5 The Men of the North

With the progressive Christianisation of the north and its opening to the Latin world over the tenth and eleventh centuries, it was perhaps only a matter of time before these more immediately northern peoples would seek to reframe their geography of origin in a positive light.2See Rix, Barbarian North. This chapter will consider one such reevaluation: the etymology of Normannus as ‘north man’ and its sudden adoption among historians within the Duchy of Normandy from the mid-1130s. This provides not only an interesting example of how authors could renegotiate the conceptual baggage associated with the north, but also highlights a limitation of previous scholarship on Norman identity, which has tended to apply a concept of Normanitas indiscriminately across England, Normandy and Italy from the early eleventh century up to the late twelfth. A narrower analysis of this terminology within the duchy itself will help to distinguish Norman identity in Normandy from England and Italy. Finally, the use of the north as an explicit locus of identification within Normandy will further highlight how these spatial categories intersected with other trends in the broader political and intellectual environment, in this case of northern France in the second quarter of the century.

The historiography of Normanitas crystalised in response to R. H. C. Davis’s The Normans and their Myth. Davis argues for the slow development of a ‘Norman myth’ over the eleventh century, which served to unify the Normans as one people, and for the solidification of this myth into a coherent narrative through the work of Orderic Vitalis.3R. H. C. Davis, The Normans and their Myth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), ch. 2. On scholarship prior to Davis, see Thomas Harry Chadwick, ‘“Normanitas” Revisited: Reconsidering Norman Ethnicity, 996–1159’ (PhD diss., University of Exeter, 2017), 13. This argument spurred a series of studies that sought to expand the historical and geographical scope of Normanitas. Central here is Loud’s article on the gens Normannorum, which not only coined the term Normanitas, but influentially argued that this theme was stronger in Dudo than Davis supposed and that many of the key features of Davis’s fully developed ‘Norman Myth’ were already present among southern Italian Normans in the eleventh century.4G. A. Loud, ‘The “Gens Normannorum” – Myth or Reality?’, Anglo-Norman Studies 4 (1981): 104–16. Over the next two decades the concept of Normanitas was drawn back to the tenth century and solidified throughout the Norman world along the lines that Loud proposed.5Cassandra Potts, ‘Atque unum ex diversis gentibus populum effecit: Historical Tradition and the Norman Identity’, Anglo-Norman Studies 18 (1995): 139–52; Nick Webber, The Evolution of Norman Identity, 911–1154 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005); Thomas, English, esp. ch. 3. Recent scholarship, however, has taken a more mixed view on Normanitas. Plassmann has argued that the Normans favoured certain characteristics which underpinned their success as conquerors – courage, cunning and ambition – and that these characteristics served as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy for generations of Norman adventurers, seeking to live up to the examples of their history.6Alheydis Plassmann, Die Normannen: Erobern – Herrschen – Integrieren (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 2008), 97–103. Conversely, Bates has made a strenuous argument for the complete abandonment of Normanitas as a research framework, suggesting that the term lacks analytically valuable content and that future research must be grounded more closely in individual lived experiences.7Bates, Empire, 6–7, 64, 183–4, passim. This disagreement may be more apparent than real, since Bates’s discussion of William the Conqueror’s self-comparison with Robert Guiscard or the commemoration of William as conqueror by his children sounds a lot like Plassmann’s self-fulfilling prophecy, wherein Normans felt the need to live up to the deeds of their predecessors.8Bates, Empire, 67, 92; cf. David Bates, William the Conqueror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 524. On the significance of Norman leaders see, e.g., Webber, Evolution, 31. Plassmann, Die Normannen, 99. More broadly, the research has generally focused on two major elements that constitute Norman identity – inherent characteristics that predispose this gens to conquest and their shared northern origin – which though consistent are hardly stable, changing greatly across the spatial and temporal span of the Norman ‘Empire’.9Thomas, English, 36–7; Plassmann, Normannen, 309–12; Webber, Evolution, 24–39; Albu, Normans, 57–63; for a more critical perspective, see Ewan Johnson, ‘Origin Myth and the Construction of Medieval Identities: Norman Chronicles, 1000–1100’, in Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Richard Corradini et al. (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2006), 153–64. On the development of Norman origin myths, see Plassmann, Origo gentis, 243–64; Rix, Barbarian North, 65–8; Johnson, ‘Origin Myth’, 153–61.

Johnson expresses further scepticism about the mental geography underlying these references to the north, which he argues no longer refer in most cases to Scandinavia. He focuses especially on the languages used for the respective etymologies, noting in particular that Amatus etymologises Normannus in terms of the German language (en langue thodesche).16Amatus of Montecassino, Storia de’Normanni 1.1, ed. Vicenzo de Bartholomaeis, Fonti per la storia d’Italia 76 (Rome: Istituto storico italiano, 1935), 9–10, trans. Prescott N. Dunbar and ed. Graham A. Loud (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), 45: ‘En celui estroit lieu habitoit grant multitude de gent, molt robuste et forte, laquel gent premerement habiterent en une ysulle qui se clamoit “Nora”; et pour ce furent clamez “Normant”, autresi comme “home de Nore”. “Man” est à dire, en langue thodesche, “home”’ (In this place lived a great number of very robust and strong people who had previously lived on an island called ‘Nora’. And for this reason they were called ‘Normans’, that is men of Nora, for ‘man’ in the German language is equivalent of [the French word] ‘home’). Johnson sees this as part of an intentional program to de-emphasise the Scandinavian origins of the Normans in Amatus’s text. Along with the removal of Paul the Deacon’s reference to Scandinavia, Johnson takes the use of German to suggest that Amatus’s mythical island ‘Nora’ should not be identified with Scandinavia, but represents a generic, all-encompassing north, comparing it with Wace’s use of English alongside Norse in his etymology.17Johnson, ‘Origin Myth’, 162–3.

