a time when the very existence of the country was at stake, is enough to show how strong were the insular aristocrats; and it was this selfish aristocracy that was destroyed by the Normans, most of whom were upstarts, the very scum of Europe having entered William's army. We doubt if ever there was a greater triumph effected by the poor and the lowly-born over the rich and the well-born, than that which was gained at Hastings, though it required some years to make it complete. "According to the common report," says Sir F. Palgrave, "sixty thousand knights received their fees, or rather their livings, to use the old expression, from the Conqueror. This report is exaggerated as to number; but the race of the Anglo-Danish and English nobility and gentry, the Earls and the greater Thanes, disappears; and with some exceptions, remarkable as exemplifying the general rule, all the superiorities of the English soil became vested in the Conqueror's Baronage. Men of a new race and order, men of strange manners and strange speech, ruled in England. There were, however, some great mitigations, and the very sufferings of the conquered were so inflicted as to become the ultimate means of national prosperity; but they were to be gone through, and to be attended with much present desolation and misery. The process was the more painful because it was now accompanied by so much degradation and contumely. The Anglo-Saxons seem to have had a very strong aristocratic feeling,—a great respect for family and dignity of blood. The Normans, or rather the host of adventurers whom we must of necessity comprehend under the name of Normans, had comparatively little; and not very many of the real old and powerful aristocracy, whether of Normandy or Brittany, settled in England. The great majority had been rude, and poor, and despicable in their own country,—-the rascallions of Northern Gaul: these, suddenly enriched, lost all compass and bearing of mind; and no one circumstance vexed the spirit of the English more, than to see the fair and noble English maidens and widows compelled to accept these despicable adventurers as their husbands. Of this we have an example in Lucia, the daughter of Algar, for Talboys seems to have been a person of the lowest degree." Ivo Talboys, or Taillebois, was one of the Conqueror's followers, and his chief gave him lands in the fen country, near the monastery of Croyland; and this chance of a locality may have had something to do with the reputation he has, for it brought him under the lash of the famous Ingulphus, Chronicler of Croyland, (if he was that Chronicler,) who charges him with all manner of crimes,—and with reason good, for he bore himself with great harshness toward the brethren of the great Croyland monastery,—an unpardonable offence. Low as he was by birth, Taillebois received the hand of Lucia, sister of the Saxon Earls Edwin and Morcar, and became very wealthy. From this union came "the great line whence sprang the barons of Kendal and Lancaster." The last descendant of this Norman baron of William's creation and of the Saxon Lucia died in 1861, a pauper in the workhouse of Shrewsbury,—Emily Taillebois, a girl of eighteen.
There were thousands of such fellows as Taillebois in William's army, and, though all were not so lucky as he, many of them drew good prizes in the lottery of war, and founded, at the expense of the noblest Saxons, families from which men are proud to be descended. Sir Walter has used this fact in "Ivanhoe," when he makes the usually silent Athelstane reply with so much eloquence to De Bracy's insolent remark that the princes of the House of Anjou conferred not their wards on men of such lineage as his. "My lineage, proud Norman," replied Athelstane, "is drawn from a source more pure and ancient than that of a beggarly Frenchman, whose living is won by selling the blood of the thieves whom he assembles under his paltry standard. Kings were my ancestors, strong in war and
