importance of the Norman. Many as were his talents as a master,
he is in history the servant of other and wider things. The landing of
Lanfranc is perhaps more of a date than the landing of William. And
Lanfranc was an Italian--like Julius Caesar. The Norman is not in history
a mere wall, the rather brutal boundary of a mere empire. The Norman is
a gate. He is like one of those gates which still remain as he made
them, with round arch and rude pattern and stout supporting columns; and
what entered by that gate was civilization. William of Falaise has in
history a title much higher than that of Duke of Normandy or King of
England. He was what Julius Caesar was, and what St. Augustine was: he
was the ambassador of Europe to Britain.

William asserted that the Confessor, in the course of that connection
which followed naturally from his Norman education, had promised the
English crown to the holder of the Norman dukedom. Whether he did or not
we shall probably never know: it is not intrinsically impossible or even
improbable. To blame the promise as unpatriotic, even if it was given,
is to read duties defined at a much later date into the first feudal
chaos; to make such blame positive and personal is like expecting the
Ancient Britons to sing "Rule Britannia." William further clinched his
case by declaring that Harold, the principal Saxon noble and the most
probable Saxon claimant, had, while enjoying the Duke's hospitality
after a shipwreck, sworn upon sacred relics not to dispute the Duke's
claim. About this episode also we must agree that we do not know; yet we
shall be quite out of touch with the time if we say that we do not care.
The element of sacrilege in the alleged perjury of Harold probably
affected the Pope when he blessed a banner for William's army; but it
did not affect the Pope much more than it would have affected the
people; and Harold's people quite as much as William's. Harold's people
presumably denied the fact; and their denial is probably the motive of
the very marked and almost eager emphasis with which the Bayeux Tapestry
asserts and reasserts the reality of the personal betrayal. There is
here a rather arresting fact to be noted. A great part of this
celebrated pictorial record is not concerned at all with the well-known
historical events which we have only to note rapidly here. It does,
indeed, dwell a little on the death of Edward; it depicts the
difficulties of William's enterprise in the fell