2
When, in December 942, Duke William went to meet Count Arnulf of Flanders on Picquigny, an island in the Somme, he had no reason to suspect foul play. William and Arnulf had been at loggerheads for some time. As the ship-savvy Normans established themselves, they presented a challenge to the counts of Flanders, who’d traditionally controlled the lucrative trade along the northern French coast. And as Rollo and William began expanding their domains, so Count Arnulf of Flanders had been busy extending his influence south and west. Soon, conflict had broken out between the two. But for all their rivalry, William and Arnulf were leading members of the northern French aristocracy – and expected to behave as such. This meant treating one another with respect and honouring the terms of parley.
So it was that William came to meet with Arnulf. No effort had been spared to make the meeting a success. Both sides had already committed to the peace process and agreed to meet on Picquigny in Picardy, roughly halfway between their respective spheres of influence. Islands were favoured sites for such summits. They were neutral territory, from which either party might retreat at the first sign of foul play. Yet even the best laid plans can come a cropper, as William now learned. For while he and Arnulf were indeed able to agree terms (or so he thought), as soon as William departed he was called back to the shore by one of Arnulf’s men. When he returned, Arnulf’s companions picked up weapons which they had stowed for this purpose, dispatching the Norman duke. The twelve men who’d accompanied William could only look on helplessly from their own vessels on the Somme.1
The next decade almost saw the extinction of the Norman settlement, as power fragmented and rival Scandinavian groups set themselves up within the region. This period was of crucial importance for the development of Normandy (as the duchy would soon be known). For it was out of the crucible of disaster and defeat that a unified polity was forged – one both larger and more centralised than that of Rollo and William. One of the main challenges facing William’s son and heir, Richard, was how to integrate the new Viking groups who’d flocked to the duchy in his early years. Unlike the armies of Hugh or Louis, such men could not be driven out; rather, Richard would have to win their loyalty. His approach, which becomes increasingly clear from the 960s, was to stress his own Scandinavian heritage, taking pride in the Northman (or rather Norman, as we now know it) heritage they shared.2 This seems to have been successful, and Richard’s own longevity proved to be another major boon. After the initial upheaval of the 940s, his half-century on the ducal throne provided ample opportunity for this Northman/Norman identity to take root. By Richard’s final decades, Normandy was a well-established territorial principality on a par with Flanders or Aquitaine. Rollo and William may have conquered Normandy, but it was Richard I who secured its future.
There was certainly much to be done. Ducal authority had always been centred on Rouen and the lower Seine. In the aftermath of the 940s, Richard was left with the unenviable task of reasserting and reconstructing – in practice, often asserting and constructing for the first time – his power and influence elsewhere. An important initial move was achieving a modus vivendi with Harald of Bayeux. This meant abrogating direct control of the western parts of the duchy, in exchange for acknowledgement of his overlordship. This then initiated a slow but steady process of integration, first clearly visible in Richard’s later years, not least in the pages of Dudo’s celebrated History.3 Richard’s efforts were assisted by a set of strategic dynastic marriages. The first was to Emma, the daughter of Duke Hugh the Great. Hugh had been the leading power in northern France following the death of Heribert of the Vermandois, and his sphere of influence bordered directly onto Richard’s to the south and west. Hugh also had longstanding interests in the Bessin, where his ancestors had long exerted authority, and had helped Richard against Louis after the siege of Bayeux in the mid-940s; the marriage now formalised this alliance. The match itself was probably brokered soon after Richard’s success against Louis, but only came to fruition in 960. By this point, Hugh himself was dead. But such was the power and influence of Hugh’s family that the marriage remained a highly desirable one. When Emma died without children in 968, Richard went on to wed Gunnor, the daughter of a local potentate in the Cotentin. This move helped further to secure Richard’s position in the western reaches of the duchy, where his authority was weakest.
