ized, were brave, and defended their homes with the greatest obstinacy, the war was necessarily a war of extermination. The invaders were forced to win the land bit by bit by hard fighting. They destroyed cities, and towns, and churches; the natives were either driven back or killed; and the Roman civilization was obliterated. The English conquest, as far as it extended, was a well-nigh complete displacement of one people by another.

Thus, during a century and a half (449-600) the invaders succeeded in establishing a number of petty states on the soil of Britain, seven or eight of which soon became prominent. They retained their own language, they brought with them their own laws and customs, and, excepting such modifications as were necessary in consequence of their new surroundings, they organized themselves in their new home as they had been organized in the old one. A king at the head; local assemblies for local purposes, general assemblies for general purposes, each of which all freemen of each tribe or state had the right to attend; an armed force made up of all freemen capable of bearing arms; these were the general features of their organization (see p. 32, ff.). It contained nearly all the germs of the later system of self-government, and its development has been continuous from that day to this.

At the close of the sixth century the Britons still held all of the land beyond the Forth, and a belt of territory extending up the western coast; the rest of the country was in the hands of the intruders. And now a change began which was to exert a vast influence on the destinies of England. This was the conversion of the heathen English to Christianity.

The work of conversion was accomplished in the south by missionaries from the Church of Rome, and in the north by missionaries from the Irish Church. There were some ritualistic differences between the two Churches which, however, were happily adjusted at the synod of Whitby (664), where the Roman influence prevailed; and, five years later, Archbishop Theodore began the ecclesiastical organization of the country on the Roman model, and "converted what had been a missionary station into an established Church." England thus acquired ecclesiastical unity as a daughter of the Church of Rome, and was brought through her into direct contact with all the civilization and culture of the time. Moreover, the example of unity in the Church had a direct influence in bringing about unity in the state. It was impossible that so many petty kingdoms, without natural boundaries, should long remain independent; the work of consolidation began early, and, helped by the example of the Church, was continued with varying success until Ecgberht, king of Wessex (800-839), succeeded in extending his authority over all the English-speaking peoples of the island.

But the work of consolidation was still incomplete when the country was confronted with a new and formidable danger. The Danes,

or Northmen, who were of the same German stock as the English, but who were still heathen, and but little farther advanced in civilization than the English had been three hundred years before, had earlier begun their terrible inroads, and now came in ever-increasing numbers. They devastated the north and center of the country with fire and sword, and even broke into Wessex itself. It seemed as if the new Church and State in England were to go down before this fresh onslaught of heathenism, when, in the very crisis of peril, King Alfred appeared. He could not drive out the Danes, but he succeeded in re-establishing the boundaries of Wessex, and, by abandoning to the intruders nearly half of England, induced them to make peace (878). The Danish leader, Guthrum, embraced the Christian faith, and his example was soon imitated by his followers. The successors of

Alfred on the West Saxon throne set to work to recover the lost supremacy. Their progress was slow, but in the end they succeeded. The peace and prosperity of Eadgar's reign (959–975) was largely due to Dunstan's wise and vigorous administration, but also to the fact that there had been no fresh Danish inroads for nearly a century because the Danish energies had been directed elsewhere.

Thus far, aside from the general devastation and misery they had caused, the chief result of the Danish invasions had been to check the growth of English unity, and to interrupt the progress of education and culture. Now the Danish settlers were gradually absorbed by the larger English population, without adding much to the strength of the nation. Meanwhile, however, in Skandinavia, the home of the Northmen, the same process of unification and consolidation had been going on which had earlier taken place in England itself. Great kings had risen to power there, and the petty leaders who opposed the national movement were forced to seek refuge in other lands. The isolated attacks on England began again, but they soon passed under the control of Swegen, the king of all Denmark, who now attempted the conquest of England. After many failures he succeeded. The weak king, Æthelred the Unready, was driven out, Swegen was accepted as king by the English people, and handed on his power to his son Cnut. The reign of Cnut was of great political importance," because it produced, on a small scale, the same tendencies which were to be developed on a large scale by the Norman conquest;" but the misrule and the early death of his two sons led to the restoration of the old West Saxon line of kings in Eadward the Confessor. England was now to be brought into closer contact with the land and the people that were destined to exert such a vast influence upon her future. The Normans or Northmen, of the same race as the Danes and the English, had conquered Normandy, a province of France, about one hundred and fifty years before this time. They had speedily accepted the religion, the language, and the institutions of the conquered province, were now farther advanced in civilization than their English neighbors, and were noted for their energy, their

boldness, their love of war and of distant foreign enterprises. Their present duke, William, had been left, at the death of his father, a boy of eight years of age, in circumstances of great difficulty and danger, out of which he had extricated himself with rare ability, and he had already won a European reputation by the vigor and wisdom of his rule. He was second cousin to the new English king. Eadward himself had spent his earlier years at the Norman court, where he had acquired strong predilections for French ways of thinking and living, and it was natural, now that he was on the throne, that he should surround himself with French influences by appointing Normans to high offices in Church and State. Opposed to this foreign tendency stood the national party headed by Earl Godwine, whose daughter the king had married. The fact that Eadward was childless, and that the only direct heir to the crown was an exile, living in remote Hungary, doubtless suggested to the ambitious duke of the Normans the idea that he might, one day, add a royal crown to his ducal coronet. He visited England in 1051, and is said to have received from Eadward the assurance that he should be his successor. Such a promise, however, Eadward had no right to make. The disposal of the crown was in the hands of the national assembly of wise men-the Witenagemot. William's sole rival was Godwine's son, Earl Harold, who, since his father's death, had become the first subject in the land. Chance placed him, later, in William's power for a time, and the duke did not release him until he had ́exacted from him a pledge made, if Norman writers are to be believed, in the most solemn form, that he would marry William's daughter, and support his claim to the English throne. At the death of Eadward (January, 1066) the national assembly promptly chose Earl Harold as king. William at once proclaimed Harold as a perjurer; by adroit representations he succeeded in making men believe that he had been defrauded of his rights; he persuaded his Norman nobles to assist him in recovering what he represented as his own; at his call volunteers from many lands flocked to his standard; he even obtained the papal sanction to his enterprise; and, in September, 1066, he landed, at the head of a large army, on the English coast.

