The event of the battle of Hastings placed all England, ultimately, at the disposition of the Normans, though many years elapsed before the country was entirely conquered. Had the English possessed a good government, or leaders who enjoyed general confidence, their defeat at Hastings would not have reduced them to bondage, or have converted their country into a new world. But they, who were even slavishly dependent on their government for leading, had no government; and they were just as destitute of chiefs who were competent to assume the lead at so dark a crisis. Taking advantage of circumstances so favorable to his purpose, William soon made himself king, but had most of his work to do long after he was crowned. The battle of Hastings, therefore, was decisive of the future of England and of the British race. Saxon England disappeared; Norman England rose. The change was perfect, and quite warrants Lord Macaulay's emphatic assertion, that "the battle of Hastings, and the events which followed it, not only placed a Duke of Normandy on the English throne, but gave up the whole population of England to the tyranny of the Norman race,"—and that "the subjugation of a nation by a nation has seldom, even in Asia, been more complete." The nation that finally was formed by a union of the Saxons and the Normans, and which was seven or eight generations in forming, was a very different nation from that which had been ruled by the Confessor. It was a nation that was capable of every form of action, and had little in common with the Saxons of the eleventh century. It matters nothing whether the Conqueror introduced the feudal system into England, or whether he found it there, or whether that system is almost entirely an imaginary creation, as most probably is the fact. We know that the event called the Norman Conquest wrought great changes in England, and through England in the world; and that Napoleon III. reigns over the French, and Victor Emanuel II. over the Italians, that the House of Hohenzollern has triumphed over the House of Hapsburg, that President Johnson rules at Washington, and that Queen Victoria sits in the seat of Akbar or Aurungzebe, are facts which must all be attributed to the decision made by the sword at Hastings, no matter what may have been the particular process of events after that battle. It is possible that the misery consequent on the victory of the Normans has been exaggerated, though a great deal of suffering must have followed from it. But there can be no exaggeration of the general consequence of the success of the Normans. That determined the future course of the world, and will continue to determine it long after the Valley of the Amazon shall be far more thickly inhabited, and better known, than to-day is the Valley of the Danube.
There is one popular error with regard to the Norman Conquest which it may not be amiss to correct. It is taken for granted by most persons who have written on it, that the triumph of William was the triumph of an aristocracy over a people, and we often hear the Saxons spoken of as democrats who were subdued by aristocrats. This is an entirely erroneous view of the whole subject. So far as there was a contest at Hastings between aristocrats and democrats, the Normans were champions of democracy, and the Saxons of the opposite principle. The Saxon aristocracy was very powerful, and its power was steadily increasing for generations before the Conquest; and had there not been a foreign invasion, it is altogether probable that the English system soon would have become strictly oligarchical. One of the chief causes of Harold's failure was his inability to command the prompt support of some of the greatest nobles, as Earls Edwin and Morcar, who paid bitterly for their backwardness in after days. Something of this may be attributed to the weakness of his title to the crown, but the mere fact that such men could so powerfully influence events at
