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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Normans
in European history
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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Title: The Normans in European history

Author: Charles Homer Haskins

Release date: December 26, 2023 [eBook #72514]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915

Credits: Brian Wilson, Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file
was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE

NORMANS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY ***
THE NORMANS IN EUROPEAN
HISTORY
 THE NORMANS IN
EUROPEAN HISTORY
BY
CHARLES HOMER HASKINS
GURNEY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
 COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY CHARLES HOMER HASKINS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE

THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM

Published October 1915

TO MY WIFE
 PREFACE
THE eight lectures which are here published were delivered before
the Lowell Institute in February, 1915, and at the University of
California the following July, and it has seemed best to print them in
the form in which they were prepared for a general audience. Their
purpose is not so much to furnish an outline of the annals of Norman
history as to place the Normans in relation to their time and to
indicate the larger features of their work as founders and organizers
of states and contributors to European culture. Biographical and
narrative detail has accordingly been subordinated in the effort to
give a general view of Norman achievement in France, in England,
and in Italy. Various aspects of Norman history have been treated
with considerable fullness by historians, but, so far as I am aware, no
connected account of the whole subject has yet been attempted from
this point of view. This fact, it is hoped, may justify the publication of
these lectures, as well as explain the omission of many topics which
would naturally be treated in an extended narrative.
This book rests partly upon the writings of the various scholars
enumerated in the bibliographical note at the end of each chapter,
partly upon prolonged personal investigations, the results of which
have appeared in various special periodicals and will, in part, soon
be collected into a volume of Studies in Norman Institutions. When it
seemed appropriate in the text, I have felt at liberty to draw freely
upon the more general portions of these articles, leaving more
special and critical problems for discussion elsewhere.
I wish to thank the authorities of the Lowell Institute and the
University of California, and to acknowledge helpful criticism from my
colleague Professor William S. Ferguson and from Mr. George W.
Robinson, Secretary of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of
Harvard University. My indebtedness to Norman scholars and
Norman scholarship is deeper and more personal than any list of
their names and writings can indicate.
Charles H. Haskins.
Cambridge, Mass.
August, 1915.
 CONTENTS
I. NORMANDY AND ITS PLACE IN HISTORY 1
II. THE COMING OF THE NORTHMEN 26
III. NORMANDY AND ENGLAND 52
IV. THE NORMAN EMPIRE 85
V. NORMANDY AND FRANCE 116
VI. NORMAN LIFE AND CULTURE 148
VII. THE NORMANS IN THE SOUTH 192
VIII. THE NORMAN KINGDOM OF SICILY 218
INDEX 251
 THE NORMANS IN EUROPEAN
HISTORY

