William the Conqueror and the Rule of the Normans

by F. M. Stenton

The murder of William Longsword was followed by the first of the two minorities which occur in Norman history, for Richard the illegitimate heir of the late duke was only a child of ten on his father’s death. The opportunity was too good to be missed, and Louis d’Outremer succeeded for a brief period in making himself master of Normandy, not improbably asserting as a pretext for his intervention a claim to the guardianship of the young duke. Whatever its legal foundation Louis’s action outraged the political individuality of the duchy, and when Richard came to years of discretion he abandoned the traditional Carolingian friendship and attached himself to the Robertian house. He commended himself to Hugh the Great, and thus began a friendship between the lords of Paris and their Norman neighbours which continued for nearly a century and was not the least among the causes which enabled the Robertian house in 987 to crown its existing pre-eminence with the royal title. The reign of Richard I. lasted for more than fifty years, and the history of Normandy during this period is extremely obscure, but there can be no question that it witnessed the gradual consolidation of the duchy, and its no less gradual absorption into the political system of France.

The seventh year of the reign of Richard II. was marked by an event of the first importance for the history of both England and Normandy—the marriage of Ethelred II. and Emma the duke’s sister. England was at the time in the very centre of the great Danish war which marks the close of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh century, and it is distinctly possible that the match may have been prompted by a desire on Ethelred’s part to close the Norman harbours to his enemies’ ships. But, apart from all dubious attributions of political motive, the importance of the marriage lies in the fact that Normandy remains thenceforward a permanent factor in English politics. The marriage must have produced an immediate immigration of Normans into England; so early as 1003 we find a French reeve of Queen Emma in charge of the city of Exeter. The mere union of the dynasties—the marriage of the representative of the ancient and decadent royal house of Wessex to the great-granddaughter of the pirate chief Rollo—was alone a sufficiently striking event. But by chance it happened that the strain of Norman blood in the offspring of the marriage came of itself to produce political results of the gravest consequence. No one in 1002 could foresee that the new queen would bear a son whose early life would be passed in exile in his mother’s land, and who would return thence to his father’s inheritance saturated with Norman ideas of the art of government; still less could anyone foresee that in virtue of this marriage a Norman duke would one day claim the throne of England by right of inheritance. But less striking results of the new alliance would soon enough become apparent. The ubiquitous Norman trader would become a more frequent visitor to the English ports, and Normandy would at once become a friendly land to Englishmen crossing the Channel for purposes of trade or pilgrimage. Nor should the marriage be considered exclusively from the English standpoint. The reception of a Norman princess as queen of England proved at least that the Norman duke was no longer a barbarian intruder among the higher nobility of France; he might not be a sovereign prince as yet, but he was certainly a ruler of greater consequence beyond the borders of the French kingdom than were any of his fellow-vassals of the French crown. It is true that the alliance of 1002 marks no immediate change in the French relations of the duke of Normandy; his energies were still confined to the petty struggles which he, like his father and grandfather, carried on with varying success against this neighbour or that. But events were soon to prove how strong a state had really been created in Normandy by the obscure dukes of the tenth century, and the marriage of Ethelred and Emma pointed to the quarter in which the strength of Normandy would find its field at last.

It must be owned that we can only describe the internal condition of Normandy, as it existed at the beginning of the eleventh century, in very general terms. Normandy, like the rest of the French kingdom, was passing through a phase in which the legislative power of the sovereign was in abeyance; and in default of written laws we can only rely upon the incidental information afforded by legal documents or by the casual expressions of later chroniclers.[^[15]] But the main features of Norman feudalism at this time are fairly certain, and sufficient to point a contrast with the contemporary constitution of England in almost every particular in which the details of the two systems are known to us.[^[15]]

