that we do not always know under which head to class natives of the land of foreign extraction. When we read that Thomas of London was the first Englishman raised to the see of Canterbury since the Conquest, it undoubtedly means, not that he was, which he was not, of Old-English descent, but that he was the first native of England, of whatever blood, who had held that place since Stigand. But when Eadmer complains that Henry I. promoted men of every nation except the English, does he reckon the grandsons of William's followers among the favoured or the rejected class? When an English poet exults over the fate of the Norman companions of the theling William†, does he mean by Normans natives of Normandy or men of Norman blood wherever born? There is an obscure story, of which, of course, Thierry makes the most, of a conspiracy against the Normans' early in the reign of Stephen. ‡ Have these words the same meaning which they would have had in the days of the Conqueror, or do they merely mean what a conspiracy against the Poitevins or the Savoyards would have meant in the days of Henry III.? Fully to answer these questions would require the minutest study of every indication to be found in the writers of several generations. Such a task would be a long one, but, as a specimen of what we mean, we will see what light is thrown on the matter by the manner of thought and speaking to be seen in two of our principal authorities, one of them Sir Francis's special favourite, namely, William of Malmesbury and Orderic.

6

Orderic, as we have seen, was born in England of a French father, but very probably of an English mother, nine years after William's accession. Now Orderic undoubtedly looked upon himself as an Englishman. He calls himself Angligena,' he speaks of his removal to Normandy as banishment. § It may be said that to one who was not a native Norman, Normandy was a land as strange as England. But then we must remember how vast a proportion of William's followers were no more Normans than Orderic's father. Soldiers of all countries

P. 110, cf. 94.

† Hen. Hunt. A. 1120:

'Num Normannigenæ Gallis clari superatis

Anglica regna petunt, obstitit ipse Deus.'

The title of Etheling-Guillelmus Adelingus-is given to this prince by Orderic 869 B.

Ord. Vit. 911, 2.

Ib. p. 548 A: 'De Angliâ in Normanniam tenellus exsul ut æterno Regi militarem destinatus sum.'

VOL. CXXI. NO. CCXLVII.

D

followed his standard and received English estates and English wives as their rewards. Priests of all countries came to share the benefices of the conquered land, from Lanfranc on his metropolitan throne to Odelirius in his wooden chapel at Shrewsbury. Now it is clear that Odelirius, an immediate follower and favourite of a great Norman earl, took no pains to bring up his son otherwise than as an Englishman. Earl Roger's French confessor was clearly living on terms of friendship and equality with the two English priests, to one of whom he paid the compliment of naming his son after him, while to the other he entrusted that son for education. It is clear then that he did not look on all his English neighbours as Saxon' churls and swine. And if Odelirius was thus well disposed, his influence over his patron and son in the faith could hardly fail to have been exercised to soften the fate of those among the conquered with whom Earl Roger had to deal. Now no doubt we here have a specially favourable case, but it can hardly have been an unique case; it at least shows that it was not impossible for the conquerors and the conquered to sit down quietly side by side. What happened at Shrewsbury must have happened elsewhere, and the son of many a foreign settler must have grown up with a heart as truly English as Orderic had. Through Orderic's whole work we see a most curious struggle between his national English feelings, backed to be sure by his natural sense of right, and the opposing traditions of a Norman monastery. He follows the narrative of William of Poitiers as far as William of Poitiers could guide him, and then begins to write for himself in a more independent spirit. He had been taught-even Siward would not be allowed to contradict that lesson-that Harold was wrong and that William was right; but he is no slavish flatterer of the Conqueror, like William of Poitiers. He admires the great king, doubly his sovereign, whom he had heard of with awe and wonder as a boy; but he exercises a free criticism on his actions, and he censures his cruel devastation of Northumberland as it deserves. Altogether we think that Orderic, his whole position and his whole way of writing, supply a most important witness on behalf of the general view taken by Sir Francis Palgrave. Nor does William of Malmesbury really tell a different story. His profession of impartiality, combined with his constant insinuations to the prejudice of the English, is to our mind less endurable than the outspoken enmity of William of Poitiers. But the way in which William of Malmesbury is obliged to mask his Norman partisanship is, in its way, a witness to the gradual

blending of the two races no less than the honest English sympathies of Orderic. William was undoubtedly of mixed race, and he spent his life in England. Why, then, is he less English in feeling than Orderic, whose mixed origin is only matter of surmise, and who spent his life in Normandy? The difference in feeling between the two is probably owing in a great degree to different social position. William was evidently born in a higher rank than the son of the priest of the wooden church at Shrewsbury. Doubtless the prejudice of birth was more enduring in proportion as the rank of the persons concerned was higher. No doubt the mixture of the two races had a most real, though mainly unconscious influence. But we may suspect that, among the higher ranks, the offspring of a mixed marriage was, for the first generation or two, liable to be looked on as a sort of half-caste. Lower down in the social scale the feeling would be much less strong. Thomas of London, born in 1118 of Norman parents settled in England, gives no sign that he was ever looked upon as anything but an Englishman either by himself or by anyone else.

