The marriage of Richard If of Normandy had occurred at some time on either side of 1000, certainly well before 1008 when Count Geoffrey of Brittany, one of the contracting parties, died, and probably soon after his father’s death in 996. ft was the first ducal marriage in which we can Find the involvement of the Church. According to William of Jumieges, the marriage occurred on the holy island of Mont St-Michel. This would indicate that the ceremonies involved at least a mass said at the abbey church. Another new thing is the survival of a text of the marriage contract by which Duke Richard bestowed a dower portion on his wife, a copy of which was kept at the abbey of Fecamp and survived until the French Revolution (and which we know of as it was copied and published in 1717). The contract sets out an early summary of a Christian theology of marriage, the product of centuries of reflection on Scripture. It states that marriage was instituted by God in the Garden of Eden; that Jesus Christ had chosen to commence his ministry by sanctifying a marriage at Cana with his presence and his first miracle; that the marriage of man and woman must duplicate the faithful relationship between Christ and his Church; and all these assertions were supported by appropriate texts. The contract then makes its point. It addresses Judith in the first person, the person of Duke Richard himself:
Instructed by the compilation of such examples and authorities, I Richard (filled in God’s name with a desire for God-fearing children, so to have them down the course of years, if such should be the Creator’s merciful will) have taken you, O Judith, sweetest of spouses and most tender of wives, in love. I have sought you from your kinsfolk and relations, and I have espoused you with bridal ornaments.
He goes on to declare that they had consummated their lawful marriage, and he now bestowed over fifty villages in Normandy on her, with their churches, mills and livestock: a princely endowment which confirmed the great landed wealth of the duke.26
The contract is in its way traditional, and comparable with what else we know of Frankish marriage customs. The duke had sought Judith from her family, and they pledged themselves to each other in a ceremony involving gifts (jewels, plate and luxury fabrics, perhaps, but also no doubt some land or treasure from her own family). The arrangements were secular, and not the least secular thing about them was the bestowal of dower on Judith after the couple had first had sexual intercourse; the main point after all was to seek children to perpetuate the dynasty, and God’s aid was discreetly solicited for this. What is new in this document is the pointed citation of scripture to imply that the new relationship was to be faithful and monogamous. We know that Duke Richard thought much about things religious. Exactly the same considerations and much the same language appear in Richard Ill’s marriage contract of January 1027 with Adela, whose lineage is not given, but who is assumed by some to have been the daughter of King Robert II (and who after Richard’s death returned to her father and was later remarried to Baldwin V of Flanders). The introduction to this contract shows a further intensification of theological language, drawing on St Augustine: the monogamous nature of marriage is firmly laid down, and an ascetic element is added when the young duke tells his wife that T Richard, duke of the Normans - striving to submit to these sentiments - accept you Lady Adela in marriage by the ring of lawful espousal, joining to me in one flesh, not for the sake of sexual pleasure but for the cause of procreating’. This was perhaps appropriate language for the occasion, as Adela was still a child at the time.27 The price of this decorous royal match was the city and province of Coutances and numerous other ample provisions, including the towns of Caen and Cherbourg.
With such wealth conferred on them, it is no wonder that women played a considerable part in the ducal family and its politics. This is clearest in the reign of Richard II. Gunnor, widow of Richard I, was the most regular witness in the written acts of her son, until her death after 1017. In such documents she always preceded her daughters-in-law, the duchesses Judith and (after 1017) Papia. Dudo recognised her influence, saying how much of her son’s business depended on her advice and memory. She was wealthy in land and in dynastic connections. The prominent appearance at court of her nephews, Osbern fitz Arfast, the ducal seneschal, and Humphrey de Vieilles, may have had as much to do with her as with Richard II, their cousin. It was never quite accepted in medieval society that gender roles excluded women from any exercise of power, although it was usual for them to use their influence in interceding and encouraging. But if women controlled estates and independent wealth, nothing disabled them from a more active part in affairs if they so chose. Gunnor, being a very wealthy widow after 996, naturally became a powerful force at the court of her son, as Dudo recognised.
There were other forms of political relationships and problems that women created. Duchess Judith did not, it seems, suckle her own children; she put them out to a wet nurse. The young Duke Robert Spent his first years, around the year looo, in the household of a foster mother in Rouen. He seems to have been happy there, for in the 1030s Achard, one of the children of his nurse and obviously a childhood companion, was high in ducal favour and acknowledged as ‘Achard my foster brother {nutricius)’. He had been, up till about 1033, in enjoyment of a sum due from the ducal rents of the city.28 Duchess Judith’s great landed wealth shows yet another sort of influence that she might exert. She attempted to devote much of her land to the foundation of an abbey. This decision of hers occurred on her deathbed in 1017, as appears from the remark of her widower, Duke Richard II, that ‘she sought to make Christ her heir for that which I had given her from my estates according to the custom of dower’. Seven years later the duke finally agreed, although he turned the huge grant partly to his own spiritual benefit by making the new abbey of Bernay a dependency of his own dynastic house of Fecamp. The transfer of such a major landed endowment away from the family must have caused major problems, and may partly explain Duke Robert’s animus against the established monasteries of his principality, including the previously favoured house of Fecamp; a younger son might reasonably expect to inherit his mother’s dower lands, and he had been robbed. It was through Robert’s agency that several of the former manors associated with Judith and Bernay were transferred to the duke’s confidant, Humphrey lord of Pont Audemer, including the estate of Beaumont, which later became the family centre. Another associate of Duke Robert, Roger de Montgomery, enriched himself not just at the expense of the estates of Bernay, but also at that of the outlying estates of the mother house of Fecamp. This upheaval was in part due to the miscalculated overgenerosity of his father’s marriage settlement.
Duke Richard III and Duke Robert both continued the established family practice of taking concubines and producing children outside formal marriage. Richard at least intended to take a formal partner. Although only briefly duke, he arranged the most exalted possible marriage, to a Capetian princess. Robert did not follow his elder brother’s dynastic strategy, so far as we know. Apart from a half-hearted scheme to marry Cnut’s sister, he did not contract a dynastic marriage. It may be that he was put off by the huge cost in dower lands involved in the marriages of his father and brother. His son and heir was therefore economically engendered in an informal sexual partnership with a woman of low social status. Even in the 1030s, this does not seem to have caused much trouble or scandal; Ralph Glaber noted the fact that the Norman dukes were given to producing heirs with concubines, and shrugged his literary shoulders by comparing them with the biblical patriarchs of the Israelites. Such children were not yet at this time branded with any social stigma; all that was important in 1035 was that William II was his father’s son. Herleva was decently put aside (perhaps before Duke Robert’s pilgrimage) and married to a minor landowner of the Lieuvin, Herluin de Conteville, by whom she was to have two other sons, Robert and Odo, both later famous in the affairs of England and Normandy.
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