THE NORMAN CONQUEST.
This month of October completes the eighth century since the battle of Hastings, perhaps the most important action that the modern world has known, with the single exception of the conflict that checked the advance of the Saracens in Europe in the eighth century,—if the battle of Tours can properly be considered an event of modern history. The issue of the battle of Hastings determined the course of English history; and when we observe how influential has been the part of England ever since it was fought, and bear in mind that the English race, great as it is, can scarcely be said to have got beyond the morning-time of its existence, we find it difficult to exaggerate the importance of a conflict by which its career for eight hundred years has been deeply and permanently colored. There is not a great event in English or American annals which is not directly traceable to what was done in the year 1066 by that buccaneering band which William the Bastard led from Normandy to England, to enforce a claim that had neither a legal nor a moral foundation, and which never could have been established had Harold's conduct been equal to his valor, and had Fortune favored the just cause. The sympathies of every fair-minded reader of the story of the Conquest must be with the Saxons; and yet is it impossible to deny that the event at Hastings was well for the world. It is with Harold as it is with Hannibal: our feelings are at war with our judgment as we read their histories. It is not possible to peruse the noble account that Dr. Arnold has left us of the Carthaginian's splendid struggle against the Roman aristocracy without feeling pained by its result. The feelings of men are with the man, and adverse to the order before which his genius failed. So is it with respect to Harold. Hastings, like Zama, impresses us as having been a "dishonest victory," to borrow the words with which Milton so emphatically characterizes Chæronea. But "cool reflection" leads to other conclusions, and justifies the earthly course of Providence, against which we are so often disposed to complain. There can be no doubt, in the mind of any moral man, that the invasion of England by Duke William was a wicked proceeding,—that it was even worse than Walker's invasions of Spanish-American countries, and as bad as an unprovoked attack on Cuba by this country, such as would have been made had the pro-slavery party remained in power. But it is not the less true that much good came from William's action, and that nearly all that is excellent in English and American history is the fruit of that action. The part that England has had in the world's course for eight centuries, including her stupendous work of colonization, is second to nothing that has been done by any nation, not even to the doings of the Roman republic: and to that part Saxon England never could have been equal.
The race that ruled in England down to the day of Hastings—call it the Saxon race, if you like the name, and for convenience' sake—was a slow, a sluggish, and a stupid race; and it never could have made a first-class nation of the insular kingdom. There is little in the history of the Saxons that allows us to believe they were capable of accomplishing anything that was great. The Danish invasions, as they are called, were of real use to England, as they prevented that country from reverting to barbarism, which assuredly would have been its fate had the Anglo-Saxons remained its undisturbed possessors. "In the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries," says Mr. Worsaae, "the Anglo-Saxons had greatly degenerated from their forefathers. Relatives sold one another into thraldom; lewdness and ungodliness were become habitual; and cowardice had increased to such a degree that, according to the old chroniclers, one Dane would often put ten Anglo-Saxons to flight. Before such a people could be conducted to true freedom and greatness it was necessary that an entirely new vigor should be infused into the decayed stock. This vigor was derived from the Scandinavian North, where neither Romans nor any other conquerors had domineered over the people, and where heathenism, with all its roughness and all its love of freedom and bravery, still held absolute sway."[B]
The work which the Danes began was completed by the Normans; and it may well be doubted if the Normans ever could have effected much in England had they not been preceded by the Danes. The Danes were Northmen, as are the Swedes and Norwegians. By Normans are meant the governing race in Neustria, the duchy of Normandy. The Northmen who settled in Neustria, and who became the foremost people of those times,—they and their descendants,—did in a portion of France what their kinsmen the Danes were doing in England. Circumstances gave to the Normans a consequence in history that is denied to the Danes; but the influence of the latter was very great on English life, and on the course of English events; and Norman influence on that life, and over those events, was materially aided by the earlier action of the Danish invaders of England. The difference between the Northmen in France and the Northmen in England was this: the former, to a very great extent, became Frenchmen, while the latter did not become Englishmen. The former, from Northmen, became Normans, and took much from the people among whom they settled. The latter remained Northmen, for the most part, taking little or nothing from the English, while they bestowed a good deal upon them. But the Northmen who became Normans underwent changes that rendered it impossible that the Northmen in England should coalesce with them after Duke William's victory in 1066. The English Northmen were strongly attached to individual freedom, as all Northmen were originally; but the Normans had learned to be feudalists in France, and this necessarily made foes of men who by blood ought to have been friends. Many of those who offered the stoutest resistance to the Conqueror were Danes; and it was not until many years after Hastings that the English Northmen submitted to the French Normans. The English Northmen, nevertheless, were of real use to the Normans, by what they had effected long before the expedition of William was thought of, and when the Normans had not become the chief champions of feudalism. The immediate effect of Danish action on William's fortunes, too, was very great. The Saxon Harold was compelled to fight a battle with the Scandinavian invaders of England but twenty days before Hastings; and these invaders sought to place a Danish or Norwegian dynasty on the English throne. Harold was victorious in his conflict with the Northmen; but the weakness and exhaustion consequent on the exertions necessary to repel them were among the leading causes of his failure before the Normans.
