The Normans in European History/Chapter 6

VI

NORMAN LIFE AND CULTURE

IN turning from the general course of Norman history in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to examine Norman life and culture in this period, we encounter the difficulties inherent in any attempt to cut a cross-section of human society in an age which was not conscious of being a society and has left us for the description of itself only raw materials of a fragmentary and uneven sort. The chroniclers confine themselves almost entirely to external events, the charters deal chiefly with land and boundaries and rights over the land, much of the literature is theological commentary or rhetorical commonplace which reflects nothing of the age in which it was written; what is lacking in all is the concrete detail of daily life from which alone social and economic conditions and even government itself can be understood. And when we have pieced together as best we may some notions of Normandy in this period, our knowledge of the parallel conditions in other regions is often so inadequate that we cannot be certain how far our results are characteristic of Normandy, how far typical of the time, or, because of the scattered nature of our material, how far they may be merely individual and isolated. Much of the social history of the Middle Ages is still unwritten; for lack of evidence much can never be written. Until the available sources have been more fully explored, nothing beyond a provisional sketch can be attempted.

Fortunately for our purposes, the fundamental structure of society in the earlier Middle Ages was exceedingly simple. There were three classes, those who fought, those who labored, and those who prayed, corresponding respectively to the nobles, the peasants, and the clergy. Created by the simple needs of the feudal age, this primitive division of labor was even declared an institution of divine origin and necessary to the harmonious life of man. It seemed right and natural that the nobles should defend the country and maintain order, the clergy lead men to salvation, the peasants support by their labor these two beneficent classes, as well as themselves. As an ideal of social organization, this system of classes is open to obvious objections, not the least of which is the persistent killing and plundering of the peasants by the class whose function it was to protect and defend them; but as a description of actual conditions, it expresses very well the facts of the case.

With respect to the fighting class, it is characteristic of the Norman habit of order and organization that the military service of the nobles was early defined with more system and exactness in Normandy than in the neighboring countries of northern France. We have already seen that at a period well before 1066 the amount of service due from the great lords to the duke had been fixed in rough units of five or multiples of five, and these again subdivided among their vassals and attached to specific pieces of land which were hence called knights' fees, an arrangement which the Normans carried to England and probably to Sicily as well. By 1172, when a comprehensive list was first drawn up, subinfeudation had produced about 1500 knights' fees in Normandy, the largest holders being the bishop of Bayeux and the earl of Leicester with 120, the count of Ponthieu with 111, and Earl Giffard with 103. From these the class of fully armed knights reached down to the holders of small fractions of a knight's fee, all however serving with the full armor which in course of time came to mark them off as nobles from the vavassors, or free soldiers, whose equipment was less complete and whose service tended to take the form of castle guard and similar duties. Quite early also custom had defined other characteristic features of the feudal service in Normandy, such as the period of forty days, the limitation of the obligation to the frontiers of the duchy, and the incidents of wardship and marriage, deductions from feudal principles which were here carried to their logical conclusions.

The symbol of the authority of the military class, the outward and visible sign of feudalism, was the castle, where the lord resided and from which he exercised his authority over his fief. Originating in the period of anarchy which accompanied the dissolution of the Prankish empire and the invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries, the castle spread over northern France as feudalism spread, and was introduced into England by the Normans when they here established their feudal state. The earliest castles of Normandy and of England were not, however, the massive stone donjons which Freeman peopled with devils and evil men. With some exceptions, of which the Tower of London is the most noteworthy, these 'hateful structures' were built of wood and surrounded by a stockade, surmounting an artificial mound, or motte, thrown up from the deep moat at its base. A great drawbridge, cleated so that horses should not slip on the steep incline, led from the farther side of the moat directly to the second story of the tower, of which the ground floor, used only for stores and the custody of prisoners, had no entrance from without. Fortresses of this type have naturally left nothing behind them save the outlines of their mounds and moats, but they are well known from contemporary descriptions and are clearly discernible in the Bayeux Tapestry, which gives rude pictures of the strongholds of Dol, Rennes, Dinan, and Bayeux, and shows a stockaded mound in actual process of construction at Hastings. The heavy timbers of these lofty block-houses offered stout resistance to battering rams, but they were always in great danger from fire, and wood was replaced by stone in the course of the twelfth century, to which belong the 'stern square towers' which still survive in Normandy and England, as well as the earliest examples of the more defensible round keeps and square keeps flanked with round towers. Whether of wood or stone, the donjon was a stern place, built for strength rather than for comfort, and bending the life of those within it to the imperious necessities of defence. Space was at a premium, windows were few and small,—sometimes only a single window and a single room to each story,—trap-doors and ladders often did the work of stairways, and from the wooden castles fires were usually excluded. Nevertheless the donjons were not, as was once supposed, mere "towers of refuge used only in time of war," but "were the permanent residences of the nobles of the eleventh and twelfth centuries."^[1] Only toward the close of this period do the outer buildings develop, so as to give something of the room and convenience demanded by the rising standard of comfort; only in the thirteenth century do the more spacious castles without keeps begin to make their appearance.

It is significant of the progress made by the ducal authority in Normandy that by the time of William the Conqueror definite restrictions had been placed upon the creation of these strongholds of local power and resistance. Except with the duke's license no one could build a castle, or erect a fortress on a rock or an island, or even dig a fosse in the open country so deep that the earth could not be thrown out from the bottom without artificial aid, while palisades were required to be built in a simple line and without alures or special works of defence. When the duke desired, he might also place garrisons in his barons' castles and demand hostages for their loyalty. These principles, which were applied also in England, were of course often difficult to enforce, and they were supplemented in the twelfth century by the development of a great system of ducal castles, secured partly by enlarging and strengthening the older fortresses of Rouen, Caen, Falaise, and Argentan, partly, as we have already seen, by new strongholds on the frontiers. Powicke has shown us how these castles became the chief administrative centres in the reigns of Henry II and Richard, and how the royal letters and accounts reveal their many-sided activity in the busy days of peace as well as in the more strenuous times of war.^[2] Under châtelains who were royal officers rather than feudal vassals, with garrisons of mercenaries and retinues of knights and Serjeants, clerks and chaplains and personal servants, they foreshadow the ultimate replacement of baronial donjons by a royal bureaucracy.

