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Books. Change. Lives.

Copyright © 2021 by Catherine Bruns
Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks
Cover art by Scott Zelazny
Internal illustrations by Freepik
Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered
trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information
storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing
from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are
used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is
purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are
trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their
respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product
or vendor in this book.
Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bruns, Catherine, author.
Title: The enemy you gnocchi : an italian chef mystery / Catherine
Bruns.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Poisoned Pen Press, [2021] | Series:
Italian chef mysteries ; book 3
Identifiers: LCCN 2021003840 (print) | LCCN 2021003841 (ebook) |
(paperback) | (epub)
Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3602.R857 E54 2021 (print) | LCC
PS3602.R857
(ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003840
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003841
 Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven
Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Recipes

Excerpt from Penne Dreadful

One

Acknowledgments
About the Author

Back Cover
For my mother, who taught me to love books.
 One

When I was a young girl, I always associated the smell of Italian

food with my grandmother’s house. Tomatoes and onions. Garlic and
homemade bread fresh out of the oven. Brown sugar and melted
butter from her mouthwatering ravioli sauce. By the time I was ten,
I’d decided her kitchen must be a little bit like heaven—warm,
sweet-smelling, and full of love.
Twenty years later, as I mixed the same sauce on Anything’s
Pastable stove, I still delighted in the fragrances that brought back
fond memories of cooking with my grandmother as a child. Kitchens
would always be my happy place. But now there was a new kitchen
in my life. The kitchen of my very own restaurant.
Creating delectable dishes in my own establishment was a dream
come true. I enjoyed coming up with new recipes when I had the
time, and every week I would feature a different dinner special on
my menu. This week’s was ravioli with a pumpkin puree, ricotta and
parmesan cheese filling, covered in a brown sugar sauce like my
grandmother’s. A cozy, seasonal dish perfect for the holidays. As a
trained chef, I enjoyed making several different entrees, and this one
had always been a personal favorite to prepare, loving the smell of
the brown sugar as I mixed together the filling in a large silver bowl.
Stephanie Beaudry, my assistant, chattered on gaily about the
show she was performing in at Harvest Park’s Little Theater. My
cousin Gabby—who’d stopped over on her lunch break—and I
listened attentively. The rehearsal schedule for A Christmas Story
had left me shorthanded on a number of occasions. It was difficult
to manage everything in the kitchen on a normal night, let alone
during the busy holiday season, and my anxiety level would often
rise like dough in the oven. Sometimes I would stop and wonder
why I was putting myself through this. Then I would laugh out loud
and remember that cooking and the holiday season were two of my
greatest loves.
“Tessa, I’ve been having so much fun,” Stephanie gushed. “I
always wanted to try local theater, but of course Ryan would never
allow it while we were married.”
Gabby raised her eyebrows at me when Stephanie’s back was
turned. She was never shy about expressing her opinion. Yes,
Stephanie had already mentioned the show several times this week,
and I’d even gone to see it the week before, but I was happy that
she was enjoying herself.
“Steph, you did a fantastic job. You’re a natural on the stage. Has
Zoe been to see it yet?”
Zoe was Stephanie’s adorable six-year-old daughter, a miniature
copy of her mother with green eyes and short, curly auburn hair. She
had a sprinkle of freckles on her cheeks that I often teased her was
fairy dust, and she loved hearing it.
Seeing Stephanie and Zoe together was always somewhat
bittersweet for me. My husband had passed away last year, and
sadly we hadn’t gotten around to having children. During the last
eight months that Stephanie had been in my employment, I’d grown
fond of Zoe and envied her mother. I’d even babysat a couple of
times when Stephanie had rehearsal. Zoe loved helping me “cook” in
the kitchen. I didn’t know if children were in the cards for me, but
my mother was always quick to remind me that my biological clock
was running out of time.
“She’s coming to tomorrow’s matinee,” Stephanie answered. “If
we’re not too tired afterward, I plan on taking her to the Festival of
Lights.”
The bells on the front door jingled merrily, and I glanced down at
my watch. Two o’clock on the dot. There was usually a lull in
clientele at this time of day with only one couple in the dining room
and the dinner rush not picking up again until around four.
“I’ll seat them,” Stephanie offered. She brushed her hands on her
apron and went into the dining room.
Gabby sipped from a bottle of water. “You look tired, Tess.”
“That’s because I am,” I smiled. “Thank goodness that Stephanie
doesn’t have rehearsal tonight. And you have no idea how much I’m
looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow. I love the holiday season,
but it wears me out.”
She puckered her lips together. “Gee, I don’t know why. You work
like—I don’t know—five 12-hour days, plus you’re usually here on
days off as well. Then there’s the Festival of Lights, which you
agreed to make Christmas cookies for, and your Breakfast with Santa
event on Christmas Eve morning. You really need to stop slacking
off.” Her mouth dropped open as she feigned shock, and she wiggled
her eyebrows, making me laugh.
“Very funny.”
“Are you going to the meeting at Town Hall tomorrow afternoon?”
Gabby asked.
“Yes, I promised that I’d be there. It’s kind of weird to have one on
a Sunday, though. Do you have any idea what it’s about?”
Gabby shook her head. “All I know is that only Harvest Park
business owners are invited. The community wasn’t even told about
it.”
“It must have to do with the festival then.” The Festival of Lights
was a huge annual affair in Harvest Park, topped only by the Apple
Festival in the fall. Every year the proceeds went to a needy charity.
It wasn’t required that business owners donate something, but the
town’s merchants were generous with their money and time. “Maybe
they need more volunteers. Will you be there?” I stirred the sauce in
my stainless steel pot and then turned the burner down to simmer.
Gabby sniffed the air and sighed happily. “I’m planning on it. And
that smells so good.” She stared at me with pleading eyes. “Any
chance of grabbing some of your ravioli before I go back to the
store?”
I removed the pot from the burner and went to the freezer,
withdrawing a sealed bag full of ravioli that I’d prepared and frozen
the other day. When water in another pot reached a boil, I tossed
the pasta in. “Hmm. I suppose I can spare a little.”
She grinned. “You’re the best. Don’t tell anyone, but you’re my
favorite cousin.”
“I’m your only cousin,” I reminded her. “Well, at least in New York.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell my brother.” Her expression soured, as if
she’d eaten a lemon. “Gino’s been such a Scrooge lately.”
“He’s tired. It can’t be easy with a newborn at home, especially
