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00:00In 1066, William the Conqueror and his fleet set off from here on the coast of Normandy.
00:24It was a remarkably well-timed trip that way, across the English Channel.
00:30The riches of England lay just over the horizon, and it was a land that would turn this Norman
00:36Duke into a king.
00:38English history was about to change forever.
00:44The Normans were coming, and nothing would be the same again.
00:50But who were William and his band of rugged warriors?
00:53Who were the Normans, and what made them so good at conquering?
00:57How did heathen Viking raiders, Northmen, turn into Christian Norman rulers and adventurers
01:05spreading across the globe?
01:08Soon, there was not a part of medieval Europe or even the Middle East that didn't feel the
01:12impact of their presence.
01:13In this series, I'm exploring how these Northmen made roots in Normandy and established a new
01:22type of society, and following the roots of conquest to find out what made the Normans
01:27uniquely successful 1,000 years ago.
01:29We are here in Normandy to meet these all-conquering men and women of the North.
01:36This part of northern France has always been a prosperous area.
01:59The Romans, and later Germanic tribes, were attracted by these riches.
02:05From the 5th century, this area then fell under Frankish control, culminating with the great
02:11European empire created by Charlemagne.
02:13Look at this absolutely luscious Norman countryside.
02:19It's incredibly fertile, and it's not just a great place for crops, but it also grows the
02:25most important crop in the Middle Ages, sheep, who are covered in wool.
02:29In a world before indoor heating, sheep and their wool mean riches, and it keeps people warm.
02:35So not only is this a wonderful place for agriculture more generally, it's a great place to be a shepherd.
02:42This means wealth and power.
02:47The Merovingian dynasty, which controlled the Frankish kingdom for centuries, took a shine
02:52to this fertile and connected area and its abundant resources.
02:56They called it Neustria, and established royal residences and monasteries across the land,
03:02including one of the most famous of them all.
03:04The medieval pilgrims, struggling their way across these windy tide flats, were on their
03:10way to what they called St. Michael in Peril of the Sea.
03:13But today we know it better as the magnificent monastery of Mont Saint-Michel.
03:22The Abbey of Saint-Michel, holding relics of the archangel St. Michael, was established
03:28just off the Frankish coast in the 8th century.
03:30It soon flourished as a place of prayer and pilgrimage.
03:39But this area had a problem.
03:44The same things that meant it was able to support religious life, well-connectedness and wealth,
03:49meant it was also susceptible to attacks from the sea.
03:52Seaborne raiders from across northern Europe had plundered the region since Roman times.
04:01But in the late 8th century, it was about to get a whole lot worse.
04:05Now there was a new threat from Scandinavia, the people we call the Vikings.
04:15Through the 8th century, they increasingly came into contact with northern European kingdoms,
04:21trading and raiding.
04:22With their formidable longboats and surprise attacks by sea and river,
04:31the Vikings sailed far and wide in search of wealth and power.
04:36But the place where the Viking story had some of its most dramatic beginnings was northern France.
04:42The rich land, cities and great rivers were a magnet for the Vikings.
04:46So we are here in Rouen, on the banks of the Seine.
04:52And from 790 onwards, this was essentially a highway for Vikings.
04:58Now before this, the Vikings had already been raiding up and down the coast of the North Sea.
05:03But by 790, they set their sights on the Seine
05:05because this is an incredibly fertile and wealthy part of the world.
05:10So from 790, the locals essentially have to put up with summer being the Viking season.
05:14And yes, you've got a great farm.
05:17But at any moment, a band of warriors might come burn it down and enslave you.
05:21It's testament to the fact that this is an incredibly rich place to live.
05:25And it's worth putting up with this kind of terror.
05:31From 841, the Viking raids intensified in Normandy.
05:36The town of Rouen was plundered and burned.
05:40The Vikings encroached further and further down the Seine.
05:44And in 845, they reached Paris.
05:49At the siege, Ragnar Lodbrok, the Viking hero,
05:52led the Northmen to plunder and occupy the city.
05:56Withdrawing only after the Frankish king, Charles the Bald, paid a ransom.
06:01The first Dengel tribute collected from the Franks.
06:04By the mid-9th century, Viking incursions are just a facet of life in the Lower Seine Valley.
06:12If you live here, you know that in the summer, they're going to come.
06:15But by 851, something changes.
06:19Instead of returning to Scandinavia in the winter,
06:21the Vikings decide they're going to overwinter here.
06:24Suddenly, Vikings aren't something that you put up with in the summer.
06:28They're here to stay.
06:29And it didn't help that the Franks were at war with themselves.
06:34Charles the Bald took the reins in the westernmost Frankish kingdom,
06:38but had to fight his own aristocrats as well as the Vikings.
06:44Northern France was there for the taking.
06:47So this is an absolute delight.
06:55It's a replica Frankish village from around the time that the Northmen would have been showing up here.
