in this crisis of the Norman mastery, which might well be called
the weakness of the strong kings. William of Normandy succeeded
immediately, he did not quite succeed ultimately; there was in his huge
success a secret of failure that only bore fruit long after his death.
It was certainly his single aim to simplify England into a popular
autocracy, like that growing up in France; with that aim he scattered
the feudal holdings in scraps, demanded a direct vow from the
sub-vassals to himself, and used any tool against the barony, from the
highest culture of the foreign ecclesiastics to the rudest relics of
Saxon custom. But the very parallel of France makes the paradox
startlingly apparent. It is a proverb that the first French kings were
puppets; that the mayor of the palace was quite insolently the king of
the king. Yet it is certain that the puppet became an idol; a popular
idol of unparalleled power, before which all mayors and nobles bent or
were broken. In France arose absolute government, the more because it
was not precisely personal government. The King was already a
thing--like the Republic. Indeed the mediaeval Republics were rigid with
divine right. In Norman England, perhaps, the government was too
personal to be absolute. Anyhow, there is a real though recondite sense
in which William the Conqueror was William the Conquered. When his two
sons were dead, the whole country fell into a feudal chaos almost like
that before the Conquest. In France the princes who had been slaves
became something exceptional like priests; and one of them became a
saint. But somehow our greatest kings were still barons; and by that
very energy our barons became our kings.

VI

THE AGE OF THE CRUSADES

The last chapter began, in an apparent irrelevance, with the name of St.
Edward; and this one might very well begin with the name of St. George.
His first appearance, it is said, as a patron of our people, occurred at
the instance of Richard Coeur de Lion during his campaign in
Palestine; and this, as we shall see, really stands for a new England
which might well have a new saint. But the Confessor is a character in
English history; whereas St. George, apart from his place in martyrology
as a Roman soldier, can hardly be said to be a character in any history.
And if we wish to understand the noblest and most neglected of human
revolutions, we can hardly get closer to it than by considering this
paradox, of how much progress