Normans Erotic

The Normans were a medieval people who took shape in the tenth and eleventh centuries along the lower Seine, in what is now Normandy in northern France, and who had melted into the French, English, Irish and southern Italian populations by the later Middle Ages. What made them a people was speed of assimilation paired with an appetite for conquest. Within three generations of Rollo's settlement in 911, the descendants of Danish and Norwegian raiders had dropped Old Norse for a Gallo-Romance dialect, taken baptism, and built the most aggressive knightly aristocracy in Europe. They were Scandinavian in origin, French in language and religion, and something new in method. The homeland was compact: the Cotentin peninsula, the Pays de Caux, the Bessin and the Seine valley down to Rouen, with the Channel Islands offshore. Old Norman was a northern dialect of Old French, an Oïl tongue that kept a scattering of Norse words for ships, tides and farm work. Carried to England after 1066 it became Anglo-Norman, the language of court and law for three centuries, which is why English still says jury, verdict, mortgage and parliament. Religion was Latin Christianity, adopted wholesale and practiced with a builder's zeal: the dukes and their barons founded abbeys at Jumièges, Fécamp and Caen, and the round-arched, thick-walled Romanesque they exported is still called Norman architecture in Britain.

The inflection points are famous. Hastings in 1066 put William on the English throne and produced the Domesday survey, the most thorough land register medieval Europe compiled. In the same decades the Hauteville brothers, younger sons of a minor Cotentin lord, carved Apulia, Calabria and then Muslim Sicily into a state that Roger II made a kingdom in 1130, administered in Latin, Greek and Arabic. Bohemond took Antioch on the First Crusade. Norman lords pushed into Wales and, from 1169, Ireland. Two details are less known. Normans shaved the back of the head, a fashion plain on the Bayeux Tapestry, which by one chronicle led Harold's scouts to report an army of priests. And the Clameur de Haro, a medieval cry for the duke's protection, can still be raised by Channel Islanders to halt a wrong until a court hears it. Philip II of France seized the duchy in 1204, and Norman families on either side of the Channel picked a king and became French or English. In Ireland the settlers turned into the Old English. In Sicily they married into the local nobility and were gone within a few generations. What remains is the name of a French region, a legal vocabulary, thousands of castles and churches, and the Norman-descended speech of Jersey and Guernsey, still kept alive by a dwindling few.