It is doubtless because of the dominant position of the duke that Normandy is less rich than some other parts of France in picturesque types of feudal lords or vivid episodes of feudal conflicts. When they go beyond the affairs of the church, the Norman chroniclers are prone to concentrate their attention upon the deeds of the ducal house, and their accounts of the great vassals tend to be dry and genealogical. The chief exception is Ordericus Vitalis, whose theme and geographical position lead him to treat at length the long anarchy under Robert Curthose and the incessant conflicts of the great lords his neighbors on the southern border, the houses of Bellême, Grentemaisnil, Conches, and Breteuil. In the main it is a dreary tale of surprises and sieges, of treachery and captivity and sudden death, relieved from time to time by brighter episodes—the lady Isabel of Conches sitting in the great hall as the young men of the castle tell their dreams; the daily battle for bread around the oven at the siege of Courcy; the table spread and the pots seething on the coals for the lord and lady of Saint-Céneri who never came back; the man of Saint-Évroul who, by the saint's aid, walks unharmed out of custody at Domfront; the marvellous vision of the army of knights and ladies in torment which appeared to the priest of Bonneval.

With these episodes of Norman feudalism it is interesting to compare the picture of Anglo-Norman society a hundred years later which we find in that unique piece of feudal biography, the History of William the Marshal. Companion to the Young King and witness of the final shame of Henry II, pilgrim to Jerusalem and Cologne, advanced to positions of trust under Richard and John, earl of Striguil and Pembroke and regent of England under Henry III, the Earl Marshal stood in close relations to the chief men and movements of his day. His biographer, however, does not let himself wander to tell of others' deeds, and while his work contains material of much importance for the general history of the time, its chief value lies in its reflection of the life of the age and its faithful portrait of the man himself—soldier of fortune, gentleman-adventurer if you will, but always loyal, honorable, straightforward, and true, by the standards of his time a man without fear and without reproach. Brought up in the Norman castle of Tancarville, the Marshal, like the Young King his master, became passionately addicted to tournaments, par éminence the knightly sport of the Middle Ages, which made hunting and other pastimes seem tame and furnished the best preparation for real war, since, as an English chronicler tells us, in order to shine in war a knight "must have seen his own blood flow, have had his jaw crack under the blow of his adversary, have been dashed to the earth with such force as to feel the weight of his foe, and unhorsed twenty times he must twenty times have retrieved his failures, more set than ever on the combat." Unknown to England before the reign of Richard, these manly sports flourished most of all in France, the country of chivalry and feats of arms, and for several years we follow the Marshal from combat to combat through Normandy and Maine, Champagne and the Ile-de-France, so that his renown spread from Poitou to the Rhine. At one period in his life he tourneyed every fortnight. The tournaments of his day, however, were not the elegant and fashionable affairs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which the word is apt to call to our minds, assemblages of beauty as well as of prowess, held in special enclosures before crowded galleries, with elaborate rules respecting armor and weapons and the conditions of conflict. On the contrary, they were fought like battles, in the open, with all the arms and methods of war and all its manæuvres and ferocity of attack; indeed they differed from war mainly in being voluntary and limited to a single day. After one series of such thunderous encounters the Marshal was found in a smithy, his head on the anvil and the smith working with hammer and pincers to remove his battered helmet. In a great tournament at Lagni three thousand knights are said to have been engaged, of which the Young King furnished eighty. Knights fought for honor and fame and for sheer joy of combat; they fought also, we must remember, for the horses and armor and ransoms of the captives. In a Norman tournament the Marshal captured ten knights and twelve horses. Between Pentecost and Lent of one year their clerks calculated that he and his companion had taken prisoners three hundred knights, without counting horses and harness; yet he seems to have preserved the golden mean between the careless largesse of the Young King and the merely mercenary motives of the large number who frequented tournaments for the sake of gain.

Concerning the great agricultural class upon which the whole social system rested, our information is of a scattered and uneven sort. The man with the hoe did not interest the mediæval chronicler, and he did not gain a voice of his own in the period which we have under review. The annals of the time are indeed careful to record the drouths and floods, the seasons of plague, pestilence, and famine of which Normandy seems to have had its share, but they tell us nothing of the effects of these evils upon the class which they most directly concerned; while the charters, leases, and manorial records from which our knowledge of the peasants must be built up give us in this period isolated and unrelated facts. Moreover our information is confined almost entirely to the lands of churches and monasteries, where agriculture was likely to be more progressive because of their closer relations to the world outside. Normandy was a fertile country, and, so far as we can judge, its agricultural population fared well as compared with that of other regions. Certainly there is here, after the eleventh century, no trace of serfdom or the freeing of serfs, and the free position of its farming class distinguished the duchy from most of the lands of northern France. In other respects it is hard to discern important differences between the Norman peasants and those of other regions. After the suppression of an insurrection at the beginning of this century, we do not hear of any general rising of the Norman peasants, parallel to those risings which make a sad and futile chapter in the annals of many parts of Europe in the Middle Ages. It was, however, a local revolt of the thirteenth century on the lands of the monks of Mont-Saint-Michel that brought out one of the best descriptions of life on a Norman manor, the Conte des Vilains de Verson,^[3] and, while it is a bit late for our purpose, it is confirmed by documentary evidence, and may well serve as an illustration of the obligations of the agricultural class:—

In June the peasants must cut and pile the hay and carry it to the manor house. In August they must reap and carry in the convent's grain; their own grain lies exposed to wind and rain while they hunt out the assessor of the champart and carry his share to his barn. On the Nativity of the Virgin the villain owes the pork-due, one pig in eight; at St. Denis' day the cens; at Christmas the fowl, fine and good, and thereafter the grain-due of two sétiers of barley and three quarters of wheat; on Palm Sunday the sheep-due; at Easter he must plow, sow and harrow. When there is building the tenant must bring stone and serve the masons; he must also haul the convent's wood for two deniers a day. If he sells his land, he owes the lord a thirteenth of its value; if he marries his daughter outside the seigniory, he pays a fine. He must grind his grain at the seigniorial mill and bake his bread at the seigniorial oven, where the customary charges do not satisfy the attendants, who grumble and threaten to leave his bread unbaked.

