back, he
touched the ground and seemed to gang, or walk. He and his Norsemen had
taken their share of France, and called it Normandy to this day; and
meanwhile, with that docility and adaptability which marks so often truly
great spirits, they had changed their creed, their language, their
habits, and had become, from heathen and murderous Berserkers, the most
truly civilised people of Europe, and--as was most natural then--the most
faithful allies and servants of the Pope of Rome. So greatly had they
changed, and so fast, that William Duke of Normandy, the
great-great-grandson of Rolf the wild Viking, was perhaps the finest
gentleman, as well as the most cultivated sovereign, and the greatest
statesman and warrior in all Europe.

So Harold of Norway came with all his Vikings to Stamford Bridge by York;
and took, by coming, only that which Harold of England promised him,
namely, "forasmuch as he was taller than any other man, seven feet of
English ground."

The story of that great battle, told with a few inaccuracies, but told as
only great poets tell, you should read, if you have not read it already,
in the "Heimskringla" of Snorri Sturluson, the Homer of the North:

High feast that day held the birds of the air and the beasts of the
field,
White-tailed erne and sallow glede,
Dusky raven, with horny neb,
And the gray deer the wolf of the wood.

The bones of the slain, men say, whitened the place for fifty years to
come.

And remember, that on the same day on which that fight befell--September
27, 1066--William, Duke of Normandy, with all his French-speaking
Norsemen, was sailing across the British Channel, under the protection of
a banner consecrated by the Pope, to conquer that England which the Norse-
speaking Normans could not conquer.

And now King Harold showed himself a man. He turned at once from the
North of England to the South. He raised the folk of the Southern, as he
had raised those of the Central and Northern shires; and in sixteen
days--after a march which in those times was a prodigious feat--he was
entrenched upon the fatal down which men called Heathfield then, and
Senlac, but Battle to this day--with William and his French Normans
opposite him on Telham hill.

Then came the battle of Hastings. You all know what befell upon that
day; and how the old weapon was matched against the new--the English axe
against the Norman lance--and beaten only because the English broke thei