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The History of English Podcast
Episode 64: Feudalism and Early Normans
01:03:27
The Normandy of William the Conqueror was a product of the feudal age of Western Europe. In this episode, we explore the history of feudalism, and we examine words associated with feudalism which entered the English language.
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- [00:09]
Kevin
Welcome to the History of English podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language. This is episode 64, feudalism and the Early Normans. In this episode, we're going to turn our attention back across the English Channel to France. We're going to look at the rise of feudalism, and we'll look at some of the words which that system gave to English. We'll also explore the early history of Normandy and how Normandy fits into the larger context of European feudalism. And we'll also see how the Normans quickly abandoned their Old Norse language once they were in France, and they quickly developed their own unique French dialect. But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com and you can always reach me directly@kevinistoryofenglishpodcast.com One quick note before we begin. Since the last episode, a few of you have contacted me to report that most of the older episodes of the podcast are no longer available in itunes. Only the most recent 20 episodes are there. Well, this is strictly an itunes issue. In fact, on many platforms, like the itunes app for mobile devices, you can still access all of the episodes. This is apparently just a glitch in the itunes store, and hopefully it'll be fixed shortly. But if you have a problem accessing the old episodes, you can always go to the website historyofenglishpodcast.com now let's turn to this episode. Last time, we looked at events in England during the reign of Edward the Confessor, but I stopped the story in the early 1050s, and I did that in part because that's the point at which William of Normandy first enters the picture. But before we get to William of Normandy, soon to become known as William the Conqueror, I wanted to give you a little background to his story. William was a product of Normandy, and Normandy was a product of the feudal age of France. Technically, Normandy was part of France, but it operated as a semi independent province. And it wasn't alone in that regard. Much of France consisted of these semi autonomous regions. So to really understand the dynamics which led to the Norman conquest of England, we need to understand a little bit about the concept of feudalism and how Normandy fits into that larger puzzle. And since the Normans introduced feudalism to England in 1066, it's going to be a very important part of our overall story as we move forward. Let me begin by noting that feudalism is really a loaded term. It can mean different things to different people. It can describe many different aspects of life in Medieval Europe, but it's a relatively modern term. The term feudalism didn't really appear until the 1600s, when scholars were looking back to earlier centuries and examining the social and economic systems in place at that time. Now, I'm not going to explore all of the various aspects of feudalism here. I just want to examine how that system developed in France and specifically how it developed in Northern France. And to understand that history, we need to go back in time to the period of the early Franks, shortly after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. As we look back to this early period, we see a society and culture that was in many ways similar to that of the Anglo Saxons. And that shouldn't be surprising. The Angles, Saxons and Franks all had common West Germanic roots in Northern Europe. So initially, the economic and social developments were very similar on both sides of the Channel. A few episodes back, we looked at Anglo Saxon earls and churls, and we saw how agricultural developments like the heavy moldboard plough and outside threats like the Vikings, led to the growth of manors. Free landowning peasants increasingly turned to local lords for support. Very often, they turned over their land to the local lord, and they agreed to work the land and share the bounty with the lord. In exchange, the lord agreed to provide protection, and he also agreed to provide food and shelter. So both sides benefited. Initially, large collective farms emerged around manors owned by a local lord. And technically, these were voluntary arrangements. A peasant could leave and try to make it elsewhere, but that rarely happened as a practical matter. Now, these are very broad, general statements about what happened, but these developments were similar on both sides of the Channel. Over time, the lords acquired more and more land. Wealth became concentrated in the hands of a few large landholders, and the status of free peasants declined. But in the 700s, something happened in the Frankish kingdom which started to distinguish the Franks from the Anglo Saxons. And what happened around this time was the adoption of a certain technology by the Franks. That technology had already changed the history of Europe, and now it was about to bring about further changes. That technology was the stirrup, specifically the stirrup on both sides of the horse, which allowed riders to balance and maneuver on horseback in ways that were previously impossible. Now, we've seen this innovation before. I noted way back in the late Roman period that the Huns had mastered that technology on the Eurasian steppes, and that gave them a huge military advantage against traditional European infantry. The Huns tended to fight on horseback, so they could literally run circles around a traditional infantry standing on the ground. Like many Germanic tribes, the Franks had once fallen victim to that technology. But by the 7 hundreds, the Franks had adopted this stirrup for themselves, and they soon came to master its military potential. And when that happened, it ensured that the Franks would soon come to dominate Western Europe. From this point on, the Franks would utilize a cavalry, while other Germanic tribes, like the Anglo Saxons, would continue to rely upon an infantry. The Franks would learn to fight on horseback while their neighbors would fight while standing on the ground. And this was a huge advantage for the Frankish military. It allowed the Franks to consolidate power in Western Europe, and it ultimately allowed Charlemagne to emerge as the master of much of Europe. In fact, the Anglo Saxons continued to rely upon an infantry all the way up to the Norman conquest in 1066. And that gave the Norman cavalry a decisive advantage at Hastings. Now, the Franks not only developed the use of a cavalry, they also added another feature, and that feature is very important to our story. Secured by those stirrups, the Frankish cavalry began to use large spears as lances. That made the cavalry even more lethal. And they also adopted chainmail and