So long as mediæval society remained almost entirely agricultural there was no need of adapting its organization to other classes than those which have just been described. In course of time, however, the growth of industry and commerce, very slow before the eleventh century, but rapid and constant in the period during and after the Crusades, as may be seen by the large number of markets and fairs in Normandy, created a new class of dwellers in towns who demanded recognition of their peculiar character and status. By reason of the nature of their occupations they sought release from the seigniorial system, with its forced labor, its frequent payments, and its vexatious restrictions upon freedom of movement and freedom of buying and selling; and as their economic needs drew them together into industrial and commercial centres of population, they developed a collective feeling and demanded collective treatment. They asked, not, as has sometimes been said, for the overthrow of the feudal system, but for a place within it which should recognize their peculiar economic and political interests; and the result of their efforts, when fully successful, was to form what has been called a collective seigniory, standing as a body in the relation of vassal to lord or king, and owing the obligations of homage, fealty, and communal military service. But while not anti-feudal in theory, this movement was often anti-feudal in practice, so far at least as the rights and privileges of the immediate overlord were concerned, and it led to friction and often to armed contests with bishop, baron, or king. In Normandy, significantly, we find none of those communal revolts which meet us throughout the north of France and even as near as LeMans; the towns are always subject to the ultimate authority of the duke, whose domanial rights were considerable even in the episcopal cities and who favored those forms of urban development which strengthened the military resources of the duchy. The early history of the Norman towns is one of the most obscure chapters in Norman history, but it indicates a variety of influences which do not fit into any one of the many theories of municipal origins which have been the subject of so much learned controversy. Some towns were originally fortified places, like the baronial stronghold of Breteuil or Henry I's fortresses of Verneuil, Nonancourt, and Pontorson on the southern border. Some took advantage of the protection of a monastery, as in the case of Fécamp or the bourgs of the abbot and abbess of Caen. The great ports, like Barfleur and Dieppe, obviously owed their importance to trade, and it was trade which created the prosperity of the chief towns of the duchy, Rouen and Caen. However developed, the Norman municipal type exerted no small influence upon urban organization: the laws of Breteuil became the model for Norman foundations on the Welsh border and in Ireland; the Établissements of Rouen were copied in the principal towns of western France,—Tours and Poitiers, Angoulême and La Rochelle, even to Gascon Bayonne on the Spanish frontier.

If we take as an illustration of this development the principal Norman town, Rouen, we find no evidence regarding its institutions before the twelfth century, while its organization as a commune dates from the reign of Henry II and probably from the year 1171. The fundamental law, or Établissements, which Rouen then received and which became the model for communal government elsewhere in Normandy, constitutes a body of one hundred peers who meet once a fortnight for judicial and other business and who choose from their number each year the twelve échevins, or magistrates, and the twelve councillors who sit with the échevins to form the council of jurés. Besides these boards, which are typical of mediæval town constitutions, the peers also nominate three candidates for the office of mayor, but the choice among these is made by the king, and the greater authority of the mayor in this system is evidently designed to secure more effective royal control. It is the mayor who leads the communal militia, receives the revenues, supervises the execution of sentences, and presides over all meetings of magistrates and boards. The administration of justice through its own magistrates is perhaps the most valued privilege of the commune, but the gravest crimes are reserved for the cognizance of royal officers, and the presence of the king or a session of his assize is sufficient to suspend all communal powers of justice. In a state like the Norman the limits of municipal self-government are clear.

The importance of Rouen as a commercial and industrial centre was not, however, dependent upon its form of government. Its ancient gild of cordwainers had been recognized by Henry I and Stephen, its trading privileges were confirmed in one of the earliest charters of Henry II. Save for a single ship yearly from Cherbourg, the merchants of Rouen had a monopoly of trade with Ireland; in England they could go through all the markets of the land; in London they were quit of all payments save for wine and great fish and had exclusive rights in their special wharf of Dowgate. Later in Henry's reign they were even freed of all dues throughout his dominions. Only a citizen might take a shipload of merchandise past Rouen or bring wine to a cellar in the town. Besides the great trade in wine we hear of dealings in leather, cloth, grain, and especially salt and salt fish. Under Henry II the ducal rights over the town were worth annually more than 3,000 livres. Apart from their share in this general prosperity, the citizens had special exemptions in the matter of duties and tolls on goods which they brought in, while the freedom from feudal restraints which characterized all burgage tenures put a premium upon their holding of property. Besides the privileged areas belonging to the cathedral and the neighboring abbeys, a foothold in the city was valued by others: the bishop of Bayeux had a town house; the abbot of Caen prized a cellar and an exemption from wine-dues which he owed to the generosity of William the Conqueror; the clerks and chaplains of the king's household took advantage of their opportunities to acquire rents and houses at Rouen, as well as at London and Winchester.

Unfortunately no one has left us in this period a description the busy life of Rouen such as Fitz Stephen has given of contemporary London, and it is only with the imagination that we can bring before our eyes the ships at their wharves with their bales of marten-skins from Ireland and casks of wine from Burgundy and the south, the fullers and dyers, millers and tanners plying their trades along the Eau de Robec, the burgesses trafficking in the streets and the cathedral close, the royal clerks and serjeants hastening on their master's business. Still more to be regretted is the disappearance of those material remains of its ancient splendor which until the last century retained the form and flavor, if not the actual wood and stone, of the mediæval city. To-day scarcely anything survives above ground of the Rouen of the dukes—of its walls and gates, destroyed by Philip Augustus, of the castle by the river, with the tower from which Henry I threw the traitor Conan and the great hall and rooms renewed by his grandson, of the stone bridge of the Empress Matilda, of the royal park and palace across the Seine at Quevilly. Only the great St. Romain's tower of the cathedral and an early bit of the abbey-church of Saint-Ouen still body forth the unbroken continuity of the Norman past.

The Norman church throughout the period of our study stands in the closest relation to the general conditions of Norman society. The monasteries and churches of the region had been almost completely wiped out by the northern invasions, and while the Northmen soon adopted the religion of their new neighbors, it was many years before ecclesiastical life and discipline again reached the level of the other dioceses of France. As late as the year 1001 a Burgundian monk reported that there was hardly a priest in Normandy who could read the lessons or say his psalms correctly. The prelates led the life of the great feudal families of which they were members, distributing the property of the church as fiefs to their friends or gifts to their numerous progeny; and the lower clergy, for the most part married, sought to pass on their benefices to their children. In the course of the eleventh century, however, more canonical standards began to prevail, largely through the influence of the monks of Cluny. Older foundations like Fécamp were renewed, and the Norman lords soon began to vie with one another in the endowment of new monastic establishments. To the half-century which preceded the Conquest of England we can trace the beginnings of twenty important monasteries and six nunneries, not counting priories and smaller foundations, a movement for which contemporaries could find no parallel short of the palmy days of monasticism in Roman Egypt. In course of time the monastic ideal reacted upon the secular clergy, and the monastic schools raised the level of learning throughout the duchy, until provincial councils succeeded in establishing the celibacy of the priesthood and the stricter discipline of Rome. In all this movement for reform the dukes took a leading part, inviting the reformers to their courts, aiding in the foundation and restoration of cloisters, and lending their strong support to the efforts for moral improvement in the secular clergy. They also asserted their supremacy over the Norman church, presiding in its councils, revising the judgments of its courts, appointing and investing its bishops and abbots. Moreover, while ready to coöperate with the moral ideas of the Papacy, they resisted all attempts at papal interference in Norman affairs. When Alexander II sought to restore an abbot whom William the Conqueror had deposed, the duke replied that he would gladly receive papal legates in matters of faith and doctrine, but would hang to the tallest oak of the nearest forest any monk who dared to resist his authority in his own land. William's resistance was equally firm in the case of Gregory VII, who failed completely in his efforts at direct action in William's dominions. Nowhere on the Continent, concludes Böhmer,^[4] was there at this time a country where the prince and his bishops were so energetic in the suppression of simony and violations of clerical vows; nowhere was the church so completely subject to the secular government.

