Of Rolf’s internal government, of the laws and institutions of the new state, of the details of the settlement of the country, we know absolutely nothing. Norman tradition sets Rolf before us as the mirror of princes, as the type of that class of ruler which that age most valued, the stern, speedy, impartial, minister of justice.[227] But we may judge of the reign of Rolf from its results. What Normandy became shows plainly enough that its first prince must have been a worthy forerunner of our own Cnut. Once settled in the land, he seems to have become as eager for its welfare as he had before been for its devastation. He must have promoted the general adoption, not only of the religion, but of the speech and manners of his neighbours. Otherwise Normandy could never have played the part which it did play even in the next reign, nor could his capital have become so thoroughly French as it was within a short time after his |No records of early Norman history.| death. But of the early institutions and early internal history of Normandy all records have perished, or, more probably, no records ever existed. We have no chronicles, no charters, nothing whatever to guide us but the results. |The settlement probably analogous to the Danish settlement in England.| From such indications as we have we may perhaps infer that the settlement was, on the whole, of much the same kind as the Danish settlement in England.[228] We cannot conceive any systematic extirpation or expulsion of the older inhabitants, such as accompanied the English Conquest of Britain. At the same time we can well believe that, after so many years of systematic havoc at the hands of the wikings, large districts may have stood almost as empty and untilled as if such systematic |Evidence from the peasant revolt. 997.| extirpation or expulsion had taken place. But it is certain that, a hundred years after the conquest, there was a peasantry at once oppressed enough and powerful enough to rise in a well-organized revolt.[229] Though in Normandy, as in England, the condition of the private settlers is likely to have gradually sunk, still we cannot believe that any descendants of the original conquerors could, in so short a time, have been brought down to such utter bondage. These peasants must have been mainly the descendants of the original Gauls, with whatever intermixture of Roman and Teutonic elements the successive conquests of the country had brought with them. |Probable position of the races in the country.| Probably the landowners, great and small, were almost universally of Scandinavian descent, while the remnant of the original population had been brought down to a state of serfdom. It is certain that there is nothing in English history at all answering to this insurrection till we come to the great revolt of the villains of the fourteenth century. This difference seems to point to a wholly different condition of the lower orders in the two countries. |Vestiges of the Danish language.| As regards the language of Normandy, the Danish tongue has utterly vanished out of the land; it had vanished out of the greater part of the land even before we reach any contemporary records; still considerable vestiges, strangely disguised as they are, may to this day be made out in the local nomenclature. In Northern Gaul, just as in Eastern England, many a place lost its name, and took a new name from its new Scandinavian lord. Here and there also we find descriptive names, meaningless in French, but which are, with a slight effort, intelligible in English.[230] These may, according to their geographical position, be either remnants of the Danish speech of Rolf and his followers or remnants of the speech of an earlier Teutonic settlement in part of the country of which I shall presently have to speak. Of the early political condition of the duchy we have absolutely no |Normandy not an absolute monarchy.| account. On the absence of such information one illustrious inquirer[231] has grounded a theory that Normandy had no assembly, no Parliament, no Estates of any kind, but that the Duke, Marquess, Patrician, or whatever he is to be called, ruled without any restraint on his personal will. I confess that I find it impossible to accept a theory so utterly repugnant to the analogy of every other Teutonic people. If there be any truth in Norman tradition, the followers of Rolf, as long as they stayed on ship-board, acknowledged no lord, and professed principles of the most extreme democratic equality.[232] However this may be, it is not likely that, as soon as they were settled on land, they should at once cast away those free institutions which were common to them with all the |Instances of the action of the States.| other branches of the common stock. And there is evidence enough to show that an assembly of some kind was often consulted from the very beginnings of the Norman state, and especially that the transfer of the ducal crown from one prince to another was effected with much the same forms as the same change would have called for in England.[233] At the same time I fully admit that to fix the exact constitution of the Norman assembly at this early time would be still harder than to fix the exact constitution of an English Witenagemót. The little light which we have may perhaps enable us to infer that it put on an aristocratic character almost from the beginning. It has also been supposed that, unlike perhaps every other assembly of the kind, it contained no ecclesiastical members;[234] but if this was the case in the earlier days of the duchy, the rule had clearly been relaxed before the reign of the great William.
