A speech put into the mouth of one of his characters expresses very fairly Lord Normanby’s political creed, a creed not uncommon among the aristocracy at the time of the Reform Bill: “I can’t help thinking it but befits a gentleman to move methodically forward with the main body of the age in its regular march of mind, neither seeking foolish forlorn hopes in advance, nor lagging disgracefully in the rear.” Acting on this principle, Lord Normanby reached the zenith of his career between the age of thirty and forty; after that he began to lag and to decline in political reputation. He succeeded his father as Earl Mulgrave in 1831, was sent out as captaingeneral and governor of Jamaica in the same year, and, in spite of certain defects of manner, gained such credit as an administrator that he was appointed lord-lieutenant of Ireland in 1835. It is significant of the reputation he then held that his appointment was received with enthusiasm as the beginning of a new order in Ireland; and during his three years of office, one of the most peaceful periods in the history of Ireland, great improvements were made. It is disputed how much was due to him and how much to his subordinate Thomas Drummond. He was created marquis of Normanby in 1838, and held successively the offices of colonial secretary and home secretary in the last years of Lord Melbourne’s ministry. From 1846 to 1852 he was ambassador at Paris, and from 1854 to 1858 minister at Florence. He died in London, 28th July 1863. The publication in 1857 of ajournai kept in Paris during the stormy times of 1848 (Ä Year of Revolutions') brought him into violent controversy with Louis Blanc on questions of fact as well as of policy; and his controversies with Lord Palmerston and Mr Gladstone, after his retirement from the public service, on questions of French and Italian policy, showed him to have fallen behind “the regular march of the mind” of his age.

Normandy, in its widest extent, reached on the eastern side to the rivers Eu and Epte, of which the Eu empties itself into the English Channel near the town of that name, while the Epte flows in the opposite direction and joins the Seine near Vernon. These streams form the boundary during nearly, but not quite, the whole of their course. Along the Epte the boundary of the duchy forsakes that of the ecclesiastical province, as the diocese of Rouen stretched a considerable way on the French side of that river. To the west Normandy is parted from Britanny by the border stream of Couësnon, but the shape of the coast makes the actual frontier very small. To the south the boundary of Normandy towards the duchy of France and the great counties which were parted off from it mainly followed the ecclesiastical frontier. But the diocese of Séez stretched beyond the duchy, while the conquests of William I. added to Normandy part of the diocese of Le Mans, and therefore of the province of Tours. The land thus marked out took in the districts of Caux, Talou, Rouen, Evreux, Lisieux, Bayeux (Bessin), Avranches, and Coutances (Cotentin, pagus Constantinus), with the greater part of the Hiesmois and about half the Vexin. This last was often a disputed ground between Normandy and France.

But the main feature of the country is its sea-coast and its great river. A glance at the map (Plate XIII., vol. ix.) will show that the coast of Normandy, long as it seems, is little more than the mouth of the Seine. To the west that mouth is guarded by the peninsula of Coutances, the Danish land which, it has been remarked, is the only peninsula in Europe, besides the older Danish land, which points to the north. To the west this peninsula presents a bold front to the Atlantic, forming with the Breton coast a bay in which lie the Norman islands, Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, Sark, and some smaller ones. Normandy, in fact, was the seaboard of France in the strict sense, the coast lying between Britanny on the one side and Flanders on the other. It is that part of the Continent which lies most directly opposite Britain. The Norman duchy, in short, as long as it had an independent being, was interposed between England and France; and in that position lies the key to its whole history.

The chief city of the duchy was always the ecclesiastical metropolis of Rouen (Rothomagus), the great city of the lower Seine. It is to be noticed that Rouen, like the cities of southern Gaul, keeps its own local n∑tme and has not taken the name of a tribe. Evreux, Séez, Bayeux, Lisieux, Avranches, preserve tribe names. The name Constantia or Coutances belongs of course to the later Roman nomenclature of imperial times. Other towns which figure in Norman history, as Caen, Falaise, Alençon, are of later origin. Havre de Grâce dates only from the 16th century, long after the loss of Norman independence.

In the divisions of modern France, Normandy answers to the departments of Lower Seine (cap. Rouen), Eure (cap. Evreux), Orne (cap. Alençon), Calvados (cap. Caen), Manche (cap. St Lo), and to the modern dioceses of Rouen, Evreux, Séez, Bayeux, and Coutances. The boundaries of Rouen and Evreux have been changed; Lisieux has been joined to Bayeux, and Avranches to Coutances. The archbishop of Rouen still keeps the title of primate of Normandy; otherwise the name of the duchy has gone out of formal use.

