The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

  An example of the permeation of Danish attitudes appeared in 1049 when Sweyn murdered his cousin, the Danish earl Beorn. King Edward and his army (called here by the Chronicle) pronounced a Viking sentence of dishonour, calling him nithing.[103] An important instance of cultural penetration is again found on northern stone crosses. The theme of Sigurd the Volsung, dragon-slayer, appears at Halton, Lancashire, and three times in the Isle of Man. Perhaps the families who set up such crosses claimed descent from the royal Volsung line. A stone found at Winchester shows a wolf attacking a bound warrior who bites its tongue; the warrior here seems to be Sigurd’s father, Sigmund. This stone was found in part of the Anglo-Saxon cathedral for which Cnut was responsible. A fourth Mancross, at Ramsey, shows Loki killing the otter with a stone: a tale linked by Snorre in the Prose Edda with that of Sigurd and the dragon. The moment of the Sigurd story which the artists depicted was that in which the hero roasts the dragon-heart, is inspired when the blood touches his tongue, and hears what the birds are saying. It is a moment of initiation, of deep change, of shamanist possession. Another group of stones deals with Ragnorök, the last battle between gods and monsters. Here the Christianization of the pagan theme is easier; Ragnorök becomes the end of the world and last judgement.[104]

  We may then say that there were many similarities between Danelaw and Normandy, but also decisive differences. Above all the fact that the Normans had to adopt a new language and stop being a piratic enclave if they were to develop an effective state brought about a different orientation. Though a centralized state had developed far more in England than in Scandinavia, the Norsemen did not feel in a strange world when they settled beside Anglo-Saxons. To survive as part of a social and political system such as existed in France, the Normans had to accept the feudalizing pressure inherent in the system. With their vigour and thoroughness they developed what they took over, with more rigour and consistency than found in any Frankish region. Hence the way in which a split developed between pagan and Christian groups, between those who accepted feudalism and those who resisted it; a revolt of the free peasantry, we saw, was precipitated under Richard II. England lacked the pressures making for such sharp divisions. The danger was simply that the men of the Danelaw would support or join any invading Danes. For there were groups of settlers who remained restless and liable to turn back to their old marauding habits. But probably such groups were those who now and then went off to settle in Normandy. We get a glimpse of such groups when we are told by the Chronicle how Edward the Elder lent his aid when Turketyl, earl of Bedford, ‘fared overseas with such men as would follow him’.

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  Now back to Normandy. Under Richard I a baron’s vassal held a precarium; he was a tenant-at-will and could lose his land if the lord so wished. Perhaps later in the same reign, certainly under Richard II, the precarium became a beneficium and the tenant had rights of a less precarious kind. The hereditary principle gained ground, and the beneficium gradually merged into the feudum, descending from father to son, while the lord gained the rights of wardship. Women could inherit land; but the lord held the right to choose a husband for a vassal’s heiress; he claimed wardship over a minor heir and took a succession duty on his inheritance. Viscounts increased the scope of their powers. They commanded troops, collected revenue, administered justice, kept castles in order, but all in the duke’s name. They were given no chance to become great men in their own right any more than the barons. Private war could not be outlawed, but was strictly limited. It needed a ducal licence; the duke set its rules and claimed the right to supervise campaigns. Devastation of opponents’ property in land disputes was forbidden, as were assaults and ambushes in ducal forests. Arms, horses or property of a man captured in a bloodfeud might not be retained. A licence was needed for the building of a castle. We do not know the exact date at which many of these regulations came in, but they formed the system that was steadily extended from Richard II to William II.

