or the first victors at Hastings, like the first conquistadores
in America, perished, as the monk chronicles point out, rapidly by their
own crimes; and very few of our nobility can trace their names back to
the authentic Battle Abbey roll. The great majority of the peers have
sprung from, and all have intermarried with, the Commons; and the peerage
has been from the first, and has become more and more as centuries have
rolled on, the prize of success in life.

The cause is plain. The conquest of England by the Normans was not one
of those conquests of a savage by a civilised race, or of a cowardly race
by a brave race, which results in the slavery of the conquered, and
leaves the gulf of caste between two races, master and slave. That was
the case in France, and resulted, after centuries of oppression, in the
great and dreadful revolution of 1793, which convulsed not only France
but the whole civilised world. But caste, thank God, has never existed
in England, since at least the first generation after the Norman
conquest.

The vast majority, all but the whole population of England, have been
always free; and free, as they are not where caste exists, to change
their occupations. They could intermarry, if they were able men, into
the ranks above them; as they did sink, if they were unable men, into the
ranks below them. Any man acquainted with the origin of our English
surnames may verify this fact for himself, by looking at the names of a
single parish or a single street of shops. There, jumbled together, he
will find names marking the noblest Saxon or Angle blood--Kenward or
Kenric, Osgood or Osborne, side by side with Cordery or Banister--now
names of farmers in my own parish--or other Norman-French names which may
be, like those two last, in Battle Abbey roll--and side by side the
almost ubiquitous Brown, whose ancestor was probably some Danish or
Norwegian housecarle, proud of his name Biorn the bear, and the
ubiquitous Smith or Smythe, the smiter, whose forefather, whether he now
be peasant or peer, assuredly handled the tongs and hammer at his own
forge. This holds true equally in New England and in Old. When I search
through (as I delight to do) your New England surnames, I find the same
jumble of names--West Saxon, Angle, Danish, Norman, and French-Norman
likewise, many of primaeval and heathen antiquity, many of high nobility,
all worked together, as at home, to form the Free Commoners of England.

I