Being Norman and Being a Duke

Although King Henry died in 1060, leaving an eight-year-old heir, and although Geoffrey Martel of Anjou died the same year, there was not to be peace on the frontiers. Duke William was not a soldier because he had to be, he was a soldier because he was good at it, and intended to bolster and extend his power by military might; a strategy that suited both him and his aristocratic supporters. It is from the 1050s that the Norman reputation for military excellence and ruthlessness comes, and it originated principally in the duke’s choice to be the Caesar his flatterers praised him for being. Although it might be argued that William was forced by aggressive and militaristic neighbours into a similar pattern of Norman rulership, the fact that he trounced them so thoroughly at their own game proves that his heart was in the transformation.

There was a feeling in the later 1050s that it was good to be a Norman; and winning is always good for morale. One symptom of this was the way that historians of Normandy and its dukes begin to appear to celebrate the Norman achievement. William de Jumieges was at work compiling his history in the mid 1050s, and very soon William de Poitiers would address the same subject. The intention of both writers was to commemorate the virtues of past Normans and their dukes for the benefit of present Normans and to the glory of Duke William. There is some reference to the deeds of William being likewise celebrated in verse and song by 1060, for a wider and less learned audience. In the church, distinguished immigrants began to wander into Normandy. Lanfranc, a celebrated teacher from Pavia, had sought seclusion and a true monastic vocation in the obscure, remoter regions of Gaul early in the 1040s. By the later 1050s any hopes of seclusion at Bec-Hellouin had been abandoned, and as prior of the abbey he was operating one of the most famous schools in northern Europe, attracting the intellectual comet of the young St Anselm into a Norman orbit in 1059.

Never happy to be entirely identified with France, the Normans were beginning to feel they belonged to an even wider world. Norman adventurers had been travelling south and eastwards for decades, some undoubtedly pushed out by the stern and effective rule of Richard II. Perhaps as early as 1016, they had been drawn to the wealth and opportunity of southern Italy, where Lombards, Greeks and Moslems were in continual conflict. Ranulf, who became ruler of Capua and Aversa around 1030, was a Norman. In 1059, Robert Guiscard - a member of an obscure migrant family from one of the places called Hauteville in the Cotentin - was invested by the pope as duke of Apulia. In the subsequent decade a member of the Norman aristocratic dynasty of Giroie, William de Montreuil, became captain of the papal mercenary cavalry. Although none of these Normans were related to the ducal house, and most were quite obscure in origins, the domestic Normans of the generation of William de Poitiers still took some interest and Even pride in their activities. In the io6os conquering Normans were to be found in Italy, and their brethren in northern France - having survived some dangerous challenges from their neighbours - began to see themselves in a similar way, as military entrepreneurs. So a feeling of Norman euphoria was sparkling in the air.

The Normans of Normandy were by the 1050s more assured and assertive of their own identity as a people than they had been even half a century earlier. They were no longer posturing as latter-day Franks, as their ducal court had been in the days of Dudo. William de Jumieges was quite clear in his mind that the French were - and had been for a long time - the enemy. The break with the long Capetian alliance in 1052 may have had something to do with this. Duke William, unlike his ancestors, was not a loyal dependent and auxiliary of a King FFugh or a King Robert; he was an autonomous prince fighting for survival against most of his neighbours, including the king. This in itself tended to sharpen the sense of there being a Norman prince leading a Norman people in a hostile world. Perhaps it is no surprise to find one of the duke’s closest intimates, Roger de Montgomery, declaring himself proudly around 1060, in somewhat blimpish fashion, to be ‘a Norman (Northmannus) descended from Normans’: no feeling here of integration into a greater French polity. And Roger may simply have been echoing the sentiments current in William’s court and military household.

The Normans of 1060 found in William II the sort of duke able to unite a threatened and yet vigorous principality. Fie had inherited a duchy which had for generations been rich in resources; and, despite the vicissitudes of his minority and the inroads of his rivals, William was still probably wealthier than his neighbours. The economy of northern France was expanding during his lifetime, towns were beginning to grow and attract population. Not just Rouen, but Bayeux and William’s own urban project of Caen (where he founded an abbey c. 1059) were sizeable towns, with new suburban overspill settlements. Major new currents of trade were stirring in central France, most notably the luxury wine trade, which in the early eleventh century began to flow with gathering strength westward down the Seine to reach markets in Britain and further north. Rouen’s considerable wealth received a new and powerful boost from this trade. Significantly, it was around 1060 that an immigrant Jewish community began to settle in the city; at this date Jews were important as commodity merchants and artisans. Dulce William was undoubtedly even wealthier than his wealthy predecessors, and the prosperity filtered down to his nobility.

Such surplus wealth had to find channels. In part, these were found in prestige projects, such as the new Benedictine abbeys that were founded across the duchy in the middle years of the century: the twin ducal abbeys of St Stephen and Holy Trinity of Caen; Roger de Beaumont’s paired abbeys of St Peter and St Leger of Preaux; fitz Osbern’s foundations of Lyre and Cormeilles; the Tosny foundation of Conches; the Tancarville abbey of St-Georges-de-Boscherville. These abbeys, and several others, in all their Romanesque grandeur, represented money to invest, as much as spiritual investment. Duke William can also be seen deploying a material vocabulary of secular splendour and display, so that people could understand that he was a prince amongst men. On the Bayeux tapestry he can be seen as duke surrounded by his courtiers and officers, sitting on a chair of state - carved with lions, like the justice seat of King Solomon - holding up in his right hand a sheathed ceremonial sword. Crowns and coronets were not yet worn by dukes in the ro6os, but there were trappings and symbols they could use to advertise their status other than simply flaunting their raw treasure: their gold plate, jewels, silks and furs. The baggage that accompanied William on the road included items that allowed him a certain dignity even in informal surroundings, such as the carpet that was spread out for him in the open air to set his faldstool* Upon at Bernouville around ro8i ‘between the church and forester’s house’ when he made a grant to the abbey of St-Sauveur. When he attended the great churches under his patronage, William may well have experienced quasi-royal state. At his entry into the mass on feast days, the clergy would sing formal Latin laudes (praises), like those sung also before the kings of France and Germany, and pray for his health and perpetual peace. But peace was not the first thing on his mind. For an energetic and accomplished ruler in his early thirties, unchallenged in war, with a brimming treasury and prosperous and confident principality at his back, it may have seemed that almost anything was in his grasp. For no other reason than this he may well have turned his eyes, like Caesar, across the Channel.