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\centerline{THE PIOUS PIRATE}\bigskip
For more than 300 years, Norman, Capetian, and
Plantagenet
apologists engaged in a communal effort to
fabricate for their royal
patrons an ascendant line of
courtly Christians, thereby justifying the
distribution of
land and power in what is now, roughly, north-central
and
north-eastern France. Annalists, historians, biographers,
hagiographers,
and poets worked with nearly intractable
material -- gangs of brutally
effective pirates preying upon
perpetually squabbling natives loosely
pledged and
discontinuously loyal to a Carolingian identity -- and
the
results of their efforts demonstrate again that history in
the
Middle Ages existed not as a separate discipline, but as
a branch of
rhetoric. Chronicles, histories, even annals,
were political, not
historical in the sense to which modern
historians aspire (Grundmann, p.
1; Guen\'{e}e, p. 25, \emph{et
passim}).\bigskip
The story of William Longsword provides a
particularly
good example of the conspiracy, supported by
ecclesiastical
and secular writers alike, to cook an embarassingly
raw
past; the short and violent life of a polygamous, ruthless,
briefly
excommunicated tenth-century pirate provided a
series of medieval writers
with a few useful incidents, and
enough provocative lacunae to concoct a
tentative solution
for a problem that grew out of the fact that
medieval
panegyric required some elementary competence at least in
the
problems of Christian theology.\bigskip
Christian theology, of course, generated many problems,
but
one in particular had to be solved, at least
provisionally, before a
medieval Christian historian could
write at all. As Pickering represents the problem, a
medieval writer had
to determine whether his sympathies lay
with a Boethian rejection of the
possibility that events in
the sublunary world had any permanent significance (in
which case he could
scarcely compose a line on events in his
own time), or with the
Augustinian affirmation that God's
will is worked out in human
history. A secular figure,
then,
could safely command Christian attention only by
working out God's will
through providentially pious acts;
only the most naive reader, then, would
be surprised to find
that medieval historians bestow the words and deeds
of a
devout athlete of God upon figures and groups in whom they
have
emotional, material, and sometimes intellectual
investments.\bigskip
Arnaldo Momigliano points to Eusebius' life
of
Constantine as the first attempt to offer the life of a
secular ruler
as the model for a life of Christian piety,
but he dismisses the attempt
not only as a failure, but as,
"an experiment not to be repeated --
historigraphically a
blind alley" (p.119). Sanctifying Constantine was certainly
no easy task, even if
Burckhard's description of the ruler
credited with converting Rome to
Christianity as a
"murderous egoist" (p. 293) who could be
credited only with
an "alleged "Christianity" (p. 298)
needs to be tempered
(Barnes, pp. 268ff.). Although no writer used
Eusebius'
Life of Constantine as a formal model for panegyric,
nevertheless,
the image fabricated by Eusebius remained
sufficiently vivid in the minds
of later chroniclers for
Gregory of Tours (II.31) to recall it in
describing Clovis'
baptism at the end of the fifth century, and for Aimon
and
others who reworked Gregory's material through the centuries
to
preserve the comparison, until well into the thirteenth
century, when
Primat translated the passage as he said he
found it in the chronicles of
St. Denis: li rois descendi
es
fonz ausi com uns autres Constantin (Viard, I, p.71;
Aimon I.xvi; LHF XV;
Fred. III.xxi). Furthermore, the
problem
of praising political leaders both for their
military competence and for
their Christian piety remained
central for writers of historical
literature in the Middle
Ages as perhaps the ultimate rhetorical
challenge;
Charlemagne, Edward the Confessor, Godfrey of Boulogne,
Thomas
Becket, and Saint Louis were the objects of
relatively successful efforts
to produce paradigmatic
figures, in whom sacred and secular virtues were
congruent.\bigskip
William
Longsword was the object of the same kind of
efforts to make the rage for
earthly real estate harmonious
with immortal longings, but the results in
his case were
finally less effective, partly because his actual
accomplishments
were too few, partly because those who
devoted their efforts to
sanctifying and gentrifying the
pirate may have lacked the necessary
competence, partly
because William's story proved less useful than others
to
later times, and partly because of the general falling off
in the
production of saints between 751 and 1000
A.D.[Poulin, p. 3, n. 6]. In spite of these negative
conditions,
however, some hagiographers were capable of
meeting extraordinary
rhetorical challenges; the first king
of Hungary (ruled from 997-1038),
for example, in the course
of insuring the succession of his sister's son,
blinded
another nephew, banished the nephew's sons, and yet became
St.
Stephen (Leeper, p. 176).\bigskip
To gentrify and sanctify the pirate required diabolizing
his
enemies, and consequently conceiving of the historic
process in terms of
clear, vivid antitheses -- a habit
of
mind that Levi-Strauss, among others, has taught us to
consider
characteristic of mythic thought. Specifically
medieval articulations of
mythic thought as described by
Dumezil and developed by Duby fall into the
three categories
of Warrior, Priest, and a function more difficult to
define,
in the area of labor and fecundity. As Dumezil describes the
difficulties
of delimiting the domain of the third function,
he seems to be describing
Joyce's Molly Bloom:\medskip
Il est moins ais\'{e} de cerner
en quelque mots
l'essence de
la troisi\`{e}me fonction, qui couvre
des provinces nombreuses, entre lesquelles des
liens \'{e} vidents apparaissent, mais
dont l'unit\'{e}
ne comporte
pas de centre net: f\'{e} condit\'{e}
certes,
humaine,
animale et vegetale, mais en m\^{e}me temps
nourriture et richesse, et sant\'{e} , et paix ... et
souvent volupt\'{e} , beaut\'{e}
... (l'id\'{e} ologie etc.,
p. 19).\medskip
Richer, the
first writer who devoted himself to converting
William Longsword into a
significant figure in the history
of northern France, concentrated on the
first function in
his attempt to convert William from a ruthless pirate
into a
roughly Carolingian warrior; later writers, like Dudo, Wace,
and
Benoit, whose task was to convert the pirate into a
satisfying ancestor
for their Norman patrons, invoked all
three functions for the task. His
military accomplishments,
his intellectual activity (almost exclusively in
religious
terms), and his sexual conduct were essential, since
military
and ecclesiastical problems were regularly
congruent in Northern France in
the ninth century, and
generally expressable in terms of real-estate,
while sexual
conduct determined who and how many would inherit the
real
estate.\bigskip
On the basis of the few documents that survive from a
period that
is regularly described as the most obscure and
confused in French history,
modern historians are willing to
assert that William was one of the five
most powerful men
jockeying for power, more frequently as brokers than
as
warriors, in northern France in the middle of the tenth
century;
Hugh the Great, Herbert of Vermandois, Arnold the
Old, and Hugh the Black
were the other four. In an attempt
to vitiate their inability to get along
with each other,
they invited Charles the Simple's son, Louis d'Outre-Mer,
to
return from England to take up the crown. As Lauer describes
the
invitation it was, if not exactly quixotic, peculiarly
paradoxical:
Ainsi fut accompli cette
restauration d'un
enfant
exil\'{e}, rejeton d'une dynastie d\'{e}chue,
rappel\'{e} par les pires ennemis de sa race (pp.
14-15).
Restoring the
Carolingian, of course, did not restore order,
but merely added another
aggravating vector to the internal
forces already at work. In addition,
and sometimes in
collusion with one or more of the internal factions,
the
Holy Roman Emperor and marauding Hungarians provided
significant
external threats.
Internal
politics, however, were further complicated by
the interpenetration of
secular and ecclesiastical
interests, since both warrior and priest tended
to measure
success in terms of acquired real estate. Hugh the Great,
for
example, the most powerful of the Northern French
nobility, endowed ten
ecclesiastical institutions, in return
for which he bore the title of
\emph{abbas}, while Artaud, during
his tenure as Archbishop of Rheims, was
made a count by
Louis d'Outre-Mer, in a transaction that was not
without
precedent. The most dramatic illustration of the confusion
between
functions in the middle of the tenth century is
probably the battle for
the Archbishopric of Rheims, waged
between Louis' candidate, Artaud, and
Herbert of Vermandois'
candidate, his own son, who was five years old in
925, the
year in which his father arranged his election. Caught in
the middle of this battle --
which lasted for approximately
a generation, with Artaud in office for the
first fifteen
years-- was the historian, hagiographer, and
ecclesiastical
functionary, Flodoard of Rheims, who offers us the
earliest
details about William Longsword.\bigskip
When Herbert of Vermandois finally
succeeded in
installing his son Hugh, by means of military and
political
maneuvering, as Archbishop, a general purge of those who
had
held office under Artaud took place, and Flodoard was
deprived of
his offices and held a virtual captive for five
months. Lauer suggests
that fear of his notes falling into
the hands of Herbert made Flodoard
more objective as an
historian, but a tenth-century ecclesiastic in such
a
position might as easily become paralysed with prudence. In
any
event, Flodoard's other major works, the \emph{History of
the Church of
Rheims}, and the versified hagiographies he
composed, are written in a far
more elaborate and
judgemental style than the Annales. Perhaps a more
useful
symptom of reliability, Dumezil's three functions have, at
best,
a skeletal presence in Flodoard's entries involving
William Longsword,
permitting us to describe his text as
less mythic, if not more accurate,
than the texts of Richer,
Dudo, and the others.\bigskip
William Longsword is only a slender thread
in the pattern
of events with which Flodoard concerns himself, although
the
fragmentary organization of the \emph{Annales}, and the absence
of
interpretation by the author himself make for difficulty
in determining
exactly what the intended pattern may be. No
prologue (or \emph{exordium}) has survived; instead, the
first
entry abruptly reports that in the year 919 A.D., in the
area
of Rheims, a remarkably large hen's egg was laid, wine
was scarce, and the
Vikings were a-harrying. However, in the
sequence of references to William
Longsword, a pattern, to
be revised and obscured by later writers,
emerges.\bigskip
First
mentioned in the entry for 927, William is
identified as \emph{filius
Rollonis}, engaged in an elaborate
transaction engineered by Herbert of
Vermandois, involving
Charles the Simple and Raoul, who had replaced
Charles as
king. In Flodoard's text, William pledges himself to
Charles
and affirms his friendship with Herbert, thus aligning
himself
with those unfriendly to Raoul. In the entry for
933, William receives a
maritime section of Britanny in
return for homage to Raoul; since Charles
had died in 929,
Williams shift of allegiance represents no dramatic
betrayal.\bigskip
William next appears in the entry for 939,
aligned with
Hugh, opposed by Louis and Arnulf. For the damage he
has
done to Arnulf's land, William is excommunicated by Louis'
bishops,
in another illustration of the complicity between
warrior and
priest:\medskip
Anno DCCCCXXXVIII, Ludowicus rex Hugoni,
filio
Ricardi, profiscitur obviam; cum quo de
Burgundia revertens, pergit contra
Hugonem,
filium Rothberti, et
Willelmum Nordmannorum
principem. Qui, quoniam villas
nuper Arnulfi
comitis quasdam
praedis incendiisque vastaverat,
excommunicatur ab episcopis qui
erant cum rege,
simul cum
Heriberto etc. (p.71)\medskip
Again, Flodoard makes no judgment
about the events and
characters he describes; whether he thought the use
of
excommunication justified in this instance will remain a
mystery
forever. In the same year, Otto, William, Hugh,
Herbert, and Arnulf
concluded some sort of pact, as a result
of which the Emperor withdrew to
the other side of the
Rhine; Louis' absence may be significant, but the
text
itself does not indicate the significance.\bigskip
In 940, William pledges fealty to Louis, as
he had to
Charles the Simple and to Raoul (\emph{se committit} in
each
case), in this case in exchange for what Charles the Simple
had
given to the Normans:\medskip
Anno DCCCCXL, rex Ludowicus abiit, obviam
Willelmo, principi Nordmannorum, qui
venit ad
eum in pago
Ambianensi et se illi comisit. At
ille dedit ei terram quam pater eius Karolus
Nordmannis concesserat, indeque.... (p.
75)\medskip
In the same year, Flodoard, again without comment,
numbers
William Longsword among the besiegers of Rheims who oust
Artaud,
Louis' appointment, and install Herbert's son as
Archbishop:
Hugo princeps, filius Rothberti, junctis
sibi
quibusdam episcopis tam
Franciae quam
Burgundiae, cum
Heriberto comite et Willelmo,
Nordmannorum principe, Remensem obsidet urbem,
sextaque obsidionis die
etc...(p.76)
Hugh, Herbert, and William Longsword then go off to
lay
siege to Laon, again opposing Louis.
