The Normans and Their World Read online

  We cannot follow the references, but the phrases can still stir. The alliterative opening, with its solemn rhythm, and the poetry in many of the expressions, bring out the link with the exalted chant; the italicized passage represents a complete verse-stanza.

  The monks exaggerated, but beyond doubt the Vikings did much damage — though the famous prayer, ‘From the Fury of the North-men, O Lord, deliver us’, seems apocryphal.[9] Sometimes the monks gathered what valuables they could and rushed off, then returned; if too scared, they looked for safer areas. The monks of St Philibert abandoned the island of Noirmouthier and after much roaming settled inland at Tournus in Burgundy.[10] A few monks fled from Fontanelles to Flanders, where they hung on till the revival of the mid-tenth century there. At times the raids were less destructive. In 858 Vikings attacked St Germain des Près; but the monks, warned, had removed the relics, treasures, library, and archives. The raiders provisioned themselves, killed a few serfs, set fire to a store, and withdrew; some lurking monks, with the aid of the Parisians, put out the fire which was threatening the church. The Chronicle of Fontanelle in the ninth century declares; ‘The regions all around bear witness that since the birth of the world never have such ravages been known. So much has been wrought that none of the wise [prudentes] chronographers can manage to relate it. So I have been silent about much because I decided to be brief.’ But the appendix of the Chronicle in the eleventh century makes the attempt to give some idea of the full blow.

  Soon after the brutal army of the Barbarians, rising up out of the waters, landed in this place. They found it deserted by the inhabitants and they despoiled everything. They burned the whole building and its sanctuary, levelled it, and went off. Then they traversed the regions in all directions, installed themselves, and carried out their general devastation of pillage and arson. They destroyed the towns [urbes], threw down the forts [castra], and razed the churches and the noble monastries which flourished more than elsewhere in this magnificent and populous province, which recalled Egypt. People were massacred without any distinction, all kinds of living creatures were wiped out. The finest of the young men were subjected to their lusts; the maidens were delivered up to the ravishing Pagans; and all the common folk, defenceless, were led off in captivity into foreign lands, to be shared out there among the Heathen [Ethnici]. For eighteen years this disaster went on unceasingly under the shock of repeated invasions, made under different chiefs. So the western coast of Gaul, lying broadly open on the British Sea, was transformed into a solitude and a desert.[11]

  Things may well have been worse in this area than across the Channel in Britain, where there was better organized resistance as well as much bigger areas to be covered. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says of the micel here or army that invaded England in 892: ‘By the grace of God the here had not on the whole afflicted the English people very greatly; but they were much more seriously afflicted in those three years by the mortality of cattle and men, and most of all in that many of the best royal thegns who were in the land died in those three years.’ The writer does not link the deaths with the invasion, but perhaps the troubles were indirectly related to the war situation. Indeed, in another passage we find that it is the English army which most afflicted the people. Under 1006 we read: ‘In spite of it all the Danish here went about as it pleased, and the English fyrd caused the people of the country every sort of harm, so that they profited neither from the native here nor from the foreign here.’ (Their term here is used for both armies, though normally it was kept for the enemy.)[12]

  The Danes have often been blamed for the breakdown of monasticism in England in the ninth and tenth centuries; but decay had set in without any attacks from outside.[13] The monastery of Much Wenlock in Shropshire was refounded after the Norman Conquest, and its failure has been attributed to a ninth-century Danish raid. But a charter of 901 shows the community still in existence.[14] Under Aethelred Unraed the raids were widespread, but seem to have had only a slight effect on monastic life. The houses in Devon first suffered; but Tavistock, burnt in 997, soon recovered — though Exeter and Bedford fade out of the records. In 1011 Aelfmaer, abbot of St Augustine’s, Aelfheah, the archbishop of Canterbury, Godwin, bishop of Rochester, and Leofryn, abbess of St Mildred’s, were taken prisoners; and in 1016 Wulsig, abbot of Ramsey, was killed at the battle of Ashingdon, Kent.[15] But we find no general ravaging of monasteries. Asser, in his Life of Alfred, thought the reason for decay was the rise in the standard of living:

