In no country has the enmity of race been carried further than in
England. In no country has that enmity been more completely effaced.
Early in the fourteenth century the amalgamation of the races was all
but complete: and it was soon made manifest that a people inferior to
none existing in the world has been formed by the mixture of three
branches of the great Teutonic family with each other, and with the
aboriginal Britons. A period of more than a hundred years followed,
during which the chief object of the English was, by force of arms, to
establish a great empire on the Continent. The effect of the successes
of Edward III. and Henry V. was to make France for a time a province of
England. A French king was brought prisoner to London; an English king
was crowned at Paris.

The arts of peace were not neglected by our fathers during that period.
English thinkers aspired to know, or dared to doubt, where bigots had
been content to wonder and to believe. The same age which produced the
Black Prince and Derby, Chandos and Hawkwood, produced also Geoffrey
Chaucer and John Wycliffe. In so splendid and imperial a manner did the
English people, properly so called, first take place among the nations
of the world. But the spirit of the French people was at last aroused,
and after many desperate struggles and with many bitter regrets, our
ancestors gave up the contest.


_The First Civil War_


Cooped up once more within the limits of the island, the warlike people
employed in civil strife those arms which had been the terror of Europe.