ROLLO, like all Scandinavian chiefs, gathered a band of warriors around him. They crewed his ship and fought for him in his early campaigns in Francia. Later they lived in his hall at Rouen and were rewarded for their services from the revenues the city produced and with the lands now at Rollo's disposal. His successors, too, surrounded themselves with young tiros, as Dudo called them, ambitious for fame and reward. In the early eleventh century, when Dudo wrote of them, this body of men and warriors comprised the duke's domus or household. By the first decades of the twelfth century, however, the household had split into two parts: the domus regis and the familia regis. By then, the domus regis was composed of the chancellor, chaplains, bakers, kitchen-staff, and huntsmen while the familia comprised a wider body that included retained knights and their commanders, not all of whom were necessarily present at court permanently and not all of whom were retained, as such. But there was still some overlap between the domus and the familia, as J. O. Prestwich observed in 1981, for the leaders of the familia were also salaried members of the domus, with the offices of the master marshal and the constables, and their stipends, recorded in the Constitutio domus regis.

These two terms, domus regis and familia regis, are most simply translated as ‘the king's house’ and ‘the king's family’, but the emphasis in the narratives on the use of the knights of the familia as garrisons, as shock troops, and as the backbone of ducal armies has led historians to prefer to translate familia regis as ‘military household’. This is somewhat deceptive. Even in the twelfth century, the familia regis was not a military institution per se. Although it included a shifting and assorted collection of young knights hoping to make their name, they did not just fight for the dukes, but might also act as messengers or hunting companions. Their function was not, then, necessarily military. Moreover, the attempt to equate the familia with the household is erroneous, as it suggests that the knights of the familia slept in the duke's hall at Rouen or followed him when he moved around the duchy.

Introduction

Toward the end of 1941, some Balokole students at the prestigious Bishop Tucker Theological College in Mukono, Uganda (located about fifteen miles east of central Kampala) began meeting for prayer at 4 a.m. These prayer meetings became opportunities for Balokole students to exhort their fellow students to repentance, with some revivalists even turning the school's water tower into a pulpit. Balokole students had become worried, because they saw that the school term was ending and the graduates would depart without ever really encountering the message of true salvation. Instead, these “unsaved” graduates would continue the various “secret sins” that Balokole students believed were practiced in the school, like drinking alcohol and engaging in minor theft, and likely permit them in their churches. Balokole believed this dangerous cycle would perpetuate the languid spiritual state of the Church of Uganda, so they seized what they believed to be an opportune moment to exhort their fellow ordinands to rid their lives of sin.

In response, the college's warden, John C. Jones, issued a set of rules that he required every student in the college to accept. Among other things, these rules limited the times at which students could gather together, and the duration of their meetings. At stake for the warden was the insidious threat of “indiscipline” and “disobedience,” both of which he sought to curtail. Balokole students deliberately disregarded these rules, as they believed themselves to be unfairly targeted by them. Furthermore, the Balokole students interpreted the new rules as part of an attempt to “stamp out” revival at the college and, by extension, within the Church of Uganda. As a result, twenty-six Balokole students (this number did not, apparently, represent all Balokole students in attendance at the college) refused to sign on to the new rules and, therefore, “were asked to leave immediately.” The repercussions of their “dismissal” nearly split the Church of Uganda along balokole/ non-balokole lines.

The following fall, in November 1942, a few miles to the west of Kampala, at King's College, Budo, a series of student “disturbances” took place. Students threw rocks at instructors, and property, including a portrait of King George V, was destroyed.

Revivalists testified that they had left the lives they had lived in spiritual darkness. Like John Bunyan's Pilgrim, Balokole got rid of their sinful burdens as they made their way to the Heavenly City. They testified to how the revival's message of salvation pulled them out of their families, out of their villages, and out of their societies. Balokole left homes in which they felt there was too much “sin,” and they resigned from jobs (or were fired) if they believed they would have to “sin” in order to perform the job according to expectations. Furthermore, in denouncing practices like polygamy and beerdrinking, revivalists in Uganda were setting themselves in an antagonistic disposition to many of the people, values, and practices which surrounded them. Their message was explicit: they were leaving for another world.

