The Normans: From Raiders to Kings

by Lars Brownworth

  If Rollo distinguished himself at Paris, it was in his determination. When it became apparent that an early victory wasn’t possible, many of the Norse began to drift away towards easier targets. By March of the next year, morale among the Vikings was so low that the nominal leader, Sigfred, reduced his demand to sixty pounds of silver – a far cry from Ragnar’s six thousand – to lift the siege. However, a rumor that the Frankish emperor, Charles the Fat, was on his way with a relief army stiffened the will of the Parisians and they refused. Sigfred held out another month, and then gave up, leaving Rollo and the other lesser leaders on their own.

  The Frankish army finally arrived in October, eleven months after the siege began, and scattered what was left of the Vikings. Rollo’s men were surrounded to the north of Paris at Montmartre, but Charles the Fat decided to negotiate instead of attack. The province of Burgundy was currently in revolt, and Charles was hardly a successful military commander. In exchange for roughly six hundred pounds of silver, Rollo was sent off to plunder the emperor’s rebellious vassal.

  It was an agreement that suited both of them, but for Rollo, the dream of Paris was too strong to resist. In the summer of 911 he returned and made a wild stab for it, hoping smaller numbers would prevail where the great army had failed. Not surprisingly, Paris proved too hard to take, so Rollo decided to try his luck with the more reasonable target of Chartres.

  The Frankish army had been alerted to the danger and they marched out to meet the Vikings in open battle. A ferocious struggle ensued, but just when the Vikings were on the point of winning, the gates flew open and the Bishop of Chartres came roaring out, cross in one hand, relic in the other, and the entire population streaming out behind him. The sudden arrival turned the tide, and by nightfall Rollo was trapped on a hill to the north of the city. The exhausted Franks decided to finish the job the next morning and withdrew, but the crafty Viking was far from beaten. In the middle of the night he sent a few handpicked men into the middle of the Frankish camp and had them blast their war horns as if an attack were underway. The Franks woke up in a panic, some scrambling for their swords, the rest scattering in every direction. In the confusion the Vikings slipped away.

  With the dawn, the Frankish courage returned, and they hurried to trap the Vikings before they could board their ships, but again Rollo was prepared. Slaughtering every cow and horse he could find, the Viking leader built a wall of their corpses. The stench of blood unnerved the horses of the arriving French, and they refused to advance. The two sides had reached an effective stalemate, and it was at this point that the French king,10 Charles the Simple, made Rollo an astonishing offer. In exchange for a commitment to convert to Christianity, and a promise to stop raiding Frankish territory, Charles offered to give Rollo the city of Rouen and its surrounding lands.

  The proposal outraged Frankish opinion, but both sides had good reason to support it. The policy of trying to buy off the Vikings had virtually bankrupted the Frankish Empire. More than a hundred and twenty pounds of silver had disappeared into Viking pockets, an amount which was roughly one-third of the French coins in circulation. There was simply no more gold or silver to mint coins, and the population was growing resistant to handing over their valuables to royal tax collectors. Even worse for Charles, the Viking raids had seriously undermined his authority. It was impossible for the sluggish royal armies to respond to the Viking hit and run tactics, and increasingly his subjects put their trust in local lords who could offer immediate protection rather than some distant, unresponsive central government. The authority of the throne had collapsed, and now it was the feudal dukes who held real power. If Charles allowed another siege of Paris he would lose his throne as well. Here, however, was a solution that promised to make all the headaches go away. Who better to stop Viking attacks than the Vikings themselves? By gaining land they would be forced to stop other Vikings from plundering it. The nuisance of coastal defense would be Rollo’s problem, and Charles could focus on other things.

  For his part, Rollo was also eager to accept the deal. Like most Vikings he had probably gone to sea around age fifteen and now, perhaps in his fifties, he was ready to settle down. Local resistance was becoming stronger, and there was little more to be gained in spoils. After decades of continuous raiding the coasts were virtually abandoned, and wandering further inland risked being cut off from the ships. This was an opportunity to reward his men with the valuable commodity of land and to become respectable in the process. Rollo jumped at the chance.