These geographical and linguistic references present more complications than Johnson suggests. The north was already an ambiguous space and Scandinavia more so still. The classical tradition had already furnished a suite of semi-mythical northern islands – notably Pomponius Mela’s and Pliny’s Scandinavia as well as Ptolemy’s Scandza (via Jordanes) – that were incorporated into the Origo gentis tradition as the fertile birthplace of nations for Jordanes and Paul the Deacon among others.18Müllenhoff’s emendation of codannouia to Scaninavia in Pomponius Mela is widely accepted; see Silberman in Pomponius Mela, De chorographia, 286–7. On the geography, see Fraesdorff, Norden, 46–50; for a summary overview of the Origo gentis tradition, see Alheydis Plassmann, ‘Lateinische Stammes- und Volksgeschichtsschreibung im frühen und hohen Mittelalter’, in Handbuch Chroniken des Mittelalters, ed. Gerhard Wolf and Norbert H. Ott (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 47–75. The particular geography of the far north, however, remained in flux up to at least the twelfth century.19See generally Fraesdorff, Norden, 82–101; Gautier Dalché, ‘Représentations géographiques de l’Europe’, 68–71; Wolever, ‘Post-Carolingian Geographies’, 153–63. We see this in the very first attempt to establish a suitably classical homeland for the Normans in Dudo of Saint-Quentin. Dudo initially takes Jordanes as his starting point, describing the exodus of peoples from Canza ‘like a swarm of bees from a basket or a sword from its sheath’, but he goes on to add more immediate, classical origin for the Normans by removing Dacia from Scythia, where the standard late antique geographies locate it, and moving it to Germania.20Dudo of Saint-Quentin, De moribus et actibus primorum Normanniae ducum 1.1, ed. J. Lair (Caen: Le Blanc-Hardel, 1865), 129, trans. Eric Christiansen (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998), 15: ‘velut examen apum ex canistro, seu gladius e vagina’; see also GND 1.3(4), ed. van Houts, 1:14–15. Cf. Isi., Etym. 14.4.3; Orosius, 1.2.53, ed. Zangemeister, 9; Jordanes, Getica 5.33–4, MGH AA 5.1, 62; Hon., Im. mun. 1.24, ed. Flint, 60. Although it is still situated on the Danube, Dudo has clearly reimagined Dacia as set on the coast of the northern ocean.21Cf., e.g., Dudo, De moribus 1.1 and 2.4, ed. Lair, 129, 143. See Fabio Stok, ‘Il mondo geo-antropico di Dudone’, in Dudone di San Quintino, ed. Paolo Gatti and Antonella Degl’Innocenti (Trento: Dipartimento di Scienze Filologiche e Storiche, 1995), 141–3, and Plassmann, Origo gentis, 248–9. Rodulfus Glaber does something similar with Raetia Secunda (Wolever, ‘Post-Carolingian Geographies’, 157–60). This association in fact predates Dudo and can be traced at least to the Ravenna Cosmographia of the eighth century.22Ravennatis anonymi cosmographia 1.11 (ed. Schnetz, 10). On this point, see Magali Coumert, ‘Les récits d’origine et la tradition historiographique normande’, in L’Historiographie médiévale normande et ses sources antiques (Xe–XIIe siècle), ed. Pierre Bauduin and Marie-Agnès Lucas-Avenel (Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2014), 142–8. Cf. Asser’s Danubia, at p. 000 above. Furthermore, just like Paul the Deacon’s Scandinavia, Dudo’s Dacia and the associated Danubian provinces are all now associated with a much more all-encompassing Germania.23Paul the Deacon, Historia Langobardorum 1.1, MGH SS rer. Lang. 1, 48; Dudo, De moribus 1.1, ed. Lair, 129; cf. Ravennatis anonymi cosmographia 1.11–12, ed. Schnetz, 10–11, which sets the ‘Northomanorum … patria’ between the ‘Germanorum … patria’ and ‘Scitharum … patria’. The point is underscored a century later by Ralph de Diceto to explain Bede’s description of the Saxons, Angles and Jutes emerging from Germania: ‘Every land that lies under the north is called Germania because it produces (germinat) so many men’.24Ralph de Diceto, Abbreviationes chronicorum 450, ed. William Stubbs, The Historical Works of Master Ralph de Diceto, Dean of London, vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1876), 85: ‘Omnis terra quae sub septemtrione jacet Germania vocatur, quia tantum virorum germinat; et Angli et aliii multi dicuntur Germani’. Thus Amatus’s placement of Nora beyond the boundary of ‘France’ within a region productive of many nations who may speak German does little to distinguish this island from a ‘Scandinavian’ insular geography.