helmets, typically worn by infantry. Over time, chainmail was gradually replaced by large armored plates and in later years, entire suits of armor. This new type of warrior was the mounted knight, but they weren't called knights yet. Knight is actually a native English word. It was kneekt in Old English, but it merely meant a boy or servant or attendant. It didn't mean a mounted warrior. Yet that meaning wasn't applied until such warriors were introduced by the Normans after 1066. Now, note that kneekt is pronounced with a k sound at the beginning. So the modern spelling of knight reflects the fact that the k was once pronounced. And in fact, most of our modern words that begin with a KN letter combination can be traced back to Old English, where the k sound was pronounced. That includes words like need, knee, a d and knee. Knee and kneel. K, N, e, e, l, no, k, N, o, w, knife, k, n, I, f, e, nit, knit and noc K, N, o, c, k. All of those words go back to Old English, and they were all once pronounced with an initial k sound. But we should keep in mind that the Anglo Saxons didn't use the letter K, they only used the letter C. So all of those words were actually spelled with a cn letter combination in Old English. So if night is an Old English word used by the Anglo Saxons, what did the Franks call those mounted warriors? Well, since they fought on horseback, they used the French word for horse, which was cheval, and they became known as the Chevaliers. The state of being a chevalier was chevalier, and that ultimately produced the word chivalry in English. Chivalry was the code of the mounted knight. Now, since English uses the word knight for this class of mounted warriors, that's the word I'll use here. And for now, in the seven hundreds and eight hundreds, that class of knights was a relatively new thing in the Frankish kingdom. Now, knights really changed the nature of warfare in Western Europe. They had the traditional advantage of being on horseback, but now they had the added advantage of being protected by chainmail and armor. And they used lances, which were deadly weapons in the hands of a skilled knight. In many ways, they were the medieval equivalent of a tank. They were armored, mobile and deadly. A small handful of highly trained knights could be more effective than a large force of ragtag infantry culled together from peasants in the countryside. So this was the new state of warfare. And the Franks found themselves in a more or less constant state of warfare. They were under constant assault. Early on, they had to deal with Muslim invasions from the south. Then they had to deal with threats from the east that included Eurasian and Central European tribes like the Slavs and the Magyars. Then the Vikings came from the north. As these threats continued, the Franks were looking to expand their kingdom. So that also required constant warfare on the periphery and borderlands of the kingdom. The net result of all of this was a need for a permanent fighting force, specifically a permanent fighting force of knights. Initially, the Franks were very much like the Anglo Saxons and other Germanic tribes. There was no permanent standing army. Now the king had a small retinue of warriors and thanes. But armies had to be cobbled together in times of war by bringing in peasants from the countryside. And they weren't professional fighters. And eventually they had to return to the farms, otherwise crop failure and starvation would result. This was one of the reasons why the Anglo Saxons had struggled so much against the Vikings. They lacked a permanent standing army. But now the constant state of warfare in the Frankish kingdom meant that the king and nobles really needed a permanent army. The king had to protect his kingdom, and the nobles and lords had to protect their peasants. And the mounted knights offered a perfect solution. A few knights were just as effective as a large standing army. But there was one problem with those knights. They were incredibly expensive to maintain. Not just anyone could be a knight. They were highly skilled warriors. To maneuver a horse in heavy chainmail or armor was difficult by itself. But then to manage a lance and other weapons and to use them effectively in battle, it all required a lot of training. It was a full time job. Horses also had to be trained to carry the knight, and land was required to raise and train those horses. And then there was all of that equipment. The knight needed chainmail or armor and a helmet. He needed a variety of weapons. Of course, he needed a horse, and he needed to feed and maintain that horse. The bottom line is that very few people could afford all of that. The only way a class of knights could exist is if a prominent and rich noble chose to maintain him. But the monetary economy we have today didn't exist at that time. The nobles couldn't just go to the bank and withdraw some money and pay the knights. Most of the lord's wealth was tied up in land. So if the lord wanted to secure the services of a knight, he had to find a way to use his land. And this is where the Franks turned to an old Roman concept. Sometimes when the Romans wanted to secure a particular service from someone, they would grant that person some land or an office or other privileges. The property or privilege that was granted was called a beneficium. And it became known as a benefice from the same root as the words benefit and beneficial. And that was because the property or privilege was usually granted on relatively easy or favorable terms to secure whatever services were required. One type of especially favorable grant was called a precaria. A precaria was a type of Roman land grant where the tenant had very few, if any, obligations in return. For example, a landowner might have some undeveloped land that wasn't ready for cultivation, so he would basically give it to the tenant with an expectation that the tenant would clear it and prepare it for crops. The precaria was typically granted for the tenant's lifetime, and it would then revert back to the landowner. It was such a good deal for the tenant that there was always a risk that the lord might renege on the deal. And because of that, the Latin word precaria ultimately gave rise to the English word precarious. Today the word refers to something uncertain and dependent upon the favor of another person. So the Romans had this idea of granting land to a tenant to secure some service in return. And that seemed like a perfect solution for the Frankish lords, who had lots and lots of land and needed to find a way to retain the services of those knights. So all of these pieces came together and the Franks started to grant land to the knights and other prominent nobles in exchange for their agreement to provide military services to the lord. This created a new and different type of relationship between the lord and the Tenant. Under the earlier system, a peasant received land in exchange for an agreement to provide agricultural services. But now a knight