But his advance was watched by one even more able and ambitious than himself.  For the last half-century England had been drawing nearer to the Norman land which fronted it across the Channel.  As we pass nowadays through Normandy, it is English history which is round about us.  The name of hamlet after hamlet has memories for English ears; a fragment of castle wall marks the home of the Bruce, a tiny village preserves the name of the Percy.  The very look of the country and its people seem familiar to us; the Norman peasant in his cap and blouse recalls the build and features of the small English farmer; the fields about Caen, with their dense hedgerows, their elms, their apple-orchards, are the very picture of an English country-side.  Huge cathedrals lift themselves over the red-tiled roofs of little market towns, the models of stately fabrics which superseded the lowlier churches of AElfred or Dunstan, while the windy heights that look over orchard and meadowland are crowned with the square grey keeps which Normandy gave to the cliffs of Richmond and the banks of Thames.  It was Hrolf the Ganger, or Walker, a pirate leader like Guthrum or Hasting, who wrested this land from the French king, Charles the Simple, in 912, at the moment when AElfred’s children were beginning their conquest of the English Danelaw.  The treaty of Clair-on-Epte in which France purchased peace by this cession of the coast was a close imitation of the Peace of Wedmore.  Hrolf, like Guthrum, was baptized, received the king’s daughter in marriage, and became his vassal for the territory which now took the name of “the Northman’s land” or Normandy.  But vassalage and the new faith sat lightly on the Dane.  No such ties of blood and speech tended to unite the northman with the French among whom he settled along the Seine as united him to the Englishmen among whom he settled along the Humber.  William Longsword, the son of Hrolf, though wavering towards France and Christianity, remained a northman in heart; he called in a Danish colony to occupy his conquest of the Cotentin, the peninsula which runs out from St. Michael’s Mount to the cliffs of Cherbourg, and reared his boy among the northmen of Bayeux where the Danish tongue and fashions most stubbornly held their own.  A heathen reaction followed his death, and the bulk of the Normans, with the child Duke Richard, fell away for the time from Christianity, while new pirate-fleets came swarming up the Seine.  To the close of the century the whole people were still “Pirates” to the French around them, their land the “Pirates’ land,” their Duke the “Pirates’ Duke.”  Yet in the end the same forces which merged the Dane in the Englishman told even more powerfully on the Dane in France.  No race has ever shown a greater power of absorbing all the nobler characteristics of the peoples with whom they came in contact, or of infusing their own energy into them.  During the long reign of Duke Richard the Fearless, the son of William Longsword, a reign which lasted from 945 to 996, the heathen Norman pirates became French Christians and feudal at heart.  The old Norse language lived only at Bayeux and in a few local names.  As the old Northern freedom died silently away, the descendants of the pirates became feudal nobles and the “Pirates’ land” sank into the most loyal of the fiefs of France.