In this book, however, I have shown that revivalists were also busy trying to build a different world in East Africa. After they left their homes, they eventually built other homes. They raised families; they attended school; they worked other jobs. Revivalists tried to do these things in accordance with the ideals of “salvation.” I have sought to write a history of the East African Revival by describing how revivalists’ lives were reoriented after they converted. It is, as much as possible, an attempt at writing a history of the revival movement from the perspectives of those who converted in its first three decades.

I have argued that converting to salvation as East African revivalists defined it entailed the adoption of a disposition toward the world around them, and this disposition was reflected in their language. Balokole spoke of sin and darkness, and they sought, through the practice of public confession, to be rid of those things that inhibited the life of salvation; they strove to live in the light. In order to do this, revivalists had to live in fellowship with others who had also confessed their sins and moved into the light of salvation. It was in regular fellowship groups that revivalists could “walk in the light” with God and one another.

THE demesne vills and towns, the people living in them, those travelling through them, or along public highways more generally, and those selling and buying in the markets and fairs established in them, all produced revenues for the dukes’ coffers. Those revenues were spent on the castles and palaces that provided the backdrop for the dukes’ display of majesty and power, which has been discussed in Chapter 7. Wealth, then, was essential to all civilian aspects of ducal rule. But contemporaries associated wealth in particular with power and military might. Thus the dukes’ income was also used to purchase the munitions that allowed their castles to stand against their enemies, and the arms and horses necessary to equip their knights, and to pay the salaries of the members of their household knights and the wages of their mercenaries.

The mechanisms that developed to allow the dukes to collect their revenues were no doubt imperfect, but they were certainly adequate, for the dukes of the Normans were renowned for their wealth – even more so after they became kings of the English. William of Jumièges wrote that Richard II ‘kept the count (Geoffrey of the Bretons) with him for a while through his enormous wealth revealing to the count the greatness of his might as he choose’, while Orderic, writing of William Clito, noted that ‘his uncle's arm was long and powerful and formidable to him, for Henry's might and reputation for wealth and power were known far and wide from the west to the east. And even if not all of that wealth was liquid, they had access to as much coin as they needed. Normandy had a money economy, and it is likely that even the lowest orders of society used coins to some extent. As David Bates noted, this is particularly evident in the multifarious grants of tolls or disbursements of money found in ducal and seigniorial acta, as well as by the discovery of the Fécamp hoard with its 8,000 or so coins. Indeed, as Lucien Musset discussed, the diversity of coins circulating within the borders of the duchy reveals how important money was. A hoard found at Sébécourt, for example, contained coins from Rouen, Dreux, Vendôme, Le Mans, and Angers.

Introduction

When Ugandans converted because of the preaching of the Balokole, they, by and large, did not leave the Church of Uganda. To be saved—during the late colonial era in Uganda, at least—was to be (or to become) Anglican. And to separate from the Church of Uganda was tantamount to becoming “cold” in salvation, which revivalists sought to avoid. While independency was seemingly an option for Ugandan Balokole, especially in the contentious years of the early to mid-1940s, the basic convictions of the revival and the general tendency of the movement were to fight to remain within the Church of Uganda and not to form an independent church apart from it, as frequently happened in colonial Sub-Saharan Africa. Conversion within the revival, therefore, meant transformation of the person and the church, but not separation from it. The Rt. Rev. Erica Sabiti described revivalists’ dispositions toward the church in an interview in 1972:

Sabiti's explanation, given nearly 30 years after the tumultuous years of the 1940s, has the benefits of hindsight and the process of institutionalization of the revival within the Church of Uganda. He was, after all, both an early revival convert and the archbishop of the Church of Uganda when he gave the interview, which demonstrates the extent to which the revival's antagonism toward the Church of Uganda had abated by the time of independence in 1962. Others interviewed in the early 1970s as well as Balokole interviewed more recently (in 2012) tell a comparable story. Today, revivalists will often speak about the unity of the Church of Uganda and compare it favorably to the fissiparous competition of the newer Pentecostal churches that are sprouting up in Uganda.

