chief territorial, political and personal interests of their lives were centred in the island. The constant wars between the Conqueror’s successors tended still further to sever the Normans of the duchy from those of the kingdom, and to drive the latter to unite themselves, at least politically, with their English fellow-subjects. Already in the wars of Rufus and Robert the change of feeling shows itself in the altered use of names; the appellations “Norman” and “French” are reserved exclusively for the duke and his allies, and the supporters of the king of England are all counted together indiscriminately as English. Tinchebray is distinctly reckoned as an English victory. From that moment Normandy was regarded, both by its conquerors and by its French neighbours, as a foreign dependency of the English crown. Historians on both sides of the sea, as they narrate the wars between Henry and Louis of France which arose out of that conquest, unconsciously shadow forth the truth that the reunion of England and Normandy really tended to widen the gulf between them. The greatest French statesman of the day, Suger, abbot of S. Denis, sets the relation between the two nationalities in the most striking light when he justifies the efforts of his own sovereign Louis to drive Henry out of the duchy on the express ground that “Englishmen ought not to rule over Frenchmen, nor French over English.”[51] One of our best authorities on the other side, the son of a Frenchman from Orléans who had come in the train of Roger of Montgomery and married an English wife--though he spent his whole life, from the age of ten years, in the Norman monastery of Saint-Evroul, never ceased to regard his mother’s country as his own, showed his love for it in the most touching expressions of remembrance, and took care to send forth his history to the world under the name of _Orderic the Englishman_. This last was no doubt a somewhat extreme case. Still the fusion between the two races had clearly begun; it was helped on directly by Henry’s whole policy, by the impartial character of his internal administration, by the nature and circumstances of his relations with his chief continental neighbours, France and Anjou; indirectly it was helped on by the sense of a common grievance in the promotion of “strangers”--men born beyond sea--over the heads of both alike. Slight as were the bonds between them at present, they were the first links of a chain which grew stronger year by year; and the king’s last and grandest stroke of policy, the marriage of his daughter and destined successor with the count of Anjou, did more than anything else to quicken the fusion of the two races by driving them to unite against sovereigns who were equally aliens from both. [50] Eadmer, _Hist. Nov._ (Rule), p. 224. [51] Suger, _Vita Ludovici Grossi_, c. 1 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. xii. p. 12).