A Short History of the Normans

Leonie V. Hicks

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780857728562
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Religiöse Architektur

The Battle of Hastings in 1066 is the one date forever seared on the British national psyche. It enabled the Norman Conquest that marked the end of Anglo-Saxon England. But there was much more to the Normans than the invading army Duke William shipped over from Normandy to the shores of Sussex. How a band of marauding warriors established some of the most powerful dominions in Europe - in Sicily and France, as well as England - is an improbably romantic idea. In exploring Norman culture in all its regions, Leonie V Hicks is able to place the Normans in the full context of early medieval society. Her wide ranging comparative perspective enables the Norman story to be told in full, so that the societies of Rollo, William, Robert (Guiscard) and Roger are given the focused attention they deserve. From Hastings to the martial exploits of Bohemond and Tancred on the First Crusade; from castles and keeps to Romanesque cathedrals; and from the founding of the Kingdom of Sicily (1130) to cross-cultural encounters with Byzantines and Muslims, this is a fresh and lively survey of one of the most popular topics in European history.

1

ROLLO AND THE SETTLEMENT OF NORMANDY

After a number of years raiding up and down the rivers of northern France, reaching as far as the city of Chartres, or so Dudo says, Rollo met Charles the Simple, king of the Franks, at Saint-Clair-sur-Epte. Here, Dudo of Saint-Quentin tells us, Charles granted Rollo the land around Rouen between the Epte and the sea in hereditary right. Not content, Rollo pressed for more, citing the fact that the land could not sustain his followers as, although fertile, it was largely uncultivated. Charles then offered him Flanders, dismissed by Rollo as marshy, before suggesting the land to the west (the Avranchin and Cotentin) as an alternative. In return, according to Dudo, Rollo was to convert to Christianity and accept baptism, as well as to marry Charles’s daughter Gisla. To seal the bargain, he ‘immediately put his hands between the hands of the king’, but considered it beneath his dignity to kiss the king’s foot and deputed one of his followers to do this on his behalf. Instead of bending down to kiss the king’s foot, this man raised Charles’s leg, thus throwing the unfortunate monarch onto his back, to the great amusement of the Vikings.1 The significance of this act, and whether it meant that Rollo held his land from the king, has been widely debated.2 What is more important is that, according to Dudo’s account, the land that Duke William II (the Conqueror) held as Normandy on the eve of 1066, from the rivers Bresle in the east to the Couesnon in the west, and from the sea to the borders with Maine, came into being in one moment through a grant made by the Frankish king and legitimized by conversion and marriage.

Dudo’s account contains many of the elements traditionally associated with the settlement of Viking war bands in other parts of northern Europe, notably England and Frisia (encompassing modern-day the Netherlands and part of Germany): land in exchange for a cessation of violence, acceptance of Christianity, and also marriage into the ruling elite.3 Rollo was the epitome of the Viking turned respectable. Writing a century after these events had taken place, very little Dudo says is substantiated by sources from the tenth century beyond the grant of land to Northmen operating in the Seine. Although the outline of events was based on the annals of Flodoard of Reims and oral history from the ducal house, much else of what Dudo wrote, particularly his borrowings from the Aeneid, led many historians to dismiss his work as little more than fiction prior to the publication of Eleanor Searle’s important article, ‘Frankish Rivalries and Norse Warriors’.4 Nonetheless, Dudo’s history became the basis for the writing of subsequent medieval historians like William of Jumièges and Orderic Vitalis. We need, therefore, to understand why our limited sources present us with such radically different pictures of Norman settlement and why Dudo wrote what he did.

This chapter looks at the settlement of Rollo and his Vikings in the Seine valley and the creation of what became the duchy of Normandy. It will also consider how historians writing in the modern era have changed the way they read the medieval sources. We will begin with a discussion of the settlement of Normandy as presented by the tenth-century sources and analyse Dudo’s account in more detail in order to understand why he wrote as he did, before moving to the circumstances of the creation of Normandy and how Rollo’s dynasty was established and survived. This chapter ends with a consideration of Richard I’s foundation of a religious community on the site of the ducal castle at Fécamp. First of all, however, it is necessary to review the ninth century context in order to understand the circumstances that made it possible for Rollo and his followers to settle.

