Battle Abbey.
12. 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.
13. 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 the 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.
14. The cause is plain: The conquest of England by the Normans was not one of those conquests of a savage by a civilized 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. The vast majority, all but the whole population of England, have always been free, and free as they are not when caste exists to change their occupations. They could intermarry, if they were able men, into the rank above them; as they could sink, if they were unable men, into the rank below them.
15. Nay, so utterly made up now is the old blood-feud between Norman and Englishman, between the descendants of those who conquered and those who were conquered, that, in the children of the Prince of Wales, after eight hundred years, the blood of William of Normandy is mingled with the blood of Harold, who fell at Hastings. And so, by the bitter woes which followed the Norman conquest was the whole population, Dane, Angle, and Saxon, earl and churl, freeman and slave, crushed and welded together into one homogeneous mass, made just and merciful toward each other by the most wholesome of all teachings, a community of suffering; and if they had been, as I fear they were, a lazy and a sensual people, were taught—
That life is not as idle ore,
But heated hot with burning fears,
And bathed in baths of hissing tears,
And battered with the strokes of doom
To shape and use.
Charles Kingsley.