Part 14

Of these last, the Normans proper were the most noted, and they have the first place of all their race in the world's annals. They changed in everything, from soul to skin. They became Christians, and they took new names. Their original language was soon displaced by the French, and became so utterly lost that hardly more is known of it than we know of the Etruscan tongue. "The Danish language," says Sir Francis Palgrave, "was never prevalent or strong in Normandy. The Northmen had long been talking themselves into Frenchmen; and in the second generation, the half-caste Northmen, the sons of French wives and French concubines, spoke the Romane-French as their mothers' tongue." The same great authority says: "In the cities, Bayeux only excepted, hardly any language but French was spoken. Forty years after Rollo's establishment, the Danish language struggled for existence. It was in Normandy that the _Langue d'oil_ acquired its greatest polish and regularity. The earliest specimens of the French language, in the proper sense of the term, are now surrendered by the French philologists to the Normans. The phenomenon of the organs of speech yielding to social or moral influences, and losing the power of repeating certain sounds, was prominently observable amongst the Normans. No modern French gazette-writer could disfigure English names more whimsically than the Domesday Commissioners. To the last, the Normans never could learn to say 'Lincoln,'--they never could get nearer than 'Nincol,' or 'Nicole.'" The "chivalry" of Virginia and the Carolinas--our Southern Northmen--might cite this last fact in evidence of their tongues having a Norman twang. They never have been able to say "Lincoln," though they make a nearer approach to proper pronunciation of the word than was vouchsafed to the genuine Normans when they say "Abe Linkin." That the Normans cherished the thought of their Northern origin is a modern error. Sir F. Palgrave, with literal accuracy, assures us that they "dismissed all practical recollection in their families of their original Scandinavian ancestry. Not one of their nobles ever thought of deducing his lineage from the Hersers or Jarls or Vikings who occupy so conspicuous a place in Norwegian history, not even through the medium of any traditional fable. Roger de Montgomery designated himself as 'Northmannus Northmannorum'; but, for all practical purposes, Roger was a Frenchman of the Frenchmen, though he might not like to own it. This ancestorial reminiscence must have resulted from some peculiar fancy; no Montgomery possessed or transmitted any memorial of his Norman progenitors. The very name of Rollo's father, 'Senex quidam in partibus Daciae,' was unknown to Rollo's grandchildren, and if not known, worse than unknown, neglected."[D]

Another unfounded notion respecting the Normans relates the purity of lineage. To read some historians, you might come to the conclusion that the Normans were an unmixed race, and that they prided themselves on the blueness of their blood, and were the most exclusive of peoples. Nothing of the kind. Like most peoples who have done much, the Normans were a mixed race. They took to themselves all who would come to them, who were worth the taking. The old Roman lay of the asylum on the Palatine Hill might almost serve as matter for a Norman _sirvente_, for the policy which it attributes to Romulus, and which was followed by his successors, was the policy adopted by Rollo, and which his successors maintained. Says Sir F. Palgrave, "When treating of the 'Normans,' we must always consider the appellation as descriptive rather than ethnographical, indicative of political relations rather than of race. Like William, the Conqueror's army, the hosts of Rollo were augmented by adventurers from all countries. Rollo exhibited a remarkable flexibility of character; he encouraged settlers from all parts of France and the Gauls and England, and his successors systematically obeyed the precedent." Most such adventurers in any age of the world must be of the most ancient of families, the families, to wit, of "robbers and reivers," the enlisted rascality of the earth, but none the worse workmen because their patron is St. Cain. There is a great deal of work to be done that can be done only by such fellows. It is sagely said that the world would be but ill peopled if none but the wise were to marry. It is certain that the world would get forward very slowly if none but the mild and the moral were active in its business. There is an immense amount of business to be accomplished that the mild cannot do, and which the moral will not do. How can it be expected of mild men that they should cut human throats, when they cannot be trusted even to stick the sheep which they have no hesitation in eating? How unreasonable it would be to expect moral men to become soldiers,--and the soldier's trade is the only permanent pursuit, save the pursuits of the grave-digger and the hangman,--when so exemplary a personage as the great Duke of Wellington gravely said, on his oath and on his honor, that the army is no place for moral and religious men? The felons who flocked to Rollo's standard wellnigh a thousand years ago were recruited from the "dangerous classes" of those remote days, and were probably as useful in the task of civilizing the world as, according to the assertion of one of the most eminent of English divines and historians, are rough and lawless men in that of Europeanizing Polynesia.[E]

