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Normandy is probably at the same time the best and the least known place on the Continent to Englishmen: the best known, because the most accessible; the least known, because, beyond the fact that the Duke of Normandy conquered England in the year 1066, and that it is in consequence from Normandy that our line of kings is derived, the average Englishman knows little or nothing of its history or associations. Ask him plainly: What is the extent of Normandy? and he will answer vaguely, “It is the north of France.” So it is, a part of the north of France, but not the whole. As a matter of fact, the term Normandy has now little geographical meaning. Normandy is not a province for practical purposes, nor does it carry any civil boundaries marking customs, or law, or government. Normandy embraces the departments of Manche, Orne, Eure, Calvados, and Seine Inférieure; that is to say, it reaches from Eu and its port Le Tréport on the east; to the stream Couesnon, which flows into the English Channel a little beyond Mont St Michel on the west; and southward it just takes in Alençon, dips down to a point near La Ferté Bernard, returning with a wavering north-eastward line across the Seine at Vernon, and by Gisors to Eu aforesaid. It answers also to the modern dioceses of Rouen, Evreux, Séez, Bayeux, and Coutances. The Archbishop of Rouen still keeps the title of Primate of Normandy, otherwise the name has gone out of formal use, and Normandy is merged in France.

Yet it is extraordinary with what tenacity and affection Englishmen regard a name which links the dwellers in the land to them as kin, and it is still more extraordinary how, after centuries of submersion, beneath a rule entirely French, the kinship makes itself felt in manner and character as well as in memory. The qualities of the sturdy northmen whose bravery and roving dispositions led them to lands far from their own, and made them at home everywhere, still exist in their descendants, as the colonies of England testify. When the Danes had settled down upon the north of France “they were,” says Freeman, “no longer Northmen but Normans; the change in the form of the name aptly expresses the change in those who bore it.” Yet many and many a vessel full of vikings discharged itself on that land without making any impression, until one came bearing the mighty Rollo, who was destined to stay and make a permanent mark.

The France of those days, torn by dissensions, was not the homogeneous country we now know. Long before Cæsar first conquered Gaul, and in the time of his successor Augustus, Lyons was the capital; then came the Germans and Goths, who began to overrun the land, and a little later the low German tribe of the Franks came also; they were destined to give their name to a land alien from their own, just as the modern name of Scotland was brought over the sea originally by the men of Ireland. It was in the beginning of the sixth century that the greater part of Gaul lay under the dominion of Clovis, King of the Franks. Yet after his death, in accordance with the German custom, the kingdom was divided among his sons, one province being Neustria, which included what we know as Normandy, and endless struggles ensued, until in the middle of the seventh century arose the great Charlemagne, who ruled by his might over all central Europe, now divided into many nations. But in the struggle between his grandsons, his great dominion was split up, one grandson taking what is now Germany, another Italy, and the third, and most powerful, Charles the Bald, holding France. He had for his kingdom “all Gaul west of the Scheldt, the Meuse, the Saône, and the Rhone; it ran down to the Mediterranean, and was thence bounded by the Pyrenees and the Atlantic.” Brittany was still savagely independent, however, and the northern coasts of Neustria were ravaged by the Northmen. The county of Paris became part of the possessions of the duchy of France, and Robert the Strong, made duke by Charles the Bald, was set to fight against the northern marauders, who had penetrated even to Paris. But the descendants of the great Charles were weak and feeble, and as his house declined that of Robert the Strong grew, culminating in his great-grandson, Hugh Capet, who, on the death of the last of the direct line of degenerate Carlovingians, became king of the France that we know.

But before Capet had succeeded in seating himself on the throne, the Northmen had settled permanently in France. In the reign of Charles the Bald’s grandson, Charles the Simple, Rollo or Rolf, the Northman, had established himself at Rouen, and the king had made terms with him, giving him his daughter to wife, and granting him a tract of land from the Epte to the sea, with Rouen as its heart. This was in 912, and is the first recognised settlement of the Northmen. Rollo himself is a fine bold figure, only surpassed by one other among his descendants. His frame was gigantic, and when in full armour no horse could carry him. He seems to have combined, with the strenuous virile qualities of the northerners, the capacity for organisation and settled government belonging to a later period, and a more civilised people. He embraced the faith of his wife Gisella, and was baptized under the name of Robert, though it is as Rollo he will be known and remembered. He was the founder of Normandy, and under his government, learning and industry sprang up and flourished. His followers received the softening influences of the French, and the French language began to be spoken in Normandy.

