The Saxons lost the battle of Hastings. Here, however, they left no blot on their name. The old historian Daniel justly, as well as forcibly, remarks, “Thus was tried, by the great assize of God’s judgment in battle, the right of power between the English and Norman nations; a battle the most memorable of all others; and, however miserably lost, yet most nobly fought on the part of England.” The death of Harold, and the absence of any other competitor, opened the way for William to the throne. Presenting himself to the nobles of the land, assembled in London, he was in due form elected to the vacant throne, and was crowned by Aldred Archbishop of York, on Mid-winter’s day. William never claimed the English crown by right of conquest. His quarrel was with Harold, not with the English people, and he denounced him as interfering with his just claims. The Saxon Chronicle expressly asserts that “Before the Archbishop would set the crown upon his head, he required of him a pledge upon Christ’s book, and also swore him, that he would govern this nation as well as any king before him had at the best done, if they would be faithful to him.” He never claimed to be the Conqueror of England in the ordinary sense of the word. In his first charter to Westminster Abbey, he founds his right to the crown upon the grant of his relative Edward the Confessor. The Domesday Book was not compiled until near the close of William’s reign (about the year 1086), yet in it he is not spoken of as a conqueror. “Throughout the Survey,” says Sir Henry Ellis, “Harold is constantly spoken of as the usurper of the realm: ‘quando regnum invasit.’ Once only is it said ‘quando regnabat.’ Of William it is as constantly said, ‘postquam venit in Angliam,’ after he came to England. Once only does the expression occur, ‘W. rex conquisivit Angliam,’ when he conquered or acquired England.”[111] But whatever were William’s rights and original intentions, it was impossible that he could long reign over England as a constitutional monarch. It was not likely that the great chiefs who survived the battle of Hastings would long submit to the rule of a stranger—hosts of foreigners would necessarily be introduced into the court, and this, as in the reign of the Confessor, would be a continual source of heartburning and jealousy—and, above all, the followers of the King were to be rewarded, and this could only be done by depriving the Saxon noblemen of their patrimonies. When William won the battle of Hastings, he bid farewell to peace for ever. His subsequent history was a continued series of entanglements and broils. One chieftain after another, one district and then another, became restless under his rule; each he crushed in succession. At length he became in the strict sense of the word the Conqueror. He ruled by the sword alone. His own Norman barons, and even his brother Odo, felt the weight of his iron hand; but it fell with peculiar force upon his native-born subjects. The writer in the Saxon Chronicle, speaking from his own knowledge, says of William, “He was a very wise and a great man, and more honoured and more powerful than any of his predecessors. He was mild to those good men who loved God, but severe beyond measure towards those who withstood his will.... He was a very stern and wrathful man, so that none durst do anything against his will, and he kept in prison those earls who acted against his pleasure.... Truly there was much trouble in these times, and very great distress; he caused castles to be built, and oppressed the poor.... He made large forests for the deer, and enacted laws therewith, so that whoever killed a hart or a hind should be blinded. He loved the tall stags as if he had been their father. The rich complained and the poor murmured, but he was so sturdy that he recked nought of them; they must will all that the king willed, if they would live; or would keep their lands; or would hold their possessions; or would be maintained in their rights. Alas! that any man should so exalt himself, and carry himself in his pride over all!”[112] Ingulph speaks of the entire subjugation of the English people, and of their systematic exclusion from offices of honour. “Many of the chief men of the land, for some time, offered resistance to William, the new king, but, being afterwards crushed by his might and overcome, they at last submitted to the sway of the Normans.... So inveterately did the Normans at this period detest the English, that, whatever the amount of their merits might be, they were excluded from all dignities; and foreigners who were far less fitted, be they of any other nation whatever under heaven, would have been gladly chosen instead of them.”[113] Henry of Huntingdon uses language which the English of the present day, accustomed as they are to rear their heads proudly among the nations, can hardly understand. “In the twenty-first year of the reign of King William, when the Normans had accomplished the righteous will of God on the English Nation, and there was now no prince of the ancient regal race living in England, and all the English were brought to a reluctant submission, so that it was a disgrace even to be called an Englishman, the instrument of Providence in fulfilling its designs was removed from the world.”[114] “Many of the people,” as Holinshed tells us, “utterly refusing such an intolerable yoke of thraldom as was daily laid upon them, chose rather to leave all, both goods and lands, and after the manner of outlaws, got them to the woods with their wives, children, and servants, meaning from henceforth to live upon the spoils of the country adjoining, and to take whatsoever came next to hand.”

