5. The story of that great battle, told with a few inaccuracies, but as only great poets tell, you should read, if you have not read it already, in the "Heimskringla" of Snorri Sturluson, the Homer of the North:
High feast that day held the birds of the air and the beasts of the field,
White-tailed erm 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.
6. 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.
7. 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 intrenched 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.
8. 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.
9. It was a fearful time which followed. I can not 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, their Norman conquerors called them often enough, but never English cowards.
10. Their ruinous vice, if we trust the records of the time, was what the old monks called accidia, 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 Anglo-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.
11. But these 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.