The first Normandy was, as has been said, the district lying around Rouen, but in 924 the district of Bayeux was added to it, hereafter to become a stronghold of the older language and customs against the Frenchified influences of Rouen. Freeman says: “Nowhere out of old Saxon or Frisian lands can we find another portion of continental Europe which is so truly a brother land of our own. The district of Bayeux, occupied by a Saxon colony in the latest days of the old Roman empire, occupied again by a Scandinavian colony as the result of its conquest by Rolf, has retained to this day a character which distinguishes it from any other Romance-speaking portion of the Continent.”

AN APPROACH TO THE ABBEY, MONT ST MICHEL

As we have seen, at the time of Rolf’s settlement in Neustria there were two powers in France, the King of France, Charles the Simple, and the powerful Duke of the French, who included in his dominions the future capital, Paris. It was to the King of France that Rolf did homage as overlord; and the story goes that the proud Northman, on being told to kiss the monarch’s foot by way of homage, deputed one of his men to act as his proxy, and that this man, no humbler than his master, contemptuously raised the king’s foot to his own mouth, thereby oversetting the monarch. The story is probably apocryphal, but it has lived with odd persistence.

Rollo died in 931, and a few years after his death his son William Longsword had the satisfaction of adding to his lands the district of Côntentin, including the peninsula and the land as far south as Granville. He obtained this additional land when he was suppressing what was called a revolt of the Bretons—for the Dukes of Normandy held shadowy rights over Brittany, rights which they were never able to enforce. By his new conquest the Channel Isles were included in Normandy, and oddly enough it was thus they became attached to the English crown, for when the Norman dukes, as kings of England, lost all their other French possessions, they retained the islands. William Longsword was of a softer mould than his father, and from what can be gathered from the chronicles of the time he was a man of a thoughtful cast of mind, serious and gentle, a character rare enough in his age. He was succeeded by his son Richard, who, of all the Norman dukes except the Conqueror himself, is the best known to English people from Miss Yonge’s charming story, The Little Duke, in which it is to be feared she regards both father and son through a haze of idealisation; but it is indeed difficult if not impossible to make sufficient allowances for the radically different cast of thought in a bygone age, and to draw men as they really were. Richard the Fearless reigned for more than fifty years, and it was ten years before his death that Hugh Capet combined in himself the power of the kings and dukes of France, and became the first king of consolidated France. Richard had been sent as a lad to Bayeux, in order that he might be brought up under the influences of the country of his ancestors instead of becoming too much Frenchified; but he was of a vigorous disposition, and there seems to have been no reason to believe that he would have suffered unduly from any softening influence.

Nothing is more striking in the early annals of France than the succession of weak rulers she produced; occasionally there arose a man of capacity and power, but his sons were invariably weaklings. France does not seem to have been able to carry on a strong ruling race. In contrast to this, note the towering figures of the Norman dukes—the gigantic Rolf, the wise William Longsword, Richard the Fearless, Robert the Devil, William the Conqueror—all men of exceptional power and capacity. The infusion of Norman blood seems to have given just that basic power of endurance needed in the Teutonic nation. Richard the Fearless was succeeded by his son Richard the Good, and he by two of his sons successively, another Richard, and Robert the Devil or the Magnificent (see p. 34). It was Roberts son William, who, left as a child to his inheritance, became the most famous of his race. No story of romance or legend is more wonderful than that of the Conqueror. At present we leave it aside to form the theme of a separate chapter, so as not to prolong too far this sketch of Norman history, which is necessary for any understanding of the topographical allusions.

With the Conquest, Normandy began to sink in importance; as in the case of a mother who has brought forth a son, destined to wield power and occupy positions far beyond her capacity, she herself took a secondary place. To be the independent King of England was grander than to be Duke of Normandy subject to the kings of France, and it needed but a generation or two to make the English forget the fact of their being conquered, and to look upon Normandy as a appanage of the English crown. It was a strange position altogether; the best blood of Normandy was emptied into England at the Conquest; abbots, warriors, nobles, men of learning and men of birth settled in the new country and became the English, and England found herself so much Normanised as to be transformed.

