Part 16

William sailed on the 28th of September, and landed his army on the 29th, without experiencing any resistance. Harold was in the North, contending with and defeating the Northmen, one of whose leaders was his brother Tostig. As soon as he received intelligence of William's landing he marched south, bent upon giving immediate battle, though his mother and his brother Gurth and other relatives, and many of his friends, strongly counselled delay. This counsel was good, for his force was to William's as one to four; and even a week's delay might have so far strengthened the Saxons as to have enabled them to fight on an approach to equal terms with the invaders. But Harold rejected all advice, and pressed forward to action so imprudently as to countenance, in a superstitious age, the notion that he was urged on by an irresistible power, which had decreed his destruction. Certainly he did not display much sagacity before battle, though both skill and bravery in it were not wanting on his part The battle of Hastings was fought on the 14th of October, 1066. The Normans were the assailants; but for six hours--from nine in the morning till three in the afternoon--they were repulsed; and had the Saxons been content to hold their ground, victory would 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 the Italians, that the House of Hohenzollern has triumphed over the House of Hapsburg, that President Johnson rules at Washington, and that Queen Victoria sits in the seat of Akbar or Aurungzebe, are facts which must all be attributed to the decision made by the sword at Hastings, no matter what may have been the particular process of events after that battle. It is possible that the misery consequent on the victory of the Normans has been exaggerated, though a great deal of suffering must have followed from it. But there can be no exaggeration of the general consequence of the success of the Normans. That determined the future course of the world, and will continue to determine it long after the Valley of the Amazon shall be far more thickly inhabited, and better known, than to-day is the Valley of the Danube.

There is one popular error with regard to the Norman Conquest which it may not be amiss to correct. It is taken for granted by most persons who have written on it, that the triumph of William was the triumph of an aristocracy over a people, and we often hear the Saxons spoken of as democrats who were subdued by aristocrats. This is an entirely erroneous view of the whole subject. So far as there was a contest at Hastings between aristocrats and democrats, the Normans were champions of democracy, and the Saxons of the opposite principle. The Saxon aristocracy was very powerful, and its power was steadily increasing for generations before the Conquest; and had there not been a foreign invasion, it is altogether probable that the English system soon would have become strictly oligarchical. One of the chief causes of Harold's failure was his inability to command the prompt support of some of the greatest nobles, as Earls Edwin and Morcar, who paid bitterly for their backwardness in after days. Something of this may be attributed to the weakness of his title to the crown, but the mere fact that such men could so powerfully influence events at a time when the very existence of the country was at stake, is enough to show how strong were the insular aristocrats; and it was this selfish aristocracy that was destroyed by the Normans, most of whom were upstarts, the very scum of Europe having entered William's army. We doubt if ever there was a greater triumph effected by the poor and the lowly-born over the rich and the well-born, than that which was gained at Hastings, though it required some years to make it complete. "According to the common report," says Sir F. Palgrave, "sixty thousand knights received their fees, or rather their livings, to use the old expression, from the Conqueror. This report is exaggerated as to number; but the race of the Anglo-Danish and English nobility and gentry, the Earls and the greater Thanes, disappears; and with some exceptions, remarkable as exemplifying the general rule, all the superiorities of the English soil became vested in the Conqueror's Baronage. Men of a new race and order, men of strange manners and strange speech, ruled in England. There were, however, some great mitigations, and the very sufferings of the conquered were so inflicted as to become the ultimate means of national prosperity; but they were to be gone through, and to be attended with much present desolation and misery. The process was the more painful because it was now accompanied by so much degradation and contumely. The Anglo-Saxons seem to have had a very strong aristocratic feeling,--a great respect for family and dignity of blood. The Normans, or rather the host of adventurers whom we must of necessity comprehend under the name of Normans, had comparatively little; and not very many of the real old and powerful aristocracy, whether of Normandy or Brittany, settled in England. The great majority had been rude, and poor, and despicable in their own country,---the rascallions of Northern Gaul: these, suddenly enriched, lost all compass and bearing of mind; and no one circumstance vexed the spirit of the English more, than to see the fair and noble English maidens and widows compelled to accept these despicable adventurers as their husbands. Of this we have an example in Lucia, the daughter of Algar, for Talboys seems to have been a person of the lowest degree." Ivo Talboys, or Taillebois, was one of the Conqueror's followers, and his chief gave him lands in the fen country, near the monastery of Croyland; and this chance of a locality may have had something to do with the reputation he has, for it brought him under the lash of the famous Ingulphus, Chronicler of Croyland, (if he was that Chronicler,) who charges him with all manner of crimes,--and with reason good, for he bore himself with great harshness toward the brethren of the great Croyland monastery,--an unpardonable offence. Low as he was by birth, Taillebois received the hand of Lucia, sister of the Saxon Earls Edwin and Morcar, and became very wealthy. From this union 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, vestments, and crucifixes crested with jewels, the silken garments for men and women, the rings, necklaces, bracelets, wrought delicately in gold and resplendent in gems, inspired the Continental barbarians with rapture, and in their imaginations made England appear the Dorado of those times." One of the writers of that day states that "incredible treasures in gold and silver were sent from the plunder of England to the Pope, together with costly ornaments, which would have been held in the highest estimation even at Byzantium, then universally regarded as the most opulent city in the world." All this implies that the Saxon aristocracy were very rich, and it is far from unlikely that it was the desire to preserve their property that led them to offer so little resistance to William,--a fatally mistaken course, for the invading adventurers had entered England in search of other men's property, and were not to be kept quiet by the quietness of the owners thereof. The aristocracy alone could afford such plunder as that described, and that so much of it was obtained shows how extensive must have been the spoliation, and how thoroughly Saxon nobles were stripped of their possessions by the low-born ragamuffins who were induced by William's recruiting sergeants to enlist under his black banner.