A sign of Normandy’s growing maturity is the sudden flowering of literature and historical writing in and around the ducal court. Pride of place naturally belongs to Dudo of Saint-Quentin. Dudo hailed from the neighbouring Vermandois (later Picardy) and had first come into contact with the Norman court when sent to Rouen as part of an embassy by Count Albert I, the son and successor of Heribert II. By virtue of his position as count, Albert – like his father – controlled the religious communities within his domains, including Dudo’s community of Saint-Quentin. Dudo himself seems to have received much of his education here, perhaps with stints for further studies at Liège, Laon or Rheims. Whatever his precise background, by 987 Dudo was a leading canon of Saint-Quentin – a figure worthy of entrusting with a delicate diplomatic mission.4
This was a turbulent time in France. The traditional Carolingian dynasty had died out in 987 and was replaced by that of Hugh Capet, the son and successor of Hugh the Great (and thus grandson of Robert of Neustria). Hugh’s family were old rivals of the Carolingians, and his accession was not welcomed by all. Among the dissenters were the counts of Vermandois. It was in this connection that Dudo was sent to Richard. The duke had been a close associate of Hugh the Great and now backed his son; Albert hoped that Richard would be an intermediary with the new monarch. Dudo’s mission seems to have been a success and he soon became a fast friend of Duke Richard. In the coming years, Dudo enjoyed regular sojourns at the Norman ducal court. And two years before Richard’s death, Dudo received a commission to write a history of the duchy. In the following years, Dudo spent much of his time at Rouen. He became a ducal chaplain under Richard’s son, Duke Richard II, in which guise he produced charters in the duke’s name. Two of these survive in their original format, preserving Dudo’s own hand.5 He was also busy gathering information for his magnum opus, on which he worked in fits and starts: the ‘History (or Deeds) of the Normans’, which he’d promised Richard I. This work was finally finished c.1015, though large elements had been written earlier.
We’ve already met Dudo as the notoriously unreliable narrator of Normandy’s origins. But what makes Dudo a bad source for the early 900s is precisely what makes him a good source for the 990s and early 1000s. For Dudo’s vision of the Norman past is fundamentally anachronistic. He projects the situation of his own day backwards, viewing the duchy’s origins in terms of its later constitution.6 Such creative anachronism is already advertised by Dudo’s choice of title. He writes a History of the Normans (Latin: Historia Normannorum; roman for emphasis). Yet in 911, there were no Normans. There were Vikings based on the lower Seine. But these were no different from the many other groups of Scandinavian marauders in France (not least in the Loire valley), all of whom contemporaries called Nor(d)manni, i.e. ‘Northmen’. By Dudo’s day, however, this Latin term (and its French equivalent) had come to mean something very different. In Normandy, it was now a proper noun referring to the inhabitants of the duchy; from the pagan Northmen had been made the Christian Normans. This connection is preserved in modern French and German, in which ‘Normans’ and ‘Northmen’ are the same word (French: Normands; German: Normannen).
The very fact that Dudo could conceive of history in these terms reveals how far Rollo’s descendants had come. Out of the disparate Viking groups that had first settled the region had emerged a single, Christian (Francophone) people: the Normans. This is not the only manner in which Dudo places the cart before the horse. Just as his Normans exist avant la lettre in his history, so too does their principality. In Dudo’s account, Normandy is not slowly assembled over the course of eighty years, but granted to Rollo outright. The same is true of the titles Dudo accords Rollo and William. Out of convenience, I’ve spoken so far of all the early Norman rulers as dukes. But the earliest Norman leaders were actually known as ‘princes’ or (more often) ‘counts’. Richard I is the first to be styled ‘duke’ (as far as we can tell), and Richard II is the first to bear the title routinely – details which Dudo, as a charter scribe, would have known first hand.7 Yet in Dudo’s account, the Norman rulers are all dukes from Rollo on.