or lesser noble received land in exchange for an agreement to provide military services. Under the prior system, a peasant could walk away, perhaps find another lord. But under this new relationship, the lesser nobler knight was effectively locked in place. If the knight wanted to walk away, he had to give up the property. But it also made the knight a mini lord. He became the master of his own little domain as long as he met his obligations to the lord who granted him the land. Now, there was one problem with this arrangement. How are knights supposed to be landowners and professional warriors at the same time? How are they supposed to be able to train and provide military service and oversee property and peasants simultaneously? Well, the knight was basically his own mini lord at this point. So all he had to do was turn around and grant some of his newly acquired land to peasants who would then agree to work the land for him. In return, if he had enough land, he could even grant land to other knights who would agree to provide military services to him. So rather than personally fighting for the lord, he could have his own knights who would satisfy that obligation for him. Over the course of many generations, this type of arrangement continued to expand. The key to all of this is that the knights started to become tied to the land. They were no longer mercenaries, free to fight for whoever paid them the most money. They were now bound to a specific lord and a specific piece of land. And what bound them together was a sacred oath. And that oath was a fundamental part of the whole arrangement. The person who granted the land or use of the land was the lord. As we've seen before, lord is an Old English word. The old French equivalent was seignior, from the same Latin root as the word senior. It survives in the term monsignor, which is an Anglicized form of a French word which literally means my lord. French took the same term and shortened it to monsieur, which is basically the French equivalent of English. Mr. So monsieur, again, is literally my lord, if we trace it back to its roots. But to describe that senior landholder, English generally uses the term lord, and in fact, Old English even had the compound term landlord to describe the owner of a piece of land. The person who received the land from the lord in exchange for a set of promises was the vassal, and that term has been retained into English. The word vassal is ultimately derived from a Celtic word which meant a young boy or servant. The Romans picked up that word very early on from the Celtic tribes in Gaul they borrowed the word, and it became vasus in Latin. During the early Frankish period, that word came to mean a slave. But by the 7 hundreds, it was being applied to free men who were dependent upon a lord. And that produced the term vassal. In later French, the word vassal produced the word valet, which meant a manservant. And that word valet has also passed into English. So this specific type of land grant was an agreement between two parties, a lord and a vassal. The key here is that these terms, lord and vassal, were relative terms. A king might grant land to a vassal. The vassal might turn around and grant part of the land to another person in exchange for certain promises, and that might continue on and on down the line. So there were a lot of potential links in the chain. And depending on where you found yourself in that chain, you might be a vassal to the person above you who granted the land to you. And at the same time, you might be a lord to the person below you who received the land from you. One person's vassal was another person's lord. But ultimately, every link in that chain was secured by a solemn oath which linked that particular lord to that particular vassal. Every time one of these lord vassal relationships was created, there was a mutual exchange of promises between the lord and the vassal. And there was a specific ceremony which formalized this. This ceremony was known as a commendadio in Latin, and it became known as the commendation ceremony. Another term for the ceremony was investitura, which became investiture. The ceremony itself consisted of two parts. In the first part, the vassal would kneel before the lord and place his hands together in a praying position. The lord would then place his hands around the vassal's hands. The vassal would then announce that he wished to become the lord's man, and the lord accepted the vassal's request. Now, when the vassal expressed the desire to become the lord's man, he didn't use the word man, which is an English word. Instead, he used the French word homme, spelled H o m m e. So since the vassal expressed the desire to be the om of the lord, this part of the ceremony became known as the act of homage from that word om. And we still use that term today, but it's been largely anglicized over the centuries as homage. Depending on how it's used today, you can hear it pronounced both ways in English. But regardless of how you pronounce it, whether we pay homage to someone or we perform some act as an homage to someone, we're using an old feudal term which goes back to the first Part of this feudal ceremony. Now, I noted that the act of homage required the vassal to put his hands together in a praying position before the lord. This essentially is what many Christians do when they pray to God. They put their hands together in a praying position. But it's important to note that the feudal ceremony did not borrow that act from Christianity. In fact, it was the other way around. This gesture of putting one's hands together as part of this act of homage was later appropriated by the church and was used by worshipers to show their personal allegiance to God. That's how sacred and important this feudal ceremony was. It was so important that people began to apply it to their religion. And this really brings us to the second part of the ceremony, the oath. Once the vassal had shown his act of homage, he would then place his hands on a Bible or other holy relic and swear an oath of allegiance and loyalty to the lord. When the vassal swore this oath of allegiance, A solemn bond was created between the lord and the vassal. This was the time when agreements were not usually written down. So these rituals, in the presence of witnesses, served the purpose of a legal record, and the culture deemed them to be unbreakable. The oath that a vassal swore to his lord was the fidelitas, or fidus. The word ultimately gave us the word fidelity. So it was essentially a promise of fidelity reinforced by a specific oath. Another word from that same root is fidelity, fealty. So this is sometimes described as an oath of fealty. Fidelity or fealty was a type of devotion. So if fidelity was a type of devotion, then lack of devotion was infidelity, and someone who lacked devotion was an infidel. The same root word which gave us fealty and fidelity also gave us the word faith. So those words are fundamentally connected. To show fealty or