The Normans and Their World Read online

  Ecclesiastics dealing with money also had a chance to build up big fortunes. We know of several, Ernauld and Odo Saillultra, who were ducal chaplains, Conan who was treasurer of the church of Bayeux, Ebremar who ended by becoming a monk and leaving his property to the same church. We see in the shadow of duke and church a rich group rising up and often merging with the nobility. The most likely to make such advances were the moneyers, ducal chaplains, and episcopal treasurers, who by purchases or by pledges acquired big urban and rural properties, gaining seigneurial and ecclesiastical rights. They built town houses of worked stone or installed themselves in strong towers, treated as equals with the great abbeys, and entered into the vassaldom of barons or bishops. There was still greater range for their activities after 1066. But no new class was thus created. Individuals merly rose up and became part of the ruling class. (After 1066 there was a steady abandonment of coining in Normandy with more governmental control of the workshops.)

  The increase in the circulation of coins must have habituated increasing numbers of people to dealing with cash or money contracts; and one reason for the increase in such transactions was the continual emigration, especially to Italy. The emigrants sold their property for ready cash. They took away the money and to that extent weakened the economy, but they helped to make money dealings familiar. Trade, however, was the main factor in getting money into circulation. Between 1049 and 1093 the bishop of Coutances saw the product of his market tolls at St Lo rise by fourteen per cent. The duke also profited, as did certain milites of his entourage and certain abbeys. The presence of a great port at Rouen was very important. Its traders dealt in wine and large fish with the London of Aethelred II and had their own wharf at Dowgate under Edward. The best wine came from further south, but much fishing was done off the Norman coast. The big fish were called whales, and they may have been whales but were more likely lesser cetacea like porpoises, whose oil was much prized. Rouen was famed for its tanners, one of which was working under the protection of the eastern ramparts in William’s time. But William felt also the need of a large and thriving town in the west (where the revolt of the early eleventh century and many of the events of 1046-7 had occurred). Hence his building up of Caen. Here he proclaimed the Truce of God in 1047; and when in 1066 he gathered his fleet, it was not in the Seine estuary, Fécamp, or Tréport; it was more to the west at Dives, though there he was further away from the shorter channel crossings. Caen no doubt was the base from which he planned and organized.[193]

  The growth in trade and money transactions was accompanied, as in Flanders, with a considerable swelling of the population in the eleventh century. Lords were drawn to build up agglomerations and to accord them privileges so as to attract settlers. The term bourg is met for the first time in 1024 in a concession made by Richard II to Fécamp of the tithe of the toll of the Bourg named Caen.[194] Before 1066 some eleven bourgs are attested: Rouen, Sées, St James de Beuvron, Caen, Arganchy, Trun, St Sylvain, Alençon, Dives, Etouvy and Cherbourg. There must have been more, but they were still not numerous. After 1066 the references to the bourg of Caen and to bourgs in general grow more common.[195]

  The new agglomerations were founded, not on ancient sites or near old towns, but away from these enclosures. Some were made round castles, some round or near abbeys. Of the first group were Alençon, Domfront, Verneuil; of the second, Caen, Montebourg, Bernay. The sole foundations with ancient bases were Lire, Dieppe, Exêmes and Lillebonne. But only the latter and Sées could be called old towns whose past prosperity continued. In the eleventh century we know the bourgs through the valuable rights they yielded to their lords.[196] Only after 1066 do we find urban customs mentioned: those of Cormeilles and of Breteuil. And we know these only from the traces left in the organization of certain towns founded by Normans in the Welsh marches — towns that it was necessary to fill quickly with people.[197] To meet franchises announcing tenure en bourgage we must wait for the reign of King Henry I with its big urban expansion, when castles like Verneuil saw settlements growing up around them and it was useful for the lord to make the place attractive, to draw people in by the concession of privileges. Not till 1080 did the word bourgage appear — and probably with it the reality that it expressed. It seems certain that these post-1066 developments were influenced by English forms.[198]

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  We saw how the dukes after Rollo began slowly rebuilding or building abbeys and organizing the shattered life of the church. The monks came back to Jumièges and to Fontenelles, where a new house was founded. Richard I put monks into the former sanctuary of the Mont St Michel; then established another house, Ouen, in Rouen. By 990 the old bishopric had come together again; and secular canons, not bound by a common rule like the monks, were settling at Fécamp, another pre-Viking site. Richard II took the important step of linking Normandy with Cluny in Burgundy, which followed the rule of the black-cowled Benedictines, the only regular order yet known in the west. Cluny was the centre of monastic reform, which sought to make monasteries independent of the secular clergy — to revive the whole monastic tradition on a new level adequate to the era and to ensure that it remained an essential part of the church. Cluny ended by developing a system in which its monks lived a wholly liturgical life, occupied unbrokenly in grandly conceived ceremonies of praise and prayer. The services were so extended that men said a Cluniac monk had hardly half an hour of his own, even on midsummer day. Cluny tried to make its buildings as grandiose as the liturgy, which was embellished with every musical device.

