If Count Arnulf’s intention had been to destabilise and neutralise the principality that William Longsword had built up in the 930s, he may have been quite pleased with himself for a while. William left a young son, Richard, whose mother was his Breton concubine. If he was conceived during the Breton campaigns of 933-34, Richard cannot have been more than nine years old when his father died. The enemies of the Northmen might then have every expectation that the principality would collapse into chaos as internal squabbles for leadership broke out, and war-chief set himself up against war-chief. Troubles certainly came, but surprisingly for such a new political entity the principality of William Longsword survived him. In part that may have had much to do with William’s own action in embracing Frankish and Christian models of legitimate rulership. Tie had established himself at home, at the royal court, and among his Frankish peers as ‘the count of Rouen’. Naturally when one count died another must succeed him. As William had but one son, that must be Richard: this was dynastic thinking.
At the end of his poetic account of the death of William Longsword the elegaist burst out patriotically: ‘Hail to you, O Richard, count of Rouen! Our prayers for the count and for the salvation of his father! So may Christ grant you [Richard] his protection all the days of your life, that you may be with him at the end forever!’ We seem to catch here the spirit of the immediate aftermath of Count William’s murder: the dead count laid to rest in the cathedral of Rouen; the boy-heir brought from Bayeux under military escort; the people of the city alarmed and apprehensive, and the nobility in intense conclave, as news filtered in from Laon of the king’s army approaching. For the Franks and half-Franks amongst the provincial nobility, the logic of embracing the boy Richard as sole male heir would have been obvious. Over the past century, the Franks had seen the former public office of count Become a family ‘honor’ (as they called it), and the hereditary succession of son to father was becoming the norm. For the senior former-Viking nobles - the original settlers of 9ir would be now at least in their fifties - the logic would not have been so obvious: it was their custom to elect the fittest male of suitable lineage to lead the army or fleet. The arrival of King Louis IV in Rouen further complicated matters and may have precipitated a division.
The Church, the Frankish-dominated city of Rouen and a party amongst the Scandinavian nobility clearly supported Richard. The boy had been brought to Rouen by his father’s trusted officer and captain, Bernard the Dane, who remained a prominent and stalwart pillar of Richard’s cause. But the Scandinavian leaders were not unanimous in accepting the boy. We hear of one Harald, who (perhaps with foreign Viking support) took control of parts of the former lands of Count William in the Cotentin and had extended his control by 944 to Bayeux. As a result-Rollo’s dynasty’s principality apparently shrank back to Rouen and the Seine valley for a while. King Louis’s arrival at Rouen some months after Count William’s death may have been a mixed blessing. Flodoard tells us: ‘King Louis gave the land of the Northmen to the son born of William from his Breton concubine, and some of his nobles swore faith to the king, others to Duke Hugh.’ The name ‘Normandy’ does not yet appear, but there is a vague entity here recognised as ‘the land of the Northmen’ which is a step towards a new geopolitical term for the lands formerly held by Count William.
King Louis had recognised Richard’s legitimate claims, and had taken him under his protection, but Flodoard more than hints at some opportunism. We know from Dudo that Duke Hugh ‘the Great’, the latest head of the Robertian family, was beginning to be closely interested in the county of Rouen. The fact that the king asked certain of Richard’s subjects to swear faith to the duke indicates that some sort of partition in his own interest was contemplated in 943. The next year, with the assistance of the perfidious Flemings, the king marched into the county of Rouen and occupied the city, while Duke Hugh invaded the Bessin, intending to seize Bayeux. Fortunately for the Normans, the king and duke fell out in the course of the campaign, and Hugh was asked to withdraw to his own lands, while Richard’s inheritance was now confided by the king to a local Frankish aristocrat, Ralph Torta, who
Was to administer the principality from Rouen in the king’s interest. Richard in the meantime was under tutelage, first at the royal court at Laon, and later with his father’s friend, Count Bernard of Senlis. In the meantime, the Viking leader called Harald, who appears to have taken control of Cherbourg and the Cotentin as early as 943, seized Bayeux and began to move against Rouen in 945, forcing the king to return to the city. A botched peace conference between this Harald, Bernard the Dane and the king led to Louis’s seizure by the Northmen, much to everyone’s satisfaction, especially that of Duke Hugh the Great. With the king in their hands, the Northmen agreed to his release in exchange for young Count Richard. Richard was returned and, at the age of only thirteen at most, took control of his inheritance. His western rival, the Viking Harald, was somehow persuaded to retire or to depart, and the Frankish governor of Rouen, Ralph Torta, was exiled to Paris, where his son was bishop.
