# The Normans in European History/Chapter 5

V
NORMANDY AND FRANCE
IN July, 1189, Henry II lay dying in his castle at Chinon. Abandoned and attacked by his sons, driven from LeMans and Tours by Philip of France and forced to a humiliating peace, sick in body and broken in spirit, the aged king made his way to the old stronghold of the Angevin counts in the valley of the Vienne. Cursing the faithless Richard as he gave him the enforced kiss of peace at Colombières, he had fixed his hopes on his youngest son John till the schedule was brought him of those who had thrown off their allegiance. "Sire," said the clerk who read the document to the fever-tossed king, "may Christ help me, the first here written is Count John, your son." "What," cried the king, starting up from his bed, "John, my very heart, my best beloved, for whose advancement I have brought upon me all this misery? Now let all things go as they will; I care no more for myself nor for anything in this world." Two days later he died, cursing his sons, cursing the day he had been born, repeating constantly, "Shame on a conquered king." Deserted by all save his illegitimate son Geoffrey, who received his father's blessing and his signet ring marked with the leopard of England, Henry was ​plundered by his attendants of gold and furnishings and apparel, just as William the Conqueror had been despoiled in the hour of his death at Rouen, till some one in pity threw over the royal corpse the short cloak, or 'curt mantle,' by which men called him. Two days later he was laid away quietly in the nunnery of Fontevrault, where a later age was to rob his tomb of all save the noble recumbent figure by which it is still marked. Thus passed away the greatest ruler of his age; thus began the collapse of the Norman empire.
Strikingly dramatic both in its public and private aspects, the end of Henry II offers material fit for a Greek tragedy, and we may, if we choose, imagine an Æschylus or a Sophocles painting the rapidity of his rise, the hybris of his splendor, and the crushing nemesis of his fall. Even the Promethean touch is not lacking in the withdrawal of Henry's unconquered soul from God, as he looked back in flight at the burning city of LeMans: "My God, since to crown my confusion and increase my disgrace, thou hast taken from me so vilely the town which on earth I have loved best, where I was born and bred, and where my father lies buried and the body of St. Julian too, I will have my revenge on thee also; I will of a surety withdraw from thee that thing that thou lovesť best in me." Henry's life needs no blasphemous closing in order to furnish inexhaustible ​material for moralizing, and in a period like the Middle Ages, given over as none other to moral lessons, it served to point many a tale of the crimes and fate of evil-doers. That vain and entertaining Welshman, Gerald de Barri, or Giraldus Cambrensis, in whom a recent writer thinks he has discovered the proto-journalist, found in Henry's career the basis for a considerable book devoted to the Instruction of Princes. But whereas the ways of the gods are dark and unsearchable to the Greek tragedians, they have no mystery for Gerald. Henry's punishment was due to his violations of religion, first in his marriage with Eleanor, the divorced wife of his feudal lord Louis VII, second in his quarrel with Archbishop Becket and the oppression of the church which followed, and third and worst of all, in his failure to take part in a crusade. The hammer of the church, Henry was born for destruction. The modern world is more cautious in the matter of explaining the inexplicable, and more prone to seek human causes when they can be found, yet the collapse of the Plantagenet empire is not the hardest of the historian's problems. Something he will ascribe to larger forces of development, something he can hardly fail to attribute to the character of Henry's sons and to his policy in dealing with them.
Henry II is not the only case in history of a king who could rule every house but his own, of a father who was ​shrewd and stern in his dealings with the world but swayed by unrequited affection and ill-timed weakness in dealing with his children. Knowing other men, he did not know his sons, and his grave errors in dealing with them were errors of public policy, since they concerned the government of his dominions and the succession to the throne. Even those who had no sympathy for Henry had little to say to excuse the character and the unfilial conduct of his sons. "From the Devil we come, and to the Devil we return," Richard was reported to have said; and none cared to contradict him. Of the four lawful sons who grew to maturity, the eldest was Henry, crowned king by his father in 1170, and hence generally known as the Young King. Handsome and agreeable, prodigal in largesse, a patron of knightly sports and especially of the tournaments which were then coming into fashion, the Young King enjoyed great popularity in his lifetime and after his early death was mourned as a peer of Hector and Achilles and enshrined as a hero of courtly romance. Yet for all this there was no substantial foundation. He was faithless, ungrateful, utterly selfish, a thorn in his father's side and a constant source of weakness to the empire. Married at the age of five to the daughter of Louis VII, he became the instrument of the French king in his intrigues against Henry II and the rallying point of feudal reaction and personal jealousy. King in name though not in fact, having been crowned merely ​as a means of securing the succession, Prince Henry craved at least an under-kingdom of his own, and on two occasions, in 1173 and again in 1183, led serious and widespread revolts against his father, the evil results of which were not undone by his death-bed repentance in the midst of the second uprising. In this revolt of 1183 he had with him his younger brother Geoffrey, duke of Brittany, 'the son of perdition,' equally false and treacherous, without even the redeeming virtue of popularity. Fortunately Geoffrey also died before his father.
