to get William chosen king on Edward's death. William now declared that Harold was false to his oath, and made ready an army of Normans to invade England and dethrone him. Even at this fatal moment, while William was preparing his fleet and mustering thousands of soldiers, not from Normandy alone but from English Disunion; all parts of France, England was not united. Stamford Harold's brother Tostig, whom he had driven Bridge. into exile, suddenly landed in Northumbria, bringing with him the King of Norway and a host of Norse warriors. Harold had to march north to fight them. He met them at Stamford Bridge and utterly defeated them. Tostig and the Norwegian king were both slain. The vast army which came in three hundred ships was so shattered that twenty-four were enough to carry it away. It was a great victory, but it was Harold's last. While he was away the wind shifted from the northwest to the south, and Duke William was able to land with, it is said, a hundred thousand men at his back. "Had I been there," cried Harold, "they had never made good their landing." He hurried his army southward, but even now, with the enemy on English shore, Edwin and Morcar, Earls of Northumbria and Mercia, would not help him, but loitered behind till too late. The battle that was to decide England's fate was fought near Hastings on the 14th October, 1066. Battle of Harold drew up his men on a hill, and Hastings. strengthened his position with entrenchments. His soldiers fought on foot; his body-guard in the centre were armed mostly with two-handed axes or long swords, but on the wings he had some hastilyraised levies, some armed with clubs, some with spears, some with scythes. The duke had a splendid force of mail-clad cavalry and a number of archers. The Normans began the attack, but neither the arrows nor the charges of horsemen could shake the English. Man after man of William's best knights went down under the English axes. The day wore on towards afternoon, and still Harold held his ground. Had he had with him the warriors who had fallen at Stamford Bridge, or even the lingering forces of Edwin and Morcar, he might have won. But suddenly some of his ill-trained levies ruined him. The duke pretended to be retreating. Many of the English left their position to pursue the foe whom they thought beaten. William ordered his men to wheel about and charge. The English, caught in the open ground, were no match for the Norman cavalry, who cut them down with ease. Then William led his knights to a fresh charge on the body-guard who had stood firm by Harold. Although desperately outnumbered, these stood firm till Harold himself was mortally wounded by an arrow in the eye. Then at length the wall of shields was broken; the English guard were overpowered and slain where they stood; and as the sun was setting, Duke William found himself the victor. Shakespeare has written "This England never did—nor never shall- But when it first did help to wound itself". The period of English history which we have followed in this chapter gives us a striking example of this. Twice in ninety years was England at a conqueror's feet. It was not for want of valour. None could be braver than Edmund Ironsides or Harold. None could do more than give their lives for their country, and the English army at Hastings poured out its blood like water for its king. It was not the open enemy that was to be feared, but the familiar friend; not the Dane or Norman, but the recreant Englishman. The falseness of Ethelred, the treachery of Edric, the rebellion of Tostig, the halfheartedness of Edwin and Morcar-these were the true causes of the Saxon downfall. V.—NORMANS AND ENGLISH: FEUDALISM. After the battle of Hastings William marched slowly towards London. He might have expected William I., that the country of Alfred and Edmund 1066-1087. Ironsides would not submit after one defeat only. But the English were still quarrelling among themselves. And so, though the Witan chose Edgar Atheling, the grandson of Edmund Ironsides, to William offered the Crown by the Witan. succeed Harold as king, yet in a short time they found it hopeless to resist further. An embassy, with Edgar himself at the head of it, came to William and offered him the crown. Thus William was able to say that he ruled, not as a conqueror, but as the lawful king, elected by the Witan. This was a great advantage, but William was still in a very difficult position. He had two things to do: the first, to subdue the English thoroughly; the second, to keep his own Norman followers contented and obedient, to reward them, and yet not make them so strong that they could revolt against him. He had, in fact, to keep himself master of both Normans and English alike. His first stroke was to declare that all those who had fought against him at Hastings were rebels, and that their estates were forfeited to him. Thus To keep he became master of almost all the land in down the the south of England; and when in later English. years the English in the north and west rebelled against him, he punished them by taking away their lands also. These vast estates he used to reward his Norman followers. And even when an Englishman's estates were not taken from him, he was obliged to pay a large fine, and to admit that the land was really the king's and not his own; that he was the king's tenant and vassal, and therefore bound to serve him. Feudal Land. Thus was set up in England what is called the "Feudal System". To understand this we must fix our eyes upon the land, for the land was the basis of it all. The king at the head was System; the owner of all the land. He granted large estates to his nobles and barons, who were called tenants-in-chief, and who were bound by these grants of land to fight for the king if he called on them to do so. The tenants-in-chief in their turn granted parts of their estates to their followers, who were also bound in their turn to obey the tenants-in-chief as their superiors. And below all classes of free tenants were a vast number of serfs who had very small holdings of land, some five, ten, twenty, or thirty acres, and who had in return for this to work upon their lord's land, and to cultivate it for him. Thus all men were divided into ranks. We may think of it all as a sort of pyramid; hosts of serfs at the bottom owing obedience to their lords who held the land; next a large number of minor tenants owing obedience to the tenants-in-chief; and then a small number of tenants-in-chief, the earls and barons, owing obedience to the one king at the top. It was the land which bound them all together. Everyone had rights or duties which depended on the way he was connected with the land. The king was the master of all because he was master of all the land; the barons were his "vassals", subject to him, because they held his land; but they were lords over the serfs, because these did not hold land as freemen at all. Those It is easy to see that the English came off badly in this arrangement. As the Norman friends of the Many English king were put at the top, the English become Serfs. naturally sank to the bottom. who in days before the Conquest had been free, though they were owners only of very small estates, now found themselves reduced to being serfs, or, as they were sometimes called, villeins. Serfs. We must see what this meant for them. In the first place, they were no longer free. They were bound to the land and could not leave it. They were forced to work three or four days in each week on their lord's estate, without being paid for doing so. They could not give their daughters in marriage without their lord's leave. And beyond all this, they were in his power. He could punish them almost as he chose by fining them, or causing them to be flogged, and they could not get any redress. This was bad enough, but it was made worse by the fact that their lords were almost always foreigners. The Normans despised the English. They called them "dogs of Saxons", and treated them worse than dogs. They did not understand the English tongue, and paid no attention to what the English said or felt. William might pretend that he had, after all, only taken the place of Harold on the English throne, but |