Richard in 945 entered on a long reign as count of the Northmen of Rouen; it was to last for fifty-one years. Such lengthy tenures of principalities have major effects on the people that the ruler governs. When Richard began his rule, Scandinavian languages were still spoken at Bayeux - which is where he himself learned his father’s native language - and many of Rollo’s original associates must still have been active. For them, their Christianity was an acquired and possibly uncomfortable religious practice. There would even in 945 have been quite a few Franks living who remembered a different world, when Rouen and its neighbouring provinces were Neustrian, ruled by counts appointed by the Robertian dynasty (one is mentioned as late as 905), and when numerous ancient Benedictine monasteries and collegiate minsters distinguished the countryside. When Richard died in 996 Neustria was long forgotten and the land he ruled was beginning to be called ‘Northmannia’, ‘Nor-mannia’ or ‘Normandy’ (although the first occurrences of the name in written sources belong to the second decade of the eleventh century). His people, Frankish or Scandinavian in origin, all spoke French and were indistinguishable in most of their customs and their way of life from their Angevin, Parisian or Picard neighbours. Their rapid linguistic and cultural assimilation was commented on by Adhemar of Chabannes in the next generation. Normandy was by 1000 once again a land of distinguished churches and monasteries, and it was accepted as one Of the integral principalities which made up the greater realm of France. Richard survived long enough to outlive his first enemies and to inhabit a world with new and different problems and complexities.
Richard’s principal concerns must have been the very identity of Normandy, and his own position as ruler. This latter concern had two dimensions. In common with the other Frankish princes, Richard had to come to some accommodation with the continuing, though much decayed, power of the king. Since he, like them, accepted that there must be a king, he had to define his own power in relation to the kingship. At another level, Richard had to come to terms with the power of other men within his principality. The local magnates had to be brought into a formal relationship with his own rulership; and they must accept the role of being his subordinate nobility. The way in which Richard handled these questions is obscure. We know they were on his agenda, though, because we see his son and grandsons continuing to grapple with them, each in their own way. It is likely, however, that Richard was the first ruler seated in Rouen who had to deal with such questions. His father and grandfather had depended on a different mechanism of lordship, and can only have imposed their rule on their lands by a mixture of warrior charisma and the fear of the swords and axes of their personal guards. The authority wielded by Rollo and William Longsword was highly unstable, and we see that instability reflected even in the patchy historical record that has come down to us. But right from the beginning. Count Richard lived in a different world. His succession was regular in Frankish terms, even if contested, and he became a legitimate civil ruler with the blessing of the anointed king of the Western Franks. His task must therefore have been to convince his Scandinavian subjects of the necessity of recognising what legitimate rule was, and the importance of deference to it, even without military threat.
