Historical Lectures and Essays - Charles Kingsley 2 стр.

England was to be conquered by the Norman; but by the civilised, not the barbaric; by the Norse who had settled, but four generations before, in the North East of France under Rou, Rollo, Rolf the Gangerso-called, they say, because his legs were so long that, when on horseback, he touched the ground and seemed to gang, or walk.  He and his Norsemen had taken their share of France, and called it Normandy to this day; and meanwhile, with that docility and adaptability which marks so often truly great spirits, they had changed their creed, their language, their habits, and had become, from heathen and murderous Berserkers, the most truly civilised people of Europe, andas was most natural thenthe most faithful allies and servants of the Pope of Rome.  So greatly had they changed, and so fast, that William Duke of Normandy, the great-great-grandson of Rolf the wild Viking, was perhaps the finest gentleman, as well as the most cultivated sovereign, and the greatest statesman and warrior in all Europe.

So Harold of Norway came with all his Vikings to Stamford Bridge by York; and took, by coming, only that which Harold of England promised him, namely, forasmuch as he was taller than any other man, seven feet of English ground.

The story of that great battle, told with a few inaccuracies, but told as only great poets tell, you should read, if you have not read it already, in the Heimskringla of Snorri Sturluson, the Homer of the North:

The bones of the slain, men say, whitened the place for fifty years to come.

And remember, that on the same day on which that fight befellSeptember 27, 1066William, Duke of Normandy, with all his French-speaking Norsemen, was sailing across the British Channel, under the protection of a banner consecrated by the Pope, to conquer that England which the Norse-speaking Normans could not conquer.

And now King Harold showed himself a man.  He turned at once from the North of England to the South.  He raised the folk of the Southern, as he had raised those of the Central and Northern shires; and in sixteen daysafter a march which in those times was a prodigious feathe was entrenched upon the fatal down which men called Heathfield then, and Senlac, but Battle to this daywith William and his French Normans opposite him on Telham hill.

Then came the battle of Hastings.  You all know what befell upon that day; and how the old weapon was matched against the newthe English axe against the Norman lanceand beaten only because the English broke their ranks.  If you wish to refresh your memories, read the tale once more in Mr. Freemans History of England, or Professor Creasys Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, or even, best of all, the late Lord Lyttons splendid romance of Harold.  And when you go to England, go, as some of you may have gone already, to Battle; and there from off the Abbey grounds, or from Mountjoye behind, look down off what was then The Heathy Field, over the long slopes of green pasture and the rich hop-gardens, where were no hop-gardens then, and the flat tide-marshes winding between the wooded heights, towards the southern sea; and imagine for yourselves the feelings of an Englishman as he contemplates that broad green sloping lawn, on which was decided the destiny of his native land.  Here, right beneath, rode Taillefer up the slope before them all, singing the song of Roland, tossing his lance in air and catching it as it fell, with all the Norse berserker spirit of his ancestors flashing out in him, at the thought of one fair fight, and then purgatory, or ValhallaTaillefer perhaps preferred the latter.  Yonder on the left, in that copse where the red-ochre gully runs, is Sanguelac, the drain of blood, into which (as the Bayeux tapestry, woven by Matildas maids, still shows) the Norman knights fell, horse and man, till the gully was bridged with writhing bodies for those who rode after.  Here, where you standthe crest of the hill marks where it must have beenwas the stockade on which depended the fate of England.  Yonder, perhaps, stalked out one English squire or house-carle after another: tall men with long-handled battle-axesone specially terrible, with a wooden helmet which no sword could piercewho hewed and hewed down knight on knight, till they themselves were borne to earth at last.  And here, among the trees and ruins of the garden, kept trim by those who know the treasure which they own, stood Harolds two standards of the fighting-man and the dragon of Wessex.  And here, close by (for here, for many a century, stood the high altar of Battle Abbey, where monks sang masses for Harolds soul), upon this very spot the Swan-neck found her hero-lovers corpse.  Ah, says many an Englishmanand who will blame him for ithow grand to have died beneath that standard on that day!  Yes, and how right.  And yet how right, likewise, that the Normans cry of Dexaie!God Help!and not the English hurrah, should have won that day, till William rode up Mountjoye in the afternoon to see the English army, terrible even in defeat, struggling through copse and marsh away toward Brede, and, like retreating lions driven into their native woods, slaying more in the 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 Gods 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 Canutes and Williams would not have fallen on them within the short space of sixty years.  They did not want for courage, as Stamford 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 accidiaακηδιαand 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 evila habit of mind too often accompanied, as in the case of the Angle-Danes, with self-indulgence, often coarse enough.  Huge eaters and huger drinkers, fuddled with ale, were the men who went down at Hastingsthough they went down like heroesbefore 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 Stephens 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.  Scotts 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.  For 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.

