period, Hincmar, Reginon, and Frodoard, who describe in some detail the ravages of the pirates on the Frisian coast, should not have a word about Rollo's exploits there. To judge from Dudo's narrative, they were very important-he ravaged the country far and wide, defeated the two chiefs, taking him with the long neck prisoner, and, forsooth, refusing to release him unless he accepted Christianity. Not a bad example for a Norse chief fresh from the worship of Odin. When we say that Hincmar, Reginon, and the rest do not name Rollo in Frisia, we do not mean that they do not mention the ravages of the pirates there. They mention them frequently, and in detail, but they were Danes, and their leaders were the two companions, Godfred and Sigfred, the same Godfred or Guthred, as we believe, that has already been mentioned, and who again has been robbed of his laurels, such as they are, to enrich the fame of Rollo. From Frisia Dudo takes his hero to the Seine, where an incident occurs which I cannot describe better than in the ingenuous phrases of Sir Francis Palgrave (i. 517), "When he landed hard by the chapel of St. Vedast, and entered the deserted sanctuary, he reverently deposited before the altar the relics of St. Himeltruda, removed from a Belgian shrine." Pace Sir Francis, whom all lovers of our old history must reverence, and whom we reverence deeply, but this is too much for us. This was

no pirate, this no Norseman. Hincmar must have overlooked one of the saints when he overlooked this event.

Dudo here ventures upon a date-a memorable date in most of the old histories -namely 876, when Rollo is said to have first occupied Rouen. "If Archbishop Hincmar," says Palgrave, "whose annals furnish the basis of French history during the period, had heard of Rollo-he hated the odious name--and to the last, among the Carlovingians, the Normans were only known as pirates." The name of Rollo was surely not more hateful to Hincmar than that of Hasting, or Godfred, or Wurm, all of whom he specially names. His annals close in 885, so that we are here on ground quite familiar to him, yet he breathes not the name of Rollo. Nor is he mentioned in any contemporary annals of this period so far as I know, the well-known passages in "Asser's Life of Alfred" having been shown to be interpolations. (Vide Mon. Hist. Britt. 479 note, and M. le Prevost "Notes pour servir a l'Histoire de Normandie," 1st part, in the Annuaire de Normandie, i. 40, note 2, cited by M. Lair.) Dudo makes Rollo advance upon Rouen and there have an interview with its bishop, Franco; but, as has long been pointed out, Franco was not made bishop until the year 909, and it is clear, as M. Lair fully allows, that, if the incidents of the story are reliable, the date 876 is utterly inadmissible. I am disposed to question the whole account. Having concluded a truce with Franco the bishop, Dudo next

makes his hero encounter a French army commanded by Ragnold, Prince of all France, with whom was allied the pirate chief Alstignus or Hasting. M. Licquet has too hastily denied the existence of this Ragnold, and would treat the whole account as fabulous, but this is a mistake. Dudo's account is in fact an enlargement of that in the annals of St. Vedast, only that the date has been altered, some incidents added, and the name of Rollo introduced. The date in the annals of St. Vedast is 885, 886. Ragnold is called dux Cenomannius, or duke of Maine, and the campaign was a portion of that which was carried on to Paris; for the Danes, according to the annals already cited, having defeated their French opponents, advanced to besiege the capital on the Seine. There Dudo takes his protégés under the leadership of Rollo. The expedition against Paris in 885 is one of which the details are perfectly well known. Hincmar describes it, and so does Abbo, a monk of St. Germain des Prés, an actual witness of the siege. The leaders of it were Sigfred, the companion of Guthred, who had been recently murdered, and Hasting. None of the annalists of the time say a word about Rollo. If he had taken a merely subordinate part in the expedition such an oversight might have been pardonable; but according to Dudo he was the hero of it all. He defeated Ragnold, he took Rouen, he led the Danes to Paris. Dudo knows nothing of Sigfred; and Hasting only appears as an ally of the French,-Hasting, the terrible ravager of the Loire, who we know took an active part in the attack on Paris in alliance with the French against his own people, -immediately after the murder of Guthred, too! The whole account is distorted, and is another instance of the way in which Dudo has converted to the honour of Rollo deeds with which he had nothing to do. The credit of the Paris campaign has, in fact, been transferred from its real heroes and leaders, Sigfred and the rest, to Rollo, who had as yet not set foot in France. With Rollo's absence from the siege of Paris follows his absence from the minor glories of the campaign assigned to him by Dudo, the capture of Bayeux and Evreux, &c. &c. We know from the Annals of St. Vedast that in the autumn of 890 the Danes, apparently despairing of capturing Paris, marched into and pillaged the Cotentin and sacked St. Lo. This campaign would bring them near Bayeux, which probably suffered at the same time; but the leader of the Danish armies was Sigfred and not Rollo. If he was not at Bayeux, he did not there marry Popa, the daughter of Count Berenger; but the whole story of Popa bristles with contradictions. There was a Berenger, count of Rennes, who might have been at Bayeux; but, as we are expressly told that William Longsword was the nephew of Bernard of Senlis, this could only be by Popa being a daughter of a Berenger