The death of the Young King left as Henry's eldest heir Richard, known to the modern world as the Lion-Hearted. With much of his father's energy, Richard seems to have inherited more than any of his brothers the tastes and temperament of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Adventurous and high-spirited, fond of pomp and splendor, a lover of poetry and music, be it the songs of Provencal minstrels or the solemn chants of the church, he belonged on this side of his nature to the dukes of Aquitaine and the country of the troubadours. He loved war and danger, in which he showed great personal courage, and in the conduct of military enterprises gave evidence of marked ability as a strategist; but his gifts as a ruler stopped there. The glamour of his personal exploits and the romance of his crusading adventures might dazzle the imagination of contemporaries more than the prosaic achievements of his father, ​and his gifts to religious houses might even predispose monastic historians in his favor, but for all this splendor his subjects paid the bills. In spite of his great income, he was always in need of money for his extravagances; and for his fiscal exactions there was never the excuse of large measures of public policy. Indeed, so far as we can see, Richard had no public policy. "His ambition," says Stubbs, "was that of a mere warrior: he would fight for anything whatever, but he would sell everything that was worth fighting for." Self-willed and self-centred, he followed wherever his desires led, with no sense of loyalty to his obligations or of responsibility as a ruler. Made duke of Aquitaine at seventeen, he sought to ride down every obstacle and bring immediate order and unity into a region which had never enjoyed either of these benefits; and he quickly had by the ears the land which he should have best understood. He was soon in revolt against his father and also at war with the Young King; for his own purposes he later went over to the king of France, and jested with his boon companions over his father's discomfiture and downfall. Even as king at the age of thirty-two, Richard remained an impetuous youth; he never really grew up. Haughty and overbearing, he alienated friends and allies; inheriting the rule of the vast Plantagenet empire, he showed no realization of imperial duty or opportunity. Thus he visited England but twice in the course of his reign of ten years and ​valued it solely as a land from which revenue might be wrung by his ministers, nor did his continental dominions derive advantage from his presence. Impetuous and short-sighted, Richard Yea-and-Nay had to meet the greatest statesman of his day in deadly rivalry; and though panegyrists placed him above Alexander, Charlemagne, and King Arthur, he went down ignominiously before Philip Augustus.
Last of all comes the youngest son John, "my heart, my best beloved." Never did father lavish his affection on a more unworthy child. False to his father, false to his brother Richard, John proved false to all, man or woman, who ever trusted him. He had none of the dash and courage of Richard, none of his large and splendid way, and none of his popularity and gift of leadership. Men saw him as he was, no Charlemagne or Arthur, but petty, mean, and cowardly, small even in his blasphemies, swearing by the feet or the teeth of God, when Henry II had habitually sworn by his eyes, and William the Conqueror by his splendor — par la resplendor De! Always devious in his ways, John's cunning sometimes got him the reputation for cleverness, and John Richard Green went so far as to call him "the ablest and most ruthless of the Angevins." But his ability, particularly in military matters not inconsiderable, was of the kind which wasted itself in temporary expedients and small successes; it was incapable of continuous policy or sustained efforts; and it everywhere ended in failure. ​Gerald the Welshman, the friend of his youth, at the end can only pronounce him the worst of history's tyrants. John's whole career offers the most convincing evidence of the futility of talent when divorced from character, by which is here meant, not so much private virtue, — for John's private vices were shared with others of his family and his time, — but merely common honor, trustworthiness, and steadfastness. Even in his wickedness John was shifty and false, and his loss of his empire was due, not to any single blunder or series of blunders, but to the supreme sin of lack of character.
It is thus possible to see how largely the collapse of the Norman empire was bound up with the family history of Henry II — the foolish indulgence of the father, the ambitions and intrigues of the mother, the jealousies, treachery, and political incapacity of the sons. A personal creation, the Plantagenet state fell in large measure for personal reasons. If it was Henry's misfortune to have such sons, one may say it was also his misfortune to have more than one son of any sort, since each became the nucleus of a separatist movement in some particular territory. The kings of France, it has often been pointed out, had for generations the great advantage of having a son to succeed, but only a single son. The crowning of the French heir in his father's lifetime assured an undisputed succession; the crowning of the Young King left him dissatisfied and stirred up the rivalry of his younger brothers.
