The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology / With Some Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and Character

by William McDougall

Thus, the family was forced to become the individualistic family; and the home of each such family was necessarily isolated, widely separated from that of every other, owing to the scattered distribution of the little areas of fertile soil. Thus were formed the first homes in the English sense of the word; the home in which the father rules supreme over his own little household, brooking no interference from outside; the home in which the children are brought up to look forward to establishing, each child for himself, similar independent individualistic homes. Such homes have been established by the Northmen in every part of the world in which they have settled; and they are peculiar to them and their descendants.

It is obvious that all the very limited domains of the Scandinavian coasts must have been fully occupied in the way described in a comparatively few generations after the process of settlement began. This seems to have occurred about the fourth or fifth century A.D. Then the younger sons, for whom there was no place at home and for whom there remained no spots suitable for homesteads in their native land, were sent out into the world to seek their fortunes. They banded themselves together to man single boats, or formed fleets of boats; and, leaving their parents and women-folk behind, set out to conquer for themselves new homesteads. Large numbers, sailing to the southern shores of the Baltic and up the Weser and the Elbe, settled on the plains of Saxony; and from this new centre they again spread, as the Anglo-Saxons to England, and as the Franks to Gaul. Others settled directly in northern France and became the Normans. Others, the Varegs, penetrated the plains of Russia and established themselves as princes over the Slav population.

This was a migration such as had never before been seen; bands of armed men, all young or in the prime of life, coming not as mere robbers, but seeking to conquer for themselves and to settle upon whatever land seemed to them most desirable. Everywhere they went they conquered and either exterminated or drove out the indigenous population, as in the south and east of England, or established themselves as an aristocracy, a ruling military caste, as the Franks in the north-east of Gaul. And everywhere they established firmly their individualistic social organisation, especially the isolated homestead of the individualistic family, characterised by the despotic power of the father and by great regard for individual property and for the rights of the individual as against all State institutions and public powers. In hostile countries the homestead became a fortified place, or at least was furnished with a fortified keep or castle; and in those regions, such as Gaul, in which the indigenous population was not exterminated, the feudal system was thus initiated. Everywhere they carried their spirit of independence, enterprise, and initiation.

It was the swarming of the young broods of Northmen in search of new homes that caused the Romans to describe these Northern lands as the womb of peoples, and to regard them with wonder and something of fear.

These qualities and habits continued to be displayed in the highest degree by the Normans after their first settlement in the north of France. The younger sons kept up the good old fashion of going out into the world to seek a fortune or rather a territory, which often was a dukedom or a kingdom. Their most characteristic performance was the conquest of the greater part of Italy. A little before William of Normandy and his companions secured for themselves domains in this country, Norman knights, engaging in enterprises that might well have seemed absolutely foolhardy, had established themselves in Mediterranean lands. Some two thousand Normans, arriving Viking fashion in their small ships, conquered Sicily and the south of Italy and divided these lands among themselves; and for a time they introduced order and a settled mode of life among the peoples of those parts. The leading spirits among them were ten sons of one Norman gentleman, Tancrède de Hauteville, the father of twelve sons of whom two only remained at home, while each of the others carved out for himself a domain in Italy. As Demolins remarks, these families, retaining undiminished their individualistic tendencies and spirit of independence, were veritable factories of men for exportation.

The modern Frenchman, says Demolins, would regard as the height of folly the enterprises of the old Northmen, who, mounted on their frail ships, quitted each spring the coast of Scandinavia, launched out on the wild sea, landed, a mere handful of men, on the coasts of Germany, Britain, or Gaul, and there with their swords carved out domains and made new homesteads. It was thus that the ancestors of Tancred had acquired the manor of Hauteville, and it was thus that his sons conquered Italy and Sicily.

It was in a very similar way that, in a later age, men of the same breed carried to the new world the same individualistic institutions and the same spirit of independence, and in doing so, laid the sure foundations of the immense vigour and prosperity of the American people.

There is one almost more striking illustration of the great and lasting effects upon character and institutions of the mode of life of the Northmen determined by their physical environment. It is furnished by the character and habits of the people who still dwell in the plains between the mouths and lower parts of the Weser and the Elbe, a region which was naturally one of the first to be conquered and occupied by the Northmen. This territory is an infertile sandy plain, and at the time of the coming of the Northmen had but scanty population; hence, instead of becoming the military and ruling caste of a subject people, the Northmen became themselves peasants and farmers. In doing so, they retained all the characteristic features of the individualistic family and have perpetuated them, together with the spirit of enterprise and independence, undiminished to the present day.

In this region each farm is a freehold which has remained in the hands of the same family for long periods, in many cases for hundreds of years. Each farm has its isolated homestead inhabited by the head of the family, his wife and young children, and one or two hired servants. Each homestead is well nigh completely self-supporting and lives almost independent of the outside world. In spite of the isolation, which might have been expected to engender an extreme conservatism and backwardness of culture, these farmers have continued to exhibit the old Northmen’s spirit of enterprise and their power of voluntary combination in the pursuit of individual ends. They were the first in Europe to establish a society for the scientific study of agriculture, and they have thus maintained themselves in the first rank as cultivators of the land, quite without State assistance. In the same way and at an early date they established schools for their children. They have continued to produce large families and have retained the custom of handing over the farm and homestead intact to one son, chosen for his ability to manage it; while all the other sons keep up the old custom of going out into the world to seek their fortunes, in the shape of new homesteads.

Most striking of all, they still do this in the old Norse fashion as nearly as possible. In one district these farmers combined their efforts some sixty years ago and built a ship which, since that time, has sailed every year to South Africa, carrying there the surplus sons in search of new domains for themselves. In that far country their spirit of independence finds satisfaction in establishing new homesteads, new families of the individualistic type, and in perpetuating their traditions of enterprise and self-reliance.