  The Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, as it came to be known, created the Terra Normanorum – the land of the Northmen. This treaty of the Northman’s Duchy, or Normandy, was formally agreed to at a meeting between the two protagonists. The Viking warlord agreed to be baptized together with his entire army, and to perform the ceremonial act of homage to King Charles. Unfortunately, this last part was carried out with a certain lack of grace.

  The traditional manner of recognizing a feudal lord was to kiss the royal foot, but Rollo wasn’t about to do any such thing. When Charles stuck out his foot, Rollo ordered one of his warriors to do the deed for him. The huge Norseman grabbed the king’s foot and yanked it up to his mouth, sending the hapless monarch sprawling onto his back. It was, had they only known, a fitting example of the future relationship of the Norman dukes to their French overlords.

  Charles hoped that his grant of land was a temporary measure that could be reclaimed later. Such things had been done before and they never lasted beyond a generation. In Rollo, however, he had unwittingly found a brilliant adversary. Rollo instantly recognized what he had; a premier stretch of northern France with some of the finest farmland in the country. His genius – and that of his descendants – was a remarkable ability to adapt, and in the next decade he managed to pull off the extraordinary feat of transforming a footloose band of raiders into successful knights and landowners.

  Rollo understood, in a way that most of those around him did not, that to survive in his new home he had to win the loyalty of his French subjects. That meant abandoning most of his Viking traditions, and blending in with the local population. He took the French name Robert, married a local woman, and encouraged his men to do the same. Within a generation the Scandinavian language had been replaced by French, and Norse names had virtually died out.

  However, the Normans never quite forgot their Viking ancestry. St Olaf, the legendary Scandinavian king who became Norway’s patron saint, was baptized at Rouen, and as late as the eleventh century the Normans were still playing host to Viking war bands. But they were no longer the raiders of their past, and that change was most clearly visible in their army. Viking forces fought on foot, but the Normans rode into their battles mounted. Charges from their heavy cavalry would prove irresistible, and carry the Normans on a remarkable tide of conquest that stretched from the north of Britain to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean.

  One final change took longer to sink in, but was no less profound. Christianity, with its glittering ceremonies and official pageantry, appealed to Rollo probably more out of a sense of opportunity than conviction. His contemporaries could have been forgiven for thinking that Odin had given way to Christ suspiciously easily.11 The last glimpse we get of Rollo is of a man hedging his bets for the afterlife. Before donating a hundred pounds of gold to the Church, he sacrificed a hundred prisoners to Odin.

  Christianity may have sat lightly on that first generation of Normans, but it took deep root among Rollo’s descendants. There was something appealing to their Viking sensibilities about the Old Testament - even if the New Testament with its turning the other cheek wasn’t quite as attractive - and they took their faith seriously. When the call came to aid their oppressed brothers in the East, they would immediately respond; Norman soldiers provided much of the firepower of the First Crusade.

  When Rollo finally died around 930, he left his son an impressive legacy. He had gone a long way towards turning his Viking followers into Normans, and turning an occup
ied territory into a legitimate state. For all that, however, troubling clouds loomed on the horizon. Normandy’s borders were ill-defined, and it was surrounded by predatory neighbors. Its powerful nobles had bowed to the will of Rollo while he was alive, but they saw little reason why they should extend the same loyalty to his son. Most worrisome of all was the French crown, which eyed Rouen warily and was always looking for an excuse to reclaim its lost territory.

  Rollo had laid the foundation, but whether Normandy would prosper, or even survive at all, was up to his descendants.

  Chapter 2

  Building a Dukedom

  Rollo’s death left the young duchy at a crossroads. Succession from father to son wasn’t an established fact, and while Rollo’s eldest child William Longsword – by now a thirty-four-year-old veteran – was the obvious candidate, Viking leadership had to be won.

