Normans

• 1. Introduction

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  The Normans were, by the account of the 11th-century Benedictine monk Goffredo Malaterra, a people "specially marked by cunning, despising their own inheritance in the hope of winning a greater." That description, written more than a thousand years ago, captures something essential about a group that began as Viking raiders on the coasts of northern France and ended up reshaping the medieval world from England to Sicily, from the Iberian Peninsula to the Levant.

  Their origin story starts with a single treaty. In 911, a Scandinavian Viking leader named Rollo agreed to swear fealty to King Charles III of West Francia following the siege of Chartres. In exchange, Rollo and his men received coastal lands along the English Channel. What had been a raiding culture became a ruling one. Within a generation, the Norse elite abandoned Old Norse for the local Gallo-Romance tongue. They converted to Christianity. They built castles and cathedrals and legal codes. And then, driven by limited inheritance prospects at home, young Norman knights fanned outward across the medieval world.

  This is the story of how a people forged from Viking settlers and West Frankish locals became one of the most consequential forces of the Middle Ages, and why their influence can still be heard in the languages and laws of England, Ireland, Sicily, and the Channel Islands today.

• 2. The Making of Normandy

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  Rollo's settlement in 911 was not built on empty land. Before his arrival, the populations of the region that would become Normandy did not differ markedly from neighboring Picardy or the Ile-de-France. Earlier Viking settlers had begun arriving in the 880s, clustering in colonies around the low Seine valley and the Cotentin Peninsula, separated by stretches where the native population remained largely untouched by Norse migration.

  The treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte between King Charles III, known as Charles the Simple, and Rollo formalized what had been a chaotic situation. Charles was born around 879 and ruled from 893 to 929. Rollo, also known as Gaange Rolf, was born around 846 and died around 929. The deal gave the Norse settlers French coastal territory in exchange for protection against further Viking incursions and a promise from Rollo not to invade further Frankish lands. Robert I of France, brother of Odo of Paris who had defended Paris against Viking raiders from 885 to 886, stood as godfather during Rollo's baptism. Rollo became the first Duke of Normandy and Count of Rouen.

  Rollo's contingents were a diverse lot. They included Danes, Norwegians, Norse-Gaels, Orkney Vikings, possibly Swedes, and Anglo-Danes from the English Danelaw. Old Norse names like Hrolff and Ansteinn were common at first, but were quickly Latinized or replaced by Christian names. The warrior ethos, however, stayed. Within a generation the Norman elite had adopted the Gallo-Romance language that would evolve into Norman French, while retaining what Malaterra called a fervour for adventures that would carry their descendants from Normandy to the farthest corners of the medieval world.

  The duchy itself reproduced the old Roman administrative structure of Gallia Lugdunensis II, and under Richard I of Normandy, known by the byname Richard sans Peur or "Richard the Fearless," it was forged into a cohesive principality. As aristocratic families multiplied and inheritance opportunities narrowed, Normandy became a major source of ambitious young knights with no land at home and every reason to look elsewhere.

• 3. Conquest of England

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  On the 14th of October 1066, William the Conqueror gained a decisive victory at the Battle of Hastings, an event recorded on the Bayeux Tapestry. The conquest was not a bolt from nowhere. Normans had been in contact with England for decades before that day.

  The ties began through marriage. Emma, sister of Duke Richard II of Normandy, married King Ethelred II of England. When Sweyn Forkbeard forced Ethelred from his throne in 1013, the king fled to Normandy and stayed until 1016. His sons by Emma remained in Normandy even longer, under Cnut the Great's rule. When Edward the Confessor finally returned from his father's Norman refuge in 1041, invited back by his half-brother Harthacnut, he brought a Norman-educated outlook with him. He appointed Robert of Jumieges Archbishop of Canterbury and made Ralph the Timid Earl of Hereford, seeding the English court with Norman influence before the conquest ever happened.

  After Hastings, the invading Normans and their descendants largely replaced the Anglo-Saxons as the ruling class. The nobility of England held lands on both sides of the Channel, and the early Norman kings, as Dukes of Normandy, owed homage to the King of France for their continental holdings. In England, locals often referred to the Normans simply as Franci.

