"Asez tost oï Richard dire
Ke vilains cumune faseient."
These downtrodden serfs, of mixed Celtic, Roman, and Frankish parentage, had actually spoken that word of fear to every feudal baron, a "commune." They established a regular representative Parliament with two peasants sent from each district to a general assembly whose decision should be binding on the whole. This was a considerably higher political organisation than the aristocratic household of their masters round the King. And bitterly their masters resented such forward and unscrupulous behaviour. The Duke's uncle, Rudolf, Count of Ivry, crushed the "revolt" with hideous cruelty, and sent back the people's representatives maimed and useless to their hovels. "Legatos cepit," says William of Jumièges, "truncatisque manibus et pedibus inutiles suis remisit," adding with unconscious ferocity "his rustici expertis ad sua aratra sunt reversi." But the germs of freedom did not die, for villenage in Normandy was lighter, and ceased far sooner, than in the rest of France. These first martyrs did not suffer in vain.
If you look closely at the few carvings remaining on the churches of the tenth and eleventh centuries, you will understand the terror under which all men were crushed as the thousandth year drew nearer, which was believed to be the end of the world. Grimacing dumbly in their stiffened attitudes of fear, these thin anatomies implore with clenched uplifted hands, the death that shall save them from the misery of their life. A world so filled with ruins might well give up all hope on this side of the tomb. The revolt of the Norman peasants had been crushed in blood. The first religious persecutions had begun, in the slaying of the Manichean heretics at Orléans. The seasons in their courses seemed to fight against humanity, for famine and pestilence, storm and tempest swept down upon the land and the people died in thousands of sheer starvation. The Roman Empire had crumbled in the dust; after it fell that of Charlemagne into the abyss. The chronicles of Raoul Glaber are full of the most gruesome details of cannibalism, of diabolical appearances, of tortures that cannot be named. The only refuge seemed to be within the walls of the churches, where the shivering congregations gathered, mute in a palsied supplication like the stone figures carved upon the walls above them. At last the terrible year passed by, and the stars fell not, nor did the heaven depart as a scroll when it is rolled together, and the kings of the earth and the great men and the rich men and the chief captains and the mighty men and every bondman and every freeman came forth from their houses and from their dens and from the rocks of the mountain, and went with one accord to give thanks to Holy Church for their deliverance. The wave of religious feeling swept from one end of Europe to the other, and nowhere was it so strong as in Normandy. For the Normans saw their advantage in it, just as the first pirates had seen their gain in baptism. The laws of Rollo and his descendants were too strict for brigandage at home, so the more restless spirits started over Europe in the guise of pilgrims, "gaaignant," as Wace says, towards Monte Cassino, to St. James of Compostella, to the Holy Sepulchre itself. It was as pilgrims that they travelled into Southern Italy, where a poor Norman knight had been rewarded for his fighting against the infidels by the County of Aversa. Tancred of Hauteville, from the Côtentin, followed there. By 1002 the citizens of Rouen were already admiring the oranges, or "Pommes d'Or" which their adventurous "Crusaders" had sent back from Salerno, as the first-fruits of that Kingdom of Calabria and Sicily which a Norman, Robert Guiscard, was to make his own.
Meanwhile within the bounds of Normandy itself, the great religious revival went on side by side with growing civic and military strength. In 1004, Olaf, King of Norway, who had come over to help the second Duke Richard, was baptised in the Cathedral of Rouen. Sweyn, King of Denmark, and Lacman, King of Sweden, were in the city at the same time, and doubtless felt the same impulse to profession of the Christian faith when visiting their Scandinavian relatives. Rouen was indeed a gathering place for all the northern royalties, for Ethelred II. who had lost the Anglo-Saxon throne, was there as well, with his wife Emma the daughter of the Duke. It seems in fact to have already become the fashion for princes of the royal house of Britain to complete their education by a little tour in France. A curious trait of the manners of the time is recorded by Wace, who describes one of the many banquets that must have been given so often during all these royal visits. He speaks of the long sleeves and white shirts of the barons, and relates the first instance of aristocratic kleptomania at a dinner-table, when a knight took a silver spoon and hid it in his sleeve (R. de R. 7030). The reign of this second Richard and of his son the third passed without much incident, and then came the sixth Duke, Robert the Magnificent as his courtiers called him, Robert the Devil as his people knew him. He is chiefly famous as the father of his mighty son, and he did little in his capital of Rouen that is of interest beyond its walls, save the attempt to restore the Saxon princes Alfred and Edward to their father's throne, which failed because his fleet was stopped by persistent headwinds and could do nothing more than thoroughly subjugate the neighbouring fief of Brittany. After this, the Duke fell in, like all around, with the dominant religious passion, took up the pilgrim's cross, and died with his Crusaders at Nicaea.
