ew England surnames, I find the same
jumble of names--West Saxon, Angle, Danish, Norman, and French-Norman
likewise, many of primaeval and heathen antiquity, many of high nobility,
all worked together, as at home, to form the Free Commoners of England.

If any should wish to know more on this curious and important subject,
let me recommend them to study Ferguson's "Teutonic Name System," a book
from which you will discover that some of our quaintest, and seemingly
most plebeian surnames--many surnames, too, which are extinct in England,
but remain in America--are really corruptions of good old Teutonic names,
which our ancestors may have carried in the German Forest, before an
Englishman set foot on British soil; from which he will rise with the
comfortable feeling that we English-speaking men, from the highest to the
lowest, are literally kinsmen. Nay, so utterly made up now is the old
blood-feud between Norseman and Englishman, between the descendants of
those who conquered and those who were conquered, that in the children of
our Prince of Wales, after 800 years, the blood of William of Normandy is
mingled with the blood of the very Harold who fell at Hastings. And so,
by the bitter woes which followed the Norman conquest was the whole
population, Dane, Angle, and Saxon, earl and churl, freeman and slave,
crushed and welded together into one homogeneous mass, made just and
merciful towards each other by the most wholesome of all teachings, a
community of suffering; and if they had been, as I fear they were, a lazy
and a sensual people, were taught

That life is not as idle ore,
But heated hot with burning fears,
And bathed in baths of hissing tears,
And battered with the strokes of doom
To shape and use.

But how did these wild Vikings become Christian men? It is a long story.
So stanch a race was sure to be converted only very slowly. Noble
missionaries as Ansgar, Rembert, and Poppo, had worked for 150 years and
more among the heathens of Denmark. But the patriotism of the Norseman
always recoiled, even though in secret, from the fact that they were
German monks, backed by the authority of the German emperor; and many a
man, like Svend Fork-beard, father of the great Canute, though he had the
Kaiser himself for godfather, turned heathen once more the moment he was
free, because his baptism was the badge of foreign conquest, and neither
pope nor kaiser should lord it over him, body or soul. St