The most prominent figure in the Norman church of the eleventh century, Odo, for nearly fifty years bishop of Bayeux, was far from fulfilling the stricter ideal of a prelate's life. Half-brother of the Conqueror through their mother Arlette, he received the bishopric as a family gift at the tender age of fourteen and became thereby one of the greatest princes of Normandy. His hundred and twenty knights' fees furnished him a body of powerful vassals; his demesne gave him manors and forests for the support of his household, fuel for his fires and reeds and rushes for his hall, rents and tithes at Caen and the monopoly of the mill at Bayeux, tolls and fines and market rights which produced a considerable income in ready money. For the invasion of England he is said to have offered a hundred ships, and he took an active part in the battle of Hastings, swinging a huge mace in place of spear and sword, since the shedding of blood was forbidden to an ecclesiastic. In the distribution which followed, Odo received large estates in the southeast, as well as the earldom of Kent and the custody of Dover Castle, and he seems to have ruled his lands with a heavy hand both as earl and as regent in William's absence. It even became his ambition to succeed the mighty Hildebrand as Pope, and he had already spent considerable sums at Rome when William, accusing him of tyranny and oppression, put him in prison, answering his assertion of ecclesiastical privilege with the statement that he imprisoned, not the bishop of Bayeux, but the earl of Kent. There he languished for five years till William on his death-bed, against his better judgment, released him for ten years more of rule in Normandy. Yet, though Odo's eulogists admit that he was given overmuch to worldly ambition, the lusts of the flesh and the pride of life, they tell us of his vigorous defence of his clergy by arms as well as by eloquence, of the young men of promise whom he supported in the schools of Lorraine and other centres of foreign learning, of the journey to Jerusalem on which he met his death, of the great cathedral which he built in honor of the Mother of God and adorned with gold and silver and probably with the very Bayeux Tapestry which is the chief surviving monument of his magnificence.

With the twelfth century the type changes. To the monastic historian a bishop like Philip d'Harcourt, likewise of the see of Bayeux, may appear wise in the wisdom of this world which is foolishness with God,^[5] but his wisdom shows itself in frequent journeys to Rome and persistent litigation in the duke's courts, not in battles and sieges, and he owes his appointment to his influence as Stephen's chancellor and not to blood relationship. Arnulf of Lisieux is another royal officer, versatile, insinuating, shifty, anything but truthful if we may believe his fellow-bishops, but proud of his Latin style and his knowledge of law and prodigal of letters to the Pope. Their contemporaries continue to owe their promotion to service as chaplains or chancellors to the king, but they also have an eye toward Rome and must be canonists as well as secular officials. The contrast between Becket the king's chancellor and Becket the archbishop of Canterbury is symptomatic of the new age, although the conflict to which it led affected Normandy but indirectly. Relations with the lay power which once rested on local Norman custom come to be formulated in the sharper terms of the canon law of the universal church; appeals to Rome and instructions from Rome increase rapidly in volume and importance; the Norman clergy attend assemblies of the clergy of neighboring lands; and by the end of the Plantagenet period the Norman church is ready to be absorbed into the church of France.

Respecting the daily life and conversation of the cathedral and parish clergy the twelfth century is silent, save for the condemnations of particular evils in the councils of the province. From the middle of the thirteenth century, however, Normandy furnishes us, in the diary of visitations kept by the archbishop of Rouen, Eudes Rigaud, a picture of manners and morals which for authenticity and fulness of detail has probably no parallel in mediæval Europe; and one is tempted to carry back two or three generations his description of the canons of Rouen wandering about the cathedral and chatting with women during service, the nuns of Saint-Sauveur with their pet dogs and squirrels, and those of other convents celebrating the festival of the Innocents with dance and song and unseemly mirth, the monks of Bocherville without a Bible among them to read. It is hard to believe that there was anything new in the disorders which this upright archbishop chronicles place by place and year by year—ignorance, drunkenness, and incontinence among the parish and cathedral clergy, lax discipline, loose administration, and neglect of learning in the monasteries and nunneries. What was old in the time of Rabelais was probably old in the thirteenth century, and there is abundant evidence of abuses in the mediæval church, in Normandy and elsewhere. What we want most to know is how general these abuses were and how many there were to counteract them like Chaucer's 'povre persoun of a toun,' who taught "Cristes lore and his apostles twelve," but first "folwed it himselve." Data of this sort are always lacking in sufficient amount for any moral statistics, and they must be supplemented and interpreted by the evidence which has reached us of popular piety and devotion. Such are the processions of priest and people throughout the diocese to the cathedrals at Whitsuntide, the miraculous cures of disease by Our Lady of Coutances, and the extraordinary burst of contrition, religious enthusiasm, and zeal for good works which broke forth at the building of the spires of Chartres in 1145 and spread throughout the length and breadth of Normandy. Forming associations of those who confessed their sins, received penance, and reconciled themselves with their enemies, the faithful harnessed themselves to carts filled with stone, timber, food, and whatever might help the churches which they sought to serve, and drew them long miles until they seemed to fulfill the saying of the prophet, "the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels." The abbot of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives, to whom we owe our fullest account of the movement, tells us of these processions:^[6]

When they halt on the road, nothing is heard but the confession of sins and pure and suppliant prayer to God to obtain pardon. At the voice of the priests preaching peace hatred is forgotten, discord thrown aside, debts are remitted, the unity of hearts is established. But if any one is so far advanced in evil as to be unwilling to pardon an offender or obey the pious admonition of the priest, his offering is instantly thrown from the wagon as impure, and he himself is ignominiously and shamefully excluded from the society of the holy. There, as a result of the prayers of the faithful, one may see the sick and infirm rise whole from their wagons, the dumb open their mouths to the praise of God, the possessed recover a sane mind. The priests who preside over each wagon are seen exhorting all to repentance, confession, lamentations, and the resolution of a better life, while old and young and even little children, prostrate on the ground, call on the Mother of God and utter to her, from the depth of their hearts, sobs and sighs, with words of confession and praise. . . . After the faithful resume their march to the sound of trumpets and the display of banners, the journey is so easy that no obstacle can retard it. . . . When they have reached the church, they arrange the wagons about it like a spiritual camp, and during the whole of the following night the army of the Lord keeps watch with psalms and canticles, tapers and lamps are lighted on each wagon, and the relics of the saints are brought for the relief of the sick and the weak, for whom priests and people in procession implore the clemency of the Lord and his Blessed Mother. If healing does not follow at once, they cast aside their garments, men and women alike, and drag themselves from altar to altar . . . begging the priests to scourge them for their sins.