"À Faleize ont li Dus hanté,"
says Wace,
"Une meschine i ont amée,
Arlot ont nom, de burgeis née."
And from this love-match with a tanner's daughter sprang William the Bastard in 1028. Though his father had insisted upon this child's inheritance on his departure for the East, the election of a boy of seven to the Ducal throne was naturally bitterly opposed by such great baronial houses as those of Belesme and others. A period of anarchy and assassination was the obvious result. But Alan of Brittany, the Seneschal Osbern, and Count Gilbert stood staunchly by the heir. All three were murdered, and young William himself with difficulty escaped. Then Ralph of Wacey and William Fitz-Osbern attached themselves to the boy who must have shown promise of his greatness early to attract such faithful friendships through the twenty years of civil war that preceded his firm holding of the throne. He had been knighted young, and he was soon to prove the strength of his right arm. But his first actions strangely enough are connected with the Church that overshadowed so much of public life. He made the mistake of giving the See of Rouen to the profligate Mauger (though the error was sternly corrected later on) just as he gave the See of Bayeux to his half-brother Odo. Benedictine monasteries began to flourish all over Normandy, chief among which was the Abbey of Bec, which in Lanfranc and Anselm was to provide Canterbury with two prelates later on. Religion was responsible, at the same time, for at least one benefit to the land in the famous institution of the "Truce of God," which was fully confirmed later on, and proclaimed that from Wednesday evening until Monday morning in every week the poor and weak were to be free from the oppressions of their overlords and from the tyranny of private war. And a still more valuable result of the prevalent religious enthusiasm was the gradual drawing together of Normandy and the Papal See which had its greatest outcome in the "Crusade" against England.
But William had much to do in his own Duchy before he could find time for any extension of his dominions. At Val-ès-Dunes he fought his first pitched battle, crying the "Dex Aie" of the Normans as he swept the rebellious barons, under Guy of Burgundy, off the field. Then feeling more secure in his own power, after he had taken Alençon and Domfront and laid his iron hand on Maine, while Anjou and Brittany were too bent upon intestine strife to trouble him, he pacified the continual quarrels with Flanders by taking Matilda the daughter of its Count Baldwin as his wife. Descended from the stock of Wessex, of Burgundy, and of Italy, with the blood of Charlemagne in her veins, Matilda was beautiful, virtuous and accomplished, and worthy to be the mate of one who set an example of domestic purity to all the princes of his time. What had been politic at first became a marriage of affection afterwards, strengthened no doubt by the opposition that at first arose. For the Duke's Uncle Mauger objected to the match as being within the forbidden degrees of relationship, and the Pope at the Council of Rheims actually pronounced against it. But now came the first-fruits of the policy which had already shown signs of drawing together Normandy and the Papacy. For it only needed a little pressure on the part of the Guiscards in Apulia to secure the consent of the Papal Legate to the banishment of Mauger to the Channel Islands, which he appears to have richly deserved for many other reasons, if Wace be right in his indictment; and after four years of waiting, Matilda was married to the Duke in the Cathedral of Rouen by the new Bishop Maurilius who finished the new church that was consecrated in 1063. Another objection to the marriage received very different treatment. For in Lanfranc of Bec William had recognised the clever Italian who would be useful in Council as much as in the Church, and it was through Lanfranc's personal intercession that the Papal authority had finally been brought to William. The "penance" inflicted for his wedding was, we may well believe, cheerfully performed in the building of the hospitals at Rouen, Bayeux, Caen and Cherbourg, and the two mighty abbeys (for William and for Matilda) that remain at Caen.