count of Senlis. How did he come to be at Bayeux? How did he come to surrender his daughter to the then unconverted Norse chief to be married danico more? The name Popa is suspicious. Palgrave suggests that it is a playful nickname, meaning "the puppet"; but this is merely a very forced explanation. I believe the name and its owner are entirely mythical, invented probably to pair off with Sprota, the wife of William Longsword, who was an historical personage and a Breton. The Landmannabok of Iceland mentions a daughter of Rollo married to a Scotch chief in the Hebrides. This marriage doubtless took place during Rollo's stay in the Hebrides, which is mentioned in the Heimskringla Saga. Rollo was therefore probably married before he reached Normandy. If, as I shall show presently, he did not set his foot there certainly before 911, and most probably before 921, and he was succeeded by William in 927, as we know from the contemporary annals, we may be sure that he was married long before he visited the Seine country, for it is not to be supposed that so turbulent a province as Normandy would in the tenth century be resigned by a skilled old warrior (Dudo contends it was resigned) to a boy of sixteen or a child of six. And we may be sure that both William and his sisters (for it may be that he had two) were born before the expedition to Normandy. So that from internal as well as external evidence the whole story of Popa falls to the ground, and we are left to the conclusion that the mother of William Longsword was a Norse woman and no victim of the sack of Bayeux.

In regard to the capture of Evreux, such a capture is indeed mentioned in the Chronica S. Stephani Cadomensis and in the Chronicle of Rouen (vide M. Lair's Introduction, page 60, note), but this is dated in 892, seven years after the campaign to Paris. The next exploit that Dudo assigns to Rollo, still during the siege of Paris, is an expedition to England, the incidents of which are told in detail: how he fought many battles there against the English under their king, Alstelmus, and, having repeatedly vanquished them, how the English king surrendered one-half his kingdom to him. These absurd exploits across the channel are evidently too much for the defenders of Dudo. Depping observes a judicious silence, M. Lair barely names the fact, while the more faithful advocate Palgrave contents himself with the judicious summary, "and Rollo cruised to England." I need not say that no English chronicler, save the interpolated Asser, knows of a campaign of Rollo's there, and yet the thing is not an invention. The whole is perfectly consistent with Dudo's method. He has simply transferred to Rollo the exploits of the Dane, Guthrum, who did fight many battles in England, and who did succeed

in securing the grant of half the kingdom. This confirms, and almost makes certain, our previous conjecture, that the Alstelmus of Dudo is no other than our Alfred the Great, and has nothing to do with any Athelstane.

Dudo next takes Rollo once more to the besieger's camp at Paris, and makes him enter into negotiations with the King Karl for a truce, transferring to him, as before, the account of transactions that really occurred, but of which the heroes were Karl the Fat and Sigfred. Here again we come upon chronological impossibilities, for Franco the bishop is made to negociate the treaty, while Franco was not bishop till 909. The suggestion of Palgrave, that Franco was the bishop of Tongres mentioned in the reign of Charles le Chauve, is of no weight, for our author distinctly styles him, both now and on a previous occasion, "Rotomagensem episcopum." By the treaty made with Sigfred, Charles the Fat gave up Burgundy, which had refused to acknowledge his feudal superiority, to be ravaged by the Danes, and they thereupon overran a large part of the country. These ravages, which are told by the contemporary chroniclers, are transferred bodily to Rollo by Dudo, and, just as the expedition after ravaging Burgundy is brought back to Paris (Annals of St. Vedast ad ann. 886), so Rollo is also brought there by Dudo.