The linguistic references pose similar issues here, especially the imputation of the language used within an etymology to the ancestors of the Normans. In particular, it seems altogether more plausible that authors simply etymologised the terms according to whatever Germanic language they were themselves familiar with. We may compare Amatus with another Italian who used this etymology. In the tenth century, Liudprand of Cremona, in his Antapodosis, describes various savage peoples who surround Constantinople and explains that those known as the Ρουσιος (Rusios) by the Greeks are called Nordmannos by Latins, going on to explain that in the German language the compound of nord and man means ‘people of the north’.25Liudprand, Antapodosis 5.15, cf. 1.11, CCCM 156, 131, cf. 10, trans. Paolo Squatriti, The Complete Works of Liudprand of Cremona (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 179, cf. 50: ‘Gens quaedam est sub aquilonis parte constituta, quam a qualitate corporis Greci vocant Ρουσιος, nos vero a positione loci nominamus Nordmannos. Lingua quippe Teutonum “nord” aquilo, “man” autem dicitur homo, unde et Nordmannos “aquilonares homines” dicere possumus’ (A certain people is established within the northern region, which the Greeks call Ρουσιος from the nature of their bodies, and we instead call ‘Norsemen’ from the location of their country. Indeed, in the German language nord means ‘north’ and man means ‘people’, whence we might call the Norsemen the ‘men of the north’). While Liudprand’s knowledge of German may be plausibly inferred from his relationship with the Ottonian court, we know less about Amatus.26Squatriti in Liudprand, Antapodosis, 4–5. Nevertheless, Montecassino had close connections with the empire through the middle of the eleventh century, even having two German abbots in this period.27Herbert Bloch, Monte Cassino in the Middle Ages, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 1:15–40. There was also some German presence in the ecclesiastical circles of southern Italy in the mid-eleventh century, as with Udalric of Benevento (1053–69) or Gerard of Siponto (d. ca. 1076), both of whom had been monks at Montecassino.28Norman Kamp, ‘The Bishops of Southern Italy in the Norman and Staufen Period’, in The Society of Norman Italy, ed. G. A. Loud and Alex Metcalfe (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 191, 194. So Amatus having some familiarity with German would not be surprising.

Geoffrey’s use of English in his etymology can easily be explained along the same lines.29Geoffrey Malaterra, De rebus gestis 1.3, ed. Pontieri, 8, trans. Kenneth Baxter Wolf (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 52: ‘north quippe anglica lingua aquilonaris plaga dicitur’. While we know little about his background, besides the fact that he came from beyond the Alps, his knowledge of Dudo suggests an origin within the Norman world. Even if he was not from Saint-Évroul, as some have suggested, it is no stretch of the imagination for someone with a Norman background to have some familiarity with the English language.30Wolf in Geoffrey Malaterra, De rebus gestis, 6–8; Johnson, ‘Normandy’, 95. Finally, Orderic’s use of English demands no further explanation. It is not until the 1160s that we find authors seeking a plausibly ‘ancestral’ language with Stephen of Rouen’s and Wace’s use of Scandinavian languages (Danica/norreis).31Stephen of Rouen, Draco Normannicus 1.21.1052, ed. Richard Howlett, Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, vol. 2 (London: Longman, 1885), 631; Wace, Roman de Rou 3.59, trans. Glyn S. Burgess, with the text of Anthony J. Holden (St. Helier: Société Jersiaise, 2002), 108–9. And indeed, this step is likely based on their use of Robert of Torigni’s redaction of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum (hereafter GND), which expressly refers to ‘[the Normans’ own] language’ in its etymology.32GND 1.3(4), ed. and trans. van Houts, 1:16–17: ‘Nortmanni autem dicuntur, quia lingua eorum Boreas North uocatur, homo uero man; inde Northmanni, id est homines boreales per denominationem nuncupantur’ (They, however, are called Northmen, for in their language ‘Boreas’ is called ‘North’, and ‘homo’ ‘man’; thence the men from the north are called ‘Northmen’). These geographical and linguistic complications do not fundamentally undermine Johnson’s broader point, but along with Plassmann, this narrative should be set within the shifting and ambiguous landscape of northern geography across the eleventh century.

This ought to be contextualised around two closely related regional narratives of Anglo-Norman identity. The first is the revival of English identity between the 1120s and 1140s. Gillingham has argued that the change from William of Malmesbury to Henry of Huntingdon represents a crucial moment in English self-conception. Where for William the history of the English and Normans is one of imperial oppression, for Henry there is no longer so clear a division and the discussion of Norman and English becomes a matter of court politics. This coincides not only with the adoption of Norman history into England, but also of English history into French with Gaimar – although we should not oversimplify the implications of multilingualism and the identities it may imply.35John Gillingham, ‘Henry of Huntingdon and the Twelfth-century Revival of the English Nation’, in Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson and Alan V. Murray (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1995), 75–101; cf. Henry Bainton, ‘Translating the “English” Past: Cultural Identity in Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis’, in Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England, c.1100–c.1500, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), 179–87, and Elizabeth Tyler, ‘From Old English to Old French’, in Language and Culture, ed. Wogan-Browne et al., 177–8. This also fits nicely into the first two of three periods in Hugh Thomas’s taxonomy of English identity in the twelfth century: The first period, from the Conquest to the reign of Henry I (1100–35), is characterised by a strong distinction between Norman and English. The second, from Stephen to Henry II (1154–89), sees an increasing turn towards English identity among second and third generation immigrants, but is also marked by the flexible coexistence of Norman and English identities within England.36Thomas, English, ch. 6, esp. 77–9. There is also a coordinate set of trends in the perception of Normandy as an imperial centre in the same period, as Bates highlights. In the 1120s, for example, William of Malmesbury’s metaphor about conjoined twins suggests just such an awareness, as too do William’s descriptions of Normandy as Babylon or Orderic’s description of Rouen as a new Rome around the same time.37WM, GR 2.207, ed. Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom, 384–7; Michael Winterbottom, ‘William of Malmesbury and the Normans’, Journal of Medieval Latin 20 (2010): 70–3; OV, 5.6, ed. Chibnall, 3:36–7. See also Bates, Empire, 128–9; Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Rouen as Another Rome in the Twelfth Century’, in Society and Culture in Medieval Rouen, 911–1300, ed. Leonie V. Hicks and Elma Brenner (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 108. This period is therefore witness to an ongoing renegotiation of English and Norman identities.