  The charters show the offices of chamberlain, constable, chancellor, hostianus; and probably the dapifer or seneschal already existed. We may assume that in early days the powers of the offices were very much limited and that they slowly grew. Richard II gave £100 from his camera to redeem lands of St Benigni; and he granted the tithes of the camera to Fécamp. But the financial system was doubtless still very primitive, and we may ignore Wace’s tale that he shut himself up in the Rouen tower and went through the accounts with viscounts and provosts. We know little of the system of justice except that the duke kept a tight control of seigneurial jurisdictions. Criminal justice was early developed, though we do not hear of any method of compurgation such as was used by both Franks and Norsemen. Pirates did much to help the growth of trade, but regular systems for the exchange and sale of goods were developing, for example between Rouen and London. The fair at Caen was of some importance. Richard patronized the monasteries and so gained his name of the Good. He held his Easter assembly at Fécamp, where in a charter of 1006 he granted the abbey freedom of election according to the custom of Cluny.

  Richard III, the first legitimate son of a duke to take his father’s office, was invested at Rouen and went on to Paris to be instituted. There he was betrothed to the king’s infant daughter. But his brother Robert, count of Hiesmes, resented not being granted the town of Falaise, and his resentment was fed by a Breton, Ermenold, suspected of black magic, who was killed, however, in a duel. A group of young malcontents gathered round Robert, and he seized Falaise. Richard then beseiged the town. Robert gave in, but still didn’t get Falaise. The two brothers went to Rouen where Richard, taken ill during a feast, died. It was generally assumed that he had been poisoned; but medieval deaths in those circumstances always bred such tales.

  Robert became duke in 1027, and was called both the Magnificent and the Devil. He began with some violent quarrels with leading churchmen. His uncle Robert, archbishop of Rouen, was also count of Evreux; and it was as count, not archbishop, says Ordericus, that he took a wife. Robert besieged him in Evreux. The archbishop-count fled to Paris, where he launched the church’s anathema at his nephew and at Normandy. But he was reconciled with the duke, apparently through the French king, and later the two Roberts appear as good friends. Next, Hugh d’Ivri, bishop of Bayeux, went to France and sent home a garrison of knights for his castle. Robert blockaded the place and Hugh couldn’t get in to join his knights.

  William of Jumièges put these troubles down to evil councillors, but it seems more likely that the duke was resisting attempts by leading churchmen to achieve baronial status.

  Falaise was set on a rocky height on the right bank of the Ante, a tributary of the Dive. The castle stood on a promontory jutting into the valley opposite the Mont Mirat. Robert is said to have seen a girl, Arletta or Herleva, paddling in the Ante or dancing in the roadway. He made her his mistress. Her father, Fulbert or Hulbert, was a tanner, a Walloon by origin, born at Chaumont near Lièges; his wife was Doda. He is said to have been unpopular because of the stink his trade made and because he Added brewing to tanning. (The combination was forbidden in England.) Falaise was indeed the centre of the Norman leather trade. Herleva bore William, it is said, in the castle-keep. In a dream prophetic of the baby’s greatness she beheld her own intestines stretched out all over Normandy and England. William of Malmesbury records the legend:

  At the very moment also when the infant burst into life and touched the ground, he filled both hands with the rushes strewn on the floor, firmly grasping what he had taken up. This prodigy was joyfully witnessed by the women gossiping on the occasion; and the midwife hailed the propitious omen, declaring that the boy would be a king.

  Another prophecy made after the event may be read in the story that William Talvas of the ferociously cruel house of de Bellême chanced to call in and was shown the baby, whom he cursed: ‘Shame! through you and your line mine will be greatly brought down.’

  Though the Normans were used to alliances more Dannico, they seem to have been an
gered at the duke’s union with Herleva, perhaps because of the connection with a tannery. William Talvas revolted. The de Bellêmes had wider territories and jurisdictions than any other Norman noble family. Robert promptly beseiged Alençon; and when Talvas surrendered, he forced him to come barefooted, with a saddle on his back, to make his submission, then gave him back his lands. There were four sons. The eldest, who had murdered a cousin come on a friendly visit, had been strangled, the tale ran, by the devil. Now the three surviving sons plotted and rose in revolt. They were defeated by local troops in the forest of Blason. One was killed, one badly wounded, and the third escaped to bring the news to their father, who died of sheer fury.

