possibly have grown; for we are told by their own biographer that it was
the nature of the sons of Tancred, when they saw that anybody else had
anything, to take it to themselves. Perhaps this dangerous tendency
extended only to misbelievers, schismatics, or at least men of other
tongues. Otherwise such vigorous annexers of other men's lands might
have found more than one chance at home, in days of confusion, of
enlarging the estate of Hauteville. In short we may speculate on many
matters; we can only say what we have seen and what we have not. And at
the last moment a frightful thought comes upon us. We have with us one
book of Gally Knight's, but it is only the Norman book. But he wrote
another book, in which the house of Hauteville plays a great part. What
if he went to Hauteville and found out all about it and put it all in
print, only not in his Norman, but in his Sicilian book.

MORTAIN AND ITS SURROUNDINGS

1892

In the course either of a Norman journey or of any study of Norman
matters, the thought is constantly suggesting itself that there is an
important class of people who are always using the names of the places
through which we go, but who seem to attach no meaning to them. The
whole tribe of genealogists, local antiquaries, and the like, are, in
the nature of things, constantly speaking of Norman places, or at least
of the families which take their names from them. But it never seems to
come into their heads that these places are real places still in being
on the face of the earth. What was the state of mind of the endless
people who have spoken of both King Stephen and King John in earlier
stages of being by the strange title of "Earl of Moreton"? Do they think
they took their title from Moreton-in-the-Marsh, or do they mix those
kings up with the Earl of Moreton in Scotland, who died by the maiden a
good while later? And, if they try to improve their spelling, and to
give it more of a continental look, perhaps he comes out in some such
shape as "Count of Mortaigne." That is to say, no distinction is made
between _Mortain_, _Moretolium_ or _Moretonium_, in the Avranchin, and
_Mortagne_, _Mauritania_, in Perche. Yet the two towns are both there,
each in its old place, though in official speech we have no longer to
speak of the Avranchin, but of the department of La Manche, no longer of
Perche, but of the department of Orne. There are railways, branch
railways certainly, which lead to both; there