There is a second significant development in Norman historiography within which this trend should also be situated. A significant divergence emerges between Dudo of Saint-Quentin’s and William of Jumièges’s presentation of the pagan past. Dudo’s long and elaborate prosimetric history of the Norman people revolves around the idea of Rollo as God’s elect and the Normans as the chosen people, destined to conquer Normandy. For Dudo, therefore, Rollo’s conversion not only establishes the gens, but represents a fulfilment of God’s providential plan.38Plassmann, Origo gentis, 251–5; Shopkow, History, 68–79; Pohl, Dudo of Saint-Quentin, 227–8. For William, on the other hand, explicitly simplifying and extending Dudo’s account into plain prose, history sees no such dynamic development. Rollo is no longer divinely elected, but selected by drawing lots and his role in the story is correspondingly diminished. Furthermore, instead of developing from paganism to Christianity, William sees simply a static continuation of virtuous Christian dukes.39Shopkow, History, 81, 87–9; Pohl, Dudo of Saint-Quentin, 228–9. For a reevaluation of the political relevance of William’s revisions, see Mark Haggar, Norman Rule in Normandy 911–1144 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2017), 9–18. This left subsequent generations with the problem of how to resolve the disparity between these two foundational texts and their divergent historical visions of the Norman past. Some late eleventh-century redactions of the GND already replace its early books with Dudo’s history, but by the twelfth century, this reintegration becomes more active. It begins with Orderic’s redaction (ca. 1109–13), in which he integrates some twenty lines of material from Dudo into the early books of the GND. Robert of Torigni, however, is the real instigator of a wholesale return to Dudo’s story in his redaction from the late 1130s. Robert more than doubles the length Rollo’s story in the GND with material drawn directly from Dudo.40Pohl, Dudo of Saint-Quentin, 229–31. Thus, around the turn of the twelfth century we see a renewal of interest in the pagan, northern past of the Normans, which only intensifies towards the late 1130s. Significantly, this development occurs somewhat differently in Normandy and England. England also saw an increasing production of Dudo manuscripts from the twelfth century, but as Pohl has shown, unlike those copied in Normandy, they preserve the manuscript context of their eleventh-century exemplars much more faithfully, which might be taken to suggest a less clear program of integration.41Pohl, Dudo of Saint-Quentin, 240–51; cf. Gillingham, ‘Henry of Huntingdon’, 79.

The panegyric poem Rothoma nobilis (1148) offers a useful lens through which to initially approach this nexus of ideas as they crystallised in the late 1140s. Though the poem itself survives in only one fifteenth-century manuscript, it seems to have been produced as part of an attempted rapprochement with Roger of Sicily to garner support for Matilda’s cause in England.43van Houts, ‘Rouen’, 111. It contains three particularly interesting elements for our purpose. First of all, it uses an etymology of Rouen’s name to imbue it with imperial honour.44Rothoma nobilis 5, ed. and trans. van Houts, 119: ‘Rothoma, si mediam removes, et Roma vocaris’ (Remove the middle [Ro ‘tho’ ma] and Rouen becomes Rome). Second, the text is very casual not only in the use of ethnic stereotypes, referring to the arrogant English, cold Scots and savage French, but it hints equally at a more scientific discourse in its opposition of ‘black Ethiopia and white Germany’ to extoll the extent of Roger’s power.45Rothoma nobilis 17, ed. and trans. van Houts, 119: ‘Ethiopes, albi, Germania, Nigra’. This is a particularly obscure line and it is not obvious that van Houts translates it correctly, but for the currency of such an opposition, cf. Isi., Etym. 14.5.10. These sorts of ethnic stereotypes were commonplace and circulated on lists during the central Middle Ages, although these are not the standard stereotypes for the English, Scots or French from these lists: Weeda, Ethnicity in Medieval Europe, 259–72, passim. While the language of skin colour is marginal in the conceptualisation of ethnicity in the Middle Ages, it was commonly associated with the opposition of northern and southern peoples. So just like the Ethiopians and Germans of Rothoma nobilis, we find an opposition of Ethiopians and Scots used to describe the influence of external heat and cold on skin colour in Johannicius’s standard introduction to medicine.46Johannicius, Isagoge 20, ed. Gregor Maurach, Sudhoffs Archiv 62, no. 2 (1978): 156; see also Liber Pantegni, theorica 1.20, ed. Andreas Turinus, Omnia opera ysaac (Lyon, 1515), 3vb–4ra. On medieval physiognomical language, see Joseph Ziegler, ‘Physiognomy, Science, and Proto-Racism 1200–1500’, in Eliav-Feldon, Isaac and Ziegler, eds, The Origins of Racism in the West, 185–98; cf. Heng, Invention of Race, ch. 4. Finally, this is all linked to the innate characteristic of the Normans as conquerors: ‘Sprung from you of famous Norman blood, / Rules Roger …’.47Rothoma nobilis 12–13, ed. and trans. van Houts, 119: ‘Ex te progenitus, Normanno sanguine clarus, / Regnat Rogerus …’. These three elements, and what they say about the intellectual environment of Normandy in the second quarter of the twelfth century, are essential to understanding the etymology of Normannus.