fidelity was to be faithful. In the 20th century, radios were produced with an extremely clear sound, and the manufacturers claimed that the sound was faithful or true to the original sound of the music. So those radios were said to have high fidelity, or hi fi for short. But the basic idea is that the sound was faithful or devoted to the original sound. So all of that means that faith, fidelity, fealty, infidel, and hi fi are all cognate. Now, once this commendation ceremony was completed, the lord and the vassal were bound together in what was theoretically an unbreakable contract. This system of lords and vassals continued to grow and expand over time, as more and more lords acquired more and more vassals. By the time of Charlemagne, this series of hierarchical relationships had become the norm. At the top of the totem pole was the king, who actually owned all of the land, or at least had a claim to all of the land. He parceled it out to his supporters, who agreed to provide certain services to him in return. Those supporters then turned around and did the same thing with a new group of people below them and on and on. At the bottom of the totem pole were the peasants and serfs and slaves who actually worked the land and didn't own any property. But in between the king and the peasants was this series of lord vassal relationships. And this was the essence of the system that later became known as feudalism. So where did that term, feudalism, come from? Well, as I said, it didn't really exist as a term until the 1600s, long after feudalism itself had faded into history. But the term was based on the word for the property right that was conveyed from the lord to the vassal. I mentioned earlier that the Romans had a similar concept called beneficeum, and that produced the word benefis to describe the property that was granted. In the late 1700s and into the 800s, the Latin term benefis was gradually replaced by the Germanic term theod. And theod was given a Latin inflectional ending, and it became theodum. Theodum eventually came to be pronounced as feudum. And since the property granted to the vassal was called the fudum, later historians used that term to create the word feudalism. Now, that word theodom or feudom came to England with the Normans, and the Normans often rendered the word as thief. So in English, we often describe the property held pursuant to a lord vassal agreement as a thief. So theod, theodom, or feud and fief are all variations of the same root word, and they all describe the property held pursuant to a lord vassal arrangement. Again, that ultimate root word was fad, a Germanic term used by the Franks. If that word sounds familiar to you, it should. Old English had the same basic word, which was theo. We've seen that word on several occasions, and it meant money or property. In Old English, it later produced the word the. And many scholars attribute the modern English word fee to both sources. They think that Old English feo and Norman French fief merged together in Middle English and produced the word fee. And that would make sense because they were basically just two different versions of the same Germanic root word. One was Anglo Saxon and one was Frankish. So English just merged them back together as the word the. So today we may have to pay a fee or fees to someone. So it still has a sense of money, which is a type of property. So the English word fee goes back to the Old English word theo and the Frankish word thead. And both of those words meant property. But we can actually trace those Germanic words back further to their Indo European origins. And if we examine the Indo European root, we find that the word originally meant cattle. Since the original Indo Europeans were nomadic herders, they didn't really own land, and there's no evidence that they used coins or money. Their cattle and livestock were the primary source of their wealth. So the original root word referred to livestock, and it also had a more general sense of any type of movable property. So what was that Indo European root word? Well, it was the word peku. And peku is a classic example of Grimm's law at work. We know from earlier episodes that the early Germanic speakers changed the pronunciation of certain consonants. The p sound became an f sound and the k sound became an h sound. And if we apply those two basic sound changes to peku, we get the original Germanic word thehu, and thehu produced Old English theo and Frankish fad. And not only did the pronunciation change, but the meaning shifted along the way from cattle or movable property to a more general term for property. Well, guess what? The same basic shift in meaning also occurred when that Indo European root word passed into Latin. Now, the Germanic sound shifts didn't apply. So Latin took the word as pechu, and they then created the Latin word pecunia, which meant money, property, or wealth. And that Latin word gave us the English word pecuniary, which is a term referring to money or monetary wealth. So Latin developed that same shift of meaning from cows to money that we see from theo to fee in English. So fee and pecuniary are ultimately cognate. One is English and one is Latin, but the original root word meant cattle. I should also note that Latin also gave us the word peculiar from the same root. Peculiar originally referred to the property of a particular person. So it was something unique to that person. And over time, that led to the sense of the word peculiar as anything unique to a particular person. So it might refer to a unique personality trait. So is something uncommon or unusual. And that led to the modern sense of the term as something strange or unusual. But again, peculiar once referred to property, and its original root referred to cows. Now, the connection between cows and property also appears in another pair of words in English, the words cattle and chattel. Cattle refers to cows, and chattel refers to property. And once again, both words have the same root. Only in this case, the process went in reverse. The original meaning was property, and it later came to be restricted to cows. So what happened here is that Late Latin had the word capital, which was a general word for property, and it ultimately gave us the modern English word capital, as in capital goods or capital gain or capitalism. As late Latin evolved into Old French, a variation of capital emerged without the p sound in the middle. In much of France, especially around Paris, it was pronounced as chattel. And that word still survives as the word chattel, which is another word for property. But in northern France, in places like Normandy, the word chattel was often pronounced as catal, and that was because the Norman dialect of French often retained that hard k sound at the beginning of certain Latin words. So from capital, Norman French had cato, where Old French, spoken around Paris, had chattel. And both of those words entered English. The Normans brought cato, and other French speakers brought