It is, of course, true that we do not learn the essentials of
our country in our schooldays. It is of no real importance that William
conquered Harold in 1066, but it is of vast importance to know how he
behaved as a conqueror, a fact seldom taught. But if we forgot all the
history we ever knew, we should not be able to appreciate Chesterton's
history, which aims to reconstruct all that we had believed while
pouring over Green in the fifth form.

Chesterton covers so much ground in this book, his treatment is so
intricate, his method so full of various peculiar contentions, that the
only possible method in a chapter is to take some of the more important
points he touches upon and try and discover what he feels about them. It
will be well to realize at once that however he may differ from
recognized historians, his history loses all its meaning unless the
standard historians are known fairly well.

* * * * *

There are probably two tremendous turning points in history--the one
occurred at the moment that the fatal arrow entered the eye of Harold at
Senlac, the other when Henry VIII set fire to the ecclesiastical faggots
that ended in the Reformation. That period which lay between them may
roughly be called the Middle Ages, which part of history Chesterton
thinks has been badly treated. Whether this is so is a question that
opens up a broader one: Has the history of England ever received the
attention it deserves? Has right proportion been given to the most
important events? Should history be made popular in the modern sense of
this much misinterpreted word? These are questions to which no adequate
answer can be given in the space of a chapter, nor is it within the
scope of this book.

Chesterton is very annoyed to find that to possess Norman blood is, to
many people, a hall mark of aristocracy: 'This fashionable fancy misses
what is best in the Normans.' What he contends, and I think rightly, is
that William was a conqueror until he had conquered. Then England passed
out of his hands. He had wished it to be an autocracy; instead, it
developed into a monarchy--'William the Conqueror became William the
Conquered.' This is a line that the ordinary historians do not appear to
take, though I fancy they imply it when they say that feudalism didn't
exist in the time of the Georges.

Perhaps one of the most picturesque parts of history is that time when
men looked across the sea and sa