league against the Norsemen and the robbers. They had planted their feet in the soil, and the moving chaos of the general subsidence had become fixed by the effort of their great hearts and of their arms. At the mouths of the rivers, in the defiles of the mountains, on the margin of the waste borders, at all perilous passes, they had built their forts, each for himself, each on his own land, each with his faithful band; and they had lived like a scattered but watchful army, camped and confederate in their castles, sword in hand, in front of the enemy. Beneath this discipline a formidable people had been formed, fierce hearts ir strong bodies,1 intolerant of restraint, longing for violent deeds, born for constant warfare because steeped in permanent warfare, heroes and robbers, who, as an escape from their solitude, plunged into adventures, and went, that they might conquer a country or win Paradise, to Sicily, to Portugal, to Spain, to Livonia, to Palestine, to England. II. 8 On the 27th of September 1066, at the mouth of the Somme, there was a great sight to be seen: four hundred large sailing vessels, more than a thousand transports, and sixty thousand men were on the point of embarking. The sun shone splendidly after long rain; trumpets sounded, the cries of this armed multitude rose to heaven; on the far Lorizon, on the shore, in the wide-spreading river, on the sea which opens out thence broad and shining, masts and sails extended like a forest; the enormous fleet set out wafted by the south wind. The people which it carried were said to have come from Norway, and one might have taken them for kinsmen of the Saxons, with whom they were to fight; but there were with them a multitude of adventurers, crowding from every direction, far and near, from north and south, from Maine and Anjou, from Poitou and Brittany, from Ile-de-France and Flanders, from Aquitaine and Burgundy; and, in short, the expedition itself was French. 1 fee, amidst other delineations of their manners, the first accounts of the first Crisale. Godfrey clove a Saracen down to his waist.-In Palestine, a widow was elled, up to the age of sixty, to marry again, because no fief could remain WAL at a defender.—A Spanish leader said to his exhausted soldiers after a battle, *You are too weary and too much wounded, but come and fight with me against tis other band; the fresh wounds which we shall receive will make us forget the witch we have.' At this time, says the General Chronicle of Spain, kings, ata, and nobles, and all the knights, that they might be ever ready, kept their bres in the chamber where they slept with their wives. * For difference in numbers of the fleet and men, see Freeman, Hist. of the Nura Cong., 3 vols. 1867, iii. 381, 387.—TR. For all the details, see Anglo-Norman Chronicles, iii. 4, as quoted by Aug. Therry. I have myself seen the locality and the country. ⚫ of three columns of attack at Hastings, two were composed of auxiliar Moreover, the chroniclers are not at fault upon this critical point; they ve stating that England was conquered by Frenchmen. How comes it that, having kept its name, it had changed its nature? and what series of renovations had made a Latin out of a German people? The reason is, that this people, when they came to Neustria, were neither a national body, nor a pure race. They were but a band; and as such, marrying the women of the country, they introduced foreign blood into their children. They were a Scandinavian band, but deteriorated by all the bold knaves and all the wretched desperadoes who wandered about the conquered country; and as such they received the foreign blood into their veins. Moreover, if the nomadic band was mixed, the settled band was much more so; and peace by its transfusions, like war by its recruits, had changed the character of the primitive blood. When Rollo, having divided the land amongst his followers, hung the thieves and their abettors, people from every country gathered to him. Security, good stern justice, were so rare, that they were enough to re-people a land. He invited strangers, say the old writers, and made one people out of so many folk of different natures.' This assemblage of barbarians, refugees, robbers, immigrants, spoke Romance or French so quickly, that the second Duke, wishing to have his son taught Danish, had to send him to Bayeux, where it was still spoken. The great masses always form the race in the end, and generally the genius and language. Thus this people, so transformed, quickly became polished; the composite race showed itself of a ready genius, far more wary than the Saxons across the Channel, closely resembling their neighbours of Picardy, Champagne, and Ilede-France. The Saxons,' says an old writer, 'vied with each other in their drinking feats, and wasted their goods by day and night in feasting, whilst they lived in wretched hovels; the French and Normans, on the other hand, living inexpensively in their fine large houses, were besides studiously refined in their food and careful in their habits.' The former, still weighted by the German phlegm, were gluttons and drunkards, now and then aroused by poetical enthusiasm; the latter, made sprightlier by their transplantation and their alloy, felt the cravings of genius already making themselves manifest. 