nquet."

BOOK II.
LANFRANC THE SCHOLAR.

CHAPTER I.

Four meals a day, nor those sparing, were not deemed too extravagant an
interpretation of the daily bread for which the Saxon prayed. Four meals
a day, from earl to ceorl! "Happy times!" may sigh the descendant of the
last, if he read these pages; partly so they were for the ceorl, but not
in all things, for never sweet is the food, and never gladdening is the
drink, of servitude. Inebriety, the vice of the warlike nations of the
North, had not, perhaps, been the pre-eminent excess of the earlier
Saxons, while yet the active and fiery Britons, and the subsequent petty
wars between the kings of the Heptarchy, enforced on hardy warriors the
safety of temperance; but the example of the Danes had been fatal. Those
giants of the sea, like all who pass from great vicissitudes of toil and
repose, from the tempest to the haven, snatched with full hands every
pleasure in their reach. With much that tended permanently to elevate
the character of the Saxon, they imparted much for a time to degrade it.
The Anglian learned to feast to repletion, and drink to delirium. But
such were not the vices of the court of the Confessor. Brought up from
his youth in the cloister-camp of the Normans, what he loved in their
manners was the abstemious sobriety, and the ceremonial religion, which
distinguished those sons of the Scandinavian from all other kindred
tribes.

The Norman position in France, indeed, in much resembled that of the
Spartan in Greece. He had forced a settlement with scanty numbers in the
midst of a subjugated and sullen population, surrounded by jealous and
formidable foes. Hence sobriety was a condition of his being, and the
policy of the chief lent a willing ear to the lessons of the preacher.
Like the Spartan, every Norman of pure race was free and noble; and this
consciousness inspired not only that remarkable dignity of mien which
Spartan and Norman alike possessed, but also that fastidious self-respect
which would have revolted from exhibiting a spectacle of debasement to
inferiors. And, lastly, as the paucity of their original numbers, the
perils that beset, and the good fortune that attended them, served to
render the Spartans the most religious of all the Greeks in their
dependence on the Divine aid; so, perhaps, to the same causes may be
traced the proverbial piety of the ceremonial Normans; they carried into
their new creed something o