“If once we rendered this double service, beyond seas as at home, it would be held a right and a custom hereafter; and we should be as mercenary soldiers, not free-born Normans.”
Out stepped a merchant.
“And we and our children would be burdened for ever to feed one man’s ambition, whenever he saw a king to dethrone, or a realm to seize.”
And then cried a general chorus:
“‘t shall not be—it shall not!”
The assembly broke at once into knots of tens, twenties, thirties, gesticulating and speaking aloud, like freemen in anger. And ere William, with all his prompt dissimulation, could do more than smother his rage, and sit griping his sword hilt, and setting his teeth, the assembly dispersed.
Such were the free souls of the Normans under the greatest of their chiefs; and had those souls been less free, England had not been enslaved in one age, to become free again, God grant, to the end of time!
CHAPTER IX.
Through the blue skies over England there rushed the bright stranger—a meteor, a comet, a fiery star! “such as no man before ever saw;” it appeared on the 8th, before the kalends of May; seven nights did it shine [235], and the faces of sleepless men were pale under the angry glare.