chattel, and that gave us cattle and chattel. And both words just meant property in Middle English. But around the 1500s, the words started to become distinct. Cattle started to be restricted to livestock, and that gave us the modern distinction between cattle and chattel. So in the prior examples, fee and pecuniary, the words developed from an original meaning of cattle to an eventual meaning of money or property. But cattle went the other way. It originally meant property and was later restricted to cows or livestock. The bigger point here is that there is a connection between property and livestock, and we can see that historical connection if we look at the history of. So that entire discussion about property and cattle goes back to the Indo European word peku, meaning cattle, which produced the Frankish word theod, meaning property. And that word produced the Latin word theudum or feudum. And that word was later appropriated to create the word feudalism. And it also produced the word fief to describe a feudal grant of property. So from cows to feudalism, that's the linguistic history. By the way, I should note here that the word feud, as in a rivalry between two people or two groups, is not related to the words feudal and feudalism. Feud is actually an Old English word which is related to words like foe and fickle, but those words come from a completely different root word. Now, I noted earlier that in the late seven hundreds, into the eight hundreds, the. The old Latin term benefis was often used to describe the property granted to a vassal. But around that time, the term benefis was gradually replaced with the terms feudum and thief, which were really just variations of the same word. But there was another Latin word used to describe a thief. It was basically a synonym for fief, and that was the word tenementum. In later French, it became tenement, which became tenement in English. From this same root, a word was created to describe the person who took possession of the land. Instead of being called a vassal, he was called a tenant. And, of course, tenant has survived into modern English as a word for a person who takes possession of property pursuant to an agreement with a landlord. So fief and tenement became synonymous, as did the words vassal and tenant. So let's look a little closer at the words tenement and tenet. The ultimate Indo European root of those Latin words was the word 10, which meant to stretch. And that root produced the Latin word tenera, which meant to hold or grasp or have possession of something. And the connection to the original root word is based on the fact that when you stretch something, you have to hold onto it tightly. So the Latin word tenera meant to hold or grasp something. And that Latin word then produced the word tenant, meaning the person who holds or possesses land, and tenement, meaning the land held by the tenant. Again, these were originally feudal terms, and they were basically the equivalent of vassal and fief. If we look a little closer at the ultimate root of tenet and tenement, we find that the original Indo European root word 10 produced lots of words in English which have to do with holding or grasping or stretching something. And most of those words came in from Latin. If you grasp something and don't let go, you're tenacious. You have lots of tenacity. Both from the same root. If you hold on tightly, you probably use a lot of tension, and tension makes things tense. Again, both words come from the same root. When you pull or stretch something, your muscles also get pulled and stretched. They're connected to bone by tendons from the same root. If you stretch something, it tends to become very thin. And when people are young, they tend to be thin and slender, and they get bigger and rounder as they get older. Well, Latin applied this same root word to describe someone who was young and thin, like something stretched. That created the word tender, which originally meant thin, young, and weak, but over the centuries has come to mean soft and gentle. Sometimes cloth was stretched over a pole to provide shelter, and that type of shelter was called a tent. From the same route, here's an interesting connection. Many medieval French knights had a favorite sport which used the ball. They would strike the ball with the palms of their hands in what was basically an early version of handball. Before a player would serve to the other player, the server would yell tine, which meant hold or receive. So it meant get ready to hold or receive the ball. Over time, the sport developed the use of a racket, and that standard call tenay gave the sport a new tennis. So tennis comes from the same root, meaning to hold or grasp or stretch something. Now, when you hold or have possession of something, you attend to it from the same root. And something that's capable of being held or managed is tenable. And one thing you can have possession of and manage is land. You might tend the land, and again, as we saw earlier, you might be a tenant holding land with the approval and permission of someone else. So we have lots of words in modern English which derive from the Latin version of an Indo European root word which meant to stretch or hold. But for our purposes, we're mostly focused on the sense of holding land. The tenancy or tenancy. Tenement, that was what the vassal received from his lord. Whether we use the term benefice, thief, or tenement, we now know that we are using words which originated in the Middle Ages to describe the transfer of land in exchange for military service or other obligations. And those terms describe arrangements where the deal was sealed by an oath, an oath of fealty. So we have most of the pieces in place, which we tend to associate with feudalism. We have this hierarchy of lord vassal relationships which extended throughout the society. And we have this professional class of highly trained mounted knights wearing chainmail and in some cases, armored plating. And we have codes of conduct developing around those knights or chevaliers, which became known as chivalry. And then in the late 800s and 900s, after the death of Charlemagne, we started to get the final piece of the puzzle, the castles. Around this time, some of the local nobles and prominent knights began to build fortified towers on hilltops. And this was really a game changer. It was one thing to attack a camp or unprotected manor, but once some of these nobles began to build fortified towers, it made it virtually impossible to kick them out. They were almost impenetrable. The tower could also be used as a base. The noble could send out his knights to do their business, and they could return to the castle for safety and security. Now, this idea was very similar to what had happened in England in prior episodes. I discussed how Alfred the Great and his descendants had built fortified towns or burrs to protect the kingdom from Vikings and other invaders. It was actually very successful. Well, castles worked on the same