tancred d'hauteville
born:
died: 1041
ascendancy: hiallt[3]
plausible descendency: wisharts of scotland [1] , [2]
spouse 1: moriella [3]
child: william [3]
child: drogo [3]
child: humphrey [3]
child: geoffrey [3]
child: serlo [3]
spouse 2: fresenda [3]
child: robert guiscard [3]
child: mauger [3]
child: william [3]
child: aubrey (stayed in france) [3]
child: hubert (stayed in france) [3]
child: tancred (stayed in france) [3]
child: roger I sicily [3]
tancred is, in truth, a sort of semi-historical figure in a probably mostly legendary genealogy that links together a number of important individuals in the norman invasions of southern italy and the levant. his place as a historical person seems to be at least highly exaggerated, if not outright fabricated.
the alarm bells first went off when i noticed it is said he had 12 sons, just like the 12 tribes of israel. what is the probability? no lower than any other number, actually. yet, if you read the history carefully it becomes difficult to take seriously. the idea that the descendents of nine brothers could work together to fulfill god's mission as elite soldiers seems a little unlikely. more likely is that they were merely presented that way in order to form the mythical basis of a new ruling class. 12 is present throughout this history: there was a council of 12 to elect william iron arm, the conquered line was split 12 ways, etc. so, the value of 12 as a mystical number in the history is very apparent. conversely, it should be noted that some sources suggest tancred had further sons.
first, let me address the wishart descent. three brothers, all from the second wife, are said to have stayed in normandy. the domesday book seems to document the movement of aubrey and kinsmen (one 'ralf') from normandy to england. there is a second movement of hautevilles from normandy to england about 100 years later. (see [4]). the first movement of hautevilles seems to be the most likely source of wishart descent, but the exact lineage is simply unknown. i'm going to ask you to hold that thought for one moment.
the next question to address is whether these 12 people were literally brothers. if they were not, it would seem that a natural place to split history from myth is with the two different wives. to begin with, it's a little odd that tancred named two of his sons "william"! second, the story around robert guiscard's ascent to control of apulia seems to split the history cleanly; guiscard usurped power after he was given guardianship over humphrey's children. so, was there a merging of several people into tancred and is it deconstructed that easily? while i think there are some things to disentangle with this type of thinking, i actually think even this may be reading into the history a little too much. i don't think there's any reason to think most of these people are closely related at all.
note again that the domesday book has two hautevilles moving to england - aubrey and ralf. this ralf is not otherwise known, besides being the patriarch of a powerful group of landholders in england. if the traditional history is accepted, then he could not have been more distantly related to aubrey than a second cousin, and thus it is confusing that there is no record of this. in desperation, internet genealogies have attempted to link him to ralph of catanzaro, but this is clearly false. most of the de hauteville genealogies on the internet seem to exist in the realm of legend. what does "hauteville" mean, exactly, anyways?
hauteville is said to have derived itself out of the name of tancred's grandfather, hiallt. hiallt-ville became hauteville. there are three problems with this. first, i think linguists would have a hard time with such a fast shift; the town could not have been settled earlier than 897 and probably not until 933 (see [5], [7]), so the shift would have had to occur in less than two generations. it may rather be said that it is more likely that the legend of hiallt is derived from the name hauteville. second, the general trend in the area at the time was a normanization of place names; this idea seems backwards. third, the place these normans supposedly took their name from has never been established with any certainty. given the importance of the family, one would think it would be easy to locate the precise whereabouts of this area, but this is not so. the traditional, and seemingly obvious, derivation of hauteville as a place name should consequently be questioned. 'hauteville' may have actually meant something else entirely. i have an intuition that hauteville may be some kind of corruption of uppland or uppsala, the medieval center of the swedish kingdom. that connection would have had to have been deeply pagan and could not have survived christianization. however, uppsala could have become hauteville through a two stage translation from english into french, as up-->haute in this process. again, i have no evidence beyond the intuition. there is, however, a need for an alternate explanation of the surname, as the place name it derives from cannot be located and the proposed chronology is really not feasible.
if 'hauteville' is accepted to mean something other than a family name that defies the rules of linguistics and is derived from a place nobody can locate, the seemingly legendary history becomes easier to understand. first, in the context of early norman expansion, two people named "d'hauteville" need not be descended from the same family - they need only be connected in a different sort of way, such as by nationality. this would allow aubrey and ralf to both be 'de hauteville' normans without necessarily having the hypothetical close common male ancestor that there is no evidence of. second, it could explain the packaging of the twelve sons together as a sort of a purposed confusion, built on top of propaganda designed to justify the usurpation of guiscard. see, the history is much more biblical, this way. there are many historical parallels to this sort of thing, more than one in the christianization of norse identity and culture.
