bold spirit of enterprise, unimpaired by the culture, the turn for art and taste for the finer pursuits, that they acquired by living in Gaul. Their new experience merely added intellectual keenness, deftness, and brilliancy of stroke to their resources for action; the old stimulating forces, their courage and their endurance, remained. Their ferocity had become valour, and their bodily strength the mastery of circumstances. That they owed the qualities which made their practical capacity to the good fortune that planted them on French soil, is suggested by the totally different history of their kinsfolk who had taken up their abode in other lands. The marauding bands of Norwegian pirates that had been roaming about and forming settlements along the Seine in the ninth and tenth centuries, were at last admitted to an authorised participation in the soil by an agreement that Charles the Simple made, in 912, at St. Clair, on the Epte, with their most formidable leader, Rolf the Norseman. Thus taken within the pale of continental civilisation, they rapidly profited by their advantages. They became Christians; they discarded their own and adopted the French language; they cast aside their semi-barbarous legal usages, and took those of the French cultivators of the soil, over whom they dominated; they learnt or discovered improved modes and principles of fighting; they acquired new weapons, the shield, the hauberk, the lance, and the long-bow; they became masterly horsemen; they developed an impressive style of architecture, and built churches and monasteries; they founded bishoprics; in a word, they soon furnished themselves with the whole moral, spiritual, and practical garniture of human conduct then available, with additions and improvements of their own. Their territory had increased by taking in both kindred settlements, and the lands of neighbouring peoples, till, from a vaguely described 'land of the Norsemen,' it became historic Normandy. Yet this wonderful growth was compatible with a political condition which was often not far removed from anarchy. The aristocratic class that the free-living, hot-natured pirate leaders had founded, and the unrestrained passions of the dukes, replenished from generation to generation, were ever on the watch for an opportunity to break loose from all rule, and govern themselves and the native tillers of the soil that lay beneath them, at their sole discretion. Nor did the sense of moral obligation keep pace with the other elements of progress; a connection free from the marriage tie was held no shame; bastardy brought no taint. But
