# The Normans in European History/Chapter 2

II
THE COMING OF THE NORTHMEN
THE central fact of Norman history and the starting-point for its study is the event so brilliantly commemorated by the millenary of 1911, the grant of Normandy to Rollo and his northern followers in the year 911. The history of Normandy, of course, began long before that year. The land was there, and likewise in large measure the people, that is to say, probably the greater part of the elements which went to make the population of the country at a later day; and the history of the region can be traced back several centuries. But after all, neither the Celtic civitates nor the Roman province of Lugdunensis Secunda nor the ecclesiastical province of Rouen which took its place nor the northwestern pagi of the Frankish empire were Normandy. They lacked the name—that is obvious; they lacked also individuality of character, which is more. They were a part, and not a distinctive part, of something else, whereas later Normandy was a separate entity with a life and a history of its own. And the dividing line must be drawn when the Northmen first established themselves permanently in the land and gave it a new name and a new history.
It must be said that the date 911, like most exact ​dates in history, is somewhat arbitrary. The Northmen first invaded Normandy in 841, and their inroads did not cease until about 966, so that the year 911 falls near the middle of a century and a quarter of invasion and settlement, and marks neither the beginning nor the end of an epoch. It is also true that this date, like many another which appears in heavy-faced type in our histories, is not known with entire certainty, for some historians have placed in 912 or even later the events commonly assigned to that year. On the whole, however, there is good reason for maintaining 911—and a thousandth anniversary must have some definite date to commemorate!
For the actual occurrences of that year, we have only the account of a romancing historian of a hundred years later, reënforced here and there by the exceedingly scanty records of the time. The main fact is clear, namely that the Frankish king, Charles the Simple, granted Rollo as a fief a considerable part, the eastern part, of later Normandy. Apparently Rollo did homage for his fief in feudal fashion by placing his hands between the hands of the king, something, we are told, which "neither his father, nor his grandfather, nor his great- grandfather before him had ever done for any man." Legend goes on to relate, however, that Rollo refused to kneel and kiss the king's foot, crying out in his own speech, "No, by God!" and that the companion to whom he delegated the unwelcome obligation performed ​it so clumsily that he overturned the king, to the great merriment of the assembled Northmen. Rollo did not receive the whole of the later duchy, but only the region on either side of the Seine which came to be known as Upper Normandy, and it was not till 924 that the North- men acquired also middle Normandy, or the Bessin, while the west, the Cotentin and the Avranchin, fell to them only in 933.
As to Rollo's personality, we have only the evidence of later Norman historians of doubtful authority and the Norse saga of Harold Fairhair. If, as seems likely, their accounts relate to the same person, he was known in the north as Hrolf the Ganger, because he was so huge that no horse could carry him and he must needs gang afoot. A pirate at home, he was driven into exile by the anger of King Harold, whereupon he followed his trade in the Western Isles and in Gaul, and rose to be a great Jarl among his people. The saga makes him a Norwegian, but Danish scholars have sought to prove him a Dane, and more recently the cudgels have been taken up for his Swedish origin. To me the Norwegian theory seems on the whole the most probable, being based on a trustworthy saga and corroborated by other incidental evidence. Yet, however significant of Rollo's importance it may be that three great countries should each claim him as its own, like the seven cities that strove for the honor of Homer's birthplace, the question of his nationality is historically of subordinate ​interest, and at a time when national lines were not yet drawn, it is futile to fit the inadequate evidence into one or another theory. The important fact is that Norway, Denmark, and even more distant Sweden, all contributed to the colonists who settled in Normandy under Rollo and his successors, and the achievements of the Normans thus become the common heritage of the Scandinavian race.
