Women played a very important role in the early days of the Norman dynasty, but we have to be careful what sort of male-female relationships we are talking about here. In the tenth century, marriage was not yet what it would become two centuries later. ‘Christian marriage’ did not as yet exist. By that, I mean exclusive monogamy based on a contractual relationship between man and woman freely entered into within a church and with the blessing of a priest. In the tenth century marriage was still largely a relationship contracted between families, not individuals. The presiding figures in the contract were usually the fathers of the pair. The key moment in a tenth-century marriage was not the exchange of promises between the couple, but the conferment on the couple of the properties that were the gifts of either family on their marriage. The celebrations of the marriage might involve attending a mass said by a priest, but that was not an essential part of the process. The tenth-century marital bond created husband and wife, but it was not always an exclusive bond. The husband might well already have a sexual partner before his marriage, and he would not always put her away simply because he now had an ‘official’ wife. Similarly, the existence of an official wife did not stop a wealthy man from forming new sexual and emotional relationships. When it suited him he would live openly with another woman, his ‘concubine’ as she was often called by Latin writers. He would not form a menage-a-trois with wife and concubine: his women would have their own homes and households. But the concubine might well be the mother of his children, and those children would have a claim on his estate after his death.
All the earlier male members of the Norman dynasty were born to concubines, not in arranged dynastic marriages. Later Norman writers, like William de Jumieges and Gilbert Crispin, living in an atmosphere of growing and aggressive church control over marriage, were embarrassed by concubinage. William called these concubines wives ‘according to Danish custom’ {more Danko), as if what the early Norman rulers were doing was continuing an irregular Viking marriage practice because they knew no better. Gilbert Crispin in the 1090s blamed ‘old Danish ways’ for the fact that in the early eleventh century Norman priests and bishops married, had children, carried arms and had a tendency towards fisticuffs to settle arguments. In fact, they were all doing no other than their Frankish contemporaries, such as King Charles the Simple, who had a wife, but who also a concubine by whom he had four sons. The concubine became an embarrassing fact of medieval family life only in the later eleventh century, when ideas about marriage had changed.
Norman historians craftily excused their ancestors on the grounds that they knew no better. More seriously, for writers of William de Jumieges’ time there was a question over the legitimacy of children born to concubines, a question which was troubling to their ideas about the legitimacy of the Norman dynasty. Children born outside marriage were beginning to be called ‘bastards’, and by 1100, because they were bastards, they were being excluded from rights over their parents’ property.
The first concubine we hear of is Popa, Rollo’s partner more Danko, according to William de Jumieges. Dudo - who lived before the days when such irregular relationships were frowned on - only tells us that Rollo and Popa were sexual partners, without comment. According to Dudo, she was the beautiful daughter of a Frankish count, who fell into Rollo’s hands when he sacked the city of Bayeux. We are in no position to comment on the truth of this. There may or may not have been a Popa; we can only say that it suited Dudo’s purposes that the mother of William Longsword should be both a Christian and a woman of high birth. It also suited Dudo’s purposes that Rollo should after his baptism contract a dynastic marriage with a daughter of King Charles the Simple, whom Dudo says was childless and fell into disgrace for insulting her husband and entertaining Frankish male visitors secretly. William de Jumieges discreetly made out that Rollo had put aside Popa while he was married to Gisla, and took up with her again only when Gisla died, but this sort of tactfulness had not occured to Dudo two generations earlier. 14
As we have already seen, Count William Longsword followed his father’s supposed example in taking to bed and forming a long-term relationship with a captive, in this case a Breton woman, whom William de Jumieges calls Sprota, on unknown authority.'s Dudo does not mention her name, only her existence, and talks of their relationship as one of ‘marriage’. Dudo in fact - determined to prove his martyr-hero was a monk in embryo - made out that Count William was very reluctant to engage in sex at all. The only reason he did so was to produce an heir, after his nobles begged and begged him for the sake of the political stability of the realm. We may doubt this. After all, as well as bedding Sprota, Count William also contracted a dynastic marriage with Leutgarde, daughter of the count of Vermandois. Since the marriage was dynastic, Leutgarde was given a substantial landed estate.
