s established. Wool was the
principal export, and fine cloths were taken in exchange from the
Continent. Women spun for their own households, and the term spinster
was introduced.

The monasteries carefully concealed everything in the way of education,
and even the nobility could not have stood a civil service examination.

The clergy were skilled in music, painting, and sculpture, and loved to
paint on china, or do sign-work and carriage painting for the nobility.
St. Dunstan was quite an artist, and painted portraits which even now
remind one strangely of human beings.

[Illustration: ST. DUNSTAN WAS NOTED FOR THIS KIND OF THING.]

Edgar Atheling, the legal successor of Harold, saw at a glance that
William the Conqueror had come to stay, and so he yielded to the
Norman, as shown in the accompanying steel engraving copied from a piece
of tapestry now in possession of the author, and which descended to him,
through no fault of his own, from the Normans, who for years ruled
England with great skill, and from whose loins he sprang.

[Illustration: EDGAR ATHELING AND THE NOBILITY OFFER SUBMISSION TO
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.]

William was crowned on Christmas Day at Westminster Abbey as the new
sovereign. It was more difficult to change a sovereign in those days
than at present, but that is neither here nor there.

The people were so glad over the coronation that they overdid it, and
their ghoulish glee alarmed the regular Norman army, the impression
getting out that the Anglo-Saxons were rebellious, when as a matter of
fact they were merely exhilarated, having tanked too often with the
tankard.

William the Conqueror now disarmed the city of London, and tipping a
number of the nobles, got them to wait on him. He rewarded his Norman
followers, however, with the contraband estates of the conquered, and
thus kept up his conking for years after peace had been declared.

But the people did not forget that they were there first, and so, while
William was in Normandy, in the year 1067 A.D., hostilities broke out.
People who had been foreclosed and ejected from their lands united to
shoot the Norman usurper, and it was not uncommon for a Norman, while
busy usurping, to receive an arrow in some vital place, and have to give
up sedentary pursuits, perhaps, for weeks afterwards.

[Illustration: SAXONS INTRODUCING THE YOKE IN SCOTLAND.]

In 1068 A.D., Edgar Atheling, Sweyn of Denmark, Malcolm of Scotland, and
the sons of Ha