Notwithstanding the heavy pressure of these evils good ensued. The political tempest resulted in the increased purity, health, and peace, of the national atmosphere.

William established a strong government. Had Harold been unopposed from without, he would have had rivals from within the nation. The opposition of his own brother Tostig was but a prelude of what the general result of his reign would have been. Ambitious men, such as Edwin and Morcar, the Earls of Mercia and Northumbria, would on the least provocation have espoused the cause of Edgar Atheling, and by rendering the land a scene of internal discord, have made it an easy prey to new bands of adventurers from Denmark, Norway, Flanders, and France. William, by the vigour, and even harshness of his rule, quelled internal dissension, and bid defiance to foreign rivalry.

The Norman invasion hastened and perfected the establishment of the feudal system in England. This system had one great defect, which renders it unfit for the present condition of England—it altogether overlooked the claims of the lower classes, who always form the great bulk of the population; still, it produced most beneficial results in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It brought all the great barons of the empire into subjection to the sovereign, and by defining the corresponding duties of the mesne lords and inferior tenants, knit the whole kingdom into one. By this unity the realm was prepared to put down intestine broils, and to resist foreign aggression. A way too was prepared for the elevation of the lower classes. The system had but to be extended in order to define the duties, and to confer corresponding privileges, upon every member of the community.

Learning and civilization were greatly advanced by the Norman Conquest. Italy at this time was the focus of the knowledge and refinement of the world. The light kindled by the genius of Attica, and nurtured by the philosophy and poetry of the Augustan era, still irradiated the seven-hilled city. Britain, severed from the main-land by a stormy channel, had less intercourse with Rome than the nations of the continent. Though William of Malmesbury may have somewhat overdrawn the statement, still there is much truth in the picture which he gives of the social condition of the Saxons at the time of the Conquest. “In process of time the desire after literature and religion had decayed, for several years before the arrival of the Normans. The clergy, contented with a very slight degree of learning, could scarcely stammer out the words of the sacraments; and a person who understood grammar was an object of wonder and astonishment. The nobility were given up to luxury and wantonness. The commonalty, left unprotected, became a prey to the most powerful, who amassed fortunes, by either seizing on their property, or by selling their persons into foreign countries; although it be an innate quality of this people to be more inclined to revelling, than to the accumulation of wealth. Drinking was a universal practice, in which they passed entire nights as well as days. They consumed their whole substance in mean and despicable houses; unlike Normans and French, who, in noble and splendid mansions, lived with frugality.”[115] There cannot be a doubt that by the introduction of the refinements of life the condition of the people was improved, and that a check was given to the grosser sensualities of our nature. Certain it is that learning received a powerful stimulus by the conquest. At the period of the Norman invasion, a great intellectual movement had commenced in the schools on the continent. Normandy had beyond most other parts profited by it. William brought with him to England some of the most distinguished ornaments of the schools of his native duchy; the consequence of this was that England henceforward took a higher walk in literature than she had ever done before.[116]