07:01About the end of the 8th century.
07:03Of course, if Vikings showed up to Kulichir, I think they'd be a little bit disappointed.
07:08The church that they would want to steal from is still under construction.
07:10But still, this is an excellent opportunity to see what things would have been like at that time.
07:19And I have got all dressed up for the occasion.
07:23To really understand the remarkable success of the Vikings,
07:27we've got to examine their most precious weapon, the Viking longboat.
07:33Oh, wow.
07:34Yes.
07:34That is just incredible.
07:37Yeah, we are really proud of this one.
07:38I can imagine.
07:39We really like to roll with it.
07:43I'm meeting with Mehdi Safer,
07:45whose team at Park Ornovic constructed a longboat using the tools available to the Vikings.
07:50So I think it's fair to say that the Viking longboat is really the most impressive piece of tech about these people.
07:59So how do you make an incredible ship like this?
08:02First of all, I think the boat should be made with the keel, which is like a spine for the boat.
08:07After that, we will start to make stems, all the strength of those boats.
08:12It's what we call clinker built.
08:15It means that the first planks will be set on the keel and overlap each planks, which allow us to have a strength boat.
08:23And then it will be also very light.
08:26So it's the best way to make a Viking ship.
08:29After this, we also have a mast, which allows the Vikings to also make sail, which allows them to go very far like America or even further on the east until the Volga River.
08:43So how difficult is it to make something like this?
08:47Could any Viking do it or is this a very special skill?
08:50No, it's a very special skill.
08:51First of all, they will use oak trunks to make almost all parts of the hull.
08:57They will take the trunk and then they will just cleave the wood in some pieces, almost until 16 pieces.
09:06And from this, they will start to work only with very basic tools such as axes or broad axes, so everything will be handmade.
09:17So look at this plank here.
09:20And as you see, I could basically hold it with two of my fingers.
09:24So those planks were very, very light.
09:28But also, if you can take your part, you will see how flexible it is that allows the boat to go along the waves.
09:45Oh, that's so cool.
09:48Sorry, I'm just freaking out.
09:49Welcome on Longvin, then.
09:51You have no idea how much this means to me.
09:53This is an absolute dream come true.
09:55Yeah, that's incredible to have such a boat.
09:58I can't help noticing how small it is.
10:01You wouldn't have that many men in it necessarily, right?
10:05In this one, we can go up to 12 or 15 men.
10:09But we had evidence of boats going up to 30, 35 meters long.
10:15And on this one, you can go up to 70 men.
10:18And I think you wouldn't want 70 Vikings coming to your church.
10:22How do we take, you know, the different pieces of tech we've seen over there, flexible planks,
10:28What are the advantages?
10:30First of all, the flexibility allows you to go through the waves, you know, going along it, because it would be flexible.
10:37Another thing, it's light.
10:38So when you come to a beach, you can drag it on the beach.
10:42Or if you want to escape from Franks, you can just grab it and change river.
10:47It is a shallow hull boat.
10:51So Vikings will go where you don't expect them.
10:54These boats, it's really what gives the advantages to those Vikings.
10:58I did the thing I always hate.
11:01And I immediately jumped to talking about the Vikings as just raiders and pillagers.
11:05But they're also so much more than that, right?
11:07Much more than that.
11:08First of all, what we have here is what we call langskip.
11:12So these ones will be mostly for war or pillaging.
11:17But there are other types of boats.
11:18They have trade ships.
11:20After all, Vikings, before being pillagers, they are traders.
11:24So they are famous for fur trade, ember trade, ivory from the walrus trade, slave trades too.
11:31So sometimes they will maybe not even take these boats, but change boats along the way.
11:37So it's almost like you do it as a relay.
11:39Stop, change boat, stop, change boat again.
11:41Exactly, exactly.
11:43So they went also to Baghdad.
11:46So they were traders and they would go everywhere.
11:50So I guess what we can say about Vikings is just like the planks that make their boats.
11:54They are really flexible people.
11:56Yes, exactly.
11:58The Vikings' maritime superiority gave them the unique advantage of surprise.
12:06But the Northmen who came here were also masters at flexibility,
12:09at being able to take on characteristics of the culture they found.
12:15Moving on from the Frankish village, I'm exploring Park Ornevik's Viking village
12:20to see how local culture developed.
12:23So you've got a whole Viking village here.
12:26Are all of these buildings based on archaeological finds from Normandy?
12:31Not really.
12:32For example, this one is based on Swedish archaeological finds.
12:37In Normandy, we have almost no finds from our Vikings.
12:41Why?
12:42Well, because mostly they integrated well.
12:46They intermarry.
12:47They will adopt the local culture.
12:48As well, the Frankish culture would be like a soft power back then.
12:53You know, it was the old empire of Charlemagne.
12:55So when they came here, they stopped to talk Norse.
12:59They started to learn the language, the culture.
