Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/592

Rh 546 But the traditional feeling was handed on from the days when Englishmen and Normans fought side by side against Frenchmen. In Normandy itself the memory of the connexion with England soon died out. We read, and it seems strange as we read, of the quarrel which, in the days of Edward I., arose between the crowns of England and France out of the disputes between Norman subjects of France and Gascon subjects of England. But the national feeling of the English towards France was none the less an inheritance handed on from the Norman fights of Varaville and Noyon. From the time of John s forfeiture Normandy ceased to be a separate state. It was a dominion of the king of France, though often granted out as a separate apanage to members of the royal family. The land fell back upon its natural geographical position as the northern seaboard of France, though now the seaboard of a France that had been vastly enlarged since the land of the Northmen had been cut off from the old French duchy. The value of such a province to the kingdom was beyond words ; but it was now simply a province of France, keeping much that was characteristic, holding to a strongly-marked pro vincial life, but not parted off by any distinction that can be called national. One cause of the ease with which the land went back to its old position in the days before Rolf doubtless was that so much of the national strength had been used up in the settlements in England and Sicily. The life of the Normans as a people though a people, strictly so called, they hardly formed is very far from being shut up within the duchy of Normandy. Still, the union between Normandy and France at all events, the possession of Normandy by the French kings of the house of Paris was not to be altogether unbroken. The duchy was for a while to go back again to the descend ants of its ancient dukes. The Normans had forgotten their connexion with England, but it was not always for gotten by English kings and statesmen. The remarkable thing is that the thought of reunion does not show itself till a much later time, when the immediate tradition must have passed away. In the two great English invasions of France Normandy plays an important part ; but it does not appear that the descendants of Rolf and William were any more welcome in their ancestral duchy than in other parts of the French dominion. But Normandy holds quite a different position in the two great parts of the Hundred Years War. Under Edward III. it was often the scene of war, because geographical causes naturally made it so ; but it was so only as any other part of France might happen to be. The war of Crecy and Poitiers was not in any special way a war for Normandy. Edward was rather a French prince claiming the crown of France than an English king seeking the aggrandizement of his kingdom. When the settlement of Bretigny was made Normandy was not among the lands that were given up to England. It was otherwise with Henry V. He was before all things an English king bent on extending the power of England. If he wished to make Continental conquests, Normandy, both from geographical position and from historical associations, associations which became keener in some sort as they grew more distant, was the land which before all others invited his ambition. His war with France, his formal union of the crowns of England and France, were, we may be sure, only means towards his real design, the annexa tion of Normandy to the crown of England. In every negotiation he was ready to waive his claim to the French crown ; he always insisted on the cession of the Norman duchy in full sovereignty. His war was before all things a war for Normandy. In his serious invasion of 1417 to be distinguished from the earlier military promenade which led to the fight of Agincourt he gave himself out, though he gave himself out in vain, as the lawful duke of the duchy. He thoroughly subdued the duchy as his Eecon first work, and from 1418 to 1450 Normandy again became &amp;lt;l ues t a possession of the English crown. The treaty of Troyes, in its 17th clause, speaks of Normandy as a land conquered from the kingdom of France, yet as actually being at the time a separate possession of the king of England, a land which, by the 21st clause, he was bound, on succeeding to the kingdom of France, to reunite with that kingdom. By that treaty England and France were to be united on the same terms as Sweden and Norway, Hungary and Austria, in later times ; but by this clause Normandy is to be part of the kingdom of France, neither part of the kingdom of England nor a separate possession of the common king. Henry never succeeded to the crown of France ; he died heir and regent of that kingdom. Normandy therefore was not reunited to France, and Henry, on his deathbed, revealed the object of his whole career. He was prepared for the loss of France, but not for the loss of Normandy. Things might take their course in other ways, but the guardians of his child were to conclude no peace with Charles of France unless Normandy was ceded to the crown of England in full sovereignty. Henry VI. succeeded to both king doms ; he uses the style of both, and never uses the style of the Norman duchy ; yet in documents of his time the duchy is in a marked way distinguished from the kingdom of France. Such phrases as &quot;oure saide royaume of Fraunce and oure saide duchie of Normandie &quot; are common. In the journal of the embassy in 1445, 1 &quot;Guyenne et Nor mandie et les autres terres esquelles les rois Dangleterre avoient droit avant la question de la couronne &quot;are pointedly distinguished from the lands which were held or claimed by the English kings only by virtue of their claim to the French crown. That Henry V. s object, the lasting union of England and Normandy, would have been no gain to England needs no proof; but there can be little doubt that the thirty years of English occupation were a gain to Normandy. As far as was possible in a time of war yet war between France and England was a less evil than war between Burgundians and Armagnacs King Henry and John duke of Bedford secured to their conquest a far better administration and more of general wellbeing than it had had or than it had again under French rule. But by this time Normans had become Frenchmen. The best English rule was but the rule of a stranger, and the land willingly went back to that dominion of the house of Paris from which it had twice been cut off, at times five hundred years apart. From this time the history of Normandy is simply part of the history of France. It is the record of such events in French history, some of the most important events in later French history among them, as took place within the bounds of Normandy. The duchy still kept a certain separate being, and its people still kept a large measure of separate feeling. Philip of Comines remarks that the Normans were always best pleased to have a duke of their own. But such a duke of Normandy, son or brother of the reigning king of France, holding a mere apanage and not a sovereign fief, remained a French subject, and had not the same independent position as a duke of Burgundy or Britanny. Philip of Comines further remarks on the wealth of the duchy the fruit possibly in some measure of the administration of King Henry and Duke John. Normandy brought in a third of the whole income of the French crown. To this day Normandy is easily seen, by those who look below the surface, to be in many things a separate land from France ; compared with southern Gaul, it has much in common with England. But the history 1 Stevenson s Letters and Papers of Henry the Sixth, i. 129.