conquest by a civil war; and when Harold beat back Tostig and his
Norwegian ally, the sullen north left him alone to do the same by
William. William's was the third and decisive Danish conquest of a
house divided against itself; for his Normans were Northmen with a
French polish, and they conquered a country in which the soundest
elements were already Danish. The stoutest resistance, not only in the
military but in the constitutional and social sense, to the Norman
Conquest was offered not by Wessex but by the Danelaw, where personal
freedom had outlived its hey-day elsewhere; and the reflection that,
had the English re-conquest of the Danelaw been more complete, so, too,
would have been the Norman Conquest of England, may modify the view
that everything great and good in England is Anglo-Saxon in origin.
England, indeed, was still in the crudest stages of its making; it had
as yet no law worth the name, no trial by jury, no parliament, no real
constitution, no effective army or navy, no universities, few schools,
hardly any literature, and little art. The disjointed and unruly
members of which it consisted in 1066 had to undergo a severe
discipline before they could form an organic national state.




CHAPTER II

THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND

1066-1272


For nearly two centuries after the Norman Conquest there is no history