At the close of the Angevin period there were in Normandy something like eighty monasteries and convents, not counting the numerous cells and priories, as, for example, the various dependencies of the great abbey of Marmoutier at Tours. These were chiefly Benedictine foundations, though the newer movements of the Cistercians, Premonstratensians, and Augustinians were well represented, the only distinctively Norman order, the Congregation of Savigny, having been early absorbed by the Cistercians. The oldest of these establishments were at the two extremes of the duchy, Mont-Saint-Michel at one end and Jumièges, Saint-Wandrille, Saint-Ouen and Fécamp at the other; but the distribution was speedily equalized, and the great abbeys of the centre, Bec and Caen and Saint-Évroul, were soon known throughout Europe. The conquest of England opened a new field for monastic influence: twenty Norman monasteries had received lands in England by the time of the Domesday survey, and the number was considerably greater when the holdings of alien priories were confiscated at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Mont-Saint-Michel, for example, had a priory in Cornwall as well as one at LeMans, and its lands in Maine, Brittany, and various parts of England did not allay its desire for more whenever opportunity offered. For a period of five years, from 1155 to 1159 inclusive, we have a record of the activity of its abbot, Robert of Torigni, in relation to the monastery's property, and a very instructive record it is. It takes him to England and the Channel Islands, to the king's assizes at Gavrai, Domfront, Caen, and Carentan, to the courts of the bishops of Avranches, Coutances, and Bayeux, and to that of the archbishop at Rouen; proving his rights, compromising, exchanging, purchasing, receiving by gift or royal charter; picking up here a bit of land, there a mill, a garden, a vineyard, a tithe, a church, to add to the lands and rents, mills and forests, markets and churches and feudal rights which he already possessed. There are also various examples of loans on mortgage, for the monasteries were the chief source of rural credit in this period, and as the land with its revenues passed at once into the possession of the mortgagee, the security was absolute, the annual return sure, and the chances of ultimate acquisition of the property considerable. With the resources of the monastery during his administration of thirty-two years Abbot Robert was able to increase the number of monks from forty to sixty, to enlarge the conventual buildings, in which he entertained the kings of England and of France, and to add a great façade to the abbey-church, a contribution to the massive pile of the Marvel which we are no longer privileged to behold. He also labored for the intellectual side of the monastery's life, restoring the library and enlarging it by a hundred and twenty volumes, and composing a variety of works on historical subjects which make him the chief authority for half a century of Norman history.

There is, however, not much concerning monasteries in Robert's chronicle, and even his special essay on the history of the Norman abbeys is confined to externals. Perhaps he was cumbered about much serving; more probably he saw nothing worthy of the historian's pen in the inner life of the institution. When the abbot had a new altar dedicated or renewed the reliquaries of St. Aubert and St. Lawrence, that was worth setting down, but the daily routine of observance was the same at Mont-Saint-Michel as in the other Benedictine foundations, and has remained substantially unchanged through the centuries of monastic history. At any rate no monkish Boswell has done for Normandy what Jocelin of Brakelonde did for contemporary England in that vivid picture of life at Bury St. Edmund's which Carlyle has made familiar in his Past and Present. A monk of Saint-Éyroul, it is true, did a much greater thing in the Historia Ecclesiastica of Ordericus Vitalis, but he was an historian, not a Boswell, and his experience of half a century of monastic life lies embedded deep in the five solid volumes of this wide-ranging work. One phase of the religious life of mediæval monasteries is admirably illustrated in Normandy, namely the mortuary rolls of the members and heads of religious houses. It early became the custom, not only to say prayers regularly for the departed members and benefactors of such a community, but to seek the suffrages of associated communities or of all the faithful. To that end an encyclical was prepared setting forth the virtues of the deceased and was carried by a special messenger from convent to convent, each establishment indicating the prayers which had there been said and adding the names of the brothers for whom prayers were solicited in return. The two most considerable documents of this sort which have come down to us are of Norman origin, the roll of Matilda, the first abbess of Holy Trinity at Caen, and that of Vitalis, founder of the Congregation of Savigny, which belongs to the year 1122 and is the oldest manuscript of this type extant in its original form, with all the quaint local varieties in execution. Each of these was carried throughout the greater part of England and of northern and central France, reaching in the first case two hundred and fifty-three different monasteries and churches, in the second two hundred and eight, and as the replies were often made at some length in prose or verse, they constitute a curious monument of the condition of culture in the places visited.

If the impulse toward religious reform in Normandy was of Burgundian origin, intellectual stimulus came chiefly from Italy. The two principal figures in the intellectual life of the duchy in the eleventh century, Lanfranc and Anselm, were Italians: Lanfranc distinguished for his mastery of law, Lombard, Roman, and canon, for the great school which he founded at Bec, and for his labors in the field of ecclesiastical statesmanship; Anselm his pupil and his successor as prior of Bec and as archbishop of Canterbury, remarkable as a teacher, still more remarkable as one of the foremost theologians of the Western Church. "Under the first six dukes," we are told, "there was hardly any one in Normandy who gave himself to liberal studies, and there was no master till God, who provides for all, sent Lanfranc to these shores." Teaching first at Avranches, Lanfranc established himself at Bec in 1042, and his school soon drew students from the remotest parts of France and sent them out in all directions to positions of honor and influence. Abbots like Gilbert Crispin of Westminster, bishops like St. Ives of Chartres, primates of Rouen and Canterbury, even a pope in the person of Alexander II, figure on the long honor-roll of Lanfranc's pupils at Bec. For an institution of such renown, however, we know singularly little concerning the actual course and methods of study at Bec, and its historian is compelled to fall back upon a general description of the trivium and quadrivium which made up the ordinary monastic curriculum. We do not even know whether Lanfranc actually taught the subject of law of which he was past master, though we can be sure that theology and philosophy had a large place under Anselm, and that the school must have felt the influence of the large part which its leaders took in the theological discussions of their time. An important form of activity in the monasteries of the period was the copying of manuscripts, a sure safeguard against that idleness which St. Benedict declared the enemy of the soul. Lanfranc sat up a good part of the night correcting the daily copies of the monks of Bec; the first abbot of Saint-Évroul had an edifying tale of an erring brother who had secured his salvation by voluntarily copying a holy book of such dimensions that the angels who produced it on his behalf at the judgment were able to check it off letter by letter against his sins and leave at the end a single letter in his favor! The monks of Saint-Évroul prided themselves on their Latin style, especially their Latin verse, and on their chants which were sung even in distant Calabria; yet the best example of their training, the historian Ordericus, freely admits the literary supremacy of Bec, "where almost every one seems to be a philosopher and even the unlearned have something to teach the frothy grammarians."