It must be remembered that the land to which the Northmen thus permanently gave their name was only one of several Scandinavian settlements in Gaul, though it was the greatest and the only lasting one. Nor was the whole of the land which became the Norman duchy occupied at once. The whole second half of the 9th century was largely taken up in both Gaul and Britain with Scandinavian inroads, which in both countries led to important Scandinavian settlements. Settlement in Britain came first, and the great settlement in Gaul seems to have been made after its model. By the peace of Wedmore, Aelfred found his own West-Saxon kingdom untouched and indeed enlarged. But a large part of England, over which he claimed at most a vague external supremacy, was left to the Danish invaders. Their king embraced Christianity, and, like his English predecessors, accepted a formal West-Saxon supremacy. A variety of later causes made the history of the Scandinavian settlement in England to differ widely from that of the Scandinavian settlement in Gaul; but in their beginnings the two are exactly alike. The smaller Scandinavian settlements, those of Hasting at Chartres, of Ragnald at the mouth of the Loire, had no historical importance. The settlement of Rolf at Rouen grew into the duchy of Normandy. The treaty of Clair-on-Epte followed the model of that of Wedmore. The Scandinavian invader embraced Christianity, and he became the man of the king of the Western kingdom. But he received no part of the king’s immediate territory. His settlement was made wholly at the cost of the duke of the French. The only difference was that the duke of the French still went on reigning at Paris, though no longer at Rouen, while the English dynasties of Mercia, East Anglia, and Deira came altogether to an end. But the two settlements are exactly alike in this, that the converted Northman becomes the man of the king, though the settlement is not made at the cost of the king’s immediate dominions. In both cases the king is strengthened, though in different ways. The West-Saxon king received an actual increase of immediate territory in the shape of that part of Mercia which formed the lordship of Aethelred and Aethelflaed. The Carolingian king received no increase of territory, but his position was distinctly bettered when the great and threatening duchy of France was split into the two rival duchies of France and Normandy. That Normandy was cut off from France in the strict sense, from the duchy of the house of Paris, is a point in its history which must always be remembered. It is the key to that abiding rivalry between France and Normandy which was inherent in the position and history of the two lands. No momentary policy on the part of their rulers could ever get over it. It lived on in truth to become no unimportant element in the general history of Europe. The close connexion which arose between Normandy and England handed on to England the inheritance of rivalry which had first begun between France and Normandy, an inheritance which England kept in its fulness for ages after its separation from Normandy. It is likely enough—considering the position of the two kingdoms, we may call it certain—that, had a separate state of Normandy never existed, a rivalry between England and France would have arisen out of some other cause. As a matter of fact, it was out of the older rivalry between France and Normandy that it did arise.

The settlement of Clair-on-Epte and the beginning of the Norman state are commonly placed in the year 912. There seems some reason to think that it may have happened a few years later. There is no thoroughly trustworthy account. The writers in the Western kingdom plainly say as little as they can about the matter; they disliked the very name of the “pirates,” as the Normans are called by Richer of Rheims down to the end of the century and beyond it. The earliest writer on the Norman side is Dudo, dean of St Quentin, who wrote late in the century, a rhetorical writer of the courtly school. But there is no doubt that the chief of the Scandinavian settlers was Rolf (in various spellings), known in Latin as Rollo and in French as Rou, a viking leader to whom many earlier exploits, real or mythical, are attributed. He received, as a grant from Charles the Simple, king of Carolingia or the Western kingdom, a tract of land of which Rouen was the centre and head, a tract certainly stretching as far as the Epte to the east, most likely stretching as far as the Dive to the west. It is an important part of the case that, though the land was cut off from the duchy of France, yet the grant was a grant from the king and not from the duke of the French, and that the king and not the duke received Rolf’s homage. The two princes were presently at war, Robert, duke of the French, having been elected as opposition-king in 922. Rolf seems to have stuck faithfully to his own lord, King Charles, alike against Robert and against Robert’s son Hugh, called the Great, and the king, Rudolf of Burgundy, whom Hugh set up. The Normans were thus at war with France almost from the moment of their settlement, and they were rewarded by a further acquisition of territory at the expense of the French duchy, namely, the Bessin or land of Bayeux. France was now nearly or wholly cut off from the sea. The Norman princes further claimed, by virtue of these early grants, a supremacy over both Britanny and Maine, which they were never able fully or lastingly to enforce.