CHRISTIANITY was the Franks’ religion. When Rollo was given Rouen and its hinterland by Charles the Simple he was obliged to convert and conform. Rouen was worth a Mass, but Rollo's authority was now subject to a religion he did not control but by which he would be judged. This was a new problem for a Scandinavian lord. The kings of Denmark and Norway had still to convert their people to Christianity in 911, and in the meantime there was no institutionalized religion in those countries, and thus no central control of it. But while the Danes and Norwegians did not have control over religion, it is also the case that they did not live with a religion that operated within their territory but which was under the control of someone else. The potential for disunity that such a rival authority brought with it must have become clear to the new duke very quickly. Fortunately for Rollo, the disruption brought by the Viking raiding of the ninth century ensured that it would be some time before the Church was in a position to be used against him or his successors. Indeed, it was only in 990 that the scribe of a ducal act could remark on the simultaneous existence of bishops for all seven of the dioceses of the province of Rouen. And by then the Franks were no longer in control. Instead, Richard I and his brother, Archbishop Robert of Rouen, stood at the helm of the Norman Church, even if their authority would not be undisputed.

Chief among their, and their successors’, rivals were the popes. The advent of the so-called reform papacy in the middle of the eleventh century, and with it a greater desire to unify and oversee religious practices, led to a greater interference by the popes in Norman affairs. This was not always welcome. The dukes might on occasion seek the pope's help when they were preparing the diplomatic ground work for, by way of example, the deposition of Archbishop Malger in 1054 or 1055 or the transfer of Bishop John of Avranches to the archbishopric of Rouen c. 1066, but they opposed appeals to papal authority by their subjects when those appeals infringed their own authority and freedom of action.

THIS is the first of three chapters that explore and attempt to explain the creation, development, and ultimately the diminution of the territory that would recognize the authority of the Norman dukes of the Normans between 911 and 1144. The discussion advances reign by reign, from Rollo to Stephen, and ends with the completion of the conquest of the duchy by Geoffrey V of Anjou in 1144. The use of this narrative structure is intended to foreground both continuity and change over time, and the focus is on what might be described as state-building, thus on conquest, coercion, diplomacy, marriages, fidelity, and the rewards or bribes offered in return for service and support.

Narratives outlining the political history of the duchy are still scarce. Probably the best to date are those written by Eleanor Searle, which ends in 1066, and the equally scholarly but more ‘popular’ surveys by David Crouch and François Neveux. For Upper Normandy there is also Pierre Bauduin's excellent La premiere Normandie, which provides not only an in-depth examination of the establishment of ducal power in the region, but also a detailed look at the families who had to be won over and their role in the continuing consolidation and operation of ducal rule. While the debt owed to this earlier work must be acknowledged, the outline provided here is based on a fresh look at the primary sources, and pays more attention to the ducal acta than has generally been the case in the past. The result is a story that, while not radically different from those which have gone before, does offer different interpretations and emphases at a great many points in the narrative. In particular, the duchy takes shape more slowly in the account presented here than has been the case previously, and there is more emphasis on the political fault lines that divided Norman lords even under a strong duke like William the Bastard, manifested most obviously in the ambition and self-interest of the Montgommery-Bellême family.

That the contemporary sources for Norman history can be interpreted in so many different ways is a result of the intentions that lay behind their origins, discussed in the introduction. In particular, the agendas of their authors mean that the narratives that tell us about Normandy and its dukes distort and conceal as much as they reveal.