In the course of the twelfth century the leadership in learning passes from the regular to the secular clergy, and the monastic schools decline before the cathedral schools of Laon, Tours, Chartres, Orleans, and Paris, two of which, Paris and Orleans, soon break the bounds of the older curriculum and develop into universities. As the current of scholars sets toward these new centres, Normandy is left at one side; no longer a leader, its students must learn their theology and philosophy at Paris, their law at Orleans and Bologna, their medicine at Salerno and Montpellier. The principal Norman philosopher of the new age, William of Conches, the tutor of Henry II, is associated with Paris rather than with the schools of Normandy. Perhaps the most original work of the pioneer of the new science, the Questiones naturales of Adelard of Bath, is dedicated to a Norman bishop, Richard of Bayeux, but its author was not a Norman, nor do we find Norman names among those who drank deep at the new founts of Spain and Sicily.

For a measure of the intellectual activity of the Norman monasteries and cathedrals nothing could serve better than an examination of the contents of their libraries, where we might judge for ourselves what books they acquired and copied and read. This unfortunately we can no longer make. The library of Bec, partly destroyed by fire in the seventeenth century, was scattered to the four winds of heaven in the eighteenth, and while the legislation of 1791 provided for the transfer of such collections to the public depositories of the neighboring towns, the libraries of Avranches, Alençon, and Rouen, reënforced by the Bibliothèque Nationale, have garnered but a small part of the ancient treasures of Mont-Saint-Michel, Saint-Évroul, and the establishments of the lower Seine. Works of importance as well as curiosities still survive—autograph corrections of Lanfranc, the originals of the great histories of Robert of Torigni and Ordericus Vitalis, service-books throwing light on the origins of the liturgical drama, cartularies of churches and abbeys,—but for a more comprehensive view of the resources of the twelfth century we must turn to the contemporary catalogues which have come down to us from the cloisters of Saint-Évroul, Bec, Lire, and Fécamp, and the cathedral of Rouen. After all, as that delightful academician Silvestre Bonnard has reminded us, there is no reading so easy, so restful, or so seductive as a catalogue of manuscripts; and there is no better guide to the silence and the peace of the monastic library, as one may still taste them in the quiet of the Escorial or Monte Cassino. Let us take the most specific example, the collection of one hundred and forty volumes bequeathed to Bec by Philip, bishop of Bayeux, at his death in 1164, or rather the one hundred and thirteen which reached the monastery, twenty-seven having fallen by the way and being hence omitted from the catalogue. Like the other libraries of the time, this consisted chiefly of theology—the writings of the Fathers and of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian commentators and theologians, ending with Philip's contemporaries, St. Bernard, Gilbert de la Porrée, Hildebert of Tours, and Hugh of St. Victor, and his metropolitan, Hugh of Amiens. Wise in the wisdom of this world, the bishop possessed the whole Corpus Juris Civilis in five volumes, as well as the leading authorities on canon law, Burchard, St. Ives, and the Decretum of Gratian. He had none of the Roman poets, although they were not unknown to Norman writers of his age, but a fair selection of prose works of a literary and philosophical character—Cicero and Quintilian, Seneca and the Younger Pliny, besides the mediæval version of Plato's Timœus. There is a goodly sprinkling of the Roman historians most in vogue in the Middle Ages, Cæsar, Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Florus, Eutropius, and the Latin version of Josephus, besides such of their mediæval successors as came nearest to Anglo-Norman affairs. Science was confined to Pliny's Natural History and two anonymous treatises on mathematics and astronomy, while the practical arts were represented by Palladius on agriculture and Vegetius on tactics. On the whole a typically Norman library, deficient on the imaginative side, but strong in orthodox theology, in law, and in history; not in all respects an up-to-date collection, since it contained none of those logical works of Aristotle which were transforming European thought, and, save for a treatise of Adelard of Bath, showed no recognizable trace of the new science which was beginning to come in through Spain; strikingly lacking also, save for a volume on Norman history, in products of Normandy itself, even in the field of theology and scriptural interpretation, where, for example, Richard abbot of Préaux had written marvellous commentaries upon Genesis, Deuteronomy, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and the Proverbs of Solomon, and had "discoursed allegorically or tropologically in many treatises upon obscure problems of the Prophets."^[7]

After all, works on the history of Normandy were the most Norman thing a Norman could produce, and it was in this field that the duchy made its chief contribution to mediæval literature and learning. All the usual types appear, local annals, lists of bishops and abbots, lives of saints, biographies of princes, but the most characteristic are the works in which the history of Normandy is grasped as a whole: the half-legendary account of the early dukes by Dudo of Saint-Quentin, the confused but valuable Gesta of William of Jumièges, at last restored to us in a critical edition,^[8] the Chronicle of Robert of Torigni, and especially the great Historia Ecclesiastica of Ordericus Vitalis, the chef-d'œuvre of Norman historiography and the most important historical work written in France in the twelfth century.

