As a preliminary to discussing the influence of Regno institutions and culture on France, some picture must be drawn of the kind of life led by the French who came down to the Regno, in order to assess what their opportunities were for meeting the locals or understanding the new world in which they found themselves. Clearly such opportunities were very unequally distributed. Those who had the richest cultural exchanges with locals were those who were least likely to return to France, because they had married local women and settled down in one of the towns of the Regno. Therefore they could not be very useful conduits for influence, the subject of this book. On the other hand, the majority of fighting men, who came down only for a year or two, had much more limited intercourse with the locals; they necessarily formed their impressions on a rather partial view of society. Only a small number of lay and ecclesiastical office-holders had the chance to penetrate quite deeply into this intriguingly different political, cultural or ecclesiastical set-up. But that small number comprised men and women who wielded authority when they returned to France.