13:02So I suppose that the Frankish life is so good and the Vikings are so flexible,
13:07you're just going to have them integrate rather than try to impose a specific culture, yeah?
13:11Yes, that's exactly what happened here.
13:20As the Vikings encroached further into Neustria and began to overwinter here,
13:25monastic communities were increasingly terrorized.
13:28In 847 AD, they pillaged the original abbey at Mont Saint-Michel.
13:35Then, they turned their attention inland to the great religious houses along the Seine Valley,
13:40places like the Great Monastery at Fontenelle.
13:43There was a reason that the Vikings were attracted to attacking monasteries specifically,
14:09and that's because they held incredible wealth.
14:12They also knew that the monks had taken vows of non-violence,
14:16so if they were attacked, there was nothing that they could do.
14:19Further, because Vikings were pagan,
14:22they didn't really care about offending the Christian god
14:25by attacking his houses and stealing all his wealth.
14:28It was a recipe for disaster.
14:31The monks of Fontenelle have left a remarkable record of the events in the 850s.
14:37No monastery was safe from the Viking attacks.
14:40They laid waste all the monasteries and other places along the banks of the Seine,
14:47or else took large payments and left them thoroughly terrified.
14:54Viking forces active in the region repeatedly passed within striking distance of Fontenelle
14:59on their way up and down the river.
15:04The monastic community here at Fontenelle would bear the brunt of several of these Viking attacks.
15:12The first occurred in 851 in October,
15:15when the Vikings sacked it, stealing all of the treasure and terrorizing the monks.
15:19Not content, 89 days later, they returned.
15:23Finding that the monks were still gone,
15:26having taken all of the treasure they could carry as well as all of their relics,
15:30they were enraged.
15:31They burnt the monastery to the ground.
15:33This was so devastating
15:43that the community wouldn't be able to return until the 10th century.
15:54The monks record their sense of terror as the Vikings destroyed their sacred home,
15:59even taking the holy relics of their patron saint.
16:02Out of fear, and due to the oppression of these execrable heathens,
16:09the sacred bones and blessed ashes of the honourable confessor of Christ,
16:14Wondriel, having been disinterred from their tombs,
16:18were carried away from the monastery of Fontenelle.
16:22Fontenelle is one of our best sources for information about what living with Viking raids was like.
16:28The annals of Fontenelle record in minute detail
16:31actual Viking incursions, which is a pretty big deal.
16:35Is the source biased?
16:37Well, yes, because it's written by the monks.
16:39But you'd be pretty biased if someone was coming and burning your house down too.
16:43Viking attacks had created a huge crisis for Carolingian rulers.
16:47They justified their rule as representatives of God's authority on earth.
16:52So, a bunch of pagan warriors attacking their lands and harassing the clergy threw their authority into doubt.
17:00Weakened with internal divisions and with no permanent army,
17:04the Franks were forced to find a way to manage the unrelenting incursions of the Vikings.
17:09One remarkable Viking leader seized on this fragility.
17:17It led it to an absolutely extraordinary event right here in Rouen.
17:24In 912, Rouen Cathedral was host to an incredible scene.
17:29Rolo, the local Viking leader, was baptized as a Christian.
17:33But it wasn't just Rolo.
17:38Hundreds of Viking retainers, his entire family, were all baptized at the same time.
17:47Imagine the medieval cathedral full of Franks and Vikings mixing together.
17:54Pagan warriors queuing up to be baptized and taken into the Christian fold.
17:58And this is a powerful symbol.
18:09It means that they mean to stay and integrate with the local area.
18:13They're not going to be fighting with the local French people anymore.
18:16As a part of this, Rolo also took a new name.
18:19He became Robert.
18:20He was named after his godfather, Robert II, who was the Marcus of Neustria.
18:25And again, this underscores the fact that they mean to be something entirely new.
18:30They're not just a bunch of Norse Vikings anymore.
18:33These are local people with a local religion, local names, and possibly new local customs.
18:41Rolo, in taking on the name Robert and embracing the Christian church, became the first leader of Normandy.
18:48But how did this Viking leader and his band of marauding warriors get to this remarkable scene in Rouen Cathedral?
18:56He was already well known in the city, and not in a good way.
19:00Rolo's story began 36 years earlier when, as a pagan Viking, he besieged and took Rouen from the Franks.
19:08Rolo is arguably one of the most important Normans to ever live.
19:12But paradoxically, we don't actually know that much about him until he comes here to Normandy.
19:16In the 11th century, people are saying that he was a Danish nobleman whose brother had got in trouble with the king and who fled here.
19:25A century later, people are saying that he was actually Norwegian and was a dignified nobleman who came here to conquer what he could.
19:33By the 13th century, the Icelandic saga of Snorri Sturlsson says that he was Hrolf the Walker, a man so large that he couldn't ride a horse.