  Over time, the two cultures merged. The historian Marjorie Chibnall noted that writers still referred to Normans and English but that the terms no longer meant the same as in the immediate aftermath of 1066. The Anglo-Norman language eventually absorbed into Old English, contributing alongside Norse and Latin to the development of Middle English, which in turn evolved into Modern English. The legal revolution was equally durable: the Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, formalized land ownership and feudal obligations in England, creating a framework for resolving property disputes that the Normans had imported from their duchy.

  In 1204, Philip II of France seized mainland Normandy by force, and by the Treaty of Paris of 1259 the English sovereign ceded his claim to the duchy, save for the Channel Islands. Those islands, the Bailiwick of Guernsey and the Bailiwick of Jersey, are considered the last official remnants of the Duchy of Normandy and remain self-governing Crown Dependencies outside the United Kingdom to this day.

• 4. Italy and Sicily

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  Norman pilgrims returning from Jerusalem in 999, according to Amatus of Montecassino, called in at the port of Salerno when a Muslim attack occurred. They fought so valiantly that Prince Guaimar III begged them to stay. They declined but offered to spread word of his need back home. That casual encounter seeded one of the most improbable Norman conquests.

  By 1017 at the latest, opportunistic bands of Normans had entered southern Italy as warriors. The two most prominent Norman families in the Mediterranean were the descendants of Tancred of Hauteville and the Drengot family. A group of Normans from the Drengot family fought the Byzantines in Apulia under Melus of Bari, a Lombard nobleman who persuaded them to return with reinforcements to throw off Byzantine rule. Rainulf Drengot received the county of Aversa from Duke Sergius IV of Naples in 1030, and the Hauteville family's elected leader, William Iron Arm, received the title of count from Prince Guaimar IV of Salerno at his capital of Melfi. Emperor Henry III legally ennobled the Hauteville leader Drogo in 1047 with the title "Duke and Master of Italy and Count of the Normans of all Apulia and Calabria."

  From those bases the Normans captured Sicily and Malta from Muslim forces under Robert Guiscard, a Hauteville, and his younger brother Roger the Great Count. Roger's son, Roger II of Sicily, was crowned king in 1130 by Antipope Anacletus II, exactly one century after Rainulf had been made count. The Kingdom of Sicily lasted until 1194, when it passed to the House of Hohenstaufen through marriage.

  The Norman kingdom of Sicily was unlike anything else in medieval Europe. It combined the administrative machinery of the Byzantines, Arabs, and Lombards with Norman feudal law. Muslims, Jews, and Christians of both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox rites served in a meritocratic bureaucracy under Norman rulers. The great geographical treatise known as the Tabula Rogeriana, written by the scholar al-Idrisi and titled Kitab Rudjdjar, or "The Book of Roger," was produced for King Roger II. William Iron Arm's citadel at Squillace and Roger II's Cappella Palatina at Palermo remain as architectural evidence of that singular civilization.

• 5. Crusades and the Near East

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  Bohemond of Taranto and his nephew Tancred joined Crusaders at the siege of Amalfi in 1096, bringing an army of Italo-Normans. Bohemond became the de facto leader of the First Crusade during its march through Asia Minor. After the successful siege of Antioch in 1097, he began carving out an independent principality around that city. Tancred worked for the expansion of the Crusader kingdom in Transjordan and the region of Galilee.

  Norman military involvement in the Near East had deeper roots than the First Crusade alone. Norman mercenaries had been fighting in Byzantine service since at least the 1050s, when Herve served as a Byzantine general. They were based as far away as Trebizond and Georgia, under the Byzantine duke of Antioch, Isaac Komnenos. In the 1060s, Robert Crispin led the Normans of Edessa against the Turks. Roussel de Bailleul even attempted to carve out his own independent state in Asia Minor in 1073 with local support, but was stopped in 1075 by the Byzantine general and future emperor Alexius Komnenos.

  From 1073 to 1074, fully 8,000 of the 20,000 troops serving the Armenian general Philaretus Brachamius were Normans, formerly of Oursel, led by a commander named Raimbaud. They gave their ethnicity to the name of their castle: Afranji, meaning "Franks." Norman families even entered the Byzantine Greek aristocracy during the Comnenian Restoration. The Raoulii were descended from an Italo-Norman named Raoul, and the Petraliphae from a Pierre d'Aulps.

