Duke of Normandy

“ Thus the Norman Bruce becomes a Scot; thus the descendant of the Norman Strongbow becomes an Irishman. No men less than Normans can be conceived as remaining as a superior caste until the present time. But this alien and adventurous loyalty in the Norman, which appears in these other national histories, appears most strongly of all in the history we have here to follow. The Duke of Normandy does become a real King of England; his claim through the Confessor, his election by the Council, even his symbolic handfuls of the soil of Sussex, these are not altogether empty forms. ”

“ Along the northern coast of France, where the Confessor had passed his early life, lay the lands of one of the most powerful of the French king's vassals, the Duke of Normandy. He and his people, who constitute one of the most picturesque and curious elements in European history, are confused for most of us by irrelevant controversies which would have been entirely unintelligible to them. The worst of these is the inane fiction which gives the name of Norman to the English aristocracy during its great period of the last three hundred years. ”

“ When the news reached the Duke of Normandy "he was in his park of Quévilly, near Rouen, with many knights and squires, going forth to the chase." He had in his hand the bow, ready strung and bent for the arrow. The messenger greeted him and took him aside to tell him. Then the Duke was very angry. "Oft he tied his mantle and oft he untied it again and he spoke to no man, neither dare any man speak to him." Then he bade his men cut down the trees in the great forests and build him ships to take his soldiers to England. ”

“ The Duke of Normandy possessed a courage as ardent as, and an ambition equal to, his own; added to which he was further excited by the personal hatred he bore to Harold, whose oath to assist William to the English throne and marry his daughter had been broken on both points. ”

“ Hand to hand, not with lance but with sword, he vanquished in open conflict the champion of the rebel knights, Hardrez of Bayeux, and ere darkness fell his enemies were vanquished and in desperate flight for life, and his power as Duke of Normandy was established finally and forever. ”

“ These words, by which the Duke of Normandy let it be understood that he would rather hold the crown by the legitimate title of a general consent than by the right of conquest, were not without the effect he anticipated, both on the nobles and people, who unanimously withdrew their allegiance from the feeble Edgar, and resolved to take the oath of fidelity to a new sovereign in the camp of the Normans. ”

“ Towards the end of the tenth century, under Richard II., Duke of Normandy, called the Good, and whilst the good King Robert was reigning in France, “In several countships of Normandy,” says William of Jumiege, “all the peasants, assembling in their conventicles, resolved to live according to their inclinations and their own laws, as well in the interior of the forests as along the rivers, and to reck nought of any established right. ”

“ The power of the duke had been reduced to such a point that hardly any one obeyed him or rendered him the respect due to a prince. Almost all the barons spurned his authority and betrayed the fealty which they owed him, while they ran after the king’s gold and silver and surrendered towns and castles on every side. [120] Yet with all his success, Henry was unable to complete the conquest of Normandy in a single campaign. Even hogsheads may be drained, and the method of waging war with gold and silver, as well as with the sword, had been costly. ”

“ When he was only twenty, an age when if there be any hardness in a man’s nature it is at its worst, unsoftened by personal experience of sorrow, he spared the lives of those of his vassals who had risen against him not openly but with treachery. The manner of it was thus. Guy of Burgundy, William’s first cousin, entered into a conspiracy with many of the most powerful nobles of Normandy to assassinate the duke. It is easy to be seen what was Guy’s motive; though he could only claim through his mother, he meant to make himself Duke of Normandy ”

“ In 911 A.D. the Northmen were offered the province henceforth known as Normandy, upon condition of their acceptance of the religion and submission to the laws of the realm. Rollo, the disreputable robber-chief, took the oath of fealty to the King of France his Suzerain, and Christian baptism transformed him into respectable, law-abiding Robert, Duke of Normandy.
With marvellous facility this people took on the language and manners of their neighbors, and in a century and a half were prepared to instruct the Britons in a higher civilization. ”

“ Great stone castles were beginning to appear at all the chief places in Normandy, and when Duke Richard had succeeded Harold Blacktooth we find that the Duchy was assuming an ordered existence internally. The feudal system had then reached its fullest development, and the laws established by Rollo were properly administered. With the accession of Hugh Capet to the throne of France, Normandy had become a most loyal as well as powerful fief of the crown. The tenth century witnessed also an attempt on the part of the serfs of the Duchy to throw off something of the awful grip of the feudal power. ”

“ He ruled his duchy wisely and well, and it flourished greatly under him. He promoted learned men from other countries, above all two men who lived to play a greater part in England than in Normandy. These were Lanfranc from Pavia in Italy and Anselm from Aosta in Burgundy. They were both monks of the newly-founded monastery of Bec in Normandy, which was at this time a nursery of famous men. The Duke married Matilda, daughter of Baldwin Count of Flanders, by whom he had several daughters and, for the present, three sons, Robert, Richard, and William. ”

“ The Duke and Duchess of Normandy had still no son, but another daughter, the Princess Bonne, had been born to them.
The war with England had gone on all the winter, but in the spring of 1360 new proposals of peace were made, and this time accepted. By the treaty signed at Bretigny, May 8, 1360, King Edward renounced his claim to the crown of France, and also to the duchy of Normandy and all the inheritance of the Plantagenets north of the Loire. ”

“ When the confederated princes had separated at Conflans, Charles the new duke of Normandy, accompanied by the duke of Brittany, the count de Dunois, and other lords, set out to visit his duchy of Normandy, and went first to Mont St Catherine, above Rouen; for the whole of the country, as has been said, had submitted to his obedience. He was advised to make his public entry into Rouen on the feast of St Catherine,—and the inhabitants had made great preparations for his reception. ”