around the holidays.” My cousin Gino and his wife, Lucy, had three
boys—six-year-old twins Rocco and Marco and a two-month-old baby
named Lucas who refused to sleep most of the time.
Gabby watched as I plated the ravioli and covered it with brown
sugar sauce. “It’s so great to see you happy again, Tess. I know it’s
been a tough year for you.”
Her words were an understatement. My husband, Dylan, had been
murdered fourteen months ago, and it had taken me a long time to
come to terms with my loss. Last Christmas had been depressing,
but I finally felt like I could start to enjoy the holiday season again.
“I couldn’t have done it without your help.” Of course, there was also
my mother, Gino, and Justin, a good friend of mine.
Stephanie came back into the room with an order pad in hand. She
ripped off a page and placed it on the metal wheel beside me. “One
order of your, I quote, delicioso ravioli and a glass of Chardonnay.”
She gave an exaggerated cough. “Your fan club awaits, Tess.”
A groan escaped from between my lips. “Oh no. Is that who I think
it is?”
“Yep.” Stephanie tried to conceal her grin. “Mario Russo is looking
forward to seeing, and I quote again, ‘the prettiest chef in the entire
state of New York.’”
I shook my head. “Please tell him I’m busy.”
“You know Mario won’t buy it,” Stephanie remarked. “He always
insists on seeing you when he comes in.”
The corners of Gabby’s mouth quivered. “I guess we’ll have to add
the new barista in town to Tess’s growing list of admirers. Of course,
he comes after Justin and that sexy landlord of hers.”
“I think you’re exaggerating.” I transferred more ravioli to another
plate and ladled sauce on top of it.
Stephanie sliced into a fresh loaf of Italian bread still warm from
the oven. “Vince is so dreamy,” she sighed. “Say, what’s the Italian
phrase for ooh-la-la?”
Gabby laughed. “Unfortunately, Tess and I don’t speak the
language fluently, not like our parents.”
A familiar clinking sound came from the dining room. Stephanie
pointed at me and I sighed in resignation. “Never mind. I’ll bring his
plate out myself.”
“I knew he wouldn’t give up until he saw you,” Stephanie said.
 Gabby stared from me to Stephanie, puzzled. “Mario’s making that
racket?”
Stephanie nodded. “He taps his fork against the water glass if he
thinks he’s been waiting too long.”
“He must be great at weddings,” Gabby snorted.
Mario Russo had moved to Harvest Park about three months ago
when he opened The Espresso Lane, a coffee bar located right
across the street from my good friend Archie Fenton’s Java Time. At
first, I hadn’t been too concerned since Archie’s cafe was beloved in
the community. After all, it was the longest running business in
Harvest Park. However, it didn’t take long for most of the residents
to be swayed by the cheaper prices at Mario’s shop, his bigger
selection of drinks, and the Christmas contest he was currently
running. Not me, though. My loyalty belonged to Archie. If only
Mario would take the hint.
I set the bread basket on a tray next to the ravioli, and Stephanie
handed me a wine goblet filled with Chardonnay. “I can’t afford to
be rude to him. He is a steady paying customer. Steph, you might as
well slice a piece of the tiramisu I made earlier. He always takes
some home with him.”
Gabby’s eyes lit up at the mention of her favorite dessert. “Can I
take a piece back with me? I’ll pay you, of course.”
“Don’t be silly. Steph, please wrap one up for Gabby and Liza as
well.” Liza was Gabby’s lone employee at her bookstore, Once Upon
a Book.
“You’re a doll.” Gabby grinned. “See you at the meeting tomorrow.”
“Mario is demanding,” Stephanie said in a low voice as she sliced
the cake. “But he’s also kind of cute. If you could save some guys in
this town for the rest of us Tessa, I’d appreciate it.”
Another random document with
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and at a time when national lines were not yet drawn, it is futile to fit
the inadequate evidence into one or another theory. The important
fact is that Norway, Denmark, and even more distant Sweden, all
contributed to the colonists who settled in Normandy under Rollo and
his successors, and the achievements of the Normans thus become the
common heritage of the Scandinavian race.
The colonization of Normandy was, of course, only a small part of
the work of this heroic age of Scandinavian expansion. The great
emigration from the North in the ninth and tenth centuries has been
explained in part by the growth of centralized government and the
consequent departure of the independent, the turbulent, and the
untamed for new fields of adventure; but its chief cause was doubtless
that which lies back of colonizing movements in all ages, the growth of
population and the need of more room. Five centuries earlier this land-
hunger had pushed the Germanic tribes across the Rhine and Danube
and produced the great wandering of the peoples which destroyed the
Roman empire; and the Viking raids were simply a later aspect of this
same Völkerwanderung, retarded by the outlying position of the
Scandinavian lands and by the greater difficulty of migration by sea.
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. In their dragon ships—shallow,
clinker-built, half-decked craft, pointed at either end, low in the
middle, where the gunwale was protected by a row of shields—they
could cross the sea, explore creeks and inlets, and follow the course of
rivers far above their mouth. The greater ships might reach the length
of seventy-five feet and carry as many as one hundred and twenty
men, but these were the largest, and even these offered but a slow
means of migration. We must think of the whole movement at first as
one of small and scattered bands, terrible more for their fierce,
sudden, and skilful methods of attack, than for force of superior
numbers or organization. The truth is that sea-power, whose strategic
significance in modern warfare Admiral Mahan did so much to make us
appreciate, was in the ninth and tenth centuries, so far as western
Europe was concerned, a Scandinavian monopoly. Masters of the seas,
the Northmen harried the coasts and river-valleys as they would, and
there was none to drive them back.
Outside of the Baltic, where the Danes ravaged the southern coast
and the Swedes moved eastward to lay the foundations of the Russian
state and to penetrate as far as Constantinople, two main routes lay
open to the masters of the northern seas. One led west to the
Orkneys, the Shetlands, and the coast of Scotland, and then either
south to the shores of Ireland, or further west to Iceland, Greenland,
and America. The other led through the North Sea to England, the Low
Countries, and the coast of Gaul. Both were used, and used freely, by
the Vikings, and in both directions they accomplished enduring results:
—Iceland and the kingdoms of the isles in the north, the beginnings of
town life and commerce in Ireland, the Danelaw in England, and the
duchy of Normandy.
When the great northern invasions began at the close of the
eighth century, Charles the Great ruled all the Christian lands of the
western Continent. By fire and sword he converted the heathen
Saxons of the north to Christianity and civilization and advanced his
frontier to the Danish border, so that the pious monk of St. Gall
laments that he did not conquer the Danes also—“be it that Divine
Providence was not then on our side, or that our sins rose up against
us.” And this same gossiping chronicler—not the best of authorities it is
true—has left us a striking picture of Charlemagne’s first experience
with the Scandinavian invaders:—

