Their religious and artistic feeling found expression in that development of Romanesque architecture which we know as Norman and which has given so many famous buildings not only to Normandy but to England, to Sicily and to Southern Italy generally. In literature the Norman-French _trouvères_ did much towards popularising the romances of war and adventure which play so important a part in medieval literature, and when they settled in England it was largely due to Anglo-Norman poets that 'the matter of Britain' became one of the great subjects of romance for all time. In its social organisation Normandy seems speedily to have been feudalised. Rollo divided the land among a comparatively small number of large landholders and the system of land tenure was quite different from that in the English Danelagh with its large number of small freeholders. On the other hand it was probably due to Norse traditions of personal freedom that serfdom disappeared earlier in Normandy than in any other of the French provinces. Trade and commerce were fostered here as everywhere by the Vikings. It was the Normans who first taught the French to become a power at sea, many French naval terms are of Norman origin and from the Norman province have come some of France's greatest sea-captains. The Vikings like the Franks before them threw off their old speech and submitted to the all-embracing power of Latin civilisation, and the result was a race endowed with vigorous personality, untiring activity, and the instinct for ruling men. The Normans may have become largely French but they lost none of their old enterprise and spirit of adventure. In the 11th century they conquered England and founded great kingdoms for themselves in Sicily and South Italy. No Viking stock was more vigorous than that which resulted from the grafting of Gallo-Latin culture on the ruder civilisation of the Teutonic north. Their influence on France as a whole is not nearly as great as the influence of their kinsmen in England, probably because English government was centralised (under Norman rule) much sooner than French government, and their influence was thus able to make itself felt outside the actual districts in which they settled. The settlement of Normandy helped however towards the consolidation of power in the hands of Charles the Bald and his successors, much as the settlement of the Danelagh helped in establishing the final supremacy of Wessex.