the sports, of the alien tyrants. Yet the subject race, though
beaten down and trodden underfoot, still made its sting felt. Some bold
men, the favourite heroes of our oldest ballads, betook themselves to
the woods, and there, in defiance of curfew laws and forest laws, waged
a predatory war against their oppressors. Assassination was an event of
daily occurrence. Many Normans suddenly disappeared leaving no trace.
The corpses of many were found bearing the marks of violence. Death by
torture was denounced against the murderers, and strict search was
made for them, but generally in vain; for the whole nation was in a
conspiracy to screen them. It was at length thought necessary to lay
a heavy fine on every Hundred in which a person of French extraction
should be found slain; and this regulation was followed up by another
regulation, providing that every person who was found slain should be
supposed to be a Frenchman, unless he was proved to be a Saxon.

During the century and a half which followed the Conquest, there is, to
speak strictly, no English history. The French Kings of England
rose, indeed, to an eminence which was the wonder and dread of all
neighbouring nations. They conquered Ireland. They received the homage
of Scotland. By their valour, by their policy, by their fortunate
matrimonial alliances, they became far more popular on the Continent
than their liege lords the Kings of France. Asia, as well as Europe,
was dazzled by the power and glory of our tyrants. Arabian chroniclers
recorded with unwilling admiration the fall of Acre, the defence of
Joppa, and the victorious march to Ascalon; and Arabian mothers
long awed their infants to silence with the name of the lionhearted
Plantagenet. At one time it seemed that the line of Hugh Capet was about
to end as the Merovingian and Carlovingian lines had ended, and that a
single great monarchy would spread from the Orkneys to the Pyrenees. So
strong an association is established in most minds between the greatness
of a sovereign and the greatness of the nation which he rules, that
almost every historian of England has expatiated with a sentiment of
exultation on the power and splendour of her foreign masters, and has
lamented the decay of that power and splendour as a calamity to our
country. This is, in truth, as absurd as it would be in a Haytian negro
of our time to dwell with national pride on the greatness of Lewis the
Fourteenth, and to speak of Blenheim and