Harold | Page 5

England, familiarise him with the contests of parties
and the ambition of chiefs, show him the strength and the weakness of
a kindly but ignorant church; of a brave but turbulent aristocracy; of a
people partially free, and naturally energetic, but disunited by
successive immigrations, and having lost much of the proud jealousies
of national liberty by submission to the preceding conquests of the
Dane; acquiescent in the sway of foreign kings, and with that bulwark
against invasion which an hereditary order of aristocracy usually erects,
loosened to its very foundations by the copious admixture of foreign
nobles. I have to present to the reader, here, the imbecile priestcraft of
the illiterate monk, there, the dark superstition that still consulted the
deities of the North by runes on the elm bark and adjurations of the
dead. And in contrast to those pictures of a decrepit monarchy and a
fated race, I have to bring forcibly before the reader the vigorous
attributes of the coming conquerors,--the stern will and deep guile of
the Norman chief--the comparative knowledge of the rising Norman
Church--the nascent spirit of chivalry in the Norman vavasours; a spirit
destined to emancipate the very people it contributed to enslave,
associated, as it imperfectly was, with the sense of freedom: disdainful,
it is true, of the villein, but proudly curbing, though into feudal limits,
the domination of the liege. In a word, I must place fully before the
reader, if I would be faithful to the plan of my work, the political and
moral features of the age, as well as its lighter and livelier attributes,
and so lead him to perceive, when he has closed the book, why England
was conquered, and how England survived the Conquest.
In accomplishing this task, I inevitably incur the objections which the

task itself raises up,--objections to the labour it has cost; to the
information which the labour was undertaken in order to bestow;
objections to passages which seem to interrupt the narrative, but which
in reality prepare for the incidents it embraces, or explain the position
of the persons whose characters it illustrates,--whose fate it involves;
objections to the reference to authorities, where a fact might be
disputed, or mistaken for fiction; objections to the use of Saxon words,
for which no accurate synonyms could be exchanged; objections, in
short, to the colouring, conduct, and composition of the whole work;
objections to all that separate it from the common crowd of Romances,
and stamp on it, for good or for bad, a character peculiarly its own.
Objections of this kind I cannot remove, though I have carefully
weighed them all. And with regard to the objection most important to
story-teller and novel reader--viz., the dryness of some of the earlier
portions, though I have thrice gone over those passages, with the stern
determination to inflict summary justice upon every unnecessary line, I
must own to my regret that I have found but little which it was possible
to omit without rendering the after narrative obscure, and without
injuring whatever of more stirring interest the story, as it opens, may
afford to the general reader of Romance.
As to the Saxon words used, an explanation of all those that can be
presumed unintelligible to a person of ordinary education, is given
either in the text or a foot-note. Such archaisms are much less
numerous than certain critics would fain represent them to be: and they
have rarely indeed been admitted where other words could have been
employed without a glaring anachronism, or a tedious periphrase.
Would it indeed be possible, for instance, to convey a notion of the
customs and manners of our Saxon forefathers without employing
words so mixed up with their daily usages and modes of thinking as
"weregeld" and "niddering"? Would any words from the modern
vocabulary suggest the same idea, or embody the same meaning?
One critic good-humouredly exclaims, "We have a full attendance of
thegns and cnehts, but we should have liked much better our old friends
and approved good masters thanes and knights." Nothing could be
more apposite for my justification than the instances here quoted in

censure; nothing could more plainly vindicate the necessity of
employing the Saxon words. For I should sadly indeed have misled the
reader if I had used the word knight in an age when knights were
wholly unknown to the Anglo-Saxon and cneht no more means what
we understand by knight, than a templar in modern phrase means a man
in chain mail vowed to celibacy, and the redemption of the Holy
Sepulchre from the hands of the Mussulman. While, since thegn and
thane are both archaisms, I prefer the former; not only for the same
reason that induces Sir Francis Palgrave to prefer it, viz., because it is
the more etymologically