The colonization of Normandy was, of course, only a small part of the work of this heroic age of Scandinavian expansion. The great emigration from the North in the ninth and tenth centuries has been explained in part by the growth of centralized government and the consequent departure of the independent, the turbulent, and the untamed for new fields of adventure; but its chief cause was doubtless that which lies back of colonizing movements in all ages, the growth of population and the need of more room. Five centuries earlier this land-hunger had pushed the Germanic tribes across the Rhine and Danube and produced the great wandering of the peoples which destroyed the Roman empire; and the Viking raids were simply a later aspect of this same Völkerwanderung, retarded by the outlying position of the Scandinavian lands and by the greater difficulty of migration by sea. For, unlike the Goths who swept across the map of Europe in vast curves of marching men, or the Franks who moved forward by slow stages of gradual settlement in their ​occupation of Roman Gaul, the Scandinavian invaders were men of the sea and migrated in ships. The deep fjords of Norway and the indented coast of the North Sea and the Baltic made them perforce sailors and fishermen and taught them the mastery of the wider ocean. In their dragon ships—shallow, clinker-built, half-decked craft, pointed at either end, low in the middle, where the gunwale was protected by a row of shields—they could cross the sea, explore creeks and inlets, and follow the course of rivers far above their mouth. The greater ships might reach the length of seventy-five feet and carry as many as one hundred and twenty men, but these were the largest, and even these offered but a slow means of migration. We must think of the whole movement at first as one of small and scattered bands, terrible more for their fierce, sudden, and skilful methods of attack, than for force of superior numbers or organization. The truth is that sea-power, whose strategic significance in modern warfare Admiral Mahan did so much to make us appreciate, was in the ninth and tenth centuries, so far as western Europe was concerned, a Scandinavian monopoly. Masters of the seas, the Northmen harried the coasts and river-valleys as they would, and there was none to drive them back.
Outside of the Baltic, where the Danes ravaged the southern coast and the Swedes moved eastward to lay the foundations of the Russian state and to penetrate ​as far as Constantinople, two main routes lay open to the masters of the northern seas. One led west to the Orkneys, the Shetlands, and the coast of Scotland, and then either south to the shores of Ireland, or further west to Iceland, Greenland, and America. The other led through the North Sea to England, the Low Countries, and the coast of Gaul. Both were used, and used freely, by the Vikings, and in both directions they accomplished enduring results:—Iceland and the kingdoms of the isles in the north, the beginnings of town life and commerce in Ireland, the Danelaw in England, and the duchy of Normandy.
When the great northern invasions began at the close of the eighth century, Charles the Great ruled all the Christian lands of the western Continent. By fire and sword he converted the heathen Saxons of the north to Christianity and civilization and advanced his frontier to the Danish border, so that the pious monk of St. Gall laments that he did not conquer the Danes also—"be it that Divine Providence was not then on our side, or that our sins rose up against us." And this same gossiping chronicler—not the best of authorities it is true—has left us a striking picture of Charlemagne's first experience with the Scandinavian invaders:—
From the actuality of such an invasion the great Charles was spared, but in the British Isles it had already begun. In 787 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us there "first came three ships of Northmen out of Haeretha-land" [Denmark?], whereupon the reeve of the Dorset port "rode down to the place and would have driven them to the king's town, because he knew not who they were; and they there slew him. These were the first ships of Danishmen which sought the ​land of the English nation." Six years later they fell upon the holy isle of Lindisfarne, pillaged the church sacred with the memories of Northumbrian Christianity, and slew the monks or drove them into the sea. In 807 they first landed in Ireland, and "after this there came great sea-cast floods of foreigners into Erin, so that there was not a point thereof without a fleet." Then came the turn of the Continent, first along the coast of Frisia and Flanders, and then in what is now France. In 841, when the grandsons of Charlemagne were quarrelling over the fragments of his empire at Fontenay, the first fleet of Northmen entered the Seine; in 843 when they were making their treaty of partition at Verdun, the Vikings entered Nantes on St. John's Day and slew the bishop before the high altar as he intoned the Sursum corda of the mass. Within two years they sacked Hamburg and Paris. Wherever possible they established themselves at the mouths of the great rivers, often on an island like Walcheren, Noirmoutier, or the Ile de Rhé, whence the rivers opened the whole country to them—Elbe and Weser, Rhine and Meuse, Scheldt, Seine, Loire, and Garonne, even to the Guadalquivir, by which the Arabic chronicler tells us the "dark red sea-birds" penetrated to Seville. One band more venture-some than the rest, entered the Mediterranean and reached Marseilles, whence under their leader Hastings they sacked the Italian town of Luna, apparently in the belief that it was Rome.
