clamor and tumult, as Aldred, the Saxon Archbishop of York, put the
crown of England on his head, and made him swear to protect his Saxon
subjects, while the fierce Norman cavalry were trampling those Saxon
subjects under their horses' hoofs outside the Abbey gates.

For one hundred and fifty years England was under foreign kings. And
although the Norman Conquerors were crowned in Edward the Saxon's Abbey
Church at Westminster, not one of them was laid within its walls. But
with the fall of the Norman and Angevin kings, better days dawned for
England. The Barons at Runnymede had forced King John, the last English
Duke of Normandy and Anjou, to grant them the Great Charter--the glory
and pride of all English-speaking people. And at John's death his son
Henry the Third came to the throne in 1216 as the first English king of
a free English people.

The young king prided himself upon his Anglo-Saxon ancestors. He was
descended from King Alfred through "the good Matilda," Henry the First's
wife. He called his sons by Anglo-Saxon names. His interests, and those
of his descendants, were to be concentrated in the island which was now
their sole kingdom. He therefore determined to desert the city of
Winchester, which his Norman predecessors had made their headquarters,
and "to take up his abode in Westminster beside the Confessor's
tomb."[6]

During the Norman occupation an irresistible instinct had been drawing
the conquerors towards their English subjects, "and therefore towards
the dust of the last Saxon king." In Henry the Second's reign Edward the
Confessor had been canonized. Many English anniversaries were celebrated
yearly in the Abbey. Good Queen Matilda was buried close to her kinsman
Edward and Edith the Swanneck, "the first royal personage so interred
since the troubles of the conquest."[7]

It was to Henry the Third, however, that the thought came of making the
Shrine of the Confessor the centre of a burial place for his race. In
addition to his love for all things pertaining to his Saxon ancestry,
Henry was passionately devoted to all sacred observances. "Even St.
Louis," says Dean Stanley, "seemed to him but a lukewarm Rationalist."
He possessed in a very high degree what we nowadays call the artistic
sense. Art in all its forms was a complete passion with him; and with
his Provencal wife Eleanor a swarm of foreign artists, painters,
sculptors, poets, troubadours, found their way to England. Louis the
Ninth w