'You might see amongst them churches in every village, and monasteries in the cities, towering on high, and built in a style unknown before,' first in Normandy, and presently in England.* Taste had come to them at once-that is, the 1 It was a Rouen fisherman, a soldier of Rollo, who killed the Duke of France at the mouth of the Eure. Hastings, the famous sea-king, was a labourer's son from the neighbourhood of Troyes. In the tenth century,' says Stendhal, ‘a man wished for two things: lat, not to be slain; 2d, to have a good leather coat.' See Fontenelle's Chronicle. William of Malmesbury. Pictorial History, i. 615. Churches in London, Sarum, Norwich, Durham Chichester, Peterborough, Rochester, Hereford, (Houcester, Oxford, etc.-Wil liam of Malmesbury. desire to please the eye, and to express a thought by outward representation, which was quite a new idea: the circular arch was raised on one or on a cluster of columns; elegant mouldings were placed about the windows; the rose window made its appearance, simple yet, like the flower which gives it its name; and the Norman style unfolded itself, original and measured, between the Gothic style, whose richness it foreshadowed, and the Romance style, whose solidity it recalled. With taste, just as natural and just as quickly, was developed the spirit of inquiry. Nations are like children; with some the tongue is readily loosened, and they comprehend at once; with others it is loosened with difficulty, and they are slow of comprehension. The men before us had educated themselves nimbly, as Frenchmen do. They were the first in France who unravelled the language, fixing it and writing it so well, that to this day we understand their code and their poems. In a century and a half they were so far cultivated as to find the Saxons 'unlettered and rude." That was the excuse they made for banishing them from the abbeys and all valuable ecclesiastical posts. And, in fact, this excuse was rational, for they instinctively hated gross stupidity. Between the Conquest and the death of King John, they established five hundred and fifty-seven schools in England. Henry Beauclerk, son of the Conqueror, was trained in the sciences; so were Henry II. and his three sons: Richard, the eldest of these, was & poet. Lanfranc, first Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, a subtle logician, ably argued the Real Presence; Anselm, his successor, the first thinker of the age, thought he had discovered a new proof of the existence of God, and tried to make religion philosophical by adopting as his maxim, 'Crede ut intelligas.' The notion was doubtless grand, especially in the eleventh century; and they could not have gone more promptly to work. Of course the science I speak of was but scholastic, and these terrible folios slay more understandings than they confirm. But people must begin as they can; and syllogism, even in Latin, even in theology, is yet an exercise of the mind and a proof of the understanding. Among the continental priests who settled in England, one established a library; another, founder of a school, made the scholars perform the play of Saint Catherine; a third wrote in polished Latin, epigrams as pointed as those of Martial.' Such were the recreations of an intelligent race, eager for ideas, of ready and flexible genius, whose clear thought was not overshadowed, like that of the Saxon brain, by drunken conceits, and the vapours of a greedy and well-filled stomach. They loved conversations, tales of adventure. Side by side with their Latin chroniclers, Henry of Huntingdon, William of Malmesbury, men of reflection, who could not only relate, but criticise here and there; there were rhyming chronicles in the vulgar tongue, as those of Geoffroy Gaimar, Bénoît de Sainte-Maure, Robert Wace. Do not imagine that 1 Ordericus Vitalis. their verse-writers were sterile of words or lacking in details. They were talkers, tale-tellers, speakers above all, ready of tongue, and never stinted in speech. Not singers by any means; they speak-this is their strong point, in their poems as in their chronicles. One of the earliest wrote the Song of Roland; upon this they accumulated a multitude of songs