e
pursuit than they slew even in the fight.

But so it was to be; for so it ought to have been. You, my American
friends, delight, as I have said already, in seeing the old places of the
old country. Go, I beg you, and look at that old place, and if you be
wise, you will carry back from it one lesson: that God's thoughts are not
as our thoughts; nor His ways as our ways.

It was a fearful time which followed. I cannot but believe that our
forefathers had been, in some way or other, great sinners, or two such
conquests as Canute's and William's would not have fallen on them within
the short space of sixty years. They did not want for courage, as
Stanford Brigg and Hastings showed full well. English swine, their
Norman conquerors called them often enough; but never English cowards.
Their ruinous vice, if we are to trust the records of the time, was what
the old monks called accidia--[Greek text]--and ranked it as one of the
seven deadly sins: a general careless, sleepy, comfortable habit of mind,
which lets all go its way for good or evil--a habit of mind too often
accompanied, as in the case of the Anglo-Danes, with self-indulgence,
often coarse enough. Huge eaters and huger drinkers, fuddled with ale,
were the men who went down at Hastings--though they went down like
heroes--before the staid and sober Norman out of France.

But those were fearful times. As long as William lived, ruthless as he
was to all rebels, he kept order and did justice with a strong and steady
hand; for he brought with him from Normandy the instincts of a truly
great statesman. And in his sons' time matters grew worse and worse.
After that, in the troubles of Stephen's reign, anarchy let loose tyranny
in its most fearful form, and things were done which recall the cruelties
of the old Spanish conquistadores in America. Scott's charming romance
of _Ivanhoe_ must be taken, I fear, as a too true picture of English
society in the time of Richard I.

And what came of it all? What was the result of all this misery and
wrong?

This, paradoxical as it may seem--that the Norman conquest was the making
of the English people; of the Free Commons of England.

Paradoxical, but true. First, you must dismiss from your minds the too
common notion that there is now, in England a governing Norman
aristocracy, or that there has been one, at least since the year 1215,
when Magna Charta was won from the Norman John by Normans and by English
alike. F