​But this is not the whole of the story. The very strength and efficiency of Henry's government were sure to produce a reaction in favor of feudal liberties in which his sons serve simply as convenient centres of crystallization. Only time could unify each of these dominions internally, while far more time was required to consolidate them into a permanent kingdom, and these processes were interrupted when they had barely begun. Such a solution of the ultimate problem of consolidation was, we have seen, entirely possible and even natural; but another was possible and also natural, namely the union of these territories under the king of France. Geography, as well as history, favored the second alternative.
The geographical unity of France is one of the most obvious facts on the map of Europe. The Alps and the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, are its natural frontiers; only on the northeast are the lines blurred by nature and left to history to determine. Within these limits there are of course many clearly marked subdivisions—the valleys of the Rhone, Garonne, Loire, and Seine, Gascony, Brittany, Normandy, Flanders, and the rest—which formed the great fiefs of the Middle Ages and the great provinces of later times. Sooner or later, however, as population increased, as trade and commerce developed, and as the means of communication were strengthened, these divisions were ​certain to draw together into a single great state. Where the centre of the new state would lie was not a matter of accident but was largely determined by the great lines of communication, and especially by the commercial axis which runs from the Mediterranean to Flanders and the English Channel. On this line are situated the Roman capital of the Gauls, Lyons, and the modern capital, Paris. This fact, combined with the central and dominant position of the Paris basin in relation to the great valleys of the Seine, the Loire, and the Meuse, established the region about Paris, the Ile-de-France of history, as the natural centre of this future nation. Such a state might grow from without toward its centre, as the modern kingdom of Italy closed in on Rome, but the more natural process was from the centre outward, as England grew about Wessex or Brandenburg about the region near Berlin. In the great contest between Capetian and Plantagenet the Capetian "held the inner lines." Shut off from the sea on the side of the Loire as well as on the side of the Seine, he was in a position to concentrate all his efforts to break through the iron ring, while the Norman rulers had to hold together the whole of their far-spread territories against reaction and rebellion at home as well as against the French at Tours and LeMans and in the Vexin. Meanwhile up and down these valleys the influences of trade, commerce, and travel were at work breaking down the political barriers and drawing the remoter regions toward the ​geographical centre. The rivers in their courses fought against the Plantagenets.
The personal element in the struggle was weighted against the Anglo-Norman empire even more strongly than the physiographic, for the weak links in the Plantagenet succession ran parallel to the strongest portion of the Capetian line. Against a knight-errant like Richard and a trifler like John, stood a great European statesman in the person of Philip Augustus, king of France during forty-four years, and more than any single man the creator of the French monarchy.
Philip Augustus was not an heroic figure, and to the men of his age he was probably less sympathetic than his adversary Richard. Vigorous and enduring, a generous liver, quick-tempered but slow to cherish hatred, Philip was preëminently the cautious, shrewd, unscrupulous, far-sighted statesman. He could fight when necessary, but he had no great personal courage and excelled in strategy and prevision rather than in tactics or leadership in the field, and he preferred to gain his ends by the arts of diplomacy. The quality upon which all his contemporaries dwell is his wisdom. Throughout his long reign he kept before him as his one aim the increase of the royal power, and by his patient and fortunate efforts he broke down the Plantagenet empire, doubled the royal revenue and more than doubled the royal ​domain, and made France the leading international power in western Europe.
As we have already seen, Philip had made substantial headway even during the lifetime of Henry II. Crowned in 1179 at the age of fourteen, a year before the death of his paralytic father Louis VII, Philip was naturally treated as a boy by Henry, who seems, however, to have acted throughout with due regard to Philip's position as king and his feudal suzerain. In the complications of those early years we find Henry constantly arranging disputes with the king's vassals and more than once saving him from a tight place. But as time went on this relation became impossible. Philip openly abetted the revolts of the Young King and of Richard, and in the war which broke out at the end Richard fought openly on his side. As soon, however, as Richard succeeded to the throne, Philip began hostilities with him, and he soon used John against Richard as he had used Richard against his father. "Divide and rule," was clearly Philip's policy, and he always had on his side the fact that he was king in France and the Plantagenets on the Continent were his vassals.
