Searle: Predatory Kinship [1 ed.] 0520062760, 9780520062764

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Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, 840-1066

Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, 840-1066

Eleanor Searle

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley

•

Los Angeles

•

London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England C> 1988 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Searle, Eleanor. Predatory kinship and the creation of Norman power, 840-1066. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Normans-France-Normandy-Politics and government. 2. Normandy (France}-History-To 1515. I. Title. DC61 l.N856543 1988 944'.02 88-4808 ISBN 0-520-06276-0 (alk. paper)

Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Note on Geographical Nomenclature

xi

Introduction PART I.

THE RAIDERS

1. Viking Raids and Frankish Rivalries 2. Bretons and Vikings: The Beginnings of Western Settlement 3. The Norse of the Seine

15 27 34

PART II. THE SETTLERS: THE BEGINNING OF COHESION

4. The Northmen's Myth: Duclo of St Quentin 5. The Boundaries of the Early Rouen Chieftainship 6. Attack and Stabilization: Richard the Fearless, 942-966 PART 111.

61 68 79

KINSHIP BY CHOICE

7. Succession and Family Limitation, 911-966 8. The Web of Allies 9. Count Rodulf (ca. 945-1015)

93 98 108

vi

Contents

PART IV. THE HOUSE OF THE RICHARDS, 966-1035

10. Resources of the Dukes in the Early Eleventh Century: Rights, Lands, Allies 11. Acknowledged Ducal Children 12. Succession: Practice and Practicability 13. Duke Robert (1027-1035) PART V.

PREDATORY KINSHIP

14. Evidence and Model 15. The "Anarchy" of the 1030s PART VI.

159 179

THE DUKE AS KINSMAN

16. Bringing Up the Boys 17. The Beginning of Winning: The Challenge of Cousin Guy 18. Winning and Wedding: Roger II and William II 19. The Uncles 20. The West and the Bishops 21. The Predatory Community PART VII.

121 131 143 149

193 199 205 213 222 230

CONCLUSION

22. The Predatory Community: Power, Ideology, and Legacy Genealogical Tables 1. The Family of Richard I and Gunnor 2. The Illegitimate Family of Richard I 3. The Family of Richard II and Judith 4. The Descendants of Count Rodulf 5. Some Lineages Linked by Descent from the Parents of the Duchess Gunnor

237

252 254 256 258 260

Contents

vii

6. The Family of Archbishop Robert 7. The Descent of the English Royal House in the Eleventh Century

262 264

Abbreviations

265

Notes

269

Works Cited

325

Index

337

Maps

1. Francia in the Ninth Century 2. Brittany, Northwest Neustria, Flanders, and Vermandois 3. Normandy and the Marches in the Eleventh Century 4. Neighbors and Possessions of the HelgoGiroie, ca. 1040 5. The Feud, ca. 1040

viii

14 28 120 178 183

Acknowledgments

Any scholarly enterprise accumulates debts to individuals and to institutions. It is one of the rewards of the scholar's life. We hope for, and receive, frank criticism and an abundance of friendship. Therefore this is a pleasant duty, but one realizes quickly that it would be impossible to acknowledge individually all the friends who have listened and talked so helpfully. A few friends and colleagues must be individually mentioned with gratitude. I, like everyone who has worked in the field, owe an immense debt to that fine scholar, Professor R. Allen Brown, not least for his creation and leadership of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman studies and for his superbly edited Anglo-Norman Studies. He brought the scholars in the field together. He created the conditions for the friendships and for the fruitful exchanges that characterize the field. Across the Atlantic Professor C. Warren Hollister has established, in the Haskins Society, a worthy daughter-house. To them both I and many others are grateful. Several institutions deserve my special thanks. The National Endowment for the Humanities supported this research at an early stage with a Fellowship. Clare Hall, Cambridge, was a lively home during months spent in that university's stimulating community. My intellectual debts there are many. Caltech is the most generous encourager of its faculty's research. The Division of Humanities and Social Sciences is small enough and congenial enough for there to be ideal opportunities to test ix

Acknowledgments ideas and learn new approaches from lawyers, economists, anthropologists, political scientists, philosophers, and historians, as well as classicists and literary scholars. It is surely the most vital intellectual community I have experienced or can imagine. At one time or another I have had occasion to present my arguments, at seminars or over meals, to nearly all my colleagues, and the list to whom I owe thanks is the Division Faculty list in the Caltech catalogue. But of course a few have been closer than the rest. I have taught with, and learned much from Professor Robert Bates, a political scientist. Professor Alan Schwartz, a lawyer, has been a willing listener and most perceptive of conversationalists and critics. Professor W. T. Jones, a philosopher, has been a profound influence upon myself and all of his colleagues. He has been more than generous with his time and his encouragement. Not least, my fellow medievalist, Professor john F. Benton, has been my encourager, critic, and steadfast friend. Those who knew him will know my great good fortune and my loss. My other home, the Huntington library, is, as always, the ideal scholars' home. Its staff, always ready to assist, deserve my deepest thanks. Its collections (though not designed to cover continental history} had in fact nearly everything I needed. Its readers immeasurably increase the resources from which one can profit. Among them I owe particular thanks to Professor John Phillip Reid, of New York University School of Law, whose reading of chapter 14 was exceedingly helpful. Many scholars listened to, or read, parts of this book. To john Benton, Warren Hollister, and Emily Z. Tabuteau, who read the whole, I owe special thanks, without implying that they agree with everything in it. They have saved me from errors, and their comments have been very helpful. But the book and my perspective are of course my responsibilities. No one has been a greater prop and help than my friend, colleague, and secretary, Rosy Meiron. To her impressive knowledge of languages she adds a capability of devotion to the task in hand and an imaginative flair that make her the ideal collaborator in the enterprise of scholarly work. My husband Leonard has not read a word of the book. But he has listened over the breakfast table for years to my evolving ideas. I thank him for his patience, and for his shrewd comments about power, as about much else. California Institute of Technology The Humington Library

E. S.

Note on Geographical Nomenclature

Avranchin Bessin Cotentin :Evrecin Hiemois Lieuvin Pays de Caux Pays de Talou SCeois

the area roughly coincidental with the diocese of Avranches. the area roughly coincidental with the diocese of Bayeux. the area roughly coincidental with the diocese of Coutances. the area roughly coincidental with the diocese of Evreux. the district roughly from Falaise to the March against Maine. the area roughly coincidental with the diocese of Lisieux. north-northwest area of the diocese of Rauen, on the right bank of the Seine. the northeast area of the diocese of Rauen. the area roughly coincidental with the diocese of SCes.

xi

Introduction

This book is about certain basic principles of state-building in one medieval European society: the duchy of Normandy. The warrior nobility that formed the community of the duchy exemplifies one way of achieving social cohesion; that is, of those mutually recognized social imperatives out of which social cohesion could (when desired) be achieved. The Norse came upon the Frankish scene in the 840s as raiders, and, when they could, as settlers. Before the coming of raiders into the Seine valley there was no Normandy, nor any unified duchy that could be transmuted into Normandy. There was northwest Neustria, or, as it was frequently and vaguely spoken of in the Annals of St Bertin, "the land between Seine and Loire with the March of Brittany." 1 For long, the land that was to become the duchy was a no-man's land, where no one save perhaps poor Gallic farmers cared to settle. The Norse, NorseCelts, and Anglo-Saxons who came in the tenth century as settlers encountered there virtually no preexistent aristocratic lineages. 2 Out of these disparate, northern bands a community eventually formed. It was not a fragmented community and the bands were not absorbed into the Frankish political ethos. They became Normans, not Franks. By the mid-eleventh century the descendants of the settlers formed the most disciplined, cooperative warrior society in Europe, capable of a communal effort-the conquest and subjugation of England-that was not, and could not have been, mounted by any other

Introduction European political entity. Yet they had none of the bonds seemingly so necessary to other European peoples of their time. They had a leader with no legitimacy save in the warriors' choice of him. They knew they were not of a single blood. They gloried that there was a Norman gens, and Dudo's image of the fierce birds is a glorification of that gens as a political, not a biological fact. 1 The polity they constructed is at the very least a remarkably interesting phenomenon. How the Normans came to develop so unified a class polity is, as I have chosen to approach it, a study of power. And I should emphasize that by power I mean coercion. I mean it is the capability (not the right, but the ability) to produce a desired effect, to bring about an intended response. My study is therefore not a history of Normandy before it was so profoundly changed by the necessities of maintaining its colonial administration of conquered England. I am not writing everything that even I know about Normandy before the conquest of England, nor am I attempting to put down everything that even our exiguous and unreliable sources tell us. Rather, I am constructing a model: a "simplified structuring of reality which presents supposedly significant relationships .... Models are highly subjective approximations in that they do not include all associated observations or measurements, but as such they are valuable in ... allowing fundamental aspects of reality to appear. This selectivity means that models have varying degrees of probability .... "" In a word, I am presenting a pattern that I claim has some validity and significance in order to further the enterprise that is history. There is, particularly in such a case as early Normandy, every reason to look for a pattern in materials left us, and to require that it be one that fits the circumstances of the time. Just what might constitute historical "proof" is a question worth more reflection than it receives. Models certainly do not prove anything. Nor can they be proven to be the unique truth about the past. They will be more or less useful ways of thinking about the past and the data left from the past. Finding a pattern, testing it for its plausibility, and then honing it into a model that is significant involves the historian, as the quotation above emphasizes, in the selection of what seems to him or her the relevant data. To some, that may seem an admission of unreliability. It is not. It is an affirmation of the value of acknowledging to oneself and one's readers the role of hypothesis and model making. For all historians choose the data they emphasize; all of us put questions to the materials, whether we acknowledge doing so or not. It is always imponant therefore to be aware of the model~r the theory, as it is often called-that one has

