assumption of the English Crown. The resistance which William met with during the first five years after his coronation was not exactly revolt against an established King and not exactly resistance to a foreign invader. William was King, so far as being formally chosen and crowned, formally acknowledged by most of the chief men in Church and State, could make him King. He was King in so far as, except during Eadgar's momentary reign at York, there was no other King. But he was not in possession, either military or civil, of the whole country, and if this or that earl or bishop had acknowledged him, the mass of the people had done so only in London and the neighbouring shires. A resistance to a King so placed could not be called revolt against an established government. But it was necessarily resistance of a local and desultory character; each city or district fought for its own liberties and not for the liberties of England; and in many cases, though the people had never submitted to the Conqueror, they were led by chiefs who had become his men and had received honours at his hands. Add that the whole resistance took the form of a reaction after submission. When William first left England in 1067, he had actual possession of hardly half the kingdom, but within that half he was the acknowledged King, and there was no acknowledged King anywhere else. The oppressions of Odo and William Fitz-Ösbern during his absence led to insurrection in the part which was already subdued and to more determined resistance in the part which was still unsubdued. But all this gave William altogether the appearance, and in some measure the reality, of a lawful King subduing rebels against established authority. He was thus enabled to conquer the country bit by bit, and to use the forces of one district in bringing another under his obedience. William, like Henry VIII., had the wonderful advantage of being able to do whatever cruelty or injustice he wished to do under the mask of the forms of law. William then gradually conquered England; he gradually substituted foreigners-by no means always Normans-for Englishmen in all high offices; he gradually, as lands came into his hands, transferred all the greatest class of estates from English to foreign owners. The English thus became an inferior class on their own soil. But William did nothing directly to uproot the laws, the language, or the nationality of Englishmen. Whatever was done in this way was the gradual and indirect result of the Conquest, but nothing more. French' and 'English' are distinguished throughout William's reign and those of his sons; but though there was much to depress and to oppress the Englishman, there was no distinct legislation against him. He laboured under many practical disadvantages, but there was nothing to prevent his overcoming them if he could, nothing to hinder the two nations from gradually fusing into one. Lands and honours were largely transferred to strangers, but the foreign landowner held his land by the old English tenure, and the foreign judge had to administer the old English law.* Let us again hear Sir Francis Palgrave: All 'England suffered most acutely by the Norman Conquest: but, comparing as far as we can imperfectly know and tell, the similar or analogous punishments of nations, never was so crushing a subjection accompanied by less oppression and wrong. Bitter oppression, cruel wrong;-yet oppression, which, according to the world's opinion, is inevitable; wrong which the statesman never fails to justify. In proportion as the "grades of society descended, so did the hardships diminish. There was no permanent evil inflicted on the great masses of society. The shattered and decayed elements of old English policy were preserved, and the means provided for reuniting them in a more efficient organisation. London retained all her Anglo-Saxon integrity. London Stone was not moved. the Stokes preserved their franchises. Colchester Townsmen met in Colchester Moothall. Lincoln's Lawmen kept their statutes. The Burghs of Mercia held their "morning speech" even as their kinsmen in the red Westphalian land. No Englishman, who patiently had continued in scot and lot, became an alien in his own country. No peasant was expelled from his cottage, no churl from his patrimonial field. So far as the Norman administration reached the villein, he obtained greater protection for the fruits of his labour, more assurance in the quiet and comfort of house and home, than he had enjoyed under the Confessor. His rent could not be raised, his services could not be increased. Above all, no "penal "laws," no persecution of faith, no legalised degradation, no spite against nationality, no proscription of dress or language, no useless insult, no labour of hatred to render contempt everlasting; no "Glorious Memory," no "Boyne Water," no "Croppies lie down." -Before the first year after the Conqueror's death has closed, we shall see the favour of the English nation sought by the Norman king.' Here, as usual, there is exaggeration, but the main facts are indisputable. The picture drawn by Sir Francis at least comes nearer to the truth than the extravagant colouring of Thierry 'Lagam Eadwardi Regis vobis reddo,' &c., says Henry I. It is amusing to find in the corrections of the press, for lagam 'read legem.' Sir Francis accurately copied King Henry's Latin, barbarous as it may be; but his editor seems not to have understood it. the other way. Thierry, throughout his narrative, colours every story, by thrusting in epithets which he does not find in his authorities. If any one is oppressed, he quietly puts in the words Saxon,' Englishman,' and the like, to imply not only that the oppressed person was necessarily an Englishman, but that he was oppressed because he was an Englishman. We can well believe that this was often the case, that an Englishman often failed to obtain justice when a Norman would have obtained it without difficulty; but we have no right to assume it in every case without evidence. It would be a good exercise for any one to go through Thierry's whole story, verifying all his references. He would not often find direct misrepresentation or misquotation. But he would almost always find that the context of the original gives the story an utterly different tone from that which it receives in the vivid and picturesque narrative which has led so many astray.