Kings from Normandy were followed by kings from Anjou.

But whether under Norman or Angevin Englishmen were a subject race, conquered and ruled by men of strange blood and of strange speech.

And yet it was in these years of subjection that England first became really England.

Provincial differences were finally crushed into national unity by the pressure of the stranger.

The firm government of her foreign kings secured the land a long and almost unbroken peace in which the new nation grew to a sense of its oneness, and this consciousness was strengthened by the political ability which in Henry the First gave it administrative order and in Henry the Second built up the fabric of its law.