concerning Charlemagne and his knights, concerning Arthur and Merlin, the Greeks and Romans, King Horn, Guy of Warwick, every prince and every people. Their minstrels (trouvères), like their knights, draw in abundance from Gauls, Franks, and Latins, and descend upon East and West, in the wide field of adventure. They address themselves to a spirit of inquiry, as the Saxons to enthusiasm, and dilute in their long, clear, and flowing narratives the lively colours of German and Breton traditions; battles, surprises, single combats, embassies, speeches, processions, ceremonies, huntings, a variety of amusing events, employ their ready and adventurous imaginations. At first, in the Song of Roland, it is still kept in check; it walks with long strides, but only walks. Presently its wings have grown; incidents are multiplied; giants and monsters abound, the natural disappears, the song of the jongleur grows a poem under the hands of the trouvère; he would speak, like Nestor of old, five, even six years running, and not grow tired or stop. Forty thousand verses are not too much to satisfy their gabble; a facile mind, abundant, curious, descriptive, is the genius of the race. The Gauls, their fathers, used to delay travellers on the road to make them tell their stories, and boasted, like these, of fighting well and talking with ease.' With chivalric poetry, they are not wanting in chivalry; principally, it may be, because they are strong, and a strong man loves to prove his strength by knocking down his neighbours; but also from a desire of fame, and as a point of honour. By this one word honour the whole spirit of warfare is changed. Saxon poets painted it as a murderous fury, as a blind madness which shook flesh and blood, and awakened the instincts of the beast of prey; Norman poets describe it as a tourney. The new passion which they introduce is that of vanity and gallantry; Guy of Warwick dismounts all the knights in Europe, in order to deserve the hand of the prude and scornful Félice. The tourney itself is but a ceremony, somewhat brutal I admit, since it turns upon the breaking of arms and limbs, but yet brilliant and French. To make a show of cleverness and courage, display the magnificence of dress and armour, be applauded by and please the ladies,-such feelings indicate men of greater sociality, more under the influence of public opinion, less the slaves of their own passions, void both of lyric inspiration and savage enthusiasm, gifted by a different genius, because inclined to other pleasures. Such were the men who at this moment were disembarking in England to introduce their new manners and a new spirit, French at bottom, in character and speech, though with special and provincial features; of all the most determined, with an eye on the main chance, calcalating, having the nerve and the dash of our own soldiers, but with the tricks and precautions of lawyers; heroic undertakers of profitable enterprises; having travelled in Sicily, in Naples, and ready to travel to Constantinople or Antioch, so it be to take a country or carry off money; sharp politicians, accustomed in Sicily to hire themselves to the highest bidder and capable of doing a stroke of business in the heat of the Crusade, Eke Bohémond, who, before Antioch, speculated on the dearth of his Christian allies, and would only open the town to them under condition of their keeping it for himself; methodical and persevering conquerors, expert in administration, and handy at paper-work, like this very William, who was able to organise such an expedition, and such an army, and kept a written roll of the same, and who proceeded to register the whole of England in his Domesday Book. Sixteen days after the disembarkation, the contrast between the two nations was manifested at Hastings by its sensible effects. The Saxons 'ate and drank the whole night. You might have seen them struggling much, and leaping and singing,' with shouts of ahter and noisy joy. In the morning they crowded behind their pausades the dense masses of their heavy infantry, and with battle-axe bung round their neck awaited the attack. The wary Normans weighed the chances of heaven and hell, and tried to enlist God upon their side. Robert Wace, their historian and compatriot, is no more troubled by poetical imagination than they were by warlike inspiration; and on the eve of the battle his mind is as prosaic and clear as theirs. The same spirit showed in the battle. They were for the most part bowmen and horsemen, well-skilled, nimble, and clever. Taillefer, the jongleur, who asked for the honour of striking the first blow, went enging, like a true French volunteer, performing tricks all the 1 Robert Wace, Roman du Rou. De lor péchiés confèz se firent |