Richard’s relationship with his king was as uneven as that of any other Frankish prince. Between 961 and 962, when he was still a young ruler in his late twenties, Richard had to contend with a dangerous alliance between the Carolingian King Lothar (d. 985), son of Louis IV, and his southern neighbour the count of Blois-Chartres, which led to damaging invasions of his lands. Dudo’s later explanation for the differences between Richard and the king was the king’s unhappiness with Richard’s level of acknowedgement of his lordship. This may be so, but part of the difficulty may have been Richard’s marriage alliance with Hugh Capet’s sister Emma, made as early as the late 950s. This tied the Normans and Capetians into an alliance which naturally threatened the Carolingians and any other Frankish dynasty working to extend itself in central France. Richard felt sufficiently threatened by the hostile incursions in the 960s to end them by the recruitment of Danish mercenaries, who pillaged the upper Seine valley and frightened King Lothar into making peace. Thereafter, at some time in late 963 or 964, Richard is found peacefully at the court of Lothar, and the two seem to have maintained tranquil relations till the king’s death. On 18 March 968 Richard was to be found at a meeting at Berneval in company with his brother-in-law, Hugh Capet, duke of the Franks and head of the Robertian dynasty, a man whom he called on that occasion his ‘lord’ (senior), although Hugh was much the younger man. This Hugh ultimately succeeded Lothar as king in 987, and Richard seems to have been happy to assist his brother-in-law to take up the kingship. Richard was involved with fighting against Hugh’s enemies in 991, so it would seem that he made support of his powerful Robertian neighbours the keystone of his policy in dealing with his neighbours: a simple strategy followed by all his successors until the 1050s.
The historical record has little else to say of the diplomacy, campaigns and warfare conducted by Count Richard, and historians are doubtless right to deduce that his main enterprises were domestic ones. Being domestic, they were mainly out of sight of the French chroniclers. We can say some things. The idea of ‘Normandy’ and the status of its ruler received some definition in his lifetime. Although both he and his father undoubtedly used the style ‘count of Rouen’ to describe themselves from the 930s through to the 960s, Richard began to look for more prestigious titles as his reign progressed. Part of the reason for this was that other counts began to appear within his realm with his blessing. Richard’s mother, Sprota, took another partner after the murder of his father, and this produced a half-brother, called Rodulf, whom Richard made lord of Ivry on the southern border of his realm, with the title of count. This may have happened as early as the mid 960s. Richard also awarded the comital title to three of his younger sons, Godfrey, Robert and William (the latter being progenitor of the lineage of the counts of Eu), perhaps As early as the 970s. Part of the reason why Richard spread the title amongst his nearest family may have been a desire to exalt his lineage; part may have been a belief — seen elsewhere in France — that great princely families shared the dignity of countship amongst its male members (Baldwin III of Flanders was called count c. 955 in his father’s lifetime). There may also have been the need to create a dependable and prestigious group within the emerging nobility of Richard’s principality, a group which could help control and shepherd the others.
In exalting others, Richard also needed to exalt himself. In so doing, he could not easily go to the king. The Carolingian king Louis IV had raised Hugh the Great of Neustria to the rank of ‘duke of the Franks’ in either 937 or 943 as a reward for helping him to the throne. But the ducal ‘style’ given Hugh was thought at the time to be exceptional, a way of making him first of the Franks after the king. >3 We have seen that William Longsword experimented with the title ‘duke of the Bretons’ in the 930s, when King Ralph had given him some mandate to extend his control west. It is conceivable that he took the title with royal licence, and the earlier rulers of the Bretons had used a number of exalted titles, including that of king. But we hear no more of Brittany in the reign of Richard. Richard’s choice of a new title becomes clear in the later 960s, when he is referred to as ‘marquis’ (marchio) in the solemn diploma of King Lothar which re-established the community of Mont St-Michel in 966. This choice of title was a long-established option for senior counts ruling border regions; marquises were counts who controlled other lesser counts. Richard used the same title again in 968, in an act where he is referred to also by the Roman imperial formula of inclitus comes (‘distinguished count’). In 990, Richard was awarded by a clerk the Roman style ‘consul’, which in the central middle ages was becoming a distinguished synonym for ‘count’. So we see the first Richard pressing hard the matter of his own prestige as a ruler, and seeking to evoke a status beyond that of count of Rouen which he had inherited.
