A short history of the Norman Conquest of England

by Edward A. Freeman

CHAPTER II.
The English and the Normans.

1. The English and Norman Settlements.—When the Normans crossed the sea to conquer England, the English had been much longer settled in the land which from them was called England than the Normans had been in the land which from them was called Normandy. It was in the fifth century that the English began to settle in those parts of the isle of Britain which from them took the name of England. But it was not till the beginning of the tenth century that the Normans settled in that part of the mainland of Gaul which from them took the name of Normandy. The English had thus been living for six hundred years in their land, when the Normans had been living only about a hundred and fifty years in theirs. The English therefore in the eleventh century were more thoroughly at home in England than the Normans were in Normandy. Among the English the adventurous spirit of new settlers had spent itself in the long wars with the Welsh which established the English dominion in Britain. But in the Normans that spirit was still quite fresh. Their conquest of England was only one, though it was the greatest, of several conquests in foreign lands made by the Normans about this time. Both were brave; but the courage of the English was of the passive kind with which men defend their own homes; the courage of the Normans was of the restless, ambitious, kind with which men go forth to seek for themselves new homes.

2. The English in Britain.—The first time when the affairs of Normandy and of England came to have anything to do with one another was about eighty years before the Norman Conquest of England. At that time all England was united into one kingdom under the kings of the house of the West-Saxons. In the course of about a hundred years after their first landing, the English had founded seven or eight chief kingdoms, besides smaller states, at the expense of the Welsh, occupying all the eastern and central parts of Britain. Among these states four stand out as of special importance, as having at different times seemed likely to win the chief power over all their neighbours. These were Kent, Wessex, Mercia, and Northumberland. The power of Kent came early to an end, but for a long time it seemed very doubtful to which of the other three the chief power would come. Sometimes one had the upper hand, and sometimes another. But at last, in the early years of the ninth century, the West-Saxon king Ecgberht won the chief power over all the English kingdoms and over all the Welsh in the southern part of the island. The northern parts of the island, inhabited by the Picts, the Scots, and the northern Welsh, remained quite independent. And in the English and southern Welsh kingdoms kings went on reigning, though the West-Saxon king was their lord and they were his men. That is, though he had nothing to do with the internal affairs of their kingdoms, they were to follow him in matters of peace and war, and at all events never to fight against him. Long before the chief lordship thus came into the hands of the West-Saxon kings, all the English kingdoms had embraced Christianity. Kent was the first to do so; its conversion began at the end of the sixth century (597), and all England had become Christian before the end of the seventh.

3. The Danes in England.—Not long after the West-Saxon kings had won the chief power over the other English kingdoms, a series of events began which made a great change in England, and which was of a truth the beginning of the Normans as a people. The people of Scandinavia, the Danes and the Northmen or Norwegians, began about this time, first to plunder and then to settle both in England and in Gaul. They were still heathens, just as the English had been when they first landed in Britain. Their invasions were therefore the more frightful, and they took special delight in destroying the churches and monasteries. In England all the latter part of the ninth century is taken up with the story of their ravaging and settlements. They settled in eastern and northern England; they overran Wessex for a moment, but there they were defeated and driven out by the famous King Alfred. They had upset the other English kingdoms, so that Wessex was now the only independent English and Christian kingdom. Alfred could therefore treat with them as the one English king. The Danish king Guthrum was baptized, and a line was drawn between his dominions and those of Alfred, leaving to Alfred all Wessex and the other lands south of the Thames and all south-western Mercia. Thus Alfred lost as an over-lord; but his own kingdom was enlarged; and the coming of the Danes, by uprooting the other English kingdoms, opened the way for the West-Saxon Kings to win the whole of England. This was done under Alfred’s successors, Edward, Æthelstan, Edmund, and Eadred, in the first half of the tenth century. After long fighting, all the English kingdoms were won from the Danes and were united to the kingdom of the West-Saxons. And the Kings of the English, as they were now called, held the lordship over the other kingdoms of Britain, Scottish and Welsh.

