Edward Augustus Freeman

“ The conquest of England was made directly from Normandy, by the reigning duke, in a comparatively short time, while the conquest of Sicily grew out of the earlier and far more gradual conquest of Apulia and Calabria by private men. The Norman settlements at Aversa and Capua were the work of adventurers, making their own fortunes and gathering round them followers from all quarters. They fought simply for their own hands, and took what they could by the right of the stronger. They started with no such claim as Duke William put forth to justify his invasion of England ”

“ Several of these features stand out very clearly in Norman history. The cunning of the Normans is plain enough; so is their impatience of restraint, unless held down by a strong master. Love of imitation is also marked. Little of original invention can be traced to any strictly Norman source; but no people were ever more eager to adopt from other nations, to take into their service and friendship from any quarter men of learning and skill and eminence of every kind. ”

“ With the zeal of new converts they set forth on their new errand very much in the spirit of their heathen forefathers. If Britain and Sicily were the greatest fields of their enterprise, they were very far from being the only fields. The same spirit of enterprise which brought the Northmen into Gaul seems to carry the Normans out of Gaul into every corner of the world. ”

“ In the end something like a Sicilian nation did arise; but it arose rather by the dying out of several of the elements in the country, the Norman element among them, than by any such fusion as took place in England. That is, as has been already said, the Norman as such has vanished in two different ways. In England the Norman duke came in as a foreign intruder, without a native supporter to establish his rule over a single nation in its own land. He could not profess to be, as the count of Sicily could honestly profess to be, a deliverer to a large part of the people of the land. ”

“ To this quality is perhaps to be attributed the fact that a people who did so much, who settled and conquered in so large a part of Europe, has practically vanished from the face of the earth. If Normans, as Normans, now exist anywhere, it is certainly only in that insular fragment of the ancient duchy which still cleaves to the successor of its ancient dukes. ”

“ And this comes out the more clearly if we compare Norman work in England and in Sicily with Norman work in at least some parts of Apulia. At Bari, Trani and Bitonto we see a style in which Italian and strictly Norman elements are really mingled. The great churches of those cities are wholly un-like those of Sicily; but, while some features show us that we are in Italy, while some features even savour of the Saracen, others distinctly carry us away to Caen and Peterborough. ”

“ The palaces and churches of the Norman kings at Palermo and Monreale and Cefalu and Messina are in style simply Saracenic; they were most likely the work of Saracen builders; they were beyond doubt built after Saracenic models. In these buildings, as in those of Aquitaine, the pointed arch is the surest sign of Saracenic influence; it must never be looked on as markin the approach of the Gothic of the North. With that form of art tile pointed style of Sicily has nothing in common. A Sicilian church has nothing in common with a French or an English church ”

“ Its chief result has been, not so much to create anything new as at once to modify and to strengthen what was old, to call up older institutions to a new life under other forms. But whatever it has done it has done silently; there has not been at any time any violent change of one set of institutions for another. ”

“ And no people ever better knew how to be all things to all men. The Norman power in England was founded on full and speedy union with the one nation among whom they found themselves. The Norman power in Sicily was founded on a strong distinction between the ruling people and the many nations which they kept in peace and prosperity by not throwing in 'their lot with any one among them. ”

“ Few buildings, at least few buildings raised Norman architecture in England and in Sicily. in in any reasonable style of architecture which makes use of the arched construction, can be less like one another than the buildings of the Norman kings in England and the buildings of the Norman kings in Sicily. In Sicily the Normans found the two most outwardly civilized of the nations of Europe, the two which had as yet carried the arts to the highest pitch. ”

“ Elsewhere, as the settlers in Gaulbecame French, the emigrants from Gaul became English, Irish, Scottish, and whatever we are to call the present inhabitants of Sicily and southern Italy. Every where they gradually lost themselves among the people whom they conquered ”

“ The new creed, the new speech, the new social system, had taken such deep root that the descendants of the Scandinavian settlers were better fitted to be the armed missionaries of all these things than the neighbours from whom they had borrowed their new possessions. ”