They have been written of enough to-day, but who has seen them from close by or understood that brilliant interlude of power?

The little bullet-headed men, vivacious, and splendidly brave, we know that they awoke all Europe, that the first provided settled financial systems and settled governments of land, and that everywhere, from the Grampians to Mesopotamia, they were like steel when all other Christians were like wood or like lead.

We know that they were a flash.  They were not formed or definable at all before the year 1000; by the year 1200 they were gone.  Some odd transitory phenomenon of cross-breeding, a very lucky freak in the history of the European family, produced the only body of men who all were lords and who in their collective action showed continually nothing but genius.

We know that they were the spear-head, as it were, of the Gallic spirit:  the vanguard of that one of the Gallic expansions which we associate with the opening of the Middle Ages and with the crusades. ...  We know all this and write about it; nevertheless, we do not make enough of the Normans in England.

Here and there a man who really knows his subject and who disdains the market of the school books, puts as it should be put their conquest of this island and their bringing into our blood whatever is still strongest in it.  Many (descended from their leaders) have remarked their magical ride through South Italy, their ordering of Sicily, their hand in Palestine.  As for the Normans in Normandy, of their exchequer there, of what Rouen was—­all that has never been properly written down at all.  Their great adventure here in England has been most written of by far; but I say again no one has made enough of them; no one has brought them back out of their graves.  The character of what they did has been lost in these silly little modern quarrels about races, which are but the unscholarly expression of a deeper hypocritical quarrel about religion.

Yet it is in England that the Norman can be studied as he can be studied nowhere else.  He did not write here (as in Sicily) upon a palimpsest.  He was not merged here (as in the Orient) with the rest of the French.  He was segregated here; he can be studied in isolation; for though so many that crossed the sea on that September night with William, the big leader of them, held no Norman tenure, yet the spirit of the whole thing was Norman:  the regularity the suddenness, the achievement, and, when the short fighting was over the creation of a new society.  It was the Norman who began everything over again—­the first fresh influence since Rome.

The riot of building has not been seized.  The island was conquered in 1070.  It was a place of heavy foolish men with random laws, pale eyes, and a slow manner; their houses were of wood:  sometimes they built (but how painfully, and how childishly!) with stone.  There was no height, there was no dignity, there was no sense of permanence.  The Norman Government was established.  At once rapidity, energy, the clear object of a united and organised power followed.  And see what followed in architecture alone, and in what a little space of the earth, and in what a little stretch of time—­less than the time that separates us to-day from the year of Disraeli’s death or the occupation of Egypt.