that's not to say that there was a history that's been lost here, so much as to say there wasn't much of a history to lose, and one consequently needed to be created.
despite hiallt's status as legendary, and the lack of further reliable sources regarding his history, there is another angle that needs to be explored: what is the relationship between robert guiscard and his first wife's mother, alice of normandy? guiscard's marriage was annulled by the pope as being incestuous, which indicates that he must have been related to alice and consequently to the norman ducal line that began with rollo. a brief flip through alice's ancestry suggests that it is most likely that tancred shares a common ancestor with gunnora de crepon (fl. 1000), who came from an established norman family near coutances. this is relevant because hiallt is thought to have settled near to there (see [3]). that is to say that guiscard's annulled marriage provides some evidence regarding tancred's history that is at least consistent with the legends. this opens up a question that likely has no answer: was the legendary hiallt a member of rollo's raiding party or did he settle in the region with a wave of soldiers from the danelaw? it is known from the anglo-saxon chronicle (see [7]) that anglicized danish soldiers migrated to the seine and the cotentin along with the "great heathen army", once it was defeated by alfred. however, there were complex conflicts in the region between franks, bretons and multiple types of vikings that would have made serious settlement difficult (although not impossible) before 933, and especially before 911.
in truth, the two ideas are not mutually exclusive. rollo's ancestry is not known to history, but he's generally thought of as a dane. while there may be no direct evidence of it, the idea that he may have migrated from the danelaw (or have been put in charge of a force that originated from there) is entirely plausible. certainly, there's no reason to discard the possibility that some of his allies may have fought in the great army.
i was initially hoping to connect the line backwards to a general grouping of vikings, but i've decided against that approach. there were initially several large groupings of viking invaders into france. there were the aforementioned soldiers from the great army, which were a mixture of anglicized danes and norwegians. there was a danish or norwegian or mixed group that set up at the mouth of the seine. there was a third group that raided the loire, and were called 'vestfoldians' (norwegians) as early as 843, but they don't seem to have left any settlements (see [6]). so, it doesn't seem to be possible to connect the loire or seine or cotentin vikings to any specific ancestral region or family, as groups.
the common ancestry between tancred and gunnora, however, does place hiallt somewhere in the cotentin. there were certainly vikings in the cotentin before 933 (which is the date the region was formally awarded to rollo's son, william), and they were probably anglicized before they got there. could the hauteville family descend from them? first, malaterra notes that hiallt was an ally of rollo, indicating he was a member of the seine group of vikings. however, that by itself needs to be accepted only with caution. the traditional dating seems to put his settlement around 920; given that rollo would have been taking control of the area at the time, this is at least consistent with the idea of hiallt being a seine viking, but the dating could very well derive from the idea that he was an ally of rollo! if hauteville existed, however, then it appears to have not have been a maritime settlement, and such a settlement would have only been rational in the context of rollo's attempt to legitimately colonize the area. lastly, the hauteville family is very clearly latinized by the time it enters history, but that doesn't rule out the idea that it was anglicized first. there's no clear conclusion. so, attempting to declare hiallt a "cotentin viking", a "loire viking" or a "seine viking" is neither something that creates a clear distinction nor any help in determining his ultimate ancestry.
of the norman invaders, it is really only guiscard that can be said to have any kind of landholding background with any certainty and only roger that provides a convincing argument (through his marriage into the norman aristocracy). the rest of these people seem to be indistinguishable from the mixed armies of mercenaries and "bandits" that they commanded. it is perfectly reasonable to think that some of them may have even come to italy not from normandy but by defecting from the varangian guard, which (along with these normans) was part of a byzantine attack on sicily in 1038 that backfired into the norman conquest of apulia and calabria. there are, however, some loose groupings to take note of. william iron arm and drogo seem to be grouped together, and they are grouped together weakly with humphrey. geoffrey, mauger and the-other-brother william also form a grouping. roger seems to be connected to this grouping, as well. guiscard seems isolated.
so, there's a lot of guesses here and some of them are likely to throw some people for a loop. at the very least, i hope i've outlined the right questions, provided some ideas for future research and convincingly made the point that the standard history doesn't add up to the point that it can no longer be upheld. all that can be said with any real certainty is that these people were part of a norman invading force that formed a ruling class in southern italy starting around the year 1050.
to me, though, that's enough to create a clade for them - and a clade is how this should be interpreted.
[1]: memoir of george wishart, p. 329
[2]: the british isles: a history of four nations, p. 95-97
[3]: the deeds of count roger of calabria & sicily & of duke robert guiscard his brother , book I
[4]: wikipedia: hauteville family
[5]: the normans: the history of a dynasty, p. 1-20
[6]: the vikings in britain, p. 25-54
[7]: anglo-saxon chronicle, 880-920