It is customary to consider that the history of Normandy ends with the conquest of England, being thenceforth merged in that of the greater country; but though the importance of Normandy as a country was lessened by the union, her history is by no means identical with that of England. Normandy several times enjoyed a sovereign prince altogether distinct from him who wore the crown of England, and this state of affairs began immediately after the death of William the Conqueror, who left the duchy to his eldest son Robert, while the second son William became King of England. Of Robert we know chiefly that he suffered from an incurable “mollesse,” and further, as regards personal details, that as “Jambes eût cortes, gros les os,” he earned the nickname of Court-hose. This son of a famous father and admirable mother, was a libertine, given over to pleasure, incapable of taking decisive action, one of those weak characters on which experience cannot engrave permanent lines, but withal full of the courage of his race. He was, however, unable to hold what had been left him. William had prophesied that his youngest son Henry should be greater than both his brothers, and Henry soon began to fulfil the parental prophecy by seizing and holding for himself the Côtentin peninsula, and with it the lordship of Mortain. Nothing is more significant of the grasping natures of the trio of brothers than the way in which they changed over, first one couple joining against the remaining one, and then almost immediately breaking up for a fresh combination. William and Henry warred against Robert; Henry and Robert combined to thwart William; William and Robert mutually agreed to keep Henry out of the succession, and so on; exactly as self-interest dictated for the moment. Finally William came uppermost, and Robert submitted, and henceforth practically held his duchy at the pleasure of his brother. It was Henry’s turn to be the “odd man out,” and he fled before his elder brothers, taking refuge in Mont St Michel, where they both besieged him. He had to submit, and, yielding up the fortress, retired a penniless adventurer. But in some way he afterwards regained the whole of the Côtentin. When the crusading mania began, Robert was seized with it; under his rule Normandy had been wretchedly governed, and little he cared. For a comparatively small sum he mortgaged his duchy to his brother William the Red, for six years, and went off to the Holy Land. Normandy was probably the better for his action. In returning from the Holy Land, he managed to occupy a year in the journey, and on the way he married Sybilla, daughter of Count Geoffrey of Flanders. He had already, it may be stated, two sons and a daughter, who seem to have inherited the best of the traits of his house. One of the sons, Richard, while on a visit to his uncle William in England, was accidentally killed in the New Forest.