We must remember that we are now in the very thick of the struggle between the two dynasties of Laon and Paris. The Norman stepped in as if sent to be the fated arbiter between the two. When Rolf made his settlement, Charles the Simple was the acknowledged King of the West-Franks; from him he received his grant; with him he entered into the mutual engagements of lord and vassal. With him and his dynasty Rolf sided, and he probably saved the Carolingian crown from utter overthrow, just as a change of policy in his successors finally decided the |End of the Karlings in Germany. 912.| same controversy the other way. It must be remembered that, in the year of Rolf’s settlement, the Carolingian line came to an end in the Eastern Kingdom. The East-Frankish Duke Conrad was now raised to the Teutonic throne, and was presently followed by Henry of Saxony. But Lotharingia refused to acknowledge either of the Kings so chosen. The border land appears throughout our history as ever fluctuating between the Eastern and Western kingdoms. But Lotharingian policy was dictated by one intelligible rule, that of unswerving loyalty to the Carolingian house, wherever its representative might be |Lotharingia attaches itself to Charles the Simple.| found. So now Lotharingia transferred its allegiance to the single Karling who still kept the royal title, and acknowledged the King of Laon as its lord. The power of Charles was thus directly strengthened to the East, while it was indirectly strengthened by the grant to the Northmen in the West. This increase of power on the part of Charles probably led to the conspiracy which soon broke out against |Robert of Paris chosen King. 922.| him, and which issued in the election of Robert of Paris as an opposition King. In the wars which followed, Charles |Rolf sides with Charles.| rested to a great extent on the arms of the Northmen, both Rolf’s settled Northmen of the Seine and the Northmen of the Loire, the followers of Ragnald, who had not |Robert killed at Soissons. 923.| yet won so distinct a local habitation.[235] When Robert was killed at Soissons, his son Hugh the Great refused the crown for himself. He was known as Duke of the French, |Rudolf of Burgundy chosen.| and, satisfied with that title, he bestowed the kingly name on his brother-in-law Rudolf, Duke of French Burgundy.[236] |Imprisonment of Charles at Peronne. 923.| Charles was afterwards treacherously seized and imprisoned by Rudolf’s fellow-conspirator Herbert Count of Vermandois, in the same fortress in which in after days a King |1468.| of France was imprisoned by a Duke of Burgundy.[237] Rolf’s combined policy and loyalty led him to refuse all allegiance |War between Normandy and France. 923–927.| to the usurpers. A war of several years followed between him and the French of Paris under Duke Hugh. The horrors of warfare were not felt on one side only. The Norman land was twice invaded, and Rolf’s fortress of Eu, its chief defence on its north-eastern border, was taken by storm.[238] But these incursions were more than repaid in kind; a large Danegeld was more than once paid to Rolf, and was levied throughout France and Burgundy,[239] and the |Acquisition of Maine and Bayeux. 924.| general results of the war left Rolf in possession of a most important increase of territory. He obtained the district of Bayeux; he obtained also a more fully recognized superiority over Britanny, and it is also distinctly asserted that |Abdication [927?] and death [932?] of Rolf.| he obtained a grant of the land of Maine.[240] Rolf did not long survive these successes; the year of his death is uncertain; but it seems most likely that, by the consent—perhaps at the demand—of the estates of his principality, he resigned |William Longsword succeeds, and does homage to Charles. 927.| the government in favour of his son William, surnamed Longsword.[241] A change in the policy of Herbert of Vermandois had restored Charles to freedom and to some nominal measure of authority. The new prince of the Northmen therefore paid to the true Carolingian King the homage which his father had paid before him, but which he had steadily refused to the Parisian and Burgundian pretenders.