  Robert Guiscard extended Norman reach into the Balkans as well. In 1081 he landed an army of 30,000 men in 300 ships on the southern shores of Albania, capturing Valona, Kanina, and Butrint before pushing toward Dyrrachium. The Normans held Dyrrachium until February 1082, when it was betrayed by Venetian and Amalfitan merchants who had settled there. They lost the city again in 1085 after Robert's death. A few years after the First Crusade, in 1107, Bohemond returned with a new army, besieging Dyrrachium with what contemporaries called the most sophisticated military equipment of the time, but ultimately signed a peace treaty in the city of Deabolis.

• 6. Ireland, Scotland, and Wales

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  The Normans landed at Bannow Bay in 1169 and had a profound effect on Irish culture from the moment of arrival. They settled mostly in the eastern region later known as the Pale, building Trim Castle and Dublin Castle among many others. Over time, the originally distinct Norman settlers were absorbed so thoroughly into Irish culture that the phrase attributed to this process holds they became "more Irish than the Irish themselves." Norman surnames survived the assimilation: French, Roche, Devereux, D'Arcy, and Lacy are particularly common in the southeast of Ireland, especially in the southern part of County Wexford where the earliest Norman settlements stood. Names beginning with Fitz-, from the Norman for "son," signal Norman ancestry and include Fitzgerald, FitzGibbons, and Fitzmaurice. Families bearing surnames such as Barry (de Barra) and De Burca (Burke) are also of Norman extraction.

  In Scotland, the process was more deliberate. King David I of Scotland, whose elder brother Alexander I had married Sybilla of Normandy, was instrumental in introducing Normans and Norman culture to the kingdom. Scholars call this process the Davidian Revolution. David had spent time at the court of Henry I of England and needed Norman allies to wrestle the kingdom from his nephew Mael Coluim mac Alaxandair. The Norman-derived feudal system was applied in varying degrees across most of Scotland, and Scottish families including Bruce, Gray, Ramsay, Fraser, Rose, Ogilvie, Montgomery, Sinclair, Douglas, and Gordon, along with the later royal House of Stewart, can all be traced to Norman ancestry.

  In Wales, Edward the Confessor had already placed the Norman Ralph as Earl of Hereford to defend the Marches before the conquest of England. After 1066, William's most trusted barons took full control of the Marches, among them Bernard de Neufmarche, Robert Fitzhamon, Roger of Montgomery in Shropshire, and Hugh Lupus in Cheshire. Their arrival introduced the word baron, in Welsh barwn, into the Welsh language, one of the earliest and most durable linguistic marks the Normans left on the British Isles.

• 7. Law, Language, and the Arts

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  Norman customary law developed between the 10th and 13th centuries and was transcribed in two Latin customaries by judges for practical court use. The Tres ancien coutumier was composed between 1200 and 1245, and the Grand coutumier de Normandie between 1235 and 1245. That legal tradition survives today in the legal systems of Jersey and Guernsey in the Channel Islands.

  Norman law during the ducal period, roughly 1000 to 1144, blended local Frankish traditions, Carolingian legal codes, and Viking customs. The Norse elements emphasized community-based dispute resolution, honor, and reparation. The Carolingian contribution included written codes, administrative structure, and practices such as the use of oaths and ordeals. In England, the Normans replaced Anglo-Saxon landholding customs with a feudal system under which all land was held by the king and granted to nobles in exchange for military service.

  The Norman language itself traces its roots to Old Norse speakers gradually adopting the local Gallo-Romance dialect of Old French while contributing some Norse elements. The poet Wace, born on the island of Jersey and raised in mainland Normandy, represents the literary tradition that grew from this fusion. Old Norman also served as an important language of the Principality of Antioch during the Crusader period.

  In music, Fecamp Abbey and Saint-Evroul Abbey became centers of production and education in the 11th century. At Fecamp, under two Italian abbots, William of Volpiano and John of Ravenna, the system of denoting musical notes by letters was developed and taught. That system remains the most common form of pitch representation in English- and German-speaking countries. The staff, around which neumes were oriented, was also first developed and taught at Fecamp in the 11th century.

  In the visual arts, the most celebrated Norman work is the Bayeux Tapestry, which is not actually a tapestry but a work of embroidery. It was commissioned by Odo, the Bishop of Bayeux and first Earl of Kent, and executed by craftspeople from Kent versed in Nordic traditions. The French Wars of Religion in the 16th century and the French Revolution in the 18th destroyed much of the Norman artistic and architectural heritage that had accumulated over those centuries, making survivors like the Cappella Palatina at Palermo and the Norman castles of Sicily all the more significant as records of what the Normans built.