By what arguments did the Duke of the Normans and the Prior of Bec
convince mankind that the worse cause was the better? We must
always remember the transitional character of the age. England was
in political matters in advance of other Western lands; that is, it
lagged behind other Western lands. It had not gone so far on the
downward course. It kept far more than Gaul or even Germany of the
old Teutonic institutions, the substance of which later ages have
won back under new shapes. Many things were understood in England
which are now again understood everywhere, but which were no longer
understood in France or in the lands held of the French crown. The
popular election of kings comes foremost. Hugh Capet was an
elective king as much as Harold; but the French kings had made
their crown the most strictly hereditary of all crowns. They
avoided any interregnum by having their sons crowned in their
lifetime. So with the great fiefs of the crown. The notion of
kingship as an office conferred by the nation, of a duchy or county
as an office held under the king, was still fully alive in England;
in Gaul it was forgotten. Kingdom, duchies, counties, had all
become possessions instead of offices, possessions passing by
hereditary succession of some kind. But no rule of hereditary
succession was universally or generally accepted. To this day the
kingdoms of Europe differ as to the question of female succession,
and it is but slowly that the doctrine of representation has ousted
the more obvious doctrine of nearness of kin. All these points
were then utterly unsettled; crowns, save of course that of the
Empire, were to pass by hereditary right; only what was hereditary
right? At such a time claims would be pressed which would have
seemed absurd either earlier or later. To Englishmen, if it seemed
strange to elect one who was not of the stock of Cerdic, it seemed
much more strange to be called on to accept without election, or to