  Although Rollo had been the unquestioned leader, his last years hadn’t been triumphant. Expansion to the east had largely been stopped by the powerful neighboring Count of Flanders, and William Longsword proved to be a handy scapegoat. Several rebellions against his authority had to be brutally suppressed before he could assert control. Much of the resistance came from his adoption of the surrounding culture. Rollo may have encouraged the embrace of local traditions, but William abandoned his heritage with unseemly haste. He married a direct descendant of Charlemagne, swore fealty to the French king, and had even started calling himself ‘Count of Rouen’.

  This last bit was typical Norman bluster. The title that the treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte accorded was a simple Latin ‘princeps’, in this case nothing more than the generic ‘leader’. By adopting a Frankish title, William not only confirmed his subjects’ worst fears about his Gallicizing tendencies, but also alarmed Arnulf, the formidable Flemish count.

  The struggle to halt the Norman advance had been a hard one, and Arnulf had no desire to see it begin again under an ambitious new leader. When William made the mistake of intervening in Flemish politics, Arnulf decided to permanently destabilize the troublesome province. Pretending that he wanted to make peace, he lured William to an island to discuss their differences, then had him assassinated.

  Not content with merely killing its leader, Arnulf twisted the knife further by then inviting the French king, Louis IV, to invade. William’s son, Richard I, was only nine years old, and clearly incapable of any organized resistance. The armies of Louis and Arnulf swept into Rouen, took Richard hostage and sent him off as a trophy to the king’s court.

  That would have been the end for Normandy if it were not for the mutual disgust King Louis and Arnulf felt for each other. Before long, Arnulf had withdrawn in a huff, and without Flemish support Louis’ position was hopeless. When a Norman force counter-attacked Rouen, he not only lost the battle but managed to get himself captured in the process. The delighted Normans exchanged him for their captive count, sending the humiliated monarch back to his capital, chastened, if not wiser. Richard I returned to Rouen in triumph, and at the tender age of thirteen took control of his inheritance. He ruled for the next forty-nine years.

  The problems facing the new count were enough to demoralize a grown man, but he threw himself into his work with a heedless abandon that earned him the nickname ‘the Fearless’. He quickly proved far more adept on the Frankish stage than his father had ever been. When the French king decided to threaten Normandy again, Richard invited some Danish Vikings to pillage the upper Seine Valley. After a few weeks of such treatment the king got the message and offered peace. Richard, however, wanted a more permanent solution. The Carolingian kings descended from Charlemagne would always be hostile to upstart Normandy, so he helped an ambitious noble named Hugh Capet to seize the throne, helping to establish the Capetian line of kings that would last for over three hundred years. All in all, it was a stunning reversal of fortune for one who had started his political career as a prisoner of a Carolingian king.

  Richard next turned his attention to internal affairs. One of the duties of a Christian prince was to look after his subjects’ spiritual well-being, and the church in Normandy was in an appalling state. The turmoil of the previous century had left most of its monastic houses abandoned, and driven priests from their parishes. Over the next few decades Richard re-founded monastic communities at Mont St-Michel, Fécamp and Evreux, and imported reforming monks from across Europe to fill them. As a signal of how important the Church was he even appointed his younger son to the See of Rouen – a tradition that virtually every reigning member of his family would continue. Since education was largely in the hands of the church, literacy slowly began to recover. It is mostly from his foundation at Fécamp that we get the earliest records of the Norman dynasty.

  As Norman prestige grew with the influx of clergy, Richard gradually became dissatisfied with the title of ‘Count’. At first he tried out the old Roman ‘Consul’ then switched to the more formal ‘Marquis’. Soon, however, he had his eyes on an even more prestigious appellation. Hugh Capet had been a Duke – a title reserved for the greatest of the Franks – and since he had vacated it on assuming the mantle of king, Richard appropriated it for himself. Neighboring chroniclers (rolling their eyes no doubt) referred to him as the ‘Duke of the Pirates’, but nonetheless, the title stuck.

