. The medieval duchy of Normandy dates from the early 10th century, when the king of the Franks granted territory in the lower Seine Valley to the Viking chieftain Rollo (or Rolf), who had settled with his followers around the city of Rouen. In the century that followed, Normandy (i.e., “Northmannia,” the lands of the Northmen) gradually expanded until it stretched east of the Seine to the River Epte and west to the Atlantic shore of the Cotentin. The area ruled by the Norman dukes conformed roughly to the diocesan boundaries of the ecclesiastical province of Rouen, which had been drawn in the days of the Roman Empire. Political, ecclesiastical, and economic development accompanied this expansion, so that by the mid-11th century a dynamic and coherent state had emerged in this corner of northwestern France. In 1066, the duke of Normandy conquered England, laying the foundations for a cross-Channel realm that fused Norman customs and language with Anglo-Saxon, marking a turning point in the history of both the French duchy and the English kingdom. But the Normans did not restrict their ambitions to France and England. In the 11th and 12th centuries, Norman adventurers sought their fortunes and carved new kingdoms in southern Italy and Sicily and in the Holy Land. In the long view, however, it was the conquest of England that had the greatest impact on the duchy, placing Normandy at the center of the rivalry between the kings of England and France for the rest of the Middle Ages.
The initial stages of Norman settlement in France are obscure. According to Norman tradition, the Viking leader Rollo met King Charles III the Simple at Saint-Clair-sur-Epte in 911 to accept baptism, perform homage, and be-come the first duke of Normandy. This version of the duchy’s foundation is shrouded in legend. A charter dated 918 indicates that the king granted to Rollo and his men only some unspecified territory around Rouen, most likely hoping to pacify Rollo’s band and to use them as a bulwark against rival French lords and other Viking groups. Grants in 924 and in 933 gave royal sanction to Norman expansion west to the Vire River and then to the sea, but royal concession meant little in this period: the Viking counts of Rouen had to extend their authority gradually over the territory that would become Normandy through an interplay of alliances and force. The new duchy that took shape in the 11th century enjoyed important strategic and commercial advantages, controlling the lower Seine, the gateway to Paris, and facing the English Channel, with easy access to the political and economic world of the northern seas.
The newcomers adopted the French language and religion; they intermarried with the French and with other Scandinavian settlers. Rollo’s son and successor, William Longsword, entered the treacherous world of Frankish
politics, performing homage to three successive kings and taking sides in the petty wars of territorial lords. Expansion and assimilation received a setback when he was assassinated in 942 by the count of Flanders, and two years later the Normans faced a two-pronged attack by King Louis IV and Hugues le Grand, duke of the Franks. In the 960s, the counts of Anjou, Flanders, and Blois-Chartres attacked the province with King Lothair. But the Normans of Rouen resisted these aggressions, and during the reigns of William Longsword’s son Richard I (r. 942–96) and grandson Richard II (r. 996–1026) the duchy emerged as a permanent territorial entity whose institutions and traditions fused its Scandinavian and French heritage. By the turn of the century, the six bishoprics under Rouen’s authority were reestablished and active and important monasteries were restored. Both Richard I and Richard II encouraged this ecclesiastical revival, inviting respected churchmen from outside Normandy to participate in the recovery and reform of churches in their duchy. During the reign of Richard II, the secular administration also took shape. A network of counts and viscounts emerged, bound together by ties of kinship and by their common allegiance to the duke.
Richard II was followed as duke by his sons Richard III (r. 1026–27) and Robert the Magnificent (r. 1027–35). Robert’s untimely death returning from pilgrimage to Jerusalem threw the duchy into political disorder, as rival lords and kinsmen opposed the succession of his illegitimate seven-year-old son, William (r. 1035–87). But the young duke survived his minority and overcame his opponents, most notably in 1047 at the Battle of Val-ès-Dunes, in 1054 at the Battle of Mortemer, and in 1057 at the Battle of Varaville. In 1063, Duke William became lord of Maine, pressing the claim of his son Robert Curthose, who had been betrothed to the sister of Count Herbert of Maine. Three years later, on October 14, 1066, William defeated Harold Godwinsson at the Battle of Hastings and seized the crown of England.
The conquest of England enriched the Norman aristocracy, since the new king rewarded his supporters with the lands and titles of the defeated Anglo-Saxon nobility. Their new lands were not to be plundered as war booty but were instead to be held conditionally, in exchange for a specified number of knights to serve the king. This principle of contractual military tenure, the underpinning of feudalism, had existed in the duchy before 1066, but after the Norman Conquest knight service came to be assessed more precisely and systematically in William’s lands on both sides of the Channel. The conquest of England thus brought wealth to Normandy, as well as more exact definitions of vassalage and military obligations.
The 11th century was the heyday of Norman expansion to the south and to the north, although this was the work of independent adventurers rather than a ducal program. In southern Italy and Sicily, Norman mercenaries led by Robert Guiscard (d. 1085) carved out a state from Byzantine and Muslim holdings. In the next century, this Norman kingdom of Sicily became a rich and cosmopolitan realm during the reign of Robert’s nephew Roger II the Great (d. 1154), one that fused Muslim, Byzantine, and Latin traditions under the Norman rule. Warriors from Normandy also fought Muslims in Spain and in the Holy Land, where the fall of Jerusalem to the First Crusade (1095–99) brought the creation of four crusader states, including the Norman principality of Antioch, whose first ruler was Bohemund, a son of the same Robert Guiscard. Although these conquests in the Mediterranean had little impact on the duchy itself, the Normans in Normandy boasted of the exploits of their fierce cousins in the south, and a few Norman churches received presents that their members sent back from Italy.