ENTRANCE TO MONT ST MICHEL

Sybilla attempted to reclaim her husband from the crowd of bad companions who gathered round him on his re-entry into Normandy, and when Robert was tired of her, as he soon became of everything, he found this inconvenient, so in less than two years she died suddenly of poison. Robert had returned too late to put in a bid for the throne of England! which was already occupied by Henry; but the death of William freed him from any obligation to pay back the debt on his duchy, and Sybilla’s dowry went in other directions. Henry now made a treaty with his brother, by which he delivered up the Côtentin, but kept Domfront and Mortain. However, becoming once more embroiled with Robert, he quickly won for himself the whole duchy, clinching the matter at the famous battle of Tinchebray, whereby the process of his father was reversed, and the King of England now conquered Normandy as the Duke of Normandy had then conquered England. After the terrible death of his son near Barfleur, Henry set his heart on the succession of his daughter Maude, who had been married first to the Emperor of Germany, and afterwards on his death, evidently by her father’s choice, to Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou and Maine, one of the most powerful of the rulers who might have opposed her succession in Normandy. Yet Maude never ascended the throne that her father had so carefully guarded for her. It is true that a claimant who might have proved very formidable, William, the remaining son of Robert, had died seven years before his uncle Henry, but there remained the two sons of Adela, daughter of the Conqueror; of these the younger, Stephen, was determined to oust his cousin. During the weary civil war that followed, Normandy was many times traversed by one party or the other, but on the whole the country declared for Stephen. The Count of Anjou was an hereditary enemy, and the Normans did not relish the idea of being governed by him in his wife’s name. When at last, after the death of Stephen’s son Eustace, it was settled that Henry should be recognised as next heir to his cousin, the land enjoyed peace. With the accession of Henry a fresh era began, for the new king held in France not only Normandy, but in right of his mother and his wife, Touraine, Anjou, Maine, and Acquitaine—together more than half the country—a formidable vassal for the French king! Henry was tenacious of his rights, and it was only as his turbulent sons grew older, and displayed to the full those unfilial dispositions so common in their race, that he consented to divide some of his possessions among them, to be held from him as lord. His gifts were many times changed, but it seems certain that Richard had ruled in Acquitaine as an independent sovereign before his father’s death, while Geoffrey, by his marriage with Constance, heiress of Brittany, became Duke of Brittany. Henry gave to his youngest and best loved John the title of Count of Mortain, and with it the vicounty of the Côtentin; and in 1181 he made his eldest son, Henry, Duke of Normandy. But Henry the younger did not long survive, dying at the early age of twenty-eight, after rebelling against his father almost continuously since his attainment of manhood. Therefore, at the death of the king, Richard came to the throne. John still continued ruler of Mortain and the Côtentin under his brother, and these dominions gave him an opportunity for putting in practice those treasonable conspiracies by which he hoped to throw off Richard’s yoke, and become an independent sovereign. Richard, however, was too strong for him; he marched into Normandy, and speedily showed himself master. Thereupon John came humbly to ask forgiveness at Lisieux. The story goes that Richard, with the open-minded heartiness which won him so much more love than his worse qualities merited, exclaimed that he forgave him freely, and set his behaviour down to bad influence, as he was only a child. As John was then six-and-twenty, this reason must have galled him had he possessed an atom of pride, but we have reason to think he did not. While Richard was otherwise engaged in the Holy Land and on the Continent, John made a second attempt to win his realms, which was brought to an end by a knowledge of his brother’s death. He heard this while at Carentan, and gleefully hastened to take advantage of it. True, there was still a boy to be reckoned with, young Arthur, son of his dead brother Geoffrey—a boy who was already Duke of Brittany, and who inherited to the full the proud fierce temper of his mother Constance. But John had two points in his favour: first, that in the old days a brother was often considered to have a better right to a throne, especially if he were a man, than a nephew who was still a child, and this idea had not altogether died out; secondly, the Normans of all people would have been the last to yield homage to the duke of the hated Bretons, their nearest neighbours, with whom they had been perpetually at war, and for whom they felt a fierce jealousy. On the other hand, Arthur had a powerful ally in Philip, King of France, who saw that it would be much more to his own advantage to have a weak boy as ruler of Normandy than a man equal to himself in cunning and craftiness. Therefore Philip helped Arthur, and even promised him his little daughter in marriage. But unluckily for the boy who was the principal actor in the drama, he fell into the hands of his uncle,—some say he was captured by treachery while asleep,—however that may be, he was in John’s clutches, and little chance was there for him to get out again. This was in August 1202. John carried his prisoner at once to one of the strongest castles in his dominions, namely Falaise. Arthur was now between fourteen and fifteen years of age, and John, reckoning without that stubborn courage of nature which the boy inherited, attempted to make him abdicate his rights, in vain. Finding this hopeless, he hurried him away to Rouen, there to dispose of him finally. Arthur’s incarceration at Falaise is dealt with in the chapter on Falaise, and his captivity at Rouen is treated in the chapter on Rouen. The fury of the Bretons, who saw the last of their ruling race, a promising boy, thus foully murdered by the duke of the Normans, their life-long foes, may be imagined; it hardly needed the French king’s call to arms to make them rise in their wrath and flood in upon the neighbouring towns of Normandy. The conduct of John after this displays a pitiable weakness. He alone of all the Conqueror’s line showed a lack of courage; others had been weak, vacillating, unfilial, cruel, vicious, but it remained for John to combine all these qualities in himself. His movements were like those of a timid animal who knows the huntsmen are closing in on him, but has not courage to make a dash through the ring. He hurried from Rouen to Caen, from Caen to Brix, and Brix to Valognes. Back again to Caen, and then to Domfront. He returned to the Côtentin, and at last embarked at Barfleur without striking a blow to save that land, which he had not hesitated to gain by murdering a boy, when he thought there was no personal danger in the action. He did indeed return in 1206 for a short time, but never in such a spirit as to make the retrieving of his dominions possible. Meantime the Normans did not submit so quietly; they could not endure the entry of the Bretons, and sternly defended themselves at Mont St Michel, which was set on fire, and at Caen; but it was of no use; the Bretons, after a triumphal progress, met the French king, who had received the submission of Caen as well as Lisieux and Bayeux, and thus with hardly a struggle there fell into the hands of France that territory which she had so long and so jealously regarded. If ever a king deserved to lose his land, it was the craven John.

A STREET, MONT ST MICHEL

By a curious oversight in the ratification and the submission which followed this conquest, the Channel Islands were overlooked. It has been suggested they were simply forgotten; if so, the event proved fortunate for them, for they have remained ever since in the happy independence granted them by England. The title of Duke of Normandy was dropped by Henry III., John’s son, at the Treaty of Saintes in 1259, when it was agreed that Acquitaine should remain an English possession, and the title was afterwards borne by a scion of the ruling French house. But the tale of Normandy’s wars is not ended. For in the time of Edward, that monarch was set upon recovering not only the territory lost by his grandfather, but, if possible, the French crown for himself; he landed at Barfleur, and, quickly subduing the Côtentin, passed on to St Lo, Coutances, and Caen, taking towns and seizing vast quantities of precious stuffs wherever he went. These triumphs were followed by the famous battles of Crécy and Poitiers, and the historic siege of Calais. However, his conquest left no permanent mark on Normandy, for by the Treaty of Bretigny in 1360, though he received much else, he resigned Normandy with his claim to the French crown, and it was reserved for his great-grandson, Henry V., to recover the duchy by the sword. This he actually did, after a brilliant series of victories; so that in the years 1417 and 1418 Normandy became an appanage of the English crown, but under the rule of the weak Henry VI. his father’s conquests lapsed, and by 1450 Normandy was once more included in the dominions of France, never again to be severed.