Of the nature of the settlement made by the Northmen in the part of Gaul which they changed from France to Normandy we can judge only by the results. The new state for a while had no recognized territorial name. To the end of the century it is simply “Terra Northmannorum.” “Northmannia,” a name which with Einhard meant Denmark, which in Adam of Bremen commonly means Norway, becomes, in the shapes of “Nortmannia,” “Normannia,” “Normendie,” and the like, fully established in the next century as the name of the Norman land in Gaul. In English chronicles it appears as “Ricar-des land,” from the princes of that name; it is not “Normandi,” “Normandie,” “Normandig,” “Normandige,” till after the Norman Conquest. The chief again has no certain titles; at Rheims he was “princeps Northmannorum,” or, more heartily, “dux piratarum.” In the next century he becomes regularly “dux” or “comes Normannorum”; that is, he was “dux” as regards the Norman people, “comes” as regards his overlord the Western king. The people become definitely “Normanni,” “Normend.” It is not easy to say to what extent the Scandinavian settlers became mingled with the earlier occupiers of the land, or again how far those earlier inhabitants were of Frankish and how far of Celtic descent. It is plain that the land was parted out among Scandinavian landowners very much as in the Danish districts of England, and many places, just as in those districts, keep the name of the first Scandinavian lord. And it can hardly fail that, after the long harryings which went before the actual settlement, the population of the lands which lay open to the Northmen must have become scanty, and many parts are likely to have been quite forsaken. On the other hand, it is certain that before the end of the 10th century there was an oppressed peasantry in the land, and it is hardly likely that descendants of the original conquerors could have sunk so low in so short a time. The actual tillers of the soil were most likely to a great extent descendants of the earlier inhabitants; that is, they would belong to the same mixed nationality as the people of the duchy from which Normandy had been cut off, to that mixture of Celtic, Latin, and Teutonic elements which has formed the modern Frenchman. Yet in Normandy, as elsewhere, the tendency would come in which makes the actual cultivators of the soil sink rather than rise, and it is by no means unlikely that the later peasantry of Normandy were largely the descendants of the Scandinavian conquerors. Anyhow, a nobility gradually sprang up among the Normans themselves, consisting chiefly, it would seem, of those who could claim any kind of kindred or affinity, legitimate or illegitimate, with the ducal house. Some of the greatest Norman houses sprang from kinsfolk of wives or mistresses of the dukes who were themselves of very lowly degree. This is always likely to happen when a nobility is first forming. Early in the 11th century the order of “gentlemen” as a separate class seems to be forming as something new. By the time of the conquest of England the distinction seems to have been fully established.

The Norman, with the softened form of his name, is distinguished from the Northman by his adoption of the French language and the Christian religion. In the case of Rolf himself, as in the case of Guthrum, his baptism formed one of the terms of the agreement. The convert took the name of Robert, from the duke of the French, who acted as his godfather; but, as in other cases of baptized Danes, he was still always spoken of by his earlier name. Whether Rolf himself learned French we are not told; his language at the time of his homage is spoken of as English. This doubtless means any Low-Dutch or Scandinavian tongue, as opposed alike to High-Dutch and to French. Among his followers the twofold change took place with very different degrees of speed in different parts of the duchy. At Rouen and Evreux and in the eastern part generally, the first grant to Rolf, the change seems to have been very speedy. In some other parts circumstances made it much slower. Thus, at Bayeux it would seem that an earlier Saxon colony coalesced with the Scandinavians; at all events, a Teutonic tongue of some kind lived on there long after Rouen had come to speak no tongue but French. In the Cotentin, a still later acquisition, both the Northern speech and the Northern creed were kept up by fresh settlements from Scandinavia. The result was a wide distinction between the eastern and the western, the French and the Scandinavian, parts of the duchy, which led to important political consequences as late as the reign of the Conqueror.

