The characteristic point of Norman rule in Sicily is that it is the rule of princes who were foreign to all the inhabitants of the island, but who were not more foreign to the inhabitants of the island than different classes of them were to one another. The Norman conqueror found in Sicily a Christian and Greek speaking people and a Muslim and Arabic-speaking people. The relations between the two differed widely in different parts of the island, according to the way in which the Saracens had become possessed of different towns and districts. In one place the Christians were in utter bondage, in another they were simply tributary ; still, everywhere the Muslim Saracen formed the ruling class, the Christian Greek formed the subject class. We speak of the Saracen very much as we speak of the Norman ; for of the Muslim masters of Sicily very many must have been only artificial Arabs, Africans who had adopted the creed, language and manners of Arabia. In each case the Arab or the Norman was the kernel, the centre round which all other elements gathered and which gave its character to the whole. Besides these two main races, Greek and Saracen, others came in through the Norman invasion itself. There were the conquerors themselves ; there were the Italians, in Sicily known as Lombards, who followed in their wake ; there were also the Jews, whom they may have found in the island, or who may have followed the Norman into Sicily, as they cer tainly followed him into England. The special character of Nor man rule in Sicily was that all these various races flourished, each in its own fashion, each keeping its own creed, tongue and man ners, under the protection of a common sovereign, who belonged to none of them, but who did impartial justice to all. Such a state of things might seem degradation to the Muslim, but it was deliverance to the native Christian, while to settlers of every kind from outside it was an opening such as they could hardly find elsewhere. But the growth of a united Sicilian nation was impos sible; the usual style to express the inhabitants of the island is "omnes" or "universi Siciliae populi." In the end something like a Sicilian nation did arise ; but it arose rather by the dying out of several of the elements in the country, the Norman element among them, than by any such fusion as took place in England.
land he was not a conqueror, but a mere visitor, and oddly enough he came as a visitor along with those whom he had him self overcome in England. Both Normans and English came to Scotland in crowds in the days of Margaret, Edgar and David, and Scottish national feeling sometimes rose up against them. In Scotland again the Norman settlers were lost in the mixed nationality of the country, but not till they had modified many things in the same way in which they modified things in England. They gave Scotland nobles and even kings; Bruce and Balliol were both of the truest Norman descent ; the true Norman descent of Comyn might be doubted, but he was of the stock of the Francigenae of the Conquest. In Wales the Norman came as a conqueror, more strictly a conqueror than in England ; he could not claim Welsh crowns or Welsh estates under any fiction of Welsh law. The Norman settler in Wales, therefore, did not to any perceptible extent become a Welshman. In Ireland the Nor man was more purely a conqueror than anywhere else; but in Ireland his power of adaptation caused him to sink in a way in which he sank nowhere else. While some of the Norman settlers in Ireland went to swell the mass of the English of the Pale, others threw in their lot with the native Irish, and became, in the well known saying, Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores (see BURGH).