evening was well come they had made themselves a strong fort. And they lighted fires and cooked food, and the duke and his barons and knights sat down to eat; and they all ate and drank plentifully and rejoiced that they were come to land.

16. When the duke came forth of his ship he fell on his hands to the ground, and there rose a great cry, for all said it was an evil sign; but he cried aloud: "Lords, I have seized the land with my two hands, and will never yield it. All is ours." Then a man ran to land and laid his hand upon a cottage, and took a handful of the thatch, and returned to the duke. "Sir," said he, "take seizin of the land; yours is the land without doubt." Then the duke commanded the mariners to draw all the ships to land and pierce holes in them and break them to pieces, for they should never return by the way they had come. "Belt and Spur," Stories of the Old Knights.

XLI-THE NORMAN CONQUEST.

1. POOR old Edward the Confessor, holy, weak, and sad, lay in his new choir of Westminster-where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest. The crowned ascetic had left no heir behind. England seemed as a corpse, to which all the eagles might gather together; and the South-English, in their utter need, had chosen for their king the ablest, and it may be the justest, man in Britain-Earl Harold Godwinson himself, like half the upper classes of England then, of all-dominant Norse blood; for his mother was a Danish princess. 2. Then out of Norway, with a mighty host, came

Harold Hardraade, taller than all men, the ideal Viking of his time. He had been away to Russia to King Jaroslaf; he had been in the Emperor's Varanger guard at Constantinople—and, it was whispered, had slain a lion. there with his bare hands; he had carved his name and his comrades' in Runic characters-if you go to Venice you may see them at this day—on the loins of the great marble lion, which stood in his time not in Venice but in Athens. And now, King of Norway and conqueror, for the time, of Denmark, why should he not take England, as Sweyn and Canute took it sixty years before, when the flower of the English gentry perished at the fatal battle of Assingdune? If he and his half-barbarous host had conquered, the civilization of Britain would have been thrown back, perhaps, for centuries. But it was not to be.

3. England was to be conquered by the Normans; but by the civilized, not the barbaric; by the Norse who had settled, but four generations before, in the northeast of France under Rou, Rollo, Rolf the Ganger, so called, they say, because his legs were so long that, when on horseback, he touched the ground and seemed to gang, or walk. He and his Norsemen had taken their share of France, and called it Normandy to this day; and meanwhile, with that docility and adaptability which marks so often truly great spirits, they changed their creed, their language, their habits, and had become, from heathen and murderous Berserkers, the most truly civilized people in Europe, and-as was most natural then the most faithful allies and servants of the Pope of Rome. So greatly had they changed, and so fast, that William Duke of Normandy, the great-great-grandson of Rolf the wild Viking, was perhaps the finest gentleman, as well as the most cultivated sovereign and the greatest statesman and warrior in Europe.

4. So Harold of Norway came with all his Vikings to Stamford Bridge by York; and took, by coming, only that which Harold of England promised him, namely, "forasmuch as he was taller than any other man, seven feet of English ground."

5. The story of that great battle, told with a few inaccuracies, but as only great poets tell, you should read, if you have not read it already, in the "Heimskringla" of Snorri Sturluson, the Homer of the North:

High feast that day held the birds of the air
and the beasts of the field,

White-tailed erm and sallow glede,

Dusky raven, with horny neb,

And the gray deer the wolf of the wood.

The bones of the slain, men say, whitened the place for fifty years to come.

6. And remember that on the same day on which that fight befell-September 27, 1066-William, Duke of Normandy, with all his French-speaking Norsemen, was sailing across the British Channel, under the protection of a banner consecrated by the Pope, to conquer that England which the Norse-speaking Normans could not

conquer.

7. And now King Harold showed himself a man. He turned at once from the north of England to the south. He raised the folk of the southern, as he had raised those of the central and northern shires; and in sixteen days after a march which in those times was a prodigious feat-he was intrenched upon the fatal down which men called Heathfield then, and Senlac, but Battle to this day-with William and his French Normans opposite him on Telham Hill.

8. Then came the battle of Hastings. You all know what befell upon that day, and how the old weapon was

matched against the new-the English axe against the Norman lance and beaten only because the English broke their ranks.

9. It was a fearful time which followed. I can not but believe that our forefathers had been, in some way or other, great sinners, or two such conquests as Canute's and William's would not have fallen on them within the short space of sixty years. They did not want for courage, as Stamford Brigg and Hastings showed full well. English swine, their Norman conquerors called them often enough, but never English cowards.

10. Their ruinous vice, if we trust the records of the time, was what the old monks called accidia, and ranked it as one of the seven deadly sins: a general careless, sleepy, comfortable habit of mind, which lets all go its way for good or evil—a habit of mind too often accompanied, as in the case of the Anglo-Danes, with self-indulgence, often coarse enough. Huge eaters and huger drinkers, fuddled with ale, were the men who went down. at Hastings-though they went down like heroes-before the staid and sober Norman out of France.

11. But these were fearful times. As long as William lived, ruthless as he was to all rebels, he kept order and did justice with a strong and steady hand; for he brought with him from Normandy the instincts of a truly great statesman. And in his sons' time matters grew worse and worse. After that, in the troubles of Stephen's reign, anarchy let loose tyranny in its most fearful form, and things were done which recall the cruelties of the old Spanish conquistadores in America. Scott's charming romance of "Ivanhoe" must be taken, I fear, as a too true picture of English society in the time of Richard I.

12. And what came of it all? What was the result of all this misery and wrong? This, paradoxical as it