In Flodoard's entry for 941, William is
present at two
more conferences with the other magnates of the north,
and
in the entry for 942 he receives Louis regaliter in
- 6 -
Rodomo, sends hostages to
Otto, and is assassinated by order
of Arnulf. The assassination is
actually the first entry for
943, in an apparent chronological error by
Flodoard, for
whom its major significance, to judge merely by the
sequence
of sentences in the text, is that it leads directly to
Louis
granting the right of succession to Richard, William
Longsword's
bastard by an unnamed woman from Britanny:
Anno DCCCCXLIII, Arnulfus comes Willelmum,
Nordmannorum principem, ad colloquium
evocatum
dolo perimi fecit;
Rex Ludowicus filio ipsius
Willelmi nato de concubina Britanna terram
Nordmannorum dedit... (p. 86)
What
Louis' motivations were for granting the land to a
bastard, who had not
reached the age of majority, cannot be
determined from the entry for 943;
later writers, however,
will fill this gap amply, although Louis may
merely be
following the principle enunciated by Gregory of Tours in
his
criticism of Sagittarius' argument that Guntar's bastard
may not inherit
the kingdom: praetermissis nunc
generibus
feminarum, regis vocitantur liberi qui de regibus fuerant
procreati
(H.F. V.20; as quoted and discussed
in
Reydellet, p. 356)
On
the basis of Flodoard's entries, then, a reasonable
man might conclude
that William's behavior was standard
operating procedure for tenth-century
politicians --
scheming, treacherous, and brutal -- and that he
received
payment in kind from Arnoul (see Fliche, p. 180, for the
lowest
imaginable judgment of 10th-century aristocratic
morality). However, the cryptic, inscrutable quality
of
Flodoard's text (which somewhat resembles the text of the
Bible as
Auerbach describes it in Mimesis, pp. 1
-20)
provoked and invited later writers to supply and to invent
motivations,
images, scenes, sounds, rhythms, even
characters, by means of which William
might be made to
conform to the needs of succeeding generations.
Richer, the next historical writer to
concern himself
with Northern French politics, writing in the last decade
of
the tenth century, takes no pains to disguise his
partiality,
demonstrating in the course of his
History
strong sympathies for the Carolingians and for Artaud.
A
self-conscious intellectual, categorized by Beryl Smalley
with
Liudprand and Widekund, among the "classicists,
entertainers,
partisans" (p. 79), he represents himself as
the continuator of
Hincmar, as well as one who improves upon
Flodoard, by treating his
subject matter dilucide
breviterque. Like many a medieval historian, Richer
claims
to be a specialist in abbreviation
(in dicendo enim
recusans effluere, plurima succincte
expediam; Latouche,
p. 4), but he
often lost sight of this objective, going on
at great length about his
father's achievements, about the
brilliance of his teacher, Gerbert, and
sometimes about
- 7 -
himself. In addition, he mythologizes, makes outright
errors
(Latouche, p. 10), and when he does abbreviate, he often
does
so not out of consideration for his audience, but to
give his story a
shape, not merely for the sake of form
itself (as Latouche suggests), but
also to conform to his
partisan political vision; as D.C. Douglas
remarks: "Before
970, Richer
is an unreliable guide whenever he glosses
Flodoard" (p. 426). All of
his imaginative effort, however,
did not protect him from being charged
with an intolerably
archaic style by Ferdinand Lot (p. xviii).
His treatment of William Longsword conforms
in broad
outline to Flodoard's entries, but with significant
additions
and elisions; like his predecessor, Richer first
mentions William in
connection with his pledge to Charles
the Simple in 927. Flodoard's
version, in spite of its
note-like style, is sharply specific with
political detail:
Heribertus
comes Laudunum ingredit voluit.
Praevenit autem eum rodolfus rex, missis illo
militibus, ad custodiam loci; ipse
denuo
subsecutus, idem
castellum ingressus est. At
Heribertus Karolum de custodia ejecit secumque
in pagum Veromandinsem, scilicet ad
Sanctum
Quintum, deduxit.
Rodolfus vero in Burgundiam
revertitur, Rotgarii filiis cum uxore sua ad
custodiam Lauduni relictis, qui
egredientes loca
quaeque
devastant circa Codiciacum, episcopii
Remensis castrum. Karolus igitur cum Heriberto
colloquium petit Nordmannorum, ad
castellum quod
Auga vocatur,
ibique se filius Rollonis Karolo
committit et amicitiam firmat cum Heriberto.
Metus interea falsi rumoris Hungarorum
et fugae
per regnum
Lothariense agitantur et Franciam.
(Lauer, pp. 39-40)
Herbert, then, frees Charles to distract Raoul;
the son of
Rollo (William Longsword's most significant identity at
this
point) pledges himself -- se
committit -- to Charles, and
establishes
amicitia with Herbert.
In
abbreviating the passage, Richer considerably reduces
the complexity of
the political transaction, although he
does make explicit some of the
motivation that was only
implicit in Flodoard; Richer also provides a more
cosmically
theatrical texture for the event, by providing
descriptions
of an eclipse of the moon, fiery armies in the sky, and
rampant
disease, presumably as harbingers of significance.
By subtracting much of
the geographic specificity, and, most
significantly, by removing the
connection between the pirate
prince and the bane of the Carolingian
faction, Herbert of
Vermandois, Richer reduces the historicity of the
scene, and
begins to rework William in the direction of a factional
figura:
- 8 -
Cum his quoque et litium tumultuatio
inter regem
ac Heribertum qui
Karolum sub custodia
detinebat, non modica exorta est,
subsecuta
atque agitata est,
eo quod Heribertus ab rege
nimia expetebat, rex vero utpote insatiabili
nihil accomodabat. Regi ergo minas
Heribertus
intendens, Karolum
regem a carcere eductum in
pagum Veromandensem deduxit, non ut
regno
fidelis eum
restitueret, at ut ex ejus
educatione aliquam suspectis formidinem
incuteret. Nortmannis itaque accersitis atque
apud oppidum Augum collectis, eum
deducit,
ibique filius
Rollonis pyratae, de cujus
interfectione jam relatum est, regis manibus
sese militaturum committit fidemque
spondet ac
sacramento firmat. (Lat. I. p. 104)
By identifying him as the son of Rollo the
pirate, whose
death had been reported earlier (and inaccurately) in the
History, Richer has roughened William's image somewhat; by
devoting
three clauses to delineating the nature of
William's pledge to Charles, he
has intensified the
significance of the fealty; the result of this rhetorical
exercise
is to give Louis' Carolingian father credit for
taming the leader of a
group of pirates, who were led,
Richer had remarked earlier, by a
congenital brutality
(paterna...sevitia ducti; Latouche I. 14).
In addition, Richer further elevates Charles'
dignity and
"purifies" the pirate somewhat, by disconnecting him
from
the Carolingians' bete noire,
Herbert of Vermandois. From
his first mention, then, of William, Richer
begins the
process of bringing the pirate's son into high relief, in
this
instance by supressing the full complexity of the
political transaction in
which William was engaged, as well
as by heightening the Carolingian
connection.
A minor illustration
of this rhetorical process occurs in
Richer's next mention of William;
when Erluin takes
Montreuil back from Arnulf in 939, Flodoard says that he
did
it with the assistance of a body of Norman troops,
collecta
Nordmannorum non modica manu (p. 72). Richer
replaces this brief phrase
with a scene in which Erluin
successfully pleads for William's help,
although the plea is
reported in indirect discourse, thereby perhaps
qualifying
as plurima succincte
(Lat. p. 148). Unlike some later
writers, however, Richer does not place
William among those
who are present at the retaking of Montreuil; moved
by
Herluin's plea, the "Norman prince," as Richer calls him
in
this passage, merely sends
auxilium and militum
copiam
(p. 142, Lat.).
- 9 -
When next mentioned, however, William is again pyratum
dux, in a passage which
contains a significant, if not
outrageous error; in recording the journey
made to Amiens by
Louis d'Outre-Mer in 940, Richer substitutes Rollo's son
for
Rollo. Where Flodoard reported that Louis gave to William
what
Charles the Simple had given "to the Normans," Richer
replaces Nordmannis with ei, referring, then, to William
Longsword himself:
Cum etiam dux praedictus obvius
venit,
exceptusque a rege
decenter, provinciam quam ei
pater Karolus rex contulerat, ab eo etiam
accepit. Unde et regis factus, tanto ei
consensu
alligatus est, ut
jam jamque aut sese
moriturum, aut regi imperii summam
restituturum
proponeret. (I.,
p. 156, Lat.)
Since Richer's Latin was not particularly weak, the
chances
that he misunderstood Flodoard's text are small; instead the
error
may have been part of his deliberate strategy to
fabricate a warrior of
great force, whose allegiance to the
Carolingian dynasty was of truly longue haleine.
Having made so much of William's fealty to Louis,
Richer
would seem to have had no alternative to removing the pirate
from
the list of those besieging Rheims in the same year
(940). Therefore, when
he describes and denounces Herbert
and Hugh for chasing Artaud from
Rheims, in spite of
Flodoard's testimony, Richer subtracts Rollo's son
from the
siege (Lat., pp. 158-160), as well as from the subsequent
siege
of Laon (p. 160), which is conducted in Richer's text
exclusively by
Herbert and Hugh (see Prentout, p. 309).
While supressing the treacherous aspects of William's
character,
Richer also wants to preserve and magnify the
pirate's primitive vitality
as a warrior; for this purpose,
in the next scene he resorts to myth,
fabricating a dramatic
encounter in which William, symbolically and
single-handedly,
restores order, if only temporarily, to
northern France.
Reworking a scene from Sallust,
Richer
imagines a scene in the royal quarters at Attigny,
where Hugh, Herbert,
Arnulf and Louis assemble, having
excluded, for some mysterious reason,
the pirate prince:
Et die
constituta rex ibi cum provinciarum
principibus affuit, Hugone videlicet cognomento
Magno, Arnulfo Morinorum, Wilelmo
piratarum
ducibus, ac
Heriberto tiranno; nec defuit
Saxoniae rex Otto. Ludovicus rex, cum in
conclavi sese cum Ottone rege ac principibus
recepisset, consilio incertum an
fortuitu, solus
Wilelmus dux
admissus non est.
Understandably, William Longsword grows angry, and
literally
breaks into the meeting:
-
10 -
Diucius ergo afforis
exspectans, cum non
vocaretur, rem animo irato ferebat. Tandem in
iram versus, utpote manu et audatia
nimius
foribus clausis vim
intulit ac retrorsum
vibrabundus adaegit.
The sight that greets his eyes displeases him
mightily,
since Otto, not Louis has the seat of honor; the pirate
proceeds
first to establish his right to be present, and
then to put the two men in
their proper places:
Ingressusque lectum conspicatur gestatorium. In
quo etiam a parte cervicalis Otto
editior, rex
vero in parte
extrema humilior residebat. In
quorum prospectu Hugo et Arnulfus, duabus
residentes sellis, consilii
ordinem
exspectabant.
Vuilelmus regis injuriam non
passus: "An," inquit, "his interesse non debui?
Desertorisne dedecore aliquando
sordui?"
Fervideque
propinquans: "Surge," inquit,
"paululm rex!" Quo mox surgente, ipse
resedit.
Dixit indecens esse
regem inferiorem, alium vero
quemlibet superiorem videri; quapropter oportere
Ottonem inde amoliri regique cedere.
Otto pudore
affectus surgit
ac regi cedit. Rex itaque
superior, at Vuilelmus inferior consederunt.
(pp. 170-172)
Whether fabula (neither true nor credible) or argumentum
(what might have happened,
not what did happen), the
anecdote performs three tasks. First, it encodes a
political
fact: breaking the doors down, and
ordering the
Emperor to cede the seat of honor to Louis, Richer's
William,
identified in this passage as the
pirate leader,
(notice that Richer, relentlessly Carolingian, calls
Herbert
"tyrant") supplies the forceful energy -- manu et audatia
nimius -- that the
Carolingians, who preferred negotiating
to fighting, characteristically
lacked. Second, Richer deals
with the accusations of treachery that might
arise from
reading Flodoard by the silence that greets the pirate's
questions,
"Do I not deserve to be among those here? When
have I been soiled
with the dishonor of treachery?" Third,
the scene encodes an
additional historical-political truth
about tenth-century politics in
northern France: the faction
to whom the Normans threw their support would
win.
