In the early tenth century, a band of Vikings settled along the Seine River in northwestern France and laid the foundation for the duchy of Normandy. The term ‘Viking’ was rarely used in medieval Europe: instead, these unwelcome seafarers from Scandinavia were called by the Franks ‘Northmen’ (northmanni), a word which evoked fear and distrust in the minds of Europeans. Northmen were those who plundered churches, burned villages and captured Christians to be slaves. Consequently, when a sizable group of Northmen or, as they came to be called, Normans, decided to make their home down-river from Paris, they were viewed by their neighbors with alarm and suspicion. Generations after the settlement of Normandy (Northmannia), Frankish writers continued to describe the Normans as untrustworthy and violent. Despite the hostility of their neighbors, however, the Normans assumed Frankish ways: they accepted the religion, the language and the women of the Franks. Through this process of assimilation, Normandy gradually came to be accepted as a newprincipality in France. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Norman churches and schools stood at the forefront of European civilization, and within two centuries of their initial settlement along the Seine River, the Normans had conquered England, carved out a new kingdom in southern Italy and Sicily, campaigned against the Byzantines, and charged off on crusade to the Holy Land.

While seeking acceptance, the Normans encouraged the view that their unique heritage set them apart from other Europeans. This pride in their origins is reflected in the legend about the foundation of Normandy which was preserved in writing by Dudo, a churchman at Saint-Quentin in the early eleventh century. Dudo's history of the Normans is notoriously inaccurate in its facts, yet nevertheless valuable in its perspective. In his account, the Normans’ first ruler, the Viking Rollo, met with the Frankish king Charles the Simple in the year 911 at Saint-Clair-sur-Epte. Dudo describes King Charles as desperate to establish peaceful terms with Rollo and his companions, offering his daughter Gisla to Rollo in marriage, along with the ‘territory from the river Epte to the sea as an allod and property; and the whole of Brittany to live off’.