Before moving on, some lingering questions about intellectual environment and patronage must be addressed. While van Houts emphasises the efflorescence of literary and scientific patronage under Geoffrey and Matilda, as well as Henry II, this environment from the late 1140s does not emerge out of a vacuum. There is an important prehistory to these scientific interests in Northern France and the Anglo-Norman world. Charles Burnett identifies two streams of scientific material into England by the turn of the twelfth century. First, there are texts on astrolabes and astrological tables that emanated from Fleury and Micy, which not only circulated around northern France (e.g. Chartres, Bec and Mont-Saint-Michel), but also found their way to England both before and after the conquest. In the same period, we find astronomical texts from Lotharingia, as well as material on the abacus, with English connections.48Charles Burnett, The Introduction of Arabic Learning into England (London: British Library, 1997), 3–16. The second is southern Italy, although its exact relation with England and the quantity of medical texts flowing between them remains unclear.49See generally, Luis García-Ballester, ‘Introduction: Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death’, in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, ed. Luis García-Ballester et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 13–29. The potential connections are exemplified in Adelard of Bath who, after studying in Laon and Tours, spent time in both southern Italy and Antioch, while still maintaining ties with Normandy. We can likewise trace the importation of Greek and Arabic medical and other scientific texts with links to Italy in the early decades of the twelfth century.50Burnett, Introduction, 16–29; Charles Burnett, Adelard of Bath: Conversations with His Nephew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), xiv–xvi. In particular, Burnett notes that English manuscripts of Salernitan material are often contemporaneous or even earlier than equivalent Italian manuscripts and that the works of Salernitan masters sometimes contain English words and names, suggesting a closer relationship than mere importation.51Burnett, Introduction, 28.

New medical texts were already circulating in the intellectual circles of northern France and particularly Normandy from the late eleventh century, with significant works like the Pantegni and Articella already in relatively wide circulation by the second quarter of the twelfth century.52García-Ballester, ‘Introduction’, 27. On the early role of Bec and Canterbury, see Giles E. M. Gasper and Faith Wallis, ‘Anselm and the Articella’, Traditio 59 (2004): 129–74. This coincides with the emergence of an interest in the sort of ethnography and climatic determinism that these texts contain. They present not only a technical medical vocabulary for addressing human difference, but also a set of ideas about the impact of different regions of the world upon these differences.53Biller, ‘Proto-racial’, 162–3, esp. n18. We can take as a representative example the Aphorismi Iohannis Mansoris, a translation of Yuhanna ibn Masawayn’s Medical Axioms preserved in a twelfth-century copy from Mont-Saint-Michel, alongside inter alia early copies of Aristotle’s Ethics, Metaphysics and Galen’s De elementis secundum Hippocratim.54Avranches, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 232, 138v–140v; Danielle Jacquart and Gérard Troupeau, eds, Yuhanna ibn Masawayh (Jean Mesue): Le Livre des Axiomes Médicaux (Aphorismi) (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 15, 48–52. It explains not only that complexions vary according to region and the heritability of mental and physical characteristics, but it provides examples of how to apply this idea.55Yuhanna ibn Masawayn, Aphorismi 11, 12, 105, 128, ed. Jacquart and Troupeau, 119, 201, 217. We learn, for example, that those living in the fifth and sixth clime require more blood to be drawn than those in the first to fourth and that the inhabitants of India have a more subtle intellect due to the fertile climate.56Yuhanna ibn Masawayn, Aphorismi 34, 129, ed. Jacquart and Troupeau, 141, 219. Although many of the ideas of ethnography and climatic determinism were already accessible in Isidore and classical texts like Vegetius or Lucan, the dissemination of these works further reinforced their influence. We find Guibert of Nogent using medicalised language to explain the decrepit state of Eastern Christianity in the first decade of the twelfth century, likewise in William of Malmesbury a little under two decades later.57Weeda, ‘Fixed and Fluent’, 95–6. Otto of Freising, who not only studied in Paris in the 1120s but spent most of the 1130s as a monk and abbot at Morimond, equally shows interest in ethnography and some awareness of climatic theory.58Weeda, ‘Fixed and Fluent’, 99; Bartlett, Gerald, ch. 6; Joachim Ehlers, Otto von Freising: Ein Intellektueller im Mittelalter (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013), 57–88; Mierow in Otto of Freising, Chronica, 10–14. Claire Weeda shows how this plausibly ties into a broader, pre-existing culture of ethnic stereotypes, promoted particularly in lists of ethnic groups and their features that circulated in the Latin world from the tenth century, highlighting especially the influence of Vegetius on the development of environmental theory in the twelfth century.59See esp. Weeda, Ethnicity in Medieval Europe, ch. 2, passim; Claire Weeda, ‘Ethnic Identification and Stereotypes in Western Europe, circa 1100–1300’, History Compass 12, no. 7 (2014): 586–606; and Claire Weeda, ‘Characteristics of Bodies and Ethnicity c. 900–1200’, Medieval Worlds 5 (2017): 95–112.

