THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS,
A.D. 1066.

 "Eis vos la Bataille assemblee,
Dunc encore est grant renomee."
Roman de Rou, 13,183.

William the Conqueror.

Arletta's pretty feet twinkling in the brook made her the mother of William the Conqueror. Had she not thus fascinated Duke Robert the Liberal of Normandy, Harold would not have fallen at Hastings, no Anglo-Norman dynasty would have arisen, no British empire.

Born in 1027, there has long been a dispute among historians as to whether William the Conqueror's mother was Arletta, the tanners daughter, or someone else. His father, Duke Robert ("the Devil") of Normandy, acknowledged William as his son. In any event, William was often called (behind his back), "William the Bastard." While William was acknowledged as his fathers heir, there was still a war of succession when Duke Robert died while on pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1034.

If any one should write a history of "Decisive loves that have materially influenced the drama of the world in all its subsequent scenes", the daughter of the tanner of Falaise would deserve a conspicuous place in its pages. But it is her son, the victor of Hastings, who is now the object of our attention; and no one who appreciates the influence of England and her empire upon the destinies of the world, will ever rank that victory as one of secondary importance.

It is true that in the last century some writers of eminence on our history and laws mentioned the Norman Conquest in terms from which it might be supposed that the battle of Hastings led to little more than the substitution of one royal family on the throne of this country and to the garbling and changing of some of our laws through the "cunning of the Norman lawyers." But, at least since the appearance of the work of Augustin Thierry on the Norman Conquest, these forensic fallacies have been exploded.

Thierry made his readers keenly appreciate the magnitude of that political and social catastrophe. He depicted in vivid colors the atrocious cruelties of the conquerors, and the sweeping and enduring innovations that they wrought, involving the overthrow of the ancient constitution, as well as of the last of the Saxon kings. In his pages we see new tribunals and tenures superseding the old ones, new divisions of race and class introduced, whole districts devastated to gratify the vengeance or the caprice of the new tyrant the greater part of the lands of the English confiscated and divided among aliens, the very name of Englishmen turned into a reproach, the English language rejected as servile and barbarous, and all the high places in church and state for upward of a century filled exclusively by men of foreign race.

No less true than eloquent is Thierry's summing up of the social effects of the Norman Conquest on the generation that witnessed it, and on many of their successors.

He tells his reader that "if he would form a just idea of England conquered by William of Normandy, he must figure to himself—not a mere change of political rule—not the triumph of one candidate over another candidate —of the man of one party over the man of another party, but the intrusion of one people into the bosom of another people—the violent placing of one society over another society which it came to destroy, and the scattered fragments of which it retained only as personal property,
or (to use the words of an old act) as ' the clothing of the soil’; he must not picture to himself on the other hand, William, a king and a despot—on the other, subjects of (William's, high and low, rich and poor, all inhabiting England, and consequently all English; he must imagine two nations, one of which William is a member and the chief.

Two nations which (if the term must be used) were both subject to William, but as applied to which the word has quite different senses, meaning, in the one case, subordinate—in the other, subjugated.

Hastings