When William the Conqueror died in 1087, the realm was divided between his two eldest sons, Robert Curthose, who received Normandy, and William Rufus, who became king of England. To finance his participation in the First Crusade, Robert entrusted the duchy to his brother in 1096 for a loan of 10,000 marks of silver. When Robert returned in 1100, William II Rufus was dead and their younger brother, Henry I, had seized England and was prepared to fight for Normandy. The subsequent fratricidal war divided the Anglo-Norman aristocracy until Henry took Robert prisoner in 1106 at Tinchebrai. England and Normandy were thus again united under Henry I, who kept his older brother captive for twenty-eight years. The government of Normandy under Henry I became more elaborate and more centralized, as royal justice extended its scope and as the first Norman exchequer kept systematic account of royal revenues, but when Henry died in 1135 with no surviving male heir anarchy broke out. Both the kingdom and the duchy were contested between Henry’s daughter, Matilda, and her first cousin Stephen of Blois. Although Stephen won the throne, civil war continued for nineteen years. In 1141, Matilda’s husband, Geoffroi d’Anjou, invaded Normandy and spent three years crush-ing King Stephen’s party in the duchy before he was received in Rouen as duke of Normandy. In 1150, Geoffroi passed the ducal title on to his seventeen-year-old son, Henry Plantagenêt. When Geoffroi died in 1151, Henry inherited Anjou as well, and he acquired Aquitaine and Poitou by marriage in 1152. The following year, King Stephen acknowledged the young Plantagenêt as his heir in England. To King Henry II (r. 1154–89), therefore, Normandy represented only one small part of his vast cross-Channel collection of principalities.
Ever since the reign of William the Conqueror, the French kings had tried to undermine the unity of the Anglo-Norman realm. Philip I had supported Robert Curthose in rebellion against his father, and Louis VI had backed William Clito, Robert’s son, against Henry I. The Angevin empire of Henry II represented an even greater threat to the French monarchy, and Louis VII (r. 1137–80) and his son, Philip II Augustus (r. 1180–1223), resolved to dismantle it. Henry II’s son Richard I the Lionhearted (r. 1189–99) managed with difficulty to check the ambitions of the French king, building the famous Château-Gaillard upstream from Rouen on the Seine and defeating the royal forces decisively at Courcelles in 1198. But Richard’s younger brother, John Lackland, succeeding him in 1199, was no match for the determined and resourceful Philip Augustus, who soon found a legal pretext to invade
Normandy. Since the English king technically held his French lands as the French king’s vassal, John was bound by feudal law to come to Philip’s court when summoned. When, in 1202, John defied Philip’s order to appear in court to answer charges, his disobedience justified confiscation of his fiefs. Philip attacked Normandy that year and by 1204 had wrenched the duchy from the English crown. Anjou and most of the rest of John’s French lands soon followed suit. Lords who held lands on both sides of the Channel had to forfeit their domains on one side or the other, and the severance of England from the Continent received its final seal with the defeat of John’s allies in 1214 at the Battle of Bouvines.
England refused to acknowledge the French conquest of Normandy until the Treaty of Paris in 1259, but the Normans themselves adjusted to the new order. During the 13th century, peace under the Capetians brought prosperity to the duchy, although increasing royal taxation rankled townsmen. Rebellion broke out over this issue in the next century, leading King Louis X to issue the Norman Charter of 1315, which guaranteed against excessive taxation and promised the duchy a sound currency. The Norman Charter was later seen as a symbol of political liberties and rights—in effect, Normandy’s Magna Carta.
The 14th century also witnessed the resumption of the Anglo-French rivalry in the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453). For Normandy, the war began in earnest in 1346, when Edward III of England invaded the duchy at the invitation of the Norman lord and rebel Godefroi de Harcourt, his army laying waste to the countryside of the Cotentin and making its way to Caen, which suffered a three-day sack. By the 1350s, the English and their allies held the major castles between the Orne and the Vire, and Godefroi confirmed the English king’s commitment to conquest by bequeathing his Norman lordships to him. In the next century, after Henry V’s defeat of the French at Agincourt in 1415, the English redoubled their efforts to take Normandy. By spring 1418, all lower Normandy was in their hands; Rouen surrendered in January the follow-ing year, after a seige of almost six months, and the rest of Normandy then fell swiftly. The English occupation of Normandy lasted for thirty years, during which time the Normans were taxed heavily to support the English war effort. By the 1430s, however, the English position was beginning to slip. The brief career of Jeanne d’Arc, burned in 1431 in the marketplace of Rouen, inspired a groundswell of French patriotism, and twenty years later, by August 1450, all Normandy again belonged to the French.
A pattern of conquest and assimilation runs through the history of medieval Normandy. The Scandinavians who created the realm in the 10th century lost much of their Norseness in the following 150 years, conquering England in 1066 as Christians, speaking French and observing French customs, yet they remained aware of their own distinct origins. Under the Conqueror and his heirs, the Norman duchy and the English kingdom were at times united, but gradually the Normans of England became more English as the Normans of France became more French. The conquest of Normandy by Philip II Augustus in 1204 confirmed this growing trend of separation, placing the duchy directly under the French crown and forcing the Anglo-Norman aristocracy to choose one side of the Channel or the other. By the Hundred Years’ War, the English king’s declaration that Normandy was his rightful legacy was in fact the thin excuse of a foreign power to invade—and the Normans, after four centuries, were prepared to defend their right to be French.
