Duchy of Normandy

The Duchy of Normandy stems from various Danish, Norwegian, Hiberno-Norse, Orkney Viking and Anglo-Danish (from the Danelaw) invasions of West Francia in the 9th century. Normandy began as a fief, probably as a county, in 911 by the treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte between King Charles III of West Francia and Rollo, leader of the Vikings known as Northmen (or in Latin Nortmanni).

Originally coterminous with the ecclesiastical province of Rouen composed of the northern portion of the province of Neustria that was centered around Rouen on the Seine, it was later expanded by Rollo's conquests southward to include the areas of Évreux and Alençon and westward into Breton territory. Eventually the County roughly corresponded to the two present-day Regions of Upper and Lower Normandy of the modern French Republic, plus the Channel Islands, which remain under the British crown as successors of the dukes of Normandy. All former mainland territory is now part of France, and the Duchy now consists solely of the Channel Island Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey, which are Crown Dependencies of the British Monarchy. The British sovereign is the current Duke of Normandy.

When the Norse-speaking settlers spread out over the lands of the Duchy, they married local women and adopted the Gallo-Romance speech of the existing populations — much as Norman rulers later adopted in England the speech of the conquered people. In Normandy, the new Norman language formed by the interaction of peoples, inherited vocabulary from Norse. In England the Norman language developed into the Anglo-Norman language. The literature of the Duchy and England during the period of the Anglo-Norman realm is known as Anglo-Norman literature.

The Norman dukes created the most powerful and consolidated duchy in Western Europe between the years 980, when the dukes helped place Hugh Capet on the French throne, and 1050. Scholar churchmen were brought into Normandy from the Rhineland, built and endowed monasteries and supported monastic schools. The dukes imposed heavy feudal burdens on the ecclesiastical fiefs, which supplied the armed knights that enabled the dukes to control the restive lay lords but whose bastards could not inherit; by the mid-11th century the Duke of Normandy could count on more than 300 armed and mounted knights from his ecclesiastical vassals alone. By the 1020s the dukes were able to impose vassalage on the lay nobility as well.