Of what was Richard ‘marquis’? The idea of a ‘land of the Normans’ was becoming established already in the 960s. The act of 968 in which Richard joined with Duke Hugh of the Franks in restoring the lands of the abbey of St-Denis within his realm referred to the ‘people’ {gens) of the Normans {Normanni) and of the Franks whose joint duty it was to support the monks. What precisely the author of this phrase meant is open to debate, but, since the transaction was being carried out on the Norman border near Gisors, it is likely enough that the ‘Normans’ were meant to be the people who lived on one side of the border under the rule of Richard ‘marquis of the Normans’; the ‘Franks’ were Duke Hugh’s people on the other side. The implication in this document of 968 is that the Normans were a recognisable people within recognised bounds under a lawful prince; no longer the ‘Northmen of the Seine’, but a people of a variety of descents gathered into one political unit within specific borders. This ‘greater Normanness’ was recognised by Dudo some decades later, when he portrayed Rollo in a vision seeing his future people as a flock of birds gathered from every direction, representing immigrants of a variety of peoples who would all one day be Normans. The ‘Normans’ had in fact as early as the 960s become one of the sub-divisions of the kingdom of the West Franks, like the Bretons and Aquitanians. Since these folk were regarded as having a distinct regional identity, their ruler was distinguished by greater titles; the Bretons had their prince or king, and the Aquitanians their duke. So naturally the Normans too had a claim to a ruler of more than usual prestige, and Richer of Reims in the 990s was clear enough that their ruler should be a ‘duke’, although he made his distaste for the Normans clear by calling Richard ‘duke of the pirates’. Other writers made their indifference to Norman pretensions plain by continuing to refer to their ruler - as Adhemar of Chabannes was still doing late in the 1020s - as the ‘count of Rouen’. Not surprisingly in this context, it was as ‘Count Richard’ not ‘Duke Richard’ that Richard II appears in a letter of his enemy, Odo II of Blois, to King Robert in c. 1023.
Richard I furthered this understanding of a Norman prince and a Norman people by other subtle means. His re-foundation at Mont St-Michel of a community of monks in 966, for instance, was a clear indication to everyone that he had recovered the authority over the Breton march that his father had exerted. Here he was following his father, who had commenced the good work by his restoration of Jumieges just before his death. There is little doubt that the ecclesiastical organisation of Richard’s realm was in need of revitalisation, although there had never been any serious danger of Christianity being eliminated there. A few major churches continued to operate throughout the Invasion period, with greater or lesser degrees of prosperity. At the cathedral of Rouen, at the church of St-Ouen in the town, and in communities of some sort or other at Mont St-Michel, Jumieges, Fecamp, and perhaps elsewhere, organised religious life survived into the time of William Longsword. But dislocation continued into the 940s, not least amongst the episcopal communities: Coutances remained abandoned by its bishop till 1025. Ironically, a community of canons is believed to have survived the Viking invasions at St-Evroult, but to have succumbed after they were handed over to the pillaging of the army of Duke Hugh of the Franks in 944.
When William reformed and enlarged the community at Jumieges and Richard restored monastic life at Mont St-Michel, they were not so much restoring Christian observance to their realm as staking a claim to supervise it, as Christian princes did. The fact that many of the reformers had to come from outside their lands rather enhanced their part in the process. As Jumieges depended on an imported abbot from Poitiers for the expertise and enthusiasm to restore Benedictinism there, so Mont St-Michel depended on an abbot and a colony of monks from Ghent to reintroduce regular life there. These, led by one Mainier, had first attempted the restoration of an abandoned Merovingian house at Fontenelle, which they renamed St-Wandrille, from its one-time patron (whose bones had been taken to Ghent during the invasion period). Outside the city walls of Evreux, Richard revived (or refounded, the sources are not in agreement) a community at the earlier church of St-Taurin. At Fecamp, Richard developed further a palace chapel built on the ruins of an old nunnery by his father, introducing first a community of secular priests, and then seeking an abbot and monks from outside his realm to commence regular life. The project failed to win favour at Cluny, but it does confirm a pattern. Richard wanted to create respectable and prestigious abbeys acknowledging him as their patron, even if it meant getting outsiders to do it. In this way he would have both the benefit of their prayers and the status attached to being a protector of Benedictine abbeys. As spiritual heirs of the Emperor Constantine, true Christian princes and kings needed to be seen to appoint and promote bishops and abbots. Richard could now do so. Certainly it was he who appointed his younger son, Robert, to the see of Rouen in c. 990. By 990 he had restored the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Carolingian province, for alongside Archbishop Robert in that year stood six suffragan bishops.
