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Contents
Introduction
The Early Years of William
William's First Visit to England
The Reign of William in Normandy
Harold's Oat to William
The Negotiations of Duke William
William's Invasion of England
The Conquest of England
The Settlement of England
The Revolts against William
The Last Years of William
CHAPTER I--INTRODUCTION
The history of England, like the land and its people, has been
specially insular, and yet no land has undergone deeper influences
from without. No land has owed more than England to the personal
action of men not of native birth. Britain was truly called
another world, in opposition to the world of the European mainland,
the world of Rome. In every age the history of Britain is the
history of an island, of an island great enough to form a world of
itself. In speaking of Celts or Teutons in Britain, we are
speaking, not simply of Celts and Teutons, but of Celts and Teutons
parted from their kinsfolk on the mainland, and brought under the
common influences of an island world. The land has seen several
settlements from outside, but the settlers have always been brought
under the spell of their insular position. Whenever settlement has
not meant displacement, the new comers have been assimilated by the
existing people of the land. When it has meant displacement, they
have still become islanders, marked off from those whom they left
behind by characteristics which were the direct result of
settlement in an island world.
The history of Britain then, and specially the history of England,
has been largely a history of elements absorbed and assimilated
from without. But each of those elements has done somewhat to
modify the mass into which it was absorbed. The English land and
nation are not as they might have been if they had never in later
times absorbed the Fleming, the French Huguenot, the German
Palatine. Still less are they as they might have been, if they had
not in earlier times absorbed the greater elements of the Dane and
the Norman. Both were assimilated; but both modified the character
and destiny of the people into whose substance they were absorbed.
The conquerors from Normandy were silently and peacefully lost in
the greater mass of the English people; still we can never be as if
the Norman had never come among us. We ever bear about us the
signs of his presence. Our colonists have carried those signs with
them into distant lands, to remind men that settlers in America and
Australia came from a land which the Norman once entered as a
conqueror. But that those signs of his presence hold the place
which they do hold in our mixed political being, that, badges of
conquest as they are, no one feels them to be badges of conquest--
all this comes of the fact that, if the Norman came as a conqueror,
he came as a conqueror of a special, perhaps almost of an unique
kind. The Norman Conquest of England has, in its nature and in its
results, no exact parallel in history. And that it has no exact
parallel in history is largely owing to the character and position
of the man who wrought it. That the history of England for the
last eight hundred years has been what it has been has largely come
of the personal character of a single man. That we are what we are
to this day largely comes of the fact that there was a moment when
our national destiny might be said to hang on the will of a single
man, and that that man was William, surnamed at different stages of
his life and memory, the Bastard, the Conqueror, and the Great.
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