Charles Homer Haskins

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No land of the western Mediterranean has burnt itself so deeply into the imagination and sentiment of the English-speaking peoples. Twice has this vivid land of the south played a leading part in the world’s life and thought, once under the Greeks, of “wind-swift thought and city-founding mind,” as we may read in the marbles of Pæstum and Selinus and in the deathless pages of Thucydides; and a second time under the Norman princes and their Hohenstaufen successors, creators of an extraordinarily vigorous and precocious state and a brilliant cosmopolitan culture. ”

“ With the widening of the historical field, southern Italy and Sicily no longer occupy, as in Mediterranean days, the centre of the historic stage, and the splendor of their early history has been dimmed by earthquake and fever, by economic distress, and by the debasing traditions of centuries of misrule. Neither in language nor race nor political traditions does England recognize relationship between the country of the Black Hand and the ‘mother of parliaments.’ Yet if the English world has lost the feeling of kinship for the people of the south, it has not lost feeling for the land. ”

“ 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 Provençal 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. ”

“ Many people are of the opinion that the only history which matters is modern history, and the more modern the better because the nearer to ourselves and our time. To such everything is meaningless before the French Revolution or the Franco-Prussian War—or perhaps the War of 1914. To those who care only for their own time the past has no perspective; as a distinguished maker and writer of history has said, James Buchanan and Tiglath-Pileser become contemporaries. ”

“ Only because the duke was strong at home could he hope to be strong abroad, only because he was master of an extraordinarily vigorous, coherent, and well-organized state in Normandy could he attempt the at first sight impossible task of conquering a kingdom and the still greater task of organizing it under a firm government. We must take account, not only of the weakness of England, but also of the strength of Normandy, stronger than any of its continental neighbors, stronger even than royalty itself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Just as, in Henry James’s phrase, the English landscape is a landlord’s landscape, and the French a peasant’s, so the mairie and the préfecture, the public garden and the public band, the café and the ever-open church, the workman’s blouse and the grandam’s bonnet, remind us continually that we are in a Latin country and on our way to Paris. ”

“ King in England, duke in Normandy, count in Anjou and Maine, duke again in Aquitaine, Henry ruled each of his dominions as its feudal lord—very much as if the German Emperor to-day combined in himself the titles of king of Prussia and of Bavaria, grand duke of Baden, duke of Brunswick, prince of Waldeck, and so on throughout the members of the German confederation. Such a government is not an empire in the sense of the ancient Roman or the modern British empires, for it has no dependencies. ”

“ If we look only to the scale of a man’s acts without regard to their moral character, we must hail in the victor of Val-ès-dunes, of Varaville, and of Senlac, in the restorer of Normandy, the Conqueror of England, one who may fairly claim his place in the first rank of the world’s greatest men. No man ever did his work more thoroughly at the moment; no man ever left his work behind him as more truly an abiding possession for all time.... ”

“ It is contrary to our prejudices that a single state should be formed out of the hard-headed Norman, the Celtic fisherman of the Breton coast,—the ‘Pêcheur d’Islande’ of a later day,—the Angevin, Tourangeau, Poitevin, the troubadour of Aquitaine, and the Gascon of the far south, with his alien blood and non-Aryan language, already a well-marked type whose swaggering gasconades foreshadow the d’Artagnan of the Three Musketeers and the ‘cadets de Gascogne’ of Cyrano de Bergerac. ”

“ There is, one may object, nothing monastic in this wonderful pæan of mediæval knighthood, whose religion is that of the God of battles who has never lied, and whose hero meets death with his face toward Spain and his imperishable sword beneath him; but knights and monks had more in common than was once supposed, and we are coming to see that the monasteries, especially the monasteries of the great highways, had a large share in the making, if not in the final writing, of the mediæval epic as well as the mediæval chronicles. ”

“ 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. [8]
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. ”