The first phase of the contest between Richard and Philip comes as a welcome interlude in the tale of border disputes and family rivalries which make up the greater part of the tangled story of Philip's dealings with the Norman empire. It takes us over the sea to the fair land of Sicily and on to the very gates of the Holy City. In ​1187 the capture of Jerusalem had crowned the long efforts of the great Saladin, and where a century before Christian knights had ridden "up to their bridles" in the blood of the slaughtered Moslem, a procession of knights and priests and poorer folk passed out of the gate of David and left the Holy Sepulchre to the infidel. To the Saracens a certain sign that they were the only people "whose doctrine was agreeable to God," the fall of Jerusalem killed the aged Pope, plunged Europe into prayer and fasting, and brought on the Third Crusade, under the leadership of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Philip of France, and Richard of England. Richard, then merely count of Poitou, was the first western prince to take the cross in this holy war; his father and Philip soon sealed their crusading vows with a public reconciliation under a great elm on the borders of Normandy and France, and the chroniclers tell us that every man made peace with his neighbor, thinking no more of tournaments and fine raiment, the lust of the flesh and the pride of the eye, but only of the recovery of the Holy City. Such great waves of renunciation and religious enthusiasm are peculiarly characteristic of the Middle Ages, but their force was soon spent. Then, as in other times, there were few who could live as on a mountain-top. In spite of all that the church could do, Henry and Philip soon came to open war, and the cause of Jerusalem was swallowed up in a struggle for the Loire and for Aquitanian fortresses. Richard, as we have seen, ​was a central point in these conflicts, and his accession to the throne simply continued the struggle in another form.
Nevertheless a peace was patched up, and the unwilling Philip was unable to hold aloof from the crusade which fired the military ardor of his chief vassal and rival. Large sums of money were raised by every means, and the two kings made an agreement to divide equally all the spoil of their expedition. They also arranged to go by sea to the East after they had assembled their ships and followers at Messina, thus avoiding the usual complications with the Eastern Empire and the fatal march through the barren and hostile interior of Asia Minor which now claimed another victim in the gallant German emperor. At the best, however, a crusade was not an organized campaign under efficient direction, but merely a number of independent expeditions which found it convenient to go at the same time and by the same route. There was no supreme command, and there was constant jealousy and friction between feudal lords who were ever impatient of restraint and careful of points of dignity and precedence. The presence of a king was of some help, the presence of two only made matters worse. If the causes of rivalry at home and the slighting of Philip's sister could have been forgotten, there was still the fact that Richard was Philip's vassal as well as his equal, and Richard was not of the type to spare Philip's susceptibilities. Rich, open-handed, fond of display, ​Lion-Heart "loved the lime-light," and his overbearing nature and lack of tact made it impossible for him to coöperate with others. He characteristically went his own way, paying scant attention to Philip and acting as if the leadership of the expedition belonged to himself as a matter of course. Relations became strained during the sojourn at Messina and grew worse in Palestine, where the affairs of the Latin kingdom and the rivalries of lesser princes added fuel to the flame. "The two kings and peoples," says an English chronicler, "did less together than they would have done separately, and each set but light store by the other." Sick of the whole enterprise, after four months in the East, Philip seized the first excuse to return home, departing in August, 1191.
Richard stayed a year longer in Palestine, yet he never entered Jerusalem and had finally to retire with a disappointing truce and to spend another year, and more, languishing in German prisons. The events of these months do not concern the history of Normandy, but if we would behold Richard in his fairest light we must see him as he rushed to the relief of Joppa on the first of August, 1192, wading ashore from his red galley with the cry, "Perish the man who would hang back," covering the landing of his followers with his crossbow, making his way by a winding stair to the house of the Templars on the town wall, and then, sword in hand, clearing the town of three thousand Turks and pursuing them into the plain with but three horsemen; or, four days later, ​repelling a Mameluke attack in force by a most skilful tactical arrangement of his meagre army, directing the battle on the beach while he also kept the town clear, "slaying innumerable Turks with his gleaming sword, here cleaving a man from the crown of his head to his teeth," there cutting off with one blow the head, shoulder, and right arm of a Saracen emir, his coat of mail and his horse bristling with javelins and arrows like a hedgehog, yet "remaining unconquerable and unwounded in accordance with the divine decree."
What most concerned the Norman empire was the king's absence since the summer of 1190, prolonged by his captivity in Germany until the spring of 1194. Although Philip had taken an oath before leaving Palestine to respect Richard's men and possessions during his absence, and even to protect them like his own city of Paris, he sought release from this engagement as soon as he reached Rome on his homeward journey, and once back in France he soon began active preparations for an attack on the Plantagenet territories. With Richard safe in a German dungeon, he seized a large part of the Norman border and made a secret treaty with John which secured the surrender of all the lands east of the Seine and important fortresses in Anjou and Touraine. He offered huge sums of money to secure Richard's custody ​or even his continued detention in Germany, and when early in 1194 he warned John that "the Devil was loose" at last, he was besieging the great fortress of Verneuil on the Norman frontier. When Richard landed at Barfleur in May, amid the ringing of bells and processions singing "God has come again in his strength," it is small wonder that he came breathing vengeance and slaughter, and that the rest of his life is a record of scarcely interrupted war against the king of France. For many years he is said to have refused the sacrament lest he might have to forgive his enemy. Again and again he had Philip on the run. Once Philip lost all his baggage and saved himself by turning aside to hear mass while Richard rode by; on another occasion Richard drove the French into Gisors so that the bridge broke under them "and the king of France drank of the river, and twenty of his knights were drowned."
