Normandy

Normandy enters our story here for the simple reason that Emma, the mother of Edward the Confessor and the wife both of Aethelred and Cnut of England, was of Norman birth, the daughter of Duke Richard I of Normandy, himself the grandfather of the future William the Conqueror. Edward the Confessor and William of Normandy were therefore related in the third degree of kinship as second cousins, with Richard I of Normandy, Emma’s father, as their common ancestor. A series of highly significant facts should be stressed here. Edward and William were cousins, but not close cousins, and not a drop of the blood of the West Saxon dynasty flowed in William’s veins. From the 1050s onwards, there were many others who could claim far closer patrilineal kinship to Edward the Confessor, not least Edward the Exile, son of Edmund Ironside, and the Exile’s son, Edgar the Aetheling. To some extent indeed, in the 1040s, Edward the Exile, already aged twenty-five in 1040, might have been promoted as a more plausible candidate for the English throne even than his cousin Edward the Confessor. Secondly, William of Normandy was a bastard, born of an extramarital liaison between his father, Duke Robert, and a woman, Herleva, whose own father has traditionally been identified as a tanner from Falaise. Tanning is a trade that in the Middle Ages, as in parts of the Third World even today, involved the use of large quantities of human urine and dog dirt. These less than dainty agents were employed to depilate and soften the hides of animals. What remained thereafter of the rotted flesh and bone was rendered, very messily, into glue. No one who has been near even the most hygienic of animalglue factories is likely to forget the experience. One of the smelliest and most disgusting of trades, tanning was entrusted to workers generally placed beyond the bounds of decent society, in locations as far removed from town or city centres as the local population could ensure. Find the tanneries in any medieval town, and you will generally have found the most squalid of slums.

As a bastard, born to a woman descended from tanners, William would have been even less plausible a candidate for the English throne than Harold Harefoot in the 1030s. By contrast to William, Harold Harefoot was merely alleged to be a bastard: he himself might have denied the charge. Recently, it has been suggested that William’s grandfather was not a tanner, but a furrier, a tailor or more likely an undertaker or embalmer. None of these trades would exactly raise the family to the highest levels of aristocracy. Finally, although we now remember Normandy as a cradle of civilization and as one of the most dynamic regions of eleventh-century Europe, the focus of an entire academic sub-industry of Norman studies, things might easily have been otherwise. Normandy’s rise, whatever William’s propagandists might suggest, was very far from inevitable or straightforward.

Between 900 and 1100, during two hundred years in which the inhabitants of that part of western Europe that we now call France were deprived of strong central monarchy, many regional dynasties emerged. Some of these new families enjoyed the most dramatic and impressive of debuts but few of these dynasties survived for more than a couple of generations in anything other than a very localized position of power. Only the dukes of Normandy, through their conquest of England, prolonged their greatness and came indeed to rival the French kings not only in terms of wealth and majesty but in the sheer extent of the territories over which they ruled. In many ways, however, this was to lend Normandy an artificial significance which but for the accidents of 1066 it would never have possessed. Had it not been for the catalogue of errors that culminated in the Battle of Hastings, Duke William, the tanner’s grandson, and Normandy itself might seem as insignificant to us today as the once powerful counts of Vermandois or Ponthieu.

It was against this background that Normandy first entered English history. It was from Normandy that Aethelred chose his bride, Emma, and it was to Emma’s family that he fled in 1014, after his initial defeat by Swein. Thereafter, it was in Normandy that Aethelred’s sons by Emma, Alfred and Edward, were raised after Emma’s return to England to marry Cnut. In later life, Edward the Confessor commemorated the more than twenty-four years of his exile in Normandy by grants of land in England to the monks of Mont-St-Michel, Fécamp and Rouen. Fécamp came to possess land in Sussex, some years before Edward’s death, including an estate at Hastings, a remarkable indication of the ties that already bound the Confessor’s court to the religious institutions of Normandy, many years before the Norman invasion. St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and its monastery, placed under the protection of the monks of Mont-St-Michel on the Norman–Breton frontier, constitutes another surviving relic of Edward the Confessor’s exile in Normandy before 1040. St Michael himself had battled with Satan and from the high places of the world had thrown him down to hell. Those appealing to the memory of St Michael tended, in the Middle Ages, to have battle in mind. Edward’s gift of a Cornish island to the Norman monks of St Michael, made in the mid-1030s on the eve of his return to England, already describing Edward as ‘King of the English’, thus suggests not only a familiarity with Cornwall (the two ‘mounts’ in Normandy and Cornwall could be mother and daughter) but an intention on Edward’s part to use his Norman alliances to mount an armed campaign against the forces of evil led by Harold Harefoot.

It was Edward’s connection with Normandy, the facts that William of Normandy was his cousin, and that Edward had passed most of his life before 1042 at the Norman court which allowed Norman claims to enter the debate over the succession to the English throne. Whoever Edward actually intended as his heir (and there is no real proof that he opted decisively for any one candidate during the more than twenty years that he sat on the English throne, after 1042), it seems reasonable to suggest that, in the early 1050s, Edward deliberately made use of his Norman connections in an attempt to build up a following for himself in England independent of the English earls. Not only was the archbishop of Canterbury Norman, but other northern Frenchmen, including the bishops of Wells and Hereford, were granted bishoprics or lands in England. Ralph of Mantes, Edward’s nephew, son of Edward’s sister and the Count of Vexin, was granted estates and an earldom in Herefordshire. There is some possibility that, in the 1050s, Edward’s court was partly French speaking. If so, the collapse of Edward’s short-lived period of independent rule, after 1052, would have been even more clearly marked since it led to the expulsion from England of most of his former French protégés. It did not, however, put an end to the claims advanced by William of Normandy for his succession to the English throne. To understand why, we need here to consider the situation of Normandy and its ducal family.

Superficially, by the 1060s, a casual observer might have found little to distinguish Normandy from England. Indeed, for ninety per cent of the human population, bonded to the land in the age-old rhythms of agricultural labour, it is doubtful whether, apart from language and the name of one’s particular lord, there would have been much to distinguish Bedfordshire from Bayeux or St-Lô from St Ives. Normandy’s landscape is similar to, indeed originally was physically attached to that of southern England. Both places have extended coastlines and many rivers allowing access to the sea and hence to seaborne trade. Both were lands of forests as well as of richly productive agricultural land. England came to be defined as the two ecclesiastical provinces of Canterbury and York. Normandy’s frontiers were for the most part coterminous with those of the single ecclesiastical province of Rouen.