FOOTNOTES:

[B] An Account of the Danes and Norwegians in England, Scotland, and Ireland, by J. J. Worsaae, Sec. I. p. 6.

[C] "What we call purchase, _perquisitio_," says Blackstone, "the feudists called conquest, _conquisitio_; both denoting any means of acquiring an estate out of the common course of inheritance. And this is still the proper phrase in the law of Scotland, as it was among the Norman jurists, who styled the first purchaser (that is, him who bought the estate into the family which at present owns it) the conqueror, or _conquereur_, which seems to be all that was meant by the appellation which was given to William the Norman." Had Harold been victorious at Hastings, he would, according to the feudists, have been the Conqueror; that is, the man who brought England into his family.

[D] The History of Normandy and of England, Vol. I. pp. 703, 704. One of the greatest historical works of a country and an age singularly rich in historical literature, but incomplete, like the works of Macaulay, Niebuhr, and Arnold, and the last work of Prescott. The third and fourth volumes, posthumously published in 1864,--Sir Francis died in 1861,--are well edited by the author's son, Mr. Francis Turner Palgrave, who honorably upholds the honored name he inherits.

[E] Merivale, History of the Romans under the Empire; Vol. IV. p. 297, note: "The civilization of barbarians, at least their material cultivation, has been generally more advanced by instructors whose moral superiority was less strongly marked, than where the teachers and the taught have few common sympathies and points of contact. Thus, in our own times, rough whalers and brutal pirates have done more to Europeanize the natives of Polynesia than the missionaries."

[F] A History of England under the Norman Kings, etc., pp. 84, 85, and 87. Dr. Lappenberg is emphatic on the subject of the formation of the Norman race through the junction of various races. "Rolf [Rollo] and his companions were like those meteors which traverse the air with incredible swiftness," he says, "and in vanishing leave behind them long streams of fire which the eye gazes on with amazement. The Northmen who settled in Neustria gradually became lost among the French, a mixture of Gauls and Romans, Franks and Burgundians, West Goths and Saracens, friends and foes, barbarians and civilized nations. Ten sorts of language, and with them, perhaps, as many forms of government, were lost amid this mass of peoples. French and foreigners have visited Normandy in search of some traces of the old Scandinavian colonies, or at least of some testimonial of their long sojourn there, and one or other memorial characteristic of this daring people. All have admired the prosperity of the province, to which the fertility of the soil and its manufactures and commerce have contributed; but vainly have they sought for the original Northmen in the present inhabitants. With the exception of some faint resemblances, they have met with nothing Norsk."--pp. 65, 66.

[G] The History of Normandy and of England, Vol. I. pp. 704, 705. Lanfranc, who was made Archbishop of Canterbury by the Conqueror, was a native of Pavia, and Anselm, his successor, a native of Aosta.

[H] Rollo and his Race: or, Footsteps of the Normans, Vol. II. pp. 107-109.

[I] What Sir F. Palgrave says of the famous son of Robert Guiscard is applicable generally to the Normans: "Bohemond was affectionate and true to father, wife, and children, pleasant, affable, and courteous: yet wrapped up in selfishness, possessed by insatiate ambition and almost diabolical cruelty, proud and faithless, but in spite of all these vices so seductive as to command the admiration even of those who knew him to be a heartless demon."--_History_ Vol. IV. p. 471.

[J] "The heart of Emma clung more and more to her native land. Her feelings were inherited by the children who were afterward born to her,--they imbibed them at their mother's breast. Their hearts were thoroughly alienated from England, and the Normans and Normandy became as their kindred and their home."--Palgrave, Vol. III. p. 112. Edward's wife was Editha, daughter of Earl Godwin, and sister of Harold.

[K] The History of Normandy and of England, Vol. III. pp. 293, 294.