I
NORMANDY AND ITS PLACE IN HISTORY

IN June, 1911, at Rouen, Normandy celebrated the one-thousandth

anniversary of its existence. Decorated with the grace and simplicity of
which only a French city is capable, the Norman capital received with
equal cordiality the descendants of the conquerors and the conquered
—Norwegians and Swedes, Danes of Denmark and Danes of Iceland,
Normans of Normandy and of England, of Sicily and of Canada. Four
Norwegian students accomplished the journey from their native fjords
in an open Viking boat, having set ashore early in the voyage a
comrade who had so far fallen away from the customs of his ancestors
as to sleep under a blanket. From the United States bold
Scandinavians, aided by the American Express Company, brought
from Minnesota the Kensington rune stone, which purports to prove
the presence of Norse explorers in the northwest one hundred and
thirty years before the landfall of Columbus. A congress of Norman
history listened for nearly a week in five simultaneous sections to
communications on every phase of the Norman past. There was
Norman music in the streets, there were Norman plays at the theatres,
Norman mysteries in the cathedral close. Banquet followed banquet
and toast followed toast, till the cider of Normandy paled before the
champagne of France. Finally a great pageant, starting, like the city,
from the river-bank, unrolled the vast panorama of Norman history
through streets whose very names reëcho its great figures—Rollo and
his Norse companions arriving in their Viking ships, the dukes his
successors, William Longsword, Richard the Fearless, Robert the
Magnificent, William the Conqueror, the sons of Tancred of Hauteville
who drove the paynim from Sicily, and that other Tancred who planted
the banner of the cross on the walls of Jerusalem, all with their knights
and heralds and men at arms, followed by another pageant of the
achievements of Normandy in the arts of peace. And on the last
evening the great abbey-church of Saint-Ouen burnt red fire for the
first time in its history till the whole mass glowed and every statue and
storied niche stood out with some clear, sharp bit of the Norman past,
while its lantern-tower, “the crown of Normandy,” shone out over the
city and the river which are the centre of Norman history and where
this day the dukes wore again their crown.
In this transitory world the thousandth anniversary of anything is
sufficiently rare to challenge attention, even in an age which is rapidly
becoming hardened to celebrations. Of the events commemorated in
1915 the discovery of the Pacific is only four hundred years old, the
signing of the Great Charter but seven hundred. The oldest American
university has celebrated only its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary,
the oldest European only its eight-hundredth. Even those infrequent
commemorations which carry us back a thousand years or more, like
the millenary of King Alfred or the sixteen-hundredth Constantinian
jubilee of 1913, are usually reminders of great men or great events
rather than, as in the case of Normandy, the completion of a
millennium of continuous historical development. So far as I can now
recollect, the only parallel is that of Iceland, which rounded out its
thousand years with the dignity of a new constitution in 1874. Of about
the same age, Iceland also resembles Normandy in being the creation
of the Norse sea-rovers, an outpost of the Vikings in the west, as
Normandy was an outpost in the south. Of the two, Iceland is perhaps
the more individual, as it certainly has been the more faithful to its
Scandinavian traditions, but the conditions which have enabled it to
retain its early characteristics have also isolated it from the broader
currents of the world’s history. Normandy, on the other hand, was
drawn at once into the full tide of European politics and became itself a
founder of new states, an imperial power, a colonizer of lands beyond
the seas, the mother of a greater Normandy in England, in Sicily, and
in America.
At home and abroad the history of Normandy is a record of rich
and varied achievement—of war and conquest and feats of arms, but
also of law and government and religion, of agriculture, industry, trade,
and exploration, of literature and science and art. It takes us back to
Rollo and William of the Long Sword, to the Vikings and the
Crusaders, to the conquerors of England and Sicily, to masterful
prelates of the feudal age like Odo of Bayeux and Thomas Becket; it
brings us down to the admirals and men of art and letters of the Grand
Siècle,—Tourville and DuQuesne, Poussin, Malherbe, and the great
Corneille,—to Charlotte Corday and the days of the Terror, and to the
painters and scholars and men of letters of the nineteenth century,—
Géricault and Millet, Laplace and Léopold Delisle, Flaubert and
Maupassant and Albert Sorel. It traces the laborious clearing of ancient
forests, the rude processes of primitive agriculture, the making of
Norman cider and the breeding of the Norman horse, the vicissitudes
