German in element and in substance. Though the grammar changed, it changed integrally, by an internal action, in the same sense as its continental cognates. At the end of three hundred years the conquerors themselves were conquered; their speech became English; and owing to frequent intermarriage, the English blood ended by gaining the predominance over the Norman blood in their veins. The race finally remains Saxon. If the old poetic genius disappears after the Conquest, it is as a river disappears, and flows for a while underground. In five centuries it will emerge once more.

! Warton, History of English Poetry, 1840, 3 vols., preface.

CHAPTER II

The Normans.

I. The protection and character of Feudalism.

II. The Norman invasion; character of the Normans-Contrast with the Saxons -The Normans are French-How they became so-Their taste and architecture Their spirit of inquiry and their literature-Chivalry and amusements-Their tactics and their success.

III. Bent of the French genius-Two principal characteristics; clear and consecutive ideas-Psychological form of French genius-Prosaic histories; lack of colour and passion, ease and discursiveness-Natural logic and clearness, soberness, grace and delicacy, refinement and cynicism-Order and charm-The nature of the beauty and of the ideas which the French have introduced.

IV. The Normans in England-Their position and their tyranny-They implant their literature and language—They forget the same-Learn English by degrees-Gradually English becomes gallicised.

V. They translate French works into English-Opinion of Sir John Mandeville -Layamon, Robert of Gloucester, Robert de Brunne-They imitate in English the French literature-Moral manuals, chansons, fabliaux, Gestes -Brightness, frivolity, and futility of this French literature-Barbarity and ignorance of the feudal civilisation-Geste of Richard Cœur de Lion, and voyages of Sir John Mandeville-Poorness of the literature introduced and implanted in England-Why it has not endured on the Continent or in England.

VI. The Saxons in England-Endurance of the Saxon nation, and formation of the English constitution-Endurance of the Saxon character, and formation of the English character.

VII.-IX. Comparison of the ideal hero in France and England-Fabliaux of Reynard, and ballads of Robin Hood-How the Saxon character makes way for and supports political liberty-Comparison of the condition of the Commons in France and England-Theory of the English constitution, by Sir John Fortescue-How the Saxon constitution makes way for and supports political liberty-Situation of the Church, and precursors of the Reformation in England-Piers Plowman and Wycliffe-How the Saxon character and the situation of the Norman Church make way for religious reform-Incompleteness and importance of the national literature-Why it has not endured.

A

I.

CENTURY and a half had passed on the Continent since, amid the universal decay and dissolution, a new society had been. formed, and new men had risen up. Brave men had at length made a

At

league against the Norsemen and the robbers. They had planted their feet in the soil, and the moving chaos of the general subsidence had become fixed by the effort of their great hearts and of their arms. the mouths of the rivers, in the defiles of the mountains, on the margin of the waste borders, at all perilous passes, they had built their forts, each for himself, each on his own land, each with his faithful band; and they had lived like a scattered but watchful army, camped and confederate in their castles, sword in hand, in front of the enemy. Beneath this discipline a formidable people had been formed, fierce hearts in strong bodies, intolerant of restraint, longing for violent deeds, born for constant warfare because steeped in permanent warfare, heroes and robbers, who, as an escape from their solitude, plunged into adventures, and went, that they might conquer a country or win Paradise, to Sicily, to Portugal, to Spain, to Livonia, to Palestine, to England.

2

II.

3

On the 27th of September 1066, at the mouth of the Somme, there was a great sight to be seen: four hundred large sailing vessels, more than a thousand transports, and sixty thousand men were on the point of embarking. The sun shone splendidly after long rain; trumpets sounded, the cries of this armed multitude rose to heaven; on the far horizon, on the shore, in the wide-spreading river, on the sea which opens out thence broad and shining, masts and sails extended like a forest; the enormous fleet set out wafted by the south wind. The people which it carried were said to have come from Norway, and one might have taken them for kinsmen of the Saxons, with whom they were to fight; but there were with them a multitude of adventurers, crowding from every direction, far and near, from north and south, from Maine and Anjou, from Poitou and Brittany, from Ile-de-France and Flanders, from Aquitaine and Burgundy; and, in short, the expedition itself was French.

1 See, amidst other delineations of their manners, the first accounts of the first Crusade. Godfrey clove a Saracen down to his waist.-In Palestine, a widow was compelled, up to the age of sixty, to marry again, because no fief could remain without a defender.-A Spanish leader said to his exhausted soldiers after a battle, 'You are too weary and too much wounded, but come and fight with me against this other band; the fresh wounds which we shall receive will make us forget those which we have.' At this time, says the General Chronicle of Spain, kings, counts, and nobles, and all the knights, that they might be ever ready, kept their horses in the chamber where they slept with their wives.

For difference in numbers of the fleet and men, see Freeman, Hist. of the Norm. Conq., 3 vols. 1867, iii. 381, 387.-TR.

3 For all the details, see Anglo-Norman Chronicles, iii. 4, as quoted by Aug. Thierry. I have myself seen the locality and the country.

