During the long reign of Richard I the descendants of heathen Scandinavian pirates had all become French Christians. Even during the reign of Rollo, the clergy did them the justice to declare that after their conversion they showed but few traces of former paganism. Of course, men passing their lives on the high seas had but little time to study Scandinavian mythology, and what little they knew of it was readily forgotten under different influences. Still, under excitement, the old heathen was apt to come out again, and in more than one engagement the cry of Thor aide was heard for a long time after, instead of Dieu aide, which was the battle cry of the Normans in the eleventh century. By that time all traces of paganism had well nigh disappeared, except an unshaken faith in elves, mountain dwarfs, werewolves, and the like, which they had in common with the Britons, the Saxons, and all other Celtic and Teutonic nations in general. Rollo died in the year 926; William I died in the year 943; Richard I died in the year 1002; Richard II died in the year 1026; Robert I died in the year 1035; William II (the Conqueror) died in the year 1087. 9 Mauger, a prelate of Rouen, who was charged with practising magic, was believed to own one of these hobgoblins, called Thoret, after Thor, and who could be neither heard nor seen, but was at the command of the prelate at any moment, day or night, and did the most awful things. It is thus referred to by Wace, in his Roman de Rou, v. 9713, and following: Plusors distrent por vérité, Ke un deable aveit privé, Mais nuz d'els nes poet véir. 8 The werewolf was called in French garwal, garul, garoul, garou, loup-garou; and bisclaveret in Breton. This is the way Marie de France describes the thing: Bisclaveret ad nun en Bretan Garwal l'apelent li Norman. In some parts of France they called it garulf, gerulf, whence the Low Latin gerulphus, found in the following passage of Gervais de Tilbury, quoted by du Cange: "Vidimus enim frequenter in Anglia per lunationes homines in lupos mutari, quod hominum genus gerulphos Galli nominant, Angli vero werewolf dicunt; were enim anglice virum sonat, wolf lupum."-Ötia imperal., pars. i. As in England, so in France, the conversion of the northern heathens was, at first at least, a matter of diplomatic arrangement rather than of sincere conviction, so we must not expect any great fervor at first among the chiefs and principal nobles in the observance of the new doctrines; but no sooner had the religious movement spread to the people than it was welcomed with an almost passionate fanaticism. Every road was crowded with pilgrims monasteries rose in every forest glade, and Normandy, which had now become the principal center of religion and of science, soon boasted of its schools of Rouen, Caen, Fontenelle, Lisieux, Fécamp, and a countless number of minor renown. Often it was far away from the noise and bustle of city life, in the deep solitudes of dense forests, that could be found an asylum devoted to study and religious meditation. Thus arose, in an island of the Seine, the famous abbey of Jumièges, surrounded by its forests, its meadows, and its silence. The abbey of Bec, more celebrated still, and of which we may still see the ruins near the small town of Brionne, in the midst of a high forest by the side of a brook, was the seat where once taught the Italian monk Lanfranc, one of the most learned men of the age, and after him the Piedmontese Anselm, a man still more eminent, and his pupil. In the course of a few years their teaching had made Bec the most famous school of Christendom, before they successively filled the archiepiscopal see of Canterbury. The whole mental activity of the time seemed concentrated in the group of scholars who gathered around them, and who, spreading their knowledge to other seminaries of learning, caused the Normans of the eleventh century to become the most polished and best educated nation of Europe, and their schools to be the resort of students from all the surrounding countries. It was, however, not always this thirst for knowledge, or the new form of religious faith only, which drove Norman pilgrims in flocks to the shrines of Italy and the Holy Land. Often the old Norse spirit of adventure turned the Pilgrims into Crusaders, and at one time the flower of the Norman knighthood, impatient of the stern rule of their dukes, followed Roger de Toesny against the moslem of Spain, or even enlisted under the banner of the Greeks, in their war with the Arabs, who had conquered Sicily. The Crusaders became conquerors under Robert Guiscard, a knight who had left his home with a single follower, but whose valor and wisdom soon placed him at the head of his fellow-soldiers in Italy. Attacking the Greeks, whom they had hitherto served, the Norman knights wrested Apulia from them in an overthrow at Cannæ; Guiscard himself led them to the conquest of Calabria and the great trading cities of the coast, while thirty years of warfare gave Sicily to the followers of his brother Roger. The two conquests were united under a line of princes to whose munificence art owes the splendor of Palermo and Monreale, and literature the first outburst of Italian song. Normandy, still seething with vigorous life, was stirred to greed and enterprise by this plunder of the south, and the rumor of Guiscard's exploits roused into more ardent life the daring ambition of its nobles and their duke. Constantly surrounded by danger, and always on the alert, their warlike energies had never had leisure to abate, and from their perpetual exertions the