The people who gave their name to what is called the Norman Conquest of England[C] were the most extraordinary race of the Middle Ages. This can be said of them, too, without subscribing to the extravagant eulogies of their ardent admirers, who are too much in the habit of speaking of them in terms that would be misplaced were they applied to Athenians of the age of Pericles. The simple truth concerning them shows that they were superior in every respect to all their contemporaries, unless an exception be made on behalf of the Mussulmans of Spain. The Northmen who came first upon Southern Europe were mere barbarians, but there were among them men of great natural powers, as there were among those barbarians who overran the Roman empire; and they were able to take advantage of the wretched condition of Europe, as earlier barbarians had profited from the wretched condition of Rome. Of these men, Rollo was one of the most eminent; and beyond all others of the Northmen his action has had the largest influence on human affairs,—an influence, too, that promises to last; for it is working vigorously at this moment, though he has been more than nine centuries in his grave, and though to most persons he is as much a mythical character as Hercules, and more so than Romulus. We know that he was the founder of Normandy in the early part of the tenth century; and but for his action in obtaining a southern home for himself and his heathen followers, the conquest of England never could have been attempted in a regular manner; and the stream of English history must have run altogether differently, in a political sense, even had Northmen, as distinguished from Normans, succeeded in establishing themselves in that country. It was the French character of the Normans which rendered their subjugation of England so important an event, giving to it its peculiar significance, and causing it to bear so strongly on European, Asiatic, and American history. The Northmen became Christians and Normans. It is not uncommon to speak of them as if they retained their Norwegian characteristics in "the pleasant land of France," and were in the habit of looking back to the home of their youth, or of their fathers, with that sort of fondness and regret which were felt by those Englishmen who founded the American nation. This is all wrong. The Northmen had left the North for the same reason that other men leave their countries,—the only reason that ever causes them to do so,—because the North did not afford them means of support. Had they remained at home, they would have starved; and therefore they turned their backs on that home, and became plunderers. Some returned home, bearing with them much spoil; but others settled abroad, and thought no more of the North. They cut the connection entirely. Like an earlier "brood of winter," they found ample compensation for all they had left behind in "the brighter day and skies of azure hue" of Southern lands. They thought they had made a good exchange of "Northern pines for Southern roses."
Of these last, the Normans proper were the most noted, and they have the first place of all their race in the world's annals. They changed in everything, from soul to skin. They became Christians, and they took new names. Their original language was soon displaced by the French, and became so utterly lost that hardly more is known of it than we know of the Etruscan tongue. "The Danish language," says Sir Francis Palgrave, "was never prevalent or strong in Normandy. The Northmen had long been talking themselves into Frenchmen; and in the second generation, the half-caste Northmen, the sons of French wives and French concubines, spoke the Romane-French as their mothers' tongue." The same great authority says: "In the cities, Bayeux only excepted, hardly any language but French was spoken. Forty years after Rollo's establishment, the Danish language struggled for existence. It was in Normandy that the Langue d'oil acquired its greatest polish and regularity. The earliest specimens of the French language, in the proper sense of the term, are now surrendered by the French philologists to the Normans. The phenomenon of the organs of speech yielding to social or moral influences, and losing the power of repeating certain sounds, was prominently observable amongst the Normans. No modern French gazette-writer could disfigure English names more whimsically than the Domesday Commissioners. To the last, the Normans never could learn to say 'Lincoln,'—they never could get nearer than 'Nincol,' or 'Nicole.'" The "chivalry" of Virginia and the Carolinas—our Southern Northmen—might cite this last fact in evidence of their tongues having a Norman twang. They never have been able to say "Lincoln," though they make a nearer approach to proper pronunciation of the word than was vouchsafed to the genuine Normans when they say "Abe Linkin." That the Normans cherished the thought of their Northern origin is a modern error. Sir F. Palgrave, with literal accuracy, assures us that they "dismissed all practical recollection in their families of their original Scandinavian ancestry. Not one of their nobles ever thought of deducing his lineage from the Hersers or Jarls or Vikings who occupy so conspicuous a place in Norwegian history, not even through the medium of any traditional fable. Roger de Montgomery designated himself as 'Northmannus Northmannorum'; but, for all practical purposes, Roger was a Frenchman of the Frenchmen, though he might not like to own it. This ancestorial reminiscence must have resulted from some peculiar fancy; no Montgomery possessed or transmitted any memorial of his Norman progenitors. The very name of Rollo's father, 'Senex quidam in partibus Daciæ,' was unknown to Rollo's grandchildren, and if not known, worse than unknown, neglected."[D]