Introduction chosen. In the case of early Normandy, partly because our evidence is thin, it is peculiarly vulnerable to manipulation and inconsistent interpretation if interpretation is not controlled by a conceptual scheme that has been consciously and frankly acknowledged. The danger of formless antiquarianism is, it seems to me, far less in a case such as early Normandy, with its ambiguous documentation, than is the danger of the historian's unexamined preference for the way things should have been. For such a preference will certainly be the basis for a conceptual scheme, but without the interpreter's being aware of the fact. If our preconceptions about the structures of the past are not openly examined they will not only be difficult to test and reformulate-they may also lead to a profoundly misleading interpretation. The currently accepted model of Norman origins is one that I shall argue is unlikely. But it has seemed to be based upon "facts," and because we cannot recheck by ourselves everything we read, and do not wish to, all too many shaky and unlikely conjectures have over the years been elevated into evidence for "the way it really was. " 5 It is fair enough to say that a model of continuity as opposed to discontinuity dominates the present day: essential continuity of Carolingian institutions and administration before and after the cession of "Normandy" to the vikings. The potency of this model is most clearly seen in the influential papers of Jean Yver.' In 911, so the model has it, the viking Hrolfr became the baptized Rollo, accepted as legitimate ruler of a province by the Frankish king Charles the Simple. Rollo thereupon became a Carolingian count, and he could have learned his duties and rights from a predecessor, for there "was" (supposedly) a functioning count in Rauen as late as 905. There was also a bishop in Rauen and there "was" (supposedly) one still in Coutances in 906. By 933 Normandy had already taken its shape by means of other grants made in good faith by King Charles and his supplanter, King Raoul. From that time on a gallicized Carolingian count ruled the ancient pagi from the Pays de Caux to the Couesnon. In other words, here supposedly is our proof of continuity-though under new management and, to use the adjective of a recent historian, a bit "dented" in the change.7 But the count of 905 and the bishop of Coutances in 906 cannot be established as having existed. Nor can the viking be shown to have been made a count. All this, so badly needed to support the hypothesis of continuity, is actually unsustainable conjecture born out of the assumption that there was continuity. R On this assumption there is, of course, no problem of how power

4

Introduction

was created. Rollo received a huge province for next to nothing. The vikings and the Frankish nobles alike accepted the right of the Carolingian king to give away land and to confer leadership. It is necessary, however, to ignore several inconvenient facts: that the centralized quasi-state of the Carolingians was fragmenting, that local counts were scrambling to injure their neighbors and to expand their influence, and that elsewhere in Francia vikings were in retreat. And while the grisly original of Raoul of Cambrai (repellent enough in later legend) was pursuing his bloody course, proponents of the continuity thesis claim that the "Normans" were more or less placidly learning to govern one of the largest territories in Francia. No one should be satisfied with this current picture, and indeed Professor Le Patourel, writing some years ago, convincing1y challenged the "continuity theory": The "continuity" theory seems to make it necessary for the powers of a Carolingian count to have been taken over and exercised by Rollo and his immediate successors at once and more or less intact. This is a process which cannot be demonsuated and, in the conditions of the early tenth century, is scarcely credible. On the other hand if there was a decisive break, by what means and at what point were the powers cenainly exercised by the duke in the late eleventh century, actually assumed? 9

Professor Le Patourel saw that the problem was very difficu1t, but he did not systematically address it because his inquiry Jay in that later period of empire. His own tentative suggestion respecting ear]y Normandy was that some rime around the end of the tenth or early eleventh century the successors of the viking Rollo "converted themse1ves ... into territorial princes, assuming the powers of Carolingian counts while retaining some elements of their authority as viking chieftains, and as their administration developed," reconstituted the ancient pagi as administrative units, "taking as their model those which had been disrupted least." 1° This cautious proposal leaves the process of power formation unexplored. As Le Patourel himself pointed out, the origins and sources of ducal power have still to be sought. His own tentative suggestion is that both are to be found in the possession, by the dukes, of great wealth, particularly in land. Here the "new" aristocracy assumes its key position in the argument. It has come to be recognized, as Professor Douglas argued, that the Norman aristocracy of 1066 was an aristocracy of "new men," whose families had risen to prominence (we should properly say "documented prominence") within two to three genera-

Introduction tions. 11 That aristocracy is unusual for the high degree of its social discipline-so much so that Lucien Musser has proposed that it was, from its very beginning, une clientele. 12 This disciplined dependence upon the dukes arises, he suggests, from the very nature of the Norse settlement in Normandy. Virtually no Frankish chieftain families seem to have remained in the area. The aristocracy was recruited from Francia, Normandy, and overseas. Its singular dependence and cohesion came from this beginning: it had no bases of power independent of the duke. The lands of that "new aristocracy" can be shown to have passed at some time through the ducal hands, whether as lands either of the Carolingian fisc or lands of the Carolingian church allotted by the duke as beneficia. or lands the transmission of which was strongly controlled by him. As their power grew, based upon the allocation of newly conquered lands to a newly recruited aristocracy, so the dukes of the eleventh century could reassume the more "public" sources of further power and revenue: rights over coinage, forests, rivers, castles, and some taxes. The early development of Normandy has thus turned into two questions, of which the first is concerned with what did occur at the cession of some territory or other to the viking Hr61fr, and the second is concerned with the means by which his successors created so unified a polity by the mid-eleventh century. This present study returns to both questions in detail, because neither the continuity model nor the clientele model is satisfactory in explaining such a major social transformation. Northern Francia could scarcely have been given away so easily and peacefully as the continuity model would have it. Ce"ainly Ponthieu and Flanders were not. Nor was the country around the mouth of the Loire. Further, the continuity model is directly contrary to the tale of the Northmen's coming that was written for the Norman ducal family a few generations later-a tale that, as I have argued elsewhere, can and should be used within certain limits as evidence of Norman fear of the Franks and Norman hostility to all that was Frankish, and an anxious realization of their own disunity. 0 ·Accordingly, the first section below, "The Raiders," looks chiefly at the vikings as they impinged upon Frankish aristocratic society. That society had its own concerns, and not infrequently, as will be seen, Frankish leaders saw vikings as useful mercenaries, pawns in their own complex maneuvers of power. The Frankish sources for the interaction between vikings and Franks are, necessarily, virtually all chronicles written by Frankish ecclesiastics. They are as difficult for us to understand as are their lay contemporaries, or indeed most men before, per-

Introduction haps, the twelfth century. Their notions of good and evil actions are not shared by later medieval writers or by ourselves. This is not to say that they are totally inaccessible, but whole texts must be read to be accessible at all. One cannot approach their reality or assess their information through the indexes of their editions. Their writings are wearily time-consuming. This is how I have approached them-as whole texts-and part I is what I have been able to wring from them. Having read the work of earlier scholars who knew far better than I the Frankish world, I hope I have profited from them and absorbed their lessons. But since they have, by and large, put different questions to our strange forebears in the art of history from those I have put, I have preferred to refer the reader to those strange men themselves. Not infrequently I have referred the reader to modern, accessible sources for chronology and events well established in time and place. I have not, on the whole, referred the reader to interpretive sources, nor have I carried on a historiographical essay in the notes. This is not to say that part I is either eccentric or even especially original. But it does put questions that others have not put in quite the same way. A picture of Franks and vikings has emerged, not quite that of others, but, I maintain, not therefore "unlike." I have asked of the sources what the Frankish nobility of the North were preoccupied with among themselves during panicular years of viking raids. Were the raiders completely an extrinsic threat? Were there peaceful contacts, and, if so, how far did they go? Did the nature of the contacts change over the years and with the circumstances of the various Frankish leaders? Were other grants made besides that to Rollo? Above all, in part I, chapter 3, I take up the question of Charles' situation at the moment of the grant of Normandy, supposing we can isolate a moment. Finally, do the answers to these questions cast any light on what might have been the expectations of the reconciled adversaries about that grant, and the almost immediately subsequent grants ofterritory? It is the expectations I have been trying to make out. No one is more aware than myself that this is the farthest shore of hypothesis. Parts I and II-the Raiders and the Settlers-are devoted to a critique of the continuity model. They show, in contrast to its predictions, a disruption so serious as to constitute discontinuity. Without any Carolingian officials or nobles remaining in the area besides the archbishop in Rouen, little could remain of Carolingian government. The evidence from Francia also suggests that the sources of noble power and social control there were shifting from a base in family prominence and

Introduction governmental appointment to the more fragmented base of the castle and the seigneurial ban. If a people with a long tradition of Carolingian governance were moving away from it, it is surely implausible to hold that northern invaders with a heritage of different social preferences would either fall immediately into compliance with old Frankish forms or take the authority of the Frankish king as the source of the legitimacy of the Rouen warleader. In fact, the reality of the old Frankish forms has been coming into question in recent scholarship. Carolingian capitularies, commands, regulations for the royal palace, are all enticingly specific. But though they have been taken to represent reality, the orderly, centrally governed society they imply is not evident from other sources. Plunder, gift exchange, and tribute instead were the business of king and nobles alike. The elite led a "semi·nomadic existence ... involving much traveling and fighting punctuated by large-scale feasts with conspicuous consumption of food and alcohol." The clashes between Carolingian warbands and vikings "were not clashes between radically different worlds: the two sides understood each other very well. " 14 In such circumstances, effective links between central governments and regional leaders such as counts should not be assumed without evidence of their actual operation. As Professor Leyser has put it, the older historiography "was in its abstractions a shadow history of institutions that did not really exist. "IS Thus even the powerful Ottonian government of the tenth and eleventh centuries was felt unequally in the different parts of the Reich because the emperor had no effective deputies in territories other warleaders considered their own. The Ottonians' stability and authority among the nobles lay not in administrative effectiveness, but simply in the spoils of the border conflicts they could authorize and coordinate, and, by the late tenth century, in their control of the silver mines of the Harz Mountains. 1' As Charlemagne's heirs split his swollen empire among themselves, his western descendants lost the profitable oppor· tunities of the eastern borders, and had no source from which to re· plenish the movable wealth so necessary for the maintenance of loyalty. Certainly fighting against vikings represented no profit. And on profit distributed as rewards, depended prestige and such power as it gave. In the light of this new picture of the operation of Carolingian power, we need no longer take continuity to mean a continuation of effective administration, as has been the case. Such a notion of continuity rests upon the assumptions of what Leyser has called "shadow history." The creation, then, of Norman power between the first settlement of the

Introduction vikings and the mid-eleventh century is not primarily of assimilation to Carolingian forms, as those appear in the capitularies. If Reuter's picture of Carolingians and vikings as groups not dissimilar has validityand I think it has-then this study of Normandy is not just a "Scandinavian interpretation." Rather it is one that sees the settlers (of mixed background and noncohesive) as resembling contemporary Germanic warrior-groups more generally. In this case the creation of Norman power is a problem of how and when these groups unified sufficiently to defend themselves and to push their conquests to a maximum limit. How and when did they assimilate to the newer forms of Frankish warrior society emerging in the tenth century? The essence of this study is not to argue that the settlers were Scandinavians, but that they brought with them-and adhered longer than the Franks around them-to older forms of social organization, older and less effective methods of social control than the Franks were evolving. In this sense the settlers preserved a continuity that the Franks themselves were abandoning. Parts III, "Kinship by Choice," and V, "Predatory Kinship," address themselves to the question of the beginnings of coherence. They ask first, what can be made out about the norms of social cohesion the settlers brought with them? And second, what was the early source of ducal power? They propose that the settlers brought with them notions of social order insufficient to create a cohesion that would long withstand the hostility of the wealthier Franks. The northern settlers were a people on the defensive, and by the mid-tenth century were close to being absorbed as a lower stratum under Frankish lords. The Norse of Rauen were saved only by a new invasion of vikings in the 960s, as Duda bears witness. The rest of Normandy we know little about, but it is arguable that it was not taken by Frankish lords because those lords were preoccupied with power building in the social order that was emerging in Francia from the shambles of the Carolingian state. They were building new offensive/defensive bases, the castles from which their power could radiate. They built cautiously, each in potential rivalry with each. Their caution, and Normandy's relatively untempting resources, gave a breathing space for the silent overseas immigration whose traces we see only in the eleventh century. Yet these immigrants were under the most severe threat, and it was their awareness of their danger that made ducal centralization possible: it began, as I argue in part Ill, with a respect among the vikings of the northeast for Richard the Fearless, and with what I have called his "web of allies." Part IV