“ There, as a result of the prayers of the faithful, one may see the sick and infirm rise whole from their wagons, the dumb open their mouths to the praise of God, the possessed recover a sane mind. The priests who preside over each wagon are seen exhorting all to repentance, confession, lamentations, and the resolution of a better life, while old and young and even little children, prostrate on the ground, call on the Mother of God and utter to her, from the depth of their hearts, sobs and sighs, with words of confession and praise. ”

“ Only a formal and mechanical view of history seeks to ticket off particular races against particular regions as the sole sources of population and power; only false national pride conceives of any people as continually in the vanguard of civilization. Races are mixed things, institutions and civilization are still more complex, and no people can claim to be a unique and permanent source of light and strength. ”

“ The Norman landscape also gives us the feeling of finish and repose and the sentiment of a rich past, not merely in the obvious externals of crumbling wall and ivied tower, but in that deeper sense of a people bound from immemorial antiquity to the soil, adapted to every local difference through long generations of use and wont, in an intimate union of man and nature which makes the Norman inseparable from his land. ”

“ His biographer, however, does not let himself wander to tell of others’ deeds, and while his work contains material of much importance for the general history of the time, its chief value lies in its reflection of the life of the age and its faithful portrait of the man himself—soldier of fortune, gentleman-adventurer if you will, but always loyal, honorable, straightforward, and true, by the standards of his time a man without fear and without reproach. ”

“ Brilliant but ephemeral, precocious but lacking in permanent results—such are the judgments commonly passed upon the Sicilian kingdom and its civilization. At best the kingdom seems to reach no farther than Frederick II, and of him Freeman has said that, though qualified by genius to start some great movement or begin some new era, he seemed fated to stand at the end of everything which he touched the mediæval empire, the Sicilian kingdom, the Norman-Hohenstaufen line. ”

“ Modern Germany owes more to Martin Luther than to Nietzsche, more to Charles the Great, who eleven hundred years ago conquered and civilized the Saxons and began the subjugation of the Slavs, than to many a more modern figure in the Sieges-allee at Berlin. Our method of reckoning time and latitude by sixtieths owes less to the contemporaries of James Buchanan than to those of Tiglath-Pileser. If we must apply material standards to history, we must consider the mass as well as the square of the distance. ”

“ 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. [5]
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. ”

“ Henry is not a national figure, either English or French; he is international, if not cosmopolitan. Only from the point of view of later times can we associate him peculiarly with English history, when after the collapse of the Norman empire under his sons, the permanent influence of his work continued to be felt most fully in England.
Both as a man and as a ruler, the figure of Henry II has come down to us distorted by the loves and hates of an age of the most violent and bitter controversy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If one were tempted to ascribe the successes of the Normans in England to happy accident or to the unique personality of William the Conqueror, the story of Norman achievement in the south, the work of scattered bands of simple barons without any assistance from the reigning dukes, would be conclusive proof of the creative power of the Norman genius for conquest and administration. ”

“ Diplomat, warrior, leader of men, William was preëminently a statesman, and it was his organizing genius which "turned the defeat of English arms into the making of the English nation." This talent for political organization was, however, no isolated endowment of the Norman duke, but was shared in large measure by the Norman barons, as is abundantly shown by the history of Norman rule in Italy and Sicily. For William and for his followers the conquest of England only gave a wider field for qualities of state-building which had already shown themselves in Normandy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There an old and rich civilization has subsisted in its entirety, founded on the soil, through whose power have resisted and endured the speech, the traditions, and the peoples of ancient times." [1] Conquered and colonized by the sea-rovers of the north, the land of Normandy was able to absorb its conquerors into the law, the language, the religion, and the culture of France, where, as Sorel says, their descendants now preserve "their attachment to their native soil, the love of their ancestors, the respect for the ruins of the past, and the indestructible veneration for its tombs." ”

“ Welcoming merchants and strangers of every land and race, containing within itself organized communities of Greeks, Mohammedans, and Jews, each with its own churches, mosques, or synagogues, the Palermo of the twelfth century was a great cosmopolitan city and the natural centre of a Mediterranean art. Midway between Cordova and Constantinople, between Africa and Italy, it laid them all under contribution. ”