land of his conquest; that his language was to be swallowed up and lost in that of the Saxon; that it was for the glory and final exaltation of the English race that he was commissioned to school them thus sternly. So, indeed, it was. But on that generation the judgment fell, as bitter as it was unexpected; it was, in their eyes, vengeance unrelenting and final; it seemed as if God had finally cast them off, and given them over, without hope of respite or release, to their tormentors."*

In closing the last lecture, the latest event in English history to which I alluded was the death of Edward the Confessor, the last legitimate Anglo-Saxon king. There still remained a few stormy months of the Saxon times— a disputed succession, brief and tumultuous-an unsteady tenure of the throne, and a bloody death. The eyes of the gentle and pious Edward had been spared the vision, of the sufferings that were so soon to befall the nation. The wild reign of Harold, in which the Saxon dynasty passed away, occupied less than a year in that period when, after the world had completed a thousand years in the Christian era, there was strange and wide-spread dismay in the hearts of men, and dim "apprehensions that the day of judgment was nigh at hand. The great comet of the year 1060 appeared; and, as it waved over England, the Saxon looked up to the sky with terror, when he beheld what seemed to him a portent of the sword of the invader or the destroyer. The Saxon vainly strove to drown his fears in revelry and riot, or else awaited in

This striking quotation I am unable to trace to its source.

W. B. R.

dread suspense the moment when the comet should, as Milton describes it,—

"Shake from its horrid hair

Pestilence and war.'

In tumult and slaughter had the Saxon rule been established in Britain; and, after six hundred years duration, it ended, in like manner, in confusion and bloodshed. Brother was warring against brother for the throne, and the Norwegian king, with his pirates of the North, was summoned to unnatural alliance in the fraternal strife. Harold's short reign had its one victory, but it was a victory that left dead on the field not only the King of Norway, but his own brother. In his season of victory,—his hand wet with a brother's blood, he was told that the ships of the Normans had set sail from the ports of France, and were approaching the shores of England.

What race of men was this that Normandy was sending forth on this voyage of conquest? The Normans, as described by an old historian, were the flower of the Swedes, the Danes, and the Norwegians. They had dwelt, indeed, long enough in France to learn a stranger's speech, but, originally, they were kindred with the Saxons; and it is curious to observe, in the progress of English history, how the various tribes of the great Teutonic race were brought into fierce collision, and how their union was again cemented by blood. The Northmen were for a long while the most adventurous and roving race of European men: they penetrated into the Mediterranean; they swept the coasts of the Northern Sea, and sailed into the navigable rivers of central Europe, striking such terror that the ancient litanies contained prayers for

deliverance from the fury of the Northmen. They won from a king of France that fair province to which they gave their name of Normandy; and, in that same century, another portion of the Northmen, undismayed by the dread of an Arctic and unknown sea, are believed to have sailed westward, and, making Iceland their stepping-stone, as it were, in the ocean, to have passed onward and reached America five hundred years before Columbus.

The Northmen who settled in France became Christianized and civilized; and, in the next century, retaining all their spirit of adventure, they went forth, not as heathen pirates, but as Christian soldiers. One band of them crossed the Alps to make a Norman settlement in Southern Italy, and still farther on, to raise the Christian banner over the crescent of the Saracens in the island of Sicily. But a mightier conquest was that which a few years later was achieved over the Saxons, and by which a duke of Normandy became King of England. I need not stop to tell you how bravely the unhappy Harold met the invaders on the field of Hastings, and how he fell in that battle which sealed the destiny of Saxon independence. In less than one year after the good King Edward, the sainted Confessor, had breathed his last, the crown of England was on the brow of William the Norman.

The Norman conquest was the last of those great revolutionary changes, which successively occurred in the formation of that great community of mankind, which is now peopling the vast and scattered territory of the colonial British Empire, and the western regions of America. It was the addition of the last element in the constitution

of a great modern people. We have thus seen how ancient British nationality received into itself a Roman nationality, and then the Saxon and the Dane, and, last of all, the Norman.

"The Norman conquest," says Southey, "is the most momentous event in English history,—perhaps the most momentous in the Middle Ages. So severe a chastisement was never, except in the case of the Visigoths, inflicted on any nation which was not destroyed by it.”* It is an important subject of historical inquiry to ascer tain the nature and extent of the changes-both social and political-which were consequent on this revolution. It is far too large a subject, even if I had the ability, for me to attempt to do more than merely touch on. The prominent events of this period are of such a character as to fill the mind to the exclusion of other less striking realities. This page of history tells of a kingdom conquered in one battle-the Saxon sovereign dead on that battle-field, and his army slaughtered or routed; it tells of Saxon fugitives in other and distant lands, and of Saxon prelates thrust out to make room for Norman ecclesiastics of Saxon thane and Saxon peasants outcast from house and home-of the introduction of a sterner form of feudal law, and even the people's language revolutionized. It tells of that peculiar stretch of despotic power, by which, at the dismal sound of the curfew-bell, lamps and fires were extinguished at an early hour,"the lights that cherish household cares and festive gladness" quenched by that stern bidding. When one thinks of the long, English winter-nights, this curfew-darkness

* Southey's Naval History, vol. i. p. 123.

seems almost as gloomy as that savage age, which Charles Lamb speaks of, in the essay in which he eulogizes candlelight as a kindlier luminary than sun or moon. "Wanting it," says he, "what savage, unsocial nights must our ancestors have spent, wintering in caves and unillumined fastnesses! They must have lain about and grumbled at one another in the dark. What repartees could have passed when you must have felt about for a smile, and handled a neighbour's cheek to be sure that he understood it?"* We read, too, how, when exasperated by Saxon resistance, the Conqueror swore a dreadful oath, that not one Northumbrian should escape his vengeance; and then hastened to fulfil it by his exterminating campaign in the North, in which one hundred thousand persons are said to have perished, and not a single inhabited village was left between Durham and York. It was a scene of devastation and depopulation like Hyder Ali's invasion of the Carnatic, made famous by the eloquence of Burke.

Such was the fearful penalty of the Conqueror's revenge, and scarcely less fearful was the penalty of his pleasure: the Norman monarchs must have their hunting-grounds, and the Saxon must needs give up his cultivated lands, not only to the new Norman proprietor, but even to the wild beasts. William, it has been said, "had a summary way of increasing the forest lands: no need of planting trees or waiting for the slow growth of oaks and beeches. There were then many woods in merry England, and he simply swept away the homes of the villagers who dwelt among and near them, so that the lands returned to their natural state of wilderness, and

* Popular Fallacies, xv.