[L] History of the Four Conquests of England, Vol. II. pp. 176-178.

[M] The legitimate descent of Queen Victoria from the Conqueror is sometimes disputed, because it is not correctly traced, in consequence of the line of descent being carried back through Henry VII., instead of being carried through his wife, _nee_ Elizabeth Plantagenet. It may not be uninteresting to state the royal pedigree, which is at times rather intricate, and full of sinuosities,--in part due to the occurrences of political revolutions, old English statesmen never having paid much regard to political legitimacy, which is a modern notion. Queen Victoria is the daughter of Edward, Duke of Kent, who was son of George III., who was son of Frederick, Prince of Wales, who was son of George II., who was son of George I., who was son of the Electress Sophia (by Ernest Augustus, Elector of Hanover), who was daughter of Elizabeth Stuart (by Frederick V., Elector Palatine and "Winter King" of Bohemia), who was daughter of James I. (Sixth of Scotland), who was son of Mary, Queen of Scots (by Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley), who was daughter of James V., who was son of Margaret Tudor (by James IV.), who was daughter of Elizabeth Plantagenet (by Henry VII.), who was daughter of Edward IV., who was son of Richard, Duke of York, who was son of Anne Mortimer (by Richard Plantagenet, Earl of Cambridge, son of Edmund, Duke of York, fifth son of Edward III.), who was daughter of Roger, Earl of Marche, who was son of Philippe (by Edmund, Earl of Marche), who was daughter of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, third son of Edward III., who was son of Edward II., who was son of Edward I., who was son of Henry III., who was son of John, who was son of Henry II., who was son of Matilda (by Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou), who was daughter of Henry I. (by Matilda of Scotland, sister of Edgar Atheling, and therefore of the Saxon blood royal), who was son of William the Conqueror. Thus Queen Victoria is descended legitimately from the Conqueror, not only through Lionel, Duke of Clarence, Edward III.'s third son, but also through that monarch's fifth son, Edmund, Duke of York, whose second son, the Earl of Cambridge, married the great-granddaughter of the Duke of Clarence. Had the great struggle of the English throne in the fifteenth century been correctly named, it would stand in history as the contest between the lines of Clarence (not York) and Lancaster. In virtue of her descent from Henry VII., Queen Victoria shares "the aspiring blood of Lancaster," which was so mounting that it brought the worst of woes on England. Henry VII. was the son of Margaret Beaufort (by Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond), who was the daughter of John, Duke of Somerset, who was the son of John, Earl of Somerset, who was the son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, fourth son of Edward III.; but the mother of the Earl of Somerset was, at the time of his birth, not the wife, but the mistress of the Duke of Lancaster, though he married her late in life, and in various ways obtained the legitimation of the children she had borne him,--facts that could not remove the great fact of their illegitimacy, if marriage is to count for anything and which no good historian has treated with respect. Lord Macaulay calls the Tudors "a line of bastards," and ranks them with the "succession of impostors" set up by the adherents of the White Rose. Froude's great work has created a new interest in the question of the English succession, for he bases his peculiar view of the character of Henry VIII., and his justification of all his acts of heartless tyranny, on the necessities that grew out of that perplexing question, which troubled England for two centuries, thus forming a practical satire on that theory which represents that the peculiar excellence of hereditary monarchy is found in its power to prevent disputes for the possession of government, and to promote the preservation of society's peace,--a theory which has often been thrown into the teeth of republicans, and particularly since the occurrence of our unhappy civil troubles. Yet one would think that Gettysburg and Shiloh were not worse days than Towton and Barnet. Those persons who are interested in the English succession question, and who would see how wide a one it was, and how far and how long and variously it affected the politics of Continental Europe as well as those of England, should read the chapter on the subject in Miss Cooper's "Life and Letters of Arabella Stuart," a learned and lively work, and not the least meritorious of those admirable historical productions which we owe to the genius, the industry, and the honesty of Englishwomen,--Agnes Strickland, Caroline A. Halsted, Lucy Aiken, Mrs. Everett Green, Elizabeth Cooper, and others,--whose writings do honor to the sex, and fairly entitle their authors to be ranked with those accomplished ladies of the sixteenth century whose solid attainments have so long been matter of despairing admiration.

[N] _Histoire de la Conquete de l'Angleterre par les Normans_, Tom. I. pp. 237, 238.

THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT.

The critic's first duty in the presence of an author's collective works is to seek out some key to his method, some utterance of his literary convictions, some indication of his ruling theory. The amount of labor involved in an inquiry of this kind will depend very much upon the author. In some cases the critic will find express declarations; in other cases he will have to content himself with conscientious inductions. In a writer so fond of digressions as George Eliot, he has reason to expect that broad evidences of artistic faith will not be wanting. He finds in "Adam Bede" the following passage:--