The Vikings (30 page)

In his detailed study of the Norman conversion, the French scholar Olivier Guillot noted that Flodoard seems to have regarded the conversion of Rollo and his settlers as a process that was demonstrably under way as early as 923, and there is evidence that Rollo was sincere in his desire to embrace certain aspects of Christian culture. As we saw earlier, tradition tells us that his Scottish-born daughter bore the Christian name Kathleen, and both the children of his later association with a woman named Poppa were given Christian names. If his son Guillaume (William Longsword) also had a Scandinavian name then this has not come down to us. Rollo’s daughter had both a Norwegian name, Gerloc, and a baptismal name, Adèle. The reference in the
Planctus for William Longsword
to William as ‘born overseas from a father who stuck to the pagan error/and from a mother who was devoted to the sweet religion’ might be no more than a factual comment on Rollo’s early life. Adémar of Chabannes, however, writing about 100 years after Rollo’s death, described his last days as a time of religious madness, in which the Heathen ‘Rollo’ rose up against the Christian ‘Robert’ and in a desperate attempt to atone for the betrayal of Odin and Thor ordered the beheading of 100 Christians as sacrifices to them.
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This was followed by a frenzied attempt to balance the books yet again when he distributed ‘one hundred pounds of gold round the churches in honour of the true god in whose name he had accepted baptism’.
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Adémar is the only ancient historian to doubt the truth of Rollo’s conversion. His story provides a rare and persuasive insight into the violent tensions that could arise when devout men change the object of their devotion as a matter of political convenience. In Rollo’s case they were seemingly mind-wrenching.

 

The large and consistent Viking military presence throughout the ninth and tenth centuries in the western Frankish kingdom has left little material archaeological trace. In 1927 the Norwegian archaeologist Haakon Shetelig visited museums along the Loire and the Seine and compiled a list of holdings that included an axe, seven spears and twenty-one swords, most of them dredged from the rivers or constituting stray finds. The Swedish archaeologists Arbmann and Nilsson complemented Shetelig’s list in 1968 with another two axe-heads from Rouen, and in 1987 a Viking Age sword was unearthed in the basement of the museum at Denain. A lance ferrule and a helmet fragment, possibly of Nordic origin, were excavated in Brittany, at the Camp de Péran (Côtes d’Armor).
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The discovery in the burnt ramparts of Camp de Péran, originally a Celtic fortified settlement, of a coin from York minted between 905 and 925 dates its restoration by Vikings to the early years of the tenth century. Alain Barbetorte is known to have landed at Dol in 936 and fought with the Vikings, an event that has been associated with the evidence of the destruction of the camp.
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Another earthwork, at Trans, Ille-et-Vilaine, may have been built or renovated by the Loire Vikings as they retreated from Nantes in 939.

In 1870 a navvy working on a road near Pîtres on the Seine came across two characteristically Viking Age brooches known as ‘fibulas’, which archaeologists have related to the presence of a Viking fleet at Pîtres in 865. Dated to the second half of the ninth century and of probable Norwegian origin, they come from the grave of a female and provide further evidence that Viking bands travelled with women who were either camp-followers or, as in the case of Hasting in the 890s in Wessex, wives. During a particularly low tide at Reville, in the Bay of Seine, a Frankish necropolis that included possible Viking Age graves was uncovered in 1964. Two ship-settings were seen, of a type familiar from Gotland and parts of Denmark and Sweden, and a third with an unusual arrangement of stones with four right-angled slabs ringed by three stone circles.
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A vase resembling vases found at Birka is the only artefact to have been found, and the cemetery is once again under water. A recent excavation of the area around Rouen Cathedral shows that the layout of streets appears to have been redesigned in the early tenth century and that the modifications gave the ancient town a layout reminiscent of Anglo-Saxon towns.
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The linguistic traces of the Scandinavian roots of the Norman colonists are slightly more extensive. Dudo’s silence on the subject of how the Viking colonists administered Normandy is only partially broken by the survival of a small number of words of Scandinavian origin into the duchy’s thirteenth-century law codes.
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The word
ullac
, meaning a sentence of outlawry, derived from Old Norse
útlagr
, and
hamfara
, or the crime of assault inside a house, from
heimsókn
. A number of words to do with fishing, whaling, boat-building and the laws covering the status of wrecks were also of Scandinavian origin.
³⁸
The settlement of the land by Rollo’s captains produced over the years a small crop of place-names of Scandinavian origin. Compounds first recorded between 1025 and 1200 include Bramatot, Coletot, Esculetot, Gonnetot, Herguetot and Ketetot. These were formed by combining the personal name of the Viking landowner with a genitive ‘s’ - respectively Bramis, Kolis, Skúlis, Gunnis, Helgis and Ketils - and -
tot
, deriving from the Old Norse word
tomt
or
toft
(cf. ‘Lowestoft’ in the English Danelaw), meaning ‘plot’ or ‘piece of land’. Other typical Scandinavian elements compounded in place-names include
bec, dalle, hom, hogue, londe
and
torp
(cf. English ‘Scunthorpe’). A number of personal and family names found in present-day Normandy can also be traced back to the Viking settlement via intermediary Latinized forms known from the eleventh century. These include Ásbjørn - Osbernus - Auber; Ásfridr - Ansfridus - Anfray; Ásketill - Anschetillus - Anquetil; Thorvaldr - Turoldus - Thouroude.
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Names like Murdac and Donecan may indicate that some of the colonists were Norwegians who arrived via Ireland and Scotland, just as certain personal names and examples of agrarian terminology that occur in the region between Bayeux and the river Orne indicate that others came via England.

