The History of England | Page 6

predecessors' neglect, bought off the raiders with ever- increasing
bribes which tempted them to return; and by levying Danegeld to stop
invasion, set a precedent for direct taxation which the invaders
eventually used as the financial basis of efficient government. At length
a foolish massacre of the Danish "uitlanders" in England precipitated
the ruin of Anglo-Saxon monarchy; and after heroic resistance by
Edmund Ironside, England was absorbed in the empire of Canute.
Canute tried to put himself into the position, while avoiding the
mistakes, of his English predecessors. He adopted the Christian religion
and set up a force of hus-earls to terrify local magnates and enforce
obedience to the English laws which he re-enacted. His division of
England into four great earldoms seems to have been merely a casual
arrangement, but he does not appear to have checked the dangerous
practice by which under Edgar and Ethelred the ealdormen had begun
to concentrate in their hands the control of various shires. The greater
the sphere of a subject's jurisdiction, the more it menaced the monarchy
and national unity; and after Canute's empire had fallen to pieces under
his worthless sons, the restoration of Ecgberht's line in the person of

Edward the Confessor merely provided a figurehead under whose
nominal rule the great earls of Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, and East
Anglia fought at first for control of the monarchy and at length for the
crown itself. The strife resolved itself into a faction fight between the
Mercian house of Leofric and the West Saxon house of Godwine,
whose dynastic policy has been magnified into patriotism by a great
West Saxon historian. The prize fell for the moment on Edward's death
to Godwine's son, Harold, whose ambition to sit on a throne cost him
his life and the glory, which otherwise might have been his, of saving
his country from William the Norman. As regent for one of the scions
of Ecgberht's house, he might have relied on the co-operation of his
rivals; as an upstart on the throne he could only count on the veiled or
open enmity of Mercians and Northumbrians, who regarded him, and
were regarded by him, as hardly less foreign than the invader from
France.
The battle of Hastings sums up a series and clinches an argument.
Anglo-Saxondom had only been saved from Danish marauders by the
personal greatness of Alfred; it had utterly failed to respond to
Edmund's call to arms against Canute, and the respite under Edward the
Confessor had been frittered away. Angles and Saxons invited foreign
conquest by a civil war; and when Harold beat back Tostig and his
Norwegian ally, the sullen north left him alone to do the same by
William. William's was the third and decisive Danish conquest of a
house divided against itself; for his Normans were Northmen with a
French polish, and they conquered a country in which the soundest
elements were already Danish. The stoutest resistance, not only in the
military but in the constitutional and social sense, to the Norman
Conquest was offered not by Wessex but by the Danelaw, where
personal freedom had outlived its hey-day elsewhere; and the reflection
that, had the English re-conquest of the Danelaw been more complete,
so, too, would have been the Norman Conquest of England, may
modify the view that everything great and good in England is
Anglo-Saxon in origin. England, indeed, was still in the crudest stages
of its making; it had as yet no law worth the name, no trial by jury, no
parliament, no real constitution, no effective army or navy, no
universities, few schools, hardly any literature, and little art. The

disjointed and unruly members of which it consisted in 1066 had to
undergo a severe discipline before they could form an organic national
state.





CHAPTER II
THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND
1066-1272
For nearly two centuries after the Norman Conquest there is no history
of the English people. There is history enough of England, but it is the
history of a foreign government. We may now feel pride in the strength
of our conqueror or pretend claims to descent from William's
companions. We may boast of the empire of Henry II and the prowess
of Richard I, and we may celebrate the organized law and justice, the
scholarship and the architecture, of the early Plantagenet period; but
these things were no more English than the government of India to-day
is Hindu. With Waltheof and Hereward English names disappear from
English history, from the roll of sovereigns, ministers, bishops, earls,
and sheriffs; and their place is taken by names beginning with "fitz"
and distinguished by "de." No William, Thomas, Henry, Geoffrey,
Gilbert, John, Stephen, Richard, or Robert had played any part in
Anglo-Saxon affairs, but they fill the pages of England's history from