It must not be forgotten that the old English constitution survived the Norman Conquest. What the constitution had been under the Saxon Eadgar, that it remained under William. The laws, with a few changes in detail, and also the language of the public documents, remained the same. The powers vested in King William and his Witan remained constitutionally the same as those which had been vested in King Eadgar and his Witan a hundred years before. Immense changes ensued in social condition and administration, and in the relation of the kingdom to foreign lands. There was also a vast increase of royal power, and new relations were introduced between the king and every class of his subjects; but formal constitutional changes there were none.
I cannot too often repeat, for the saying is the very summing up of the whole history, that the Norman Conquest was not the wiping out of the constitution, the laws, the language, the national life of Englishmen. The English kingship gradually changed from the old Teutonic to the later mediæval type; but the change began before the Norman Conquest. It was hastened by that event; it was not completed till long after it, and the gradual transition, was brought to perfection by Henry II.
Certain events indicate the remoter causes of the Norman Conquest. The accession of Eadward at once brings us among the events that led immediately to that conquest, or rather we may look on the accession of this Saxon king as the first stage of the conquest itself. Swend and Cnut, the Danes, had shown that it was possible for a foreign power to overcome England by force of arms.
The misgovernment of the sons of Cnut hindered the formation of a lasting Danish dynasty in England. The throne of Cerdic was again filled by a son of Woden; but there can be no doubt that the shock given to the country by the Danish Conquest, especially the way in which the ancient nobility was cut off in the long struggle with Swend and Cnut, directly opened the way for the coming of the Norman. Eadward did his best, wittingly or unwillingly, to make his path still easier. This he did by accustoming Englishmen to the sight of strangers--not national kinsmen like Cnut's Danes, but Frenchmen, men of utterly alien speech and manners--enjoying every available place of honour or profit in the country.
The great national reaction under Godwine and Harold made England once more England for a few years. But this change, happy as it was, could not altogether do away with the effects of the French predilections of Eadward. With Eadward, then, the Norman Conquest really begins. The men of the generation before the Conquest, the men whose eyes were not to behold the event itself, but who were to do all that they could do to advance or retard it, are now in the full maturity of life, in the full possession of power.
Eadward is on the throne of England; Godwine, Leofric, and Siward divide among them the administration of the realm. The next generation, the warriors of Stamfordbridge and Senlac, of York and Ely, are fast growing into maturity. Harold Hadrada is already pursuing his wild career of night-errantry in distant lands, and is astonishing the world by his exploits in Russia and Sicily, at Constantinople and at Jerusalem.
The younger warriors of the Conquest, Eadwine and Morcere and Waltheof and Hereward, were probably born, but they must still have been in their cradles or in their mothers' arms. But, among the leaders of Church and State, Ealdred, who lived to place the crown on the head both of Harold and of William, is already a great prelate, abbot of the great house of Tewkesbury, soon to succeed Lyfing in the chair of Worcester.
Tostig must have been on the verge of manhood; Swegen and Harold were already men, bold and vigorous, ready to march at their father's bidding, and before long to affect the destiny of their country for evil and for good. Beyond the sea, William, still a boy in years but a man in conduct and counsel, is holding his own among the storms of a troubled minority, and learning those arts of the statesman and the warrior which fitted him to become the wisest ruler of Normandy, the last and greatest conqueror of England.
The actors in the great drama are ready for their parts; the ground is gradually preparing for the scene of their performance. The great struggle of nations and tongues and principles in which each of them had his share, the struggle in which William of Normandy and Harold of England stand forth as worthy rivals of the noblest of prizes, will form the subject of the next, the chief and central portion of my history.
The struggle between Normans and Englishmen began with the accession of Eadward in 1042, although the actual subjugation of England by force of arms was still twenty-four years distant. The thought of another Danish king was now hateful. "All folk chose Eadward to King." As the son of Æthelred and Emma, the brother of the murdered and half-canonised Alfred, he had long been-familiar to English imaginations. Eadward, and Eadward alone, stood forth as the heir of English royalty, the representative of English nationality. In his behalf the popular voice spoke out at once, and unmistakably. His popular election took place in June, immediately on the death of Harthacnut, and even before his burial. Eadward, then, was king, and he reigned as every English king before him had reigned, by that union of popular election and royal descent which formed the essence of all ancient Teutonic kingship. He was crowned at Winchester, April 3, 1043. But by virtue of his peculiar character, his natural place was not on the throne of England, but at the head of a Norman abbey, for all his best qualities were those of a monk. Like him father, he was constantly under the dominion of favourites.