In addition to its mythic
function, however, William's
balancing act, in Richer, is directly
responsible for his
death, since Otto promptly decides to avenge the
insult by
instigating Hugh and Arnulf to murder the pirate prince.
Where
Flodoard had provided one dispassionate sentence, with
no mention of an
instigating Otto, Richer imagines a
sequence of two scenes in which he
amplifies what Flodoard
had left merely as colloquium and dolus (see
p. 86 of
Lauer's edition).
- 11 -
In the first scene, Hughes and Arnulf discuss
dispassionately
whether to kill William, and when they have
decided in the affirmative,
because his death will weaken
Louis and will save lives, they set about
planning the
killing. Richer
offers, then, characters with at least
rudimentary capacities for
introspection, who are practical
politicians, not demonic killers. Their practicality is
emphasized in the
second scene, where they fabricate two
scenarios, one to be used if the
pirate comes by boat, and
the other if he comes by land.
When William comes by boat, the
conspirators carry out
the plan developed for such a contingency; in
addition to
supplying more geographic detail than Flodoard, Richer
supplies
three additional figures: a sailor and two boys to
row William's boat,
presumably necessary to preserve, or to
create a sense of the pirate's
status. In later versions of
the scene, the three figures will disappear,
to heighten the
possibilities of creating a tragic isolation for
William,
but the boys, inermes,
provide a motif of wounded
innocence that will be transferred in some of
the later
texts to William himself. In addition, Richer represents
the
murder as an immediate violation of
amicitia and fides
-- the
basis of the heroic code:
Locus quoque in pago Ambianensi secus fluvium
Summam ubi est insula Pinchinea
conceditur;
negocioque peracto, legati redeunt.
Tempore ergo
contituto,
Arnulfus terra, Wilelmus aqua in
locum destinatum conveniunt ac de amicia multum,
plurimum de fide utrimque servanda,
collocuti
sunt atque post
nonnullos sermones a se soluti.
Arnulfus reditum simulans aliquantisper
digreditur. Vuilelmus vero ad classem rediit,
naviculamque ingressus dum per
pelagus
navigaret, a
conjuratis multo strepitu
inclamatus, proram obvertit, remigansque ad
litus, quid vellent sciscitaturus,
redit. Illi
mox quidam praeocissimum se deferre
asserunt,
quod a domino suo
oblivione suppressum fuit.
Dux, navicula litori apulsa, illos excepit; a
quibus etiam mox gladiis eductis
interimitur.
Duobus quoque puberibus, qui cum eo
inermes
aderant, et nauta
sauciatis, a navicula
facinorosi exiliunt ac post conscium dominum in
fugum feruntur. Qui autem jam per
pelagus
navigebant, conversi
litus relictum repetunt ac
dominum interemptum duosque puberes et nautam
sauciatos inveniunt; sumptumque domini
corpus
lamentabili obsequio
sepulturae deportant. (p.
180)
Like Flodoard,
Richer now goes on to describe the
transfer of power to William's bastard
son; unlike Flodoard,
- 12 -
however, Richer provides
some motivation to account for
Louis' choice of Richard: the king is
struck by the
elegantia of the pirate's son:
Nec multo post et ejus filium de
Britanna
concubina, nomine
Richardum, regi deducunt,
gesti negotii ordinem pandentes. Rex
adolescentis elegantiam advertens, liberaliter
exciepit, provinciam a patre pridem
possessam,
ei largiens. Potitiores quoque qui cum
adolescentulo accesserant, per manus
et
sacramentum regis fiunt;
multaque regis
liberalitate
jocundati, recedunt Rodomum. Alii
vero Normannorum, Richardum ad regem transisse
indignantes, ad Hugonem ducem
concedunt. (p.
180)
The process of gentrifying
pirates, then, involves improving
their physical appearance, although
Richer offers only the
spark of an
effictio here; in addition, the more
elaborate, ceremonial language
used to describe Louis'
committment also magnifies, or at least burnishes
the
Carolingian "image." For Richer, however, no attempt need
be
made to apply rhetorical cosmetics to William's mother, who
remains,
as she was in Flodoard, a Breton concubine.
Richer goes beyond Flodoard, however, by describing the
Northmen
as indignantes at Louis' grant,
thereby
providing, or at least implying a motivation for the king's
action:
Richard was young, and therefore weak, and the
irregularity of his birth
might factionalize the pirates,
reducing their political and military
influence in Northern
France. Richard's next appearance in the History occurs
many years later, with
the report of his death by apoplexy;
as a Carolingian supporter, Richer
naturally supresses the
incidents later writers offer to illustrate Louis'
attempts
to use and to abuse the pirate's bastard.
Less than a generation after Richer had
finished his
History, the far more rhetorical, shamelessly partisan
Dudo
of Saint Quentin produced an elaborate set of panegyrical
biographies,
in a mixture of prose and verse, designed to
praise the Normans, and
particularly the more recent rulers;
"the theory guiding the
discourse" (Hayden White, p. 115) is
even more transparent in Dudo
than in Richer, who together
with Flodoard, is among the writers never
mentioned by Dudo.
Instead, Raoul, the brother of Dudo's patron, Richard
of
Normandy, is named as the exclusive historical source, in a
short
poem among the prepatory verses, (Lair, pp. 125-126).
As a result, Dudo
can compose a text that avoids comparison
with the earlier texts, permitting
him to add fabula and
argumentum,
while subtracting historia, according
to the
needs of his genre.
- 13 -
His major subtraction from the life of William Longsword
involves
removing Archbishop Artaud and the embarrassing
ambiguity between military
and ecclesiastical functions
brought about by the battle for the see of
Rheims in the
first half of the tenth century. However, Dudo will recall
those events, encoding them
mythically when his William
Longsword and the abbot of Jumi\`{e}ges
discuss the necessity of
separating the first two functions, in a scene
fabricated
out of material supplied to him partly by contemporary
history,
and partly by earlier texts by Adalberon, Odo of
Cluny, and perhaps by
Eusebius on Constantine and Ermoldus
Nigellus on Louis the Pious. The
scene is part of the
apparatus by means of which Dudo composed his
excercise in
failed hagiography, if we assume that success is not to
be
measured exclusively by the number of manuscripts that
survive in
twentieth-century libraries (the implication of
Guenee, pp. 248-274); for
the panegyrist with hagiographical
tendencies, the inclusion of some
version of his text in the
Acta
Sanctorum would seem to be the necessary sign of
success.
In addition to his rhetorical inventions,
Dudo clearly
used sources earlier than Raoul, both historical and
literary,
including popular geste. His own text, however,
clearly
distinguishes itself from Flodoard and Richer by a
constant verbal excess,
that places it unambiguously in a
tradition of panegyric that goes back at
least to Augustus'
Rome [Syme, pp. 459-475]. In feudal, Christian
societies,
however, an additional complexity arose: "La biographie est
souvent concue
comme un panegyrique, sinon comme un texte
hagiographique... Le passage du
heros au saint se fait
aisement" [Rousset, p. 626]. Church fathers,
of course were
sufficiently familiar with traditional panegyric
[Aigrain,
p. 120] to carry out such a task competently, and Dudo was
well
equipped to praise, to gentrify, and to sanctify his
patrons and their
antecedents, as the textbook schemes and
tropes characteristic of ninth
and tenth-century rhetorical
training that proliferate throughout the De moribus,
together with more than
twenty kinds of prosodic schemes
(Lair, p. 23), amply demonstrate. History then becomes not
a process, but
a performance, by an author who was also a
skilled political negotiator
and a successful ecclesiastical
politician (Lair, pp. 18-19). The result, according to
Prentout, is a
masterpiece, not of historical narrative, but
of habile politique (p. 136).
An additional result, however, is the production of a
text,
or a series of texts, that partially fills a lacuna
that Petit-Dutaillis
described 50 years ago:
The
pagan pirates who, in the ninth century, had
ravaged Gaul, terrifying peasants and clergy
alike, and contributed to checking
the
Carolingian renaissance,
became, during the
- 14 -
tenth and eleventh century, landowners fully
qualified to get the best returns from
their
lands. They supported
the growth of an extremely
powerful regional church and a brilliant
monastic civilization; above all they accepted
the authority of a powerful duke. We
have no
evidence of the
causes and methods of this
transition. (p. 51-52)
On
the evidence of Dudo's text, and that of Wace and Benoit
afterwards,
rhetoric was one of the methods employed to ease
this transition.
Of these three attempts to write an
official Norman
history, Wace's
Roman de Rou gives the most complex vision
of historical reality,
partly because of the nature of the
genre in which he worked -- chanson de geste -- and, to an
extent
impossible to determine with any certitude, because
of Wace's own
temperament. Perhaps as a result of his more
comprehensive vision, as well
as, "une certaine malice," as
Gaston Paris described the tone of
the Roman de Rou (p.
149), he lost his job as official verse-historian to
Benoit.
[See ll. 1141ff. of the
Rou]. Peter Dronke, in The
Medieval Poet and his World, p.
283, considers the reasons
for Wace losing his job: because of his close connection
with
Eleanor of Aquitaine (Rita Lejeune, "R*le litt\'{e} raire
d'Alienor
d'Aquitaine et de sa famille," Cultura neolatina
14 (1954) 5-57; because he took too long
(U. Broich, in W.F.
Schirmer and U. Broich, Studien zum literarischen Patronat
im England des 12
Jahrhunderts, Cologne-Opladen,
1962,
86-88), or as Dronke argues (283) "Henry was a perceptive
enough
critic to know how much better a poet Benoit was than
Wace." The
question is not finally aesthetic, but political.
Both Dudo and Benoit are
relentless panegyricists,
idealizing their patrons' progenitors
shamelessly, but in
different styles, reflecting a difference between
the
eleventh and twelfth centuries, as well as differences
between
what is possible in Latin and what is possible in
French.
For example, from the opening panegyrics
addressed to
Adalbert and to Richard I, Dudo performs pyrotechnical
feats,
importing references from philosophy, theology,
music, and rhetoric, to
lend resonance and dignity to the
brutal achievements of the pirates. As
George Duby describes
the purpose, Dudo's perspective was Augustinian
(in
Pickering's sense of the term):
What our clerk meant to say was that the Norman
chiefs had emerged from the depths of
barbarism
and had by degrees
risen to Christian culture
and to the divine grace conveyed therein. At
first they
had relied on the monks, and later
had concluded their civilizing works with the
help of the secular church. (p. 85)
- 15 -
Dudo's reinvention reflects
as well the change from pirate
to landowner, with the consequent emphasis
on labor, the
means of production, and on women, the means of
perpetuating
ownership of land and labor beyond the life of an
individual.
William, then, once again must be seen as a
thread in a
larger pattern; in Flodoard, he was one of five Northern
magnates,
whose behavior could not meaningfully be
distinguished from the others;
Richer begins the process of
converting him for partisan purposes, to a
mythic figure,
embodying primitive, pirate energy in the service of
legitimitizing
Carolingian hegemony. Dudo's William becomes
a much more finished,
civilized product, whose uncomfortably
barbaric qualities may be displaced
onto figures from
previous generations, although Dudo preserves a bit
of
roundness for his character, by retaining a touch of
brutality in
the remarks with which WL insults the Duke of
Poitier, when the duke seeks
the pirate's sister's hand in
marriage, and a touch of incompetence in the
first function,
when Bernard the Dane must rouse WL from apparent
military
sluggardry.
To aid
in the process of permitting negative qualities to
regress in time, Dudo
departs from the chronological order
observed by Flodoard, and roughly
observed by Richer,
choosing instead a biographical order, with
frequent
panegyrical cadenzas, both in prose and in verse. As a
result,
the characters move from relatively "realistic" to
"iconic"
figures [Spiegel's terms]. Before considering what
happens to the figure
of William Longsword in de
moribus,
then, we must consider what Dudo did with some of the
pirate's
avatars, in his attempt to pursue what he and the
later Encomiast of Emma
set as their task: "to find a middle
way between obvious lies and
truths unpalatable to their
employers" [Campbell, p. xxxv].
To represent the worst of the barbaric
past, Dudo
retrieves the figure of Hastings, mentioned neither by
Flodoard
nor by Richer, heaping upon this shadowy figure,
who may be a conflation
of at least two ninth-century
pirates, every conceivable abhorrent
quality, in spite of
the fact that, as Prentout points out [p. 97],
"... de tous
les faits relatifs a Hasting que mentionnent les
annales
franques, il ne s'en trouve pas un qui concerne la
Normandie."
William's father, Rollo, becomes an equivocal,
transitional figure,
playing approximately the role that
William himself had played in
Richer's History.
In an antithesis as clear as that proposed
by the poet of
the Song of Roland,
when he insists that, Paien unt
tort
e chrestiens unt dreit, Wace makes Hasting's function as an
antithesis
to Rollo and his descendants explicitly clear:
Amdui furent Danoiz, mez moult furent divers,
- 16 -
Rou fist auques a droit, Hastains fist a
envers,
Rou fu amiables,
Hastainz fier et divers
[ll.
12-14 of Holden I, p. 15].
If
the figure of Hastings becomes the locus of all pirate
vices, and
William's father, Rollo, the transitional figure,
then William and his
son, Richard are free to absorb as many
positive qualities as Dudo
can invoke from
the early
eleventh-century storehouse
of panegyric commonplaces.
Rollo, however, in spite
of Dudo's best efforts, remained
a
difficult pill to swallow for later
writers; William of
Jumi\`{e}ges, for example, focuses on the treatment of Rollo as
an
example of Dudo's tendencies to fawn (Marx,
p. 2). In
spite of his
dedicatory epistle to William the Conqueror,
whom he compares
for fortitudo to Samson,
and for
sapientia to
Solomon [Marx, p.1], William refuses to
engage
in dishonest adulation of his ruler's pirate avatar:
Sane geneologiam Rollonis,
a paganis majoribus
nati, et multa etate sua
in paganismo acta,
tandem
ad sanctam infantiam
saluberrimo fonte
renati, necnon somnium ejus cum pluribus id
generis ab
historica serie desecui,
animadvertens ea penitus adulatoria, nec speciem
honesti vel utilis pretendere. [p. 2]
William of Jumi\`{e}ges' firm
statement, however, was undermined
by the interpolations of Robert de
Torigny, who reintroduced
some of the material on Rollo, in yet another
example of the
vulnerability of
medieval texts to the
demands of later
times. Moreover,
if Rollo is the Rolf-Gangr
mentioned by
Snorri Sturlson
(Heimskringla: Sagas of the Norse Kings,
III. xxiv) as
a powerful Viking, instrumental
in settling
Normandy, then
Dudo has supressed most of the information
about Rollo that
Norsemen might have made available to him.
Nevertheless, undeterred by too faithful adherence to the
facts,
and after an extensive preface, both in
prose and in
verse,
complimenting secular and ecclesiastical notables,
piously
brought to a climax by a series of
variation on the
theme of the
Trinity, Dudo devotes the first
book of de
moribus to Hastings.
To indicate the universal significance
of his subject matter,
however, he first delivers a
lecture
on world geography, then
he narrows the focus to the Trojan
ancestry of the Danes,
some of whom,
driven by
overpopulation
in Scandinavia, emigrated to France.
According to Dudo, the
early Danes tended to scatter
their maker's image through
the land with indiscriminate
vigor (as the Carolingians, judging by
Charlemagne -- three
wives and
at least as
many concubines --
and his
descendants, had
also done; see also Lauer, p. 10):
Concretis igitur humana
connubii stuprique
copula
plurimis Dacigenarum pubium
turmis,
illisque bellorum
incendia inter se, et
in
- 17 -
patres, et
avunculos frequenter
suggerentibus
[p.
141]
The uncontrolled sexuality,
then, is both a symptom and a
cause of general
political turbulence; Wace represents the
situation from a
more practical perspective, connecting
two
aspects of the third function
-- sex and food, as sexual
overproduction leads to
a Malthusian predicament, that can
only be solved by lottery. Wace also adds a
specifically
Christian moral judgement at this point:
fiere fu et preissant, gaie et
luxuriouse,
nus hons ne se
tenoit a une fame espouse.
De
plusors fames ourent a merveilles enfanz,
mout y out de petiz et mout y out de granz;
tant y out fiz et filles et fames et
serjanz,
ne poout sa gent
paistre trestout le plus mananz.
[ll. 19-24]
To correct the problem, Vikings selected par
sort are to
be driven from
the country, to
settle elsewhere.
Eventually, two
brothers, Rollo and
Garin, lead an
unsuccesful revolt against this
policy; Garin is killed and
Rollo
flees first to Scotland, then through
England and the
Low Countries to Normandy.
One group of exiled
pirates is led by Hastings,
whose
negative qualities
provoke Dudo to an immediate burst of
vituperative hexameters:
Hic sacer et ferox nimium crudelis et atrox.
Pestifer, infestus, torvus, trux,
flagitiosus.
Pestifer
inconstansque, procax, ventosus et exlex.
Lethifer, immitis, praecautus, ubique rebellis.
(Lair, p. 130)
Benoit also despises
him, representing Hastings
as
universally abhorrent
[ll. 841ff.], and
as, le Judas
(1218). Most damning, however, is Hastings'
behavior at
Luna, where he submits
to a Christian baptism, not to
save
his soul, but as part of a ruse to take the Italian city,
which he
believes, presumably with pirate
stupidity, to be
Rome. Claiming to be mortally ill and
desperate to be
baptized, Hastings
is brought on a litter to a cathedral
within the city
walls, where his men
proceed to murder
everybody
in sight. Dudo's representation of the slaughter
is
conventional, and significant mostly as a dramatization
of the
violation of the second function by those momentarily
in command of the
first function:
Participant
omnes Christiani mystico
sacrificio
Jesu Christi. His
missarum solemniis decenter
expletis, paulatimque paganis
congregatis,
jussit praesul corpus ad
sepulturam deferri.
Pagani cum magno clamore petebant feretrum, et
dicebant
alternatim non eum sepeliendum. Stabant
igitur
Christiani super responsis eorum
stupefacti. Tunc Alstignus feretro
desiluit,
ensemque fulgentem vagina
deripuit. Invasit
- 18 -
funestus praesulem librum manu tenentem.
Jugulat
praesulem, prostrato
et comite, stantemque
clerum in ecclesia inermem.
Obstruxerunt pagani
ostia templi, ne posset
ullus elabi. Tunc
paganorum rabies
trucidat Christianos
inermes.
Traduntur
omnes neci, quos furor reperit hostis.
Saeviunt infra
delubri septa, ut lupi
infra
ovium
caulas. Corde premunt gemitum mulieres,
lacrymasque effundunt inanes. Juvenes
cum
virginibus loris
concatenantur simul. (Lair, pp.
134-135)
All the Christians were participating
in the
mysterious sacrifice of Jesus Christ. When the
ceremonies of the mass
had been properly
completed, and the
pagans had little by little
assembled, the priest ordered the body
to be
brought forward to
be buried. With a
great
shout, the pagans declared, one after another,
that he was not to be buried. The
Christians
were astonished by
this response. Then Hastings
leaped forth from the feretro,
snatching his
shining
sword from its sheath, and attacking the
unfortunate
bishop, who was
standing there
holding
the book in his
hand. He cut
the
bishop's
throat, his retinue having been
struck
down, and he cut the
throat of an unarmed cleric
standing next to him in the
church. The pagans
blocked the doors of the church, so that no one
could
escape. Then the fury
of the pagans
slaughtered the unarmed
Christians. They
slaughtered everyone they came upon in
their
madness, raging
among the ??? like wolves among
the ?
of sheep. The women groaned deep within
their hearts, pouring forth useless
tears. They
bound together young men and women with
reins.
To produce this incident, Dudo may be recollecting a passage
from
Einhard's Life of Charlemagne, in
which, immediately
after describing the precautions taken by
Charlemagne to
reduce the damage done by Norse pirates and by the Moors,
Einhard lists two exceptions to the success of
Charlemagne's
policy; Civita Vecchia was destroyed by the treachery of
the
Moors, and certain Frisian islands were harried by Vikings:
Ac per hoc nullo gravi damno vel a
Mauris Italia
vel Gallia atque Germania a Nordmannis diebus
suis
adfecta est, prater
quod Centumcellae
civitas Etruriae per proditionem a mauris capta
atque vastata est et in Frisia quaedam
insulae
Germanico litori
contiguae a Normannis
depraedatae sunt. (pp. 52-54)
[No serious damage was done to Italy by the Moors, or
to
Gaul and Germany by the
Northmen. The only exceptions
were
Civitavecchia, a city in Etruria,
which was captured and
- 19 -
sacked
by the Moors as the result of treachery;
and certain
islands in
Frisia, near to the German coast, which were
looted by the Northmen] Thorpe, p. 72.
Dudo
seems to have melded the Moorish and Viking threats,
and on the hint of Morrish treachery, filled
in a background
by reinventing the
stories of treacherous pirate baptism.
Earlier chroniclers had
confused invaders also, though not
with such an elaborate, blatant intention of fabricating an
anti-paradigm (see Viard
II, p.228 on
the confusion of
Vandals
and Arabs at the battle of Sens in 725).
Pagans raging against
helpless Christians is the image
firmly established
by the scene, that
is based on no
incident in Flodoard or
in Richer, although Richer does
offer a scene of pirate baptism
that offers violence, but
to
rather than by a pirate
(Latouche, p. 26) In both
cases, the
stories encode Christian
suspicion of the
earnestness of
pirates' baptisms; Einhard records
such
suspicion, Notker Balbus (I.19) tells an elaborate
comic
anecdote about a pirate
who becomes weary of
sartorial
fashion in baptisms, and Richer tells a story of
appropriate
suspicion of pirate
conversions. To dissipate
his
audience's well-founded suspicion of the notion that
pirates
made good Christians in the
early tenth century, Dudo
goes
to great lengths
to prepare a
convincing baptism for
William's father, Rollo,
preparing a scene in which feudal
submission, marriage,
and baptism (i.e.,
all three
functions) follow
each other in rapid succession.
In the dodecasyllabic
fragment of the Roman
de Rou,
Wace makes no mention of Hastings' behavior at Luna, but in
the 750-line fragment printed by Holden as an appendix to
his edition,
Wace devotes a significant
number of lines to
the incident. He takes the shine from Hasting's sword,
makes
him a decapitator
rather than a cut-throat, and expands
Dudo's commonplace comparison,
involving wolves and sheep to
include peasants, and a rudimentary
farm-scene:.
Quant vint a le
biere porter,
que l'en dut le
corps enterrer,
Hastainz de
la biere sailli,
s'espee
traite fist un cri;
au premerain
coup qu'il donna
a l'evesque
le chief coupa,
a son parrain
coupa la teste
com se fust
une vil beste.
Paienz, touz
trai(s)tes lor espees
et lez
chapes des cols jetees,
les
portes coururent fermer,
que
nus n'en peust eschaper;
dez
chetiz font tel tueiz
comme
li leu fet de brebiz
quant il
peut entrer en teit,
que li
villainz ne s'aperchoit;
estrangle moutons et brebiz
- 20 -
et aigniaux touz granz et petiz.
Ensement firent li paien
du dolent peuple crestien...
[693-712]
Benoit, at this point
in his text, uses no such homely
cliche, restores Hastings
as a cutthroat, and adds, perhaps
reinventing Wace's decapitation, the
mutilated arms and
breasts of
weeping women, thereby,
to expand Duby's
intuition (p. 279), feminizing
horror:
E Hastenc est em piez
sailli,
Enz en son poign
s'espee nue.
Com male deserte
a rendue
A saint evesque, som
parrein!
Tot le fendi deci qu'eu sain;
Mort l'a e le conte ensement,
S'a il des meillors plus de cent.
Paine unt les portes serrees,
Les eisues e les entrees.
Li clerjez est enz desarme
E tuit icil de la cite;
Nunt desfense, nen unt od quei.
Fu mais oiz si fait deslei?
Detrenchent les, n'os sai plus
dire.
Alas! com doleros
martire!
Hauz criz crient e
angoissos,
De nule part ne
sunt rescos.
Braient dames,
plorent puceles
Cui l'en cope
braz e mameles.
Soz les autex
les escervient,
Toz
detrenchent e tot ocient. [1712-32]
After such horror, then, to make Rollo more appealing
than Hastings would not be the most difficult rhetorical
task imaginable.
To prepare for the conversion of the rough
pirate, Dudo provides an
appropriate past for Rollo;
first,
his father was a powerful man, who had successfully
resisted
feudal subjugation:
qui nunquam colla suae
cervicis cuipam regi
subegit, nec
cujuslibet manibus gratia servitii
manus suas commendando commisit...Erat enim
omnium Orientalium
praestantiore virtute
praestantissimus. (p. 141)
The superlative, though anonymous father
has equally
superlative
children, at least in strength and
beauty, and
in accordance
with classical epideixis
(Curtius, pp.
180-182):
armis
strenui, bellis edocti,
corpore
pulcherrimi,
animositate robustissimi...etc. (p.
141)
Both Wace (ll. 71-94) and Benoit (ll. 2355-2410) provide
the
same kind of idealized paternity for Rollo, although Benoit,
as usual,
goes on at greater
length about the Dane's
virtues; in any event, the brutal Catillus whom Richer had
identified as Rollo's
father has completely disappeared.
- 21 -
Eventually, Rollo and
his brother Gurim are defeated by
the
trickery of the Dacian king; D.C.
Douglas' [p. 422]
convincing
argument that Rollo was Gangr-Rolf, a
Norwegian,
and not a Dane allows
us, therefore, at this
point, to
detect an element
of fabula in Dudo's fabrication. Gurim
dies in battle, and Rollo,
somewhat like Aeneas, leaves his
city burning behind him, to wander as
an exile through
Europe. First he
travels to the British
Isles, directed,
again
like Aeneas, by a divine voice,
whose message is
interpreted
both literally and figuratively by a
convenient
Christian:
"Rollo, velociter
surge, pontum festinanter
navigio transmeans, ad Anglos perge: ubi audies
quod ad patriam
sospes reverteris,
perpetuaque
pace in ea
sine detrimento frueris." Hoc somnium
cum cuidam sapienti
viro et Christicolae
retulisset, hujusmodo sermone
interpretatus est:
"Tu
vergente venturi temporis cursu
sacrosancto
baptismate puricaberis, praedignusque
Christicola efficieris: et ab errore fluctuantis
saeculi ad Anglos, scilicet
Angelos, usque olim
pervenies, pacemque perennis gloriae
cum illis
habebis."
(Lair, pp. 144-145)
Combining the Augustinian commonplace of the voyage of life
and Gregory's pun on the beauty of the English (Bede
II.1
and De Doctrina Christiana
IV), Dudo presents a vision of
a
providential divinity, preparing to convert the barbaric
pirate into a
soldier of Christ.
Wace
supresses the dream, perhaps to keep his pirate free
of any meddling with the second function
for as long as
possible;
When Rollo first appears in Normandy, Wace
emphasizes his unconverted
nature:
Rou vint en Normendie
a Jumi\`{e}ges tout droit:
n'iert mie crestien ne baptizie n'estoit,
neporquant en son cuer amoit Dieu et
cremoit,
dez songes qu'ot
songie sovent le sovenoit,
esperance avoit bonne qu'a bien li torneroit. (ll. 403-407)
Benoit, on the other hand, devotes considerable rhetorical
energy to the dream,
and his voiz divine expands the
phrase,
perpetuaque pace in ea sine detrimento frueris, to
emphasize that
Rollo's reward will be not merely in
heaven,
but on earth as well,
particularly in the area of the third
function:
Neu te porra tolir ne fraindre
Nule genz vive qui seit nee.
Tex i sera ta destinee
Qu'od fine paiz i renneras
Trestoz les jorz que tu vivras,
Hauz e riches enorez
E
pleins de granz beneurtez. (ll. 3164-70)
In the course of interpreting
the dream, Dudo's holy man
uses a pious cliche, ab errore fluctuantis seculi, that
produces a set of more specific
details in Benoit:
- 22 -
De la non fei, de l'erreiance
Ou tu avras mes de t'enfance,
Des pechez orribles e maus
Que an siecle faiz criminaus
Seras mundes et toz assous. (ll.
3197-3201)
Error and
seculum, then, become
l'erreiance and
siecle, while
the other five lines replace
and amplify
fluctuans.
The dream, however, would not survive
Benoit's text,
since William
of Jumi\`{e}ges chose not merely
to supress it,
but to make its
supression a sign of his own integrity as an
historian. Since
Primat relies primarily on
him for his
version of Norman
history, the last Capetian vision of Rollo
will be closer to that of
Richer than to Dudo.
A Christian
prisoner interprets the second
dream of
Dudo's Rollo,
this time of a
mountain and a purifying
fountain, as a
vision of the Church and of
baptism. Even
more
dramatically, during a storm at
sea, Rollo composes a
prayer of
eleven hexameters, resonantly nasal [See
Wilkinson,
pp. 62-63, where the examples of euphonious lines
of Latin poetry consist
predominately, perhaps
exclusively,
of resonating n's and
m's] acknowledging the power of the
Christian deity:
O Deus omnipotens, coelestia lumine
complens,
Qui coelum terramque
tenes per secula, cujus
Numen
et aeterno complectens omnia giro,
Infectum vitiis peccati et faece repletum,
Qui me Christicolam fieri vis munere
visi
Temporis exiguo cursu
volvente futuri:
Suscipe vota
libens, precibusque faveto benignus,
Fluctus sedatisque feros compesce ruinis,
Casibus eripiens istis nos atque
labore,
Comprime demulscens,
mitescens, atque serena
Undantem nimium violente turbine pontum. (Lair, p. 149)
The
sea, of course, immediately subsides. Flodoard's text
certainly contains
no such rhetorical
and prosodical
sophistication; Richer's speeches are often elaborate, but
his Rollo delivers no such speeches. Dudo's Rollo, then,
like Eusebius' Constantine and
Ermoldus' Louis the Pious,
inter alia,
shows rhetorical skill
in manipulating
theological,
liturgical language, in a sense, anticipating
St. Louis,
as Jacques Le Goff describes the process of
sanctification:
"la saintete se
manifeste...dans la parole
royale" [p. 97].
Wace supresses Rollo's prayer at sea,
but Dudo's eleven
hexameters
in Benoit grow
into a 59-line exercise in
octo-syllabic couplets;
the three lines
on God's power
become
thirty, and the two-line confession of
guilt becomes
approximately 10 lines.
- 23 -
Once he arrives in
France, Rollo achieves a series of
military victories, with only
one setback, and that requires
a miracle, which, of course, contributes to
converting the
pirate. Dudo gives a restrained, sketchy version of the
harrying done
by Rollo and his men, supressing incidents
like the one
reported in the Annales of St. Bertin,
for
843 (RDH VII), which depicts Rollo burning a church. In the
course of ravaging France, Rollo
suffers his first defeat at
Chartres,
when the Archbishop
marches forth from
the
besieged town with a set of
holy relics, singing, as Dudo
evokes a commonplace that can be traced
through Nithard,
Ermoldus
Nigellus, Gregory of Tours, and back into the Old
Testament (Graus,
p.456), with the most direct model perhaps
St. Germain interceding
against the Normans in Abbo's
Siege of Paris (p. 86, II, ll. 271ff.). No matter what the
model,
however, the combination of
relics and song strikes
terror in the heart of Rollo, who flees, followed
closely by
his men. Thus the
military power of Christianity, and the
pious potential of the
pirate reveal
themselves[1]. The
incident would
seem to be a
development of the defeat
described with
so much satisfaction, and inaccuracy,
although
without any divine intervention, by Richer.
Dudo, however, expresses sympathy for Rollo, breaking
into
verse to insist on the pirate's competence in the first
function, pointing to the supreme competence of the second
function, with
an interesting ambiguity, since the
power of
the second function is
expressed by an efficacious female
[therefore, of the
third function] relic -- Mary's tunic:
Rollo potensque valensque asperrimus armis,
Ne verecunderis si jam fugitivus
haberis,
Non te Franco fugat,
te nec Burgundio caedit,
Concio multimodae gentisque utriusque phalangis:
Sed tunica alma Dei genitricis Virginis,
atque
Reliquiae simul, philateria,
cruxque verenda. (p. 163)
Wace and Benoit
both give the incident, with
Benoit again
going to greater
rhetorical lengths, composing
a lengthy
speech of discouragement by Rou, designed to coat the
Norman
progenitor with a
twelfth-century equivalent of
tragic
grandeur. Even
William of Jumi\`{e}ges expresses some sympathy,
attributing Rollo's defeat not to his incompetence at
the
first function, but
to the providential nature
of the
decision:
et
provido consilio, non
timida ignavia
declinavit a certamine (p. 26).
One of the most significant differences between Wace and
Benoit in
their versions of the defeat of Rollo is that Wace
is socially more inclusive; in describing
Chartres, Wace
paratactically lists
Chartres' advantages as age,
rich
citizens, an authoritative church, and Mary's chemise:
La ville estoit moult bonne de grant antiquite,
borjoiz y avoit riches et d'avoir grant
plente,
yglise y avoit bele
de grant auctorite;
- 24 -
de la sainte Virge marie, mere de
De
y estoit la chemise tenue
en grant chierte. [818-822]
The implication seems clear -- the wealthy bourgeoisie and
the church
support each other,
as Wace continues
to
emphasize by
describing the citizens preparing to defend
their city [ll.
823ff.]. Benoit, at the
comparable point,
gives no socially comprehensive vision of the city, instead
(relentlessly
"feminizing" his
material) concentrating
his
energies on describing the
frightened women weeping in the
streets:
Por la grant perte de lor fiz
E por le deol de lor mariz
Vunt les dames eschevelees
Parmi la vile, forsenees.
(7363-66)
The pirates recover, however, from
their miraculous
defeat, to
continue on their
destructive ways until the
French are brought to their
knees. When the nobles assemble
to
urge Charles to make peace with
the pirates, Dudo uses
the occassion to compose yet another encomium of
Rollo, as a
chorus of Frenchmen heap honorific epithets upon him:
Rollo
superbo regum ducumque sanguine
natus,
corpore
pulcherrimus, armis fervidus, consilio
providus, aspectu decorus, contra suos mansuetus
(p. 166)...
The relentless
panegyric continues for ten more
lines, and
contrasts sharply
with Wace's version of the scene,
which
allows far more of historical reality to break in.
Instead
of a chorus of undifferentiated aristocrats, Wace offers
several distinctive
perspectives, each of which emphasizes
the destructive
powers of the pirates; describing the damage
done several times, not as an
exercise in "epic repetition,"
but to provide several
perspectives, again produces a
more
comprehensive vision of
historical reality. First
he
describes the destruction
from the perspective
of the
narrator, then from
the perspective of the notables in
general, and then, dramatically, from the perspective of
the
negotiating Archbishop.
As the narrator, he locates the geographical limits and
the damage
to property and to human beings: old and young,
men and women, the great
and the small, husbands and
wives,
all suffer, paradoxically
alike in pain, though members of
conventionally
antithetic categories:
Le plain
pais gasterent, de Bleiz jusq'a Saint Liz,
les hommes ont destruiz et lez avoir raviz,
n'i remaint bourc a fraindre qui tant
fust bien garniz
se il ne
fust bien clos de murs ou de palis;
dexz hommes voissiez merveilloux tueiz,
n'en ont nule pitie plus que lou de brebiz,
tuent jembles et viex, tuent granz et
petiz,
veuves font les
moilliers, orfelinz font les fiz,
et porgiessent les dames dejouste lor mariz;
icelle honte suffre nul franz homs a
enviz. (ll. 1056-1065)
- 25 -
From the perspective of the clergy and the nobility (i.e.,
the first two functions), the king is to
blame for the major
problem caused by Norman aggression -- a fall in production
and
distribution (third function):
Voient la felonnie, voient la crualte
dez Normanz et de Rou qui le regne ont gaste:
de Bleiz jusqu'a Saint Liz n'a un arpent
de ble,
marcheant n'osent
aler n'a chastel n'a cite,
villainz n'osent en vingne laborer ne en pre,
si ceste chose dure moult avront grant
cierte,
ja tant com guerre
soit nen avront grant plente;
face pais as Normanz, trop a cest mal dure. (ll. 1073-80)
However,
although Dudo is concerned for the
most part
with producing
unrelieved panegyric, he
acknowledged the
destructive
activities of the pirates in an earlier scene,
that,
significantly, takes place in another
country. When
Rollo promises king
Aethelstan, in return for one half the
land and
wealth of the kingdom, to
repress the rebellious
factions in
England, he proposes a series
of destructive
accomplishments
that culminate in three
elements of the
third
function:
Quos vis, conteram,
quos voluerit disperdam.
Subvertam urbes eorum, villasque
et oppida
incendiam ipsorum: proteram eos et dispergam,
subjiciam eos tibi et
occidam. Uxores et
semen eorum captivabo,
et armenta eorum
devorabo. (p. 159)
That the preparations for converting the pirate should
provoke a
connection with the third function recalls the
baptism in 826
of Danish leader
Herold (Ermoldus ll.
2164-2365), in which Ermoldus calls upon Herold to cast
his
own gods away, or turn them into plowshares, thus turning
the false images of the second function into practical
implements
of the third function.
Rollo's
conversion, then, satisfies
the needs of the
medieval as
well as specifically Norman
imagination,
although The
evidence that Rollo
was ever converted is
slender. Flodoard has no comparable scene in the Annales,
although he
does record the conversion of the
pirates,
without specifically mentioning Rollo, in
the History of
Rheims,
IV.xiv (MGH SS XIII, p. 577) and without
mentioning
feudal submission or marriage. Significantly, in
Flodoard
the conversion
follows the defeat at
Chartres, with no
intervening scene in which the
French demand that their king
negotiate with the overpowering
pirate:
De Nordmannorum quoque mitigatione atque
conversisone valde laboravit, donce tandem post
bellum, quod Rotbertus comes contra eos Carno
tenus gessit, fidem Christi suscipere coeperunt,
concessis sibi maritimis quibusdam
pagis, cum
- 26 -
Rothmagensi, quam pene deleverant, urbe
et isdem
subjectis.
Furthermore,
according to the planctus composed at
William
Longsword's death, Rollo died unbaptized, although William's
mother,
and William himself were Christian:
... transmarino natus patre,
in errore paganorum permanente,
matre quoque consignata alma fide,
Sacra fuit lotus unda. (Lair,
"Complainte," p. 393)
Clearly,
then, Dudo, Wace,
and Benoit are involved in
fabricating a
scene that allows Rollo
to maintain his
primacy in the first function, that
permits the power of the
second function
its peculiar hegemony, that
incorporates
what must have
been an historical fact -- the
pirates were
defeated at Chartres -- and that provides the Normans,
by means of an argumentum, if not an
outright fabula,
with a pious
pirate progenitor.
When
Wace's Archbishop addresses Rollo
on the necessity
for conversion
and feudal submission, he suggests that
the
pain inflicted by the
Viking in life will be symetrically
awarded to him after
death:
"Rou," dist
il, "Dex veut creistre t'onnor et ton barnage;
en painne et en malice as use ton
aage
et vescu d'autrui lermes
et d'autre gaaignage,
maint
homme as essillie et torne a servage
et mis par povrete mainte fame au putage,
et tolloit lor chasteaux et lor droit
heritage;
ne prenz conroi de
t'ame plus que beste sauvage,
tu iras en enfer en dolerouz mesnage,
en perdurable painne
qui onques n'asoage,
de vivre
longuement n'as pleige ne gage. (ll. 1120-29)
Wace has gone beyond
Dudo here, whose
Archbishop is too
accomplished
a diplomat to use such provocative images of
destruction at this point. Instead, Dudo's
Archbishop limits
his rhetorical
exertions to emphasizing everyman's
human
limitations, then offers salvation and real estate:
Deum te aestimas? Limo plasmatus, nonne
homo es?
Nonne es
esca vermium, cinisque et
pulvis?
Memento qualis es
et eris, et cujus judicio
damnaberis.
Herebro, ut reor, frueris,
nec
quamquam lacesses
ultra praelis. Si
vis
Christianus fieri,
praesenti futuraque pace
poteris frui, ditissimusque hac terra morari [p.
168].
Neither in the
discussion with the king, urging him
to
negotiate with the
pirates, nor in
the Archbishop's
negotiations
with Rollo, does Dudo permit anyone to
mention
the severe damage done by Rollo's men. In an earlier passage
(pp. 164-165),
Dudo does give a vague description of their
destructive activity,
but it follows a truce foolishly
broken by the Franks, so that
the results, mostly involving
killing
peasants, seem, in a sense, "just."
-
27 -
Benoit's Archbishop
reduces the damage done by Rollo by
distributing the
blame between Hastings and
Rollo (ll.
8472ff.), while magnifying the appeal for conversion
to 110
lines.
In all three texts, the Archbishop now
urges Rollo to
marry the king's
daughter, which he agrees to do, leaving
only one
final transaction to be accomplished: a ritual
humiliation[2]. The last impediment to Rollo's submission
involves his
kissing the king's foot, a gesture to which
he
expresses great resistance:
Rolloni pedem regis nolenti osculari dixerunt
episcopi: "Qui tale donum
recipit, osculo debet
expetere pedem regis." Et ille: "Nunquam
curvabo genua mea alicujus
genibus, nec
osculabor cujuspiam
pedem." Francorum igitur
precibus compulsus,
jussit cuidam militi pedem
regis
osculari. Qui statim
pedem regis
arripiens, deportavit ad os
suum, standoque
defixit
osculum, regemque fecit resupinum.
Itaque
magnus excitatur risus, magnusque
in
plebe tumultus.
(Lair, p. 169)
Rollo's behavior
here recalls Dudo's description
of his
father:
qui
nunquam colla suae cervicis cuipam regis
subegit, nec cujuslibet manibus
gratia servitii
manus suas
commendando commisit. (p. 141)
The
scene displeased Michelet very much: "Telle etait
l'insolence de ces barbares"
[p.321], but he might have felt
even greater repugnance towards Wace's
version of the scene,
in which
Rollo himself, and not
one of his retainers,
overturns the king:
Rou devint hons li roiz et sez mains li
livra;
quant beiser dut le
pie baiser ne se daingna,
la
main tendi aval, le pie au roi leva,
a sa bouche le traist et le roiz enversa,
assez s'en ristrent tuit, et le roiz se
drescha.
(ll. 1152-56)
Wace's
Rollo is certainly less gentrified than Dudo's or
Benoit's, whose
Rollos also have more visions;
Benoit's
Rollo delivers a fifteen-line speech on the impossibility
of
his abasing himself before
any mortal, and he returns to
Dudo's
version of the agent of Charles' fall.
Thus the political truth encoded
by the story of William
Longsword's behavior at Attigny (which
Dudo supresses),
where he temporarily balanced the European hierarchy by
reversing the postions of Louis and Otto --i.e.,
Carolingean
hegemony depended directly on the behavior of the pirates
--
is transferred and encoded in
this incident in the life of
William's
father, with a comic variation.
The balance of
power in
northeastern France was in the
hand(s) of the
pirates. As Freeman remarked
(I.235): "The whole Norman
- 28 -
story is strange and unlikely and many of the events sound
most temptingly like repetitions of earlier events." In
addition, by subtracting the
incident at Attigny, Dudo
reduces the motivations for
William's murder. The degree to
which
Rollo has been gentrified is perhaps
best illustrated
by considering two other stories told about his conversion;
in a passage described by its editor as "pure fantasie,"
Ademar de
Chabannes (c. 988-1034)
provides a wild
combination of a Rollo both pagan
and Christian, celebrating
his conversion by killing and by giving away
money:
Et Normanni regressi,
terram vacuam
reperrientes, sedem sibi in Rotomago
constituunt
cum principe suo
Roso. Qui factus christianus,
captivos plures ante se
decollare fecit in
honore quos coluerat deorum. Et item infinitum
pondus auri per
ecclesias distribuit
christianorum in honore veri Dei,
in cujus
nomine baptismum susceperat. [pp.
139-140).
This particular fabrication
also shows Rollo as
the
cardino rerum
in Norman conversion, but rather more
violently, if
not grotesquely, than the official Norman
versions. One might
also speculate that Ademar's Rollo
symbolically articulates the pagan impression that
the new
religion required new priorities; for Christians, gold, not
human life, was the
most valuable commodity. A
milder
version of the scene,
in a chronicle compiled in the
early
thirteenth century,
emphasizes the linguistic,
rather than
the religious
differences between the
pirates and their
unwilling
hosts:
Hic Carolus dedit Normanniam Rolloni cum filia
sua Gisla. Hic non
est dignatus pedem Caroli
osculari, nisi ad os suum
levaret. Cumque sui
comites
illum ammoneret ut
pedem Regis in
acceptionem tanti
muneris oscularetur,
lingua
Anglica respondit, Ne se bi Goth,
quod
interpretatur, Non, per
Deum. Rex vero et sui
illum
deridentes, et sermonem ejus
corrupte
referentes, illum vocaverunt
Bigoth: unde
Normanni adhuc Bigothi dicuntur. [
RHG VIII,
Paris, 1752,
p. 316, Anno
912: Ex Brevi
Chronico S. Martinis Turonesis]
This
story encodes the necessity of converting from Norse to
Latin, that
accompanied the religious conversion;
according
to Ademar of
Chabannes, WL himself
accomplished the
religious
and linguistic shift after the death of Rollo:
Tunc Roso defuncto 8'
(an. 931), filius ejus
Willelmus loco
ejus praefuit, a
puericia
baptizatus, omnisque eorum Normannorum, qui
juxta
Frantiam inhabitaverant, multitudo
fidem
Christi suscepit, et
gentilem linguam obmittens,
Latino sermone assuefacta est.
-
29 -
In any event,
Dudo's Charles the Bald makes
Rollo an
offer he
chooses not to refuse,
and his conversion and
feudal submission occur
simultaneously. Early in the
next
book, after bestowing his lands and power formally on his
son William, Dudo's Rollo dies peacefully of old
age; thus
the doyen of Saint
Quentin solidifies William's
right to
Normandy, which had
depended, in the
Carolingian text of
Richer, on a
renewal by Louis. Dudo may
also have had in
mind an
intertextual transaction, by means of which he might
contradict Richer's
report that Rollo
had died in
a
slaughter of Vikings (see Lat. pp. 100-101)
As Wace prepares to end his section on
Rollo, he tells us
that, at the
death of Rollo's royal wife, the arrangement
with Poppa
is regularized, and
William Longsword
legitimately
inherits Normandy:
A honor et
a joie vesqui bien longuement;
N'out nul enfant de Gile qu'il prist premierement,
sanz enfant vint la dame a son
definement,
donc espousa Rou
Pope, qu'il tint puiz longuement.
Longue Espee, son fiz, estoit de beau jovent,
bien estoit percreus et de bon
escient,
armes pooit porter,
nes dotoit mez noient;
Rou
fist son heir de lui au conseil de sa gent. (ll. 1286-93)
Poppa's discontinuous presence in Rollo's
conjugal bed
presented a
problem for the panegyrists; Dudo
records the
sequence,
making as little of it as possible,
while Wace
implies,
by his paratactic construction, that Poppa's
fertility
was the central motivation.
Benoit, however, in
keeping with the traditions
of fin amors, represents
Rollo's act first as the
resumption of a grand passion,
and
then as a productive act as well:
Ci truis escrit en ceste page
Que Gisle, la proz e la sage,
La fenne Rou, morut sanz eir,
Mais ce ne puis mie saveir
Quanz anz fu longe od lui sa vie.
Mais apres ce que fu fenie,
Reprist Pope, si l'esposa;
Ce fu la riens qu'il plus ama.
Gerpie l'oct sanz mauvoillance
Por la fille le rei de France.
Porquant ne mist pas en obli
La grant amor qu'il oct od li. (ll.
10123-34)
Benoit, then, may begin
his life of William Longsword,
having given his subject the
appearance of being legitimate,
in spite of the testimony of Flodoard
and Richer. Poppa's
importance
is almost entirely as the mother of
William, to
the fabrication of whose idealized life Dudo devotes
Book
III of De Gestis Normanniae.
To consider the results of his
efforts in the light of
Dummezil's three
functions requires no
Procrustean
abilities,
perhaps because Dudo,
in the process of
- 30 -
transferring
his protagonist to the sonorous, enclosed world
of poetry,
permitted his imagination
such license that
Warrior, Priest,
and Labor-Procreation simply
took over
(although the
third function is far
more developed by
Benoit) the task of providing an
idealized progenitor for
Richard, who
is envisaged in Dudo's first apostrophe to
William (Lair, p. 180) as the equilibrator, led by Christ
to
apotheosis in Elysium.
Dudo either knew nothing whatever
about WL's early life,
or
chose to supress any facts that
might interfere with
fabricating
a young athlete of God,
since he offers only
rhetorical
commonplaces, like those
identified by Curtius
(pp.
180-181), to describe the pirate's youth; as a warrior,
Dudo's William combines, from an early age,
grace and
wisdom:
Est
namque ei filius
nobilissima Francorum
stirpe
progenitus, qui et corpore
vegetabili
sospitate vigorato elegantissimus, sensuque
plurimarum studiis rerum
informato peritissimus
(Lair, p. 181).