Another important advantage resulting from the Conquest was the emancipation of the lower classes. At the period of the invasion the great bulk of the population were in a servile condition. One class of the people, the churls, were attached to the land, and were transferred with it from one master to another without the power of choosing their employer, or taking any steps to improve their condition—another large class, the thews, were the absolute property of their owners. The attempts which Alfred and some of the clergy made to remedy this gigantic evil were attended with but partial success. The Conquest gave it its death blow. The convulsions which ensued afforded great numbers the wished-for opportunity of escaping from thraldom. Many of the landowners, seeing the shipwreck of their fortunes inevitable, made a virtue of necessity, and manumitted their serfs. One of William’s regulations had a tendency quietly to complete what was thus auspiciously begun. He passed a law declaring that every slave who had resided unchallenged a year and a day in any city or walled town in the kingdom, should be free for ever.[117] This law became a door of hope to many, and in due time not one slave was left in England. It had another very beneficial effect. Men were led to congregate in towns; knowledge was promoted; a stimulus was given to the cultivation of the refinements of social life; and the commoners, strong in their numbers, were induced to assert and maintain their common rights.

Even the despotic measures of the king had a beneficial influence upon the lower grades of society. The thanes and aldermen of the Confessor’s days being deprived of their lands, were glad to hold a small portion of them as the inferior tenants of the great Norman barons. Hence sprung the yeomanry of England, who, in days of difficulty and danger, have often proved themselves the mainstay of the country. The Saxon noblemen, in descending from their high estate, brought with them their independence of feeling and high spirit. They were chastened but not crushed. They not only maintained their own freedom of thought, but infused a portion of their energy into the newly emancipated class below them. Formerly the difference in social position between the landed proprietor and the tiller of the soil was so great, that there could be little friendly intercourse between them, and no unity of interest; but now, by the formation of a middle class, the two extremes of society were linked together, and all classes placed in a position to benefit the rest, as well as to be benefited by them. The hope of rising in the social scale now dawned upon the lower orders.

Another signal benefit resulted from the Conquest. It brought to our English soil a host of men renowned in their own persons and those of their descendants for all that is great in art and arms, for all that is noble in knightly enterprise and chivalric feeling. Strike out from the page of history the deeds of the Montfords, the Marmions, the Warrens, the Nevilles, the Percys, the Beauchamps, the Bruces, the Balliols, the Talbots, the Cliffords, and a host of others who fought with William at Hastings, or followed in his wake, what a blank would be left. True, they were not always found contending on the side of liberty and truth; but, on the whole, they contributed to the developement of England’s liberties and enlightenment and power, and left an example of indomitable energy and manly bearing which mankind to the latest ages will do well to copy.

One other view of the subject we must take. England required chastisement, but shall the oppressor on that account go free? The chroniclers most favourable to William do not conceal the harshness and covetousness which disfigured the latter part of his reign. They tell us, too, of the evils which afflicted his age, and pursued him beyond the tomb. His eldest son rose in rebellion against him. Many of his own nobles joined the undutiful youth; even his beloved wife Matilda favoured him. In the New Forest, which he had wrongfully appropriated to his own pleasures, his son Richard was slain, during his lifetime. His son William, who succeeded him, came to a violent end in the same place. A grandson also is said to have perished in it. Whilst ravaging Mantes, in revenge for an idle jest, he met with his own death stroke. No sooner had he ceased to breathe than his lifeless body was forsaken by his family and domestics. When all that remained of the once potent William was about to be committed to the tomb, the man from whom he had wrested the site forbade his burial; some of the bystanders ‘of their charity’ satisfied the claim, and the Conqueror was laid in an eleemosynary grave. At a subsequent period that grave was violated, and his bones dispersed.

His followers, bent upon enriching themselves at the expense of justice, did not escape. Many of them rose in rebellion, and were crushed. Others suffered in the troubles which ensued upon his death. In the struggle between Stephen and Matilda, dreadful was the havoc committed upon the followers of William and their children. During the Wars of the Roses, nearly all the great families founded at the Conquest suffered calamities differing little in kind or degree from those which the victors of Hastings inflicted upon the old nobility of the land. History gives emphasis to the divine injunction, “Fret not thyself because of evil doers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity: for they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb.”