of trade in fish and marten-skins, in pottery, cheap cottons, and strong
waters, the development of a centre of fashion like Trouville or centres
of war and commerce like Cherbourg and Havre. It describes the slow
building of monasteries and cathedrals and the patient labors of priests
and monks, as well as the conquest of the Canaries, the colonization
of Canada, and the exploration of the Great West. A thousand years of
such history are well worth a week of commemoration and retrospect.
To the American traveller who wends his way toward Paris from
Cherbourg, Havre, or Dieppe, the first impression of Normandy is that
of a country strikingly like England. There are the same high chalk
cliffs, the same “little grey church on the windy shore,” often the same
orchards and hedges, poppies and roses. There are trees and wide
stretches of forest as in few other parts of France, placid, full-brimmed
rivers and quiet countrysides, and everywhere the rich green of
meadow and park and pasture, that vivid green of the north which
made Alphonse Daudet at Oxford shudder, “Green rheumatism,” as he
thought of the sun-browned plains and sharp, bare hills of his own
Provence. Normandy is brighter than England, with a dash more of
color in the landscape, but its skies are not sunny and its air breathes
the mists of the sea and the chill of the north. There is a grey tone
also, of grey towns and grey sea, matched by an austere and sombre
element in the Norman character, which, if it does not take its
pleasures sadly after the manner of Taine’s Englishmen, is prone to
take them soberly, and by an element of melancholy, a sense of le glas
des choses mortes, which Flaubert called the melancholy of the
northern barbarians. 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. All this, too, is English, but English with a
difference. 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.
Now the history of Normandy reflects this twofold impression of the
traveller: it faces toward England and the sea, but it belongs to France
and the land. Open to the outer world by the great valley of the Seine
and the bays and inlets of its long coast-line, Normandy was never
drawn to the sea in the same degree as its neighbor Brittany, nor
isolated in any such measure from the life of the Continent. Where the
shore is low, meadow and field run to the water’s edge; where it is
high, its line is relatively little broken, so that the streams generally
rush to the sea down short, steep valleys, up which wheeze the trains
which connect the little seaside ports and watering-places with the
modern world within. In spite of the trade of its rivers and its ports, in
spite of the growth of industry along its streams, Normandy is still
primarily an agricultural country, rooted deep in the rich soil of an
ancient past, a country of horses and cattle, of butter and cheese and
cider and the kindly fruits of the earth; and the continuity of its history
rests upon the land itself. “Behind the shore and even upon it,” says
Vidal de la Blache, “the ancient cumulative force of the interior has
reacted against the sea. 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
 1
of ancient times.” 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
2
past, and the indestructible veneration for its tombs.”
If the character of Normandy is thus in considerable measure
determined by geography, its boundaries and even its internal unity are
chiefly the result of history. For good and ill, Normandy has, on the
land side, no natural frontiers. The hills of the west continue those of
Brittany, the plains of the east merge in those of Picardy. The
watershed of the south marks no clear-cut boundary from Maine and
Perche; the valleys of the Seine and the Eure lead straight to the Ile-
de-France, separated from Normandy only by those border fortresses
of the Avre and the Vexin which are the perpetual battle-ground of
Norman history—Normandy’s Alsace-Lorraine! Within these limits lie
two distinct physiographic areas, one the lower portion of the Paris
basin, the other a western region which belongs with Brittany and the
west of France. These districts are commonly distinguished as Upper
and Lower Normandy, terms consecrated by long use and
representing two contrasted regions and types, but there is no general
agreement as to their exact limits or the limits of the region of Middle
Normandy which some have placed between them. Even the attempt
to define these areas in terms of cheese—as the land respectively of
the creamy Neufchâtel, the resilient Pont-l’Évêque, and the flowing
Camembert—is defective from the point of view of geographical
accuracy!
The most distinctive parts of Upper Normandy are the valley of the
Seine and the region to the north and east, the pays de Caux, fringed
by the coast from Havre to the frontier of Picardy. Less monotonous
than the bare plains farther east, the plateau of Caux is covered by a
rich vegetation, broken by scattered farmsteads, where house and
