The Scandinavian origin of the famous bastard was
one source of his ambitious designs on England, which
had been so often pillaged by t^e renowned Vikings
or kings of the sea, the rivals of his own ancestors ;
but he was quite ignorant of the language of the
North, which his subjects had never learned. When
RoUo, the founder of the duchy of Normandy, came,
in the beginning of the tenth century, to pay homage
to Charles the Simple, he had hardly pronounced the
first words of the oath, " By Got" than the whole Car-
lovingian court, Germanic also in its origin, burst out
into laughter. He was not understood; it was the
same at Rouen and at Falaise, and the Scandinavian
tongue fell into disuse.
A similar lot would have befallen French in Eng-
land if William had come to govern the English,
but he had only conquered the country in order to
dispose of its wealth. He distributed land, offices, and
honours to his vassals so systematically that the whole
country was enveloped in a close network of which
every knot represented a barony, a county, a Norman
domain. The accession of the Plantagenets introduced
a new influx of greedy strangers, the honoured ances-
tors of the noblest families. In each town, each rural
district, the proprietor, the judge, the civil or military
chief and his vassals constituted a French centre.
But in creating a dominant caste, the Conquest really
reanimated Anglo-Saxon, of which the decadence is
apparent in the eleventh century under Edward the
Confessor. The speech of the vanquished resisted
energetically the language of the conquerors; they



4 1 8 The Indo-Europeati Orgamsm.