Dr. Lappenberg, whose authority is great in all that relates to the history of the Normans, confirms what is said by Sir F. Palgrave of the ignorance of the North and the indifference to it which characterized the Normans. Speaking of the Norman literature, he observes: "In vain we seek herein imitations of the old Norse poesy, or allusions to the history or customs of Scandinavia. There may, perhaps, exist more resemblance between the heroic sagas of the North and the romances of chivalry of the South of Europe, both having for subjects wonderful adventures, and the praise of heroism and beauty; but from this resemblance it cannot be concluded that the Anglo-Norman poets have borrowed their fictions from the Norman skalds. We have not a single proof that they were acquainted with any saga or any skaldic composition. All remembrance of their national poetry was as completely obliterated among the posterity of the Northmen in France, as if, in traversing the ocean, they had drank of the water of Lethe. This total oblivion of their original home they have in common with the West Goths, who in Castilian poesy have not left the faintest trace of their original manners and opinions. The same remark has been applied to the Vareger, who founded a royal dynasty in Russia, and to whom that country, as a Russian author remarks, is not indebted for a single new idea. The causes are here the same with those that effected a complete oblivion of their mother tongue, namely, their inferior civilization, their intermixture with the natives, their marriages with the women of the country, who knew no other traditions than those of their native land. In Normandy, too, the Christian clergy must have suppressed every memorial of the ancient mythology."[F] Further, "Whatever partiality the Normans may have entertained for history, they nevertheless betrayed an almost perfect indifference for their original country. The historians of Normandy describe the heathen North as a den of robbers. After an interval of two centuries, they knew nothing of the events that had caused the founder of their ruling family to forsake the North; they did not even know where Denmark and Norway lay. Benoit de Ste More begins his chronicle with a geographic sketch, in which he takes Denmark for Dacia, and places it at the mouth of the Danube, between the extensive countries of the Alani and the Getae, which are always covered with ice, and surrounded by a chain of mountains." The excellent chronicler's geographical notions seem to have been about as clear as those of Lolah, who tells Katinka that

"Spain's an island near Morocco, betwixt Egypt and Tangier."

The earliest Norman chroniclers show that the Normans, or rather the Northmen, bore much ill-will toward the French; and this prejudice, it has correctly been said, "probably lasted as long as their Northern physiognomy, their fair hair, and other characteristics whereby they were distinguished from the French." But they soon became the flower of French races, and were regarded as Frenchmen in all the lands to which they were led by their valor, their enterprise, their ambition, and their avarice. They continued to avail themselves of the talents of other races long after Northmen had been converted into Normans, greatly to their own advantage, and considerably to the advantage of others. "Inclination, policy, interest," says Palgrave, "strengthened the impulse given by the diffusion of the Romane speech. Liberality was the Norman virtue. 'Norman talent,' or 'Norman taste,' or 'Norman, art,' are expressions intelligible and definite, conveying clear ideas, substantially true and yet substantially inaccurate. What, for example, do we intend when we speak of Norman architecture? Who taught the Norman architect? Ah, when you contemplate the structures raised by Lanfranc or Anselm, will not the reply conduct you beyond the Alps, and lead you to Pavia or Aosta,--the cities where these fathers of the Anglo-Norman Church were nurtured, their learning acquired, or their taste informed? Amongst the eminent men who gloriously adorn the Anglo-Norman annals, perhaps the smallest number derive their origin from Normandy. Discernment in the choice of talent, and munificence in rewarding ability, may be truly ascribed to Rollo's successors; open-handed, open-hearted, not indifferent to birth or lineage, but never allowing station or origin, nation or language, to obstruct the elevation of those whose talent, learning, knowledge, or aptitude gave them their patent of nobility."[G] The Normans won their fame, as the Romans their empire, through aid of various races, and by borrowing and assimilating whatever they found of good among all the peoples with whom they came in contact,--meaning by good what was useful for the promotion of their purposes.

The old Northmen in Neustria did not give way without a struggle, not for existence only, but for victory, of which at one time their prospect was by no means bad. The Danish party was strong in the time of Rollo, and it might have established itself over Normandy in the early years of his son, William I., who deemed his Norman sovereignty lost, and who at one time showed the white feather in a very unNorman-like manner, and in quite the reverse fashion to that adopted by Henri IV. at Ivry. At length he recovered his courage, and, delivering battle, he won a complete victory, which was ruinous to the vanquished. They were exterminated, and Riulph, their leader, was captured, and blinded by William's orders. It is supposed he died under the operation. William's cruelty is attributed to his earlier cowardice, and it is an old saw that no one is so cruel as a victorious coward; but cruelty was not so uncommon a thing in the year 933 that there should be any necessity for attributing the Norman's savageness to the reaction from fear. He probably had called his cowardice caution. His success settled the character of Normandy, which became, or rather continued to be, a French country; and its people were Normans, the result of a liberal mixture of many races, from whom were to issue the rulers of many lands. The combat of the _Pre de la Bataille_ took place just four generations before Hastings, and had its issue been different the current of history might have run in a very different direction from that in which it has set for eight centuries; but the consequences of such a change "must be left to that superhuman knowledge which the schoolmen call _media scientia_, and which consists in knowing all that would have happened had events been otherwise than they have been." The question at issue was whether the Normans should live as Frenchmen or disappear; and William's triumph secured the ascendency of the Romane party, who alone could establish Normandy. When his son, Richard sans Peur, became chief of the Normans, A. D. 943, Normandy was a power in Europe, and virtually a free state,--for its rulers were "independent as the kings of France, whose superiority they acknowledged, but whose behests they never held themselves bound to obey."

