Introduction

One of the more curious stories to come out of medieval Europe is that of the Norman dynasty and people. The Norman phenomenon began in an almost inconspicuous way: a small fleet of Scandinavian ships and their miscellaneous crews cruised into the Seine estuary at the beginning of the second decade of the tenth century. Those particular ships were not the first of their sort to sail up that particular river. Their crews were not the first to take possession of the battered Frankish city of Rouen on the third great meander of the Seine. What was different about them? They had a leader of some ability; so much is clear. His name was Hrolfr, but he was not a Viking of any great lineage or royal connections. He was one of many ambitious warriors adrift on the northern Atlantic in those days, a man whose ship had ploughed the grey seas from Norway to the Hebrides and down into the English Channel. He may well have led his men as a breakaway group from the bigger Viking army at that time pillaging and settling the estuary of the Loire and Brittany.

Hrolfr, however, was more accomplished than his fellow jarls. He was able to impose himself on his men and get them to accept his unqualified leadership. He was also astute enough to be able to come to terms with the ecclesiastical authorities of Rouen and use them to make contact with the Frankish king and his counts further upriver. Playing on the political circumstances of the decrepit Frankish kingdom, he got the king to sanction his possession of Rouen and was prompt in accepting Christianity, which allowed the Frankish lords and peasants of the region to associate with him as a respectable man. Soon he and his son were posing as Christian ‘counts of Rouen’ and claiming equality with the Frankish rulers who surrounded them. But the Franks did not forget that this new lord in the old province of Neustria was an outsider or that his people were northerners: they were the ‘Northmen’ (Northmanni).

Other such Scandinavian colonies in France and England rapidly lost their identity and failed to establish themselves. The Vikings on the Loire were driven out and forgotten within a generation, but this was not to be the fate of the Vikings of the Seine. Hrolfr and his men were assimilated with astonishing rapidity into the Christian Frankish culture that surrounded them. In two generations, the Normans were in fact little different in aspirations and language from the Franks still living in the lands they had settled. In that embracing of Frankishness lay their claim to legitimate possession of their land. Yet they were still called ‘Normans’. Why? A succession of talented rulers in succession to FFrolfr realised that, much as they wished to be considered Franks and Christians, their growing principality needed an identity to mark them out from their neighbours. Their unusual origins provided what they needed, and on their colonial identity they built their own distinctiveness. Within three generations of Hrolfr his descendants were secretly rather proud of their free-spirited, swashbuckling and bloodthirsty forebears, even if they did not resemble them much. So grew up the idea of a Norman people and a Norman dynasty.

The Normans went a long way, although it would be anachronistic of us to suggest that it was their Viking ancestry that made them keen to roam Europe and the Middle East. It just so happened that opportunities for travel and adventure were there to be had in the eleventh century. So they joined the pilgrim movements that made Normans princes of Tarragona in Spain and Antioch in Syria. The collapse of Lombard and Byzantine rule in Italy attracted obscure Norman mercenaries, who colonised and assumed control of Apulia and Sicily. Most famously, of course, the long-term involvement of Normandy with the kingdom of England across the Channel led to the descent of a Norman army on English soil in October 1066. Its success raised the Norman ducal dynasty to an immortality comparable to that of the Caesars and Ptolemys.

Such a reputation has attracted many writers to look at the Normans down the centuries, and this book is but the latest of dozens which have examined the Norman phenomenon, their ultimate ancestor being Sir John Hayward’s The Lives of the Three Normans, Kings of England (1613). Hayward talked of three Norman kings, but in this book you will find four kings reckoned as Normans, adding Stephen to the two

Williams and Henry I. King Stephen was in fact called by a contemporary chronicler, the Anglo-Norman monk Orderic Vitalis, the ‘fourth king of Norman stock’. Orderic’s purpose was to promote the legitimacy of Stephen, who was a grandson of the Conqueror, but a Frenchman born and raised in Chartres. Yet there are other reasons to consider Stephen along with his three Norman predecessors on the throne. The principal one is that contemporaries decided that the succession of Henry II to Stephen in 1154 marked the end of the Norman story; with him they no longer saw the royal line originating in Hrolfr or Rollo the Viking; instead they saw him as the latest representative of a lineage stretching back through his grandmother Edith-Mathilda to Alfred the Great. Henry II’s reign inaugurated an entirely new concept of dynasty and legitimacy.

Now is a good time to re-examine what the past three centuries have made of the Normans. At last the complete body source material for the Normans, their rulers’ charters and their chronicles, is readily available in handsome and scientific editions incomparably superior to what was available to Sir John Hayward, or even to Edward Augustus Freeman, the nineteenth-century arch-historian of the Norman Conquest. The historical profession has also been active on a broad front over the past few decades, formulating daring new models of medieval ethnicity, aristocracy and family formation. This book reconciles all that scholarship into what is a new narrative of the Norman dynasty and its achievements, one that is only possible because of the unstinting dedication of generations of other scholars and writers.

To David Bates