4. The Northmen in Gaul.—While this was going on in Britain, something of much the same kind was going on in Gaul. Throughout the ninth century the Northmen were plundering in Gaul, sailing up the rivers, burning towns and monasteries, and sometimes making small settlements here and there. But in the beginning of the tenth century they made a much greater and more lasting settlement. A colony of Northmen settled in that part of Gaul which from them took the name of Normandy, and there founded a new European state. This was in the year 912. The great dominion of the Franks under Charles the Great was now quite broken up into four kingdoms. That of the West-Franks, called Karolingia, because several of its kings bore the name of Charles, took in the greater part of Gaul. The crown was more than once disputed between the kings of the house of Charles the Great, who reigned at Laon, and the Dukes of the French, whose capital was Paris, and whose duchy of France was the greatest state of Gaul north of the Loire. Some of these dukes themselves wore the crown, and, when they did not, they were much more powerful than the kings at Laon. But whether the king reigned at Paris or Laon, the princes south of the Loire, though they called themselves his men, took very little heed to him. Now when the kingdom was at Laon, the king was pretty well out of the way of invaders who came by sea; but no part of Gaul was more exposed than the duchy of France, with its long seaboard on the Channel, and with the mouth of the river Seine making a highway for the Northmen up to Rouen and Paris. Paris was several times besieged in the ninth century; and now at the beginning of the tenth, the coasts of Gaul, especially the northern coast, were ravaged by a great pirate-leader named Rolf—called in Latin Rollo and in French Rou—who had got possession of Rouen and seemed disposed to settle in the land.

5. Settlement of Rolf.—At this time the kingdom of the West-Franks was held by Charles, called the Simple, who reigned at Laon. Robert, Duke of the French, was his man, but a man much more powerful than his lord. But no prince in Gaul had suffered so much from Rolf’s ravages. So King Charles and Duke Robert agreed that the best thing to be done was very much what Alfred had done with Guthrum, to grant to Rolf part of the land as his own, if he would be baptized and hold it as the man of the king. So Rolf was baptized with Duke Robert to his godfather, and he took his name in baptism, though he was still commonly spoken of as Rolf. And he received the city of Rouen and the land from the Epte to the Dive, as a fief from King Charles, and became his man. So Rolf and his followers settled down in the land which from them was called the Land of the Northmen and afterwards the Duchy of Normandy. It was enlarged in Rolf’s own time by the addition of the city of Bayeux and its territory, and in the time of his son William Longsword, by the addition of the peninsular land of Coutances, called the Côtentin, and the land of Avranches to the south of it. The Norman dukes claimed also to be lords over the counties of Britanny and Maine; but they could never really make good their power there. But the whole north coast of the duchy of France now became the duchy of Normandy. Paris and its prince, sometimes king, sometimes only duke, were quite cut off from the sea by the land of the Norman dukes at Rouen.

6. The Early Norman Dukes.—In this lay the beginning of the strife between Normandy and France, which, when the same princes came to rule over England and Normandy, grew into the long wars between France and England. The princes and people of France never forgot that they had lost the great city of Rouen and all the fair land of Normandy. But King Charles at Laon gained by the duchy of France being in this way weakened and cut in two. He gained too because, when Rolf swore to be his man and be faithful to him, he really kept his oath. For when, first Duke Robert of France (922), and then Duke Rudolf of Burgundy (923), rose up against King Charles and were made kings in his stead, both Rolf and his son William after him clave to the lord to whom Rolf had first sworn. Rolf too ruled his land well, and put down thieves and murderers, so that the story ran that he hung up a jewel in a tree, and no man dared to take it. Under him and his son William Longsword (927–943) most of the Normans gradually became Christians, and left off their Scandinavian tongue and learned to speak French. By the end of William’s reign nothing but French was spoken at Rouen; but in the lands to the west, which had been won more lately, men still spoke Danish, and many still clave to the gods of the North. This heathen and Danish party more than once revolted, and, after the death of Duke William, they even for a while got hold of the young Duke Richard and made him join in their heathen worship. About the same time new settlements from the North were made in the Côtentin. But Duke Richard presently commended himself to Hugh the Great, Duke of the French; that is, he became his man instead of the King’s man. During the rest of his reign the duchies of France and Normandy were in close alliance, and Richard had a chief hand in giving the kingdom to Hugh Capet, the son of Hugh the Great.

