have
been theirs. But they left the position they had so valiantly
maintained, to pursue the Normans, when the latter feigned to fly. Even
then they fought with heroic resolution, and might have regained the
day, had not Harold fallen. Soon after, the English position was
stormed, and the king's brother, Gurth, was slain. The combat lasted
till the coming on of darkness. Fifteen thousand of the victors are said
to have fallen,--a number as great as the entire English army.

The event of the battle of Hastings placed all England, ultimately, at
the disposition of the Normans, though many years elapsed before the
country was entirely conquered. Had the English possessed a good
government, or leaders who enjoyed general confidence, their defeat at
Hastings would not have reduced them to bondage, or have converted their
country into a new world. But they, who were even slavishly dependent on
their government for leading, had no government; and they were just as
destitute of chiefs who were competent to assume the lead at so dark a
crisis. Taking advantage of circumstances so favorable to his purpose,
William soon made himself king, but had most of his work to do long
after he was crowned. The battle of Hastings, therefore, was decisive of
the future of England and of the British race. Saxon England
disappeared; Norman England rose. The change was perfect, and quite
warrants Lord Macaulay's emphatic assertion, that "the battle of
Hastings, and the events which followed it, not only placed a Duke of
Normandy on the English throne, but gave up the whole population of
England to the tyranny of the Norman race,"--and that "the subjugation
of a nation by a nation has seldom, even in Asia, been more complete."
The nation that finally was formed by a union of the Saxons and the
Normans, and which was seven or eight generations in forming, was a very
different nation from that which had been ruled by the Confessor. It was
a nation that was capable of every form of action, and had little in
common with the Saxons of the eleventh century. It matters nothing
whether the Conqueror introduced the feudal system into England, or
whether he found it there, or whether that system is almost entirely an
imaginary creation, as most probably is the fact. We know that the event
called the Norman Conquest wrought great changes in England, and through
England in the world; and that Napoleon III. reigns over the French, and
Victor Emanuel II. over