And now as to the transfer of the land from English to foreigners. On this point Domesday is of course our chief evidence. Now a careful study of Domesday will certainly guide the inquirer to that middle view of the subject for which we contend throughout. The Survey shows that there was a transfer of property on an enormous scale, a transfer complete enough to exclude every native Englishman from a place in the highest class of landowners, and thus to found a real territorial aristocracy of foreign origin. But Domesday gives no support to the popular notion that every Englishman was turned out of house and home. We find, indeed, no Englishman in possession of such enormous estates as those held by some of the Norman barons. But we find a vast number of Englishmen either retaining smaller holdings of the King in capite or holding as tenants of some intermediate lord. We may suspect that, in a great number of cases, the actual occupant was not disturbed at all.* He often lost a portion of his lands, he was often reduced to hold of another what had been his own, but there is no ground for the belief that men who quietly submitted to the

*See a curious story in Wilkins' Leges Anglo-Saxonicæ,' p. 287, how a certain Eadwine in Norfolk contrived, after much tribulation, to keep part of his lands, but we need not infer that every English landowner who occurs in Domesday was worried in the

same manner.

foreign government were, as an ordinary thing, turned adrift landless and homeless. As for the actual process of the transfer, there can be no doubt that confiscations, doubtless sometimes very arbitrary and unjust, largely helped in this work, but mere confiscation was not all. In many cases the Norman or other foreigner got peaceable possession of an English estate by marrying an English heiress or widow. In this case the possessor in the next generation simply inherited the estate of his maternal grandfather. All property again which was attached to any office, all land--and Sir Francis shows that there was a good deal of land so circumstanced-which was not strictly hereditary, came gradually into the King's hands for fresh disposal. And at William's first entry, the vast estates of Harold and his family lay ready to be dealt with as the forfeited property of traitors. Indeed, there seems reason to think that this rule was applied to all who could be proved to have fallen or fought at Senlac.*

The two points to be established are, that the transfer of lands and honours was very gradual, and that, though very extensive, it was not absolutely universal. The picture, in short, which Domesday gives us is, when translated into modern language, that of a great nobility wholly, or almost wholly, of foreign origin, a nobility of which probably none were of Old-English descent by the full blood, but of a smaller gentry, a yeomanry, a class of burghers, among whom the two races were mixed up in such a way that in a generation or two there could be little means of distinguishing them. t

We think that we may fairly set down as established truths, in utter opposition to the theory of Thierry, and in substantial agreement with Sir Francis Palgrave, that the transfer of land at the Conquest was much less complete, and that the fusion of the two races took place much more speedily, than the popular version of the story represents them. It is clear to us that, by the time of Henry II., every native of England looked

6

*See Dialogus de Scaccario,' vol. i. p. 10, apud Madox, 'History of Exchequer.'

So the Dialogus de Scaccario,' vol. i. p. 10 (ap. Madox, Hist. of Exchequer): Tam cohabitantibus Anglicis et Normannis, et alterutris uxores ducentibus vel nubentibus, sic permixtæ sunt nationes ut vix discerni possit hodie, de liberis loquor, quis Anglicus quis Normannus sit genere.' He goes on to except the villains at one end, and be might doubtless have excepted the great nobles at the other, but no doubt the description is eminently true of the intermediate classes in the reign of Henry II.

،

on himself as an Englishman, and that even Englishmen of foreign descent were beginning to share the genuine insular feeling towards men of foreign birth. And we must always remember that Englishman, Anglus,' Angligena,' was the only name that was ever opposed to French or Normans.' We talk of Normans and Saxons,' but no Englishman of that age called himself a 'Saxon,' or was called a 'Saxon' by his Norman neighbour or master.

We are deeply grateful to Sir Francis Palgrave for more than one energetic protest against this misleading popular use of the words Saxon' or even Anglo-Saxon,' as the proper term to oppose to Norman.' It is therefore to be regretted that his Editor should, in his Table of Contents and his marginal analysis, have constantly brought in the expression which his father so distinctly eschews. I must needs here pause,' says Sir Francis, and substitute henceforward the true and ancient 'word English for the unhistorical and conventional term Anglo-Saxon, an expression conveying a most false idea in ' our civil history. It disguises the continuity of affairs, and 'substitutes the appearance of a new formation in the place of a progressive evolution.' (vol. iii. p. 596.) So again :- Our 'readers will recollect that, in conformity with our denial of the real existence of an Anglo-Saxon nation, except as a con'venient, though somewhat delusive mode of designating the English of the ante-Norman period, so also must we deny there being any Anglo-Saxon language. If you had asked Alfred what he had in his hand, he would have answered it was an Englisc-boc, and would have been wonderfully sur'prised if you had given it any other name.' (vol. iii. p. 631.) The name of our nation then, as now, was English,' the only name known to ourselves, the only name known to foreign nations, save that the Celts within Britain, then, as now, thought

6

6

* The form 'Angli-Saxones' or 'Anglo-Saxones' is sometimes used to express the nation formed by the union of Angles and Saxons; not, as people commonly mean by it, 'Saxons settled in England.' But 'Angli' alone is far more common, and Saxones,' we think we may safely say, is never found in this sense, except when the words or matter is borrowed from a Celtic source. Saxon always means the inhabitants of the distinctly Saxon part of England, never the whole people, and it is never opposed to Norman,' ' Frenchman,' or the like. Orderic, indeed (666 A.), makes certain Normans say 'Saxones Anglos prostravimus;' but surely this is a mere flourish, like calling the Byzantine Empire Ionia' and its inhabitants 'Danai' and 'Pelasgi.'