Such scenes, however, are only the striking episodes in a series of campaigns which are confused and complicated and do not lend themselves to clear narration. Decisive engagements were rare, each side seeking rather to wear out the other. Money was spent freely for allies and mercenaries—a contemporary called the struggle one between the pound sterling and the pound of Tours, and the advantage was on the side of the pounds sterling by reason of their greater number. There was usually a campaign in the spring and summer, ending in a truce in the autumn which the church tried ​to prolong into a lasting peace but which soon broke down in a new war. The wars were for the most part border forays, in which the country was burned and wasted far and wide, to the injury chiefly of the peasants, upon whom the burden of mediæval warfare mainly fell. "First destroy the land, then the enemy," was the watchword. Booty and ransom were the object as well as military advantages, so that even the contests between knights had their sordid side, so definitely were they directed toward taking profitable prisoners; while feudal notions of honor might cause Richard to put out the eyes of fifteen prisoners and send them to Philip under the guidance of one of their number who had been left one eye, whereupon Philip blinded an equal number of knights and sent them to Richard under the guidance of the wife of one of them, "in order," says his eulogist, "that no one should think he was afraid of Richard or inferior to him in force and courage."
The brunt of the war fell on Normandy and ultimately on the castles which supplied the duchy's lack of natural frontiers. To supplement the great interior fortresses of Caen, Falaise, Argentan, Montfort, and Rouen, Henry I began the organization of a series of fortifications on the southern and eastern borders. Henry II, we are told, improved or renewed nearly all these strongholds, and especially Gisors, the frontier gateway toward France, on which fortress the exchequer ​roll shows him expending 2650 pounds Angevin in a single year. These castles, remains of many of which are still standing, were typical of the best military architecture of their age, but they were inferior in strength and scientific construction to the great fortresses of Christian Syria, such as Krak or Margat, which seem to have gone back to Byzantine and even Persian models. A keen warrior like Richard had not spent his two years in Palestine without gaining an expert knowledge of eastern methods in the art of war, and we are not surprised to find that he had Saracen soldiers and Syrian artillery-men with him in his Norman campaigns, and that he made large use of oriental experience in strengthening his defences. His masterpiece, of course, was Château Gaillard, the saucy castle on the Seine controlling the passage of the river and its tributaries in that region of the Norman Vexin which was the great bone of contention between the Plantagenets and the French kings. Having first expropriated at great expense the lord of the region, the archbishop of Rouen, he fortified the adjacent island of Andeli and laid out a new town on the bank. This he surrounded with water and rëenforced with towers and battlements, protecting the whole with a stockade across the river and outlying works farther up. Then on the great rock above he built the fortress, with its triangular advance work, its elliptical citadel, and its circular keep surrounded by a "fossé cut almost vertically out of the rock." There was no dead angle, ​such as permitted sappers to reach the base of rectilinear walls, but instead a sloping base down which projectiles might ricochet; nor was there, as at the corners of square towers, any part of the surrounding area which could not be reached by direct fire from within. "The approaches and the fossé," says Dieulafoy, "were covered by the fire of the garrison right up to the foot of the scarp, and no sapper could touch any point in towers or walls, provided that the fortress was under the direction of an experienced commander." This qualification is important, for the new type of fortification was designed for an active defence, one might almost say an offensive defence, and not for the mere passive resistance with which the older strategy had been content. The works at Andeli, carried on largely under Richard's personal direction, occupied more than a year of labor and cost nearly 50,000 pounds Angevin, which we find distributed in the royal accounts over lumber and stone and hardware, and among masons and carpenters and stone-cutters and lesser laborers.
By the year 1199 Richard had recovered his Norman possessions save Gisors and certain castles on the border, where Philip never lost his foothold, and he had raised an effective barrier to French advance in the valley of the Seine. Strong allies were on his side, and the diplomatic situation was decidedly in his favor. Never had ​Philip been so hard pressed, and even the friendly legate of the Pope could secure for him nothing better than the retention of Gisors in the truce which was then drawn up. And then a second stroke of fortune, greater even than the captivity of 1192, came to Philip's aid. Richard, impetuous and headstrong as ever, spoiled all by a raid on an Aquitanian rebel in which he lost his life. His energy, his military skill, and his vivid personality had concealed the fundamental weakness of his position against France; his removal meant the swift fall of the Norman empire.
