Normandy and the Normans
There is no understanding a country unless one gets to know the nature
of its sub-units. In some way not easy to comprehend, impossible to
define, and yet very manifest, each of the great national organisms of
which Christendom is built up is itself a body of many regions whose
differences and interaction endow it with a corporate life. No one could
understand the past of England who did not grasp the local genius of the
counties--Lancashire, cut off eastward by the Pennines, southward by the
belt of marsh, with no natural entry save by the gate of Stockport;
Sussex, which was and is a bishopric and a kingdom; Kent, Devon, the
East Anglian meres. No one could (or does) understand modern England who
does not see its sub-units to have become by now the great industrial
towns, or who fails to seize the spirit of each group of such
towns--with London lying isolated in the south, a negative to the rest.
France is built of such sub-units: it is the peculiarity of French
development that these are not small territories mainly of an average
extent with government answerable in a long day's ride to one centre,
such as most English counties are; nor city States such as form the
piles upon which the structure of Italy has been raised; nor kingdoms
such as coalesced to reform the Spanish people; but _provinces_,
differing greatly in area, from little plains enclosed, like the
Rousillon, to great stretches of landscape succeeding landscape like the
Bourbonnais or the Perigord.
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