19:43Now, these are all light on actual facts, but what it shows us is that Rolo was an important enough person in the Middle Ages that if they didn't have facts, they were willing to make them up.
19:53This myth-making is as important to medieval people as any dates or names are to us.
19:58Rolo's real-world adventures here began with violence.
20:04He took on the local ruler and besieged Rouen, virtually flattening it in the process.
20:10Hungry for more, Rolo took part in the Siege of Paris in 885 and then captured Bayou.
20:17Rolo was skilled with the usual Viking tools of violence and chaos, but he also cultivated the local nobility and even married Papa, the daughter of a French noble.
20:31Her exact parentage is uncertain and may have been invented to legitimize their son, William Longsort.
20:39Her rather sweet statue, made much later, still stands in Bayou.
20:44Whatever Papa's real origins, by marrying her, Rolo was entering a powerful network of kinship.
20:53This would be the blueprint of Norman power.
20:57Conquest through terror and force.
20:59But then settlement, intermarriage, and adaptation to local society.
21:07Rolo continued to attack further and further down the sun.
21:11He laid siege to Shat in April 9-11.
21:15Eventually, after months of intense pressure on the city, the king, Charles the Simple, decided to counterattack and sent a coalition relief army to assist the besieged people of Shat.
21:26The king's forces succeeded and Rolo retreated back to Rouen.
21:31Rolo may have lost, but this was a major turning point in his fortunes.
21:36It showed that he was firmly entrenched in the heart of the kingdom.
21:40And Charles was tired of fighting.
21:42Compromise was necessary.
21:46Lengthy negotiations between Rolo and King Charles culminated with the famous Treaty of Saint-Claire-sur-Einte.
21:52The treaty gave the Normans much more stability, but it also meant that they were now technically vassals of the French king.
22:01And that meant that they had to do homage.
22:03As a part of this, it meant that they were supposed to get on their knees and kiss the French king's feet.
22:08Legend has it that Rolo refused to do this, and instead sent one of his own vassals to do it in his stead.
22:15A second and more dramatic version of the story insists that Rolo pretended he was going to kneel down, and instead toppled the king over backwards off of his chair.
22:24Now, these are legends, and there's probably no truth to them, but they exist because they tell us that the Normans were still incredibly proud.
22:32Yes, they were vassals of the French king, but they saw themselves as something entirely different, a sort of people that were too powerful to do homage.
22:41Rolo had realized that the route to power called for diplomacy, including taking the king's daughter Gisela's hand in marriage.
22:49Rolo's second marriage was Christian, setting Gisela apart from his first wife Papa, whose marriage had more Danico status, a Scandinavian custom which allowed for more than one wife.
23:04In the tiny village of St. Clair-sur-Epte, Rolo swore loyalty to the king, agreed to protect him from other Viking raiders, and promised to convert to Christianity.
23:15In return, the king offered Rolo all the land between the river Epte and the sea.
23:23The province of Normandy was born.
23:25Rolo's baptism in 912 AD was a key step on his integration into the Frankish world, and there's written evidence from just a few years later that backs this up.
23:51I'm meeting historian Pierre Bardouin.
23:54So, what's very interesting about this is that ordinarily with Viking settlements, I expect less written documentation and more archaeological evidence, but you actually have some written evidence to show us, don't you?
24:07Yes, there is a diploma.
24:09Yes, there is a diploma that is a royal actor of Charles the Simple with the first document who mentions Rolo and his companions, and the documents have been written in 1918.
24:22So, it's the first written evidence of Rolo, and so what it said, that the abbaye of Lacroix-Saint-Lefroy is given to the abbaye of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, but this abbaye had been given to the Norman of the Seine, that is Rolo, and his companions for the protection of the kingdom, Protutella Regni.
24:48So, that's amazing, because it shows us that already at this point in time, Rolo is integrated to the point that the king understands him as a protector.
25:00Rolo, the former pagan Northman, but now newly baptized, was now trusted by the king in Paris to protect great Christian sites.
25:10The Viking was fast becoming a Norman.
25:16Rolo's mass baptism marked the beginning of a complex process of Christianization for the Vikings in Normandy.
25:24To understand more about the importance of Christianity to the first leaders, I'm meeting Professor Leonie Hicks.
25:31So, I think, arguably, one of the most important moments in the history of the Normans is this conversion of Rolo to Christianity.
25:40But how much can we know about this, really?
25:43Is this something that is entirely pragmatic and political, or is this something that is genuinely spiritual?
25:49The short answer is we can't be certain that it's something that he's doing out of faith.
25:54So, one of the ways in which Vikings, Northmen, whatever we want to call them, are made acceptable is to suggest, well, we will, yes, give you some land, but we want something in return which is for you to convert.
26:07So, that's, if you like, the diplomatic, political aspect of conversion.
26:13But what we do know is that after Rolo was baptized, following the Treaty of St. Clair's Ept, he did make donations to the major Norman abbeys.
