rtainly less French than the same
communities after the Conquest. And they have a modern reputation which
is exactly the reverse of their real one. The value of the Anglo-Saxon
is exaggerated, and yet his virtues are ignored. Our Anglo-Saxon blood
is supposed to be the practical part of us; but as a fact the
Anglo-Saxons were more hopelessly unpractical than any Celt. Their
racial influence is supposed to be healthy, or, what many think the same
thing, heathen. But as a fact these "Teutons" were the mystics. The
Anglo-Saxons did one thing, and one thing only, thoroughly well, as they
were fitted to do it thoroughly well. They christened England. Indeed,
they christened it before it was born. The one thing the Angles
obviously and certainly could not manage to do was to become English.
But they did become Christians, and indeed showed a particular
disposition to become monks. Moderns who talk vaguely of them as our
hardy ancestors never do justice to the real good they did us, by thus
opening our history, as it were, with the fable of an age of innocence,
and beginning all our chronicles, as so many chronicles began, with the
golden initial of a saint. By becoming monks they served us in many very
valuable and special capacities, but not notably, perhaps, in the
capacity of ancestors.

Along the northern coast of France, where the Confessor had passed his
early life, lay the lands of one of the most powerful of the French
king's vassals, the Duke of Normandy. He and his people, who constitute
one of the most picturesque and curious elements in European history,
are confused for most of us by irrelevant controversies which would have
been entirely unintelligible to them. The worst of these is the inane
fiction which gives the name of Norman to the English aristocracy during
its great period of the last three hundred years. Tennyson informed a
lady of the name of Vere de Vere that simple faith was more valuable
than Norman blood. But the historical student who can believe in Lady
Clara as the possessor of the Norman blood must be himself a large
possessor of the simple faith. As a matter of fact, as we shall see also
when we come to the political scheme of the Normans, the notion is the
negation of their real importance in history. The fashionable fancy
misses what was best in the Normans, exactly as we have found it missing
what was best in the Saxons. One does not know whether to thank the
Normans more for appearing or f