Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/596

550 NORMANS tinguislied from the older inhabitants, Greek and Saracen. The Norman conquest of England was at the moment a curse ; the Norman conquest of Sicily was at the moment a blessing. But the gradual and indirect results of the Norman conquest of England are easily to be seen to this day, and they have been largely, though indirectly, results for good. 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. In Sicily and southern Italy there is hardly any visible Norman influence, except the great historic fact which we may call the creation of Sicily and southern Italy in their modern sense. The coming of the Norman ruled that these lands should be neither Saracen nor Greek, nor yet Italian in the same sense as northern Italy, but that they should politically belong to the same group of states as the kingdoms and principalities of feudal Europe. William assuredly did not create the kingdom of England ; Roger assuredly did create the kingdom of Sicily. And yet, notwithstanding all this, and partly because of all this, real and distinct Norman influence has been far more extensive and far more abiding in England than it has been in Sicily. In Sicily then the circumstances of the conquest led the Norman settlers to remain far more distinct from the older races of the land than they did in England, and in the end to lose themselves, not in those older races of the land, but in the settlers of other races who accompanied and followed them. So far as there ever was a Sicilian nation at all, it might be said to be called into being by the emperor-king Frederick II. In his day a Latin element finally triumphed ; but it was not a Norman or French- speaking element of any kind. The speech of the Lom bards at last got the better of Greek, Arabic, and French ; how far its ascendency can have been built on any survival of an earlier Latin speech which had lived on alongside of Greek and Arabic this is not the place to inquire. Use of The use of language and nomenclature during the time Lan- of Norman rule in the two countries forms a remarkable guages in con t ra st, and illustrates the circumstances of the two as and in t h ev ^ ave J ust keen sketched. The chroniclers of the Sicily, conquest of Apulia and Sicily use the Norman name in every page as the name of the followers of the conquerors from Hauteville. It was the natural name for a body of men who must, by the time the conquest of Sicily was over, have been very mixed, but whose kernel was Nor man, whose strength and feelings and traditions all came from a Norman source. But if we turn to Hugo Falcandus, the historian of Sicily in the 12th century, the Norman name is hardly found, unless when it is used historically to point out (as in Muratori, vii. 260) that the royal house of Sicily was of Norman descent. Of the various " Sicilian populi," we hear of Greeks, Saracens, Lombards, sometimes of Franci, for by that time there were many French- speaking settlers in Sicily who were not of Norman descent. There is a distinction between Christians and Saracens ; among Christians there seems to be again a distinction between Greeks and Latins, though perhaps without any distinct use of the Latin name ; there is again a further distinction between "Lombardi" and "Franci"; but Nor mans, as a separate class, do not appear. In England there is no room for such subtleties. The narratives of the con quest of England use both the Norman and the French names to express the followers of William. In the English chronicles " French " is the only name used. It appears also in the Bayeux Tapestry, and it is the only word used when any legal distinction had to be drawn between classes of men in the English kingdom. " Franci " and " Angli " are often opposed in Domesday and other documents, and the formula went on in charters long after all real distinction had passed away. That is to say, there were several purposes for which it was convenient to distinguish " English " and " French " the last name taking in all the followers of the Conqueror ; there were no purposes for which there was any need to distinguish Normans as such, either from the general mass of the people or from others who spoke the French tongue. We can see also that, though several languages were in use in England during the time of Nor man rule, yet England was not a land of many languages in the same sense in which Sicily was. In the 12th cen tury three languages were certainly spoken in London ; yet London could not call itself the "city of threefold speech," as Palermo did. English, French, Latin, were all in use in England ; but the distinction was rather that they were used for three different purposes than that they were used by three distinct races or even classes. No doubt there was a class that knew only English ; there may have been a much smaller class that knew only French ; any man who pretended to high cultivation would speak all as a matter of course ; Bishop Gilbert Foliot, for instance, was eloquent in all three. But in Sicily we see the quite different phenomenon of three, four, five classes of men living side by side, each keeping its own nationality and speaking its own tongue. If a man of one people knew the speech of any of the others, he knew it strictly as a foreign language. Before the Norman Conquest England had two official tongues ; documents were drawn up sometimes in English, sometimes in Latin, now and then in both. And the same usage went on after the Conquest; the use of English becomes gradually rarer, and dies out under the first Angevins, but it is in favour of Latin that it dies out. French, the language which the Normans brought with them, did not become an official language in England till after strictly Norman rule had passed away. French documents are unknown till the days of French fashion had come in, that is, till deep in the 1 3th century. So it was in Sicily also ; of all the tongues of Sicily French was the most needful in the king s court ("Francorum lingua quae maxime necessaria esset in curia," says Hugo Falcandus, 321) ; but it was not an official tongue. The three tongues of Palermo are Greek, Arabic, and Latin. King Roger s clock is commemorated in all three. Documents were drawn up in such and so many of these tongues as was convenient for the parties con cerned ; not a few private documents add a fourth tongue, and are drawn up in Greek, Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew. In neither case is the actual speech of the conquerors one of the tongues in formal use. French, as a separate tongue from Latin, already existed as a literary speech, and no people had done more than the Normans to spread it as a literary speech, in both prose and verse. But neither in England nor in Sicily did official formalism acknow ledge even French, much less Italian, as a fit tongue for solemn documents. In England, English, French, Latin, were the three tongues of a single nation ; they were its vulgar, its courtly, and its learned speeches, of which three the courtly was fast giving way to the vulgar. In Sicily, Greek, Arabic, Latin and its children, were the tongues of distinct nations ; French might be the politest speech, but neither Greek nor Arabic could be set down as a vulgar tongue, Arabic even less than Greek. The different positions then which the conquering Nor- Normans man took in his two great conquests of England and of Sicily in Sc amply illustrate the way in which he could adapt himself au to any circumstances in which he found himself, the way in which he could adopt whatever suited his purpose in the institutions of any other people, the way in which he commonly lost his national being in that of some other people. From England moreover he spread into Scotland,