Once Charles arrived by chance at a certain maritime town of

Gallia Narbonensis. While he was sitting at dinner, and had not
been recognized by the townspeople, some northern pirates came
to carry on their depredations in that very port. When the ships
were perceived some thought they were Jewish merchants, some
that they were Africans, some Bretons. But the wise king, knowing
from the shape and swiftness of the vessels what sort of crews
 they carried, said to those about him, “These ships bear no
merchandize, but cruel foes.” At these words all the Franks rivalled
each other in the speed with which they rushed to attack the
boats. But it was useless. The Northmen hearing that there stood
the man whom they were wont to call Charles the Hammer, were
afraid lest all their fleet should be taken in the port, and should be
broken in pieces; and their flight was so rapid, that they withdrew
themselves not only from the swords, but even from the eyes of
those who wished to catch them. The religious Charles, however,
seized by a holy fear, rose from the table, and looked out of the
window towards the East, remaining long in that position, his face
bathed in tears. No one ventured to question him: but turning to
his followers he said, “Know ye why I weep? Truly I fear not that
these will injure me. But I am deeply grieved that in my lifetime
they should have been so near landing on these shores, and I am
overwhelmed with sorrow as I look forward and see what evils
11
they will bring upon my offspring and their people.”

From the actuality of such an invasion the great Charles was

spared, but in the British Isles it had already begun. In 787 the Anglo-
Saxon Chronicle tells us there “first came three ships of Northmen out
of Haeretha-land” [Denmark?], whereupon the reeve of the Dorset
port “rode down to the place and would have driven them to the king’s
town, because he knew not who they were; and they there slew him.
These were the first ships of Danishmen which sought the land of the
English nation.” Six years later they fell upon the holy isle of
Lindisfarne, pillaged the church sacred with the memories of
Northumbrian Christianity, and slew the monks or drove them into the
sea. In 807 they first landed in Ireland, and “after this there came
great sea-cast floods of foreigners into Erin, so that there was not a
point thereof without a fleet.” Then came the turn of the Continent,
first along the coast of Frisia and Flanders, and then in what is now
France. In 841, when the grandsons of Charlemagne were quarrelling
over the fragments of his empire at Fontenay, the first fleet of
Northmen entered the Seine; in 843 when they were making their
treaty of partition at Verdun, the Vikings entered Nantes on St. John’s
Day and slew the bishop before the high altar as he intoned the
Sursum corda of the mass. Within two years they sacked Hamburg and
Paris. Wherever possible they established themselves at the mouths of
the great rivers, often on an island like Walcheren, Noirmoutier, or the
Ile de Rhé, whence the rivers opened the whole country to them—Elbe
and Weser, Rhine and Meuse, Scheldt, Seine, Loire, and Garonne, even
to the Guadalquivir, by which the Arabic chronicler tells us the “dark
red sea-birds” penetrated to Seville. One band more venturesome than
the rest, entered the Mediterranean and reached Marseilles, whence
under their leader Hastings they sacked the Italian town of Luna,
apparently in the belief that it was Rome.
About the middle of the ninth century the number of the Norse
pirates greatly increased and their ravages became more regular and
constant, leading in many cases to permanent settlements. In 855 the
Old English Chronicle tells us “the heathen men, for the first time,
remained over winter in Sheppey,” at the mouth of the Thames, and
thereafter, year by year, it recounts the deeds of the Viking band which
wintered in England and is called simply here, the army. It is no longer
a matter of summer raids but of unbroken occupation. In 878 during
midwinter “the army stole away to Chippenham and overran the land
of the West-Saxons and sat down there; and many of the people they
drove beyond sea, and of the remainder the greater part they subdued
and forced to obey them except King Alfred, and he, with a small
band, with difficulty retreated to the woods and to the fastnesses of
the moors.” The following year a similar band, now swollen into “the
great army” made its appearance on the Continent and for fourteen
years ravaged the territory between the Rhine and the Loire. Year after
year “the steel of the heathen glistened”; in 886 they laid siege to
Paris, which was relieved not by the king’s valor but by his offering
them Burgundy to plunder instead. A century later the English began
to buy them off with Danegeld. “All men,” laments a chronicler, “give
themselves to flight. No one cries out, Stand and fight for your
country, your church, your countrymen. What they ought to defend
with arms, they shamefully redeem by payments.” There was nothing
to do but add a new petition to the litany, “From the fury of the
Northmen, good Lord, deliver us.”
 * * * * *
To the writers of the time, who could not see the permanent
results of Viking settlement, the Northmen were barbarian pirates,
without piety or pity, “who wept neither for their sins nor for their
dead,” and their expeditions were mere wanton pillage and
destruction. Moreover, these writers were regularly monks or priests,
and it was the church that suffered most severely. A walled town or
castle might often successfully resist, but the monasteries, protected
from Christian freebooters by their sacred character, were simply so
many opportunities for plunder to the heathen of the north.
Sometimes the monks perished with their monastery, often they
escaped only with their lives and a few precious title-deeds, to find on
their return merely a heap of blackened ruins and a desolate
countryside. Many religious establishments utterly disappeared in the
course of the invasions. In Normandy scarcely a church survives
anterior to the tenth century. As the monasteries were at this time the
chief centres of learning and culture throughout western Europe, their
losses were the losses of civilization, and in this respect the verdict of
the monastic chroniclers is justified. There is, however, another side to
the story, which Scandinavian scholars have not been slow to
emphasize. Heathen still and from one point of view barbarian, the
Northmen had yet a culture of their own, well advanced on its material
side, notable in its artistic skill, and rich in its treasures of poetry and
story. Its material treasures have been in part recovered by the labors
of northern archæologists, while its literary wealth is now in large
measure accessible in English in the numerous translations of sagas
and Eddic poems.
After all barbarism, like culture, is a relative thing, and judged by
contemporary standards, the Vikings were not barbarians. They rather
show a strange combination of the primitive and the civilized—
elemental passions expressing themselves with a high degree of
literary art, barbaric adornment wrought with skilled craftsmanship,
Berserker rage supplemented by clever strategy, pitiless savagery
combined with a strong sense of public order, constant feuds and
murders coexistent with a most elaborate system of law and legal
procedure. Young from our point of view, the civilization of the Vikings
had behind it a history of perhaps fifteen centuries.
On its material side Viking civilization is characterized by a
considerable degree of wealth and luxury. Much of this, naturally, was
gained by pillage, but much also came by trade. The northern warriors
do not seem to have had that contempt for traffic which has
characterized many military societies, and they turned readily enough
from war to commerce. In a Viking tomb recently discovered in the
Hebrides there were found beside the sword and spear and battle-axe
of all warriors, a pair of scales, fit emblem of the double life the chief
had led on earth and may have hoped to continue hereafter! Of trade,
and especially trade with the Orient, there is abundant evidence in the
great treasures of gold and silver coin found in many regions of the
north. The finely wrought objects of gold and silver and encrusted
metal, which were once supposed to have been imported from the
south and east, are now known to have been in large part of native
workmanship, influenced, of course, by the imitation of foreign
models, but also carrying out traditions of ornamentation, such as the
use of animal forms, which can be traced back continuously to the
earliest ages of Scandinavian history. Shields and damascened swords,
arm-rings and neck-rings, pins and brooches—especially brooches, if
you find an unknown object, says Montelius, call it a brooch and you
will generally be right—all testify, both in their abundance and their
beauty of workmanship, to an advanced stage of art and handicraft.
This love of the north for luxury of adornment is amply seen in
chronicle and saga. When the Irish drove the Vikings out of Limerick in
968 they took from them “their jewels and their best property, and
their saddles beautiful and foreign, their gold and their silver, their
beautifully woven cloth of all kinds and colors—satin and silk, pleasing
and variegated, both scarlet and green, and all sorts of cloth in like
manner.” “How,” asks the Valkyrie in the Lay of the Raven, “does the
generous Prince Harold deal with the men of feats of renown that
guard his land?” The Raven answers:—
 They are well cared for, the warriors that cast dice in Harold’s
court. They are endowed with wealth and with fair swords, with
the ore of the Huns, and with maids from the East. They are glad
when they have hopes of a battle, they will leap up in hot haste
and ply the oars, snapping the oar-thongs and cracking the tholes.
Fiercely, I ween, do they churn the water with their oars at the
king’s bidding.
Quoth the Walkyrie: I will ask thee, for thou knowest the truth
of all these things, of the meed of the Poets, since thou must
know clearly the state of the minstrels that live with Harold.
Quoth the Raven: It is easily seen by their cheer, and their
gold rings, that they are among the friends of the king. They have
red cloaks right fairly fringed, silver-mounted swords, and ring-
woven sarks, gilt trappings, and graven helmets, wrist-fitting rings,
12
the gifts of Harold.