​About the middle of the ninth century the number of the Norse pirates greatly increased and their ravages became more regular and constant, leading in many cases to permanent settlements. In 855 the Old English Chronicle tells us "the heathen men, for the first time, remained over winter in Sheppey," at the mouth of the Thames, and thereafter, year by year, it recounts the deeds of the Viking band which wintered in England and is called simply here, the army. It is no longer a matter of summer raids but of unbroken occupation. In 878 during midwinter "the army stole away to Chippenham and overran the land of the West-Saxons and sat down there; and many of the people they drove beyond sea, and of the remainder the greater part they subdued and forced to obey them except King Alfred, and he, with a small band, with difficulty retreated to the woods and to the fastnesses of the moors." The following year a similar band, now swollen into "the great army" made its appearance on the Continent and for fourteen years ravaged the territory between the Rhine and the Loire. Year after year "the steel of the heathen glistened"; in 886 they laid siege to Paris, which was relieved not by the king's valor but by his offering them Burgundy to plunder instead. A century later the English began to buy them off with Danegeld. "All men," laments a chronicler, "give themselves to flight. No one cries out, Stand and fight for your country, your church, your countrymen. What they ought to defend with ​arms, they shamefully redeem by payments." There was nothing to do but add a new petition to the litany, "From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord, deliver us."
To the writers of the time, who could not see the permanent results of Viking settlement, the Northmen were barbarian pirates, without piety or pity, "who wept neither for their sins nor for their dead," and their expeditions were mere wanton pillage and destruction. Moreover, these writers were regularly monks or priests, and it was the church that suffered most severely. A walled town or castle might often successfully resist, but the monasteries, protected from Christian freebooters by their sacred character, were simply so many opportunities for plunder to the heathen of the north. Sometimes the monks perished with their monastery, often they escaped only with their lives and a few precious title-deeds, to find on their return merely a heap of blackened ruins and a desolate countryside. Many religious establishments utterly disappeared in the course of the invasions. In Normandy scarcely a church survives anterior to the tenth century. As the monasteries were at this time the chief centres of learning and culture throughout western Europe, their losses were the losses of civilization, and in this respect the verdict of the monastic chroniclers is justified. There is, however, another side to the story, which Scandinavian scholars have not ​been slow to emphasize. Heathen still and from one point of view barbarian, the Northmen had yet a culture of their own, well advanced on its material side, notable in its artistic skill, and rich in its treasures of poetry and story. Its material treasures have been in part recovered by the labors of northern archaeologists, while its literary wealth is now in large measure accessible in English in the numerous translations of sagas and Eddie poems.
After all barbarism, like culture, is a relative thing, and judged by contemporary standards, the Vikings were not barbarians. They rather show a strange combination of the primitive and the civilized—elemental passions expressing themselves with a high degree of literary art, barbaric adornment wrought with skilled craftsmanship, Berserker rage supplemented by clever strategy, pitiless savagery combined with a strong sense of public order, constant feuds and murders coexistent with a most elaborate system of law and legal procedure. Young from our point of view, the civilization of the Vikings had behind it a history of perhaps fifteen centuries.
