A Norman minstrel named Taillefer (Hew-iron) began the battle; he rode up to the English line singing the Song of Roland, Charles the Great's paladin, and tossing his sword and lance high in the air and catching them as they fell; he wounded two Englishmen before he was killed. The Norman knights, when they found the archers could make no impression, charged up the hill, calling, “God help us! God help us!" and tried to break the line. But the English kept the pale, cheering and shouting, "Out! out! Holy Cross! God Almighty!" cutting down horse and man with their twohanded axes and tumbling them backward down the slope. After two attacks the Normans faltered, and there was a cry that the duke was slain, but he threw back his helmet to show his face, and rallied his men for a third onslaught. The pale was now broken on the right, and in the centre William fought his way by main strength to the standards, where Gurth killed his horse with a spear-cast and fell by the duke's sword. Leofwine also fell, but the guard and main body were still able to hold their own. Then, as a last hope, William gave the signal for a feigned flight, and the English on the right broke their ranks, against Harold's orders, and, cheering loudly, rushed after the horsemen down the hill. On the flats the Normans turned and cut them to pieces. Harold's right wing being destroyed, the Normans could now get on the hill-top and fight him on level ground. But they could not break his guard till the duke, seeing that the English had slung their shields round their necks that they might use their axes more freely, brought up his archers and ordered them to shoot high so that the arrows might fall on the English from above. One struck Harold in the right eye, and he fell at the foot of his standard. Eustace of Boulogne with a few knights, who had sworn to take the standards, now rushed forward, beat down the Fighting Man and the Golden Dragon, and slew the dying Harold, one of them being brutal enough to mangle his body. The guards now gave way slowly, followed by the victorious Normans, till they came to a piece of swampy ground by a steep part of the hill, where the knights' horses being useless, the Englishmen turned to bay and killed a great number of their pursuers. But their leaders were gone, and no effort could now avail to retrieve the lost battle. William checked the pursuit, and pitching his tent where Harold's standard had stood, halted his army for the night. Next day Eadgyth Swanneck, a lady whom the dead king had loved, coming with other Englishwomen to search for their dead, found Harold's

disfigured corpse under a heap of dead. William had it buried under a stone heap on the cliff at Hastings, saying that it was fit sepulchre for him who had guarded his land so well while he lived. But afterwards the canons of Waltham Holy Cross, the minster Harold had endowed, took it home with them and buried it, but no man now knows where the last old English king lies.

State of Eng

land at the Conquest. The

land.

7. The state of England on the eve of the Norman Conquest is known to us from Domesday Book (see p. 68), which shows us a little nation of two million souls, three-fourths of whom are living by the land they till, the rest being townsfolk, gentry, and churchmen. The eastern and southern shires, especially Kent, are the best tilled, richest, and most thickly peopled. There the downs and wold gave fine pasturage for sheep, the hursts, shaws, and copses on the hill shoulders affording fattening grounds for swine, and the hollows at the downs' foot, the river flats, and low gravel hills were the best and easiest land to plough and crop. Far the largest part of the country is forest, that is, uncleared and undrained moor, wood, or fen. If we take one of the 9250 villages or manors which are scattered over the country, it will be found that three-fifths of the land of each is waste untilled common land, one-fifth pasture, and one-fifth (half fallow each year under their rude system of farming) under plough, so that there was ample room for population to increase.

The towns.

8. Ever since Alfred's days the towns had been getting richer and more important as trading centres, fishing stations, and bulwarks against the Danes. And by the settlement of these energetic sailors they had grown still further. An English borough was nothing more than a walled group of villages or parishes, each with its village-moot and officers, while the borough court was a hundred-moot. A city or port was like a walled shire, its husting presided over by the port-reeve, being a folk-moot; while its wards, each with its own alderman and ward-moot, were hundreds, each of course including two or three parishes. The burghers (householders) held all power, and made their own bylaws in their hustings and ward-moots, but the towns were practically managed by the Merchant Gild, or Association of Traders, to which nearly every burgher belonged, for the purpose of protecting, furthering, and regulating the commerce and manufactures of the place. The principal towns (London, Bristol, Norwich, Lincoln, Oxford, York, Exeter, and Winchester) were the exchanges,

inlets and outlets of the country's trade, whence imports from abroad (wine, silk, oil, ivory, glass, sulphur, dyes, gold and silver) were distributed about the country, while slaves, metals, and wool were taken to foreign lands in return. A great deal of trade was done at the great annual fairs, especially Winchester, Stourbridge, and Abingdon. It should be noticed that from the days of Ethelred London was bidding fair to become the capital of England, being more central, easier of access, and richer than Winchester. 9. The old village system of communal ownership, such as still holds in Russia, having long broken Police and gilds. down in England, and a man's family having slight hold or right over him, it was necessary to devise some other way of making people responsible for crimes committed among them. This was done by the system of frank- or peace-pledge, or frith-borrow, by which the country freeholders were grouped into sets of ten [tithings] under a tenth-head, each man in the tithing being obliged to act as perpetual bailsman for the other nine, producing the offender to the hundred-elder if a crime was committed, or paying the fine or were-gild for him. Landless men were obliged to find a lord whose frith-borrow or peace-pledge they would be in.