THE NINTH-CENTURY CONTEXT

In order to place the settlement of Normandy in a wider context, we must begin almost a century before and set the story of Charles’s grant to Rollo against the struggles between the descendants of the Carolingian emperor Charlemagne and the Viking raiders.5 After Charlemagne’s death, his empire began to disintegrate as his sons struggled for dominance. The division was formalized in the treaty of Verdun of 843, which split the empire between the three sons of Louis the Pious, though this did not prevent future infighting every time a particular ruler died. The result was a steady decline in royal authority and control of territory with successive weak kings leading to the eventual division of Francia into east and west kingdoms following the deposition of Charles the Fat in 888.6 In addition to dynastic squabbles, more and more Northmen made an appearance on the rivers of Francia as the century progressed, sometimes spending longer periods of time in proto-settlements over winter. The Frankish annals, short accounts of events written according to the year in which they took place, record Viking raids in the Seine valley as early as 841. In this year the annals of Saint-Bertin note:

Danish pirates sailed down the Channel and attacked Rouen, plundering the town with pillage, fire and sword, slaughtered or took captive the monks and the rest of the population and laid waste all the monasteries and other places along the banks of the Seine, or else took large payments and left them thoroughly terrified.7

This account is corroborated by the annals of one of those monasteries, Saint-Wandrille. These name the Viking leader as Oskar, and note that the monks of Saint-Denis on the outskirts of Paris ransomed sixty-five captives from the community’s lands. The towns and monasteries of the Seine valley were, however, too attractive a target and when, after a series of raids, the Vikings reached Paris in 845, King Charles the Bald paid them ‘7000 pounds of silver’ to go away and leave his people alone.8 The mid-ninth century saw an increase in the frequency and scale of the Viking raids in Francia, possibly encouraged by Lothar I as a means of undermining his brother Charles’s power. In 841, the annals of Saint-Bertin record that Lothar granted the Frisian town of Walcheren (in what is now the southern Netherlands) and its surroundings to the Viking Harald in order to secure his support. This was an act that earned him the condemnation of the annalist for putting Christians under the rule of ‘men who worshipped demons’.9

The descendants of Charlemagne also had to deal with another dangerous threat that would prove significant in the creation of Normandy: the Bretons, a group that had never been part of the Carolingian empire. Like the Vikings, this group took advantage of the decline in royal authority following the death of Charlemagne. In 862, to counter this threat and also to bolster defence against Viking incursions, Charles granted an area of land known as the Neustrian March to a powerful noble, Robert the Strong. This was a buffer created by Charlemagne between the empire and the Breton territory, part of which comprised Normandy. Robert was not wholly successful as the Bretons acquired the Avranchin and Cotentin in what is now Lower Normandy in 867 and advanced further east towards Bayeux. The grant of the Neustrian March to Robert, however, had a much wider political significance and one in which the ‘Normans’ would play a significant part. Robert’s descendants founded the dynasty, known to history as the Capetians, that eventually in 987 succeeded the Carolingians as rulers of Francia after the crown had passed between the two families for a century. The settlement of Rollo and his Vikings in the Seine valley therefore took place against a backdrop of dynastic struggle, competing interests and the fragmentation of royal authority. Anyone able to exploit these fault lines and negotiate the resulting complex web of alliances would do very well.

THE SETTLEMENT OF NORMANDY ACCORDING TO THE TENTH-CENTURY SOURCES

Our understanding of the settlement of Normandy is complicated by the fact that Dudo’s is the only account of the treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte that exists and was written around eighty years later. The original treaty, if it ever existed, no longer survives. Contemporary entries in the Frankish annals and some of the later charters of Charles the Simple do, however, survive and through these it is possible to arrive at a narrative of Norman settlement that helps place Dudo’s version in context.

The date of Rollo’s arrival in the area around Rouen is a matter of conjecture. The eleventh-century historical tradition, following Dudo, places his appearance around 876,10 but it is more likely his activity in the Seine valley dates from the early tenth century. Historians place the formal land grant sometime between 905/906, when the last Carolingian charters showing direct evidence of government in Normandy were issued under Charles the Simple, and 918 when a charter refers to the grant retrospectively.11 In lieu of a firm date, 911, the date given by Dudo, has been taken as the traditional moment of the foundation of the duchy. The 918 charter provides a suggestion for why this territory was given to Rollo. This document records that Charles the Simple made a grant of land previously belonging to a defunct abbey to the monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés near Paris ‘except that part of the abbey[‘s lands] which we have granted to the Normans of the Seine, namely to Rollo and his companions for the defence of the kingdom’.12 This excerpt probably means that the land was granted to Rollo in order that he could defend it from raids by other groups of Vikings. In other words, he had entered into some form of reciprocal arrangement with the king and this may well have involved a formal recognition of Charles’s overlordship. Terms like ‘vassal’ and ‘homage’ that occur in modern historical writing are not unambiguous, however, and the evidence does not permit any certainty in understanding how and by what conditions Rollo held the grant.13 The area covered by the treaty is not specified, but Flodoard, a canon of the cathedral of Reims, records in his History of the Church of Reims that Rollo was given Rouen and the pagi (Carolingian administrative units) on the coast and surrounding the city: Talou, Caux, Roumois and parts of the Vexin and Evrecin.14 This is by no means the huge swathe of land that Dudo records, nor was it exceptional, as Vikings had already settled in Frisia.15 What was unusual was that the settlement in Normandy lasted whereas the others fizzled out.