As regards social organization, Viking society shows the Germanic

division into three classes, thrall, churl, and noble. Their respective
characters and occupations are thus described in the Rigsmal:—

Thrall was of swarthy skin, his hands wrinkled, his knuckles

bent, his fingers thick, his face ugly, his back broad, his heels long.
He began to put forth his strength, binding bast, making loads,
and bearing home faggots the weary long day. His children busied
themselves with building fences, dunging plowland, tending swine,
herding goats, and digging peat. Their names were Sooty and
Cowherd, Clumsy and Lout and Laggard, etc. Carl, or churl, was
red and ruddy, with rolling eyes, and took to breaking oxen,
building plows, timbering houses, and making carts. Earl, the
noble, had yellow hair, his cheeks were rosy, his eyes were keen
as a young serpent’s. His occupation was shaping the shield,
bending the bow, hurling the javelin, shaking the lance, riding
horses, throwing dice, fencing, and swimming. He began to waken
13
war, to redden the field, and to fell the doomed.
 Both churl and earl were largely represented in those who went to
sea, but the nobility naturally preponderated, and it is particularly their
exploits which the sagas and poems celebrate. Viking warfare was no
mere clash of swords; they conducted their military operations with
skill and foresight, and showed great power of adapting themselves to
new conditions, whether that meant the invasion of an open country
or the siege of a fortified town. Much, however, must be credited to
their furor Teutonicus, to that exuberance of military spirit which they
had inherited from far-off ancestors. Not all were wolf-coated
Bearsarks, but all seemed to have that delight in war and conflict for
their own sakes which breathes through their poetry:—

The sword in the king’s hand bit through the weeds of Woden
[mail] as if it were whisked through water, the spear-points
clashed, the shields were shattered, the axes rattled on the heads
of the warriors. Targets and skulls were trodden under the
Northmen’s shield-fires [weapons] and the hard heels of their
hilts. There was a din in the island, the kings dyed the shining
rows of shields in the blood of men. The wound-fires [blades]
burnt in the bloody wounds, the halberds bowed down to take the
life of men, the ocean of gore dashed upon the swords’-ness, the
flood of the shafts fell upon the beach of Stord. Halos of war
mixed under the vault of the bucklers; the battle-tempest blew
underneath the clouds of the targets, the lees of the sword-edges
[blood] pattered in the gale of Woden. Many a man fell into the
14
stream of the brand.

Again:—

Brands broke against the black targets, wounds waxed when

the princes met. The blades hammered against the helm-crests,
the wound-gravers, the sword’s point, bit. I heard that there fell in
the iron-play Woden’s oak [heroes] before the swords [the sword-
belt’s ice].
 Second Burden: There was a linking of points and a gnashing
of edges: Eric got renown there.
Second Stave: The prince reddened the brand, there was a
meal for the ravens; the javelin sought out the life of man, the
gory spears flew, the destroyer of the Scots fed the steed of the
witch [wolves], the sister of Nari [Hell] trampled on the supper of
the eagles [corses]. The cranes of battle [shafts] flew against the
walls of the sword [bucklers], the wound-mew’s lips [the arrows’
barbs] were not left thirsty for gore. The wolf tore the wounds,
and the wave of the sword [blood] plashed against the beak of the
raven.
Third Burden: The lees of the din of war [blood] fell upon
Gialf’s steed [ship]: Eric gave the wolves carrion by the sea.
Third Stave: 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-
15
faring.

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. The gray web of
the hosts is raised up on the spears, the web which we the friends
of Woden are filling with red weft.
This web is warped with the guts of men, and heavily
weighted with human heads; blood-stained darts are the shafts,
iron-bound are the stays; it is shuttled with arrows. Let us strike
with our swords this web of victory!
War and Sword-clasher, Sangrid and Swipple, are weaving
with drawn swords. The shaft shall sing, the shield shall ring, the
 16
helm-hound [axe] shall fall on the target.

And those who met their death in battle had reserved for them a
similar existence in the life to come, not doomed like the ‘straw-dead’
to tread wet and chill and dusky ways to the land of Hel, but—I am
17
quoting Gummere —as weapon-dead faring “straightway to Odin,
unwasted by sickness, in the full strength of manhood,” to spend their
days in glorious battle and their nights in equally glorious feasting in
the courts of Valhalla.
In his cradle the young Viking was lulled by such songs as this:—

My mother said they should buy me a boat and fair oars, and
that I should go abroad with the Vikings, should stand forward in
the bows and steer a dear bark, and so wend to the haven and
cut down man after man there.

When he grows up the earl’s daughter scorns him as a boy who “has
never given a warm meal to the wolf,” “seen the raven in autumn
scream over the carrion draft,” or “been where the shell-thin edges” of
the blades crossed; whereupon he wins a place by her side by
replying:—

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
18
men, we laid the bleeding corses to rest in the gates of the city.

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. They are calling

me home, the Fays whom Woden the Lord of Hosts has sent me
 from his hall. Merrily shall I drink ale in my high-seat with the
19
Anses. My life days are done. Laughing will I die.

Politically, Viking society was aristocratic, but an aristocracy in

which all the nobles were equal. “We have no lord, we are all equal,”
said Rollo’s men when asked who was their lord; and men thus minded
were not likely to spend their time casting dice in King Harold’s court,
even if their independence meant the wolf’s lot of exile. What kind of a
political organization they were likely to form can be seen from two
20
examples of the Viking age. One is Iceland, described by Lord Bryce
as “an almost unique instance of a community whose culture and
creative power flourished independently of any favoring material
conditions,”—that curiously decentralized and democratic
commonwealth where the necessities of life created a government
with judicial and legislative duties, while the feeling of equality and
local independence prevented the government from acquiring any
administrative or executive functions,—a community with “a great deal
of law and no central executive, a great many courts and no authority
to carry out their judgments.” The other example is Jomburg, that
strange body of Jomvikings established in Pomerania, at the mouth of
the Oder, and held by a military gild under the strictest discipline. Only
men of undoubted bravery between the ages of eighteen and fifty
were admitted to membership; no women were allowed in the castle,
and no man could be absent from it for more than three days at a
time. Members assumed the duty of mutual support and revenge, and
plunder was to be distributed by lot.
Neither of these types of Viking community was to be reproduced
in Normandy, for both were the outgrowth of peculiar local conditions,
and the Northmen were too adaptable to found states with a rubber-
stamp. A loose half-state like Iceland could exist only where the
absence of neighbors or previous inhabitants removed all danger of
complications, whether domestic or foreign. A strict warrior gild like
that of Jomburg could arise only in a fortress. Whatever form Viking
society would take in Normandy was certain to be determined in large
measure by local conditions; yet it might well contain elements found
in the other societies—the Icelandic sense of equality and
independence, and the military discipline of the Jomvikings set in the
midst of their Wendish foes. And both of these elements are
characteristic of the Norman state.
Such, very briefly sketched, were the Northmen who came to
Normandy. We have now to follow them in their new home.
We must note in the first place that the relations between
Normandy and the north were not ended with the grant of 911. We
must think of the new Norman state, not as a planet sent off into
space to move separate and apart in a new orbit, but as a colony, an
outpost of the Scandinavian peoples in the south, fed by new bands of
colonists from the northern home and only gradually drawn away from
its connections with the north and brought into the political system of
Frankish Gaul and its neighbors. For something like a hundred years
after the coming of Rollo the key to Norman history is found in this
fact and in the resulting interplay of Scandinavian and Frankish
influences. The very grant of 911 was susceptible of being differently
regarded from the point of view of the two parties. Charles the Simple
probably thought he was creating a new fief with the Norman chief as
his vassal, bound to him by feudal ties, while to Rollo, innocent of
feudal ideas, the grant may well have seemed a gift outright to be held
by himself and his companions as land was held at home. From one
point of view a feudal holding, from another an independent
Scandinavian state, the contradiction in Normandy’s position explains
much of its early history. The new colony was saved from absorption in
its surroundings by continued migration from the north; before it
became Frankish and feudal it thus had time to establish itself firmly
and draw tightly the lines which separated it from its neighbors. At
once a Frankish county and a Danish colony, it slowly formed itself into
the semi-independent duchy which is the historic Normandy of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Although Rollo was baptized in 912 and signalized his conversion
by extensive grants of land to the great churches and monasteries of
his new territories, his Christianity sat lightly upon him and left him a
Norse sea-rover at heart till the end, when he sought to appease the
powers of the other world, not only by gifts of gold to the church, but
by human sacrifices to the northern gods. His legislation, so far as it
can be reconstructed from the shadowy accounts of later historians,
was fundamentally Scandinavian in character, and his followers
guarded jealously the northern traditions of equality and
independence. His son, William Longsword, was a more Christian and
Frankish type, but his death, celebrated in a Latin poem which
represents the earliest known example of popular epic in Normandy,
was the signal for a Scandinavian and pagan reaction. We hear of
fresh arrivals on the Seine, Vikings who worshipped Thor and Odin, of
an independent band at Bayeux under a certain Haigrold or Harold,
and even of appeals for reënforcements from the Normans to the
Northmen beyond the sea. The dukes of Rouen, says the Saga of St.
Olaf, “remember well their kinship with the chiefs of Norway; they hold
them in such honor that they have always been the best friends of the
Norwegians, and all the Norwegians who wish find refuge in
Normandy.” Not till the beginning of the eleventh century does the
Scandinavian immigration come to an end and Normandy stand fully
on its own feet.
Not until the eleventh century also does the history of Normandy
emerge from the uncertain period of legend and tradition and reach an
assured basis of contemporary evidence. Throughout Europe, the
tenth century is one of the most uncertain and obscure of all the
Christian centuries. To the critic, as an Oxford don distinguished for
knowledge of this epoch once remarked, its delightful obscurity makes
it all the more interesting, but there are limits to the delights of
obscurity, and a French scholar who has tried to reconstruct the
history of this period in Spain finds that all surviving documentary
sources of information are fabrications! Matters are not so bad as that
for Normandy, for the forgers there chose other periods in which to
place their products, but there are for the tenth century practically no
contemporary documents or contemporary Norman chronicles. The
earliest Norman historian, Dudo, dean of Saint-Quentin, wrote after
the year 1000 and had no personal knowledge of the beginnings of the
Norman state. Diffuse, rhetorical, credulous, and ready to distort
events in order to glorify the ancestors of the Norman dukes who were
his patrons, Dudo is anything but a trustworthy writer, and only the
most circumspect criticism can glean a few facts from his confused and
turgid rhetoric. Yet he was copied by his Norman successors, in prose
and in verse, and has found his defenders among patriotic Normans of
a more modern time. Not until quite recent years has his fundamental
untrustworthiness been fully established, and with it has vanished all
hope of any detailed knowledge of early Norman history. Only with the
eleventh century do we reach a solid foundation of annals and charters
in the reigns of the princes whom Dudo seeks to glorify in the person
of their predecessors. And when we reach this period, the heroic age
of conquest and settlement is over, and the Normans have become
much as other Frenchmen.
At this point the fundamental question forces itself upon us, how
far was Normandy affected by Scandinavian influences? What in race
and language, in law and custom, was the contribution of the north to
Normandy? And the answer must be that in most respects the tangible
contribution was slight. Whatever may have been the state of affairs in
the age of colonization and settlement, by the century which followed
the Normans had become to a surprising degree absorbed by their
environment.