Introduction

looks then at the centralizing dukes and proposes that they built upon family manipulation, not upon public, ducal rights. The remainder of the book concentrates upon kinship as the very basis of ducal power and, at the same time, as a difficult problem for the dukes within their own family. There are difficulties with the hypothesis of a "snowballing" ducal power that steadily increased by the dukes' possession of wealth in land and by their victories. Though that hypothesis is dramatically substantiated by the generation of William II, as will be argued in the final section, "The Duke as Kinsman," it works less well for the earlier generations, as the settlers became Normans. As for the overlapping hypothesis of power based upon the recruitment of a clientele with no landed bases of power beyond ducal favorit assumes what is to be proved, that the vikings accepted a centralized ducal authority authenticated by the will of a Frankish king. This assumption, in turn, derives from another assumption, that a Rauen warleader whom we call a duke already somehow had coercive power far from Rauen. There is little evidence in support of either assumption. Both are in conflict with the picture of warrior society drawn by the family's own mythmaker, Dudo of St Quentin. He portrays Norse warleaders established east and west of the river Risle in the tenth century who had only a vague tie of friendship with Rouen, of which some were suspicious. With warleaders occupying the nearby lands in cautious alliance, and with others established completely independently in central Normandy and the west-as they were-how could the dukes without much fighting have recruited subservient immigrants and given them land? Dudo pictures the tenth-century dukes as weak and Richard I's survival as long in doubt. Behind the rhetoric of his expected flattery, Dudo's evidence is a serious embarrassment to the clientele theory. A weak duke could control land only with the loyalty of the warleaders who in fact took it. Those warleaders, unless they were remarkably stupid, would not have allowed the duke to dispose of lands so as to recruit an aristocracy that would have been hostile to the earlier warleaders' own interests. There is no reason to believe that they were so stupid. Pan V, "Predatory Kinship," argues that they had a rational assessment of their own interests as well as the capacity for violence that could translate that assessment into profitable feud. This study proposes a way out of the historiographical difficulties: simply to take seriously the claim of the upper ranks of the eleventh-

10

Introduction

century Norman aristocracy to be kin both to one another and to the duke. The closest approximation to the essence of that aristocracy is to think of it not as a clientele, but rather as a warrior kin-group: district leaders who over the generations gradually came to be identified as kinsmen of the chieftain of Rouen. The later chapters argue that selfinterest, not self-discipline, is the characteristic most notable of this group. Their growing ability to cooperate in the interests of expansion and wealth deserves at least as much emphasis as discipline. Indeed, when one compares the leaders of William H's generation with their contemporaries in France and Anglo-Saxon England, the Norman leaders' ability to cooperate is their dominant characteristic and underlies the discipline that they exhibited. Expansion explains the dynamic political kinship system of the invaders who, over the generations, became Normans. That is why I have characterized it as a predatory kinship, and part V sets out the norms of the system-the expectations of constantly increasing resources that provided the dynamic of early Germanic societies generally, and can be made out clearly among the extraordinarily successful Normans. Kinship as I am using the term is not a matter of "blood" or descent but a way of reckoning those who have a right to share in resources, and it is therefore also a way of identifying those upon whom each individual can depend. The kinship system of Germanic Europe inevitably involved aggression and an appetite for violence, since only in predation could a kin-group support all its sons as fighters and recruit by marriage to its daughters. In predation alone lay the ultimate defense of the group. As Karl Leyser has commented about a similar society, early medieval kinship structures "must remain obscure until we have understood the conditions which underlay them, and these again must be looked for not so much in the aristocracy's self-awareness, as has been done recently, but in its situation-its hard, dangerous and unhealthy mode of existence. " 11 The Norse invaders came into Francia during the last years, it may be, of such a disruptive inheritance system among the Germanic Franks, where it was slowly being replaced by the ideology of unigeniture. But it was not so among the Normans. 11 All must inherit. But no restriction determined the choice of the kin-group's leader and major inheritor. In that power of choice lay much of the Normans' power to adapt and to be effective. When they were able to add to the aggressive expectations of their inheritance norms the new technology of Frankish castle and cavalry warfare, then they could control Normandy, turn against

Introduction

11

England, and conquer stupendously. The Normans of William II's generation held resources if they had been selected to do so. They were therefore excellent fighters and loyal to their duke and group. But they had (in the French context) anachronistic expectations about the results and morality of predation. And they had the wit to realize that their goals could best be achieved by cooperation of effort. Lastly they had a great leader who shared their expectations, was an effective centralizer and an inspired warrior, willing to fight his whole life long. This was the "Norman achievement." It was the achievement of a particular generation that they realized their moment of chance was at hand, and rode on to victory. That is ultimately the argument of this study. Two last points should be made about methodology. The first relates to what I have just said about a "particular generation." What impresses one in looking at the Norman evidence is how differently the succeeding generations appear to have acted and reacted. In studying the adaptable Normans therefore, one must be careful to concentrate upon the individuals and upon the circumstances of given moments. I have used later evidence and read back from it, but I am aware that with the Normans this is tricky and should be done only when there is strong justification for it. The second point concerns the people in the landscape. This is a story of power; peasants have no place in it. We shall see them but seldom, and then always in powerless subjection, subject to savage punishment even for attempts to protect themselves. This is a landscape of warrior nobles. But that does not mean that men alone figure in the landscape. Far from it. The Normans built their "state" out of property and women, as well as out of men and swords. We will see their politics more clearly by putting their women, as they did, into that landscape. And we shall not assume, as is done so often, that the women were subservient prey and plunder. There is no reason to suppose that they did not share the predatory values of their society, and, as we shall see, there is evidence that they did. What I have made of the evidence is a possible story. But all history is "possible history," and especially must this be so when the evidence is ambiguous and the actors so different from ourselves. This is an attempt to make sense of the data, to integrate the Norse myth about themselves into the more "objective" data, to account for the lateness of the arrival of the eventual ruling class upon the scene-that is, to revise the model that now exists. Above all, it is an account of the way power might, once, and under certain circumstances, have been created. It is possible then that matters looked somewhat as follows.

PART I

The Raiders

Map 1. Francia in the Ninth Century

1 Viking Raids and Frankish Rivalries

They came, barbarous, uncivilized traders from a poor region to the far north, with little to offer in exchange for the relative riches they found in Francia. By Charlemagne's time, they had the sails with which to travel far along the Frankish coasts-and to England. From that latter shore, they had begun to get some capital. On Lindisfarne, where they had doubtless made haven often, and where (as Alcuin's famous letter bears witness) even the clerics liked to hear the old Danish stories, a force of the barbarians looted the monastery in 793. By the end of Louis the Pious' life, in 840, they had discovered their commodities: loot, but probably more important, slaves from Ireland and England destined for the markets of Spain and the Mediterranean. Their aptitude for violence among civilized traders and in monasteries sacred to the Christians was the prerequisite for such trade and for amassing capital rapidly, and they possessed it in plenty. Soon they turned toward Francia. Thereafter, for some two hundred years, trading, slaving for sale or ransom, and the plundering of monasteries and markets were all viking modes of enriching themselves. They did not come to fight. They came to gain profit at the least expense to themselves. Before fighters they most often preferred to retreat when they were raiding. If besieged, as at Angers, which a viking band had actually occupied in the 870s, they were willing to take oaths "just as the Franks might dictate," and ask to be allowed to settle on an island in the Loire until late winter, and 15

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to trade from there. 1 But negotiation always involves respect, and the raiders had to be willing to be reckless fighters as well as canny retreaters1 in order to survive and profit. They had to be murderers. Then they could negotiate and, most profitable of all, require local authorities to plunder for them: to buy them off with collected silver, which the Anglo-Saxons came to call Danegeld. Lucien Musser, writing of the viking incursions into Francia, distinguishes three phases.! In the first they raided the shores of the sea and rivers. The Rhine, Scheidt, Somme, Seine, Loire, and Gironde were the wide entrances leading to unfortified cities and monasteries of the interior, and to smaller navigable rivers and on to still further prey. During this phase they not only raided from Scandinavia but established bases: for land raids, as winter quarters, and as entrepOts for trading and slaving. The second phase was that of the Danegelds, when violence, or the threat of violence, was used to intimidate and force a region to pay them in the hope they would leave. The third of Musset's phases is that of "direct exploitation." When the attacked territory was too disorganized by the ravaging vikings for further resistance, actual settlement began and a Norse "state" was established. Such "phases" are useful categorizations of different viking activities, if it is kept in mind that to a great extent they overlap and did not follow the same course everywhere or inevitably. Nor is there necessarily a causal connection between them. In 841, the first time the Norsemen are known to have sailed up the Seine to attack the undefended monasteries and the town of Rouen, they looted, took captives, and "accepted much money" to leave. 1 In 838, Rorie, a Danish "king," was asking Louis the Pious to "be given the Frisians and Abroditos." He was contemptuously refused, but already the island of Walchern, at the mouth of the Scheidt, was a base from which the pirates of the North were exacting tribute "as they pleased'' from nearby areas and from the trading emporium of Dorestadt itself. In 841-842 Louis' son Lothar made the first of the Carolingian grants to the Danish Harold: making a sort of formal grant of Walchern to the pirate who was occupying it, and acknowledging his authority in the shore region. The Frankish court annalist, writing the chronicle known now as the chronicle of St Bertin, recorded with horror the spectacle of a Christian king delivering over Christian subjects, with their lands and churches, to serve their pagan persecutors.~ Raiding, intimidating, and attempting to settle depended upon the vikings' own reaction to events at home, in England and Ireland (upon