Flodoard of Reims provides additional information regarding the settlement of the Normans. Although he was writing at quite some geographic distance from the English Channel, Flodoard suggests Rollo and then William Longsword accrued their territory in three separate grants as they took advantage of political divisions elsewhere in the Frankish realm. In this narrative, the Normans acquired Maine and the Bessin in 924 and then, under Rollo’s son William Longsword, ‘the territory of the Bretons, which is situated on the sea-coast’, namely the Cotentin and the Avranchin in 933.16 This was the territory the Bretons themselves had been granted in 867. This tripartite grant is accepted as the most likely version of events, but grants of land do not necessarily translate into the ability to exercise authority over that territory and can mask longer-term developments as will be discussed below.17 What we can say is that, according to the Frankish sources, Rollo was granted land in the Seine valley in return for service to the king and that gradually the Normans acquired more territory through a series of raids and negotiations. The process by which they were able to rule this territory effectively was, however, a slow and bumpy one.

Flodoard’s opinion of the Normans is also a point of difference between his writing and that of Dudo. These Vikings were not innocent victims of plots by the Franks as depicted in Dudo’s account of the assassination of William Longsword, but truce breakers, greedy for land. Flodoard does not make much of a distinction between the Seine valley Norse and those elsewhere as he recounts episodes of raiding, pillaging and devastation. His History of the Church of Reims also sheds fascinating light on the settlers’ relationship with the Christian faith. The archbishop of Reims, Harvey, was asked for advice by his counterpart in Rouen, Guy, on how to deal with the Northmen who converted, relapsed and converted again. If Rollo had been active in the Seine valley earlier than the first decade of the tenth century, it is possible that he was one of the lapsed Scandinavian converts.18 Flodoard’s Vikings of the Seine are a very different people indeed from the pious converts we find in Dudo’s later account.

DUDO’S ACCOUNT

Dudo’s History of the Normans formed the basis of all the major Norman historical writing in the duchy from the mid-eleventh century onwards. Placing Dudo in his context and understanding why he wrote what he did and for whom is crucial. If Dudo is read less for ‘facts’ and more for what he was trying to achieve in creating a history for the descendants of Rollo, his account becomes far more interesting: it reflects the ambitions of the Norman rulers, his own concerns, and fits into a wider political discourse in late tenth- and early eleventh-century Francia. Having said that, it is easy to see why scholars in the past dismissed episodes in the History as fantasy, as there are certainly passages which, if read literally, strain credulity. A good example is his account of the origins of the ancestors of Rollo. In terms of geography, he places the Danish ancestors of the Normans initially on the island of ‘Scanza’ and thence to ‘Dacia’, the Roman province on the Danube, a long way from the northern homelands of the Danes.19 In doing this he drew on sources from the world of late antiquity, notably Jordanes’s history of the Goths. This is not simply a case of Dudo muddling up his geography, but, as Ewan Johnson notes, a device to situate the Normans within a classical schema that gave them some antiquity as a people.20 Dudo goes on to describe the customs of the Scandinavian people, including a graphic description of human sacrifice to the god Thor, which again owes more to the writings of classical authors than it does to any original information. Finally, he links the Danes with the Trojans and ancient Greeks, notably from Antenor from whom, he claims, they were descended. Claiming descent from classical peoples was a common device in medieval historical writing. What is important here is that the Franks, the people among whom Rollo and his Vikings settled, also claimed descent from Antenor. Dudo was providing the Normans with a genealogy that did not emphasize their difference from the Franks, but their similarity, or at least an ideal that he thought they should aspire to.

In understanding how and why Dudo provided such a different account, it is necessary to think about for whom he was writing. He was initially commissioned to write a history of the Normans by Duke Richard I, and this was completed under his successor, Richard II. He was well educated and, as we have seen, drew on classical traditions. His position at the ducal court, initially as an ambassador and then as a ducal chaplain, enabled him to garner information and memories from eyewitnesses, including members of the ducal family. Interestingly though, the dedicatory letter at the beginning of his history is addressed not to the dukes, but to Bishop Adalbero of Laon (d. 1030). The seeming disjuncture between the subject matter (the settlement of the Normans) and the addressee (a Frankish bishop) has led historians to advance a number of theories for Dudo’s audience and reasons for writing. On the whole most scholars agree that this was a history written very much in the Carolingian tradition; however, Eleanor Searle argued that Dudo should be read as something approaching a Latin saga, ‘the victory song of the Norse people’.21 Se...