On its material side Viking civilization is characterized by a considerable degree of wealth and luxury. Much of this, naturally, was gained by pillage, but much also came by trade. The northern warriors do not seem to have had that contempt for traffic which has characterized many military societies, and they turned ​readily enough from war to commerce. In a Viking tomb recently discovered in the Hebrides there were found beside the sword and spear and battle-axe of all warriors, a pair of scales, fit emblem of the double life the chief had led on earth and may have hoped to continue hereafter! Of trade, and especially trade with the Orient, there is abundant evidence in the great treasures of gold and silver coin found in many regions of the north. The finely wrought objects of gold and silver and encrusted metal, which were once supposed to have been imported from the south and east, are now known to have been in large part of native workmanship, influenced, of course, by the imitation of foreign models, but also carrying out traditions of ornamentation, such as the use of animal forms, which can be traced back continuously to the earliest ages of Scandinavian history. Shields and damascened swords, arm-rings and neck-rings, pins and brooches—especially brooches, if you find an unknown object, says Montelius, call it a brooch and you will generally be right—all testify, both in their abundance and their beauty of workmanship, to an advanced stage of art and handicraft.
This love of the north for luxury of adornment is amply seen in chronicle and saga. When the Irish drove the Vikings out of Limerick in 968 they took from them "their jewels and their best property, and their saddles beautiful and foreign, their gold and their silver, their beautifully woven cloth of all kinds and colors—satin ​and silk, pleasing and variegated, both scarlet and green, and all sorts of cloth in like manner." "How," asks the Valkyrie in the Lay of the Raven, "does the generous Prince Harold deal with the men of feats of renown that guard his land?" The Raven answers:—
They are well cared for, the warriors that cast dice in Harold's court. They are endowed with wealth and with fair swords, with the ore of the Huns, and with maids from the East. They are glad when they have hopes of a battle, they will leap up in hot haste and ply the oars, snapping the oar-thongs and cracking the tholes. Fiercely, I ween, do they churn the water with their oars at the king's bidding.
Quoth the Walkyrie: I will ask thee, for thou knowest the truth of all these things, of the meed of the Poets, since thou must know clearly the state of the minstrels that live with Harold.
Quoth the Raven: It is easily seen by their cheer, and their gold rings, that they are among the friends of the king. They have red cloaks right fairly fringed, silver-mounted swords, and ring-woven sarks, gilt trappings, and graven helmets, wrist-fitting rings, the gifts of Harold.
As regards social organization, Viking society shows the Germanic division into three classes, thrall, churl, and noble. Their respective characters and occupations are thus described in the Rigsmal:—
Thrall was of swarthy skin, his hands wrinkled, his knuckles bent, his fingers thick, his face ugly, his back broad, his heels long. He began to put forth his strength, binding bast, making loads, and bearing home faggots the weary long day. His children busied themselves with building ​fences, dunging plowland, tending swine, herding goats, and digging peat. Their names were Sooty and Cowherd, Clumsy and Lout and Laggard, etc. Carl, or churl, was red and ruddy, with rolling eyes, and took to breaking oxen, building plows, timbering houses, and making carts. Earl, the noble, had yellow hair, his cheeks were rosy, his eyes were keen as a young serpent's. His occupation was shaping the shield, bending the bow, hurling the javelin, shaking the lance, riding horses, throwing dice, fencing, and swimming. He began to waken war, to redden the field, and to fell the doomed.
Both churl and earl were largely represented in those who went to sea, but the nobility naturally preponderated, and it is particularly their exploits which the sagas and poems celebrate. Viking warfare was no mere clash of swords; they conducted their military operations with skill and foresight, and showed great power of adapting themselves to new conditions, whether that meant the invasion of an open country or the siege of a fortified town. Much, however, must be credited to their furor Teutonicus, to that exuberance of military spirit which they had inherited from far-off ancestors. Not all were wolf-coated Bearsarks, but all seemed to have that delight in war and conflict for their own sakes which breathes through their poetry:—
The sword in the king's hand bit through the weeds of Woden [mail] as if it were whisked through water, the spear-points clashed, the shields were shattered, the axes rattled on the heads of the warriors. Targets and skulls were ​trodden under the Northmen's shield-fires [weapons] and the hard heels of their hilts. There was a din in the island, the kings dyed the shining rows of shields in the blood of men. The wound-fires [blades] burnt in the bloody wounds, the halberds bowed down to take the life of men, the ocean of gore dashed upon the swords'-ness, the flood of the shafts fell upon the beach of Stord. Halos of war mixed under the vault of the bucklers; the battle- tempest blew underneath the clouds of the targets, the lees of the sword-edges [blood] pattered in the gale of Woden. Many a man fell into the stream of the brand.
