y; they already
consider the ocean as their appointed realm. Do they observe, or fancy
they observe, any diminution in the strength of England? They complain
to the king in remonstrances more than once heard again, word for word,
within the halls of Westminster: "Twenty years ago, and always before,
the shipping of the Realm was in all the ports and good towns upon the
sea or rivers, so noble and plenteous that all the countries held and
called our said sovereign, the King of the Sea."[427] At this time,
1372, the country is, without possibility of doubt, the England of the
English.

From that period the English are found either singly or in small bands
on all the seas and on all the highways.[428] Their nature has been
modified; the island no longer suffices them as it sufficed the
Anglo-Saxons. "Il ne sait rien, qui ne va hors"--he knows nothing who
stirs not out--think they with Des Champs; they are keen to see what
goes on elsewhere, and like practical folks to profit by it. When the
opportunity is good they seize it, whatsoever its nature; encountering
Saracens they slay them: so much towards Paradise; moving about in Italy
they are not long in discovering the advantages offered by a
condottiere's existence. They adopt and even perfect it, and after their
death are magnificently buried in the cathedral of Florence, and Paolo
Uccello paints their portrait on the wall.[429] On every occasion they
behave like Normans; in the halls of Westminster, in their City counting
houses, on the highroads of Italy and on the ocean they everywhere
resemble the rulers whose spirit has passed into them, and prove
themselves to be at once adventurous and practical. "They are good
walkers and good horsemen," said Ralph Higden of them in the fourteenth
century, adding: "They are curious, and like to tell the wonders they
have seen and observed." How many books of travel we owe to this
propensity! "They roam over all lands," he continues, "and succeed still
better in other countries than in their own.... They spread over the
earth; every land they inhabit becomes as their own country."[430] They
are themselves, and no longer seek to be any one else; they cease by
degrees to _francigenare_. This combination of boldness and obstinacy
that is theirs, is the blend of qualities by which distant settlements
can be established and kept; to these qualities must be traced the
founding of the English colonial empire, and the power which allowed t