Viking Raids and Frankish Rivalries

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both of which they preyed and where they settled), and upon the local defenses within Francia and Aquitania. 1 In the case of the Danes, it was the "business as usual" of border raid and counterraid characteristic of Carolingian life. Not least, I propose, the "phases" depended upon the interests of the multiplying Carolingian kings of Francia and the increasingly strong magnates of the Western Kingdom, over the course of the ninth and tenth centuries. Leaving the complexities of overseas events to one side, in order to simplify the struggle between Franks and Norse in Francia, I intend here to concentrate upon the land, and upon the policies of the Franks toward what we may call their "Norse problem." It was no simple problem met with a sustained determination to resist the vikings. Far from it. Viking bands had their uses, and their value was first recognized in the rivalry among the three sons of Louis the Pious: Lothar I, emperor and holder of the Middle Kingdom, the Carolingian heartland; Louis the German of the kingdom east of the Rhine; and Charles the Bald, youngest and cleverest, and holder of the Western Kingdom.' THESCHELDT In the north of the Carolingian empire, the cession of Walchern and Frisia illustrates the complexity of the "Norse problem." Regino of Prilm gives a vivid picture of the "far reaches of the realm," the nether lands (in regni extremitatibus): it is a region of "innumerable river-mouths and impenetrable marshes" where the Carolingian host of mounted warriors could not operate, and which the counts of the richer inland areas neither cared greatly about nor dared to invade. Only local seamen knew the region's shifting waterways, sands, and baffling tides.' The local Germanic seafolk, mingled with the incoming Norse, were virtually impregnable. They were also of some use as mercenaries, as the sons and grandsons of Louis the Pious fragmented the empire. In the early 840s, as we have seen, the Norse occupiers were "granted" Walchern by Lothar I, to the horror of the chronicler Prudcntius-and in return they served Lothar: they fought Saxons for him, they were loosed to raid in his brother Charles' Western Kingdom. A band was with Lothar when he fled from both his brothers across the Moselle in 842, after the battle of Fontenoy. Yet the Norsemen were unreliable: in 850 Rorie, the kinsman of Harold of Walchern, "left off peace with Lothar," gathered a fleet, and attacked the northern coast and islands as far as the Rhine, "and Lothar, although he detested the

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The Raiders

compromise, received him once more as a fide/is and granted him Dorestadt and other counties. " 1 At the same time, Lothar's brother, Louis the German, came to terms with other Norse. In or just after 851, says the chronicle of St Benin, pirate Danes settled Frisia and the Batavian islands, and bands attacked overland on foot into the kingdom of Charles the Bald. The news received and recorded by Prudentius was that on the march into Neustria, the Norse got as far as Beauvais and Rauen but were intercepted on their return, with losses on both sides. In the following year, a large fleet came to Frisia and, having demanded and received "many things," were diverted elsewhere.' Were they levying a district ransom on other Norse? The Frankish chroniclers do not seem to have known: all barbarians near the coast were Nordmanni. Even the Carolingians who dealt with them more and more frequently could not be sure that when they had paid one viking leader off, other bands would stop fighting, or that when they hired one band to drive another off, they might not combine. Godefrid, the son of the Norse Harold of Wakhern, who had been baptized and was with Lothar-presumably as a hostage and ward----escaped, rejoined his people, and raided along the coast from the Scheidt to the Seine, which he entered. Charles the Bald, whose kingdom they had entered now, was joined there by Lothar and an army. They managed to block the viking advance by holding both banks of the river. But Charles' men were unwilling, according to the chronicler, to undertake battle, and Charles came to an agreement with Godefrid; "others of the Danes" remained aher the departure of the armies, however, to burn and to take captives. 10 The disaster-a disaster for the farmers of the lower Seine only-illustrates the complexities of what I have called the "Norse problem" in the fragmenting empire. Charles the Bald was willing enough to lead the host in defense of the vulnerable rivers, and he was willing to fight bravely and hard, as he later showed when he caught a force of invaders within Angers. But the leaders of the mounted host-regional nobiles-were unwilling to fight an enemy presumably dug in behind hastily erected fortifications on an island in the Seine, and with boats to shih location. It would indeed have been next to impossible for the Franks to have joined battle under such circumstances. Nor was the Seine of great moment to the nobiles of Francia. That very year Aquitanian lords in dangerous numbers were refusing to recognize Charles and were calling upon his brother Louis the German to come to them. 11 Charles' interests lay elsewhere-in the Carolingian home-

Viking Raids and Frankish Rivalries

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lands, in Burgundy and in Aquitaine. For the lightly inhabited lower valley of the Seine, none of them wished to die. Charles was willing enough to buy the Norse off, but, as Lothar's and his own experiences had shown, trusting Norse fide/es was a tricky business, and giving silver did not always ensure their departure. And, after all, who might be the real leader with whom the Franks might deal? The problem was real at any rate, and long-remembered. Dudo of St Quentin put it down in his saga of the early Normans, when he has a Frank ask a company of raiders, "By what name does your leader go?" The reply was sharp about realities: "By none, for we are all of equal power. "IZ The unpredictable deviousness of the Norse in dealing with the Franks was more than matched by Carolingian treachery, if one can use that term in speaking of the treatment of one's tormentors. The end of formal Norse domination of Frisia demonstrates Frankish hostility clearly, and the tale seems to have passed into Norman historiography, for it colors the panegyric of Dudo of St Quentin, to a large extent determining his portrayal of relations between Rouen and the Franks. The ninth-century events in upper Lorraine are remarkably analogous to the settlement of the Norse in Normandy, and illustrate the involvement of the vikings in the family rivalries of the Carolingians. They are therefore worth pausing over. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 had ended the overt squabbling of Louis the Pious' three sons by dividing the empire into a realm for each of the survivors as we have noted above: roughly, Louis the German held the territory east of the Rhine; Charles the Bald the Western Kingdom (Burgundy, Aquitaine, and Neustria); while the eldest, the Emperor Lothar I, held a kingdom that stretched from Frisia in the north (between the Rhine and the Scheidt) to southern Italy." It was Lothar who legitimized Norse occupation of Walchern at the mouth of the bordering river Scheidt, hoping perhaps to encourage Norse ambitions to be directed west, into the kingdom of Charles the Bald, rather than south and east into his own lands. Lothar I died in 855, and his kingdom itself was divided among his three sons. Lothar II received the districts between the Rhine and the Scheidt, from Frisia to the Alps, the territory that came to take its name from his: Lotharingia, Lorraine. It included the ancient Carolingian homeland and the ancient loyalties: it was the beloved land of the Carolingians. The western kings' desire for Lorraine and their unease in the west and southwest never allowed them more than a shallow

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The Raiders

interest in and nominal control over the territories most accessible to the vikings' depredations. Both Louis the German and Charles the Bald coveted the realm of Lothar II. Their opportunity came through the unhappiness of the marriage of Lothar and Theutberga, whose family was of great importance between the Jura and the passes of the Alps. 14 "Through which union," wrote Regino of Prilm from his Lotharingian monastery, "the greatest ruin came not only upon him, but upon his whole realm." 15 Within a few years Lothar had repudiated Theutberga and returned to the aristocratic girl to whom he had been joined in a less formal union "while he was still a boy in his father's house." That union, with the noble Waldrada (Lothar's advocates pointed to her status as vital to the validity of their union), produced at least one son and two daughters. 1" Fearing attack from his uncles and perhaps from Theutberga's powerful family, Lothar II, in the midst of the wrangle over his divorce, hired vikings, paying them with the proceeds of a tax imposed throughout his realm, and with grain, flocks, wine, and cider. 1 ' Neither concubinage, subsequent marriage, repudiation, nor remarriage after repudiation were unknown-or even uncommon-among the Carolingian kings. Charles the Bald later took Queen Theutberga's kinswoman as his concubine before he married her. His nephew Charles the Fat created territories for his children born out of Christian wedlock. Charles the Bald's own son, Louis the Stammerer, was to repudiate his aristocratic wife and to take another. Yet all three of Louis' sons (two by his first wife, one by his second) were of unimpugned legitimacy.'R Charles the Bald's own view of marriage seems to have been perfectly consistent: royal marriages were made by the choice or with the consent of the sovereign. Nearly all his children enraged him in this regard, for they simply disregarded his wishes. Louis was made to give up a wife; yet after his death, his sons by both wives inherited, with the goodwill of church and nobility. But Charles the Bald was determined to deny legitimacy to Waldrada 's children, and in this he had the inestimable services of his archbishop and chaplain, Hincmar of Reims. The great affair, the divorce of Lothar, was not therefore Lothar's doing. He had simply and by custom repudiated his father's choice for him. The divorce was his uncle's doing, to prevent the woman with children from being crowned. Thus it is that out of Charles the Bald's lust for Lorraine, the papacy was presented with Archbishop Hincmar's argument that marriage was indissoluble, and thus it happened that the pope obligingly intervened

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in the papacy's earliest known ruling on a marriage case, upholding the archbishop. Thus too, Lothar"s ecclesiastics, in opposition, offered the proposition that a noble girl, given by her parents and with her consent, was in fact a wife and no concubine. Both propositions came from Carolingian norms of behavior-norms, not absolutes-rather than from papal theory, and both came out of desperate attempts to manipulate inheritance. In 869 a new pope was preparing to rule once more on the marriage, when Lothar died in August at Piacenza. Within a month Charles the Bald had invaded Lorraine, and within a year he and Louis the German had panitioned it in the Divisio Regni. preserved by Hincmar. 19 Lothar H's children, however, remained to be dealt with. They are not heard of for some years, but within a decade the boy, Hugh, was causing trouble. 20 Lothar's two daughters seem to have been in the guardianship of Louis the German's son and successor, Charles the Fat. One, Benhe, was married to Count Thietbald, nephew of the very Theutberga of Lothar's divorce case, strong evidence of a Lotharingian network of powerful families to which both Lothar's wives belonged, and of which the Carolingians were the chief." The other daughter, Gisla, was married in 882 to Gotfrid, "king of the Norsemen," as part of the concession ceremony, in which Gotfrid was baptized, while Charles the Fat acted as his godfather and bestowed upon him the province of Frisia. 22 By 883, the supporters of Lothar H's son Hugh had grown to include a number of powerful Lotharingian magnates, Count Thietbald among them, and he was in hopes of gaining his father's realm, so ran the tale at Priim. 21 Two years later he sent secretly to his brother-in-law Gotfrid, calling upon the Norseman in the name of their affinity (eo quad illi esset affinitate coniunctus propter sororem, quam in conjugum acceperat), to come to his aid to retake Hugh's patrimony, promising to share it with Gotfrid. Gotfrid sent instead to the emperor Charles the Fat asking that he be given cenain imperial estates near the confluence of the Ahr and the Rhine, which he wanted for their excellent vineyards. Charles, sensitive to the dangers of vikings in "the bowels of the kingdom" rather than at its edge, where their presence would defend it against their own people, as Regino has it, determined to extirpate them. An elaborate ruse was planned, outlined in great detail by Regino, writing at Priim not far off. Gotfrid and his wife were lured to a parley where Gotfrid was murdered with his warband, and Gisla captured, to be sent to a convent. Finally Hugh was lured to a separate parley by

