menace both the independence of the crown and the freedom of the commonalty. The earls, or eorldermen, the rulers of large provinces, like Earl Siward, Earl Leofric, Earl Godwin and his sons, and others, were forming a separate order in the State, through the aggressive influence of which the political rights and liberties of the others would probably have decayed and perished. The catastrophe of the Norman Conquest prevented this; a catastrophe terrible in itself; but, in all human probability, the averter of greater evils even to the Saxons themselves than those which it inflicted.

CHAPTER V.

The Norman Element.-Different from the Danish.-Rolf the Ganger's Conquest of Neustria.-State of Civilization in France. -Characteristics of the Normans.-Their brilliant Qualities.Their Oppression of the Peasantry.

LAST, but not least in importance, of the four elements of our nation came the Norman. In some respects it may seem to be identical with the Danish: as Scandinavia was the parent country of both Norman and Dane. But there is this essential distinction. The Danes came to England direct from their Scandinavian homes. The Norman nation had dwelt in France for more than a century and a half between the time of its leaving Scandinavia and the time of its conquering England. During that interval the Normans had acquired the arts, the language, and the civilization of the Romanized Gauls and the Romanized Franks. They had done more than acquire the characteristics of others: they had created and developed a new national character of their own, differing both from that of their rude Danish and Norse kinsmen on the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea, and from that of the Romanesque provincials, whom they found on the banks of the Seine and the southern coast of the Channel.

RISE AND PROGRESS OF THE CONSTITUTION.

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Osker, Regner Lodbrok, Eric the Red, Biorn Ironside, Sidroc, and many more kings and jarls of the Norse or Dansker-men, had sailed up the Seine and spread the terror of their plunderings and slaughters through France, before a young Norwegian chief, named Rolf, and surnamed "Ganger" from his length of limb, left Norway with a fleet of warriors, and in 876 A.D., after some passing forays in England and Belgium, entered the estuary of the Seine, and made the familiar voyage of his countrymen up to Rouen. To say that he was enterprising, energetic, and fearless, is only to say that he was a Norse Viking. But tall striding Rolf was much more. He was a founder of empire. His brains were as good as his sinews. He was a man of thought as well as a man of action, and was worthy to be the lineal ancestor of England's sovereigns. He "formed the plan of substituting permanent colonization for periodical plunder. His host, his men, his baronage,' ultimately took possession of the city of Rouen, and the neighbouring country, measuring and dividing the land according to the Danish custom, by the rope." * But their settlement there was not effected at once. A long series of wars with the Frankish kings followed, varied by truces which were always bought of the Northmen with French gold. At last, in the year 912, King Charles Le Chauve formally ceded to Rolf the province which the jarl already firmly held, and which, from its new lord and his warriors, has thenceforth borne the name of Normandy.

Even in the crushed and miserable state of France

* Palgrave's "Normandy and England," p. 518.

under her last Carlovingian kings, Rolf, and his fellowadventurers from Scandinavia, could perceive and appreciate the yet living fragments of a civilization superior to their own. This, in truth, the instinctive faculty of discerning and adopting the creations of the genius of others, peculiarly characterized the Normans, not only at the period of their first settlement in France, but throughout the ages of the rule of their dukes in Normandy. Rolf and his warriors embraced the creed, the language, the laws, and the arts, which France, in those troubled and evil times, during which the Carlovingian dynasty ended and that of the Capets commenced, still inherited from Imperial Rome and Imperial Charlemagne. Duke Rollo (such were the title and name which Jarl Rolf assumed) was succeeded in his duchy by a race of princes resembling him in mental capacity, as well as in martial bravery. The descendants also of the original Norman barons, taken as a body, were conspicuous for the same merits that had marked their sires. The century and a half which passed between Duke Rollo's settlement in Normandy and Duke William the Bastard's invasion of this island was an important period in mediæval history. France, throughout this time, was little more than a federation of feudal princes; and, during this period, the power, and pride, and predominance of the nobility, as a distinct order from the mass of the nation, grew rapidly, and assumed a peculiar social organization.

Amid the general disorder of France the noblesse fortified their castles where they dwelt; each baron in his stronghold, with his family and his band of favourite retainers round him. The management of horses and arms began to be regarded as the sole occupation worthy those

of "gentle" blood. During this century and a-half, chivalry, with all its romantic usages and institutions, grew into existence; and the germs of modern literature, of the poetry of the Trouveur and the Troubadour, appeared. Religious zeal, also, as manifested in distant pilgrimages, and in the lavishing of wealth and architectural skill upon abbeys, cathedrals, and shrines, was carried to a height previously unknown. In all these things, and in a generous respect for intellectual excellence, by whomsoever and however manifested, the Normans were preeminent. Their national originality of character was at the same time shown in the free, but orderly and intelligent spirit, which made them establish and preserve in their province a regularity of government, system, and law, which contrasted strongly with the anarchy of the rest of France. The Norman had a steady fixity of purpose, he had a discernment of the necessity of social union and mutual self-sacrifice of free-will among the individual members of a State for the sake of the common weal. Such qualities are the indispensable materials for national greatness; they were peculiar in those days to the Normans, especially as distinguished from the versatile and impatient noblesse of the rest of continental Christendom.

We have no trustworthy details of the institutions and laws of the Normans before the conquest of England. We only know generally that there was a council of the Norman barons, which the Norman duke was bound to convene and consult on all important matters of state; and that William the Conqueror's counts and chevaliers had not degenerated from the independent frankness of their Scandinavian sires.

Such were the brighter qualities of the Normans, who gave kings to our throne, ancestors to our aristocracy,