The acquisition of the territory which this last war added to the dominions of Rolf was inferior in importance only to the original acquisition of Rouen. And it is only on the ground of its being the original acquisition, the beginning and starting-point of the whole settlement, that the possession of Rouen itself can be looked on as more important than the possession of the noble region which |Maine.| was now added to the Land of the Northmen. Maine indeed was the most precarious of all possessions. The struggles for its retention and recovery, the adventures of its gallant Counts and of its no less gallant citizens, form no small part of the later history of the Norman |The Bessin.| duchy. But the acquisition of Bayeux and its territory gave Normandy all that created and preserved the genuine and Norman character; it gave her the cities which are adorned with the noblest works of the days of her independence; it gave her the spot which was to be the earliest home of her mightiest son. Caen, around whose castle and whose abbeys so much of Norman and French history was to centre—Bayeux itself, the see of the mighty Odo, where the tale of the Conquest of England still lives in the pictured history which forms its most authentic record—Cerisy, with its stern and solemn minster, the characteristic work of the Conqueror’s father—Falaise, immortal as the birthplace of the Conqueror himself—all these historic spots lie within the region which the last warfare of the reclaimed wiking had added to the Norman land. |The Saxon colony at Bayeux;| Bayeux itself is a city whose history has an especial claim on the attention of Englishmen. Nowhere, out of the Old-Saxon and Frisian lands, can we find another district 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,[242] 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 every other Romance-speaking |its lasting influence on the district.| portion of the continent. The Saxons of Bayeux kept their name and their distinct being under the Frankish dominion;[243] we can hardly doubt that the Scandinavian settlers found some parts at least of the district still Teutonic, and that nearness of blood and speech exercised over them the same influence which the same causes exercised over the Scandinavian settlers in England. Danes and Saxons were welded together into one Teutonic people, and they kept their Teutonic language and character long after Rouen had become, in speech at least, no less French than Paris. With their old Teutonic speech, the second body of settlers seem to have largely kept their old Teutonic faith. We shall presently find Bayeux the centre of a heathen and Danish party in the duchy, in opposition to Rouen, the centre of the new speech and the new creed. The blood of the inhabitants of the Bessin must be composed of nearly the same elements, mingled in nearly the same proportions, as the blood of the inhabitants of the Danish districts of England.[244] To this day there is no Romance-speaking region of the continent in which an Englishman feels himself so thoroughly at home as in this old Saxon and Danish land. In every part of Normandy, as compared with France or Aquitaine,[245] the Englishman feels himself at home; but in the district of Bayeux he seems hardly to have left his own island. The kindred speech indeed is gone; but everything else remains. The land is decidedly not French; men, beasts, everything, are distinctively of a grander and better type than their fellows in the mere French districts; the general aspect of the land, its fields, its hedges, all have an English look. And no contrast can be greater than that which may be often seen between the tall, vigorous, English-looking, Norman yeoman, out of whose mouth we instinctively feel that the common mother-tongue ought to come, and the French soldier, whose stature, whose colour, whose every feature, proclaims him to be a man of another race, and whose presence proclaims no less unmistakeably that the glory of Normandy has passed away.
Rolf, the converted pirate, died, according to his Norman |Religion of Rolf.| admirers, in the odour of sanctity.[246] According to the wild reports of his enemies, he mingled the two religions, and, while making gifts to the Christian churches, offered Christian captives in sacrifice to his Scandinavian idols. Such a strange confusion is possible at some earlier stage of his career; but we need much better evidence than we have to convince us that he was guilty of any such doings just before his death.[247] But, whatever traces of heathendom may have cloven to Rolf himself, it is certain that his son |Birth and education of William Longsword.| William Longsword, half a Frenchman by birth, was almost wholly a Frenchman in feeling. His mother was French; but he did not spring from the union of the converted Northman with the royal blood of the West-Franks. Gisla bore no children to her already aged husband, and William was the son of a consort who both preceded and followed her in his affections. She was known as Popa, whether that designation was really a baptismal name or, as some hint, a mere name of endearment. She was the daughter of a certain Count Berengar, and was carried off as a captive by Rolf when he took Bayeux in his pirate days.