nd artificers--nay, of
thralls and bondsmen--compelled to till the land they once owned.

We must imagine, he adds, two nations on the surface of the same
country: the Normans, rich and free from taxes; the English (for
the term Saxon is an anachronism), poor, dependent, and oppressed
with burdens; the one living in vast mansions or embattled castles,
the other in thatched cabins or half-ruined huts; the one people
idle, happy, doing nought but fight or hunt, the other, men of
sorrow and toil--labourers and mechanics; on the one side, luxury
and insolence; on the other, misery and envy,--not the envy of the
poor at the sight of the riches of others, but of the despoiled in
presence of the spoilers.

These countries touched each other in every point, and yet were
more distinct than if the sea rolled between them. Each had its
language: in the abbeys and castles they only spoke French; in the
huts and cabins, the old English.

No words can describe the insolence and disdain of the conquerors,
which is feebly pictured in the Etienne de Malville of the present
tale. The very name of which the descendants of these Normans grew
proud, and which they adorned by their deeds on many a field of
battle--the English name--was used as a term of the utmost
contempt. "Do you think me an Englishman?" was the inquiry of
outraged pride.

Not only Normans, but Frenchmen, Bretons--nay, Continentals of all
nations, flocked into England as into an uninhabited country, slew
and took possession.

"Ignoble grooms," says an old chronicler, "did as they pleased with
the best and noblest, and left them nought to wish for but death.
These licentious knaves were amazed at themselves; they went mad
with pride and astonishment, at beholding themselves so
powerful--at having servants richer than their own fathers had been
{i}." Whatever they willed they deemed permissible to do; they
shed blood at random, tore the bread from the very mouths of the
famished people, and took everything--money, goods, lands {ii}.
Such was the fate which befell the once happy Anglo-Saxons.

And it was not till after a hundred and forty years of slavery,
that the separation of England from Normandy, in the days of the
cowardly and cruel King John, and the signing of Magna Carta, gave
any real relief to the oppressed; while it was later still, not
till after the days of Simon de Montfort, when resistance to new
foreigners had welded Norman and English into one, that