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The Raiders

the emperor's order. There he was captured, blinded, sent to the monastery of St Gall, and at last to Priim, where Regino, who told his story, himself tonsured the prince. 2" Carolingians blinded Carolingians. They murdered Norsemen. And tales traveled, as the vikings traveled, throughout the lands and islands of the northern seas. A generation later one of them, the viking Hr6lfr, was offered a cession of land by Charles the Bald's grandson. He could scarcely have been innocent of Frankish rivalries and of the fate of Norsemen serving those rivalries. Yet of course for the Franks, the murder of one "accepted" Norseman could not rid the northern regions of vikings. What at last effectively defended the Rhine-Scheidt area and made a viking "state" impossible to found was rather the growth of the independent power of the local nobility, above all the ninth- and tenth-century counts of Flanders. As the Carolingian ducatum of Baldwin I was transformed into his county of Flanders, and his castra came to guard his territory against all comers, any Norse hope of state-building there faded, leaving only a tale at Priim of a formal grant and of a Carolingian wife who had seemed to legitimate a Norse polity in Francia. The Carolingian wife was the visible link to legitimization. She would be the channel through which rights would be inevitably transmitred to her children. The future of the region was born from a quite different Carolingian marriage. In 860 the twice-widowed queen of England, Charles the Bald's daughter Judith, had sold her possessions in England and returned to her father's palaces, very rich, it was said. In that year she eloped with Baldwin I to his castra. In 864 the king forgave the disobedience and recognized the already fruitful marriage. From Baldwin and Judith came the sons to inherit maternal royal affinity and a paternal base for expansion. No Norse/Carolingian children were admitted as having been born to the viking leader and Gisla. Only a blind prince at Priim and a Carolingian abbess remained, witnesses to a Norse assumption that royal affinity guaranteed amity. THE LOIRE On the northwestern borders of Carolingian Fr:ancia, the Franks had encountered the unassimilable and hostile Bretons. Against these Celts even Charlemagne had been able to accomplish little but their containment in the northwestern peninsula. From there the Bretons raided, and their lowlands were raided in turn. They ensured that a wide border, roughly from Nantes on the Loire to Rennes and the channel coast near

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the sands of Mont-Saint-Michel (and thence eastward or west as their power waxed or waned) would be dangerous territory for Franks. Thus the western lands of the territory that became Normandy had never been securely under Carolingian rule. Those lands provided no base of power for a Frankish noble family who might guard the area against vikings. If it was to be secured against viking attack and settlement, the Breton border chieftains alone could secure it. But they had as enemies the Franks as well as the Norse. And the Franks were more concerned that the Bretons should not expand eastward than that the horn of Brittany be protected against the Norse. In the year 843, when vikings first raided successfully against the marcher town of Nantes, the Bretons were invading Frankish territory, while the Carolingian count of the March seems to have been in league with them.H The following year the Breton warleader NomenoC was raiding Frankish Maine when he was compelled to return, not because of a Frankish counterattack but because of the Norsemen. 2 ' The Norse came, looted, and slaved, and for the time being went away again with their "goods. 1121 But they maintained a base at the mouth of the Loire, and their presence hindered not only the Bretons, but Charles the Bald too from maintaining control over Maine and the Breton march. After the battle of Redon (845-846), Charles seems to have been forced to recognize NomenoC and the Bretons as independent. About the same time, in the late winter of 845 1 vikings had probed into the Seine and raided as far as Paris. There Charles was forced to buy them off with a ransom worth seven thousand pounds of silver, so it was said. 11 With the Norse freely operating at the mouths of both the Seine and the Loire, the emperor and the Bretons were both at risk. One answer was the betrothal of Charles' heir, Louis the Stammerer, to the daughter of NomenoC's successor, ErispoC, and the attempt to establish the boy in Maine. But this policy of "better the devil you know" was unsuccessful, for it did not suit the western magnates, particularly the clan most strongly entrenched on the Loire, whom we may, at the risk of some blurring, call the Robertians. They did not love Bretons or Norse. But neither did they welcome the prospect of a WelfCarolingian rooted in Western Neustria, siring Breton-Carolingian kings, with claims on loyalties no Carolingian had yet enjoyed. 29 In the mid-ninth century the Franks of the western kingdom were divided in loyalties and wary. The family of a former count of Maine, Gauzbert, beheaded for treason, was in rebellion. The more serious disruption was the conflict between the kinsmen of Charles the Bald's mother Judith

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The Raiders

and those of Louis the Pious' first wife Ermentrude, who were determined not to be overshadowed by imperial grants to Judith's menfolk. This kind of factionalism between the kinsmen of different royal wives, and their backing of the royal sons related to themselves, pitted Louis the German and Lothar against their half-brother Charles. 10 By 853 Charles recognized Robert the Strong as imperial dux "between Seine and Loire against the Bretons," so Regino wrote, far away in Priim. 11 By 858 "the counts of King Charles, allied with the Bretons, ... drove his son Louis and his household out of Maine and forced him to cross the Seine and to seek refuge with his father. " l l The Bretons clearly shared the counts' disquiet at the thought of a Breton-Carolingian king, and returned to their hostility. The 850s in the meantime had witnessed Norse attacks up the Loire: Angers was attacked, the monastery of St Martin of Tours and the town of Tours were burned.H The Norse attacked and left with loot, and though they once actually camped on and lived off the rich land of Touraine while raiding inland, they do not seem yet to have entertained hopes of settlement.-14 The Bretons, under an effective warleader Salomon between 857 and 874, sped them on their way past Nantes: in 862, for example, Salomon actually rented boats to the vikings, who never willingly provoked a strong warleader. Rohen the Strong captured twelve ships of such raiders and massacred nearly all aboard. He then was able to hire Norse coming to the Loire from the Seine, to join him against Salomon. 35 Loyalties, in the tactics of the moment, were just this fluid. Rohen, who had recently slaughtered the Norse he had caught, was willing to exchange hostages with other Norse for a common attack upon the Bretons. As far as the district was concerned, only Robert the Strong consistently fought in its defense. Attack might come from the Norse, the Bretons, or even from the Carolingians pursuing their family rivalries. In 862 Louis the Stammerer returned to Brittany and, joining a Breton force, was on the attack against Robert in Anjou, "devastating with slaughter, fire and plundering. " 3 ' Rohen defeated these marauders, and the forces on the field present us with an opponunity to see one of those unlikely but illuminating combin"ations that conditions in the mid-ninth century made all too frequent: a regional Frankish noble and his viking mercenaries fighting against the emperor's heir and his Breton "friends," the traditional enemies of his people, and only recently of himself. Scarcely three years later a Breton-Norse raiding party attacked Le Mans. H The vikings were mercenaries, predators, and prey. Being what they were, the Norse were useful to the Carolingian princes both

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in power and out. In Aquitaine in 864, Pepin II (the son of Charles the Bald's brother Pepin, King of Aquitaine), disinherited and consigned to a monastery, escaped and himself joined the pillaging vikings. He even, so Archbishop Hincmar maintained, participated in their pagan rites. Hincmar was willing to go far to blacken an enemy of the emperor, but it is true that the desperation of total disinheritance drove both Pepin II and Lothar's son Hugh to the Norse invaders, and ultimately to prisons. 18 The defense of the Loire did not come from the initiative of the Carolingians. Their responsibilities were too far-flung, their family rivalries too absorbing, complex, and dangerous, and perhaps their information too inadequate, for the kings themselves to defend the rich valley. Robert the Strong, who had his own resources and allies there, was appointed imperial guardian of Neustria, adding royal resources to his own, and was effective ruler to the time of his death, fighting in defense of the region in 866. During the time of his strength, the vikings, as Lot has pointed out, took advantage of the Carolingian family quarrels in Aquitaine. They shifted much of their raiding to the Charente and Garonne, to a region distracted by the quarrels between Charles and his uncontrollable teenage son (whom he had designated king of Aquitaine) and by the last desperate and tragic moves of Pepin IL" Where a regional leader was courageous and effective, the Norse began to fade, and to reappear in the relatively undefended areas where Carolingians maneuvered against one another. They appear to have had, as did the Norse armies in England, considerable information. On the Loire the Bretons and the Franks did not (perhaps could not) offer anything like a common defense against Norse intrusion. Salomon of Brittany was strong enough to ward off viking attacks in the midninth century, but his effective strategy was to come to terms with them. He could not, perhaps, have driven them from their fortified bases at the mouth of the Loire, and his choice was to live in no doubt uneasy amity with them. Salomon himself is reported to have come to an agreement with the Norse in order to cross the river for the vendange."'0 They joined forces in 865, and again in 866, in attacking Le Mans. In the latter year the combined force was mounted, rather than in the vikings' more usual method of river attack. Robert the Strong was ready to attack aggressively when he was informed of bands roving ashore. This time the raiders were returning westward when they were found by Robert. In the attempt to bar their way back to Brittany he attacked them, and was himself killed in the skirmish." His death left the Loire

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open again to viking attack, for his sons were children, but Charles the Bald himself had some success there, besieging the Norse who had actually captured Angers, and driving a wedge berween that group and the Bretons. His appointment of Gauzfrid and Abbot Hugh gave the valley two warleaders who fought whenever they could make contact with the enemy. 42 Ultimately the very riches of the Loire region which tempted the Norse to settle defeated their hopes. Towns began to fortify themselves.0 It took generations, but when strengthened, the sheer multiplicity of Loire towns would have made permanent Norse settlement there unlikely, even had a more powerful defense not interdicted it absolutely. This defense came from the large number of Frankish warriors with roots in the district, who in the generations roughly between the 860s and 960s, built private forts and established private jurisdictional authority radiating out from these castella. 44 The Carolingian successors of Charles the Bald ceased to be able to remove the counts of Western Francia. For the Carolingians as for the Merovingian kings-and Scandinavian, for that matter-the dominance of a leader rested upon his ability to enrich his great nobles or to lead them to profitable raids or conquest. The Carolingians no longer had that ability. As success faded, Carolingian authority faded. In its place, a feudal aristocracy employing dependent warriors proliferated, and provided local defense to the domain of each. 4 .s Towering above them along the Loire was the line of Robert the Strong, able enough to impose loyalty and to coordinate regional defense. The new organization enabled society to withstand, as well as mount, attack. It took until the second or third decade of the tenth century at least, but vikings disappeared from the Loire. They retreated leaving no trace, save here and there the story of a fighter absorbed. 46

