William the Conqueror

William the Conqueror

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Title: William the Conqueror
Author: E. A. Freeman
Release Date: October, 1997 [EBook #1066] [This file was first posted
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Language: English

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THE CONQUEROR ***

Transcribed by David Price, email [email protected]

William the Conqueror

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