The Laws of Rollo as a Primitive Constitution for Normandy: Writing and Rewriting Legal History in France during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

The laws of Rollo are regularly evoked in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Norman historiography. As a result of a renaissance of interest in, and the study of, medieval Norman sources, notably the gestae of Dudo of Saint-Quentin and Guillaume of Jumièges, early modern jurists and historians located the legal particularism of Normandy in Rollo’s laws. They exploited these sources in order to preserve Norman rights and liberties and to use the history of their medieval origins to justify ongoing legal provincialism. But as the Revolution approached, the memory of Rollo’s laws also became an essential issue in emerging political and ideological debates, because they served as much to defend absolute monarchy as to challenge it.