  William of Volpane, a Piedmontese who was abbot of the Cluniac house at Dijon, was invited in 1001 to Fécamp, where he at once substituted monks for the canons. He went on reforming other Norman houses. Interested in music, medicine, geometry, architecture and art, he founded schools for youths who wanted to become monks. Laymen or people who wanted to enter the secular clergy could also attend. Out of twenty-eight or so monastic houses it seems that twenty-one derived directly from his work. In addition to the demand for a revival of monastic ways of life, at once both ascetic and deeply aesthetic, the century saw a growing attempt to formulate and apply ecclesiastical law, to grasp with a new fullness the issues involved in Christian theology, and to spread education more effectively.

  Cluniac influence appeared in the increasing number of nobles going on pilgrimages to the East. The two leading dynasties of northern France, those of Anjou and Normandy, were linked with Cluny, and despite their rivalries patronized the pilgrimages. Fulk Nerra of Anjou, a terrifying character, went to Jerusalem in 1002, and returned there twice. The count of Angoulême went off in October 1026. Richard II of Normandy sent alms and Robert led a huge company away in 1035. All such pilgrimages were carefully recorded by Glaber of Cluny. In general the monasteries did well out of them, as later out of the crusades. Men mortgaged land to them to raise ready money for the journeys, or sold it. The monks seized mortgaged lands at once if the loan was not repaid on the stated day; and at the council of Tours, in the middle of the twelfth century, Pope Alexander III felt it necessary to stigmatize such practices as usury.[199]

  William of Poitiers depicted the duke as regular in attending mass, open to the counsels of his clergy, and especially favourably disposed towards monks. The Anon, probably a monk of Caen, who told of his end, copied out a few phrases from Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne Chapter 26, to praise him as addicted to churchgoing. But the Normans, apart from needing to use the church politically, seem to have been pious only in the fear of death. The warrior class had little moral respect for the secular clergy who enjoyed power and wealth if of high status, or who lived much as everyone else if of humbler rank, and yet were always ready to rebuke sin. Monks were different, however: the Militia of Christ who were making an effort to live according to the Gospels. By William’s time the barons had begun to compete in endowing houses that would save their souls by prayer and even ensure good fortune in this world. William took a crowd of clerics and monks in his invading army, with two bishop
s, Odo of Bayeux and Geoffrey of Coutances. They were to fight with prayers, Poitiers comments. Gratefully William despoiled the English church after victory to enrich the Norman monasteries.

  In the Bayeux Tapestry no stress is laid on William being a religious character. Poitiers says that he wore round his neck at Hastings the relics on which Harold swore his oath, but we do not see them. However, the flag shown at his ship’s masthead seems to be the gonfalon presented by the pope, as is shown by the cross-headed staff and the method of mounting the standard from a crossbar.[200] (For a masthead light we should expect open cressets like those that soldiers used in setting fire to the palisades of Dijon.) To defeat the contrary winds that kept his fleet from sailing, William ‘fought with his prayers’ by having the relics of the local St Valery carried in procession; but this episode does not appear on the Tapestry. The Chroniclers tell of his prayers before Hastings; the Tapestry shows a feast. Odo too is depicted as what he was, a feudal baron with benefit of clergy. He does not even say grace at the feast and does not appear in his vestments, but acts as fighter and councillor.[201]

  William was shrewd enough to use his role as head of the Norman church to learn something of its organizing methods. Watching how it legislated in council, had begun using written records, and had devised administrative forms, he could not but ponder how to build up the same sort of apparatus. The intellectual and moral ferment at work now in the ecclesiastical world passed over his head; but he was ready to protect the church while it supported him and allowed him a free hand in his own affairs, which in his view included making church appointments. At Lillebonne in 1080, setting out the positions he had taken all his life, he showed that he accepted ecclesiastical courts as long as they behaved themselves. He sharply regulated ecclesiastical jurisdiction, while encouraging it when he approved of its aims: for example in moral matters, especially when attempts were made to discipline the lower clergy. He punished ecclesiastical judges whom he considered to have erred. Archdeacons, responsible to bishops, supervised the clergy within defined areas; priests serving cathedrals were organized in chapters with their own endowments and duties. The bishop dealt with offences committed in churches or churchyards; he fined clerks and members of his own household, but how far he could deal with laymen is unclear. A priest was subject to his lord for his secular holding; and the church had no concern with forest offences. As with all strong rulers of the century, the duke appointed prelates, or if he desired, had them deposed; no bishop could exercise comital powers within his own city.