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.  For 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 racesmaster 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 could 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 bloodKenward or Kenric, Osgood or Osborne, side by side with Cordery or Banisternow names of farmers in my own parishor other Norman-French names which may be, like those two last, in Battle Abbey rolland side by side the almost ubiquitous Brown, whose ancestor was probably some Danish or Norwegian house-carle, proud of his name Biorn the Bear, and the ubiquitous Smith or Smythe, the Smiter, whose forefather, whether he be now 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 namesWest Saxon, Angle, Danish, Norman, and French-Norman likewise, many of primæval and heathen antiquity, many of high nobility, all worked together, as at home, to form the Free Commoners of England.

If any should wish to know more on this curious and important subject, let me recommend them to study Fergusons Teutonic Name System, a book from which you will discover that some of our quaintest, and seemingly most plebeian surnamesmany surnames, too, which are extinct in England, but remain in Americaare really corruptions of good old Teutonic names, which our ancestors may have carried in the German Forest, before an Englishman set foot on British soil; from which he will rise with the comfortable feeling that we English-speaking men, from the highest to the lowest, are literally kinsmen.  Nay, so utterly made up now is the old blood-feud between Norseman and Englishman, between the descendants of those who conquered and those who were conquered, that in the children of our Prince of Wales, after 800 years, the blood of William of Normandy is mingled with the blood of the very Harold who fell at Hastings.  And so, by the bitter woes which followed the Norman conquest was the whole population, Dane, Angle, and Saxon, earl and churl, freeman and slave, crushed and welded together into one homogeneous mass, made just and merciful towards each other by the most wholesome of all teachings, a community of suffering; and if they had been, as I fear they were, a lazy and a sensual people, were taught

But how did these wild Vikings become Christian men?  It is a long story.  So stanch a race was sure to be converted only very slowly.  Noble missionaries as Ansgar, Rembert, and Poppo, had worked for 150 years and more among the heathens of Denmark.  But the patriotism of the Norseman always recoiled, even though in secret, from the fact that they were German monks, backed by the authority of the German emperor; and many a man, like Svend Fork-beard, father of the great Canute, though he had the Kaiser himself for godfather, turned heathen once more the moment he was free, because his baptism was the badge of foreign conquest, and neither pope nor kaiser should lord it over him, body or soul.  St. Olaf, indeed, forced Christianity on the Norse at the swords point, often by horrid cruelties, and perished in the attempt.  But who forced it on the Norsemen of Scotland, England, Ireland, Neustria, Russia, and all the Eastern Baltic?  It was absorbed and in most cases, I believe, gradually and willingly, as a gospel and good news to hearts worn out with the storm of their own passions.  And whence came their Christianity?  Much of it, as in the case of the Danes, and still more of the French Normans, came direct from Rome, the city which, let them defy its influence as they would, was still the fount of all theology, as well as of all civilisation.  But I must believe that much of it came from that mysterious ancient Western Church, the Church of St. Patric, St. Bridget, St. Columba, which had covered with rude cells and chapels the rocky islets of the North Atlantic, even to Iceland itself.  Even to Iceland; for when that island was first discovered, about A.D. 840, the Norsemen found in an isle, on the east and west and elsewhere, Irish books and bells and wooden crosses, and named that island Papey, the isle of the popessome little colony of monks, who lived by fishing, and who are said to have left the land when the Norsemen settled in it.  Let us believe, for it is consonant with reason and experience, that the sight of those poor monks, plundered and massacred again and again by the mailed swarms of Lochlin, yet never exterminated, but springing up again in the same place, ready for fresh massacre, a sacred plant which God had planted, and which no rage of man could trample outlet us believe, I say, that that sight taught at last to the buccaneers of the old world that there was a purer manliness, a loftier heroism, than the ferocious self-assertion of the Berserker, even the heroism of humility, gentleness, self-restraint, self-sacrifice; that there was a strength which was made perfect in weakness; a glory, not of the sword but of the cross.  We will believe that that was the lesson which the Norsemen learnt, after many a wild and blood-stained voyage, from the monks of Iona or of Derry, which caused the building of such churches as that which Sightrys, king of Dublin, raised about the year 1030, not in the Norse but in the Irish quarter of Dublin: a sacred token of amity between the new settlers and the natives on the ground of a common faith.  Let us believe, too, that the influence of woman was not wanting in the good workthat the story of St. Margaret and Malcolm Canmore was repeated, though inversely, in the case of many a heathen Scandinavian jarl, who, marrying the princely daughter of some Scottish chieftain, found in her creed at last something more precious than herself; while his brother or his cousin became, at Dublin or Wexford or Waterford, the husband of some saffron-robed Irish princess, fair as an elf, as the old saying was; some maiden of the three transcendent hues, of whom the old book of Linane says: