A Literary History of the English People, from the Origins to the Renaissance. J. J. Jusserand
failed; the Normans tried and succeeded. They were ever successful.
Powerful means were at their disposal, and they knew how to make the best of them. Firstly, the chiefs of the nation are French; their wives are mostly French too: Stephen, Henry II., John, Henry III., Edward I., Edward II., Richard II., all marry Frenchwomen. The Bohuns (from whom came the Herefords, Essexes, Northamptons), the Beauchamps (Warwick), the Mowbrays (Nottingham, Norfolk), the Bigods (Norfolk), the Nevilles (Westmoreland, Warwick), the Montgomerys (Shrewsbury, Pembroke, Arundel), the Beaumonts and the Montforts (Leicester), are Frenchmen. People of less importance married to English women—"matrimonia quoque cum subditis jungunt"[144]—rear families which for many years remain French.
During a long period, the centre of the thoughts and interests of the kings of England, French by origin, education, manners, and language, is in France. William the Conqueror bequeaths Normandy to his eldest son, and England to his younger. Not one of them is buried at Westminster before 1272; they sleep their last sleep most of them at Caen or Fontevrault[145]; out of the thirty-five years of his reign, Henry II. spends more than twenty-one in France, and less than fourteen in England.[146] Before his accession Richard Cœur-de-Lion only came to England twice in twenty years. They successively make war on France, not from hatred or scorn, not because they wish to destroy her, but because they wish to be kings of France themselves. They admire and wish to possess her; their ideal, whether moral, literary, administrative, or religious, is above all a French ideal. They are knights, and introduce into England the fashion of tournaments, "conflictus gallici," says Matthew Paris. They wish to have a University, and they copy for Oxford the regulations of Paris. Henry III. quarrels with his barons, and whom does he select for an arbiter but his former enemy, Louis IX., king of France, the victor of Taillebourg? They organise in England a religious hierarchy, so similar to that of France that the prelates of one country receive constantly and without difficulty promotion in the other. John of Poictiers, born in Kent, treasurer of York, becomes bishop of Poictiers and archbishop of Lyons, while still retaining the living of Eynesford in Kent; John of Salisbury, secretary of the archbishop of Canterbury, becomes bishop of Chartres; Ralph de Sarr, born in Thanet, becomes dean of Reims[147]; others are appointed bishops of Palermo, Messina, and Syracuse.
Impetuous as are these princes, ready at every instant to run all risks and play fast and loose, even when, like William I., old and ill, one precious quality of their temper diminishes the danger of their rashness. They undertake, as though for a wager, superhuman tasks, but once undertaken they proceed to the fulfilling of them with a lucid and practical mind. It is this practical bent of their mind, combined with their venturesome disposition, that has made of them so remarkable a race, and enabled them to transform the one over which they had now extended their rule.
Be the question a question of ideas or a question of facts, they behave in the same manner. They perceive the importance both of ideas and of those who wield them, and act accordingly; they negotiate with the Pope, with St. Martin of Tours, even with God; they promise nothing for nothing; however exalted the power with which they treat, what they agree to must be bargains, Norman bargains.
The bull "Laudabiliter," by which the English Pope Nicholas Breakspeare (Adrian IV.) gives Ireland to Henry II., is a formal bargain; the king buys, the Pope sells; the price is minutely discussed beforehand, and set down in the agreement.[148] But the most remarkable view suggested to them by this practical turn of their mind consisted in the value they chose to set, even at that distant time, on "public opinion," if we may use the expression, and on literature as a means of action.
This was a stroke of genius; William endeavoured, and his successors imitated him, to do for the past what he was doing for the present: to unify. For this, the new dynasty wanted the assistance of poets, and it called upon them. William had persistently given himself out to be not only the successor, but the rightful heir of Edward the Confessor, and of the native kings. During several centuries the poets who wrote in the French tongue, the Latin chroniclers, the English rhymers, as though obedient to a word of command, blended all the origins together in their books; French, Danes, Saxons, Britons, Trojans even, according to them, formed one sole race; all these men had found in England a common country, and their united glories were the general heritage of posterity. With a persistency which lasted from century to century, they displaced the national point of view, and ended by establishing, with every one's assent, the theory that the constitution and unity of a nation are a question not of blood but of place; consanguinity matters little; the important point is to be compatriots. All the inhabitants of the same country are one people: the Saxons of England and the French of England are nothing but Englishmen.
All the heroes who shone in the British Isle are now indiscriminately sung by the poets, who celebrate Brutus, Arthur, Hengist, Horsa, Cnut, Edward, and William in impartial strains. They venerate in the same manner all saints of whatever blood who have won heaven by the practice of virtue on English ground. Here again the king, continuing the wise policy of his ancestors, sets the example. On Easter Day, 1158, Henry II. and his wife Aliénor of Aquitaine enter the cathedral of Worcester, wearing their crowns, and present themselves before the tomb of the holy protector of the town. They remove their crowns, place them on his tomb, and swear never to wear them again. The saint was not a French one, but Wulfstan, the last Anglo-Saxon bishop, one who held the see at the time of the Conquest.[149]
The word of command has been given; the clerks know it. Here is a poem of the thirteenth century, on Edward the Confessor; it is composed in the French tongue by a Norman monk of Westminster Abbey, and dedicated to Aliénor of Provence, wife of Henry III. In it we read: "In this world there is, we dare to say, neither country, nor kingdom, nor empire where so many good kings and saints have lived as in the isle of the English … holy martyrs and confessors, many of whom died for God; others were very strong and brave as Arthur, Edmond, and Cnut."[150]
This is a characteristic example of these new tendencies. The poem is dedicated to a Frenchwoman by a Norman of England, and begins with the praise of a Briton, a Saxon, and a Dane.
In the compiling of chronicles, clerks proceed in the same manner, and this is still more significant, for it clearly proves that the pressing of literature into the service of political ideas is the result of a decided will, and of a preconceived plan, and not of chance. The chroniclers do, indeed, write by command, and by express desire of the kings their masters. One of them begins his history of England with the siege of Troy, and relates the adventures of the Trojans and Britons, as willingly as those of the Saxons or Normans; another writes two separate books, the first in honour of the Britons, and the second in honour of the Normans; a third, who goes back to the time when "the world was established," does not get down to the dukes of Normandy without having narrated first the story of Antenor the Trojan, an ancestor of the Normans, as he believes.[151] The origin of the inhabitants of the land must no longer be sought for under Scandinavian skies, but on Trojan fields. From the smoking ruins of Pergamus came Francus, father of the French, and Æneas, father of Brutus and of the Britons of England. Thus the nations on both sides of the Channel have a common and classic ancestry. There is Trojan blood in their veins, the blood of Priam and of the princes who defended Ilion.[152]
From theory, these ideas passed into practice, and thus received a lasting consecration; another bond of fraternity was established between the various races living on the soil of Britain: that which results from the memory of wars fought together. William and his successors do not distinguish between their subjects. All are English, and they are all led together to battle against their foes of the Continent. So that this collection of scattered tribes, on an island which