The Vikings (29 page)

The treaty agreed upon in 912, at a meeting between Rollo and Charles the Simple at Saint-Claire-sur-Epte, has not survived and is a historical presumption only; but there is a reference to it in a royal charter of March 918 which deals with the matter of an abbey whose patrimony had been bisected as a result of it:

we give and grant this abbey of which the main part lies in the area of Méresias on the River Eure to Saint-Germain and to his monks for their upkeep, except that part of the abbey [’s lands] which we have granted to the Normans of the Seine, namely to Rollo and his companions, for the defence of the kingdom . . .
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Rollo received a further grant of land in central Normandy in 924. The contemporary French analyst Flodoard of Reims tells us:

The Northmen entered upon peace with solemn promises in the presence of Count Hugo, Count Herbert and also Archbishop Seulf. King Ralph was not there, but with his consent, their [the Normans’] land increased with Maine and the Bessin, which in a pact of peace was conceded to them . . .
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Rollo died sometime between a final mention of him by Flodoard in 928, and 933, the year in which a third grant of land, usually identified as being the Cotentin and Avranchin areas of Brittany, was made to his son and successor William, known as Longsword. This completed the basic territory of what would become known as the duchy of Normandy. Its boundaries ran roughly from Eu, at the mouth of the river Bresle in the east, across to the river Vire in the west. It was bounded by the English Channel in the north and by the waters of the Avre in the south, an area corresponding to the modern French
départements
of Manche, Calvados, Seine Maritime and Eure. Orne was included, with the exception of Mortagne and Domfront. The validity of Dudo’s claim that Brittany was included in the initial grant of land remains uncertain. One small piece of possible evidence in favour is a coin found at Mont-St-Michel bearing the inscription + VVILEIM DUX BRI that is thought to refer to Rollo’s son William and to have been issued by him as a duke of Brittany.
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Along with the agreement of 878 between Alfred and Guthrum, sometimes known as the Treaty of Wedmore, and the trade agreements negotiated in 907 and 911 between the Kievan Rus and the Byzantine emperor, Saint-Claire appears to be the third example available to us of a negotiated settlement between pagan Vikings and Christian rulers. Each in its own way attempted to invite the raiders into the fold of the nominally civilized world of Christian culture, and each in its own way succeeded. Charles’s aims were to put an end to the century-old threat from Viking fleets that used the Seine to attack Paris and to bring stability to a volatile region by sponsoring the authority there of a ‘good’ Viking leader. From the time Rollo’s occupation of its lower regions was legalized he remained loyal to the agreement and Viking attacks on Paris effectively ceased.

Following the original grant of land to Rollo in 911 the duchy of Normandy had grown to include the Cotentin peninsual by about 933.

The early years of the colony’s history are turbulent and hard to follow. In 923 Rollo’s forces fought alongside those of Charles around Beauvais, and the grant to him of Bayeux and Maine in the following year may have been an attempt by Charles’s enemy, King Ralph of Burgundy, to split the alliance. In 925 the Vikings devastated Amiens and Arras in the east, but were stopped at Eu by a coalition of Ralph’s allies in their attempts to expand further east into modern-day Picardy. A further complication was the activities of another band of Viking raiders on the Loire, under the leadership of the otherwise obscure Rognvald. After the death of Duke Alan the Great in 907, the Vikings showed an increasing interest in Brittany, whose Celtic population had maintained a fierce independence of Frankish attempts to incorporate it. By about 919 Rognvald’s army had control of all Brittany. In 921 he was formally given Nantes by Count Robert of Neustria, and it seems he may have been expecting the concessions to Rollo in 924 to lead to a Frankish version of the Danelaw which would also involve him, for Flodoard tells us that in anger at not being awarded any land within France at this settlement he led his forces on a series of devastating raids into Frankish crown land, between the Loire and the Seine, until defeated by Hugh the Great, the Robertian count of Paris and duke of the Franks, and compelled to fight his way back to Nantes. He seems to have died shortly after this and with him any prospect of a Viking axis of power connecting Rouen and Nantes and posing the same sort of threat to the whole of France as the York-Dublin axis might have done to the kings of Wessex. His Vikings survived for a few more years, but had been driven out of the area by 939 following a campaign by the Breton leader Alan Barbetorte, or Twisted Beard.

 

Dudo, in words similar to those in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
that announced the Danish takeover in Northumbria and East Anglia, says that Rollo ‘divided that land among his followers by measure, and rebuilt everything that had long been deserted, and restored it by restocking it with his own warriors and with peoples from abroad’.
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What flimsy documentary evidence there is suggests that he took seriously his new role as the representative of the king’s authority in Normandy, and for his own sake and the sake of his sponsor attempted to restore order and respect for the law to the region. The government of the Norman rulers was illiterate for most of the first century of its existence and as Dudo tells us so little about the specific nature of Rollo’s administration we do not even know whether he continued to surround himself as a Frankish count with the
hird
of a typical Viking chieftain, nor whether he imported from Scandinavia the system of naval levy known as the
leithanger
. There is, however, nothing to suggest that he introduced government by
thing
meeting, and plenty of hints that it was autocratic in the Frankish tradition. Dudo claims that Rollo passed laws against robbery and violence that made them punishable by death, a novelty by comparison with Carolingian law, which exacted only a fine.
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Two of his anecdotes show that, from the very start, Rollo responded to slights or challenges to his authority with the same implacable faith in the efficacy of terror he had shown as a Viking.