basic principle, but instead of being an actual fortified town. These were smaller private structures with their own private army. Over time, the castle became the headquarters of the medieval feudal system. It evolved into a multi purpose building. It was the home of the lord and his family, his servants and his knights. It was where local business was done. The lord met his vassals there and courts of justice met there. But ultimately, it was also used as a military base and a fortified building from which a whole region could be defended or subjugated, depending on your perspective. Now, again, this was another development which distinguished continental Europe from England. Prior to the Normans, the English didn't really use castles. Now, recent archaeology has unearthed some primitive castles from the late Anglo Saxon period, but they weren't built on the same scale as the French castles, and their overall impact was much more limited. But all of that changed after the Norman conquest in 1066. In fact, it was really William's construction of castles in England that made the conquest there permanent. Of course, castle is a French word which ultimately came from Latin. The original Latin word was castellum, and in its original Latin sense, it could refer to a fortified town. So it was basically the Latin equivalent of the Old English bur. Over time, this word was applied to a fortified tower and it became known as a castle. In later French, it also produced the word chateau. Now, there's some interesting things going on here with words like castle and chateau. And earlier we looked at words like cattle and chattel, so you may hear a connection there. Within French, Old Latin words which began with a hard k sound, like castellum or capitol, which we saw earlier, they sometimes kept that hard k sound at the beginning, and we ended up with words like castle from castellum and cattle from kapital. But sometimes that initial consonant shifted to a ch sound or an sh sound. So in those cases, we got chateau from castellam and chattel from capital. And earlier, I explained why that happened. It was primarily because the Norman dialect of French, called Norman French, tended to retain that hard k sound at the beginning. But the standard Old French dialect spoken around Paris shifted that original hard K sound to a ch sound. I actually gave examples of this back in episode 44, the Romance of Old French. You might remember that Latin caput, meaning head, produced the word coppa, meaning a head covering or cloak, and that produced the word cape. Well, St. Martin's famous cloak or kappa, became a holy relic, and the place where it was stored was called a coppola. But then within standard Old French, the initial k sound shifted to a ch sound, and coppola became Chapel. And later that ch sound shifted again to an sh sound. And that same root, capa, produced the later French word chapeau with an sh sound. And I mentioned how English captured those French sound changes from cape to chapel to chapeau. The initial sounds are pronounced differently in English because those words entered English at different times, and English retained the pronunciation which the words had when they first came into the language. Now, all of that had to do with the development of Standard French. But the Normans spoke a slightly different dialect, and one feature of their dialect is that they didn't tend to make that sound shift at the front of those words, so they tended to retain the original Latin K sound. And that explains the pronunciation of all of those words I mentioned earlier in modern English. From kapital to the Norman French kept the original k sound and gave us cattle. But the Old French spoken around Paris made that initial sound change and gave us chattel. And from Latin castellum, Norman French again kept the hard k sound, and that produced the word castel. And that word gave us English castle, thanks to the Normans. But the Old French spoken around Paris changed that Latin word castellum to chastal with a ch sound. And then later that initial sound shifted to an sh sound. So the word went from chastel to chateau. And since that particular word didn't enter English until the 1700s, it came in with that later sh sound. So within these words, cape, chapel, chapeau and capital, cattle, chattel and castle, chateau. What we're hearing there is the history of a French sound change. We're also hearing the difference between the Norman French of Normandy and the Old French of Paris, all of that having been preserved within English. And that's because English often serves as a time capsule. It preserves certain sounds from the time when the words first entered the language. So I hope you found that interesting. We're going to look much more closely at Norman French in the next episode. But for now, let's return to those castles which were being constructed throughout the French countryside after the death of Charlemagne. As I noted earlier, those castles allowed small numbers of men to tie up large numbers of opponents. It was virtually impossible to break through the fortified walls of the castle. And that meant that it was almost impossible to oust the lord who owned it. Even a small scale lord could dominate his region with a castle and a relatively small band of knights. The castle allowed a local lord to rule the surrounding countryside. And this starts to explain why the Carolingian Empire became so fractured after the death of Charlemagne. We know from an earlier episode that Charlemagne's empire was ultimately divided among his three grandsons. And that division ultimately created the east west division that produced the Kingdom of France in the west and the Holy Roman Empire in the east. In earlier episodes, I discussed the state of France or Western Francia. After that division, I discussed how the Carolingian descendants of Charlemagne fought with each other after his death. And I also discussed how they had to fight the Vikings who started to invade from the north. The grandson who inherited the western kingdom, what became France, was Charles the Bald. He was in constant warfare with his brother in the east, Louis the German, and he was now under threat from the Vikings, and he had the largest coastline to defend in northern France. To deal with all of those external threats, Charles the Bald ramped up those feudal grants. He increasingly gave out part of his own royal lands to local nobles who swore that oath of fealty to protect the lands they were given and to provide military service directly to the king when needed. This was the only way to deal with the Viking threats, since no one knew when or where the next attack would occur. So Charles was forced to give the local lords the independence they needed to defend themselves and their fiefs. And as we've seen, they defended those fiefs with mounted knights and with the construction of castles. That's why the construction of castles expanded so much throughout the nine hundreds. And this is