dregs the same bitter cup which
he administered so unmercifully to the Briton. His Teutonic blood
saved him from no humiliation or insult. The Normans seized all the
lands, all the castles, all the pleasant mansions, all the churches
and monasteries. Even the Saxon saints were flung down out of their
shrines and trampled in the dust under the iron heel of the Christian
conqueror. Everything Saxon was vile, and the word 'Englishry' implied
as much contempt and scorn as the word 'Irishry' in a later age. In
fact, the subjugated Saxons gradually became infected with all the
vices and addicted to all the social disorders that prevailed among
the Irish in the same age; only in Ireland the anarchy endured much
longer from the incompleteness of the conquest and the absence of the
seat of supreme government, which kept the races longer separate and
antagonistic. Perhaps the most humiliating notice of the degrading
effects of conquest on the noble Saxon race to be found in history,
is the language in which Giraldus Cambrensis, the reviler of the Irish
Celt, contrasts them with his countrymen, the Welsh. 'Who dare,'
he says, 'compare the English, the most degraded of all races under
heaven, with the Welsh? In their own country they are the serfs,
the veriest slaves of the Normans. In ours whom else have we for our
herdsmen, shepherds, cobblers, skinners, cleaners of our dog kennels,
ay, even of our privies, but Englishmen? Not to mention their original
treachery to the Britons, that hired by them to defend them they
turned upon them in spite of their oaths and engagements, they are
to this day given to treachery and murder.' The lying Saxon was,
according to this authority, a proverbial expression.

The Saxon writers lamented their miserable subjection in a monotonous
wail for many generations. So late as the seventeenth century an
English author speaks in terms of compassion of the disinherited
and despoiled families who had sunk into the condition of artisans,
peasants, and paupers. 'This,' says M. Thierry, 'is the last sorrowful
glance cast back through the mist of ages on that great event which
established in England a race of kings, nobles, and warriors of
foreign extraction. The reader must figure to himself, not a mere
change of political rule, not the triumph of one of two competitors,
but the intrusion of a nation into the bosom of another people which
it came to destroy, and the scattered fragments of which it retained