Another unfounded notion respecting the Normans relates the purity of lineage. To read some historians, you might come to the conclusion that the Normans were an unmixed race, and that they prided themselves on the blueness of their blood, and were the most exclusive of peoples. Nothing of the kind. Like most peoples who have done much, the Normans were a mixed race. They took to themselves all who would come to them, who were worth the taking. The old Roman lay of the asylum on the Palatine Hill might almost serve as matter for a Norman sirvente, for the policy which it attributes to Romulus, and which was followed by his successors, was the policy adopted by Rollo, and which his successors maintained. Says Sir F. Palgrave, "When treating of the 'Normans,' we must always consider the appellation as descriptive rather than ethnographical, indicative of political relations rather than of race. Like William, the Conqueror's army, the hosts of Rollo were augmented by adventurers from all countries. Rollo exhibited a remarkable flexibility of character; he encouraged settlers from all parts of France and the Gauls and England, and his successors systematically obeyed the precedent." Most such adventurers in any age of the world must be of the most ancient of families, the families, to wit, of "robbers and reivers," the enlisted rascality of the earth, but none the worse workmen because their patron is St. Cain. There is a great deal of work to be done that can be done only by such fellows. It is sagely said that the world would be but ill peopled if none but the wise were to marry. It is certain that the world would get forward very slowly if none but the mild and the moral were active in its business. There is an immense amount of business to be accomplished that the mild cannot do, and which the moral will not do. How can it be expected of mild men that they should cut human throats, when they cannot be trusted even to stick the sheep which they have no hesitation in eating? How unreasonable it would be to expect moral men to become soldiers,—and the soldier's trade is the only permanent pursuit, save the pursuits of the grave-digger and the hangman,—when so exemplary a personage as the great Duke of Wellington gravely said, on his oath and on his honor, that the army is no place for moral and religious men? The felons who flocked to Rollo's standard wellnigh a thousand years ago were recruited from the "dangerous classes" of those remote days, and were probably as useful in the task of civilizing the world as, according to the assertion of one of the most eminent of English divines and historians, are rough and lawless men in that of Europeanizing Polynesia.[E]
Dr. Lappenberg, whose authority is great in all that relates to the history of the Normans, confirms what is said by Sir F. Palgrave of the ignorance of the North and the indifference to it which characterized the Normans. Speaking of the Norman literature, he observes: "In vain we seek herein imitations of the old Norse poesy, or allusions to the history or customs of Scandinavia. There may, perhaps, exist more resemblance between the heroic sagas of the North and the romances of chivalry of the South of Europe, both having for subjects wonderful adventures, and the praise of heroism and beauty; but from this resemblance it cannot be concluded that the Anglo-Norman poets have borrowed their fictions from the Norman skalds. We have not a single proof that they were acquainted with any saga or any skaldic composition. All remembrance of their national poetry was as completely obliterated among the posterity of the Northmen in France, as if, in traversing the ocean, they had drank of the water of Lethe. This total oblivion of their original home they have in common with the West Goths, who in Castilian poesy have not left the faintest trace of their original manners and opinions. The same remark has been applied to the Vareger, who founded a royal dynasty in Russia, and to whom that country, as a Russian author remarks, is not indebted for a single new idea. The causes are here the same with those that effected a complete oblivion of their mother tongue, namely, their inferior civilization, their intermixture with the natives, their marriages with the women of the country, who knew no other traditions than those of their native land. In Normandy, too, the Christian clergy must have suppressed every memorial of the ancient mythology."[F] Further, "Whatever partiality the Normans may have entertained for history, they nevertheless betrayed an almost perfect indifference for their original country. The historians of Normandy describe the heathen North as a den of robbers. After an interval of two centuries, they knew nothing of the events that had caused the founder of their ruling family to forsake the North; they did not even know where Denmark and Norway lay. Benoît de Ste More begins his chronicle with a geographic sketch, in which he takes Denmark for Dacia, and places it at the mouth of the Danube, between the extensive countries of the Alani and the Getæ, which are always covered with ice, and surrounded by a chain of mountains." The excellent chronicler's geographical notions seem to have been about as clear as those of Lolah, who tells Katinka that