I ve been making a series of short videos asking Who Made the Scottish People,
But I ve been doing it in rainy Scotland Aujourd hui nous sommes en France et il pleut
as we take a all too brief look at possibly THE most influential group of all the Normans
If you re interested in the people, places and events in Scottish history
then click the subscribe button at the bottom right of the screen.
In the meantime, let me tell you a story
Today s Scotland history tour starts in Rouen in France,
but by the time we re finished it s going to take me much closer to home.
If you follow The River Seine as it meanders its way through this region , it leads you
all the way upstream to Paris. In the ninth century it brought
Vikings who raided and settled, just like they had been doing in Scotland...,
and England and Ireland for that matter. Large numbers of them settled here around Rouen.
They left their Scandinavian lands as land-less younger sons or political dissidents
looking to build a home for themselves first with sword, and then with ploughshare.
They had no intention of stopping here, but the French ,
we should really call them The Franks back then , were starting to hold these Vikings back,
first with successes at the Siege of Paris , then more significantly for us
a siege seventy-five miles to the south of here
in Chartres these Vikings were held back by Charles the Simple, King of West Francia
Now there are going to be people who complain in the comments about
the use of Viking as a noun rather than a verb. I know they think they re being pedantic but
they re actually being a wee bit daft. I ve got a page for my Patreon members where I add
extra videos and if you click the link up there I ll upload a short video for those
Patreon members to explain why. In the meantime, lets deal with this Viking.
Back in 858AD, Norsemen had raided and burned Chartres.
Now, the town's defences were rebuilt so that it became a fortified city.
In 911, this Viking called Rollo led another siege of the city.
According to legend the local bishop exposed the Virgin's tunic on the ramparts
Mrs Robinson
He then led a mob of peasants in a charge that saw off the Norsemen.
Our West Frankish King, Charles the Simple, followed up with a cavalry charge.
Now the Norsemen had no time to board an army onto ships,
so Rollo and his men created a defensive wall by slaughtering the livestock from those ships.
and the Frankish horses were frightened by the sight and smell of the dead
livestock and wouldn t go forward. Now whether you believe that or not,
The Franks called off the attack and negotiated terms with Rollo.
A bunch of Norsemen had already settled in this area around the River Seine and River Epte.
What if Charles the Simple gives Rollo the lands between the River Epte and the sea,
for him and his Norsemen. Rollo would then act as a
buffer to protect the Franks against more naughty Norsemen coming from the west.
Rollo took the deal, made Rouen here his capital, was baptised and given the Christian name Robert.
The treaty being signed at St Caire Sur Epte. He also adopted the surname St Claire which,
modern day Scots might recognise as Sinclair This, of course, is a statue of Rollo
CR or should I say CR Bobby Sinclair
Well done Bobby Walk off
This is Place de Gaulle. It s in Bayeux.
You ve probably heard of Bayeux because of the
tapestry in the museum round the corner and we ll get on to that
but first I wanted to introduce you to this fine lass.
Her name is Poppa. When Rollo raided Bayeux
he took her and made her his wife. The details, level of coercion,
existence of another Christian wife and all that kind of thing are a bit dubious and sketchy,
but it was Poppa who gave birth to Rollo s successor CR William Longsword Count of Rouen.
But it wasn t just this union that brought local Frankish and Norse together,
the existing Frankish and the Norse incomers together forged a new people:
The Normans. The road wasn t smooth
rebellion by Norse settlers who thought William was becoming far too Frankish;
later William s son Richard was abducted by the Frankish king who distrusted the Norse,
but it was that Richard who introduced feudalism amongst the Norsemen and each passing generation
the people here became less like Norse and Frankish peoples thrown together
and more like Normans. They were hugely
successful in the coming centuries. Like their Norse forebears the need for
land, conquest and adventures sent them out across Europe:
extending into the Iberian Peninsula as the Moors were pushed back,
establishing a kingdom in Sicily, influencing the Crusades and the
creation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem They tell me that one way or another every
surviving European monarch today is descended from Rollo
Of course, Normandy itself grew with conquest and consolidation, and five generations after Rollo
the capital of Normandy was moved here to Caen.
This castle here would become the headquarters and home of The Duke of Normandy.
This change was made by the guy who would make the biggest impact of all the Normans
William of Normandy, who in 1066 would become known as William the Conqueror.
From here he plotted the biggest expansion of Norman power yet.
There s a convoluted tale about why William felt he was justified by his God
given right to become King of England and back in Bayeux that justification,
along with his invasion is described in intricate detail in the famous tapestry.
The story s well enough known that I don t need to go into the details here
after all this isn t England History Tours
so let me take you to somewhere much more part of Scotland s story Brix
This is the small town of Brix and, whilst you may not realise it, you ve heard about it before
in the name of one of the local knights who crossed Le Manche in
the wave of 11th century Norman emigrants, who turned Saxon England into Norman England.
He was another Robert, hence the name Robert de Brix.
If you re Scottish , or even if you ve spent any time at all on my channel
you know of this Robert s Great great great great great grandson Robert the Bruce
This is where the ancestors of our warrior king came from.
This is the current Bruce Castle in Normandy.
Looking back now we KNOW what became of the descendants of the Norman knight,
who hailed from here. .. but when he set of from Normandy,
he could never have known that his line would produce the most famous king of Scots.
Henry I of England was the son of William the Conqueror.
He had married the daughter of Malcolm Canmore of Scotland, and his right-hand man
was that wife s of England s brother David. Henry gave David lands here in Normandy and
one of his tenants, feudal knights was a local Norman from here in Brix.
His name was Robert.
Henry would give Robert de Brix lands in England, where the Bruces would become great magnates
but David would make that family more famous still.
You see David would go on to be David I of Scotland.
From his time as a loyal friend to Henry I of England
Carlisle Castle was David s capital and power base.
In old age this was eventually where he d die, but before he did, he would bring
a revolution to Scotland. That Davidian revolution brought
changes to town and commerce structures, religious organisation and trade, it brought
feudalism, chivalry and Normans. Carlisle was his English heartland,
but David needed to secure and exert influence over Scotland.
For that David brought Norman knights most famously on the west coast would
be the Stewarts and the Bruces. They, along with many other Norman knights,
helped him subdue the kingdom he built up, but in which he d never grown up.
These Norman knights often held lands both north and south of the Scotland England border,
but for David initially the real border was the Forth, or at furthest the Tay.
He seldom travelled north of these, particularly in his early reign.
He had yet to impose Norman ways in those Gaelic realms.
But David wasn t the first to bring Normans to Scotland.
When David s father Malcolm Canmore had come north with a Saxon army to
seize the throne from Macbeth years before,
there were Normans fighting on the side of the man so maligned by Shakespeare.
Yet it was WITH Normans that Malcolm s son David imposed the Canmore line.
Most of the Canmore Monarchs are buried here at Dunfermline Abbey.
When Alexander III, the last of the Canmore line,
died without heirs the community of the realm of Scotland were faced with a choice .
There emerged two men to choose from to lead the country.
Two candidates for King of Scots. Both had Celtic Gaelic speaking mothers
but both had Anglo Norman fathers. Who would choose between them, but an
Anglo Norman Plantagenet king They called him Longshanks.
I don t need to recount what followed. We all know that the grandson of one of those
two candidates, moulded Scotland into a nation and, in the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath,
set out that nation s history and right to be. Robert the Bruce, who lies buried here,
in Dunfermline Abbey, was at least partly born of a
family that migrated from Brix in Normandy. Scotland was at least in part Norman.
If you want to know more about the peoples who made Scotland, then there s a video
coming up on screen now. In the meantime