The land is not the whole of nature’s gift to Normandy; we must also take account of the sea, of those who came by sea and those who went down to the sea in ships; and history tells us of another type of Norman, those giants of an elder day who, as one of their descendants has said, “found the seas too narrow and the land too tame.” The men who subdued England and Sicily, who discovered the Canaries and penetrated to the Mississippi, who colonized Quebec and ruled the Isle of France, were no stay-at-homes, no cautious landsmen interested in boundaries and inheritances and vain strivings about the law. Warriors and adventurers in untamed lands and upon uncharted seas, they were organizers of states and rulers of peoples, and it is their work which gives Normandy its chief claim upon the attention of the student of general history. These are the Normans of history and the Normans of romance. Listen to the earliest characterizations of them which have reached us from the south, as a monk of the eleventh century, Aimé of Monte Cassino, sets out to recount the deeds of the southern Normans, _fortissime gent_ who have spread themselves over the earth, ever leaving small things to acquire greater, unwilling to serve, but seeking to have every one in subjection;[4] or as his contemporary, Geoffrey Malaterra, himself very likely of Norman origin, describes this cunning and revengeful race, despising their own inheritance in the hope of winning a greater elsewhere, eager for gain and eager for power, quick to imitate whatever they see, at once lavish and greedy; given to hunting and hawking and delighting in horses and accoutrements and fine clothing, yet ready when occasion demands to bear labor and hunger and cold; skilful in flattery and the use of fine words, but unbridled unless held down firmly by the yoke of justice.[5] Turn then to the northern writers of the following century: William of Malmesbury, who describes the fierce onslaughts of the Normans, inured to war and scarcely able to live without it, their stratagems and breaches of faith and their envy of both equals and superiors;[6] or the English monk Ordericus, who spent his life among them in Normandy and who says:-- The race of the Normans is unconquered and ready for any wild deed unless restrained by a strong ruler. In whatever gathering they find themselves they always seek to dominate, and in the heat of their ambition they are often led to violate their obligations. All this the French and Bretons and Flemings and other neighbors have frequently felt; this the Italians and the Lombards, the Angles and Saxons, have also learned to their undoing.[7]