  At first he had no noble or freeman of his own nation who would of his own accord enter the monastic life, apart from children who by reason of their tender age could not choose good or refuse evil. For indeed for many years past the desire for the monastic life had been utterly lacking in all that people, and also in many other nations, though there still remain many monasteries founded in that land, but none properly observing the rule of this way of life, I know not why: whether on account of the onslaughts of foreigners, who very often invaded by land or sea, or on account of the nation’s too great abundance of riches of every kind, which I am more inclined to think the reason for that contempt of the monastic life.[16]

  And Alfred himself considered the raids the result rather than the cause of religious laxity. The attacks were punishments: ‘We possessed only the name of Christians and very few possessed the virtue.’ Before everything was ravaged and burnt, the churches throughout all England stood filled with treasures and books, and likewise there was a great multitude of the servants of God. And they had very little benefit from those books, for they could not understand anything in them, because they were not written in their own language.’[17]

  Certainly the Danish raids were one cause of the breakdown of the Carolingian empire and the Mercian kingdom in the Midlands, but only one cause; the full picture must include the inner conflicts of the disrupted areas as well as other attacks from outside apart from those of the Vikings. France was in a ceaseless state of civil war. Arnulf in the mid tenth century built up a strong power in Flanders, but his system broke down with his death. The Normans indeed occupied Brittany in 921, but next year the Hungarians devastated Italy and sacked the important town of Pavia. The Vikings went on devastating Aquitaine and Auvergne. In 905 they had gone up the Seine as far as Noyon. In 926 Robert of France beat a band in Artois, while others invaded the valley of the Loire; and there were two more Hungarian invasions. The terrible Hungarian raids went on in 933 and 935, and then on a vaster scale in 955. In Italy, after devastation by Berengar, things were a little quieter, but bands of Saracens watched over the Alpine passes where until 973 or 983 they blocked the routes, killed travellers or held them to ransom, impeding the communication of Italy with the rest of Europe.[18]

  Monks might denounce the heathen, but laymen were often ready to collaborate with the Vikings. They helped them, called them in, made alliances with them. Charlemagne’s grandson treated them as allies.[19] Charles the Bald in 858 was fighting hard against them, but his brother seized the chance to invade his land and win over many of his followers. Alfred’s nephew deserted to the Danes, who accepted him as king; and many of the Frankish royal family behaved in the same sort of way. Old English poetry, celebrating the deeds of Danes, Swedes, Burgundians, Franks and Frisians, shows a deep-rooted sense of the common origin of all the Norse and Germanic peoples.[20]

  *

  After thus glancing at the sustained impact of the Norsemen on England, Ireland, and France, we may return to the question of the war basis and its effect on the Norse or Germanic freemen and their leaders. The relationship of warrior and lord was throughout western Europe crucial for the development of feudalism and of medieval society. We saw how Tacitus stressed the need for plunder if the war chief was to maintain his band of companions, his comitatus. Through the Dark Ages and the medieval epoch a king or lord was expected to be generous and open-handed; and this quality was not a mere incidental virtue of the leader. It was something essential to his whole being, his role, his
function in society. He had to be generous with hospitality and gifts: gifts that included gold, other valuables, weapons, land. A letter from Theodoric the Ostrogoth summoned the warriors settled in south Italy to attend his court so as to enjoy his Royal Largesse; for a warrior ‘is as one dead who is unknown to his lord’. The Anglo-Saxon poem, The Wanderer, tells of the exile, deprived of kinsmen, brooding on the ‘Retainers in Hall and the receiving of Treasure; of how in his youth his Gold-friend was courteous to him at the Feast. It seems to him in his mind that he clasps his Lord and lays hands and head on his knee, as when once in past days he was near the Gift-Throne.’ Beowulf’s great collar was a royal reward. Hrothgar, King of the Danes, is called the Keeper of Ring-Treasures, an excellent Ring-Giver, the Treasure-Guardian of Heroes. The young Wiglaf calls Beowulf himself: ‘Our Lord who gave us these Rings’, to whom loyal battle-service is due. For bard and warrior the stress was thus on gold, on the Fire of Leifi’s Road (a saga term). The lord was the one who gave swords, byrnies, helmets, horses, rings, jewels, ‘gracious giver of mighty gifts’, a gold-giver, ‘a scatterer of the ice-of-the-hand’. The poet Gunnlaug asked King Aethelred for permission to leave the court reciting, ‘I must go visit the house of three princes and two earls; I have promised this to the possessors-of-land. I shall not return before the gold-giver summons me. Give me the servant of the goddess of the spearpoint, the Couch-of-the-Dragons, [gold] for his sleeves.’[21] It is the possessors-of-land who can give gold; the lord is the ‘lord of land’. A scaldic singer praises a chief as ‘the scorner of the fire of the bow’s seat’, the gold rings of the hand. A poet of the court of Harald Fairhair (c 860-933), the unifier of Norway, tells of the life led by his warriors:

