Then began a new governmental era, one having no parallel in our history since. The Saxon had been in most recent supremacy. Wealth and power passed from Saxon to Norman hands. Had the Duchy of Normandy been large enough to form the centre of its ruler's activities, England, like the Britain of the past, would have become a dependency of a foreign power. Two factors prevented: England, because of its size and of its separation from the continent was the more valued possession of the two; and William and his followers, although considering themselves greatly superior in culture and breeding, were really of the same race as the men they conquered, and hence easily assimilated with them. Had this been an invasion of people, that is, of men with their wives and children--it must have meant extermination of the Angles, Saxons, and Danes, either in war or in economic strife. But no such colonizing force was at work. The lords of England were reduced {6} to peasantry, and the peasants of whatever origin kept on about their affairs. In time the new nobility was no longer foreign. Neither a dependency, nor a colony, England gradually absorbed the Normans and all the importance of Normandy. From this assimilation England rose independent and a unit. The Normans, it has been said, crushed the Angles, Danes, and Saxons into one people.[6-1] Just as inexorably were the Normans themselves fused into the common mass-- "Thus from a mixture of all kinds began, That heterogeneous thing, an Englishman: . . . The silent nations undistinguish'd fall, An Englishman's the common name for all. Fate jumbled them together, God knows how; Whate'er they were, they're true-born English now."[6-2] Out of the vigour and strength that resulted have risen the Pan-Angles; and no foreign power since then has conquered or ruled them in England or elsewhere. With several governmental units co-ordinated to no central authority, England had been devastated and had been unable to repel invasions. These local powers were now combined under a strong unitary government. So efficient did it prove for many generations, that Pan-Angles as a whole are only now realising its limitations. For five centuries no change in circumstances warranted the consideration of any other.