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 s