Born in 1075 near Shrewsbury, Ordericus was early devoted to the monastic life, and lest family affection might interfere with his vocation and the sure hope of Paradise held out to the sobbing boy, his sorrowing parents sent him forever from their sight to spend his days at Saint-Évroul near the southern border of Normandy. Tonsured at ten, ordained a deacon at eighteen and a priest at thirty-two, he bore the burden and heat of the day under six successive abbots, until as an old man of sixty-six he laid down his pen with a touching peroration of prayer and thanksgiving to Him who had disposed these years according to His good pleasure. During this half century of poverty and obedience Ordericus had little opportunity to leave the precincts of the monastery, although on rare occasions we can trace him in England and at Cambrai, Rheims, and Cluni, and the materials of his history had to be gathered almost wholly from the well-stocked library of the abbey and from conversation with those who passed his way. These facilities were, however, considerable, for, remote as Saint-Évroul may seem in its corner of the pays d'Ouche, it was in constant relations with England, where it possessed lands, and with southern Italy, whither it had sent its members to found new convents; and like all such establishments it was a place of entertainment for travellers of all classes, priests and monks, knights and jongleurs, even a king like Henry I, who brought with them accounts of their journeys about the world and tales of great deeds in distant Spain, Sicily, and Jerusalem. There were few better places to collect materials for the writing of history, and there was no one who could make better use of them than Ordericus. He was fully launched in his great work by 1123, and he kept at it throughout the remaining eighteen years of his life, putting it aside in the winter when his fingers grew numb with the cold, but resuming it each spring in the clear round hand which meets us in many a manuscript of Saint-Évroul, and offering it at the end to future generations, a monument more lasting than the granite obelisk erected to his memory in 1912. His original purpose was limited to a history of his monastery, but the plan soon widened to include the principal movements of his time and finally grew to the idea of a universal history, beginning, indeed, with the Christian era instead of with the more usual starting-point of the Creation. Nevertheless, even in its final form the work of Ordericus is not a general history of the Christian centuries, for the general portion is chiefly introductory and comparatively brief; his real theme is Norman history, centring, of course, round the vicissitudes of his convent and the adjacent territory, but also giving a large place to the deeds of the Normans in that greater Normandy which they had created beyond the sea, in England, in Italy, and in Palestine. He is thus not only Norman but pan-Norman. The plan, or rather lack of plan, of his thirteen books reflects the changes of design and the interruptions which the work underwent; there is some repetition, much confusion, and a distinct absence of architectonic art. These defects, however, do not diminish the prime merit of the work, which lies in its replacement of the jejune annals of the older type by a full and ample historical narrative, rich in detail, vivid in presentation, giving space to literary history and everyday life as well as to the affairs of church and state, and constituting as a whole the most faithful and living picture which has reached us of the European society of his age. Neither in the world nor of the world, this monk had a ripe knowledge of men and affairs, independence of judgment, a feeling for personality, and a sure touch in characterization. He had also a Latin style of his own, labored at times rather than affected, ready to show its skill in well-turned verse or in well- rounded speeches after the fashion of the classical historians, but direct and vigorous and not unworthy of the flexible and sonorous language which he had made his own.

Latin, however, was an exclusive possession of the clergy,—and not of all of them, if we can argue from the examinations held by Eudes Rigaud,—and by the middle of the twelfth century the Norman baronage began to demand from the clerks an account of the Anglo-Norman past in a language which they too could understand. History in the vernacular develops in France earlier than elsewhere, and in France earliest in Normandy and in the English lands which shared the Norman speech and produced the oldest surviving example of such a work, the Histoire des Engles of Gaimar, written between 1147 and 1151. The chief centre for the production of vernacular history was the court of that patron of ecclesiastical and secular learning, Henry II, and his Aquitanian queen, to one or both of whom are dedicated the histories of Wace and Benoît de Sainte-More. Wace, the most interesting of this group of writers, was a native of Jersey and a clerk of Caen who turned an honest penny by his compositions and won a canonry at Bayeux by the most important of them, his Roman de Rou. Beginning with Rollo, from whom it takes its name, this follows the course of Norman history to the victory of Henry I in 1106, in simple and agreeable French verse based upon the Latin chroniclers but incorporating something from popular tradition. Such a compilation adds little to our knowledge, but by the time of the Third Crusade we find a contemporary narrative in French verse prepared by a jongleur of Évreux who accompanied Richard on the expedition. If we ignore the line, at best very faint, which in works of this sort separates history from romance and from works of edification, we must carry the Norman pioneers still further back, to the Vie de Saint Alexis which we owe probably to a canon of Rouen in the eleventh century, and to the great national epic of mediæval France, the Chanson de Roland, pre-Norman in origin but Norman in its early form, which has recently been ascribed to Turold, bishop of Bayeux after the death of the more famous Odo and later for many years a monk of Bec. There is, one may object, nothing monastic in this wonderful pæan of mediæval knighthood, whose religion is that of the God of battles who has never lied, and whose hero meets death with his face toward Spain and his imperishable sword beneath him; but knights and monks had more in common than was once supposed, and we are coming to see that the monasteries, especially the monasteries of the great highways, had a large share in the making, if not in the final writing, of the mediæval epic as well as the mediæval chronicles.

When we reach works like these, the literary history of Normandy merges in that of France, as well as in that of England, which, thanks to the Norman Conquest and the Norman empire, long remained a literary province of France. We must not, however, leave this vernacular literature, as yet almost wholly the work of clerks, with the impression that its dominant quality is romantic or poetical. Its versified form was merely the habit of an age which found verse easy to remember; the literature itself, as Gaston Paris has well observed,^[9] was "essentially a literature of instruction for the use of laymen," fit material for prose and not for poetry. It is thus characteristically Norman in subject as well as in speech—simple and severe in form, devout and edifying rather than mystical, given to history rather than to speculation, and seeking through the moralized science of lapidaries and bestiaries and astronomical manuals to aid the everyday life of a serious and practical people.

Normandy had also something to say to the world in that most mediæval of arts, architecture, and especially in that Romanesque form of building which flourished in the eleventh century and the first half of the twelfth. The great Norman churches of this epoch were the natural outgrowth of its life—the wealth of the abbeys, the splendor of princely prelates like Odo of Bayeux and Geoffrey of Coutances, the piety and penance of William the Conqueror and Matilda, expiating by two abbeys their marriage within the prohibited degrees, the religious devotion of the people as illustrated by the processions of 1145. The biographer of Geoffrey de Mowbray, for example, tells^[10] us how the bishop labored day and night for the enlargement and beautification of his church at Coutances (dedicated in 1056), buying the better half of the city from the duke to get space for the cathedral and palace, travelling as far as Apulia to secure gold and gems and vestments from Robert Guiscard and his fellow Normans, and main taining from his rents a force of sculptors, masons, goldsmiths, and workers in glass. Nearly forty years later, when the church had been damaged by earthquake and tempest, he brought a plumber from England to restore the leaden roof and the fallen stones of the towers and to replace the gilded cock which crowned the whole; and when he saw the cock once more glistening at the summit, he gave thanks to God and shortly passed away, pronouncing eternal maledictions upon those who should injure his church. Of this famous structure nothing now remains above the ground, for the noble towers which look from the hill of Coutances toward the western sea are Gothic, like the rest of the church; and for surviving monuments of cathedrals of the eleventh and twelfth centuries we must go to the naves of Bayeux and Évreux and the St. Romain's tower of Rouen. Even here the impression will be fragmentary, broken by Gothic choirs and by towers and spires of a still later age, just as the simple lines of the early church of Mont-Saint-Michel are swallowed up in the ornate Gothic of the loftier parts of the great pile. Edifices wholly of the Romanesque period must be sought in the parish churches in which Normandy is so rich, or in the larger abbey-churches which meet us at Lessay, Cerisy, Caen, Jumièges, and Bocherville. Jumièges, though in ruins, preserves the full outline of the style of the middle of the eleventh century; Caen presents in the Abbaye aux Hommes and the Abbaye aux Dames two perfect though contrasted types of a few years later, the one simple and austere, the other richer and less grand. Freeman may seem fanciful when he suggests that these sister churches express the spirit of their respective founders, "the imperial will of the conquering duke" and the milder temper of his "loving and faithful duchess,"^[11] but in any event they are Norman and typical of their age and country. There are elements in the ornamentation of Norman churches in this period which have been explained by reference to the distant influence of the Scandinavian north or the Farther East, there are perhaps traces of Lombard architecture in their plan, but their structure as a whole is as Norman as the stone of which they are built, distinguished by local traits from the other varieties of French Romanesque to which this period gave rise. Not the least Norman feature of these buildings is the persistent common sense of design and execution; the Norman architects did not attempt the architecturally impossible or undertake tasks, like the cathedral of Beauvais, which they were unable to finish in their own time and style. "What they began, they completed," writes the Nestor of American historians in his sympathetic interpretation of the art and the spirit of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. In Norman art, as in other phases of Norman achievement, the last word cannot be said till we have followed it far beyond the borders of the duchy, northward to Durham, "half house of God, half castle 'gainst the Scot," and the other massive monuments which made 'Norman' synonymous with a whole style and period of English architecture, and southward to those more ornate structures which Norman princes reared at Bari and Cefalù, Palermo and Monreale. "No art—either Greek or Byzantine, Italian, or Arab—" says Henry Adams,^[12] "has ever created two religious types so beautiful, so serious, so impressive, and yet so different, as Mont-Saint-Michel watching over its northern ocean, and Monreale, looking down over its forests of orange and lemon, on Palermo and the Sicilian seas."