* We are, indeed, inclined to think that most modern writers have a tendency to exaggerate the amount of conscious national feeling which existed in the eleventh century, either in England or elsewhere. If any people ever was, in the slang of our day, an oppressed nationality,' the English were so under our two Williams. But they show very little consciousness of their condition. Nowhere do we find so little expression of strictly national feeling as in the most strictly national record, the Saxon Chronicle. The Chronicler bitterly deplores the oppressions of William's reign, but he never once sums them as a modern writer would do, in the one phrase of foreign 'dominion.' He feels that William is very different from the kings that were before him, he feels that the state of things up, * Let us take two instances out of many. William, in 1085, arrested his brother Odo on several charges. Orderic (647 B.) puts a speech into the King's mouth, in which three of the accusations run thus: Angliam vehementer oppressit,' 'crudeliter pauperes oppressit,' 'totum regnum injustis exactionibus concutiens exagitavit.' Thierry, professing to follow Orderic, leaves out the last charge and thus colours the two first, 'Le roi accusa l'évêque 'd'avoir maltraité les Saxons outre mesure, au grand danger de la cause commune.' 6 The other is the story of one Brihtstan in the reign of Henry I., given at length by Orderic, p. 629. It is clear that Brihtstan was of English descent, that he was a man of considerable wealth, that he was vilely treated. But there is no evidence that he was so treated because he was an Englishman, or that the same unjust judge might not have treated a Norman as vilely. But Thierry, by constantly sticking in 'l'Anglais,' 'le Saxon,' &c., gives the story a turn for which there is no foundation at all in the original. has greatly changed, and changed greatly for the worse, but he seems to have no idea of the real cause of the change. No 'oppressed nationality' now-a-days could lament more bitterly, but modern lamentations would take another form. We do not mean that no national feeling existed, that men were not conscious of the difference between a countryman and a stranger; we do not mean that, even in the Chronicle itself, the consciousness of such difference is not plainly marked. But we doubt whether, either in England or anywhere else, the feeling had, in that age, assumed the distinct shape which it has assumed in later times. England especially was used to the presence of foreigners. She had learned to place one foreign conqueror, whose beginnings had promised much worse than the beginnings of William, among the best and noblest of her native princes. The experience which England had had of the good government of Cnut, probably helped in no slight degree to pave the way for the success of William. And the promotion of foreign earls and bishops was only the continuation to a greater extent of a system to which men had been already used under King Eadward. They knew that a stranger was not necessarily an oppressor; even Godwine and Harold, in the full swing of triumph, did not drive out all Eadward's foreign favourities; the bad were driven out, but those who had not abused their position retained their honours. But however all this may be, it is certain that there is a remarkable absence in the Chronicle of the sort of complaint which we should have looked for, complaint of the domination of strangers as strangers. When we come to writers who lived further from the event, the expression of national distinction becomes much plainer. That is to say, in William's own reign men had no leisure for speculation on these matters; afterwards they began to think and speculate and remark the distinction between the races and the effects of that distinction. Each generation saw the difference more clearly as a matter of history, even while each generation saw another stage in the practical healing of the breach. When we reach Robert of Gloucester, he talks of Normans and Saxons,' as Thierry himself might have done, in words which Thierry has appropriately chosen as a quotation to wind up his history.† Compare the Chronicle A. 1052 with Roger of Howden on the same year (Scriptt. post Bed. p. 254). William, the Norman Bishop of London, seems to bear a good character both before and after the Conquest. Of pe Normannes bep pýs hey men, pat bep of pys lond In estimating the effects of the Conquest, no question is more important, or rather we may say that it is the question itself, how soon and by what steps were the Normans and English fused into one nation? It is very curious to trace the way in which the old phrase, Franci et Angli,' as an exhaustive division of the King's men,' gradually dies out. But the inquiry is rendered more difficult by the question which constantly occurs-who was French and who was English? There is no doubt as to the position of a man who had fought for William at Senlac; there is none as to that of a man of unmixed Old-English descent.* But under which head came the children of the first Norman settlers? What were the feelings of a man, son of a Norman father, but born on English ground, often of an English mother, holding English estates and English honours, obeying and administering English laws? When the King's men, French and English,' were summoned to his standard, among which class did such a man do his service? We do not ask about great earls and bishops; what were the feelings-in modern phrase, what was the 'nation'ality,' of a citizen, a yeoman, an ordinary priest, an ordinary country gentleman, to whom England was his birthplace and his home, but whose father or grandfather had fought on the winning side at Senlac? We are indeed told, in a rather rhetorical way, that, at the end of the Conqueror's reign, it was a disgrace to be called an Englishman†; but, surely natives of England, born subjects of the King of the English, knowing no other country and owing no allegiance to any other sovereign, could not very long have refused the name. And in estimating this difficulty we must not forget the constant immigration that went on after the Conquest, the multitude of foreigners of all kinds who kept coming over to make their fortunes in England, to the prejudice alike of men of Old-English race and of the descendants of the original settlers. The words Angli,' Franci,' Normanni,' thus become ambiguous; in a transitional period they were doubtless often largely used, so that the same man might call himself Norman or English almost indiscriminately. The result is 6 The whole of this writer's remarks on this subject are very curious. See vol. i. p. 363, 4th ed. 1810. * 'Angli naturales,' Ord. Vit. p. 666 D.° Antiqua Anglorum in'genuitas. Eadmer, p. 48. Hen. Hunt. p. 212: 'Ita etiam ut Anglicum vocari foret opprobrio. Cf. Ord. Vit. p. 782 B.: Num prosequi me ritum 'autumat Anglorum.' |