or his successors, and have remained from that day to this attached to the English crown. They still have their baillis and vicomtes, their knights' fees and feudal modes of tenure. The Norman dialect is still their language; the Coutume de Normandie is still the basis of their law; and one may still hear, in disputes concerning property in Jersey and Guernsey, the old cry of haro which preserves one of the most archaic features of Norman procedure.
After all is said, it is in England that the most permanent work of the Normans survives. They created the English central government and impressed upon it their conceptions of order and of law. Their feudalism permeated English society; their customs shaped much of English jurisprudence; their kings and nobles were the dominant class in English government. Freeman could never understand those who claimed that, as he declared, "we English are not ourselves but somebody else." The fact, however, remains that in a mixed race—and all races are to some extent mixed—there is no such thing as 'ourselves'; and if the numerical preponderance in the English people is largely that of pre-Norman elements, the Norman strain has exerted an influence out of all proportion to its numerical strength. Without William the Conqueror and Henry II the English would not be 'themselves,' whatever else they might have become.