The Normans soon made themselves felt in Europe. They became the foremost of Christian communities, and were distinguished in arts and arms and letters. They were the politest people of their time, and in their manners and modes of life they presented strong contrasts to the general coarseness of the period in which they flourished. Their valor seemed to increase with their culture; and if they were admired by the few because of their intellectual superiority, they were dreaded by the many because of their dauntless bravery and the energy and success which characterized their military exploits. Though often fighting at great odds, they were rarely defeated. They furnished the most distinguished adventurers of an adventurous age. There is nothing more romantic than the history of the Norman family of Hauteville, which sent forth a number of men whose exertions in Southern Europe had great effect in the eleventh century. Foremost of his countrymen in courage and capacity was the adventurer Robert de Hauteville, better known as Robert Guiscard, substantially the founder of that Neapolitan kingdom which we have seen absorbed into the new kingdom of Italy. His daughter married a son of one of the Byzantine Emperors, who was dethroned; and Robert was thus enabled to enter on a series of Eastern conquests, which would have ended in the taking of Constantinople had not imperative circumstances compelled him to return to Italy. A few years later he resumed his Oriental schemes, but died before he could complete them, and when everything promised him success. Had a Norman dynasty been established at Constantinople, at the close of the eleventh century, by so able a man as Robert Guiscard, it is probable the Lower Empire would have renewed its life, and that the Normans would have become as influential in the East as their contemporary conquest of England had made them in the West. The feudal system, of which they were the great masters, might as easily have been introduced into Greece as it was into England, and with the effect of producing an order of men who would have proved themselves more than a match for any force that the Mussulman could have brought against the new nation. There would have been a regular flow of Normans and other hardy adventurers to Byzantium, and the Turks never would have been allowed to cross the Hellespont to establish themselves in Europe, and would have been fortunate had they been able to keep the Normans from crossing the Hellespont to establish themselves in Asia. Thousands of those fanatics who were so soon to cover the Syrian sands with their bones, as Crusaders, would have been attracted to Greece, and would have done Christendom better service there than ever they were allowed to render it under the Godfreys and Baldwins and Raymonds, the Louises and Richards and Fredericks, who piously fought for the redemption of the Redeemer's sepulchre. Indeed the Holy Sepulchre could best have been freed from infidel pollution by operations from Greece, had Greece renewed her life under a dynasty worthy of the Greeks of old; and Asia, the Land of Light, might have been relieved from the thick darkness under which it has so long labored, had Norman genius and Norman valor been authoritatively employed to direct the Christian populations of the East, reinforced by the surplus adventurers of the West, against the Mussulmans. The West might have liquidated its debt to the East, by restoring Christianity to it.

All this was on the cards, had Robert Guiscard lived a few years longer,--and he was one of many sons of a poor and petty Norman baron, and superior to thousands of his countrymen only in the circumstance that he was more favored by Fortune. We are not to judge of what might have been effected by a Norman dynasty in Greece by the miserable failure of that Latin empire of which Greece was the scene in the thirteenth century, and which grew out of the capture of Constantinople by the French and the Venetians. That empire had not the elements of success in it; and it was established too late, and on foundations too feeble, to meet the demands of the time. Its founders lacked that legislative capacity with which the Normans were so liberally endowed. Though we cannot subscribe in full to Mr. Acton Warburton's enthusiastic estimate of the Norman race, we believe him to be substantially correct in what he says of their legislative genius. He dwells with unction on the strong tendency to institutions that ever characterized them. This tendency, he observes, strongly indicates "the profound sentiment of perpetuity, inherent in the Norman mind, to which everything was valueless that shared not in some degree its own enduring character. Abhorrent alike of despotism and license, they imparted this love of institutions wherever they came. In their days the world was passing through a fierce ordeal. A stern necessity lay on the whole system of things, a necessity which may be expressed in this brief formula,--the sword. In their several missions, if I may so speak, the Normans were forced to use the appointed instrument of the hour; but the readiness with which the sword was sheathed, the facility with which the soldier changed into the citizen, shows how deeply they felt that a state of hostilities, bloodshed, and disorder could not be the normal condition of man. And so we see them pass at once from the battle-field to the council-chamber. The fierce warrior of yesterday is the thoughtful legislator of to-day. The first interval of repose was ever employed in devising means for giving stability to their acquisitions, and a constitutional form to the society in which they were to be vested. Among the Teutons, such a task was never referred to the wisdom of any one leader, however successful,--any oligarchy of chiefs, however eminent. From time immemorial, the provisions from which their laws were derived, and on which their societies were based, were the emanations of free public opinion. Their armies were triumphant, because the soldier yielded up his will implicitly to his general; their societies were vigorous and stable, because, when the soldier became a citizen, he resumed that will again. No sooner had conquest and peace transmuted the army into a society, than the dominant sentiment appeared,--the sentiment of rational independence,--resulting, as the community formed, in liberal institutions."[H] Had this legislative spirit been applied to Greece at the close of the eleventh century, the effect would have been to create there a powerful nation; and the Crescent never would have triumphed over the Cross in that land from which the West has drawn so much that is of the highest value in all its processes of intellectual culture.