26:22And we also have indications that towards the end of his life, or during his life, he ransomed captives who were Christians.
26:31Rather, one of the chroniclers says, I don't know, or Chabon says, before he would have beheaded them.
26:35Okay.
26:36But now he ransomed them, or set them free, because that was the right thing to do.
26:40But what we can say is that certainly the Dukes, or the Counts of Rouen, as we should call them in this early stage, did take on the board that being a Christian was something you should at least seem to be, and seem to be doing the right things.
26:56And I think we need to think of this as a process.
26:59So, he might be, well, I think this is a good idea.
27:02So, yes, I'll be baptized.
27:04And then gradually, faith deepens.
27:06So, it's very much a process.
27:07So, the longer they spend, these people spend around churchmen, and hearing sermons, and so on, that the faith sort of deepens.
27:16We can never get in anybody's heads as historians.
27:19We do have a slightly different take on it.
27:22So, Archbishop Guy of Rouen, Guy writes to the Archbishop Reims and said, I've got a problem.
27:28I've got these Norsemen that have settled in the Seine Valley.
27:31This is in the first decade or so of the 10th century.
27:35They've converted.
27:36They're sort of lapsing a bit, and they're going back to some of their pagan ways.
27:40They don't really know what to do.
27:41The Pope gets involved, and the advice is, be patient.
27:46So, very much following the model that St Augustine adopted when he came in the late 6th century to England.
27:53Be patient, teach them, persevere.
27:56You know, they might be genuine in some respects.
27:59These are long-seated traditions that they're not ready to give up yet.
28:01So, we get these tantalizing glimpses of the process that Rollo and his descendants must have gone through
28:07to actually come to some sort of faith that was perceived as genuine by contemporaries.
28:13Well, I think that one thing is clear here is that, as much as this might be a pragmatic decision on Rollo's part to convert,
28:20it's also really pragmatic on the part of the church as well.
28:23Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
28:25The problem is what to do with these quite violent people who have been raiding up and down the river.
28:31They've got as far as Paris and Charlotte.
28:33You need to come to some arrangement with them to stop the violence.
28:37And so, yes, it is pragmatic on both sides.
28:41By becoming Christian, the Normans then become less alien, less other.
28:47They become more like the Franks.
28:48And they can then start to work within that political and diplomatic sphere that the Franks are used to.
28:55It's an accepted way of bringing people into the fold,
29:00of coming to a modus vivendi with other groups of people and actually getting along.
29:07As a band of Viking pirates became a new and settled political force,
29:24this also meant embracing a new religion.
29:26And the Normans did this as they did with everything, fiercely.
29:31If they were going to be Christians, they were going to be the biggest and best Christians you'd ever seen.
29:36And that meant doing things like expanding things here at Mont Saint-Michel.
29:41There had been churches here since the Merovingian period,
29:44but the Normans established a new monastery where there would be monks who could pray for their souls as they engaged in warfare.
29:52But how was there even a church here for the Normans to expand on in the first place?
30:10After all, the Vikings had been raiding up and down the coastline here for centuries.
30:14Well, locals attributed the protection to the intercession of St. Michael the Archangel,
30:19who this church is named after.
30:21St. Michael was the leader of God's army.
30:24He was responsible for defeating Satan in the war between the angels and the rebel demons.
30:29This fierce and warlike approach to Christianity would have really appealed to the Normans,
30:34who saw themselves not just as Christians,
30:37but defenders of Christianity against the Norse pagan Vikings.
30:41Rolo was revered for turning the Viking Northmen into Norman Christians.
30:48When he died, he was buried in Rouen Cathedral,
30:52the site of the pivotal baptism which cemented the place of the duchy in the Christian European world.
30:59A later version of his tomb is still here.
31:02This is Rolo's tomb.
31:05He was buried here in Rouen Cathedral, the same place that he was baptized,
31:10which is a really explicit statement about his connection to the place and his conversion to Christianity.
31:15But we don't actually know when Rolo died.
31:19We know he was certainly dead by 933.
31:22This is just kind of a guess based on when he drops out of records.
31:26However, by this point, he'd already passed on power to his son, William Longsort.
31:31And William integrated really well into the line of succession.
31:35His mother was a local.
31:36He was born a Christian, so he had nothing to prove.
31:39And things passed on really smoothly.
31:42And that's really testament to what Rolo was able to achieve.
31:46His son was accepted as a ruler.
31:48And it's because he'd created something very new.
31:51A Norman dynasty.
32:00Rolo's son, William Longsort, seems to have been a sincere Christian.
32:04And he was the first duke to take interest in the restoration of the monasteries.
32:09He expanded his border westward and was able to give the canons of Mont-Saint-Michel several estates in Avoirchamps.
32:18The monasteries were a kind of insurance policy.
32:21Religious castles where the monks engaged in endless spiritual warfare against Satan on their behalf.