Rollo had introduced a decree ordering that farm implements be left out in the field and not taken into the house at the end of the day. To make it appear as though they had done so and been robbed, it seems that a farmer’s wife hid her husband’s ploughing implements. Rollo reimbursed the man for his loss and ordered the trials by ordeal of the potential suspects. When all survived the ordeals he had the wife beaten until she confessed. And when the husband admitted that he had known it was her all along, Rollo handed down a finding of guilty on two counts: ‘The one, that you are the head of the woman and ought to have chastised her. The other, that you were an accessory to the theft and were unwilling to disclose it.’ He had them both hung ‘and finished off by a cruel death’, an action which Dudo credibly claims so terrified the local inhabitants that the territory became and remained free of petty criminality for a century afterwards.

The second tale also shows how central was the Viking idea of personal honour, and how fatal to it the taint of unmanliness. Shortly after Rollo’s marriage to Charles’s daughter Gisla, two of Charles’s warriors paid her a visit. Gisla entertained them in private. Presently rumours began circulating, to the effect that Rollo had failed to consummate the marriage. Any suggestion of sexual impotence, casting doubt on the legitimacy of his heirs, would have seemed particularly dangerous to Rollo. Suspecting that Gisla’s visitors were the probable authors of the rumours, he had them arrested and summarily executed in the public market place in Rouen. The story, with its possible hint at Rolf’s homosexuality, provides another glancing point of contact with the
Saga of Ganger Rolf
, whose ‘Rolf’ is said to have been uninterested in women. As an illustration of Rollo’s decisive ways, the tale has a certain symbolic value; but as history it is compromised. Gisla was one of the king’s six daughters by his first wife, Frédérune, and as the couple did not marry until 907 Gisla would have been, at most, five years old at the time of the Saint-Claire treaty.
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That the child-marriage took place as a diplomatic seal on the agreement that gave Rollo a foothold in the Frankish aristocracy need not be doubted.

Dudo is more interested in persuading his readers of the genuine nature of Rollo’s conversion than in providing details of the legislative and executive structures of the new regime. He solves the delicate problem of how to deal with Rollo’s Heathendom in the years before baptism and the respectability of legitimate rule by a literary trick involving Hasting, or Anstign, as he calls him, amplifying whatever natural qualities of cruelty Hasting may have possessed to turn him into a Heathen archetype of purest evil:

He lists the holy places burnt by Hasting during his ravages in Western Francia, including his own monastery at St-Quentin, the churches of St-Médard and St-Éloiat Noyon, and St-Denis and Ste-Geneviève. Rollo, by easy contrast, becomes the ‘good’ Heathen, the Viking whose natural instincts always inclined him towards the Christianity he eventually espoused. Dudo credits him with the restoration of churches he and his men had been responsible for ravaging, the reopening of monasteries they had made uninhabitable, and the rebuilding of the walls and defences of cities and towns torn down by them. He even makes Rollo’s piety retrospective and tells an incredible tale of how he brought over with him from England the relics of a holy virgin, Hameltrude, carried them up the Seine on board his longship and deposited them in the church of St-Vaast. In further proof of Rollo’s piety, while still wearing the white baptismal robes and under his baptismal name ‘Robert’, he spent, we learn, the first seven days of his expiation at St-Claire in handing out gifts of land to various churches in the diocese of Rouen, having first ascertained which of them were considered most venerable and which were protected by the most powerful saints. Not until the eighth day did he finally turn his attention to the allocation of land to his own men.

Many of these, it seems, were not willing to join their leader in abandoning their Heathen beliefs. In a letter written before 928 Guy, the archbishop of Rouen, approached his colleague Hervé at Reims for advice on the best way to deal with apostate Heathen converts. In language that recalls the exasperation of Louis the Pious’ bishops at the behaviour of Klak-Harald’s following, who practised their own form of serial baptism in the 820s, Hervé passed the question to Pope John X, asking what was to be done with Heathens, ‘when they have been baptized and rebaptized, and after their baptism carry on living as Heathens, killing Christians as the Heathens do, slaughtering priests and eating animals that have been sacrificed to their idols’.
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In reply, the pope counselled patience and persistence, urging them to regard Rollo and his colonists as merely inexperienced in the ways of the new faith, and their conversion as not an event but a process which would inevitably take time to complete. He also reminded Hervé that ‘the calamities, the oppression, the dangers which have threatened our regions have come not only from the Heathens but from Christians too’.
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Flodoard tells us that in 943 there was an engagement between the Frankish Duke Hugo and a group of Normans ‘who had arrived as Heathens or who were returning to Heathendom: a large number of his own Christian soldiers were killed by them’. Later in the entry for the same year we hear of an otherwise unknown Viking Norman leader named Turmod, ‘who had reverted to idolatry and to the gentile religion’ and was apparently also trying to ‘turn’ the Norman ruler Richard (Rollo’s grandson) and involve him in a plot against the Frankish King Louis. In 1906 a tenth-century longship burial on a commanding headland on the Île de Groix, some 6 kilometres off the coast of southern Brittany, was excavated and found to contain two bodies as well as the remains of dogs and birds. Among the wealth of finds recovered were swords, arrowheads, lance-heads, rings, tools, gaming pieces and dice. Like the Oseberg ship, it had been dragged overland to a previously prepared site. Unlike the Oseberg ship it had then been burnt, the spectacle being framed by twenty-four shields.
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This is the only known archaeological evidence of a ship being burnt as part of a Viking burial ritual, and Ibn Fadlan’s literary description of the Rus funeral ceremony for their dead chieftain on the banks of the Volga gives us some idea of what the ritual may have involved.
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One of the two bodies was that of an adolescent and the archaeologist Julian D. Richards has suggested that here, too, may be the signs of a human sacrifice. The Île de Groix funeral probably took place after the official conversion to Christianity of most of the Vikings in the region, and the sumptuous nature of the ceremony may hint at a conscious act of apostasy.
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