brother-in-law). And this year came a fleet from Norway. It is tedious to
tell how these matters went." These were the normal phenomena of a reign
which seemed, to the eyes of monks, a holy and a happy one; because the
king refused, whether from spite or superstition, to have an heir to the
house of Cerdic, and spent his time between prayer, hunting, the seeing of
fancied visions, the uttering of fancied prophecies, and the performance
of fancied miracles.

But there were excuses for him. An Englishman only in name,--a Norman, not
only of his mother's descent (she was aunt of William the Conqueror), but
by his early education on the Continent,--he loved the Norman better than
the Englishman; Norman knights and clerks filled his court, and often the
high dignities of his provinces, and returned as often as expelled; the
Norman-French language became fashionable; Norman customs and manners the
signs of civilization; and thus all was preparing steadily for the great
catastrophe, by which, within a year of Edward's death, the Norman became
master of the land.

Perhaps it ought to have been so. Perhaps by no other method could
England, and, with England, Scotland, and in due time Ireland, have become
partakers of that classic civilization and learning, the fount whereof,
for good and for evil, was Rome and the Pope of Rome: but the method was
at least wicked; the actors in it tyrannous, brutal, treacherous,
hypocritical; and the conquest of England by William will remain to the
end of time a mighty crime, abetted--one may almost say made possible, as
too many such crimes have been before and since--by the intriguing
ambition of the Pope of Rome.

Against that tyranny the free men of the Danelagh and of Northumbria rose.
If Edward, the descendant of Cerdic, had been little to them, William, the