ever made him pause in any measure that seemed adapted to increase and consolidate his power.

There are some yet standard works on our history and our laws, in which the Norman Conquest of England is spoken of in terms, which would lead the reader to imagine that it amounted to little more than the substitution of one royal family for another on the throne of this country, and to the garbling and changing of some of our laws through the "cunning of the Norman lawyers." But it is certain that the social and political changes which that Conquest introduced into England, excelled in importance the effect of any similar event which had occurred in mediæval Christendom, and that they have not been. equalled by the results of any subsequent conquest which one Christian nation has effected over another. In consequence of the triumph of the Normans here, new tribunals and tenures predominated over the old ones, new divisions of race and class were introduced, whole districts were devastated to gratify the vengeance or the caprice of the new tyrants, the greater part of the lands of the English were confiscated and divided among aliens, "the very name of Englishman was turned into a reproach, the English language rejected as servile and barbarous, and all the high places in Church and State for upwards of a century filled exclusively by men of foreign race." The words of Thierry* on this subject are no less true than eloquent. He tells his reader that "if he would form a just idea of England conquered by William of Normandy, he must figure to himself, not a mere change of political rule, nor the triumph of one candidate over

* Thierry's "Norman Con- "Middle Ages," vol. ii. p. 304. quest." See, too, Hallam's

:

another candidate, of the man of one party over the man of another party, but the intrusion of one people into the bosom of another people, the violent placing of one society over another society, which it came to destroy, and the scattered fragments of which it retained only as personal property, or (to use the words of an old act) as 'the clothing of the soil.' He must not picture to himself-on the one hand, William, a king and a despoton the other, subjects of William's, high and low, rich and poor, all inhabiting England, and consequently all English he must imagine two nations, of one of which William is a member and the chief-two nations which (if · the term must be used) were both subject to William; but as applied to which the word has quite different senses, meaning in the one case subordinate, in the other subjugated. He must consider that there are two countries-two soils-included in the same geographical circumference; that of the Normans rich and free,—that of the Saxons poor and serving, vexed by rent and taillage; -the former full of spacious mansions, and walled and moated castles,-the latter scattered over with huts of straw and ruined hovels;-that peopled with the happy and the idle-with men of the army and of the courtwith knights and nobles,-this, with men of pain and labour-with farmers and artizans;-on the one, luxury and insolence, on the other, misery and envy-not the envy of the poor at the sight of opulence which they cannot reach, but the envy of the despoiled when in presence of the despoiler."

We have now traced the four great elements of our nation from their respective origins, until they were all brought together in this country. The period which elapsed between the introduction of the last of these in

point of date (that is to say, the Norman), and the national rising against King John in the early part of the 13th century, is a period of fusion; very interesting, as to many of its events, and as to the personal characters of many who figured during it. In particular, the Conqueror himself, the brave Saxon chieftain Hereward, the Archbishops Lancfranc and Anselm, King Henry the Second, Archbishop A'Beckett, and William Longbeard, the Saxon burgess, who strove in vain to defend the oppressed commonalty of the capital against their Norman tyrants, all deserve the careful attention of the student of English history, and of the student of human nature. But to avoid prolixity, I pass over the details of this period; and proceed to examine the number and condition of the various classes of the population of England in the reign of John, the epoch of the true dawn of our complete nationality. In making that examination, we shall be led to consider several of the most important events which had then happened in the interval since the Conquest.

One primary point, before we notice the subdivisions of the population, is to ascertain, as well as we are able, the numerical amount of the whole. And this is closely connected with a topic, which ought not to be omitted when we speculate on the comparative importance of each of the four elements of our race; I mean the proportion which the Normans and other new-comers from Continental Europe bore to the Anglo-Saxons and AngloDanes, among whom they settled as conquerors.

The population of England at the time of the Norman Conquest is variously estimated at from a million and ahalf to two millions. It is necessary to bear this in mind, when we read of the losses sustained by defeats in the

field, and other calamities of this period; because we are too apt to think of the England of bygone centuries, as of the England of our own times in point of population. Unless we correct this anachronism in our ideas, we shall not attach sufficient importance to the destruction of two or three hundred thousand human beings in that age, as being a catastrophe, not only shocking in itself with regard to the immediate sufferers, but calculated seriously to thin the land of its old inhabitants.

I propose to determine as far as possible, 1st, The extent to which the Saxon population was diminished by its afflictions under the Normans; and, 2ndly, the probable number of the Normans and other Continental Europeans who settled here. We shall find that these calculations will supply us with our primary data for estimating the number of the population at the epoch of the Great Charter.

The Saxon army which perished with Harold, at Hastings, is said not to have been a very large one. But the slaughters of the Saxons, which followed, in consequence of their subsequent insurrections against the Conqueror, were numerous and severe: nor can we estimate the total number that perished by the edge of the sword, during William's invasion and reign, at less than a hundred thousand. The number of exiles also was considerable; as very many of the Saxons sought refuge in Scotland; and many fled beyond seas from the tyranny of their Norman lords. But the massacres perpetrated in cold-blood by William's command destroyed more than fell fighting, or fled into exile: and the famines and pestilences caused by his merciless devastations of wide tracts of populous and fertile territory, were more destructive still. One of his most atrocious acts of this kind was his laying waste the

country between the Humber and the Tyne, partly out of anger for a rising of some of the inhabitants against him, and partly as a measure of precaution, because he expected an invasion from Denmark, and thought that the Danes would most likely land in the North of England, where the population was most nearly akin to them. The Norman Monkish Chronicler, Ordericus Vitalis, who is generally William's unscrupulous panegyrist, thus speaks of his devastation of Northumbria. "He extended his posts over a space of one hundred miles. He smote most of the inhabitants with the edge of the avenging sword: he destroyed the hiding-places of others: he laid waste their lands: he burned their houses, with all that was therein. Nowhere else did William act with such cruelty: and in this instance he shamefully gave way to evil passion; while he scorned to rule his own wrath, and cut off the guilty and innocent with equal severity. For, excited by anger, he bade the crops, and the herds, and the household stuff, and every description of food to be gathered in heaps, and to be set light to and utterly destroyed altogether and so that all sustenance for man or beast should be at once wasted throughout all the region. beyond the Humber. Whence there raged grievous want far and wide throughout England; such a misery of famine involved the helpless people that there perished of Christian human beings, of either sex and every age, upwards of a hundred thousand."*

"New

A large part of Hampshire was similarly made a wilderness by his orders, so as to supply him with a Forest," wherein he might pursue his favourite sport of

* Ordericus Vitalis, lib. iv.