Of three columns of attack at Hastings, two were composed of auxiliaries. Moreover, the chroniclers are not at fault upon this critical point; they agree in stating that England was conquered by Frenchmen.

เ

How comes it that, having kept its name, it had changed its nature? and what series of renovations had made a Latin out of a German people? The reason is, that this people, when they came to Neustria, were neither a national body, nor a pure race. They were but a band; and as such, marrying the women of the country, they introduced foreign blood into their children. They were a Scandinavian band, but deteriorated by all the bold knaves and all the wretched desperadoes who wandered about the conquered country; and as such they received the foreign blood into their veins. Moreover, if the nomadic band was mixed, the settled band was much more so; and peace by its transfusions, like war by its recruits, had changed the character of the primitive blood. When Rollo, having divided the land amongst his followers, hung the thieves and their abettors, people from every country gathered to him. Security, good stern justice, were so rare, that they were enough to re-people a land. He invited strangers, say the old writers, and made one people out of so many folk of different natures.' This assemblage of barbarians, refugees, robbers, immigrants, spoke Romance or French so quickly, that the second Duke, wishing to have his son taught Danish, had to send him to Bayeux, where it was still spoken. The great masses always form the race in the end, and generally the genius and language. Thus this people, so transformed, quickly became polished; the composite race showed itself of a ready genius, far more wary than the Saxons across the Channel, closely resembling their neighbours of Picardy, Champagne, and Ile-. de-France. The Saxons,' says an old writer, 'vied with each other in their drinking feats, and wasted their goods by day and night in feasting, whilst they lived in wretched hovels; the French and Normans, on the other hand, living inexpensively in their fine large houses, were besides studiously refined in their food and careful in their habits.' The former, still weighted by the German phlegm, were gluttons and drunkards, now and then aroused by poetical enthusiasm; the latter, made sprightlier by their transplantation and their alloy, felt the cravings of genius already making themselves manifest. You might see amongst them churches in every village, and monasteries in the cities, towering on high, and built in a style unknown before,' first in Normandy, and presently in England. Taste had come to them at once—that is, the

4

3

1 It was a Rouen fisherman, a soldier of Rollo, who killed the Duke of France at the mouth of the Eure. Hastings, the famous sea-king, was a labourer's son from the neighbourhood of Troyes.

2 'In the tenth century,' says Stendhal, ‘a man wished for two things: 1st, not to be slain; 2d, to have a good leather coat.' See Fontenelle's Chronicle. 3 William of Malmesbury.

4 Pictorial History, i. 615. Churches in London, Sarum, Norwich, Durham, Chichester, Peterborough, Rochester, Hereford, Gloucester, Oxford, etc.-William of Malmesbury.

desire to please the eye, and to express a thought by outward representation, which was quite a new idea: the circular arch was raised on one or on a cluster of columns; elegant mouldings were placed about the windows; the rose window made its appearance, simple yet, like the flower which gives it its name; and the Norman style unfolded itself, original and measured, between the Gothic style, whose richness it foreshadowed, and the Romance style, whose solidity it recalled.

With taste, just as natural and just as quickly, was developed the spirit of inquiry. Nations are like children; with some the tongue is readily loosened, and they comprehend at once; with others it is loosened with difficulty, and they are slow of comprehension. The men before us had educated themselves nimbly, as Frenchmen do. They were the first in France who unravelled the language, fixing it and writing it so well, that to this day we understand their code and their poems. In a century and a half they were so far cultivated as to find the Saxons 'unlettered and rude.' That was the excuse they made for banishing them from the abbeys and all valuable ecclesiastical posts. And, in fact, this excuse was rational, for they instinctively hated gross stupidity. Between the Conquest and the death of King John, they established five hundred and fifty-seven schools in England. Henry Beauclerk, son of the Conqueror, was trained in the sciences; so were Henry II. and his three sons: Richard, the eldest of these, was a poet. Lanfrane, first Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, a subtle logician, ably argued the Real Presence; Anselm, his successor, the first thinker of the age, thought he had discovered a new proof of the existence of God, and tried to make religion philosophical by adopting as his maxim, 'Crede ut intelligas.' The notion was doubtless grand, especially in the eleventh century; and they could not have gone more promptly to work. Of course the science I speak of was but scholastic, and these terrible folios slay more understandings than they confirm. But people must begin as they can; and syllogism, even in Latin, even in theology, is yet an exercise of the mind and a proof of the understanding. Among the continental priests who settled in England, one established a library; another, founder of a school, made the scholars perform the play of Saint Catherine; a third wrote in polished Latin, 'epigrams as pointed as those of Martial.' Such were the recreations of an intelligent race, eager for ideas, of ready and flexible genius, whose clear thought was not overshadowed, like that of the Saxon brain, by drunken conceits, and the vapours of a greedy and well-filled stomach. They loved conversations, tales of adventure. Side by side with their Latin chroniclers, Henry of Huntingdon, William of Malmesbury, men of reflection, who could not only relate, but criticise here and there; there were rhyming chronicles in the vulgar tongue, as those of Geoffroy Gaimar, Bénoît de Sainte-Maure, Robert Wace. Do not imagine that

1 Ordericus Vitalis.