2 Bretons and Vikings: The Beginnings of Western Settlement

There never was a time before the viking incursions when there was peace between the Bretons and the Franks of the Carolingian empire. There never was a border that the Bretons and the Franks acknowledged. There was instead an indefinite no-man's land (or, to adopt the Frankish term, a March), varying in width according to the relative strengths of the two peoples. 1 Its intent was to confine the Bretons to the horn of Brittany and to support therefore an occupying defensive count. Roland, the hero-victim of Roncesvalles, had been count of the March. His kinsman in the mid-ninth century, Lambert, died a rebel. His loyalty to the Carolingians had long been a thin and feeble thing, and his aspiration seems to have been to become free of his responsibilities to the royal family. The Bretons tested Frankish loyalty, and used a Frankish ally no doubt as quickly as they did the Norse, and with the same pragmatism. Acknowledging no legitimacy of the occupation of some of the best lands available to them, the Bretons disputed it by pushing, when they could, into the March, and raiding it when they could not advance. This March was made up of the border towns-Nantes, Vannes, Rennes--of Maine, and perhaps, though seldom, of Anjou and what came to be western Normandy. Maine and Anjou were rich enough to be peculiarly tempting, but rich enough too to become well settled and effectively defended.' Western Normandy was no-man's land in very fact. For that reason the viewpoints from which we see "Normandy" 27

>-----'~00 miles 100 km

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are external and ill-informed. But the closest may be provided by the Chronicle of Nantes, that late, strange, dubiously reliable amalgam. It provides a picture we cannot take on trust, but with all its limitations it does spring from the Franco-Breton city on the Loire, the first encountered by boats turning into the busy river, and the first therefore to be attacked by the Norse.' In 843, on the great summer feast of St John, the vikings, already camped near the mouth of the Loire, attacked the festival crowd that was gathered at Nantes. The barbarians, so the chronicle maintains, murdered the bishop during Mass and rounded up many captives." This was no accidental raid. The Norse use of the Christian calendar to catch their prey unawares, and attending in unusual numbers and with unusual amounts of money and goods the markets associated with festivals, became common during the century. 5 There is no indication that Nantes was at this time anything but a Frankish town, though far enough from other centers of Frankish control for its count, Lambert, to have been an unreliable agent of his king. 6 Indeed the following year, the Breton warchief Nomenoe was himself raiding into Maine, rather than trying to free the Loire of vikings. While on the raid however, he heard of a Norse incursion into his lands and quickly returned. 7 NomenoC seems to have been taking advantage of the disputes among Louis the Pious' sons following their father's death in 840, to push eastwards into the March. The Frankish response was not strong enough to stop him. In 845 Nomenoe defeated a Frankish force at Redon and in the negotiations that followed the Bretons achieved a recognition of sorts-an acknowledgment that Brittany was independent.8 It was about this time, in an ultimately vain attempt to save something of western Neustria for his family, that Charles the Bald betrothed his son Louis (the Stammerer) to the daughter of Nomenoe's heir ErispoC. From NomenoC's time until the tenth century the Breton church was isolated from the Franks and from the organization of the Frankish church.' Nantes and Rennes became cities with Breton warleaders, and between the 830s and the 870s something like a unified Breton monarchy briefly emerged. 10 These are the years of Nomenoe, Erispoe, and Salomon. They are also the years in which the Bretons were able to contain the Norse threat to themselves: fighting them, negotiating, sometimes allying with them on raids-as in 866 when Robert the Strong was killed by a joint Norse-Breton force-on occasion aiding Charles the Bald against them. In what is to us a blur of shifting, temporary alliances, Salomon, as we have noted earlier, was

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The Raiders

able to send the vikings past his own town of Nantes, to raid farther up the Loire. 11 In 867 there occurred one of those grants of Frankish territory that look so formal when they are made to stick, and are seen in the context of temporary expedients only when they do not. In that year, wrote Archbishop Hincmar (and he should have known), Charles the Bald "having given hostages, received Pacswethen, the ambassador of Salo· man, at CompiCgne ... and gave (Salomon) the county of Cotentin, with the royal fiscs and vills and abbeys lying within that county, and everything appurtenant thereto, save the bishopric. And on Salomon's part he (Charles) received from the ambassador an oath of fidelity and peace ... and of discharging (the duty of) deputy against his enemies." 12 The first grant of the Cotentin then, was to the Bretons, and against what enemies save the Norse? They had not, this would seem to indicate, yet begun their occupation of the Cotentin-not at least in such numbers that Salomon had despaired of replacing them. It is the last we hear of the peninsula until it was again "granted"-to the Norsesome sixty years later. Yet vikings were coming upon the Bretons from the north as well as the south, and they came whenever the Bretons lacked a vigorous leader. After the death of Salomon, so the chroniclers of Nantes thought, "hearing of his death, they began to come back into the Loire to the city of Nantes, devastating everything." 11 For some years Alan (the Great) and Judicael, count of Rennes, disputed the leadership and seem to have divided the Bretons more than ever. Then the Norse profited from the rivalry. But shortly, in 888, the two Breton lords had joined forces and defeated a Norse "army." In the battle Judicael was killed and Alan became the sole Breton leader. "In his time," declares the Nantes chronicle, "the Norsemen scarcely dared to enter the Loire. " 1" Alan now turned to the Northern menace, and with the aid of Judicafl's son, the count of Rennes, decisively defeated invading vikings at St LO, at the base of the Cotentin peninsula and in the south, near Nantes. 15 Yet soon there is evidence of Norse settlement in the north and along the channel shore. Alan the Great died ca. 907, and very soon the word spread in the northern seas. As the Nantes chronicle felt sure: "[the Norse] hearing of his death were aroused and the earth trembled before their face. Against the perfidious and pagan Northmen no king, no warleader, no defender arose, ... for the kings of Francia ... had no courage or vigor for defense in them, and the sons of Alan the Great followed not in the

Bretons and Vikings

31

footsteps of their father." Now was the time that the devilish Norse stole "the whole province of Rouen from Charles the Simple," so ran medieval Breton historiography. And now a "great fleet" from the ocean devastated Brittany. 1' To Francia, Burgundy, and Aquitaine the Breton nobles fled, and the count of Poher sought refuge at the AngloSaxon court, with his small son Alain, later Barbetorte.' 7 From the middle of the second decade of the tenth century to Alain's return in 937, Brittany lay defenseless against viking attack. This is mirrored in Dudo's Rouen saga in the supposed agreement between Charles the Simple and the Rouen Norse that they be "allowed" Brittany to raid, and in the supposed and anachronistic claim of William Longsword to be overlord of Brittany. And indeed, the Frankish magnates, quick to rid themselves of their tormentors, were ready with "formal" grants of others' lands. The contemporary Flodoard, writing from Reims, recorded with unconscious brutality that in 921, Duke Robert (marquis of Neustria and son of Robert the Strong) took advantage of Breton leaderlessness to move the Norse out of his territory: he "besieged for five months Norsemen who occupied the river Loire, and having received hostages from them, conceded them Brittany, with the pagus of Nantes, which they devastated. Some began to take up the faith of Christ." 11 During these years Brittany and "the poor cultivators of the land lay in the power of the Northmen without ruler or defender." 1' The vikings could freely attack up the Loire and they took Nantes. Yet any claim that they established a viking "state," even a short-lived one, can scarcely be postulated, for evidence is lacking. In 933 King Raoul made some sort of a grant-"the land of the Bretons lying on the seacoast"to William Longsword of Rouen. 20 We shall return to this. But we should note here that under the conditions of the west, this can scarcely have meant more than the grant of the same territory to Salomon by Charles the Bald years before (the Cotentin, royal resources there), or the official recognition granted in 921 to the Loire vikings by Duke Robert of "Brittany with the pagus of Nantes," or the renewal of that grant by his successor Hugh in 927. 21 The Franks believed in temporizing, not in legitimatizing seizures of their territory by barbarians, Norse or Breton, as the Norse of Frisia had already found. The picture given by the Nantes chronicle is of a derelict city upon the Loire, and under the conditions of fleeing refugees, its subsequent picture of the commencement of Norse settlement in the North is at least a reasonable one. 22 Flodoard assumes such settlement in his notice

32

The Raiders

of a Breton rising in 931: "The Bretons who remained subjected to the Norsemen in the Horn of Gaul, rising against those who possessed them, on the very feast of Michaelmas, they say, killed all the Norsemen who dwelt among them, their chieftain (by name Felecan) having been the first killed."" In 936 or 937 Alain Barbetorte returned to claim Brittany." Within three years he had been successful and was installed at Nantes. The account of his early activity is particularly significant for our purposes. In 937 his fleet made a landfall near Doi, then on the northern coast, near Mont-Saint-Michel. "He had first approached the monastery at Doi, and found there a throng of Norse celebrating a wedding"-Christian Norse then? Settlers of whom Flodoard had heard rumors, who had accepted Christ? Alain attacked the wedding guests, without warning, unforeseen. He massacred them all. "Then, hearing that there were others at St Brieuc, he sailed there and all the Norse he found he put to the sword. And when the news spread, those dispersed throughout Brittany left the land, all of them. " 1s What is "Brittany" in this story? The events deal with the coast from Doi west past St Malo to St Brieuc on the next bay, and the story, if story there was, that Norse settlers had "spread through all Brittany" refers to the Breton coast nearest the Couesnon and the lands around Avranches and Coutances. "The Norse having fled Brittany, Bretons from all parts came to Alain and elected him dux over them .... " 2' So much for the Frankish grant to the Norse of the Loire. The tale of the vengeance of Alain Barbetorte was, as we shall see, the nightmare of the Rouen Norse when their own warleader was murdered some five years later. In 939 a further and decisive victory at Trans, near Doi, was won against the Norse by Alain and his kinsman Berenger, count of Rennes, and their ally-significantly Hugh, count of Le Mans. 27 Bretons and the vassal of the very Neustrian Frank who had "granted" the Norse the land, now jointly and violently disputed Norse infiltration into the ancient March between Celtic Brittany and Neustria. After the victory, "after all the Norsemen had been defeated and had fled from all parts and borders of Brittany, (Alain) entered the town of Nantes, deserted for many years. "ZR Hearing of this, the Breton leaders and the bishop came joyously home. And now, so at least it was recalled by the church at Nantes, Alain took steps of great importance in the evolution of the more efficiently defensive-and aggressive-social ordering that was coming into being generally in Francia. He redivided the possessions of the episcopal see of Nantes. It had had half the tolls of the city, all of

Brctons and Vikings

33

the city itself and the region around from the city walls for five leagues. Alain's redivision is said to have left the church with only a third of its former possessions. The tolls and the town were divided among the church, Duke Alain, and his chieftains (vicecomitibus et proceribus). "And the lands throughout the Nantes territory that had belonged to the church of Nantes and the bishops, he distributed to his fighters .... " 29 Further, fearing that the Norse would return, he secured the right from the Frankish king to offer freedom to any servus vet colibertus who would immigrate and settle, "for he wished to populate his homeland so that he might better defend himself from the barbarians."'" The Chronicle of Nantes cannot be accepted as reliable about a time so remote as the days of Alain Barbetorte. But it did point out a tenurial arrangement that was in fact the effective answer to invasion and settlement: peasants and fighters settled on lands, the one free at least of royal obligations, and thus freer to increase the agricultural surplus, the latter with an interest in remaining and fighting. The chronicler of Nantes entered the new order under the very year in which William Longsword, the dux pyratarum of Rouen, was murdered at a parley by the men of the Frankish Arnulf of Flanders, the expansionist enemy of the Norse to their northeast. Alain's next move, made at about the same time, in ca. 946, was a further innovation in Breton policy. He married the sister of Thibaut, count of Blois-Chartres, though he already had a Breton wife, Judith, of notable family and already the mother of acceptable sons who bore the very Celtic names, Hoel and Guerech. By this Frankish union, the western enemy of the parvenu Norse of Neustria became allied with their most formidable enemy to the south.J 1 By 946 it was the Norse in "Normandy" who were without a leader, for after the murder of William Longsword, no one had risen to unite their efforts. The Franks and the Bretons had buried their ancient hatreds in a common hostility to the Norse occupation of their lands. And there can be little question that the Norse of the Seine-always well-informed-knew about the tightening circle of enemies around them, and knew therefore that their very survival had come to be doubtful.