The other thing that abbeys and religious communities could give Richard was memory. It was almost certainly a member of the community of Jumieges who composed the lament on his father’s death; it was in the cathedral of Rouen that the first two Norman counts of Rouen were buried, and presumably commemorated liturgically on their obituary (the anniversary of their death). It was at Fecamp that Richard was buried and commemorated, and it is from Fecamp that we derive the earliest annals of Normandy and an in-house catalogue of the Norman dynasty, with notes on their burial places, which had been compiled before the death of William the Conqueror. It was these Norman religious houses and their writers which developed and sustained the view of the Norman dynasty which we are discovering and analysing here. To give just one example, at the eleventh-century abbey of St-Ouen-de-Rouen, the founder of the dynasty was scrupulously remembered as ‘Robert’ the Christianised pagan; as the generous benefactor who restored its great estate of Gasny; and as the pious count who walked with bare feet in humility to receive back the relics the sainted archbishop Ouen on their return from the Ile-de-France to Rouen, and who put his own shoulders to the shrine for the last mile into the city. It was as much the Church as the ducal family itself which devised an appropriate texture for the trunk of its family tree.
Richard became ill during the course of the autumn of 996, and moved from Bayeux to his favourite residence of Fecamp, where he wished to die and be buried. The eyewitness account of his end given to Dudo by Richard’s half-brother talks of an assembly of nobles gathered at which Richard formally nominated his successor. He piously and laboriously walked barefoot to receive a last communion in the nearby abbey, and, while in the church, selected a burial place in the portico, at the door. The following night, 21 November 996, a sudden seizure carried him off in his early sixties, struggling to get out the words of commendation drawn from Luke’s gospel: ‘Into thy hands, O Christ, I commend my spirit.’ We have an account of his appearance in his latter days, given by Dudo, who met him on a mission to the Norman court in 987. The old man was tall, straight-backed and distinguished in appearance, with alert and clear eyes, thick eyebrows and a long and white patriarchal Beard. Like the clerk of Jumieges who commemorated William Long-sword, Dudo commemorated Richard I as a sustainer of the poor, a guardian of orphans, a defender of widows and a redeemer of captives; in other words as a pious Christian prince. But Richard was commemorated in other ways too; he graduated into legend. The twelfth-century Norman writer. Master Wace, recorded earlier tales of Richard’s peculiar practice of fearlessly wandering the streets of Rouen at night, and encountering and defeating phantoms in deserted and dark city churches. Outside Normandy, Richard was not so well-treated in legend. Another contemporary twelfth-century writer, the Picard author of the William of Orange epic cycle, remembered him as a vengeful and ruthlessly ambitious prince: commemorating him variously as ‘Richard the Bearded’, ‘Richard the Old’ and ‘Richard the Red’, allotting to him the colour of hair which medieval writers gave to their supernatural, weird or treacherous characters; heroes were blondes. It is a historical fact that several members of the dynasty had reddish hair.
Richard, in his longevity and acknowledged wisdom, became a focus for later French legend, as a prince with uncanny foresight and unnatural bravery. Outside Normandy, Richard managed to identify himself inextricably with the foundation of the duchy. The earliest romance epics, when they dealt with the times of Roland, Oliver and Charlemagne, found it inconceivable to picture a France without a Normandy - despite the anachronism - and the name they gave its duke, for duke it had to have, was ‘Richard the Old’, whose historical prototype was Richard I. This romance Richard appears in the ‘Song of Roland’ (c. 1100) and the ‘Coronation of Louis’ (c 1130). With the death and apotheosis of Richard I we come to a new phase in the history of his dynasty: historical sources suddenly multiply and legend retreats. But it is as well to have looked first at the misty lands from which Normandy and the Norman dynasty emerge into hard-edged reality, for it was out of that mist that the later Norman rulers moulded their own image of themselves.
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