CHAPTER XV. RESULTS OF THE CONQUEST. NEW POLITICAL POSITION OF ENGLAND-SOME CHANGES CAUSED ADMINISTRATION: IN CHURCH MATTERS: IN THE LAW MILITARY SERVICES-JUSTICE-EFFECTS IGNORANCE OF ENGLISH-HIS OF WILLIAM'S LEGAL HEIR TO THE THRONE-FALSE IMPRESSIONS AS TO FRANC-MAMINOT-WILLIAM'S MENTS. necessity Conquest. 1. We have now arrived at the conclusion of General the era of great individual and greater national for the suffering. England was mercifully dealt with. Since the reign of Ethelred, the empire had been gradually losing all power of defence against foreign enemies, whilst the people, deeply corrupted, were exaggerating the faults and losing the virtues of their ancestors. In the same manner as the sins of the European community demanded the visitation of the French revolution, so did England require the discipline of the Norman sword. The sceptre was taken from the English race, and they were placed beneath the dominion of the alien, raised up to fill the throne, and to whom the power was transferred. VOL. III. Former intercourse between Europe : 82. One of the most prominent consequences resulting from the Conquest, was its effect upon the external relations of the kingdom. England was brought into a closer connexion with the general affairs of the Commonwealth of Western Christendom than had ever subsisted before. Of England and course, a previous degree of intercourse had always existed of necessity. The narrow seas might be crossed by the merchant: missionaries were sent forth from our island to the banks of the Rhine. As we rush along his waters, the gigantic towers of Maintz still attest the pious labours of Boniface. After the desolations of the Danes, holy men might be brought from Gaul to Glastonbury or to Malmesbury, for the purpose of renewing the chain of ecclesiastical tradition in the minster, which an Alfred's piety had raised again from the ground. Furthermore, the community of intellect continued, though in a limited degree. Alcuin, the friend and companion of Charlemagne, was known and praised as an Englishman. Bede was universally received as a father of the Church; and Duns Scotus, and some few other British names, were known in the libraries of Gaul and Germany. But notwithstanding all these links,—and we may moreover enumerate amongst them an occasional matrimonial alliance or a complimentary embassy,-the limited intercourse and connexion was gradually diminishing. England, off, enclosed within her four seas, always harassed Had fallen by the fears or the presence of the still pagan Northmen, was becoming more and more foreign to the feelings and thoughts and interests of the rest of Western Christendom. practically unknown at Perhaps there is no one fact which illus- England trates this severance more forcibly and more Rome. completely, than the circumstance that when Anselm attended the council of Rome (1098), the fathers were utterly unable to decide what place should be assigned to the insular prelate in that venerable assembly. In the reign of the Confessor, Anselm's predecessor had crossed the Alps to receive from the Pope the pallium by which he was confirmed in the primacy, but an Archbishop of Canterbury had never before been seen taking his seat in council amongst the other members of the western hierarchy. No person living, no not the oldest, had known such a thing. From their predecessors, the prelates present had heard nothing of the station amongst them of Anselm's predecessors: their records told them nothing: if they turned over the acts of preceding councils, they did not find one single signature of an English bishop or an English abbot. In other words, England had no representatives in what were, virtually, the Parliaments of Christendom. Urban removed all difficulties of station and precedence, by giving to Anselm the highest Honours to Rome. 594 ENGLAND NOW UNITED WITH FRANCE place in the synod: he caused him to sit in the Anselm at apse, where he himself was stationed, having already in the council of Bari, addressed him almost as a colleague-"Includamus hunc in orbe nostro, quasi alterius orbis Papam ;" a most significant epithet, and in which, it should seem, that more than a mere complimentary honour was implied. It appears to have amounted almost to an acknowledgment that Britain was considered as a co-ordinate empire, such as it was when the Basileus of Albion appeared as sharer with Charlemagne in the sacred honours of royalty, when he and Charlemagne were, in fact, the only sovereigns in the Roman world. England now united with France, Such had been the separation of Britain from the rest of the Christian Commonwealth, that, by the accession of the Conqueror and his dynasty, the political situation of England was entirely changed. The waters of the Channel still continued to divide the cliffs of Albion from the cliffs of Gaul, but the island and the firm land were compelled to be constantly in communication with each other, to be united by sympathies, and cognizant of each other by hostilities. Henceforward England and France were connected by domestic ties, whether conjoined in friendship or conflicting in the field. The same lineages spread over England and Normandy and Flanders: it was hard to say who was the foreigner. But perhaps even more IN THE GENERAL WESTERN COMMONWEALTH. 595 the political organization influential than these ties and relationships were the influences of doctrine and opinion. England was now prevented, as it were, from drifting away. The theory at this period of the Western Enters into Commonwealth, was that of unity: a unity of Europe. often disturbed in practice, but which, yielding a nominal supremacy to the empire, and a real, though contested, supremacy to the Pope, impressed the nations of Europe that they constituted one community. Rome became the common sensorium of Europe, and through Rome all the several portions of Latin Europe sympathized and felt with each other. Hence the great difficulty of writing the history of the middle ages. The history of the papacy enters as an element into the history of each state or kingdom, and at the same time that so much of that history must be brought in as is needful to illustrate your national transactions, you must avoid any exuberance of discussion or detail, which may perplex the course of events with which you are more immediately concerned. The geographer cannot complete the square of the map of England, unless he introduces an angle of the opposite coast; but much more must be done by the historian. §3. I must now pass to the effects occasioned at home by the accession of the Norman king, and to the manner in which the bitterness of the lot of the English was mitigated, and the inevitable miseries of foreign conquest speedily overruled. |