“ Scarce had the courserman, who had sped with the news to the duke's castle at Rouen, delivered his message than the boy flamed with rage, and turning to his guardian, Ralph of Wacey, captain-general of the armies of Normandy, he cried:
"Good cousin, this is not to be borne. I have done King Henry's will, and been faithful to my fealty vows, but this passeth even my bent. Fling out our standard. Summon every loyal Norman to our aid—knight and archer and cross-bowman. Cry 'Maslon!' and 'Dix aie!' [J] and let us straight against this dastard rebel at Falaise." ”

“ A merry, liberal duke was this Richard; fond of his court, and always ready to uphold Normandy's [Pg093] honor and his own when there was any fighting to be done. He had a great regard for his nobles, and we begin to find a great deal said about gentlemen; the duke would have only gentlemen for his chosen followers, and the aristocrats make themselves felt more distinctly than before. The rule of the best is a hard thing to manage, it sinks already into a rule of the lucky, the pushing, or the favored in the Rouen court. The power and reign of chivalry begins to blossom now far and wide. ”

“ Very few great baronies existed in Normandy formed of contiguous territory and capable of development into independent principalities, and those that did exist were kept constantly in the hands of relatives of the ducal house and under strong control. Political feudalism existed in Normandy in even greater perfection and in a more logical completeness, if we regard the forms alone, its practices and customs, than was usual in the feudal world of that age; but it existed not as the means by which the state was broken into fragments, but as the machinery by which it was governed by the duke. ”

“ Normandy, where the northmen had settled a hundred years before, was now growing into a great power, and it was to win the friendship of Normandy and to close its harbours against Swein that Æthelred in 1002 took the Norman Duke's daughter, Emma, to wife. The same dread of invasion gave birth to a panic of treason from the northern mercenaries whom the king had drawn to settle in the land as a fighting force against their brethren ”

“ His war with William Rufus still dragged on. Disloyal barons continued to desert to the English cause; and twenty Norman castles were said to be in the Red King’s hands. Prince Henry, long firmly established at Domfront, and now backed by the strong arm and the long purse of his older brother, had gained control of ‘a great part of Normandy’; and the ‘soft [90] duke’ had fallen into contempt among his turbulent subjects. Disobedience and disorder were everywhere on the increase, and the unarmed population lacked a protector. ”

“ To a man who was at once king of France and duke of Aquitaine it was comparatively no great matter whether the dominions of Henry I. were to be annexed to those of Geoffrey of Anjou or allied to those of Theobald of Blois. The truest interest of France, however, obviously was that England and Normandy should be divided, one of them being held by each of the two competitors ”

“ There were many reasons for the cordial welcome which Normandy extended her duke upon his return from the Crusade. The old evils and abuses of his earlier reign had doubtless largely been forgotten, while the rule of William Rufus, who had “trampled Normandy under his feet” [16] by reason of his warlike undertakings and the extreme rigor of his justice, [17] had prepared men’s minds for a milder régime. Robert’s long labors in the Holy War had brought him much prestige and made him a European figure. ”

“ Soon after, the duke won a victory of almost equal importance by the reduction of Le Homme and the capture of William Peverel and a garrison of eight hundred knights. [220]
These reverses came as a staggering surprise to William Rufus. Immediately he sent off to England and ordered the assembling of a great army of English foot soldiers—some twenty thousand, it is said—for the invasion of Normandy. But when they came to Hastings for the crossing, Ranulf Flambard, at the king’s order, took from each of them the ten shillings that he had brought for maintenance during the campaign ”

“ He is the greatest vassal of the French crown, a vassal more powerful than the overlord whose invasions of his duchy he has had to drive back.
These invasions of Normandy by the King of the French and his allies fall into two periods. At first Henry appears in Normandy as the supporter of Normans in open revolt against their duke. But revolts are personal and local; there is no rebellion like that which was crushed at Val-ès-dunes, spreading over a large part of the duchy. In the second period, the invaders have no such starting-point. There are still traitors; there are still rebels ”

“ One part of the duchy in short was altogether Romance in speech and manners, while more or less of Teutonic character still clave to the other.33 So now Teutonic Normandy rose against Duke William, and Romance Normandy was faithful to him. The nobles of the Bessin and Côtentin made league with William’s cousin Guy of Burgundy, meaning, as far as one can see, to make Guy Duke of Rouen and Evreux, and to have no lord at all for themselves. ”

“ Political Contrast between Normandy and England.—The causes which were making the English thegnhood a military aristocracy acted with still greater force in Normandy. The tillers of the soil, sprung from the old inhabitants of the land, were kept by their Norman lords in even harsher bondage than the English serfs. The Norman warriors held their land by military service, each one being bound to fight for his lord, and the lord in turn being bound, together with his dependents, to fight for a higher lord, and all at last for the Duke himself. ”

“ That Henry should have been able to land an invading army at Barfleur, advance without opposition to an unprotected village, and there delay at will in all security, is a striking proof of the defenceless condition of the duchy. The duke’s sole reliance was in his strongholds. There is no evidence that he had any force assembled to oppose the invader in the open.
King Henry had no need to hurry. While he delayed at Carentan, his supporters in Normandy rallied around him, and his forces gained greatly in strength. ”

“ The whole objection seems to have been made for fear that their doubled and extraordinary tribute should be made a precedent, but the duke promptly gave his word of honor that it should not be so, and their estates should not be permanently weighted beyond [Pg285] their ability. The scribes took down the record of the knights and soldiers that each baron had promised, and from this time there was a hum and stir of war-making in Normandy, and that spring there were more women than men in the fields tending the growing crops. ”