The point about patronage must also be highlighted in this early period. There was already a close interconnection between the prominent cathedral schools of northern France and the development of the Norman ecclesiastical aristocracy in the first half of the twelfth century. We can extrapolate outwards from Philip, bishop of Bayeux (1142–63). Having left no writings, his primary contribution to the history of thought is the donation of his personal library to Bec in the mid-twelfth century, and the chance survival of the booklist.60Avranches, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 159, 1v, ed. Laura Cleaver, ‘The Monastic Library at Le Bec’, in A Companion to the Abbey of Le Bec in the Central Middle Ages (11th–13th Centuries), ed. Benjamin Pohl and Laura L. Gathagan (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 190–5, and Omont, Catalogue Rouen, 394–8. Beyond the texts one would expect of an educated bishop from the early twelfth century, like the Latin Fathers, the list also contains a notable collection of scientific works both ancient and contemporary. In particular, it contains an unusually complete collection of uncommon classical texts, such as Pliny’s Naturalis historia, Pomponius Mela’s De chorographia, Seneca’s Naturales quaestiones, Macrobius, Plato’s Timaeus (in Cicero’s translation) and Vegetius’s De re militari as well as a range of contemporary authors, including both Petrus Alfonsi and Adelard of Bath.61Nos 66–7, 79, 90, 106–8, 111, 114 in Cleaver, ed., ‘The Monastic Library at Le Bec’, 193–5; Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 47–56. This should not be taken as some silver bullet. Philip was evidently a bibliophile, but his possession of these books is no proof that he ingested their contents. Nevertheless, his ownership implies not only their availability in Normandy in the mid-century, but their currency among the ecclesiastical elite. What is more, Philip is not an isolated figure, but one of a large group of Norman ecclesiastics, like Hugh of Amiens, archbishop of Rouen (1130–64) and Arnulf, bishop of Lisieux (1142–84), who will not only have known one another, but will have moved through the schools of northern France in precisely this period between the 1110s and 1130s.62Rouse and Rouse, Witnesses, 34, 42; cf. Patricia Stirnemann, ‘Two Twelfth-Century Bibliophiles and Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum’, Viator 24 (1993): 121–42. Finally we can draw this picture into closer focus by noting that Adelard’s Natural Questions (1111–16) was itself dedicated to Philip’s predecessor Richard, bishop of Bayeux (1107–33).63Rouse and Rouse, Witnesses, 53–4; Charles Burnett, ‘The Introduction of Arabic Science into Northern France and Norman Britain: A Catalogue of the Writings of Adelard of Bath and Petrus Alfonsi and Closely Associated Works, Together with the Manuscripts in which They Occur’, in Adelard of Bath: An English Scientist and Arabist of the Early Twelfth Century, ed. Charles Burnett (London: Warburg Institute, 1987), 176. So even if patronage was not yet flowing from the duke, Normandy was already a fertile intellectual environment for medical and scientific writings.

This brings us back to etymology and the 1130s. Given this context, it seems plausible that the use of etymology served as a way of pointing towards an ethnic characterisation of the Normans. As in Rothoma nobilis, names reveal far more about their subject for a twelfth-century academic than mere linguistics. Isidore explains that etymology, properly deployed, served to identity not only the origin (ortum) and force (vim) of a word but also to express its ‘innate qualities’ (qualitatem, qua genita sunt).64Isi., Etym. 1.29.2–3, trans. Barney et al., 55; Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Routledge, 1953), 495–500; Mark Amsler, Etymology and Grammatical Discourse in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1989), 165–72. Thus, for example, when Peter Abelard explains the Bretons’ brutishness, he appeals to etymology:

Interest in etymology is itself a more general feature of twelfth-century historiography.72Guenée, Histoire et culture historique, 184–91. This is especially evident in Wace’s Roman de Rou, which includes multiple etymologies of Normannus. Beyond the duchy of Normandy, the etymology of Normannus is also included by Hugh of Saint Victor in his influential chronicle around 1130.73Mortensen, ‘Hugh of St. Victor on Secular History’; Green, ‘De Tribus Maximis’. Given the lack of a critical edition it is difficult to pin down possible sources for Hugh’s use, as it is unclear whether he was aware of either Glaber or Hugh of Flavigny (the two closest sources geographically). Nevertheless, in his account of Norman dukes, Hugh includes a description of the term Normannus much along the lines that we have already seen: ‘“Normans” are called in [their] barbarous language as it were northern men, because they originally came from that region of the world’.74Bibliothèque nationale de France Latin 15009, 27r: ‘Normanni in lingua barbara quasi homines septemtrionales dicti sunt, eo quod primum ab illa mundi parte uenerint’. Despite the value laden ‘barbara’, Hugh’s use of septentrio, a term with more value neutral and scientific connotations than either aquilo or boreas, may suggest a more academic interest on Hugh’s part.75Fraesdorff, Norden, 147–50. Whether from this impartiality or his own prominence, Hugh’s etymology is no doubt the most significant proximate source for the etymology’s use within Normandy.