In the first place, vassalage had become localised in Normandy. The relationship between lord and man would in most cases imply that the latter held his land of the former. So far as we can tell, the course of Norman feudalism started from a point of departure different from that with which the English system takes its origin. The history of the terms employed to designate dependent tenure seems to make this clear. At an early date a great man’s vassal will hold of him a precarium; he will be a tenant at will, his tenure will be revocable at his lord’s instance. To the precarium succeeds the beneficium; a term which sufficiently expresses the fact that the tenant’s rights over his land are derivable from his lord, although it does not, like the older word, imply their temporary character. In the meantime, the hereditary principle in regard to dependent tenure is continually securing a wider extension, and the feudum, the fee, the term which ultimately supplanted the precarium and beneficium, denotes an estate which will in the normal course of things descend to a tenant’s heir. Some such succession of ideas can distinctly be traced in the Frankish kingdom, and the Anglo-Saxon land books here and there contain words and phrases which suggest that the English land law would have followed a similar development, had it not been arrested by the general dislocation of society occasioned by the wars of the ninth century. The wide estates with which the newly converted kings of Wessex, the Hwicce and the Middle Angles, endowed the churches founded in their dominions afforded an excellent field for the growth of dependent tenure, which was not neglected by thegn and free man, anxious to participate in the wealth of the saints by virtue of discharging military obligations which monks and clerks could not perform in person. But the Danish wars stripped the eastern churches of their possessions and peopled the eastern counties with settlers of approximately equal rank; and when in the century before the Norman Conquest the land loan reproduces many of the features of the continental precarium, it appears as an exotic institution rather than as a normal development of previous tenurial custom. It would be very easy to exaggerate the distinction which exists between England and Normandy in this matter; the mass of our contemporary information about Old English land tenure relates to ecclesiastical estates; but with Domesday Book before us we cannot doubt that the distinction was very real and of deep importance in connection with the other divergent features of the Anglo-Saxon social organisation.

Everything, then, seems to show that, for at least a hundred years before 1086, dependent tenure and the hereditary descent of fiefs had been recognised features of the land system of Normandy. We also know that these principles had, long before the conquest of England, produced their corollaries in the rights of wardship, marriage, and relief, which a lord would enjoy upon occasion with reference to his vassals.[^[16]] Women were capable of inheriting land and Norman custom allowed at least to the duke the privilege of choosing a husband for his female vassal. The rights of assuming the guardianship of a minor’s land, and of receiving a money payment upon the succession of a new heir, were obvious developments of the originally precarious character of the fief, and we shall see that King Henry of France exercised the former right over Normandy itself upon the death of Duke Robert in 1035. There does not seem to be any direct evidence for the existence of the relief as a Norman custom before 1066, but its appearance in England immediately after the Conquest is sufficient proof of its previous recognition by the feudal law of Normandy. None of these customs, so far as we can tell, had found a place in the social system of independent England.

Private jurisdiction was undoubtedly an essential feature of Norman feudalism, though we may well doubt whether the principles on which it was based had ever been defined by Norman lawyers. It is also clear that the duke possessed upon occasion the power of overruling the judgment of his barons, and that his exercise of this power was applauded by all who were interested in the welfare of the humbler classes of society. The military character of feudalism made it imperative that there should be some power in the land capable of vindicating right by force, and the stronger dukes of Normandy were not slow in the assertion of their judicial supremacy. How far the ubiquitous manorial court of Norman England represents an imitation of continental practice, and how far it is referable to the “sake and soke” possessed by Anglo-Saxon thegns, is a difficult question, and the explanation given by the legal writers of the generation succeeding the Conquest must be reserved for a later chapter.

It is, however, clear, that one custom which to modern ideas would be ruinous to any social order distinguishes Norman life from that of England in the eleventh century. Private war was a recognised custom in Normandy. For obvious reasons this custom was fenced round with stringent regulations; the duke’s license was necessary before a campaign could be opened and its conduct was subject to his general supervision. But private war is separated by no certain barrier from anarchy, and under a weak duke or during a minority the barons of Normandy would take the law into their own hands. Herein lay the real cause of the disorders which prevailed during the minority of William the Conqueror; and in the abeyance of state intervention the church endeavoured with considerable success to confine the practice within reasonable limits. The Truce of God, in the limitations which it enforced upon the operations of war, made life more tolerable for peasant and burgess, but it was at best an inefficient substitute for the hand of a strong ruler. William the Conqueror made good peace in Normandy, as well as in England, and we may well doubt whether even private war, so long as its legal sanctions were respected, was not less harmful to the well-being of a community than were the savage outbreaks of internal strife which from time to time occurred under the helpless government of Edward the Confessor.

