rear families which for many years remain
French.

During a long period, the centre of the thoughts and interests of the
kings of England, French by origin, education, manners, and language, is
in France. William the Conqueror bequeaths Normandy to his eldest son,
and England to his younger. Not one of them is buried at Westminster
before 1272; they sleep their last sleep most of them at Caen or
Fontevrault[145]; out of the thirty-five years of his reign, Henry II.
spends more than twenty-one in France, and less than fourteen in
England.[146] Before his accession Richard Coeur-de-Lion only came to
England twice in twenty years. They successively make war on France, not
from hatred or scorn, not because they wish to destroy her, but because
they wish to be kings of France themselves. They admire and wish to
possess her; their ideal, whether moral, literary, administrative, or
religious, is above all a French ideal. They are knights, and introduce
into England the fashion of tournaments, "conflictus gallici," says
Matthew Paris. They wish to have a University, and they copy for Oxford
the regulations of Paris. Henry III. quarrels with his barons, and whom
does he select for an arbiter but his former enemy, Louis IX., king of
France, the victor of Taillebourg? They organise in England a religious
hierarchy, so similar to that of France that the prelates of one country
receive constantly and without difficulty promotion in the other. John
of Poictiers, born in Kent, treasurer of York, becomes bishop of
Poictiers and archbishop of Lyons, while still retaining the living of
Eynesford in Kent; John of Salisbury, secretary of the archbishop of
Canterbury, becomes bishop of Chartres; Ralph de Sarr, born in Thanet,
becomes dean of Reims[147]; others are appointed bishops of Palermo,
Messina, and Syracuse.

Impetuous as are these princes, ready at every instant to run all risks
and play fast and loose, even when, like William I., old and ill, one
precious quality of their temper diminishes the danger of their
rashness. They undertake, as though for a wager, superhuman tasks, but
once undertaken they proceed to the fulfilling of them with a lucid and
practical mind. It is this practical bent of their mind, combined with
their venturesome disposition, that has made of them so remarkable a
race, and enabled them to transform the one over which they had now
extended their rule.

Be the question a question of ideas or a question of