But as the world knows, William was able to make good his flimsy claim. Whether Edward gave him the crown or not, Stamford Bridge and Hastings did give it him. When at last, following the law of the time, he presented himself to the suffrage of the English nation, the representatives of the beaten people had no option but to elect him. He was a part of the baggage that Queen Emma brought with her.
What was the rest of it? For one thing, union and consolidation, centralization. England up to that time had been but a broken congeries of earldoms or tribal territories, and would have gone on thus if it had not at last found a master. In the next place, William brought the touch of France, of Rome, of the graceful Latin world, to England. This son of a hundred pirates passed on to England the torch of a culture that had been lighted in Greece and relumed in Rome. It was not for nothing that what had been ox meat with the Saxons now became beef for the English; what had been calves' flesh became veal, and base swine flesh reappeared as a more elegant dish called pork. It meant something that the rude language of Beowulf was to be succeeded by the smoother lilt of Chaucer—that, in short, the English had a new and bookish tongue.
It meant, in simple truth, the disappearance of the old England and the birth of a new and greater nation. "It was in these years of subjection," says Green, "that England became really England." The Normans degraded the bulk of the English lords, but they made these displaced nobles the nucleus of a new middle class. At the same time their protection led to the elevation into the same middle class of a race of cultivators who had been peasants. Furthermore, the Norman rule expanded villages into towns and cities, and these in time began to stand, as powerful boroughs, for the rights of the people. The conquest, says Green, "secured for England a new communion with the artistic and intellectual life of the world without her. To it we owe not merely English wealth and English freedom, but England herself."
Edward A. Freeman calls the Norman conquest "the most important event in English history since the first coming of the English and their conversion to Christianity." If the succession of native kings had continued, says the same authority, "freedom might have died out step by step, as it did in some other lands. As it was, the main effect of the conquest was to call out the ancient English spirit in a new and antagonistic shape, to give the English nation new leaders in the conquerors who were gradually changed into countrymen, and by the union of the men of both races, to win back the substance of the old institutions under new forms."
In other words, the Norman Princess Emma brought with her John Bull as a part of her dowry, when she came to weak Ethelred as his bride.
CHAPTER IV
IF COLUMBUS HAD KEPT HIS STRAIGHT
COURSE WESTWARD
On the morning of the 7th day of October, 1492, Christopher Columbus, sailing unknown seas in quest of "Cipango," the Indies, and the Grand Khan, still held resolutely to a course which he had laid out due to the westward. This course he held in spite of the murmurings of his crew, who wished to turn back, and contrary to the advice of that skilled and astute navigator, Martin Alonzo Pinzon, who commanded the Pinta. Pinzon had repeatedly advised that the course be altered to the southwestward.