CHARLES H. HASKINS. CAMBRIDGE, MASS. _August, 1915._ CONTENTS I. NORMANDY AND ITS PLACE IN HISTORY 1 II. THE COMING OF THE NORTHMEN 26 III. NORMANDY AND ENGLAND 52 IV. THE NORMAN EMPIRE 85 V. NORMANDY AND FRANCE 116 VI. NORMAN LIFE AND CULTURE 148 VII. THE NORMANS IN THE SOUTH 192 VIII. THE NORMAN KINGDOM OF SICILY 218 INDEX 251 THE NORMANS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY I NORMANDY AND ITS PLACE IN HISTORY In June, 1911, at Rouen, Normandy celebrated the one-thousandth anniversary of its existence. Decorated with the grace and simplicity of which only a French city is capable, the Norman capital received with equal cordiality the descendants of the conquerors and the conquered--Norwegians and Swedes, Danes of Denmark and Danes of Iceland, Normans of Normandy and of England, of Sicily and of Canada. Four Norwegian students accomplished the journey from their native fjords in an open Viking boat, having set ashore early in the voyage a comrade who had so far fallen away from the customs of his ancestors as to sleep under a blanket. From the United States bold Scandinavians, aided by the American Express Company, brought from Minnesota the Kensington rune stone, which purports to prove the presence of Norse explorers in the northwest one hundred and thirty years before the landfall of Columbus. A congress of Norman history listened for nearly a week in five simultaneous sections to communications on every phase of the Norman past. There was Norman music in the streets, there were Norman plays at the theatres, Norman mysteries in the cathedral close. Banquet followed banquet and toast followed toast, till the cider of Normandy paled before the champagne of France. Finally a great pageant, starting, like the city, from the river-bank, unrolled the vast panorama of Norman history through streets whose very names reëcho its great figures--Rollo and his Norse companions arriving in their Viking ships, the dukes his successors, William Longsword, Richard the Fearless, Robert the Magnificent, William the Conqueror, the sons of Tancred of Hauteville who drove the paynim from Sicily, and that other Tancred who planted the banner of the cross on the walls of Jerusalem, all with their knights and heralds and men at arms, followed by another pageant of the achievements of Normandy in the arts of peace. And on the last evening the great abbey-church of Saint-Ouen burnt red fire for the first time in its history till the whole mass glowed and every