The results of the Conquest, too, are of chief significance for the conquered. For the Normans the immediate effect was a great opportunity for expansion in every department of life. There was work for the warrior in completing the subjugation of the land, for the organizer and statesman in the new adjustments of central and local government, for the prelate in bringing his new diocese into line with the practice of the church on the Continent, for the monks to found new priories and administer the new lands which their monasteries now received beyond the Channel. The Norman townsman and the Norman merchant followed hard upon the Norman armies, in the Norman colony in London, in the traders of the ports, in the boroughs of the western border. In part, of course, the change was simply the replacing of one set of persons by another, putting a Norman archbishop in place of Stigand at Canterbury, spreading over the map the Montgomeries and Percies, the Mowbrays and the Mortimers and scores of other household names of English history; but it was also a work of readjustment and reorganization which required all the Norman gift for constructive work. A certain _élan_ passes through Norman life and reflects itself in Norman literature, as the Normans become more conscious of the glory of their achievements and the greatness of their new empire. England had become an appendage to Normandy, and men did not yet see that the relation would soon be reversed. For England, the Norman Conquest determined permanently the orientation of English politics and English culture. Geographically belonging, with the Scandinavian countries, to the outlying lands of Europe, the British Isles had been in serious danger of sharing their remoteness from the general movements of European life and drifting into the back waters of history. The union with Normandy turned England southward and brought it at once into the full current of European affairs--political entanglements, ecclesiastical connections, cultural influences. England became a part of France and thus entered fully into the life of the world to which France belonged. It received the speech of France, the literature of France, and the art of France; its law became in large measure Frankish, its institutions more completely feudal. Yet the connection with France ran through Normandy, and the French influence took on Norman forms. Most of all was this true in the field in which the Norman excelled, that of government: English feudalism was Norman feudalism, in which the barons were weak and the central power strong, and it was the heavy hand of Norman kingship that turned the loose and disintegrating Anglo-Saxon state into the English nation. England was Europeanized only at the price of being Normanized.