32:27This is the oldest extant part of Mont-Saint-Michel.
32:37Built in the early 10th century.
32:40And it's a wonderful example of what we call Romanesque architecture.
32:43Where you get these gorgeous, rounded arches.
32:46And it's a very French form of architecture.
32:50And there's no surprises there.
32:52When the Normans became local, they wanted everyone to understand that they knew what a church looked like.
32:57They were building Frankish churches because they were a new type of Frankish person.
33:02And not only did they build churches, they built the best and most beautiful versions of them.
33:06They weren't just some Vikings fresh off the boat from Norway.
33:10They knew what it meant to be a Frank.
33:18William Longsword continued and completed the expansion of Normandy westwards.
33:23Receiving Continent and Avernchamps from the king.
33:27Scandinavian through his father and Frankish through his mother.
33:30William had been brought up a Christian.
33:32He should have been accepted by both communities.
33:35But not everyone was happy with the growth of Norman power and lands.
33:40On the 17th of December, 942, William was assassinated by the men of Arnulf, the Count of Flanders.
33:48Marriage alliances could work in the Normans' favor.
33:52But they could also create perilous difficulties.
33:55On the one hand, you can convert.
33:57And you become in the same religious, cultural, political milieu as the people that you're living among.
34:03But if you start marrying them, you form very strong political alliances.
34:08You've got friends on your borders that you can call on.
34:12There's that expectation then that you're not going to be fighting with, say, the Duke of Aquitaine or the Duke of Brittany.
34:19William Longsword marries Léard of Fermandois.
34:21The problem comes, Arnulf Flanders is actually excluded.
34:27He sees himself as excluded from this series of marriage alliances.
34:31So instead of having a nice ally on the northeastern borders of Normandy,
34:36you end up with somebody who is outside this sort of charm circle of all the marriages that William's making.
34:43And Arnulf possibly feels left out of these connections and sees other nobles profiting in alliance with the Normans.
34:51And so this might be one of the reasons, as well as the expansionist nature of the Normans, that leads to William's murder.
35:01And that seems to be why William Longsword met a violent end.
35:05At the behest of a jealous rival for power in northern France.
35:09By 942, William is succeeded by his son, Richard I.
35:16But that's not really an obvious point of succession, because Richard wasn't a legitimate son.
35:21He's born in a really Viking way.
35:23His mother is not actually the queen.
35:25It's a Breton concubine named Sprata.
35:28So we know that there are still kind of Viking concubines clicking about the court.
35:32But he's not Viking enough that he speaks Norse, so his father sends him away to Besson, which is near Beu, in order to learn Norse.
35:40You know, make sure he understands where his roots are.
35:43Another Viking thing about Richard is that he allows a slave market to operate here in Rouen, which it continues to do up until about the year 1000.
35:51That's super odd for a Christianized people, because the church is really big on saying that Christians can't enslave other Christians.
35:59However, Richard is like, well, Vikings are bringing in enslaved people from Ireland and England.
36:03It's not my fault.
36:05And he wants to make sure that he's still connected with his Viking roots.
36:08You don't want to make the other Norse people angry.
36:11This is a real tension that really embodies what it means to be Norman.
36:15Despite difficult beginnings, Richard would rule Normandy for more than 50 years.
36:23He relied on the church for support and restored more church land, and established his second son, Robert II, as the Archbishop of Rouen.
36:31Peace and security again reigned in Normandy.
36:35By the time of Richard's death, aged 64, in 996, he had become known as Richard the Fearless.
36:41There was an idea of Normanness that hadn't existed before.
36:46Within two generations, Normandy was a consolidated duchy with a heritage and a dynastic family.
36:53Not Viking, nor French, but something new entirely.
37:01Richard I is succeeded by his son, Richard II.
37:06And really, Richard II's rule is completely defined by order and stability.
37:11He's the person who makes the borders of Normandy what they still are today.
37:16And as a part of this, he makes shrewd political moves, like marrying his sister off to the King of England.
37:21He also commissions Dudo of San Quentin to write the family history, which is how we know about all of his ancestors, basically from Rollo up to him.
37:29All of these are calculated moves, and they show that the Normans are not a family of chaos and anarchy.
37:37They are one of stability and order.
37:39The initial task of the first four leaders had been to expand, define, and protect Normandy's borders, which in the beginning were constantly under threat.
37:51In doing so, they created and strengthened a durable duchy.
37:58Richard II understood the importance of myth-making and cultural heritage.
38:02Like his predecessors, he was creating a dynasty through strategic marriages.
38:08But the Norman approach to marriage was much more complex than it may seem from the records.
38:13So what we find is that often the Dukes are marrying Frankish women because that's politically expedient, but they also have what some historians call concubines,
38:26or might call mistresses or partners, but very actually quite deep long-term relationships with women of Danish or Norman Danish ancestry.
38:38For example, Gunnar would be a very good case here.