orchard and outbuildings are protected from the wind by those
rectangular earthworks surmounted by trees which are the most
characteristic feature of the region. It is the country of Madame Bovary
and of Maupassant’s peasants. Equally typical is the valley of the
Seine, ample, majestic, slow, cutting its sinuous way through high
banks which grow higher as we approach the sea, winding around
ancient strongholds like Château Gaillard and Tancarville or ruined
abbeys like Jumièges and Saint-Wandrille,—where Maeterlinck’s bees
still hum in the garden,—catching the tide soon after it enters
Normandy, reaching deep water at Rouen, and meeting the “longed-for
dash of waves” in the great estuary at its mouth. Halfway from the
Norman frontier to the river’s end stands Rouen, mistress of the Seine
and capital, not only of Upper Normandy, but of the whole Norman
land. Celtic in name and origin, like most French cities, chief town of
the Roman province of Lugdunensis Secunda and of the ecclesiastical
province to which this gave rise, the political and commercial
importance of Rouen have made it also the principal city of mediæval
and modern Normandy and the seat of the changing political authority
to which the land has bowed. As early as the twelfth century it is one of
the famous cities of Europe, likened to Rome by local poets and
celebrated even by sober historians for its murmuring streams and
pleasant meadows, its hill-girt site and strong defences, its beautiful
churches and private dwellings, its well-stocked markets, and its
extensive foreign trade. In spite of all modern changes, Rouen is still a
city full of history, in the parchments of its archives and the stones of
its walls, in its stately cathedral with the ancient tombs of the Norman
dukes, in the glorious nave of its great abbey-church, the florid Gothic
of Saint-Maclou, the richly carved perpendicular of its Palace of
Justice, and its splendid façades of the French Renaissance; historic
also in those unbuilt spots which mark the landing of the Northmen and
the burning of Joan of Arc.
Lower Normandy shows greater variety, comprising the hilly
country of the Bocage,—the so-called Norman Switzerland,—the plain
of Caen and the pasture-lands of the Bessin, and the wide sweep of
the Atlantic coast-line, from the promontory of La Hague to the shifting
sands of the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel. It is a country of green fields
and orchards and sunken lanes, of dank parks and mouldering
châteaux, of deserted mills and ancient parish churches, of quaint
timbered houses and long village streets, of silent streams, small ports,
and pebbly beaches, the whole merging ultimately in the neighboring
lands of Brittany and Maine. Its typical places are Falaise, Vire, and
Argentan, with their ancient castles of the Norman dukes; Bayeux and
Coutances, the foundations of whose soaring cathedrals carry us back
to the princely prelates of the Conquest; provincial capitals of the Old
Régime, like Valognes, or the new, like Saint-Lô; and best of all, the
crowning glories of the marvel of Mont-Saint-Michel. Its chief town is
Caen, stern and grey, the heart of Normandy as Rouen is its head, an
old poet tells us; no ancient Roman capital, but the creation of the
mediæval dukes, who reared its great abbey-churches to
commemorate the marriage and the piety of William the Conqueror
and Matilda, and who established their exchequer in its castle; an
intellectual centre also, the seat of the only Norman university, of an
academy, and of a society of antiquaries which has recovered for us
great portions of the Norman past.
Fashioned and enriched by the hand of man, the land of
Normandy has in turn profoundly influenced the character of its
inhabitants. First and foremost, the Norman is a peasant, industrious,
tenacious, cautious, secretive, distrustful of strangers, close-fisted,
shrewd, even to the point of cunning, a hard man at a bargain, eager
for gain, but with the genius for small affairs rather than for great, for
labor and economy rather than enterprise and daring. Suspicious of
novelty, he is a conservative in politics with a high regard for vested
interests. The possession of property, especially landed property, is his
great ambition; and since, as St. Francis long ago reminded us,
property is the sower of strife and suits at law, he is by nature litigious
and lawyerly. There is a well-known passage of Michelet which
describes the Norman peasant on his return from the fields explaining
the Civil Code to his attentive children; Racine, who immortalized
Chicaneau in his Plaideurs, laid the scene in a town of Lower
Normandy. Even in his time this was no new trait, for the fondness for
legal form and chicane can be traced in the early days of the Coutume
de Normandie, while the Burnt Njal Saga shows us the love of lawsuits
and fine points of procedure full-blown among the Northmen of
primitive Iceland. If Normandy is the pays de gain, it is also the pays
de sapience. Hard-headed and practical, the Norman is not an idealist