  In Normandy, as in Edward’s England, men from other countries came in to take up high places. Germans were made abbots at Holy Trinity (Rouen), St Pierre-sur-Dive, St Wandrille; an Angevin was abbot of Grestain; there were also Burgundians and Italians such as La nfranc.

  Just as the ducal family had many blood-ties with the barons, so members of it took up the most important church seats, especially the see of Rouen which they held from 987 to 1087 (apart from 1055-67), and that of Bayeux (1015-99), Lisieux (1049-77), Avranches (1060-7).[202] Some were unashamedly worldly; but others took their vocation seriously — for instance, John of Avranches who was at Rouen 1067-87 and wrote a work on the liturgy. The bishops were in general more subservient to the duke than the barons; William controlled all preferments and demanded military services from his prelates.[203] He expected the synods presided over by the archbishop to keep order in the church, and was reluctant to let in influences from outside. The church magnates had vassals and at times many knights, and some of them were ready enough to fight in battle; but as a whole they needed the duke and his law for protection more than the lay barons did. He presided over their councils and they could feel he was committed to their policies. From about 1042, however, encouraged by the duke’s youth and the reform movement, they had begun to assert themselves more. Archbishop Mauger’s council, about 1042, not only attacked simony (the selling of church offices and sacraments) but also made some criticism of William, Mauger’s nephew. That, however, may have been merely the result of the politics of the moment. Archbishop Maurilius, a papal man who had been in monasteries at Florence and Fécamp, held councils at Rouen and Lisieux, and made a strong attack on priestly marriage or concubinage. But so far, despite the church courts, there was nothing remotely like a clash between church and state, with the powers of the pope asserted against the temporal ruler.

  Already by the end of the tenth century or early in the eleventh there seems to have been a school at Rouen. Dudo addressed his History to the Northmannica Gymnasia; and a satirist, Garnier, writing in Latin verse, reproaches his adversary Moriuht for having fraudulently introduced himself as one of the professors, grammatici, of Rouen, and takes up the defences of one of the masters against Franbald, whom he advises to leave Rouen, where his wretched talents should not be employed. In the second satire he also mentions the grammarian Donatus of the fourth century, showing that a methodical system of teaching was practised. The first satire is worth summarizing. The poet opens by celebrating the archbishop Robert, son of Richard II, and his mother Gunnor, mentioning also Robert of France. Moriuht comes from Scottia (Ireland), an island fertile but dishonoured by its inhabitants; a proper Irishman, he claims to be a grammarian, but is simply a he-goat. His wife had been carried off by Danes. He too is captured in his turn, and the crew of the ship use him as their plaything. Taken ashore at Corbric, he is sold to a nunnery for three deniers, where, bragging that he is a poet, he is well received and rampages sexually among the nuns. The people catch him at his fornications, put him in a boat, and let the sea carry him off. Pirates catch him again, and he, who sacrifices to the gods like a pagan, is brought into a Saxon port. A widow buys him up cheap and pays the price in forged money. He again rampages and the people are glad to let him go. In a rite of black magic, he learns from a Demon that his wife is a slave at Rouen and is about to marry a Dane. He rushes to Rouen in his Irish clothes and begs the countess (Gunnor) for aid; she promises to buy out his wife if he can find her. He discovers her somewhere working as a weaver. (The poet warns him of the woman’s lubricity.) Getting the right to remove his wife, Moriuht carries her off on his shoulders all the way to Rouen; and he also recovers his daughter. At court he boasts of his poetic powers, but unhappily he makes an error in versification. The poet launches into an account of prosody, corrects Moriuht, and dismisses him to his lewd games. In the second satire, Garnier declares that true wisdom lies in the monastic state, with its stability and its poverty; he bids Franbald go back to his monastery. ‘Theoretician, yes, but your voice is like a crow’s, it makes the fishes flee, it’s even put St Michael to flight. Return to silence: then you yourself can return to the Mont.’ Franbald has come to Rouen out of cupidity to teach music.