At Richard's death there were two possible successors, his younger brother John, whom he had designated heir, and his nephew Arthur, son of his elder brother Geoffrey and duke of Brittany. There was enough uncertainty in feudal law to admit of a plausible case for either one, but Arthur was only twelve and John quickly took possession, being crowned at Rouen in April and at Westminster in May. Arthur, however, had the following of his Bretons and, what was more important, the support of Philip Augustus, who used Arthur against John as he had used John against Richard and Richard against his father. Philip confirmed Arthur as count of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine, and soon brought him to Paris, where he was betrothed to Philip's daughter. Nevertheless the course of events at first favored John. Philip was in the midst of the great struggle with Pope ​Innocent III over the divorce of his queen Ingeborg, and a treaty was signed in 1200, by which, on giving up territory in the Norman border and in central France and paying a large relief of 20,000 marks for his lands, John was confirmed in his control of Anjou and Brittany, while a visit to Paris, where he was splendidly received, seemed to crown the reconciliation. In a position, however, where all possible strength and resourcefulness were required, John's defects of character proved fatal. No one could depend upon him for loyalty, judgment, or even persistence, and he quickly earned his name of "Soft-Sword."
Meanwhile the legally-minded Philip, while spending money freely on John's followers and abating nothing of his diplomatic and military efforts, brought to bear the weapons of law. The revival of legal studies in the twelfth century had given rise in western Europe to a body of professional lawyers, skilled in the Roman and the canon law, and quick to turn their learning to the advantage of the princes whom they served. Philip had a number of such advisers at his court, and they doubtless contributed to the more lawyerlike methods of doing things which make their appearance in his reign; but it was feudal custom, and not Roman law, that he used against John. In law John was Philip's vassal,—indeed, he had just confessed as much in the treaty of 1200,—and as such was held to attend Philip's feudal court and subject himself to its decision in disputes ​with other vassals. It might be urged that the king of England was too great a man to submit to such jurisdiction, and that the duke of Normandy had been in the habit of satisfying his feudal obligations by a formal ceremony at the Norman frontier; still the technical law was on the side of the king of France, and a suzerain had at last come who was able to translate theory into fact. In the course of a series of adventures in Poitou John carried off the fiancée of one of his barons of the house of Lusignan, who appealed to his superior lord, the king of France. All this was in due form, but Philip was no lion of justice eager to redress injuries for justice' sake. He waited nearly two years, John's visit to Paris falling in the interval, and then, when he was ready to execute sentence, promptly summoned John before the feudal court of peers. John neither came nor appeared through a representative, and the court in April, 1202, declared him deprived of all his lands for having refused to obey his lord's commands or render the services due from him as vassal. The capture of Arthur temporarily checked Philip; the boy's murder by John in the course of 1203 simply recoiled on the murderer. Whether this crime led to a second condemnation by the court of peers, as was alleged by the French at the time of the abortive invasion of England in 1216, is a question which has been sharply discussed among scholars. What has now become the orthodox view holds that there was no second condemnation, ​but a clever case has recently been made by Powicke, who, minimizing the importance of the accepted argument from the silence of immediate contemporaries, argues, on the basis of the Annals of Margam, that there probably was a second condemnation in 1204. After all, the question is of subordinate importance, for Philip's effective action was based on the trial of 1202, and by John's fate was already sealed.
The decisive point in the campaign against Normandy was the capture of Château Gaillard, the key to the Seine valley, in May, 1204, after a siege of six months which seems to have justified its designer, save for a stone bridge which sheltered the engineers who undermined the outer wall. Western Normandy fell before an attack from the side of Brittany; the great fortresses of the centre, Argentan, Falaise, and Caen, opened their gates to Philip; and with the surrender of Rouen, 24 June, 1204, Philip was master of Normandy. John had lingered in England, doing nothing to support the defense, and when he crossed at last in 1206 he was obliged to sign a final surrender of all the territories north of the Loire, retaining only southern Poitou and Gascony. Gascony and England were united for two centuries longer, but the only connection was by sea. The control of the Seine and the Loire had been lost, and with that passed away the Plantagenet empire.