It is not Orderic, however, but Robert of Torigni who ensured the success of this etymology. In contrast with Orderic, who for all his modern acclaim was a monk of little significance in his own day, Robert was one of the foremost figures of his generation in Normandy. Not only was he respectively prior, then abbot of two of the premier abbeys in Normandy (Bec and Mont-Saint-Michel), but he had close ties to the ducal family through Matilda and was a key figure in the Norman literary world.79van Houts, ‘Latin and French’, 54–7; Benjamin Pohl, ‘Abbas qui et scriptor?: The Handwriting of Robert of Torigni and His Scribal Activity as Abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel (1154–86)’, Traditio 69 (2014): 45–8; Stirnemann, ‘Two Twelfth-Century Bibliophiles’, 121–42. He was also situated at an early epicentre for the dissemination of medical and Aristotelean texts at Mont-Saint-Michel.80See Pierre Bouet, ‘Inventaire des manuscrits d’Avranches: Les sources antiques’, in L’Historiographie médiévale normande et ses sources antiques (Xe–XIIe siècle), ed. Pierre Bauduin and Marie-Agnès Lucas-Avenel (Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2014), 90; cf. Bernard G. Dod, ‘Aristoteles Latinus’, in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 54–5. Crucially, it is Robert who introduces this etymology to the GND. He adds two sentences to William of Jumièges’s section on the history of the Danes: The first reintroduces a paraphrase of Dudo’s explanation of the terms Daci, Danai and Dani. The second contains an etymology of Normannus. The latter is likely drawn from William of Apulia, given the agreement in the use of Boreas and lingua eorum/soli genialis, a theory that is corroborated by the presence of an early copy at Mont-Saint-Michel.81GND 1.3(4), ed. van Houts, 1:16–17; William of Apulia, Gesta 1, MGH SS 9, 241; Avranches, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 162, 48r–63v; Chibnall in OV, 2:xxii. Likewise in his redaction of Sigebert of Gembloux, which he started between 1147–50, he adds a paragraph introducing the Norman gens to the year 876.82On the dating, see Pohl, ‘Abbas qui et scriptor?’, 48, and Bisson in Robert of Torigni, Chronica, 1:xlvii–lvii. But, reflecting perhaps the shift from a ducal history to a continuation of a world chronicle, he draws this etymology near verbatim from Hugh of Saint Victor’s Chronicle.83Robert of Torigni, Chronica 876, ed. and trans. Bisson, 2:2–3: ‘Normanni uero lingua barbarica quasi homines septentrionales dicti sunt, eo quod primum ab illa mundi parte uenerunt’ (But the Normans were spoken of, in their foreign tongue, as men of the north, because they first came from that part of the world). Cf. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Latin 15009, 27r.

There are two significant features to Robert’s inclusion of this etymology in the GND. First, it shows an interest in the meaning of words and etymology almost for its own sake, as is evident also in the reintroduction of Dudo’s discussion of the terms Daci, Danai and Dani. This does not add new information to William’s text, which already explained in the previous paragraph that the Goths settled in ‘Dacia, also called Denmark’, named for a King Danaus.84GND 1.3(4), ed. and trans. van Houts, 1:14–17: ‘Dacia, que et Danamarcha’. He nevertheless includes it at a very specific point so that it not only explains the term, but also recontextualises the subsequent statement. Now the etymology introduces and reinforces the subsequent ethnographic commentary on the mores and perhaps physiology of the Goths and Danes as well as their propensity for conquest. It is also linked with a broader genealogical interconnection of the Normans as descendent from the Goths and Danes. This enriches its intertextual connection to Isidore’s description of the Goths and Dacians (Daci), who he describes as not only genealogically related but characteristically warlike and northern, a point that is quickly followed by Isidore’s ethnographical characterisation of the Germans as strong and warlike due to the cold and severe climate.85Isi., Etym. 9.2.89–90, 97. In a similar sense, by attending to the meaning of the word Normannus Robert is not only keeping up with contemporary intellectual currents, but is also pointing to the genealogical interconnection and ethnic character of the Normans as descendants of the Goths and Danes. On this point it is especially notable that in his Chronicle he draws from Hugh of Saint Victor as, besides the use of septentrio, Hugh’s chronicle represents a widely disseminated and externally authoritative account. In drawing from Hugh, Robert not only draws on an eminently suitable source for a world chronicle, but imbues the origins and status of the Norman people with the authority of a widely used French source.

