10 - Dudo of St. Quentin as an Historian of Military Organization

Summary

Modern scholars have long considered the early eleventh-century author Dudo of St. Quentin, to have been a failure as a historian. This judgment has been rendered because Dudo's De Moribus et Actis primorum Normanniae ducum (sometimes referred to by scholars as Gesta Normannorum) is filled with inaccuracies. Dudo's failure to get the facts right is believed by many scholars to have been intentional for the most part. It is argued that apparently Dudo cared little or not at all about setting out in an accurate manner the details of the political narrative that he constructed. It is clear, nevertheless, that the contemporary ruling family in Normandy, Dudo's patrons, commissioned him to write a plausible story in praise of their ancestors. In short, the story, which pretended to be history, had to be credible as fact rather than fantasy, at least to the patrons and very probably to those in Dudo's likely audience, whose opinions these patrons may be thought to have valued.

Dudo was not unaware of the need for plausibility in this context. He is known to have provided accurate material details to contemporaries about matters with which they were well acquainted. These include, for example, the physical realities of the ducal palace at Fécamp and various types of legal documentation. It will be argued here that as a result of the need to be plausible, Dudo worked diligently to treat the matter of military organization in a largely accurate manner. Indeed, this was certainly a subject about which he knew that his patrons in the ducal family and many in his potential audience at the Norman court likely were well informed.