Again:—
Brands broke against the black targets, wounds waxed when the princes met. The blades hammered against the helm-crests, the wound-gravers, the sword's point, bit. I heard that there fell in the iron-play Woden's oak [heroes] before the swords [the sword-belt's ice].
Second Burden: There was a linking of points and a gnashing of edges: Eric got renown there.
Second Stave: The prince reddened the brand, there was a meal for the ravens; the javelin sought out the life of man, the gory spears flew, the destroyer of the Scots fed the steed of the witch [wolves], the sister of Nari [Hell] trampled on the supper of the eagles [corses]. The cranes of battle [shafts] flew against the walls of the sword [bucklers], the wound-mew's lips [the arrows' barbs] were not left thirsty for gore. The wolf tore the wounds, and the wave of the sword [blood] plashed against the beak of the raven.
Third Burden: The lees of the din of war [blood] fell upon Gialf 's steed [ship]: Eric gave the wolves carrion by the sea.
Third Stave: The flying javelin bit, peace was belied there, the wolf was glad, and the bow was drawn, the bolts clattered, the spear-points bit, the flaxen-bowstring bore the ​arrows out of the bow. He brandished the buckler on his arm, the rouser of the play of blades—he is a mighty hero. The fray grew greater everywhere about the king. It was famed east over the sea, Eric's war-faring.
Or listen to the weird sisters as they weave the web of Ireland's fate under Brian Boru:—
Wide-stretched is the warp presaging the slaughter, the hanging cloud of the beam; it is raining blood. The gray web of the hosts is raised up on the spears, the web which we the friends of Woden are filling with red weft.
This web is warped with the guts of men, and heavily weighted with human heads; blood-stained darts are the shafts, iron-bound are the stays; it is shuttled with arrows. Let us strike with our swords this web of victory!
War and Sword-clasher, Sangrid and Swipple, are weaving with drawn swords. The shaft shall sing, the shield shall ring, the helm-hound [axe] shall fall on the target.
And those who met their death in battle had reserved for them a similar existence in the life to come, not doomed like the 'straw-dead' to tread wet and chill and dusky ways to the land of Hel, but—I am quoting Gummere—as weapon-dead faring "straightway to Odin, unwasted by sickness, in the full strength of manhood," to spend their days in glorious battle and their nights in equally glorious feasting in the courts of Valhalla.
My mother said they should buy me a boat and fair oars, and that I should go abroad with the Vikings, should stand forward in the bows and steer a dear bark, and so wend to the haven and cut down man after man there.
When he grows up the earl's daughter scorns him as a boy who "has never given a warm meal to the wolf," "seen the raven in autumn scream over the carrion draft," or "been where the shell-thin edges" of the blades crossed; whereupon he wins a place by her side by replying:—
I have walked with bloody brand and with whistling spear, with the wound-bird following me. The Vikings made a fierce attack; we raised a furious storm, the flame ran over the dwellings of men, we laid the bleeding corses to rest in the gates of the city.
And at the end, like Ragnar Lodbrok captured and dying in the pit of serpents, he can tell his tale of feeding the eagle and the she-wolf since he first reddened the sword at the age of twenty, and end his life undaunted to the ever-recurring refrain, "We hewed with the sword":
Death has no terrors. I am willing to depart. They are calling me home, the Fays whom Woden the Lord of Hosts has sent me from his hall. Merrily shall I drink ale in my high-seat with the Anses. My life days are done. Laughing will I die.