Focused on Longueville in the Pays de Caux. After his death, she married Count Theobald of Blois and had several more children. Sprota, in the meantime, lived under William’s protection in her own household at Bayeux, where her son Richard was born. No doubt William hoped for children from the liaison with Leutgarde; and, in view of her Carolingian blood, those children would probably have been preferred over Richard when it came to succession. But the marriage with Leutgarde remained childless. Later sources tell us that Sprota remarried too after Count William’s death, taking as husband one Esperleng, presumably a wealthy landowner, of whom it is only known that he managed the mills at Pitres, upriver from Rouen. Sprota and Esperleng produced several daughters and one son, Rodulf, who was made count of Ivry by his halfbrother, Richard I. Rodulf failed to found a male lineage - his children were all girls, or boys who became bishops - but his sisters and daughters married some of the more powerful of the emerging Norman aristocrats, and he was grandfather of arguably the most famous of them all, William fitz Osbern.
Richard I of Rouen duplicated the pattern of his father (and possibly grandfather) in making a dynastic marriage outside Normandy, and seeking emotional and sexual satisfaction in other relationships. He was clearly enthusiastic about women and produced numerous offspring from several liaisons; all the children were acknowledged and provided for out of Count Richard’s great wealth. Dudo implies that the marriage to Emma Capet lasted only into the later 960s, no more than a decade, and it was only after her premature death that Count Richard began his principal sexual partnership. This was with Gunnor, a woman of Danish descent from within his realm, whom he formally married after a period of concubinage, but when he married her the count may have had other reasons than sexual and emotional. The union with Gunnor seems to have had a political purpose. Her family was great in western Normandy, and she was herself reputed to be very wealthy. In taking her to wife, he may have been creating a link with one of those putative rival Viking dynasties within his principality at whose existence we may guess, and by allying with her enhancing his own power. We know of her brother, Arfast, who was the progenitor of one of the great noble lineages of Normandy, and grandfather in the male line of William fitz Osbern. To emphasise the importance of her lineage, a number of
Gunner’s sisters made great marriages to some of the most significant nobles of Normandy at the beginning of the eleventh century. It is a startling fact that in the year 1110 seven of the counts and earls of the aristocracy of the Anglo-Norman realm, and numerous high barons, were great-grandchildren of Gunnor and her sisters, as also was the then king, Henry 1 of England.
On the authority of William de Jumieges, we learn that Gunnor and Count Richard had the count’s heir Richard 11; Robert, archbishop of Rouen and count of Evreux (989-1037); and also Mauger, count of Corbeil; and two other boys, one of whom was called Robert ‘the Dane’ and died young in the 980s. Dudo mentions two other sons from different mothers, Godfrey and William, successively counts of Eu. A further son, yet again called Robert, is known, who was created count of Mortain. As well as fathering the highest echelon of a new aristocracy, Richard I also had numerous daughters with Gunnor and other partners. With Gunnor he had Emma, Hawise and Mathilda, whom he used to enhance his marital connections with his neighbours. Emma became queen of England, marrying successively King Hithelred II and King Cnut, Hawise married the count of Nantes in Brittany, and Mathilda married Count Odo 11 of Blois.
So we find that by the third generation of the Norman dynasty it had already embedded itself deeply into the network of princely families that ruled north-western Europe, including the Capetian and West Saxon royal dynasties. This brought high status, diplomatic advantage and the security that intermarriage brought to new families within older societies. On a lower level, the dynasty had produced male and female cadet members who had begun to found lesser lineages within the principality, who secured clerical high office and who tied other magnates to the ruling dynasty by intermarriage. As well as inventing a duchy, the first counts of Rouen also originated much of its aristocracy. We can see from the Norman lineage how quickly complete outsiders could take possession of and transform the structures of power within a region.
Map 1. Normandy and its environs, c. 950.
World History