Robert’s etymology takes on further significance in the context of the aforementioned return of the Normans’ Scandinavian past to their history-writing. In both of his presentations of this etymology, it is set alongside a particular evocation of the Danish past of the Norman people, as previously observed in Orderic.86OV, 9.3, ed. Chibnall, 5:24–7. In the GND, this connection is seen not only in the explanation of the terms Dani and Daci but also due to the etymology’s location within the first book, itself about the departure of the Normans from Denmark.87GND 1.1, 3(4), ed. van Houts, 1:10–11, 14–17. In the Chronicle, Rollo’s conversion story is added alongside the etymology.88Robert of Torigni, Chronica 876, ed. Bisson, 2:2–3. This same context is evident in subsequent adaptations of this etymology. Thus, in Benoît de Saint Maure, it is placed in the context of a discussion of the Danes and Trojans.89Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Chronique des ducs de Normandie 1.645–76, ed. Francisque Michel, Histoire des ducs de Normandie et des rois d’Angleterre (Paris: J. Renouard, 1840), 25–6; cf. Emmanuèle Baumgartner, ‘Les Danois dans l’Histoire des ducs de Normandie de Benoît de Sainte-Maure’, Le Moyen Age 108 (2002/3): 481–95. In Wace, the etymology is introduced for the first time in the context of Rollo’s election as leader of the Normans upon his invasion of Normandy. Wace also explicitly notes the genealogical aspect: ‘the ancients’ name for it persists amongst their heirs; they are Normans, they were Normans and have been Normans’.90Wace, Roman de Rou 2.441–2, cf. 3.45–80, trans. Burgess, 20–1, 108–11. But the ambiguity of the north here allows Wace to partially elide the Normans and the English by adding an English proverb about northern origins alongside the second reference to the Normannus etymology.91Wace, Roman de Rou 3.53–6, trans. Burgess, 108–9; Françoise H. M. Le Saux, ‘The Languages of England: Multilingualism in the Work of Wace’, in Wogan-Browne et al., eds, Language and Culture, 191–2. Wace thereby sets these groups in opposition to the French through the coincidence of Neustria’s name change with the French losing it to the Normans, as well as a scornful French suggestion that the Normans are beggars from the north.92Wace, Roman de Rou 3.69–80, trans. Burgess, 108–11; Le Saux, ‘Multilingualism’, 191–2.

The results of this development are clear in Stephen of Rouen’s Draco Normannicus. As in Robert’s chronicle, Stephen situates the etymology in the context of Rollo’s baptism story and land grant, explaining that:

Although etymological identification with north served different purposes for different authors, they all seem to orbit around a similar set of ideas. It served Orderic as a means of unifying and ethnically characterising the Norman gens in line with his broader view towards promoting their success in conquest and castigating their moral failure. For Robert, it allowed him to add authoritative pedigree to the Norman people, as well as to keep up with contemporary intellectual trends. Finally, for Wace and Stephen it provided a useful frame for Norman origins, so that the former could elide English and Norman, and the latter could identify the Normans with the newly heroic Danes, and both could set themselves in opposition to the French.

Setting Robert I’s pilgrimage aside this discussion of Norman identity, however, provides an interesting, albeit implicit, opposition of the northern and western identification for the Normans. Its function here may be something like the function of Rollo’s conversion narrative set alongside the etymology in Robert of Torigni and Stephen of Rouen, a nod to the piety and Christianity of this northern and previously pagan people. But by using this pilgrimage instead, it serves to establish the potential for an underlying narrative looking towards Norman and perhaps Warenne involvement in the crusades, themselves taking place within the conceptual political sphere of the west. Indeed, this sphere of politics emerges at least one other time, when Normandy, under Henry I, is attacked by Baldwin VII of Flanders, Louis VI of France and Fulk V of Anjou, because of which, ‘not only England and France were shaken, but the entire western region’.101Warenne Chronicle 32, ed. and trans. van Houts and Love, 68–71: ‘concussa est non solum Anglia aut Normannia, uerum etiam uniuersa occidentis plaga’. Thus, the introductory pilgrimage may look towards the position of the Normans within their present moral and political environment, while using William the Conqueror as a pivot for discussing the characteristic martial qualities of the gens. Rollo is specifically characterised as ‘utterly foreign to the blood of the French’, once again picking up on the distinction between Normans and French.102Warenne Chronicle 1, ed. van Houts and Love, 2–3. This also shows how the underlying ‘scientific’ context of this etymology could make inroads into the lay elite of Normandy in the mid-century, although for others, like the Beaumonts, the pattern extends back to the 1110s.103van Houts and Love, Warenne Chronicle, xli.

The Warenne Chronicle highlights therefore how ideas of north and west had filtered into the background of identity construction in the twelfth century. Certainly, these ideas are not, for the author of the chronicle or for the majority of authors in the period, an overarching theoretical backdrop to their work. They are nevertheless increasingly conceptualising their place in the world, at least in part, in terms of these spatial dynamics. Against the opposition of Islam, along with an increasing consciousness of eastern Christianity, Latin-European centres begin to describe themselves in terms of a western unity. And while this unity is very different from our modern conception of the West, it nevertheless provided a useful sense of collective Christian activity for Latin authors of this period.104Cf. Bonnett, The Idea of the West, ch. 1. As the Normans, and other northern peoples, increasingly integrated into the Latin world, especially through involvement in the crusades, the north was beginning to acquire positive connotations in its confluence with the west. This by no means undermined the broader Carolingian spatial construction of Europe as centred on the Francia in the first half of the twelfth century, but this rich tapestry of spatial notions was beginning to provide a new, or at least updated, framework by which authors could situate themselves and their writings within a politico-religious context.