Politically, Viking society was aristocratic, but an aristocracy in which all the nobles were equal. "We have no lord, we are all equal," said Rollo's men when ​asked who was their lord; and men thus minded were not likely to spend their time casting dice in King Harold's court, even if their independence meant the wolf's lot of exile. What kind of a political organization they were likely to form can be seen from two examples of the Viking age. One is Iceland, described by Lord Bryce as "an almost unique instance of a community whose culture and creative power flourished independently of any favoring material conditions,"—that curiously decentralized and democratic commonwealth where the necessities of life created a government with judicial and legislative duties, while the feeling of equality and local independence prevented the government from acquiring any administrative or executive functions,—a community with "a great deal of law and no central executive, a great many courts and no authority to carry out their judgments." The other example is Jomburg, that strange body of Jom vikings established in Pomerania, at the mouth of the Oder, and held by a military gild under the strictest discipline. Only men of undoubted bravery between the ages of eighteen and fifty were admitted to membership; no women were allowed in the castle, and no man could be absent from it for more than three days at a time. Members assumed the duty of mutual support and revenge, and plunder was to be distributed by lot.
​Neither of these types of Viking community was to be reproduced in Normandy, for both were the outgrowth of peculiar local conditions, and the Northmen were too adaptable to found states with a rubber-stamp. A loose half-state like Iceland could exist only where the absence of neighbors or previous inhabitants removed all danger of complications, whether domestic or foreign. A strict warrior gild like that of Jomburg could arise only in a fortress. Whatever form Viking society would take in Normandy was certain to be determined in large measure by local conditions; yet it might well contain elements found in the other societies—the Icelandic sense of equality and independence, and the military discipline of the Jomvikings set in the midst of their Wendish foes. And both of these elements are characteristic of the Norman state.
Such, very briefly sketched, were the Northmen who came to Normandy. We have now to follow them in their new home.
We must note in the first place that the relations between Normandy and the north were not ended with the grant of 911. We must think of the new Norman state, not as a planet sent off into space to move separate and apart in a new orbit, but as a colony, an outpost of the Scandinavian peoples in the south, fed by new bands of colonists from the northern home and only gradually drawn away from its connections with the north and brought into the political system of ​Frankish Gaul and its neighbors. For something like a hundred years after the coming of Rollo the key to Norman history is found in this fact and in the resulting interplay of Scandinavian and Frankish influences. The very grant of 911 was susceptible of being differently regarded from the point of view of the two parties. Charles the Simple probably thought he was creating a new fief with the Norman chief as his vassal, bound to him by feudal ties, while to Rollo, innocent of feudal ideas, the grant may well have seemed a gift outright to be held by himself and his companions as land was held at home. From one point of view a feudal holding, from another an independent Scandinavian state, the contradiction in Normandy's position explains much of its early history. The new colony was saved from absorption in its surroundings by continued migration from the north; before it became Frankish and feudal it thus had time to establish itself firmly and draw tightly the lines which separated it from its neighbors. At once a Frankish county and a Danish colony, it slowly formed itself into the semi-independent duchy which is the historic Normandy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Although Rollo was baptized in 912 and signalized his conversion by extensive grants of land to the great churches and monasteries of his new territories, his Christianity sat lightly upon him and left him a Norse sea-rover at heart till the end, when he sought to appease the powers of the other world, not only by gifts ​of gold to the church, but by human sacrifices to the northern gods. His legislation, so far as it can be reconstructed from the shadowy accounts of later historians, was fundamentally Scandinavian in character, and his followers guarded jealously the northern traditions of equality and independence. His son, William Longsword, was a more Christian and Frankish type, but his death, celebrated in a Latin poem which represents the earliest known example of popular epic in Normandy, was the signal for a Scandinavian and pagan reaction. We hear of fresh arrivals on the Seine, Vikings who worshipped Thor and Odin, of an independent band at Bayeux under a certain Haigrold or Harold, and even of appeals for reinforcements from the Normans to the Northmen beyond the sea. The dukes of Rouen, says the Saga of St. Olaf, "remember well their kinship with the chiefs of Norway; they hold them in such honor that they have always been the best friends of the Norwegians, and all the Norwegians who wish find refuge in Normandy." Not till the beginning of the eleventh century does the Scandinavian immigration come to an end and Normandy stand fully on its own feet.