21
It is now generally admitted, says Professor Maitland, that
for at least half a century before the battle of Hastings, the
Normans were Frenchmen, French in their language, French in
their law, proud indeed of their past history, very ready to fight
against other Frenchmen if Norman home-rule was endangered,
but still Frenchmen, who regarded Normandy as a member of the
state or congeries of states that owed service, we can hardly say
obedience, to the king at Paris. Their spoken language was
French, their written language was Latin, but the Latin of France;
the style of their legal documents was the style of the French
chancery; very few of the technical terms of their law were of
Scandinavian origin. When at length the ‘custom’ of Normandy
appears in writing, it takes its place among other French customs,
and this although for a long time past Normandy has formed one
of the dominions of a prince, between whom and the king of the
 French there has been little love and frequent war; and the
peculiar characteristics which mark off the custom of Normandy
from other French customs seem due much rather to the
legislation of Henry of Anjou than to any Scandinavian tradition.

The law of Normandy was by this time Frankish, and its speech
was French. Even the second duke, William Longsword, found it
necessary to send his son to Bayeux to learn Norse, for it was no
longer spoken at Rouen. And in the French of Normandy, the Norman
dialect, the Scandinavian element is astonishingly small, as careful
students of the local patois tell us. Only in one department of life, the
life of the sea, is any considerable Scandinavian influence discernible,
and the historian of the French navy, Bourel de la Roncière, has some
striking pages on the survivals of the language of the Norse Vikings in
the daily speech of the French sailor and fisherman.
The question of race is more difficult, and is of course quite
independent of the question of language, for language, as has been
well said, is not a test of race but a test of social contact, and the
fundamental physical characteristics of race are independent of
speech. “Skulls,” says Rhys, “are harder than consonants, and races
lurk behind when languages slip away.” On this point again scientific
examination is unfavorable to extended Scandinavian influence.
Pronounced northern types, of course, occur,—I remember, on my first
journey through Normandy, seeing at a wayside station a peasant who
might have walked that moment out of a Wisconsin lumber-camp or a
Minnesota wheat-field,—but the statistics of anthropometry show a
steady preponderance of the round-headed type which prevails in
other parts of France. Only in two regions does the Teutonic type
assert itself strongly, in the lower valley of the Seine and in the
Cotentin, and it is in these regions and at points along the shore that
place-names of Scandinavian origin are most frequent. The
terminations bec and fleur, beuf and ham and dalle and tot—Bolbec,
Harfleur, Quillebeuf, Ouistreham, Dieppedalle, Yvetot—tell the same
story as the terms used in navigation, namely that the Northmen were
men of the sea and settled in the estuaries and along the coast. The
earlier population, however, though reduced by war and pillage and
famine, was not extinguished. It survived in sufficient numbers to
impose its language on its conquerors, to preserve throughout the
greater part of the country its fundamental racial type, and to make
these Northmen of the sea into Normans of the land.
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. It is no accident that the
names of the leaders in early Norman movements are largely Norse.
And finally a race of princes, high-handed and masterful but with a
talent for political organization, state-builders at home and abroad,
who made Normandy the strongest and most centralized principality in
France and joined to it a kingdom beyond the seas which became the
strongest state in western Europe.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The best outline of the beginnings of Normandy is H. Prentout,

Essai sur les origines et la fondation du duché de Normandie
(Paris, 1911). For the Frankish side of the Norse expeditions see
W. Vogel, Die Normannen und das fränkische Reich (Heidelberg,
1906), supplemented by F. Lot, in the Bibliothèque de l’École des
Chartes, lxix (1908). Their devastation of Normandy is illustrated
by the fate of the monastery of Saint-Wandrille: F. Lot, Études
critiques sur l’abbaye de Saint-Wandrille (Paris, 1913), ch. 3. There
is a vast literature in the Scandinavian languages; for the titles of
fundamental works by Steenstrup, Munch, Worsaae, and
Alexander Bugge, see Charles Gross, Sources and Literature of
English History (London, 1915), § 42. Considerable material in
English has been published in the Saga-Book of the Viking Society
(London, since 1895). On the material culture of the north see
Sophus Müller, Nordische Altertumskunde (Strassburg, 1897–98),
and the various works of Montelius. The early poetry is collected
and translated by Vigfusson and Powell, Corpus Poeticum Boreale
(Oxford, 1883). Convenient summaries in English are C. F. Keary,
The Vikings in Western Christendom (London, 1891); A. Mawer,
The Vikings (Cambridge, 1913); and L. M. Larson, Canute the
Great (New York, 1912).
 III
NORMANDY AND ENGLAND

AFTER the coming of the Northmen the chief event in Norman history
is the conquest of England, and just as relations with the north are the
chief feature of the tenth century, so relations with England dominate
the eleventh century, and the central point is the conquest of 1066. In
this series of events the central figure is, of course, William the
Conqueror, by descent duke of Normandy and by conquest king of
England.

* * * * *
Of William’s antecedents we have no time to speak at length.
Grandson of the fourth Norman duke, Richard the Good, William was
the son of Duke Robert, who met his death in Asia Minor in 1035 while
returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. To distinguish him from the
later duke of the same name he is called Robert I or Robert the
Magnificent, sometimes and quite incorrectly, Robert the Devil, by an
unwarranted confusion with this hero, or rather villain, of romance and
grand opera. A contemporary of the great English king Canute, Robert
was a man of renown in the Europe of the early eleventh century, and
if our sources of information permitted us to know the history of his
brief reign, we should probably find that much that was distinctive of
the Normandy of his son’s day can be traced back to his time. More
than once in history has a great father been eclipsed by a greater son.
The fact should be added, which William’s contemporaries never
allowed him to forget, that he was an illegitimate son. His mother
Arlette was the daughter of a tanner of Falaise, and while it is not clear
that Duke Robert was ever married to any one else, his union with
Arlette had no higher sanction than the Danish custom of his
forefathers. Their son was generally known in his day as William the
Bastard, and only the great achievements of his reign succeeded in
replacing this, first by William the Great and later by William the
Conqueror.
Were it not for the resulting confusion with other great Williams,—
one of whom has recently been raised by admiring subjects to the
rank of William the Greatest!—there would be a certain advantage in
retaining the title of great, in order to remind ourselves that William
was not only a conqueror but a great ruler. The greatest secular figure
in the Europe of his day, he is also one of the greatest in the line of
English sovereigns, whether we judge him by capacity for rule or by
the results of his reign, and none has had a more profound effect on
the whole current of English history. The late Edward A. Freeman, who
devoted five stout volumes to the history of the Norman Conquest and
of William, and who never shrank from superlatives, goes still
further:—

No man that ever trod this earth was ever endowed with
greater natural gifts; to no man was it ever granted to accomplish
greater things. 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.... If
we cannot give him a niche among pure patriots and heroes, he is
quite as little entitled to a place among mere tyrants and
destroyers. William of Normandy has no claim to a share in the
pure glory of Timoleon, Ælfred, and Washington; he cannot even
claim the more mingled fame of Alexander, Charles, and Cnut; but
he has still less in common with the mere enemies of their
species, with the Nabuchodonosors, the Swegens, and the
Buonapartes, whom God has sent from time to time as simple
scourges of a guilty world.... He never wholly cast away the
 thoughts of justice and mercy, and in his darkest hours had still
22
somewhat of the fear of God before his eyes.

I have quoted the essence of Freeman’s characterization, not

because it seems to me wholly just or even historical, but in order to
set forth vividly the importance of William and his work. It is not the
historian’s business to award niches in a hall of fame. He is no
Rhadamanthus, to separate the Alfreds of this world from the
Nebuchadnezzars, the Washingtons from the Napoleons. So far as he
deals with individuals, his business is to explain to us each man in the
light of his time and its conditions, not to compare him with men of far
distant times and places in order to arrange all in a final scale of
values. It was once the fashion in debating societies to discuss
whether Demosthenes was a greater orator than Cicero, and whether
either was the equal of Daniel Webster. It is even more futile to
consider whether William the Conqueror was a greater man than
Alexander or a less than George Washington, for the quantities are
incommensurable. So far as comparisons of this sort are at all
legitimate, they must be instituted between similar things, between
contemporaries or between men in quick sequence. When they deal
with wide intervals of time and circumstance, they wrest each man
from his true setting and become fundamentally unhistorical.
An able general, strong in battle and still stronger in strategy and
craft, a skilful diplomat, a born ruler of men, William was yet greater in
the combination of vision, patience, and masterful will which make the
statesman, and the results of his statesmanship are writ large on the
page of English history. To his contemporaries his most striking
characteristic was his pitiless strength and inflexible will, and if they
had been familiar with Nietzsche’s theory of the ‘overman,’ they would
certainly have placed him in that class. Stark and stern and wrathful,
the author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle approaches him, as Freeman
23
well says, “with downcast eyes and bated breath, as if he were
hardly dealing with a man of like passions with himself but were rather
drawing the portrait of a being of another nature.” This, the most
adequate characterization of the Uebermensch of the eleventh century,
24
runs as follows:

If any would know what manner of man king William was, the
glory that he obtained, and of how many lands he was lord; then
will we describe him as we have known him, we, who have looked
upon him and who once lived in his court. This king William, of
whom we are speaking, was a very wise and a great man, and
more honoured and more powerful than any of his predecessors.
He was mild to those good men who loved God, but severe
beyond measure towards those who withstood his will. He
founded a noble monastery on the spot where God permitted him
to conquer England, and he established monks in it, and he made
it very rich. In his days the great monastery at Canterbury was
built, and many others also throughout England; moreover this
land was filled with monks who lived after the rule of St. Benedict;
and such was the state of religion in his days that all that would
might observe that which was prescribed by their respective
orders. King William was also held in much reverence: he wore his
crown three times every year when he was in England: at Easter
he wore it at Winchester, at Pentecost at Westminster, and at
Christmas at Gloucester. And at these times, all the men of
England were with him, archbishops, bishops, abbots, and earls,
thanes, and knights. So also, was he a very stern and a wrathful
man, so that none durst do anything against his will, and he kept
in prison those earls who acted against his pleasure. He removed
bishops from their sees, and abbots from their offices, and he
imprisoned thanes, and at length he spared not his own brother
Odo. This Odo was a very powerful bishop in Normandy, his see
was that of Bayeux, and he was foremost to serve the king. He
had an earldom in England, and when William was in Normandy
he was the first man in this country, and him did he cast into
prison. Amongst other things the good order that William
established is not to be forgotten; it was such that any man, who
was himself aught, might travel over the kingdom with a bosom-
full of gold unmolested; and no man durst kill another, however
 great the injury he might have received from him. He reigned over
England, and being sharp-sighted to his own interest, he surveyed
the kingdom so thoroughly that there was not a single hide of land
throughout the whole of which he knew not the possessor, and
how much it was worth, and this he afterwards entered in his
register. The land of the Britons was under his sway, and he built
castles therein; moreover he had full dominion over the Isle of
Man [Anglesey]: Scotland also was subject to him from his great
strength; the land of Normandy was his by inheritance, and he
possessed the earldom of Maine; and had he lived two years
longer he would have subdued Ireland by his prowess, and that
without a battle. Truly there was much trouble in these times, and
very great distress; he caused castles to be built, and oppressed
the poor. The king was also of great sternness, and he took from
his subjects many marks of gold, and many hundred pounds of
silver, and this, either with or without right, and with little need.
He was given to avarice, and greedily loved gain. He made large
forests for the deer, and enacted laws therewith, so that whoever
killed a hart or a hind should be blinded. As he forbade killing the
deer, so also the boars; and he loved the tall stags as if he were
their father. He also appointed concerning the hares, that they
should go free. The rich complained and the poor murmured, but
he was so sturdy that he recked nought of them; they must will all
that the king willed, if they would live; or would keep their lands;
or would hold their possessions; or would be maintained in their
rights. Alas! that any man should so exalt himself, and carry
himself in his pride over all! May Almighty God show mercy to his
soul, and grant him the forgiveness of his sins! We have written
concerning him these things, both good and bad, that virtuous
men might follow after the good, and wholly avoid the evil, and
might go in the way that leadeth to the kingdom of heaven.

