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 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 were the conquerors themselves; there were the Italians, in Sicily known as Lombards, who followed in their wake; there were also the Jews, whom they may have found in the island, or who may have followed the Norman into Sicily, as they certainly followed him into England. The special character of Norman rule in Sicily was that all these various races flourished, each in its own fashion, each keeping its own creed, tongue and manners, under the protection of a common sovereign, who belonged to none of them, but who did impartial justice to all. Such a state of things might seem degradation to the Mussulman, but it was deliverance to the native Christian, while to settlers of every kind from outside it was an opening such as they could hardly find elsewhere. But the growth of a united Sicilian nation was impossible; the usual style to express the inhabitants of the island is “omnes” or “universi Siciliae populi.” In the end something like a Sicilian nation did arise; but it arose rather by the dying out of several of the elements in the country, the Norman element among them, than by any such fusion as took place in England. That is, as has been already said, the Norman as such has vanished in two different ways. In England the Norman duke came in as a foreign intruder, without a native supporter to establish his rule over a single nation in its own land. He could not profess to be, as the count of Sicily could honestly profess to be, a deliverer to a large part of the people of the land. But, coming in by a title which professed to be founded on English law, establishing his followers by grants which professed no less to be founded on English law, he planted a dynasty, and established a dominant order, which could not fail to become English. The Normans in England did not die out; they were merged in the existing nation. The Normans in Sicily, so far as they did not die out, were merged, not in a Sicilian nation, for that did not exist, but in the common mass of settlers of Latin speech and rite, as distinguished from the older inhabitants, Greek and Saracen. The Norman conquest of England was at the moment a curse; the Norman conquest of Sicily was at the moment a blessing. But the gradual and indirect results of the Norman conquest of England are easily to be seen to this day, and they have been largely, though indirectly, results for good. Its chief result has been, not so much to create anything

new as at once to modify and to strengthen what was old, to call up older institutions to a new life under other forms. But whatever it has done it has done silently; there has not been at any time any violent change of one set of institutions for another. In Sicily and southern Italy there is hardly any visible Norman influence, except the great historic fact which we may call the creation of Sicily and southern Italy in their modern sense. The coming of the Norman ruled that these lands should be neither Saracen nor Greek, nor yet Italian in the same sense as northern Italy, but that they should politically belong to the same group of states as the kingdoms and principalities of feudal Europe. William assuredly did not create the kingdom of England; Roger assuredly did create the kingdom of Sicily. And yet, notwithstanding all this, and partly because of all this, real and distinct Norman influence has been far more extensive and far more abiding in England than it has been in Sicily.

In Sicily then the circumstances of the conquest led the Norman settlers to remain far more distinct from the older races of the land than they did in England, and in the end to lose themselves, not in those older races of the land, but in the settlers of other races who accompanied and followed them. So far as there ever was a Sicilian nation at all, it might be said to be called into being by the emperor-king Frederick II. In his day a Latin element finally triumphed; but it was not a Norman or French-speaking element of any kind. The speech of the Lombards at last got the better of Greek, Arabic and French; how far its ascendancy can have been built on any survival of an earlier Latin speech which had lived on alongside of Greek and Arabic this is not the place to inquire.

The use of language and nomenclature during the time of Norman rule in the two countries forms a remarkable contrast, and illustrates the circumstances of the two as they have just been sketched. The chroniclers of the conquest of Apulia and Sicily use the Norman name in every page as the name of the followers of the conquerors from Hauteville. It

was the natural name for a body of men who must, by the time the conquest of Sicily was over, have been very mixed, but whose kernel was Norman, whose strength and feelings and traditions all came from a Norman source. But if we turn to Hugo Falcandus, the historian of Sicily in the 12th century, the Norman name is hardly found, unless when it is used historically to point out (as in Muratori vii. 260) that the royal house of Sicily was of Norman descent. Of the various “Siciliae populi,” we hear of Greeks, Saracens, Lombards, sometimes of Franci, for by that time there were many French-speaking settlers in Sicily who were not of Norman descent. There is a distinction between Christians and Saracens; among Christians there seems to be again a distinction between Greeks and Latins, though perhaps without any distinct use of the Latin name; there is again a further distinction between “Lombardi” and “Franci”; but Normans, as a separate class, do not appear. In England there is no room for such subtleties. The narratives of the conquest of England use both the Norman and the French names to express the followers of William. In the English chronicles “French” is the only name used. It appears also in the Bayeux Tapestry, and it is the only word used when any legal distinction had to be drawn between classes of men in the English kingdom. “Franci” and “Angli” are often opposed in Domesday and other documents, and the formula went on in charters long after all real distinction had passed away. That is to say, there were several purposes for which it was convenient to distinguish “English” and “French”—the last name taking in all the followers of the Conqueror; there were no purposes for which there was any need to distinguish Normans as such, either from the general mass of the people or from others who spoke the French tongue. We can see also that, though several languages were in use in England during the time of Norman rule, yet England was not a land of many languages in the same sense in which Sicily was. In the 12th century three languages were certainly spoken in London; yet London could not call itself the “city of threefold speech,” as Palermo did. English, French, Latin, were all in use in England; but the distinction was rather that they were used for three different purposes than that they were used by three distinct races or even classes. No doubt there was a class that knew only English; there may have been a much smaller class that knew only French; any man who pretended to high cultivation would speak all as a matter of course; Bishop Gilbert Foliot, for instance, was eloquent in all three. But in Sicily we see the quite different phenomenon of three, four, five classes of men living side by side, each keeping its own nationality and speaking its own tongue. If a man of one people knew the speech of any of the others, he knew it strictly as a foreign language. Before the Norman Conquest England had two official tongues; documents 