There is a reverse to this picture of the Normans. They had some very bad qualities, for they had no higher claims to perfection than is found in the case of any other people. Mr. James Augustus St. John, speaking of the Norman princess Emma, who married the English Ethelred, says, after admitting her great personal beauty, that "her mental qualities were very far from corresponding with the charms of her person. Like all other Normans, she was greedy of gold, ambitious, selfish, voluptuous, and in an eminent degree prone to treachery."[I] This may stand for a portrait of the whole Norman race. Nor does it detract from their aristocratical spirit that they were ever fond of money, or from their chivalrous spirit that they were faithless when they supposed treachery would best promote their interests. Aristocracies are always money-seekers, and often money-grubbers; and they plunder all whom they have the power to spoil. _Alieni uppetens_ is ever their motto, but _sui profusus_ does always go with it. The American slavocracy were the aristocracy of this country, and they were far more "greedy of gold" than ever "Yankees" have been. Treachery is common to the chivalrous classes, and the history of chivalry is full of instances of its display by men who claimed a monopoly of honor. Our Southern "chivalry" were unfaithful to every compact they made, and it was their infidelity that brought about their fall. The dangers that now threaten the country exist only because the party vanquished in the late civil war are bent upon breaking the terms on which they were admitted to mercy. They are fond of calling themselves Normans, though we have not heard much of their Norman origin since their Hastings went against them; but in respect to treachery and cruelty, and disregard of the rights of the poor and the helpless, they are the match of all the barons of Normandy.

The Normans were often cruel, and some of their modes of punishing their defeated enemies--blinding them, and cutting off their feet and hands, and inflicting on them the most degrading of mutilations--might lead one to suppose they were of Eastern origin, were not such practices traceable to the Northmen. These practices imply a grossness of mind that is much at war with the common notion of the gentleness and cultivation of the Norman nobles. They were noted for their craft, their spirit of intrigue, and their readiness to get possession of the property of others by any and all means. The most unscrupulous modern devotee of Mammon would be ashamed of deeds that never disturbed the placid egotism of men who considered themselves the flower of humanity and the salt of the earth,--and whose estimate of themselves has seldom been called in question. The fairer side of their conduct with regard to money is visible in their sensible encouragement of "business" in all the forms which it then knew. "Annual Mercantile Fairs," says Sir F. Palgrave, "were accustomed in Normandy. Established by usage and utility, ere recognized by the law, their origin bespake a healthy energy. Foreign manufacturers were welcomed as settlers in the Burghs,--the richer the better. No grudge was entertained against the Fleming; and the material prosperity of the country and the briskness of commerce carried on in all the great towns, proves that the pack-horses could tramp along the old Roman roads with facility. Indeed, amongst the Normans the commercial spirit was indigenous. The Danes and the folk of Danish blood were diligent traders. The greed of gain unites readily with desperate bravery. When occasion served, Drake would deal like a Dutchman. Any mode of making money enters into facile combination with the bold rapacity of the Flibustier." There was much material prosperity in Normandy at the close of the tenth century, or less than a hundred years after Rollo had established himself and his followers on French soil. The burgher class throve amazingly, and were the envy of all who knew their condition; and their military skill and valor were as famous as their success in the industrial arts, and their wealth, which was its consequence. Free they were, or they would have been neither rich nor valiant. The peasantry, too, were a superior people, who enjoyed much freedom, and who exhibited their bravery whenever there was call for its exhibition,--facts which show that they must have been well governed, and which tend to elevate our conception of the merits of their rulers.