Historical Lectures and Essays | Page 5

the beasts of the field,
White-tailed erne and sallow glede, Dusky raven, with horny neb, And
the gray deer the wolf of the wood.
The bones of the slain, men say, whitened the place for fifty years to

come.
And remember, that on the same day on which that fight
befell--September 27, 1066--William, Duke of Normandy, with all his
French-speaking Norsemen, was sailing across the British Channel,
under the protection of a banner consecrated by the Pope, to conquer
that England which the Norse- speaking Normans could not conquer.
And now King Harold showed himself a man. He turned at once from
the North of England to the South. He raised the folk of the Southern,
as he had raised those of the Central and Northern shires; and in sixteen
days--after a march which in those times was a prodigious feat--he was
entrenched upon the fatal down which men called Heathfield then, and
Senlac, but Battle to this day--with William and his French Normans
opposite him on Telham hill.
Then came the battle of Hastings. You all know what befell upon that
day; and how the old weapon was matched against the new--the
English axe against the Norman lance--and beaten only because the
English broke their ranks. If you wish to refresh your memories, read
the tale once more in Mr. Freeman's "History of England," or Professor
Creasy's "Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World," or even, best of all,
the late Lord Lytton's splendid romance of "Harold." And when you go
to England, go, as some of you may have gone already, to Battle; and
there from off the Abbey grounds, or from Mountjoye behind, look
down off what was then "The Heathy Field," over the long slopes of
green pasture and the rich hop- gardens, where were no hop-gardens
then, and the flat tide-marshes winding between the wooded heights,
towards the southern sea; and imagine for yourselves the feelings of an
Englishman as he contemplates that broad green sloping lawn, on
which was decided the destiny of his native land. Here, right beneath,
rode Taillefer up the slope before them all, singing the song of Roland,
tossing his lance in air and catching it as it fell, with all the Norse
berserker spirit of his ancestors flashing out in him, at the thought of
one fair fight, and then purgatory, or Valhalla--Taillefer perhaps
preferred the latter. Yonder on the left, in that copse where the
red-ochre gully runs, is Sanguelac, the drain of blood, into which (as
the Bayeux tapestry, woven by Matilda's maids, still shows) the
Norman knights fell, horse and man, till the gully was bridged with
writhing bodies for those who rode after. Here, where you stand--the

crest of the hill marks where it must have been--was the stockade on
which depended the fate of England. Yonder, perhaps, stalked out one
English squire or house-carle after another: tall men with long- handled
battle-axes--one specially terrible, with a wooden helmet which no
sword could pierce--who hewed and hewed down knight on knight, till
they themselves were borne to earth at last. And here, among the trees
and ruins of the garden, kept trim by those who know the treasure
which they own, stood Harold's two standards of the fighting-man and
the dragon of Wessex. And here, close by (for here, for many a century,
stood the high altar of Battle Abbey, where monks sang masses for
Harold's soul), upon this very spot the Swan-neck found her
hero-lover's corpse. "Ah," says many an Englishman--and who will
blame him for it--"how grand to have died beneath that standard on that
day!" Yes, and how right. And yet how right, likewise, that the
Norman's cry of Dexaie!--"God Help!"--and not the English hurrah,
should have won that day, till William rode up Mountjoye in the
afternoon to see the English army, terrible even in defeat, struggling
through copse and marsh away toward Brede, and, like retreating lions
driven into their native woods, slaying more in the pursuit than they
slew even in the fight.
But so it was to be; for so it ought to have been. You, my American
friends, delight, as I have said already, in seeing the old places of the
old country. Go, I beg you, and look at that old place, and if you be
wise, you will carry back from it one lesson: That God's thoughts are
not as our thoughts; nor His ways as our ways.
It was a fearful time which followed. I cannot but believe that our
forefathers had been, in some way or other, great sinners, or two such
conquests as Canute's and William's would not have fallen on them
within the short space of sixty years. They did not want for courage, as
Stamford Brigg and Hastings showed full well. English swine,