History of Normandy

• 1. Introduction

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  In the history of Normandy, the 9th of November 1469 is the day a ducal ring was placed on an anvil and smashed. The gesture was meant to show that the duchy would never be handed out again. That duchy lay in the north-west of what later became France, and it ended up with a long list of rulers and a long list of wounds. Who lived on this land before anyone could be called a Norman? Why does the region carry the name it does? And what became of the place once its dukes were gone?

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• 2. Gauls and Caesar

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  The cave paintings at Gouy and Orival in Seine-Maritime show that people were living in Normandy in prehistoric times. Other finds in Eure and Calvados say the same, and megaliths scattered across the region were mostly built in one uniform style.

  A gilded Gallic helmet from Amfreville-sous-les-Monts, made in the 4th century BC, tells a clearer story about the Celts. Local scholars in the 19th century studied sites, especially in Upper Normandy, and recorded what they found. Besides the gilded helmet, they turned up an iron helmet, now in the Museum of Louviers. They also examined the cemetery at Pitres, where urns held cremated remains. Together these objects point to a Gallic presence reaching back to the Hallstatt and La Tene cultures.

  Between the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, Belgae and Celts, together called Gauls, arrived in successive waves. The Celtic peoples of Normandy belonged to Armorica, a confederation of closely related peoples. It stretched along the English Channel and Atlantic shores from the Seine estuary to the mouth of the Loire.

  Much of what we know about these peoples comes from Julius Caesar and his account of invading Gaul, de Bello Gallico, covering the years 58-50 BC. Caesar named nine tribes among the Belgae. Each held its own territory and lived in enclosed agricultural towns. The Veliocasses had their centre at Rotomagus, now Rouen, while the Baiocasses were based at Augustodurum, now Bayeux. The Unelli were centred on Cosedia, now Coutances, and the Lexovii on Noviomagus Lexoviorum, now Lisieux.

  The Gauls united under Vercingetorix to resist Caesar's army. Even after their defeat at Alesia, the people of Normandy kept fighting until 51 BC, the very year Caesar completed his conquest of Gaul.

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• 3. Roman Roads and Villas

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  In 27 BC, Emperor Augustus redrew the map of Gaul and added the Caletes and the Veliocasses to the province of Gallia Lugdunensis. Its capital was Lyon. Rome made Normandy Roman by familiar means, building roads and pushing a policy of urbanization.

  The construction of the A29 autoroute in Seine-Maritime uncovered many Gallo-Roman villas, and most of what classicists know about them comes from those finds. Builders used one of two main plans. The first was a tall, slender structure with an open facade facing south. The second resembled an Italian villa, arranged around a square courtyard, and the villa at Sainte-Marguerite-sur-Mer follows it. Walls went up in local flint, chalk, limestone, brick and cob. Half-timbering dates from this period too, and it drew on Celtic huts. Inside, the villas were warmed by the Roman hypocaust.

  Pliny the Elder wrote that the region's farms produced wheat and linen. He also noted small temples called fana, with a square plan around a central point, in great numbers. At Evreux, the temples made the town an important pilgrimage site. It had a forum, Roman baths, a basilica and a Gallic theatre, and statues of mother goddesses turned up in its tombs and houses.

  Under the reforms of Emperor Diocletian, who ruled from 285 to 305, the future Normandy became a province of its own, called Lyonnaise Secunda. It ran from the Couesnon to the Bresle, with the upper courses of the Sarthe and the Avre as its southern limit. Its outline foreshadowed the Archdiocese of Rouen and the borders of ducal Normandy seven centuries later.

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• 4. Rome Withdraws

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  Traces of fire and hastily buried treasures mark the late 3rd century in Northern Gaul. From the second third of that century, raiders devastated many places in the Norman region. Saxon pirates attacked the coast, as did Franks and Frisians. Rome answered by recruiting Germanic contingents to fight other Germans, and it allowed these newcomers to settle inside the Empire.

  The danger was serious enough that an entire legion of Sueves was stationed at Constantia, the administrative centre of the Unelli. Batavi were garrisoned at Bayeux. Christianity also entered the area in this period, and Saint Mellonius was supposedly ordained Bishop of Rouen in the middle of the 3rd century.

  In 406, Germanic and Alan tribes began invading from the east, and the Saxons subjugated the Norman coast. In 457, a man named Aegidius set up the Domain of Soissons in the area. It was cut off from the Empire and independent of it, yet its citizens still thought of themselves as Roman. His son Syagrius took over in 464 and held on until the kingdom fell in 486. Rural villages were abandoned, and the remaining Romans retreated behind urban fortifications. Place names suggest that barbarian groups had settled and formed alliances as early as the end of the 3rd century, well before the Western Roman Empire fell in 476.

  By 486, the lands between the Somme and the Loire had come under the Frankish lord Clovis. Frankish settlement was not massive. It shows up mainly in cemeteries at Envermeu, Londinieres, Herouvillette and Douvrend, and place names of the time were chiefly Frankish. The eastern part of Normandy became a residence for Merovingian royalty.

