WARS and BATTLES
From Ancient Greece - to modern day.

The latest conquerors of this island were also the bravest and the best. I do not except even the Romans. And, in spite of our sympathies with Harold and Hereward, and our abhorrence of the founder of the New Forest and the desolator of Yorkshire, we must confess the superiority of the Normans to the Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Danes, whom they met here in 1066, as well as to the degenerate Frank noblesse, and the crushed and servile Romanesque provincials, from whom, in 912, they had wrested the district in the north of Gaul, which still bears the name of Normandy.

It was not merely by extreme valor and ready subordination to military discipline that the Normans were pre-eminent among all the conquering races of the Gothic stock, but also by an instinctive faculty of appreciating and adopting the superior civilizations, which they encountered. The Duke Rollus and his Scandinavian warriors readily embraced the creed, the language, the laws, and the arts, which France, in those troubled and evil times with which the Capetian dynasty commenced, still inherited from imperial Home and imperial Charlemagne.

So, also, in all chivalric feelings, in enthusiastic religious zeal, in almost idolatrous respect to females of gentle birth, in generous fondness for the nascent poetry of the time, in a keen intellectual relish for subtle thought and disputation, in a taste for architectural magnificence, and all courtly refinement and pageantry. The Normans were the Paladins of the world. Their brilliant qualities were sullied by many darker traits of pride, of merciless cruelty, and of brutal contempt for the industry, the rights, and (the feelings of all whom they considered the lower classes of mankind.

                
Their gradual blending with the Saxons softened these harsh and evil points of their national character; and in return they fired the duller Saxon mass with a new spirit of animation and power.

As Campbell boldly expressed it, " They high-mettled the blood of our veins." Small had been the figure which England made in the world before the coming over, of the Normans, and without them she never would have emerged from insignificance.

The authority of Gibbon may be taken as decisive when he pronounces that " assuredly England was a gainer by the Conquest." And we may proudly adopt the comment of the Frenchman Rapin, who, writing of the battle of Hastings more than a century ago, speaks of the revolution effected by it as "the first step by which England is arrived to the height of grandeur and glory we behold it in at present."

The high personal character of the competitors for our crown materially enhances the interest of this eventful struggle, by which William of Normandy became king of England. They were three in number. One was a foreign prince, from the north; one was a foreign prince, from the south; and one was a native hero of the land. Harald Hardrada, the strongest and the most chivalric of the kings of Norway, f was the first; Duke William of Normandy was the second; and the Saxon Harold, the son of Earl Godwin, was the third. Never was a nobler prize sought by nobler champions, or striven for more gallantly.

The Saxon triumphed over the Norwegian, and the Norman triumphed over the Saxon; but Norse valor was never more conspicuous than when Harald Hardrada and his host fought and fell at Stamford Bridge; nor did Saxons ever face their foes more bravely than our Harold and his men on the fatal day of Hastings. During the reign of King Edward the Confessor over this land, jthe claims of the Norwegian king to our crown were little thought of; and though Hardrada's predecessor, King Magnus of Norway, had on one occasion asserted that, by virtue of a compact with our former king, Hardicanute, he was entitled to the English throne, no serious attempt had been made to enforce his pretensions.

But the rivalry of the Saxon, Harold and the Norman William was foreseen and bewailed by the Confessor, who was believed to have predicted on his deathbed the calamities that were impending over England. Duke William was King Edward's kinsman. Harold was the head of the most powerful noble house, next to the royal blood, in England; and, personally, he was the bravest and most popular chieftain in the land.