of Gaul, which still bears the name of Normandy.
It was not merely by extreme valour and ready subordination to military discipline, that the Normans were preeminent among all the conquering races of the Gothic stock, but also by an instinctive faculty of appreciating and adopting the superior civilizations which they encountered. Thus Duke Rollo and his Scandinavian warriors readily embraced the creed, the language, the laws and the arts, which France, in those troubled and evil times with which the Capetian dynasty commenced, still inherited from Imperial Rome and Imperial Charlemagne. "Ils adoptèrent les usages, les devoirs, la subordination que les capitulaires des empereurs et les rois avoient institués. Mais ce qu'ils apportèrent dans l'application de ces lois, ce fut l'esprit de vie, l'esprit de liberté, l'habitude de la subordination militaire, et l'intelligence d'un état politique qui conciliât la sureté de tous avec l'independance de chacun."[1] So also in all chivalric feelings, in enthusiastic religious zeal, in almost idolatrous respect to females of gentle birth, in generous fondness for the nascent poetry of the time, in a keen intellectual relish for subtle thought and disputation, in a taste for architectural magnificence, and all courtly refinement and page-