[248] Her brother, Bernard Count of Senlis, plays an important part in the reigns of his nephew and great-nephew. Popa and her son seem to have stood in a doubtful position which they share with more than one |Norman and Frankish laxity as to marriage.| other Norman Duke and his mother. Rolf and Popa were most likely married, as the phrase was, “Danish fashion,”[249] which, in the eyes of the Church, was the same as not being married at all. A woman in such a position might, almost at pleasure, be called either wife or concubine, and might be treated as either the one or the other. Her children might, as happened to be convenient, be either branded as bastards or held entitled to every right of legitimate birth. Rolf put away Popa when he married King Charles’s daughter, and when King Charles’s daughter died, he took Popa back again.[250] So William, Popa’s son, put away Sprota, the mother of his son Richard, when he married Liudgardis of Vermandois.[251] This strange laxity with regard to marriage, though spoken of as something specially Danish, was in truth hardly more Danish than Frankish. The private history of the Frankish Kings, Merwings and Karlings alike, is one long record of the strangest conjugal relations. Ordinary concubinage is not amazing anywhere; what stands out specially conspicuous in the history of these Kings—nowhere more conspicuous than in the history of the great Charles—is the liberty which they assumed of divorcing their Queens at pleasure, and sometimes of having several acknowledged Queens at once. |William Longsword French rather than Danish.| William, born of a doubtful union of this kind, was far more French than Danish in feeling. His tutor was Botho, a Danish companion of Rolf, but one who threw himself thoroughly into the French and Christian interest. Such an education made William familiar with the language and feelings of both classes of his subjects; but his own sympathies lay with the speech, as well as with the creed, of his mother; he was more at home in Romanized Rouen than in Teutonic Bayeux. In the existing state of things, divided as the duchy was between the Danish or heathen and the French or Christian party, the personal sympathies of the prince were of the highest importance, and there can be no doubt that the French feelings and Christian convictions of William had a most decisive effect on the history of the Norman state.[252]
The first great event in the internal history of the duchy |Breton revolt. 931.| during the reign of William is a general revolt of its Breton dependencies. This event was probably not unconnected with the general course of affairs in Gaul. At William’s accession, two Kings, Charles the Simple and Rudolf of Burgundy, disputed the crown of the West-Franks. William, as we have seen, became the vassal of |William’s attachment to the cause of Charles. His peace with Hugh and Herbert. 928.| Charles, and refused all submission to Rudolf. Even in finally making peace with his great French neighbours, Hugh of Paris and Herbert of Vermandois, William made it a condition that Herbert should do homage to Charles as he himself had done. Herbert, it should be remembered, was himself of Carolingian descent, and might have further designs of his own. It was only on these terms that William restored Herbert’s son, who had been given to his father Rolf as a hostage.[253] Charles remained for some while a puppet in the hands of Herbert, brought forth as a sovereign or confined as a prisoner, as suited the ever-shifting |Death of Charles the Simple. 929.| relations of Herbert, Hugh, and Rudolf. At last the unhappy descendant and namesake of the great Emperor died in bonds at Peronne, whether actually murdered by Herbert, or simply worn out by sorrow and captivity, it matters little.[254] Rudolf was now the only acknowledged King, and he soon showed himself to be, in one respect at least, fully worthy of his crown. The independent and unsettled Northmen of the Loire had committed |King Rudolf defeats the Northmen of the Loire at Limoges. 930.| great devastations in Aquitaine. King Rudolf overcame them in a great battle at Limoges, where he utterly broke their power, and procured the acknowledgement of his own supremacy over Aquitaine.[255] It was probably this great defeat of one Norman army by a King to whom no |The Bretons rise.| Norman had hitherto done homage which encouraged the Bretons to make an attempt to throw off the Norman yoke altogether. That yoke was of a twofold kind; there was the more regular and endurable supremacy of the Norman Duke at Rouen, and there was also the constant annoyance of small bands or colonies of independent adventurers within their frontiers or upon their borders. Under their princes, |Massacre of the Normans, Michaelmas 931.| Juhel Berengar and Alan, the Bretons rose; they made a massacre of the Normans in their own country, which may have given a precedent for the later massacre of the Danes in England.[256] The feast of Saint Michael in the one case was what the feast of Saint Brice was in the other. |The Bretons attack Bayeux.| Flushed with success, they entered the Norman duchy, and attacked Rolf’s latest and most precious acquisition, Teutonic Bayeux.[257] Alike under Saxon and under Norman occupation, the Teutonic colony was a thorn in the side of the Celts, which they were always eager to get rid of. |The revolt crushed.| But William completely crushed the revolt, and its only result was to bring all Britanny more completely under Norman control, and to extend the immediate boundaries |Normandy gains the Côtentin peninsula.| of his duchy. The districts of Avranches and Coutances, with the noble peninsula to which the latter city gives its name, were now added to the immediate Norman dominion.[258]
