it was very foolish they had not done so before. A people so helpless,
so utterly anarchic, so incapable of united action, deserved to undergo
a severe training from the hard taskmasters of Romance civilisation. The
nation remained, but it remained as a conquered race, to be drilled in
the stern school of the conquerors. For awhile, it is true, William
governed England like an English king; but the constant rebellion and
faithlessness of his new subjects drove him soon to severer measures;
and the great insurrection of 1068, with its results, put the whole
country at his feet in a very different sense from the battle of Senlac.
For a hundred and fifty years, the English people remained a mere race
of chapmen and serfs; and the English language died down meanwhile into
a servile dialect. When the native stock emerges again into the full
light of history, by the absorption of the Norman conquerors in the
reign of John, it reappears with all the super-added culture and
organisation of the Romance nationalities. The Conquest was an
inevitable step in the work of severing England from the barbarous
North, and binding it once more in bonds of union with the civilised
South. It was the necessary undoing of the Danish conquest; more still,
it was an inevitable step in the process whereby England itself was to
begin its unified existence by the final breaking down of the barriers
which divided Wessex from Mercia, and Mercia from Northumbria.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE.

A description of Anglo-Saxon Britain, however brief, would not be
complete without some account of the English language in its earliest
and purest form. But it would be impossible within reasonable limits to
give anything more than a short general statement of the relation which
the old English tongue bears to the kindred Teutonic dialects, and of
the main differences which mark it off from our modern simplified and
modified speech. All that can be attempted here is such a broad outline
as may enable the general reader to grasp the true connexion between
modern English and so-called Anglo-Saxon, on the one hand, as well as
between Anglo-Saxon itself and the parent Teutonic language on the
other. Any full investigation of grammatical or etymological details
would be beyond the scope of this little volume.

The tongue spoken by the English and Saxons at the period of their
invasion of Britain was an almost unmixed Low Dutch dialect. Orig