This impossible old idea about a German Austrasia has serious consequences in Mr. Wells’s History, for it makes him still talk of the two divisions as the origins of modern France and Germany; just as they used to talk in 1870! Nowadays that kind of thing won’t do. Nor is it tolerable to speak of Mercia as “holding out stoutly against the priests and for the ancient Faith and ways.” We leave all that kind of thing to John Richard Green. The conversion of Mercia naturally came later than that of Kent and Northumbria because it lay further inland, but Penda of Mercia marched with the army of Christian Welsh Princes, and Sussex and the Isle of Wight were evangelized much later than Mercia. To talk of Pepin of Heristal as “conquering Neustria” has been inadmissible for the better part of fifty years. And it is still wilder to speak of “but small racial or social difference” between the “Anglo-Saxon, Jute, or Dane.” The civilized Christian England of the Dark Ages was utterly different socially, and very different racially, from the Pagan, Saxon or Scandinavian; it felt so and it said so the whole time. The languages were similar, though the similarity can be exaggerated: the mind was different. As for the “Normans,” if the word is used in the sense of the Northmen of the old pirate raids, then they were simply Scandinavians; but used as it is on page 400, after mention of the Conquest, it is quite wrong. The Norman of the Conquest was a Frenchman, much like any other—short, stocky, round-headed, and with all the French violence, all the French vice of partizanship and fighting against one’s neighbour, all the French instinct for simple mechanical order in building and measurement and legal system, and much of the French fun. Even the families of known Scandinavian origin were by that time French. William the Conqueror himself had but one-sixteenth of Scandinavian blood.