ion
came "the great line whence sprang the barons of Kendal and Lancaster."
The last descendant of this Norman baron of William's creation and of
the Saxon Lucia died in 1861, a pauper in the workhouse of
Shrewsbury,--Emily Taillebois, a girl of eighteen.

There were thousands of such fellows as Taillebois in William's army,
and, though all were not so lucky as he, many of them drew good prizes
in the lottery of war, and founded, at the expense of the noblest
Saxons, families from which men are proud to be descended. Sir Walter
has used this fact in "Ivanhoe," when he makes the usually silent
Athelstane reply with so much eloquence to De Bracy's insolent remark
that the princes of the House of Anjou conferred not their wards on men
of such lineage as his. "My lineage, proud Norman," replied Athelstane,
"is drawn from a source more pure and ancient than that of a beggarly
Frenchman, whose living is won by selling the blood of the thieves whom
he assembles under his paltry standard. Kings were my ancestors, strong
in war and wise in council, who every day feasted in their hall more
hundreds than thou canst number individual followers; whose names have
been sung by minstrels, and their laws recorded by Wittenagemotes; whose
bones were interred amid the prayers of saints, and over whose tombs
minsters have been builded." There can be no doubt that Saxons as
far-descended as Scott represents Athelstane to have been were treated
worse than he, and that Saxon ladies of the highest birth and greatest
wealth experienced the fate of the conquered in much severer measure
than it became known to Rowena. Scott has been accused of exaggerating
the effects of the Conquest, but his glowing picture is by no means
overcharged, if we look at the effect of that change on the higher
classes of the vanquished people. The Saxons were very wealthy, and the
invaders obtained an amount of spoil that astonished them, the accounts
of which remind the reader of what was told of the extraordinary
acquisitions made by the ruffians who formed the force of Pizarro in
Peru. Years after the day of Hastings, we are told, William "bore back
with him, to his eager and hungry country, the plunder of England, which
was so varied in kind, so prodigious in amount, that the awe-stricken
chroniclers maintain that all the Gauls, if ransacked from end to end,
would have failed to supply treasures worthy to be compared with it. The
silver, the gold, the vases, vestm