Although Rollo was baptized in 912 and signalized his conversion by extensive grants of land to the great churches and monasteries of his new territories, his Christianity sat lightly upon him and left him a Norse sea-rover at heart till the end, when he sought to appease the powers of the other world, not only by gifts of gold to the church, but by human sacrifices to the northern gods. His legislation, so far as it can be reconstructed from the shadowy accounts of later historians, was fundamentally Scandinavian in character, and his followers guarded jealously the northern traditions of equality and independence. His son, William Longsword, was a more Christian and Frankish type, but his death, celebrated in a Latin poem which represents the earliest known example of popular epic in Normandy, was the signal for a Scandinavian and pagan reaction. We hear of fresh arrivals on the Seine, Vikings who worshipped Thor and Odin, of an independent band at Bayeux under a certain Haigrold or Harold, and even of appeals for reënforcements from the Normans to the Northmen beyond the sea. The dukes of Rouen, says the _Saga of St. Olaf_, “remember well their kinship with the chiefs of Norway; they hold them in such honor that they have always been the best friends of the Norwegians, and all the Norwegians who wish find refuge in Normandy.” Not till the beginning of the eleventh century does the Scandinavian immigration come to an end and Normandy stand fully on its own feet. Not until the eleventh century also does the history of Normandy emerge from the uncertain period of legend and tradition and reach an assured basis of contemporary evidence. Throughout Europe, the tenth century is one of the most uncertain and obscure of all the Christian centuries. To the critic, as an Oxford don distinguished for knowledge of this epoch once remarked, its delightful obscurity makes it all the more interesting, but there are limits to the delights of obscurity, and a French scholar who has tried to reconstruct the history of this period in Spain finds that all surviving documentary sources of information are fabrications! Matters are not so bad as that for Normandy, for the forgers there chose other periods in which to place their products, but there are for the tenth century practically no contemporary documents or contemporary Norman chronicles. The earliest Norman historian, Dudo, dean of Saint-Quentin, wrote after the year 1000 and had no personal knowledge of the beginnings of the Norman state. Diffuse, rhetorical, credulous, and ready to distort events in order to glorify the ancestors of the Norman dukes who were his patrons, Dudo is anything but a trustworthy writer, and only the most circumspect criticism can glean a few facts from his confused and turgid rhetoric. Yet he was copied by his Norman successors, in prose and in verse, and has found his defenders among patriotic Normans of a more modern time. Not