 

For all that Dudo is now regarded with some scepticism as a reliable source for the settlement of Normandy, his history remains a vivid and interesting document. Two of his anecdotes have played a major role in creating the image of the Viking as an independent, heroic, proud and manly ideal. It seems that once the details of the meeting at Saint-Claire had been agreed upon, Rollo was advised that, as Charles’s vassal, it would now be fit and proper for him to kiss the king’s foot. Rollo declined: ‘I will never bow my knees at the knees of any man, and no man’s foot will I kiss.’ He ordered one of his men to do so instead. The man stepped forward, took hold of the king’s foot and lifted it to his lips without bending himself. The king fell over backwards, provoking ‘a great laugh, and a great outcry among the people’.
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The laughter was presumably from the Vikings and the outcry from the Franks; but the story is a good illustration of the reality behind the agreement, that Charles’s grant to Rollo was a concession to reality.

When William of Jumièges tells us that Rollo was chosen as a leader by the drawing of lots we add the tacit presumption that he was also known by his peers to be the best leader; and yet an insistent streak of egalitarianism attaches to the Viking war band. As part of his claim that Rollo was present at the 886 siege of Paris, Dudo describes an encounter at Damps between the Vikings and Charles’s go-between. The emissary asked by what title their leader was known, and was told ‘By none, because we [are] equal in power.’
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They were then asked if they would be willing to bow to Charles the Simple and devote themselves to his service and accept grants of land from him, to which the reply was: ‘We will never subjugate ourselves to anyone nor cling to anyone’s service nor take favours from anyone. The favour that would please us best is the one that we will claim for ourselves by force of arms and in the hardship of battle.’ The sentiments recall Ibn Rustah’s story of the Rus father throwing down a sword in front of his infant son and convey a specifically Viking ethic of self-reliance and self-assertion through violence. Despite the rapid cultural and linguistic assimilation to Frankish ways that took place, this code survived the transition from Viking to Norman. In his
Deeds of Count Roger and his brother Duke Robert
, written about 1090, Geoffrey Malaterra, a Norman writer living in southern Italy, formulated a set of general characteristics of the Normans which seem to reflect this continuity of values.
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He writes of an astute people, eager to avenge injuries and looking to enrich themselves from others rather than from work at home. Much interested in profit and power, they are hypercritical and deceitful in all matters, ‘but between generosity and avarice they take a middle course’. Mindful of their reputations, the leaders are notably generous. They are skilled in flattery and cultivate eloquence ‘to such an extent that one listens to their young boys as though they were trained speakers’. They work hard when necessary and can endure hunger and cold. When times are good they indulge their love of hunting and hawking, and they cultivate a sizeable streak of dandyism in their clothing. The aesthetic care that was formerly lavished on the longship was transferred to the horses’ livery as Viking pirates became Norman cavalry, and the practice of decorating and personalizing one’s weapons continued. It is another reminder that Viking culture was not so much primitive, as contemporary Christian scribes so determinedly described it, but essentially different.