Following both Dudo and William, Wace provides a lengthy
effictio
of WL,
emphasizing his physical
prowess and his
good looks, qualities that seem to account cumulatively
and
paratactically for his
royal marriage (though not to
the
mother of the next Duke, Richard):
Guillaume Longue Espee fu de grant
estature,
gent fu et bel et
de moult grant faiture,
gros
fu par lez espaulles, greille par la chanture,
jambes out longues, droites, large la forcheure,
oilz droiz et apers out et douce
regardeure,
mez a sez anemis
sembla moult fiere et dure;
bel nez et bele bouche et bele parleure,
n'estoit mis sa chiere embronchie ne oscure,
la vertiz porta haut, longue out
cheveleure,
fors fu comme jaanz
et hardiz sanz mesure,
qui
son coup atendi de sa vie n'out cure.
Dam Herbert de Saint Liz fu de grant teneure,
Guillaume prist sa fille par marial
droiture.
(ll.
1314-1326)
Benoit also provides
a lengthy effictio, but lists
abstract qualities first, expending only three lines
at a
comparable point in his text on physical beauty:
Sor autres beiaus ert sa beautez
Dreiz, lons e fors e prox e granz
E les deus oiz resplendi sanz...
(10572-74)
Certainly knights
idealized in romance possess such good
looks, but saints, recalling the beauty of
Rebecca, Rachel,
Joseph, Jonathan,
and Absalon, were
often unusually
attractive
(Graus, pp. 463ff.). Courtly
and Christian
conventions, then,
might operate simultaneously.
- 31 -
For the greater
part of his
approximately 50-line
encomium
of WL, however, Benoit develops the notion of his
feudal qualities,
through a series
of commonplaces;
sapientia et fortitudo, for example, modulates into
pietas:
Son sa valor, son sa puissance
Deslei ne tort ne desigance
N'i fera ja, son escient,
Ne grant ovre sanz jugement.
Honnorez ert, plein de poeir,
Plein d'escience e de saveir. (ll. 10557-564)
Neither
Flodoard nor Richer had attributed such qualities to
William, nor had they numbered his mother among the French
nobility
(see Lair, p. 180, note a);
for Flodoard she had
been an anonymous concubine from Britanny,
and Richer does
not mention her at all. As part of his attempt to
gentrify
William, Dudo
supplies a proper name and a proper lineage
for her, although she is clearly a different woman
from the
Gisla whom Rollo
received from Charles the Simple
at the
time of his baptism.
Her name is Poppa, and Dudo provides a
gentrifying, though
restrained, effictio for her:
Quin
etiam quandam Popam
virginem, specie
decoram, superbo
sanguine concretam,
praevalentis principis Berengarii
filiam, secum
laetus adduxit eamque sibi connubio
ascivit, et
ex ea filium nomine Willelmum
genuit. (Lair, p.
157)
Wace's description
of Poppa is significantly different;
after a conversation with Hastings, and
in the process of
wreaking havoc
in Northern France, Rollo forms
an amorous
attachment to a very young girl, Poppa,
the daughter of a
count; in
seven lines, Wace introduces her,
invokes the
topos of
outdoing to characterizes her
as a non-pareil,
indicates her geneological significance, and foreshadows
both the birth and the death of William Longsword, placing
the blame for the latter
event squarely on the shoulders
of
the Flemish:
Li quens
Berengier out une fille moult bele,
Pope l'apeloit l'on, moult ert gente pucele,
n'avoit encor eu sain ne triant ne
mamele,
ne savoit l'en plus
gente dame ne damoisele.
Rou
en a fait s'amie, qui moult l'a desiree,
de lie fu nez Guillaume qui out non Longue Espee,
que li Flamenz occistrent par traisson
provee. (ll. 591-97)
The range of
reference in this passage gives the
poem at
least momentarily
the quality Auerbach calls
"Homeric," in
his discussion of Odysseus' scar (pp.
1-20, et passim).
The
specific physiological detail, suggesting (by triple
synecdoche) that she was scarcely pubescent, is an original
contribution by Wace,
which disappears in Benoit's 32-line
effictio of Poppa as an ideal
courtly beauty of aristocratic
lineage,
capable of rousing fin amor in
Rou's breast (ll.
6290-6322); to obscure the irregularity of the
relationship,
- 32 -
Benoit invokes the
principle of cultural
relativity,
developing the
implications of more danico {William of
Jumi\`{e}ge's
phrase, p. 24},
in the spirit of
vigorous
encomium:
Son la costume e son les leis
Qu'en Denemarche unt li Daneis
L'a prise a finne a grant haustece,
A grant joie e a grant leece.
Moct la tint honnoreement.
De li, si l'estoire ne ment,
Fu Guilleaume nez, e Gerlos,
Une pucelle de grant los.
(6323-6330)
Pirate sexuality is
a problem for Christian
panegyrists,
and Carolingian sexuality
provided them with
equal
difficulties; the
population explosion produced by
de
facto polygamy had originally been responsible for
migration
from Scandinavia,
according to Dudo, and
Wace made the
phenomenon
even clearer in his version (see above).
Dudo's solution for the
troublesome intrusion of the
third function is rhetorical, i.e.,
he records and burnishes
his details, avoiding unpleasant inferences; in
an even more
strenuous
tour-de-force later on,
he offers the
same
strategic
solution to account
for William Longsword's
polygamous behavior, although the rhetorical problems are
compounded in the case of
Rollo's son, because Dudo (and
Benoit after
him) takes on the
additional problem of
establishing WL's monkish
tendencies.
Dudo's first task,
however, is to establish William's
competence in the first function; therefore,
Rollo's son
sets out to
battle Bretons, and
to make peace with the
treacherous rebel Riulf. His
major military accomplishment
occurs, or is imagined to have occured at the battle of
Pratum Belli,
where he responds
initially with more
discretion than valor. At the
sight of his enemies amassed
in
great numbers at Rouen, William calls a council and
suggests delaying
until able to
recruit more troops.
Rebuked for effeminacy by
Bernard the Dane, Dudo's William
replies, in a burst of
alliterating f's, c's, and d's,
with
a vigorous
beotword, claiming the
standard for himself,
and
challenging his followers to fall upon
the enemy like a
wolf upon lambs:
"Duris et obscoenis
verbis me turpiter
lacessisti, cum me
effeminatum, armisque
frigidum, quin etiam nihilum
vocasti. Ecce
praeibo
signifer festinanter ad
praelium, et
conteram constanter exercitum inimicorum.
Devorabit
gladius meus carnes
perjurorum,
disrumpamque et dissipabo castra eorum. Non
diutius
segnes et timidi moramini,
verum me
festinanter sequemini, et invadamus eos
ut agnos
lupi." [p.
190]
-
33 -
Bernard promptly apologizes, like an ideal
retainer,
insisting that
his remarks were meant only to test
the
loyalty of the troops,
giving Dudo the opportunity to weave
a few more panegyrical phrases
into the biography:
Cernens autem Bernardus animositatem,
constantiamque virilem Guillelmi ducis, dixit ad
eum
verbis humillimis: "Domine dux
praepotentissime, noli irasci
nostra
allocutione, quia consequens est et utile quod
nobis jubes facere. Tantum experiamur
quis tecum
ibit ad praelium, quique subvenient
tibi in
auxilium." (p. 190)
Bernard, then, presents
his provocation as a
kind of
rhetorical test, not
of William Longsword, but of the Norman
troops.
Wace gives a far less elegant scene, with
two men, Boton
and Bernard, attacking William's slothfulness, and with a
change in the nature and giver of the test:
"Boton," ce dit Guillaume,
"je ne m'i os combatre,
quer contre un de mez hommes en a bien Riouf quatre,
mort sui se il me peut detenir ne
abatre.
--- Coart es,"
dit Boton, "par le cors Saint Fiacre!
Par la foi que je doi au Saint Filium Patre,
Se fust qui cue feist bien te deust on
batre,
tu ne t'oses aremer ne
en tez armes embatre." [1433-39]
When William again insists that Riulf is too formidable an
enemy, Bernard then composes a longer
attack, accusing
William of
lacking sufficient faith in God, and invoking,
inter alia, the image of Rollo [ll. 1446-61]. William
then
reveals that he was speaking,
par art, to test the troops:
"Amis," dist il, "Bouton, et tu amis
Bernart,
ne me tenez donc mie
a mauvez n'a coart,
essaier
vous vouloie, si parloe par art,
quer combatre me voil et de ferir m'est tart."
In Benoit's version of the
scene, Bernard delivers a
59-line denunciation of WL, without
alluding to any testing;
WL's response is an angry, extensive (11547-589) gab, also
without any mention of
testing, which produces Bernard's
immediate assent.
Thus Benoit, the
most extensively
rhetorical
of the three, deletes the element of rhetorical
test present
in Dudo and in Wace.
WL now decides to press
forward, winning a striking
victory over Riulf, with no
casualties suffered by William's
men:
Tunc Guillelmus lustrans campum cadaverum, et
non inveniens mortuum ullum suorum,
glorificavit
cum suis Deum,
qui subvenit sperantibus in se in
adjutorium. Locus autem, in quo
bellum mirabile
fuit, dicitur
usque in praesentem diem
add
Pratum-Belli. [p. 191]
Wace and Benoit also
report no dead or injured on
William's
side, while many on
Riulf's side died, staining the grass
with their blood,
or drowned in the Seine. In addition,
however, Benoit
emphasizes the amount
of wealth, of
beautiful, luxurious
objects involved, calling
upon the
nonpareil-topos to
augment the presence
of the third
function:
Tel aveirs mais n'i fu jostez,
Tant trefs ne tant bel pavillon,
Tant mantel vair, tant pelicon,
Tant coffre ne tante vaiselle,
Tante despoille riche et bele,
Tant bel osberc, tant branc
d'acer,
Tant palefrei e tant
destrier,
Autres aveirs
riches et mainz:
Ne fu mais
fait si faiz gaainz. (11822-30)
Dudo, however, at this
point, does not invoke the third
function, choosing
instead to concentrate his rhetorical
efforts on developing a sense of William's military and
political importance;
in the course of receiving credit for
almost every virtue and accomplishment
possible, Dudo's
pirate negotiates the return of Louis
d'Outre-Mer, then
loyally
supports Louis against the
treacherous elements of
the French
nobility; in return, Louis himself composes a
panegyric for his most faithful retainer, elegantly triune:
nemo
justior in factis, nemo
sanctior in dictis, nemo
potentior in armis (Lair, p. 196). Dudo, Wace, and Benoit
also report that WL arranges for Louis and Henry the German
Emperor to
establish a temporary alliance, although not in a
scene as
violent and dramatic as
the one contrived by
Richer, in which WL rearranged the
seating for Louis and the
Emperor Otto.
When William proceeds to pledge
his loyalty to Louis'
infant son Lothar, however,
and to the concept of a
Carolingian dynasty (Lair, p. 198),
the other French
magnates take
umbrage, though not
openly, as Dudo's
antithetic construction
emphasizes, ira corde, non vultu,
commoti, and they begin to
plot, nequiter. Clearly this
Norman marchio is
very far from Flodoard's dux,
and
easily distinguishable from Richer's pirate.
His intellectual curiosity, however, makes him even more
complicated, if not exactly complex. One day he asks Abbot
Martin of Jumi\`{e}ges why the Christian religion
observes a
tripartite structure
(col. 675), and Martin's response is
a
lecture on a topic discussed at some length by Duby (pp.
270ff.) When
William reveals his own desire
to become a
monk to the abbot,
Martin objects strenuously, arguing
that
the warrior should guard
those in charge of the other two
functions. A
lecture on the necessity for separating the
first and second functions should come as no surprise in a
work dedicated to Adalbert, whose satiric
Carmen ad
Rotbertum
Regem constantly juxtaposes warrior
and monk for
comic purposes, with
lines like:
Miles nunc,
monachus diverso more manebo.
Non ego sum monachus, jussu sed milito regis. [p. 8]
The
parodic battle between monks and
Saracens that Adalbert
imagines (ll.
119-154), as part of his attack on Odilon and
the Cluniacs, also
makes the combination of functions comic.
Duby's objections to Benoit's version, where he finds the
warrior's part
in the dialogue disproportionatly large,
overlooks the fact that such a scene is part of the
stock in
trade of panegyrists; Ermoldus (Faral, p. 147, ll. 1909ff.)
represents Louis lecturing to the archbishop of Rheims
in
823 A.D., on how to convert the Danes, more than one hundred
years before
Dudo attempts his
biography of William
Longsword, and
in accordance with what Poulin (p.
131)
describes as the ideal
for a Carolingian prince: not to
find sainthood by retreating
from society, nor in governing
with
particular competence, but in renewing ancient virtues,
where duty to
state and personal sanctification coalesce. In
spite of the abbot's advice, however, William persists,
leaving the
monastery precipately, uncharitably declining an
invitation to
dine; he immediately becomes
sick, and
recognizes in
the illness the punishing hand of God.