why France became so fractured in the 10th and 11th centuries. Those local lords effectively became many kings. They had their own warriors and they had fortified castles. They issued their own edicts and laws. They punished criminals. Some of them even levied their own taxes and minted their own coins. The only thing that kept them from going rogue was that oath of fealty to the king. But that oath was starting to break down. Not everyone was willing to honor it. A few of those nobles did decide to go rogue. And Charles soon found himself at war with nobles in Aquitaine in the southwest and Brittany in the northwest. Not only were local nobles starting to rebel against the king, in part because they could, but they were also starting to fight with each other. So lords were not only under threat from external invaders like the Vikings, they were now under threat from neighboring lords who were looking to expand their territory. What ensued was an arms race. If you were a lord and a neighboring lord collected a force of knights and built a castle, you'd better do the same thing or you are likely to be annihilated. The only thing that was holding the society together were those feudal bonds secured by those Oaths of fealty. But those oaths weren't actually written down. It was sort of like a verbal contract. Everybody's happy with a verbal contract until a dispute arises and then nobody can agree what the specific terms were. And that started to happen as vassals claimed they weren't violating their oath to their lord. They just had a different interpretation of what that obligation was. In other cases, a vassal had received property from two different lords, so the vassal had an obligation to both. But now the two lords were fighting each other, and both were calling upon the vassal to honor his agreement to provide military service. Well, he couldn't fight for both, so he had to break his oath to one of them. The result was a period of conflict and uncertainty. By the mid-900s, the king of France only had direct control over the region around Paris. Pretty much everything else was controlled by local lords, some of whom recognized the king's authority and. And some of whom didn't. These various regional nobles went by a variety of titles. Some were dukes who oversaw a duchy, some were counts who oversaw a county, some were barons who ruled over a barony, and some went by the title of marquis to reflect the fact that they oversaw a march or border region. But those titles were not always precise, and some nobles went by a variety of titles, and that was the case in the new region of Normandy. As we know from prior episodes, Charles the Bald's grandson was also named Charles, so he's known to history as Charles the Simple. He was also king of Western Frankia, or early France. And in the year 911, he granted the region around the Lower Seine to the Viking Rollo. In prior years, the Vikings had started to use the Seine as a direct route to Paris, and that had become a major problem. So Charles granted Rollo's Vikings some land near the mouth of the Seine so that they would protect the region and prevent any further Viking incursions up the river. Now, I say that Charles the Simple granted the region of Normandy to Rollo, but let's be a little more specific. What Charles actually granted was a small region around the town of Rouen, which was located on the Lower Seine between Paris and the coast. That region was technically a county, the county of Rouen. And that's what Rollo got. And he didn't just get it. Charles didn't say, here, you can have it. Charles did what the king always did in those situations. He made a feudal grant. Rouen was a thief. That same lord vassal relationship that we've been exploring now applied to Charles and rollout Rollo received Rouen, but he was obligated to provide military service to Charles when called upon. So Rollo was now a vassal of the French king. Now, as I noted, this was originally the county of Rouen, so Rollo was sometimes referred to as the Count of Rouen. This region was also considered a march, a border region, using that old Germanic word march, meaning borderland. The ruler of a march was called a marquis. So Rollo was also sometimes referred to as marquis, but he was not referred to as duke. That was a more prominent title. And it would take a few generations for Rollo's descendants to lay claim to that title. The fact is that Normandy had very modest beginnings. Rollo's Scandinavian Northmen, or Normans, settled around the Lower Seine, and Rouen emerged as the early capital of Rollo's realm. But it was a relatively poor region of France. Now, Rollo did the job he was asked to do. He kept watch over the Seine, and he prevented any further Viking attacks up the river. In fact, Rollo was a good vassal. He had sworn an oath of fealty to the French king, Charles the Simple. So he honored that oath. And that's why Rollo didn't expand southward towards Paris into the king's realm. But events in the year 922 started to change all of that. In that year, the French king, Charles the simple, was deposed and held prisoner. This was the period in which many French nobles started to abandon Charles, who was a Carolingian king. And they started to support the Robertians, the descendants of Odo, who had been the Count of Paris and had briefly served as king in the eight hundreds after he resisted one of those Viking sieges on Paris. I discussed him in a prior episode, so I'm not going to go back through his story here, but Odo provided an effective alternative to the ineffective Carolingian kings. However, the Carolingians soon regained power after Odo. But from that point on, Odo's descendants remained powerful nobles, and they continued to be seen as a potential alternative to the weak and ineffective Carolingian Kings in the 900s. And in 922, one of those descendants, named Robert, led a coup and deposed Charles the Simple. Robert got himself selected as king by the other nobles. He was actually killed in the following year. But his son in law, Rudolf, another Robertian, was selected as his successor. So the Robertians remained in power. Now, all of this is important to our story because Rollo up in Normandy, had been a vassal of Charles. He had sworn an oath of loyalty and fealty to Charles but he hadn't sworn an oath to the Robertian usurpers. So as far as Rollo was concerned, he was no longer a vassal of the French king. So soon after Charles was deposed, we see Rollo engaging in a period of expansion in northern France. He still didn't move southward into the king's territory. Instead, he expanded westward along the northern coast of France, effectively doubling the size of his original grant. As I said, this was a period in which the local counts and dukes and other nobles were often at war with each other as they sought to expand their territory and influence at their neighbor's expense. And Rollo was especially good at doing just that. By the time of Rollo's death in 932, his lands had expanded