Historical Lectures and Essays | Page 6

their
Norman conquerors called them often enough; but never English
cowards. Their ruinous vice, if we are to trust the records of the time,
was what the old monks called accidia--[Greek text]--and ranked it as
one of the seven deadly sins: a general careless, sleepy, comfortable
habit of mind, which lets all go its way for good or evil--a habit of
mind too often accompanied, as in the case of the Angle-Danes, with
self-indulgence, often coarse enough. Huge eaters and huger drinkers,

fuddled with ale, were the men who went down at Hastings--though
they went down like heroes--before the staid and sober Norman out of
France.
But those were fearful times. As long as William lived, ruthless as he
was to all rebels, he kept order and did justice with a strong and steady
hand; for he brought with him from Normandy the instincts of a truly
great statesman. And in his sons' time matters grew worse and worse.
After that, in the troubles of Stephen's reign, anarchy let loose tyranny
in its most fearful form, and things were done which recall the cruelties
of the old Spanish conquistadores in America. Scott's charming
romance of "Ivanhoe" must be taken, I fear, as a too true picture of
English society in the time of Richard I.
And what came of it all? What was the result of all this misery and
wrong?
This, paradoxical as it may seem: That the Norman conquest was the
making of the English people; of the Free Commons of England.
Paradoxical, but true. First, you must dismiss from your minds the too
common notion that there is now, in England, a governing Norman
aristocracy, or that there has been one, at least since the year 1215,
when Magna Charta was won from the Norman John by Normans and
by English alike. For the first victors at Hastings, like the first
conquistadores in America, perished, as the monk chronicles point out,
rapidly by their own crimes; and very few of our nobility can trace their
names back to the authentic Battle Abbey roll. The great majority of
the peers have sprung from, and all have intermarried with, the
Commons; and the peerage has been from the first, and has become
more and more as centuries have rolled on, the prize of success in life.
The cause is plain. The conquest of England by the Normans was not
one of those conquests of a savage by a civilised race, or of a cowardly
race by a brave race, which results in the slavery of the conquered, and
leaves the gulf of caste between two races--master and slave. That was
the case in France, and resulted, after centuries of oppression, in the
great and dreadful revolution of 1793, which convulsed not only France
but the whole civilised world. But caste, thank God, has never existed
in England, since at least the first generation after the Norman
conquest.
The vast majority, all but the whole population of England, have been

always free; and free, as they are not where caste exists to change their
occupations. They could intermarry, if they were able men, into the
ranks above them; as they could sink, if they were unable men, into the
ranks below them. Any man acquainted with the origin of our English
surnames may verify this fact for himself, by looking at the names of a
single parish or a single street of shops. There, jumbled together, he
will find names marking the noblest Saxon or Angle blood--Kenward
or Kenric, Osgood or Osborne, side by side with Cordery or
Banister--now names of farmers in my own parish--or other
Norman-French names which may be, like those two last, in Battle
Abbey roll--and side by side the almost ubiquitous Brown, whose
ancestor was probably some Danish or Norwegian house-carle, proud
of his name Biorn the Bear, and the ubiquitous Smith or Smythe, the
Smiter, whose forefather, whether he be now peasant or peer, assuredly
handled the tongs and hammer at his own forge. This holds true equally
in New England and in Old. When I search through (as I delight to do)
your New England surnames, I find the same jumble of names--West
Saxon, Angle, Danish, Norman, and French-Norman likewise, many of
primaeval and heathen antiquity, many of high nobility, all worked
together, as at home, to form the Free Commoners of England.
If any should wish to know more on this curious and important subject,
let me recommend them to study Ferguson's "Teutonic Name System,"
a book from which you will discover that some of our quaintest, and
seemingly most plebeian surnames--many surnames, too, which are
extinct in England, but remain in America--are really corruptions of
good old Teutonic names, which our ancestors may have carried in the
German Forest, before an Englishman set