Duchy of Normandy

A proxy kisses the king's foot

formationDrafted from Palgrave, The History of Normandy and of England, Volume I (1851)

By 911 the Viking leader Rollo had held the ruins of Rouen and the surrounding country for years, through occupation and reoccupation that no French king had managed to reverse. King Charles the Simple, under pressure from his own nobles to make peace with an enemy they had already tried and failed to dislodge, offered a settlement: Rollo would receive the lands he already held, formally and for his heirs forever, in exchange for baptism, an oath of fidelity, and marriage to the king's own daughter Gisella.

British Library · Palgrave, The History of Normandy and of England, Volume I (1851) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Even the offer of land was contested before it was made. Charles's first instinct was to grant Rollo nothing more than the wasted, unstocked country immediately around Rouen - land nobody was farming, offered as though it cost the crown nothing to give away. Rollo's own Frankish sponsors, the archbishop Franco chief among them, judged the offer insulting and pressed the king to be more generous; the final grant covered the country the Northmen already held in practice, recognized as theirs by right rather than by sufferance.

Not by God

What the negotiations could not soften was the ceremony itself. Homage to a Frankish king traditionally required the vassal to kiss the royal foot, and when the moment came, Rollo's refusal was blunt: ne si by Got - "not so, by God." The Franks insisted on some form of compliance, and Rollo, unwilling to bend himself, ordered one of his own men to perform the act as his proxy. The soldier did not kneel so much as reach down and yank the king's foot up to his own mouth, pitching Charles backward onto the ground before the assembled court. It was, by every account that survived to reach Dudo of Saint-Quentin a century later, the opening note of a relationship between duchy and crown that neither side would ever quite let go of being an insult.

A jewel hung in a tree

expansionDrafted from Freeman, A Short History of the Norman Conquest of England (1880)

Rollo's grant at Saint-Clair-sur-Epte was only a beginning. He enlarged it himself with the addition of Bayeux and its territory, and his son William Longsword, who ruled from 927 to 943, added the Cotentin peninsula and the land of Avranches to its south - the addition that finally gave the duchy the whole north coast of what had been the duchy of France, cutting Paris off from the sea by way of Rouen. Rollo ruled the land he had won firmly enough that the story was told of a jewel he hung up in a tree, which no man in his territory dared to steal.

Freeman, A Short History of the Norman Conquest of England (1880) · Brams · Public domain

A pagan revolt and a captive duke

Under Rollo and William Longsword the Normans settled around Rouen gradually became Christian and left off their own Scandinavian tongue for French; by the end of William's reign, French alone was spoken there. But in the more recently won western lands, Danish speech and the old gods still held on, and when William was murdered, the heathen party got hold of his young son and successor Richard and forced him to join their own worship for a time. Duke Richard - later called Richard the Fearless - outgrew that crisis and went on to commend himself to Hugh the Great, duke of the French, binding Normandy and France into a close alliance; it was Richard who had a chief hand in giving the Frankish crown itself to Hugh's son, Hugh Capet.

Gentlemen on horseback

Richard the Fearless was followed by Richard the Good, whose reign from 996 to 1026 saw a great revolt of the Norman peasantry, likely drawn largely from the duchy's Celtic population, against a landed class that was by then entirely Norman. The revolt was put down, and Richard began drawing a new distinction among his own subjects, favoring the men called gentlemen - the word appears for almost the first time here. By now the Normans had transformed themselves completely from the seafaring raiders of Rollo's day into the best horsemen in the world, mounted men with kite-shaped shields and long lances who went out, in the same restless spirit as their Viking forebears, to seek fighting wherever it could be found - helping the Christians of Spain against the Moors, and, in the reign of Richard the Good, sending the private adventurers whose descendants would carve out whole principalities of their own in southern Italy and Sicily.