  Cathedrals rose in the principal cities and churches in smaller localities. In the 7th century, Neustrian aristocrats founded abbeys in the Seine valley, among them Fontenelle in 649 and Jumieges around 654. Pavilly and Montivilliers followed. The abbeys adopted the Benedictine Rule, gathered land across France and drew large incomes from it. That wealth, stored along the Seine, would soon attract attackers sailing up the river.

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• 5. Men of the North

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  Medieval Latin documents called the Viking invaders Nortmanni, meaning men of the North, and that word gave us Norman and Normandy. The Latin form Normandia took the ending -ia, like Neustria and Francia. After 911, the name replaced Neustria for the region. The other parts of Neustria became known as France, now Ile-de-France, as well as Anjou and Champagne. In modern Norwegian, nordmann means a Norwegian person, while Swedish uses norrman.

  The Viking threat came in two phases, from 790 to 930 and again from 980 to 1030. The first raids hit the coasts of western France between 790 and 800. Under Louis the Pious, who reigned from 814 to 840, several coastal areas were lost. The Seine became the main route into the Kingdom of France.

  In 841, an incursion down the Seine did severe damage to Rouen and Jumieges. The attackers wanted the treasures stored at monasteries, and monks could rarely put up any resistance. An expedition in 845 sailed up the Seine as far as Paris. The raids came mostly in summer, with the Vikings first wintering back in Scandinavia.

  After 851, Vikings began staying through the winter in the lower Seine valley. In January 852, they burned the Abbey of Fontenelle. Surviving monks fled to Boulogne-sur-Mer in 858 and to Chartres in 885. The relics of Sainte Honorine travelled from Graville to Conflans, a safer spot to the south-east in the Paris region. The place became Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. Monks also tried to move their archives and libraries south, but several of those collections burned.

  The Carolingian kings of the time followed contradictory policies, with severe results. In 867, Charles the Bald signed the Treaty of Compiegne with the Breton king Salomon. He yielded the Cotentin Peninsula, and probably the Avranchin, on condition that Salomon swear loyalty and fight the Vikings as an ally.

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• 6. Rollo's Bargain

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  At the Battle of Chartres in 911, the Franks under Robert I defeated the Viking leader Rollo. Rollo and the Frankish King Charles the Simple then signed the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte. Charles gave Rollo Rouen and the area of present-day Upper Normandy, and the Duchy of Normandy began. In exchange, Rollo pledged vassalage, agreed to be baptized and vowed to guard the Seine estuaries against further Viking attacks. Robert I stood as godfather at the baptism. Rollo was the jarl, the chief of the Viking population, and after 911 he held the title of count of Rouen.

  The territory then grew by conquest. Hiemois and Bessin were taken in 924. In 933, King Raoul of France was forced to hand the Cotentin and part of the Avranchin to William I of Normandy. That gave Normandy essentially all the land north of the river Selune, which the Breton dukes had theoretically controlled for about 70 years. Between 1009 and 1020, the Normans pushed west again and took everything between the Selune and the Couesnon, Mont Saint-Michel included. This finished the conquest of the Avranchin. William the Conqueror closed out these campaigns in 1050 by taking Passais.

  There was a logic behind this expansion. Norman rulers tried to unite two separate Viking settlements, one in the pays de Caux and lower Seine and one in the Cotentin. Rollo also re-established the archbishopric of Rouen, and he wanted to restore its old western limits, which had always included the Cotentin and the Avranchin.

  Church sources paint the Viking raids in an unfairly dark light, though. Raiders pillaged, burned or destroyed many buildings, and all the abbeys were destroyed, but no city was completely wiped out. The rule of Rollo and his successors brought a rapid recovery.

  The settlers were mostly Danish, led by the Norwegian Rollo, and the Cotentin also had a Norwegian element. The first name Barno appears in two documents from before 1066. It is a Frankish version of the Old Scandinavian name Barni, known only from Denmark and from England in the Viking Age. The name survives in places such as Barneville-sur-Seine and Banneville, and in England at Barnby. Doncanville, from Duncan, and Digulleville, from Dicuil, carry Celtic names from Ireland or Scotland, regions Norwegian Vikings were reputed to have occupied. Rocks and cliffs with typical Norwegian names mark the coastal route from the Orkney Islands down to the Cotentin.

  The colonization was not a mass migration, although Scandinavians settled quite densely in the pays de Caux and the northern Cotentin. Most colonists probably came after 911 as fishermen and farmers from the English Danelaw, which makes the settlement Anglo-Scandinavian. Denestanville, recorded as Dunestanvilla in 1142, holds the name Dunstan. Venestanville holds Winston.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle supports this three times. A Danish army stationed in Kent for three years finally broke up, and Danes who owned ships crossed the Channel to the Seine. A jarl named Thurcytel, who first settled in the English Midlands, sailed to Francia in 920. Around the year 1000, another Viking fleet left England for Normandy. Anglo-Saxon swords dredged from the Seine were probably used by these Danes. A buried hoard at Saint-Pierre-des-Fleurs held nine Anglo-Saxon coins marked with blows made to test their metal.