  The putting-down of the ambitious clerics and of the de Bellêmes brought Robert some tranquil years during which he showed his capacities as a king-maker. Baldwin of Flanders had been driven out by his son; Robert restored him in a campaign remembered for its harshness. Then King Henry of France was driven out by his mother, who favoured a younger son; Robert invaded France and restored him to his throne. In Brittany the ruler Alan was a child. His father Geoffrey, married to a sister of Richard II, had been killed on a journey to Rome by an innkeeper’s wife who, infuriated by one of his hawks attacking her chickens, threw a big pot at his head. In 1010 came a revolt of the Breton peasants, on the same lines, it is said, as that of the Norman peasants under Richard II. Alan, helped by his mother, put it down without Norman intervention. Then, after he had had the daughter of Odo of Chartres abducted for him by the count of Rennes, he began to feel too important to pay homage en parage to Robert of Normandy. (The latter paid the same homage to the French king.) To hold Brittany as a vassal region was a key part of Norman policy, and Robert at once invaded and defeated Alan, who gave in.

  Now Robert had the two athelings, Edward and Alfred, sons of Emma and Aethelred, as fugitives from Cnut in his court. Emma seems to have disliked them, or at least to have decided to put all her hopes on her union with Cnut, discarding anything that interfered. Robert tried to get Cnut to agree to a partition on the lines of the earlier agreement between Cnut and Edmund Ironside, but he had no success. The story that he married Cnut’s sister, Estritha, we may ignore. But he was growing restless and eccentric. Perhaps the old Viking wanderlust was asserting itself, forced to take odd forms. He called a meeting of his vassals, made them do homage to his son William, and announced that he was going to Jerusalem as a poor pilgrim and a repentant sinner. To show how serious he was, he took young William to Paris, surrendered the duchy in his favour, and saw the boy do homage en parage to King Henry. Clearly he wanted very much to ensure his acceptance, but he took no steps to marry Herleva. Alan of Brittany was appointed regent.

  Reaching Rome, he acted the fool, put a cloak on the statue of Marcus Aurelius, and shod his mules with silver shoes that easily fell off their one nail. At Byzantion he swaggered into the presence of the Emperor Michael IV, bundled up his cloak, and sat on it. Michael seems to have ignored his behaviour. On going, Robert was offered his cloak by an attendant who picked it up, and rudely replied, ‘It’s not the way in our land to carry our seats with us.’ Crossing Asia Minor, he had to be borne in a litter by Negro slaves; and meeting a Norman pilgrim on the way home, he said, ‘Tell them you saw me being carried to paradise by devils.’ In Jerusalem he behaved with wild lavishness and died on his return journey at Nicaea.

  Why he didn’t marry Herleva is unclear. He is said to have disposed of her about 1034 by marrying her off to his vassal and servant Herluin, vicomte of Conteville, to whom she bore Odo and Robert (later of Mortain). By the twelfth century three types of union were recognized among Norsemen: Christian marriage carrying full rights of compensation and property for the wife; alliance with a freewoman, frilla, also involving rights, though with some legal disabilities; and cohabitation with a concubine. The story of the Norman dukes suggests that there was the same sort of system in Normandy. Robert however may have married Herleva off over quickly to Herluin and later realized that he needed William as heir. William had been born in 1027-8; and as Odo became bishop of Bayeux in 1049-50, he was probably born in the early 1030s. Once Herleva was married to Herluin, Robert could not undo the marriage and marry her himself. In any event the ducal court did not rate Christian marriage highly. What brought William such trouble was possibly not so much his bastardy as his extreme youth on his succession. The baronial unrest seized on the fact that he was nothus, bastardus, as a stick to use against him. (Isidore’s Etymology defines nothus as someone born of unlike or imperfectly matched stock.) Herleva, we may note, was a distinguished German dithematic name; Robert’s archbishop uncle was also married to an Herleva. The looseness with which the Danes in general regarded the wedding tie is illustrated by a Durham tract dealing with the fate of six vills which bishop Aldhem (990-1018) gave from the episcopal estate with his daughter Egfrith when he married her to the son of a Northumbrian earl. A genealogy of six generations is set out. Egfrith had two husbands and was repudiated by both; her first husband made two later marriages; her daughter by the second marriage, Sigred, had three husbands in succession.[105]

