iumphant from the fens of Ely to the hour when John fled defeated from
Norman shores, our story is one of foreign masters. Kings from Normandy
were followed by kings from Anjou. But whether under Norman or Angevin
Englishmen were a subject race, conquered and ruled by men of strange
blood and of strange speech. And yet it was in these years of subjection
that England first became really England. Provincial differences were
finally crushed into national unity by the pressure of the stranger. The
firm government of her foreign kings secured the land a long and almost
unbroken peace in which the new nation grew to a sense of its oneness,
and this consciousness was strengthened by the political ability which in
Henry the First gave it administrative order and in Henry the Second
built up the fabric of its law. New elements of social life were
developed alike by the suffering and the prosperity of the times. The
wrong which had been done by the degradation of the free landowner into a
feudal dependant was partially redressed by the degradation of the bulk
of the English lords themselves into a middle class as they were pushed
from their place by the foreign baronage who settled on English soil; and
this social change was accompanied by a gradual enrichment and elevation
of the class of servile and semi-servile cultivators which had lifted
them at the close of this period into almost complete freedom. The middle
class which was thus created was reinforced by the upgrowth of a
corresponding class in our towns. Commerce and trade were promoted by the
justice and policy of the foreign kings; and with their advance rose the
political importance of the trader. The boroughs of England, which at the
opening of this period were for the most part mere villages, were rich
enough at its close to buy liberty from the Crown and to stand ready for
the mightier part they were to play in the developement of our
parliament. The shame of conquest, the oppression of the conquerors,
begot a moral and religious revival which raised religion into a living
thing; while the close connexion with the Continent which foreign
conquest brought about secured for England a new communion with the
artistic and intellectual life of the world without her.

[Sidenote: William the Conqueror]

In a word, it is to the stern discipline of our foreign kings that we owe
not merely English wealth and English freedom but England herself. And of
these foreign masters