mering of hope to the serf, to find a place in this world and a provision for the destitute, whose existence the State did not even recognise."

This last observation of Kemble's refers to the wretched position of those outcasts of the Saxon civil community who could find no place in one of the mutual associations, the tithings, and find no lord who would permit them to become his retainers. These friendless, helpless beings could not have been very numerous (we are not speaking of the wilful outlaws who lived by brigandage, but of the involuntary outlaws), but some of them must have existed. Such a being had no existence in the eye of the law, the civil State regarded him not, but abandoned him to arbitrary violence or starvation. But (to adopt again the eloquent words of Kemble) Christianity "taught that there was something even above the State, which the State itself was bound to recognise." The church impressed the heavenly law by which the poor and needy, whom the earthly law condemned to misery, were to be relieved; and the clergy presented their organization as an efficient machinery for the distribution of alms. There were other sources of relief for the poor. The tithes and other ecclesiastical revenues contributed their portion, and thus at every cathedral and every parish church there was a fund for the helpless pauper, and officers ready for its administration.

I leave unnoticed many points in the Anglo-Saxon system, of interest in themselves, but not indispensable for the general purpose of this treatise. But, in approaching the period of the Norman Conquest, it may be usefully observed, with Guizot, that in the last period of the Anglo-Saxon system the power of the great nobles was becoming more and more predominant, so as to

menace both the independence of the crown and the freedom of the commonalty. The earls, or eorldermen, the rulers of large provinces, like Earl Siward, Earl Leofric, Earl Godwin and his sons, and others, were forming a separate order in the State, through the aggressive influence of which the political rights and liberties of the others would probably have decayed and perished. The catastrophe of the Norman Conquest prevented this; a catastrophe terrible in itself; but, in all human probability, the averter of greater evils even to the Saxons themselves than those which it inflicted.

CHAPTER V.

The Norman Element.-Different from the Danish.-Rolf the Ganger's Conquest of Neustria.-State of Civilization in France. -Characteristics of the Normans.-Their brilliant Qualities.Their Oppression of the Peasantry.

LAST, but not least in importance, of the four elements of our nation came the Norman. In some respects it may seem to be identical with the Danish: as Scandinavia was the parent country of both Norman and Dane. But there is this essential distinction. The Danes came to England direct from their Scandinavian homes. The Norman nation had dwelt in France for more than a century and a half between the time of its leaving Scandinavia and the time of its conquering England. During that interval the Normans had acquired the arts, the language, and the civilization of the Romanized Gauls and the Romanized Franks. They had done more than acquire the characteristics of others: they had created and developed a new national character of their own, differing both from that of their rude Danish and Norse kinsmen on the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea, and from that of the Romanesque provincials, whom they found on the banks of the Seine and the southern coast of the Channel.

RISE AND PROGRESS OF THE CONSTITUTION.

57

Osker, Regner Lodbrok, Eric the Red, Biorn Ironside, Sidroc, and many more kings and jarls of the Norse or Dansker-men, had sailed up the Seine and spread the terror of their plunderings and slaughters through France, before a young Norwegian chief, named Rolf, and surnamed "Ganger" from his length of limb, left Norway with a fleet of warriors, and in 876 A.D., after some passing forays in England and Belgium, entered the estuary of the Seine, and made the familiar voyage of his countrymen up to Rouen. To say that he was enterprising, energetic, and fearless, is only to say that he was a Norse Viking. But tall striding Rolf was much more. He was a founder of empire. His brains were as good as his sinews. He was a man of thought as well as a man of action, and was worthy to be the lineal ancestor of England's sovereigns. He "formed the plan of substituting permanent colonization for periodical plunder. His host, his men, his baronage,' ultimately took possession of the city of Rouen, and the neighbouring country, measuring and dividing the land according to the Danish custom, by the rope." * But their settlement there was not effected at once. A long series of wars with the Frankish kings followed, varied by truces which were always bought of the Northmen with French gold. At last, in the year 912, King Charles Le Chauve formally ceded to Rolf the province which the jarl already firmly held, and which, from its new lord and his warriors, has thenceforth borne the name of Normandy.

Even in the crushed and miserable state of France

*Palgrave's "Normandy and England," p. 518.
D 3

under her last Carlovingian kings, Rolf, and his fellowadventurers from Scandinavia, could perceive and appreciate the yet living fragments of a civilization superior to their own. This, in truth, the instinctive faculty of discerning and adopting the creations of the genius of others, peculiarly characterized the Normans, not only at the period of their first settlement in France, but throughout the ages of the rule of their dukes in Normandy. Rolf and his warriors embraced the creed, the language, the laws, and the arts, which France, in those troubled and evil times, during which the Carlovingian dynasty ended and that of the Capets commenced, still inherited from Imperial Rome and Imperial Charlemagne. Duke Rollo (such were the title and name which Jarl Rolf assumed) was succeeded in his duchy by a race of princes resembling him in mental capacity, as well as in martial bravery. The descendants also of the original Norman barons, taken as a body, were conspicuous for the same merits that had marked their sires. The century and a half, which passed between Duke Rollo's settlement in Normandy and Duke William the Bastard's invasion of this island, form an important period in medieval history. France, throughout this time, was little more than a federation of feudal princes; and, during this period, the power, and pride, and predominance of the nobility, as a distinct order from the mass of the nation, grew rapidly, and assumed a peculiar social organization.

Amid the general disorder of France the noblesse fortified their castles; where they dwelt, each baron in his stronghold, with his family and his band of favourite retainers round him. The management of horses and arms began to be regarded as the sole occupation worthy those