"Every schoolboy" (to quote Macaulay) is familiar with the salient facts in the history of the Normans; their origin in Scandinavia; the seizure of a fertile province in France (wrung from a fainÉant heir of Charlemagne); their extraordinary evolution as the great ethnic force of the period; their absolute mastery of sea and land on every shore, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, and notably their Conquest of England, their perfect fusion with the conquered peoples, and the resulting evolution of the English race. All this is commonplace to every historical reader. But recent investigators, going deeper, have inquired if the laws, institutions, language, and material constructions which mark the pathway of Norman conquest are simply the memorials of an extinct race? Is the Norman still living, still powerful, progressive, and prolific? Or is it an exhausted racial force, pithless, impotent, and effete, with no recognizable evidence of its ancient prepotency in racial struggles for existence in the conflicts of the past? Or, in a word, is it, as Mr. Freeman affirms, a Lost Race? The answer to these questions depends largely upon the answer to other queries, to wit: Was the conquest and sequential settlement of England merely a military invasion? or was it a vast popular migration such as America has witnessed in later times? or was it not in point of fact both—an invasion and a migration, the one following the other?

England was not conquered in a day. The battle of Hastings was decisive, but not conclusive. There was a long and bloody struggle before the invading force. Nearly four years (the duration of our "Civil War") of close, desperate fighting must be encountered before the work of subjugation could be declared complete. Every gap in the ranks of the invader must be filled by the importation of forces from abroad. There was a perpetual draft upon the Continental populations, and a ceaseless "rushing of troops to the front," precisely as in the protracted "War between the States." All Europe had become the recruiting ground of the Conqueror. He was peopling England even in the midst of war; and when the period of "reconstruction" came the stream of migration continued to flow. England was the bourn from which no immigrant returned; and under the military or reconstructive methods of the Conqueror, every invader was permanently planted upon the soil.

Apparently, these considerations furnish a conclusive answer to certain critical objections which shall be cited as we proceed. The facts upon which our conclusions rest are found, chiefly, in the official records of England and in the authentic annals of the Anglo-Norman races.

Here, then, we must infer the existence of an immense multitude of Norman immigrants mingling and eventually fusing with the subjugated race. What has been the result of this intimate commingling of ethnic elements upon English soil? Is it possible that so daring and successful a gamester as the Norman was lost in the shuffle when an auspicious destiny was directing the game? The writer of this paper thinks that he found in the great Library of the British Museum evidence that the Norman people are still a power upon this planet; to be as carefully counted with in the struggles of the future as in the conflicts of the past.

Recent investigation has disclosed the fact that contemporary records in England and Normandy—records of two different countries of seven hundred years' standing, relating to different branches of the same race—are so minutely detailed as to enable the philosophic enquirer "to trace the identity of families and even individuals, in two countries." And this has been done by placing the Great Rolls of the Norman Exchequer in juxtaposition with similar English records of the Twelfth Century. This comparative juxtaposition of contemporary official records of kindred races geographically separate has been made the basis of an alphabetical series of English or Anglo-Norman surnames, which is remarkably full, though necessarily incomplete since the compiler, a very able English scholar, was not in position to enumerate all the families then extant; but it contains five times as many names as the famous Battle Abbey Roll, and conclusively shows that the ancestry of the intellectual aristocracy of England was Norman. The Anglo-Saxon and the Dane were shown to be in a hopeless minority. The enquiry which resulted in the compilation of the alphabetical list was restricted entirely to surnames of a purely Norman origin still existing in England. A third or more of this English population is Norman, directly descended from the Norman migration that preceded, accompanied, or followed the Conquest.

Can evidence be more conclusive that the Norman was neither extinguished nor absorbed by the sluggish Saxon who accepted his yoke?

Mr. Thomas Hardy, in his powerful fiction, "Tess," plainly accepts the conclusiveness of these views. His heroine, though of humble origin, clearly owed her involuntary seductiveness and fatal charm to the transmitted potency of her Norman blood, and it is said that in certain secluded parts of England may be found to-day rural or village populations of the same class gathered about some old Norman castle, donjon, or keep; their Norman descent distinctly visible in their inherited personal traits; a certain characteristic combination of intellect, courage, beauty, and social charm distinguishing them at a glance from the dull, heavy, long-bodied, short-legged, unshapely Saxon of a neighboring town or shire. The same restless blood or the same spirit of adventure which brought the Scandinavian to Normandy and the Norman to English soil, in time drove him to the great settlements beyond the Atlantic Sea—settlements known by the English of to-day as "The States." Their brethren in Ireland followed in great numbers at a later day, and, wherever in recent wars the American flag has been unfurled, "the fighting race" has stood beneath its folds—always in force and always at the front, each with the line of battle beneath his feet and the fire of battle in his eye.

Thither, too, came the indomitable Scot, precisely as he came in the Colonial and Revolutionary days. "The Lowland race," says Mackintosh, "Briton and Norman and Saxon and Dane, gave the world a new man—the Sea Rover, the Border Soldier, the Pioneer.... The folk speech, from Northumberland to the Clyde and the Forth, is Northern English or Lowland Scotch; and the future man of Bannockburn and King's Mountain is beginning to appear. He is the man with the blood of the Sea Rover mixed with the blood of the Borderer, and the soldier, the scholar and thinker, the statesman and lawyer, the trader and farmer." He is the man that crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains as a pioneer. He is the man that sat in the conventions that organized the State, and stood in an unbroken line in all the pioneer battles of his race. The earliest migration of the Anglo-Norman folk was to the Colony of Virginia, as many of the old Virginian surnames, Bacon, Baskerville, Boys (Bois), Cabell, Clay, etc., clearly attest; and the State of Kentucky deriving a large population of English descent from Virginia, we should naturally find a strong infusion of Anglo-Norman blood in the people of this State—an inference fully sustained by the transcript of Anglo-Norman surnames which the writer made from the list that he found in the great Library in London.

The late Professor Shaler is frequently quoted to the effect that ethnological research discloses the existence in Kentucky of the largest body of nearly pure English folk to be found on the face of the globe—that has been separated for two hundred years from the parent English stock. But the facts do not warrant the assumption that the Kentuckian is of purely "Anglo-Saxon" derivation. In him, at least, the blood of the Norman is not wholly lost. He is, however, as Professor Shaler says, an "Elizabethan" Englishman.

We print elsewhere a list of names familiar to Kentuckians, which clearly points to the same general conclusion. With more leisure and space this list might be greatly extended.