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They have an intuitive and most discriminating perception of antiquity, and their adhesion to it is invincible. Whether they came in with the Normans, or before, history does not say. One thing would seem evident. They are older than the Order of the Garter, and belonged to feudalism.
He was in Flanders, to our great loss, when the Normans invaded England, and there he heard, with grief, of the death of our Harold and the slaughter at Senlac. Now, hearing that many brave men yet defy the tyrant in the Isle of Ely, protected by its bogs and marshes, he has accepted the invitation of the Abbot Thurstan, and has hastened to return home and place himself at their head.
The tide of English power was at that hour at its lowest ebb; it had left far in the interior the landmarks of its first irresistible rush; it might be said, without exaggeration, that Gaelic children now gathered shells and pebbles where that tide once rolled, charged with all its thunders; it was now about to turn; the first murmuring menace of new encroachments began to be heard under Henry VII.; as we listen they grow louder on the ear; the waves advance with a steady, deliberate march, unlike the first impetuous onslaught of the Normans; they advance and do not recede, till they recover all the ground they had abandoned.
When on their iron-clad horses they resembled turtles, so that if a knight fell off, he had to be chopped open to be rid of his metal clothes. Yet all this was in vain, for when the Norman marched out in bodies, or rode in squadrons, the Welshery kept away and were hidden. Even the birds and beasts noticed this, and saw what fools the Normans were, to behave so brutally.
Since the Normans were for some time the governing race, while many of the Saxons occupied comparatively menial positions, numerous French words indicative of rank, power, science, luxury, and fashion were introduced. Many titles were derived from a French source. English thus obtained words like "sovereign," "royalty," "duke," "marquis," "mayor," and "clerk."
The smaller central mound of the citadel itself would appear to have been a work of the Normans, who divided the space occupied within the outer defences into two parts; that on the east belonging to the military works, and the western half pertaining to the Bishop and having within it the original Salisbury Cathedral.
It was a sad time for the English, for the word of the Northman was the law, and wherever there seemed need for it, a grim, gray castle towered up solidly above the forest, with a great ditch, called a moat, dug around it; and behind that water and those walls of stone lived Normans, as they now were called.
We Normans are too apt to trust wholly to our horses' legs to the neglect of our own, and although I have no doubt that you could ride as far as a horse could carry you, I warrant that you could hardly have performed on foot the journey from Beaurain in twice the time in which they did it.
"I scarce know what we demand as yet, that must depend upon how we prosper," returned Hilyard, with a bitter laugh; "but the rising will have some good, if it shows only to you lords and Normans that a Saxon people does exist, and will turn when the iron heel is upon its neck. We are taxed, ground, pillaged, plundered, sheep, maintained to be sheared for your peace or butchered for your war.
The Normans instigated the people to reject him, on the plea of his illegitimacy; but Henry I., then King of France, gratefully remembered the good offices of Robert the Devil, William's Father: therefore espoused his cause, and raised an army of three thousand men to invade Normandy; long and obstinate wars continued, which did not terminate till William had accomplished the successful invasion of England; he was the grandson of Rollo, known after his marriage as Robert the 1st., Duke of Normandy, who died 935.
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