This Requiescat of the monk of Peterborough has carried us

forward half a century, till the Conqueror, in the full maturity of his
power and strength, rode to his death down the steep street of the
burning town of Mantes and was buried in his own great abbey-church
at Caen. And the good peace that he gave the land at the end came,
both in Normandy and in England, only after many stormy years of
war, rebellion, and strife. William was but sixty when he died; when his
father was laid away in the basilica of far-off Nicæa, he was only seven
or at most eight. The conquest of England was made in his fortieth
year, when he had already reigned thirty-one years as duke. Or, if we
deduct the years of his youth, the conquest of England falls just
halfway between his coming of age and his death. I give these figures
to adjust the perspective. William’s place in the line of English kings is
so prominent and his achievements in England are so important that
they always tend to overshadow in our minds his earlier years as duke.
Yet without these formative years there could have been no conquest
of England, and without some study of them that conquest cannot be
understood.
If we pass over rapidly, as for lack of information we must needs
do, the dozen years of William’s minority, we find his reign in
Normandy chiefly occupied with his struggles with his vassals, his
neighbors, and the king of France, all a necessary consequence of his
feudal position as duke. The Norman vassals, always turbulent and
rebellious, seem to have broken forth anew upon the death of Robert
the Magnificent, and such accounts as have reached us of the events
of the next twelve years reveal a constant state of anarchy and
disorder. The revolt of the barons came to a head in 1047, when the
whole of Lower Normandy rose under the leadership of the two chief
vicomtes of the region, Ranulf of Bayeux and Néel of Saint-Sauveur,
the ruins of whose family castle of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte still greet
the traveller who leaves Cherbourg for Paris. William, who was hunting
in the neighborhood of Valognes, was obliged to flee half-clad in the
night and to pick his way alone by devious paths across the enemy’s
country to his castle of Falaise. With the assistance of the French king
he was able to collect an army from Upper Normandy and meet the
rebels on the great plain of Val-des-Dunes, near Caen, where the
Mont-joie of the French and the Dex aie of the duke’s followers
answered the barons’ appeals to their local saints of St. Sauveur, St.
Sever, and St. Amand. William was victorious; the leaders of the revolt
were sent into exile, but one of them, Grimoud of Plessis, the traitor,
apparently he who had sought William’s death in the night at
Valognes, was put in prison at Rouen in irons which he wore until his
death.
With the collapse of the great revolt and the razing of the castles
of the revolting barons, Normandy began to enjoy a period of internal
peace and order. Externally, however, difficulties rather increased with
the growing power of the young duke. In discussions of feudal society
it is too often assumed that if the feudal obligations are observed
between lords and vassals, all will go well, and that the anarchy of
which the Middle Ages are full was the result of violations of these
feudal ties. Now, while undoubtedly a heavy account must be laid at
the door of direct breaches of the feudal bond, it must also be
remembered that there was a fundamental defect in the very structure
of feudal society. We may express this defect by saying that the feudal
ties were only vertical and not lateral. The lord was bound to his vassal
and the vassal to his lord, and so far as these relations went they
provided a nexus of social and legal relations which might hold society
together. But there was no tie between two vassals of the same lord,
nothing whatever which bound one of them to live in peace and amity
with the other. Quite the contrary. War being the normal state of
European society in the feudal period, the right to carry on private war
was one of the cherished rights of the feudal baron, and it extended
wherever it was not restricted by the bonds of fealty and vassalage.
The duke of Normandy and the count of Anjou were both vassals of
the king of France, but their relations to each other were those of
complete independence, and, save for some special agreement or
friendship, were normally relations of hostility.
And so an important part of Norman history has to treat of the
struggles with the duchy’s neighbors, Flanders on the north, the royal
domain on the east, Maine and Anjou to the southward, and Brittany
on the west. Fortunately for Normandy, the Bretons were but loosely
organized, while the Flemings, compacted into one of the strongest of
the French fiefs, were generally friendly, and the friendship was in this
period cemented by William’s marriage to Matilda, daughter of the
count of Flanders, one of the few princely marriages of the time which
was founded upon affection and observed with fidelity. With Anjou the
case was different. Beginning as a border county over against the
Bretons of the lower Loire, with the black rock of Angers as its centre
and fortress, Anjou, though still comparatively small in area, had
grown into one of the strongest states of western France. Under a
remarkable line of counts, Geoffrey Greygown, Fulk the Red, and Fulk
the Black, ancestors of the Plantagenet kings of England, it had
become the dominant power on the Loire, and now under their
successor Geoffrey the Hammer it threatened further expansion by
hammering its frontiers still further to the north and east. Geoffrey,
William’s contemporary and rival, is known to us by a striking
characterization written by his nephew and successor and forming a
25
typical bit of feudal biography:

My uncle Geoffrey became a knight in his father’s lifetime and

began his knighthood by wars against his neighbors, one against
the Poitevins, whose count he captured at Mont Couër, and
another against the people of Maine, whose count, named Herbert
Bacon, he likewise took. He also carried on war against his own
father, in the course of which he committed many evil deeds of
which he afterward bitterly repented. After his father died on his
return from Jerusalem, Geoffrey possessed his lands and the city
of Angers, and fought Count Thibaud of Blois, son of Count Odo,
and by gift of King Henry received the city of Tours, which led to
another war with Count Thibaud, in the course of which, at a
battle between Tours and Amboise, Thibaud was captured with a
thousand of his knights. And so, besides the part of Touraine
inherited from his father, he acquired Tours and the castles round
about—Chinon, L’Ile-Bouchard, Châteaurenault, and Saint-Aignan.
After this he had a war with William, count of the Normans, who
later acquired the kingdom of England and was a magnificent
king, and with the people of France and of Bourges, and with
William count of Poitou and Aimeri viscount of Thouars and Hoel
count of Nantes and the Breton counts of Rennes and with Hugh
count of Maine, who had thrown off his fealty. Because of all these
wars and the prowess he showed therein he was rightly called the
Hammer, as one who hammered down his enemies.
 In the last year of his life he made me his nephew a knight at
the age of seventeen in the city of Angers, at the feast of
Pentecost, in the year of the Incarnation 1060, and granted me
Saintonge and the city of Saintes because of a quarrel he had with
Peter of Didonne. In this same year King Henry died on the
nativity of St. John, and my uncle Geoffrey on the third day after
Martinmas came to a good end. For in the night which preceded
his death, laying aside all care of knighthood and secular things,
he became a monk in the monastery of St. Nicholas, which his
father and he had built with much devotion and endowed with
their goods.