  Whatever the facts behind these works, the accounts are none the less instructive. Garnier has some classical knowledge; he shows much respect for Virgil, recalls the lessons of Horace, and seems to know Juvenal and Persius well. The picture of Moriuht’s wife, ‘Poor woman with bare shoulder, bare, with lovely breasts’, for instance, is based on a line of Juvenal. An anonymous satire on Jezebel has the same qualities of pedantry, liking for abuse and scatology, and interest in magic. Its Jezebel does not seem to be an historical character, but merely a symbol of lascivious woman. Pre-1066 Normandy, besides Chronicles, also had hagiographical works, and the History of Dudo, which was much more than a Chronicle. Here is a definite literary effort, looking back to Boethius for its mixture of verse and prose, and seeking out-of-the-way terms or Greek words as did Liutprand of Cremona; it uses a circuitous approach as did Gumpold, bishop of Mantua (late tenth century), and displays great erudition. But there is something of a Norse fury about Dudo’s way of attacking the themes, his accumulation of effects, his personal vanity, and his great need to flatter and to shine, by using whatever methods were available, however tawdry.

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  At William’s accession there were nine abbeys and one nunnery; he himself built two hous
es in Caen to expiate his allegedly incestuous marriage — that is, to placate the church. He later built Battle abbey in England to atone for the deaths at Hastings, and an abbey at Montebourg in Normandy: not much, considering his resources. Indeed he seems even to have stolen the land on which St Stephen’s was built at Caen; for when he came to be buried there, Ascelin fitzArthur, with supporters present, declared that he had illegally taken the land from his father, and had to be bought off so that the burial might go on. William did not attend the dedication of the new abbey at Bec though he and his wife were in Normandy at the time and the event was of some importance. But he did not interfere when his barons began founding monasteries instead of using their resources for purposes of war. He was always ready to give someone else’s lands to the church, for example the six parishes in Guernsey owned by Niel de Saint-Sauver, who, as vicomte of the Cotentin, had been a leader in the 1047 revolt. William gave the estate to the abbey of Marmoutier in Tours; later Niel confirmed the monks’ title for a payment of £30. Certainly monastic life in this period made many advances in Normandy, but these were no doubt linked with the general developments going on all over the west. William Calculus, of Jumièges, soon after 1070 wrote his confused history of the Norman dukes; Durand of St Wandrille, pupil of the German Isembert and later abbot of Troarn, composed a theological treatise against Berengar of Tours. But one of the best Norman writers was William of Poitiers, a secular clerk and archdeacon, not a monk. Three important scholars came from south of the Alps: John of Ravenna at Fécamp, Lanfranc of Pavia at Caen, Anselm of Aosta at Bec.

  We know most about Bec because one of its monks, Gilbert Crispin, later abbot of Westminster, wrote of Herluin and Lanfranc, both his masters. Herluin was one of the members of the Norman nobility who renounced the world of violence and greed. A knight of William’s uncle, count of Brionne, he gave his hereditary estates to the church, with ducal permission, and in about 1034 built with his own hands a chapel, on his lands at Bonneville, learning to read the psalter at night. He visited monasteries to study their rules, which disappointed him. Pulling down his old home, he built a monastery there. The bishop of Lisieux consecrated it, accepted Herluin and two retainers as monks, and later made him a priest, then, as the community grew, an abbot. The monks worked the land, and Herluin’s mother washed and cooked for them. The place was barren, the nearest water two miles away, so they all moved to another part of Herluin’s land, Bec, on a stream in a wooded valley. A wooden church and cloister were raised; but the site was unhealthy and some monks couldn’t bear it. Then Lanfranc stopped there and was won over to Herluin’s way of life. He stayed on and after three years resumed his teaching, to raise funds. He became prior and urged a change of site. In 1060 Anselm joined them and Herluin agreed on a move. In June 1063 Lanfranc became abbot of St Stephen’s, Caen; in 1067 he refused the see of Rouen, but in 1070 he was persuaded to become archbishop of Canterbury. In October 1077 he returned to dedicate the new church at Bec amid such a huge crowd that many of the monks were pushed out of the ceremony. Herluin died at eighty-four in 1078, succeeded as abbot by Anselm. Through Lanfranc Bec had come to conform more and more to the rule of the other Norman houses, and grew strongly Benedictine.