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 as their names might lead us to suppose,—Tancred of Lecce and his son William III, and Constance, Roger's daughter and Frederick's mother, wife of the Hohenstaufen Emperor Henry VI. It is usual to consider the Norman period as closing with the deposition of William III in 1194 and to class Constance and Frederick II with the Hohenstaufen. In the case of Constance there seems to be no possible reason for this, for she was as Norman as any of her predecessors and issued documents in her own name throughout the remaining three years of her husband's life and during the few months of 1197–98 by which she survived him. With their son Frederick II, half Norman and half Hohenstaufen, the question is perhaps even, and the science of genetics has not yet advanced far enough to enable us to classify and trace to their source the dominant and the recessive elements in his inheritance. No one, however, can study him at close range without discovering marked affinities with his Norman predecessors, notably the second Roger, and the whole trend of recent investigation goes to show that, in the field of government as in that of culture, his policy is a continuation of the work of the Norman kings, from whom much of his legislation is directly derived. Half Norman by birth, Frederick was preponderantly Norman in his political heritage. It was in Sicily that he grew up and began to rule, and in Sicily that he did his really constructive work. To judge him as a Hohenstaufen is only less misleading