The Norman Conquest (9 page)

But it was not just the king who witnessed his authority ebbing away. In a society that had been militarized by the raids, the dukes and counts of West Francia soon found themselves in exactly the same predicament of being challenged from below. Power ultimately devolved to those who could marshal the resources to resist their supposed superiors, while at the same time repressing those beneath them. The clearest manifestation of this trend was fortification. During the time of the Viking raids, the dukes and counts had built large fortresses, generally called
castella
, in order to protect whole communities. In the second half of the tenth century, however, a new breed of
castella
emerged, built not so much to protect communities as to dominate them. What we, in short, would regard as castles.
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Some of these new castles are easily identified as such today: along the valley of the River Loire stand several giant stone towers built around the turn of the first millennium by the buccaneering Fulk Nerra, count of Anjou, whose grasp of the potential of this new weapon transformed him from a comparatively minor figure into one of West Francia’s greatest regional rulers. The wonderful thing about castles, however, from the point of view of the ambitious potentate, was that they did not have to be fashioned in stone, laboriously and expensively, in order to be effective. It was equally possible to dominate a particular area on a fraction of the budget by raising earthworks to form protective enclosures, and topping them with wooden palisades. Instead of a stone donjon, castle-builders could opt for a single large mound of earth, known as a motte, topped with a simple wooden tower. Such innovation (both the great stone tower and the motte have no precedents) enabled men of
comparatively modest means— cadets of established noble families, or ambitious men of non-noble rank— to resist their overlords, assert themselves against their neighbours, and to impose their own lordship— however debatable or unwelcome— on their localities.
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Provided, that is, they had the men with which to garrison them. If the appearance of a new species of fortification was one indication of the changes occurring in Frankish society around the turn of the millennium, the other was the appearance of a new breed of warrior. Again, change occurred initially as a consequence of the Viking raids. The switch from offensive to defensive warfare meant that it was no use relying on a system where armies had to be called up from among the local aristocracy; effective defence required men who were armed and ready all year round, and accordingly dukes and counts began to recruit such full-time professionals into their entourages. Of course, great men had always retained warriors; what seems to have happened as the millennium approached, and traditional structures of authority in West Francia continued to crumble, is that they began to increase the size of their retinues. As society became ever more dog eat dog, the top dogs were those who could maintain the biggest military followings. In search of extra muscle, lords reached out beyond the ranks of the nobility, recruiting the landless and sometimes even the unfree, and issuing them with swords, mail shirts and horses. Because they were mounted, such men were sometimes referred to in French as chevaliers. In England, they would be known as knights.
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Around the turn of the millennium then, power and authority in West Francia (which from now on we shall call France) was increasingly about the control of castles and the recruitment of knights. In each case, it is important to emphasize not only their novelty, but also their crudeness. Great and noble stone castles were very rare— the vast majority were rough and ready constructions of earth and timber. Great and noble knights were rarer still. Most were little better than peasants in terms of their social origins. Not only were they a long way from donning shining armour; chevaliers were also a long way from embracing a code of chivalry, with high ideals of justice and honour. These early knights did not see it as their responsibility to protect the poor and the weak. On the contrary, a large part of their job was to terrorize the lower orders, persuading them to accept the authority and the material demands of the new
castellan lords. No sooner do we encounter castles and knights than we start to hear about ‘bad customs’— new tolls, new taxes, restrictions on movement and behaviour. To be a knight originally was to help discipline a peasantry that had hitherto enjoyed considerably greater freedom, coercing them into accepting the new order that was starting to emerge.
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If we had to sum this new society up in a single word, we might describe it as feudal— but only if we were prepared for an outbreak of fainting fits among medieval historians. The problem with the word feudal, they will tell you, is that it is not actually a medieval word at all, but a coinage of sixteenth-century lawyers, while the abstraction ‘feudalism’ does not occur until as late as the nineteenth century. This is undeniably true, as is the more reasonable objection that both ‘feudal’ and ‘feudalism’ have been employed so loosely and so variously by historians in the past as to be all but meaningless to scholars working in the present. It is worth pointing out, however, that the term ‘feudal’ does derive from the medieval Latin word
feodum
, meaning fief, which was a parcel of land given to some knights in reward for their service. Since we first start to hear of fiefs in significant numbers from the start of the eleventh century, there are still good reasons for using the words ‘feudal’ and ‘feudalism’ to describe a society that was everywhere affected, if not yet entirely dominated, by the arrival of knights and castles.
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How, then, does this generalized picture of society in France compare with what was happening in Normandy? Obviously, Normandy was very different in having been a Viking colony. The Norsemen had not merely raided here; they had settled and stayed to rule. We might expect, therefore, that the duchy would be different by virtue of its Norseness. It seems, however, that this was not the case. As we have already seen, the Normans had been quite quick to abandon much of their Scandinavian heritage, dropping Norse in favour of French, and converting—at least at the higher levels of society—from paganism to Christianity. More surprising still, they appear to have successfully maintained (or resurrected) many of the governmental structures of their Carolingian predecessors. They ruled, for example, from centres associated with the old Carolingian counts, and issued a Carolingian-style silver coinage. Normandy’s borders remained more or less where they had lain in earlier centuries. Far from
demonstrating the kind of comprehensive disruption that one might expect from a violent takeover, the duchy exhibited notable administrative continuity. It
was
an exceptional region, but paradoxically this was because the Normans had preserved the public authority of the Carolingians that elsewhere had collapsed.
