NORMAN INFLUENCE
[1130-1194 A.D.]
Of all the points to be insisted on, that which it is most necessary to bear in mind is the Norman power of adaptation to circumstances, the gift which in the end destroyed the race as a separate race. English history is utterly misconceived if it is thought that an acknowledged distinction between Normans and English went on, perhaps into the fourteenth century, perhaps into the seventeenth. Long before the earlier of those dates the Norman in England had done his work; he had unwittingly done much to preserve and strengthen the national life of a really kindred people, and, that work done, he had lost himself in the greater mass of that kindred people. In Sicily his work, far more brilliant, far more beneficent at the time, could not be so lasting. The Norman princes made Sicily a kingdom; they ruled it for a season better than any other kingdom was ruled; but they could not make it a Norman kingdom, nor could they themselves become national Sicilian kings. The kingdom that they founded has now vanished from among the kingdoms of the earth, because it was only a kingdom and not a nation. In every other way the Norman has vanished from Sicily as though he had never been. His very works of building are hardly witnesses to his presence, because, without external evidence, we should never have taken them to be his. In Sicily, in short, he gave a few generations of unusual peace and prosperity to several nations living side by side, and then he, so to speak, went his way from a land in which he had a work to do, but in which he never was really at home. In England he made himself, though by rougher means, more truly at home among unacknowledged kinsmen. When in outward show he seemed to work the unmaking of a nation, he was in truth giving no small help towards its second making.[c]