Wace's first interest
in describing WL's visit to
the
monastery is to distinguish William from Hastings, as he
had
made the antithetical
distinction between Rou and
Hastings
earlier; in this case,
William has rebuilt what Hastings,
li cuvert, destroyed:
Li dus vint a Jumeges o mesnie
privee
por voier l'abeie
qu'il avoit restoree,
que
Hastain, li cuvert, out destruite et gastee. [1701-03]
Wace's WL does
not ask a question
about the tripartite
structure
of society, but states, in indirect discourse,
that he wishes to change his
life and become
a monk
(1706-09). Abbot Martin tries, briefly and unsuccessfully,
to dissuade him, then invites him to
stay for dinner.
William refuses,
hurrying off towards
Rouen, where he
immediately falls
ill, punished for
refusing monastic
hospitality. Benoit follows the same sequence, augmenting
the amount of direct
discourse, and placing the
description
of the three orders or
functions in the mouth of William,
rather than in the
mouth of the abbot, thereby distressing
Duby:
In the original account, it was the
clerk -- the
abbot, the contemplator of invisible things --
who described the ideal order to be imposed on
earthly society. In
Benedict's version, the
description is given by the duke himself... This
is the fundamental, the tragic change, -- this
fall, this plunge from the dizzying heights of
theology...toward the
abysmal depths of that
petty, trivial thing that we call politics. (p. 276)
Neither Wace nor Benoit subscribe to William
of Jumi\`{e}ges'
notion that
WL declined the abbot's offer
out of culinary
fastidiousness.
When
Dudo's William announces
his retirement, his
subjects object, but when he adds that his son will
succeed
him, the loyal Normans instantly accede (pp. 203-204). Wace
offers the same event,
expanding the passage
with a
description of
Richard as a perfect prince, fluent in Danish
and French, physically
attractive, generous, literate,
able
to care for
birds, play chess, hunt,
and behave in a
thoroughly courtly fashion
(1762-75). Benoit, however,
imagines three specific
nobles convoked by William, swearing
allegiance, in an elegantly appointed
room, to Richard, who
is clearly
too young to
have achieved many
courtly
accomplishments,
since Benoit describes him as lying before
them in the nude,
La jut li enfes trestoz nuz [13665];
Benoit ends the scene with William commending the child to
the care of Anslec,
Bernard the Dane, and Boton.
The next problem with which Dudo
deals is how to provide
Arnulf
with necessary but morally insufficient reason to
murder Williiam. The solution is provided by a struggle
for
the property of Erluin, a sequence of events that replaces
the
humiliation of the Emperor Otto at Attigny in Richer's
History, as
the provocation for
William's assassination.
Arnulf
takes Erluin's castle, and when his protector Hugh
will
not help him regain the property, Erluin turns to
William. Appropriately, William first redirects
him to
Hugh, who
promises not to harm anyone who
helps Erluin;
William
then proceeds to
restore the property
to its
rightful owner,
thereby providing Arnulf with
murderous
motivation (pp. 203-204).
When Wace's Arnulf takes Montreuil, Herluin goes through
a process of three
stages; first he goes
to Hugh, who
refuses to
help because Arnulf is sez amis. (l.
1804).
Then he goes to king
Louis, who says that he cannot help
because Arnulf is sez homs (l. 1809). Finally, he goes to
William
Longsword who, after
first determining that
both
Hugh and Louis have promised not to interfere if
Herluin
finds help elsewhere,
personally sets out with his
troops.
By retaking Montreuil
and fortifying it
against the
neighboring
Flemish, William thus provides Arnoul with the
necessary motivation, although Arnoul's
accomplices are
supplied
not by Flodoard, Richer, and
Dudo, but by the
chanson
de geste to which Wace had
earlier referred, as
Holden indicates (III. p. 25).
Nothing becomes William's life like his
leaving of it, as
the panegyrists,
Benoit particularly, represent
the final
scene, although
practical considerations also play a
part.
Dudo's version of
the preparations for the
meeting at
Piquigny acknowledge political and
military reality more
precisely
than the previous texts. His Arnoul,
for example,
calls for separating the two
armies while the leaders meet,
and
the river serves that practical
purpose, since the
Somme, Dudo points out, is very
deep at Picquigny. At the
same
time, however, Dudo's rhetorical urges lead him to
compound
the antithetical possibilities; for
Richer, the
only opposition
in the scene was derived from the fact
that
one leader arrived by
land, and the other by water; for
Dudo, however, hic
martyrixandus citra, ille dolosus
et
perfidus ultra (Lair, p. 207),
and he continues to contrast
William's
innocence and Arnulf's perfidy
throughout the
passage. When William is called back, after the conference
on the island has
formally ended, and the participating
parties have exchanged the kiss of peace (Dudo shows
more
restraint here than some
later writers, who are
quick to
suggest the
Christ/Judas analogy), William
rows back to
shore alone in
one boat, and his twelve retainers (the
traditional number both for the comitatus and for Christ's
apostles) row back in another. Four conspirators call to
him to
return, because Arnulf, too weakened by
gout to come
forward himself, has forgotten something:
Domine, domine, melioris consilii
obliti, torque
parumper, precamur,
navim, quia volumus to
paucis. Noster senior nequit amplius aggredi,
quia podagrae infirmitate sic eum detineri, sed
mandat
mirabile, cujus oblitus est, tibi.
(p.
207)
Innocently, or stupidly
(for a text which claims
Arnulf's
technical innocence, see
Lair, note a,
p. 208),
unaccompanied
even by the two boys who rowed
him back in
Richer's version,
William turns the
boat around, rows
himself
back to the island, and presents
himself unarmed to
his enemies, who take instant, effective action,
hacking him
to pieces and fleeing:
Tunc Willelmus,
fide integerrimus, perfidorum
precatibus crebrius
compulsus, torquet navim
celerius, venitque
ad ripam fluminis armorum
securus sine suis, cum eis locuturus. At illi,
sub pellium tegmine
jam absconsis quattuor
mucronibus
celeriter extractis, rabie
immanissimi furoris accensi diabolicoque spiritu
exagitati, percutiunt et
occidunt, heu dolor!
Innocentem Willelmum,
videntibus cunctis;
hincque, cum Domino omnium nequissimo, cleri
classe
transvecti, suoque exercitui
annexi,
praepete
equitatu potiuntur fuga lapsi. (p. 208)
Normans and Bretons
then mourn the martyred
Viking,
although Dudo magnifies
the martyrdom, and
supresses the
Viking:
- 38 -
Sic pretiosus marchio
Willelmus testisque
Christi gloriosissimus
felici martyrio
consecratur. Taliterque regnum
coelorum, quod
diu
concupivit, adeptus, vivens
in Christo
feliciter coronatur. Perfusum quippe sui
cruoris
rore beati viri corpus
jacuit exanime. Verum
anima,
in coelum ab angelis deducta, inter
choros
angelorum inaestimabiliter est collocare.
(p. 208)
When they strip his body, they find strapped,
strophio
lumborum ejus, the silver key to the place where he kept
his
monk's outfit After his death,
the Normans and the Britons,
in a
scene from which Louis
d'Outre-Mer has been entirely
removed, spontaneously and unanimously elect Richard their
leader (pp.
208-209):
necnon
Northmannorum principes dixerunt nimium
ejulantes:
"Seniorem, proh dolor!
perdidimus,
seniorem
faciamus."
Wace follows
Dudo's outline for the murder scene,
with
several modifications;
where Dudo represented all four
of
the conspirators calling the Duke
back to the island, only
Bauce calls to
him in Wace's text, perhaps because the
nature of
chanson de geste requires a reduction
in the
agents of evil. In
addition, Wace supresses the motif
of
Arnulf's illness:
"Sire duc," ce dit Bauces, "retornez a nos cha,
lessiez passer vos hommes, le batel
revendra,
mis sires vous veut
dire un grant besoign qu'il a,
mez por autres paroles qu'il vous dist l'oublia,
et ce est tout li miex porquoi il
s'acorda;
venez a lui parler,
vous reperrerez ja." (ll. 1972-77)
When WL returns, Bauce strikes the
first blow, decapitating
the Duke,
and the others then chop him to pieces:
Li dus sailli arriere et le bateaux passa,
la pais estoit juree, nulle rien ne
douta.
Alas, quel felonnie!
Dex. porquoi retorna!
Bauces
leva l'espee que souz ses peaux porta,
tel l'en donna eu chief que tout l'escervela;
li autres trois ferirent et le duc
trebucha. (ll. 1978-83)
Benoit
develops a lengthy scene for the
martyrdom of WL,
substituting an oar for the murder weapon wielded by Wace's
Bauce:
Bauce parmi le chef en som
Le feri se d'un aviron
Que tote la teste out fendue
E jus la cervele espandue;
Traites unt les espees nues. (14597-601)
[See Andresen
for discussion of the substitution of an oar]
Benoit firmly supports
Dudo's assertion of WL's
sainthood, although,
like Dudo and Wace, he
supplies no
miracles :
- 39 -
Eisi out sa vie finee
li dux Willaumes Longe Espee
Martir fu saint e glorios. (ll. 14765-67)
Like Dudo and
Wace, Benoit represents Richard's
election at
this point without the presence of Louis, and in hyperbolic
terms:
Ne fu faiz sires n'establiz
Plus ducement, ce dit l'escriz.
Sempres, n'i out autre devise,
Sus le maistre autel de l'iglise
Li unt sa feaute juree
Eisi cum mieuz fu devisee. (ll.
14755-60)
In all texts,
the martyr's death is
followed by no
thaumaturgical
events; after all the panegyric possible,
composed in
Latin and in French, in
verse and in prose,
William
remains no canonized saint, (to use Ulisso's phrase)
com 'altrui piacque.
On the
other hand, his son's
body will be remarkably
preserved -- both in Dudo
and in Benoit, Richard's body is
odiferous -- although
his grandson's body will show no
such
signs. The Norman panegyrists had to settle for bestowing
only the odor, not the
fact of sanctity upon their patrons.
Dudo's text, then, shows what
might be produced in the
early
eleventh century by
an ecclesiastical politician
trained in classical panegyric; Wace's text shows how a
twelfth-century
cleric might convert such material into
chanson de geste,
with the help of some
intervening Latin
prose
abbreviations; Benoit's text shows
how the same
material might be reinvented when literary fashion changes,
and roman becomes the rage. Although Wace lost his job to
Benoit in
the twelfth century, and Primat, in the process of
composing the
final Capetian version of French history,
Les Grandes Chroniques, prefers
to rely upon William of
Jumi\`{e}ges, rather than Dudo,
Wace, or Benoit, nineteenth and
twentieth-century
readers interested in Norman history and
poetry have come to prefer
Wace, because his rougher vision
seems
to give more pleasure, and because he
supressed less
of historical reality than his predecessors and
competitors.
Ph. A.
Becker, "Die Normannenchronicon:
Wace und seine
Bearbeiten,
Zur romanischen Literaturgeschichte,
Munich,
1967, pp. 466-495.
Eleanor Searle, "Fact and Pattern in Heroic
History,"
Viator 15 (1984),
119-37. Rollo as Aeneas, with consequent
abandonment of the
Viking cultural past. Eastern Normandy is
emphasized. p.
132: "The great set-piece of the work is
devoted to
Richard's winning-over of
the Danes to
Christianity and to peaceful
settlement of lands that he
will assign them." Gunnor a
significant figure, as Richard's
non-Christian then legitimate
wife. Robert of
Torigny
- 40 -
offers another version
of the tale,
involving
bed-substitution.
p. 136 Two themes of Dudo's
work: "the
legitimacy
of the male lineage, and its dependence upon
alliance with the female lineage.
Meinolf
Schumacher, "Teuflische
Piraten," Archive fuer
Kulturgeschichte 74 (1992),
249-256.
- 41 -
[1] The
military power of the
church was, of
course,
significant in
the practical world also; perhaps 2/5
of
a Carolingian bishop's income was spent on maintaining
the
militia ecclesia, according to
Janet L. Nelson's
calculations, in "The Church's
Military Service in the
9th Century," in The Church and War, ed. by W.J.
Sheils, Blackwell, 1983.
[2] See Marc Bloch,
roi thaumaturge: les formes
de la
rupture de l'hommage dans l'ancien droit f\'{e}odal,
Paris,
1912.
-
42 -