Not only Normans, but Frenchmen, Bretons--nay, Continentals of all
nations, flocked into England as into an uninhabited country, slew
and took possession.

"Ignoble grooms," says an old chronicler, "did as they pleased with
the best and noblest, and left them nought to wish for but death.
These licentious knaves were amazed at themselves; they went mad
with pride and astonishment, at beholding themselves so
powerful--at having servants richer than their own fathers had been
{i}." Whatever they willed they deemed permissible to do; they
shed blood at random, tore the bread from the very mouths of the
famished people, and took everything--money, goods, lands {ii}.
Such was the fate which befell the once happy Anglo-Saxons.

And it was not till after a hundred and forty years of slavery,
that the separation of England from Normandy, in the days of the
cowardly and cruel King John, and the signing of Magna Carta, gave
any real relief to the oppressed; while it was later still, not
till after the days of Simon de Montfort, when resistance to new
foreigners had welded Norman and English into one, that the severed
races became really united, as Englishmen alike. Then the greatest
of the Plantagenets, Edward the First, the pupil of the man he slew
at Evesham, was proud to call himself an Englishman--the first
truly English king since the days of the hapless Harold; and one of
whom, in spite of the misrepresentations of Scottish historians and
novelists, English boys may be justly proud: his noble legislation
was the foundation of that modern English jurisprudence, in which
all are alike in the eyes of the law.

Not long after came the terrible "hundred years war," wherein