The Viking who became Normandy

Chapter 23 of the living edition long contained a sentence I was proud of: the printed pedigrees offered a road from the Clares to the dukes of Normandy across a step the heralds flag as illegitimate, and it was not wired, because this family's rule does not bend for dukes. The rule never bent. The evidence caught up instead, twice over. The dukes came in first by the road that needs no bending, William the Conqueror's own paternal line; and then the Clare road was proven too, through Godfrey, Count of Eu, an openly acknowledged natural son of Richard the Fearless, admitted on exactly the standing this tree already accepts for Robert of Gloucester.

The Conqueror has stood in this tree since the week of the crown. What the July research added is everything above him. His father, Robert the Magnificent, who died on pilgrimage at Nicaea. His grandfather Richard the Good, and Richard the Fearless before him, who held the duchy from boyhood for more than fifty years. William Longsword. And at the top, Rollo: the Viking who raided the Seine until the King of the Franks concluded, in 911, that the only way to stop him was to give him the province and call him its defender. The pirate became the state. Normandy is, quite literally, his name, the land of the Northmen, and every duke and every King of England after 1066 descends from him.

And beside the dukes stands a woman with no title at all, and she may be the best of the intake. Herleva of Falaise was a tanner's daughter. The old story has Duke Robert seeing her from the castle walls; what the record has is that her son became William the Conqueror, and that she was married afterwards to a lord named Herluin and bore two more sons who helped conquer England. Every royal house in Europe that descends from the Conqueror descends from the tanner's daughter, and this site, which keeps a Restoration tavern-keeper's daughter proudly in its direct line, is delighted to add her.

Above Rollo the sagas offer fathers, and the sagas are where they stay: the frontier above him is marked note-only, like Cerdic above Alfred and the king-lists above Kenneth MacAlpin. The Norman ladder, dukes, duchesses and Herleva, is drawn in The Royal Houses.