ing of forests for
shipbuilding, in the crossing of the Channel, and especially in the
charge up the hill at Hastings, in which full justice is done to the
destructive resistance of Harold's army. But it was really after Duke
William had disembarked and defeated Harold on the Sussex coast, that he
did what is historically worthy to be called the Conquest. It is not
until these later operations that we have the note of the new and
scientific militarism from the Continent. Instead of marching upon
London he marched round it; and crossing the Thames at Wallingford cut
off the city from the rest of the country and compelled its surrender.
He had himself elected king with all the forms that would have
accompanied a peaceful succession to the Confessor, and after a brief
return to Normandy took up the work of war again to bring all England
under his crown. Marching through the snow, he laid waste the northern
counties, seized Chester, and made rather than won a kingdom. These
things are the foundations of historical England; but of these things
the pictures woven in honour of his house tell us nothing. The Bayeux
Tapestry may almost be said to stop before the Norman Conquest. But it
tells in great detail the tale of some trivial raid into Brittany solely
that Harold and William may appear as brothers in arms; and especially
that William may be depicted in the very act of giving arms to Harold.
And here again there is much more significance than a modern reader may
fancy, in its bearing upon the new birth of that time and the ancient
symbolism of arms. I have said that Duke William was a vassal of the
King of France; and that phrase in its use and abuse is the key to the
secular side of this epoch. William was indeed a most mutinous vassal,
and a vein of such mutiny runs through his family fortunes: his sons
Rufus and Henry I. disturbed him with internal ambitions antagonistic to
his own. But it would be a blunder to allow such personal broils to
obscure the system, which had indeed existed here before the Conquest,
which clarified and confirmed it. That system we call Feudalism.

That Feudalism was the main mark of the Middle Ages is a commonplace of
fashionable information; but it is of the sort that seeks the past
rather in Wardour Street than Watling Street. For that matter, the very
term "mediaeval" is used for almost anything from Early English to Early
Victorian. An eminent Socialist applied it to our armaments, which is