Dudo’s History thus gives voice to a developing sense of Norman identity. It speaks of the newfound confidence within the corridors of power in Rouen, and there is a good chance that it was intended for recitation at the ducal court.8 Dudo is not, however, our only evidence for these shifts. Ducal charters similarly reveal a growing sense of collective Norman identity, with Richard I and II regularly styled ‘duke/count of the Normans’ (dux/comes Normannorum). Even more striking are the signs that the duchy was starting to be considered a territorial unit. The Latin term for Normandy, Normanni(c)a, is first found in ducal charters of 1014 and 1015, just as Dudo was putting the finishing touches to his History. One of these documents survives in its original format, written (perhaps not coincidentally) by Dudo himself!9
Relations between Normandy and its neighbours also reflect these shifts. William’s reign had seen the ducal family integrated into the upper echelons of northern French aristocratic society; his son and grandsons now became players on a truly European stage. Richard I’s first wife, Emma, had she lived, would have seen her brother crowned the French king. And in Richard’s later years, his daughter Matilda was betrothed to Count Odo II of Blois, another major player in French politics. The biggest coup came, however, with the match of Richard’s daughter – the sister of Duke Richard II – to the English king, Æthelred, in 1002. The immediate grounds for the marriage were tensions between the two realms, first over the treatment of political exiles and then over Richard II’s harbouring of Viking raiders.10 In 1000, a particularly large Viking force sought shelter in ‘Richard’s kingdom’ (i.e. Normandy) and William of Jumièges reports an English raid on the Cotentin, which may have been a reprisal.11 Yet out of such conflict soon came compromise. Æthelred needed all the friends he could get – particularly those, like Richard II, with ports and ships. So it was that a marriage alliance was forged. We don’t know for certain who proposed the match, but one suspects it was the English king. For some time, Richard’s family had been rubbing shoulders with royalty; now they joined its ranks.
Just how Scandinavian the Norman duchy remained is a moot point. The first half of the tenth century had seen substantial Viking settlement, reinforced by new arrivals in the 940s. Norse speakers must, however, now have been a minority in all but pockets. Dudo famously reports that Richard I was sent to Bayeux in his youth, so that he could cultivate a knowledge of the Danish tongue. And though this does not necessarily mean that the language had died out elsewhere, it does suggest that French was the language of the ducal court.12 That the western parts of the duchy remained more Norse is also indicated by Richard’s marriage to Gunnor, the daughter of a local nobleman – a marriage designed to secure the loyalty of the region. As her name suggests, Gunnor was of Scandinavian descent and in all probability a native Norse speaker. Place-names likewise point to continued use of the language into the eleventh century, with a strong presence in the Cotentin.
Similarly significant are the signs of continuing contact with the Normans’ Scandinavian homelands. Richard I employed Scandinavian mercenaries when reconstructing his polity in the 960s, and as late as 1013/14 Richard II can be seen calling upon Viking allies during conflicts with his neighbours. (This was, however, the last time a Norman duke would do this.) So if in many respects the Normans had ‘gone native’, they remained distinct from their French neighbours. Dudo’s celebrated narrative attests as much. Though written in the Latin characteristic of French learned culture, Dudo’s account strongly emphasises the Scandinavian origins of his protagonists. The Normans may have been culturally French, but they continued to celebrate their Scandinavian roots. This sense of distinctiveness wasn’t restricted to the circles around the ducal court. Writing in Rheims in the mid-990s, the French historian Richer refers to Richard I as ‘duke of the pirates’ (dux piratae), a clever play on his real title ‘duke of the Normans (i.e. Northmen)’ (dux Normannorum). In Richer’s eyes – and probably those of many at the ducal court – Norman and Northman still amounted to one and the same.13 The Normans thus became the Australians of the medieval world, taking pride in their criminous pedigree.
Dudo was an essential part of this transition. His history offers the Normans a means of glorying in their past paganism, while still flaunting their Christian credentials. In his narrative, the Norman settlement and conversion were all part of a divine plan. The real hero of the story was not Rollo but Richard I, Dudo’s patron; and all signs are that Richard II and his court continued to promote a distinctive brand of Christian Norman identity.14 The eleventh-century Norman duchy thus makes a Janus-like impression. It owed its existence to Scandinavian settlement and took great pride in this. Yet its evolution and vitality are only understandable within the context of the northern French political culture of the time. The more Dudo insists on the distinctiveness of the Normans, the more it seems like special pleading. The Normans were different from their neighbours, but by degree, not nature.