Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/30

16 for their own part to high ideals, and yet respectful to idealists; altogether a hard-headed, heavy-handed, laborious and tenacious type of men."

These contrasting types of life and character it is tempting to refer to the respective influences of land and water, to the differences between the peasant and the rider to the sea. One might even attempt a philosophy of Norman history somewhat on this wise. In its normal and undisturbed state Normandy is a part of France, in its life as in its geography, and as such it shows only the ordinary local differences from the rest of the French lands. So it was under the Romans, so under the Franks. At the beginning of the tenth century the coming of the Northmen introduces a new element which develops relations with the sea and the countries beyond the sea, with Scandinavia and later with the British Isles. Normandy ceases to be provincial, it almost ceases to be French; it even becomes ths centre of an Atlantic empire which stretches from Scotland to the Pyrenees. It sends its pilgrims to Compostela, its chivalry to Jerusalem, its younger sons to Sicily and southern Italy. Its relations with the sea do not cease with its political separation from the lands across the Channel in 1204. The English come back for a time in the fifteenth century; the Normans cross the Atlantic in the sixteenth and settle Canada in the seventeenth. But the overmastering influence of the soil