Rollo's next feat, according to Dudo, was his attack on Chartres, which was miraculously protected by a relic of the Virgin preserved in the cathedral. M. Licquet is disposed to accept this feat of Rollo as historical, save the date. I can see no good reasons for this view. The chronicles vary in the date from 891 to 911 (see Depping, 345, note). Chartres is out of the way of the Seine pirates. It belongs to the country of the Loire, which was the special patrimony of another set of invaders, the peculiar country of Hasting, and we find accordingly that in one authority, perhaps the only independent authority (Aganon Vetus in the Chartulary of the Abbey of St. Pierre, vol. i. of the Cartularies of France, Paris, 1842), the capture of Chartres is assigned to the band of Hasting (see Depping, 344, note).

Here, again, there is probably no actual invention, and we can almost see how the story has been built up, and how the crooked details have been dovetailed in: e. g. the campaign which Rollo is made to fight in Burgundy, to which I have already referred, is undoubtedly, as we can test by the various details, a mere transference of the account of the war as told in the Vedastine annals to Dudo's hero. In this transfer we get a curious insight into the process of fabrication. This war was actually fought in 886. Now, Ebles only became Count of Poictou in 902, yet Dudo makes him take part in it as Count of Poictou. This seems a hopeless tangle, but the fact is, that in the great campaign against Paris, of

which this Burgundian excursion is only an incident, one of the chief heroes was Ebulus or Ebles, the abbot of St. Germain, who has been shown to be the brother of Rainulph, count of Poictou, and uncle to the younger Ebles (Annales Vedastianæ in Pertz, i. 528, note 1), so that the mention of an Ebles of Poictou as a hero of the Burgundian war is explained. This also explains the presence of an Ebles of Poictou at the siege of Chartres.

I have mentioned how one authority assigns the celebrated capture of Chartres to Hasting. I may add that at a somewhat later date Chartres, we know, was a fief held by the leader of the Loire pirates. Rollo has again appropriated the doings of other folk-of Hasting and the Loire pirates.

We have now arrived at the end of the ninth century. The history of France during the ten years from 900 to 910 is hid in almost impenetrable mists. There is a huge gap in the Annals-they all fail us here-the reason being no doubt the terribly disturbed state of Gaul and Germany and the ravages of the Danes. As these Annals fail, so does Dudo most consistently. Having no material to transform, he creates none. He has not handed us even a tradition, but makes a clean jump over the chaotic interval; and when we emerge from the blank it is generally supposed that we come upon undoubted, independent evidence of the existence of Rollo; that the Frodoard Annals mention the treaty he made with Charles the Simple at St. Clair-sur-Epte in 911; and that this date is the first one at which we have independent evidence of the presence of Rollo in France. I differ entirely from this view; but let us first examine Dudo's account of the treaty, in which he has again dragged in circumstances that properly attach to Guthred, and has otherwise distorted the evidence. That Rollo married Gisela, daughter of Charles the Simple, as one of the terms of the treaty of St. Clair-sur-Epte, has been accepted by English writers with, I believe, almost unvarying credulity. Yet the fact has been virtually disproved by Dom Lobineau, by M. le Prevost, and M. Licquet. Let me collect the evidence. Charles the Simple was born in the year 879, and on the feast of St. Lambert (ie. the 17th of September), as he tells us in one of his charters (Recueil des Historiens de France, ix. 531, quoted by Licquet 82). The treaty of St. Clair sur Epte was made, according to Dudo and his copyists, at the end of the year 911, and put in force at the beginning of 912, so that Charles must then have been 32 or at most 33 years of age. It is barely possible, but surely very improbable, that he should then have had a daughter old enough to be married. At 15 or 16 few men have daughters, nor can those daughters at 15 or 16 be described as Dudo describes Gisela :-" She joined elegance of form

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