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

There is no general account of Norman life and culture in any period of the Middle Ages, and no general study of Norman feudalism. For conditions in France generally, see Luchaire, La société française au temps de Philippe-Auguste (Paris, 1909), translated by Krehbiel (New York, 1912); for England, Miss M. Bateson, Mediæval England (New York and London, 1904). On castles, see C. Enlart, Manuel d'archéologie française, ii (Paris, 1904, with bibliography), and Mrs. E. S. Armitage, The Early Norman Castles of the British Isles (London, 1912). For William the Marshal, see Paul Meyer's introduction to his edition of the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal (Paris, 1891–1901); the poem has been utilized by Jusserand for his account of tournaments, Les sports et jeux d'exercice dans l'ancienne France (Paris, 1901), ch. 2.

The work of Delisle, Études sur la condition de la classe agricole et l'état de l'agriculture en Normandie au moyen âge (Évreux, 1851), is a classic.

The best studies of Norman municipal institutions are A. Chéruel, Histoire de Rouen pendant l'époque communale (Rouen, 1843); A. Giry, Les Établissements de Rouen (Paris, 1883-85), supplemented by Valin, Recherches sur les origines de la commune de Rouen (Précis of the Rouen Academy, 1911); Charles de Beaurepaire, La Vicomté de l'Eau de Rouen (Évreux, 1856); E. de Fréville, Mémoire sur le commerce maritime de Rouen (Rouen, 1857); Miss Bateson, The Laws of Breteuil, in English Historical Review, xv, xvi; R. Génestal, La tenure en bourgage (Paris, 1900); Legras, Le bourgage de Caen (Paris, 1911).

The excellent account of the Norman church in H. Böhmer, Kirche und Staat in England und in der Normandie (Leipzig, 1899), stops with 1154. On Odo and on Philip d'Harcourt see V. Bourrienne's articles in the Revue Catholique de Normandie, vii-x, xviii-xxiii. The register of Eudes Rigaud (ed. Bonnin, Rouen, 1852) is analyzed by Delisle, in Bibliothèque de l'École des Chartes, viii, pp. 479-99; the Miracula Ecclesie Constantiensis and the letter of Abbot Haimo are discussed by him, ibid., ix, pp. 339-52; xxi, pp. 113-39. For the mortuary rolls, see his facsimile edition of the Rouleau mortuaire du B. Vital (Paris, 1909). The best monograph on a Norman monastery is that of R. N. Sauvage, L'abbaye de S. Martin de Troarn (Caen, 1911), where other such studies are listed. See also Génestal, Rôle des monastères comme établissements de crédit étudié en Normandie (Paris, 1901), and Delisle's edition of Robert of Torigni.

The schools of Bec are described by A. Porée, Histoire de l'abbaye du Bec (Évreux, 1901). Notices of the various Norman historians are given by A. Molinier, Les sources de l'histoire de France (Paris, 1901–06), especially ii, chs. 25, 33. For Ordericus and St. Évroul see Delisle's introduction to the edition of the Historia Ecclesiastica published by the Société de l'Histoire de France, and the volumes issued by the Société historique et archéologique de l'Orne on the occasion of the Fêtes of 1912 (Alençon, 1912). Other early catalogues of libraries, including that of Philip of Bayeux, are in the first two volumes of the Catalogue général des MSS. des départements (Paris, 1886–88). For the vernacular literature, see Gaston Paris, La littérature normande avant l'annexion (Paris, 1899); and L. E. Menger, The Anglo-Norman Dialect (New York, 1904). For the latest discussions of the Chanson de Roland see J. Bédier, Les légendes épiques, iii (Paris, 1912); and W. Tavernier's studies in the Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Litteratur, xxxvi-xlii (1910-14), and the Zeitschrift fur romanische Philologie, xxxviii (1914). Enlart, Manuel d'archéologie française, i, mentions the principal works on Norman ecclesiastical architecture. See also R. de Lasteyrie, L'architecture religieuse en France à l'époque romane (Paris, 1912), ch. 15; Enlart, Rouen (Paris, 1904); H. Prentout, Caen et Bayeux (Paris, 1900); Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (Boston, 1913).

1. Armitage, Early Norman Castles of the British Isles, p. 359.
2. The Loss of Normandy, pp. 298 ff.
3. Printed by Delisle, Études sur la classe agricole, pp. 668 ff.
4. Kirche und Staat, p. 41.
5. Robert of Torigni (ed. Delisle), i, p. 344.
6. The text is printed in the Bibliothèque de l'École des Chartes, xxi, pp. 120 ff.
7. Ordericus Vitalis (ed. LePrévost), iii, p. 431.
8. Guillaume de Jumièges, Gesta Normannorum Ducum (ed. Marx). Société de l'Histoire de Normandie, 1914.
9. La littérature normande avant l'annexion, p. 22.
10. Gallia Christiana, xi, instr., coll. 219-23; Mortet, Recueil de textes relatifs à l'histoire de l'architecture (Paris, 1911), pp. 71-75.
11. Norman Conquest, iii, p. 109.
12. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, p. 4.