the land, the greater part of the Saxon population. As visible signs of the
changed order appeared here and there throughout the country massive and
gloomy castles of stone, and in the larger cities, in place of the simple
Anglo-Saxon churches, cathedrals lofty and magnificent beyond all
Anglo-Saxon dreams. What sufferings, at the worst, the Normans inflicted on
the Saxons is indicated in a famous passage of the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,'
an entry seventy years subsequent to the Conquest, of which the least
distressing part may be thus paraphrased:

'They filled the land full of castles. [Footnote: This was only during a
period of anarchy. For the most part the nobles lived in manor-houses, very
rude according to our ideas. See Train's 'Social England,' I, 536 ff.] They
compelled the wretched men of the land to build their castles and wore them
out with hard labor. When the castles were made they filled them with
devils and evil men. Then they took all those whom they thought to have any
property, both by night and by day, both men and women, and put them in
prison for gold and silver, and tormented them with tortures that cannot be
told; for never were any martyrs so tormented as these were.'

THE UNION OF THE RACES AND LANGUAGES. LATIN, FRENCH, AND ENGLISH. That
their own race and identity were destined to be absorbed in those of the
Anglo-Saxons could never have occurred to any of the Normans who stood with
William at Hastings, and scarcely to any of their children. Yet this result
was predetermined by the stubborn tenacity and numerical superiority of the
conquered people and by the easy adaptability of the Norman temperament.
Racially, and to a less extent socially, intermarriage did its work, and
that within a very few generations. Little by little, also, Norman contempt
and Saxon hatred were softened into tolerance, and at last even into a
sentiment of national unity. This sentiment was finally to be confirmed by
the loss of Normandy and other French possessions of the Norman-English