  Why Robert was later given the nickname of Devil we do not know. The name is linked with a tale-type about a great sinner who finally repents. In one episode the devil in the duke’s likeness ravishes the wife in a wood, and she bears Robert the Devil.

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  Now let us turn again to England. When Sweyn Forkbeard died in 1014 at Gainsborough, the crews of Danish ships in the Trent gave their allegiance to Cnut, the younger of his two sons, who had been left in command as Sweyn went south. After yet another invasion, during which he harried the Danelaw, he became king at Edmund’s death in November 1016. He rapidly built up a large empire, so that his full title was King of Englishmen, Danes, Norwegians, and part of the Swedes; but there is no sign that he attempted to work out any unifying system or to treat his dominions as a single organized state. He did not expect, it seems, that his empire would outlast him.

  We saw how Emma hastened to marry him; and he for his part no doubt welcomed the union as strengthening his position. He kept his other wife Aelgifu, an English lady from Northampton, mother of Harold I, in a position of authority in the Danelaw.[106] Possibly in ancient Scandinavia and among pre-migration Germanic tribes the man who married a king’s widow succeeded to his throne; the northern ruler had once been the husband of the goddess Freyja and the divine element was inherited through the woman.[107] That this sort of idea survived in weakened form is shown by texts suggesting that Cnut’s marriage was in harmony with old Anglo-Saxon custom. Eadbald, son of the first Christian king in England, Aethelberht of Kent, married his stepmother at his father’s death on ascending the throne; and Bede denounced him for the act. (Eadbald was a pagan.) St Augustine included among the questions to Pope Gregory the Great the problem of marriages with stepmothers in Anglo-Saxon society.[108] Queen Judith in ninth-century Wessex married her dead husband’s son.[109]

  Emma’s marriage was accompanied by an attempt to deal with surviving members of the English royal family. Edmund’s brother was taken out of a monastery at Tavistock and executed; his two young sons were deported to Scandinavia, whence they later went to Hungary. Emma’s English daughter was later married to Dreux, count of Mantes; but the athelings, Edward and Alfred, as we saw, were safe from Cnut in Normandy. When Cnut died, Harold his son by Aelgifu was elected, mainly through the support of Earl Leofric, the seamen of London, and the thegns beyond the Thames. At first a regent, he was formally king by the end of 1037. During his short reign, however, his mother was probably the real power. It was natural, no doubt, in this situation for the athelings to attempt an assertion of their claim. Alfred crossed to England with a small force. He was hospitably received, then seized by Earl Godwin and handed over to Harold to be blinded and killed. This act left a heritage of suspicion and distrust of Godwin and his line; one of the ways that the Normans justified the slaughter at Hastings was as an avenging of the Anglo
-Saxon Alfred. When Harold died on 17 March 1040, his brother Harthacnut invaded and took the crown. He seems to have regretted Alfred’s murder; for he recalled Edward, adopted him as a member of his household, and almost certainly put him forward as heir. In June 1042 Harold collapsed and died ‘as he stood at his drink’ at the wedding feast of his father’s retainer Tovi the Proud. Even before he was buried, Edward was elected king by popular acclamation in London, and was crowned at Winchester on Easter Day 1043. An invasion of Denmark by Magnus of Norway checked any Danish attack; but when Magnus took over most of the country, he claimed England by right of a treaty with Harthacnut which laid down that if either ruler died childless the other should inherit his dominions.