Not until the eleventh century also does the history of Normandy emerge from the uncertain period of legend and tradition and reach an assured basis of contemporary evidence. Throughout Europe, the tenth century is one of the most uncertain and obscure of all the Christian centuries. To the critic, as an Oxford don ​distinguished for knowledge of this epoch once remarked, its delightful obscurity makes it all the more interesting, but there are limits to the delights of obscurity, and a French scholar who has tried to reconstruct the history of this period in Spain finds that all surviving documentary sources of information are fabrications! Matters are not so bad as that for Normandy, for the forgers there chose other periods in which to place their products, but there are for the tenth century practically no contemporary documents or contemporary Norman chronicles. The earliest Norman historian, Dudo, dean of Saint-Quentin, wrote after the year 1000 and had no personal knowledge of the beginnings of the Norman state. Diffuse, rhetorical, credulous, and ready to distort events in order to glorify the ancestors of the Norman dukes who were his patrons, Dudo is anything but a trustworthy writer, and only the most circumspect criticism can glean a few facts from his confused and turgid rhetoric. Yet he was copied by his Norman successors, in prose and in verse, and has found his defenders among patriotic Normans of a more modern time. Not until quite recent years has his fundamental untrustworthiness been fully established, and with it has vanished all hope of any detailed knowledge of early Norman history. Only with the eleventh century do we reach a solid foundation of annals and charters in the reigns of the princes whom Dudo seeks to glorify in the person of their predecessors. And when we reach ​this period, the heroic age of conquest and settlement is over, and the Normans have become much as other Frenchmen.
At this point the fundamental question forces itself upon us, how far was Normandy affected by Scandinavian influences? What in race and language, in law and custom, was the contribution of the north to Normandy? And the answer must be that in most respects the tangible contribution was slight. Whatever may have been the state of affairs in the age of colonization and settlement, by the century which followed the Normans had become to a surprising degree absorbed by their environment.
It is now generally admitted, says Professor Maitland, that for at least half a century before the battle of Hastings, the Normans were Frenchmen, French in their language, French in their law, proud indeed of their past history, very ready to fight against other Frenchmen if Norman home-rule was endangered, but still Frenchmen, who regarded Normandy as a member of the state or congeries of states that owed service, we can hardly say obedience, to the king at Paris. Their spoken language was French, their written language was Latin, but the Latin of France; the style of their legal documents was the style of the French chancery; very few of the technical terms of their law were of Scandinavian origin. When at length the 'custom' of Normandy appears in writing, it takes its place among other French customs, and this although for a long time past Normandy has formed one of the dominions of a prince, between whom and the king of the French there has been little love and ​frequent war; and the peculiar characteristics which mark off the custom of Normandy from other French customs seem due much rather to the legislation of Henry of Anjou than to any Scandinavian tradition.
The law of Normandy was by this time Frankish, and its speech was French. Even the second duke, William Longsword, found it necessary to send his son to Bayeux to learn Norse, for it was no longer spoken at Rouen. And in the French of Normandy, the Norman dialect, the Scandinavian element is astonishingly small, as careful students of the local patois tell us. Only in one department of life, the life of the sea, is any considerable Scandinavian influence discernible, and the historian of the French navy, Bourel de la Roncière, has some striking pages on the survivals of the language of the Norse Vikings in the daily speech of the French sailor and fisherman.