3 The Norse of the Seine

The fate of the Seine was substantially different from that of the Loire in the ninth century. Raided at about as early a date (841), it offered little downstream of Paris that the vikings either wished to raid or needed to fear. The Roman port of Lillebonne was by then so unimportant that it is never mentioned by a chronicler of the viking period. The monasteries of St Wandrille and JumiCges were tempting, but they were quickly abandoned, unlike Tours, for example, to which the monks returned again and again during the century. Rouen was no rich prize at this time, and the country "between Seine and Loire, with the March of Brittany,, (in the phrase of the annalists of St Bertin) was provided with no such Frankish nobles as those who came to realize the potential for themselves in local leadership along the Loire, and therefore ultimately defended that rich valley. Even in the late tenth century the chronicler Richer wrote of the Seine area in vague terms, recounting how by 888 "pirates ... were dwelling in the province of Rouen 1 which is part of Celtic Gaul. " 1 Perhaps the vagueness of Richer and the St Bertin annalists is a clue to understanding the condition of pre-Norman Normandy: it was the land exposed to Breton expansion and to punitive deterrent Frankish expeditions against the Bretons. Lightly settled, it was not a land allowed to grow prosperous; it had been backward long before the vikings arrived. There were no counts of Rouen during the invasion period; there were bishops only. In the

.l4

The Norse of the Seine

35

840s there were "keepers of the river" instead. The nearest count who mattered was upstream, at Paris. 2 When the Norse arrived around the mid-ninth century, they therefore did not need to fortify a position at the mouth of the Seine, as they had the Loire-or at any rate the Franks knew nothing of such fortifications. The river was a highway, and its banks were not a danger. By the 850s they had established themselves in winter quaners upstream of Rouen and were raiding into the more prosperous and populous Francia. 1 Their first fortification was at Fossa-Givaldi (Jeufosse); in 858 they occupied the island Oscellus (Oiselle). For some fifty years thereafter the vikings had a complex and close relationship with the Carolingian kings themselves: they raided Paris and the rich monasteries of that region; they were besieged in their fortifications by Charles the Bald, and they were the occasion of his own fonifications, constructed to control their access to tributary rivers; they negotiated with the kings and received enormous Danegelds. 4 For our purposes their constant negotiation with the kings themselves is the significant fact. Like the Norse of Frisia and the Loire they came to want land for unthreatened settlement. But would a royal grant of such land be any different, any more permanently legitimizing, than the grants in Frisia and the March of Brittany? It is a question that needs to be put before we can approach an understanding of their reality. Negotiation began soon after the establishment of fortified winter quarters on the Seine. In 858, "Berno, chief of part of the pirates occupying the Seine, came to King Charles' palace of Verberie, and placing himself in his hands, at once swore faith" to the king. 1 Dealing with one viking leader assured no one of his control over another. In 860 Charles the Bald hired Norsemen of the Somme, under the warchief Weiand, to fight Norsemen of the Seine. He paid them a fortune in silver, and had provisions brought them lest they raid while they besieged the Seine Norse on their island of Oiselle. The rwo groups did not in the event prove as mutually hostile as their willingness to be hired against one another might indicate. The besieged force on Oiselle paid a ransom to Weland's forces, then joined them and sailed down the Seine toward the sea. There they found that the early winter storms had bottled them up on the river, and so they spread themselves out "in their individual companies" in separate river ports, an accommodation that vividly shows how undefended the river lay. Weiand himself occupied a fort at Melun, while fortifiers (castellani)

36

The Raiders

occupied the monastery of St Maur-les-FossCs with Weland's son.' From there they soon overreached themselves, for some ventured in small boats up the Marne to Meaux, northeast of Paris. Charles hastened to cut off their retreat. Negotiation followed, as usual. The independence of each raiding company can be seen at least as clearly as it was seen from Reims. The vikings, the annalist says, promised to return the captives taken aher they had entered the Marne, and to retreat upon an agreed day, down the Seine to the sea with the others, or, if the others were unwilling, they would ally themselves in battle with Charles against the other crews. Weiand came to Charles, commended himself to the king and proffered oaths along with his men. Returning to his ships, he sailed downstream with the whole Norse fleet to JumiCges, where they established themselves to refit their ships and to await the spring. Finally they went to the sea, split up into many fleets, and sailed in different directions. So Archbishop Hincmar of Reims describes the great and leisurely penetration of the Seine in the early 860s. Frankish eyes must have watched along the river until the evil sails were out of sight on the sea. Hincmar knew of the Norse as organized into independent crews, or groups of crews, able temporarily to unite under a single leader, yet willing to fight one another in danger or for profit. Weiand could swear oaths to the Carolingian king, since he "with his wife and sons came to Charles and with them he was made a Christian." Whatever the significance of wife and children (and surely it implies at least that Weiand was not the leader of reckless warriors with no thought of settlement), he was too early to lead the rest to the only hope of accommodation with the Franks. A year later he was challenged for his "infidelity" by a viking and, while the king and his Franks looked on, Weiand was slain in a formal combat.7 Hincmar's account shows us, too, a region in which there was no challenge to viking occupation of Seine pons: they could spread out along the river. JumiCges was safe enough for leisurely refitting of ships. He even ponrays them able to stay long enough not only for refitting but for rebuilding ships as well, and therefore they must have dealt with Franks for seasoned timber. 8 For the inhabitants of the district there was little choice save accommodation with the Norse, if accommodation was what the Norse wanted. Hincmar's description implies that it was. Certainly no succor was offered the Franks of the region by their own people. When a troop was sent "across the Seine" (to the left bank), as in 868 when Charles the Bald sent his son Carloman with a

The Norse of the Seine

37

force, "it devastated the land but did nothing of use against the Norsemen whom it had been sent to oppose."' It had long been clear that no warrior would oppose the Norse below, perhaps, Pitres, Charles' fortification upstream of Rouen. Even in the 850s, Norse warriors must have been penetrating up the small rivers of the region, probably for provisions, for "common people between Seine and Loire, making a league amongst themselves against the Norsemen of the Seine, resisted them strongly; but because their conventicle had been undertaken incautiously, they were easily put down by our nobles." 10 Better vikings than unauthorized, lowly, defenders. The area was safe for no one. It required a need on the pan of a Carolingian before even the usual unreliable Frankish grant made the beginning of settlement a realistic option for the Norse, who needed a minimum of security against attack, whether or not they valued a license. RIVALRIES OF THE NORTHWEST Charles the Bald's grandson, Charles the Simple, the last Carolingian Charles, was a boy of nine when his imperial predecessor died in 887 1 and he was therefore passed over. Furthermore, he was not passed over for a Carolingian kinsman. The western Franks were too er.dangered by the terrible viking raids of the 880s to put the blood-imperial before defense. They elected Odo, son of the effective Robert the Strong, and himself the hero of a long viking siege of Paris. Odo ruled and fought for ten years, and, dying, urged the claims of the nineteen-year-old Charles as king of the western Franks. 11 As the ninth century drew to a close, the magnates of his fragment of empire came to swear fidelity: Richard of Burgundy, William of the Auvergne, Herbert I of Vermandois, Baldwin of Flanders, and Robert, marquis of Neustria. They in their territories were the real rulers. They had little need of Charles, as they were to show. The king was never a wise politician, but he was aware of his isolation. It is in this political situation in northwestern Francia that the beginning of Normandy must be seen. The politics, without a doubt, were to a great extent shaped by the magnates' relation to their territories. The transformation over the course of the ninth century may have been less dramatic than appears from the chronicles, in which the interest shifts rapidly from empire to inheritance among the nobles. Up to the 880s, Archbishop Hincmar could still concentrate upon the achievements and failures of the im-

38

The Raiders

perial line. 12 His continuator1 Flodoard, was obsessed instead with the rivalries for land, wealth, and power, among the nobles of the region. This shift of emphasis is to some extent deceptive. The Carolingian state could never have been so effectively centralized as its capitularies imply. Orders were sent from the emperor far and wide, but the extent to which they were acted upon is problematical. Missi were sent from the emperor, but it seems very likely that even the early missi may have been sent to areas in which they had influence independent of the emperor. Carolingian sons were sent early to their destined inheritances, and were there married into great regional families who gave them entry into the networks of power and support such families possessed-and this policy is revealing about the realities of power under Charlemagne and his sons. Nevertheless, a line between the region as public responsibility and the region as family property had been recognized in earlier generations by both the imperial family and the magnates. Imperial estates and monastic foundations were known to be parts of the imperial fisc, and it was accepted that the emperor could give them or take them away from his official. By the reign of Charles the Simple the distinction seems to have all but disappeared. In 900, when he was free to act as king, Charles attempted the politics of his ancestors and "took away" from Baldwin of Flanders the abbey of St Vaast, "which Count Baldwin held with the castrum of Arras,,, and transferred the abbey to his faithful advisor, Archbishop Fulk. The abbey had to be taken in a siege: the king is not mentioned, and it would appear that Fulk's men conducted the operation. Furthermore it led only to Fulk's murder by an ally of Baldwin's and the retaking of the abbey by its regional ruler, Baldwin. 11 Abbeys had ceased to be part of the royal fisc when warrior-counts withdrew their consent to allow the king to dispose of resources within regions where theirs, not his, was the unchallengeable power. St Vaast was Baldwin's because he willed it so and could defend it. Woe to the man who thought to take it as a Carolingian gift. Within a few years the archbishopric of Reims itself was seized by the count of Vermandois as the endowment of his five-year-old son whom he installed as archbishop. When the Norse became the king's men, they entered this world of rivalries, where politics were concerned with establishing family territory, increasing it, and splitting it amongst competing heirs, each eager to repeat the ancestor's success. The nobles' changing relation to their