The results of the separation of Normandy from ​England have been a favorite subject with historians, and especially with those who approach the Middle Ages from the point of view of modern politics and modern ideas of nationality. It all seems so natural that Normandy should belong with France and not with England. Nationality, however, is an elusive thing, and many forces besides geography have made the modern map. England in the Middle Ages had much more in common with Normandy than she had with Wales or Scotland, while in feeling, as well as in space, the Irish Sea was wider than the Channel. From the English point of view there was nothing inevitable in the loss of Normandy. On the French side the matter is more obvious. If Paris was to be the capital, it must control the Seine and the Loire, and when it gained control of them, its position in France was assured. The possession of Normandy meant far more to France than to England. Moreover the conquest of Normandy cut England and France loose from each other. The Anglo-Norman barons must decide whether they would serve the king of England or the king of France, and they were quickly absorbed into the country with which they threw in their lot. It was no longer possible to play one set of interests against another; turned back on themselves, the English barons met John on their own ground and won the Great Charter, so that the loss of Normandy has a direct bearing on the growth of English liberty. "When the Normans ​became French," concludes Powicke, "they did a great deal more than bring their national epic to a close. They permitted the English once more to become a nation, and they established the French state for all time."
Viewed in this way, the end of Normandy almost seems more glorious than Normandy itself; as was said of Samson, "the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life." But of course in the larger sense the work of the Norman empire was not ended in 1204. For one thing, the administrative organization of the Norman duchy could not fail to exert an influence upon the French monarchy. In spite of the great progress made by the Capetian kings of the twelfth century, the Norman government still maintained its marked superiority as a system of judicial and fiscal administration, and Philip Augustus was not the man to neglect the lessons it might have for him. The nature and extent of Norman influence upon French institutions is a subject which is still dark to us and for lack of evidence may always remain dark; but there can be little doubt that Norman precedents were followed at various points in the development of the Parlement of Paris and in the elaboration of the French financial system. In the main, however, the influence was inevitably in the other direction, from France upon Normandy, not from Normandy upon ​France. There was, it is true, no sudden change. Philip respected vested interests, both in the church and among the barons, and preserved Norman customs, so that the duchy long retained its individuality of law, of local organization, and of character, and secured its rights from Louis X in a document of 1315, the Charte aux Normands, which has sometimes been compared in a small way to the Great Charter. The Coutume de Normandie persisted, like the customs of the other great provinces, until the French Revolution, but it was a body of custom worked out under the influence of the central government and gradually absorbing the jurisprudence of the king's court. If the Norman exchequer continued to sit at Rouen, it was presided over by commissioners sent out from Paris. Even that most characteristic of Norman institutions, trial by jury, was insensibly modified by the new inquisitorial procedure of the thirteenth century and silently disappeared from the practice of the Continent. As in law and government, so in culture and social life, the forces of centralization did their work none the less effectively because they were gradual, and Normandy became a part of France.
There was, it is true, a period when Normandy was once more united to England, this time as a conquered country. Between 1417 and 1419 Henry V subdued Normandy in a series of well-conducted campaigns, and he and his son remained in possession of the duchy ​until 1450. During this period of English rule no effort seems to have been made to restore earlier conditions which had now been outgrown: law, local government, fiscal organization continued unchanged. English officials were, of course, appointed, and English immigration was encouraged at the expense of the lands of the Normans who had left the province. The first Norman university was founded at Caen in the reign of Henry VI. In the face, however, of all efforts at conciliation and fair treatment the population remained hostile. The idea that the Englishman was a foreigner had grown up during two centuries of absence; it was to crystallize definitely as the conception of French nationality took form through the work of Joan of Arc. Lavisse has reminded us that this war "was not a conflict between one nation and another, between the genius of one people and that of another; nevertheless it continued, and was fierce as well as long. From year to year the hatred against the English increased. In contact with the foreigner France began to know herself, like the ego in contact with the non-ego. Vanquished she felt the disgrace of defeat. Acts of municipal and local patriotism preceded and heralded French patriotism, which finally blossomed out in Joan of Arc, and sanctified itself with the perfume of a miracle. Out of France with the English! They left France, and France ​came into existence." In this rapid growth of French national consciousness Normandy had its full share, and some of its great scenes are set on Norman soil. It was at Rouen that Joan of Arc was tried and condemned by the Inquisition; it was in the old market-place of this same city that the English soldiers discovered too late that they had burned a saint.
And so it came about that twenty years later the Normans welcomed the troops of Charles VII and passed finally under French sway. Proud of its past, proud also of its provincialisms and local peculiarities, Normandy was nevertheless French in feeling and interests, and grew more French with time under the unifying force of the absolute monarchy, the Revolution, and the modern republic. It ceased to be a duchy in 1467; it ceased to be even a political division with the creation of the modern departments in 1790. Its last survival as an area recognized by the government, the ecclesiastical province of Rouen, disappeared with the final separation of church and state in 1905. The only unity which its five departments now retain is that of the history and tradition of a common past—of a petite patrie now swallowed up in the nation.
