There is a good argument that the most important member of any dynasty is the second one. It is he who establishes the founder’s power, redefines it if necessary, and gives it continuity. William son of Rollo did all of this. He was not born in France: the Latin lament (planctus) composed soon after his death talks of his being born ‘beyond the seas to a father dwelling in heathen lands’. “ If we accept this, then William was born well before his father’s embarkation on his Viking enterprises, somewhere in the Scandinavian-ruled lands. His first language would not have been French, and his education would have been among pagan Vikings. It was in France, we are told, that he was baptised, presumably Alongside his father in Rouen. He would not have been ‘William’ as a child. He took a Christian name on baptism, for William must have been the name of his godfather; William was no Viking name, it was Frankish. It is interesting and worthwhile to speculate who that godfather may have been. One possible candidate would be King Charles the Simple’s courtier, William the Pious, duke of Aquitaine, who might well have consented to act as sponsor if only by proxy. More likely might have been William, son of Eble Manzer, count of Poitiers, who was one of the younger magnates in the front line fighting the Vikings on the Loire, and who actually married Rollo’s daughter, and William Long-sword’s sister, Gerloc.
William was known to later generations as ‘Longsword’. The name first appears in later eleventh-century sources (Dudo does not use it) but it must depend on a solid family tradition. ‘Longsword’ was a warrior’s name, and could very well have been a Viking cognomen. Since William must have been involved in the brutal campaigning of 924—25 around Beauvais, Ponthieu and Amiens, there had been plenty of opportunities for him to earn it bloodily. William was therefore a bridge between the old Viking ways of the Scandinavian settlers, amongst whom he had grown to manhood, and the new world of the competing Frankish principalities in which he had assumed power. By 927 he was a mature adult, and swore faith to the then Robertian king, Ralph, who recognised him as ruler over the areas conceded to Rollo and his associates. The Seine Vikings’ expansion to the east had been halted in the valley of the Bresle, at Eu, by the counts of Flanders and Vermandois.I2 It may be that this reverse had decided the Northmen of Rouen to drop Rollo as leader, and rivals amongst the community certainly contended with his son for control. There is an ominous passage in the lament at his death which says that, while his father was dying, ‘warfare arose against him, but ever trusting in God, he mastered every enemy by the strength of his right hand’. Dudo too says that William took power before his father died, although he describes an ailing Rollo bestowing his authority on his son and heir in the presence of a regular ducal council. The truth may be that Rollo was seen as a failure by his men, for whatever reason, and William had to fight to reassert the control over the Vikings that his father had lost.
By 927 William seems to have secured the acquiescence of the Seine
Vikings to his overlordship. Alliance with King Ralph brought benefits to the nascent Norman principality. By the 930s the Vikings of Rouen were being seen as domesticated Vikings, and safe to use against their wilder brethren. In 933 King Ralph and William met and, in Flodoard’s words, ‘William, leader (princeps) of the Northmen swore faith to that same king; to whom the king gave the land of the Bretons lying along the sea coast’. The great Viking army on the Loire and in Brittany had continued to hold together through the 920s, but - perhaps because there were so many more of them - had not thrown up a stabilising leader as the Seine Vikings had in Rollo. The Vikings had broken the power of the once considerable Breton kingdom and driven its leaders abroad to shelter in England. There had been a time in the 86os when Charles the Bald had been forced to cede royal regalia to Salomon, the Breton leader, and also make territorial concessions, perhaps the Cotentin peninsula. But the Vikings had occupied Nantes and eastern Brittany, and from place-name evidence, had also moved eastward into the Cotentin.
The native Bretons, long suppressed, began at last to move against their Viking oppressors in 931. This left the Cotentin Vikings exposed and isolated. These settlers may not originally have had any connection with Rollo’s group further east, but that was to change. What we see perhaps, in King Ralph’s grant of 933, is the king’s encouragement of William Longsword to take over lordship of this now-isolated Viking colony to the west of Bayeux, and see what else he might do in the direction of Brittany, which was once again coming under the rule of native counts at Rennes and Nantes. William was clearly enthusiastic about the opportunity. He did secure lordship over the Cotentin (perhaps peacefully) and coins issued in his name have been found further south at Mont St-Michel, on one of which he describes himself exuberantly as ‘duke of the Bretons’. How far he managed to give that title any reality is an open question. At the time the coins were issued, William may have been encouraging the remnants of the Vikings in Brittany to rally to his lordship, and assumed the title to imply that under King Ralph he was the lawful prince in the region. One souvenir of his campaigns in Brittany was a concubine, a Breton woman, with whom he had a son, baptised by the Frankish name of Richard, and whom he established in a household at Bayeux, as Flodoard tells us.
Coins and ducal styles tell us that William actively took up the role of a Christian Frankish prince. He issued coins at Rouen from a restored mint; thus taking over one of the royal prerogatives, as he had also taken over the considerable royal fisc (landed estates) and forests within his growing realm. Some of his older subjects may not have liked this transformation of a charismatic Viking war-leader into a rather more mundane Frankish magnate. Dudo tells the story of the outbreak of a revolt in 934 amongst William’s Scandinavian subjects, led by a rival leader, Riulf Riulf and his faction cornered William in Rouen, and William - Longsword the Viking once more - was forced to lead his personal guard out to do battle and assert his leadership. Although he succeeded, and Riulf was forced to flee for his life, this incident - if it indeed happened - tells us that there may have been many sharp pangs in the birth of Normandy.