Normans, whether at home or abroad, had become everywhere distinguished for their indomitable valor and their great skill in war. We thus see in the Scandinavian settlers in Gaul, after they had put on the outward garb of their adopted country, a people restless and enterprising above all others, adopting and spreading around them all that they could make their own, in their new land and everywhere elsea people in many ways highly gifted, greatly affecting and modifying every country in which they settled, and so identifying themselves with its interests as to gradually lose themselves among the people of the land. In this respect, as in many others, the expeditions of the Normans in Gaul may be looked upon as continuations of the Danish expeditions in England. The people were by descent the same, and both were led by the same old spirit of war and adventure. Their national character remained largely the same in both countries; but even as the Danes in England in course of time became English, so the Normans, in contact with what remained of Roman civilization, became French in religion, in language, in law, and in society, in thoughts and feelings in all matters. The change was as rapid as it was thorough and effective. The early part of the tenth century was the time of the settlement of the Northmen in Gaul; by the end of it, any traces of heathen faith, or of Scandinavian speech, remained only here and there as mere survivals. The new creed, the new speech, the new social system had taken such deep root that the descendants of the Scandinavian settlers were better fitted to be the armed missionaries of all these things than the neighbors from whom they had wrested their new possessions. With the zeal of new converts, they set forth on their new errand very much in the spirit of their heathen forefathers. The same spirit of enterprise which brought the Northmen into Ġaul seems to carry the Normans out of Gaul into every corner of the world. Their character is well painted by a contemporary historian of their exploits.' He sets the Normans before us as a race specially marked by cunning, despising their own inheritance in the hope of winning a greater, eager after both gain and dominion, given to imitation of all kinds, holding a certain mean between lavishness and greediness-that is, perhaps uniting, as they certainly did, these two seemingly opposite qualities. Their chief men, he adds, were specially lavish through their desire of good report. They were, moreover, very skillful in flattery, given to the practice of fine speaking, so that the very boys were orators and natural debaters; a race altogether unbridled, unless held firmly down by the yoke of justice. They could endure toil, hunger, and cold, whenever ill-fortune sent them; they were fond of hunting and hawking, and delighted in the pleasure of horses, and of all the weapons and garb of war. But if the Norman was a born soldier, he was also a born lawyer. It is the excessive litigiousness, the fondness for law, legal forms, legal processes, which has ever been characteristic of the Norman people. Even Norman lawlessness in some sort took a legal shape. In the worst days of Norman history, the robber-baron could generally give elaborate reasons for every act of wrong that he did. For the rest, strict observers of form in all matters, the Normans attended to the forms of religion with special care. No people were more bountiful to ecclesiastical bodies on both sides of the Channel; and strict attendance to re 1 Geoffrey Malaterra, i, 3. "Es quippe gens astutissima, injuriarum ultrix, spe alias plus lucrandi, patrios agros vilipendens, quæstus et dominationis avida, cujuslibet rei simulatrix, inter largitatem et avaritiam quoddam medium habens. Principes vero delectatione bonæ famæ largissimi, gens adulari sciens, eloquentiis in studiis inserviens in tantum, ut etiam ipsos pueros quasi rhetores attendas, quæ quidem, nisi jugo justiciæ prematur, effrenatissima est; laboris, inediæ, algoris, ubi fortuna expedit, patiens, venationi accipitrum exercitio inserviens. Equorum, cæterorumque militiæ instrumentorum, et vestium luxuria delectatur. Ex nomine itaque suo terræ nomen indiderunt North, quippe Anglica lingua aquilonaris plaga dicitur. Et quia ipsi ab aquilone venerant terram ipsam etiam Normanniam appellarunt." ligious observances, as well as a wide bounty to religious foundations, may be set down as national characteristics of the Normans. Such were the people among whom Edward, son of Ethelred and Emma, sister of Richard II, Duke of Normandy, had spent the days of his youth before ascending the throne of England, and who, from the joint effects of situation, exigencies, wise legislation, Christianity, and natural energy, had so much improved within one hundred and fifty years, after they had quitted the Baltic, as to be described in the following manner by a historian of the country which they had most afflicted: "Their dukes," he says, "as they were superior to all others in war, so they as much excelled their contemporaries in their love of peace and liberality. All their people lived harmoniously together, like one great body of relations, like one family, whose mutual faith was inviolable. Among them, every man was looked upon as a robber who, by falsehood, endeavored to overreach another in any transaction. They took assiduous care of their poor and distressed, and of all strangers, like parents of their children; and they sent the most abundant gifts to the Christian churches in almost every part of the world."1 1 Glaber Rodolphus, c. v, p. 8. |