speech and
manners--enjoying every available place of honour or profit in the
country.

The great national reaction under Godwine and Harold made England once
more England for a few years. But this change, happy as it was, could
not altogether do away with the effects of the French predilections of
Eadward. With Eadward, then, the Norman Conquest really begins. The men
of the generation before the Conquest, the men whose eyes were not to
behold the event itself, but who were to do all that they could do to
advance or retard it, are now in the full maturity of life, in the full
possession of power.

Eadward is on the throne of England; Godwine, Leofric, and Siward divide
among them the administration of the realm. The next generation, the
warriors of Stamfordbridge and Senlac, of York and Ely, are fast growing
into maturity. Harold Hadrada is already pursuing his wild career of
night-errantry in distant lands, and is astonishing the world by his
exploits in Russia and Sicily, at Constantinople and at Jerusalem.

The younger warriors of the Conquest, Eadwine and Morcere and Waltheof
and Hereward, were probably born, but they must still have been in their
cradles or in their mothers' arms. But, among the leaders of Church and
State, Ealdred, who lived to place the crown on the head both of Harold
and of William, is already a great prelate, abbot of the great house of
Tewkesbury, soon to succeed Lyfing in the chair of Worcester.

Tostig must have been on the verge of manhood; Swegen and Harold were
already men, bold and vigorous, ready to march at their father's
bidding, and before long to affect the destiny of their country for evil
and for good. Beyond the sea, William, still a boy in years but a man in
conduct and counsel, is holding his own among the storms of a troubled
minority, and learning those arts of the statesman and the warrior which
fitted him to become the wisest ruler of Normandy, the last and greatest
conqueror of England.

The actors in the great drama are ready for their parts; the ground is
gradually preparing for the scene of their performance. The great
struggle of nations and tongues and principles in which each of them had
his share, the struggle in which William of Normandy and Harold of
England stand forth as worthy rivals of the noblest of prizes, will form
the subject of the next, the chief and central portion of my history.

The struggle between Normans and Englishmen began with the access