considerably. Rollo was succeeded by his son William, known to history as William Longsword. William proved to be a very worthy successor to his father. Shortly after he came to power, he supported the return of Charles the Simple's son, Louis, who had been in exile in England after Charles was deposed. So William was actually instrumental in returning the Carolingians to power as kings of France. Having secured his relationship with the French king, William set about continuing the expansion of Normandy. He continued to expand westward. Now, he did face some opposition from Bretons in Brittany and even some native Normans or Vikings in the west. But he defeated the rebels, and he expanded anyway. During this period, William also continued to integrate the Normans into the Frankish aristocracy. His mother had been from a prominent Frankish family, and he also married a Frankish woman. Now, the evidence from this period is limited, but it appears that the early Normans quickly adopted Frankish culture and language. Over time, the Normans became as French as anyone else in France. And this conversion happened pretty quickly. The Normans quickly gave up their Old Norse language, and within a couple of generations, it appears that most of the Normans were speaking French. We get some evidence of this when it comes to William's son, Richard. Richard eventually succeeded his father as ruler of Normandy. As a young boy, his father, William, sent him to the region around Bayeux in northwestern Normandy, one of the regions recently acquired by the Norman expansion. It's said that his father sent him there, in part to learn the Old Norse language of his Scandinavian ancestors. And he had to go there, apparently because Old Norse was no longer being spoken in Rouen. Or it was in such limited use there that young Richard had to travel to the northwest to learn to speak it. All of this suggests just how quickly the Normans around the capital at Rouen had abandoned Old Norse and integrated into the local Frankish culture. So what happened there? Why did the Normans abandon their native language so quickly? Well, the answers are unclear. There are very few surviving documents from Normandy during this early period. The Normans weren't literate, and they appear to have had very little appreciation for writing in that first century. That makes it difficult to trace linguistic developments on the ground. Most of the early history of Normandy has to be pieced together from chroniclers who were living outside of the region. So without written evidence from the region, scholars have had to look for other evidence, like personal names and place names. Those provide some clues about the language that was being spoken early on. First of all, with respect to personal names, it's interesting to note that all of the Norman rulers after Rollover used French names, not Norman names. From William Longsword to his son Richard I, to his son Richard ii to his son Robert, and to his son William, later being known as William the Conqueror. They all used French names, not Scandinavian names. So that suggests that they were speaking French, at least as a second language, by the time Rollo died. Furthermore, place names also provide some clues. Unlike the Danelaw in Britain, where there are still lots of Scandinavian place names, that isn't really the case in Normandy. There are only a small handful of towns with Scandinavian names in Normandy. They tend to be grouped together, and they tend to be located near the mouth of the Seine. That suggests that when the first Normans settled around the mouth of the Seine, they were still speaking Old Norse. So they gave those places Scandinavian names. But by the time they spread into the other parts of Normandy, they must not have been speaking Norse anymore, because we don't tend to find Scandinavian town names in other parts of Normandy. Now, there are a few here and there, but not the concentration one would expect to see if Old Norse was being spoken in those regions. So all of that suggests that that Old Norse died out very quickly. By the time the Normans were expanding westward, within the first couple of generations after Rollo, Norse must not have been the primary language anymore. And it appears that the ultimate reason for the quick disappearance of Old Norse was simply a matter of numbers. Rollo and his Scandinavian supporters were a powerful band of Vikings, but compared to the overall population, they were relatively few in number. They were basically a small ruling elite. Furthermore, it's known that most of the prominent Norman leaders married Frankish women, so it's very likely that the second generation of Normans were speaking French and probably speaking French as their primary language. Old Norse probably lingered on as a secondary language among the ruling elite. But it wasn't being widely spoken. So by the time we get to Rollo's grandson, Richard I, he had to be sent to the northwestern coast to find enough people speaking Old Norse so that he could learn it. Furthermore, many scholars think that it's very likely that the Norse speakers in that western region around Bayeux weren't even Normans. Now, the Vikings weren't traveling up the Seine anymore, but they were still using the northern French coasts for refuge and shelter. So it's very possible that the Norse speakers around Bayeux, near the coast, were part of another Viking group who settled in that area separately from Rollo's Vikings. And we know that Richard's father, William Longsword, had to deal with an uprising in that same general region by people who are sometimes described as being Normans, but who may very well have been a completely different band of Vikings who spoke Old Norse. At any rate, it appears that by the late 900s, the region around Bayeux in the northwest was the only part of Normandy where Old Norse was still being spoken with any regularity. But within another generation, even the Norse language in that region had largely disappeared. The Normans completely assimilated into Frankish culture. In fact, the last evidence of Norse cultural influence was the presence of a Norwegian poet at the Norman court in the year 1025. But beyond that, it appears that the Normans were culturally and linguistically French by the turn of the 11th century. But as we saw earlier in this episode, the French spoken by the Normans was similar to the French being spoken around Paris, but it wasn't exactly the same. They had their own unique dialect which became known as Norman French, and that was the dialect which was brought to England in 1066. So in the next episode, we're going to turn our attention to the Norman dialect of French. We'll examine some of the features that made it unique, and we'll see how some of those differences impacted English. And we'll also follow the story of Normandy from the death of William Longsword through the reign of William the Conqueror. So until next time, thanks for listening to the History of English podcast.