The question of race is more difficult, and is of course quite independent of the question of language, for language, as has been well said, is not a test of race but a test of social contact, and the fundamental physical characteristics of race are independent of speech. "Skulls," says Rhys, "are harder than consonants, and races lurk behind when languages slip away." On this point again scientific examination is unfavorable to extended Scandinavian influence. Pronounced northern types, of course, occur,—I remember, on my first journey through Normandy, seeing at a wayside station a ​peasant who might have walked that moment out of a Wisconsin lumber-camp or a Minnesota wheat- field,—but the statistics of anthropometry show a steady preponderance of the round-headed type which prevails in other parts of France. Only in two regions does the Teutonic type assert itself strongly, in the lower valley of the Seine and in the Cotentin, and it is in these regions and at points along the shore that place-names of Scandinavian origin are most frequent. The terminations bec and fleur, beuf and ham and dalle and tot—Bolbec, Harfleur, Quillebeuf, Ouistreham, Dieppedalle, Yvetot—tell the same story as the terms used in navigation, namely that the Northmen were men of the sea and settled in the estuaries and along the coast. The earlier population, however, though reduced by war and pillage and famine, was not extinguished. It survived in sufficient numbers to impose its language on its conquerors, to preserve throughout the greater part of the country its fundamental racial type, and to make these Northmen of the sea into Normans of the land.
What, then, was the Scandinavian contribution to the making of Normandy if it was neither law nor speech nor race? First and foremost, it was Normandy itself, created as a distinct entity by the Norman occupation and the grant to Rollo and his followers, without whom it would have remained an undifferentiated part of northern France. Next, a new element in the population, numerically small in proportion to the mass, but ​a leaven to the whole—quick to absorb Frankish law and Christian culture but retaining its northern qualities of enterprise, of daring, and of leadership. It is no accident that the names of the leaders in early Norman movements are largely Norse. And finally a race of princes, high-handed and masterful but with a talent for political organization, state-builders at home and abroad, who made Normandy the strongest and most centralized principality in France and joined to it a kingdom beyond the seas which became the strongest state in western Europe.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The best outline of the beginnings of Normandy is H. Prentout, Essai sur les origines et la fondation du duché de Normandie (Paris, 1911). For the Frankish side of the Norse expeditions see W. Vogel, Die Normannen und das fränkische Reich (Heidelberg, 1906), supplemented by F. Lot, in the Bibliothèque de l'École des Chartes, lxix (1908). Their devastation of Normandy is illustrated by the fate of the monastery of Saint-Wandrille: F. Lot, Études critiques sur l'abbaye de Saint-Wandrille (Paris, 1913), ch. 3. There is a vast literature in the Scandinavian languages; for the titles of fundamental works by Steenstrup, Munch, Worsaae, and Alexander Bugge, see Charles Gross, Sources and Literature of English History (London, 1915), § 42. Considerable material in English has been published in the Saga-Book of the Viking Society (London, since 1895). On the material culture of the north see Sophus Müller, Nordische Altertumskunde (Strassburg, 1897-98), and the various works of Montelius. The early poetry is collected and translated by Vigfusson and Powell, Corpus Poeticum Boreale (Oxford, 1883). Convenient summaries in English are C. F. Keary, The Vikings in Western Christendom (London, 1891); A. Mawer, The Vikings (Cambridge, 1913); and L. M. Larson, Canute the Great (New York, 1912).
* ↑ ii, 14, as translated by Keary, Vikings, p. 136.
* ↑ Corpus Poeticum Boreale, i, p. 257.
* ↑ Corpus Poeticum Boreale, i, pp. 236-40.
* ↑ Corpus Poeticum Boreale, i, p. 265 f.
* ↑ Corpus Poeticum Boreale, i, pp. 268-70.
* ↑ Ibid.,i, p. 281 f.
* ↑ Germanic Origins (New York, 1892), p. 305 f.
* ↑ Corpus Poeticum Boreale, i, p. 373.
* ↑ Ibid., ii, p. 345.
* ↑ "Primitive Iceland," in his Studies in History and Jurisprudence (Oxford, 1901), pp. 263 ff.
* ↑ Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, i, p. 66.
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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