At this point comes the first of many signs which we shall meet with in the course of our story, all of which show the high position which England held at this time, and the important influence exercised on foreign politics by the renowned prince who now filled the West-Saxon throne. In this, as in every other respect, all depended on the personal character of the King. It was now exactly as it was ages later. England under Æthelstan differed from England under Æthelred, just as England under Elizabeth or Cromwell differed from England under the first or the second pair of Stewarts. Through the whole of this period, the King of the English, the common friend and kinsman of most of the contending princes, appears as a dignified mediator among them. Through the marriages of his sisters, some contracted before, some after his election to the crown, Æthelstan was the brother-in-law of most of the chief princes of Western Europe. |His connexion with most of the Western Princes.| He stood in this relation to King Otto, to King Charles, to King Lewis of Arles, to Duke Hugh of Paris, and to a nameless prince near the Alps.[259] On the imprisonment |Eadgifu and Lewis take refuge in England.| of Charles, his Queen Eadgifu,[260] with her young son Lewis, had taken refuge in England,[261] and the future King of the West-Franks was now learning lessons of war and statesmanship at the hands of his glorious uncle. So |Alan of Britanny does the like.| now, on the extinction of the Breton insurrection, while Berenger submitted to the Normans, Alan took shelter with Æthelstan,[262] as his father before him is said to have taken shelter with Eadward. England might in either case seem a strange place of refuge for a banished Armorican prince and his following. The descendants of those who had originally fled before the English conquerors now sought for safety in the very land from which their forefathers had been driven. And at this particular moment such a refuge might seem stranger than ever. The Breton exiles sought shelter in England at the hands of the very King by whom the last footsteps of Celtic independence in Southern Britain were trampled out. Æthelstan and William of Rouen might well seem to be carrying out |Relations of England with Normandy less friendly than with the other states.| the same work on opposite sides of the sea. But a nearer tie of common hostility might well at that moment unite the Breton and the Englishman. Each was engaged in a struggle with Scandinavian intruders in his own land. Between the Danes in England and the Danes in Normandy communications never wholly ceased, and, long after this time, we shall find the connexion between Denmark and Normandy directly affecting the course of English events. The Normans and their Duke seem always to have been on less intimate terms with England than most of the neighbouring states; William stands almost alone among princes of equal rank in not being honoured with the hand of a sister of glorious Æthelstan. The Norman historian even puts forth a claim on the part of his Duke to a dominion over England,[263] which is among the most ridiculous outpourings of his lying vanity. Still such a boast speaks something as to the feelings which existed between the Danes in Gaul and the great destroyer of the Danish power in Britain. With Æthelstan then, the common champion of Christian and civilized Europe, at the court which was the common shelter of the oppressed, the common school of every princely virtue, did the Breton prince, fleeing from his conqueror, |Restoration of Alan. 936.| seek the safest and the most honourable refuge. At a later date, when the influence of Æthelstan on the affairs of Gaul was specially great, Alan and his companions were allowed to return.[264] He received a large part of Britanny as a vassal of the Norman Duke; he appears to have remained steady in his allegiance, and he is henceforth constantly mentioned among the chief peers of the Norman |His struggles with the Northmen of the Loire.| state.[265] But he could win back the actual possession of his dominions only by hard fighting against the independent Normans of the Loire. These pirates, even after Rudolf’s victory at Limoges, held many points of the country, and they were hardly more inclined to submit to the Norman Duke at Rouen than to the Breton Count at Vannes.[266] Alan restored the ruined city of Nantes, and did much for his recovered dominions in various ways. The relations between Normandy and Britanny were now definitely settled, as far as anything could ever be said to be settled in that age. The boundary between the dominions of the vassal and his lord was fixed by the Norman acquisition |The Côtentin becomes thoroughly Norman.| of the Côtentin and Avranchin. These lands, the last won part of Normandy, form one of the districts which became most thoroughly Norman. They stood open for Norman colonization; and we shall presently see that colonization was allowed, perhaps invited, not only from the settled parts of Normandy, but even directly from the heathen North itself.
