselves. Modern Germany owes more to Martin Luther than to Nietzsche, more to Charles the Great, who eleven hundred years ago conquered and civilized the Saxons and began the subjugation of the Slavs, than to many a more modern figure in the Sieges-allee at Berlin. Our method of reckoning time and latitude by sixtieths owes less to the contemporaries of James Buchanan than to those of Tiglath-Pileser. If we must apply material standards to history, we must consider the mass as well as the square of the distance.
Obviously, too, we must consider distance in space as well as in time. The Boston fire of 1872 did not rouse Paris, and our hearts do not thrill at the mention of the Socialist mayors and Conservative deputies whose names become household words when the streets of French towns are rechristened in their memory. The perspective of Norman history is different for a Norman than for other Frenchmen, different for a Frenchman than for an American.
Now there can be no question that for the average Norman the recent period bulks larger than the earlier. His life is directly and constantly affected by the bureaucratic traditions of the Old Régime, by the new freedom and the land-distribution of the Revolution, by the coming of the railroad, the steamship, and the primary school. William the Conqueror, Philip Augustus, Joan of Arc, their deeds and their times, have become mere traditions to him, if indeed they are that. In all these changes, however, there is nothing distinctive, nothing peculiar, nothing that cannot be studied just as well in some other part of France. Their local and specifically Norman aspects are of absorbing interest to Normandy, but they are meaningless to the world at large. With the union with France in 1204 Norman history becomes local history, and whatever possesses more than local interest it shares with the rest of France. From the point of view of the world at large, the history of Normandy runs parallel with that of the other regions of France. Normandy will contribute its quota of great names to the world, in art and music and literature, in learning and industry and politics; it will take its part in the great movements of French history, the Reformation, the Revolution, the new republic; but it will be only a part of a larger whole and derive its interest for the general student from its membership in the body of France.
Much the same is true of the period before the coming of the Northmen. Under the Celts, the Romans, and the Franks, the region which was to become Normandy is not distinguished in any notable way from the rest of Gaul, and it has the further disadvantage of being one of the regions concerning which our knowledge is particularly scanty. A few names of tribes in Cæsar’s Gallic War and in the Roman geographers, a few scattered inscriptions from the days of the empire, a few lives of saints and now and then a rare document of Frankish times, this with the results of archæological research constitutes the basis of early Norman history. After all, Normandy was remote from Rome and lay apart also from the main currents of Frankish life and politics, so that we should not look here for much light on general conditions. Nevertheless it is in this obscure age that the foundations of Normandy were laid. First of all, the population, Gallo-Roman at bottom, receiving a Germanic admixture of Saxons and Franks long before the coming of the Northmen, but still preponderantly non-Germanic in its racial type. Next, language, determined by the process of Romanization and persisting as a Romance speech in spite of Saxon and Frank and Northman, until in the earliest monuments of the eleventh century we can recognize the beginnings of modern French. Then law, the Frankish law which the Northmen were to absorb, perpetuate, and carry to England. Fourth, religion, the Christian faith, triumphing only with difficulty in a land largely rural and open to barbarian invasion, but established firmly by the sixth century and already reënforced by monastic foundations which were to be the centres of faith and culture to a later age. Finally, the framework of political geography, resting on the Roman cities which with some modifications were perpetuated as the dioceses of the mediæval church, and connected by Roman roads which remained until modern times the great highways of local communication. A beginning was also made in the direction of separate organization when, toward the close of the fourth century, these districts of the northwest are for the first time set off by themselves as an administrative area, the province of Lugdunensis Secunda, which coincides with later Normandy. Then, as regularly throughout Gaul, the civil province becomes the ecclesiastical province, centring about its oldest church, Rouen, and the province of the archbishop of Rouen perpetuates the boundaries of the political area after the political authority passed away, and carries over to the Middle Ages the outline of the Roman organization. In all this process there is nothing particularly different from what took place throughout the greater part of northern Gaul, but the results were fundamental for Normandy and for the whole of Norman history.
A new epoch begins with the coming of the Northmen in the early tenth century, as a result of which Normandy was differentiated from the rest of France and carried into the broader currents of European history. At first an outpost of the Scandinavian north, its relations soon shifted as it bred the conquerors of England and Sicily. The Normans of the eleventh century, Henry Adams maintains, stood more fully in the centre of the world’s history than their English descendants ever did. They “were a part, and a great part, of the Church, of France, and of Europe.” The Popes leaned on them, at times heavily. By the conquest of England the “Norman dukes cast the kings of France into the shade.... Normans were everywhere in 1066, and everywhere in the lead of their age.”[10] A century later Normans ruled half of Italy, two thirds of France, and the whole of England; and they had made a beginning on Ireland and Scotland. No one can write of European affairs throughout this whole period without giving a large place to the Normans and their doings; while events like the conquests of England and Ireland changed the course of history.
Normandy has also its place in the history of European institutions, for the Normans were organizers as well as conquerors, and their political creations were the most efficient states of their time. Masterful, yet legally minded and businesslike, with a sense for detail and routine, the Norman princes had a sure instinct for state-building, at home and abroad. The Norman duchy was a compact and powerful state before its duke crossed the Channel, and the central government which the Normans created in England showed the same characteristics on a larger scale. The Anglo-Norman empire of the twelfth century was the marvel of its day, while the history of the Norman kingdom of Sicily showed that the Norman genius for assimilation and political organization was not confined to the dukes of Rouen. Highly significant during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Norman institutions remained of permanent importance, affecting the central administration of France in ways which are still obscure, and exerting a decisive influence upon the law and government of England. Normandy was the connecting link between the Frankish law of the Continent and the English common law, and thus claims a share in the jurisprudence of the wide-flung lands to which the common law has spread. The institution of trial by jury, for example, is of Norman origin, or rather of Frankish origin and Norman development.