Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/64

50 peasant who might have walked that moment out of a Wisconsin lumber-camp or a Minnesota wheat- field,—but the statistics of anthropometry show a steady preponderance of the round-headed type which prevails in other parts of France. Only in two regions does the Teutonic type assert itself strongly, in the lower valley of the Seine and in the Cotentin, and it is in these regions and at points along the shore that place-names of Scandinavian origin are most frequent. The terminations bec and fleur, beuf and ham and dalle and tot—Bolbec, Harfleur, Quillebeuf, Ouistreham, Dieppedalle, Yvetot—tell the same story as the terms used in navigation, namely that the Northmen were men of the sea and settled in the estuaries and along the coast. The earlier population, however, though reduced by war and pillage and famine, was not extinguished. It survived in sufficient numbers to impose its language on its conquerors, to preserve throughout the greater part of the country its fundamental racial type, and to make these Northmen of the sea into Normans of the land.

What, then, was the Scandinavian contribution to the making of Normandy if it was neither law nor speech nor race? First and foremost, it was Normandy itself, created as a distinct entity by the Norman occupation and the grant to Rollo and his followers, without whom it would have remained an undifferentiated part of northern France. Next, a new element in the population, numerically small in proportion to the mass, but