In the later 930s, the process of transformation continued. William and his intimates, amongst whom would have been churchmen, began crafting a new identity for him. Flodoard calls William in 933 by the neutral Latin title princeps, meaning no more than ‘leader’ of the Northmen. But the Vikings themselves were now being asked to recognise William, Rollo’s son, as the comes Rothomensis, or ‘count of Rouen’, and elsewhere - as we have seen - he was asserting his right to the title ‘duke of the Bretons’. Count and duke were styles customarily awarded at the discretion of the Carolingian king, but in the 930s there were plenty of other powerful Frankish magnates who were assuming such titles on their own initiative. With the titles went an ideology of Christian ruler-ship, with which the Church was happy to provide him: ‘O William! Maker and lover of peace; comforter and defender of the poor; main-tainer of widows and orphans!’ sobbed the cleric who composed the lament on his death. All were qualities once expected of Christian kings, but now expected of all Christian princes. If a Christian ruler kept to these biblical virtues then his rule was rightful, and it was a sin to resist him. Witgar, the panegyrist of the very Count Arnulf of Flanders who had conspired to kill William, flattered Arnulf by attributing to him exactly the same qualities. With his need to assert legitimacy amongst the other counts and dukes, it may well be that William took the ideology seriously, and perhaps Dudo’s picture of both Rollo and William as lawgivers and law enforcers in their realm may not be wholly exaggerated.
William made another step towards legitimacy in the latter years of his reign when he welcomed back into his province and supported the exiled monks of the Merovingian abbey of Jumieges, on the Seine. Some or all of the monks had retreated for a number of decades to an estate at Haspres, near Cambrai, a hundred miles away, but under the leadership of Martin, a reforming abbot sent from Poitiers by Gerloc, William’s sister, they returned and revitalised Benedictine life and liturgy on the Seine: the lament on his death credited William with ‘founding’ Jumieges. If he could found monasteries, then he was truly a lawful Christian prince, especially, perhaps, in the eyes of his Frankish Christian subjects. Later sources go further and say it had been William’s intention to retire to the monastery as soon as he possibly could, but this may be no more than an attempt to credit him retrospectively with sanctity, since he met the end of a martyr for peace. Richer of Reims tells the unusually complimentary story (for him) of William’s treasure box, which, when opened after his death, contained only a hair shirt which he wore in seasons of penance.
Another significant step in the naturalisation of William Longsword in his adopted land was his marriage. This was arranged c. 936-37 between him and Leutgarde, daughter of Count Flerbert II of Vermandois, a direct descendant of Charlemagne in the male line. We know of the marriage gift that ‘Count William of the city of Rouen’ made to Leutgarde: the substantial estate of Longueville in the Pays de Caux. It was a good investment. Any children of the marriage would share their mother’s imperial lineage, and the marriage introduced William as a member of the elite club of princes which was beginning to divide up West Francia amongst its members. Endogamy (or intermarriage) meant acceptance in this, as in other ages. William’s sister had married the count of Poitiers, another leading member of the Frankish princely cabal. What sort of game William played amongst this coterie of princes in the decade between 933 and his death in 942 is not clear. The Frankish princes were exploiting to their own advantage the continuing rivalry between the Robertian dynasty, with a power base around Paris, and the descendants of Charlemagne, limited to the vicinity of the old imperial palace of Laon, who had few resources other than moral. Later (Norman) tradition portrays William as the arbiter in the succession of the Carolingian exile, Louis IV, in 936. But this political pre-eminence Amongst the other princes is an idea which has little contemporary support, although it is true that William’s elegaist says that his enemies resented his closeness to the new king.
In the end, William Longsword was a victim of the power-play of the other Frankish princes, rather than of internal plotting amongst his fellow Scandinavian warlords. The Northmen of the Seine had early fallen foul of the emerging principality of Flanders, under its vigorous marcher counts. Flanders had appeared as a political entity in the reign of Charles the Bald, partly through policy and partly through the enterprise of its founder, Baldwin ‘Iron-Arm’, count of Ghent. It developed as an important and formidable bulwark against Viking penetration of the Rhineland and the north of France. The Vikings who settled on the Seine had outflanked the Flemings, and were a threat that they did not appreciate. So it is no surprise to find that in 925 Count Arnulf deployed his forces and connections to curb the Northmen of the Seine and contain them at the River Bresle, which was to become the permanent northern frontier of Normandy.
Tension continued between the Northmen and the Flemings. In 939 Count William antagonised Arnulf by his involvement in reinstating a certain Herluin as count over the region of Montreuil, which he himself had attempted to annex. This appears to have decided Arnulf that the Northmen were getting restless and becoming a threat once again. His method of dealing with them was as ruthless as you might expect from a tenth-century marcher count used to dealing with pagan outlanders. He enticed William to a marcher conference on the River Somme at Picquigny, west of Amiens. The two counts met on an island in the river on the afternoon of Saturday 17 December 942 to arrange a peace settlement, William went trustingly, having asked for no hostages from Arnulf. Some of the details of what happened next are given by the lament composed soon after his death, perhaps by a member of the community at Jumieges. After a long and amicable discussion, which the crafty Arnulf protracted until the winter sun was beginning to set behind the black alder thickets on the river bank, William returned to his boat while Arnulf went to his. As he was pulled away across the waters of the river, which was in spate, several of Arnulf’s household called him back saying that their lord wanted to tell him some more important information. William obligingly returned in the dusk, only to be met on shore by the swords of as many as six assassins, and he was hacked down, being killed by a savage cut to the head. William himself was unarmed and defenceless, as were his men; nevertheless two of his household, indifferent to wounds, recovered his dead body and hauled it to the boat and back across the river.
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