hed in courage, but the Saxon surpassed his foe in that
stern, unyielding endurance which enabled him to resist every defeat and
prepare again for the contest. The whole surface of the country became
studded with entrenchments, moats, and mounds, within whose line the
harassed Saxon defended his property and all he valued in his home.
History begins, as far as England is practically concerned, with the
Norman Conquest. It was then the Norsemen, blue-eyed, fair-haired, the
finest blood in Europe, planted themselves in Norfolk and Suffolk, and
brought with them feudalism and civilization. It was in 787 that,
according to the Saxon Chronicle, they first reached England; but it was
not till William the Conqueror made the land his own that they settled as
English lords, and divided between them the land in which their rapacious
forefathers had won many a precious treasure.

'The red gold and the white silver
He covets as a leech does blood,'

wrote an old poet of the Norseman.

Let us take, as an illustration of the county, a Norfolk family. In
Westminster Abbey there is monument to Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, who was
buried in the ruined chancel of the little church at Overstrand, near
Northrepps, 'a droll, irregular, unconventional-looking place,' as
Caroline Fox calls it, where he loved at all times to live, and where he
retired to die. The family from which Sir Thomas descended resided,
about the middle of the sixteenth century, at Sudbury, in Suffolk. It
was while at Earlham that he made his debut as a public speaker at one of
the earlier meetings of the Norfolk Bible Society. In the winter of 1817
he went over to France with some of the Gurneys and the Rev. Francis
Cunningham, who was anxious to establish a Bible Society in Paris. He
was also anxious to inquire into the way in which the gaols at Antwerp
and Ghent were conducted. On his return he examined minutely into the
state of the London gaols, and, to use his own expression, his inquiries
developed a system of folly and wickedness which surpassed belief. In
the following year he published a work entitled 'An Inquiry whether Crime
be Produced or Prevented by our Present System of Penal Discipline,'
which ran through six editions, and tended powerfully to create a proper
public feeling on the subject. In 1819 we find him in Parliament
seconding Sir James Mackintosh in his efforts to promote a reform of our
criminal law--then the most sanguinary in