  By the fall of 996 Richard the Fearless had spent half a century in power and was in failing health. At sixty-three he had lived longer than most of his contemporaries and few expected him to survive much longer. While in Bayeux he fell ill and moved to his favorite castle in Fécamp. There he solemnly chose a successor and walked barefoot to the nearby abbey where he received communion and asked to be buried on the portico. The next night a sudden seizure struck him and he was dead by the time his attendants reached him.

  He had been a formidable duke, and Normandy owed much of its firm foundations to him. While Normandy had been largely Christianized and feudalized under his leadership, perhaps his greatest accomplishment had been to convince his Scandinavian subjects that the principle of legitimacy, of son succeeding father, was far preferable to the instability of rule by the strongest.

  His reign is also the great dividing line in early Norman history. The reigns of Rollo and William Longsword are shadowy at best, long on legend and short on facts. Thanks to Richard’s patronage of the Church, however, the monks returned to their Chronicles, and contemporary accounts multiplied. With Richard the mists of legend part and Normandy emerges into the historical record.

  The Normans certainly appreciated their long-lasting duke; they virtually canonized him. He was remembered glowingly as a sustainer of the poor, a guardian of orphans, a defender of widows and a redeemer of captives. Later legends even had him wandering Rouen at night, confronting demons outside dark churches. The greatest tribute to him, however, was composed a century after his death. In the Song of Roland, the great French epic about Charlemagne, he appears as ‘Richard the Old’, complete with long white beard and clear, alert eyes. Normandy of course didn’t exist at the time of Charlemagne, but thanks to Richard, by the time the poem was written, France without a Normandy seemed inconceivable to the French.

  Chapter 3

  Inventing the Normans

  If the Normans gained a duke with Richard the Fearless, they gained an identity with his son. Oddly enough, this was in large part due to the kingdom of England. While the Norman role in the creation of modern England is well known, most are unaware that the reverse is also true. England played a crucial role in the creation and defining of Normandy.

  The British Isles had not only born the brunt of the first Viking raids in the eighth century but had proved so tempting to the Norse that a great Viking army had invaded with the intention of completely conquering it. The Anglo-Saxons were hampered by the fact that they were split into several kingdoms at the time (seven is the traditional number) and within a few years the Vikings had managed to conquer all but the southern kingdom of Wessex. It seemed only a matter of time before that fell as well
, but fortunately for the Anglo-Saxons, the king of Wessex was a brilliant strategist named Alfred and he managed to fight the Vikings to a standstill. During his reign he turned the balance of power in his favor and slowly but surely pushed back the Norse invaders. He was so successful that he earned the epithet ‘the Great’, the only English monarch to accomplish that thus far. Alfred’s greatest accomplishment, however, was that he convinced the Vikings that England was no longer a land of such easy pickings. As a result, the next wave of invaders, which included the adventurer Rollo, decided to try their luck in France.

  Alfred’s grandson Æthelstan continued his father’s efforts, even extending English control into Scotland where he received the submission of the Scottish king and declared himself ‘King of all Britain’. Under a strong monarchy, commerce replaced raiding, and by the time Richard I was reigning in Normandy, England was fabulously wealthy. It did not, however, have a surplus of leaders, as the English were quick to find out.

  A fresh wave of Viking activity hammered northern Europe and the British Isles, and the English king Ethelred fell back on the tried �� and disastrous – method of buying the Norse off. This won him the unflattering nickname ‘Ethelred the Unready’.12 Raiders that had come in search of plunder discovered an endless supply of easy money. All they had to do was burn a few villages and wait for the king’s representative to show up with gold to buy them off

  Ethelred’s treasury couldn’t handle the strain of constant Viking payments, so he levied a special tax called the ‘danegeld’ (literally ‘Viking money’) to pay for it. This would possibly have been acceptable to the common man (who was paying it) had it been effective, but the danegeld only made things worse. Not only was it tremendously expensive, but since it tended to draw invaders instead of discourage them, it was also completely demoralizing.