Along with the peninsula of Coutances the Norman Dukes obtained a possession which was afterwards to form a bond of connexion of a singular kind between Normandy and England.[267] In comparing the extent of the West-Frankish kingdom at this age with that of modern France in our own day,[268] while mentioning many |Normandy acquires the Channel Islands.| points in which the French frontier has advanced, I had to mention three points where it has fallen back. The extent of the land whose princes acknowledged a nominal superior in the West-Frankish King took in Flanders, Barcelona, and the Channel Islands. Those islands, a natural appendage to the Constantine peninsula, now became Norman. When continental Normandy was lost by John, the insular part of the duchy was still retained, and it has ever since remained a possession of the English crown. As long as the English Kings kept the title either of Duke of Normandy or of King of France, here was a portion of the duchy or of the kingdom whose actual possession might be said to make good their claim to the rest. This insular Normandy remains to this day French in speech, but deeply attached, and with good reason, to the |Peculiar relation of the islands to England.| English connexion. The islands form distinct commonwealths, dependent on the British crown, but not incorporated with the United Kingdom. This condition of a dependency is perhaps that which best suits a community which has a distinct existence of its own, but which could not possibly maintain its independence as a distinct and sovereign state. Keeping their ancient constitutions, and enjoying the protection of the power of England, the Norman islands unite the safety of a great kingdom with the local independence of a small commonwealth. How much they would lose by becoming a French department I need not stop to point out. But they would also lose, not nearly so much, but still not a little, by becoming an English county. The right of sending one or two members to the British Parliament, where, among so many greater interests, their voice could hardly be heard, would be a poor exchange for their present legislative independence. Parliament can indeed, on any emergency which may call for its interference, legislate for the Norman islands. But it must legislate specially for them, after special consideration of the circumstances of the case. The islands cannot find themselves unexpectedly bound by some piece of general legislation, passed without their knowledge and possibly contrary to their interests. Thus the dependent condition of the islands secures a greater consideration of their interests than they could receive if they formed an integral portion of the kingdom. We occasionally hear of internal abuses in the Channel Islands which are held to need the intervention of Parliament, but we never hear of external grievances laid to the charge of Parliament itself. The Norman islands seem to be far |Comparison with Orkney.| more contented as dependencies than those Norwegian islands which, having been formed into a Scottish county, have become an integral part of the United Kingdom. The ancient earldom of Orkney, represented in Parliament by a single member, has its wrongs, or at least its grievances; of the wrongs or grievances of Jersey or Guernsey no one ever heard. And this singular and beneficial relation in which these interesting little communities stand at this day to the English crown is connected by a direct chain of cause and effect with the revolt of the Bretons against Norman supremacy nine hundred and forty years ago.
William, thus become the conqueror of the Bretons, ruled for the present as a French prince. As such, his French speech, French connexions, and French religion, caused him to be hated and dreaded by a large portion of his subjects. A strong Danish and heathen party still survived within the older limits of the duchy, and the newly won lands probably contained some of those independent Danish settlements by which Britanny in general was so |Revolt of the Danish party in Normandy, 932.| infested. Out of these two elements a Danish and heathen revolt was organized. Its leader was Riulf, seemingly an independent Danish chief settled in the Constantine |Legendary details of the revolt and its suppression.| peninsula. The story, as we have it,[269] reads like a romance. The rebels rise in arms; they demand one concession after another; the panic-stricken Duke is ready to yield everything; he even proposes to resign his duchy and to flee to his French uncle at Senlis. But he is recalled to a better mind by his veteran counsellor, the Danish-born Bernard. He then wins an almost miraculous victory over the rebels, and, for the time at least, crushes all signs of revolt. These details cannot be accepted as historical; but one or two points in the story are instructive. The rebels are made to demand the cession of all the country west of the river Risle. The land which would have been left to the Duke after such a cession nearly answers to the original grant to Rolf, excluding the later acquisitions of |Geographical character of the two parties.| Bayeux and Coutances. This demand, like everything else in the history, shows how thoroughly the Norman parties were geographical parties. The Christian and French-speaking Duke might keep Christian and French-speaking Rouen and Evreux; but the heathen and Danish land to the west must be independent of a prince who had cast |Christianity and French manners supported by a party among the native Danes.