Never so fully known it since!  For we of the eleventh century, hard-headed, close-fisted, grasping, shrewd, as we were, and as Normans are still said to be, stood more fully in the centre of the world’s movement than our English descendants ever did.  We were a part, and a great part, of the Church, of France, and of Europe.  The Leos and Gregories of the tenth and eleventh centuries leaned on us in their great struggle for reform.  Our Duke Richard-Sans-Peur, in 966, turned the old canons out of the Mount in order to bring here the highest influence of the time, the Benedictine monks of Monte Cassino.  Richard ii, grandfather of William the Conqueror, began this Abbey Church in 1020, and helped Abbot Hildebert to build it.  When William the Conqueror in 1066 set out to conquer England, Pope Alexander ii stood behind him and blessed his banner.  From that moment our Norman Dukes cast the Kings of France into the shade.  Our activity was not limited to northern Europe, or even confined by Anjou and Gascony.  When we stop at Coutances, we will drive out to Hauteville to see where Tancred came from, whose sons Robert and Roger were conquering Naples and Sicily at the time when the Abbey Church was building on the Mount.  Normans were everywhere in 1066, and everywhere in the lead of their age.  We were a serious race.  If you want other proof of it, besides our record in war and in politics, you have only to look at our art.  Religious art is the measure of human depth and sincerity; any triviality, any weakness, cries aloud.  If this church on the Mount is not proof enough of Norman character, we will stop at Coutances for a wider view.  Then we will go to Caen and Bayeux.  From there, it would almost be worth our while to leap at once to Palermo.  It was in the year 1131 or thereabouts that Roger began the Cathedral at Cefalu and the Chapel Royal at Palermo; it was about the year 1174 that his grandson William began the Cathedral of Monreale.  No art—­either Greek or Byzantine, Italian or Arab—­has ever created two religious types so beautiful, so serious, so impressive, and yet so different, as Mont-Saint-Michel watching over its northern ocean, and Monreale, looking down over its forests of orange and lemon, on Palermo and the Sicilian seas.

Down nearly to the end of the twelfth century the Norman was fairly master of the world in architecture as in arms, although the thirteenth century belonged to France, and we must look for its glories on the Seine and Marne and Loire; but for the present we are in the eleventh century,—­tenants of the Duke or of the Church or of small feudal lords who take their names from the neighbourhood,—­ Beaumont, Carteret, Greville, Percy, Pierpont,—­who, at the Duke’s bidding, will each call out his tenants, perhaps ten men-at-arms with their attendants, to fight in Brittany, or in the Vexin toward Paris, or on the great campaign for the conquest of England which is to come within ten years,—­the