I have to do more than present an amusing picture of national manners
--detail the dress, and describe the banquet. According to the plan I
adopt, I have to make the reader acquainted with the imperfect fusion
of races in Saxon England, familiarise him with the contests of
parties and the ambition of chiefs, show him the strength and the
weakness of a kindly but ignorant church; of a brave but turbulent
aristocracy; of a people partially free, and naturally energetic, but
disunited by successive immigrations, and having lost much of the
proud jealousies of national liberty by submission to the preceding
conquests of the Dane; acquiescent in the sway of foreign kings, and
with that bulwark against invasion which an hereditary order of
aristocracy usually erects, loosened to its very foundations by the
copious admixture of foreign nobles. I have to present to the reader,
here, the imbecile priestcraft of the illiterate monk, there, the dark
superstition that still consulted the deities of the North by runes on
the elm bark and adjurations of the dead. And in contrast to those
pictures of a decrepit monarchy and a fated race, I have to bring
forcibly before the reader the vigorous attributes of the coming
conquerors,--the stern will and deep guile of the Norman chief--the
comparative knowledge of the rising Norman Church--the nascent spirit
of chivalry in the Norman vavasours; a spirit destined to emancipate
the very people it contributed to enslave, associated, as it
imperfectly was, with the sense of freedom: disdainful, it is true, of
the villein, but proudly curbing, though into feudal limits, the
domination of the liege. In a word, I must place fully before the
reader, if I would be faithful to the plan of my work, the political
and moral features of the age, as well as its lighter and livelier
attributes, and so lead him to perceive, when he has closed the book,
why England was conquered, and how England survived the Conquest.