Rollo

The ancestors of Normans were actually Vikings who had settled in France in the late 9th and early 10th centuries.

In the year 911, the French king Charles the Simple, I love these kings' old names, right? The French king Charles the Simple made an agreement with a Viking leader called Rollo.

Rollo was given territory in northern France in return for defending the area from other Vikings.

This territory became known as Normandy.

The Scandinavian settlers became integrated into society.

As the Vikings' reputation grew ever more fearsome, they could rely on extortion rather than raids.

Frankish rulers paid a tax known as a Danegeld, giving huge sums of silver in exchange for peace.

From the mid-9th century, Vikings looked to settle down.

Their raids lasted longer, and they camped through the winter.

Banquet followed banquet, and toast followed toast till the cider of Normandy paled before the champagne of France.

Finally, a great pageant, starting like the city from the riverbank, unrolled the vast panorama of Norman history through streets whose very names re-echo its great figures, Rollo and his Norse companions arriving in their Viking ships, the dukes, his successors, William Longsword, Richard the Fearless, Robert the Magnificent, William the Conqueror, the sons of Tancred of Hauteville.

who drove the Paynim from Sicily, and that other Tancred who planted the banner of the Cross on the walls of Jerusalem, all with their knights and heralds and men-at-arms, followed by another pageant of the achievements of Normandy in the arts of peace.

And on the last evening, the great abbey church of Saint-Ouen burnt red fire for the first time in its history till the whole mass glowed and every statue and storied niche stood out with some clear sharp bit of the Norman past, while its lantern tower, the crown of Normandy, shone out over the city and the river which are the centre of Norman history and where this day the dukes wore again their crown.

Normandy, on the other hand, was drawn at once into the full tide of European politics and became itself a founder of new states, an imperial power, a colonizer of lands beyond the seas, the mother of a greater Normandy in England, in Sicily, and in America.

At home and abroad, the history of Normandy is a record of rich and varied achievement, of war and conquest and feats of arms, but also of law and government and religion, of agriculture, industry, trade, and exploration, of literature and science and art.

It takes us back to Rollo and William of the Long Sword, to the Vikings and the Crusaders, to the conquerors of England and Sicily, to masterful prelates of the feudal age like Odo of Bayeux and Thomas Becket.

It brings us down to the admirals and men of art and letters of the Grand Siècle, Tourville and Duquesne, Poussin, Malherbe, and the great Corneille, to Charlotte Corday and the days of the Terror, and to the painters and scholars and men of letters of the nineteenth century, Géricault and Millet, Laplace and Léopold Delisle, Flaubert and Maupassant and Albert Sorel.

The story comes from Dudo of St. Quentin, a Frankish cleric hired by the Dukes of Normandy to write their family history.

He wrote it between about 996 and 1020, well over a century after Hasten's disappearance, and he needed a villain to set against Rollo, their founding ancestor.

Hasten was cast as the villain of the story, likely because he was still a renowned Viking in that time.

Dudo spends the better part of a page piling up adjectives for him, calling him fierce, pestilent, untrustworthy, fertile in ruses, and then tells the tale of what happened.

The geography and chronology lines up, from the Loire in 882 to the Somme in 890 to the Thames in 892, and most scholars who've looked closely treat the two as one man.

But a man commanding fleets in 866 was likely pushing 60 when he built the fort in 892, with two sons young enough to be handed back to him as children.

That's actually a plausible timeline, and Rollo, the Norse founder of Normandy, was just as long-lived and was commanding armies into his old age.

But speaking of Rollo, it's necessary to go back to the narrative of Dudo, because his version of events seem to veer openly into historical fiction.

There's a chap called Lars who works in the Waitrose near me and he's tall and gay and handsome and lovely and I'm very fond of him.

Okay, my first suggestion is this book, An Accessible Narrative, following their story from Viking raiders and Rollo.

Rollo's a fascinating chap in history.

He was the first king.

Through to Norman rulers and their wider conquests, available on audio.

Let me tell you the first few chapters.

Beginnings, Strange Men from a Strange Land, The Lowest Seine, 911-42.

Number two, Consolidating a Colony, Rollo's Heirs, Normandy, 942 to 1026.