difficulty in a land largely rural and open to barbarian invasion, but established firmly by the sixth century and already reënforced by monastic foundations which were to be the centres of faith and culture to a later age. Finally, the framework of political geography, resting on the Roman cities which with some modifications were perpetuated as the dioceses of the mediæval church, and connected by Roman roads which remained until modern times the great highways of local communication. A beginning was also made in the direction of separate organization when, toward the close of the fourth century, these districts of the northwest are for the first time set off by themselves as an administrative area, the province of _Lugdunensis Secunda_, which coincides with later Normandy. Then, as regularly throughout Gaul, the civil province becomes the ecclesiastical province, centring about its oldest church, Rouen, and the province of the archbishop of Rouen perpetuates the boundaries of the political area after the political authority passed away, and carries over to the Middle Ages the outline of the Roman organization. In all this process there is nothing particularly different from what took place throughout the greater part of northern Gaul, but the results were fundamental for Normandy and for the whole of Norman history. A new epoch begins with the coming of the Northmen in the early tenth century, as a result of which Normandy was differentiated from the rest of France and carried into the broader currents of European history. At first an outpost of the Scandinavian north, its relations soon shifted as it bred the conquerors of England and Sicily. The Normans of the eleventh century, Henry Adams maintains, stood more fully in the centre of the world’s history than their English descendants ever did. They “were a part, and a great part, of the Church, of France, and of Europe.” The Popes leaned on them, at times heavily. By the conquest of England the “Norman dukes cast the kings of France into the shade.... Normans were everywhere in 1066, and everywhere in the lead of their age.”[10] A century later Normans ruled half of Italy, two thirds of France, and the whole of England; and they had made a beginning on Ireland and Scotland. No one can write of European affairs throughout this whole period without giving a large place to the Normans and their doings; while events like the conquests of England and Ireland changed the course of history.