7. Manners of the Normans.—During Richard’s reign then the Normans were getting more and more French in their language and manners. And more than this, it was their help which took the crown of Karolingia from the German kings at Laon, and gave it to the French kings at Paris. Thus the Dukes of the French became Kings of the French, and, as they extended their power, the name of their duchy of France was gradually spread over nearly all Karolingia, and over the greater part of the rest of Gaul. In the time of the next Duke, Richard the Good (996–1026), there was a great revolt of the peasants in Normandy. These were most likely largely of Celtic descent, while all the great landowners were Normans. And it is also noticed of this duke that he began to draw new distinctions among his subjects, and would have none but gentlemen about him. This is almost the first time that we hear that word. The peasants were put down, and the gentlemen had the upper hand. The Normans had now quite changed from the ways of their Northern forefathers. From seafaring men they had turned into the best horsemen in the world. The Norman gentleman, mounted on his horse, with his shield like a kite, his long lance, and sometimes his sword or mace-at-arms, became the best of all fighting-men of his own kind. And, now that they were fully settled in their own land, the Normans began, quite in the spirit of their forefathers, though in another garb, to go all over the world to seek for fighting wherever fighting was to be had. Often religious zeal was mingled with love of fighting. Some went to help the Christians of Spain against the Saracens, and others, later in the century, went to help the Eastern Emperors against the Turks. But their greatest exploits of all were done in the two greatest of European islands, one the greatest in the Mediterranean, the other the greatest in the Ocean, Sicily and Britain.

8. The Normans in Italy and Sicily.—We shall come presently to their doings in our own island. But it is well to remark that the Norman Conquest of England was no doubt largely suggested by the Norman exploits in southern Italy and Sicily. These went on during nearly the whole of the eleventh century; but they began under Richard the Good. They were not enterprises of the Norman dukes, or of the Norman state in any way, but of private Norman gentlemen who went out to seek their fortunes. They founded more than one principality in southern Italy, but the most famous settlement was that made by the sons of a simple Norman gentleman called Tancred of Hauteville. They conquered all southern Italy, putting an end to the dominion of the Eastern Emperors, and they got the Pope to invest them with what they conquered. Then Robert Wiscard son of Tancred became Duke of Apulia. He then went on to attack the Eastern Emperor beyond the Hadriatic, and actually held Durazzo and other possessions there for some while. Thence he came back to help the Pope against the Western Emperor Henry the Fourth, so that he defeated both Emperors in one year. His brother Roger, partly with his help, conquered all Sicily from the Mahometans. He was only called Great Count; but his son, another Roger, became the first King of Sicily. All this began before the Norman Conquest of England, and was going on at the same time. We speak of it here to show what manner of men the Normans of the eleventh century were. When private men could found duchies and kingdoms and put Emperors to flight, we might indeed look for great things whenever a Duke of the Normans at the head of his whole people should put forth his full strength.

9. The Danish Conquest of England.—Meanwhile the Danish invasions of England, which had been put an end to by the great kings who followed Alfred, began again in the last twenty years of the tenth century, and went on for thirty-six years (980–1016) till England was altogether conquered. But these were invasions of another kind from the earlier Danish invasions. In the ninth century both England and Denmark were still made up of various settlements, more or less distinct, and this or that party of Danish adventurers came to settle in this or that part of England. But in the course of the tenth century Denmark, like England, had been joined together into one kingdom; and the invasions now took the form of an enterprise of a king of all Denmark trying to win the crown of all England. But, though England was now joined under one king, its different parts were not yet thoroughly welded together, and it needed a great king to make the whole force of the kingdom act together. In the former part of the tenth century England had had such great kings; but when the Danish invasions began again, she had a king, Æthelred, of quite another kind. His name means noble rede or counsel, but men called him the Unready or man without rede. For, though he sometimes had what we may call fits of energy, they were commonly in the wrong place; and during his long reign it was only once towards the very end that he showed himself as at all a national leader against the enemy. Generally the Danes landed at this or that point; then, if the men of that shire had a brave leader, a good fight was made against them; but there was no general resistance. The king thought more of giving the Danes money to go away than of fighting them. And of course this only led them to come again for more money. In this way one shire after another was harried; the land was weakened bit by bit, till the Danes could march where they pleased, even in the inland parts. At last, in 1013, the Danish king Swen or Swegen was able to subdue all England, and to make the English acknowledge him as king. King Æthelred had to flee from the land and to take shelter beyond the sea. And his wife and her children had to seek for shelter beyond the sea along with him. By this time the story of Normandy and the story of England are beginning to be joined into one. For Æthelred’s wife was a Norman woman, and the land in which he and she sought shelter was her own land of Normandy. We must now therefore go back a little way in our story, and see how the Normans and the English had already come to have dealings with one another, in war and in peace.