38:43So Gunnar married Richard I, and in the 12th century, Robert of Turinje, updating the guest of Norman Oran Dukum,
38:52tells us about this cloak marriage whereby he marries Richard and Gunnar marry each other,
38:59and the children are surrounded with a cloak, the parents and the children are surrounded with a cloak to make them legitimate.
39:06But what is very interesting is the way that Dudo, our main source for early Normandy,
39:11what he does is to show us that the children that are succeeding are all from these partnerships,
39:17rather than the marriages with Frankish women, that we don't have children from these Frankish marriages recorded at all.
39:25So either they didn't have any children, or they died, or Dudo just didn't write about them,
39:31but the people inheriting and the Ducal line are coming from the partnerships, the concubines, the mistresses, the partners,
39:38whatever you want to call them, which is very interesting in terms of perhaps how the Normans are perceiving themselves.
39:43So on one level, yes, we're Frankish or we're like the Franks, but actually we have our own identity too.
39:50Gunnar was a remarkable Norman woman.
39:53She was mistress, then wife, to Richard I, and functioned as Regent of Normandy during the absence of her spouse.
40:01We also have a very, actually, vitriolic, nasty poem about an Irish poet, Morrit, by Warner of Rouen.
40:10But at the end of that, we have, as Morrit tries to find his wife who's been sold into slavery,
40:16and his daughter, he appears before Gunnar at court, and we see here an image of a powerful woman
40:23who has the ability to manumit slaves and to exercise some kind of power and influence and authority on her own behalf.
40:32She's incredibly long-lived, so she was a figure of great continuity, of great wisdom.
40:38We see her witnessing charters, so she's a very, very important lady.
40:44The Northmen had realized that to make wealth and power permanent, they had to learn to run a state.
40:50Their new neighbors showed them how.
40:53They mastered French social structures, administration, and legal systems with their customary, ferocious energy and ambition.
40:59And they began to speak Latin and French, mainly because they needed to play Western European religion and politics.
41:08They established castles as bases for control.
41:12This is Mighty Philaeus in central Normandy, where I'm meeting historian Matthias Delis.
41:22Oh, wow. What an incredible view.
41:29Well, here we are on the stunning walls of Philaeus Castle, and can you tell me when this incredible building was founded?
41:37Well, the whole castle was actually founded in around 960 by Normandy's third dude, Richard the Fearless.
41:44And we have here in Philaeus, one of the first stone castles of Normandy.
41:49That's a really strong kind of statement about what he means to do in his ambitions for a dynasty,
41:54because it's one thing to be a conqueror and come in and burn things down and completely antagonize the church.
42:01It's another to situate yourself as a part of the local landscape.
42:05That's why they were so smart, because they understood very quickly that if they had just remained this colonizing force in Normandy
42:13and crushing the local population, they wouldn't get anywhere.
42:17So they have the church on their side, and they try to have the local population on their side.
42:22And so if you build a castle, that means you offer protection to the local population.
42:25And so this definitely will make you very popular.
42:28And in that way, a castle like this is more than just a strategic position, but it's symbolic, yes?
42:34Yeah, that's right.
42:34You mean to show that, you know, you're actually the ruler of all of Normandy.
42:38And the paradox, again, is that the Normans were able to control all of Normandy the way the King of France hadn't been able to before the Vikings were there.
42:51The Normans here at Falaise were part of a culture rooted in order and permanence.
42:57But they didn't completely lose touch with their Viking past.
43:01Any attempts to revolt against the new order were brutally repressed.
43:05And, as with any noble family, factional feuds were rife.
43:11There is a lot of infighting.
43:12So one of the challenges of a duke would be to make sure that he could control quite a rowdy bunch.
43:17Because they were former Vikings, so they definitely were not cryboys.
43:25And eventually you get to this point where there are questions of succession as well, right?
43:29You know, you can be a bit more Norman, but, you know, the way Vikings come to power
43:33could be sometimes fighting your own brother over who is going to be the ruler, yes?
43:38And so, yeah, now family is going to be very important.
43:41The lineage, there's going to be a lot of drama.
43:43And sometimes even mysterious deaths will happen.
43:46And suddenly a brother will take over.
43:49But one of the biggest cold cases, right?
43:51This comes to us from 1026 and kind of coalesces here, doesn't it?
43:56So we have Robert the Magnificent, who was a count of a little area next to Falaise.
44:01And there was a bit of a spat between him and his brother, Richard.
44:05Robert decided to stay in the castle.
44:09And Richard then besieged the castle here.
44:12After quite a lengthy siege, eventually Robert surrendered to Richard.
44:18And then Richard married the daughter of a king of France.
44:23They'd made him really very sort of officially legitimate in Normandy.
44:26And then banquets.
44:28And he dies right after the banquet.
44:30So who knows what happens?
44:32I guess we'll never know.