Introduction

“Mary” was born in 1920, the last of seven children, and she grew up along the northwestern slopes of Mount Elgon, in eastern Uganda. Her mother died when she was five and one of her sisters raised her, making sure Mary joined her at school. She eventually graduated from a teacher training college at the age of sixteen, having progressed as far as she could in her education. She taught for the next nine years. Then, in December 1945, Mary traveled to Kampala, where her sister was working as a nurse at Mulago Hospital. “When I reached Mulago, I found another lady, a Toro from western Uganda. She took me to the visitors’ room. She started preaching to me, talking about salvation. She gave me testimonies. I started wondering, ‘Eh! Maybe my sister had told her about my life and what I did.’ Because whatever she said was about me.” Mary continued:

Introduction

Balokole conversion was a somatic experience. Converts felt the tension between past and future ways of life and, in response, often convulsed, wept, or even laughed hysterically. Especially in the first decade of the revival's history, conversion was often enacted through these extraordinary bodily experiences, as Balokole moved from spiritual darkness to the light of salvation.

While some Balokole in southern Uganda, Rwanda, and northwestern Tanganyika described their conversion with reference to bodily states and physical manifestations, living the life of salvation was also intimately associated with a host of changes to converts’ bodies. How revivalists ate, dressed, and adorned their bodies became markers of the life of salvation. Revivalists became strict teetotalers, refusing to smoke tobacco or drink any form of alcohol (either “European” or “traditional”). Revivalists, however, were not only known for what they refused to consume, but they often deliberately broke taboos by consuming foods that others in their societies viewed as morally and socially harmful. In order to live the life of salvation, converts changed how they related to their bodies, and converts’ bodies, as a result, became sites of moral and political contestation. In making these changes to the way they treated their bodies, revivalists demonstrated their creation of a new moral code that pushed beyond the ethics and sensibilities of ethnic particularity and moved toward common patterns of ethical bodily comportment. This community was cosmopolitan, but it also attempted to mediate colonial cosmopolitanism's morally degrading influences by regulating how revivalists related to forces of change that impacted their bodies as well as their societies. The life of salvation was a life of sobriety, moderation, and cleanliness, and the changes revivalists made to their bodies and how they treated them were testimonials: they were meant to communicate the superiority of their life by demonstrating the power they had over destructive forces. This chapter begins with revivalists’ intense physical conversionary experiences, and connects these experiences with later changes converts made to the ways they treated their bodies.

The ethnographic and historical material in this chapter centers on a small geographical region that was divided into southern Uganda, northern Rwanda, and northwestern Tanganyika.

IT was concluded in Chapter 6 that the duke retained executive power over his duchy in his own hands at all times. That power might wax and wane across his dominions as a whole, but in theory at least the duke stood at the top of the Norman political hierarchy, and was the principal point of contact with the French king, the pope and his legates, and other outside powers and visitors. All of this provided a strong incentive for petitoners and beneficiaries to visit his court. These visitors, it was hoped, would be awed by the political theatre of the buildings, the furniture and utensils and servants found in them, and by the appearance and aspect of the dukes themselves.

But it was essential that ducal government and power should be more than just a show. Petitioners and would-be beneficiaries wanted effective government. They wanted to know that a duke's confirmation of their possessions was worth the parchment it was written on – and the cost of the ink used to write on it and that of the journey to the court and back. The belt and braces of an anathema clause and a fine provided a degree of insurance, but as Church reform and ducal power grew the anathema slowly gave way to the forfeiture clause, making God less central where secular matters were concerned. Ducal justice, too, was shown to be effective and efficient, even though existing ties of lordship and local loyalties might obstruct the dukes’ attempts to bring the whole of the duchy under their jurisdiction. The dukes, then, proved their worth to their subejcts, and their subjects kept coming to the court for help, justice, and confirmations as a result.

This, then, was a symbiotic relationship. A duke needed his subjects to come to them, and a duke's subjects needed his aid and protection against their aggressive, sometimes stronger, sometimes socially superior, neighbours. And so they sought him out wherever he was. More often than not, that would have been Rouen, or so the first section of this chapter will argue, for the dukes seem to have operated what historians have termed a palace government, that is one that remained largely static in a capital city or palace (or at least in a very few of them), rather than an itinerant government that moved regularly between a number of different centres.