The Normans were Nordics with a dash of brunet blood and their conquest of England strengthened the Nordic and not the Mediterranean elements in the British Isles, but the connection once established with France especially with Aquitaine later introduced from southern France certain brunet elements of Mediterranean affinities.
The upper class Normans on their arrival in England were probably purely Scandinavian, but in the lower classes there were some dark strains. They brought with them large numbers of ecclesiastics who were, for the most part drawn from the more ancient types throughout France. Careful investigation of the graveyards and vaults in which these churchmen were buried revealed a large percentage of round skulls among them.
In both Normandy and in the lowlands of Scotland there was much the same mixture of blood between Scandinavian and Saxon but with a smaller amount of Saxon blood in France. The result in both cases was the production of an extraordinarily forceful race.
The Nordics in England are in these days apparently receding before the Neolithic Mediterranean type. The causes of this decline are the same as in France and the chief loss is through the wastage of blood by war and through emigration.
The typical British soldier is blond or red bearded and the typical sailor is always a blond. The migrating type from England is also chiefly Nordic. These facts would indicate that nomadism as well as love of war and adventure are Nordic characteristics.
An extremely potent influence, however, is the transformation of the nation from an agricultural to a manufacturing community. Heavy, healthful work in the fields of northern Europe enables the Nordic type to thrive, but the cramped factory and crowded city quickly weed him out, while the little brunet Mediterranean can work a spindle, set type, sell ribbons or push a clerk’s pen far better than the big, clumsy and somewhat heavy Nordic blond, who needs exercise, meat and air and cannot live under Ghetto conditions.
The increase of urban communities at the expense of the countryside is also an important element in the fading of the Nordic type, because the energetic countryman of this blood is more apt to improve his fortunes by moving to the city than the less ambitious Mediterranean.
The country villages and the farms are the nurseries of nations, while cities are consumers and seldom producers of men. The effort now being made in America to settle undesirable immigrants on farms may, from the viewpoint of race replacement, be more dangerous than allowing them to remain in crowded Ghettos or tenements.
If England has deteriorated and there are those who think they see indications of such decline, it is due to the lowering proportion of the Nordic blood and the transfer of political power from the vigorous Nordic aristocracy and middle classes to the radical and labor elements, both largely recruited from the Mediterranean type.
Only in Scandinavia and northwestern Germany does the Nordic race seem to maintain its full vigor in spite of the enormous wastage of three thousand years of the swarming forth of its best fighting men. Norway, however, after the Viking outburst has never exhibited military power and Sweden, in the centuries between the Varangian period and the rise of Gustavus Adolphus, did not enjoy a reputation for fighting efficiency. All the three Scandinavian countries after vigorously attacking Christendom a thousand years ago disappear from history as a nursery for soldiers until the Reformation when Sweden suddenly reappears just in time to save Protestantism on the Continent. To-day all three seem to be intellectually anæmic.