The great source of conflict between William and Geoffrey was the
intervening county of Maine, whence the Angevins had gained
possession of the Norman fortresses of Domfront and Alençon, and it
was not till after Geoffrey’s death, in 1063, that the capture of its chief
city, LeMans, completed that union of Normandy and Maine which was
to last through the greater part of Norman history. The conquest of
Maine was the first fruit of William’s work as conqueror.
With William’s suzerain, the king of France, relations were more
complicated. Legally there could be no question that the duke of
Normandy was the feudal vassal of the French king and as such bound
to the obligations of loyalty and service which flowed from his oath of
homage and fealty. Actually, in the society of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, such bonds were freely and frequently broken, yet they
were not thrown off. Here, as in many other phases of mediæval life,
we meet that persistent contradiction between theory and practice
which shocks our more consistent minds. Just as the men of the
Middle Ages tolerated a Holy Roman Empire which claimed universal
dominion and often exercised only the most local and rudimentary
authority, so they accepted a monarchy like that of the early
Capetians, which claimed to rule over the whole of France and was
limited in its actual government to a few farms and castles in the
neighborhood of Paris. And just as they maintained ideals of lofty
chivalry and rigorous asceticism far beyond the sordid reality of
ordinary knighthood or monkhood, so the constant violation of feudal
obligations did not change the feudal bond or destroy the nexus of
feudal relations. In this age of unrestraint, ferocious savagery
alternated with knightly generosity, and ungovernable rage with self-
abasing penance.
At such times the relations of the king and his great feudatories
would depend very largely upon personal temperament, political
situations, and even the impulse of the moment, and we must not
expect to find such purpose and continuity in policies as prevail in
more settled periods. Nevertheless, with due allowance for momentary
variations, the relations of Normandy with the Capetian kings follow
comparatively simple lines. The position of Normandy in the Seine
valley and its proximity to the royal domain offered endless
opportunity for friction, yet for about a century strained relations were
avoided by alliance and friendship based upon common interest. Hugh
Capet came to the throne with the support of the Norman duke, and
his successors often found their mainstay in Norman arms. Robert the
Magnificent on his departure for the East commended his young son to
King Henry, and the heir seems to have grown up under the king’s
guardianship. It was Henry who saved William from his barons in 1047,
and it was William that furnished over half the king’s soldiers on the
campaign against Anjou in the following year. Then, about the middle
of the eleventh century, comes a change, for which the growing power
and influence of Normandy furnish a sufficient explanation. Henry
supported the revolt of William of Arques in 1053 and attempted a
great invasion of Normandy in the same year, while in 1058 he burnt
and pillaged his way into the heart of the Norman territory. A waiting
game and well-timed attacks defeated these efforts at Mortemer and
at Varaville, but William refused to follow up his advantage by a direct
attack upon his king, whom he continued to treat with personal
consideration as his feudal lord. Even after William himself became
king, he seems to have continued to render the military service which
he owed as duke. By this time, however, the subjection had become
only nominal; merely as duke, William was now a more powerful ruler
than the king of France, and the Capetian monarchy had to bide its
time for more than a century longer.
 Before we can leave the purely Norman period of William’s reign
and turn to the conquest of England, it is important to examine the
internal condition of Normandy under his rule. Even the most thorough
study possible of this subject would need to be brief, for lack of
available evidence. Time has not dealt kindly with Norman records,
and over against the large body of Anglo-Saxon charters and the
unique account of Anglo-Saxon England preserved in the Domesday
survey, contemporary Normandy can set only a few scattered
documents and a curious statement of the duke’s rights and privileges
under William, drawn up four years after his death and only recently
recovered as an authority for his reign. The sources of Norman history
were probably never so abundant as those of England; certainly there
is now nothing on the Continent, outside of the Vatican, that can
compare with the extraordinarily full and continuous series of the
English public records. The great gaps in the Norman records, often
supposed to be due to the Revolution, really appear much earlier.
Undoubtedly there was in many places wanton destruction of
documents in the revolutionary uprisings, and there were many losses
under the primitive organization of local archives in this period, as
there undoubtedly were during the carelessness and corruption of the
Restoration. Nevertheless, an examination of the copies and extracts
made from monastic and cathedral archives by the scholars of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shows that, with a few
significant exceptions, the materials for early Norman history were
little richer then than now, so that the great losses must have occurred
before this time, that is to say, during the Middle Ages and in the
devastation of the English invasion and of the Protestant wars of the
sixteenth century. The cathedral library at Bayeux, for example,
possesses three volumes of a huge cartulary charred by the fire into
which it was thrown when the town was sacked by the Protestants. On
the other hand, it should be noted that the French Revolution
accomplished one beneficent result for local records in the
secularization of ecclesiastical archives and their collection into the
great repositories of the Archives Départementales, whose
organization is still the envy of historical scholars across the Channel.
One who has enjoyed for many months access to these admirable
collections of records will be permitted to express his gratitude to
those who created them, as well as to those by whom they are now so
courteously administered.
Piecing together our scattered information regarding the
Normandy of the eleventh century, we note at the outset that it was a
feudal society, that is to say, land was for the most part held of a lord
by hereditary tenure on condition of military service. Indeed feudal
ideas had spread so far that they even penetrated the church, so that
in some instances the revenues of the clergy had been granted to
laymen and archdeaconries and prebends had been turned into
hereditary fiefs. With feudal service went the various incidents of
feudal tenure and a well-developed feudal jurisdiction of the lord over
his tenants and of the greater barons over the less. In all this there is
nothing to distinguish Normandy from the neighboring countries of
northern France, and as a feudal society is normally a decentralized
society, we should expect to find the powers of government chiefly in
the hands of the local lords. A closer study, however, shows certain
peculiarities which are of the utmost importance, both for Norman and
for English history.
First of all, the military service owing to the duke had been
systematically assessed in rough units of five or ten knights, and this
service, or its subdivisions, had become attached to certain pieces of
land, or knights’ fees. The amounts of service were fixed by custom
and were regularly enforced. Still more significant are the restrictions
placed upon the military power of the barons. The symbol and the
foundation of feudal authority was the castle, wherefore the duke
forbade the building of castles and strongholds without his license and
required them to be handed over to him on demand. Private war and
the blood feud could not yet be prohibited entirely, but they were
closely limited. No one was allowed to go out to seek his enemy with
hauberk and standard and sounding horn. Assaults and ambushes
were not permitted in the duke’s forests; captives were not to be taken
in a feud, nor could arms, horses, or property be carried off from a
combat. Burning, plunder, and waste were forbidden in pursuing
claims to land, and except for open crime, no one could be condemned
to loss of limb unless by judgment of the proper ducal or baronial
court. Coinage, generally a valued privilege of the greater lords, was in
Normandy a monopoly of the duke. What the absence of such
restrictions might mean is well illustrated in England in the reign of
Stephen, when private war, unlicensed castles, and baronial coinage
appeared as the chief evils of an unbridled feudal anarchy.
In the administration of justice, in spite of the great franchises of
the barons, the duke has a large reserved jurisdiction. Certain places
are under his special protection, certain crimes put the offender at his
mercy. The administrative machinery, though in many respects still
primitive, has kept pace with the duke’s authority. Whereas the
Capetian king has as his local representatives only the semi-feudal
agents on his farms, the Norman duke has for purposes of local
government a real public officer, the vicomte, commanding his troops,
guarding his castles, maintaining order, administering justice, and
collecting the ducal revenues. Nowhere is the superiority of the
Norman dukes over their royal overlords more clear than in the matter
of finance. The housekeeping of the Capetian king of the eleventh
century was still what the Germans call a Naturalwirthschaft, an
economic organization based upon payment in produce and labor
rather than in money. “Less powerful than certain of his great vassals,”
26
as he is described by his principal historian, Luchaire, “the king lives
like them from the income from his farms and tolls, the payments of
his peasants, the labor of his serfs, the taxes disguised as gifts which
he levies from the bishops and abbots of the neighborhood. His
granaries of Gonesse, Janville, Mantes, Étampes, furnish his grain; his
cellars of Orleans and Argenteuil, his wine; his forests of Rouvrai (now
the Bois de Boulogne), Saint-Germain, Fontainebleau, Iveline,
Compiègne, his game. He passes his time in hunting, for amusement
or to supply his table, and travels constantly from estate to estate,
from abbey to abbey, obliged to make full use of his rights of
entertainment and to move frequently from place to place in order not
to exhaust the resources of his subjects.”
In other words, under existing methods of communication, it was
easier to transport the king and his household than it was to transport
food, and the king literally ‘boarded round’ from farm to farm. Such
conditions were typical of the age, and they could only be changed by