s,
that were the objects of their hunting, the subjects of their heraldry?
If the Normans were really the Northmen, the sea-wolves of Scandinavian
piracy, why did they not display three wolves on their shields?
Why has not John Bull been content with the English bull,
or the English bull-dog?

The answer might be put somewhat defiantly by saying that the very name
of John Bull is foreign. The surname comes through France from Rome;
and the Christian name comes through Rome from Palestine. If there
had really been any justification for the Teutonic generalisation,
we should expect the surname to be "ox" and not "bull"; and we should
expect the hero standing as godfather to be Odin or Siegfried, and not
the prophet who lived on locusts in the wilderness of Palestine or the
mystic who mused with his burning eyes on the blue seas around Patmos.
If our national hero is John Bull and not Olaf the Ox, it is ultimately
because that blue sea has run like a blue thread through all the
tapestries of our traditions; or in other words because our culture,
like that of France or Flanders, came originally from the Mediterranean.
And if this is true of our use of the word "bull," it is obviously
even truer of our use of the word "lion." The later emblem is enough
to show that the culture came, not only from the Mediterranean,
but from the southern as well as the northern side of the Mediterranean.
In other words, the Roman Empire ran all round the great inland sea;
the very name of which meant, not merely the sea in the middle of
the land, but more especially the sea in the middle of all the lands
that mattered most to civilisation. One of these, and the one
that in the long run has mattered most of all, was Palestine.

In this lies the deepest difference between a man like Richard
the Lion Heart and any of the countless modern English soldiers
in Palestine who have been quite as lion-hearted as he.
His superiority was not moral but intellectual; it consisted in
knowing where he was and why he was there. It arose from the fact
that in his time there remained a sort of memory of the Roman Empire,
which some would have re-established as a Holy Roman Empire.
Christendom was still almost one commonwealth; and it seemed to Richard
quite natural to go from one edge of it that happened to be called
England to the opposite edge of it that happened to be called Palestine.
We may think him right or wrong in the particular quarrel,
we may