The Perspective from Ponthieu: Count Guy and His Norman Neighbour (The Des Seal Memorial Lecture)

Summary

For the British, ‘The Somme’ is a phrase that continues to resonate, but the name of the area where the waters of the River Somme reach the Channel is less well-known. If the county of Ponthieu attracts our attention at all, it does so infrequently: the marriage of Mary Tudor to Louis XII at Abbeville; the battle of Crécy and, of course, the landfall of Harold Godwinson. In the twenty-first century the area that used to be the county of Ponthieu is located in the Hauts-de-France region, unevenly divided between the départements of Somme and Pas-de-Calais, but for 500 years from the year 1000 it enjoyed some autonomy. It was a small polity of around 5,000 square kilometres whose independent existence began as one of the comtés péripheriques, defined by Dominique Barthelémy. It is a matter of perspective whether Ponthieu is perceived as on the periphery of Normandy or that of Flanders, but it is in the struggles of those two powers that Ponthieu apparently had its origins and it is Ponthieu's perspective on the eleventh century that forms the subject of this essay.

The source which has shaped our understanding of Ponthieu is the history of the monastic community at St Riquier, a seventh-century foundation that lay more or less in the centre of the area. Sometimes called the Chronicon Centulense, because the original name for St Riquier was Centula, the history was written in the late eleventh century by the monk Hariulf. For Hariulf, Ponthieu had existed as the hinterland of his monastery and its abbots had been powers in the land. He recognized, however, a change in the closing years of the tenth century and he associates that change with the rise of one particular family, based in Abbeville, that held lay office with the monastery of St Riquier. In three widely spaced chapters of his fourth book, he describes not so much the emergence of Ponthieu, as the emergence of its ruling family. His narrative is one of seigneurial control through the exploitation of office-holding and ecclesiastical property. Although it is no more than the bare bones of a genealogy across four generations, it is a story with many parallels and has provided the framework in which historians have worked.