The Normans in European History

In June, 1911, at Rouen, Normandy celebrated the one-thousandth anniversary of its existence. Decorated with the grace and simplicity of which only a French city is capable, the Norman capital received with equal cordiality the descendants of the conquerors and the conquered—Norwegians and Swedes, Danes of Denmark and Danes of Iceland, Normans of Normandy and of England, of Sicily and of Canada. Four Norwegian students accomplished the journey from their native fjords in an open Viking boat, having set ashore early in the voyage a comrade who had so far fallen away from the customs of his ancestors as to sleep under a blanket. From the United States bold Scandinavians, aided by the American Express Company, brought from Minnesota the Kensington rune stone, which purports to prove the presence of Norse explorers in the northwest one hundred and thirty years before the landfall of Columbus. A congress of Norman history listened for nearly a week in five simultaneous sections to communications on every phase of the Normanpast. There was Norman music in the streets, there were Norman plays at the theatres, Norman mysteries in the cathedral close. Banquet followed banquet and toast followed toast, till the cider of Normandy paled before the champagne of France. Finally a great pageant, starting, like the city, from the river-bank, unrolled the vast panorama of Norman history through streets whose very names reëcho its great figures—Rollo and his Norse companions arriving in their Viking ships, the dukes his successors, William Longsword, Richard the Fearless, Robert the Magnificent, William the Conqueror, the sons of Tancred of Hauteville who drove the paynim from Sicily, and that other Tancred who planted the banner of the cross on the walls of Jerusalem, all with their knights and heralds and men at arms, followed by another pageant of the achievements of Normandy in the arts of peace. And on the last evening the great abbey-church of Saint-Ouen burnt red fire for the first time in its history till the whole mass glowed and every statue and storied niche stood out with some clear, sharp bit of the Norman past, while its lantern-tower, “the crown of Normandy,” shone out over the city and the river which are the centre of Norman history and where this day the dukes wore again their crown.

In this transitory world the thousandth anniversary of anything is sufficiently rare to challenge attention, even in an age which is rapidly becoming hardened to celebrations. Of the events commemorated in 1915 the discovery of the Pacific is only four hundred years old, the signing of the Great Charter but seven hundred. The oldest American university has celebrated only its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, the oldest European only its eight-hundredth. Even those infrequent commemorations which carry us back a thousand years or more, like the millenary of King Alfred or the sixteen-hundredth Constantinian jubilee of 1913, are usually reminders of great men or great events rather than, as in the case of Normandy, the completion of a millennium of continuous historical development. So far as I can now recollect, the only parallel is that of Iceland, which rounded out its thousand years with the dignity of a new constitution in 1874. Of about the same age, Iceland also resembles Normandy in being the creation of the Norse sea-rovers, an outpost of the Vikings in the west, as Normandy was an outpost in the south. Of the two, Iceland is perhaps the more individual, as it certainly has been the more faithful to its Scandinavian traditions, but the conditions which have enabled it to retain its early characteristics have also isolated it from the broader currents of the world’s history. Normandy, on the other hand, was drawn at once into the full tide of European politics and became itself a founder of new states, an imperial power, a colonizer of lands beyond the seas, the mother of a greater Normandy in England, in Sicily, and in America.