Only at one point did the old Normandy really maintain itself against the forces of centralization, namely in the Channel Islands, those “bits of France fallen into the sea and picked up by England,” as Victor Hugo calls them. These were not conquered by Philip or his successors, and have remained from that day to this attached to the English crown. They still have their _baillis_ and _vicomtes_, their knights’ fees and feudal modes of tenure. The Norman dialect is still their language; the _Coutume de Normandie_ is still the basis of their law; and one may still hear, in disputes concerning property in Jersey and Guernsey, the old cry of _haro_ which preserves one of the most archaic features of Norman procedure. * * * * * After all is said, it is in England that the most permanent work of the Normans survives. They created the English central government and impressed upon it their conceptions of order and of law. Their feudalism permeated English society; their customs shaped much of English jurisprudence; their kings and nobles were the dominant class in English government. Freeman could never understand those who claimed that, as he declared, “we English are not ourselves but somebody else.” The fact, however, remains that in a mixed race--and all races are to some extent mixed--there is no such thing as ‘ourselves’; and if the numerical preponderance in the English people is largely that of pre-Norman elements, the Norman strain has exerted an influence out of all proportion to its numerical strength. Without William the Conqueror and Henry II the English would not be ‘themselves,’ whatever else they might have become. For a more specific illustration let us come back once more to the jury. If the jury died out in Normandy, it survived in England, where it flourished in the fertile soil of the popular local courts. It spread to the British colonies and to the United States; it has in recent times been reintroduced on the Continent. But it is still the same fundamental institution, bound by direct continuity with the old Frankish procedure through the Norman inquests of the twelfth century. Wherever the twelve good men and true are gathered together, we can see the juries of Henry II behind them. In such matters the Norman influence is thus as wide as the common law; we are all heirs of the early Normans. As Freeman well says: “We can never be as if the Norman had never come among us. We ever bear about us the signs of his presence. Our colonists have carried those signs with them into distant lands, to remind men that settlers in America and Australia came from a land which the Norman once entered as a conqueror.”[48] * * * * *