The Cotentin, with its appendage of the Channel Islands, seems not to have been added to the land of the Northmen till after the accession of its second duke, William surnamed Longsword, about 927. Whether Rolf died, or abdicated, or was killed in battle, and the exact date of his son’s accession, do n<ff seem clearly fixed. The certain point is that William became the man of King Charles in 927, and that he refused all allegiance to the rival king, Rudolf of Burgundy, as long as Charles lived. His own reign lasted till 943. It is one of the most confused periods in the history of Gaul, and a good deal of the confusion is owing to the shifting policy or caprice of William himself. He changed sides more than once in the struggles between Lewis, the Carolingian king at Laon, and the more powerful Duke Hugh of Paris. At last, there can be little doubt, he was murdered by the practice of Count Arnulf of Flanders. In Normandy itself the history and effects of his reign are more marked. We see the struggle between the heathen or Danish party and the Christian, which may be also called the French, party. By this must be understood the party of the French speech and French civilization, not at all a party in the political interest of France. Its policy was to make Normandy a Christian and French-speaking state, an independent member of the Western kingdom, alongside of France and Flanders. The two parties are distinctly marked as geographical. The first years of William’s reign are marked by a revolt of the heathen party, who demand the cession of the lands west of the Risle. The Christian and French-speaking duke might reign in the region which had adopted his creed and tongue; the western Normandy should form a separate state, heathen and Scandinavian. Though all this rests on the not very high authority of Dudo, it bears the stamp of truth; it falls in with facts earlier and later; it is not the kind of story to grow up in the hands of a rhetorical panegyrist. William, successful over the rebels, appears as a Christian, not without fits of special devotion, and as anxious to take his place among the great princes of the Carolingian kingdom, notwithstanding the reproach of pirate origin that still cleaves to him. Yet he does not show himself the enemy of the other side. Himself speaking both tongues, he has his son Richard sent to Bayeux to gain a fuller mastery of the Northern speech, and he seems even to have admitted fresh settlement from the North in the western part of the duchy. The deep and clearly intentional darkness in which contemporary writers at Rheims leave the Norman history of this period makes any minute knowledge of this reign quite hopeless. But we may safely set it down as a time of struggle between the two elements in the land, a time in which things, on the whole, tended to the strengthening of the Christian, French, eastern element,—the influence of Rouen and not that of Bayeux.

It was the long reign of William’s son, Richard the Fearless, which finally settled the position of Normandy and which had no small influence on the position of France. We must always remember that Normandy and France were alike vassal states of the Western kingdom, the kingdom of the Carolingian king at Laon, a king who, in all but the moral influence of his kingly dignity, was a prince of far smaller power than either of his mighty vassals. Normandy, rent away from France, bound by direct homage to the king at Laon, had hitherto been on the whole an ally of the king who dwelled beyond the dominions of the duke. The fifty years of Richard’s reign changed all this. For the events of its early days we are not left wholly to Dudo; the writers at Rheims tell us enough to show that the division between the heathen and the Christian Normans was still strongly marked. The heathen party, strengthened by a new band of settlers from the North, got hold of the young Richard and persuaded or compelled him to fall back to his heathen worship. Richard was the son of William by a Breton mother, one who stood to his father in that doubtful relation which was called the Danish marriage, and who might be spoken of as wife or concubine at pleasure. At Rheims she bore the harsher name; yet it is a matter of avowed record that her son was received as his father’s successor by King Lewis. But the young duke —it is hard not to give him the title, though it is perhaps premature—was presently got hold of by the heathen party, who were just then strengthened by a fresh settlement from the North. The Christians sought help both at Laon and at Paris; king and duke entered the land, seemingly in concert, in two successive years (943, 944). The heathens were defeated; the king occupied Rouen and the whole Norman land, doubtless with the intention of keeping it. Nothing could better suit the king of Laon than to rule at Rouen as well, and to hem in the duke of Paris on both sides. The Norman writers tell a romantic tale of the escape of young Richard from captivity at Laon. What is more certain is that Normandy soon rose against Lewis, and that, by the help of a Danish leader, in whom the Normans see the famous king Harold Blaatand, the king was defeated and made a prisoner. The policy of Hugh of France now obtains possession of Lewis and a commendation of Richard to himself. Lewis was released on surrendering Laon; his kingdom was cut down to Compïègne. In 946, in alliance with the Eastern king...