  They are favoured with wealth and finest swordblades, with metal from Hunland and maids from the East. Glad are they then when they guess battle’s near, swift to leap up and lay hands on the oars, to snap off the grummets and splinter the tholes, and smite billows bravely at their lord’s bidding.[22]

  The bard or scald also relies on the lord’s generosity:

  One may see by their gear and their golden rings, they are all comrades close to the king. Red are their cloaks with richly-wrought borders, swords bound with silver, corselets of ring-mail, belt-straps gilded and helmets graven. On their wrists are the rings which Harald gave them.[23]

  But the gold that binds lord and man is also the cause of murder, dissension, treachery. It is the dragon-hoard. Hence the central role of the fatal Gold of the Nibelungs, as told in the tenth-century Eddic poems and the prose Völsunga Saga, written down in Iceland in the thirteenth century, but current orally throughout Europe much earlier: a primitive version was known in England in the eighth century. The Saga reflects the age of migrations also in its references to various vast royal treasures which changed hands according to the luck of war. Later we find the church, a hoarder of gold like the dragons, seeking to guard its treasures with bans and curses. Abbot Suger, recounting the treasures of St Denis in the 1140s, mentions that the new gem-studded cross of gold was protected by a ban which Pope Eugenius pronounced on the spot at Easter 1147; the anathema was inscribed at the foot of the cross. ‘Treasure, gold in the ground, may easily madden many men, hide it who will,’ declares Beowulf.

  In return for gold, arms, land, the Anglo-Saxon gesithas, the companions, have to render a total loyalty to their lord. Beowulf in the epic (probably composed in its existing form some time in the eighth century) looks back on the services he performed for his lord, King Hygelac (earlier sixth century): ‘I repaid him in battle for the treasure he gave me...Ever would I be before him in the troop, alone in the van.’ The lord can even take the honour of his companions’ exploits: Hygelac in Beowulf is called the Slayer of Ongentheow, though two of his thegns did the killing and he rewarded them. The retainer brings to his lord the spoils he has won. Beowulf gave Hygelac the gifts he gained through services in Denmark. Again, when killing the Frankish champion Daeghrefn, he was glad that he had prevented him from taking off to his lord the armour of Hygelac fallen in battle (apparently at Daeghrefn’s hands). The poet Widsith, on returning home, gave his lord the ring which King Eormanric bestowed on him; he had been given land by his lord. The Anglo-Saxon lord presented armour and horses to the man entering his service, and this gift grew into a legal due, heriot (war-gear), paid on the man’s death. The payment was remitted if the man fell on a campaign ‘before his lord’. Until the end, heriot was paid in kind. Thus a twelfth-century ealdorman declares: ‘And I bequeath to my royal lord as a heriot 4 armlets of 300 mancuses of gold and 4 swords and 8 horses, 4 with trappings, 4 without, and 4 helmets and 4 mailcoats and 8 spears and 8 shields.’

  To fail one’s lord was the ultimate disgrace. Beowulf’s young kinsman Wiglaf felt only contempt for the men failing to come to their lord’s support:

  He who wishes to speak the truth can say that the lord who gave you those treasures, that war-gear you stand up in — when he often gave to men on the ale-benches in the hall, as a prince to his thanes, the most splendid helmet and corselet that he could find, far and near — he wholly threw away this war-gear when battle befell him.

