inheritance, marriage, and partnership with the Lords of the Villae;
their chief was permitted to hold local government, to tax and to levy
men as the administrator of the whole province; but there followed
something which wherever else the experiment had been tried had not
followed: something of a new race arose. In Burgundy, in the northeast,
in Visigothic Aquitaine the slight admixture of foreign blood had not
changed the people, it was absorbed; the slight admixture of
Scandinavian blood, coming so much later, in a time so degraded in
government and therefore so open to natural influence, did change the
Gallo-Romans of the Second Lyonesse. Few as the newcomers may have been
in number, the new element transformed the mass, and when a century had
permitted the union to work and settle, the great soldiers who founded
us appeared. The Norman lords ordered, surveyed, codified, and ruled.
They let Europe into England, they organized Sicily, they confirmed the
New Papacy, they were the framework of the Crusades.

The phenomenon was brief. It lasted little more than a hundred years,
but it transformed Europe and launched the Middle Ages. When it had
passed, Normandy stood confirmed for centuries (and is still confirmed)
in a character of its own. No longer adventurous but mercantile, apt, of
a resisting courage, sober in thought, leaning upon tradition, not
imperially but domestically strong: the country of Corneille and of
Malesherbes, a reflection of that spirit in letters; the conservative
body of to-day--for in our generation that is the mark of Normandy--and,
in arms, the recruitment to which Napoleon addressed his short and
famous order that "the Normans that day should do their duty."