The moment was opportune. The English fleet, which had been watching his movements all the summer, had temporarily retired, and Harold, himself, was in the north engaged in repelling a dangerous attack headed by his rebellious brother and the Norwegian king. At the news of William's landing he hurried southward, gathering his forces as he went, and met his rival on the hill of Senlac. The terrible battle which was fought there, lasting all day, in which Harold, two of his brothers, and the chief of the English nobility were slain, practically decided the fate of England.

The immediate changes wrought by the Norman conquest were few, yet of immense significance. As the new king claimed to be the legitimate successor of Eadward, he could treat all those who had op

posed him as rebels and traitors. The vast estates of Harold and his supporters were, therefore, confiscated, and were either held by William or bestowed upon the chiefs of his army; and within a few years all the high offices in Church and State were in the hands of Normans. The classes that had hitherto ruled in England were thus forced to take a subordinate position, and that change, of itself, was pregnant with meaning to the English people. But a still greater change was in the spirit and tone of the new order of things, a change which grew out of the personal views and character of the new sovereign. William regarded kingship as a possession rather than as an office, and the kingdom as a private estate to be managed primarily in the interests of the king rather than as a trust to be administered for the good of the nation. But the old laws were continued in force, and under them the rights of the conquered were strictly maintained; the old institutions were preserved, and were modified only so far as the conqueror thought necessary in order to establish a strong centralized government, which was the great need of the time.

The indirect influence of the conquest can be traced in all the subsequent history of the country. It made itself felt in manifold ways on the judicial, legislative, and administrative systems, on foreign and ecclesiastical relations, on language, literature, architecture, and society. The energy and vigor infused by the Norman nobles into the English people prevented them from falling into a state of stagnation and isolation toward which they were tending, and ultimately enabled them to recover the liberties which they had temporarily lost.

Under the Conqueror Normandy was naturally regarded as the chief possession, and England as a dependency; under his sons this relation was reversed. The kingdom became the basis of their power, and the duchy an appendage of the English crown. In the disputes with their brother Robert, as well as in their conflicts with the turbulent feudal nobility, both the Red King and the first Henry relied for support upon the conquered English. Henry, who was born in England, strengthened his position among the conquered race by marrying an English wife, and in all his measures showed a determination to mete out strict justice to Norman and Englishman alike. His chief aim, like that of his father, was to build up and extend the royal authority, and to make its influence felt in every corner of the land. The imperative need of such an authority was made more manifest than ever by the anarchy of Stephen's reign. At the close of that terrible score of years, so full of confusion and bloodshed, all men in England who loved law and order were ready to join hands in hearty support of the new sovereign. Fortunately Henry the Second was in many ways eminently qualified for his high position. The general success of his administration stamps him as a man who was born to rule. He destroyed a great multitude of the feudal castles which had been illegally erected and were centers of oppression. He dimin

ished the military strength of the nobles by his law of scutage, which allowed them to substitute a money payment in place of the personal service in the field, which they were bound to render as the condition on which they held their lands. By his assize of arms he revived and reorganized the old English militia system, and made it an effective means of national defense. He sent out his judges, at regular intervals, to hold court in every county, thus securing to all his subjects a uniform, cheap, and prompt administration of justice. He revolutionized the methods of judicial procedure then in vogue by substituting the sworn testimony of twelve men, both in civil and criminal cases, for the crude and clumsy ordeal and trial by battle. He failed, indeed, to gain the points at issue in the quarrel with Becket, yet the contest aroused a spirit in the nation which proved fatal to papal claims and exactions in the later years. In all these measures Henry seems to have had the steady support and sympathy of the great mass of the people. It is evident that all distinctions of race were rapidly disappearing. The nobles, themselves, began to feel that they were Englishmen, and that their interests lay chiefly in England. Henry's system, with their support, proved strong enough to bear the strain to which it was subjected during the reign of the absentee Richard, and, a few years later, we see the descendants of the men who had fought for the Conqueror uniting with the conquered race to wrest the Great Charter from the tyrant John.

The Great Charter, at the time it received the royal signature, was the supreme constitutional effort of the nation. Clergy and laymen, nobles and commoners, had united to obtain it, It embodied all that men had regarded as good law and custom for the last hundred years. It was direct and practical, free from political abstractions, designed to meet wants which actually existed or which were likely to arise in the immediate future. The fact that it was afterward so often appealed to, and so often re-affirmed, proves that it was, on the whole, well adapted to accomplish the objects which its framers had in view. Yet it did not, and could not, in the very nature of the case, embody a complete constitutional system. The political machinery for such a system did not then exist. The highest judicial, legislative, and administrative body in the land was the king's council, which was composed exclusively of the higher clergy and the baronage. These were the men who framed the Charter, and it did not enter their thoughts to change the composition and character of their own assembly. Just then their interests coincided with those of the nation; but the time might come when, under other circumstances and influences, they might combine with the king against the liberties of the people. If the nation was ever to govern itself, it must have a really national assembly through which it could act, one in which all classes should be represented, in which chosen men from the shires and from the cities and boroughs should be associated with the higher clergy and the baronage; in a word, it must have a Parliament.