until quite recent years has his fundamental untrustworthiness been fully established, and with it has vanished all hope of any detailed knowledge of early Norman history. Only with the eleventh century do we reach a solid foundation of annals and charters in the reigns of the princes whom Dudo seeks to glorify in the person of their predecessors. And when we reach this period, the heroic age of conquest and settlement is over, and the Normans have become much as other Frenchmen. At this point the fundamental question forces itself upon us, how far was Normandy affected by Scandinavian influences? What in race and language, in law and custom, was the contribution of the north to Normandy? And the answer must be that in most respects the tangible contribution was slight. Whatever may have been the state of affairs in the age of colonization and settlement, by the century which followed the Normans had become to a surprising degree absorbed by their environment. It is now generally admitted, says Professor Maitland,[21] that for at least half a century before the battle of Hastings, the Normans were Frenchmen, French in their language, French in their law, proud indeed of their past history, very ready to fight against other Frenchmen if Norman home-rule was endangered, but still Frenchmen, who regarded Normandy as a member of the state or congeries of states that owed service, we can hardly say obedience, to the king at Paris. Their spoken language was French, their written language was Latin, but the Latin of France; the style of their legal documents was the style of the French chancery; very few of the technical terms of their law were of Scandinavian origin. When at length the ‘custom’ of Normandy appears in writing, it takes its place among other French customs, and this although for a long time past Normandy has formed one of the dominions of a prince, between whom and the king of the French there has been little love and frequent war; and the peculiar characteristics which mark off the custom of Normandy from other French customs seem due much rather to the legislation of Henry of Anjou than to any Scandinavian tradition. The law of Normandy was by this time Frankish, and its speech was French. Even the second duke, William Longsword, found it necessary to send his son to Bayeux to learn Norse, for it was no longer spoken at Rouen. And in the French of Normandy, the Norman dialect, the Scandinavian element is astonishingly small, as careful students of the local _patois_ tell us. Only in one department of life, the life of the sea, is any considerable Scandinavian influence discernible, and the historian of the French navy, Bourel de la Roncière, has some striking pages on the survivals of the language of the Norse Vikings in the daily speech of the French sailor and fisherman.