Dangerous

the Normans.

The wicker-work, which with modern arms would be so feeble a barrier, was to the Normans a most formidable obstacle. From nine o'clock until situation of noon there was no advantage on either side. Then, however, a troop of Bretons under Eustace, Count of Boulogne, which had been specially engaged, fell back before the Saxons in almost utter rout. In the low ground, his followers became involved in ditches and in the brook, and perished by the hundred. Utter defeat seemed to lie before the invaders. Bishop Odo of Bayeux, William's brother, with a white ecclesiastical dress sweeping about his stately figure, but wearing a hauberk as well and with a mace swinging at his wrist, dashed on a white horse into the confusion, crying, "Stand fast!" William, too, who had been supposed to be slain, flung his helmet from him, and with head bare, stopped the flight. "I am here!" he cried. "Look at me; I live, and will conquer!" Throughout the afternoon the clang of the conflict was unabated. Somewhere toward four o'clock, it is probable, took place the event which was the beginning of the end. William, observing that the shafts of the archers, shot horizontally, stuck in the osiers and did little harm, ordered that they should be shot upward, that they might descend vertically upon the heads of the Saxons. Aloft flew the arrows. Harold, looking up unwarily, received one in his left eye. Blinded, and crazed with pain, he drew it out, and leaned exhausted upon his shield. Just here the Normans practised a stratagem with results to them most fortunate. Their horsemen feigned a retreat in great confusion into the low ground, leaving their archers behind them.

Harold wounded.

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 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 The rout of bleeding Harold at the foot of the gleam- the Saxons. ing standard. Covered with sweat and blood, they shouted cries of defiance that the Normans compared to the barking of dogs. But the knights came charging, William at the head fighting like a common manat-arms. The sun had sunk below the level of the woods. Twenty Norman knights, devoting themselves to death or victory, made their way to the standard's foot. The blinded King struck wildly at his foes; but a blow on the helmet felled him, and the sword of a knight cut his thigh through to the bone. In the twilight the last resistance was beaten down, and a group of exhausted men stood with uncertain footing upon the heap of corpses. The standard of the dead Harold fell, and that of William took its place.

"Then the duke took off his armor, and the Barons and knights came, when he had unstrung his shield, and took the helmet from his head and the hauberk from his back, and saw the heavy blows upon his shield and how his helmet was dinted in, and all greatly wondered, and said: Such a Baron never bestrode war-horse, nor dealt such blows, nor

6

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 bat

tle-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 massaCenturies 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,

cred.

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