Only at one point did the old Normandy really maintain itself against the forces of centralization, namely in the Channel Islands, those "bits of France fallen into the sea and picked up by England," as Victor Hugo calls them. These were not conquered by Philip ​or his successors, and have remained from that day to this attached to the English crown. They still have their baillis and vicomtes, their knights' fees and feudal modes of tenure. The Norman dialect is still their language; the Coutume de Normandie is still the basis of their law; and one may still hear, in disputes concerning property in Jersey and Guernsey, the old cry of haro which preserves one of the most archaic features of Norman procedure.
After all is said, it is in England that the most permanent work of the Normans survives. They created the English central government and impressed upon it their conceptions of order and of law. Their feudalism permeated English society; their customs shaped much of English jurisprudence; their kings and nobles were the dominant class in English government. Freeman could never understand those who claimed that, as he declared, "we English are not ourselves but somebody else." The fact, however, remains that in a mixed race—and all races are to some extent mixed—there is no such thing as 'ourselves'; and if the numerical preponderance in the English people is largely that of pre-Norman elements, the Norman strain has exerted an influence out of all proportion to its numerical strength. Without William the Conqueror and Henry II the English would not be 'themselves,' whatever else they might have become.
​For a more specific illustration let us come back once more to the jury. If the jury died out in Normandy, it survived in England, where it flourished in the fertile soil of the popular local courts. It spread to the British colonies and to the United States; it has in recent times been reintroduced on the Continent. But it is still the same fundamental institution, bound by direct continuity with the old Frankish procedure through the Norman inquests of the twelfth century. Wherever the twelve good men and true are gathered together, we can see the juries of Henry II behind them. In such matters the Norman influence is thus as wide as the common law; we are all heirs of the early Normans. As Freeman well says: "We can never be as if the Norman had never come among us. We ever bear about us the signs of his presence. Our colonists have carried those signs with them into distant lands, to remind men that settlers in America and Australia came from a land which the Norman once entered as a conqueror."
Our survey of Norman history might perhaps stop here; but it needs to be rounded out in two directions. We have been so busy with the external history of the Norman empire and with the constitutional developments to which it gave rise, that we have had no time to examine the society and culture of Normandy in its flourishing period of imperialism. And we have been ​concentrating our attention so exclusively on the dominions of the Plantagenets that we have left out of view that greater Normandy to the south which constitutes one of the most brilliant chapters of Norman achievement and one of the most fascinating subjects of European history. These topics will be the themes of the three remaining lectures.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The best account of the downfall of the Norman empire is Powicke, The Loss of Normandy, where abundant references will be found to further material. The general narratives of Adams, Davis, and Ramsay may also be consulted, as well as Miss Norgate, John Lackland (London, 1902). For the French side see Luchaire, in Lavisse, Histoire de France, iii, i. The fullest treatment of relations between the Plantagenets and France, down to 1199, is A. Cartellieri, Philipp II. August (Leipzig, 1899-1910), supplemented by his Richard Lowenherz im heiligen Lande, in Historische Zeitschrift, ci, pp. 1-27 (1908), and Philipp II. August und der Zusammenbruch des angiovinischen Reiches (Leipzig, 1913). For the controversy concerning John's condemnation by the court of Philip, see Gross, Sources and Literature, nos. 2829, 2833. Characterizations of Richard and John by Stubbs will be found in his Historical Introductions, pp. 315 ff., 439 ff. J. Lehmann, Johann ohne Land (Berlin, 1904), is more favorable to John. The biography of the Young King is traced by P. C. E. Hodgson, Jung Heinrich, Konig von England (Jena, 1906).
There is no general work on the English occupation of Normandy in the fifteenth century; the scattered monographs are mentioned in Prentout, La Normandie, pp. 71-76. Something may be expected from the continuation of the late J. H. Wylie's work on the reign of Henry V.
* ↑ Giraldus Cambrensis (Rolls Series), viii, p. 283.
* ↑ Salzmann, Henry II, p. 214.
* ↑ Constitutional History, i, p. 551.
* ↑ See the extracts from the chroniclers translated in T. A. Archer, The Crusade of Richard I (London, 1888), pp. 285 ff.
* ↑ Guillaume le Breton, Philippide, v, lines 316-27.
* ↑ Le Château-Gaillard, in Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions, XXXVI, I, p. 330.
* ↑ The Loss of Normandy, p. 449.
* ↑ General View of the Political History of Europe (translated by Charles Gross), p. 64.
* ↑ William the Conqueror, p. 2.
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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