He is little, but he will grow

expansionDrafted from Freeman, A Short History of the Norman Conquest of England (1880)

William was born at Falaise, the son of Duke Robert and Herleva, the daughter of a tanner of that town; his parents had never married, so he was known for most of his life as William the Bastard. Before leaving on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem from which he never returned, Duke Robert persuaded the leading men of Normandy to accept his only son as their future duke, over the objections that the boy was barely seven years old. "He is little," Robert is said to have told them, "but he will grow." Robert died at Nicaea in 1035, on his way home, and William became duke as a child with no father left to protect him.

Metropolitan Museum of Art · Freeman, A Short History of the Norman Conquest of England (1880) · Alfred Capel-Cure · CC0

Rebels, murder, and a fool's warning

The years that followed were violent. Normandy's nobles had never wanted the tanner's grandson for their lord, and several kinsmen of Duke Robert believed they had a far better claim to the duchy themselves. More than one of William's guardians was murdered; the land fell into confusion, and the king of France seized the opportunity to take a border castle from his own weakened vassal. The crisis came to a head in 1047, when the western half of the duchy - Bayeux and the Cotentin, still more Danish in speech and temper than the French-speaking east - rose against him under his own cousin Guy of Burgundy. William was among the rebels at Valognes when they tried to seize him; only a warning from his own fool in the night let him escape and ride for his life to Falaise.

Val-es-Dunes

Unsure he could put the rising down alone, William rode to Poissy and asked King Henry of France for help. The French king came with an army, and the combined forces of Henry and the loyal, French-speaking east of Normandy met the Danish-speaking rebels of the west in William's first pitched battle, at Val-es-Dunes near Caen. King and duke both fought hand to hand; Henry himself was unhorsed by a spear from a Cotentin man, a feat the peninsula's people commemorated afterward in their own songs, but the rebels broke regardless. William's victory settled, for good, that Normandy would take its character from French Rouen rather than Danish Bayeux, and made him master of his own duchy for the first time - nineteen years before he would need to master a second one.

Freeman, A Short History of the Norman Conquest of England (1880) · Dave osm · CC BY-SA 4.0

An arrow through the eye

peakDrafted from Freeman, A Short History of the Norman Conquest of England (1880)

By the afternoon of the 14th of October, 1066, Duke William's army had spent hours failing to break the English shield-wall on the ridge above Senlac, and the fight showed no sign of ending before dark. William's answer was a new tactic: archers ordered to shoot upward, so their arrows would drop like bolts from the sky onto the men still packed around King Harold's standard, while twenty handpicked knights swore an oath to reach the standard itself and bring it down.

The volley found its mark in the worst possible way. One arrow struck King Harold through the right eye. He fell beside his own standard, and although most of the twenty knights sent to finish the work died in the attempt, four of them reached the wounded king and killed him where he lay, carrying off both his personal banners. Around him his household troops fought on without him rather than flee or surrender

• by the record's own account, not one of the king's chosen men either ran or was taken prisoner - until the last of them fell at their posts as darkness closed over the field.

Bayeux Museum · Freeman, A Short History of the Norman Conquest of England (1880) · Myrabella · Public domain

Not yet a king

William did not call himself king of England that evening, or for more than two months afterward. He held only a corner of Sussex when the battle ended, and it took him years to bring the rest of the country under his own control. But Hastings had already decided the question that mattered most: no English army would ever again meet him in a pitched battle for the crown. When William offered Harold's own mother the weight of her son's body in gold for the right to bury him with proper rites at Waltham, he refused outright, judging Harold a perjured man unworthy of Christian burial, and had him interred without ceremony on the coastal rocks near the battlefield instead - a small, deliberate cruelty from a duke who, within three years, held the whole kingdom that single afternoon at Senlac had made his to take.

Forty years to the day

contractionDrafted from Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings, Volume I (1887)

William the Conqueror's own sons could not hold what he had won together. Normandy passed to his eldest son, Robert Curthose, while England went to a younger son, and the two brothers spent the following years at war with each other until the youngest of the three, Henry, held both England and, after 1106, wanted Normandy as well. Before the armies met at the castle of Tinchebray, Henry offered his brother easy terms - half the duchy's revenue for life, in exchange for giving up its government entirely - and Robert, "foolish to the last," refused.