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Consequently, if we look at Normandy around the turn of the millennium, we find that the rule of Duke Richard II (996–1026) was comparatively strong. If his predecessors had struggled to assert their authority over other Viking chieftains who had settled in Normandy, by Richard’s day that authority was uncontested. It is at this time, for instance, that we have the first evidence of a titled aristocracy beneath the duke himself. Richard conferred the title ‘count’ on his brothers and half-brothers, as well as on his uncle Rodulf (the earliest individual to use the title, in a charter of 1011). Around the same time, Richard appointed a number of ‘viscounts’, administrative officials for his own demesne. The significant point is that in each case the duke was in charge of appointments, and these titles remained revocable. They were not simply assumed by their holders, as was the case in other regions.
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Nor is there any evidence in Normandy of the kind of fragmentation we see elsewhere in France. Take castles, for instance. We
do
see castles in the duchy by this date, but they are few in number, and either in the hands of the duke or his deputies. At Rouen, for example, we know that the dukes had a great stone tower from the time of Richard’s namesake father (now sadly vanished, but possibly depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry). Those castles entrusted to counts were seemingly to help them to defend difficult border regions. Count Rodulf, for example, had a mighty donjon at Ivry (substantial ruins of which still survive) on Normandy’s eastern frontier.
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We also see knights in Normandy, at least to the extent that we see men in mail shirts fighting on horseback. The Normans had long since abandoned the Viking practice of fighting on foot, and had quickly become adept at the Frankish art of mounted warfare. But the fighting they engaged in during the early years of the eleventh century was external; within the duchy itself there is no evidence of the proliferation of unlicensed castles, or the endemic violence associated with independent castellans and lawless gangs of knights.
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One fact illustrates this better than any other. In southern France the collapse of public authority in the years immediately before the
millennium had provoked a remarkable reaction. At the instigation of local religious leaders, but driven too by a groundswell of popular enthusiasm and indignation, large crowds had gathered in great open-air assemblies to decry the violence, and to call upon the power of the Almighty to bring it to an end. Armed with relics, penances and the power of excommunication, the Church aimed to impose a ‘Peace of God’ to protect the most vulnerable members of society. A little later, when lay rulers responded to the same imperative, they would declare a ‘Truce of God’, restricting feuds and fighting to certain days of the week.
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In 1023, a council was convened at Compiègne, a town in the territory of the king of France, to discuss the introduction of the Peace of God, or the Truce, into northern France. Duke Richard attended the meeting, accompanied by his leading churchmen, as did the king of France and the count of Flanders. But while in other areas the Peace was proclaimed as a result of the meeting, in the end it was agreed that it would not be introduced into Normandy. Richard’s duchy had no need of such drastic measures. In Normandy, the duke’s own peace was enough.
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This situation changed, however, after the old duke died in 1026, and the duchy was divided in the rancorous dispute between his two sons, Richard and Robert. While it remains unclear whether Robert had any direct hand in Richard’s death the following year, the fact that he had encouraged rebellion against ducal authority did him no favours when he himself took over as duke. The fallout from the feud between the two brothers may in itself explain why Robert soon clashed with two senior members of his own family. Hugh, bishop of Bayeux and son of the late Count Rodulf, was besieged in his father’s castle at Ivry and fled into exile. More serious still, Robert fell out with his namesake uncle, the archbishop of Rouen, who similarly fled after a siege and promptly laid Normandy under interdict. Since both of Robert’s opponents were leading churchmen, it is equally possible that they objected as much to his methods as to the man himself. In his bid for power, the new duke had built up a substantial military following on the promise of future reward, and once in power he made good that promise by plundering the lands of the Church. Estates that his predecessors had granted to monasteries for the good of their eternal souls Robert seized and turned into fiefs for his knights.
Feudalism, it seems, was arriving in Normandy with a vengeance.

And yet in the event the threat to ducal authority was arrested. Robert made peace with the Church, restoring the confiscated lands, and candidly admitting in his charters that he had been led astray by ‘the counsel of evil men’. He recalled the exiled archbishop, who not only lifted the interdict but became his most trusted counsellor, lending the administration a valuable air of continuity and stability. It was therefore obvious that the archbishop should be the principal prop of government when his nephew decided to head off to the Holy Land in 1035, and even more so when the duke failed to return, leaving the seven-year-old William as his heir. That there was some measure of stability in Normandy after William’s accession is suggested by the ongoing support that his government afforded to the English exiles, Edward and Alfred, in their bids to return home, and that stability doubtless owed much to the archbishop’s steady hand on the tiller. The problem was that by this time Archbishop Robert was already an elderly man. Not long afterwards, in March 1037, he died, and with him all sense of order in Normandy.
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The clearest manifestation of the chaos that followed was the sudden emergence of unlicensed castles. ‘Lots of Normans, forgetful of their loyalties, built earthworks in many places’, explains William of Jumièges, ‘and erected fortified strongholds for their own purposes. Having dared to establish themselves securely in their own fortifications they immediately hatched plots and rebellions, and fierce fires were lit all over the country.’ The duchy rapidly descended into violence as magnates struggled to gain the upper hand against their rivals. A well-informed twelfth-century writer called Orderic Vitalis tells the story of the unfortunate William Giroie, who was seized by his enemies at a wedding feast, taken outside and horribly mutilated— his nose and ears cut off, his eyes gouged out. Normandy seems to have experienced a rash of mafioso-style killings, as powerful families used any methods against each other, knowing that the government of the young Duke William was powerless to protect or punish them.
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