Besides the merchant gilds in the towns, there was in nearly every big village a gild like our Benefit Societies or Farmers' Associations, formed for mutual help and protection, and for feeding the poor and providing burial and masses for dead members. Once a year, on the day of the patron saint of the gild, there was a gild-feast, when all the members, men and women, went to church in the morning in procession, passed the day in merry-making, and had a great dinner together, at which the fines, payable in ale, for the year were drunk.

10. Not only were changes made in the speech of North England by the new words brought in by the Language. Danes, but in other ways the English tongue altered greatly in the eleventh century, getting rid of many old forms and inflexions, breaking down the old endings a, u,i, and an, un, on into e and en (as in modern German), and thereby being forced to use a more modern syntax. Of course the Norman invasion helped this very much, as the gentry speaking French and the learned Latin, left English to be a mere people's speech, neither written nor used by cultivated men. The two following specimens, of the middle and end of the century, will show some of these changes :

.

a. That wolde thyncan wundorlic ælcum men the on That would think (seem] wondrous to-any man that in Englalande wæs gif ænig man ær tham sæde that hit swa England was if any man ere to-them said that it SO gewurthan weolde · for tham the he was ær to tham swythe happen would • because he was ere to such a pitch upahafen swylce he weolde thæs cynges and ealles as that he wielded the king and all Englalandes and his sunan wæron eorlas and thæs cynges England and his sons were earls and the king's dyrlingas and his dohtor thæm cynge beweddod and darlings and his daughter to-the king wedded beawnod. (Of Godwine's Outlawry, Old English Chronicle.) bound-by-law.

raised

b. Reowlic thing he dyde thing he did

Rueful

and

and reowlicor him

and more-ruefully to-him gelamp. Hu reowlicor? him geyfelade and that him it-happened. How more-rueful? to-him it-went-ill

and that to-him

stranglice églade. Hwæt mæg ic teollan? Se scearpa death strongly ailed. What may I tell? The sharp death the ne for let ne rice menn ne heane. Seo hine genam. that does-not-leave nor rich men nor high. It him took. (Of King William's Death, Old English Chronicle.)

11. The first six centuries of old English history is, as we have seen, full of cruel wars, with which our Summary of old story has been mainly taken up, but it must be English history. remembered that in the early rough times of a nation's life, unless it can fight well it has but a poor chance of living at all in the struggle going on around it. And we must also recollect that behind the fighting kings and earls of whom we hear, there were always the wise and gentle churchman and the sturdy hard-working yeoman, who go on with their work in silence, but whose labour is seen in the advances their country had made. A little knot of tribes colonizing a new land at the point of the sword has become a great nation, under the rule of a single king. Into this nation a second body of immigrants (the Danes) has been quietly absorbed. The whole island obeys the behests of the English king as Emperor of Britain; while by their belonging to the church system of Western Europe the English of this "Empire outside the world" have entered upon their career as a family of the European State-group, and taken a place in the world's history. Six centuries hardly seem too long for such progress as this.

BOOK II.

THE NORMAN KINGS.

king, 1066.

CHAPTER I.

William the Conqueror, 1066–1087.

1. While William was still lying in the south resting his William chosen army and awaiting fresh troops, Eadwine and Morkere came to London, and the Wise Men met and chose the child Eadgar Etheling, Edward's nephew, for king. Whereupon the two earls, whether from disgust or fear, went north again, leaving the city and the south of England to its fate. The duke had now got Dover, Canterbury, and Winchester, and was ready to move; so marching up the Thames past London, ravaging the land as he went, he crossed it at Wallingford and turned east so as to cut off all help from the north. Seeing no hope left Eadgar, the archbishop and the best men of London went to him at Berkhamstead and "bowed to him for need." And at Westminster on Midwinter Day, in the midst of an uproar (caused by the Norman soldiers taking the cheers of the English for the beginning of an attack on them and the king), Ealdred of York hallowed him king, making him swear before he set the crown on his head that he would keep his people as well as ever the best king before him had if they would be true to him. The landholders then came to him, paid dues, and bought back their land. But the lands of those that had fallen in fight against him or fled from England were given to Normans and Frenchmen, many of whom also were married to English heiresses and widows. But no new laws were made, the old courts were kept up, and in all things Edward's ways were followed.