44:36Richard III's brief reign from 1026 to 1027
44:40highlighted the tension at the heart of Norman society.
44:44Normandy was a fracturous place.
44:46After Richard III's mysterious death, his brother, Robert I, became Duke.
44:53He may have come to the throne through fratricide.
44:56And from this context, the most famous Norman of all was born.
45:09There are several myths about how William's parents met.
45:13But they all involve this well below Falaise Castle.
45:18One such version says that Duke Robert spied from the castle walls
45:22the beautiful common woman Hurleva here next to the well.
45:27Overcome with lust, he does what any self-respecting duke would do at the time.
45:31He sent his servants down here to ask her to come up to the castle
45:34for a little bit of off-the-books fun.
45:37Hurleva said to the servants that she might be a common woman,
45:40but she was not a common hussy.
45:42And that if Robert wanted a relationship with her,
45:44she was going to enter the front gates of the castle like a lady would.
45:48The next day, she rode in resplendent on a white horse
45:51with her hair shining down.
45:53And she became Robert's official frilla,
45:56the Danish word for a concubine.
45:58Now, this might seem a little unofficial to us,
46:01but from a Norman standpoint,
46:03it was perfectly acceptable and extremely official.
46:07When Robert and Hurleva met,
46:15the course of French and English history changed.
46:19The child conceived in this meeting, William,
46:22will come to be known as the Bastard.
46:25But his origins were understood differently by contemporaries.
46:29So now we tend to talk a lot about the fact that William is born out of wedlock.
46:34You know, we talk about how he's called William the Bastard.
46:36But at the time, that wasn't really that unusual, was it?
46:40No, absolutely not.
46:41Because most of the Norman aristocracy at the time was born out of wedlock.
46:45So, you know, William the Bastard.
46:47Yeah, so what?
46:47We are all bastards, essentially.
46:49That's what it means.
46:50So it wasn't really something that would be held against him.
46:53Probably what the Norman aristocracy would hold against him
46:56was that his mother was not from the aristocracy.
47:00She was probably accepted by most people at the time.
47:02The church, we're already frowned upon that,
47:05but the church was very flexible at the time.
47:08Matthias reflects on the speed of the Viking transition into a Norman identity.
47:13But we can imagine that after that generation,
47:16Norman dukes would no longer speak really Scandinavian,
47:19and that's when there's going to be really like a huge rift between Normans and Vikings.
47:23We can really fairly suppose that there was a bit of contempt between Normans and Vikings Scandinavians.
47:30The Scandinavians would actually see the Normans as former adventurers who had settled
47:37and then were forming the land, so not romantic at all.
47:41And then the Normans would actually see the Vikings as those pirates, pillagers, pagans,
47:47not worthy of respect at all.
47:49So there was really this sort of clear separation now between Norman identity and Scandinavian identity.
47:55So on the one hand, you've gone soft, and on the other, well, you're a Viking.
47:59Yeah, exactly.
48:01But the smart thing is that those new Normans would actually still incorporate parts of their own culture
48:08and combine it with Frankish culture.
48:11And that's how Norman culture was invented, and that's why it was so powerful.
48:15Down the generations, the Normans ended up dominating almost all of the Kingdom of France,
48:19so that's how they were successful.
48:21And, of course, as they were Vikings, they would settle elsewhere,
48:24for instance, in the south of Italy and Sicily as well,
48:27and they founded a kingdom there.
48:28So if you find Normans everywhere in Europe,
48:31it's because they exported their own culture in sometimes the most unlikely of places.
48:36So, you know, sometimes the technology that helps you isn't just about boats.
48:41It can be a social technology as well.
48:43Yeah, exactly.
48:43It's going to massively improve your standards of living,
48:47even just the law enforcement and how peaceful your own duchy is going to be.
48:51And we have to really remember that 11th century in Europe is a brutal environment.
48:56There is only one area that is certainly peaceful, that's Normandy.
49:01The Mont Saint-Michel thrived during that particular period because now peace had been established.
49:06When Robert and Herleva met, the course of French and English history changed.
49:18The chaos surrounding his father's ascension to the throne would define William's early years.
49:23This, then, is the context into which William was born.
49:28Normandy was a fracturous place.
49:30But the young Norman Duke had powerful friends across the clergy and nobility.
49:35He had inherited a strong duchy.
49:39The Normans had combined Scandinavian seafaring ways of war
49:43and the Carolingian continental tradition of organization and strength.
49:47They had created something potent and new.
49:51Relative internal stability enabled them to turn their ferocious appetite outwards.
49:58Norman sites would soon be turning north.
50:02In the next episode, we explore William's precarious childhood and early military experience.
50:12By 1066, the Normans were hungry for more land and power.
50:21We see how William the Bastard became William the Conqueror
50:26and what happens when the Norman ferocity confronts another culture.
50:56We see how William the Bastard became William the Bastard became William the Bastard.