  The blending of Scandinavian and native elements produced one of the most powerful feudal states in Western Europe. Its naval skill would let the Normans conquer England and take part in the Crusades.

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• 7. Dukes and Kings

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  Historians have only a few voices to rely on for ducal Normandy: Dudo of Saint-Quentin, William of Jumieges, Orderic Vitalis, Flodoard of Reims, Richerus and Wace. Diplomatic messages are the main evidence for who succeeded whom. Rollo's successors gained the title Duke of Normandy only with Richard II. After the Capetians rose to power, the Normans had to give up the title for a time, since there could be only one duke in Neustria and the Robertians held it.

  The dukes still grew stronger, though they had to acknowledge the superiority of the King of France. They struck their own money, delivered justice and collected taxes. They raised their own armies and named most of the prelates of their archdiocese. They paid homage to each new monarch but were practically independent.

  Ties with foreign courts mattered as well. Emma, sister of Richard II, married King Ethelred II of England. Around the year 1000, the dukes began appointing family members as counts and viscounts. They kept some territory in Scandinavia and the right to enter those lands by sea. They also made sure their vassals never grew strong enough to threaten ducal authority. Wealth let them grant large tracts to the abbeys and win loyalty with gifts of fiefdoms. William's conquest of England opened up still more land, which let the dukes keep doing this while holding enough to remain their own powerbase.

  The 11th century itself was somewhat chaotic and had no strict organization. Great lords swore oaths of fidelity to the heir of the duchy and received public and ecclesiastical authority in return. Justice had no central governing body, and written laws were uncommon. The aristocracy was a small group of Scandinavian men, while most political leaders were of Frankish descent. At the start of the century, Bretons attacked from the west, Germans from the east and the people of Anjou from the south. By 1040, the word baron described the duke's elite knights and soldiers. The word vassal vanishes from documents from 1057 onward, and fiefdoms came into being in the middle of the century. Richard the First assigned fiefdoms to counts of the dynasty and to cities so that none would grow too powerful.

  Mainland Normandy joined the Kingdom of France in 1204. A king named Philip, doubting Norman loyalty, installed French administrators and built a powerful fortress, the Chateau de Rouen, as a symbol of royal power. Norman law still served as the basis for court decisions. In 1315, the barons and towns, facing steady encroachment, pressed the Norman Charter on the king. It did not give the province autonomy, but it protected it from arbitrary royal acts. The judgments of the Exchequer, the main court of Normandy, were declared final, so Paris could not reverse a ruling from Rouen. The King of France also could not levy a new tax without Norman consent. The monarchy violated the charter several times once its power returned.

  The duchy lived on mainly through the intermittent appointment of a duke. Sometimes the French king gave Normandy to a close relative, who did him homage. Philippe VI made his eldest son and heir, Jean, Duke of Normandy, and Jean II in turn named his heir, Charles, the Dauphin.

  In 1465, nobles forced Louis XI to cede the duchy to his eighteen-year-old brother Charles as an appanage. This was a problem because Charles was the puppet of the king's enemies, and Normandy could become a base for rebellion. Louis XI therefore arranged with his brother to swap Normandy for the Duchy of Guyenne, also called Aquitaine.

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• 8. Revolution to Liberation

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  In the 1780s, bad harvests, technical progress and the Eden Agreement of 1786 hurt jobs and the economy in Normandy. Normans carried a heavy fiscal burden, and the crisis of the Ancien Regime that struck here and elsewhere in the nation led to the French Revolution. Weaving, metallurgy, sugar refining, ceramics and shipbuilding had been introduced alongside agriculture.

  Dauphin Louis Charles, the second son of Louis XVI, was given the nominal title Duke of Normandy again before his elder brother died in 1789. In 1790, five departments replaced the old province. On the 11th of July 1793, the Norman Charlotte Corday assassinated Jean-Paul Marat.

  Throughout the 19th century, Normans reacted little to the political upheavals around them. They warily accepted each change of regime, from the First French Empire to the Third Republic. After the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars, which ran from 1792 to 1815, the economy revived with mechanized textile manufacture and the first trains. The coasts gained new activity as seaside tourism arrived, and the first beach resorts appeared in this century.

  After the armistice of the 22nd of June 1940, continental Normandy fell inside the German occupied zone. German forces held the Channel Islands from the 30th of June 1940 until the 9th of May 1945. At Dieppe, Canadian and British forces mounted the unsuccessful Dieppe Raid.

  On the 6th of June 1944, the D-Day landings began under the code name Operation Overlord. Britain, the United States and Canada had assembled a massive build-up of troops and supplies. The Germans waited in fortified emplacements above the beaches. Caen, Cherbourg, Carentan, Falaise and other Norman towns suffered many casualties in the Battle of Normandy. The fighting lasted until the Falaise gap between Chambois and Mont Ormel was closed, and the liberation of Le Havre followed. This was a major turning point in the war and led to the restoration of the French Republic. The Channel Islands were freed only on the 9th of May 1945, when the war ended.

  In 1956, mainland Normandy was split into two regions, Lower Normandy and Upper Normandy. They were reunified in 2016.

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