e Capet family, the counts of Paris, who had fought most
valiantly against the Northmen. But the entire power of these so-called
kings lay in their own estates, in the fact that they were counts of
Paris, and by marriage or by force were slowly adding new possessions to
their old. Any other noble might have been equally fortunate in his
investments, and wrested from them their purely honorary title. In fact,
there was more than once a king of Aquitaine.

Yet, in 1066, William the Conqueror was able to form for a moment a
strong and centralized monarchy in England.[12] With him we reach the
period of the second Northmen, or now Norman, outbreak. The marauders
had grown polished, but not peaceful, in their French home. They had
become more numerous and more restless, until we find them again taking
to their ships and seeking newer lands to master. Only they go now as a
civilizing as well as a devastating influence.

[Footnote 12: See _Norman Conquest of England_.]

Most famed of their undertakings, of course, was William's Conquest of
England. But we find them also sailing along the Spanish coast, entering
the Mediterranean, seizing the Balearic Isles, making out of Sicily and
most of Southern Italy a kingdom which lasted until 1860, and finally
ravaging the Eastern Empire, and entering Constantinople itself.[13]
Last and mightiest of the wandering races, they accomplished what all
their predecessors had failed to do.

[Footnote 13: See _Decline of the Byzantine Empire_, page 353.]

In England, William, with the shrewdness of his race, recognized the
tendencies of the age, and erected a state so planned that there could
be no question as to who was master. He gave fiefs liberally to his
followers; but he took care that the gifts should be in small and
scattered parcels. No one man controlled any region sufficiently
extensive to give him the faintest chance of defying the King. William
had the famous _Domesday Book_[14] compiled, that he might know just
what every freeman in his dominions owned and for what he could be held
accountable. The England of the later days of the Conqueror seemed far
advanced upon our modern ways.

[Footnote 14: See _Completion of the Domesday Book_, page 242.]

But what can one man, however able and advanced, do against the current
of his age? History shows us constantly that the great reformers have
been those who felt and followed the general feeling of their times, who
became mouthpiec