The exact nature of the feudal tie which bound the duke of Normandy to the king of France is a very difficult question.[^[17]] It undoubtedly comprised all those obligations which were implied in the performance of the act of homage, but these would vary indefinitely in stringency according to the status of the parties concerned. An oath of fealty and service was certain to be kept only so long as the man to whom the oath was sworn could compel its observance by the threat of confiscation. When made between two parties who were for effective purposes equal in power, there was no certainty that the oath would imply more than an assertion of dependence on the part of the man who swore. On the other hand, it would be an error to regard the homage which a duke of Normandy paid to his overlord merely as a ceremonial form. Even in the early feudal times the sense of personal honour would generally serve to prevent a man from wantonly attacking his lord. William the Conqueror, whenever possible, refrained from violating the fealty which he had sworn to King Henry; and if put on his defence for his conduct at Varaville, he would probably have pleaded that the necessity of self-preservation outweighed all other considerations. But in earlier times the maintenance of feudal relations between Normandy and France was less dependent upon the personal loyalty of the reigning duke. Occasionally, the king of France will confirm the grants of land with which the duke of Normandy endowed some religious house; he may, as we have seen, claim the right of wardship over a duchy during a minority. Also, it should not be forgotten that in the case of the dukes between Richard I. and Robert I. the traditional alliance between Normandy and the Capetian dynasty disguised the practical autonomy of the former. So long as the knights of Normandy were at the disposal of the king of France for an attack upon Flanders or Blois, the king would not be concerned to argue the question whether they were furnished to him in obedience to his claim to feudal service, or merely in pursuance of the territorial interests of his vassal.

Within the limits of his territory, the duke of the Normans enjoyed an almost absolute sovereignty. The external limitation of his authority—the suzerainty of the king of France—was at its strongest very ineffectual, and within the duchy the barons were to an exceptional degree subject to the ducal power. All the members of the Norman baronage stood very much on a level in regard to the extent of their fiefs, and the political influence which any individual baron might from time to time exercise depended mainly on his personal favour with the duke. Here and there among the mass of the Norman nobility we meet with a family claiming a more ancient origin and a purer descent than that of the ducal house, and disposed towards insurrection thereby; but such cases are highly exceptional, and the names which are of most significance in the history of William the Conqueror are those of men who held official positions at his court, or were personally related to his line. In Normandy there were no baronies of the first rank, and the number of counties was small; also most of them, by the policy of dukes Richard I. and II., had been granted on appanages to junior members of the reigning family. One striking exception to the territorial significance of the Norman baronage existed in the great fief of Bellême, which lay on the border between Normandy and Maine, and was regarded as dependent on the French crown.[^[18]] The lords of Bellême in early times are certainly found behaving as sovereign princes, but it fortunately happened that the male line of the family became extinct during William’s reign, and a standing obstacle to the centralisation of the duchy was removed when Mabel, the heiress of this formidable house, carried its vast possessions to her husband, the duke’s loyal friend, Roger de Montgomery.

The ecclesiastical, like the lay, baronage of Normandy had no members fitted by their territorial influence to lead an opposition to the ducal power. The greater abbeys of Normandy, Fécamp, St. Wandrille, Jumièges, had been founded or refounded by the dukes themselves, and the restoration of the western bishoprics had mainly been the pious work of Richard I. The re-establishment of the Norman episcopate after the disorder of the settlement could never have been effected had it not been for the countenance afforded to the movement by successive dukes, and the connection between church and state in Normandy was peculiarly intimate. The rights of patronage, elsewhere jealously guarded by the king of the French, in Normandy belonged to the duke, and his power of nominating the official leaders of the church enabled him to govern the whole ecclesiastical policy of the land. Naturally, there occur from time to time gross instances of nepotism, as when Odo, Duke William’s brother, was thrust into the see of Bayeux at the age of ten; but in general the dukes of Normandy were at pains to select worthy candidates for bishoprics and abbeys, and in 1066 the spiritual quality of the Norman episcopate was extraordinarily high. Over the independent ecclesiastical jurisdiction which had arisen in the duchy under the influence of the great[great] Cluniac movement the duke kept a steady control; when in England the Conqueror is found insisting that no ecclesiastical law shall be introduced into the country without his sanction, he was but asserting a principle which had governed his conduct in regard to those matters in Normandy.