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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 av