| away the creed and speech of his forefathers. On the other hand, we see that there were men of Danish birth, old companions of Rolf, men who retained a strong national feeling, who still distinctly threw in their lot with the French party. They wished Normandy to remain an united and independent state; they had not the slightest wish to merge Normandy in France in any political sense; but they wished the Norman duchy to be a member of the general French commonwealth, French in religion, language, and civilization. Such a man was Botho, the old tutor of William and afterwards tutor to William’s son; such were Oslac, bearing a name famous in our own Northumbrian history, and Bernard the Dane, who plays an important part in Norman affairs for many years to |William’s French and Christian government.| come. Through the overthrow of the rebellion this party was now dominant, and William reigned as a Christian prince, as a French prince, aiming at an influence in French affairs proportioned to the extent of his dominion on Gaulish soil. Through his whole life he was subject to strong religious impulses, and, according to a legend which may well contain some groundwork of truth, he was with difficulty hindered from becoming a monk in his own foundation of Jumièges.[270] Yet he was by no means lavish in grants to the Church, and the ecclesiastical foundations, which had suffered so cruelly during the Scandinavian incursions, still remained weak and impoverished, and, in many cases, altogether desolate. His general government is described as just and vigorous, and he seems to have |He does not wholly break with the Danish element.| deservedly won the general love of his subjects. And it is certain that, though he laboured to bring his dominions within the pale of Christian and French civilization, he did not wholly cast away the national speech and national feelings of his fathers. It is not unlikely that his policy towards the Danish element in the duchy varied at different periods of his reign. He may have found that the transformation of a nation must needs be a work of time, that too much haste might hinder the object which he had at heart, that a certain measure of toleration, in language, in manners, and even in religion, might be needful in order to bring about a final change in |Towards the end of his reign he makes further advances to the Danes.| any of those points. In his later days he may even have gone further than this. After all his efforts to identify himself with the French, and to act as a French prince among other French princes, he still found himself scorned and hated, still looked on as Duke only of the Pirates. Under the influence of such feelings, he may to some extent have thrown himself into the hands of the Danish party. According to a story which cannot be received as it stands, but which probably contains some germs of truth, he admitted a fresh Danish colony, direct from Denmark, into the newly-acquired peninsula of Coutances.[271] It is certain that he entrusted his son Richard to the care, not of any French clerk or Bishop, but to his own old |Danish education of his son Richard.| tutor, the Danish-born Botho. The boy was purposely taken to Bayeux, the Teutonic city which Botho himself, in his pirate days, had helped to harry. He was sent thither expressly to become familiar with the ancestral tongue, which was already forgotten at Rouen,[272] but which was still spoken by the mixed Saxon and Danish population of the Bessin. The boy was to be brought up in a Danish city, but by a native Dane who had accepted Christianity and French manners. We may be sure that no religious apostasy was dreamed of; but William now saw that the sovereign of Normandy must be neither pure Dane nor pure Frenchman, but, as far as might be, Dane and Frenchman at once.
For the purposes of the present sketch, the internal developement of the Norman duchy, the distinction between its Danish and its French elements, its relations to its Celtic neighbours and vassals, are points of more importance than the part played by its second Duke in the general politics of Gaul. Yet the history of Normandy would be hardly intelligible without some understanding of the general position of the duchy as one of the great |Utter confusion of this period.| fiefs of the West-Frankish crown. The reign of William Longsword forms the most confused part even of the confused Gaulish history of the tenth century. It is a period utterly without principles, almost without definite parties; even the strife between Laon and Paris, between the Karling and the house of Robert, between the Frank and the Frenchman, is in a manner lulled as long as Rudolf of Burgundy fills the Western throne. Every vassal of the Western crown sought little beyond his own gain and aggrandizement, and all of them freely changed sides as often as it suited their interest so to do. And William himself added as much to the confusion as any man, by changing sides perhaps oftener |Comparison between William and the French Princes.| than anybody else. And hardly any practical difference was made by the fact that William seems to have been several degrees less selfish and unprincipled than his neighbours. He was evidently a creature of impulse, and his impulses, if they often led him astray, often led him to righteous and generous actions. Though we cannot set him down, with his panegyrist, as a saint and a martyr, we can at least see in him far nobler qualities than any that can be seen in the contemporary princes of Vermandois, of Flanders, or even of ducal France. Still the practical difference was slight. William was doubtless morally a better man than his neighbours; but politically he was as untrustworthy as the worst of them. His plighted faith went for as little as the plighted faith of a deliberate perjurer. Impulse led him to one course one day, and impulse led him to an opposite course the next day. He probably never was intentionally treacherous, but he did as many of what were in effect treacherous actions as the basest traitor among them all.