  And he goes on to describe the life of dishonoured infamy that lay ahead of such men. On the other hand Finnesburh tells us that ‘retainers never repaid better the bright mead than his young followers did to Hanef’. The Wanderer recounts the perils of the kinless man: ‘Where is the mare? where is the young man? where is the treasure-giver? where are the banquet-benches? where, the joys of hall?’[24] Gifts had a ritual significance; they bound together the members of a group; they expressed and created the close bond of lord and man. A Norse proverb says: ‘A gift always looks for a return’.[25]

  This matter of the relation of king or lord to his retainers will continue to be of primary importance in our inquiry. As tribal brotherhood was eroded by differences in property and status, the war-bond constituted one of the key points at which new social formations could come about. Already in the breaking-up Roman empire of the West, the big landlords built up bodies of retainers, bucellarii; the tradition carried on through the gesiths and house-carles, the antrustiones and gasindi, to the bachelors of the high Middle Ages and the liveries of the fifteenth century; but a new force and significance was infused into the relationship as it emerged from tribal society.[26]

  *

  We must not however think of the war basis as the sole important factor at work in these centuries. The free warrior was generally also a farmer, and in Scandinavia he often combined farming with sea-voyages for trading purposes as well as for piracy. At times it is hard to draw a sharp line between marauding raids and the quest for new lands on which to settle. An important phase in the colonizing of Normandy seems linked with the dispersal of the Danish army in England in the summer of 896 after a campaign of four years. The Chronicle says: ‘And those who were without money got themselves ships and went south across the sea to the Seine.’[27] We see how plundering was often bound up with the wish to accumulate capital for settlement. And the traffic went on both ways. King Edward the Elder in the early tenth century encouraged his followers to buy land ‘from the pagans’.[28] The Olaf sagas accepted raid and trade simply as alternative methods of gaining property.

  Loden was the name of a man from Vigg, rich and of good family. He went often on merchant voyages and sometimes on viking cruises. It happened one summer he went on a merchant voyage with much merchandise in a ship of his own. He directed his course first to Estonia and was there at a market in summer. Many trading goods were brought there, and also many thralls or sales for sale...

  He was a promising young man. In his earliest youth he had a desire to go abroad, and he soon gathered property and reputation; and he was by turns a year abroad and a year with his father. Biarne was soon owner of a merchant ship of his own...

  There was a man called Eyvind Urarhorn, a great man of high birth, who had his descent from Easter Agder country. Every summer he went out on a viking c
ruise, sometimes in the West Sea, sometimes to the Baltic, sometimes south to Flanders, and had a well-armed snaekke of twenty benches of rowers.[29]

  Few western European coins minted before 950 have been found in Scandinavia; money gained by looting was used for such purposes as buying land.[30]

  *

  We can now turn directly to the colonization of Normandy. Viking attacks on the coast of north-east France had been going on through the second half of the ninth century; and it was from Boulogne that the main army of Danes sailed in 893 for Lympne and Appledore. Already in the 840s Quentovic, Nantes and Rouen were sacked; and the port of Dorestad at the mouth of the Rhine was for a while controlled by Rorik, who in effect ruled the Lowlands. One result in France was the building of a large number of castles, often by royal agents, though in 864 Charles the Bald ordered the demolition of all raised without authority, as the lords of the castles were usurping his rights concerning justice, tolls, and the like.[31] Then in 911 the Viking founders of Normandy seem to come into the full light of history. The tradition ran that after being defeated at Chartres by the troops of Charles III, the Simple, their leader Rollo made a pact with the king at St Claire-sur-Epte, between two hills on the Paris-Rouen highway. Charles at the time was in a difficult position, striving to hold together the dwindled remnants of the Carolingian empire despite the anarchic pressures of his nobles; he was in league with Robert of Neustria, who was to supplant him. Rollo, advanced in years, is said to have agreed to be baptised by the archbishop of Rouen and to marry Charles’s daughter; in return for his homage he was granted the area later called Upper Normandy.