Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/27

Rh motions of the heavenly bodies. The Norman mind is neither nebular nor hypothetical!

The land is not the whole of nature's gift to Normandy; we must also take account of the sea, of those who came by sea and those who went down to the sea in ships; and history tells us of another type of Norman, those giants of an elder day who, as one of their descendants has said, "found the seas too narrow and the land too tame." The men who subdued England and Sicily, who discovered the Canaries and penetrated to the Mississippi, who colonized Quebec and ruled the Isle of France, were no stay-at-homes, no cautious landsmen interested in boundaries and inheritances and vain strivings about the law. Warriors and adventurers in untamed lands and upon uncharted seas, they were organizers of states and rulers of peoples, and it is their work which gives Normandy its chief claim upon the attention of the student of general history. These are the Normans of history and the Normans of romance. Listen to the earliest characterizations of them which have reached us from the south, as a monk of the eleventh century, Aimé of Monte Cassino, sets out to recount the deeds of the southern Normans, fortissime gent who have spread themselves over the earth, ever leaving small things to acquire greater, unwilling to serve, but seeking to have every one in subjection; or as his contemporary, Geoffrey Malaterra,