VI.] FOREIGN PROMOTIONS. 1 49 preferment, and, probably, the few names of Englishmen promoted abroad, which history has recorded, might be supplemented with large additions if the records of foreign churches had been kept as carefully as those of our own. And I am not careful to distinguish here between Norman and native Englishmen, because, from the very accession of Henry II, I regard the two elements as forming one people, and indeed, except in the very highest ranks of the baronage, it is impossible now to distinguish whether the English or the Norman strain was the strongest in any given Englishman. And for a similar reason, it is not necessary to include the Norman and Angevin provinces in our calculation. Many of the great families from which Norman bishops were taken, such as the Beaumonts and the Bohuns, were equally powerful on both sides of the channel, and, it may be added, in the Norman kingdom of "Sicily also. Such men as Rotrou of Beaumont, Archbishop of Rouen, and Henry of Beaumont, Bishop of Bayeux, not only were members of a kinship which counted the English Earls of Warwick and Leicester, and the Norman Counts of Meulan as cousins, but were near relations of the Sicilian kings, and knew how to push in the southerTfc. regions the fortunes of their servants : the broken up condition of France left potentates like the Counts of Champagne and Flanders able to treat on an equal footing with the royalties around them, and to govern their own churches quite as freely as the King of France or the Emperor could govern theirs. Hence there was a good deal of international promotion as a matter of course. I shall, however, name only the greatest names : and first take the Englishmen who were promoted abroad. The two most eminent instances in France and the Frenchspeaking countries are the two Johns, John of Poictiers and John- of Salisbury; the latter a,name that is so in