The Saxons, unrestrained now that Harold was wounded, rushed down the hill in disorderly pursuit, -"like sand without lime," is the graphic phrase of Matthew of Westminster. At a signal from William, the knights returned on the gallop and swept round them; then, fighting backward, Norman and Saxon entered the entrenchment together.

The rout of

tut Ram

The closing scenes are made sadly vivid in the old tales. The men of Kent who survived, and the levies of Essex and Sussex collected with the bleeding Harold at the foot of the gleaming standard. Covered with sweat and blood, they shouted cries of defiance that the Normans compared to the barking of dogs. But the knigine came charging, William at the head figirting like a common Healat-arms. The sun had sunk below the level of th woods. Twenty Norman knigine. devoting theilige vib to death or victory, made their way to tim sabbat O'r foot. The blinded King struer wd a foc but a blow on the helmet lejet tim

"

of a knight eut he tag through in ba
the twilight the last resistance, na
and a group of eximuset met elka
footing upon the heap of corpos
the dead Harold fell aut tud! V
place.

"Then the daka w

A

did such feats of arms; neither has there been on earth such a knight since Roland and Oliver.' And the duke stood meanwhile among them, of noble stature and mien, and rendered thanks to the King of Glory through whom he had the victory, and he ate and drank among the dead, and slept that night upon the field."

William was fierce as the lions which he had chosen for his escutcheon; but there is a superb strength in the historic figure. He had begun to take on some superficial refinement and accomplishment, just as upon the steel of his armor were embossed some few lines of ornament a fine type of the Norse barbarian, whose tumultuous forces were beginning to be steadied and calmed for the ruling of the world. No doubt he was a sad scourge to his new domain; and yet it is not slight praise which our infant history accords him, pleasantly lisping in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle: "Man mihte faran ofer his rice mid his bosme fullum goldes ungedered" (“One might go through his kingdom full of gold unharmed "); and a passing flush of genial poetry burns momentarily in the dry, meagre record in the passage: "He loved the tall deer as if he were their father."

A walk to-day over the battle-field.

This is the story whose outline I read on the ridge, sitting where waited the Kentish vanguard for the Norman charge. I went slowly down the hill in the track of Eustace and his routed troops to the spot where they were massacred. Centuries after, in wet weather, the brook was believed to flow with a reddish tinge, remembering the ancient slaughter. As I saw it, its bed was nearly dry, and in it grew osiers, descendants,

perhaps, of slips that were woven into Harold's entrenchment, as I pleased myself with fancying I might be a descendant of a tattooed ceorl of Kent that stood sheltered behind them. It must have been just here that Odo, the bishop, rode forward with his mace; and here that the Spanish charger pranced in the morning, and the eager Barons burst out rapturously over their leader's beauty and manhood. The gray ruin of the abbey now lay opposite; among constructions of a more recent date, a broken wall, an ivy-covered turret, a mouldering gable pierced here and there with the rounded Norman arch. It was just there, where within the wall a remnant of the high altar yet remains, that the gems and gold of the Saxon standard flashed over the combat. That night there was scarcely a soul in sight. Lovely upon the trees, here and there yellow and scarlet, where the autumn was even then kindling, was the sunlight through the haze. The quiet fields sloped smoothly to the brook, welted down to the hillsides by the long hedges, and bossy with oaks and elms. The old battle-field was indeed at peace. Riding back to London in the dusk, I found myself imagining that the rounding of the hills, the wide moor, the patches of woodland, might be somewhat as they were when out from all this country the faithful levies came gathering to Harold's side. Old oaks were in the fields, which possibly may even then have been standing; or whose parent acorns, at least, dropped from branches beneath whose shade, as the King rushed too hotly southward, tired footmen might have fallen out to rest their blistered feet.

Submergence of popular government through feudalism.

THE ancient popular government underwent a great submergence through the Normans. These invaders, originally Scandinavian rovers, and probably then scarcely, if at all, distinguishable from the Danes, so long the scourge of England, had been in contact with the Franks, a German tribe, which after having conquered the Romanized Gauls, had undergone through the vanquished very considerable modification, blending with them into one people, assuming their language and many of their institutions. The Franks, in their turn, had wrought with a curious power, during a century and a half, upon the followers of Rolf the Ganger, the successful freebooter to whom had been ceded Northwestern France, until in 1066 William and his followers had accepted the tongue and customs of those who had been subdued. The Frankish polity, adopted by the Normans, had early shown, even before the emigrations from Germany, a difference from that of the Saxons. In the former the authority of the King was at first a well-marked feature, for which, in the case of the latter, must be

supplied, as we have seen, the rule of the elected heretogas, or of the folk-moot; but as time proceeds, the authority of the King among the Franks diminishes. Feudalism (plain signs of which, developed from the ancient institution of the comitatus, are traceable in Saxon England, particularly under the rule of the Danish Kings), had received among the Franks a much more thorough development. The great vassals almost equalled the King.

The Roman custom of granting lands to be held by tenure of military service, combined with the Teutonic comitatus to produce Frankish feudalism. But feudalism never prevailed in England to the extent that it did upon the continent; the Kings managed, except for one reign, to keep great power in their own hands, and were not overawed by vassals.

Nor

Although causing such woe to the vanquished, and overlying so thoroughly for the time being AngloSaxon freedom, the effect of the Norman Ultimate good conquest, viewed in the historic perspec- effect of tive, was only good. It created in Eng- quest. land a sense of unity which before had been lacking. By mingling their strain with that of the English, the Normans added fire and vigor to the stock. So far as they remained distinctly Norman, they provoked and stimulated the energies of the vanquished, even by their opposition and oppression. Before leaving Normandy, William had ruled his people as a personal sovereign, with the William's advice and consent of a council of great Barons who stood to him in a feudal relation. The mass of the people were cultivators, living in strict dependence upon the lords, to whose standards they

Character of

rule.