He has been made the type of the brave and cunning warrior, capable
of performing the most extraordinary feats; for instance, he is represented
as overhearing, through a partition wall, talk of an attempt upon his
capital, plotted during his absence by the sons of Conan, Count of Rennes.
Instantly he gallops without stopping from Orleans to Angers where he
cuts his enemies to pieces, and hastens back to Orleans with such speed
that there has not even been time to remark his absence. He has been
made to figure as the defender of the Pope whom by his marvellous exploits
he saves from the fiercest robbers and from the formidable Crescentius
himself. Finally, he has been credited with so subtle a brain as to know
how to avoid all the traps which the utmost ingenuity of the Infidels
could set for him to hinder his approach to the Sepulchre of Christ.
Out of this man, on whom the fear of Heaven's wrath would sometimes
fall, legend has made the ideal type of the repentant sinner. Not three
times, but four or five times he is represented to have performed the
pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and is pictured as having himself dragged
half-naked, with a cord round his neck, through the streets of Jerusalem,
scourged by two grooms, and crying aloud "Lord, have pity upon the
traitor!" Does not all this exaggeration of the good as well as the evil
in him, these legendary, almost epic, touches, do more to convince us
than any argument could, of the strange importance which the Angevins
of the period attributed to the person of the count? In comparison with
the shadowy figures of the kings who succeed one another on the throne
of France, that of a Fulk Nerra stands out in high relief against a drab
background of level history.
Normandy. It has been useful, in order to give something like a life-like conception of the great feudatories of the eleventh century, to spend some time over one of the few personalities of the time which we are in a position to know at least in its main outlines. In dealing with the Dukes of Normandy, we may be the briefer because many details concerning them belong to the chapters devoted to the history of England.
More than any other feudal principality, Normandy had derived from the very nature of its history a real political unity. It was not the fact that the chief Norman counties were held as fiefs by members of the duke's own family which secured to the duke, as some continue to repeat, a power greater than was enjoyed elsewhere, for we have already seen that family feeling had no effect in preventing revolts. But the duke had been able to keep a considerable domain in his own hands, and there were hardly any abbeys in his duchy to which he had not the right of nomination, many were part of his property and he freely imposed his own creatures upon them. His word was law throughout the ecclesiastical province of Rouen, and he disposed at his pleasure of all its episcopal sees. Without differing notably from what prevailed elsewhere, the administrative organisation of the duchy was perhaps more stable and regular. The ducal domain was divided into a certain number of
