Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/34

20 general student from its membership in the body of France.

Much the same is true of the period before the coming of the Northmen. Under the Celts, the Romans, and the Franks, the region which was to become Normandy is not distinguished in any notable way from the rest of Gaul, and it has the further disadvantage of being one of the regions concerning which our knowledge is particularly scanty. A few names of tribes in Cæsar's Gallic War and in the Roman geographers, a few scattered inscriptions from the days of the empire, a few lives of saints and now and then a rare document of Prankish times, this with the results of archæological research constitutes the basis of early Norman history. After all, Normandy was remote from Rome and lay apart also from the main currents of Prankish life and politics, so that we should not look here for much light on general conditions. Nevertheless it is in this obscure age that the foundations of Normandy were laid. First of all, the population, Gallo-Roman at bottom, receiving a Germanic admixture of Saxons and Franks long before the coming of the Northmen, but still preponderantly non-Germanic in its racial type. Next, language, determined by the process of Romanization and persisting as a Romance speech in spite of Saxon and Frank and Northman, until in the earliest monuments of the eleventh century we can recognize the beginnings of modern French. Then law, the Frankish law which