The Norse of the Seine

39

resources was transforming Frankish society quite as effectively as their need for defense against invaders. Nor was their competition channeled into nondestructive forms by effective law or government. Aggressive and competitive magnates and counts looked at brothers, neighbors, and even kings as competitors and prey. 14 Anything-incWding genealogy and legitimacy (as the case of Lothar II demonstrates)-could be weapons in this competition. The motives of Baldwin of Flanders in stealing Charles the Bald's widowed daughter, Judith, in 862 and marrying her without her father's permission, were undoubtedly complex. 1s But among them was the desire to beget sons with a peculiarly strong right, a legitimate right-a Carolingian right-to the territory he was so successfully enlarging at the expense of the invaders from the northern seas, and, it may be imagined, at the expense of Frankish competitors as well. Judith's sons were the sons Baldwin acknowledged and to whom his territory descended. Property-resources from which the family could not be removed-had become a transforming agent in this society. In the transformation the kings were left with little save prestige. The claims of sons (even daughters) required a continual expansion of the family's resources, or it bred competition among claimants to constant resources. The pressures of inheritance may have had advantages, but they inevitably bred violence. The Carolingians themselves are an example of inheritance pressures. Whatever the wishes of the rulers concerning the unity of the patrimony, so strong were the pressures to provide for all members of the family that conflict was avoidable as long as, but only as long as, the empire expanded. By the beginning of the tenth century, Charles the Simple needed allies in large measure because the fragments of empire that he had inherited had become in effect the patrimonies of the counts of Flanders and Vermandois, of the marquis of Neustria and of the duke of Burgundy. 16 He needed these lords, together or in combinations, if he was to rule in any sense at all. But it is less clear that they needed him, or regarded themselves as bound by his decisions. From Odo's death in 898 they allowed Charles to be king, but two years later, as we have just seen, he was unable even to transfer St Vaast to Archbishop Fulk. The Robertians and the counts of the North, relying upon kinship-alliances to coordinate their activities when it suited them, had the power of their armies, supported by the profits of estates royal or not-within their territories. There is no evidence that Charles had more than a few fighters primarily loyal to him rather than to the local

The Raiden

40

magnates. To judge from the fate of Archbishop Fulk, the fighters of the archbishopric would be available to the king, but inadequate to protect either master when his enemy was a count in his territory.

CHARLES THE SIMPLE AND THE TREATY OF ST CLAIR-SUR-EPTE In such circumstances, Charles' need of allies is evident. It is less evident that he had anything tangible with which to buy them. There could have been little question however that the vikings of the Seine were the only fighters near enough and sufficiently unattached to be tempted by the questionable authority of a Carolingian concession. In Charles' boyhood, bands of raiders had again and again overrun the regions reached by the Seine between Rouen and Reims. ,- In 889 King Odo, hearing of a Norse attack, hastened toward Paris from the south and, "by messengers going between them," bribed the Norse m fall back from the Paris region and indeed to leave the Seine. From the

river, "going by ship on the sea and on the land by foot and horse, they went to the territory of the town of Coutances." There they attacked

the castrum of St Lo, which they took. But the Bretons pushed them back from that region, and they came back up the Seine once more, to

Noyon, "to set up their winter forts. " 1' From there they were ultimately pushed back again. The Norse were bribable and they were beatable. They were unable to establish themselves on Breton territory or near the centers of Frankish forces. But they did not go away.

In the final decade of the ninth century they still raided. Aodoard records that Archbishop Fulk received priests, other clerics, and monks escaping from Norsemen "infesting the lands and depopulating di\·ers places," living off the peasants and slaving among a prey that must have been both easy and valuable: the clerics. 1• The compilation known

as the "Chronicle of the Deeds of the Norsemen in Francia" (early but of questionable reliability) refers to a Norse leader "Rodo" leading a warband in 895 from the Seine into the area around Choisy.:o In 897

Odo again bought them off. They then wintered on the Loire. In the spring of the following year they took to their ships and raided north and south of the great river. But the account of the annalist of St Vaast

does not in these years speak of profitable looting. He speaks pessimistically, but his news is of fom and of resistance: .. of many forts overthrown and the inhabitants slain."! 1 Just after Odo's death, young Charles with a warband (cum exercitu p.in'O) dro\•e a group of Norse

The Norse of the Seine

41

marauders back to their boats, and Odo's brother, Robert of Neustria, caught a force trying to winter in Burgundy, fought with them, emerging victorious, and "forced them to retreat to the Seine." 22 The Norse of the Seine were not the scourge they once had been. Their own legend, as Dudo retold it, described them now as wearying, as wanting a safe haven rather than the loot the earlier generation had come for. They

could however live off the land of the Seine valley and the territory (virtually invisible to Frankish chroniclers of the late ninth cenrury) that was watered by the rivers of eastern "Normandy." The chronicler of St Vaast recorded that in 897 Norsemen reruming from a raid as far as the Meuse were pursued by a royal army. They retreated rapidly to their boats and got away to the Seine, "and there they remained the whole summer, committing robbery, with no one resisting them. "lJ The

chronicler is using a customary phrase of disapproval at the lack of Frankish protection of the land. But if the Norse could in the winter raid into Francia and spend the summer on the Seine, then there were

peasant farmers still there from whose grain they could live. And by the rum of the tenth cenrury the invaders had been there often enough and long enough for us to be sure that they had not killed off or starved off the peasants, or driven them to seek refuge elsewhere. The vikings

then had not devastated the district, and they were not thought of by the Frankish chroniclers as having settled compatriots there. Frankish/

Gallic farmers still raised crops, and the Norse took part of the harvest. just so did the warriors of Francia. In "Normandy" it was still "robbery" to the chronicler; not yet was it the right of lords.

Yet there they were. And Charles, while still under the rutelage of King Odo in the mid-890s, was negotiating for an alliance with a group of vikings. If they were the Seine vikings, as is likely, this was some time before they were sufficiently weary to accept the necessary condition of Carolingian alliance, conversion to Christianity. Not that

Charles the Simple objected to their paganism. He was only nominally king, without power to object to anything. But Archbishop Fulk (883900) objected. He thought the siruation dangerous enough (and Charles weak enough) to threaten to ruin the young man if he persisted in these negotiations. The archbishop was furious that the ill-advised prince was

trying to ally himself with the Norse in order to have the glory of a realm. "Who of those who should be faithful to you," he wrote, "would not be terrified that you wish friendship with enemies of God and take up pagan arms and a detestable alliance, to the destruction and ruin of the Christian name?" Charles' ancestors, once they had been converted,

42

The Raiders

the archbishop went on, had been upheld by God. Charles was now deserting God, since he was allying himself with His enemies. In case the prince did not draw the inference, the archbishop put it bluntly: "Better you had not been born than to wish to rule a devil's patrimony, and to aid those whom you ought to fight every inch of the way. Be clear about it, if you do this and accept such counsels, you will never have me as your faithful man. And I shall recall from their fidelity to you as many as I am able!" 24 Some sixty years before, the royal chronicler had been horrified when Walchern and parts of Frisia, with their Christian inhabitants, had been granted to a pagan viking. 2·, But there could have been no threat to Lothar I. Fulk's letter, if genuine (and there is no evidence against it), sets Charles' later grant to the Seine Norse in an unfamiliar light: not as a legitimation of a fait accompli and a bulwark against other Seine invaders, but as an access to a force independent of the magnates of the region who had passed over his claims once, and who had no pressing need of his presence anywhere on "their" territories. He was in the 890s a prince looking desperately and dangerously for power. In 898 Odo died, and, as he had advised, the magnates accepted Charles as king. In that context, Flodoard's emphasis upon the labors of the archbishop's successor, Flodoard's hero Archbishop Herve (900922), for the conversion of the Seine vikings may be interpreted as help given by a worried church to a king still desperately weak. Such long labors may imply negotiations over months or even years for a Christian alliance. Certainly no contemporary or near-contemporary chronicler has commemorated a moment when such an alliance was made formal. No doubt the settlement occurred after 905 when, in an extant charter, Charles the Simple awarded certain serfs of the royal fisc at Pitres to his chancellor, Ernust, a grant that implies that there was one royal possession at least with which to reward service, if only in the area no Frankish lord wished to possess: on the Seine and not far from Rouen.u A truce and an alliance between the king and the vikings of the Seine were forged in the second decade of the tenth century, very probably as the immediate result of a serious defeat of the vikings, and as the longer-term result of their control of the lower reaches of the Seine and of Charles' need for fighters. Flodoard, the closest source (at Reims and a contemporary) connects the truce with the aftermath of a battle successfully fought against them by Robert of Neustria at Chartres." The much later Burgundian chronicle of Bi:ze and that of Ste Columbe of Sens place such a battle in June 911, and the BCze chronicler associates

The Norse of the Seine

43

Richard of Burgundy with Robert of Neustria as victors. 2a AdCmar of Chabannes at the end of the tenth century, and not of impeccable reliability, associates it with defeat also-for him the debacle took place in Burgundy, and after it, "the retreating Norsemen, finding the land empty, set up headquarters in Rouen with their chieftain Roso." The Norse themselves accepted the tale of a serious defeat as the cause of the heart-weariness that made their ancestors accept peace at whatever terms the Franks demanded. 29 We can be sure that the alliance and a grant of the right to settle came before 918, for in that year a charter of Charles the Simple, granting the abbey of La Croix-Saint-Leufroy and all its possessions to St Germain, makes an exception of "the part of this abbey that we have given to the Norse of the Seine, namely Rollo and his company, pro tutela regni. "Jo Now, La Croix-Saint-Leufroy, as the charter says, is situated on the river Eure and, under the conditions of the establishment and development of a small monastery of the region, is unlikely to have had possessions very widely spread. In the absence of other information, we can infer from the. charter only that Norse were settling by right in the tvrecin; it tells us no more.Ji And as for the phrase pro tutela regni, it is ambiguous. Merely a charter formula? Setting thieves to keep out thieves? Or to defend, not the land, but the reign (regnum means both realm and reign) against whatever threat to the king? As to the supposed meeting and the treaty at St Clair-sur-Epte in 911---