Millennium, Holland, Tom [manga ereader txt] 📗

himself. The same demon whose sacred groves in Saxony had long since been torched by Charlemagne was still worshipped by the Northmen under the name of ‘Odin’: a cloaked and one-eyed figure, the master of magic, a pacer of the realms of the night. Perhaps, in the final years of Richard’s rule, it was a certain resemblance to the fabled ‘All-father’ that helped to explain the awe with which the aged count had come to be regarded: for just like Odin, he was bright-eyed and long-bearded, and it was said that after dark he would wander the streets of Rouen, cloaked and alone, and fight with the shades of the dead. Certainly, when he died at last, the grave in which he was buried appeared almost a spectre itself, conjured up from the mists of his forefathers’ past: an earthen mound, looking out to sea.

Yet if Richard had always kept one eye firmly fixed on the world of the North, then so too, with great skill and patience, had he sought to demonstrate to his fellow princes that he was one of their own number: that he and all his dynasty had forever cleansed themselves of the ordure of barbarism, and become the epitome of Christian lords. No matter the sophistries deployed by the Count of Flanders to justify his brutal assassination of William Longsword — Richard and all the Normans had been righteously appalled. ‘For he was a defender of peace, and a lover and consoler of the poor, and a defender of orphans, and a protector of widows – shed tears, then, for William, who died innocently.’ That a monk had felt able to compose this eulogy with a straight face had reflected, almost certainly, something more than simple time-serving. William it was, even as he had dyed the frontiers of his county with Frankish blood, who had first demonstrated that taste for founding – or refounding – monasteries, and then for lavishing spectacular donations on them, that would become, under his successors, a positive obsession. By 1000, the holy places desecrated by the fury of the Northmen had long since been lovingly restored; the relics put into safe keeping brought out of hiding; the men of God restored from exile. When the chaplain to the new count, Richard’s son and namesake, hailed his master as ‘magnanimous, pious and moderate, an extraordinary, God-fearing man!’, his hero worship came naturally: Richard II was indeed a patron of churches fit to stand comparison with any prince in France. Yet nothing, perhaps, better illustrated the full astounding completeness of the Normans’ assimilation into the heart of Christendom than the fact that they too, by the time of the Millennium, had ended up no less prone than their Frankish neighbours to dismiss anyone who lived on the edge of the world as a savage. This, it might be thought, coming from the descendants of pirates who were widely believed to have been forced into exile from their native lands due to their own incontinent taste for rutting, was a truly heroic display of hypocrisy. Of the Irish, for instance, a people who had been Christian for half a millennium, one Norman poet could assert with a cheerful dismissiveness: ‘They couple like animals, not even wearing trousers, because they are forever having sex.’ The wheels of snobbery had turned full circle.

Not that the Normans’ new ruler was done with his own social climbing quite yet. Unlike many other princes, Richard II was assiduous in cultivating the King of France. It helped that relations between his family and the Capetians had always been excellent: Hugh Capet’s grandfather, it was claimed, had been godfather to Rollo, while one of his sisters had certainly been married to Count Richard I. King Robert, hemmed in all about as he was by enemies, was naturally grateful for support wherever he could find it: Norman horsemen had a formidable reputation, and warriors dispatched by Richard II regularly took starring roles in the royal campaigns. And the quid pro quo. Well, for Richard himself, there was always the satisfaction of being regarded as a loyal vassal. That, however, was far from the limit of his ambitions. The Count of Rouen had his gimlet eye fixed on a source of even greater prestige. In 1006, a charter was issued in which he was for the first time termed, not a count at all, but a ‘dux’ – a duke. A truly vaunting self-promotion: for to be a duke was to rank as the superior of everyone save a king. In the whole of France, there were only two other lords who could convincingly lay claim to the title: the princes of Burgundy and Aquitaine. Exclusivity was precisely what gave it such cachet. If Richard’s right to the title were widely accepted by his fellow princes, then it would rank, for a descendant of pagan warlords, as a truly remarkable prize.

Yet the uncomfortable truth was that many of his neighbours remained deeply suspicious of him precisely because they could not forget his origins. Years before Richard laid claim to his grandiose title, hostile Frankish chroniclers had already named his father a duke — ‘the Duke of Pirates’. Now, with the Millennium, there was a renewed bitterness in the perennial charge of Norman wolfishness. Out on the seas, the Northmen were back on the move. Dragon- ships were docking again in the harbours of Normandy. Her markets were filling up once more with the plunder looted from an ancient Christian people. True, it was not the Franks this time who found themselves the objects of the Northmen’s rapacity. But they had only to raise their eyes and look northwards to the realm of another anointed king, a wealthy and famous one, to be reminded of their own agony at the hands of the pirates, and to shudder. For the kingdom of the English was burning

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The British Isles in the year 1000

Bound in with the Triumphant Sea

‘Middle Earth’s