CHAP. I. the first English conquerors slew, expelled, or enslaved the Nor- the whole nation of the vanquished Britons. It was not

man Con

than the

the Bar

baric con

quests.

In what

the change

really consisted.

quest less such a change as when Goths or Burgundians sat down as a ruling people, preserving their own language and change effected by their own law, and leaving the language and law of Rome to the vanquished Romans. But it was a far greater change than commonly follows on the transfer of a province from one sovereign to another, or even on the forcible acquisition of a crown by an alien dynasty. The conquest of England by William wrought less immediate change than the conquest of Africa by Genseric; it wrought a greater immediate change than the conquest of Sicily by Charles of Anjou. It brought with it not only a new dynasty, but a new nobility; it did not expel or transplant the English nation or any part of it, but it gradually deprived the leading men and families of England of their lands and offices, and thrust them down into a secondary position under alien intruders. It did not at once sweep away the old laws and liberties of the land; but it at once changed the manner and spirit of their administration, and it opened the way for endless later changes in the laws themselves. It did not abolish the English language; but it brought in a new language by its side, which for a while supplanted it as the language of polite intercourse, and which did not yield to the reviving elder tongue till it had affected it by the largest infusion that the vocabulary of one European tongue ever received from another. The most important of the formal legislative changes for changes in legislation, in language, in the system of government and in the tenure of land, were no immediate consequences of the Conquest, no mere innovations of the reign of William. They were the developements of a later age, when the Norman as well as the Englishman found himself under the yoke of a foreign master. The distinct changes in law and government which we commonly

Formal

the most

part of a later date.

EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST.

5

ance of the

Second.

results of

attribute to William the Norman belong, in truth, in by CHAP 1. far the greatest number of cases, to his great-grandson Henry the Angevin. But the reign of William paved the Importway for the reign of Henry; had not William's military reign of conquest gone before, Henry could have found no oppor- Henry the tunity for his administrative revolution. And the imme- Immediate diate changes were, after all, great and weighty, not the the Conless great and weighty because they affected the practical quest mainly condition of the people far more than they affected its practical. written laws and institutions. When a nation is driven to receive a foreigner as its King, when that foreign King divides the highest offices and the greatest estates of the land among his foreign followers, though such a change must be carefully distinguished from changes in the written law, still the change is, for the time, practically the greatest which a nation and its leaders can undergo.

extent of the present

of the ac

quest and its immeThe diate

causes.

I propose then, as a necessary introduction to my nar- Plan and rative of the actual Conquest, to sketch the condition of England and of Normandy at the time when the two History. nations came into contact with each other. This process will involve a summary of the earlier history of both countries. From the beginning of the eleventh Narrative century the history of England and of Normandy be- tual Concomes more and more intermixed, and it will be necessary to tell the story more and more in detail. period of the actual Conquest and its immediate causes, 1042-1066. the reigns of Eadward, of Harold, and of William, will form the centre of the work. The reigns of William's sons will show the character of the Norman government in England, and the amount of immediate change which it really brought with it. With the accession of the Angevin Accession dynasty the purely Norman period comes to an end. Nor- Angevin man and Englishman alike have to struggle for their own dynasty. against the perpetual intrusion of fresh shoals of foreigners, a process almost equivalent to a second Conquest. The

of the

1154.

CHAP. I. natural effect of this struggle was that Norman and Englishman forgot their differences and united in resistReign of ance to the common enemy. Under the great Henry, the Henry the Second. ruler and lawgiver of this second Conquest, the struggle is 1154-1189. for a while delayed, or veils itself under an ecclesiastical

Degrada tion of England under

form. A Prelate, of English birth but of the purest Norman descent, wins the love of the English people in a struggle in which nothing but an unerring instinct could have shown them that their interest was in any way involved. Under Richard, the most thoroughly foreign of all our Kings, the evil reaches its height, and England becomes a mere province of Anjou. As is usual in cases of the First. national discontent, it is not till the worst day is passed 1189-1199. that the counter-revolution openly begins. Under John and his son Henry, the history of England becomes mainly National the history of a struggle between the natives of the land, struggle against of whatever race, and the foreign favourites who devoured foreigners, the substance of both. During the process of this struggle

Richard

1214-1266.

ward the

First.

1265. the Old-English liberties are won back in another form, Close of and the modern constitution of England begins. At last, the subject under Ed- in the person of the great Edward, the work of reconciliation is completed. Norman and Englishman have become 1272-1307. one under the best and greatest of our later Kings, the first who, since the Norman entered our land, either bore a purely English name or followed a purely English policy. Under him England finally assumed those constitutional forms which, with mere changes of detail, she has preserved uninterrupted ever since. The work of the Conquest is now over; the two races are united under a legislation whose outward form and language was in a great measure French, but whose real life was drawn from the truest English sources. Here then our narrative, even as the merest sketch, comes to its natural close. But, for a long time before this point, a mere sketch, pointing out the working of earlier events in their results, will be all

PLAN OF THE WORK.

that will be needed. The kernel of my narrative will contain somewhat less than an hundred years, the latter half of the eleventh century and the earlier years of the twelfth. This will give the history of the actual Conquest, introduced, as is essential to its understanding, by a slighter sketch of the events which led to it, and wound up, as is hardly less essential, by another sketch slighter still of the permanent results which it left behind it.

7

The races and languages of

essentially

the time of the Nor

quest as

they are

now.

CHAPTER II.

FORMATION OF THE KINGDOM OF ENGLAND.

449-975

§ 1. The Heathen period of English Conquest. 449-597.

THE

HE Norman invaders in the eleventh century found in the Isle of Britain, as any modern invader would Britain find now, three nations, speaking three languages, and the same at they found, then as now, one of the three holding a distinct superiority over the whole land. Then, as now, Engman Con- lish, Welsh, and Gaelic were the three distinct tongues of the three races of the island; then, as now, the dominant Teuton knew himself by no name but that of Englishman, and was known to his Celtic neighbour by no name but that of Saxon. The boundaries of the two races and of their languages were already fixed, nearly as they remain at present. The English tongue has made some advances since the eleventh century, but they are small compared with the advances which it had made between the fifth Preserva- century and the eleventh. The main divisions of the local names country, the local names of the vast mass of its towns and villages, were fixed when the Norman came, and England. they have survived, with but little change, to our own day. While a map of France or Germany in the eleventh century is useless for modern purposes, and looks like the picture of another region, a map of England proper in the reign of Victoria hardly differs at all from a map of England proper in the reign of William. The Norman

tion of

and divi

sions in

1