These two conquests, wrought in the great island of the Ocean and in the great island of the Mediterranean, were the main works of the Normans after they had fully put on the character of a Christian and French-speaking people, in other words, after they had changed from Northmen into Normans. The English and the Sicilian settlements form the main Norman history of the 11th century. The 10th century is the time of the settlement of the Northmen in Gaul, and of the change in religion and language of which the softening of the name is the outward sign. By the end of it, any traces of heathen faith, and even of Scandinavian speech, must have been mere survivals. The new creed, the new speech, the new social system, had taken such de3p root that the descendants of the Scandinavian settlers were better fitted to be the armed missionaries of all these things than the neighbours from whom they had borrowed their new possessions. With the zeal of new converts they set forth on their new errand very much in the spirit of their heathen forefathers. If Britain and Sicily were the greatest fields of their enterprise, they were very far from being the only fields. The same spirit of enterprise which brought the Northmen into Gaul seems to carry the Normans out of Gaul into every corner of the world. Their character is well painted by a contemporary historian of their exploits. He sets the Normans before us as a race specially marked by cunning, despising their own inheritance in the hope of winning a greater, eager after both gain and dominion, given to imitation of all kinds, holding a certain mean between lavishness and greediness—that is, perhaps uniting, as they certainly did, these two seemingly opposite qualities. Their chief men, he adds, were specially lavish through their desire of good report. They were moreover a race skilful in flattery, given to the study of eloquence, so that the very boys were orators, a race altogether unbridled unless held firmly down by the yoke of justice. They were enduring of toil, hunger, and cold whenever fortune laid it on them, given to hunting and hawking, delighting in the pleasure of horses, and of all the weapons and garb of war. Several of these features stand out very clearly in Norman history. The cunning of the Normans is plain enough; so is their impatience of restraint, unless held down by a strong master. Love of imitation is also marked. Little of original invention can be traced to any strictly Norman source; but no people were ever more eager to adopt from other nations, to take into their service and friendship from any quarter men of learning and skill and eminence of every kind. To this quality is perhaps to be attributed the fact that a people who did so much, who settled and conquered in so large a part of Europe, has practically vanished from the face of the earth. If Normans, as Normans, now exist anywhere, it is certainly only in that insular fragment of the ancient duchy which still cleaves to the successor of its ancient dukes. Elsewhere, as the settlers in Gaul became French, the emigrants from Gaul became English, Irish, Scottish, and whatever we are to call the present inhabitants of Sicily and southern Italy. Everywhere they gradually lost themselves among the people whom they conquered; they adopted the language and the national feelings of the lands in which they settled; but at the same time they often modified, often strengthened, the national usages and national life of the various nations in which they were finally merged.

But Geoffrey hardly did justice to the Normans if he meant to imply that they were simple imitators of others. Their position was very like that of the Saracens. Hasty writers who forget the existence of the eastern Rome are apt to claim for the Saracens of Baghdad, or more commonly for those of Cordova, a monopoly of science and art at some time not very clearly defined by dates. In so doing they slur over the real position and the real merit of the Saracens with regard to science and art. In neither department did any Saracen, strictly speaking, invent anything; but they learned much both from Constantinople and from Persia, and what they learned they largely developed and improved. The Normans did just the same. They adopted the French tongue, and were presently among the first to practise and spread abroad its literature. ’ They adopted the growing feudal doctrines of France, and worked them, both in Normandy and in England, into a harmonious system. From northern Italy, as it would seem, they adopted a style of architecture which grew in their hands, both in Normandy and in England, into a marked and living form of art. Settled in Gaul, the Scandinavian from a seafaring man became a landsman. Even in land-warfare he cast aside the weapons of his forefathers; but he soon learned to handle the weapons of his new land with greater prowess than they had ever been handled before. He welcomed the lore of every stranger. Lanfranc brought law and discipline; Anselm brought theology and philosophy. The gifts of each were adopted and bore fruit on both sides of the Channel. And no people ever better knew how to be all things to all men. The Norman power in England was founded on full and speedy union with the one nation among whom they found themselves. The Norman power in Sicily was founded on a strong distinction between the ruling people and the many nations which they kept in peace and prosperity by not throwing in their lot with any one among them.

The quality which Geoffrey Malaterra expresses by the word “effrenatissima” is also clearly marked in Norman history. It is, in fact, the groundwork of the historic Norman character. It takes in one case the form of ceaseless enterprise, in another the form of that lawlessness which ever broke out, both in Normandy and in every other country settled by Normans, when the hand of a strong ruler was wanting. But it was balanced by another quality which Geoffrey does not speak of, one which is not really inconsistent with the other, one which is very prominent in the Norman character, and which is, no less than the other, a direct heritage from their Scandinavian forefathers. This is the excessive litigiousness, the fondness for law, legal forms, legal processes, which has ever been characteristic of the people. If the Norman was a born soldier, he was also a born lawyer. Randolf Flambard, working together the detached feudal usages of earlier times into a compact and logical system of feudal law, was as characteristic a type of the people as any warrior in the Conqueror’s following. He was the organizer of an endless official army, of an elaborate technical system of administration, which had nothing like it in England before, but which grew up to perfection under Norman rulers. But nothing so well illustrates this formal side of the Norman character as the whole position of the Conqueror himself. His claim to the crown of England is something without earlier precedent, something as far as possible removed from the open violence of aggressors who have no pretexts with which to disguise their aggression. It rested on a mass of legal assumptions and subtleties, fallacious indeed, but ingenious, and, as the result proved, effective. His whole system of government, his confiscations, his grants, all that he did, was a logical deduction from one or two legal principles, arbitrary certainly in their conception, but strictly carried out to their results. Even Norman lawlessness in some sort took a legal shape. In the worst days of anarchy, in the minority of William or under the no-reign of Robert, the robber-baron could commonly give elaborate reasons for every act of wrong that he did.

It is perhaps less wonderful that this characteristic should have been left out in a picture of the Normans in Apulia and Sicily than if it had been left out in a picture of the Normans in Normandy and England. The circumstances of their Apulian and Sicilian conquests certainly did not tend to bring out this feature of their character so strongly as it was brought out by the circumstances of their English conquest. Possibly the same cause may have kept the chronicler from enlarging on their religious character ; yet in Sicily at least they might pass for crusaders. Crusaders in fact they were before crusades were preached. Norman warriors had long before helped the Christians of Spain in their warfare with the Saracens of the Peninsula, and in Sicily it was from the same enemy that they won the great Mediterranean island. Others had done a kindred work in a more distant field as helpers of the Eastern emperors against the Turks of Asia. All these might pass for religious wars, and they might really be so; it needed greater ingenuity to set forth the invasion of England as a missionary enterprise designed for the spiritual good of the benighted islanders. The Norman, a strict observer of forms in all matters, attended to the forms of religion with special care. No people were more bountiful to ecclesiastical bodies on both sides of the Channel; the foundation of a Benedictine monastery in the 11th century, of a Cistercian monastery in the 12th, seemed almost a matter of course on the part of a Norman baron. The Conqueror beyond doubt sincerely aimed at being a religious reformer both in his duchy and in his kingdom, while it is needless to say that his immediate successor was exceptionally ungodly, whether among Normans or among other men. But among their countrymen generally strict attendance to religious observances, a wide bounty to religious foundations, may be set down as national characteristics. On the other hand, none were less inclined to submit to encroachments on the part of the ecclesiastical power, the Conqueror himself least of all.

We thus see in the Scandinavian settlers in Gaul, after they had put on the outward garb of their adopted country, a people restless and enterprising above all others, adopting and spreading abroad all that they could make their own in their new land and everywhere else,—a people in many ways highly gifted, greatly affecting and modifying at the time every land in which they settled, but, wherever they settled, gradually losing themselves among the people of the land. The Norman, as a visible element in the country, has vanished from England, and he has vanished from Sicily. The circumstances of his settlement in his two great fields of conquest were widely different; his position when he was fully established in his two insular realms was widely different; but the end has been the same in both cases. Neither island has for ages been in any sense a Norman land, and the tongue which the Norman brought with him into both has not for ages been spoken in either. Norman influence has been far stronger in England than in Sicily, and signs of Norman presence are far more easily recognized. But the Norman, as a distinct people, is as little to be seen in the one island as in the other. His disappearance in both cases is an illustration of one of the features which we have spoken of in the Norman character, the tendency which in fact made Normans out of Northmen, the tendency to adopt the language and manners of the people among whom they found themselves. But, as far as outward circumstances are concerned, we may say that the same effect has been brought about by different and almost opposite causes. The whole circumstances of the conquest of England constrained the conquerors to become Englishmen in order to establish themselves in the conquered land. In William’s theory, the forcible conquest of England by strangers was an untoward accident. The lawful heir of the English crown was driven against his will to win his rights by force from outside. But he none the less held his crown as an English king succeeding according to English law. Moreover every Norman to whom he granted lands and offices held them by English law in a much truer sense than the king held his; he was deemed to step into the exact position of his English predecessor, whatever that might be. This legal theory worked together with other causes to wipe out all practical distinction between the conquerors and the conquered in a wonderfully short time. By the end of the 12th century the Normans in England might fairly pass as Englishmen, and they had largely adopted the use .of the English language. The fashionable use of French for nearly two centuries longer was far more a French fashion than a Norman tradition. When the tradition of speaking French had all but died out, the practice was revived by fashion. Still the tradition had its effect. The fashion could hardly have taken root except in a land where the tradition had gone before it.

The Normans in England therefore became Englishmen, because there was an English nation into which they could be absorbed. The Normans in Sicily could hardly be said to become Sicilians, for there assuredly was no Sicilian nation for them to be absorbed into. While the Normans in England were lost among the people of the land, the Normans in Sicily were lost among their fellow-settlers in the land. The Normans who came into Sicily must have been much less purely Norman than the Normans who came into England. The army of Duke William was undoubtedly very far from being wholly made up of Normans, but it was a Norman army; the element which was not Norman, though considerable, was exceptional. But we may doubt whether the Norman invaders of Sicily were Norman in much more than being commanded by Norman leaders. They were almost as little entitled to be called pure Scandinavians as the Saracens whom they found in the island were entitled to be called pure Arabs. The conquest of England was made directly from Normandy, by the reigning duke, in a comparatively short time, while the conquest of Sicily grew out of the earlier and far more gradual conquest of Apulia and Calabria by private men. The Norman settlements at Aversa and Capua were the work of adventurers, making their own fortunes, and gathering round them followers from all quarters. They fought simply for their own hands, and took what they could by the right of the stronger. They started with no such claim as Duke William put forth to justify his invasion of England; their only show of legal right was the papal grant of conquests that were already made. The conquest of Apulia, won bit by bit in many years of what we can only call freebooting, was not a national Norman enterprise like the conquest of England, and the settlement to which it led could not be a national Norman settlement in the same sense. The Sicilian enterprise had in some respects another character. By the time it began the freebooters had grown into princes. Sicily was won by a duke of Apulia and a count of Sicily. Still there was a wide difference between the duke of the Normans and the duke of Apulia, between an hereditary prince of a hundred and fifty years’ standing and an adventurer who had carved out his duchy for himself. And, besides this, warfare in Sicily brought in higher motives and objects. Though crusades had not yet been preached, the strife with the Mussulman at once brought in the crusading element; to the Christian people of the island they were in many cases real deliverers; still, the actual process by which Sicily was won was not so very different from that by which Apulia had been won. Duke William was undisputed master of England at the end of five years; it took Count Roger thirty years to make himself undisputed master of Sicily. The one claimed an existing kingdom, and obtained full possession of it in a comparatively short time; the other formed for himself a dominion bit by bit, which rose to the rank of a kingdom in the next generation. When Count Roger at last found himself lord of the whole island, he found himself lord of men of various creeds and tongues, of whom his own Norman followers were but one class out of several. And the circumstances of his conquest were such that the true Normans among his following could not possibly lose themselves among the existing inhabitants of the island, while everything tended to make them lose themselves among their fellow-adventurers of other races, among whom, by the time the conquest was ended, they could hardly have been even a dominant element.

As far then as concerned the lands in which the settlements were made, the difference lay in this, that, as has been already said, while there was an English nation, there was no Sicilian nation. The characteristic point of Norman rule in Sicily is that it is the rule of princes who were foreign to all the inhabitants of the island, but who were not more foreign to the inhabitants of the island than different classes of them were to one another. The Norman conqueror found in Sicily a Christian and Greek-speaking people and a Mussulman and Arabic-speaking people. The relations between the two differed widely in different parts of the island, according to the way in which the Saracens had become possessed of different towns and districts. In one place the Christians were in utter bondage, in another they were simply tributary; still, everywhere the Mussulman Saracen formed the ruling class, the Christian Greek formed the subject class. We speak of the Saracen very much as we speak of the Norman; for of the Mussulman masters of Sicily very many must have been only artificial Arabs, Africans who had adopted the creed, language, and manners of Arabia. In each case the Arab or the Norman was the kernel, the centre round which all other elements gathered and which gave its character to the whole. Besides these two main races, Greek and Saracen, others came in through the Norman invasion itself. There...