 

Richer of Reims tells a story that epitomizes the determination of the first generations of Viking leaders in Normandy not to be deprived of their newly won land and their status as Frankish aristocrats. In 941, as a vassal of the Frankish King Louis IV, William Longsword made his way to Attigny, where the most powerful leaders in Francia were gathered to confer. Finding the doors barred against him on his arrival, he simply broke them down and voiced his rightful claim to a place at the table. The sight of the Emperor Otto and not his patron in the seat of honour affronted him, however, and before allowing the meeting to proceed he obliged Otto to yield his seat to Louis. A year later and, according to Richer, as a direct result of the insult to Otto, William was murdered.
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The succession passed to his ten-year-old son Richard and precipitated the most serious crisis the colony had faced so far in its short life. In 944 Louis IV and Hugh the Great mounted a joint attack on Normandy, with Hugh attacking Bayeux and Louis occupying Rouen. It seems that Louis could not countenance the thought of Hugh’s occupation of Bayeux and, as so often before, dissension among the Frankish allies worked to the advantage of the Vikings. Hugh took the king into captivity and ended his hostility to the Normans. His troops helped Richard’s men regain possession of Rouen, and in the wake of their victory Hugh gave his daughter Emma in marriage to the young count. The family ties thus established with the Capetians further increased the status of Normandy’s ruling family, and with surprising speed the threat to the survival of the duchy had vanished.
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Hugh continued to offer military support to Richard I and in 954 defeated a certain Harold in what may have been another attempt to retake the duchy. Richard’s marriage to Emma was childless, and after her death he married Gunnor, the mother of his two children and a member of a powerful family of Viking settlers from the west of Normandy. This second marriage strengthened his position in the Cotentin region.
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When a large group of people settles in a foreign country it tends initially to accentuate its roots in an attempt to stave off cultural entropy. Smaller groups, like the Vikings who settled in Normandy, let go more quickly. Dudo tells us that William Longsword had to send his son Richard to Bayeux to learn the Danish tongue, since the language was no longer spoken in the area around Rouen; although this is generally regarded as, at best, an exaggeration, the linguistic position of those in Normandy was unlike that of their fellow-Scandinavians in the colonies of the Danelaw across the Channel, where the native and immigrant languages resembled one another closely enough for a fusion of the two to evolve. Mutual incomprehen sibility must have hastened the demise of the spoken Scandinavian languages in Normandy, much as it did among the Kievan Rus, another warrior aristocracy who settled in a minority in a linguistically remote community. But even though they had traded in their longships for horses, the Normandy Vikings retained a number of their cultural traditions. While slavery was being replaced in other parts of the Carolingian empire by serfdom, the colonists in Normandy developed Rouen as an important centre for the trading of slaves. The trade brought such prosperity to the region that it was still thriving at the end of the eleventh century, occasioning a rebuke from the Lombard cleric Lanfranc to his master, William the Conqueror, and a request that he forbid slavery throughout his territories.

There are many possible suggestions for a date at which the assimilation process could be said to have advanced so far that it is no longer meaningful to refer to the Normans as Vikings and to look for Scandinavian elements in their cultural manifestations. Olav Haraldson, the future saint-king of Norway, was baptized at Rouen in 1013, the last Norwegian king to visit the duchy; and those soldiers from Normandy who fought beside the Dublin king Sihtric Silkbeard at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 were the last to do so in a Scandinavian cause. As late as 1025, the court of Richard II at Rouen received a visit from Olav Haraldson’s court poet, Sigvat, who may have done what skalds do and composed praise poetry for his host in return for honour and gifts. Richard II, known as ‘the Good’, was the first of the Norman rulers to use the title ‘duke’, which he did from 1006. Perhaps the clearest sign of the irrevocable transition from Viking to Norman is the history his father asked Dudo of St Quentin to write in 994. It must have been among the last acts of Richard I, and there is profound significance in the fact that he chose to have his family remembered in prose, on parchment and in Latin and not, as his forefathers would have done, in verse, on stone and in Old Norse.