or a mystic; even his religion has a practical flavor, and the Bretons are
wont to assert that there has never been a Norman saint. With the
verse of Corneille and the splendid monuments of Romanesque and
Gothic architecture before us, no one can accuse the Normans of lack
of artistic sense, yet here, too, the Norman imagination is inclined to be
restrained and severe, realistic rather than romantic. Its typical modern
writers are Flaubert and Maupassant; its typical painter is Millet,
choosing his scenes from Barbizon, but loyal to the peasant types of
his native Normandy. Indeed Henry Adams insists that Flaubert’s style,
exact, impersonal, austere, is singularly like that of those great works
of Norman Romanesque, the old tower of Rouen cathedral and St.
Stephen’s abbey at Caen, and shows us “how an old art transmutes
3
itself into a new one, without changing its methods.” In history, a field
in which the Norman attachment to the past has produced notable
results, the distinguishing qualities of Norman work have been acute
criticism and great erudition rather than brilliant imagination. In
science, when a great Norman like Laplace discovered the nebular
hypothesis, he relegated it to a note in the appendix to his ordered and
systematic treatise on the motions of the heavenly bodies. The
Norman mind is neither nebular nor hypothetical!
The land is not the whole of nature’s gift to Normandy; we must
also take account of the sea, of those who came by sea and those who
went down to the sea in ships; and history tells us of another type of
Norman, those giants of an elder day who, as one of their descendants
has said, “found the seas too narrow and the land too tame.” The men
who subdued England and Sicily, who discovered the Canaries and
penetrated to the Mississippi, who colonized Quebec and ruled the Isle
of France, were no stay-at-homes, no cautious landsmen interested in
boundaries and inheritances and vain strivings about the law. Warriors
and adventurers in untamed lands and upon uncharted seas, they
were organizers of states and rulers of peoples, and it is their work
which gives Normandy its chief claim upon the attention of the student
of general history. These are the Normans of history and the Normans
of romance. Listen to the earliest characterizations of them which have
reached us from the south, as a monk of the eleventh century, Aimé of
Monte Cassino, sets out to recount the deeds of the southern
Normans, fortissime gent who have spread themselves over the earth,
ever leaving small things to acquire greater, unwilling to serve, but
4
seeking to have every one in subjection; or as his contemporary,
Geoffrey Malaterra, himself very likely of Norman origin, describes this
cunning and revengeful race, despising their own inheritance in the
hope of winning a greater elsewhere, eager for gain and eager for
power, quick to imitate whatever they see, at once lavish and greedy;
given to hunting and hawking and delighting in horses and
accoutrements and fine clothing, yet ready when occasion demands to
bear labor and hunger and cold; skilful in flattery and the use of fine
5
words, but unbridled unless held down firmly by the yoke of justice.
Turn then to the northern writers of the following century: William of
Malmesbury, who describes the fierce onslaughts of the Normans,
inured to war and scarcely able to live without it, their stratagems and
6
breaches of faith and their envy of both equals and superiors; or the
English monk Ordericus, who spent his life among them in Normandy
and who says:—

The race of the Normans is unconquered and ready for any

wild deed unless restrained by a strong ruler. In whatever
gathering they find themselves they always seek to dominate, and
in the heat of their ambition they are often led to violate their
obligations. All this the French and Bretons and Flemings and
other neighbors have frequently felt; this the Italians and the
Lombards, the Angles and Saxons, have also learned to their
7
undoing.

A little later it is the Norman poet Wace who tells, through the mouth of
the dying William the Conqueror, of these same Normans—brave and
valiant and conquering, proud and boastful and fond of good cheer,
8
hard to control and needing to be kept under foot by their rulers.
Through all these accounts runs the same story of a high-spirited,
masterful, unscrupulous race, eager for danger and ready for every
adventure, and needing always the bit and bridle rather than the spur.
The contrast is not merely between the eleventh century and the
twentieth, between a lawless race of pioneers and a race subdued and
softened by generations of order and peace; the two types are present
in the early days of Norman history. Among the conquerors of England
a recent historian distinguishes “the great soldiers of the invading host
... equally remarkable for foresight in council and for headlong courage
in the hour of action, whose wits are sharpened by danger and whose
resolution is only stimulated by obstacles; incapable of peaceful