The quality which Geoffrey Malaterra expresses by the word "effrenatissima" is also clearly marked in Norman history. It is, in fact, the groundwork of the historic Norman character. It takes in one case the form of ceaseless enterprise, in another the form of that lawlessness which ever broke out, both in Normandy and in every other country settled by Normans, when the hand of a strong ruler was wanting. But it was balanced by another quality which Geoffrey does not speak of, one which is not really inconsistent with the other, one which is very prominent in the Norman character, and which is, no less than the other, a direct heritage from their Scandinavian forefathers. This is the excessive litigiousness, the fondness for law, legal forms, legal processes, which has ever been characteristic of the people. If the Norman was a born soldier, he was also a born lawyer. But nothing so well illustrates this formal side of the Norman character as the whole position of William the Conqueror himself. His claim to the crown of England is something without earlier precedent, some thing as far as possible removed from the open violence of aggressors who have no pretexts with which to disguise their aggression. It rested on a mass of legal assumptions and sub tleties, fallacious indeed, but ingenious, and, as the result proved, effective. His whole system of government, his confiscations, his grants, all that he did, was a logical deduction from one or two legal principles, arbitrary certainly in their conception, but strictly carried out to their results. Even Norman lawlessness in some sort took a legal shape. In the worst days of anarchy, in the minority of William or under the no-reign of Robert, the robber baron could commonly give elaborate reasons for every act of wrong that he did.
The Normans were, therefore, crusaders before crusades were preached. Norman warriors had long before helped the Christians of Spain in their warfare with the Saracens of the Peninsula, and in Sicily it was from the same enemy that they won the great Mediterranean island. Others had done a kindred work in a more distant field as helpers of the Eastern emperors against the Turks of Asia. All these might pass for religious wars, and they might really be so ; it needed greater ingenuity to set forth the invasion of England as a missionary enterprise designed for the spiritual good of the benighted islanders. The Norman, a strict observer of forms in all matters, attended to the forms of religion with special care. No people were more bountiful to ecclesiastical bodies on both sides of the Channel ; the foundation of a Benedictine monastery in the i i th century, of a Cistercian monastery in the 12th seemed almost a matter of course on the part of a Norman baron. On the other hand, none were less in clined to submit to encroachments on the part of the ecclesiastical power, the Conquerer himself least of all.
Neither England nor Sicily has become a Norman land, and the tongue which the Norman brought with him into both has not for ages been spoken in either. Norman influence has been far stronger in England than in Sicily, and signs of Norman presence are far more easily recognized. But the Norman, as a distinct people, is as little to be seen in the one island as in the other, a result due to different and almost opposite causes. The whole circumstances of the conquest of England constrained the con querors to become Englishmen in order to establish themselves in the conquered land. In William's theory, the forcible conquest
of England by strangers was an untoward accident. The lawful heir of the English crown was driven against his will to win his rights by force from outside. But he none the less held his crown as an English king succeeding according to English law. More over, every Norman to whom he granted lands and offices held them by English law in a much truer sense than the king held his ; he was deemed to step into the exact position of his English predecessor, whatever that might be. This legal theory worked together with other causes to wipe out all practical distinction between the conquerors and the conquered in a wonderfully short time. By the end of the i 2th century the Normans in England might fairly pass as Englishmen, and they had largely adopted the use of the English language. The fashionable use of French for nearly two centuries longer was far more a French fashion than a Norman tradition. When the tradition of speaking French had all but died out, the practice was revived by fashion. Still the tradition had its effect. The fashion could hardly have taken root except in a land where the tradition had gone before it.
The Normans in England therefore became Englishmen, because there was an English nation into which they could be absorbed. The Normans in Sicily could hardly be said to become Sicilians, for there assuredly was no Sicilian nation for them to be absorbed into. While the Normans in England were lost among the people of the land, the Normans in Sicily were lost among their fellow settlers in the land. The Normans who came into Sicily must have been much less purely Norman than the Normans who came into England. Indeed, we may doubt whether the Norman in vaders of Sicily were Norman in much more than being com manded by Norman leaders. They were almost as little entitled to be called pure Scandinavians as the Saracens whom they found in the island were entitled to be called pure Arabs. The conquest of England was made directly from Normandy, by the reigning duke, in a comparatively short time, while the conquest of Sicily grew out of the earlier and far more gradual conquest of Apulia and Calabria by private men. The Norman settlements at Aversa and Capua were the work of adventurers, making their own fortunes and gathering round them followers from all quarters. They fought simply for their own lands, and took what they could by the right of the stronger. They started with no such claim as Duke William put forth to justify his invasion of England ; their only show of legal right was the papal grant of conquests that were already made. The conquest of Apulia, won bit by bit in many years of what we can only call freebooting, was not a na tional Norman enterprise like the conquest of England, and the settlement to which it led could not be a national Norman settle ment in the same sense. The Sicilian enterprise had in some re spects another character. By the time it began the freebooters had grown into princes. Still there was a wide difference between the duke of the Normans and the duke of Apulia, between an hereditary prince of i 5o years' standing and an adventurer who had carved out his duchy for himself.