A battle fought on foot

The armies that met at Tinchebray were unevenly matched in kind: Duke Robert stronger in footsoldiers, King Henry stronger in knights, with the flower of the Norman nobility fighting on his side against their own duke. Both leaders fought on foot in the English style. When Robert's first charge drove back Henry's front line without breaking it, Henry's only mounted reserve, Breton and Manceaux horsemen under Count Elias, swept in on the flank and cut down two hundred men in a single charge; Robert of Belleme fled the field with his own followers the moment he saw the battle turning, and the duke's army dissolved with him. Henry himself described the victory plainly: the battle had delivered into his hands "the duke of Normandy, the count of Mortain... some four hundred knights, ten thousand foot - and the duchy of Normandy." The date was Michaelmas Eve, 1106 - forty years to the day since William the Conqueror had landed at Pevensey to begin the conquest of England. Robert Curthose never regained his freedom; he remained Henry's prisoner until his own death, nearly three decades later.

Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings, Volume I (1887) · Brian Deegan · CC BY-SA 2.0

Geoffrey of Anjou completes a second conquest

Henry I died in 1135 with no surviving legitimate son, and the succession he had extracted a triple oath from his barons to honor - his daughter Matilda, married to Geoffrey of Anjou - was disputed almost as soon as he was in his grave. Geoffrey spent much of the following decade winning Normandy by force from supporters of the rival claimant, Stephen, town by town and castle by castle, until in January 1144 he crossed the Seine and camped before Rouen itself. The citizens opened their gates to him the next day; only the castle held out, for three months, before hunger forced its surrender. One last holdout, the fortress of Arques, fell the following summer after its Flemish commander was killed by a stray arrow. Geoffrey held the duchy afterward by his own right of conquest, formally recognized by the king of France - not in his wife's name, and not yet in his son's, though it was that son, Henry, who would carry Normandy into a still wider Angevin realm stretching from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees.

Museum of Archaeology and History, Le Mans · Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings, Volume I (1887) · Unknown enameller · Public domain

Urbs invicta

endDrafted from Powicke, The Loss of Normandy (1189-1204) (1913)

By the end of 1203, King John had already left the duchy his ancestor had won England from, and Philip Augustus had spent months driving a wedge between its eastern and western halves. The garrison at Vaudreuil, well provisioned and apparently prepared for a determined defense, surrendered without a stone being cast against it, a collapse so sudden that contemporaries blamed treachery among the castellans rather than any failure of the walls themselves.

What Vaudreuil gave up without a fight, Chateau Gaillard did not. Built by King Richard as the key to the whole Seine valley, the fortress held out under siege for six months, from the autumn of 1203 until Roger de Lacy, its constable, finally surrendered on the 6th of March, 1204. The length and difficulty of the siege - the only substantial resistance Philip's campaign met anywhere in the duchy - gave it a place in the chronicles that the rest of the war never matched.

Powicke, The Loss of Normandy (1189-1204) (1913) · Michel Chéron · CC BY-SA 3.0

The unconquered city falls

Rouen was the duchy's own seat, and its own defenders knew what Chateau Gaillard's fall meant for them. On the 1st of June its barons and citizens agreed an armistice with Philip: they would surrender within thirty days unless help arrived from England, terms that amounted, in substance, to a treaty of surrender already signed. Help did not come, and the city did not wait out the full month. On the 24th of June, the feast of St John the Baptist, Rouen

• urbs invicta, the unconquered city - capitulated, along with Verneuil and Arques on the same day. Resistance may have continued in scattered places afterward, but no record of it survived; Philip's own officials moved quickly to fold the duchy into the French royal administration, and the state Rollo had extracted from a French king at the point of an insult very nearly three centuries earlier ceased, in that single summer, to answer to anyone but the crown it had once refused to kneel to.