a great popular achievement, when no vernacular version of it is known
to have existed before the sixteenth century, and when it contains
hardly a word or an idea of popular English origin, involves complete
misunderstanding of its meaning and a serious antedating of English
nationality.

At no time, indeed, did foreign influence appear more dominant in
English politics than during the generation which saw Richard I
surrender his kingdom to be held as a fief of the empire, and John
surrender it to be held as a temporal fief of the papacy; or when, in
the reign of Henry III, a papal legate, Gualo, administered England as
a province of the Papal States; when a foreign freebooter was sheriff
of six English shires; and when aliens held in their hands the castles
and keys of the kingdom. It was a dark hour which preceded the dawn of
English nationality, and so far there was no sign of English
indignation at the bartering of England's independence. Resistance
there was, but it came from men who were only a degree less alien than
those whose domination they resented.

Yet a governing class, planted by Henry II, was striking root in
English soil and drawing nourishment and inspiration from English
feelings. It was reinforced by John's loss of Normandy, which compelled
bi-national barons who held lands in both countries to choose between
their French and English sovereigns; and those who preferred England
became more English than they had been before. The French invasion of
England, which followed John's repudiation of the charter, widened the
cleavage; and there was something national, if little that was English,
in the government of Hubert de Burgh, and still more in the naval
victory which Hubert and the men of the Cinque Ports won over the
French in the Straits of Dover in 1217. But not a vestige of national